Sitting crouched in a white Maruti
van, five of us are heading towards Amritsar. A pall of silence hangs inside,
separating us. The van is racing on ahead, as though involuntarily, very much
like an unregulated life winding down the path of destiny. A dark, tarmac road
lies ahead, stretching out like the unending hours of grief. With one milestone
blowing into another, the trees are falling in and out of view like
long-forgotten, distant memories. Appalled at the prospect of going to school
in my worn-out, over-repaired shoes, as a twelve-year-old, I had, once,
presented him with a sudden demand for a new pair. Of my secret childhood
fascination with shoes, he was least aware. He hadn’t the faintest of notions
of how I spent hours together polishing my shoes every evening. Polishing shoes
and combing hair were the only two obsessions I had. It was simply unthinkable
for me to go to school wearing leather chappals, something he had suggested
merely to put me off. It was almost like asking me to step out of the house,
with my hair all crumpled. But he had no patience for my pleas. Dismissing them
all with an inflexible ‘no,’ he had walked out of the house in a huff, shutting
the door behind. Though I was known to be quite a docile child, a sudden frenzy
had overtaken me. Rushing towards the main door and finding it bolted from
outside, I had simply shot my hand through the glass pane. Crashing into a
splintered heap around my feet, it had left a deep gnash on my left wrist,
which had taken several days to heal. The sudden stab of pain, I had felt then,
was still fresh in my mind. As fresh perhaps as was the unexpected, secret joy
I had experienced years later, when dragging me to the market, he had compelled
me to pick up an expensive suit length for myself, something I didn’t really
have any felt need for. In his characteristic style, he had announced his
intention of having made up his mind to gift me a suit length the day I was
awarded a doctoral degree. Now, I wasn’t a child of twelve any longer. Well
past my thirty-two years, I was already a much-married man with two little
children of my own. For me, it was only natural to have reservations about
accepting an offer of such an expensive gift from him. But I knew the futility
of resisting him just as well. He had made it abundantly clear, he wouldn’t
take a ‘no’ for an answer, only allow me a choice of colour. This time round,
there was no need for me to bang my hand into the glass pane. Unmindful of my
weak protestations, he had simply gone ahead and bought me something I could
have very well done without.
Such a man was he, one who always
spoke very little, his actions speaking louder than his words. Though he always
chose his moment, even manner of action, he never felt troubled by any special
need to find reasons for his actions or deeds. Even if he did find the reasons,
the urge to share them with others was not necessarily the strongest of all the
urges he had. His reasons always lay deep inside his heart, wrapped in
impenetrable silence. Looking out of the window now as I sit holding the back
of the front seat, suddenly his face is hovering before my bleary eyes. Broad
forehead, well cut, chiselled features, aquiline nose, a strong, angular
jawbone and thin, white hair, blown back. Everything was just the way I had
seen it, the last time, except that the dark circles around the eyes have
darkened and the cheeks have cut hollows much deeper. Seeing the dark circles
and sunken hollows, I burst into a sudden cry, “Oh! Why did it have to happen?”
And each time my wife hears me repeat this, her hand reaches out mine,
reassuringly, resting upon it awhile, withdrawing slowly, her eyes still moist.
Once in a while, when I burst into uncontrollable, hysterical sobs, Anurag, who
is sitting in the front, next to the driver, reminds me, without so much as
turning around, “Get hold of yourself. You should think of mother. Right now,
we need only think of her.” Amazing that even in this moment, when we are
heading to participate in his last rites, Anurag is refusing to think of
father. His thoughts have always been for mother; right from his early days, he
has felt a strong, irresistible pull towards her. Even as a child of ten, he
often used to sell stickers in school to be able to make little money so as to
buy mother sugarcane slivers she loved to eat. Mother hadn’t been keeping too
well. She would stay up nights; persistent, asthmatic cough and loud, rasping
breath racking her whole being. As she had to take a heavy dose of medicines,
she had developed a craving for sugar-cane slivers. She rarely ever had any
money she could either call her own or spend the way she wished. All four of us
knew this, but only Anurag had the ingenuity to help mother through. Only he
had the better sense to intuit little needs of mother, which often went
unexpressed, also unattended. Once he had even fought with father for his
refusal to provide pin money to mother. Anurag had learnt to play the provider
much before he actually became one.
