Nothing to Hide and Everything to Declare

When I finally step out of the station, my thoughts are neither about hunger nor food; these are about order and stability. Walking back, I am mulling over the entire experience, admiring the way things function here. Be it the airport, railway station or the coach station, it’s the orderliness of the English life that strikes everyone, especially an Indian mind that often assumes that chaos is the most natural state for a man to live in. Whosoever said that India is a ‘functional anarchy’ perhaps could not have put it any better. What I find truly amazing is that here everything appears to work to a plan. It’s almost as if there is not a single cog out of place in this huge wheel. It moves as though it is well oiled and well heeled, and grease is something it would never ever require. Just when I was about to break into a hymn in praise of English orderliness, I stepped inside a phone booth across the street. What I saw inside made me wonder if I was right about whatever I had understood about the notion of order and stability. It was while inserting the phone-card into the phone that I found several provocative, hot and steamy photographs staring back at me. Small advertisements, displaying all kinds of women, half-naked or barely clothed, baring their bosoms or fingering their private parts, with telephone numbers and inviting, come-hither messages. These messages were about phone-sex or paid-sex, mistresses or girl friends of all shades and hues, black, white, Thai or Latino. Was this just another face of a society that could justifiably pride itself on its impeccable, flawless sense of order? Was this order only skin-deep? Was there a raging tumult of sex and passion waiting to explode or go bust (that pun is most certainly not unintended)? Was this just another side to this information society? Or was it merely an expression of an unhindered freedom of speech? Whatever it may be, one thing is clear that ‘sex’ is not a private affair in English society. It is something of a public performance, a way of demonstrating to others, more than oneself or one’s partner that you do care or do love. Later when I saw an endless stream of couples, young and not-so-young, hugging and kissing each other or coiled up in each other’s lap, unconcerned making an open display of the emotions or passions they either felt or never felt, I was surprised, less and less. Who were they trying to convince of the intensity of their feelings, themselves or others? It was almost as if the walls of bedrooms in several houses had collapsed all of a sudden and I was left peering inside or was it now, outside? The words of the thickset man behind the counter at Heathrow inevitably rang in my ears, ‘There’s no place in London as cheap as this.’ But the telephone booth appeared to suggest otherwise. Sex, it appeared to proclaim, was cheap; cheaper than the hotel-room where it could be bought and performed. It made me somewhat less guilty about the uncivilized way in which I had satiated my hunger earlier on in the day. The hunger that rises a little below the stomach is perhaps much more unsettling than the one that rises from it. 

Late in the evening, quite accidentally, I had turned in to BBC 2. Louis Theroux was cruising the streets of US again, in his inimitable style, searching for yet another subculture. And this time his cameras had trained themselves on Porn Industry in the US, picking up some lurid images that easily reminded me of the pictures I had seen inside the phone booth, earlier on in the evening.  It was sheer curiosity, of whichever kind you might say, that made me stay tuned in. Was I disappointed? Frankly, no Louis Theroux had managed to trick me in. Much before I could sit back, turning into an incorrigible voyeur, he had already slipped out of his position of narrator-commentator and become a subject himself. An aspirant model, hunting for an assignment that could, quite literally, help him ‘strip off’ all his talents.

He went ahead and got himself photographed in nude from one of the agencies that did talent hunting for the industry. It was quite bizarre! Perhaps, he was going too far in search of a journalistic story or was this his way of creating sympathy for his subject? Here were men and women, willing to risk everything they had, including their lives, by making ‘live performance love’ to just about anyone, all for what they called ‘great money.’ It was interesting to see how Louis was on the trail of subcultures in American society, when his society had far too many of its own thriving in its backyard. If every spectator were to become a participant and every voyeur, a victim, perhaps human world would have a much better understanding of itself than what it has today. These are the two faces of English society, one that makes ‘cheap sex’ available and the other that warns against the dangers of giving in to it.

Sex is an absorbing subject, but only for the great minds. Yes, someone like Freud could talk about it intelligently. For lesser beings like us, it is not a matter to be theorised, only to be performed and experienced. Or perhaps, one could digress, as we often do, when ‘sex’ is the subject and talk not of the performance, but of the post-office. It was only my first day in England and I was already looking for a post-office where I could buy a few aerograms to be able to write letters back home. It was, indeed, amazing the way in which I had suddenly found myself outside a post-office quite by chance. As I bent down to ask for the aerograms, I saw an Asian face looking up at me; a long face with buckteeth and hair blown back. Handing in a pack of ten aerograms at a concessional rate of one pound ninety, she surprised me by asking a personal question I least expected her to, “Are you from India?” When I told her that I was from Chandigarh and had just come in that day, her face did not light up. It fell rather unexpectedly as she mumbled, “I, too, am from Chandigarh. My parents live in Sector 35.” I told her that we, too, had stayed for long, not very far from her parents. Our conversation over, I came out. I do not think we are ever likely to meet again. Though we may not meet, I would perhaps always remember that a little way off the Belgrave Road is a post-office where a woman from Chandigarh sits behind the counter, selling stamps and envelops. It is strange how sometimes fleeting moments seal off bonds one may never be able to return to, ever. And repeating the name of Chandigarh had worked like a mantra. It had carried me back home almost instantly. Walking back to the hotel, I was already writing out the letter in my head. Back in the room, they just had to be copied down. There was so much to write and so little space within which I'd have to write it all. For a traveller in a foreign land, what he experiences always exceeds what he expresses and what he expresses is always much more than what he can ever make sense of. It is something like the excess baggage we all carry, hiding it from the prying eyes of the customs or the airline officials. When it comes to experiences, we can easily off-load it and say, ‘Well, I have nothing to hide and everything to declare.’

Much as you want to, you always find things to hide when you travel abroad. There are always things you like to stuff in those corners of your bags where no one can easily find them. Just as you press down secrets in your heart that threaten to break out into the open. One thing that I had not been able to declare to Christine Wilson was my pathetic ignorance about the computers. When in her letter she had sought to know which computer programme I used, Microsoft Word or Word Perfect, I simply didn't have the heart to tell her 'neither.' It was perhaps hard for her to imagine that there were people living in certain parts of the world who still managed life without the computers. Only on arriving in England was I to learn that professional life was, indeed, inconceivable without computer(s). How could I tell her that I had a certain dread of computers and that the very sight of the machine filled me with all kinds of unimaginable fears! While indicating my determined preference for the Microsoft World, I had not quite anticipated how my harmless lie would return to haunt me, one day. It was not much of a lie, really. Before starting from home, I had taken a crash course in computers from Roopinder, a friend. He had overestimated either his own ability to teach or mine to learn. Armed with a crash course but little practical experience of using computer, I had landed in Norwich, only to be given a Toshiba laptop. I still remember how triumphantly I had walked back to Norfolk TerraceA.03, laptop in one hand and the printer in another.

