THE LAST PORTRAIT. Part 3

Love is the courage that stifles our muscles with rage, for one last fightback when all else had failed. It is an emotional strength that we choose to derive from our heart, sucking at our feelings, to get back onto our feet when reality had cracked up our bones and left us limp. It is the sweet, ineffable hope of kissing the face of the women we love that tightens our fingers to a hard, unforgivable fist, ready to blow up everything that stands between us to destiny and attempts to conspire against us. It is at once the alarming touch of sympathy that would make the devil crawl out of the human shelter, and just for that, for love and its completion, for desire and its sensuousness, that one wouldn’t feel shame drowning human instincts in the bloodshed of redemption and hold up a gun against the very world to win your lady in the wrapping safety of your arms. Love, for everything else, at the edge of attainment, needs a human soul inside a devil’s body.   

Satyjayeet wonders, standing beneath the black-baked sky of Peshawar that drizzles over him with pellets of snow as he struggles to get over the images of last evening. The shatter of the saucer. Nawaz pressed against the table. The loading of the bullets. And the spark of fire that he had seen flicker in Rukshar’s eyes, the moment his finger receded on the trigger. It incessantly rolled before his eyes, like a sad Ghazal on repeat in a broken lover’s music retreat.  And today, no sooner than the light of day rose up the morose sky to engulf the night, that he had set out in his rubber boots, walking into the mist to the bus stop. A part of him knows, like the truth that had stared from her eyes and stayed unblinking the other evening in the backdrop of a loud fire of a bullet, that Rukshar would come and together they would board a bus back to their destiny, they wrote twenty eight years back.

He is standing beneath the shade of a crumbling bus stop, listening to the hammering of ice crystals that rained on the roof, as gusts of strong winds swept down from the far end of the terrain, swirling in clouds of mist and rattled the dilapidated stand with a shudder. Endless stretch of land rise and unwind on either side around him, immaculate beneath heaps of snow, guarded at the distance by the mighty range of Karakoram, as the chain looms high at the horizon, eating away the vision of sky that towered beyond. Leafless tress stand across the terrain, bordering small villages as thick smoke rise from above their huts and sail into the dim sky; their bark cracked, their branches dripping snow.

He is wearing a striped, woolen sweater draped over by a button down leather jacket and a woolen scarf that is held by a lazy knot at his throat, the hem beating on his back in the wind. He has his hands tucked into a pair of brown gloves, the material at the tip of his fingers thinning from the hard washes as he leans ahead, looking into the hazy drizzle of snow for Rukshar. His vapored breath splitting through his mouth in dense fumes. He stood there for quiet sometime, biting onto the dazzling flames of hope that he imagines enkindled in the snowy pastures of his reality and feels warm, until soon he sees her approach him through the downpour and felt the belief that he had stayed clung to, beat in his chest with the ferocity of a drum in an orchestra. He watches her stiff, sturdy walk down the uneven terrain, the heel of her boots ploughing through the snow and a briefcase held in the firm grip of her slender hands. He had walked down her way and have lend his arm in an unsaid possession of love, lifting her briefcase that she had packed heavy with all the necessities of her life and have come along his way to embark on a new journey, they had been longing and dreaming for every single day of those cruel twenty eight years of their lives and led her to the wait stop.

Suddenly he feels the warmth in his heart die at the touch of hatred that seems to rise in his gut. His eyes narrowed beneath a trifle shade of anger and his body contracting like a leopard behind the bushes eyeing at his prey, when he saw Nawaz trailing behind Rukshar. He has his shoulders flung over a crutch that digs into the snow laced earth, leaving tiny potholes that is soon surfaced by the restless downpour. His left leg plastered in white with visible stains of blood that seem to ooze from the wound of bullet last evening, adding to his walk a strangely twisted gait, all the while leaning over the crutches. Satyajeet lifts his face to Nawaz at once and he looks away from him, averting his eyes towards the lurking chain of mountains that rose quiet and jagging across the horizon, like a monster in his siesta.

