Bhaskaryya Deka's Blog

THE DEPARTURE

Nandita felt her feet crunch the gravel as she took her morning walk. The sun shone from behind a thick veil of clouds trying to break through like a fish caught in a net. The town hadn’t woken up yet, and it was in this thick sense of lull that Nandita liked to start her day.

Nandita often liked to dream during her walk. Dream of her younger days when she wasn’t only the wife of someone, but a person who was unbridled and unencumbered. A bird on the perch of a tree aware of her existence and freedom. She was once a doctor, and another time a writer. Sometimes a soldier. But never a wife or a mother.

‘I am not even a wife now,’ she thought. She looked toward her house shrouded in the morning fog. The lights on the front porch looked bleak, and everything else around was hazy. Two drops of tears trickled down her eyes and met on her lips, which had cracked in the winter cold. Even in her fifties, her frame was erect and her face considered beautiful, but age had stamped her face with lines and pulled down parts of her that once stood tall. A gasp escaped her lips as she wrapped the shawl closer to her body.

She heard the sound of a cycle creaking toward her as she entered the house. ‘Khuri,’ said the boy as he handed her a copy of the daily newspaper, which nowadays could be found stacked in the store room. Unread. A token of a reminder that Sushil was no more. She smiled at the boy as he cycled away.

The house was quiet as Nandita sat on the veranda. Ram soon brought a cup of tea to her and went back to the kitchen, and the sounds he made while he cleaned the kitchen and prepared breakfast brought an eerie semblance of days to come that would resemble this morning’s quietness. She watched now the hedges that lined the small plastered way leading from the front gate to the door of the house. Ram used to trim them every other evening when she and Rashmi were taking their evening walks. Now, she remembered the suitcases that she helped Rashmi pack for her college that was to start in two days, and the emptiness lurking at the empty bedside stand and the spaces in the earlier stacked bookshelf.

She knew the house would be filled with sounds in the next few moments. Her sister, Chandni, had come to help Rashmi. But Nandita suspected it was more to help her deal with this sudden change. Nandita couldn’t say no but she wished she had these two days alone with her daughter. She wished to be sad in the preparations and cry, and not have the clamour of an almost stranger in the house.

 

It was twenty years back when she and Sushil had moved into that house along with Sushil’s father. Since her marriage, her life had been tied to the marriage and the relationships that were born with that. Two years after that, Rashmi was born and her life and her marriage had irrevocably changed. Years rushed past her, and all she could now remember of her passing years were the hazy images like a person sees from a rushing car. However, sprinkled among them were a few images of immense clarity. Sushil, Rashmi and she at the dinner table. But the time frames had been lost, and she could not locate when that happened. Ten years ago, or was it twenty?

She sighed and got up to take her bath.

 

***

 

When she got back, she found Rashmi and Chandni on the veranda.

‘Ma, the tap in the bathroom is leaking,’ Rashmi said as she crunched on a toast that Ram had prepared.

 ‘I will get that done later.’

 ‘Nandi, you remember we didn’t have taps when were growing up and in the winters Ma used to heat the water from the tube well at the chulha,’ Chandni chirped. 

Nandita nodded at her sister. She wished to tell her not to fold her feet on the chair but she didn’t. She kept it in her mind to tell Ram to clean the chair covers once they were gone. A shiver went through her.

Nandita stole a glance at Rashmi, who sipped on her tea and looked at the birds chirping. Her face still showed remnants of sleep but no signs of her imminent departure. Instead, the last few days she had been happy and loud. She watched her daughter’s hands wrapped around the cup as she leaned against the back of the chair. Her frame was thin and her features soft. They bore proof of having spent a life at peace and rest. The fair skin of her face bearing no signs of the sun.

‘Not like me,’ thought Nandita as she looked at her own hands, worn by age and hardened labour as a child and later as a wife and a mother.

‘You look like there’s death in the family,’ Chandni said. Rashmi’s face broke into a smile.

‘You tell me that when Ritu will be going to college,’ Nandita said but her voice betrayed the nonchalance she wished to convey. Rashmi’s smile froze like a stunned animal at the break of her mother’s character. Nandita was not someone who cried or smiled. She seemed to everyone mechanical and busy with keeping things running in the house. So much so that everyone forgot the nights she spent sleepless at night, especially after Sushil was gone, and now the last few days when stillness seemed imminent after a life spent in noise.

‘Don’t worry. I will be here before you know. You should visit khuri for a few days.’

‘That’s not a bad idea. Why don’t you? Ritu misses you, you know.’

‘Let’s first go to the market and send this girl off,’ Nandita said, recomposed, and laughed, and sadness hung in the air like a knife.

 

***

When afternoon came, they were in the market hustling for things. The market was too crowded for a Friday afternoon. They walked amidst the shops lined up on both sides of the road.

‘Baideu, new sarees from Sualkuchi at discount,’ someone shouted.

Someone shouted from another shop about discounts.

Ignoring, they went to the shop of Singh Saheb, which was the only shop that Sushil, and now, Nandita trusted.

‘Are the kurtas ready?’

‘Yes, it was ready yesterday only baideu. When are you leaving, Rashmi beta?’ he said as the assistants offered them seats.

 ‘Tomorrow morning, uncle.’

 ‘Beware of Guwahati, beta. Remember baideu, son of Prakash, who went there after getting first division here, and failed to pass in twelfth.’

‘What is he doing now?’ Chandni said.

‘Works with a contractor in a construction shop.’

‘Rashmi knows Singh Saheb that she won’t get a job there,’ Nandita smiled as they got up to leave.

There were so many small things that make up life in a house that Nandita found it disconcerting when they started buying them. Scissors. Soap. Needle. Toothbrush.

‘Toothbrush?’ In the hustle of the market a memory rose amid the drowning voices of Rashmi and Chandni negotiating with a shopkeeper. Nandita remembered her first day at the hostel when she woke up and stared at the ceiling. The immediate feeling of recollection of not being at home. A sob that erupted and was suppressed, but which burst through when she could not find her toothbrush.

They rushed from shop to shop. Rashmi had her own list. Dresses. Makeup.

‘Perfume?’ Nandita shouted at one point. ‘You need books for college.’

 ‘Ma, everyone buys them at college.’

 By the time they were done, there were two big bags that for once even made Chandni wonder how they were going to fit it all in the bus. On their way back, they stopped at a temple on the foothill of an enormous hill that belittled its holy existence. Nandita stayed back at the car and watched as the two of them bought a thali of earthen lamps and incense sticks at one of the shops that lined the boundary wall of the temple. She watched them struggle against the long queue at the front of the temple gate as they were pushed back and forward yet somehow they managed to drudge ahead to reach the temple. She watched them disappear into the dark hall of the temple. The driver impatient at the sudden stoppage in his otherwise planned schedule. Nandita wrapped the end of her saree to save herself from the dust that was thrown at her by the rushing trucks.

 ‘When do we leave tomorrow, baideu?’ the driver asked. An effort to break the silence.

 ‘At 5.30. The bus is at 6.’

 ‘It will be 12 by the time maina reaches.’

 ‘Yes, she doesn’t want me to go, or even take the car. I don’t know what she wants.’

 ‘It happens when they grow up baideu.’

 Nandita nodded at the smile, which seemed too kind, and turned her head toward the darkness of the inner hall of the temple and wondered about her daughter with her aunt offering prayers. She became aware of her own absence. It was much later that she saw two figures in white emerge from the gate. The top of their heads was covered with handkerchiefs and their foreheads lined by long red tilaks. Her daughter too tall for her age. Too unfamiliar. Like an old friend with whom she lost contact. Like a stranger met in passing.

***

         The rest of the night was spent in noise. Nandita forgot, or tried to, that she despised the presence of her sister. The sadness was kept at bay by the preparations that had to be done. Till the previous night, the departure seemed too far to be true and was ignored to never happen. But now that only one night’s sleep was left, there was no denying it. In its imminence, Nandita protested.

