The Vagrant Trust

‘You’ve all my mother’s trust.’

I heard the words come off her mouth, as easily and instinctively, as pleasantries exchanged in a greeting: without any reflection or consideration, unrehearsed and spoken raw, the way it first originated in her mind. The way truth is spoken perhaps, as I believed – on the face and without a flinch.

We were seated at the promenade of a buzzing Calcutta theatre. The evening show had just ended and people boisterously poured out of the gates like jets of water shooting from the broken edge of gushing water pipe: chattering and hooting on top of their voices; their faces ecstatic. Children, quick to adapt the antics of the protagonist, had their flimsy glasses tucked to the back of their necks; women shied under their coquettish smile imagining the bare-chested, beefy, ageing hero setting the world alright on screen; while men, as they seemed with their lurid faces, discussed the heroine in explicit details.

For the initial few minutes as the mob ran amok within the premises, we stalled our conversation and sat with our gazes affixed on an abandoned fountain pool where our shadows brushed at the temples. I leaned slightly to my left to check if the shadows belied, and felt her hair brush my cheek. She withdrew, smiling; and I watched the shadows part on the dusty tiled bed. A colony of creepers unrestrained, thrived in the crevasses.

‘She was asking so many questions. Gawd!’ she declared, animatedly holding her head. ‘Where are you? When’ll you be home? It’s getting late. Blah Blah!’

She had just ended the call with her anxious mother, that a solemn smile, like a ripple growing on a lake as the stone of concern slowly sank, I watched, quickly conquer her face. 

‘I just told her I was with you.’

Until then we had no formal acquaintances of what could suffice for the necessary bit of information required to placate her worries concerning her daughter’s convenience on a day out with a boy she had known only as far as her eyes could make out from the second-floor balcony of their house: leaned over the sidewall with her eyes spread out in wait on the dim alley sweeping up to the entrance, as I walked her home a couple of times from our evening classes; or rode up early morning on my bicycle with a roll of notes from classes she missed (damn the migraine) and waited outside the porch, until she emerged through the door with sleep imbued eyes, and unkempt hair to collect them from me under her mother’s gaze, affixed on us from the balcony, spreading wet clothes on taut nylon ropes. To let her worries, rest with just one statement, that she was with me, and contently ending the call, given our limited exposure to each other’s lives was a little too much to believe, even while the idea of my love making inroads with her had my heart bursting into confetti. Or, had she picked the changed air of my body language, of me missing steps and fumbling with words while I was with her? Was the auburn glee in my eyes, as I waited at the porch with my head turned to the door, desperate to behold her daughter once in the garb of lending study notes, busted by a mother’s unfailing instincts? Was there finally someone in this world, except my own smitten heart, who knew how my bones became water and my head a raging sandstorm, abandoned of consciousness and thoughts trailing skyward, every time she lifted her smiling eyes to me?

We had bunked our classes to watch a Nolan rendition at Matrix, Calcutta, and it wasn’t until I arrived at the theatre teeming with cine-goers under its low domed roof, and the air abuzz with chants of ‘bhai’, with jostling bodies in long winding queues braving the humidity before dust-laden, gigantic pedestal fans as they made way to a shabby ticket counter, did I realize that we were at the wrong place, expecting a movie as foreign and distant to their knowledge as sense and artistic credibility to the movie being screened.

‘How could you even imagine they playing a sci-fi here?’ she confronted me at the desolate kerb of the cinema, where, disappointed, we were sitting down to while away the evening.

‘Sometimes they do.’ I shrugged. ‘Hindi dubs.’

‘You came in for Hindi dub?’ she asked with stretched eyes.

‘Nothing like DiCaprio mouthing Hindi lines in American accent.’

She plunged her elbow to the side of my stomach in response to my mirthless retaliation, as we sat down on concrete steps flanking an ornamental fountain that had long lost its use. A mesh of rusted water pipes ran around a tubular sprinkler with a dead motor at its centre. In its nooks were nests of stray birds with reeds of fodder jutting out of the weave and unguarded eggs clustered in the hollow. Its dusty blue floor of broken tiles was carpeted with decaying sheets of leaves that ruffled and sung with the afternoon breeze. With the city at work on a weekday, the road outside was relatively empty as the market strip idled and napped under the mild August sun. The distant rumble of tram carriages occasionally floated in, and vanished before it grew in prominence. A groaning ambassador flew past the gates tilting the balance of quiet, that she pulled me by the shoulder and planted her lips on mine. There on the steps of a scraped fountain, and in broad daylight, with a room full of people at our back in their matinee, we led ourselves across boundaries our minds built and bodies broke. Till she pulled me by my shoulder, till I saw her luscious mouth close over mine, till my arms very reluctantly crossed on her back and our breaths mated; we were only friends. A friend who could seize my senses with a look, whose mother trusted her safety with me, and whom whenever I looked at, even thought of, regardless of the circumstances, life felt like a delightful, more purposeful voyage. We must have sat there long, and not until did we hear the scurry of footsteps land back on the kerb, and the clouds darkened between astride electric wires running high on the poles, did we care to sit apart. She checked her phone and it revealed a dozen missed calls from her mother. She called back and was subjected to a flurry of questions. That was when she said she was with me and startlingly, no other question followed. She slid the phone back into her sling and smiling, stood up to dust the back of her denim. I followed her down the steps, wading through littered butts of tickets towards the exit.

We took a bus home standing by the barred window beside her, our hands inches apart on the same iron grille, as evening flashed past us outside in frames of dust and smoke. I watched her in silence: breathing sedately down her chin, locks of her hair rippling in the wind by her face, and her eyes averted from mine, rested lonely on the smoggy horizon. I wanted to talk about it: put out my feelings dressed in choicest of words, talk about how I lose my step and fail my words every time she looks at me; how all this had been raging inside me but could never muster enough audacity to pursue them; how she was everything that looked and felt like love in the dreams I had so far been weaving in her longing. But nothing came out. Just a smile that tasted like her breath, as the bus lurched to a halt at our destination.