Though I had little understanding of computers, whenever I thought of acquiring a PC, it was none other than a laptop. Mohan Bhandari has a story on a young man whose childhood dream of becoming a poet had been soured by his poverty and he had ended up as a donkey-herd. It is perhaps not right for the mule-herds to dream of becoming poets. Nor is it quite right for someone mulish to dream of acquiring something as poetic as a laptop. I had visions of endless reams of papers rolling off the printer as I worked on the laptop through the night. So the moment I reached my flat, I cleared off the table and created the space where laptop could sit in all its splendid glory. I fixed up the wires as best I could, plugged the switch in and waited for the miracle to happen. Roopinder had warned me that I should not use the computer until I had read the instructions very carefully. Ignoring his cautious advice, I decided to press on ahead when it offered no resistance and instead obeyed all the commands I keyed in. I was already typing out a short story. Lo and behold!  My work had begun with a singular flourish. So overjoyed was I with this initial success that I could not simply wait to get through to the end of the story. I decided to take the printouts of the very first page I had so cleverly keyed in. Pressing the print command, I relaxed in my chair, waiting for the laser printer to show its magic. The printer ran full steam, but nothing came off it. I checked all the points and repeated the command. This time, a few jumbled letters spluttered off the printer and again it stopped. How could a mere printer fail me when I was so close to success! I simply refused to accept defeat and in my impatience pressed, I don’t really know, how many and which all commands. Even a child balks when he is given contradictory commands and this was, after all, a computer. It immediately went into a long sulk. Believe it or not, it just got into a logjam and stopped functioning. By now, signs of real worry had begun to appear on my brow. Beads of perspiration thickened as the prospect of having ruined a BCLT computer on my very first day of arrival in Norwich came back to haunt me. What would happen now? How would I face Christine? Where would I take the computer for repairs? All kinds of questions started hammering inside my head. Meanwhile, it flashed a sudden message, which dipped my spirits only further as it said, ‘Low battery.’ That moment I just wanted to run out of the room, into the wilderness of the forest outside. It was becoming impossible to stay closeted with this computer in the same room, any longer. I rushed out for some fresh air, thinking it just might help my mind or bring the computer back to life through some unexpected miracle; neither happened. On the contrary, as I was gingerly walking back to my room, half an hour later, I lay surrounded by all kinds of feverish, nightmarish images. I could see the computer going kaput right before my eyes, sparks flying out, my room and my flat on fire. And the next moment I heard Christine tell me, ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid, you’re being asked to return home.’ I’m sure people have had to face deportation for several reasons, but never for the kind of reasons I then imagined myself being deported for. Now, when I think about it, I can afford to laugh at it. But that moment it was a question of life and death. My blood pressure had suddenly plummeted and so had my confidence. More than the blood pressure, I was concerned about the fall of my confidence for it can sometimes help us sail through situations, which are otherwise hopeless. It was, after all, April 8. So the number eight had played its sinister role, again. It was hard to believe that this black numerical sign of Saturn had come all the way from India, tugging at my sleeves to this far-off land of the whites. Does our destiny travel with us? Do our superstitions and prejudices overleap themselves, travelling faster than we do? Is travelling a way of confirming one’s half-baked ideas or growing out of them? I am yet to know and discover.

Often when we travel to other cultures, we carry a cartload of stereotypes with us. We continue to look at the people through this invisible, myopic lens permanently grafted to our eyes. It is always more convenient to fit people into the categories we know rather than invent categories to fit our knowledge of people after we have known them. Besides, how does one know people well enough to be able to talk about them with a degree of certitude? Was it Eliot who said, “What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them! They have changed since then, but to pretend…” yes, when it comes to knowing people, one always has to pretend that one does know. My first meeting with Peter Bush, the Director of BCLT, was surprisingly informal I had been with him for barely ten minutes when he looked at his watch and declared, “How about some lunch?” It was still 12.30 p.m. and I was quite undecided. He thought my hesitation was a sign of affirmation. Coming out of his office and peeping into Christine’s, he asked her to join as well and together we walked down the long corridor of the Arts building, talking of translation and English weather. Of course, he did most of the talking and I, the listening. I was still at a stage where one listens more than one talks, and one observes more than one sees; something of a silent stage that a child goes through in the process of language learning.

As he was leading us into the Bowl, the campus restaurant, I noticed his impressively tall frame, which occasionally gave him a natural swagger as he walked. But that was not a sign of arrogance as I was to soon discover. Once in, he not only bought lunch for both of us but also carried our trays across to the table. Looking at him, I wonder if an Indian professor in a similar situation would have ever done what he had. Peter certainly had no professorial airs and graces and was remarkably unpretentious, quite the observe of what I had anticipated an average British professor to be. Where was the proverbial stiff upper lip or the somber, self-absorbed look, I wondered all to myself as Peter quizzed me about my other interests, apart from translation! His soft and benignly curious eyes often peered at me from behind a bespectacled face, wonderstruck, especially when I made some off-the-cuff comment, which to my discomfiture I did make quite often. It was my first ever meeting with a British professor and though he was disarmingly informal and courteous, I was certainly more self-conscious and guarded than was necessary. All along I was being cautions, avoiding an unfavourable impression upon him or Christine. It was, I suppose, this self-consciousness that often led me into the trap from which I was desperately trying to save myself. After we had finished our meals, I stood up, little realising that the tray had to be carried back to the kitchen. Halfway across the hall as I turned back, I saw Peter lifting my tray off the table. Do I need say what an acute embarrassment it was!

Without a word, Peter had made it known to me that while I was in Britain it won’t be a bad idea for me to practise a wee-bit of self-help. And this was the beginning of my education in the mores and customs of the English society. I was to learn in the days to come that self-help was not only an important part of table manners in a restaurant but almost a national attitude, practised on a much wider scale. It was perhaps the only survival kit that an advanced, competitive society puts at the disposal of its people to get through the daily business of living. Later, at every stage, I was to learn the importance of self-help. Whether it was the computing centre or the library, one had to know how to find one’s way or to get around things. A certain amount of basic techno-literacy was almost taken for granted. For instance, it was expected that once you were given your user number and a password, you knew exactly how to operate your e-mail account. (It took me good fifteen days to start using it without getting into many scrapes). Or walking into the library, you could not only sit in front of the computer but also access information on the books and periodicals available there (I had to seek Eliff’s intervention and that I did, after much hesitation, that lasted, if you please, only a little less than a month). Or that net surfing was as much your passion as it was anyone else’s. (I got to read The Tribune after a month and a half, first time on May 20). Perhaps it was hard for the English society to imagine that there were people in the world who were simply neo-literates in computer and almost illiterate when it came to its multiple operations. (Apparently, I’m not making any insinuations, only talking of my own peculiar case). Not that there was any dearth of information; it was everywhere. In catalogues, brochures, tables and assorted printed material, even on the tip of people’s tongue; only it rolled off the white tongues very rarely. The personal help was not given, unless it was actively and consciously sought. Having put everything down in black and white, it was as though the English had absolved themselves of the responsibility of sharing information through human agencies. That is when it dawned on me, for right reasons or wrong, that a society becomes advanced not when it invents things or starts using them in daily life, but only when it begins to rely less upon the spoken word and more upon the written word. It’s the transition of a society from the inchoate oral stage to the orderly materialization of the written stage that actually puts it way ahead of others. As people begin to speak to each other more and more through the written documents such as books, reports, diaries, newspapers and recorded histories, they also begin to speak less and less to each other. What makes people more productive is exactly what makes them more impersonal, too. Meeting Peter has been quite thought provoking. Walking back to my flat, I’m already turning over in my mind the possibility of fighting long spells of silence that lie ahead, of course, with black ink spilling over reams and reams of white paper.

                                    

                                                        *           *           *           *            *  

(Excerpts from TO ENGLAND, WITHOUT APOLOGIES: A Travelogue)  

Thought For Today

"THE SUPERIOR MAN UNDERSTANDS WHAT IS RIGHT; THE INFERIOR MAN UNDERSTANDS WHAT WILL SELL." -- CONFUCIUS

Electoral Reforms in India: Who will bell the cat, anyway? By Rana Nayar

For a long time now, there has been a talk of electoral reforms in India, but unfortunately, very little has been done on the ground to ensure their effective implementation. Over the years, several commissions have been set up and a plethora of changes recommended, but often the successive governments, and even the opposition parties, drag their feet over these changes. No wonder, we have moved ever so slowly over the process of electoral reforms and consequently, our political culture has slipped into one logjam after another, virtually bringing the process of policy making and governance to a screeching halt.

Today, we find ourselves in an unenviable situation as far as our political culture is concerned. In the name of political debate, often charges are traded and abuses exchanged on the national television. In the Parliament, the most hallowed forum for public debate, business is rarely ever conducted with the kind of seriousness it often demands. Either the party in power bulldozes its way to manufacture consent it so desperately needs, or the opposition simply digs in its heels, regardless of the merits of the specific case and/or the supervening national interest. No wonder, our legislative assemblies and the parliament only demonstrate the proverbial ‘death’ of the public debate in our political culture.  

