Amit was squatting on the grass, meticulously sketching on the white paper the smiling faces of Ranbir and Anu, who were sitting on the other side of the fire. Ramesh came out of the tent, carrying several platters and bowls on a tray. A snake passed near Ramesh’s feet, and he tumbled over. The tray fell over Amit.
The white paper got drenched in the spicy yellow dal; it looked in Amit’s hands like a lump of yellow shit. He threw it at Ramesh’s face and said, “You—you—bastard—son-of-a-bitch.”
Ranbir leaped up and stood in font of Amit.
“Calm down, calm down,” Ranbir said, “It was just an accident—”
Amit pushed Ranbir aside and picked up a bamboo stick from the ground. Ramesh had been leaning till now by the tree, unperturbed by the scorns, like an inanimate object. As the bamboo stick struck his chest and shoulders again and again, he uttered not a sound and there was not a blink in his eye. Ranbir snatched the cane from Amit’s hand and shouted, “For God’s sake stop it! What are you doing? He is a human like us. It was just a mistake!”
“You are always trying to protect him Ranbir,” said Amit, “get out of the way. He is a useless creature—brainless—mentally retarded” – he turned towards Ramesh – “—haramzaada. My father kept him in service just out of pity. He wasn’t able to feed his parents. He could do nothing in life. He is a bloody animal. He does not know how much I toiled over the sketch.”
For a minute, they looked at each other. The only sound that issued was Amit’s heaving. Anu remained unconcerned; it was a regular sight for her.
Amit was looking at Ramesh with his flaring eyes. Ramesh’s passiveness and impenitence enraged him further. He tried to leap over Ramesh, but was stopped by Ranbir.
“Stop it I say! Enough! Ramesh, you go back and cook again. After that you can sleep.” Ramesh walked back inside the tent, without saying a word.
Amit brushed off Ranbir’s hand and threw the stick in the fire. He took out a packet of biscuits from his backpack, and nibbled at them; his eyes, still red with anger, were fixed on the fire.
After some time, Anu kept her cell-phone in her backpack and said, “I am feeling bored.”
Ranbir said, “Let me tell you all a story.”
Anu looked at him with puzzled eyes.
“A story?” asked Anu.
“Yes—a story.”
“What is it about?” asked Anu.
“It’s about the world’s most amazing man,” said Ranbir. “Ok now, I need two names. First, the narrator’s, um . . . let us call him—”
“Ranbir,” said Anu and gave a wry smile.
“Ok, let us call him Ranbir. And the main character, let us call him,” – Ranbir saw Ramesh passing by the tent – “let us call him Ramesh.”
“Shall I begin?” asked Ranbir. “Amit, come on yaar, I’m sorry. Come here and listen.” Amit reluctantly came over and sat next to Ranbir.
“Start now,” said an excited Anu.
*
It does not take more than a few seconds to notice a noise, but it can take a long time to notice silence; it took me twelve years to notice Ramesh’s silence. The teacher had made me sit at the last bench, next to him. In the classroom, he always looked at the blackboard with his unshakeable gaze, and in the recess, at the air; I knew nothing about him other than this. But it was only after I got to sit with him, after twelve years of being in the same school, that I realised his silence. He had completely concealed himself from the world. I came to know that he had no friends; he didn’t talk to girls; he didn’t play cricket; he didn’t study; he didn’t come to school in a coloured uniform on his birthday; he didn’t fight; he didn’t eat ice-cream; he didn’t bully juniors; and he didn’t speak.
In fact, no one claimed to have heard his voice. Some juniors were convinced that he was mute. Once, some students of 2nd Class took to teasing him in the recess. They would throw paper balls at him and shout ‘mute, mute’. They were met with such indifference from his part that after a time they started feeling that he was partially blind and couldn’t even see them. They never teased him again, and became very sympathetic towards him. They would hide behind the tree and take turns in peeking at him.
I sat with him the whole year and came to know a lot of things. But what I came to know was what all he didn’t do; I didn’t come to know what he did, because he never did anything (except one thing): he never stood in groups, never smiled or laughed, never ran, was never excited, never teased dogs and never danced in the rain. He was the only boy who didn’t crowd around the ice-cream walla after the school hours. The only thing I came to know that he did was: he spoke—but not more than a couple of monosyllables in a week, and that too were almost inaudible. It was hard to believe at first, but I had heard him with my own ears.
Just a day before the end of our session, I offered him my ice-cream. He shook his head and went away. I stood there, with my eyes trying their best to pop out of their sockets. My classmates crowded around me, asking me to give them my ice-cream if I didn’t want it. I brushed them aside and followed Ramesh. He walked inside the woods and then, sat down on a stone near the lake. A sparrow perched on the ground next to him. He picked it up and caressed it. There came a smile on his face; by God, I was shocked. It was the second thing I came to know of that he did. If the boys of my class had caught the bird, they would have forced it to eat paper pellets, tied thread around its limbs or would have even stuffed it in their smelly bags. And if the boy was a kinder one, he would have thrown it in the air with a jerk, as if it were a stone. But Ramesh wasn’t like them; he gently placed it back on the ground, from where it flew away. He turned his face towards the lake and looked at it. His face was like a rock and his eyes fixed, almost frozen at a point; it seemed as if he was searching for his reflection in a water droplet in the lake. I went away from there and came back later in the evening. He was still there. By God, he had looked at it for a longer time than I had ever slept in my life, perhaps.
The more I came to know about him, the more I wanted to. The next year, I again sat with him. He didn’t bring lunchbox with him anymore; he slept during the recess. Soon, he started sleeping during all the free periods also. I was puzzled. Three months after our summer vacations, I saw him smiling again. All the classes had gone to Fun Fair. For three hours, while we sat on merry-go-rounds, slides, and even on roller-coasters, he sat on a chair and played with a leaf. A five-year old girl came and sat next to him, with a large bunch of flowers and a crutch in her hands. When I returned one hour later, with my hands full of Cadbury’s Dairy Milks that a rich man was giving for free, I saw him plucking the petals, sepals and leaves from the flowers; he was making a collage of the face of Mickey Mouse on the chair. The kid sitting next to him was jumping in excitement. When the collage was complete the kid clapped, and, that was when, for the second time, I had seen Ramesh smiling. He was the only person I ever knew who preferred playing with a disabled kid to roller-coasters and free Dairy Milks. He amazed me beyond limits.
You might find all that I am saying about him a bit improbable. I can understand it. Even I, who had seen all of it with my two eyes, found it hard to believe.
It was our games period. I was feeling sick and was told to go back to class. Rather than keeping my head down, I opened Ramesh’s bag. Nothing struck me as odd in it, except for a small blue notebook. I took it out. It contained, as I felt then and as I feel now, the world’s best sketches: minutely detailed; lifelike; every stroke, every line, every dot was harmonious with each other; they looked so real that it seemed as if the world itself came alive and sketched them. The notebook contained ten sketches. My heart throbbed in myriad awe. The more my eyes devoured on the beauty of one, the more they became reluctant to move to the next; and as they moved to the next, the beauty of the first looked diminished. Every mark of pencil on the pages spoke of the genius of the man who held the pencil.
On our next games period, instead of playing, I went and sat besides Ramesh.
I said, “I saw your blue notebook. I didn’t know you sketched.”
My words didn’t produce any effect on him.
I said, “They were amazing.”
He turned his face towards me.
“You really liked them?” he said.
“Liked them? I loved them! They are the best I’d ever seen.”
For the whole period, he questioned me on what I liked about them and what I didn’t. The more I praised them, the more his face beamed with happiness. Believe me, happiness never looked so good on anyone’s face as it looked on his. He did most of the talking, and didn’t let me speak much. He asked me if I was free in the evening and could come to his house. After the period was over, there remained a perpetual shock on the faces of those boys and girls who had seen him talking.
His house was a modest one. Without introducing me to anyone, he dragged me to his room. He opened his cupboard and took out a veiled canvas and an easel. He quickly removed the cloth from the canvas. I was shell-shocked for some minutes. My father had tried to imbue artistic zeal in me by taking me to various art exhibitions; I had met a lot of artists, seen a lot of great works, and had even tried to learn painting; hence, I had enough knowledge of art and painting to judge which work was good and which bad. This one was great, though still half-finished. At 16, Ramesh was a genius.
“You know, there is a small lake near our school,” he said, “It is that lake I’m painting on the canvas.”
He continued after I didn’t speak anything:
“You must we wondering why I’m painting it here, in my room, and not on the scene itself.”
He looked at me. I was still looking at the painting, dazed.
“I go to the lake daily and look at it carefully. And then, I come home and paint it. I prefer painting from memory.
“This is my magnum opus. I have been working on it since long. Believe me, when it would be finished, it would be a masterpiece.”
“I agree,” I said, “it is amazing.”
“It has to be. I work on it nine hours a day.”
I looked at him, once more shocked.
“Yes, nine hours,” he said. “From 10 in the night to 7 in the morning. Without a break.”
“Is that why you are always sleeping the class?” I asked.
“Yes.”
We both laughed. When I returned home, I found myself wondering whether to call Ramesh a genius or a lunatic.
In the next few days, his passion for painting became clearer to me, and I also got my answer: he was both. I came to know that he wasn’t lonely: painting was for him his friend, his brother, his mate. Either he talked to me about painting, or he never talked; and when he talked about painting, his face would always be glowing with joy. Holding a brush and making colours dance on the canvas gave him the joy that the world’s most expensive and exquisite things could never have given. One day I asked him why he doesn’t show his paintings to someone at the Delhi Art Gallery. Ramesh thought about it, and then spent his whole pocket money and couriered two of his paintings, along with a letter, to Delhi Art Gallery. He got a reply within a week. The letter was filled with ravishing praises; one was, ‘. . . your vibrant use of colours reminds me of Gogh, and realism, of Waterhouse. They are masterpieces.’ Ramesh hadn’t mentioned his age in the letter. He was called at the gallery the next day. The comparison with Gogh made Ramesh mad with excitement. I also shed two tears.
Two days later, I asked him what had happened at the meeting. He said, “I didn’t go.”
“What! You didn’t go!” I cried, “Have you lost your mind! That man wrote that you will become famous all over the world in a few days!”
“That is the problem,” he replied. “Ranbir, you know that I’ve always been alone. I appreciate his praises, but I—I don’t want to become famous. I just want to be alone. I’ve always lived life that way. I can’t change it now. I’ve written a letter saying that I am donating the painting to the gallery, and don’t wish anybody to know about me.”
“Ramesh, I just don’t understand you—how can you—I mean this is insane—”
“I know it is weird, Ranbir. But I have always been like this. Nature has made he like this. I am happy with myself. I like to be alone. I am different from others. I’m happy the way I am.”
I was very angry with him.
“You know Ranbir,” said Ramesh, “to add meaning to our existence, we need to have something that we value more than out life. For me that thing is painting. I don’t care if I have no friends and live a lonely, baseless life. I am the happiest man on earth till the time I can paint. I am not sad having missed the chance to be famous, or even those bundles of rupees. I don’t want all that. I just want to paint. It is my only friend. It is all I need to be happy.”
Such lunatic geniuses are born once in generations. I knew I could never love anything in life, or even life itself, as much as he loved painting. He was, and will always remain, the most amazing person I’ve come across.
Ramesh had succeeded in hiding his passion for painting from his father, Mr Mohanlal, who kept on thinking that his poor grades were because of his low intelligence, not because he devoted less time to studies. Mr Mohanlal owned a small cloth shop, but most of his income came from dealing in shares. The recent Global Meltdown had, like everybody else’s, affected his investments. He had taken heavy loans and was now on the verge of bankruptcy. Out of tension, he started pacing about the drawing room late at nights. Then one day, he went inside Ramesh’s room. Ramesh told him everything. His father was furious, and threatened him to stop his madness and turn down to studies. Belonging to a conservative family, he felt that a man cannot earn his roti by painting. Mr Mohanlal didn’t realise what painting meant to Ramesh; it was as if he was telling him to stop breathing. Ramesh still painted. The slaps and canes had no effect on him. The share market fell further. Mr Mohanlal’s health fell along with it. I met Ramesh in the school one day and asked him what he planned to do now. He told me that he would prove to his father that a man can earn his roti by painting. When it gets completed, he would sell his canvas, The Lake, to the Delhi Art Gallery. From nine, he started working on it for eleven hours.
Ramesh failed in his exams. When he returned home one day, his mother told him that on hearing of his bankruptcy and of Ramesh’s failing in his exams, his father had fainted and had to be hospitalised. They rushed to the hospital, and came to know that Mr Mohanlal was partially paralysed for life. For the first time, he saw contempt in his mother’s eyes for him. He felt crushed under the weight of guilt. He swore never to paint again and tore all his sketches and paintings, and threw a bottle of colour over The Lake.
*
Ranbir fell silent. Ramesh came out of the tent carrying a large tray.
“Keep the tray and go, we’ll serve ourselves,” said Amit.
“Take a blanket if you’re sleeping,” said Ranbir.
They all ate in silence. Darkness had completely shrouded the woods. The moon and the stars looked like holes in the shroud. Amit kept his plate down and said, “Nice story. Thank God such things don’t happen in real life. I’m going to sleep.” Amit walked inside the large white tent.
Ranbir said, “I’m going for a walk. Want to come?”
“Sure,” said Anu.
As they walked through the tall alpines, the only sound that penetrated in the air was of the wet grass crushing under their feet.
After some time, Anu said, “Is that the end? What happened after that?”
Ranbir said in a sober voice, “Having failed in the exams, Ramesh was getting no job. His father’s friend took pity on his family and took him in as a servant. He would have killed himself long back, if it hadn’t been for his helpless parents.”
They passed by their tent. Ranbir picked up a spare blanket and walked to where Ramesh was sleeping, under the tree.
Ranbir covered Ramesh with the blanket and said, turning towards Anu, “By vowing to live without painting, he had vowed to live without his soul He became more secluded from the world than ever. Earlier, he would talk to me about painting, about the beauty of nature, about birds, trees, grass, lakes—but now, he didn’t. He never smiled again, never caressed a sparrow, never sat by the lake, and never spoke again. He had no complaint with God, or life, or with anybody. Only his lifeless body was being dragged along with time; his heart and brain had left his body, and were forever encaged in that moment when he had vowed never to paint again; they refused to accompany his body in being a part of that time where there were no colours and palettes. When I looked into his eyes, I felt as if—as if—a wire was pulling around his neck and he was being chocked to death. His silence pains me. Why doesn’t he speak to me about his loss, his suffering? Why does he keep it all inside, and suffer from the same suffering, every day, again and again? How can God be so merciless? Every night, I silently pray for death to come and free him from this suffering. Hell would have been a better fate.”
Anu looked at the thin stream of tears that was surging down Ranbir’s cheeks.
“Anu, you know what he did when he felt the urge to paint?” said Ranbir, his voice chocked with tears. “He took a blade and cut his thumb and index finger, so that he won’t be able to hold a brush or a pencil.”
Ranbir lifted Ramesh’s hand and showed it to Anu. The skin was swollen, and hard, and there were cut marks on his finger and thumb. Ranbir said, “Ten years have passed, but Ramesh still cuts his finger, every week. He punishes himself for the crime of being a genius.”
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Song of Happiness
The waning sun found the seven-year-old Radha sitting under a streetlamp, eating a chapatti with half-baked potatoes. She saw a fleeting shadow on the yellow-lit road. She turned her head and saw a brown-coat puppy walking the along the edge of the road, sniffing the plastic cups, paan-spits and ice cream sticks.
Radha leaned towards it and said, “Hey little doggie, have you lost something?”
It turned its head and looked at her. It blinked and then began sniffing the trash again. She picked it up and said, “Please tell me little doggie, I will also look with you.”
It uttered a low mewl and then tried to spring down from her arms.
“What happened, you look so sad.” She loosened her grip, but it didn’t spring out. It turned absolutely still and looked solemnly at the leftover morsels of potatoes on the newspaper.
“Little doggie, are you hungry? Why, you not eaten anything?”
Radha took out a piece of dry chapatti from her pocket; the puppy grabbed it and hurriedly ate it. She put the puppy on the newspaper and placed another dry chapatti near it. After eating all of it, it sat down and wagged its petite tail.
“You liked it, little doggie? I cook it. Mamma also said I cook well,” Radha said, patting its head, “Okay, now that your tummy is full so you should go back, your mamma will be looking for you. If she sees you here, she say, ‘You bad bad girl! You are trying to take away my little child from me!’ My Mamma also got very worried when I come home late. Now go home little doggie, it is very late.”
Radha stood up and went down the twilit road, dancing on the notes of a song which, her Mamma used to say, a very old lady sings every night, while she sits on the moon, gently rocking in her chair, spinning something. Radha always wondered what the lady looked like, how many grand-children she had, whether she knew any stories, and what was she spinning. She looked up at the moon: it was round, white and calm, like a bowl of milk kept on a paper. Radha couldn’t see her, but she could hear the song: it was soft and clear; one could touch and smell it; it seemed to fill the air with happiness: if you listened to it carefully, you could feel happiness; and if you stretched out your hands, happiness stuck to your fingers.