It was close to 9 in the evening when we got off and was walking her down the familiar lanes towards her house. She was instructed to be home by 7, no matter what, but we had flouted that ultimatum by a good two hours. I expected her to be animated, panic, be afraid for what would be awaiting back home, absolutely anything to break the silence that hung on us throng the entire course of our journey. But there was nothing, and that in turn cemented my faith about her parents being okay about her being out with me, about us, about my love that I was certain she would confess any moment soon.

She walked a few paces ahead of me: through shadows of buildings leaning into each other, crossing arcs of saffron light from street lamps that lay washed in mud suggesting a passed spell of rain, past the municipal trucks parked to the side and taking right from a square past a pack of stray dogs maddened and howling, gnawing at the litters, headed straight to her house. I lifted my eyes from her back to the second-floor balcony where her mother stood: bent over the balustrade under a diminutive lamp, chin in her palm and waiting for her daughter to be home. I waited as she ambled up the stairs, and looked up to her mother. She returned me my prized smile of acknowledgement, and at that moment, it sufficed for every word of love and promise I couldn’t say or hear from her daughter. A heart won with trust, I believed, was a big achievement to start with, as I walked home with ambrosial dreams of an accomplished love.

It’d been six years since that day of walking her home late in the night, that I caught sight of her at a grand Durga Puja pandal in central Calcutta this year. Resplendent in a crimson saree with her undulating curls left open on the back and doubling over in an impressive laughter. I glanced at my watch; it was well past 2. She should have been home by 7, I told myself, and almost impulsively started striding towards her. Until soon I watched a man step in from the dark and hold her by the waist, joining in her laughter. She then flipped out her phone and cheerfully, started talking. I watched her lips move in a familiar murmur. I remembered her words, ‘You’ve all my mother’s trust.’

From a distance, I watched them walk away, with old trust retiring to bed in new hearts.

Author: Sobhan Pramanik

   

A Quiet World, A Better World

Imagine all the people you ever came across staying back, never leaving your side, a world without goodbyes or heartbreaks, of all friendships and acquaintances retained, of never being through abandonment, of no one ever forgetting anyone or letting go; our lives would've been a bloody chaos. An incorrigible disarray of lives breathing down our neck about their dreams, desires, and apathy. Much like the city's Sunday market strip: an alley thronging with people desperate about their needs, all of them wanting to be heard, to be prioritized; everyone going out of their way to opine, to lend their voices to a political debacle around the corner that had started to amass impetus; everyone in a frenzy, rushing to be elsewhere; an entourage of bodies pushing against one another, hollering, haranguing, never ever having enough of it.

What a pitiable situation it would be, to be living lives without silences in them, without a corner of quiet to pray, to play soft music, to write letters to loved ones or pen verses in longing. If not for anything, let this soothing environment of calm be the justification for everyone who left with or without notice, to everything you held dear but eventually lost in wanting and all the pieces that fell off leaving you hollow. It's alright, friend. That is how it is supposed to be. Only when the contours of a boulder are chipped away that it gives way to a sculpture. And you're on your to being one. Relax. That last failed relation you're grieving about was destiny sculpting a handsome set of eyes onto your soul. Now the light shall reach your blood and you'll know that you had done no wrong. It's all fair. To be left out, forgotten. Every receding wave leaves more than just muddy sand; a lasting silence to sing yourself a song. Embrace it: this fall, the quiet. You’re an art in making. Don’t ever worry. Nothing is ever so precious to be substituting your inner quiet. No love so valuable to be losing your music.

By: Sobhan Pramanik

Diwali: A Realization

It's much more than just lighting the lamp.

In fact, it's the easiest of all - to strike a match and lend the flame, guarded in the cave of your palms, to an oil-slicked wick curled in the hollow of the earthenware. That's it. The lamp comes to life, its muffled-yellow sheen encroaching upon the dark, like weary ocean waves closing around rocks, catching our appreciation altogether, our love.

But that's not all - the oil, meanwhile, would be quickly depleting in the lamp; the wick, burnt to its half and the flame a disfigured leaf of orange walloping perilously against the wind. It would die any moment and, so here's the larger consideration, the better understanding to courtship that is to be espoused: one of us has to keep checking on the lamp, responsibly, from time to time, with a fresh wad of wicks and a cup of oil, to keep it glowing; to keep us going. It's not as easy. And unless we are truly committed to keeping vigil - our sincerity consolidated, our loyalty upheld, our faith unwavering; until we learn to hold onto things past their initial epiphany without losing zeal; let's not light one.

By: Sobhan Pramanik

Oh! Poor Man

What's hugely distressing, sardonic and unpardonably hypocritical, and in all probability is leading our society down helpless despair and imparity is, where a happy looking man in neat, ironed clothes at work, carrying lunch boxes packed with delectable, sumptuous food is attributed to being blessed with wonderful and loving wife; is, on the contrary, audaciously endorsed as a disciplinarian with so-called high morals, when she starts panicking of being late with a meeting extending beyond 8, afraid of being rebuked; when she never makes it to team dinners at swanky hotels, skipping glittery evenings of lavish cuisines and flowing alcohol, lying of ill health or responsibilities at home, reprimanded by 'the man' and in-laws; when on a shopping spree she unwillingly racks away that exquisite one piece that held her just right at the waist, with plunging shoulders giving her butterflies as she turned to the trial room mirror, feeling 21 all over again, complaining of coarse texture in a rather fine material, half imagining the scalding parallels that would be drawn at home afterwards.

