I bolted upright from the bed as the alarm bell went ding-ding in the pre-dawn stillness, the jingle came galloping, tearing apart the thick quilt of hush with the Harpe sword. I was gasping as though I had seen the ghosts of past. I fumbled in the dark to arrest the cell phone, who was dribbled past the pillow in the crack between mattress and bed, before its blare hit the ceiling. I was afraid it might wake up Puja at this inky blue hour and she may mumble. I stretched my neck and stiff torso to see if I hurt myself by the jolt. Fortunately, I did not. I fell back and rested my head on the bed of my stilted arms broadened on the pillow; I slept straight like an arrow, intently staring at the grey ceiling. It was not the best night to sleep; I flipped restlessly all night, as I would when I had to appear for Math exam in the morning, those twinges in the stomach. I bet Sigmund Freud has coined a term in Psychobabble for this state which is neither sleep nor wakefulness. Nor was I dreaming. On weekdays, the alarm is a call for morning jog. Not today. Nor am I going to enjoy the hit-snooze luxury of the weekend. I am going to wait for Sunil’s knock on the door. A knock. And I would dash to answer first. Puja does not even know why. But for now, I remain stationed. The night-lamp looks like an ark in the flood of darkness. I routinely keep a tube-light on while asleep but Puja could not sleep like a log then, yet I set aside a tiny bulb for reassurance. Sparse ventilation in the abode dunked the air in reek of old almari, aged mattresses, bug-filled fixtures and other household items rammed in like passengers in trains. I say if we ever allowed this house to put across its views, it would surely rage like ‘Willy’ Loman did in Death of a Salesman. But that’s just the corporal matter; the spirit of this house was that of army bunkers (I had seen a few long back). No, not for the lack of space. The Anxiety. The Uncertainty.
But how am I ruminating supinely all of this at this anomalous hour?
I woke up from the bed. It is a strange pain now. My back would never ache but if I lay idle after hitting the alarm, my torso felt baffling restiveness. From the windowpane, the blue beams of crack are making narrow opening into this dwelling, even she found it difficult to inhabit at ease here. The sky is beset with fleeting clouds as was my mind with neither-here-nor there reflections. The moon is reduced to an arc, a wedge around the dimming stars. And will soon disappear.
Perhaps watching a movie with Puja till late was not wise after all. Lack of sound sleep often got me into a stew. But watching a few minutes of Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness had me caved-in. The melancholy and the yearning in Chris Gardner’s eyes and his day after day work-like-a-trojan were heart-wrenching. The parts of life in sequence as narrated by Chris Gardner, namely Riding the Bus, Being Stupid, Running, Internship, Paying Taxes and last one yet most elusive, Happiness, put me in the mirror, as though I was standing at the lake and watching my reflection mimic me knavishly, somehow the line between the watcher and the character was blurred. But there was Gardner’s monologue that had me meditate upon it over and over. The Declaration of Independence of U.S.A by Thomas Jefferson lists unalienable right of men and women, namely Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Note the ‘Pursuit’ of Happiness, did you? The Pursuit. The journey. Is it a pursuit to no end? Isn’t happiness merely a state of being? And what is happiness?
Or is it the happiness of pursuit?
I went to bed with smoke and mirror questions, hoping to sort them some day.
Well, perhaps my wait for Sunil too is a pursuit of happiness. Even solving Rubik’s Cube to impress Mr.Twistle, the recruiter at Dean Witter & Co., was a pursuit of happiness for Chris Gardner.
I think I should better wait in the balcony. Else, worse, I fear I could even fall asleep. I could take a puff outside.