As my thoughts begin to wander off,
I twist around to look at the faces of my daughters, who are sitting huddled
together, holding on to my wife for support. Fear lurking in their large,
innocent eyes, they are looking at their mother’s face, bewildered. Too young
to understand the significance of what has transpired! How can I tell them what
it is to lose him when I don’t quite know the real nature of the loss myself?
The only thought that is returning somewhat insistently to me now is that I’d
never be able to use the word ‘Papa’ ever again. It is as if this word has
slipped out of my ‘dictionary’ forever, unseen and unnoticed. Now it exists
only as a noun, not as person for me. Often, the loss of a dear one is
experienced in or through language much before it becomes a real, material fact
or is experienced as an actual event. And this is something my daughters can’t
be expected to grasp even if I try hard enough to explain, which I don’t quite
feel up to, anyway.
The van jerks to a sudden halt,
throwing me back upon myself. An interminably long row of cars, buses, trucks
and other vehicles stand on ahead. We have pulled up at a railway crossing.
Sensing that the train may be long in coming, the driver has lit a cigarette to
distract himself. And then leaning against his seat, he is now dragging at it.
I don’t really know what it is, his relaxed demeanour or the curls of smoke
rising up; suddenly I’m feeling rather edgy, even angry. Father had refused to
heed to the repeated injunctions of the doctor against his smoking habits. He
had been warned that smoking may ultimately claim his life as well, but did he
care? Of late, he had taken to smoking on the sly. It was only on going into
the toilet, one day, immediately after he vacated it that I had rushed out,
coughing rather badly. The toilet lay choked with cigarette smoke. When I
confronted him, later, he had initially demurred, only to concede rather
hesitantly, soon after, how he had begun smoking a cigarette or two a day, all
over again. With a thousand questions hammering inside my head, my patience was
running down, slowly but surely. Could he have saved his life by giving up
cigarettes altogether? Despite an awareness of his condition, why did he
persist in smoking? What was it, smoking or something else that had ultimately
proved to be his undoing? The realisation that all such questions shall now
remain unanswered has only sharpened my agony, manifold. I can’t understand why
the train is taking so long to arrive? Or why we are stranded in the middle of
nowhere? Silently, I even curse the government for not showing enough
initiative for building overbridges. Or just about anything we could have used
right now to go across, without prolonging our wait, unnecessarily. It is as
though this sudden halt, this arrested flow of speed, has left me shaken deep
inside. Nothing could have been more disconcerting than this forced halt, this
temporary stillness; not even the thought of my father dragging away at his
smoke. With each passing moment, my desperation is rising to a pitch and so is
my helplessness. Finally, the screaming whistles of the train far in the
distance bring a sudden relief to my agitated mind.
It was a morning, just like any
other. Smriti was busy getting the children ready for school. I was still
lazing around, my morning cup of tea tilting dangerously over the newspaper. I
had already scanned the columns of the local daily for the day’s predictions,
which is what I did, every morning, as soon as I laid my hands upon the paper.
It hadn’t made any startling predictions about the day that awaited me. Another
day, teeming with little worries, another day, announcing its ordinariness, its
predictable rounds of diurnal cycle. I hadn’t quite made up my mind on how to
meet this challenge of ordinariness when the doorbell rang, all of a sudden. It
had the shrillness of a dog howling at night. On peeping from my second-storey
balcony, I found Punnu uncle standing outside, looking up. With a wave of his
hand, as he always did, he had motioned me to come down, saying, “Well, there’s
a call for you.” I had rushed down the flight of stairs, breathless. He had
taken me inside, his hand resting upon my shoulder. After making me sit down
upon a chair opposite his, he had finally broken the news, “This morning, there
was a call for you from Amritsar. I think, your neighbour was on the line. He
left a message saying that your father wasn’t well and so you must reach
immediately. Then, a little while ago, another one came saying, he’s no more.”