Of course, there are other serious questions about the style of functioning of our political masters, both in and outside power. For almost three and a half decades, West Bengal was ruled and governed by the CPM led front. After a great deal of hesitation and reluctance, the people of West Bengal voted for a change. The way in which Mamta-led TMC government in West Bengal is now tearing all pretence to democratic norms to shreds is already making the people wonder if they have made a grave mistake in doing what they have done. Ironically, only the political parties are voted in and out of power in our country, as our tenacious political culture, impervious to all changes, continues to stink, more than ever before.   

With the increasing trend towards criminalization of politics, it has now become almost a compulsion for most of the political parties, national as well as regional, to field candidates with dubious background, even criminal record. In the recent elections in UP, though Akhilesh Yadav came into power riding on the promise of development, performance and of ushering in a radically new political culture, he has miserably failed to resist the pressure of inducting legislators with known criminal background into his Cabinet. Despite all the efforts of the Election Commission to ensure free and fair elections, at all possible levels of people’s participation, from the village panchayats to the municipal corporations, from the State Assemblies to the National Parliament, the vital questions about the fairness of elections remain hopelessly unanswered. With the introduction of the electronic voting machines, booth-capturing and rigging may have been reduced substantively, but the use of money and muscle power is still so flagrant and widespread that even the Election Commission, with all its paraphernalia, finds itself completely helpless in containing it.   

Governance and policy making in India have increasingly become an insulated process, in which public participation, at best, remains notionally minimal. During the recent Anna Hazare movement for the Jan Lokpal Bill, the manner in which the role of the civil society was repeatedly questioned by the political parties of all shades and hues is a case in point. Never in the history of the parliamentary democracy in Independent India have the political parties across the ideological spectrum shown as much solidarity and unanimity as they did over the question of how the right of the parliament to legislate laws was being usurped by the ‘so-called’ civil society. The only time, the political parties wake up to the existence of the ‘civil society’ or that of the people is during the election season, and then, too, people are seen less as people, and more as members of different castes or communities, in short, the much desirable and sought after ‘vote banks.’

To put it another way, it appears to be really a hopeless situation. One wonders if there is some way out of this morass, some way of protecting our democracy, some way of arresting this precipitous decline in our polity. Often, when we talk of the electoral reforms, we interpret them in a very narrow sense. We think of them in the sense of ameliorative measures that could streamline the election process, improve the functioning, not of our democratic institutions, but of the elections, and thus help in containing, to some extent, the widespread and ever growing systemic rot. By thus focussing our attention on the electoral process, we often miss the woods for the trees. We forget that the electoral process is only a very small component of our political culture, and unless efforts are made to change this diseased and defunct culture, electoral reforms, of whatever nature, substance or content, shall fail to make the necessary difference on the ground.

First of all, we must look into the way the political parties function in our country. There was a time when ideology was considered to be the main bulwark of a political party and often the ideological constrains impacted not only the public policy making but also the governance. Nehru-Lohia debate is a case in point. Now, it is no longer so. Today, it is difficult to identify even a single political party in our country that would be prepared to sacrifice power for the sake of ideology. In relentless pursuit of naked power, often ideology is the most common casualty. Party positions depend not so much upon the ideological grounds as on the contingent factors that govern the rough and tumble of everyday politics. It might be argued that politics is, in the best or the worst of times, an art of managing contradictions and so why must we expect the impossible from it?

My point is that if the ideology can guide the work-a-day politics in the developed countries, why can’t it do so in the developing nations? In the absence of clearly defined ideological positions, most of the political parties, at least, in terms of their practices and functioning, seem to have lost their distinctive character and are beginning to look more and more like each other. In our context, ring-wing, left-wing and centrist positions keep shifting, depending upon the individual whims/convenience and/or political expediency, thus making utter mockery of the ideology or its role in public affairs. Moreover, in the era of globalization and economic liberalization, all that the political parties can do is to hitch their band wagon to the economic reforms, with the ‘pace of the reforms’ being the only barometer of their political positioning.  

Corruption may be as much a part of political culture in the developed nations as it is in the developing ones, but in the developed world it is mostly restricted to the highest echelons of power. It certainly doesn’t take on the form of horse-trading, floor-crossing or shifting gears mid-stream by way of changing party affiliations, the way it happens out here? Out there in the West, a candidate may not be born into an ideology, but s/he certainly is initiated into one, and having been initiated once, prefers to go along with the party ideology, refusing to swerve from the chosen path every now and then. Besides, candidates are not hand-picked to join a particular political outfit or represent a particular constituency, as it often happens in our country, but are invariably men of proven public service record, who have already worked at the grassroots level for a number of years, before being inducted into the party or given a party ticket to contest the elections. True democracy demands that the individuals who wish to be the people’s representatives must have prior consent of the people and also a particular brand of political culture of a party whose ideology has nurtured them. Intra-party democracy, which is virtually unknown in our country, is almost a norm in most of the Western democracies.

So long as the money and muscle power continue to play an all-important role both in the selection and the election of the candidates, all talk of electoral reforms shall only be a form of empty rhetoric. In order to contain the role of money in the elections, apart from imposing an embargo on poll expenses (as the other initiative about the declaration of personal assets has been a non-starter of sorts), it is necessary to strengthen the institutions that help in the restoration of grassroots democracy. If a candidate has no known record of public service of minimum ten years, s/he should not be considered eligible for the party ticket of any political party. And if s/he is given a ticket in violation of this principle, the Election Commission should have the right to reject her/his candidature.

This would certainly be much better than prescribing minimum educational qualifications for our legislators, where the illiteracy rates are still very high among our politicians and the majority of those who enter politics are not necessarily university graduates. This would also discourage the perpetuation of dynastic rule in democracy, and compel people to undertake social service prior to taking a plunge into politics. No candidate should be given a party ticket unless he has won the confidence of the people in his/her constituency. Once we manage to do away with the practice of doling out party tickets, the highest bidders for the party tickets shall be discouraged, and prior acceptability of the candidates among the people shall further restrict the buying and selling of votes or voters at the time of elections.

This would also ensure that only candidates with a clean record enter the public life and criminals are not able to hold the entire electoral system to ransom, as they often tend to do in our context. As in this case, the responsibility of selecting the candidates shall rest with the people and not with the party, should they choose an individual with a criminal background, they would only have themselves to blame, not the party or the political culture. Besides, this would also inject into our political culture, the system of direct accountability of the leader towards his/her constituents and that of the people towards their leader. It is absence of this principle of direct accountability that has resulted in the virtual breakdown of dialogue between the political elite and the ruled public, and has also created a situation where the principle of accountability has surreptitiously been replaced by a more pernicious system of patronage and mai-baap culture.

There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between the rulers and the ruled and also put the rulers in a tight spot where they are left with no choice but to follow the principle of accountability. Restoration of accountability would further act as a deterrent to the unbridled and unabashed misuse of power, position and authority by those who wield it. The real question is: are our politicians ready for this principle of accountability? Are they prepared to bring in the legislations that will ultimately curb their illegal and unlawful manipulation of the levers of power? Or to put it differently, is anyone ready to bell the cat or conversely, is the cat ready to bell itself?    