It is a weekend morning; Puja would be free and easy, particularly now that I hushed up the alarm. But my mother could wake up anytime. That is what is hanging over my head. This would be like any other day for her where she would be slow on the uptake about her workaday. She would be unaware of Sunday morning unless I ask her about visit to the Shiva Temple nearby. She would then throw few clueless glances at me or Puja at the very question itself, scratch her head under the wispy hair and go about searching for wooden walk-stick who anyway would be waiting beside her bed. And then start walking ahead of us. She would take small but assured steps. When she passed by small shops in the narrow lane, she would nonchalantly acknowledge ‘Namaste’ from shop-keepers who I think furtively pitied her. Many a time, the workers at such
shops guided her home back, engaging in small talk, if they saw her in the neighboring lanes. She would be repelled if I or Puja held her hand on the street. She perhaps could walk back, if we insisted. Only time she would seek me is when approaching the traffic signal or undecided on taking a turn, where she would ask me ‘But where are we headed?’ About 3-4 times until we reached. In the last two decades, the neighborhood has bushed out disproportionately; the illegal structures have sprouted like wild cactus, everyone hustling for own little piece. But I can not fault the changes in topography be the cause of her forgetting the directions. And it is not just the directions that she fails to figure out. Over this period, I witnessed her fall brick-by-brick. I could not help her thoughts being besieged by the mystery of cataclysm that broke us. After my guilty denials at first, my efforts to bring her into the moment met with unbreakable resistance of silence. She lost her thoughts in the eddy, words failed her conversations, and embarrassingly she would fall quiet in the dialogues. Her refusal to life precipitated the fester. And with that she forfeited her hobbies too. Cooking was no longer the joy to yodel but a measly scutwork. Her handicraft work that usually consumed a month, dragged along for a year, I inadvertently initially left that out of account. She retreated into a cocoon. For years now. If I play the folk songs she crooned so merrily, now she greets with a distance. I am only left with a doubt whether she really put her fingers on them. Her present bearing is a far cry of the only portrait of her I am left with, a young lady, cheery as the boisterous river, standing by the veranda pillar proudly carrying her baby by the waist.
My head is still screaming. Before anyone is up and about, I could take another small puff. It is a vivid morning, however ill spent in a concrete jungle, scarcely any jingle of cheep in distance. Very soon Sun will plant ropes in the earth stridently, without having to wrestle with thick foliage of stocky trees, as they did in our courtyard, Gulmohurs looked only prettier when soaked in iridescent yellowish glow. It is only at this hour of the day one could sense immobility of the street, waiting to play a new fable each day. Few morning joggers passed by, perhaps on their way to the Laughter Club at the Park at the far end of the street. Puja habitually prodded me to join the Club. But I wouldn’t. Members of the club start-off by stretching, chanting and body movements to ease the body, followed by breathing exercise and eventually, hearty laughter. Some of them insisted on calling it ‘Laughter Meditation’, I didn’t object a bit. But I simply didn’t belong to the place. Those ‘hearty laughters’ rammed at my ears. And child-like playfulness? What could that be? I lost it when I was a child. What is the childhood in concrete jungle? And dingy house that reminds you of army bunkers? By the age of 13 or 14, I was the man in the house.
I had left my childhood at the age of 10 upon our exodus. In the vast courtyard of a storied house where I played cricket and climbed the Chinar and Mulberry trees heedlessly. In the house situated on the hilly incline, standing like a big brother watching over others, where from the top of the house I called out my neighborhood friends and cousins. In our well-columned orchard where I picked Apples. In the home where my mother hummed off the cuff and I giggled. In the movie parlor where my father took me to watch Rishi Kapoor movies. In the Shalimar Bagh and shikara in Dal Lake where my parents took me in the summers. In the village where my cousins lived nearby. Not anymore. No one.
Though my Mother may forget our visit to the Shiva Temple by evening; she still remembers intensely what had happened that last day.
25 years ago.