Walking along with Radha was a shadow, short, with four feet, oblivious of the song, but trying to match with the rhythm of her dance. She turned around and saw the puppy. She stooped and said to it,
“Why are you following me, little doggie? Go back to your Mamma now, fast!”
She gently pushed it. “Come on now, go.”
She started walking again. The puppy stood there for a moment, silent, its sober eyes fixed on Radha. It followed her again. Radha had just walked a few steps, when she saw its shadow again.
“You silly doggie! If Pa sees you he beat me! Go away.” She picked up a small stone and threw at it. It hit him but failed to produce an effect more than a blink in its eye. She threw a larger stone. The puppy looked down and whined, and went away with sulky steps. Kali walked away, her steps faltering with the weigh of guilt. She could still hear the song, but she didn’t dance now.
She was soon inside the open ground, where she could see her shack standing among the squalor of gullies and gutters. She took a scrubber and squatted next to a bucket of clothes immersed in soap water. The mother Earth embraced its children with a soft kiss of breeze, covered them in a blanket of darkness and sang a lullaby of soporific silence: wailing babies, hitting husbands, crying wives, urchins and beggars—all went to sleep; except for Radha, who, seven-years-old, ugly, smelly, with dry hair, torn clothes, running nose, squatting near a drainpipe, scrubbed and washed the clothes.
Minutes later, it started raining. Amidst the clamour of rain, she could hear muffled whines. She stood up and went towards the ox-cart. She stooped down and saw the puppy, wet, shivering, looking at her with its black and still eyes. Then it looked down and tried to hide its face among its paws.
“You bad doggie! I knew you had not gone! Now it start raining and now you will catch cold and you mamma will blame me.”
She picked up the puppy and sat down leaning against a stack of hay. She softly slapped its head and said, “Now, tell me, why do you not go back to your mamma, hmm?”
The puppy looked down and hid its face in her arm, and mewled.
After a minute she spoke,
“You don’t have a mamma, do you?”
She took out a torn cloth from her pocket and rolled the puppy in it. It stopped shivering. They both—the little girl, clothes torn, hands rough and blistered, squatting besides a stack of hay, and the puppy, little, sad, rolled up in a cloth, under warm palms—, looked silently at the road as the drops poured upon it. Radha spoke,
“I miss Mamma. She was a good human. She never beat me. She even bring me clothes on birthday. Before she went to live with God, I play with other children. But now I don’t, because Pa send me to beg, and everyday I go to bus stop and beg, and I don’t have a bowl also. People there do not treat me nicely. I don’t like to beg. People curse me and push me and some even take my money and run away, and then I get home with less money and then Pa beat me. And I even wash clothes all night. Still he beat me. Mamma never ever beat me. Never. If Mamma were not live with God, she would not allow me to wash clothes or beg or Pa beat me. I miss Mamma. You also miss your mamma little doggie, huh?”
The puppy turned its head and looked into Radha’s eyes for a moment; and then looked back at the rain drops as they fell on the road and died. Rain drops don’t beg or wash clothes; they don’t have a bad father also; they just fall and die.
“I don’t have one friend also. Little doggie, you want to be my friend?”
Radha took out its paw from the cloth folds and gently shook it.
“Now that we are friends, I am sorry I hit you with a stone.” She held her earlobes and said, “Very very sorry. I wanted you to go away, because if Pa saw us, he beat us both. He won’t tell why, but he still beat us. He is bad human. I don’t like Pa. He always beat me and never tells why he beat me. Mamma said he is a bad man. Your Pa is also a bad man little doggie, huh?”
She bent her head and searched for the little being in the folds of the cloth roll; it was asleep, the peace and calmness on its face resembled that of the baby who, having cried all night, falls asleep when the morning suns rises from the ocean bed and comes out to greet him. When Radha looked at it, she felt what the mother feels when she wakes up and sees her little baby lying asleep next to her. A smile flits on Radha’s face. The puppy moved its head slightly and rested it against her palm. The warmth of its skin created a lovely feel; it thawed the coldness of her arms. She slowly moved her palm away, in case the blisters of her skin hurt it.
After a minute, she noticed something moving near her feet. She looked down and saw a mouse nibbling at her clothes. The puppy woke up and looked at Radha’s eyes; they were fixed on the ground, still ghoulish with the fear which had failed to come out in form of a shriek. With puzzled eyes, it looked down at her curled up toes. The sumptuous feast of the mouse was brought to a standstill, as it heard the loud bark of a big creature whose head was emerging out of a cloth roll. It was terrified, and would have had a heart attack, that is, if mice did really have them. It jumped several feet in the air—the puppy and Radha shrunk back with amazement—and fell in an old shoe nearby. It didn’t come out of it that night. The puppy looked at Radha. She said agitatedly, “No little doggie you should not, you should not! Mouse can harm you. They bite you. They once bite my ear while I sleep. You should not.” The puppy paid no attention; it fastened its paws around her palm and dozed off. She caressed its head with her fingers, and looked at the soft falling shower. Behind the translucent curtain of rain, she saw a tall and large-built figure coming towards her. She carefully placed the puppy behind the hay stacks and rushed towards it.
“Pa, Pa, I was—was washing—rain came—Pa I—”
He slapped her and showered curses. She fell down; he kicked her in the stomach with his army boots. Radha lay curled up on the wet road. She didn’t shriek or shout. She just counted the seconds that passed.
“Where is the money?” he asked, “You bitch! You are late, and I won’t be able to go today! You’re good for nothing, you bitch! Why didn’t you just die with your mother?”
Radha took out a sack of coins and notes from her pocket and handed it over to him. Before he could start counting them, he felt a pinch in his leg. He looked down and saw a puppy, with its teeth trying to dig inside his flesh. “This bastard!” He kicked it with his other leg. The puppy fell at some distance, and tried to stand up. He went near it and pressed his hard sole over it. It uttered low squeaks, whose audible range was not beyond its own breath. By this time, Radha was holding his boot, trying with her flimsy fingers to lift it off, uttering, “No Pa no! He is small—don’t don’t, it does hurt him it does, he is very small now I will get more money tomorrow, don’t hurt him he is small now Pa don’t, Pa—”
I remember how, five years back, a similar incident had occurred: she was trying to lift off Pa’s boots from her Mamma’s neck.
He said, “You bitch! So this was why you were late! Playing around with dogs!” The puppy stopped wriggling, and its squeaks slowed down and then ceased. He slapped Radha and walked away, towards the infamous iridescent streets whose glitter first attracted, and then blinded.
Radha crawled towards the puppy and whispered in a low voice, “Wake up friend, wake up, fast! He’s gone he’s gone, wake up, friend.”
It lay still; still as the road; still as the moon; still as her doll.
She shook it and said, “Wake up bad doggie, wake up, I not talk to you, I not, I not ever ever, wake up—
But no, it would not wake up. And she soon knew why. Five years back, when she shook her Mamma, who lay on the floor, absolutely still, she knew why she wouldn’t wake up. Mamma had left her alone and gone to live with God; and five years later, her little friend did the same. And she knew it, but she never understood it. She looked at the dead puppy for a minute, and then hit it with her hand, just as she once hit her dead Mamma. People didn’t have the right to leave her alone again and again, and live with God. She hated God. He always took the people she loved.
She picked up the puppy and ran, without crying, to the cemetery. She knew that she had to do the last rites, as no one from its family was there (her grandmother had once told her what to do with those who go to live with God). She dug a small hole next to the wall of cemetery, between the drainpipe and a sapling, and buried it there. As last rites, she joined her hands and prayed for it. She felt content.
She quickly bent her head down and whispered, “I forgot to tell: say to Mamma I’m fine.”
She was too tired to go away. She lay down next to the gutter and placed her head on a stone. She picked up a small caterpillar that was trying to make its way up a plant, and fondled it. Suddenly, her hand stopped and her smile faded: she realised what had just happened; she realised that little doggie had now gone to live with God, and so she won’t ever be able to see it again. Five years back, the day Mamma was cremated, she woke up at three in the night to cry because she knew she won’t ever be able to meet her again. She cried now also. All the beetles and worms hid under the wet soil. The caterpillar curled up and shivered. Radha flung it in the air and uttered a loud wail. For an hour, she turned her head left and right and cried and pounded the soil with her fist, talked in low whispers to the grave. And then a breeze blew: cold, shuddery, with a sharp whistling sound. Along with the breeze flowed the notes of the song which a very old lady sings every night as she sits on the moon, gently rocking in her chair. As the notes passed by, happiness fell from them and stuck to her arms, legs, mouth, hair and eyes. She stopped crying, as Sleep took her in her arms and sang a lullaby. She entered the world of dreams: her Mamma and her little doggie and she were playing ice-water in a lovely garden with pink chrysanthemums, green green grass, big big clouds, a smiling and happy sun, and fluffy rabbits jumping up and down. They all were laughing. No one was crying. They all were with her. No one was with God.
I perched on a branch and looked at her, and cried, just as I had been doing since seven years.
Radha leaned towards it and said, “Hey little doggie, have you lost something?”
It turned its head and looked at her. It blinked and then began sniffing the trash again. She picked it up and said, “Please tell me little doggie, I will also look with you.”
It uttered a low mewl and then tried to spring down from her arms.
“What happened, you look so sad.” She loosened her grip, but it didn’t spring out. It turned absolutely still and looked solemnly at the leftover morsels of potatoes on the newspaper.
“Little doggie, are you hungry? Why, you not eaten anything?”
Radha took out a piece of dry chapatti from her pocket; the puppy grabbed it and hurriedly ate it. She put the puppy on the newspaper and placed another dry chapatti near it. After eating all of it, it sat down and wagged its petite tail.
“You liked it, little doggie? I cook it. Mamma also said I cook well,” Radha said, patting its head, “Okay, now that your tummy is full so you should go back, your mamma will be looking for you. If she sees you here, she say, ‘You bad bad girl! You are trying to take away my little child from me!’ My Mamma also got very worried when I come home late. Now go home little doggie, it is very late.”
Radha stood up and went down the twilit road, dancing on the notes of a song which, her Mamma used to say, a very old lady sings every night, while she sits on the moon, gently rocking in her chair, spinning something. Radha always wondered what the lady looked like, how many grand-children she had, whether she knew any stories, and what was she spinning. She looked up at the moon: it was round, white and calm, like a bowl of milk kept on a paper. Radha couldn’t see her, but she could hear the song: it was soft and clear; one could touch and smell it; it seemed to fill the air with happiness: if you listened to it carefully, you could feel happiness; and if you stretched out your hands, happiness stuck to your fingers.
Walking along with Radha was a shadow, short, with four feet, oblivious of the song, but trying to match with the rhythm of her dance. She turned around and saw the puppy. She stooped and said to it,
“Why are you following me, little doggie? Go back to your Mamma now, fast!”
She gently pushed it. “Come on now, go.”
She started walking again. The puppy stood there for a moment, silent, its sober eyes fixed on Radha. It followed her again. Radha had just walked a few steps, when she saw its shadow again.
“You silly doggie! If Pa sees you he beat me! Go away.” She picked up a small stone and threw at it. It hit him but failed to produce an effect more than a blink in its eye. She threw a larger stone. The puppy looked down and whined, and went away with sulky steps. Kali walked away, her steps faltering with the weigh of guilt. She could still hear the song, but she didn’t dance now.
She was soon inside the open ground, where she could see her shack standing among the squalor of gullies and gutters. She took a scrubber and squatted next to a bucket of clothes immersed in soap water. The mother Earth embraced its children with a soft kiss of breeze, covered them in a blanket of darkness and sang a lullaby of soporific silence: wailing babies, hitting husbands, crying wives, urchins and beggars—all went to sleep; except for Radha, who, seven-years-old, ugly, smelly, with dry hair, torn clothes, running nose, squatting near a drainpipe, scrubbed and washed the clothes.
Minutes later, it started raining. Amidst the clamour of rain, she could hear muffled whines. She stood up and went towards the ox-cart. She stooped down and saw the puppy, wet, shivering, looking at her with its black and still eyes. Then it looked down and tried to hide its face among its paws.
“You bad doggie! I knew you had not gone! Now it start raining and now you will catch cold and you mamma will blame me.”
She picked up the puppy and sat down leaning against a stack of hay. She softly slapped its head and said, “Now, tell me, why do you not go back to your mamma, hmm?”
The puppy looked down and hid its face in her arm, and mewled.
After a minute she spoke,
“You don’t have a mamma, do you?”
She took out a torn cloth from her pocket and rolled the puppy in it. It stopped shivering. They both—the little girl, clothes torn, hands rough and blistered, squatting besides a stack of hay, and the puppy, little, sad, rolled up in a cloth, under warm palms—, looked silently at the road as the drops poured upon it. Radha spoke,
“I miss Mamma. She was a good human. She never beat me. She even bring me clothes on birthday. Before she went to live with God, I play with other children. But now I don’t, because Pa send me to beg, and everyday I go to bus stop and beg, and I don’t have a bowl also. People there do not treat me nicely. I don’t like to beg. People curse me and push me and some even take my money and run away, and then I get home with less money and then Pa beat me. And I even wash clothes all night. Still he beat me. Mamma never ever beat me. Never. If Mamma were not live with God, she would not allow me to wash clothes or beg or Pa beat me. I miss Mamma. You also miss your mamma little doggie, huh?”
The puppy turned its head and looked into Radha’s eyes for a moment; and then looked back at the rain drops as they fell on the road and died. Rain drops don’t beg or wash clothes; they don’t have a bad father also; they just fall and die.
“I don’t have one friend also. Little doggie, you want to be my friend?”
Radha took out its paw from the cloth folds and gently shook it.
“Now that we are friends, I am sorry I hit you with a stone.” She held her earlobes and said, “Very very sorry. I wanted you to go away, because if Pa saw us, he beat us both. He won’t tell why, but he still beat us. He is bad human. I don’t like Pa. He always beat me and never tells why he beat me. Mamma said he is a bad man. Your Pa is also a bad man little doggie, huh?”
She bent her head and searched for the little being in the folds of the cloth roll; it was asleep, the peace and calmness on its face resembled that of the baby who, having cried all night, falls asleep when the morning suns rises from the ocean bed and comes out to greet him. When Radha looked at it, she felt what the mother feels when she wakes up and sees her little baby lying asleep next to her. A smile flits on Radha’s face. The puppy moved its head slightly and rested it against her palm. The warmth of its skin created a lovely feel; it thawed the coldness of her arms. She slowly moved her palm away, in case the blisters of her skin hurt it.
After a minute, she noticed something moving near her feet. She looked down and saw a mouse nibbling at her clothes. The puppy woke up and looked at Radha’s eyes; they were fixed on the ground, still ghoulish with the fear which had failed to come out in form of a shriek. With puzzled eyes, it looked down at her curled up toes. The sumptuous feast of the mouse was brought to a standstill, as it heard the loud bark of a big creature whose head was emerging out of a cloth roll. It was terrified, and would have had a heart attack, that is, if mice did really have them. It jumped several feet in the air—the puppy and Radha shrunk back with amazement—and fell in an old shoe nearby. It didn’t come out of it that night. The puppy looked at Radha. She said agitatedly, “No little doggie you should not, you should not! Mouse can harm you. They bite you. They once bite my ear while I sleep. You should not.” The puppy paid no attention; it fastened its paws around her palm and dozed off. She caressed its head with her fingers, and looked at the soft falling shower. Behind the translucent curtain of rain, she saw a tall and large-built figure coming towards her. She carefully placed the puppy behind the hay stacks and rushed towards it.
“Pa, Pa, I was—was washing—rain came—Pa I—”
He slapped her and showered curses. She fell down; he kicked her in the stomach with his army boots. Radha lay curled up on the wet road. She didn’t shriek or shout. She just counted the seconds that passed.
“Where is the money?” he asked, “You bitch! You are late, and I won’t be able to go today! You’re good for nothing, you bitch! Why didn’t you just die with your mother?”
Radha took out a sack of coins and notes from her pocket and handed it over to him. Before he could start counting them, he felt a pinch in his leg. He looked down and saw a puppy, with its teeth trying to dig inside his flesh. “This bastard!” He kicked it with his other leg. The puppy fell at some distance, and tried to stand up. He went near it and pressed his hard sole over it. It uttered low squeaks, whose audible range was not beyond its own breath. By this time, Radha was holding his boot, trying with her flimsy fingers to lift it off, uttering, “No Pa no! He is small—don’t don’t, it does hurt him it does, he is very small now I will get more money tomorrow, don’t hurt him he is small now Pa don’t, Pa—”
I remember how, five years back, a similar incident had occurred: she was trying to lift off Pa’s boots from her Mamma’s neck.