It was when Rukshar and Satyajeet have boarded the bus that shrieked to halt on the thin asphalt road rolling down the terrain, that the grimace across Satyajeet’s face have relaxed to a calmer expression. They walked down the aisle of dozing passengers wrapped in thick woolens and took their seat in the last row. Satyajeet pushed the window aside and a stream of icy wind blew in, brushing past his face like the edge of a blade being dragged across his skin. He squinted to the agony and looked at Nawaz who stood beneath the ratting tin shade, hunched over his crutches, and it was then for the first time he saw in his eyes, the burden of shame. His steady, unwavering stare fanned by thin grey lashes, seem to plead before him a mercy which he himself knows he is undeserving off and in that subtle moment of deciding to let go a grievance or sticking to it for a lifetime, Satyajeet remembers Rukshar’s tears on the mirror from behind the doors of the mosque and he couldn’t gather himself to submit to his plea altogether. The day comes back reeling before his eyes, clawing his heart with an unbearable ache accompanied by hatred and he withdraws his eyes from Nawaz’s face.

The bus starts with a gurgling noise, stuttering awake the passengers and started to roll down the steep slope across the face of Karakoram. Rukshar didn’t look back for once and as he pulled the window shut against the pelting of snow, Nawaz started to recede from the window. The grey sky and the mountains and the snow, drowning in the swamp of shame in his eyes as they picked speed and everything outside started to blur in their eyes, dissolving away into the mist that hung low. It was when they rose up the steep roads cutting through the frozen neck of Karakoram and Habotabad, floated beneath them, going deeper into the suffering and snow of winter, that Satjayeet had given away in his heart the grievance for Nawaz and still knew that he is not after all freed. For Rukshar’s mercy won’t find his soul ever - be it in a slice of sunlight on his grave or a drop of rain.

*****

“Were you sure that you will recognize me when you came to meet me after all these years?” she asked him.

“Love does strange things to our recognition and somewhere behind our eyes, in our heart, we secretly know how the other person looks after all these years.” He had said. “Despite the distance that prevailed, there was always a part of us that stayed with the other. A part of your soul stayed with me and a part of my soul stayed with you. They looked after us and kept note of how we grew and changed at the turn of every single day. It woke us up, fed us and combed our hair when we were too broken to do anything. And likewise, we were aware about each other through the length of time and lived as a whole despite being apart and alone. Love, you know, Rukshar, is this simple act of living with the soul of your beloved when you cannot touch, feel and kiss the body.”

She had squeezed his fingers on her lap and smiled at him with her head tilted to the side. The incomplete world of Satyajeet for the first time then felt the epiphany of completeness. She had then shown him the very painting he had gifted her on his birthday, sitting atop the windblown dune by the river Ganga beneath a fading evening sky. Rukshar lying on the grass. The poetry book propped on her chest. And a butterfly hovering over her head. She had asked him to promise her that he will draw another sketch of her and Satyajeet had broken his stare, looking away beyond the window and the passing trees, faltering to give her his word as that fateful night in New York comes rolling back to him, fifteen years after he had been there and settled himself as a sketch artist. Rukshar holds up his face in the hollow of her palm as he delves into the agony of that cursed night.

His face pressed against the cracked windshield of the car. Blood gushing from his skull. A savage pain rising from his back, wrecking his nerves, his bones. A blinding light dimming in his unconscious eyes. And his mangled body being carried away on a stretcher, soaked in blood.

Rukshar weeps quietly as tears fall from her eyes and collects on the pink of her palm, like still white drops of morning dew on rose petals.