Why am I so very (not kola veri) apologetic about being a Hindu? By Rana Nayar

I do not know whether I’m an insider or an outsider in India. Much will depend on what historians may have to say about my origins or my beginnings, which in any case, shall remain shrouded in endlessly inconclusive controversies. Some people will insist on treating me as a descendant of the Hindus, tracing my links with Indus Valley Civilization (emphasizing the homology between ‘Indus’ and ‘Hindus’), while others may look upon me as a leftover of the Aryan race that came from the West and overran the Nagas and/or Dravidians (read the original inhabitants of this land), seeking to establish my hegemony over this land, its peoples, its languages and its native cultures, too. I do not know whether I’m a naturalized citizen of this land or an aggressor, an invader and/or a colonizer. Historians would probably never let me have the satisfaction of knowing this, one way or the other. What I do know is that I have lived on this land for close to three, four thousand years; that I’m among one of its oldest, if not the oldest, inhabitants; and that I have participated in its social, political, religious and cultural life for as long as I can remember.

Of course, I know that despite having lived in this land for close to four thousand years, and despite having made all the contribution towards shaping, and not controlling, its cultural forces; and despite all my protestations about being truly, genuinely non-violent, secular and democratic in my convictions, today, I’m extremely apologetic about being a Hindu or made to feel so. Do I have a right to ask, why, for God’s sake, am I being pushed into such defensive postures, today? You perhaps don’t know that I was very much part of the crowd of non-decrepit soldiers who were led into the First War of Independence by Mangal Pandey, and the moment I witnessed the birth of the Congress Party out of the womb of history, I had simply stood by and cheered loudly. I was there when the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre happened, or when the non-cooperation movement was started by Gandhi. I was there when Lala Lajpat Rai was mercilessly beaten to death or Bhagat Singh was hanged with his companions following a farcical trial. I was among the crowds in 1942 when they booed and jeered at Englishmen, saying, “Quit India”, before plunging headlong into the unprecedented communal conflagration of 1947. Yes, I was killed among those who died during the Partition and was born, yet again, with the birth of a new nation.      

And let me assure you, since 1947 I have never participated in any of those loony linguistic movements that you witnessed in the late 1950s for the reorganization of Indian states on the basis of language or regional aspirations. To be honest, I wasn’t the one who raised the bogey of ‘official language,’ or the one who shed the blood of those who didn’t want ‘Hindi’ to be installed as an the sovereign, national, and/or official language. Now as I look back, I feel, it’d have been much better had Tamil been made the official language, as it‘d have probably brought the never ending colonial march of English to a sudden, necessary halt. It worries me to think now that we have missed out on a real opportunity to decolonize ourselves by making one of our own languages as the national/official language. Do you really think that I was the one who torched the government buildings or damaged the public property when the communal fires engulfed our sanity? Certainly not! Why to hide from you, friends, at that point of time, I was only too busy managing the petty affairs of my inconsequential life, running from pillar to post, clutching on to a bottle of milk or a can of kerosene, or waiting endlessly in the long queues either outside an employment bureau, a post-office, a bank, or a polling booth or just about too busy keeping the wolves at bay.

Believe me, when I say that I never participated even once in all those crazy, misdirected Rath Yatras (on Toyota convertibles) that some power hungry, political opportunists organized from time to time in the name of Hindutva. Do you know that I was not at all opposed to the political churning or mobilization that Mandalization caused in this country, nor did I ever support those who pulled down the Babri Masjid or engineered the Godhra Riots or burnt the train carrying Muslims across to Pakistan? Instead, I have been a strong votary of the affirmative action, as I sincerely believe that weak must always be protected by the strong, whatever the cost; and also whatever is pushed down by history must ultimately come up the hard way, and that it is not at all possible without social engineering of some kind. You do not know me enough to know that when this bandwagon of Hindutva was rolling out in the Indian streets, I was among those who were silently crying over the death of a shared dream, and grieving over the possibility of communalization of Indian politics. Much before that, I had already shed enough tears, or even spent many sleepless nights worrying over the criminalization of politics in our country, when it hit in the late 1970s.

Each time, a Kashmiri Muslim is killed either by the militants or the State, each time an innocent Sikh is burnt alive in a politically sponsored carnage, each time a Christian missionary is slain by some lunatic Hindu, and each time a Parsi is forced to migrate owing to the bullying tactics of Shiv Sainiks, I go through, no, not just the spasms, but genuine convulsions of conscience, and agonize endlessly over how the dream of secularism is fast turning into a nightmare, how the specter of communalism is forever hanging over our heads, threatening to unleash forces we can’t contain; how the ever growing decline of governance and moral imperatives of our politicians is pushing us deeper into a chaos and anarchy from which we may never be able to recover. And yet, you continue to doubt my secular credentials, suspect my political convictions or affiliations, interrogate my religious beliefs, and much before I realize what you are doing, you quietly dump all this guilt and pain of those whom I do not even know or recognize at my rickety door, leaving me with no choice but to cower in shame or run for a cover. And yet, you condemn me each time a fringe group of lunatics, who know no religion except the religion of violence or hatred and who know no language except the language of terror and crime, inflict all kinds of horrible wounds on your skin. You perhaps do not even know how the wounds in your skin have cut permanent holes in my body, and how your pain keeps searing my conscience, even my soul, in the silent hours of night.

When I’m alone with myself, I often wonder when did I ever give legitimacy to Manuvaad or the abominable caste-system. Did I ever want its continuation or perpetuation in our society? Did I ever want to live down the guilt of asking some people to serve me or my class interest perpetually? Did I ever want that Manu should codify Hindu laws in a certain way? Wasn’t Manu, after all, doing this codification for a society that was essentially moving from the tribal to the feudal, agrarian stage? And pray, when did Manu ever claim that his codification was sacrosanct and should not ever be subjected to a process of re-examination or revisionism? If some of my ancestors just didn’t get into the exercise of revisionism and Manuvaad or Brahmanism colluded to create conditions for the continuation of caste-system, why must I be made to bear the cross, especially, when I’m genuinely modern, moderately secular and materially egalitarian, and also when I celebrate the cultural synthesis of Bhakti movement? Am I supposed to feel guilty if a certain class of people (read Brahmins) chose to hegemonize others, as all classes, often driven by the egregious self-interest, almost always tend to do, in the best or the worst of times?

I also wonder why most of the people who condemn me for being a Hindu often forget that if the ancient Hinduism legitimized Manuvaad, it also gave Ved Vyas and Valmiki, both outcastes (one, the son of a fisherwoman, and the other, a reformed dacoit), the responsibility of disseminating two of their most significant narrative texts among its adherents. Why do they forget that the principle behind the caste-system was one of mutual interdependence of different sections (read castes) of society and of their integration and oneness at socio-religious level? And further, if the priestly class of Brahmins had not turned self-serving (as all ruling classes invariably do), probably caste-system would not have become an unchanging, ossified fact of Indian social and religious life? If I’m to be held accountable for crimes the priestly class committed through history, then I should also be held accountable for all the acts of omission and commission the ruling class of today is committing with much the same impunity. Don’t you think so? After all, logic is the same, isn’t it? So how many of us are actually prepared to bear the burden of other’s sins, pray? How many of us would want to do penance on behalf A. Rajas or Kalmadis of our times? Please don’t tell me now that my logic is fallacious, or my argument, untenable or specious.

Now whether or not I was a natural inhabitant of this land, I did make this land my home and you certainly can’t grudge me that or, will you? And then I slowly began to give birth to an entire civilization, mythological, Indus and then Vedic. Do you think it was a mean achievement on my part to seek to build secure edifices of civilization at a time when the rest of the world was still steeped in the dark ages, and was struggling hopelessly to preserve the Mayan or Mesopotamian civilizations, Abyssinian or Egyptian civilizations? Do I need to say that all those civilizations have quietly slipped into oblivion and disappeared into the haze of time, but my ancient wisdom, like the ageless Ganges, continues to flow, not merely through the veins of my own children, but those of rest of the humanity, too? Over the centuries, I did create a diverse wealth of art, literature, philosophy and/or culture, whose worth and estimation is today easily recognized, the world over. I may have believed in the fatalism of the Karmic theory, but I also gave the spirited message of activism through the philosophy of Karma Yoga in Sri Bhagwatgita. If I talked of the three stages in the life of a householder, to be achieved by following the three-fold path of arth, kama and moksha, I also gave the over-enveloping concept of dharma as an enabling principle. If I taught you the difference between the Purusha and Prakrati and the process of their interanimation, I also helped you understand that there is nothing outside the Braham, the eternal, transcendental, and perhaps the only all-subsuming reality. Perhaps, that’s why, I could throw the doors of my house open to people who came to visit this land first, and then decided to make it their own.