           Nandita for once became what she usually always was. Busy. She walked from room to room to make sure that Rashmi had everything that she needed. Ram was shouted at to bring one thing or another, and to finish cooking. Chandni partook in this defiance in ignorance. It was very late by the time Nandita was satisfied that everything was in order.

The dinner was spent sharing advice and talking about new beginnings.

‘Best times of our lives, isn’t it, Nandita?’ Chandni chirped about her college.

‘As if it was yesterday.’

‘I have always wanted to be in a hostel,’ Rashmi said.

Nandita smiled, ‘So did I. There were only twenty students in our hostel. Those were different times.’

‘Do you still talk to them?’

‘Yes, Rabha aunty and Singha aunty, you know. I lost touch with some.’

‘Who was your best friend?’

‘Your father.’

Rashmi smiled.

‘You should have seen your papa and ma when they were young,’ Chandni said. ‘No one was surprised when they got married.’

‘He was in your class?’

‘No, we met in the tea stall in front of our college. It was my second year, and his third.’

Rashmi looked at her mother playing with the food on her plate with a spoon. ‘I miss him though it was a long time ago.’

Nandita repeated, ‘A long time ago.’

‘I will come soon. Don’t worry.’

Nandita smiled at her promise, ‘I know.’

When Nandita retired to bed, the promise lingered on in her head. Nandita knew what the night was, and what would follow. It was the final night. The next day when she and Rashmi would wait for the bus, there would be tears and more promises. There would be calls every night after dinner, which would grow infrequent as time went on. There would be vacation visits of Rashmi, and she would feel like a stranger. The unfamiliarity that would replace this sense of belonging. A life of her own that Nandita would not find a constant place in.

But it was in time to come. For this night, it was her Rashmi sleeping in the room adjacent to her. Nandita looked at Sushil’s smiling photograph hung on the wall. Nandita got up and traced steps in the darkness toward Rashmi’s room. And ever so quietly, she slipped in beside Rashmi in the bed.

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Family

‘He can’t move. Father, open your eyes!’ a lonely voice soared in the silent fields of Amalpur.

***

What would satisfy a human? The question has hung upon mankind all these years, yet there has been no answers. What do we live for? What would lead to happiness? Is it to be attempted in pursuit of wealth, or is it to be attempted like sages, pursuing God, yet the question arises. What do they see in God? Why pursue? Is it God they are looking for, or is it happiness, or is it rather an outright denial of the fact that our lives are to be passed in utter futility, without possessing ever the knowledge of the reason of our existence? Are we destined to perish as ignorant beings?

People will never find out these answers, for I don’t believe there to be a correct one, because we can never answer these as long as we can’t see the beyond, what after this life?

What are we doing here, really? I ask again. What would we accomplish here if we are destined only to die, and leave our efforts behind?

I tell you, people have gone mad searching for the answers, people have been transported to a world of indifference, decaying in the lack of knowledge. People have abandoned property and lived like beggars, and what more, some have gone on to find answers in the heart of nature, away in Alaska, or in unknown, virgin corners of earth, an effort to connect with the inner being lost somewhere in the buzz … but I tell you, nature could only provide you so much respite from these never ending accusations. Eventually, in these dangerous paths, winding and unwinding, they lost their minds, some driven to the point of suicide, for they could never find the reason, and at that time it would seem the only thing that matters.

But even long after they are gone, the question persists. What would lead to happiness?

 

Anirudh sat back with the grin of a victor, the desk giving away a slight creak as his weight fell back. It had gone better than he had planned. He could see the confounded faces in the classroom, not asking questions, but soaking in his knowledge, and he was convinced that the speech was good enough to leave behind an impression of his superiority.

The evening was dark that day, letting him wonder and fall back into this inactivity. But now as he looked outside, lit by the faint light of the lamp in the courtyard, and watched the kitchen hut where his wife, Shamala, was preparing the night’s dinner, like the waning light of the lamp in the courtyard, he felt his momentary satisfaction slipping away. The clamour of utensils and crockery, loud enough for the silent night, seemed only to accentuate Shamala’s anger toward him.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Three years before, when Shamala had married him and arrived at that home, it had spoken of wealth and wellbeing. Wealth was proliferating as the crops covered their whole land in brilliant golden hue, another house (with bricks!) was being built beside the hut, and there was even talk of buying a television (Television! You can wonder how royal the idea might have seemed in a place, where the whole town passed into the hands of darkness as soon as night arrived). Coming from an orphanage, Shamala had stood in awe on the day of marriage, awe at the signs of prosperity that were in her husband’s house, and now, hers. But this feeling had passed, much like the other feelings of a newly-wed, and with familiarity, an inquisitive gaze took its place, looking at the gaps in the walls that seemed mere cracks before. And probably, it was what urged Anirudh tonight to look deep into a person’s mind, and wonder about satisfaction and happiness.

His father was taken ill soon after his marriage. It was two years ago that he had been shaken awake by his wife at the strike of midnight, telling him that father was squirming in his bed and trying to mumble something. And when he reached, he was half turned, lying on his left side, with his mouth hung open like a dead man, but it was his frantically moving eyes that told them something was very wrong. It turned out to be a heart attack.

“Dinner’s ready,” a loud shout reached him amidst the sound of scrubbing utensils, but was it an invitation? No, no, it floated in their house, proclaiming an imminent battle, and he knew the roars of utensils had become too quiet for Shamala.

Anirudh sighed. He crossed the courtyard in silence, washed his hands outside in the hand pump, from where, through the half engaged curtain, he saw his father sitting in his wheelchair. Shamala was laying a cloth over his lap so that he wouldn’t spill any food over his pyjamas, but when the act was over, the wrinkled kerchief looked more like her frown. He walked in silence inside the room. The kitchen was a mud hut of two small rooms; it was in the southernmost corner of their land; south, from where in daylight their fields could be seen spread far and far, till the gold seemed to dissolve into terrific blueness, and beside it a pond was visible that now reflected the moonlight back to them in all its shininess. Anirudh sat down in front of his father on a bench, and watched him struggle with a spoon. The lamp was placed by the door, so that flies would be away; its case was dark, blackened by use. The light coming through the translucent casing was dim, yet it shone enough to show them the contents of his plates, lying disarrayed much like the loosely tied hair of his wife, but he said nothing, for an anticipation hung in the air as Shamala moved in hurried steps, of an awaiting fury of words if the vow of silence was broken. So, he sat down and watched her rough hands serve the food, and ate in silence.

***

“I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I have got now more gray hair than your father. I can’t serve him anymore. Get him help,” Shamala said when they were alone, in bed. The lamp was put out to save kerosene, and his father was asleep in the adjoining room.

“Help?” Anirudh said impatiently. “We have barely food to eat in our house. And you talk of help?” His eyes blazed in the darkness as he looked at her, but the truth couldn’t be denied, for it was a reflection of her face, which had sunken like a dry leaf, of the hollows of her eyes that had gone frighteningly deep like two pools, and of  her hair that had grown thin and grey. The last five months had been tiring for her. The initial eagerness to cure his illness had gradually passed into passivity, and now, in the final days when father had become too frail, too ill, floating in an uncertainty between life and death, it had putrefied into this hatred like she had never felt before, whose stink nowadays kept him awake at nights.

“Yes, yes, in the name of God, I talk of help. Get it, for I need it more than he.”

“What help? The crops grow no more like before, half destroyed by insects, and the other half will probably dry out in this heat. There is no money in the jar.”

“Then dig the earth for money. I don’t care. The man of the house isn’t supposed to sit this way in his room all night, and tell there’s no money. I am not even thirty and I feel like hundred. Bring help, till then I am not going to cook. There will be no more food.”

She turned to her left and slept.

But of course there was food, as it must be. The words of her mouth were lost the next day. When the sun rose, her feet set in motion. On the days that followed, the food continued to be lain down like it had always been, on the wooden table of the kitchen, intermixed with her rhapsody of bitterness, and sitting four feet away from the lamp, in the shady light he and his father continued to taste the tunes in her rice and sharp salted daal, a taste that he carried with him as he paddled to the school, where it spread further as he made vale attempts to baffle his students, talking about subjects that baffled him as much. And the household persisted in obstinate silence amongst the noise of knocking utensils and roughly deposited plates.

