Calcutta, 1972
From the vantage point of the low
doorway leading to the backyard, two enormous tress that rose up the overgrown
lawn, seem to bend inwards towards each other against the radiant spring sky,
as if leaning into a handshake. Branches of one tree escaping into the canopy
of other. The breeze pampering their leaves and sunshine reflected upon the margins
in a sparkling twinkle, as if the branches were but bejeweled arms of newly wed
women.
Rukshar is stretched out on the
grass, her face striped by the shadows of embracing branches overhead. A
headband is flattened across her forehead, holding her short hair in place,
down her shoulders. She wears a yellow frock with broad, circular prints of
flowers all over it. Her bare legs crossed one above another, rest hidden in
the high grasses, warmed by the drift of daylight through the leaves. She is
trying to memorize a poetry, perhaps, the book propped on her chest and all the
while a butterfly is fleeting across her face. Her eyes the color of wet sand;
dusty gold, washed by the awe of blue as her thinly cuts lips move in a murmur
beneath her breath.
Together, we saw the clouds build their
mansion,
Then the heaven lit its
rooms with his purple thunder,
The wind blew the curtains and rang
wind chimes in their heart;
Their happiness, that day,
echoed the whole sky.
And then, we don’t know
why they cried,
And then, we don’t know
where the laughter died,
Only the earth below was
flooded with their pain.
“Repeat after me.” She says. “And
then we don’t know why they cried,”
“Hello, are you listening? Say the
next line. Say with me. I will be able to learn it quickly then.”
But he doesn’t. He is quiet and
sitting up against the trunk of the lemon tree. His knees drawn close towards
his chest, his foot submerged in the grass as he draws into the white sheet of
paper on his lap, a trait, people say he derived from his father, Abhijeet Roy, a
renowned artist.
“You are so dumb. You can’t even
remember a line.” Rukshar snaps, rolling her eyes at him, her expressions
visibly bland behind lines of shadows crisscrossing her round, pink face and
gets back to her task of memorizing the poem, leaving Satyajeet alone and
silent against the lemon tree, lost in his world of sketch and crayons.
That was how their friendship began –
on a bright spring day, beneath the canopies of handshaking trees, stretched
across an untamed grass bed and the sun warming their limbs, coloring their
round cheeks with a shade of rose pink. That is how every relation begins. With
friendship. A clichéd startup bond, one may say, before our heart gets to the
steering of our destiny and lends the cliché, an edge of the unconventional. Our
mind, perhaps, is the bed to a hibernating clay artist. It starts with balls of
clay being pressed over the fragile frame of our feelings, in the name of
friendship, the same way idols of god and goddesses are churned out. Then with
the first layer, once the artist is wide awake, he starts adding one coat after
another, strengthening it, drying under the sun of time, all the while
graduating the bond to a whole new level, before draping it with vivid colors
of imagination and establishing us as gods and goddesses of our own emotions.
And with it every god thereafter, secretly, admiringly, wishes to reside in the
prayers of his endearing goddess and the whole soon becomes their
devotee, as they bask in the pouring petals of love.
Three years passed since then and
their love for each other only deepened. Satyajeet was mere eighteen, absorbing
the ruggedness of the world at the gateway to adulthood. Rukhshar was even
younger, fifteen something. Yet they understood and reflected to each other’s
love like people having spent a lifetime together did and still fell short of a
divine completion that true togetherness makes one feel. They were birds who
never flew out of the nest and still could tell with precision the vastness of
the sky that soared above the world.
It was on Rukshar’s birthday that
year, that Satyajeet took to pin his whole life beside her, even when long
back, in the idle corners of their young hearts, they were a family feasting
together at the glamorous buffet of love. They sat upon a heap of sand and
faced the color spilled 5 PM sky as the sun sank into the bosom of holy Ganga
and the water gushed in its tide with the trailing red rippling across it
surface, soundlessly lapping against the shore. The wind was strong and faded
out the humdrum of the city, blowing past their ears in a howl,
stuffing their nostrils with the lingering scent of wet sand and wild flowers
that grew in reeds along the bank. Apart from his life that she already owned,
Satyajeet as a token of gift on her birthday had given her the painting he drew
three years back, sitting against the bark of the lemon tree, that bright
spring morning. He had drawn her in it. Rukshar, flat against the ground, the
poetry book propped against her chest, her eyes awash with attention with thin
blades of grass caught in her hair.
“Why you didn’t show this to me all
this while?”
“Because I couldn’t afford to miss
the amusement your face is now lit up with.”