She still remembers my father’s promise yet unfulfilled; laments how my father refused to yield to her forewarnings. Her insistence on unanswered questions regarding disappearance of my father never let her get a move on. The answers were all what we knew. Whenever she talked about his vanishing, however seldom, her sentences were qualified by ‘perhaps’, yet I was acutely aware that one of the perhaps was a certainty. Though one ‘perhaps’ she never uttered was that he encountered the same fate as did countless other Hindu men, young and old. Perhaps, the din of vicious threats blazoned out from the village mosque still reverberates in her ears, the banging sound of feet and chanting of impassioned mob patrolling the village that night. She remembers he had assured her it was a matter of few days and we will come back home. Those
‘few’ days never ended. The darkness of dawn enmeshed many lives. However, I doubt if she remembers how unnaturally we lived in inhuman ‘temporary’ camps situated harmfully close to a cement kiln for 3 years, before my maternal uncle forced us out, each moment scoffed at our face as we scampered in the dark. I was too young to grasp at the instant. For few days she scurried around in his search, starving and desolate, not knowing that the warmth of those arms wrapped around her shoulders when we parted was never to be felt again, not having an iota of inkling to have come a cropper. Nor did we meet or hear about his sister’s family he had dashed to ensure whereabouts of, while leaving us at my maternal uncle’s home. Now I surmise, God or whatever you call the mighty power pulling our strings, would often subject cyclopean human
dreams to randomness of universe, perhaps to affirm his ever prevalence. Sometimes, the unpredictable happens in a brisk flap of butterfly wing. Death simply walks a step ahead of life, once it will stop to clasp you. For few weeks she ruptured like volcanic ash, tectonic plates of our lives were pulled apart, I tugged along. However, not so soon, the fog was cleared. The ‘temporary’ tent was the home. No one going back. No one coming back. Randomness of life made few undying amends. Even hot lava befalls dormant in the crust of the earth. As the months passed, we moved far back in the camp, away from the likewise ill-fated acquaintances. And she was reduced to a lump. The irony of sadness is it offers generous space for you to snuggle down. Happiness is never so kind. She pretended to be busy in odd jobs in my presence to avoid my quizzical stares but disbelief and denial thickened the red. We waited for a cheery shout from the voice silenced in gloom. Her routine included an involuntary visit to the Police Station nearby in the hope of leaf of luck turning side and I have no memory of she coming back ever with a word worth sharing with me, often soggy eyes. The more she faced up to the same question again and again, the more she was mired in the entrapping rings of a pond. Time could never heal her wounds. Her wounds had penetrated much deeper, could bleed at slightest tamper and yet she mourned alone. There is no volume to be said about what happened in some 1000 days we spent in the camp, it remained a clean canvas. No prose. No poetry. We were listless.
There was no faith left to worship the rising Sun. We lived through the perfunctory cycle of day and night. I played with other kids in grime or at times, waited outside the camp to check if Police van came by, then we darted like beggars. Seeking mercy? For what crime? The crime of being victims.
She sometimes revels to Puja about how entire village gathered at her maternal home on Shivaratri for holy rituals and celebrations lasted for days. She misses those days spent with her sisters making elaborate spread for Navreh (New Year). She can still talk about ethereal beauty of Kausarnag Lake and the myth surrounding the lake she had visited twice with my father.
It appears as though, after a point, the churning of yores left no pocket for new memories to dwell in.
Though we were forced out of heavenly mountains to concrete jungles, she never growled. The environs were the last of her worries. Nonetheless she never got accustomed to tropical weather, I can spot heat rashes on her arms.
Today is 19th January and it’s 25th anniversary of our exodus from our homeland. Newspapers will be performing annual pre-set machine ritual of paying token homage to our plight, carrying two or three conversations. I am never sure of their verity. So many lives lost. So many women raped. So many families destroyed. Now they are treated as national statistics. What about doomed survivors? Some losses are better not surveyed.
I am waiting for Sunil to deliver the newspaper, so I could hide it. Or even tell him to take it back. And I pray that she would not bother about newspaper for the day. Else I would have to invent a lie. Some lies are imperative. If she read the unwanted portions, she would be deadened for few hours. As much as her pain, I am repulsed at my powerlessness.
“A knock at the Door”