Well, why do you think we even need feminism? The fact that one needs to be handed out pre-set rules about how they must interact and go about human beings of a particular gender, speaks galore of our incompetency as a community. The fact that one has to probed in the eye with demands of equality only goes to reveal our lopsided idea about a perfectly balanced society. In other words, feminism, like a bottle of disinfectant, is more for us, men to wash clean their vision, redevelop and align their deranged ideals along the common line of humanity; shifting their fulcrum of prejudices to the centre of this see-saw, of what could be an egalitarian world. More so for the poor man to know that freedom was never so little, so tameable as to be crushed in his fist. It had always been a milling two way street and the only way forward is to stop and make way for others. For everyone. To live.

By Sobhan Pramanik

Fools, Flowers and Falls

I remember keeping your rose in an empty beer bottle on the bedside stool, as I got home that night. Passing the stem through its mouth and withdrawing my fingers, letting it drop. Its petalled bulb coming to rest against the rim in a soundless thud.

I do not know why I did that. On other days there would have been no bottle at the first place. Having never realized sense in the idea of a person dutifully showing up at my door and asking for a bagful of garbage, I personally took the trash out first thing in the morning, without anyone's asking, to a designated bin in the lobby for it to be picked from there. And likewise, with that habit, went the bottles too, emptied overnight in desperation. But that morning I was getting late, and so it all stayed in.

Though I fell in line with my habits soon, that bottle with your rose in it never quite left its place. Not that I didn't want to, but I never remembered it was there. Until all the petals had fallen dried, their hue drained, their fragrance faded, their purpose lost; and that once green stock, reduced to a mere wilted line of black against the thick glass.

May be there always is a thing called conscience that we choose to not pay heed. May be we all do know what awaits us before it really unfolds. Perhaps not the whole picture but that slightest of inkling, that undeniable tremor of vibes at our throat is always there, unlying, through everything. But the hazard in love is that it wants to get to the bottom of everything even when it’s a bottomless pit, and the imminent fall, its doom – seeking clear answers out of grave silences and be broken as ever; awaiting warm goodbyes from the unwelcoming who departed without a trace; and for everything there was to wither and lose fragrance before giving it all up. Love, in its quest for truth, wants as bad to be wounded as it wishes to triumph.

May be it wasn’t sheer nonchalance after all that I left the rose there that day. May be we were destined to not happen: like the beer I solemnly chugged, knowing well it won’t get me drunk.

© Sobhan

Just Hugs

Let's just hug each other to sleep tonight.

No, don't get me wrong - I am not saying you're unattractive or that you don't turn me on. Trust me, my feelings belong to no one but you, moored to your soul like sail boats at the harbour from being blown, for you to cut me loose with your own hands and row me ashore. Nor do I possess any dark desire for someone from the past either. If there was a way to click and save everything I see once I close my eyes, you'd know that as the heat starts to radiate from my loins, up my stomach and to my heart; I see just you. I see just you in colors of your skin crawling upon me: a fever under your chest, your areolas ripe; and our mouths submerged in the unsaid. That pinched wedge of skin on the inside of your thigh throbbing warm under my kneading palms where Ester bit you once, as you tried to bathe her on a cold day; and our pelvics pressed, like a cornice in rain, dripping lasciviously into each other.

But tonight, let's just lie hugging each other, shrouded by the dark, permeated by the music of falling rain. Your head on my chest and my fingers doodling upon your collarbones. Tonight I wish to pursue you in quiet. Like the sun eventually rising on a storm-wrecked island: in complete silence, with the sea at rest. I want to count your breaths on my fingers and fathom the infinity we have spent loving each other. I want to lie sans any space between us in a tight embrace, feeling the breeze in your bones to decipher your guileless nights, wrapped in spewing demons or flowering meadows. To see how your hair slides off your face as you turn in sleep, like a wisp of wind passing, your lips gently parted.

Do not misunderstand me, but tonight I needn’t our desires seethe, for the greatest depths are touched only in great silence and the truest loves often realized without the wanton striving to fuck.

Let me just hug you, so I can touch your whole without any sound and still hear the loudest echo of everything that we are.

© Sobhan

The Bookcase

I love sitting hidden between the doors of my wooden bookcase. 
In fact, when I am too unsure about picking a new read or simply feeling worn out by the chores of a routine life, needing a deliberate escape, I do exactly that: pull up a chair in between; the doors hanging from the hinges by my sides forming impenetrable walls to the most private, quietest, thought-inducing space I can have to myself, and sit with my legs crossed on my lap, smelling the musky odour of its rain-fattened timber, pulling out titles - read, unread, half-read; and turning over to stray pages to catch the story midway, off guard, littered in passages of wordy brilliance. Like impishly walking in on your woman dressing at the mirror and running your cold fingertips down her moist, bare back, evoking a love that is to remain a secret between them, like the lost reader's existence in a sea of books.

By - Sobhan Pramanik

going away: a night left behind

you wouldn’t know
this day coming.

the 3 AM alarm
buzzing by the pillow,
and my dismissing it
instantly, as if waiting,
which I were in an
acidic insomnia;
before staggering through
the dark hallway to your room.
with a soft tap, i wait with
my knuckles on the door’s
shiny timber
hearing you wake:
the rustle of your
clothes, your bare heels
lowered to the marble.

it’s always the same.
platform number 2.
sparing its somnambulist
travellers the ardour of wandering.
from the parallel of
of the foot-over-bridge,
i glimpse at the idle
column of coaches beneath –
freshly washed with water
splashed on glass windows
of AC cabins, its tail
vanishing beyond the bright
signal poles in night’s translucent
mist.