He said, “You bitch! So this was why you were late! Playing around with dogs!” The puppy stopped wriggling, and its squeaks slowed down and then ceased. He slapped Radha and walked away, towards the infamous iridescent streets whose glitter first attracted, and then blinded.
Radha crawled towards the puppy and whispered in a low voice, “Wake up friend, wake up, fast! He’s gone he’s gone, wake up, friend.”
It lay still; still as the road; still as the moon; still as her doll.
She shook it and said, “Wake up bad doggie, wake up, I not talk to you, I not, I not ever ever, wake up—
But no, it would not wake up. And she soon knew why. Five years back, when she shook her Mamma, who lay on the floor, absolutely still, she knew why she wouldn’t wake up. Mamma had left her alone and gone to live with God; and five years later, her little friend did the same. And she knew it, but she never understood it. She looked at the dead puppy for a minute, and then hit it with her hand, just as she once hit her dead Mamma. People didn’t have the right to leave her alone again and again, and live with God. She hated God. He always took the people she loved.
She picked up the puppy and ran, without crying, to the cemetery. She knew that she had to do the last rites, as no one from its family was there (her grandmother had once told her what to do with those who go to live with God). She dug a small hole next to the wall of cemetery, between the drainpipe and a sapling, and buried it there. As last rites, she joined her hands and prayed for it. She felt content.
She quickly bent her head down and whispered, “I forgot to tell: say to Mamma I’m fine.”
She was too tired to go away. She lay down next to the gutter and placed her head on a stone. She picked up a small caterpillar that was trying to make its way up a plant, and fondled it. Suddenly, her hand stopped and her smile faded: she realised what had just happened; she realised that little doggie had now gone to live with God, and so she won’t ever be able to see it again. Five years back, the day Mamma was cremated, she woke up at three in the night to cry because she knew she won’t ever be able to meet her again. She cried now also. All the beetles and worms hid under the wet soil. The caterpillar curled up and shivered. Radha flung it in the air and uttered a loud wail. For an hour, she turned her head left and right and cried and pounded the soil with her fist, talked in low whispers to the grave. And then a breeze blew: cold, shuddery, with a sharp whistling sound. Along with the breeze flowed the notes of the song which a very old lady sings every night as she sits on the moon, gently rocking in her chair. As the notes passed by, happiness fell from them and stuck to her arms, legs, mouth, hair and eyes. She stopped crying, as Sleep took her in her arms and sang a lullaby. She entered the world of dreams: her Mamma and her little doggie and she were playing ice-water in a lovely garden with pink chrysanthemums, green green grass, big big clouds, a smiling and happy sun, and fluffy rabbits jumping up and down. They all were laughing. No one was crying. They all were with her. No one was with God.
I perched on a branch and looked at her, and cried, just as I had been doing since seven years.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
The Deafening Silence
The doorbell’s sonorous sound encrusted inside my ears, shook my whole body, and woke me from the fitful sleep. I felt better having come out of the well of old and unhappy memories. I raised my head and looked at the incomplete article on the computer.
I opened the door.
“Done with the report?” Anil asked.
“Almost.”
“Want some help?”
“Yeah. If you could just proof-read what I’ve written—I’ll be back in ten minutes, and then I’ll finish it.”
“Fine.”
I looked down and walked along the clamorous sunlit afternoon street. I looked around: the road was brimming with pedlars and vendors, noises and shouts; the red spit clung to the walls, no more incongruous, but a design to beautify the dull thing. I looked at the crowd and the calm faces that rested above those uneasy bodies. I didn’t feel as if I was one of them. I was born here, but I couldn’t say I belonged to this place. This city nursed me, taught me to walk, hid me when there was danger, and one day, I left it. I raised my arm and allowed the warmth of sunrays on fall on my skin. It seemed to be flinching from me; it didn’t greet me with love, it showed apathy.
I entered a park, and sat down on a bench in the empty corner, occupied till now by pigeons. Time turns present into past; the present is shrouded over by a layer of time, slowly, like dust: blurs it, veils it, and then obscures its very existence: and then, when present has become past, you look back at it and say, “It never existed.” It heals gravest of pains and rids one of the harrowing memories. But somehow, owing to some arcane reasons, some incidents, some people, survive this mar of time; layers and layers of time fail to obnubilate them; they remain clear, unmisted, pristine and forever an invincible part of your memory. Hasan did. That tall, plump, sentimental ten-year-old boy defeated time.
*
It was the first day of my duty. I was patrolling with my chest aloft to flaunt the new ebony Break Monitor badge, when some noises drew my attention. I went around the staircase and saw a group of senior boys sitting under the peepul tree, jeering and laughing. At some distance, another boy was sitting on the low cement mound, calm and composed, indifferent to the jeers. One of the seniors picked up a small stone and threw at him. It fell in his lunchbox, almost tipping it off his lap. The boy picked up the lunch box and continued eating, silent, unperturbed, as if he never saw the stone. The senior who threw the stone laughed and boasted of his accuracy to the other boys. Then another senior from the group picked up a stone, a bigger one, and threw at him. It hit the boy’s head. Spasm of helplessness and despair appeared over the boy’s face, his eyes shut and his mouth angled downwards, about to burst into violent cries; but he didn’t cry, the despair vanished, slowly, as if coaxed by an invisible spirit. The boy rubbed his head where the stone struck, and then went back to eating, not even looking up once. His face was again calm and composed, but his body shivered with fear. One of the senior boys saw me. I was writing their names on a piece of paper to be handed over to the Discipline Head. They all hid their faces and ran away. I had written almost all the names. The boy turned his head back and saw me. I noticed tears under his eyes.
In a quavering voice, he said, “I—I am sorry. Don’t punish me—please.”
I replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t.”
I wondered what made him think I was going to punish him. I told him to sit on the steps besides me, so that the boys don’t bother him again. I advised him not to eat from that lunchbox and offered mine; he courteously refused. After propelling again, he took a bite of my paratha. He smiled and thanked me.
“What’s your name? I forgot,” I asked.
“Hasan.”
We had been in the same class, but it seemed to me that I was looking at him for the first time. For me he had been just a fat, tall and shabbily dressed boy, who scratched his unoiled hair, sat on the last bench and rarely talked to anyone. He wasn’t a popular, and other than during the morning attendance, his name was seldom called out in the class. There was nothing worth noticing about him.
“Can I take another bite?” Hasan asked.
“Of course.”
My eyes fell on the piece of paper stuck on his back, with ‘BEWARE I BITE,’ written on it. I took it out, but the chewing gum remained glued to his shirt.
“Hasan, this chewing gum won’t come out, you will have to buy a new shirt.”
He sighed and looked down.
“Vijay,” he looked up and asked, his large and round eyes fixed at mine, “can I always sit with you in the break?”
“Well, yes.”
The bell rang. It was our Social Studies class. Groups of children burst into the class, like a frightened cattle let loose. Hasan walked slowly and sat down on the last bench, indifferent to the paper balls that were being thrown at him. I turned my head and looked at him. Like a wounded animal, there was an innate fear in his eyes; as if he feared the very air he breathed. This fear had given birth to his indifference: he let himself be teased, mocked, dominated, without opposing. I felt pity over his condition and rage over him.
The teacher came in and announced that the results of our class were in the worse among all sections of 3rd. She called out the names of ten children – including Hasan – and made them stand in a line. She chided them all and sent them out of the class, after striking their palms with the wooden ruler.
After school hours, I met him outside the school gate and asked, “Hasan, why don’t you study hard? You failed this time also. I am sure you can pass with good marks only if you work a bit hard. It’s not so difficult.” He looked down and said, “There is always a lot of work at the shop.” I looked around, short of words.
“Hasan, you want to be my friend?” I asked, moving my hand towards him.
He shook it gently and smiled. The mirth in his eyes hid the innate fear for the time being.
When Hasan came to school next day, his face was bruised and his hands were swollen. When he sat besides me in the break, I asked him, “What happened, did you fall down?”
He replied, “No, I didn’t. Ammi hit me.”
“Why?”
“Because of that chewing gum on my shirt. She said that I was perhaps careless and we don’t have enough money this month to buy another shirt.”
He excitedly showed me his bruises and cuts, explained how they were made, as if they were souvenirs, or badges of honour earned at the battlefield.
I said, “You look so happy even though she hit you. I cry when Mummy or Daddy hit me.”
He laughed and said, “I don’t mind it. She loves me a lot. Every time after beating me, she starts crying and says Sorry, and then she puts a balm over my bruises and next day gives me ten rupees for lunch. And she says that she beats me because she loves me; she won’t beat people she does not love.” He thanked me for reminding him about the ten rupees. He ran to the canteen and fetched two samosas for us.
After the school hours, I found him waiting at the school gate. I approached him. He said, “Vijay, will you come to my house today?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Yesterday, I told my Ammi about you. She was very happy that I had made a new friend. She told me to call you for dinner today. Will you come?”
“Definitely! But, I don’t know you house.”
“No problem. Come to my shop today at four, I will take you to home.”
His shop was at walking distance from my house, but my parents still didn’t allow me to go alone. I took my elder brother Arnav with me.
Hasan’s shop was small compared to the other ones. He was sitting cross legged on the white cloth, that was spread over the raised platform, utterly absorbed in folding the bundles of loose cloth that lay spread all over. As he saw me approaching, he waved his hand and smiled. I told my brother that I will reach home before eight and told him to go back. I went and sat besides Hasan on the cold and cosy white cloth. We talked a great deal about school, our new Social Studies teacher and the myriad Maths homework. Hasan called for the tea pedlar, who was roaming in front of the shop. Hasan took out nine rupees from the crude locker and paid for three teas; two for us, one for the thin servant who sat in the corner still folding the cloth. Before my lips could touch the cup, he shouted, “Wait, Vijay! Stop! Don’t drink it!”
“What?” I asked, searching the cup if a lizard had fallen into it.
“Wait for a minute.” Turning towards the servant, he said, “Ramesh, come here.” Ramesh kept his tea on the counter and asked in sombre voice, “What?”
“Bring two Parle-G packets. Go fast!” Hasan gave a ten rupee note to Ramesh, and said, “Bring three, instead.” Ramesh put on his slippers and rushed out, somewhat happier than before. When the biscuits came, Hasan taught me how to dip them into the tea and toss into the mouth before it fell down and sank. He told me to look at Ramesh and learn. The thin boy was deeply immersed in dipping and flinging the biscuits into his mouth, with the agility and dexterity of a professional.
When it was 6 O’clock, Ramesh and Hasan closed the shop. I asked Hasan why his father was not at the shop today. He replied, “Ammi says he died two days before I was born.” He wasn’t sad and didn’t really mourn over his father’s absence: one can’t mourn over losing something one never really had.
He said, “Ammi cooks very well. You will like her food.”
His house was small, painted in dark green. When I entered, the strong smell of food filled my nose. Aunty came rushing out of the kitchen to greet us. She said that she was eagerly looking forward to meeting me. I sat down on a low stool and she sat opposite to me, on a cot; Hasan next to her. She asked about my studies and parents. And then she asked if Hasan does any mischief in school. She told me to look after him and if he did anything wrong, to punish him like an elder brother. She left us and set the table. She had cooked tomato soup and Shahi Biryani, along with the usual course. I and Hasan ate all the Biryani. Hasan’s mother cooked more, which she did with pleasure, extremely happy that I liked it. She closed the kitchen door and said Hasan that he was behaving like a rabbit gone nuts to prevent him from repeatedly opening the refrigerator door and exclaiming, “Yummy! Can’t wait for it,” with a strange amount of pathos in his voice. In the end, when I and Hasan were staring at our stomachs and wondering how it seemed so heavy but looked the same size, Aunty came with a cake in her hand. It was small and round, with a thin layer of white cream over it, embellished with crumbs of dark Cadbury and fine coconut. “Here it comes,” exclaimed Hasan. She said that it was to celebrate my coming to their house for the first time. We couldn’t eat more than a piece; she packed the rest of it in a steel box and told me to take it home. She also gave me a gift. When I shook it, no sound came. I was excited to reach home and open it. Then I and Hasan sat on the creaky chairs and she read us the story of The Happy Prince. Hasan cried.
I said, “Aunty, I have to go now. It is dark. Mummy will be waiting.”
“OK, I’ll take you.”
“No problem, I can go alone.”
“Not at all, I won’t allow you to go alone. I’ll come with you.”
“No Aunty, it’s all right, I can—”
“Vijay, I won’t allow you. It’s final.”
We three walked along the twilit road, holding each other’s hand. Aunty sang an old Hindi song on my request. Hasan tried to follow it, but only succeeded in uttering sporadic words.
“Aunty,” I said breaking the silence that prevailed after the song ceased, “the food was fabulous! Specially the biryani.”
“Oh, you really liked it? Why don’t you come with Hasan every Sunday? He will get some company and I’ll make delicious food each time.”
She looked at me beamishly. To visit Hasan and eat Aunt’s delicious food each Sunday would be idyllic, I thought. I found no reason to object.
“Definitely! I’ll come every Sunday.”
And I did go, every Sunday, for one year.
*
“You, Vijay, come here,” said a large built senior boy coming towards us.
“Why?”
Tension and strain appeared on my forehead as the boy came towering towards me, with his face and eyes burning in anguish.
“Hey, what’s you problem?” shouted Hasan who was standing behind the boy, leaning by the grid of our school gate.
“Because of this dog I got suspended today—I’ll kill him,” said the boy, reaching for my neck.
“Don’t you touch him!” shouted Hasan.
The boy pressed his fingers around my neck and forced it down: my knees fell on the rough ground and my neck hung in midair, held by his tight grip. Little did my senses work, but I think I heard a loud groan. The taut fingers fastened around my neck gradually loosened. I fell down and gasped for breath. I raised my head and saw Hasan and the boy rolling into the mud, kicking, and cursing each other. Hasan shouted, “Run Vijay, run. Fast! Go!”
I stood up and ran towards my house. I pushed open the main door, dashed across the hall and ran upstairs to my room. I jumped on the bed and threw a thick blanked over self. I could feel the shivering of my eye lids, the thumping of my chest and the fear that was imbued in every heave. I woke up two hours later from what seemed like a fitful state between sleep and reality, and left me sweating in that cold room. I washed my face, and went downstairs, feeling better. Mummy, Daddy and Arnav were watching the TV, petrified. I took a place besides Mummy and looked at the TV screen. The news channel was showing abandoned streets, obliterated houses, disfigured human bodies and sporadic blood puddles: it seemed as if the whole town was scourged by a tempest. Looking at it, one could never have said they humans lived here once: it looked as if it was a dumpsite of bodies and burnt houses and cars. I hid my face in the sofa and moaned in fear. Mummy took me in her lap and switched the channel. Daddy sighed and said in a low, forlorn voice, “What has become of my world! Animals live in more harmony. These people are killing each other as if—as if—people were rag rolls and not flesh-and-blood.”
“Yes, Pa,” said Arnav, “what happened Hindus did was wrong and their anger against it is justified. But what they are doing is also as wrong as what the Hindus did. They—”
“Anger, my child, is a son who devours over the womb that gave it birth. Those few Hindus did wrong by demolishing the Masjid, I agree. Those who were involved deserve to be hanged. But I don’t understand why they are slaughtering others for it. Sorrow does not compensate sorrow.”
“Things will be all right in a few days” said Mummy.
A silence issued, in which all looked down, as if ashamed of something.
“I am going to the shop,” said Daddy.
“No, please, don’t go today,” said Mummy.
“I will go. It is better to die than live in this vicious world.”
Before Mummy could do anything, Daddy picked up his handbag and stormed out of the room. Seeing the plea in Mummy’s eyes, Arnav rushed out to block the door. Daddy pushed him aside and went out, cursing.
The whole day Mummy sat besides the window, fanning the folded newspaper, now and then drawing aside the polychrome curtains to search the bright sunlit pavement for the tall figure of her husband coming back home. I hid behind the kitchen door and looked at the drops of tears that clung to her cheeks, refusing to slide down. She had always been someone who had comforted me when I cried. And now, when I wanted her comfort more than ever, I see her crying. It never occurred to me that she could have cried. I went back to my room and covered my head with the pillow, to keep the sadness from penetrating.
That night, as I was lying on the bed, I heard yells and cries. I ran downstairs. Arnav was holding Daddy’s rifle in his hand, yelling at Mummy who was holding his hands and was trying to snatch the rifle from him.
“Get away, Ma! Get away! I’ll not leave them alive—I’ll kill all! Their blood is not like ours; they are not humans. What was Daddy’s fault? He never did anyone harm. What did he do? He just wanted to run his shop. Those Muslims chopped him in mid street. He never did anyone harm. They want blood—I’ll show them what blood is. I swear on the heat of his pyre that I will kill those who killed him. Leave my hand!”
Arnav pushed Mummy. Her head rammed with the wall and she fell down. “They killed father; Those Muslims killed my father! He never did anyone harm.” he said and stormed out, kicking the furniture.