Do you think, if I hadn’t the catholicity of spirit that my religion (read Hinduism, not Hindutva) ingrained in me, right from the very beginning, I’d have been able to accommodate all the Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Muslims, who came calling? You know pretty well how some of them came looking for refuge, and others, simply with a specific aim of reducing me into a refugee in my own land. But I made no discrimination; as I not only threw open my doors to one and all, but also allowed each one of them the freedom to pitch their own tents, of whatever size and wherever they wished, simply following the dictum that this universe constitutes a single brotherhood. Do you think, it would have happened so easily, if I, too, had followed the policy of discrimination on the basis of caste, colour, creed, race or religion? I know, what you are thinking of, now. You’re possibly thinking that I was too weak religiously and too easily divided and fragmented politically to have taken care of my social/cultural space or what I sometimes call my home, if not my territory. Just remember, only the Muslims forced their way into my home (and yet I embraced their thought and philosophy of Sufism, even Islam) with open arms; others came as peacefully as they could, and apparently there was no question of my raising objections either to their presence here or their desire to make this land their home. Even when I didn’t possess the political sagacity of Ashoka or Akbar, the openness of my heart and the generosity of my spirit were never found wanting.

The only difference between you and me is that I’m looking at the vast panorama of history spread over four thousand years or more, and you have your eyes focused exclusively on the contemporary reality. In the recent times, you have found one too many reasons to put me on the dock; starting with, of course, the emergence of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha in the early 1930s and its dubious role in the freedom struggle, to the assassination of the Mahatma in which again, you claim, RSS had some shady role to play; from the machinations of Vajpayee and Advani in the 1980s, who created an entirely new political outfit called the Bharatiya Janata Party out of its erstwhile avatar Jan Sangh, to the militantly aggressive postures of rabid Ashok Singhal and Vinay Katyar of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, you have found enough reasons to pick holes in my defenses, and now you constantly keep nagging me about my Hindutva affiliations. If you were to stop at this, I wouldn’t really mind, but you don’t, and actually go much further than that. You accuse me of being anti-Muslim, and of harbouring hatred against all Muslims, sometimes going so far as to claim that I’d like to see all the Muslims transported to their sacred land of Pakistan. I don’t deny that it troubles me when Pakistan refuses to respect our territorial integrity and strikes aggressive postures, or surreptitiously pushes ISI-trained terrorists or militants into our soil for senseless murder and mayhem. It troubles me when the centuries-old communal ties snap all of a sudden, and communal hatred begins to stalk the land. In my moments of moral weakness, sometimes, I do begin to doubt the nationalist spirit of my Muslim neighbours or start blaming them for their extra-territorial loyalties, but even in my weakest moments, not even once do I wish them away.

My occasional sense of insecurity or moral lapse is only a passing fancy; certainly not the defining moment of our centuries-old mutual co-existence, in which we continue to share our myths and fables, our folklores and festivals, our languages and cultures, all differences notwithstanding. Besides, who told you that I’m a die-hard Hindutva fan, just because I happen to be a Hindu? My sense of politics, if seen historically, has been extremely weak. Had it not been so, I would not have been pushed around so much by the invaders or the aggressors. It’s because of my poor sense of political judgment that I sometimes ended up colluding with my own enemies, thus working against my own best political interests. Whatever my failures or lapses, the fact is that I have paid much too heavy a price for it, as well. Having said so, let me go on to explain the basic differences between Hindutva and Hinduism, as you often use them interchangeably, thus not only confusing the issues, but also damning me for no fault of mine. Hinduism teaches me openness of heart and magnanimity of spirit, which also goes hand in hand with my total or partial lack of political wisdom. My problem is that I’m too easily swayed by the political slogans and quickly succumb to the hate-mongering of our special breed of fire-spewing politicians. Hindutva, with which I have never had any affiliation, and which I have always suspected as much as you have, if not more, is only a subversive way of twisting, distorting and manipulating the actual teachings of Hinduism for political ends. In other words, Hinduism is a way of life that teaches catholicity, whereas Hindutva is a way of controlling or manipulating Hindu votes, by whipping up narrow, parochial jingoism or fanaticism among them.

You would perhaps complain that in such moments of existential crisis, why don’t I invoke the teachings of Patanjali, who had once warned me against losing my viveka ever, and always keeping my body, mind and soul together? My problem is that in this long march over so many centuries, I have moved so far away from his teachings and many more things besides, that I don’t hear Patanjali’s words any longer. Though I have heard Krishna tell me repeatedly that I must do all I can to become a sthithapragyana, I’m too much into the world to achieve that and continue to wallow in the dance of the three gunas -- sattva, rajas and tamas -- thus nullifying all possibility of attaining inner poise and equilibrium. But that only makes me human, doesn’t it?

Do you think, it is right on your part to make me feel less about myself, just because I’m only too human, like you and everyone else? Don’t forget that I always showed immense tolerance for the difference, great patience for dissent and always supreme respect for an alternative viewpoint. Had it not been so, do you think, Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism could have possibly emerged out of our soil? Each time, as a Hindu, I saw the prospect of my own decadence and decay; I re-incarnated myself as a Buddha, a Mahavira or a Guru Nanak. I never had any problems with re-inventing myself, or any issues with initiating a dialogue with myself or my neighbours. I never tried to create monoliths out of my beliefs, as I always gave myself, even others, the freedom to follow any one of the “thirty three crore Gods” I had created for possibly as many followers.

I always had immense faith in the philosophy of cultural pluralism, never deviated from it and shall perhaps never do. And yet, you call me a staunch Hindu, a violent oppressor or aggressor, a power-hungry Hegemon, perpetually trying to swallow the minorities, their right to life and survival, a perpetual threat to their social and cultural space. For God’s sake, don’t extend the logic of US imperialism to understand my position (in their case, the Big Brother is not only watching but also breathing down everyone’s neck all the time, and in our case, he’s happily living with the younger ones), or judge me in the light of the theories you may have borrowed from the West, or impose them on me, unthinkingly.

Please don’t treat me as a colonizer, just because the British told you that I was one. And finally, don’t let them divide us now that we think we are free, for we have, are and will continue to live with each other, peacefully, joyously and harmoniously. And the next time, you are tempted to blame me just because I’m a Hindu, or catch me by the collars because I let you share my home, do think again!

I only hope, you do or else, I’ll continue to be apologetic for no other reason, but for being what I’m, yes, just another Hindu. 