However, a few weeks later, in the month of June, when the seeds were being planted and the fields were dotted with people in dripping sweats, when the land started to crack in thirst, this noise in the household intensified into a sharp cry that Anirudh would never be able to forget.

‘He can’t move! Father, Open your eyes’ she was saying, but when Anirudh walked into the room, pushing the dirty curtain out of his way and saw his father lying like the other day, it in no way surprised him, for he knew dead men could not move. And a new cry dominated the air in their household, with perverseness of a sense of relief associated with it. Beside him, Shamala tore her hair and beat her breasts as neighbours came in, their interest peaked at this new happening. And more women came in, and more tears were shed. A few calmed his wife, telling her it was a mercy from God, a few others reverberated his goodness. And even in the days that followed, Shamala wore white in sadness, and realized how her father had fulfilled her promised, for no food was prepared in the house for ten days, and she shed some more tears for that. And eventually the neighbours stopped coming, and grief stopped gushing out of her eyes, until one of those days that it seemed father had never lived there. And time passed, and she found her voice again, once more the utensils knocked together, because of damaged crops or her worn out sarees, and it seemed to grow in loudness, driving Anirudh further into the corner again in the house, sitting by the lamp in his study, wondering about his students and satisfaction of human beings.

SILENCE

“No one is smiling anymore,” I said, adjusting my collar against the wind.

An act in futility it seemed though, for the chilly winds still swept through the thickness of my shirt, making me shiver and utter curses. I rolled up the windows of the car, and then tucked my seatbelt. I wasn’t used to a weather as cruel as this, neither did the incessant driving from home to home did anything to acclimatize me to it. It had already been three years, three lonely years since I had left home and arrived at this place to earn some money. My home, those days was in total chaos.

“What do you mean?” the man now asked.

“People seem too wrapped up. They run from place to place, ruthlessly, and no one knows where they want to go. They don’t want to be talked to. Everything seems to be falling apart.”

The man said nothing. He was a heavy-set man, quite handsome, with curly hair and a face, which appeared shaven recently. He looked no more than twenty-five,and he was looking right into my eyes. After a moment though, he looked out of the window. The heavy rain had given away to a steady drizzle. People now started to come out of the sheds in numbers, filling the streets once more. The traffic officer standing at his post, once more started waving his hands. The man, at the back, sighed. I, however, said nothing.

It was one of those days that made me nostalgic, even made me feel a tinge of sadness at how things had come to pass. I hated the job. It depressed me to drive people to places they would rather not go, like the person now that I was driving to the hospital to. I felt terrible how sad people seemed when they sat at the back of my car, staring out of the window. Take the lady I took the other day to the end of the city for an example. She was perfect. She was with a baby, and she was going to meet her husband at the railway station, who had been away for just fifteen days. But she was crying in the car. It wasn’t such a big thing, but it made me sad, to witness this kind of crying. For one thing, I have seen people cry so much in the secrecy of the cab, letting go off themselves at the anonymity that they find themselves in that I could not help but feel sad. And for another, this evening, four years ago, I had lost my son in an accident, and I remember driving to the hospital much as I was driving now. It was a drizzly Saturday, I recall.

He was a good person, my son. He was sixteen when it happened. Once, a few weeks before he passed away, I went inside his room and found all the work he had been doing. He had joined some organization or something, helping in raising money for building a club in the village for sports. He didn’t pretend, that’s what so special in him. Most people do that, work for something and expect appreciation in return. He worked hard, went to people, and even met some ministers, but he never said anything. Not that he was not human, he liked when people patted his back, but I didn’t see anything that got to his head. That’s what most I liked in him. It was sad though how he died. A man had come running in the evening to our house, screaming that a drunk driver had run a car over him. When we got to the hospital, he had already passed away. We never found out the driver.

The house was a wreck the weeks following his death. His young sister, Neila, two years younger to him, had gone mad. We took her to the hospital for a week. She refused to eat, refused to be helped, and we, in the sorrow of death of a son, drowned in the grief along with her. It seemed like it would never end, that abyss.

“Here,” the man at the back said in his deep voice.

I nodded. I steered the car away from the road. It was almost seven in the night, and the hospital was silent now. There was no emergency that day, I guess.

“Keep the change,” he said.

He nervously got out from the car.

“Don’t worry, sir. Your wife will be fine. Your child will be fine. Allah is watching over you,” I lied. It made me sick lying, but I would lie again if I had to, because for a moment it seemed that even he believed me. And then, after shaking my hand, he walked away. It depressed me even more. I hoped his little boy came out alright.

Then I drove away from the hospital till the end of the road, where beside the petrol station, a few taxi drivers were playing cards, waiting for someone to hire their taxi. Ah, the whole situation seemed too pathetic. But it stung me more that they could return home once they were done, return to something familiar, whereas I had only a lonely sack to return to. And it made me even sadder that I had not called home for the last twenty days, but I gave up the idea as soon as it had come to me.

I decided to park the taxi and go over to Ali chacha. He was an aged man, who lived by the side of the parking hub. He lived with his wife in that house. He was the only one who helped me when I first came to the city. What a ruckus everything seemed. He helped me get a taxi finally to drive. It didn’t pay much , but it was better than sleeping in the curb at least.

I knocked a few times. No one answered. Theywere often like that. A few times, I had come and gone back without even meeting them. They had been asleep, they would tell me later. But this time, a red-eyed Ali opened the door.

“I thought I heard something, Amir. Come on in.”

They must be have deep in sleep, for I heard nothing as I went inside the room.

“Sit down, sit down. Rohini will be here in a minute too.”

I nodded as I took a seat. Ali chacha walked off inside. From the kitchen, I heard sounds of water being splashed against something. Ah, I regretted waking them up from their slumber. For a moment, I considered bidding goodbye, but I knew they would not hear any of my requests. So, I sat down. I guess, more or less, they were used to it by now, me barging in on them.

“It is such a rainy day. I wish more days were like this,” chacha said as he came and took a seat.

“Yes, a good day for the fares too. I just took a man to the hospital. His wife was having a baby.”

He nodded. He did not say anything more. He could be very quiet sometimes. There were times when I had come to their house and sat with chachi and he just sat at one corner, saying nothing. And other times, you couldn’t just make him stop talking. He could get pretty excited too.

I noticed that rain had started again, splattering hard against the tin roofs. It elicited a whole different response in me now. Unlike when I was in the cab, I relaxed now, enjoying the music the raindrops played. And for a moment, it took me back to my home. I wondered what Aasma might be doing. When I was home, she was always running in the house, from the kitchen to the kids, she would spend some time with them, and be back again. That was the only image I had of her. The kids, they were her world. That is why, it hit her hard when Dastaan died. She would not do anything after that. She sat around the house, sat with people from the village who came to visit, talked with them. For some time, when the guests were in the house, it seemed normal too, but when they were gone and we were alone at night, we felt something awful in our hearts. She always insisted for the lights to remain after he died, even when she was asleep. She said she was too afraid of the dark.

That same year, the crops had failed too. And we did not have much to fall back upon. I worked as a labourer for some days. I worked in the fields, cleaned people’s houses even at half a day’s wages. It irked me more that I could not stay with her, but we needed to eat, so I worked. To tell you the truth, a tiny part of me was relieved too, the house felt so hollow, so sad, that being away for some part of the day helped me keep my sanity.

“Where have you been these days?”  Chachi asked.

“Ah, I have been running around. It is already first of the month, and I haven’t sent any money home. I have been working a lot lately,” I said.

She nodded.

“It seems futile though, everything I am doing. Neila is sick at home. Aasma is not what she used to be. And I just gave a ride to a person to a hospital, who believes his wife is too sick. No one is smiling anymore.”

Chachi was silent, but Ali Chacha put down the newspaper he was reading and looked at me. However, he said nothing. Chachi went inside the kitchen to bring some more sugar. I felt ashamed. I did not like the idea of coming to their home and crying like I was doing. But I had nowhere else to go, so I sipped in their tea, and looked up. He was still staring in my direction, I noticed. He could do that often too. He was one of those people really, who could right through your eyes. He didn’t care if it made you feel uncomfortable, but he would stare right at you, until you said something, or averted your eyes from the gaze. I decided to do the latter.