*
Mummy never sat by the window now. She was afraid to nurse hopes. The Ram-Sita and Krishna idols, which she loved and cared for like her own child, were given to our maid, and the small marble temple was now being used to keep utensils. For us, God was no more He, but It. There was a time when the warm morning rays used to enter through the window and collect around her temple, like little eager children, waiting for her to commence the morning prayers. And when she would sit on the cot and begin her prayers, the whole house would be filled with honeylike notes: the morning rays would flicker and beam and dance. And, like us, they relished the melody, and were ignorant of the meaning of those words. She would then move about the house, swaying the incense stick: the black and white figures would rise from it and dance, devoted, unperturbed, like a barmy Mira dancing in front of her Krishna. But things changed now: the rays collected around the abandoned temple, and waited, cold and quite, no more flickering or beaming or dancing. Instead of the black and white figure and becharming notes, the house was now shrouded in silence, loud silence, so loud that it deafened you.
I went to the school after five days. No one talked in the class. The deafening silence was present here too. You wanted someone to pierce your eardrums and run away from this place. But it wasn’t possible. It followed you like a shadow; it was present in every nook, alley, street, house, room and barn. Even the deaf could hear it, see it in fact. I raised my eyes from the blank notebook and looked at Hasan: his hands and knees were bandaged, and the pink stain of chewing gum was still clung to his shirt, only now dirt stuck to it. He looked at me and smiled. I felt rage towards him. My brother’s words echoed in my ears, as if they had abided there forever, to be echoed whenever I saw a Muslim. His people killed my father. His blood is different. I looked away.
Sitting on the steps, with the tiffin kept open on my lap, I was remembering Daddy and Arnav. I was about to tuck my head in my lap and cry when Hasan came and sat next to me; he opened his tiffin and laid in front of me.
“Not feeling well, huh? I brought biryani today, with extra paneer. Eat it, you’ll feel better. Ammi made it for you specially. I also got ten rupees for breaking my hand in the fight.”
I went away and sat on the raised platform under the peepul tree. Hasan came and sat next to me.
He said, “It’s better in here—shade and all.”
I ducked my head in my lap and held my hair in my hands and cried.
“What happened Vijay? Are you all right?”
“Go away,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?”
I raised my head and said, “Get away from me!”
“Hey, Vijay, what happened? You not feeling—”
I stood in front of him and shouted, “Are you deaf? Get lost!”
He stood up and said, coming towards me, “Vijay, wh—”
“Don’t you touch me! You filthy dog! Your blood is foul and dirty! Get away!” I picked up a stone and threw it at him. It hit his bandaged hand; the expression on his face said that it hit him like a bullet.
“You people killed Daddy! Get away from my sight before I kill you!”
I turned and ran, cursing him, feeling a vague pang of satisfaction.
Hasan stood up and went in the class. He kept the tiffin in his bag, rested his head on the table, covered it with his arms and cried. He didn’t understand why Vijay, his only friend, was so rude to him. Why did he say his blood was filthy? Had he done something that upset him? but what? He couldn’t remember.
He took out the dirty handkerchief and wiped his tears. But he still didn’t know why Vijay hated him so much. And there was no one to give him the answer. As he thought this, more and more tears surged down his cheeks. He turned his head sideways and stared impassively at the pencil box. He snatched the box and took out a paper cutter from. He pressed the skin of his lap under his index finger and thumb. With the other hand, he took the cutter and pressed it against the soft skin, slowly and carefully, as if threading a needle. A drop of blood came out, and slid down his leg; it was red, pure and shiny, not filthy. He wiped it with his finger and inspected it closely. Yes, it was not filthy. He kept the cutter back into his box. Vijay was mistaken, and he will go and tell him about it and Vijay will say Sorry to him and he say It’s all right and things will be back to normal. Yes things will be back to normal. But if Vijay didn’t believe him? And why did he say he killed his father? The tears slid down the contours of his cheeks mercilessly, as once more there was no one to answer his questions.
After the school hours, I saw him; he leaned by the school gate, his cheek pressed against the grid, his low lip sticking out, eyes round and blank. I looked left and right. I picked up a large stone from beneath the scooter and motioned it to hit him. He was unperturbed, unafraid; his eyes still round and blank. I threw the stone; it struck the gate, producing a sonorous sound. He ducked behind the grid. Then he peeped out and looked at me. He eyes narrowed and tears and redness replaced the void. He rubbed them with his wrist. I approached him and shouted, “Leave my country, go to Pakistan, your country. Just go away! You people killed my father. Your blood is filthy.” He was looking at me, tears in his eyes, his head pressed in between the steel bars.
I was walking on the clamorous street with my hand in Mummy’s. Among the large and vivacious shops selling the most lustrous bangles and polychrome sarees, I saw it: small, narrow and pallid as ever – Hasan’s shop. But Hasan was not there. A fat man, wearing a dirty white shirt, sat on the counter. Ramesh, narrow, thin, was sitting at the back, playing with a scissor. Ramesh saw me and rushed to me. Mummy was busy bargaining.
“Where is Hasan?” I asked before he could say anything.
He spoke in a dismal voice, “He left.”
“Left? When? Where?”
“Yesterday morning. He said that now he was going to live with his Uncle, in Pakistan. Things were unsafe for them here.”
“And yes, Vijay,” Ramesh spoke, “he left something for you.”
Ramesh reached for his pocket. Mummy called me. I turned and ran to her, without looking back.
*
The pain of a sad memory withers away with time, but it forever on remembrance gives birth to sorrow and guilt. I took stood up from the bench and continued my walk. I was late but had no mood to go back and work on that dire report. The street was filled with multifarious noises: shouts of pedlars, cries of infants, yells of drunks. But hiding behind these noises was silence, the loud and deafening silence. It was there in the awry alleys, the quite quoins, the raucous roads, the grim gutters, the pallid parlours; it was in your shadow, in your voice and your silence; in the dark and the light. It was there ten years back, during the Babri Masjid Demolition, and was here now, during the Godhara Riots.
I hired an auto-rickshaw and went to the street where Hasan’s shop was. It was still there, small, narrow, pallid. On the other side of the counter was Ramesh. Standing outside, leaning his elbow on the counter was a tall and thin man. He turned around and dusted his scooter with a cloth. Those almond eyes; the innate smile on his face, unperturbed by winter or autumn, despair or disdain; the gentleness in his movements: he couldn’t be anybody but the ten-year-old boy who cried because of me, ten years back. He saw me. The smile on his face faded away and his face turned blank. We stood looking each other, absolutely still, as if the fourth dimension had halted. His lips turned upwards and bloomed into a hopeful smile. I just stood there, inert. The unanswered smile vanished from his face. He picked up the polythene from the counter and drove away. He entered the crowd and became a part of it, like a droplet entering the ocean. I ran to where his house was. I hid behind the truck and looked at the small green building. Hasan’s mother came out on the terrace to hang the wet clothes on the clothesline. She was humming, in a sombre, calm, poignant voice.
I couldn’t sleep that night. What I said ten years back was right; his blood was different: it had fidelity. He came back to his city, his people, as soon as things were calm. He didn’t run away from memories, he came back to them, lived with them. As the dawn broke, I rushed to his shop. I wanted to breach the wall of religion that had soured our friendship. Hasan was kind; he couldn’t have refused my plea. For him, even ten years wasn’t too late to ask for forgiveness. Under the pale and cold morning light I saw Ramesh squatting by the shutter, opening the locks. He looked up.
“Ramesh, it’s me, Vijay. Remember?”
He looked at me with confusion.
“I used to come to shop with Hasan, remember?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“When did he come back? Is he buying back the shop?”
He looked at me with irritation and said, “What are you talking about? Who was come back?”
“I’m talking about Hasan and his mother.”
“—he died ten years back,” Ramesh said bending down to open the lock, “Hindus burned their train before it reached Pakistan. All were killed. Not a soul survived. I saw their bodies.”
I opened the door.
“Done with the report?” Anil asked.
“Almost.”
“Want some help?”
“Yeah. If you could just proof-read what I’ve written—I’ll be back in ten minutes, and then I’ll finish it.”
“Fine.”
I looked down and walked along the clamorous sunlit afternoon street. I looked around: the road was brimming with pedlars and vendors, noises and shouts; the red spit clung to the walls, no more incongruous, but a design to beautify the dull thing. I looked at the crowd and the calm faces that rested above those uneasy bodies. I didn’t feel as if I was one of them. I was born here, but I couldn’t say I belonged to this place. This city nursed me, taught me to walk, hid me when there was danger, and one day, I left it. I raised my arm and allowed the warmth of sunrays on fall on my skin. It seemed to be flinching from me; it didn’t greet me with love, it showed apathy.
I entered a park, and sat down on a bench in the empty corner, occupied till now by pigeons. Time turns present into past; the present is shrouded over by a layer of time, slowly, like dust: blurs it, veils it, and then obscures its very existence: and then, when present has become past, you look back at it and say, “It never existed.” It heals gravest of pains and rids one of the harrowing memories. But somehow, owing to some arcane reasons, some incidents, some people, survive this mar of time; layers and layers of time fail to obnubilate them; they remain clear, unmisted, pristine and forever an invincible part of your memory. Hasan did. That tall, plump, sentimental ten-year-old boy defeated time.
*
It was the first day of my duty. I was patrolling with my chest aloft to flaunt the new ebony Break Monitor badge, when some noises drew my attention. I went around the staircase and saw a group of senior boys sitting under the peepul tree, jeering and laughing. At some distance, another boy was sitting on the low cement mound, calm and composed, indifferent to the jeers. One of the seniors picked up a small stone and threw at him. It fell in his lunchbox, almost tipping it off his lap. The boy picked up the lunch box and continued eating, silent, unperturbed, as if he never saw the stone. The senior who threw the stone laughed and boasted of his accuracy to the other boys. Then another senior from the group picked up a stone, a bigger one, and threw at him. It hit the boy’s head. Spasm of helplessness and despair appeared over the boy’s face, his eyes shut and his mouth angled downwards, about to burst into violent cries; but he didn’t cry, the despair vanished, slowly, as if coaxed by an invisible spirit. The boy rubbed his head where the stone struck, and then went back to eating, not even looking up once. His face was again calm and composed, but his body shivered with fear. One of the senior boys saw me. I was writing their names on a piece of paper to be handed over to the Discipline Head. They all hid their faces and ran away. I had written almost all the names. The boy turned his head back and saw me. I noticed tears under his eyes.
In a quavering voice, he said, “I—I am sorry. Don’t punish me—please.”
I replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t.”
I wondered what made him think I was going to punish him. I told him to sit on the steps besides me, so that the boys don’t bother him again. I advised him not to eat from that lunchbox and offered mine; he courteously refused. After propelling again, he took a bite of my paratha. He smiled and thanked me.
“What’s your name? I forgot,” I asked.
“Hasan.”
We had been in the same class, but it seemed to me that I was looking at him for the first time. For me he had been just a fat, tall and shabbily dressed boy, who scratched his unoiled hair, sat on the last bench and rarely talked to anyone. He wasn’t a popular, and other than during the morning attendance, his name was seldom called out in the class. There was nothing worth noticing about him.
“Can I take another bite?” Hasan asked.
“Of course.”
My eyes fell on the piece of paper stuck on his back, with ‘BEWARE I BITE,’ written on it. I took it out, but the chewing gum remained glued to his shirt.
“Hasan, this chewing gum won’t come out, you will have to buy a new shirt.”
He sighed and looked down.
“Vijay,” he looked up and asked, his large and round eyes fixed at mine, “can I always sit with you in the break?”
“Well, yes.”
The bell rang. It was our Social Studies class. Groups of children burst into the class, like a frightened cattle let loose. Hasan walked slowly and sat down on the last bench, indifferent to the paper balls that were being thrown at him. I turned my head and looked at him. Like a wounded animal, there was an innate fear in his eyes; as if he feared the very air he breathed. This fear had given birth to his indifference: he let himself be teased, mocked, dominated, without opposing. I felt pity over his condition and rage over him.
The teacher came in and announced that the results of our class were in the worse among all sections of 3rd. She called out the names of ten children – including Hasan – and made them stand in a line. She chided them all and sent them out of the class, after striking their palms with the wooden ruler.
After school hours, I met him outside the school gate and asked, “Hasan, why don’t you study hard? You failed this time also. I am sure you can pass with good marks only if you work a bit hard. It’s not so difficult.” He looked down and said, “There is always a lot of work at the shop.” I looked around, short of words.
“Hasan, you want to be my friend?” I asked, moving my hand towards him.
He shook it gently and smiled. The mirth in his eyes hid the innate fear for the time being.
When Hasan came to school next day, his face was bruised and his hands were swollen. When he sat besides me in the break, I asked him, “What happened, did you fall down?”
He replied, “No, I didn’t. Ammi hit me.”
“Why?”
“Because of that chewing gum on my shirt. She said that I was perhaps careless and we don’t have enough money this month to buy another shirt.”
He excitedly showed me his bruises and cuts, explained how they were made, as if they were souvenirs, or badges of honour earned at the battlefield.
I said, “You look so happy even though she hit you. I cry when Mummy or Daddy hit me.”
He laughed and said, “I don’t mind it. She loves me a lot. Every time after beating me, she starts crying and says Sorry, and then she puts a balm over my bruises and next day gives me ten rupees for lunch. And she says that she beats me because she loves me; she won’t beat people she does not love.” He thanked me for reminding him about the ten rupees. He ran to the canteen and fetched two samosas for us.
After the school hours, I found him waiting at the school gate. I approached him. He said, “Vijay, will you come to my house today?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Yesterday, I told my Ammi about you. She was very happy that I had made a new friend. She told me to call you for dinner today. Will you come?”
“Definitely! But, I don’t know you house.”
“No problem. Come to my shop today at four, I will take you to home.”
His shop was at walking distance from my house, but my parents still didn’t allow me to go alone. I took my elder brother Arnav with me.
Hasan’s shop was small compared to the other ones. He was sitting cross legged on the white cloth, that was spread over the raised platform, utterly absorbed in folding the bundles of loose cloth that lay spread all over. As he saw me approaching, he waved his hand and smiled. I told my brother that I will reach home before eight and told him to go back. I went and sat besides Hasan on the cold and cosy white cloth. We talked a great deal about school, our new Social Studies teacher and the myriad Maths homework. Hasan called for the tea pedlar, who was roaming in front of the shop. Hasan took out nine rupees from the crude locker and paid for three teas; two for us, one for the thin servant who sat in the corner still folding the cloth. Before my lips could touch the cup, he shouted, “Wait, Vijay! Stop! Don’t drink it!”
“What?” I asked, searching the cup if a lizard had fallen into it.
“Wait for a minute.” Turning towards the servant, he said, “Ramesh, come here.” Ramesh kept his tea on the counter and asked in sombre voice, “What?”
“Bring two Parle-G packets. Go fast!” Hasan gave a ten rupee note to Ramesh, and said, “Bring three, instead.” Ramesh put on his slippers and rushed out, somewhat happier than before. When the biscuits came, Hasan taught me how to dip them into the tea and toss into the mouth before it fell down and sank. He told me to look at Ramesh and learn. The thin boy was deeply immersed in dipping and flinging the biscuits into his mouth, with the agility and dexterity of a professional.
When it was 6 O’clock, Ramesh and Hasan closed the shop. I asked Hasan why his father was not at the shop today. He replied, “Ammi says he died two days before I was born.” He wasn’t sad and didn’t really mourn over his father’s absence: one can’t mourn over losing something one never really had.
He said, “Ammi cooks very well. You will like her food.”
His house was small, painted in dark green. When I entered, the strong smell of food filled my nose. Aunty came rushing out of the kitchen to greet us. She said that she was eagerly looking forward to meeting me. I sat down on a low stool and she sat opposite to me, on a cot; Hasan next to her. She asked about my studies and parents. And then she asked if Hasan does any mischief in school. She told me to look after him and if he did anything wrong, to punish him like an elder brother. She left us and set the table. She had cooked tomato soup and Shahi Biryani, along with the usual course. I and Hasan ate all the Biryani. Hasan’s mother cooked more, which she did with pleasure, extremely happy that I liked it. She closed the kitchen door and said Hasan that he was behaving like a rabbit gone nuts to prevent him from repeatedly opening the refrigerator door and exclaiming, “Yummy! Can’t wait for it,” with a strange amount of pathos in his voice. In the end, when I and Hasan were staring at our stomachs and wondering how it seemed so heavy but looked the same size, Aunty came with a cake in her hand. It was small and round, with a thin layer of white cream over it, embellished with crumbs of dark Cadbury and fine coconut. “Here it comes,” exclaimed Hasan. She said that it was to celebrate my coming to their house for the first time. We couldn’t eat more than a piece; she packed the rest of it in a steel box and told me to take it home. She also gave me a gift. When I shook it, no sound came. I was excited to reach home and open it. Then I and Hasan sat on the creaky chairs and she read us the story of The Happy Prince. Hasan cried.
I said, “Aunty, I have to go now. It is dark. Mummy will be waiting.”