an IRCTC kiosk, half-opened,
hosts a ring of travellers at its
façade. sweet aroma of hard boiled
tea wraps around the complex
like gauge tightened over a wound.
i purchase packaged water and tea
through the crowd of tea-sipping,
news-reading travellers,
and head back to the coach.
you’re on the lower berth. the VIP
suitcase chained to a ring under
the seat. the adjacent ones to
be occupied from distant stations.
in the cold hum of air-condition
we drink tea, partly veiled from
footsteps milling the aisle.
only a fluttering blue drape of curtain
to our humble guard of privacy.

it’s 30 minutes to departure
when i leave, ascending the same
bridge out to the exit, feeling the
moist tip of your fingers on my chin,
and your lips on my forehead.
back home, it’s still too early.
close to 5, the air quiet. cold.
the horizon ablush and trees dewy.
i lay to bed and immediately fall asleep.

when you call to wish
morning, I squint my eyes
at the window looking down
at me spilling hot light.
you tell me about the
station you just passed.
i imagine of the sun risen
on your back, of meadows
rolling by bathed in day.
may be joined by another traveler
on the next seat. but you sure
have missed this day. one that’s
on my city. in my eyes. feeling like
an abandoned night in the wake
of your absence.

nights
that the leaving
shall never know of.

© Sobhan

going away: the day before

the kitchen’s
unusually quiet
this morning.
no clanking
of pots or of
water running
down the sink.
the counters
too are clean;
untouched.
there’s no marinated
meat glowing
saffron in turmeric
awaiting by the flame.
only a pot of rice
steams quietly
on the oven,
boiling starch
bubbling to its neck.
and next to it
in a deep bowl,
shimmers the last
supper’s remains.

i cut out the rice’s
flame, looking for her.
she is in the adjacent
room, hauling from
under the bed her
maroon VIP suitcase.
she racks messily
folded sarees – Bengal Taant
and South Indian silk –
in its dusty hollow.
a pharmacy envelope
with her hypertension and
B-Complex pills, ticked on
its back: Morning-Night;
is zipped to the side.
an old Eveready torch
rests between the clothes,
and in a cotton pouch
held by a drawstring,
is her gold bangles,
that she didn’t
prefer wearing in travels.
an elastic strap buckles
over in a cross to hold things in place,
before the lid comes down.
click.

i keep the ticket
in her purse. with your Boroline
and comb, letting her know.

at lunch, we do not
look at each other.
silence stealthily
crawling up my spine:
like a damp millipede
treading monsoon-earth
as our toes brush under
the table, mistakenly,
and recede. i raise my fingers
to forehead and lower it to
the base of my neck; impulsively.
she gets up from the table,
looking away and i lower the
full plates in the sink.

it’s not just
the person that
departures steal
from you. you lose
your light too,
caught in the gap
they leave in your soul.

© Sobhan

The Joke of Being Alive

Indu was in the kitchen, bent over the counter and removing spongy, biconvex discs of idlis onto a plate from the steamer’s belly. Plumes of hot smoke dispensed through the open lid and grazing past her face died on the low, oil-filmed ceiling. The mixer grinder rumbling in a corner on the shelf, choked and crackled to a sudden stop.

‘Aargh.’ grunted Indu. ‘It’s high time I get a new one.’ Grabbing the rolling pin, she, twice, struck the head of the jar, and the motor roared back to life. An unpleasant, screechy clamour of metal blades smashing through chopped coconuts, chillies, grains of lentils and mustard seeds filled the kitchen, literally disconnecting Indu from every other sound of the world.

‘Anu’ she called out, placing the plate containing four idlis and a generous serving of the creamy coconut chutney by the side on the hall room table. ‘Have your breakfast, dear.’

Walking across the dining in quick steps, she threw opened the windows, undid the blinds. Bright sunshine flooded the room, driving away the rancid, late night odour. The pendulum above the closet was caught by a streaming strand of sun and a coin of light, like a restless butterfly, merrily fleeted through the room. It was 8 in the morning.

She headed over to Anuja’s room and softly tapped on the door, before starting to push. It felt immensely heavy at the hinges, as if guarded by sandbags, but Indu, with some efforts drove it open. Her first foot in landed on something pudgy, slimy and then, too stoned to even express her horror, she dropped to the floor. There, lay Anuja—naked, bloodied, and barely breathing.

*****

One Month Later

‘She’s resting. All the surgeries went well, we were finally able to…put the intestines together.’ Dr Mehra lowers his voice, as if trying to sound less grisly. ‘The infection…. haemorrhage…it was too much. Out of danger, finally.’ He says standing by Anuja’s bedside, taking readings of every beeping, dripping, and draining machineries surrounding her.

Indu does not reply. Her eyes are bereft of life, as she feels the soles of her daughter’s feet under the white, medicine smelling sheets—cold with her toes turned inwards. She then places her curled palm on her forehead and almost immediately, Anuja withdraws her head into the pillow. Hostile to the touch, a quiver in her eyes. Unclear words, like a scream choked, bubbles up her throat. ‘No’, she breathes in delirium. ‘Please’, her chest falling away like a pit with every expulsed word. Indu, sensing her displeasure, rests her hand on the pillow for a while, before the motherly instincts gets the better of her. She leans over to kiss her temples that Anuja stiffens in sleep, in her tortured, brutal world where she is still fighting her predator, and shoves her in the face, falling back unconscious; and crying. ‘No. Please, no.’

Gaining her foot against the wall, Indu stands watching Anuja from a distance, now drugged to sleep, and the doctor beside her.

*****

Outside, in the corridor, news played on the television. A content looking, almost smiling journalist reported the news of the rape victim being out of danger, hailing the hospital and its doctors for their tireless efforts and the State for incorporating advanced facilities for its people, before slyly adding about the convicts still absconding—a rather unscrupulous ploy perhaps to brush the matter under carpet. On one hand was this appalling broadcasting for the State to encash on, on the other was her daughter, ‘out of danger’ as they say, on the ICU bed, with her soul ransacked, unable to recognize her mother. The brain-deadness of which rages Indu, and she storms past the corridor towards the exit. Each step a recollection of that fateful day.