She lowered her eyes and averting her
gaze to the silently meandering Ganga, felt in her heart the celebration noises
of her life making a complete circle. A circle that took three years of time to
roll around a long proposed center of epiphany. A center where she feels she
could stand barefoot with Satyajeet and watch the world gyrate around them,
lending to each of their mutual choice and desires. A center to which every
happiness of the world will be at an arm’s distance from her and standing where
she could derive the mighty strength to battle all the grief that life was
packed inevitable with. It was the center which she now recognizes, under his
loving stare, to be the patch of green that will last beyond all the famines of
life, with the tributary of love that flowed from his eyes and irrigated her soil,
every single time he raised his deep eyes to her face and she felt all the more
possessed, all the more reaping, all the more loved.
Satyajeet had draped his arms around
her and pulled her close, as their heads dipped on each other. The whole of Calcutta
then gleamed with a fluidic shine in their eyes. The dark sky dotted with the
winking stars and buildings and hutments and everything, reflected over the
water in long, still lines with the wind pouring sand and grit into their
faces, that they had closed their eyes and their lips froze in a kiss of forever.
A week later, as Satyajeet woke up
from his sleep one morning, he couldn’t find his mother. He had ran up the
stairs and pushed through the doors of every single rooms in their house, only
to emerge sad. It was when he was descending down the stairs to the foyer that
he spotted his father leaving through the door. His demeanor hurried.
“Dad, have you seen mom?”
“Oh! She has gone to meet your
grandparents. Will be back in a few days.” He replied almost immediately, like
an answer learnt by heart and have left through the door, striding down the
kerb in long steps.
Satyajeet felt sad at heart. He
couldn’t believe his mother went to meet his grandparents without him. He sat
down at one corner and wept silently, wiping his cheeks with the heel of his
palm. And all of a sudden with Riya at her singing classes, he felt extremely
lonely in that big house. He shuddered with fear every time he heard the sniff
of his own crying breath, trapped between the walls of a painfully empty place.
He stood up and slipped out of the house. Running down the pavement, he crossed
the road and went to the other side where queue of vendors sat out in the sun
selling their goods. He kept running, his face devoid of colors and eyes
terrorized, as if a monster was behind him and stopped till he couldn’t run
anymore. His chest throbbing for air and the more he looked into the scorching
distance for a familiar face, the more he regretted doing so. He kept looking for
his father through the brawl of the occupied lane and at last dejected, his
throat pleading for water and air, his body sodden with sweat, that he walked
over and sat on the marble stairs of a mosque at the end of the road. In the
rare quiet moments of the premises, he heard the hissing voice of someone
behind. He had turned over his shoulders to get a view of the cool, quiet
insides of the mosque, where light from all corners reflected from inscribed
pillars studded with gemstones and fell upon a few faces before his eyes. The
moment fetched him like a drill switched to life, cutting through the walls of
his heart. The ground shifted beneath his feet and the lane ahead, narrowed in
his eyes to a coarse hem rope and kept tightening around his throat till he
couldn’t breathe anymore. Till he felt he died.
A rancid taste of hatred rose up his
throat, swinging him back to the present as he remembered the last painting of
his father, Riya told him about. He left the courtyard the very moment. His gut,
a stinking sewer of shame, betrayal and scowl that he ran up the stairs to his
father’s room. The light of the night slowly receding from his sweat stained
back as he leapt and turned at the head of the stairwell. He had then ransacked
through a pile of paintings, before unclipping one from the frame and threw it in disgust. He took a scissor and started chopping the painting in pieces,
all the while murmuring, “Why dad? Why you did this?” before the sheet was
reduced to a fist full of pieces scattered all across the table. Cold wind
blew through the ajar window, turning the pieces on their spine as he remembers
Rukshar’s call in the morning. About the half-truth he is yet to know. About
how his life could still have its share of redemption. About how the betrayal
he carried in his heart for all these years, could still be reduced if not
obliterated all together. He believed her then, he believes her know, as he
perfectly collects all the pieces and puts in a plastic bag. His eyes melting
down his face with years of agony and a glimmer of choice that could probably
set everything right. Probably.
He clings to the choice with his
heart around it as he sets up to meet Rukshar in Peshawar. He sets up for his
share of truth his life now tortured him to reverberate with.
*****
2001.
Peshawar, Pakistan.
This was one of those rare moments
when he felt thankful for having a US citizenship; you can get the visa to any
land on this planet without much of a hassle. The world somehow considers the
US people trustworthy. He remembers signing the embassy form, citing ‘Personal
reasons’ for the trip while it was his life, his very existence that dangled
from the cliff.
He took a cab from the airport,
passing onto the chauffer in a piece of paper, the address Rukshar had told him
over the phone. It was the setting of winter and the wide sky that leaned over
chains of mountains, was dull grey. Blocks of clouds shifted over the peaks in
the breeze, revealing small villages along the slope shrouded in a curtain of
mist. The roads were only partly clear and the traffic slowed down to the
trundle of pedestrians. Men had long beards, some dark and some red. They wore
long silk kurtas and moccasins, their heads covered in embroidered Taqiyah caps of several colors,
resembling the traditional Islamic culture. Women were mostly in burqa, their
faces screened by a thin clothing tied to the back of their heads. Peshawar was
supposedly the oldest city in Pakistan, over 3000 years, as we made our way
through the aisle of tall, sagging buildings that leaned over the unwinding
roads. Their shadows flickering on the asphalt ahead of us.