I had kept looking at him, my mouth wide-open. It hadn’t even occurred to me
that I should burst into tears instantaneously. A numbness that had been in my
veins for the past several weeks had crawled back, unseen, leaving me
transfixed. So much so, Punnu uncle had to shake my shoulders, saying, “What’re
you thinking of now. There’s no time to be lost. You must leave immediately.”
That’s when something had stirred deep inside, thawing my frozen tears. But
there was no time to shed them as so much was still to be done. I had to call
up Anurag and inform him, fix up a taxi and, of course, inform my office that I
was going out of town. It is strange, this insistence of the service rules that
an employee must always plan out when to leave the town, especially when life
itself is so unpredictable! While sipping tea in the morning, did I know that
I’d have to rush to Amritsar to participate in his final journey? We know so
little about our beginnings and our departures, and yet we insist upon framing
our lives neatly, as if the order isn’t just there but works as well.
The train has sped past, whistling
away. The barriers at the railway crossing have already lifted. The vehicles in
the front have begun to crawl across the railway line. So stubbing out his
cigarette, the van driver turns the key in, lurching on ahead, his eyes fixed
upon the road, straight and clear. Far into the distance, smoke is rising above
the wheat crop, drenched in the golden hue of the afternoon sun. Ripening to a
fullness, the shoots are swaying in the hot breeze, unmindful of the tyranny of
Baisakh, less than a fortnight away, when, falling under the farmer’s scythe,
they would ultimately be flattened to the ground. Balancing a bundle of hay
upon her head, a woman is rushing along a narrow pathway running through the
fields, her elongated pale, grey shadow falling across. It was the month of
April and I was laid up with a bad attack of asthma. For several years, now,
this was something that had begun to happen with almost an unfailing sense of
regularity. As soon as the harvest season began, my asthma would surface,
leaving me debilitated for weeks together. I had had a particularly bad night,
as the attack had continued right through, without much reprieve. Though it was
afternoon, I was still in the bed, hunched over my stomach, gasping for breath
and fighting back my tears. Suddenly, he had come into my room. I had looked
into his eyes, pleading for mercy and compassion. I don’t know whether or not
he had read the expression in my eyes, but throwing one quick glance at me, he
had simply said, “Why don’t you go, kill yourself?” and walked out of the room,
slamming the door shut. Hearing him speak in this manner, it was as though the
floodgates had been thrown open. I had cried my heart out, sobbing bitterly,
wishing death upon myself a hundred times over. But death doesn’t ever come,
when solicited; it can neither be wished upon oneself nor anyone else. As a
child, I had heard him talk of death several times over, as though it were some
familiar story he often told the four of us, as we sat around in a circle, our
eyes popping out in a dazed wonder. I must have been around nine when he had
called me over to his room, once and after bolting it from inside, thrown open
the personal closet, he always kept locked for some reason I could never
fathom. Then pulling out a neatly tied up bundle of papers from under a pile of
clothes, he had said, “You must open this when I die. This is how you’ll get to
know the real story of my life.” Hearing him speak of death with such
unconcern, I had almost become hysterical. Unmindful of my tears, he had
continued in the same vein, “You’ve another brother, older than you. He’ll come
back one day to claim his share. Just do exactly as you find written in this
document.” For several days thereafter, I had suffered from an undying curiosity
to sneak into his room in his absence, turn the key into the lock, open his
closet and take out the bundle. I had even toyed with the idea of growing up
overnight in the childlike belief that as an adult nothing could possibly
prevent me from gaining an easy access to that mysterious pack of papers. Now
rushing towards Amritsar, my mind is suddenly beginning to untie the knots that
lie encircling the bundle I haven’t even seen for several years now. Who knows,
whether or not those mysterious papers would ever be found? So much has
happened in the intervening years; we have moved in and out of so many houses,
the bundle, too, must have changed so many cupboards, and it is difficult to
say whether it is still in the safe custody of one of them or has quietly
slipped out and got lost in one of those uncertain moments of transit. Suddenly
I’m seized with a desire to lay my hands upon that bundle, whose existence is a
mystery to me now. Suddenly, it has become a sort of filial obligation for me
to unlock its dark secrets, as though all the silences of his heart lie neatly
wrapped inside, waiting to scream out.