When Chachi came, the conversation resumed. I didn’t mention home anymore. We ate, and talked about the weather. I talked about the fares, how the policemen asked money from us sometimes, how difficult it was to bargain the fares. We talked about nothing then.

It was about nine when I thought I should let them sleep. But Ali chacha started, “Go home Amir. You will regret it later if you don’t.”

I did not say anything. Chachi was silent as usual. It saddened me, the way chacha said these things. My home was broken. It was too damn far away for me to go. Yet it depressed me a lot, for the things that came to my head. It was all so dark, the fleeting image of my wife with our daughter.

“Go home. Find some peace.”

I said nothing again. What could I have said? I felt so much that he said all those things, that he gotten out of the image he had set for himself. Finally, I nodded. I said nothing more. I walked out of their home. I heard Chachi mumble something to Ali, but I didn’t exactly get a hold of it. To tell you the truth, I didn’t care anymore. A gust of wind invited me as I set foot out of the house. At the side of the curb, the drivers were still engrossed in their game of cards. A torrent of rain drops spluttered inside my spectacles as I walked toward my car. At halfway, I turned and returned once more to the shed. What was it, I wondered, that reminded me so much of my home today? Was it the rain, or was it the sinister resemblance of the whole scene to the death of my son some years ago. I could not be sure. But still, it caught in my throat, this feeling, and it spread to my heart like a cold reptile seeking a home. I could not cry. I stood that way for some time. Then for the first time in three weeks, I picked up the phone.

“Hello,” I heard a soft voice in the other end.

 

 

 

ASHES

There are carcasses around me,

Whose pants are torn, and eyes are bright,

Who walk with limps, and heads held high.

Silent in their steps,

They pass each other.

Each of their lips, stitched with threads,

Black ones that spiral in and out of their mouths.

I stare at one,

And he gazes back at me,

Dark pools of red, and a smile on his face.

Silent still, he walks past me,

And when a little away,

We laugh at each other’s hypocrisy-

It is bright daylight,

But there are carcasses around me.

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A Lie

O Lord, where has it fallen,

I cannot see-

O Lord, where has it gone,

I look for it-

It disappeared once,

when I was deep in my sleep-

forlorn, fluttering-

it flew away.

Where has it gone-

In your temple I search,

I find nothing-

In the midst of nothingness,

a whiteness I see.

It disappears again, just like before-

when I am deep in my sleep.

It flies away.

But laughter, I can hear-

Lies

O Lord, where has it fallen,

I cannot see-

O Lord, where has it gone,

I look for it-

It disappeared once,

when I was deep in my sleep-

forlorn, fluttering-

it flew away.

Where has it gone-

 

 

In your temple I search,

I find nothing-

In the midst of nothingness,

a whiteness I see.

It disappears again, just like before-

when I am deep in my sleep.

It flies away.

But laughter, I can hear-

A Strange Night

It was a cold January evening, and Ramu had been without a passenger since sunset. It was chilly, and fog that prevailed in the cold air, much like in those winter evenings he used to spend in front of the fire when he was a child, created an illusion of utter confinement. Ramu lay in his rickshaw with his head covered with a rugged piece of cloth that might have been a mop, but its stink he seemed immune to. He lay still, oblivious to the uncalled silence, or even the irking sounds of passing rickshaws impeding it. However, once every now and then, a gust of cold wind would blow that would rattle him to the bones, and remind him that he was not dead.

It was a terrible thing at his age to be stuck riding a rickshaw in a night as cold as that. The street was deserted, if not for him and a few stray dogs, which crossed him at times looking for shelter. Ramu shut closed, an effort it seemed to block off the disappointments that the scene spoke of; yet the lights in the homes of comfortably asleep people sarcastically casted a faint smile upon the old man, as if mocking the impossibility for his chance to conquer where they resided.

In this air of disappointments, a soft voice rose.

“To the hospital.”

Soaring, Ramu lifted his eyes slowly from his slumber and sat up. A man stood shuffling on his feet, huffing clouds of smoke. His face was small, studded with pimples, and his hair looked too thin in presence of his enormous body. But the enormity of his size was overshadowed by his eyes, which beseeched for innocence. He had a big suitcase in one hand. Ramu got to the seat in the front as the man took the one behind, and slowly the pedals creaked against the strain.

“Ride faster, faster, and maybe I will give you an extra ten.”

Ramu didn’t look back. He pedaled harder. The man said nothing. The night was cold indeed, but nothing should have elicited a desertion of the street as that. Ramu had seen it all. He had been in that little place all his life. He had ridden that thing in storms, when tin roofs flew off of huts, threatening decapitation; when people ran in search of shelters, fearing they would fly away with the wind too; but even in those sinister days, there would be passengers. People were always too busy to care for a calamity. But today was different.

It was in the evening that a rumour had started about the elections. Nobody knew for sure, but people were afraid, locked inside.

“Faster, fellow! Faster! Remember the ten?”

Ramu grunted at another burst of energy.

“Why the hospital, sir?”

Another grunt.

“Ah, not the hospital exactly. A little ahead of that.”

“But it’s barren ahead of it for ten miles. Except for a graveyard.”

“Yes.”

Ramu looked back at the man, who seemed unperturbed, gazing at the streets as if his words conveyed no meaning at all.

“A friend is waiting for me to leave for the railway station,” he added finally.

“In the graveyard?”

“Yes, yes,” a little impatiently. “A distant friend of mine.”

Disturbed from their induced hibernation by the creaks of wheels, a few dogs barked at the rickshaw, but as if fearing where they were headed, they stayed back. Ramu looked back at the man’s face again, and saw nothing.

“What is it, sir? Why on a night as this, and to a graveyard? Do you not fear the rumours?”

“Fear the rumours… why? I have a child to reach in another city. Fear is only there till you have got two roads to take. I have just the one.”

Ramu said nothing, concentrating only on the sordid street ahead of him. He pedaled harder as another grunt came out. Cold sweat had started to slide down his cheeks by the time they made it to the main square. In the distance, a huge building came steadily into sight. If not for the sign board on top surrounded by white fog, despite his familiarity, Ramu might have mistaken it for a mausoleum.

“Do not stop there. Do not stop there.”

“Yes, sir.”

He pedaled toward the hospital. In anticipation, he didn’t even glance at the place, which rather than the usual quietness at this hour, witnessed a flurry of activity around it. The whole place reeked of urgency. The smoke in the fog became denser in front of the big man as the hospital drew closer. And past.

“What is it, sir? Have you done something?”

“No, it is my daughter. I am not sure if I will be able to get to her.”

“Why?”

“Have you not heard the news?” asked the man, who looked back again at the hospital.

“Yes, yes, I have heard about a rumour.”

“That is no rumour. The minister has gone mad, and no one seems to have the power to stop him. He has closed the markets.”

“But, how could it stop you from…”

“Because the minister is furious. He threatens to stop the railways, the roads. Nobody gets out, he says.”

The fog veiled perfectly the road in front of him as the rickshaw wobbled to the left and right. If not for the candle fitted in a box on the handle, he might not have been able to see his own nose. Questions rose in this uncertainty.

“But…”

“And my daughter is ill in another town. I must get to her.”

“Who is it that you are meeting at the graveyard?”

“A friend of mine. He says he can get me out of here. The odds are against me, but I have to try. I swear to you, if I ever get out, I will never come to this God forsaken place again.”

Denser fog… candlelight cowered against darkness… Ramu looked back and for a moment, it appeared the man’s innocent face would break into a sob. He turned his head again at the road, which seemed now almost to have disappeared in the fog. But he concentrated on whatever was discernible, unsure what to think of it. The road was too unobvious for him to decide where to go, just as the dilemma he had found himself in.

“Okay sir, I will help you get to the graveyard. But from there on, you are on your own.”

“Kind fellow. I have never met a man kinder than you, my friend.”

