Gulzar: The Memory of Weight

A mahogany chest holds his beloved’s kuch saamaan.

He was walking behind her in a straight line, trying not to swing his gaunt hips.

He called out, “Sunoh, zara yahan aana.”

She turned around, her anklets swerved to deliver a stuttering sound. She dropped her shoulders, putting weight on her hips; a sign of both acceptance and disdain. She walked towards him. He looked at her, tilting head to make way past her long, curled lashes.

He groaned, “Kya bhar diya tumne iss sandook mein, bahut wazan hai, utthaya nahi ja raha. Kya hai isme?”

She put a dark hennaed hand on the weight of the luggage to cause a depression on his hunched shoulder and with little sympathy for his agony, her voice ironic, she said, “Mera kuch saamaan.”

That very instance, Gulzar was stirring his evening tea in his bungalow Boskyana. Alone, stretched out on the rattan in the balcony, and dissolving brown sugar in the cup, his seat was overlooking the security gate that was unlocked and unmanned.

He looked vacantly pass the gate into the deserted road ahead. He decided to wait for the tea to cool. He felt heavy, displaced. He couldn’t devise a mukhda for the tune he had received from music composer R D Burman, having played it repeatedly on his recorder all afternoon. He hadn’t taken a nap after a sumptuous lunch of muri ghonto, bhendi bhaja and fragrant gobind bhog rice.

He decided to take a nap and left the tea in a whirlpool. Maybe a dream would help.

He sat by his bed and stared at the mahogany chest in the corner, the key to which she had taken along. He wondered what she must have left in it. Why didn’t she leave the key with him? Didn’t she want him to open it and ferret through her personals? How else would he describe her if not for the perfume trapped in her chest?

He caressed the padlock in one hand, and like a sleepy child lay down alongside.

एक इजाजत दे दो बस

जब इस को दफ़नाऊँगी

मैं भी वही सो जाऊँगी

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