“OK, I’ll take you.”
“No problem, I can go alone.”
“Not at all, I won’t allow you to go alone. I’ll come with you.”
“No Aunty, it’s all right, I can—”
“Vijay, I won’t allow you. It’s final.”
We three walked along the twilit road, holding each other’s hand. Aunty sang an old Hindi song on my request. Hasan tried to follow it, but only succeeded in uttering sporadic words.
“Aunty,” I said breaking the silence that prevailed after the song ceased, “the food was fabulous! Specially the biryani.”
“Oh, you really liked it? Why don’t you come with Hasan every Sunday? He will get some company and I’ll make delicious food each time.”
She looked at me beamishly. To visit Hasan and eat Aunt’s delicious food each Sunday would be idyllic, I thought. I found no reason to object.
“Definitely! I’ll come every Sunday.”
And I did go, every Sunday, for one year.
*
“You, Vijay, come here,” said a large built senior boy coming towards us.
“Why?”
Tension and strain appeared on my forehead as the boy came towering towards me, with his face and eyes burning in anguish.
“Hey, what’s you problem?” shouted Hasan who was standing behind the boy, leaning by the grid of our school gate.
“Because of this dog I got suspended today—I’ll kill him,” said the boy, reaching for my neck.
“Don’t you touch him!” shouted Hasan.
The boy pressed his fingers around my neck and forced it down: my knees fell on the rough ground and my neck hung in midair, held by his tight grip. Little did my senses work, but I think I heard a loud groan. The taut fingers fastened around my neck gradually loosened. I fell down and gasped for breath. I raised my head and saw Hasan and the boy rolling into the mud, kicking, and cursing each other. Hasan shouted, “Run Vijay, run. Fast! Go!”
I stood up and ran towards my house. I pushed open the main door, dashed across the hall and ran upstairs to my room. I jumped on the bed and threw a thick blanked over self. I could feel the shivering of my eye lids, the thumping of my chest and the fear that was imbued in every heave. I woke up two hours later from what seemed like a fitful state between sleep and reality, and left me sweating in that cold room. I washed my face, and went downstairs, feeling better. Mummy, Daddy and Arnav were watching the TV, petrified. I took a place besides Mummy and looked at the TV screen. The news channel was showing abandoned streets, obliterated houses, disfigured human bodies and sporadic blood puddles: it seemed as if the whole town was scourged by a tempest. Looking at it, one could never have said they humans lived here once: it looked as if it was a dumpsite of bodies and burnt houses and cars. I hid my face in the sofa and moaned in fear. Mummy took me in her lap and switched the channel. Daddy sighed and said in a low, forlorn voice, “What has become of my world! Animals live in more harmony. These people are killing each other as if—as if—people were rag rolls and not flesh-and-blood.”
“Yes, Pa,” said Arnav, “what happened Hindus did was wrong and their anger against it is justified. But what they are doing is also as wrong as what the Hindus did. They—”
“Anger, my child, is a son who devours over the womb that gave it birth. Those few Hindus did wrong by demolishing the Masjid, I agree. Those who were involved deserve to be hanged. But I don’t understand why they are slaughtering others for it. Sorrow does not compensate sorrow.”
“Things will be all right in a few days” said Mummy.
A silence issued, in which all looked down, as if ashamed of something.
“I am going to the shop,” said Daddy.
“No, please, don’t go today,” said Mummy.
“I will go. It is better to die than live in this vicious world.”
Before Mummy could do anything, Daddy picked up his handbag and stormed out of the room. Seeing the plea in Mummy’s eyes, Arnav rushed out to block the door. Daddy pushed him aside and went out, cursing.
The whole day Mummy sat besides the window, fanning the folded newspaper, now and then drawing aside the polychrome curtains to search the bright sunlit pavement for the tall figure of her husband coming back home. I hid behind the kitchen door and looked at the drops of tears that clung to her cheeks, refusing to slide down. She had always been someone who had comforted me when I cried. And now, when I wanted her comfort more than ever, I see her crying. It never occurred to me that she could have cried. I went back to my room and covered my head with the pillow, to keep the sadness from penetrating.
That night, as I was lying on the bed, I heard yells and cries. I ran downstairs. Arnav was holding Daddy’s rifle in his hand, yelling at Mummy who was holding his hands and was trying to snatch the rifle from him.
“Get away, Ma! Get away! I’ll not leave them alive—I’ll kill all! Their blood is not like ours; they are not humans. What was Daddy’s fault? He never did anyone harm. What did he do? He just wanted to run his shop. Those Muslims chopped him in mid street. He never did anyone harm. They want blood—I’ll show them what blood is. I swear on the heat of his pyre that I will kill those who killed him. Leave my hand!”
Arnav pushed Mummy. Her head rammed with the wall and she fell down. “They killed father; Those Muslims killed my father! He never did anyone harm.” he said and stormed out, kicking the furniture.
*
Mummy never sat by the window now. She was afraid to nurse hopes. The Ram-Sita and Krishna idols, which she loved and cared for like her own child, were given to our maid, and the small marble temple was now being used to keep utensils. For us, God was no more He, but It. There was a time when the warm morning rays used to enter through the window and collect around her temple, like little eager children, waiting for her to commence the morning prayers. And when she would sit on the cot and begin her prayers, the whole house would be filled with honeylike notes: the morning rays would flicker and beam and dance. And, like us, they relished the melody, and were ignorant of the meaning of those words. She would then move about the house, swaying the incense stick: the black and white figures would rise from it and dance, devoted, unperturbed, like a barmy Mira dancing in front of her Krishna. But things changed now: the rays collected around the abandoned temple, and waited, cold and quite, no more flickering or beaming or dancing. Instead of the black and white figure and becharming notes, the house was now shrouded in silence, loud silence, so loud that it deafened you.
I went to the school after five days. No one talked in the class. The deafening silence was present here too. You wanted someone to pierce your eardrums and run away from this place. But it wasn’t possible. It followed you like a shadow; it was present in every nook, alley, street, house, room and barn. Even the deaf could hear it, see it in fact. I raised my eyes from the blank notebook and looked at Hasan: his hands and knees were bandaged, and the pink stain of chewing gum was still clung to his shirt, only now dirt stuck to it. He looked at me and smiled. I felt rage towards him. My brother’s words echoed in my ears, as if they had abided there forever, to be echoed whenever I saw a Muslim. His people killed my father. His blood is different. I looked away.
Sitting on the steps, with the tiffin kept open on my lap, I was remembering Daddy and Arnav. I was about to tuck my head in my lap and cry when Hasan came and sat next to me; he opened his tiffin and laid in front of me.
“Not feeling well, huh? I brought biryani today, with extra paneer. Eat it, you’ll feel better. Ammi made it for you specially. I also got ten rupees for breaking my hand in the fight.”
I went away and sat on the raised platform under the peepul tree. Hasan came and sat next to me.
He said, “It’s better in here—shade and all.”
I ducked my head in my lap and held my hair in my hands and cried.
“What happened Vijay? Are you all right?”
“Go away,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?”
I raised my head and said, “Get away from me!”
“Hey, Vijay, what happened? You not feeling—”
I stood in front of him and shouted, “Are you deaf? Get lost!”
He stood up and said, coming towards me, “Vijay, wh—”
“Don’t you touch me! You filthy dog! Your blood is foul and dirty! Get away!” I picked up a stone and threw it at him. It hit his bandaged hand; the expression on his face said that it hit him like a bullet.
“You people killed Daddy! Get away from my sight before I kill you!”
I turned and ran, cursing him, feeling a vague pang of satisfaction.
Hasan stood up and went in the class. He kept the tiffin in his bag, rested his head on the table, covered it with his arms and cried. He didn’t understand why Vijay, his only friend, was so rude to him. Why did he say his blood was filthy? Had he done something that upset him? but what? He couldn’t remember.
He took out the dirty handkerchief and wiped his tears. But he still didn’t know why Vijay hated him so much. And there was no one to give him the answer. As he thought this, more and more tears surged down his cheeks. He turned his head sideways and stared impassively at the pencil box. He snatched the box and took out a paper cutter from. He pressed the skin of his lap under his index finger and thumb. With the other hand, he took the cutter and pressed it against the soft skin, slowly and carefully, as if threading a needle. A drop of blood came out, and slid down his leg; it was red, pure and shiny, not filthy. He wiped it with his finger and inspected it closely. Yes, it was not filthy. He kept the cutter back into his box. Vijay was mistaken, and he will go and tell him about it and Vijay will say Sorry to him and he say It’s all right and things will be back to normal. Yes things will be back to normal. But if Vijay didn’t believe him? And why did he say he killed his father? The tears slid down the contours of his cheeks mercilessly, as once more there was no one to answer his questions.
After the school hours, I saw him; he leaned by the school gate, his cheek pressed against the grid, his low lip sticking out, eyes round and blank. I looked left and right. I picked up a large stone from beneath the scooter and motioned it to hit him. He was unperturbed, unafraid; his eyes still round and blank. I threw the stone; it struck the gate, producing a sonorous sound. He ducked behind the grid. Then he peeped out and looked at me. He eyes narrowed and tears and redness replaced the void. He rubbed them with his wrist. I approached him and shouted, “Leave my country, go to Pakistan, your country. Just go away! You people killed my father. Your blood is filthy.” He was looking at me, tears in his eyes, his head pressed in between the steel bars.
I was walking on the clamorous street with my hand in Mummy’s. Among the large and vivacious shops selling the most lustrous bangles and polychrome sarees, I saw it: small, narrow and pallid as ever – Hasan’s shop. But Hasan was not there. A fat man, wearing a dirty white shirt, sat on the counter. Ramesh, narrow, thin, was sitting at the back, playing with a scissor. Ramesh saw me and rushed to me. Mummy was busy bargaining.
“Where is Hasan?” I asked before he could say anything.
He spoke in a dismal voice, “He left.”
“Left? When? Where?”
“Yesterday morning. He said that now he was going to live with his Uncle, in Pakistan. Things were unsafe for them here.”
“And yes, Vijay,” Ramesh spoke, “he left something for you.”
Ramesh reached for his pocket. Mummy called me. I turned and ran to her, without looking back.
*
The pain of a sad memory withers away with time, but it forever on remembrance gives birth to sorrow and guilt. I took stood up from the bench and continued my walk. I was late but had no mood to go back and work on that dire report. The street was filled with multifarious noises: shouts of pedlars, cries of infants, yells of drunks. But hiding behind these noises was silence, the loud and deafening silence. It was there in the awry alleys, the quite quoins, the raucous roads, the grim gutters, the pallid parlours; it was in your shadow, in your voice and your silence; in the dark and the light. It was there ten years back, during the Babri Masjid Demolition, and was here now, during the Godhara Riots.
I hired an auto-rickshaw and went to the street where Hasan’s shop was. It was still there, small, narrow, pallid. On the other side of the counter was Ramesh. Standing outside, leaning his elbow on the counter was a tall and thin man. He turned around and dusted his scooter with a cloth. Those almond eyes; the innate smile on his face, unperturbed by winter or autumn, despair or disdain; the gentleness in his movements: he couldn’t be anybody but the ten-year-old boy who cried because of me, ten years back. He saw me. The smile on his face faded away and his face turned blank. We stood looking each other, absolutely still, as if the fourth dimension had halted. His lips turned upwards and bloomed into a hopeful smile. I just stood there, inert. The unanswered smile vanished from his face. He picked up the polythene from the counter and drove away. He entered the crowd and became a part of it, like a droplet entering the ocean. I ran to where his house was. I hid behind the truck and looked at the small green building. Hasan’s mother came out on the terrace to hang the wet clothes on the clothesline. She was humming, in a sombre, calm, poignant voice.
I couldn’t sleep that night. What I said ten years back was right; his blood was different: it had fidelity. He came back to his city, his people, as soon as things were calm. He didn’t run away from memories, he came back to them, lived with them. As the dawn broke, I rushed to his shop. I wanted to breach the wall of religion that had soured our friendship. Hasan was kind; he couldn’t have refused my plea. For him, even ten years wasn’t too late to ask for forgiveness. Under the pale and cold morning light I saw Ramesh squatting by the shutter, opening the locks. He looked up.
“Ramesh, it’s me, Vijay. Remember?”
He looked at me with confusion.
“I used to come to shop with Hasan, remember?”
“Oh, yes, yes.”
“When did he come back? Is he buying back the shop?”
He looked at me with irritation and said, “What are you talking about? Who was come back?”
“I’m talking about Hasan and his mother.”
“—he died ten years back,” Ramesh said bending down to open the lock, “Hindus burned their train before it reached Pakistan. All were killed. Not a soul survived. I saw their bodies.”
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
This is my first article, written for my quaterly school magazine. I don't think the editorial board will accept it - the students are only interested in ' Let's Laugh', 'Results of Painting Competition', and 'Solve this Puzzle'.
Bengali Renaissance
In 1814, Raja Ram Mohan Roy came to Bengal to fulfil his literary ambitions. He established ‘Atiyo Sova’ (Club of Kins) in 1815, and started an Amitya Sabha - a philosophical discussion circle to debate monotheistic Hindu Vedantism and like subjects. He also formed Brahmo Samaj, and tried to instigated radical ideas in people. He opposed the custom of suttee, the act of burning the widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. His radical views and revolutionary ideas triggered off a spark what would later turn into the fire of Bengal Renaissance.
Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who was a frequent contributor to Roy’s Atiyo Sova, brought drastic changes in the Bengali alphabet; he made it more rational and simple. When he discarded the teachings of Vedanta and Samkhya, calling them “false systems of philosophy”, he drew in a lot of hostility from Sanskrit scholars. In the Sanskrit College, he debated that western philosophy – Fancis Bacon, John Stuart Mill – should be introduced in the syllabus. He was adamant on his decision till the end, and finally, won over his peers.
Shortly after his death, Rabindra Nath Tagore reverently wrote about him: "One wonders how God, in the process of producing forty million Bengalis, produced a man!" The influence of Vidyasagar over Rabindra Nath Tagore was persisting.
Despites its prominent achievements, the rising world of Bengali literature was fairly unknown in the West; this was changed by Rabindra Nath Tagore. He drew notable praises from the likes of Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1913 and Knighthood in 1915. He traveled all over the world, spreading the knowledge of Bengali culture and art.
The aftermaths of Bengali Renaissance on cinema were profound. Bimal Roy made Do Bigha Zamin, a neo-realistic movie based on the plight of farmers; it paved way for future cinema makers in the neo-realist movement, which was to start in the 70’s. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, his peer Satyajit Ray made Pather Panchali. The movie was made on a shoestring budget by new-comers, was included in The Village Voice’s list of the greatest movies ever made. Ray is often considered to be the greatest Indian director, a fact which can be justified when mentioned that he won an Academy Award in 1992.
Music was also a part of this Renaissance, though on a smaller scare. A popular name to have come out it is Pandit Ravi Shankar. He collaborated with the Beatles, Satyajit Ray and many other famous names, winning three Grammy Awards and fourteen honorary degrees.
These geniuses collaborated with national and international names and reached the masses. But they remained faithful to their native land, working in Bengali as well as other languages. Bengal still produces geniuses, but unfortunately, they no more work or live in Bengal. To ‘make their work known to the world’ they leave their native land, and work in other languages. The irony is that they leave by will but express nostalgia over it to the media. Are they to blame?
The truth is slightly different than what it appears: it is we to blame. We Indians have never valued true art. The West gives them better prospects, and their leaving Bengal is justified. When we go to a book shop, we pick up the latest Campus Fiction book written by someone fed up of his monotonous post-IIT life; but none of us look at the small book kept in the corner titled ‘Gitanjali’. If we are planning to buy some DVD’s this summer, how many of them are going to by Ray’s black and white masterpieces? How many of you knew there was a movie called Do Bigha Zameen or Pather Panchali ever made in India?
We may become the ‘superpower’ by 2030 – as some people predicted –, produce dozens of billionaires every year, take over all high-paid jobs in the West, but when it comes to admiring art and valuing intellectuals, the future of India seems a bit bleak. Art is a sphere where we can’t expect to win over the West.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
New Story
31 May
Bela kept fidgeting in her bed. Unable to endure the anxiety anymore, she picked up the spectacles -- whose broad rim, despites being bandaged over a hundred times, had been in use since fifty years -- and placed them on the edge of her nose. He should have been back by now. I didn’t hear his footsteps as yet, she thought as she came out in the corridor and hurried towards Anand’s room. Looking at the opened door she concluded that he was back, but her trepidation wouldn’t have subdued until she saw him. She gently opened the door and went inside.
“Anand, are you there?”
No reply. I think he’s asleep. .
In the centre of the suffocating room two chairs were placed facing each other; to the right, a small wooden desk and a chair were kept askew. Placed on the desk were an opened notebook and a pen kept in between the pages.
She peeped into the notebook. Oh! It’s his personal diary! She turned her head in the all the directions. Then she looked at the door that that led to his bedroom. She calmly pulled the chair and sat down.