Pieces of her dressing lay scattered in the room. A pillow burst open from a long struggle perhaps sat on the disheveled bed, its cotton fill dispersed by the whirring fan. A long window overlooking the main road, generally kept closed, that day, was wide open. Books, toppled from shelves, lay flat on the floor. And there, two tiles away, was Anuja, convulsing in her lap. Her face swollen, a purple clot throbbed under her eyes and her lips, chipped, bitten, forced in, bled in thick drops. There were deep scratches down her shoulder, her bosom mottled in blue and red, as a dying tremor in her legs continued to pulsate blood out of her pubis. On the door knob inside were blood stains from her hands, her desperate, futile attempts of getting away from the barbarism. And all this while she was away in the kitchen, disconnected by the boisterous groaning of the problematic grinder, deaf to every shriek of help or agony that might have been.  

As she unlocks her car and pulls at the gate, it comes to her from nowhere. ‘Teri toh main ghar me ghuske lunga’ (I will fuck you in your own house). Two years back at a traffic signal, she remembers a guy on the motorcycle coming to stop by their car. She and Anuja were returning post a movie at the nearby theatre, that the guy waiting by their window, started to lech at Anuja. A lustful gaze in his eyes, he seemed to look through her, rubbing his groin and blowing kisses. He had then leant close to the window glass, sliding in and out his middle finger through the ring of his index and thumb, right in their eyes. The signal by then had turned green, and Indu, furious at his audacity, had steered left and rammed into his bike, throwing him over the divider.

‘Who the hell do you think you’re?’ Indu screamed getting out of the car as a passing PCR van stopped to intervene and caught hold of him. He had a gashed forehead.
  

They were taken to the nearest police station and in a series of vague interrogations, revealed of him residing in Vasant Kunj. Indu and Ahuja, in a night long explanation to the cops of what had happened and the lecher crying foul, did they slightly succeed in making them believe that the guy had done something wrong for Indu to react that way. Otherwise, for them, it was Indu, who, out partying at night, was probably drunk and simply crashed into the biker. And all the while, the creep sat in a corner, making phone calls to everywhere to get him out. Finally, in the morning they were let off—with warnings and obviously, money.

Outside the police station, a group of guys waited in a shining white Audi car. He walked up to them and engaged himself in a casual chat, before getting into the car. That was the last he said – ‘‘Teri toh main ghar me ghuske lunga’, vengeance peeking from his eyes, before the Audi stormed out of the kerb.

Indu hardens her grip on the wheel with the memory, her knuckles turning white. She guns the car’s engine. The roaring shakes awake the security at the hospital gate. He puts back his cap that had slipped to his face. Another hard press on the accelerator this time, the RPM needle going all the way down to red. The security, furious, gathers his baton and marches down the steps. She slams the gear stick to reverse and flies out of the drive.

‘Crazy woman’ the security exclaims standing in a blast of exhaust.

This time there will be truly gruesome stories for the media.

---THE END---

By Sobhan Pramanik

   

In the Autumn of Life

A shadow on the hall room wall, cast in hot bright stripes of the August sun seeping through the curtains, of his still forlorn head and shrunk shoulders ended abruptly like a cliff on both sides as he sat at the table, was what it took me to look at the despair, the melancholic social abandonment that had gradually descended his life. 

Four slices of crisply warmed bread, buttered, waited beside a bowl of chopped cucumber on the plate. Just the way he always preferred—cucumbers separate, bringing to bread right at the point of eating, lest it left his toasts dank. Baba. I watched him draw 20 units of Insulin, the vial pierced through its membranous head and raised to light slightly above his face to ensure the right count. The hem of his kurta held up under his chin and the drawstrings of his pyjama unfastened, dangling, revealed two permanently calloused speck of brown on either side of his belly button. He plunged the needle without a flinch and the concoction vanished into his cells. With the emptied syringe in one hand, he smudged the spot with his thumb. A subtle tremor in his knobby fingers as they hung mid-air by the table. Once the cooker’s fuzzy whistle died in the kitchen, I heard the telephone ringing in the backdrop. Baba looked around from his chair before getting up to reach for it. He picked the cordless receiver from its set and strained his eyes across its flashy screen, his thumb hovering unsurely over the keys. There was a strange clumsiness I observed in his gait, as he strode back to the table for his glasses. Meanwhile mother entered from kitchen, annoyance furrowed into her brows for having let the phone ring that long, as Baba lends her the receiver. Fingertips smeared in turmeric and barely wanting to touch the phone, she dug onto the ‘Talk’ button with the corner of her nail and raised it to her ear.

‘Hello’ ‘Ha’ ‘Yes yes’  

For what seemed no less than a minute, there was nothing expect mother’s wondering, monosyllabic responses to the caller. Her eyes narrowed in recollection was the only give away, interspersed by deep thinking exhales, before she held out the phone for Baba who sat at the table wearing a phlegmatic look.

‘Noor’ she whispered, as he grabbed onto the phone. A warm reflection from nowhere, like a sleeping child’s disbelief being awoken at midnight to be surprised with a long-awaited wish, I watched, creep to Baba’s face.

There it was. A name. Just a name to whom I was only as close as a reader can get to character in a novel while reading about his antics, and was supposed to distance and wear away, perhaps, with time and new books; but from how I felt with the mere sound of his name mumbled to Baba across the table, I knew there lied a bond unwreckable underneath and, that the affair had just begun.