The man seemed to suddenly look at the sky, as if to thank the stars, but it was engulfed in darkness. The candlelight flickered for a moment.

Ramu smiled. “Thank me later. Let me get you safe first.”

The man nodded furiously. “Yes, yes.”

 

***

 

“Bonjo, I was afraid you lost your way,” a frail man said as a greeting when the rickshaw stopped in front of the graveyard. He had a face similar to the other one, but his provoked an anticipation that the sturdiness of the features might melt any moment and an angelic smile would be unveiled. He was sharply dressed than the other, hair combed neatly, clean shirt that clung to the body in the perfect amount. The two men hugged each other and mumbled something inconspicuous to Ramu.

The frailer one came forward now and shook Ramu’s hand. “Thank you for your help. Here, a hundred.”

Ramu smiled. “But…”

“Come on in, you must be cold. I have built a fire inside,” said the man as if it was his home, leaving the hundred rupees in Ramu’s hand.

He led them both past graves, to the other side, where beside a shed a small fire was breathing. The three of them sat around it in a circle. Bonjo put two more logs in the fire, trembling in cold.

“The train is in half an hour. You should reach there in the morning.”

Bonjo nodded. “How is she?”

“Good. She misses you.”

Once again to Ramu, it seemed Bonjo’s innocent face would break into a cry, but just that moment, the animation died. The graveyard fell silent, but fire crackled, protesting against the silence, urging to hear something that must be told of the night.

Ramu obeyed a while later.  “Oh, but what is the rumour? There seems no one of whom I could ask about it?”

The frail man seemed surprised. “Bonjo? He doesn’t know?”

Bonjo shook his head. “He is an old man. How could I tell him?”

“Tell him what?” Ramu asked.

“The rumour is true. The minister’s son was killed this evening. He is in the hospital now. That is why the minister is furious. He thinks some politician killed him. And the way things look, it might be true.”

The frail man started, “He doesn’t care anymore about the elections. He will block every way out of this town.”

“Ah lord! What about my daughter?”

“We will figure something out, Bonjo. This train is your hope.”

They sat around the fire. The conversation went back and forth between the two men about what should be done. In the distance, they heard angry shouts around the hospital. Something must have come up about the body.

Brutal death, was it? Ramu thought.

A thick flame burst into the sky from the fire, licking the blackness above before settling down. The shouts were getting louder in the distance. A tearing roar from the crowd was heard, followed by an announcement about the death.

The two men looked at each other.

“What time is it?” Bonjo asked.

“Eight-thirty.”

He nodded, deep in contemplation. “A terrible night to make a journey as important as this. I leave you to enjoy the fire, my friend!” Bonjo said, smiling an eerie smile at him.

The two men got up and hugged each other. “Bonjo, give my love to her.”

Ramu watched them in amusement. They were like brothers.

“I will, I will,” he said.

They mumbled something to each other. Bonjo hugged the man again before turning away. The fog wasn’t dense near the shed anymore, Ramu noticed. A flame of red burst high into the blackness, casting a shadow of Bonjo, a figure that didn’t seem so innocent anymore. It followed him out of the graveyard, till the two mingled into the night.

The Long Road Home

Home has always been a concept to me, an open-ended one whose discussion ends in subjugation of my mind. That is why I try to avoid it, try to pack this bundle of knowledge and leave it off at some far unknown corner of my conscience. But such a concept it is, it always finds a way of clawing back into my mind. A few conversations and there, it pops out again, raising its indolent head at me. At other times, the mention is sudden and unexpected, like the impact of a hammer. And for days, this small mention would keep reminding me of an image, and a smell. The fleeting scent of incense sticks would trouble me as I sit in my office and transport me to a house made of bricks, one that seems too big for the narrow path lined with hedges that leads to it, and along which I always see a lonely figure walking. But no more memories today, I know, because after eight years that neglected concept is about to burst into life.

“I am going home!” I say to myself.

It is surrealistic, this feeling of closeness to home, and with the scares my nightmares have left behind, it is all I could do not to jump from my seat and turn back to Mumbai, my home now. I am travelling in a small, rickety bus that smells of vomit and sweat. There are only five rows of seats and they are packed with people. Even in the space between them, people stand with their bodies pressed up against each other, and who from time to time like clockwork, let go off their hands holding the iron bar above their heads and pat the back of their pants to be sure that their wallets are still in place. It is the start of the month of July, when summer is at its peak, and even now at five in the evening, the red sun glares at me through the glass less window pane. The air seems too thick to breathe as I sit cramped at one corner at the back, with my elbow resting on the rusted lane and my eyes searching for milestones on the road, seeking some comfort in the approaching end.

Suddenly, the bus comes to a halt and the conductor, a middle-set man with a small, brown bag hanging by his shoulder, starts shouting, “Dhekiajuli! Dhekiajuli!”

Hearing this, a few passengers get up. Some of them shout as they push and squeeze past the thick crowd. Only a few more miles and I will be there, I think, suddenly afraid of what I might find once I reach. A gust of wind blows as the bus starts again, and it slaps my face with dust it has carried from familiar places. I cringe against its force and turn my head away.

I do not have much impression of my home. It has been such a long time. The image of home that I carried with me to Mumbai has been lacerated into pieces by the abrasions of time, and these abraded pieces have slowly and deliberately slipped out of my mind. However, there are a few remains whose jagged edges have stuck to my conscience – a few reminders of Tezpur, a small town when it used to be dotted with people I knew, and the kacha road that led to my home, on both sides of which, I remember small houses made of bricks and their tin roofs slanting like an inverted V. But surprisingly, the only memories of my home are dark and dreary. I see an image of a woman working in the kitchen with me by her side, and a figure looming over us. He is frowning at her. He shouts something and rushes out in anger. I see her chopping vegetables as if nothing is wrong, but a drop of tear looms over her right eye. I see her turn to me and smile, and I see that thick drop dissolving back into her red eye.

All my childhood, I have lived in this aura of fear, thick and thriving – the evening walks with father, or even when he came into the house. I was always so afraid. His voice roared in the house for us to do his chores, light up his cigarettes, blow the fire for him.

He was a robust man too, and in fear we caved, thinking that the words he spoke might turn into actions. That is one of the reasons I never returned home – in Bihu, even in Christmas and New Year when the entire city of Mumbai seemed to be on vacation. I used to stay back in my apartment every year and work alone in projects, even though I knew I could never spend the money they paid me. It is pathetic, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to return and fall into the banal pattern of regularity and fear that mother had found herself all her life. And then, after eight years of separation, when I was placated that the words that boomed through the rusted copper wires could never hurt me, when I thought the fear had died, a letter came to open the lid. The tone was softer than it had been, but the voice still demanded an acceptance of his request. And though I thought to deny, the same fear took grip of me that made me return his calls, write to him and tell him I am happy in the town alone.

The bus stops. I release a sigh.

 

After paying the conductor, I step down the bus. It is six in the evening and the sun casts long shadows of people around me. They flicker as I walk past them toward the shed in the bus stand. The place is much less crowded than I expected, only a few vendors passing by- vendors of fruits and fries, nuts and sweet-smelling pies. A few boys pass by me in their bicycles, laughing among themselves as they ring their shrill bells. But though less crowded, Tezpur too seems to have rolled in the revolution of progress, like cars and bikes that whiz past me every second now, and buildings that have shot up, adamantly refusing to be left behind.

My sister has come to meet me. When she sees me, she rushes and engulfs me in a warm embrace, and elicits in me memories of familiar scents.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” she says as she holds me at an arm’s length and looks at me. “Everything has changed so much.”

I look at her and see reflections of her statement in her face. The dark hollows of her eyes are gone and her big, brown eyes sparkle as they look at me. Her cheeks are fuller too, explains the small bump in her belly that has started to look out.

“Give me some credit. I am a family person like you.” She lets out a light laugh at that.

“How have you been?” I ask her.

“Good, good! I am glad you made it.” She smiles. “And this is Rumi, father’s maid,” she says of a fat woman beside her, who smiles at me, her red teeth flashing again her white skin. She does a polite namaste. I join my hands in response.