*****

Stabbed with the knife of hatred at the heart and left bleeding with loss for a lifetime, Satyajeet hardly talked to his father after that day at the mosque. He finished his schooling and his interest in art having reached its zenith by then, applied for his graduation courses abroad and much to his admiration, he was picked by one of the best colleges in New York. Each day in that house with his father was like accepting the reality and moving ahead with it, as if nothing wrong had happened, as if his life was still the same beneath the dreading quiet of the house. He couldn’t stand that. He couldn’t keep numb and absorb the aftermath and therefore the chance to get admitted in a college abroad for his further studies, was the best that he could have asked for to lessen the impact of the present that was slowly and gradually hammering him to pieces. Who on earth would keep quiet to the loss of his love and accept it like it was the just right thing to be done? He did, but then silence is a tortured man’s revenge and as his flight took off from Calcutta that day, he pledged to himself to never forgive his father.

He graduated as a scholar and started establishing himself as a sketch artist in that enormous city throbbing with life. He bought his own house in Manhattan and worked hard, studying and exposing himself to the knowledge of various art forms so as to further develop his skills. Everything was just at the right place, yet he couldn’t surface in his life a deep void that seem to draw into its dark depths every bit of prosperity that he worked to attain. He somehow couldn’t free himself from the pain of a wound, only he knew existed. It bled forever, all the while swelling to an infectious sore in its place, every time he lied alone in his bed and cried through the night. He did receive calls from his father on Sunday morning but then the moment, he heard his voice he quietly lowered the receiver into the cradle and got back to work. Rings followed one after another but they all died unresponsive, echoing between the walls of his foyer, like his love that wore away into the silent acceptance of the wrong, beneath the heaps of grudge and scowl in his heart.

One day while he was driving back home from work, a trailer speeding against a one way lane had ran into his car with a shattering roar. The impact threw him off his seat onto the dashboard. He had smashed his skull open. Blood ran in rivulets down his body, soaking into his cloth as his legs twisted into a knot in the arch of the steering wheel. He lay there smashed and bleeding till the ambulance had arrived and pulled out his distorted body, lifting it to the stretcher. He remembers the agonizing pain that tore through his back before he closed his eyes to the sedative and passed away beneath the shimmering night sky of New York. It took him a couple of surgery to resurrect his crushed spine and shattered bones as he regained consciousness after a week in the confines of an Intensive Care Unit, breathing though a life support. His limbs strapped in plasters and a multiple drips connected through needles pushed at his wrist. Even though the doctors said that he will back to work in mere two months, he strangely felt something odd about himself. Something disturbing. Something unfulfilling. And somehow he did not feel the same person as he was, before the trailer had ran into him.

Months later while he sat down by his desk to work, he felt he couldn’t grip the pencil. Every time he lifted it up and had pressed the nib against the paper, it had spilled out of his grip and rolled down the page. With several attempts when he could finally grip the pencil firmly, he had attempted to pull it across the page in long straight lines and it was then he had discovered the strangeness in him. He had consoled himself believing it to be an aftermath of a near death experience and that a meet with his doctor will fix the issue. But then, day after day as he had sat down at his desk and held onto his pencil, dragging it along the paper, it had only given rise to squiggly, curly lines rippling across the page against a straight, flat stroke that he intended to draw. He saw his doctor and he had said, it was due to a heavy injury to his lower motor nerve and that often such injuries take a lifetime to heal unless the person is lucky enough to be blessed with some sort of miracle. Satyajeet had sat by his desk, sorrowed and dejected, months after months only to succeed at the squiggly lines. Every time he had tried to steady his hand, strengthening his grip over the pencil, he had felt an invisible force dragging his arm to the left and a numbness creeping up his muscles, forcing him to stray away from the path of his stroke and soon he knew that his career as a sketch artist had come to its extremely fateful end. It was then that he had applied for the job of professor in the Hastings College of Art and helped himself on its way.

*****

Calcutta.