*****

There was no rain that year; the aridest in the history of our village. Long, toiling months of cauterizing sun had rid the earth with every bit of moisture. Fields had cracked open, as if struck by an incomplete earthquake, and crops had started to wilt. Just a single tube well system planted by the village council at the far end of the fields barely sufficed for the water necessities. Adding to the struggle was failing power supply, rendering the tube well less than two hours of runtime each day to water the crops. There was too little money in the family for us to get peasants dig up irrigation channels to our fields, and the only viable option was to pick a shovel myself. And that, was how I met Noor. 

I was digging a trench, the sun unforgiving above me as sweat ran in dripping streams down my head to the tilled soil. I might have been at it for long, for every smack of the shovel felt like a nervous force pulsate through my wearied arms. That was when I noticed him behind me, shovelling along, continuing with the trail of my trench. I was far too exhausted to probe him on why was he doing so and decided to embrace the welcome help as a heaven-sent blessing. By dusk, together we had dug an eighty odd feet trench to our field and spent, we sat on the field. Two zombie figures enswathed in sweat and soil with the setting sun glistening upon us, we watched a silver stream of water travel along the trench to our field. 

‘Why did you help me?’ I asked.

‘So the water could come.’ He beamed and washing the chunks of mud from between his toes, hopped onto his bicycle.

That was a rather straight answer, the blatantness of which left me dwelling about the plausibility of my own question. But it was no time to better my question or understand his motives. Smiling, as he cycled away from me down the clay road, I was glad to be witnessing the start of a friendship that was to change the course of my life.

Baba paused, ripping the scales of a sugarcane stem with his teeth for me to chew upon the fleshy part and relish the sweet, sublime juice. It was a Sunday morning and like every Sunday, we were sitting out in the courtyard of our quarter in Dehri. He sat on a lawn chair under the shade of a guava tree, his feet crossed on the grass, a teapot and a cup to his left on a three-legged stool, looking out at the manicured garden, peeling succulent stems of sugarcane for both of us. 

The years that saw bud us into one entity. It was a friendship that felt like brotherhood. Our hearts were a vault of trust that held all the laments and glories of our lives without ever once breaking anything to the world. If he were hurt, I could see that in his eyes, and if I were to grieve, I couldn’t imagine anyone but his presence beside me. Some relationships are just like that. You don’t have to make grand efforts, and yet, nothing falls apart. Like a river that continues to flow, carving its destined path without having to be told about the mountains, heaths and forests that lay on its way. We were rivers flooded in awareness about the obstacles in each other, climbing them graciously without a grunt and keeping the lamp alit through turmoil. 

Noor came from an affluent family of lawyers in a nearby village, and as it is mostly with doctor and lawyer families, the child is not left with much option but to pursue the same. With my father working at a grocery store, the flow of money into the house never really bettered, and being the eldest son, the onus was on me to assuage the conditions. When I graduated from school, it was Noor who presented me with the idea of pursuing engineering which, back in the 70s used to be a coveted degree and came with lucrative job offers, something my family was in dire need of. But then came to perspective the bigger and by far the most important question: will I be able to afford it? That moment, had it not been for Noor’s helping arm across my shoulder and that clear, endearing smile with nothing but love at its core that I saw on that first day of trenching, life would have been entirely different, a world more difficult perhaps. He went onto enrol in judicial studies and even though we were into different things at the fore, leading engrossing schedules, there was hardly any impact to truth of the bond that held us together. Often on weekends he would come to my place, spend the day in lazy gossips and have lunch. Once he had left, on several occasions I had found in my study rolls of engineering drawing sheets, drafters and other equipment needed for my course. I never told or asked from him anything, but he still saw through me. As if I were clear glass and he, Noor, the light. He truly lived by his name.

After completing my bachelors in civil engineering, I took the test for railways and was soon deployed on probation to a remote town in UP. I were to take the midnight mail to Calcutta. It had been raining continuously for the last few days and that night, it probably got worst. With my belongings—few shirts and trousers, a folder containing my certificates and utensils (a saucepan to make tea, a plate to eat on and a few bowls) wrapped in a bulging holdall, I plodded through swamps and muddy tracks to the station, leaving the village crumbling to ruins under the merciless rain. Only a few concrete houses, including ours, stood through the torrent. Mud houses with their roofs blown, lay heaped on the ground, reduced at the very end to where it originated from.

Just like the trenching day, helpless, when I looked behind and found him shovelling, sharing my labour with a smile; there he was again, my friend, Noor, at the platform in a pistachio green kurta, soaked in rain, looking at me with the saddest pair of eyes I had ever seen. I walked up to him and he embraced me. Cold and rain sodden, the sky roaring above the station’s tin shelter in blue thunders, I closed my eyes on his shoulder, until our breaths turned to convulsive hiccups and we broke into tears.

The mail drew hurtling into the station, awaking the rain silenced village. Noor handed me a packed lunchbox for my journey and an envelope containing some money. I was reluctant to accept the money, but he held the envelope pushed down in my breast pocket, his palm cold against my weeping heart, until the train whistled and shuddered ahead. Holding my hand he jogged a steps ahead with the rolling train, before letting it go. I waited at the footstep hoping to see his smile, the same smile that put us together, but it wasn’t such a day. He was sad to see me go and there was nothing I could do to make him feel better. At the juncture of life’s beckoning and a friends’ breaking heart, I stood numb and incapable, parting like an opportunist from everything that comprised me. And as the engine groaned harder, rain and darkness stole from my eyes Noor’s last waiting glimpse, that had failed to cry.

A gentle breeze, abuzz with the chanting of parrots and the scent of ripened guavas was drifting through the courtyard, when mother’s calling for lunch cut Baba adrift in his reverie. She arrived at the courtyard combing her freshly bathed hair that lay shinning on her back like a cascade.

‘You should have written back to him.’ Mother said collecting the empty tea pot from the table, referring to the few letters that arrived at his office in the initial years of employment. 