“It has been so long. You seem a lot older.”

“I am older.” I laugh. “More so because of whom I am about to meet.”

She shakes her head. There is no smile at the mention of his name, neither is there any concern. I look around the place again and sigh. I suddenly hope that he isn’t at home, hope that he has gone out to one of his trips, or to drink, but I know he hasn’t. Five years back, paralysis disabled the left portion of his body. So, he is reduced to bed now, with a chair and a maid, and a lopsided smile stuck permanently to his face.

“He waits for you,” Akansha finally says, looking at me.

I nod. “Shall we go then?”

She sighs, but says nothing. In silence, we get in the car.

The roads curl endlessly around themselves, and I am surprised at the ease with which the driver takes those turns. Living in Mumbai, I have lost familiarity with them, where upon a straight road I drive to my office and come back in the night, too tired to bother to turn on the television, or go to a party I am invited to. But more than that, I am surprised at the distortion of my memories of this lane. My familiarity and belongingness have been snatched by the tall, coloured houses that stand on sides of the road, places that once used to be covered with thick vegetation, so bright and green that it will hurt your eyes on a sunny day. We drive through this newness to a dilapidated house standing at the corner.

 

 

When I stand at the foyer of our house, I feel transported to one of my dreams. I see canvases boasting their swanky colours against the pale white walls. They glint in the dim light of the room. I see the past erupting in front of me in pieces, like the wooden closet that stands beside the kitchen door with a little drawing I made on its door when I was eight. However, my eyes get drawn to the centre of the wall, where I see the masterpiece mother liked to talk about. Father sits in a huge chair while mother stands behind him. How many times mother had told the story of its capture in her little span of time with me; how a painter once came to our house claiming to be able to replicate everything; how they had posed for days and when it was complete, how father had thrown a wad of notes at him for its perfection. But that perfection is not evident now.

Time has stained the image. The one or two botches on it when I was a child have now spread to the whole painting like cancer. And even as I look around my father sitting in a steel wheel chair, the smile of that image seems to be distorted into a pout. His eyes are glassy and his skin has cracked up, much like the walls of the house. His voice too has lost the fire that burnt my childhood, instead it now sings in a soft note of prayer. How many hours before this changes to its usual hostility, I can only imagine.

“The house isn’t the same as when you left, but of course, it has been so long.” Father laughs a small laugh. “Sometimes, I cannot remember how long it has been.” “Yes, me neither,” I say awkwardly.

Silence prevails for some time. I try to swallow what I see in front of me and imagine it like it has been all those years back. Where is my mother?

“Come, come!” he finally says. “You must be tired. Chai will be ready soon.”

 

The living room seems similar to everything else, subdued than before; the house no more bears the resilience of a gentle touch as when mother had lived here, or even when Akansha might have. However now, it seems forgotten, moving shyly toward its inevitable end in ignorance, just as my father. The ruins are all over the house, like dead leaves hanging in a tree, waiting for a gust of wind to make them fall.

As we sit on the sofa, Rumi brings tea on a tray, smiling a tad at me and telling me to call her if I need anything. I nod gratefully at her. Rumi has been recently hired, Akansha had told me when we were alone, and that many others have already left, unable to cope with the whims of the old man. But when I look at her, I think she can make it, with her stout frame and smiles, she stands the best chance if anybody has one at all.

The tea is taken by us in silence, except the spluttering sound father makes when he sips, incapable of moving his face as he once had before the attack of paralysis. A few drops are spilled, staining the carpet below. I notice him looking at the stains for some time, then turning his gaze at the cup again, making sure not to spill any more tea. Yet to his frustration, he spills some more, a few drops slid down his chin, meeting his shirt, and a few notorious others escape, dripping slyly, escaping his shirt, escaping even the handle of the chair and only to stain the carpet. Rumi comes to wipe his mouth, but she is driven away, and I watch his efforts, yet as the tea is spilled over and over again.

When the cup is empty, it is deposited on the table with a shaky hand, and the eyes are lifted shyly to see the watch on him; now, every one of them averted. And satisfied with a moment of victory, he shouts again. “Let’s show you around the house a bit. A lot has changed in the house after you left you know. It has been so long,” he says, forgetting that he has just said that moments before.

“Sure,” I say.

No one says anything for some time. We wait for Rumi. Soon, she emerges from the kitchen, tying the end of her saree at her waist, and nods only, acknowledging the demand of silence. She holds the two post of the chair protruding out at the back and starts pushing him.

“Come, though you seem tired. See, what the house looks like,” he says to me.

 

The rest of the evening passes as such, with Rumi pushing the chair from here to there, while his voice keeps leaping in pitch as he barks order for her to take a turn or stop. From time to time, he addresses me too, albeit in a much softer tone than the prior, and tells me about how everything has changed, picking one of only a handful of those good memories of my childhood and twisting it to fit himself in. He takes me from the kitchen to their bedroom, after which passing through a narrow corridor we reach my room. It’s too dark to see anything, but it looks left out, abandoned. There is

a wooden arm-chair at one corner of the room and the bed lays bare without a mattress. Where my table used to be, I see now boxes mounted one top of another, layers of dust accumulated over them. As we go in, a rat sprints from one of them and leaps out of the door. Rumi lets go off his chair for once and chases the rat with the day’s newspaper.

“It’s been locked for years. But now that you are here we may as well clean it up for you tomorrow,” Father says.

I give father a nod. I walk around my old room and look at the decayed remains, for to call these dregs of my childhood change would be wrong.

… ‘Father! Father!’ the words ring in my ears, a distant cry piercing the web of time, web made of years and years, tangled together in a mass, and yet the cry pierces it with precision, landing finally in my ears. Yes, yes, I can still hear it. A distant cry. Faint.

Oh, but discernible.

“Father, Father,” he is crying.

Silent as ever, I walk to the door which has been left slightly open, and like all those years back, I peer through the small gap. I see a woman lying on the floor, while a drunk man stands over her, tall and proud as he looks down at her. And from one of the rooms, a cry is heard, “Father! Father!”

“Is anything wrong?” asks father now from his chair.

I look at Akansha, whose face has sullen down like mine. But I watch again, him as he sits in his chair, his collar-bone that protrudes from his once proud body, as if urging the onlooker to hear the tales of its sufferings, the countless medicines it has seeped, the meals it was denied.

I shake my head and smile. “No, everything is fine.”

 

Father goes to bed early that evening, too tired from his performance. And late in the night, when the moon has climbed up and Rumi’s clamour in the kitchen has died down, I and Akansha sit in my abandoned room, taking sips at intervals from a bottle of beer, while she for the little bump, from a cartoon of juice by her side. The room is darker than I would have liked. The windows are barred and though there are no curtains, the trees surrounding the house prevent any moonlight from streaming into the room. We sit in the dark, except now and then a glow-worm flies by us, illuminating the room and then disappearing in an instance.

The day has passed by in too much puzzlement. There were too many sights to take in, too much familiarity that brushed my roiling conscience. Yet none of them elicited a worry in me, as this concern on Akansha’s face does now. She squirms in her seat.

“You know what this is, right? All of a sudden, a letter!” she says. Her brows are furrowed.

“He said there’s something important.”

“There is a problem,” Akansha starts in hesitance. The room is silent if not for her voice. The house itself is in such seclusion that a soul other than us would have been an apparition. “There is no one here and father needs special care, which not even Rumi can provide.”

“Maybe we can get another maid,” I say casually, swallowing a gulp of the cool liquid.

It burns my throat.

“No, it won’t work. No one will work for him. And that’s why he is snapping at me, because I suggested we move him into a home, you know, for old people” A hoarse laugh escapes me. I look at her, raising my eyebrows.

“Why are you laughing?”

“You really told him that. You are braver than I thought.”

She doesn’t laugh but I can detect a trace of smile in the darkness. “Be serious Sonu!

He is angry.”

“Is that so, after what he did to us?”

But in those rare flashes of light, she looks tensed still, as if she is eight again, waiting for father’s anger to wash over her. She looks away.