On getting off the van, we don’t hear any shrill cries
or wild, uncontrollable screams the way we had expected. The house lies shrouded
in a strange, elusive stillness. Its white colour smudged into a dull greyness.
We walk up to the main door in a file, our heads bowed, guiltily. With
trembling hands, I push the door open. There he lies upon the floor, covered in
a white sheet. Seeing us enter, mother gets up, her eyes already glazed with
tears. Throwing her frail arms around me, she bursts into hysterical sobs. And
then, by turns, she hugs each of one of us, just as we move from one relative
to another, sobbing and wailing, involuntarily, helplessly. All this while, he
lies there, as quiet as ever. When I finally remove the sheet off his face for
his last darshana, I’m struck by the way his lips lie strangely curled up, as
though waiting to say something. All these years, I waited for these pursed
lips to open, waited for the silence to flesh itself out into words; silence
that lay behind them, inviolate and pure. But now, when he can no longer
incarnate his silence into words, this strange curling up of his lips has left
me completely shaken. The well-knit scowl that defined his face in life has now
suddenly disappeared, leaving a strange calm on his furrowed face. Somewhere
behind those creases lies the serenity of Casablanca, my childhood hero, whose
story he loved to tell each time we pestered him for one. The boy who had stood
on the burning deck, stock-still, in deference to the wishes of his father,
waiting to be claimed by him from among the engulfing flames, rising sky-high.
Often on reaching this point in the story, my father used to go into a trance,
as though the ship had sailed too close to the harbour, as though he could now
easily trade places with Casablanca. It was one of those few stories he would
never tire of repeating to us, and each time he did so, we found ourselves surging
with a desire to respond to every call of duty, a desire which lasted only so
long as the story did, never beyond. Now looking at his eyes, with eyelids
carefully drawn over them, I’m suddenly reminded of an intense, blazing
expression that lies masked. Over the years, the crow’s feet around his eyes
have deepened, giving a false sense of gaiety to his sombre, almost a studied
expression. The tip of his nose is still as sharp as ever, now pointing
skywards, mocking the world. His thin, white hair lie strangely ruffled, bald
patches shining through the red streaks of blood congealed at the back of his
head. In early hours of the morning, as he stood in the kitchen, preparing a
cup of tea for himself, something he occasionally did, he had simply collapsed
into a heap, never to rise again. His fall had left marks of injury strangely
hidden from the naked eye and certainly not so clearly visible as were its
telltale signs. Pulling the sheet back over his face, I wonder if the telltale
signs would ever live to tell their tale, of injuries congealed behind his head
or bundled inside his heart. Human heart is like a dark cave, rarely ever
illumined for those who look at it from outside. Unable to penetrate the depths
of its silences, often we only get to see nothing but the fleeting shadows,
falling across its dumb walls. It’s a measure of our ignorance that what we
take to be the real, substantial things ultimately turn out to have a mere
ghostly presence, neither confirmed nor denied. Thousands of ghosts dance
within the secret walls of this cave, a territory, which appears strangely
familiar but is forever out of bounds, forever elusive. And yet, for centuries
now, journeymen have continued to walk through its vast, unending deserts,
puzzling over the silence of the Sphinx, little knowing that the promise of a
hidden treasure is often not the same thing as stumbling upon the real
one.