Satyajeet is standing at the courtyard of his house, gently leaning against the barren compound wall. A dribble of moonlight is caught in the sliding curls of his hair as he raises his head to the sky and blows into the dark, a thick puff of cigarette smoke. It rises above and catching the glide of the wind, drifts apart like an opening ripple, lending to the night air a pungent smell of tobacco and tar. The sky above his head is bisected by the branches of trees that rise in the courtyard. The dome of night heaven shimmering with the adorning stars, visible through the roll of the leaves, as if a celebration have erupted up there and everyone, each of the stars danced in their shoes, waving the torch of frolic. As he stands there gazing at the festivity of the celestial bodies, his eyes dragged into their sockets, sore with the wounds of truth and trauma, he feels an indifferent completion within himself. He closes his eyes, the twirl of smoke rising above him and imagines himself at the heart of one such celebration and drifts along the tide of happiness. He remembers Rukshar in this very courtyard, lying beneath the overlapping canopies of leaning tress, the brown of her eyes majestically gleaming and awash in the blue of inspiration while she reads from the book on her chest. And the next moment, he watches her innocent frame, sleeping quiet in his first floor bedroom and the wave of her hair spilled back on the pillow. He watches the contours of her body, rise and dip in filling breaths beneath a cotton sheet. Her face, straight and aglow, even in the sleep, like the crystal waters of a handsome river with moonbeams splashed over it. Satyajeet remembers of the years that had kept them apart, of the time that had crawled out of its bosom, minute by minute, day by day, and had split his heart and soul with the pain of longing. He recounts fate as the untimely downpour that eroded the earth of his love at once and left it gathering its shape for three decades, before finally saplings of contentment have pushed up the soil, watered by hardships and the stretch of the field dazzles, for the first time in many years, in a shade of lively green. He ambles up the stairs in the dark and standing at the door of her room, admires her in her peaceful sleep. Calm as a forest at night, aired by her long deep breaths. He at once wishes to lie down beside her. Wrap her in the width of his embrace, like winter mist pressing two mountains together in the sky. Hide his face in the folds of her neck and taste the night sweat on her chin. Breathe in the sweet smell of her breath and drink the succulent juice of her lips. Look into her eyes through the night and watch the sun take the sky through the valley of her brows. Set sail in the tumultuous wave of her charcoal hair and lose his way in her - his dreams, his destination, his everything and be each other’s on the lap of a distant shore, where the ocean breaks on the sand into froth and the city rises in glamorous monuments through lanes and alleys.  

   

There was a power failure across the city and men, awoke from sleep, hurdled on the narrow lanes beneath. Their shadows overlapped on the pavement, as they walked in the dark, talking in loud voices with cigarette smoke spiraling above their pressed heads. Their chatter nudged by the howl of dogs from down the lanes, as they scampered down, chasing distant voices and lights that came floating along with the calm of the night. Satyajeet soon finds himself in his father’s room, staggering along like a somnambulist, knocking against a shelf in the dark as thick books toppled onto the floor with a thud. He lights a candle and pulls out from the drawer, the plastic bag containing the chopped pieces of his father’s last portrait. He then stretches out a blank sheet across the table and plasters it with liquid glue, smearing the borders with the press of his fingers as the flame of the candle gleam in his eyes against the sticky wetness. He then fondles through the pieces in the bag and starts aligning them, one after another on the blank sheet. Each stuck piece, picked and pressed against the sheet, was like a shard of his shattered dreams, once again claiming completeness of the otherwise blank horizon of his life. He goes on with it, slowly, piece after piece with his translucent night shirt clung to his back in sweat. It was tedious work and why wouldn’t it be? Acclaiming your dream and building wishes on the heart of ruin takes a whole lifetime to be done and here he was trying to put the shambles of three decades together between the passage of one dark, humid night. He is bent over the table, the portrait walking towards a tattered completion, the night wind whistling through the window and the candle slowly wearing away with blobs of wax hardening at its foot, as the flame reflect in a muffled shin across his sweaty face.

He murmurs beneath his breath, “I knew it then. I know it now and I wish to tell you someday that it was but the anthem of our relationship.” He slips up the last piece in its place, remembering the day Rukshar had asked him to repeat the poetry after her and rambles in a dreamy voice, the last three lines of the poem that took him all this while to understand and read with the lips of his heart. “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.”