“Umm… that’s the other thing,” she says. “…that he wants you to do that.”  And there is that silence again.

What…what…my mind wanders. Does he really? Is the cordialness squeezed out of him by his helplessness…is the ever dominant father now reduced to this, yet what is it that I am feeling?

Sadness….No, no!

‘Father, father!’ the cry reaches my ears again and it somehow amalgamates with the actions of my father since the evening, which now begs of me a response in denial.

“I will think about it,” I say and sit back, tired and relaxed, as one would be after a long war. He really needs me. A feeling of satisfaction spreads through my heart. She speaks no more words of it, and I keep silent too. We take comfort in the darkness of the room, afraid that the glee that floats in our eyes would demean our intentions to filial obligation.

Later that night, when the drinks get too much into my head, we stop. Akansha goes to bed, but in this new wake of realization, I decide to take a walk in the courtyard. I go out and walk upon the small path that I used to dream in my sleep. In the absence of any obscurity as in the house, I now find myself looking at the moon and its showered rays shining off of the undergrowth. How has it come to this, I could only wonder, this sense of enmity; yet, this thought doesn’t come to me with regret, but rather with profound loneliness at having been severed from the fear that has till now stuck to my conscience. I go and sit on a small, wooden bench installed under the mango tree for hot summer days. Beside me is a swing made of nylon, attached to branches of the tree. I graze my fingers along a rope; my heart filled with empathy at the broken threads, undone at the corners. Most of my life has been consumed by this hatred. Now that I think of my apartment in Mumbai, those two rooms with bare walls and the bulb with flickering light, I suddenly know that it is over, for the thread like that of the rope has broken from the lot, and it sticks out as if it has never belonged there.

It is about an hour later, when sitting under the mango tree, I spot Akansha coming toward me.

“You should come in. It’s three in the morning.”

I nod at her and walk toward the house. For one last time, I look back, fixing the image of my last night here, framing it in my innermost conscience like a daguerreotype. The next morning, I get up when it is still dark. I go and have a look at father’s room, where he sleeps in peace. I move about the house like a ghost, capturing images that will fill my memories for years to come. I go to the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea, and sit in a cane chair in the veranda. Finally, an hour or two later, when the sun shows itself in the far eastern horizon, washing me in its redness, I get up. I go to my room and pick up my bag. My mind should have been filled with memories from my childhood, of a child running about in the room, of mother sitting in her chair, smiling at me, yet these thoughts never appear on the horizon as I get on to the long road back to home. All I can think of is the once stout man, a bully, a disciplinarian, looking at the stains on the carpet, which only seemed to mockingly stare back at his lopsided smile.

 

Review of the ‘Brutal’

“In pitch darkness, Kunal Chaubey dashed through thick foliage, ignoring branches and twigs clawing into his flesh. Webs of overhanging roots keep getting in his way, lacerating his face like barbed wires. Yet he ran like a mad man. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to get out of this damned forest…”  ‘The Brutal’ starts this way, creating a grotesque image in our minds, and the story progresses on similar lines. It is the story of a respected journalist, who tortured by images of a past project and in search of peace, finds himself in the middle of a straight case that would go horribly wrong, and which would guide him to ignored secrets. A crime thriller in every sense, the twists and turns of the story are well augmented by the background Uday has managed to create, because of which, unlike many thrillers they seem well justified rather than random happenings as witnessed even in the stories of some bestselling authors. His writing too, simple and direct, compliments the story well. However, there are places where it falls apart and leaves us with rather amateurish phrases. Just like there are places in the story, where I thought though the plot seemed good, but rather than showing, it provided us with a direct narration of what has happened. Thus, not eliciting emotions as I suppose the author desired. So, though it impresses with its fluidity and plot, it lacks the compactness and consistency in writing to make it to favourites list.

Rating – 3/5

Author- Uday Satpathy

Publisher: Bloody Good Book

WAR OF WORDS

In the quiet morning, the sun was obscured by the floating clouds in the sky like sheets of doom, through which slight rays of hope penetrated and reached the dark courtyard of their house, illuminating it a little, but leaving much unseen, ignored. The day had just begun, fresh it was, untouched by the soring abrasions of the day, yet Shona could feel the decayed remnants in her heart, which had now spread to her mind like cancer. She sat in her chair in the veranda, collapsed against its back, making an attempt to gather the last vestiges of energy in her and wake up their daughter, but the quietness in the morning only seemed to convey a sense of utter quietness, a sense that it was too early for such an act, invoking her to wait for a few moments, moments, which she realized have culminated to be more than an hour now. Beside her were a couple of chairs, lined for guests, but which stood empty for most mornings and evenings nowadays under the shade of the tin that extended from just below the terrace, slanting a little, supported in the front by four worn out bamboo poles. The sun still floated in the far horizon, coming out a little of the envelope, and whose lines as they hit her in the eyes seemed at once delicate and painful. But in ignorance of the commotion going around her, Shona sat quietly, shielding her sleepy eyes with a hand, watching as a few ducks wadded in the courtyard, picking faeces of creatures with their beaks or sometimes, a few luxurious grains.

Soon, through the shade of her hand, she saw a familiar figure started conjuring in the far distance and it grew larger walking toward her. The walk was slower than it had been when they had first been married and the limp in his right leg, far worse, but the lanky frame of his was still the same, as was his face that had refused to age and shrivel down like their marriage.

A smoke dangled between his fingers as he walked up to the veranda, his shirt too not tucked, rather hanging over one side of his pants like fading leaves dangled from branches, and the sight disgusted her. But Lohit said nothing as he walked past her and into the room, and denied of her anticipation of an imminent fight, Shona was surprised. Had he forgotten that she had to sleep on the sofa because he came late from office, so late that she slept without dinner. But unlike other nights, when a war of words would ensue, dismissing her acquired peace like a teacher dismissing a student, today she said nothing, instead went inside their room to lay down some new clothes for him.

The room was dark, for the windows were closed, obtusely blocking off the only source of light, and lying among the disarrayed things in the dark room, she found one sitting in her bed, dark hands hiding his face. Dark hands and a dark face. Shona walked up to him and realized that drops trickled from a pool of red, from which somehow trickled still more thick ones, and some of them fell on her feet, beseeching for sympathy. Shona stared at them for some time as they formed pools in her skin too, and slid forming shapes she could not recognize.

“What is it?” she asked, the voice angry but still a stint of concern contained in it. “What is it?”

“Mother is ill,” he said. “She had a heart attack.”

***

Their marriage had a happy beginning. It was the beginning of the 1970s, and a time of utter turmoil. There were wars and scars it left behind. A new country was being formed. Indians were killed in it, it said, and still more. But far from these avalanche of changes, in a remote college, Lohit studied.

Coming from a village, a commoner, pertaining in him all the cliché associated with it, his lanky frame carrying his thin face with a moustache, the only thing that stood out in him were his pair of huge, black bordered spectacles, a thing that he gave due credit to for earning a perception of innocence in the eyes of any stranger. Perhaps, as he went along, it was still those spectacles that he gave credit for earning tuitions. Yes, as the morning sun would bath the eastern sky in redness, unlike other boarders lying asleep in their beds, he would be up on his cycle, riding towards the far part of the town to provide tuitions. And on his way, beside the house of Sharma’s he would stop and drink a cup of chai and move on.

The stall had acquired a funny place in his heart, a place for chais and incoherent discussions. The time when he had been first here, two years back, he had sat at the stall and listened to the myriad tales of the chaiwala, whose doubled chinned face would be filled with profound expressions as he would recall all those stories- a story of a student dropping a cigarette in his purdah that had burnt his whole stall, or about the haunted building behind the stall that made him close up early. People had a knack for disappearing in it, he would say. But it was a place he would later remember for something entirely else, a chain of events that would redirect his whole life, a lost book that put him in a house, and sitting in a chair watching a thick pair of lashes, bordered darker than his black bordered spectacles, as they blinked and big eyes it held, deceiving the petite frame it accompanied, a pair of lashes he would grow to love, so that even in the worst of fights, later in their years, those pair would calm him down and remind him of his own hopeless life before they came together.