Baba got up from the chair, his breathing strained and slowly made his way back to the house. There was too much work, I suppose, too much to manage. Two sisters to be married back home, two brothers studying university and parents growing old. Away from home on a distant land, being the lone bread earner, growing me up, playing the loving father and a dutiful husband; somehow had friendship, unwillingly, take the back seat. 

But then, as they say it, there’s always a second chance to set things right; and apparently, it took destiny forty years to play his hand and roll the dice again. That call from Noor on a Sunday morning in August 2016, I believe, was all about the redemption that was to be made. For Baba to deboard the train and reach out to his friend, who now needs him, like he needed someone, on that arid day of cutting the trench. 

*****

‘HaHa.’ Baba laughed on the call, amber glow in his happy eyes. ‘Don’t worry, I will tell you how the curved tracks are laid so the trains don’t fall off.’ 

It was a long call and by the time he hung up, it was noon. The shadow was now gone from the walls, as if it were never there, as if he was never lonely. It was the most jovial I had seen him in years. Post his retirement from the railways, he had consciously withdrawn at the social front, never reaching out to anyone beyond his immediate family, choosing to live as a recluse in his Calcutta house. Winding together his chores was a loose thread of habit, and except the desolation that he had consciously invited over to his life, nothing ever would seem out of place to an onlooker. After the wellbeing of his wife and children, it was the newspaper, the insurance advertisements promising great retirement returns, the government’s new tax policy and cricket match results that managed to catch his interest. And occasionally, an inflated diabetes result that would see him visit the physician. The world beyond these few elements, as inexistent to him as the cosmos were to its natives in the pre-Copernicus era.  

‘Noor is coming next week.’ He declared, visibly impaired to contain his smile. ‘While travelling in a train he wonders how come it doesn’t fall over in a curve’ Baba guffawed at his dear friend’s innocence. 

I imagined Noor— an altruistic character to my mind’s eyes from the tales I had grown up with, now was a week’s time away from being born as real to me—standing at the gate of his homebound local chugging along a blind curve and astonished at the surreal possibility of the speeding iron caterpillar not being derailed.  

There were stories waiting to be told, to burst open. Forty years is a long time. They parted to make a life and were now meeting again to reinvent the life lived. To compare the dreams conceived as adults, with a much bigger and accomplished reality in their autumn. Each passing day thereafter was like holding a flood in his heart, and I earnestly waited for the deluge to drown us all. 

*****

They were at the Veranda. Noor, a man too handsome for his age, sat relaxed opposite Baba in a cane chair. He was clean shaven, with high squared sideburns sprinkled with flakes of silver; and his hair, swept back from his temples was slick with oil. His walnut skin eyes overlooking the ridge of his nose, was much like a boat upturned on the shore. And that smile—the hopeful, benevolent sweep of his lips that accentuated the high of his cheek bones, made for the world a man in whose heart trust was still a new born child, unscathed of vices. He wore a long full sleeved kurta; richly scented. The cuffs starch-rigid held together by a pair of studs and an old HMT model on a silver strap, fastened to his wrist. Strings of vein, blue-green and dilated, emerged from under his sleeves onto the back on his palm. 

Behind him on the window grille, a potted hibiscus lazily tossed in the breeze. Beyond and into the open, dusk silently poured, down ribs of drunk kites somersaulting in air, painting the landscape in a pink sheen. Flocks of birds in a tired flight home, rode past the sinking sun. Their shadows on its orange periphery like craters on moon. In the distance, trees were slowly becoming opaque shadows.  

Baba was scribbling on a newspaper. Parallel lines crossed by horizontal bars; the way railways tracks are. Tea in two white porcelain cups sat on saucers between them. Tenderness apparent in his throat as he spoke, one word at a time. His eyes downcast and wet.

‘That’s how it is.’

‘The curves screwed to the ballast.’

‘Following Euler’s Curvature Law’

‘It moves on.’

‘It doesn’t fall’

‘That’s how it is. It just doesn’t fall over.’

Noor sat there listening intently. His fingers balled under his chin. But none of it really mattered. Really. Not the mathematics, neither the laws. Two old friends coming together to look back at life, talking about how not to topple along a bend that fate sends along our way. Well, there really wasn’t anything else to be understood. 

I watched coils of fumes rise from the tea cups and climbing the curtains, drifted out into the night. Noor reached out to touch Baba on his arm. He looked up as tears trickled from his clouded eyes. They lurched forwards in an embrace. They both were crying. But today, there was no train ready to depart.   

By - Sobhan Pramanik

Traitor Tree

Traitor Tree: A Short Story

There is a Gulmohar growing at the fence. Its slender brown trunk though arising from the soft, grassy earth of my compound, has its crimson canopy, like a cloud stranded at dusk, floating low beyond on the other side.

While it wore my rains for years, lived my sunshine and slowly depleted my breast with its roots; now inadvertently sheds its blossoms over a different world, strewing its path in a flaming red.

A little girl ambling past the lawn, twirling a colourful umbrella on her back like a spinning wheel, stops amid the fallen flowers and picks one from her feet. She takes it to her face and feels its petals against her cheeks. Breathes its aura deep before giving in to a complacent smile. She then walks home, the flower aloft on her palm and bliss in her eyes.

I hold onto her smile in my mind and try to feel happy about it. But a strange feeling of loss whips me hard, and the tree I long cared for, now feels like strangulating my existence. I wish to get rid of this feeling, of its everything emanating from deep inside me. It won’t be an easy thing to do, I know. For pulling out a deep-rooted tree, some old feelings, often rips the ground open.