He succeeds now and in the demure light of the candle that warms the room in a soft, dying glow, he watches on the table for the first time, the very portrait of his own life. A young couple leaning into each other, their hands locked, her one leg raised behind her in the air and his eyes on her face, in the backdrop of crisscrossing lanes and a mosque at the far end. That was all his life was, like the very portrait, complete yet broken, a beautiful mosaic, the pieces un-united from each other by thin lines of crack, supposedly of fate and destiny, of shame and agony, of longing and love, of what happened eventually and still feels like it didn’t.

*****

6 months later.

New York.

It is a bright summer day and the university is closed for its scheduled vacation. The skyline glitters like a mold of gold with the light emerging and disappearing between the splendorous rise of buildings across the belt of the city. They, Rukshar and Satyajeet, are by the shores of the Hudson River for a day out together. Sail boats cruise along the water, swaying with the wave, like butterflies fleeting across a fragrant garden. A dozen more is moored by the side, their deck ablaze under the sun. Kids run around chasing each other on the golden-white strip of sand that slips away beneath your feet like velvet moss in rain. Their parents stretched out on beach chairs, sipping cold beer from Styrofoam cups, tanning under the sun, ocassionally, lazily, flipping through a book which they slept open with on their faces, shielding away from the sun’s glare.

Rukshar is right by the water, sitting with her legs stretched out in the front. Her hands flat by her side, gripping onto the wet sand that rise through her fingers. A wave seem to approach her from the distance, triggering an innocent uproar amid the kids, as they laugh and run towards it. She is quiet and unmoved there. A slice of the sun on her nape. The wave crashes at her feet with a gurgle and rushes in, pooling around her hips in a puddle, before receding back, carrying from beneath her palm a sheet of loose sand as she trembles and balances herself, letting out a gentle laughter with the Hudson ringing in her voice and the brooding heaven, accomplished in her drenched eyes.

Satyajeet is at the back, hunched on a boulder, all the while watching her heave back and forth with every tiny bits of emotion. He lowers his head once and captures on the sand her jovial frame in the backdrop of a gold sky and the blue water that seem to kiss her toes and recede in its journey. He draws with his finger, turning the sand beneath his nails in long, flowy lines. He draws for the first time in fifteen years. First, her hair that drops down her back, the silky sand caught in her strands. Then her eyes that possess all the seasons of the planet. Then her nose that rise on her face like a soft, straight hill. And lastly her lips, whose thin stretch of smile can light up windblown towns in a moment. He smiles at the drawing for a while before drifting off to a calming sleep beside it. He smiles at how the waves won’t reach up here to wash it away. He smiles at how his love will remain as a shining emblem upon the sands of time. He smiles at the eternity that he now sees waving at him, summoning him from behind the clouds. He smiles and he smiles at the wonders of it all.  

---THE END---

Author - Sobhan Pramanik

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.**

THE LAST PORTRAIT. Part 2

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.

Author  - Sobhan Pramanik

   To be continued....

Part - 3

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.**

THE LAST PORTRAIT. Part 1

October 2001.
Manhattan, New York.

It was just yesterday that the sun was beaming at its pinnacle and the sky, a crease-less sheet of blue overhead, stretched across the wide bed of heaven between the infinite horizons. Pillows of clouds rose stacked and the sun with its back against it, comfortably shone from its adobe. And the light was just brilliant, like on any late summer day, like spools of silk threads being unreeled from the sky, as they lower and entangle between the branches of the trees, glistening upon the leaves, slowly waking up sleep laden streets early morning, quiet between the high rises of Manhattan and reflect ferociously, like shards of broken mirror scattered across the face of Hudson, as it flows in its blinding shine of molten gold and silver with a million mini balls of fire lit at the surface.
And just the very next day, everything is changed at the turn of a conspiring night, he wonders. Unexpected, like a bend along the roads of fate, the city experiences its first snowfall for the season. 
Somewhere, at the heart of the truth that only we seem to know, our life too is an array of all such bewilderment, interspaced by our own undivided reactions of joy and sorrow, of shame and hate and of love and the longing that follows.