He leans his head back on the seat,
the ache of winter wind slapping across his face that he closes his eyes and
imagines Rukhshar’s frame after 28 years long. He remembers her shoulder length
hair pressed beneath a headband and assumes it must be longer, more denser now,
romantically gliding on her back as she walked. The images of her golden brown
eyes, the contours rimmed with black like monsoon clouds steepening at the
horizon, fills him with pleasure. Her slender arms that had tangled with his on
the sand dune that evening when they first kissed and became each other’s
forever. He feels drifting away from the present in her comfort, knowing that
she is just few miles away, beautiful as ever. Sleep dims his vision and he
rests back, sleeping, breathing in sedately the sweet taste of her lips in his
chest.
*****
An hour or so later he is seated at
the waiting area of a house in the locality of Habotabad in Peshawar, sipping
clear water from the edge of a crystal glass. The ceiling is low and
surrounding packed with closely standing houses, their walls painted in bright
colors as he observes so many faces, at different windows, encompassed in their
daily lives and smiles at the irony of people defining various thing, such as a
pin or an ant crawling along the wall, to be the smallest existing thing in the
world when it is the very roll and turn of human beings day to day life that is
the tiniest. Just a few square feet of areas, few kilometers of land and
thousands of life silently prospered and struggled in the shoes of their own
mediocrities. Cooking smell drifted from the window in the backdrop of
conversing voices and somewhere in a small second of waiting in that compact
community, he saw Rukshar emerge through the door in a pistachio green pathan
suit and approach him. Her face adorning the silent expression of a thirsty
traveler who just gulped water. Revived. Relieved. Escorted from a torment that
was getting unbearable.
She sits across him in straight back
wooden chair and it was then that Satyajeet, for the first time in twenty eight
years, felt the void that surfaced every single moment of his life till then,
find a healing. She looks down at him and the gaze was but the tilt of sunlight
over a sleeping garden, suddenly erupting with a cocktail of fragrances.
Streaks of grey visible in the tight wound of her hair through the translucent
veil that draped her head. Their lips were quiet while their hearts became the
meeting of oceans, boisterous and roaring, bursting with enormous strength and
energy. Their silent gazes pierced their bodies and touched their soul, sucking
at their pains that never went away and tormented them each night with
treacherous virtues. They swallowed the long, lingering agony, their souls feeding the
other with morsels of starved desire and their hearts clinked like fine glassware in an
evening party as they drank from the champagne that flowed. In those silent
moments, over everything that was yet to come, they became one with each other,
like how the evening fused with the night sky and patiently waited for a
dawn.
“I promised to complete you and I
won’t move away from my words.” She said.
“My completion is no different from
yours, Rukshar.” He paused. “We are divers of ocean with a common oxygen tank.”
And Rukshar leans in from her chair,
smiling, touching the top of his palm with her long, pointed fingers and the
very gesture had Satyajeet travelling back into the tunnel of time. To the
bright afternoon on the steps of the mosque. To the day, he felt he died.
*****
“Your mother didn’t went to see your
grandparents, she went to stay with them and never return. I hope you realize
that by now. For years she lived in a lie, ignorant of everything and selflessly
loved your father to the core. Their marriage of twenty five years was her being
sucked into the delusionary pool of love while she worked her days with her
eyes closed to the truth. It was less of love and more of being forgiving. I
believe she knew it beforehand but waited, hoping he would confess himself of
his guilt and then they could pull it off from there. But one day she ran out
of being patient and being hopeful and she parted ways.”
Satyajeet was quiet, apprehension
bursting in his eyes.
“Your father fell in love with an
Iranian woman during his days in the art college. She was an outspoken,
qualified and an extremely good looking woman. Her eyes had the glitter of a
hundred diamonds placed in the path of light. Her face so radiant that every
colorless object in the cosmos seem to envy her. Her body, a sculpture of flesh
and bones, where beauty stood and bowed in praise. But they couldn’t marry each
other as families raised cultural barriers and she wasn’t the one who would
elope to embark a journey that is a dream for every woman. Eventually, things
halted at its place and your father, pressed upon by his family, got married to
woman from his community. But then, do you think love is such an easily
stoppable force?? It flourished beyond the realms of his so-called marriage, in
his heart and soul, in the themes of his painting, all the while hurting him
with a conscious guilt he couldn’t part ways with.”