The light and the rain is for everyone to share. This earth is home to all. Perhaps it is the fence that must be pulled down. This feeling of possession in love is what is to be set on fire. There is no way we can let things go by killing them in our heart. It would be making a cemetery within, being haunted by ghosts of old lovers. Instead, let them live. And flourish. Reach out to the sky and dance in the rain. Every once in a while we are going to show up under the tree, I promise, pick up a flower from the ground and smile at each other, reminding us of the better ways to love. From a distance, devoutly and from the soul, without ever being one.

© Sobhan

Gautam Gambhir: An Underrated Prodigy

No, we do not wish to see that face— the sadness in those handsome eyes and the evergreen glee drained from his smile, as SRK stands upfront at the Chinnaswamy balcony in a sleek black tee-shirt, clapping a gentleman’s consolation clap for all the hard work put in by the boys to reach to the semi-final, only to be outplayed by their long-term nemesis.

(For representational purpose only)

Despite a win against the Sun Risers in a rain curtailed eliminator, KKR clearly came into the match as underdogs against the high-flying Mumbai Indians with their momentum unsettled after a string of losses at the near end of the league stage. With wickets stumbling right from the start on a sluggish Bangalore pitch, KKR never seemed to be out of the doom that the Mumbai Indians had been to them in a decade of play. So, no, there won’t be any cartwheels this year, no charming kisses to be blown from the strands that set the crowds to a frenzy or little AbRam going around the ground with daddy darling waving his little palms to the exalting audience. All said and done, KKR this year with their experimentative game plan had left for us a lot to cherish: Lynn’s fury at the start and then coming back from an uprooted shoulder to provide all the entertainment, Robin’s consolidated cricket, Narine’s blistering cameos with the bat and the unfailing trap he always sets for the batters. 

While Pandya’s wide slash went past a diving Yadav on the third man boundary hauling Mumbai Indians to their third ever IPL final, and the camera quickly spans over to an ecstatic Rohit Sharma embracing all the player and support staffs in their dugout, my heart painfully goes out to the man who had been at the receiving end of everything bad and unfortunate despite his best efforts in this long tournament--Gautam Gambhir. Walking out of the park with his shoulders hung low, a grim shadow across his face, one of nation’s very best yet tragically underrated, I wonder if we could have done better to this man. With the team touring England for Champions Trophy in the coming month where they will be battling out on faster, bouncier pitches, this decision to pick Sharma ahead of Gambhir, despite his poor run in this IPL and even longer episodes of his inconsistency at the top of order, forever playing recklessly without a care in the world, feels in the heart like a stupid, unforgiveable comedy of errors.

For how long shall Sharma be backed for his once in blue moon carnage of 264 on a flat-as-highway Kolkata turf? For how long will the selectors wait before pulling the plugs on their beliefs of Sharma and Dhawan giving India a belting start, who like Rohit had also been a victim of inconsistency in the recently concluded England series and a strangely lucky cynosure to selector’s eyes? For how long shall GG be kept waiting on the lines, bearing the brunt of neglect and dubious choices, who at 35, from what I feel, like Sehwag, Zaheer and Dravid, is already at the brink of a hurtful retirement to a revered career?

© Sobhan

The History of Our Being

This motionless Agra sky

like a chalky dust hat,

hangs from the finial of Taj.

Its enormous yellowing dome

roofs the mausoleum

like Time’s blessing palm

frozen over History’s head;

housing deep under

in sacred stone chambers,

the ivory remnants of star crossed lovers.

In its huge curvy shadows,

Yamuna passes like a muddy brook.

Dark and ash grey;

awash with the spirits of dead,

rolling on eternally with

sea dreams in its quotidian waves.

Coils of sunshine drip from the alcoves,

of soot wrapped minarets where

birds return for the night.

Behind, in the Shalimar,

Chrysanthemums have closed their eyes,

wilted under the sun;

and the sighing willows at the distance

brush the grin of admirers and

fog cameras, with the charred sulphurous

breeze of a bustling city.

Yet, on a full moon night

invariably the pavements fill up –

amazed laughs dribble

through gaping mouths,

watching the wonder reborn.

In the cascade of silver light

as the shadows slowly recede,

the heavens send down a million-stars blush

and lovers clutch hands in longing

watching their reflection in the pool,

for Taj redeems from the dark

draped in the blue of night, and dazzle –

like all the jewels of the universe

heaped at once by the banks of Yamuna;

of a painter’s luscious dream

conceived in the eyes of his muse;

and a poet’s beautiful thinking hand,

ink smelling, love-loss smelling, hope smelling

striding the pages in a lyrical delirium.

Fragrant wind pants through the

archways, honouring dead poets

whose verses float on the bejewelled walls,

engraved in sensuous calligraphy;

stopping at the foyer for a while,

beneath the echoing marble sky,

delving into an indecipherable hush-hush

with the ghosts of dead lovers,

before rushing headlong out to the gardens.

I look out at the wasted earth of our being.

Deserted meadows of fruits trampled to dust,

and thorny hedges growing in the alley

where I remember having pulled you aside

to kiss your lips, to touch

your smooth midriff.

In the clearing of trees where

in a hammock we splayed out,

lowering our eyes to the blemishes of sun

and napped—my chin to your nape,

your waist to my stomach,

two human commas, pausing

their life sentences to be each other’s;

now lies a deep abyss, filled with burnt out

suns of solitary days.

I wonder if you will ever return

with a full moon in your thoughts,

and replace the fallen crown of our legacy.

Trust me for once, if you do, no heath will be too

arid for flowers to bloom again,

no sky too morose to cast a blessing rain.

And in the clearing we shall lie all over again,

chasing gold deers and swimming in rivers,

inspiring this new generation with our old, eternal love.

In this deep ravine of longing,

will you not seek to redeem our pride

by restoring our history with your forgiveness,

for the world to swoon, like Taj Mahal on moonlit nights?

© Sobhan