Day Two

It is the night of vigil. Long, unending and burdensome. Four of us have decided to take turns and sit up, watching over him. An earthen lamp lies towards his head, burning. Every half an hour or so, ghee will have to be poured into it, and its wick trimmed, to keep the flame alive. And every few hours, the ice slabs will have to be changed to prevent the body from putrefying. The days’ events have left everyone spinning around, circles of grief and exhaustion widening. Fighting rather hard to keep my eyes wide open, I’m wondering what it is that is being protected now. Only a few months ago, when I visited him the last time, I had found him particularly sullen and withdrawn. ‘Of late, he has become a little incommunicative,’ is how mother had put it, cryptically. Late into the night, he would sit up, poring over the account books, making calculations that none of us could ever figure out. During the day, he would simply make himself scarce, returning home only late in the evenings. Then too, rather than join the rest of us, he would prefer to park his cane-chair out in the garden in front of the house, and sit there for hours on end, his head buried among his hands. Very rarely would he lift his head up, and when he did, his eyes would shut involuntarily as head rolled over the back of his chair, reclining. Often, sitting in this posture, he used to stare vacantly at the summer sky, perhaps watching it change colours from orange to crimson to deep red, purple and then inky blue. Such were the moments when he didn’t want anyone, not even his granddaughters whom he loved to distraction, to disturb him. One day, finding him sitting in the garden by himself, I had walked across to him and said, “Something seems to be playing on your mind. Why don’t you share it? For all you know, it just might help.” He had looked at me as if I was a rank stranger, doubt and suspicion lurking in his eyes. And then, after what appeared to be a great effort, he spoke haltingly, “This is something you won’t understand...There comes a stage in life, when you have nothing to do…nothing to look back...or forward to....And that’s when you become what I have…a watchman.” Despite the evening shadows thickening around him, I had been able to detect a sudden flash of light in his weary eyes. Years ago, when Hemant was still a college student, he had made it a habit of returning home late. Every day, it was a new excuse, either an outing with the friends or an extra class or tuition or a game of tennis. Hemant had always been the most outgoing among us all. He spent as little time at home as he could. And when he didn’t have any genuine reason to be away from home, he often found reasons or rather manufactured them. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he had had a particularly troubled childhood. He was born at a time when the family was recovering from the sudden death of one of the young sons in a tragic road accident. Rather than hail his birth as a return of the lost member, something, which, too, could have been done, everyone had begun to believe, for whatever reasons, that his was an inauspicious arrival. Whether or not there was any real basis for such a prejudice, Hemant had definitely grown up under the shadow of being ‘the accursed one,’ a sobriquet he had earned much before he was given a proper name. As a child, he used to be extremely violent, so much so, that the moment he was denied anything he demanded, he would start banging the doors. Once in school, he had lifted a stool to hit his class teacher who had pulled him up for wearing chappals and not his regular school shoes. And now in college, he had found other, more subtle ways of retaliation, returning home late being the most conspicuous of them all. It had become almost a daily affair. In winters, it used to be dark by eight in the evening. Everyday, around this time, father would position himself in the window, waiting for Hemant to return. Silhouetted against the dim light of the room, he would stand for hours together, his eyes searching desperately through the darkness. With the clock ticking away silently, he would start pacing up and down the room, occasionally peering out of the window. Once, while he waited, his anxiety mounting to a pitch, a police jeep had pulled outside the main gate. Two policemen got off the jeep and came towards the house, walking up the stairs. They hadn’t even laid their fingers upon the bell when he threw the door open. After making a few preliminary enquiries, they had told him how Hemant had been arrested on the charge of eve-teasing. Hemant had spent the night in the lock-up, and father had stayed wide-awake, worrying over his fate. 

The thick ice slabs are beginning to melt, running into little rivulets across the floor. As the cold water hits against the skin of my soles, I’m startled. With ghee already dried up, the wick has burnt itself out, and is now giving off a foul smell. While pouring ghee in the earthen lamp, I look around, guiltily, wondering if anyone has seen the extinguishing of the lamp. 

An oval-shaped lake lay at the bottom, with a thick, wooded forest surrounding it. Guarding the expanse of water stood tall tress of deodar and pine, lining up the hills receding from the view, ablaze in the summer sun. Only the tip of the frozen peaks was visible, peering from somewhere close to the sky. Sitting on the edge of the lake, I was casting pebbles into water, watching the ripples break into ever widening circles, dissolving into nothingness. Today, again, the postman had come and gone, without bringing us the money order we had long been waiting for. Only last night, the hotel manager had sent a word across that if we wanted to prolong our stay, we must deposit some more money as an advance. All our efforts to contact father on the phone had proved to be abortive. Each time, we called him up, it so happened that he wasn’t home. It was intriguing, this silence on his part, for he usually did make an effort to get in touch, every second day or so. But now for the past ten days, there had been no news from him. We had begun to worry, not so much for him as ourselves. The money was running out fast. And we were stranded here in this strange place, unable to pay the bills. Mother’s condition had only made the matters a shade worse. Of late, she had been complaining of acute acidity, which often brought on, rather unexpectedly, these sudden attacks of asthma, too. Unconcerned, Hemant would go off with his friends, either for a game of billiards or horse riding, leaving Anurag and me to manage the situation. The local doctor hadn’t been able to figure out what really was wrong with her but her condition was worsening by the day. That’s when I found myself, perhaps the first time ever, wondering if I shouldn’t have hastened to pick up a job and be financially independent. Though I had already finished my masters, I hadn’t shown any urgency in looking for a job. I had plans to continue my studies, go abroad and do a doctoral degree in literature. For someone who had chosen to live in the world of books, the demands of commerce and money appeared not only futile, but also demeaning. Now as I sat by the lake, casting pebbles into its depths, the futility of my dreams had suddenly been driven home to me. Finally the money order did arrive, but only after a fortnight or so. The very same day, Anurag and I decided to pack up the bags and leave. Though Hemant was in no mood to leave, wanting to spend another week or so, our immediate worry was that we should get mother home, somehow. The day we decided to leave, we weren’t sure if we were bound for Amritsar or elsewhere. During the journey, mother’s condition deteriorated, suddenly. Going to Amritsar would have meant a gruelling twelve hours or more. So midway across, we had got off our Amritsar-bound bus, and boarded the one heading towards Delhi, no more than seven hours away. Right through the journey, mother had kept groaning with pain, complaining of constant burning sensation in her stomach, and throwing up, intermittently. It was so bad that she couldn’t even digest a glass of plain water. It was just touch and go, something the doctors also confirmed later when she was hospitalised. They said, had there been a few hours’ delay in bringing her to the hospital, she probably wouldn’t have survived. Slipping out of her kidney, the stones had travelled close to her heart and now lay lodged there, threatening her.

Accompanied by friends, Hemant was walking through the forest. The soil under their feet was damp and slippery, as it had been raining incessantly through the night. Holding on to each other for support, they were walking rather gingerly, wading through a wild overgrowth, balancing their feet upon the rugged rocks that lay perilously jutting out. One wrong step and all of them would have gone hurtling through the abyss, below which stood the lake, its giant-sized mouth, gyrating. In a sudden burst of recklessness, quietly slipping his own hands out of his friends’, Hemant decided to press on ahead. He had developed this sudden desire to outstrip his friends, leaving them far behind. Holding on to the roots and the branches firmly, he advanced slowly, clearing his path through the dense forest. Soon enough, he was taking long strides, unmindful of the precipitous heights.  Moving on ahead, he didn’t turn back even once to see how far behind he had left his friends. Now, he was enjoying the cool forest wind against his face; its chill had a certain solace about it. He had hardly walked a hundred yards or so, when his hand fell upon a mulberry bush. Unable to realise that if he hung on to it for support, it just might get uprooted a little too easily, he had done precisely that. And the very next moment, he was skidding off the hill, down towards the lake. Once or twice, he made a bid to clutch on to the wild bushes, but that didn’t stop his descent in anyway. The shoots kept slipping out of his hold, hastening his fall. That moment, when he had given up all hope of returning home alive, something of a miracle happened. He felt as though someone had suddenly got hold of his hands and was now pulling him up with great force. And the very next moment, his feet had landed upon a firm rock, jutting out. Suspended in mid-air, he had stood, waiting for the help to arrive, which came only after two hours or more. Having lost his track, his friends had branched off in a different direction, altogether. Echoing through the forest, all his cries for help had returned, crashing against him. Finally, on finding him stranded upon the rock, they had immediately lowered a rope for support. By the time he was hauled up, he was so exhausted that he nearly collapsed.          