It was as if the room had fallen off
some invisible orbits and swayed in the outer space. He struggled to hold his
mind and the hatred that he had subdued the other night while chopping his
father’s last painting, was kicking hard in his stomach now. It was as if he
was losing his ways over himself. It was as if every bit of light was being
consumed by an inevitable darkness around him and he drifted and drifted farther
away to the dark, uncommunicable corners of the infinite space that Rukshar’s
words had started to form around him.
“It was all planned Satya. Only we
were the ignorant victims. When your mother fed you, I was silently growing in
my mother’s womb, unaware that I will take birth as the outcome of a disowned
love. Months after my birth, one day while I cried in her lap, hungry, she sat
quiet with me and unlike other days, did not raise me to her breasts. I
snatched. I stabbed. I yelled. Yet, she sat quiet. Staring down at me. A gentle
smile on her full lips, until soon I saw a stream of foam trickle from the corner
of her lips and the smile faded from her blue face.”
“She drunk poison, I later came to
know. She couldn’t bear it anymore and how I wish I would have sucked at her
tits that day. At least, I wouldn’t have been the prisoner of this deserted
life today.” She breathed deep before resuming.
“We were seen by someone that evening
at the bank of the river and your father made a hard choice before it got too
late. Everyone knew about his affair with the Iranian lady but no one spoke
much about it, all thanks to his dignified position in the society. A
celebrated artist. Who would have believed such stuff? And before things got
out of hand and his son, Satyajeet, would have blotted his face with stain of
shame by starting a relationship with his illegitimate daughter, he sorted
things out. The day your mother went away, I was lured into the nearby mosque
and made to put on a wedding veil. I was still to figure out what was waiting
for me. And it all came cleared before my eyes, like the fog receding from the
landscape at the touch of sunshine when I saw your father walk into the mosque
and pick up the holy Quran.”
Satyajeet bit on his lips hard,
drinking his own blood as she continued to speak. Agony unraveled in the
cadence of her voice and her eyes screamed into the never receding darkness of the
past.
“I closed my eyes for a moment and
tears spilled on the mirror before my face. When I opened, it was in the mirror
beneath the veil that I had seen the crooked smile of Nawaz, the guy who called
for prayers in the very mosque, the guy who had lured me there and made me put
on the veil and with whom I will be married to for the rest of my life with the
utterance of the last word of the verse from the Quran and had let go, for one
last time, for forever, my life, my choices, my desires and my happiness, dwindling
away into the woods of conspiracy, lamenting for a bite of justice.”
“In this very life of mine, that
began with breach of loyalty and was finally locked up by cruel conspiracy,
somewhere in between you happened and I couldn’t summon death altogether. Yes,
Satyajeet, you fell in love with your illegitimate sister.”
*****
A musky evening fell across the skies
of Peshawar and they say sat there silent. Their fates entwined. Their hearts
weeping.
“You are coming with me. No matter
what. You are just coming with me.”
“But….Nawaz…” she spoke. Her voice a
feeble murmur.
“I will deal with him…”
And just then, Nawaz, a short, stout
man emerged into the balcony where they sat together. He wore a linen kurta
with visible streaks of grey hair spilling over the buttons at his chest. His
face had the complexion of soil and round, bloated eyes sat hunched below his
bushy brows as he walked up and sat across Satyajeet.
“I want to take Rukshar with me…” He
was straight into business. The cut on his lips, stained with dried blood and
hands closed tightly across his chest.
A loud ironic laugh then rang in the
air, “You must be kidding…”
“I am going to take Rukshar with me.
Is that clear?” Satyajeet repeated. His eyes narrowed and evoking hatred.
Nawaz leans in, his face suddenly stifled
with determination. A weary crudeness propped up his tight lips.
“Do you even wish to get out of this
place alive?” He spoke narrowing his eyes that inspired terror and sliding his
hand inside the pockets of his kurta pulled out a 9mm pistol and placed right
upon the crystal saucer that lay at the center of the table.
“Just leave, else….” He paused,
leaning back into the chair and a cruel smile then cut across his tanned face.
A quivering calm packed with hatred,
grief and terror was just starting to freeze in the long balcony that Satyajeet
had kicked at the table, sending it pushing against Nawaz’s chest. The saucer
crashed to the ground with a shatter as he leaned and picked up the gun. He had then pulled the muzzle back,
loading the bullets back into the chamber and aimed it at Nawaz from a feet’s
distance.
“You are such a bastard. I wish your
mom had kept her legs closed."
The succeeding moment he saw the
darkened Peshawar skyline against a flash of spark in his eyes. A thundering
roar rocked the place, slowly reducing to vibrating din beneath the low ceiling
balcony. Birds blew out of the turret and fluttered away into the night sky and a thin plume of smoke tilted away from the muzzle as Rukshar sat across the floor,
frozen.
Disclaimer - **All characters and names of institutions appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to person, living or dead, or the existence of those very institutions, is purely coincidental. I also do not intend to hurt any religious or personal sentiments.**
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