_ _ _
January 13, 2007
It was 2 O’clock in the afternoon and I was still sleeping, when Bela, my sweet landlady, came in. She drew the curtains aside, told me the breakfast -- considering the time you can call it lunch also -- is kept on the table, and went out.
The bright yellow light pierced through my pupil. Even when I shut my eyes, the light remained impregnated; but now it became yellow with a bright white centre. I drew the curtains back together.
I walked towards the mirror and opened my eyes. A figure of an ugly man was visible, who somehow resembled me. His jaws and cheeks looked like a hard loaf of bread with thick spots of mould on it. The beard had covered almost every patch of skin on the face. His teeth had changed their colour from dim yellow to light brown. His clothes were no more alive, they were patches of different fabrics forcefully sewn together.
After eating the sandwiches, I went over to my incomplete painting. I looked at the giant oak tree in the centre and thought, Ok this part seems done. The vast empty space on either sides of the tree pricked my eyes. At least four months. My eyes fell on a branch on the top-left side and I almost jumped up. Aw God… how can I do it! I thought as I brought my eyes closer to the branch. Disaster! I just killed the painting.
I picked it up and bumped it in the shelf, along with the other seven. I halted in front of the shelf which contained my completed paintings and looked at my painting, ‘The Eighth Note’, which was kept in front, and had occupied the most space. I caressed its dry paint with the tip of my fingers and smiled with satisfaction. The anger was gone.
At 5 O’clock, I went back to my bed. Staring at the ceiling, I thought about my life. In the shallow pond of my present life I found nothing interesting. Then I tried to peep into the well of my past. Abstract images flashed in front of me. My brain was caught in a trap. I wanted to end the dream, wake up, but an invisible force stuck me to the bed. When I regained control over my mind, I panted towards the toilet and looked into the mirror. I regained my breath and sprinkled water on my red face.
My mind sails freely in the sea of my present life. But when I steer it towards my past, I find the water replaced by infinite blankness. If I go near it, my mind gets trapped in a whirlpool of abstract images. The same thing happened today. My past is a blind-spot.
The only clear image of my past is of a seven-year-old boy sitting inside the cupboard, amidst stinky clothes, hearing three distinguishable sounds: the low-pitched shriek of his mother, the sound of a wooden club beating her hard flesh, and the hoarse shouts of his father.
When I opened the curtains, the blaring yellow light had turned dim red and the sun had begun its journey to plunge behind the mountains. On the road below, a stout man took out a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and looked at this watch. He repeated this process every five minutes. A beggar came dragging his paralysed legs against the dusty road and extended his brass plate in front of the man. The man walked away. The beggar dragged along. The man yelled curses at him and went away, sweating. The beggar wasn’t angry. He had got used to it. He crawled away, consoling himself with his faith in God. I felt pity. Poor Guy. What all people do to earn money. I am lucky to have been living without a job or money. I looked above and patiently waited for the dim red ball to be swallowed completely by the brown teeth at the horizon.
I looked down. It was dark now. People were still moving here and there; with their pockets jingling, some were walking towards the bars; some were looking down and slowly heading for their homes; and some were nervously looking left and right and sneaking towards the dimly lit, forbidden street. I patiently waited. When all the people had concluded their journeys, I put on my overcoat and began mine.
I crossed a barren field and a deserted house on my way. The house was the only human creation visible; alone, empty, futile; like a black dot on a white paper. He was deserted the very day his four walls were erected. He stands there the whole day and talks to himself. At times, he cries by shedding tears of dry paint. But he knows it is of no use. No one will consol him. But still he cries. I know all this because we talk to each other. Before moving ahead, I always pause for a moment to talk to him. He is very sad; just like me.
I don’t know much about the field; except that he is also lonely and barren. But he prefers more seclusion that the house; he looks away when I try to talk. He is ashamed to show the sores and cuts on its face that the farmer has created.
There is also a straight path, away from the house and the field, but I prefer this one. There is always a lot of commotion there. There the lights don’t go off until 12 O’clock.
I went over to a bench, and sat down. I looked around. It pleased me to see that I was the only soul around. I don’t like people around me. Their fake smiles and false concern irritates me. All of them are salt outside and pepper inside. I fixed my eyes on the ground. The dust particles were laid dead on the uneven surface. They like human interference. If someone stamps on them, they wake up and run here and there with enthusiasm. At times, they grow very fond of some people; they stick to his clothes and happily go home with him.
After sitting there until 1 O’clock, I came home. Darkness prevailed from the horizon to the zenith; but I was not afraid. You will always notice it – lonely people are never afraid of the dark. For them, darkness is what sand is for a camel.
.
August 10, 2007
A great deal of time has passed since last I wrote. There were many days when I sat down to write, but I couldn’t; unlike today, my days have been going exactly the same as the one mentioned above. Life seems more monotonous than the hands of the clock.
At 10 O’clock, when Bela was going upstairs to hang the clothes, she passed through my room. She was surprised when she saw the morning yellow light unceasingly entering the room. She knew I didn’t like the curtains open. She came in and drew the curtains back together.
“I opened them. Let them remain.” I said, lying on the bed.
“How come you’re awake so early!” she cried.
“Don’t know. ‘just woke up.”
“Strange.”
In fact, it was strange for me also.
She returned after five minutes with finger-chips in a plate. While keeping the plate on the table, she looked at me with puzzled eyes.
I said without turning my eyes from the water-stained window, “Aunt, come here, listen. You know, I saw a strange dream today.”
“What kind of dream?” she asked.
“I was a white angel. I was flying in the sky, singing and delivering letters to the different gods. It started raining and I hid beneath the moon to prevent letters from getting wet. And look at the lovely weather - it was really raining when I saw the dream! I have this—weird feeling, like my instinct is trying to tell me something about the rain . . . dunno what. Maybe this coincidence is a good omen. What d’you say?”
I expected her to be astonished at my abnormal behaviour, but with a mocking smile on her face, she patiently said, “It’s a sign.”
After she walked out, I went towards my table, and picked up an old book. There was a thick layer of dust on it. I cleaned it with my hands and started reading.
After an hour, the door opened.
“The garden looks so good today. The smell of wet grass, the chirping of birds. It’s all so lovely!” Bela said in frenzy.
“So what?”
She slowly said, “So, instead of here, why don’t you come down in the garden for the tea?”
She knew I was happy and wouldn’t have refused. She can do anything to get me to eat downstairs.
“Please? Today I’ve got toasts also.” she said.
“Um…ok.”
“That’s like my boy!”
She took a chair besides me and said, “So, did you find it out as yet?”
I saw the same mocking smile on her face.
“What?”
“So you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“What is so special about today.”
“Oh! It’s holi today!” I said judging by the fact that a long time has passed since last it came.
“God!” she said laughing, “I can’t believe it!”
“What happened?”
“My darling, it’s your birthday today,” she said. “I don’t believe you forgot it. Your intuition, this off-season rain” (it rains every year on my birthday) “you don’t need a bigger signs, do you?”
“Anyways,” she said, “I have a very good plan for today. You will come with me to the temple. I have made some rice, with which we will give to the poor people there. They will give you blessings - which you sorely need. Maybe then you will spend less time in this wretched room. After which, we will go and have lunch at Pizza Hut - I have been saving money for it since a week. I will be back in half-an-hour, and hope to find you ready.”
“You know that I don’t out. I can’t come,” I said looking at her.
“Yes, you’re absolutely right. Why will you bend your rules for this for this poor old lady, huh?”
She waited for me to speak, when I didn’t, she said, “Come one now, don’t be such a lazy bun. Get ready and come down.”
For the first time in my life, I shouted at her: “I told you I am not coming. Do I have to repeat it again and again? You are not my mother; and don’t try to become one.”
She stepped back, and her head bumped with the iron hinge on door. I looked at her angrily. She stood motionless for a minute. She closed the door gently and went down.
I stood up and walked towards the mirror. The monster that was missing during the morning was back.
I would have agreed for the temple—considering the merry state I was in. But the word ‘birthday’ killed all the joy. There have been many harsh memories connected with my past birthdays. I don’t know what they are, but I know they are. My birthday is like my past – abstract pain. This day always haunts me. I looked at the roof; it might collapse any moment. The gently rain outside might turn into torrential storm any moment, and would wipe out my meagre existence.
I threw myself on the bed and covered my shivering body with a blanket. The darkness and the minimal space inside gave me a sense of protection. I felt the unholy calamities wouldn’t be able to touch me within the warm cosiness of the blanket. Sleep descended from the heavens, flew in through the wet window and took me in her comforting arms. Her soothing whispers drenched away my pain.
The door opened slightly, and in a soft low voice, Bela said, “Please come down, dinner is ready.”
My eyes were fixed on a drop of water that was alone sliding down the glass. When she had gone, I came back from the world of thoughts and realised that I had forgotten to refuse.
Around the oval shaped dining table, two chairs were kept facing each other. The food items, plates and a bottle of cold-drink were placed orderly on the table.
The dinner was delicious; but I was so occupied with the thought of my birthday that I forgot to praise Bela at her success, for which she was patiently waiting.
While I ate the delicacies, the way she talked and smiled, it seemed that she had forgotten that I had shouted at her some time back.
She didn’t mention about the temple again. She went alone. When she had gone, I saw a square, chocolate cake kept in the refrigerator. It was my birthday cake, but she didn’t ask me to cut it. She didn’t want me to get angry again.
The care and love which I see in her eyes frights me sometimes.
August 10, 2008
This year when Bela came into my room to keep the sandwiches, she had expected to find me standing besides by the window, praising the rains or narrating some weird dream of mine. But she was disappointed. She found me lying in the bed.
I could have stood by the window, but the lashing sound of the rain and ugly drops of water sliding down the glass pane would have slain the little courage I had gathered to face my birthday.
After eating the sandwiches, I went over to my table, took a sharp pencil in my hand and sketched what first came into my mind: a butterfly flying in a field of pearl-white jasmine flowers. After I had completed it, I got irritated and threw it away. It was the first time in four years of paintings and sketching that my hands had created a flower.
Today when I reached the bench, I saw a one-year old boy sitting there. There were a few traces of hair on his head, under the lamp, which gave it a bright yellow shine. I hated babies, and sat as far away as I could. The voice of his laughter irritated me. He held a rubber Donald Duck in his hands. He inspected it from every angle, like a goldsmith giving his finishing touches. Then he raised it high in the air and threw it on the bench. The toy made a squeak sound, following which, the baby burst out laughing, and fluttered his hands up-and-down like a butterfly. Besides his bald head, the other noteworthy feature was his two minute teeth that made their presence felt when he opened his mouth to laugh.
Unwillingly, I kept turning my head to look at him. Then he came and sat besides me. He grabbed my shirt with his little curly fingers and stood up with its support. He was unable to make a firm balance, and kept rocking like a cradle. I broadened my eyes and looked at him in anger. He looked into my eyes and laughed, showing his miniature teeth. I held his chest around my arms and tried to make him sit. My grip slipped and he fell over my chest; he tightened his arms around my stomach to prevent from slipping down. I wanted to grab him, fling him on the bench and go away.
He moved away from my chest and sat down besides me. His gaily laughter paused for a moment. I looked at him again. His big round eyes were fixed at me and his mouth was slightly open; as if he was asking, “Why did you try to hurt me?”
I felt ashamed. Deep in my heart, I wanted to play with him, take him in my hands and love him. But I couldn’t: lonely people don’t do such things.
A tall, dark man came towards the bench. He was wearing bright blue clothes, which were visible even in the dim light. He sat down on the bench, and took the baby in his lap. The baby became cheerful again and gave such a big laugh that his eyes had to shut in order to make space for the widely opened mouth. He pointed his tiny index finger towards me—which he later placed in his mouth.
“It seems that he likes you.” The man said, still looking into the eyes of the baby.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “He’s a cute boy.”
“What’s your name, young man?”
“Anand Kapoor.”
“I think I know you. Are you the one who lives with the landlady, Bela?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Rajesh told me.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“I met him at a tea stall near your house. Nice boy.”
“He’s a nice boy,” I said, “but he talks a lot. He didn’t bore you?”
“No, not at all. In fact, I felt he was a very interesting chap,” he said. “He also told me a lot about you.” He spoke the last sentence in a gloomy voice.
“What did he tell?”
“He told me how you spend all your days inside, never going out—doing painting and stuff.”
I looked away irritated.
He sunk his head in his jacket, and after a long pause he looked up and calmly spoke, “Listen buddy, life is fruit that cannot be eaten alone. Maybe you’ve seen only treachery, theft, and evil in the outside world; but it doesn’t mean that you spend the rest your life inside; all alone in a small room, painting, sketching or reading books.”
“Better rot inside than living outside—in that filthy world.” I replied.
“This world is not as bad as you think—”
“It is. It is worse than what I think. This world is a huge pile of trash; filthy, dirty, corrupted. People live for their own sake. They can kill their own mothers for money. There is no love, no friendship, only greed. There is only evil in it. ”
“You’re wrong, my friend. There are bad aspects, I agree. But there are equally good ones also.”
“I agree that there are equally good aspects. But only a handful of people get to face them—the rich ones, and the ones who cheat. Most of the others live in the dirt, and face the bad aspects. The cruel don’t have faith, and they live. The poor do, and they die.”
“It’s a wrong assumption, my friend. God is never biased”
“It seems that you are a firm believer in God.” I said mockingly.
“Yes.”
“There is no God.”
“That’s another wrong assumption.”
“Okay,” I said looking angrily into his eyes, “you believe that God is there, has made this world, and has the power to do anything, right?”
“Right”
“Then, tell me,” I said, “why did he make sadness? Or things like pain, tears, ugliness . . .? Wouldn’t life be better without these? Can’t he remove all this with his power? Or tell me, he hasn’t got the power?”
“Look at that flower,” he spoke after a long pause, pointing towards a rose. It was a red rose, whose petals were dispersed in a way, as if showing the insight of a person’s brain whose mind is a whirlpool of thoughts. Beneath the rose was a broad green belt, wrapped around with exquisite thorns pointing in all the directions, protection the virgin beauty and divine innocence of the rose from the evil. On the other plants around it, the flowers and other inferior creations of nature bend their heads in jealousy and shame.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” he continued.
“It’s amazing.”
“Look at those thorns. Don’t you feel pity for the rose? It is so beautiful, and those thorns—so ugly.”
I looked at the long pointed thorns and gave a nod of approval.
He gave a soft laugh, and continued, “But the rose doesn’t think so; it understands the value of those thorns in its survival. If it wouldn’t have been for them, the rose would have been plucked up by someone, and would have been lying somewhere on the street. Don’t you think so?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
The baby was looking at us with amusement. He kept twisting his head left-and-right in order to see the face and expression of the speaker.
“Always remember,” he said “every time when God created a bad thing, there was a firm reason behind it. The reason may be different for different cases. In this case, the ugliness was acts as a protector. He, who understands this, never loathes life. This world works because of the harmony between good and bad. It will collapse if we remove any of these.”
He waited for me to speak, but when I didn’t he continued, “Moreover, even if we do remove the latter, and somehow, let us say, this world doesn’t collapse. Then one day, people would start calling less happiness as sadness. Things would come back from where they started.”
He was so right, so truthful. His words struck me like magic.
We remained silent for some time. Then the man stood up and said, “Ok, now I gotta go. See you later, Anand.” Without waiting for me to say anything, he took the baby in his hand and walked away. The baby, resting on his shoulders, looked at me and smiled. I smiled back—this time without hesitation—and waved my hand. He turned back and said, “Give life another chance my boy.”
I looked at the faintly visible outline of their body, which soon got dissolved in the ubiquitous darkness.
Drops of water fell over the dusty road. The fallow-brown dust rebelled and arose in anger. Soon, the weak dust lost to the force of rain. It mixed with the droplets, lost its brown anger and settled down to form mud. The sepia landscape was washed clean. Everything looked new and fresh. The rain, sliding down the chalk-cement carving, produced an irresistible fragrance. Maybe he’s right, I thought. I walked slowly, enjoying my birthday rain pouring over me, washing away my sorrow, leaving behind a faint odour of joy. I wasn’t afraid of the rain anymore. A new sun was ascending at the horizon.
August 11, 2008
Today Bela didn’t come to wake me up.
When I went down, she was sitting on a rocking-chair looking out of the window. As soon as she looked me, she turned her head away. On the rim of her twenty-year-old, bandaged spectacles, I saw stains of water. I ran to the kitchen and asked Rajesh about it.
“Sir, she is very upset today.” he said.
“What happened?”
“You uncle Ranbir came to meet you from
“So?”
“He said that he is going to
I moved out of the kitchen, towards the room where Bela was sitting. She knew that Rajesh had told me all, and was waiting for my reply. I went over and took a seat besides her.
“Aunt,” I said looking into her wet eyes, “do you trust your Anand? Do you thing he will leave you and go away?”
“Why should I care?” she said and looked away.