Right in the heart of a sprawling, six-acre complex,
carefully fortified by red brick walls, stands an old peepul tree, majestic in
its impenetrable loneliness. Twisted into myriad shapes, its gnarled roots lie
hanging off the stolid branches, eager to touch the ground. A brick platform
runs all around, encircling it. Beyond the platform lie vast stretches of
uncultivated fields, opening out in all four directions. The factory, which
has, since long ceased belching out thick clouds of smoke, now stands apart,
almost apologetic about its intrusive, concrete presence. Initially, when the
design of the factory was being drawn up, it was decided that the tree
shouldn’t be allowed to stand in way of the factory’s construction. But when
the labour, working on the site, had refused to axe the tree, defying the clear
instructions of the contractor, the engineer had sat up nights, re-drawing the
plans. Living in the village close by, people had come to believe that it was
sacrosanct to preserve the exclusive privacy of the peepul. It was rumoured
that the tree had survived from those times in antiquity when the village had
not yet acquired either its present name or its habitation. Someone even
recounted how this tree, which once stood in the middle of nowhere, had at some
distant point in time, served as a haven for highway robbers and fugitives.
Often, at night, they would assemble under its protective canopy, either for
dividing among themselves their daily loot or for dumping stolen goods or
valuables, including precious gold coins and ornaments in the nearby fields.
Another one talked of how, for a long time, this peepul had been a haunt of a
pir, who had suddenly disappeared one day, leaving a trail of mystery behind.
Over the years, the tree has turned into a hallowed spot, a small structure of
bricks raised beside it. Even now, I’m told, every Thursday of the week,
someone or the other does make it a point to visit this spot, lighting an
earthen lamp on a makeshift ledge. And though the inmates of this vast,
sprawling complex have now long since moved out, the weekly ritual, still alive
and vibrant, continues, undisturbed.
I do remember father telling me how he, once, had a
strange dream about this very tree, which, incidentally, was much before I was
born, while he was still a young man, unmarried. In the aftermath of the Second
World War, the government had taken recourse to some stringent forms of
taxation, both personal and collective. Heavy taxation had sent the family
fortunes into a tailspin, slowly grinding all business to an unexpected halt.
Most of the liquidity had either gone towards the payment of the taxes or had
been used up in misdirected litigation. With the capital constantly in a short
supply, it had become nearly impossible to run the factory at its existing
capacity, and much less think of pushing through any pre-war plans of future
expansion. Such was the situation, when, one night, he had dreamt of the
unlimited treasure lying buried underneath the peepul tree. A particularly
vivid dream, in which he not only saw caskets overflowing with pearls, gems and
diamonds but also a black cobra guarding the treasure, hissing menacingly, its
fangs spread wide apart. Haunted by this dream for a long time, he had often
debated with himself the possibility of sharing it with the other members of
the family but then, for some inexplicable reason, had refrained from doing so.
When the dream had begun to surface again and again, repeating itself with an
unnerving regularity, he had simply gone ahead and hired the labour to get the
digging-in started off. Going against the popular opinion, he had used his
initiative, hoping to unearth the unlimited treasure that lay entombed. They
had hardly been at the job a few hours, and perhaps cut only marginal digs
around the peepul roots, when one of workers suddenly developed convulsions and
later died, within a span of few weeks. That was the only time father
supervised any attempt at a treasure hunt, which had to be aborted prematurely,
abandoned much before it could actually begin.
That day, while returning home from school, Hemant and I
had missed the bus. In those days of erratic bus services, it always took more
than an ordinary effort to reach the school or return home on time. Often, only
a few buses plied on this route, connecting that part of the town where the
school was and our village where we lived in a white mansion, surrounded by the
red brick walls. And whenever we missed the bus, either way, it meant a wait of
no less than an hour and a half, even two, at times. So we had decided to walk
across to the petrol pump, some distance off, from where it was always possible
to hire a tonga, something we usually did, each time the bus packed up on us.