Hemant has been sitting by my side, for close to two hours now. But we haven’t exchanged a single word. Occasionally, he looks at me, as though rattled by a sudden pain, and then looks away. His hurtful look has always had an unsettling effect on me. Over the years, it has become familiar, but not any the less unnerving. It all started with that Diwali gift, lying frozen somewhere in the memory. Though we used to be rather hard up those days, grandfather would still insist on buying us gifts, howsoever small. Often while going out to buy them, he would go alone, refusing to take any one of us along. Somehow he had this feeling that, being a true patriarch he could always sense the needs of each and every member of the family, right from the eldest to the youngest. He had his own imperious manner of announcing these special gifts, too. In the evening, he would hold his private darbar to which we were all summoned, one by one, and given the prize. We had instructions from the father to accept whatever was given with gratitude and, certainly, without a demur. That year, he had decided to buy both Hemant and me, cloth material for the school dress, we had been demanding for some time. When I went in to collect my prize, he told me, conspiratorially, that I mustn’t show it to Hemant as mine was more expensive than his. Chafing at the injustice of it all, I had come away, wondering, if it was right on my part to become a party to the crime I had no intentions of committing. As soon as Hemant stepped out, holding his gift in hand, disappointment was all over his face. Before going in, he had already felt my cloth between his fingers and instinctively knew that his coarse-grained, rugged one was no match to mine, which not only had a soft feel but also a rich texture. That moment, he had looked up at me, accusingly, as though I had betrayed him in some way he hadn’t been able to explain. And now, it’s this feeling of hurt and betrayal that often shines through his eyes, especially when he looks at me, in his off-guarded moments. Across the years, his look hasn’t lost its power to disturb me. 

Dawn is still a few hours away, and I can see Anurag walking in to relieve Hemant. He takes his position up against the wall, and sits with his legs folded up in the front, his head resting over his knees. He has lost that sparkle in the eyes he was born with. While expecting him, mother was confident that she wouldn’t beget another son, but rather proving to be third time lucky, be blessed with a daughter. Earlier on two occasions, she had prayed quite desperately for a daughter, but apparently, to no avail. Though she wasn’t much of a believer in idol worship, retiring to the puja room, she would often sit there for hours together, staring at the mischievous, kohl-lined eyes of Krishna, whose idol was the centrepiece. Anurag was born with large, impish eyes, and upturned, curvaceous eyelashes, almost feminine in their appeal, which sometimes misled people about his sex, when he was still an infant. As he grew up, he would chase mother in and out of the kitchen, run errands for her and even help her with cooking whenever he could. Food is something he loved to eat, and cooking is what gave him the utmost pleasure. Once as a teenager, he had surprised all of us with his doughnuts, which no one in the family knew the recipe of. His culinary skills were something the family often spoke of either with pride or with sarcasm or with both thrown in for good measure. He must have been around seven or eight when Biro, a young girl of twelve, was hired to work in the kitchen. Daughter of a former employee of the factory, she would spend most of her time playing with Hemant and Anurag. Occasionally, she was expected to give Anurag a good scrubbed bath as well, especially when mother would either be busy in the kitchen or in bed, recovering from a bad attack of asthma. One day, in summer, he wasn’t to be seen anywhere in the evenings. For quite sometime, it didn’t even occur to any of us that we ought to be looking for him. Everyone presumed that he must be out in the fields, playing and would eventually return on his own. But when he didn’t until eight, we had gone out, searching for him. Hemant had gone as far as the servant quarters, lined up against the boundary wall, right behind the factory, but no, Anurag was not there; he was nowhere. It’s only when the grandfather, quite accidentally, threw the door of the bathroom open that he had found Anurag, lying on the floor, face-down, tap still running. It was the first time, anyone of us woke up to this strange habit he had developed of falling off to sleep, on the bath-floor. It had triggered off all kinds of speculation, grandfather had even tried out his homeo remedies but nothing had really worked. Strangely, he got over this habit only a few years later, when Biro suddenly left the job on the plea that she was to get married. For months on end, this mysterious habit of Anurag had intrigued the family members, only to be forgotten when he grew up into a young boy. Now, years later, as he sits doubled up in a corner, eyeing the flame of the earthen lamp, it rises unsteadily, almost stealthily.         

An interminable procession is pressing on ahead, spilling over into lanes and by-lanes, jostling for space in an overcrowded bazaar as though the juggernaut of Lord Jagannath is rolling out. It is as if each memory is desperate to get its firm hold over the sacred ropes, anxious to fall in line with the movement of the chariot, its huge wheels grinding, slowly but surely. And yet each memory is alone, facing only its own moments of truth or falsehood, fighting only for its own survival. So much gets crushed in this long journey, and so much more is left behind that often we wonder if the journey is really worth the effort put behind it. The ritualistic bath over, he is now being dressed up for the final procession. It has been decided that the official van carrying him will lead the way, private cars and scooters bringing up the rear. The route of the procession has already been worked out to avoid any last minute confusion. I wonder if he would have liked to go on his last journey the way we have planned it out for him. All his life, he had had this incurable distaste for the crowded places, something he had developed rather early on in life. He must have been around twenty-five, when, one evening, he went out on a drive with his friends. As a young man of ample means, it wasn’t unusual for him to be surrounded by a band of friends, who often lived it up at his expense. A spirit of gaiety and abandon was in the air. Huge crowds were milling around in the streets, crawling towards the Dusshera ground, eager to witness the annual ritual of ‘evil’ going up in flames at sunset. He was speeding away as he often did. Suddenly, at the crossing, while giving his Ford car a sharp turn, he had lost balance, swerved to the left and rammed into a family of three, walking on the pavement. The man and the wife had jumped to safety, but the child lay flattened on the pavement, her body spattered with blood. Suddenly, the crowd had split, as people lunged forward towards the victim. His friends had simply got off the car, and disappeared into the crowd. Too stunned to react, he had sat there, unmoved. While he was busy haggling with the police, someone had rushed the child to the hospital. That day, he had taken a vow never to step out of the house on a festival day, a vow he had kept all through his life. Over the years, he had developed this habit of avoiding the milling crowds everywhere, on the road, in the market place or even at home. But now, silent and inert, he’s leading his own procession.    

Walking in through the fields, he is coming, in a white kurta-pyjama, a light brown shawl thrown across his shoulders, his head bowed in distress. Other men and women, all dressed in white, are bringing up the rear, a neat file stretching out. Leaving the cars parked outside the main gate, all of them are now zigzagging through a beaten track that runs diagonally across the field, dragging their feet wearily along. Shading off their faces with bare hands, they are trying to ward off the fury of a July sun beating down hard upon their heads. Though crackling with their own heat, the clouds are moving apace, waiting to burst at the first available opportunity. Standing on the steps of the house and seeing them approach, I wonder, why they haven’t hit the brick-lined road, skirting the vacant lot, choosing instead this short cut through the fields. It’s only when he comes closer do I find that during the past few weeks’ of his absence from home, he has grown thick salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. As he is without his specs, it’s not too difficult for me to see that his face is already awash with tears. And the very next moment, walking up to me, he throws his arms around my tiny, eight-year old shoulders, and starts crying, inconsolably, almost like a child, repeating again and again, “Oh, Why did it have to happen? Why did God have to do ‘this’ to us?” Hearing his cries it feels as though I’m not his son, but his father, patting his back encouragingly with my tiny hands, which barely reach up to his shoulders. Now, looking back I wonder if Natchiketa can ever return from the Yamloka and talk to his father, Udalayaka about the great significance of death that he doesn’t quite understand himself. 