“Aunt, you don’t care, but I care. I won’t leave you. It’s a promise.”
She looked at me with her inquisitive eyes. Her looks told me that she wanted me to repeat the last sentence.
“When uncle comes next time, tell him that I won’t go with him.”
I went over to get water for her. I didn’t look at her face but I knew that she was crying. Consoling her gave me special warmth. Moreover, I am happy here; I may get a good job and a luxurious life over there, but I don’t want to go.
When I went back to her, she said, “I trust you my son, I trust you. I’m really sorry, I got too possessive.” she said wiping her tears.
During the dinner, Bela was in a very cheerful mood. She sat opposite to me and kept asking me abstract questions. It seemed that she wanted to talk, but was out of words. Then she asked me, “Anand, you look soooo happy today. You should always be like this. Any special reason, huh?”
I recalled the clatter of rain, the smile of the baby, and my meeting with the man.
“Oh, no, nothing. It’s just—a good day.”
“You should always be like this. I feel very sad when I see you sitting alone in your room. I have told you so many times, why don’t you go out? If you want you can come with me for a walk every morning.”
“No, thanks Aunt. I prefer my night walks.”
“Aunt,” I asked after a hiatus, “why didn’t you ever marry?”
God know from where the question sprung up!
“I’m already married,” she said without looking at me. “His name’s Prithvi. I saw him for the first time—twenty-seven years ago, on the day of our marriage. Father had said that he’s a good boy—I agreed. He was a tall, dark, handsome man, about two years my elder. He had those ambitious eyes; looking into them one feels so small. When we were left together to talk, he told me about his interest in astronomy. He said that he wanted to study at MIT, and then go to NASA. I sat besides him, wearing my heavy zari saree, and a golden necklace around my neck, looking at him timidly and listening to every word he said. He soon understood that I knew nothing about astronomy and science. He never talked to me nicely again. Throughout the ceremony he had a gloomy look on his face. I felt that he wasn’t happy with the marriage. After our marriage, he would bring heavy books from the library and would spend hours reading them. After five years of our marriage, one day, while I was watching TV, our little boy, Raj, came rushing towards me with a slip of paper in his hand. His father had gone away from our lives. He had only written in his note that he is going forever, and he hates me. He took away the money that my father gave us as dowry. I wanted to use that money for Raj’s education. Prithvi’s parents had died during the second year of our marriage; hence, I and Raj were left alone in this house. Raj had always been under the influence of his father; hence, he wasn’t very fond of me. But I was very fond of him. Anand, he looked just like you: the same small nose, round eyes; you smile always reminds me of him.”
“Where is Raj now?”
“He left me,” she said pricking her fork into the peas, “Twenty years after Prithvi left, I woke up one day and found him missing. Unlike his father, he didn’t even leave a note for his mother. You know, I sank into a depression after he left.”
Here she paused for a few seconds and then spoke, “And then, you came here in the search of a house. I was living all alone; hence, I thought I will get a good company. After this, I got engaged in cooking, washing, gardening, waking you up—and my depression went away. Time is the best medicine, they say.”
Even though she didn’t say it directly, I understood that she meant she was living because I came into her life. She finds her son in me. Maybe you mean nothing for this world, but for someone you mean the whole world. It feels so good when you realise this.
I hurriedly crossed the house and the bench. From a distance, two figures were visible sitting on the bench. I approached them with a rare smile.
“You come here often?” the man asked.
“Yes, daily.”
“Okay. I’m new in the city.”
“Where are you from?”
“I come from
“What’s your name, by the way?” I asked.
“Oh! I didn’t tell you my name? My name is Mohan Biswas. And this is my son, Karan.”
Karan was looking at us with amusement. When he sees us talking, he smiles; and when we stop, he face acquires a stern expression.
“Anand, are you free tomorrow?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Tomorrow, we have a party at our house. Just a—small one. I have already talked to Bela, and she is ready to come. When I told her to bring you along, she said that it is impossible. So I thought why not I give it a try. So you’re coming?”
“I can’t come. I don’t—”
“Hey, come on buddy. Just a few hours?”
If I agreed, I’d be giving life a new chance. But it would be very hard; I don’t like even two or three people around me, and in the party there will be a whole bunch of them. If I would refuse, I wouldn’t get such an offer again and I’d surely spend the rest of my life in my room.
“Yes, I will come.” I said, looking forward for the first party of my life. It was dark, but light was visible at the horizon – a faint yellow light.
August 13, 2008
Five minutes after returning from the party, Bela and Rajesh found themselves standing next to the washbasin. Rajesh had clipped his nose tightly with his fingers, and Bela was patting my back. She told Rajesh to get ten drops mint mixed in a bowl of water. With great courage, I took my face away from the washbasin and drank the contents of the bowl. The strong mint revived my taste buds and brought an end to my vomiting.
Bela had heard the time wrong, because of which we reached Mohan’s house quite early; in fact, three hours before the next guest arrived. Mohan was in the highest of spirits, and instead of saying, “It’s all right.” he greeted us with, “That’s even better!”
After introducing me to his wife, Leela, he took me to his study. The room was brightly lit. A dazzling array of black and white smoke arose from the thick wick placed in a plate, and filled the room with its fragrance. On the blue wall, numerous paintings and portraits were hung. On the shelf, which covered an entire wall, books of all thickness were orderly placed. We sat down on a cosy sofa and discussed about his job and the various cities he had visited. Our talks took a sharp turn and we soon found ourselves plunging into the pools of life and philosophy. He was quite happy when I told him that I agreed with some his points. Unlike other men who are uncomfortable in discussing such serious matters in front of their family members, Mohan’s tone and facial expressions didn’t change when his daughter Tina entered to serve the snacks. I was lost in her enchanting beauty. Her hair were so black that even the black sky would have turned green with jealousy; her eyes lacked the skill to intoxicate a man or wound someone’s heart, instead, they had an aura which could bestow sanity to the insane, or heal even the most painful of wounds. The halogens, who found their brightness shadowed by her face, expressed their discomfort by blinking red and green; and Mona Lisa kept staring at her smile, and later hid her face behind the wall and cursed Da Vinci for his incompetence.
I tried not to look at her again and again; but when, for the fifth time, I looked up from my plate and gazed at her face, I felt it was impossible.
The reader might be thinking that I am in love. But this is false. I have never been in love, nor would I ever be. All I wanted was to befriend her. She went away without looking at me. I was disappointed.
Our discussion about life was followed by a discussion on ancient literature and renaissance paintings. I told him that I also paint. He showed a grave interest in my paintings. I promised I will show them soon.
By 7 O’clock, all the guests had arrived. They comprised entirely of people who were either his acquaintances—which were made in the narrow time line between his arrival in the city and this day—and the people who worked with him.
Throughout the party, I conversed with either Mohan or Bela. In case, any of these two dragged me in midst of a group, or tried to introduce me to someone, I stealthily moved away.
After some time, frustrated, I sat in a corner and looked at the happenings, just like a spectator in a circus. People stood here in groups, with more or less an empty glass of cold-drink in hand; and despites the loud music blaring in the background, the women folk conversed mindlessly about jewellery and sarees, and men folk shook some familiar but most unfamiliar hands and asked everybody, “How do you do?”—the reply to which is a universal constant but is asked nevertheless.
A group of boys went to Mohan’s room along with the CD-player in their hands. The women folk and I took a breath of satisfaction on getting rid of the devastating compositions. Mohan came to me, and told me go along with them so that I can make new friends. This time Mohan did not approve of my firm refusal and I was pushed into the prison with a bunch of drunken cavemen dancing to haunting tunes. After half an hour of sitting and listening to music that almost made me loose my sanity, we were called by someone to come out for the dinner; and because my mind was bereft of senses at that time, even the gender of that person escapes my memory.
After the last song, which contained lengthy curses of a witch who was probably getting buried alive—one of them told me that it’s alternatively called ‘heavy metal’—, I looked forward to something that would rejuvenate my senses, and expected food to do the job.
Happenings of the rest of the day do persist in my memory, but I, being a human, cannot recall them (except for the one about the washbasin); just like the memory of the day when your mother scolded you when she first found a puddle of pee in your bed does exist in some drawer of your memory, but cannot be recalled.
I have even forgotten how the food tasted. I judged it by the number of cockroaches who lost their lives in the floods of my vomit. Bela, who went for a walk early morning today, found their bodies lying overturned and unclaimed near the sewer outlet. I decided that I will refuse even the most forceful party invitations in future.
October 28, 2009
During these months, our acquaintance with Biswases turned into friendship. We often visit them now. We went to their house twice for dinner, and they came to out house one for lunch, and we also had a few tea parties.
I and Mohan have become very good friends. He is a man of exceptional charm and humour; and the effect of his latter quality has had a lasting effect on me. He showed a grave interest in my works. He’d spend a lot of time in my room, looking at my paintings. He told me that once he used to be a professional artist.
In his cosy study, we had long discussions on Renaissance, Da Vinci and Michelangelo. I came to know about Mohan’s interest in ancient literature and languages.
Sometimes, Karan would come toddling in the study. Mohan would give him a picture-book and he would sit and look at them with amazing seriousness. Mid-way, he would keep his head on the book and sleep.
There were a few more parties held at their house, but I refused. Mohan understood my problem and saved some cockroach lives.
Feburary 18, 2009
The other day, I had gone to their house for Tina’s birthday. I and Bela were the only guests. We were playing a game where each one of us had to act. Tina was to decide the role we had to play. When Mohan’s chance came, he was told to act like a person who just won a lottery of one crore rupees.
Mohan said, “huh? This is it?” and began by taking off his jacket which he waved in the air and threw in a random direction. It hit Karan in his face, and almost knocked him off the table. Then Mohan jumped around the carpet, yelling his plans of buying a car and a flat. As soon as Karan saw him coming near him, he hurriedly toddled towards his mother, but failed. Mohan grabbed Karan in his hand and waved him around in all the directions and told him that he would buy him new clothes and toys. Karan started crying. No one noticed it. A river of vomit came out from his mouth and covered Mohan’s face. It took him half-an-hour to clean himself, and till then, we laughed. It had been a long time since I had last laughed. A sudden rush of pain stopped my laughter. I went to the toilet and looked in the mirror. I touched my lips. They pained. Bereft of smiles and laughs, my lips had grown rusted all these years.
But I wasn’t sad. In fact, I was happy. It was a sign that told me my life is changing.
All these four months, my life has been blessed with a lot of other such changes, and the most prominent being the arrival of joy. Most of these took place because of Mohan. He gave full support to Bela in trying to drive away my loneliness.
Some days back, while I was sitting with Bela, enjoying tea in her new Chinese tea set, I heard a knock on the door. I saw Mohan, Tina, Leela and Karan standing outside, all neatly dressed, with their car parked in front. Mohan told me that they were going to McDonalds and wanted Bela and me to come with them.
“I can’t come.” I said.
“Oh, come on Anand!” said Mohan.
“No, I don’t feel like going. Please, I can’t.”
Mohan was disappointed. He looked around as if searching something. He looked at Karan and said, “Tina, look at Karan. It seems he wants to sleep.”
Karan, who was in Tina’s arms, leaned towards Mohan and gave a puzzling look.
“It’s a big problem: where will he sleep in the restaurant?” Mohan said, “I think it is better we don’t go.” Mohan said.
“Yes, you’re right.” Tina said, searching Karan’s face for signs of fatigue.
Mohan erupted, “I have an idea! Why don’t we order something here? Anand doesn’t want to come with us, fine, no problem, but at least he can eat with us here. What’d you say, Anand?”
“I—”
Before I could finish my sentence, all had gone inside with their faces lit up.
Love and care can melt the hardest of hearts. My refusals soon changed. I started going with Biswases to their picnics, movies and theatres. I became a regular customer of McDonalds and Pizza Hut. I managed to get a discount card also of the latter. I also met some of Biswases’ relatives.
Few days back, Mohan told me that he is busy and asked me to take Tina to meet her Aunt, in the countryside. Tina’s aunt was of the same age as Bela. She lived with her son, who was about the same age as me. Her house was not big, but a very comfortable one. Strong fragrance of sandalwood greeted us on the door. When I went inside, I saw that it was made up of rough wood; and wasn’t even painted. She had cooked native food for us. At first I was reluctant to eat it, but then Tina told me it tastes better than the city food. When we were going back, Tina’s aunt forced us to come next Sunday also. Our trips soon became a routine. One day she took us to her fields. I felt that life in the countryside is amazing: away from the noise, tension and pollution. One day we went for fishing also. When the basket would become full of jingling creatures, Tina would record the number and would throw them back in the lake. Then we would again sit down to fish. Most of the time, I won.
Tina became a very good friend of mine. The beauty of her heart exceeds the beauty of her figure by leaps and bounds. While I and Mohan would sit in the study, discussing, she would bring a strawberry cake for us (Tina always smiled when she handed me the plate. I soon realised that my pieces were bigger than Mohan’s). We would sit in the garden and talk endlessly. Hearing her laughter, many birds would come from the neighbouring gardens to join our conversation. She knows a lot about my tastes and sometimes she even fights for me. One day, I saw her arguing with Leela in the kitchen. Tina was saying that they should make Chocolate pudding for desert and not strawberry or banana pudding. I had told her the day before that I liked chocolate pudding.
Four days back, she gave me a present. It was a brown teddy bear with a red heart, made of silk, stuck to its belly. She said that she saw it in a shop and thought that I would like it. When I showed it to Bela, she giggled and said, “Today is 14th February.”
Very soon, a bond of love was formed between me and Tina, whose presence was known by both, but was never exchanged in words.
At times, I would see her sitting in the garden: her hands were laid on the table overlapping each other, her chin lay resting on the fluffy pillows of her hands, her tightly closed mouth created wrinkles on her lips, which looked like the peel of a pink strawberry in the clean light. I would lean by the pillar and look at her mesmerising beauty, until Bela would come and shake me. I feel I have everything one expects from life.
Though I came to know Mohan and Tina very well, but Leela’s character confused me. She is very reserved. All I came to know of her was that she was a lady who had astray hair, wore shabby clothes, didn’t talk much and spent most of her time in the kitchen helping Bela or sitting on the sofa without a sound.
These days were a mixed bag of joy and sorrow for Bela.
When I would come home after spending long hours at Mohan’s house, I would find her waiting in the drawing room. She would frown, and in a broken voice she would tell me that she had been waiting for me since four hours, and even though I know that she always eats with me, I came late; and that I have forgotten her as I have got new friends, and that one day I will come home and find her lying dead on the sofa, and wouldn’t have enough time to attend her funeral also. I would hug her and say sorry. Then we would go and have dinner. For the sake of her happiness, I never told her that I had already eaten.
At times, while playing, Karan would urinate on Mohan’s face and I’d start laughing. Bela would peep in from the kitchen, and then tears would trickle down her cheeks. Later she’d tell me that those tears are of happiness, and she is very happy to see the new Anand and the only thing she ever wanted is my happiness and that now she has got it; and that even if she dies, she’d die happily. Then she would abruptly say, “Oh no, not at all! I take my words back! I won’t die happily until you children piss on me.”
Scattered among these happy days, were a few sad days also. But they didn’t bother me much; the happy days outnumbered the sad ones by far.
Few days back, I saw a doctor coming out of Mohan’s house. I ran inside and asked him what happened. All tried to avoid the topic. After much forcing, Mohan told me that he is Asthma patient. Before I could mourn, he told me that it’s very minor. He refused all sympathies from me and Bela. He said that sympathies make a man weak.
One day, while I was sitting by the window, looking at the squirrels playing hide-n-seek, the face of an old woman flashed through my mind. Her skin had lost its beauty to numerous black-spots, but was still bereft of wrinkles; it showed that she had aged before time: it was the result of long hours that she had spent working over-night to get her child admission in an English-medium school, and to fulfil her husband’s requests for beer. Her flesh had grown hard like a sand bag, owing to numerous clubs and hockey-sticks that were regularly struck on it. Her eye-sight had weakened, for the numerous nights that she spent looking out of the window, waiting for her son to come back. Every year on his birthday she would bring a cake, decorate the house with balloons and would wash the bed-sheets. Then she would place a chair in front of the door and would patiently look at it; in case it opened and her son came in. And when he didn’t, she would rush towards her room, lean out of the window and cry. She was my mother.
I laid my head on the window pane. I wanted to cry, but tears refused to come out. Pain without tears hurts more. Then, I felt better when I consoled myself by telling that I am blessed with so much happiness that I have forgotten how to cry.
Entangled in these commotion and changes, I didn’t realise when Biswases became such a vital part of my life. Today when I look back, I feel pity for what I was: I hated people, life, god and religion; but I didn’t know why. As if hating them gave me consolation. But things are different today. Sitting by the window, I see a rising sun every day.