But that day, tonga-ride had turned out to be somewhat different, much more
than a pleasurable ride back home. As all the seats were occupied, Hemant and I
had positioned ourselves on the two opposite poles that jutted out of the tonga
frame, supporting the saddle. Sitting right next to the tonga driver, I was
constantly trying to balance my weight upon the pole, fearing that a sudden
trot of the horse might send me hurtling down, unexpectedly. But the horse was
moving apace, as though it had been trained not to fall out of rhythm.
Suddenly, directing his attention towards us, one of the passengers shot a
question, “Oye mundeo, where do you live?”
“Across the railway line.” I was quick to reply.
“Where exactly in the village?”
“No, it isn’t inside the village. It’s a little distance
short of. …”
Before I could say a word more, another passenger spoke
up, “Sardara, you don’t know them? They’re the grandsons of Lala Kishan Chand.”
That very moment, a sudden hush fell across the tonga, and
nothing could be heard except the rat-a-tat of the horses’ hooves. Even those
passengers, who were engrossed in their own gossip, paying only scant attention
to our conversation, suddenly fell silent. I had felt rather uncomfortable,
even embarrassed at having been denied this opportunity of introducing myself.
I was still making up my mind on how to react when someone, sitting in the rear
seat, chirped rather merrily, “Oh, these Lalas! Who doesn’t know them? They’re
the ones who own that factory. It’s perhaps one of the oldest in the area,
too.”
“Yes, I know, my father used to work for them. He would
often tell me all kinds of stories,” the tonga-driver, too, jumped in, cracking
his whip on the horse. Now, this was enough to raise eyebrows, all around.
Forgetting all about our existence, the passengers’ had started edging closer
to the tonga-driver, their curiosity peaking into wide-eyed, mysterious smiles.
Perhaps, this kind of prompting was about all that the tonga-driver needed.
Rattling his whip across the wheel of the tonga, signalling the horse to fall
into a quicker stride, he started off, “They say, this factory actually
belonged to a French Saab. He had come to India before the war started. All the
machinery was imported from France. Thousands of workers used to work for him.
He was very kind and generous. Always at hand to help his workers out of their
problems. They say, once, one of his workers lost his arm in an accident on a
machine. The Saab somehow got to know that the poor fellow was the only
breadwinner in his family. He had offered him a very handsome compensation,
apart from a peon’s job in the office. He really had a heart of gold.”
“But then, how did these Lalas get the ownership of this
factory?” queried one of the younger passengers. Throwing one quick glance at both of us, the tonga-driver
resumed his story, “I don’t know how far it is true. But they say Lala Kishan
Chand was only a minor partner. After
the war started, it became extremely difficult for the French Saab to continue
operating his business from India. He was forced to return to France. Some say
that before leaving, he sold off all his shares to these Lalas...” At this
point, the tonga-driver suddenly pulled the reins, bringing the tonga to a
halt. A passenger got off, paid his money and went his way, and when the tonga
lurched into motion, once again, the driver’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Some
also say that the elder Lala hired goons and got the French Saab killed. This
is how ownership of the factory changed hands.” With these words, the
tonga-driver had fallen silent, whipping up a storm within, which had continued
to explode inside me for the rest of the journey. Though I had remained
tight-lipped, exchanging an occasional helpless, guilty expression with Hemant,
I had not been able to lift my head again to meet the gaze of other passengers.
Most of them were perhaps glaring at me as though I wasn’t just another
normal-looking, school going child but a malformed Asthavakra, a freak who had
no right to be where he was.
That day, on returning home, I had sat by the window of my
room for hours together, looking out. In the evening, when the sun was about to
set, its crimson light had suddenly set the red bricks of the boundary wall
aflame. I don’t know what it was, the effect of the tears rising in my eyes or
the light shimmering upon the wall, at least, momentarily, it felt as though
blood was dripping off the crevices of red bricks.