Ever since he has returned from the cremation of Diwan uncle, father has been unusually distracted. More than his sister’s husband, Diwan uncle has been a friend and a confidante. It was their fascination for beautiful women that often made them sit up through the nights, talking animatedly. During his frequent visits to Amritsar, father and he would take off on a secret mission, all of a sudden in the evenings, leaving the family in a quandary. His sister had somehow convinced herself that her brother was the one responsible for leading her husband into adventures he could have very well done without. Unwilling to believe that her husband was a gullible fool she was quite willing to believe the worst about her own brother. How and when this bad faith developed between the two is something rather difficult to say. But all that has survived from the stories doing the rounds in the family circles is that once both of them had fought a pitched battle over this, so much so that they hadn’t spoken to each other, after that, for more than two years. And now after Diwan uncle’s premature death, when father occasionally slides back into deep depressions, I don’t quite know whether he is mourning the man he has shared his youth with or is mourning the passing away of his own youth. But each time it happens, a pall of gloom descends upon the house, his black moods flaring up into unexpected acts of violence. It was a Sunday morning. Father had repeatedly been telling Hemant to go into his room and study, but he just wouldn’t pay any attention. Suddenly, pulling a compass out of his geometry box, father had thrust it into Hemant’s thigh as he stood, trembling in a corner. Groaning with pain, he had doubled over. One afternoon, mother had stubbornly refused to serve hot chappatis to grandmother in her room, on the plea that she couldn’t handle both cooking and serving at the same time. Refusing to step down from the position she had already struck, grandmother, too, had preferred to go without food. In the evening, on his return from the factory, when the matter was reported to father, he had come charging at mother, intimidating her into a corner. That night, retreating into a dark corner of the storeroom, where I could always sit for hours together, unnoticed, I had cried my heart out. I don’t quite remember what it was that made me burst into muffled tears, the fate of my brother or the humiliation of my mother. All I do remember is that I had, secretly, held myself responsible for the entire situation. A few months’ prior to Diwan uncle’s sudden departure, I had begun to think more and more of death. So strong was this feeling that I often entertained this idea of putting an end to life in some unexpected, rather dramatic manner. The more I thought about it, more it appealed to my raw, untrained imagination. It wouldn’t be such a bad idea, after all, to put an abrupt end to life. One rash gesture held out the promise of eternal peace. What better solution could my childish mind come up with, a single stroke would have taken care of just about everything. All at once, it would have spared me the agony of having to witness father’s unending remorse, mother’s untold humiliation and brother’s bleeding wounds. At seven, if you’re ever compelled to think about death, you only think of it as a fragrant dream that hangs elusively over your private stink, waiting to snuff it out, saving it from spreading outwards. At seven, it appears to you that even if you were to think of death in relation to yourself, you could actually make it happen to someone else within the family. It is as if your secret thoughts have this mysterious power of being heard by God, who, in retaliation, immediately sends the messengers of Yama down upon the earth, to claim some member of the family everyone has so dearly loved. On Diwan uncle’s death, it was really strange how father had experienced all the grief, while I had been left reeling under loads and loads of guilt for having caused it, quite unwittingly. 

Waves of grief and depression are rippling through the house, once again, now that having been consigned to the flames already, he has become indistinguishable from the elements. Gautam is distracted in much the same manner as father had been, several years ago. Being the youngest in the family, he definitely did get to spend with him, the longest spell anyone of us could claim to. He was the only one at home when father suddenly collapsed into a heap; and it was just yesterday morning. Bewildered, he had rushed him from one doctor to another, from one hospital to another, hoping that someone would be able to work the miracle; that someone would bring him back from the land of the dead. It was his incredulity, his total disbelief, his refusal to accept that the inevitable had happened; that we had found the hardest to manage. Even when the funeral bier was being prepared, he kept saying, “Don’t take him away. Do something if you can. No, he’s not dead. Don’t you see beads of sweat shining on his forehead? Now, how can that be, if he’s already dead? No, the doctors have made some mistake…” Unable to fantasise about death at thirty-five now, I’m at a loss to understand how my words can pierce through his pain, offering some diversion by way of consolation. Inconsolable, he walks into father’s room, bolting the door from inside. From across the door, only muffled sounds of his cries are occasionally heard. Positioned outside the door, as we wait for him to materialise, a distant memory knocks all of a sudden, and my heart starts thumping, ever so loudly. Once, father had had a tiff with his parents, something he had refused to talk to us about. In a fit of rage, he had simply locked himself inside the room, threatening to kill himself. Standing outside, I was imagining how, soon enough, a key would turn into his closet, throwing it open with a screech. And before I even get myself to react, he’d probably do the next possible thing he could, which was to lay his hands upon a six-bore, licensed gun he always kept in his personal closet and perhaps shoot himself dead. Having been a witness to this frightening scene a number of times in my childhood, I could’ve predicted its well-rehearsed quality, down to the last detail. The gun is still very much inside father’s closet. What if Gautam decides to execute the threat that father had never used as anything more than a pretext to let off his steam! And the next moment, I’m beating at the door, hard, urging Gautam to throw it open. Hemant and Anurag are also trying out whatever strategy they can, from mild persuasion to wild intimidation, but nothing seems to be working with him, right now. He appears to have crossed that frontier of grief, which makes grief what it is, a manageable human experience, something to be assuaged, and not entirely beyond the pale of redemption. For Gautam, who stands outside the range of mere human grief, it appears to have become the single most important reason for being alive, something that holds out a dangerous prospect of splitting his innards. After about two hours or more, when he finally does open the door, he appears relatively calm and composed. But in a bid to reach out across, the moment we inch close to him, violently jerking off our hold, he snarls flames of hatred blazing in his eyes, “O you bloody bastards. Get lost, I don’t want to see the faces of anyone of you. You’re the real murderers. You’ve killed my father. Yes, you’ve killed him.” Years later, today, once again, I can see that seven-year-old, lying curled up inside a dark storeroom, shedding silent tears, but this time round, I don’t hear his muffled screams, at all.

The factory siren has already been sounded, its shrillness crashing upon the ears. The workers are swirling around in a tizzy, switching off the machines, putting away the gunny sacks full of unused yarn, eager to wind up their night shift and rush back home. Lined up next to the supervisor, some are busy loading into the scales the yarn they have spun through the night, while others, having weighed it already, are heading towards the store room, where it would ultimately be deposited. Only after everything has been accounted for and the stock registers put in order would they be able to get the supervisor’s permission to leave. And now, filing up near the main gate, they are waiting for the timekeeper to punch their cards. Much before the next shift begins, in about half an hour or so, everyone would have left, including the supervisor. Chet Ram, the watchman, is pacing up and down the road, watching the workers shuffle towards the cycle-shed, eager that they clear off. For soon enough, he would pull the shutters down and proceed home, after having locked in the main gate. Sarup Singh, the other watchman, would soon be back on his morning duty, and it is for him to oversee the start of the next shift. Like other days, Chet Ram ambles across to the shutter, in a bid to pull it down, marking the end of the night shift. He has barely put his hand on the clasp, and is still preparing to pull it down when the shutter comes crashing upon his head. Lying flattened on the ground, he’s been reduced to a mangled heap of flesh, his screams buried under the weight of the shutter. It’s only when Sarup Singh comes, half an hour later that he discovers how Chet Ram died in an accident. Rushing off towards the kothi, he goes and informs the sahibs about it. If I were to say that this incident happened much before I was born, you’d probably begin to doubt the very credibility of the entire story. For instance, you’re bound to question how and in what manner did I really learn of this incident, if it’s not something I have either seen or heard. In whatever I have told you so far, I may have somehow succeeded in creating this impression that what you’re reading is not outside the range of things seen or heard, yet it doesn’t always happen so. After all, Natchiketa doesn’t always have to know the shashtras to be able to question the meanness of what his father regarded as an act of charity. Well, as far as this incident goes, all I can say is that it has been handed down from one generation of workers to another. By the time I grew up into a young lad, it had already passed into some kind of a folk-tale, which workers told each other in hushed tones, occasionally, over lunch. But one thing that they scrupulously avoided to mention was as to what really happened to Chet Ram’s family, perhaps because they didn’t know it, or could it be that they didn’t want to talk about it.           

              

                 

      *                                         *                                         *                                        * 

DAY ONE

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.                    

  

(Excerpts from a novel titled: THOSE EIGHTEEN DAYS)      

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