June 13, 2009
My painting, ‘The Ninth Note’, consumed one whole year of my life. It is my most ambitious and secretive work till date. Near the bottom of the frame, citizens are running here and there, terrified by the flames shooting from the sky. Taansen, sitting on the right side, over a mat, wearing a gold-embroided robe, is so wonderstruck that he just forgot to fret over his defeat. He is looking at Baiju Bawra, who, sitting in the centre, over the floor, with his eyes shut, is lost in the notes of his Deepak Raag.
“Anand, you can fetch a very good price for it.” Mohan said looking at it.
“Eh…no, I don’t want to sell it. I paint for myself, not for money.”
“One can’t live his whole life without earning money. I insist you sell them; if not for money, then at least for giving this world a good piece of art.”
“That’s right but—well…I will think about it.”
His words inspired me; but were far from convincing.
I began painting to express my feelings. They contain abstract allusions and hints, which, when joined together, reveal every secret buried in my heart. So, my paintings are like my personal diary, and one does not sell his personal diary.
Mohan went over to my book shelf, and for a long time, passed his eyes from one column to another. At last he said, “Anand, there no Russian writer here. Strange.”
He advised me to read Gogol and Dostoevsky. Then he looked at his watch and said that he has to go somewhere.
Half-an-hour after he left, I went downstairs. Bela saw me passing.
“Sit sit,” she said hysterically, “It’s very important.”
I went and sat on the sofa. Before I could say anything, she hurriedly looked around and asked, “Anand, do you like Tina?”
“Yes I—I do like her. She’s a good girl—“
“Arre baba, not like that. I mean—do you love her? Would you like to marry her?”
Her eyes showed the fascination of a four-year-old who was waiting for me to tell whether the fairy and the prince happily lived after or not.
When I didn’t say anything for two seconds she repeated her words.
“W-Why are you asking this?” I asked.
“Yes or no? Fast!” She said, springing up and down on the chair.
Before I could comprehend the situation, I felt I had already uttered a word that somehow resembled ‘yes’. Before I could say something else, Bela had already taken the air out of me by her grand hug,
“O,” she said sobbing, “you are going to get married.”
“What?”
“Mohan came to me with a proposal. He wants you to marry Tina.”
“Did—they ask her about it?”
She laughed and said, “She was the one who asked Mohan.”
We went over to their house for dinner at 8 O’clock. Tina greeted me with a hug at the door (our first). Karan started giggling. After the dinner, when we all were sitting in the drawing room, Mohan came out of his study and told me come inside. He held my hands and made me sit. He expressed his heart’s elation, and said that Tina loved me a lot and she was afraid if I will say no, and that they could not have got a better husband if they had searched this world for a hundred years. I was out of words. We both remained silent.
After some time, his tone changed and he calmly spoke,
“Anand I—I want to talk to you”
I nodded.
“Anand,” he said, “I can’t force you to do anything. But, tell me, how will you feed your children? It’s all right if you don’t want to sell your paintings, at least you can do a job? If you want I can help, I can talk to—”
“No, I can’t work under anyone. It’s well and good if I sell my paintings. And, if they fetch a good amount, I will pursue my career in painting.”
“Excellent!”
“But the problem is—I don’t know where to sell them, can you help me?”
“’Course I will! You give me your paintings; I will be leaving off to
June 14, 2009
Tina, wearing a white dress, with blossoms engraved on it, is running around in our new house, with a plate in her hand, trying to catch hold of the seven-year-old boy who is far away from her, and is singing, “I won’ eat it! I won’ eat it!” The boy enters a big room. He sprints pass the enormous ceramic vase in the centre, imported from China, and without looking at the enormous gold trophies, or the paintings, which, like their predecessors are expected be sold for more than ten million rupees, he grabs me leg, and says, “Fath’r! Fath’r! ‘elp me.” I keep the brush down, and look at Tina, who is holding her knees, panting, and warning
Before my dream could come to a conclusion, a voice told me to come downstairs. I woke up and went down.
With a brown shawl wrapped around his shoulders, Mohan sat in the centre. He was looking lean and pale. I sat down and waited for someone to speak. Tina, who was standing behind Mohan with her head bent down, muttered that Mohan fainted the day before, his test reports were appalling and they are leaving for
While eating, I raised my eyes and looked at Mohan. Despites his ill health, the smile on his face was not lost; it had the same pleasantness as I had seen on the day I met him. He didn’t have much time; yet he spent it under the roof of two people with whom he has no blood relation. All these days, he knew that he hadn’t got much time, but he still spent all of it on me: he wanted to reform me.
Things seemed to have changed so soon. All those days which I spend in his study, when I went with him to McDonalds, when I earnestly listened to his philosophies – all seemed so quaint.
When we were alone, he told me to get all my paintings. I told him that they are not important at this time. He tightly held my hand, and with tears in his eyes, he said, “Anand, please try to understand. I want to see your paintings fetch a good price before—before something happens to me—”
My philosophies, my hatred towards love, my agony towards god, my scepticism towards religion; all seemed so small in front of his love.
I gave him all my eight paintings. Never was the burden of Mohan’s gratitude more than at that time. I hugged him and cried, until he said that I am behaving like Karan by wetting his shirt. I have always loved him; but at that moment I felt like hitting him. Why is it that he cares for others and never for himself?
June 20, 2009
After waking up, the first thing I did all these days was to check if any of the letters had the word Biswas written on it.
In a fit of rage, I threw away the painting I had been working on, and took a vow not to work on anything until Mohan is back.
During the days Mohan was in my life, the house and the field didn’t talk; I searched their faces to see what they were hiding, but the place where their faces had one been was now covered by peeling paint and rocky soil. Form living creatures, they soon became inanimate objects: a hollow brick-structure, covered by corrugated iron, which stood by the road; and a piece of infertile land that brought misery and hardship to the owner. But today when I went pass them, I saw the life back again. They talked to me, consoled me, and said that life had played similar games with them. In the tears shed by the house and in the wounds & scars on the surface of field, I found my true self - alone and sad.
Life is what I had told Mohan: an unbalanced weighing-scale, a joke played by God to amuse his spouse, and bread that is thrown on earth to rot for seventy years.
June 27, 2009
I tried to recall the face of my mother. I could not. Instead, baffling images flashed through my mind. After I came back to senses, I rushed to the toilet and saw my face red in the mirror. My past had again become a series of painful of abstract images.
I realised one thing today: I am able to remember my sad past only when I am happy. Strange.
Bela is doing all she can to make me happy. She even took out money from the forbidden locker and forced me to come with her to McDonalds.
All these days, she has been spending her time either in the kitchen, trying her hand on the various recipes, hoping that one of them pleases me, or going through tons of jokes books and reciting the best ones aloud when I am nearby.
July 1, 2009
Bela rushed upstairs and gave me a folded piece of paper. In petite and confusing handwriting, Tina had written they had safely reached there, and were living with her Aunt. The operation would be carried out within a week, and they expect to come back within thirty days. In the meantime, she would not be able to write letters any more.
August 10, 2009
More than a month has passed. No more letters came. My worst fear has taken a firm shape.
Today, I opened the curtains. The dazzling yellow light pierced through my pupil and got engraved on my retina. I didn’t close my eyes until tears came and got evaporated, before they could fall down on the window pane. I looked up at the sky. Behind those white clouds, were a lot of dot-like stars. Some of them were new; some of them were older than the earth. Mohan is one of them now. He’s one of the recent stars, one of them which were formed within the past month.
I put on my overcoat and went out. It had been a long time since the yellow light had touched my skin. The sun seemed to have lost its glory. It didn’t shine the way it did when I used to go out with Mohan.
The cliff was not far away. It was nine hundred yards from the house. The jagged land ascended upwards, until it got higher than any other patch of land visible. Then, skilfully sliced by the God’s knife, it fell down perpendicularly and got drowned in the shallow lake beneath. I looked around to see the world for the last time. I took a step forward and recalled the days spend with Mohan, Tina, and Bela.
I stepped back, thinking about Bela. I can’t. I turned back and ran; only for the sake of that old woman who wakes up every morning to see my face.
Smells of baked brown-bread, rose-water, lime soaps and fresh baked cookies impregnated the street; but were still unable to conceal the familiar faint whiff that came from the crowd. I looked around. Amid the thousand heads, resting on a thousand indistinguishable bodies, there was one that seemed familiar.
“Tina!” I shouted.
Without looking back she ran away. I followed after her until she ran inside a narrow lane. With her back touching the brick wall, she unveiled her face and panted. I hugged her and asked, “How is Mohan? How is Mohan?”
She threw me on the opposite wall.
“I hate you.” She said.
She ran, took a sharp turn to the left, repeated her words and was soon out of sight. I leaned on the wall and allowed my back to slide down the brick wall. Every inch of slide blended a hundred questions in my life. I stood up and ran after her; unconscious of where I was, who I was, or if I was. A fifty yards in front of me, I saw her enter a white mansion. I sneaked in.
There was nobody in the drawing room. In the centre, under the bright halogens, a king-size sofa was laid. A round glass table was set in front of it. In the glass showcase to my right, a series of unrelated ceramic pottery were concealed. The dining table was wrapped in thick polythene. On the table a TV was kept packed in a box.
A string of large paintings, articles and photographs were hung on the wall. The smallest one was a framed magazine article. I went closer and looked at it. A big glass trophy was being exchanged by two hands. The picture was magnified, due to which the faces had become unrecognisable, and they looked like a combination of innumerable brown coloured squares. On the left, in large black letters it was written, ‘Mohan Biswas fetches 10 crore and wins annual paintings prize for his masterpiece, ‘The Ninth Note’’ For ten minutes I kept re-reading the words; hoping that my eyes had betrayed me the first time.
A man, dressed in an exotic black suite was descending the stairs. Walking along his sides were two men, dressed in tight-fitting blue shirts.
“Mohan!” I shouted.
He ran downstairs and the two men came along.
“What are you doing here!” Mohan yelled.
I looked into his eyes and muttered, “Why Mohan, why?”
He rubbed the tips of his fingers over his forehead, turned back and shouted, “Ali! Abbas! Come here!”
The two men came rushing down. Mohan went over to the sofa and seated himself. He drew a cigarette from a case that lay on the glass table and placed it between his lips. He pointed his index finger towards me and said, “Teach that baaastard a lesson. Break his bones.”
Time lost its faithfulness. Every passing second seemed longer than the predecessor. Ingratitude and shoes combined together and unleashed a spasm of weird feeling in body, which was akin to pain, but was much intense. During those rare instances, when the men stood erect and panted for a while, did time come back on its trail and pain gave a clearer account of its presence. Every thump on my skin pushed the previous sore deeper and deeper inside my flesh. An hour of time and a century of pain seemed to have passed when the men finally stepped back and allowed the light on hit my body. Like a worm, I lay curled on the floor. I raised my eyes from the floor and saw Mohan sitting on the sofa. How different he looked since last I saw him. The smile that once used to light up my face even in the moments of utter despair was replaced by a wicked grin of pride. His eyes, which once brimmed with infinite love, had arched and become thin, like a predator’s.
He bent towards me and said, “As far as the police are concerned—you can always approach them. I will make sure they help you. But then—I’ll have to tell my boys not to kill Bela. You know—they get very angry if someone goes against me.”
He took out a bundle of notes from his pocket and kept it on the table.
“Take it, and leave. It’ll help you to reduce some medicinal charge.” His eyes bulged out and became red. “And if I ever see you here again. I swear immortality won’t be able to prevent your death.”
I came out of his mansion. He is not Mohan. He is someone else. My Mohan was different. He was not like this. I had almost lost my senses. Were those years the reality, or was this the reality? All happened in an instant. My world betrayed me in an instant.
Hearing the eight alike notes of nature, in some part of the land, came out a vibrant peacock and danced her heart out, unaware, unconcerned, like a free spirit. A naked child came out of the shack to enjoy the off-season delight. Drops trickled down black his naked skin. He shivered with joy. His mother, concerned about the clothes that hung on the barbed wires, rushed out bare feet to take them.
The wind blew, the odour chased; umbrellas claimed their freedom, the iron roofs angrily clattered; the branches waved, the bark tried; the cows waved its head, the bell trailed—all danced to the song of rain.
It didn’t seem as if the earth was created a billion years ago. It looked fresh as dew. I looked up and smiled, rejoicing every drop of my birthday rain that slid down my chest and entered my mouth. Drops washed away the blood and stained the road. Mixed with the rain, were tears of my mother, who was sitting in heaven, crying.
I was not sad because he cheated me; I was sad because he killed my hope. I felt like a pilgrim who walked the whole world, bare feet, to meet his idol; and when he reached his destination, he found out that his idol never existed. His faith, his hope, his expectations – all was an illusion.
It was noon, but the sun was not overhead. It was beyond the horizon, where it was emitting its last warm rays. It had already begun to sink in the vast ocean. The yellow glare had become dim red. The tired sun would soon complete its long journey, crawl in its bed and sleep; leaving behind pristine shadows and reminiscences of warmth.
Jumping over the puddles, I went back to his house.
_ _ _
Bela closely examined the last page. The ink was fresh. The last words had been written just a few minutes back. She took out her spectacles and pressed her eyes to drain out the tears. The torrential rain clattering on corrugated iron roof didn’t let her sleep. The whole night, wetting her pillow, she thought of the injustice done to Anand.
As an act of sympathy, she had planned to make pepperoni pizza for her tormented child. She was baking the wheat base when Rajesh came inside the kitchen.
“You read the paper today?”
“Don’t disturb me,” said Bela.
“Listen, it’s very important. You remember Anand’s friend, Mohan? He died yesterday. At—” he searched the dismantled newspaper in his hand and said, “at 11 O’clock. He was stabbed. It says, the murderer ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife—”
“Oh my God!” She muttered as she threw the half-cooked base on the dirty floor. She ran upstairs, pushed open the door and ran into Anand’s bedroom.
Rajesh ran after her. A puddle of water was formed on the quaint carpet. All the paintings were teared and kept arranged on the table. Next to them was a scissor. The fan was bent because of a thick rope that was tied to it. Bela blankly stared at the familiar body that was hanging from the rope. Rajesh took out a dirty handkerchief to wipe his sweat and waited for Bela to respond.
He went downstairs to get water for her. Climbing the stairs, he fell down and had to go back again. When he came in the room he saw Bela sitting on the floor. Anand’s head was laid in her lap. She was passing her hand through his hair and was talking to him in whispers.
The glass fell off Rajesh’s hand.
She looked up and angrily said, “Shh….”
Rajesh was happy, but also puzzled, as things had became normal as soon as the funeral procession was over. Bela soon laughed and chattered like before. She went to market the next day and began preparations for Diwali: cleaning the outhouse, new paint for the house, replacing the furniture of her bedroom etc…. She called her friends for tea parties and sat in the garden for long hours. The house was filled with their loud laughs. The birds chirped again.
Rajesh felt Anand did the right thing by killing Mohan. He tried to discuss it with Bela, but she grew agitated and nervous whenever anybody talked about Anand. She also closed Anand’s room forever. No more was ever heard of Tina or Leela.
Exactly one year had passed since Anand’s death. Rajesh ran inside and shut the door. He closed his umbrella and placed it besides the sofa. As he took out his wet jacket, he heard a loud wailing from Bela’s room. The wailing persisted for two hours. When she came out, she was in a state of frenzy. She closed all the windows and doors. Then she sat on the table, tightly clasped her ears with her hands and started shouting, “Stop this rain. Please, stop this rain. Can’t bear it.” She remained like this for a long time. Afraid, Rajesh ran home. The next day when he came, he had expected to find the things returned to normal, but when he went inside, he found Bela missing. He went to her room and found that clothes and some money were missing. Even the suitcase was not in the closet. He considered that she had gone to her maternal house in Haridwar. She would often go there for months, leaving the house to him.
Ten months passed. Rajesh felt that she had gone forever. He was angry as he had been taking care of the house since ten months and was not yet paid for it. He got an idea to pay back his rising debts. He put up a big board in front of the house. It read, ‘TOLET’.
A small family moved in. He told them that they can live only for three months, paying three thousand rupees per month. Time passed, but Rajesh remained worried if Bela came back.
A long time passed; Bela didn’t come. One day, the children rushed to their mother and told her that a pungent smell was coming from the room upstairs. She ignored and told them not to disturb her. The smell soon filled the house. Rajesh was called to open Anand’s room.
“I told you I can’t open the room. It’s impossible.”
“We leave this house today.”
Rajesh brought the keys and opened the door. The children ran away as soon as the door was opened. The rain water entered through the window and had already covered half the floor and was constantly acquired new territories. The torn and dusty paintings were kept on the table, with a rusted scissor besides them. The pungent smell had driven away the spiders, leaving behind the thick white webs had made the corners round, as if they were part of a large sphere. Cockroaches were crawling on the rope whose one end was fastened around the fan and the other around the elongated neck of an old woman. Her hard hair had become a habitat of cockroaches and their slimy larvae. Just below the oscillating body lay spectacles whose glasses were cracked and coated with dust, and whose broad rim, despites being bandaged a hundred times, had been in use since fifty years.
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