It was a good story it made, and good deal of coincidences that made it happen. But was it not how it is supposed to be, coincidences making up a story, a story that would otherwise had been dealt in differently, narrated differently, or not narrated at all, but sitting on that rainy Saturday evening in the summer of 71, Lohit found the book, devoid of its owner. And picking it up, he would have taken it home, but some conscience made him return it, for the name reminded him of a beautiful woman sitting in a class, wearing a red salwar, with her hair parted in the middle and falling lightly on her shoulders.

The day after when he had gone to her house, she was not at home, and it was a Sunday, another coincidence, but it was again the spectacles that he worshipped, for a studious man was welcomed everywhere those days and a tuition was fixed.

“Come, come, Lohit ji!” her father said the next day.

The house was a huge one, walled from all the sides. A narrow path formed between two rows of bushes, which led straight to the main building. A maid took his umbrella, as her father led him to their room. It was a small one, but neatly arranged. A few pictures hung on the walls, one of a ghazal singer that his mother too idolized, but there was no one. Her father sighed.

“Maina!” He shouted.

Again.

A girl emerged from another room and stood in front of them, a blue salwar now, yet the dupatta lost. “Maina, be decent,” he shouted at her.

He averted his eyes, while she went to the wardrobe and searched, mumbling something under her breath.

She came back soon. “Namaste!” she folded her hands, the tone full of sarcasm, yet the delicate hands that folded in front of him making him disregard her intentions. She was prettier than he remembered, a perfect curve of lips that flashed red.

“Namaste!” he said.

The rest couldn’t be less known. Glances exchanged between pair of eyes, big eyes meeting his, and the commotion it might have caused inside him, a smile hidden beneath a straight pair of red lips, mischievous hands seeking a hold. And the practical man that her father was, he decided better a marriage be fixed before it brought shame upon their family.

***

A month later, everything had changed. The stranger, the one with a funny face, the one that seemed so distant, began to be wherever she was. The realization hit her much later about what she had consented to. The first week had passed in discovery, finding what was forbidden before, and she had relished in that moment, but as weeks gave away and the pleasure subsided, replaced by a continuation of an utter congruous schedule, the delight changed to accusation.

She could recall precisely what had ensued then, a silence had taken abode in their home, a silence that he carried back with him as he walked back with his limp, and even when Maina was born, the silence never subsided to exist, rather it began to break off the shackles into a war of words. But now as she sat by the table, the room still dark albeit the shady red rays the bulb threw at them, she couldn’t understand, how everything had seemed to matter so less.

And in perturbation did she keep looking at Lohit, bathed in the glow of the light and her watch, how he had changed, the lanky boy to the man with this terrible limp. Was it what all marriage led to, terrible afflictions? The whole day Lohit had sat there in their room, refusing to be calmed or told anything of the world, waiting by the phone for some news of his mother. Left alone, Shona had gathered herself, and helped Maina reach the school bus, who seemed lost at the silence the house had fallen into. And the day had passed in such inactivity that would otherwise have made Lohit restless, but today, it only made him sit back and reflect, while Shona sat there and did some of her own reminission, of lost love, the wooden chairs that she had been gifted in her wedding, worn out now, but taking her back to a time when they used to sit together, looking at the sun disappear in the horizon and the stars come up, when food was forgotten, and thick eyelashes sated his hunger without lighting the chulha. Where those days had gone, she could only wonder.

He was rocking slightly in an armchair, his head at the roof, and a grim expression on his face, but sometimes a threatening twitch would appear at the corner of his lips, however soon he would look about and make sure that Shona had not seen it. A river welled up to his throat, but it was kept controlled, for a time when the need might arrive, for the night was still young, and the ache in his heart was growing. Shona walked up and came and sat near him. She had not changed, and her saree had grown damp in the July sun, but now that he sat like this in the primal form he had been when she had first laid her eyes on him, a lost friend he again seemed to her.

She got up a while later and went to the kitchen. It was going to be a long night she knew, and how Lohit sat in the chair, she wasn’t even sure if he was going to bed that night. She took a saucepan and boiled water for two cups of chai. It was already long past their bed time, the ticking clocks and silence shrouding their house reminded her how everything had changed since the morning, how the silence that had seemed so angry that very morning, had given birth to this, and this newness that sipped into their lives now, only seemed to be growing.

When the water was boiled, she took their cups and into the living room, and switching off the lights sat beside her husband. The dark room didn’t seem much different from what it was before, for still she could see the silhouette of her husband as he lifted his cup and made quiet gulping noises. The cup was laid down soon though, and not much was said. A gust of wind would blow once and then, through the window, and make them chilly as their sweats was driven off by the wind, which seemed to have accumulated with the rising moon.

“What is it?” Shona asked. “She is going to be okay, you know.”

Lohit nodded, watching closely at the shadows that the moon made of the grills in the windows, the length increased terribly giving it a ghastly look, and which flickered at times, making it all the more repulsive.

“I know, but she is so old, and there has been no news since the evening.”

And the silence fell again, like a lid above a graveyard.

“It isn’t supposed to be this way. People dying.” His voice was strained with nostalgia, a weight that seemed too heavy for his voice, which seemed to crack under it. “Gone. Without anyone knowing. What is it that is left? Gone without a trace. Who would know if she is gone? It’s…so….so…”

Shona watched him.

“It’s so depressing.”

“But she might be well? Tomorrow morning, maybe it will all be okay.”

“Okay?” He scoffed a laugh. “What will be? Eventually, everything will be gone. Wiped out. And no one will ever know we once sat by the window, thinking about our mother, thinking how terrible our lives are. How terrible it had all become. You remember the first time I met you?”

She looked down, the memory in her grasp still held tightly to her chest. Was he thinking the same things as she, was he just as regretful of what had come to pass, she could not decide.

“Yes,” she said. “I think of it sometimes.”

“Where has the magic gone?”

They sat there, but soon the tragedy grew in the darkness and became too unbearable. They went out and sat by the porch, looking at the stars. The noises of the morning had long gone, replaced by the stillness that only comes with death. There was no awake creature in the neighbourhood, only some fouls to be ignored, but as if knowing their consternation, Roxie, their pet dog, wigged her tail at them. And overwhelmed by everything, Lohit hugged her as he had once wished, watching her dark lashes flashing the pools of whites beneath it, and in spite of herself, she returned the hug, grazing her hands by his back. Reminission kept coming back to him with much higher vigour.

Finally they parted. It reminded her again of the first time he had gone away on an office trip, and sitting by the window how he had looked back.

“I bet you didn’t expect to see yourself like this after you get married.”

She smiled, but spoke nothing of it. “Would you like another cup of tea?”

A look of disappointment clouded his face, but he nodded. And she got up again and walked to the kitchen. When she came back, she found him sitting in his chair, one more brought for her. The tea was kept, whose perfume permeated the air. He inhaled a deep breath of air.

How many nights like this had passed, he wondered, without them looking at each other’s face, with their backs turned to each other in their beds? There were nights when they didn’t even sleep together, like last night, when silence occupied the house and they settled in their own spaces, untouched and far from each other. But they sat that night, their eyes on each other, and he talked of what wrongs he had done, to which she had nodded forgiveness, but spoke instead of his mother whose illness had compelled them to such a deep reflection.

***

Early next morning, when they were still asleep in each other embraces, a call from the hospital came. Their mother was safe, the voice at the other end blurted out.

“Mother is safe,” Lohit kept repeating inside his head, yet no jubilation broke out of him as he had hoped. Shona stood by him, smiling at the news with a smile that revealed more of a sadness. By that evening, she packed a light bag for him, his shirt that he wore to his office, a couple of other things he might need.

“We will talk when I get back,” he said, smiling at her before leaving at the airport.

She smiled back too.

But as he waved back at her, and walked away with his limp, a remembrance of the night nagged at the back of her mind, making her wish that the illness had stayed a little longer, for the cancer had spread too much into her marriage, and the divorce papers in her bag burnt against her hip. The next time he would be home, she knew, it would be over.