The air that day was so dense with poignancy that
the whole universe smelled like dry chrysanthemums. But I neither smelled nor
sensed any of that melancholy, much of which was impending, during the
indefinite period of time I spent outside Kumar’s door, deep in thought. During
that time, staring at his closed door, I ventured to recreate memory by memory
from a haze of vagueness the events of our friendship that had been muffled and
eroded by time over the last 5 years. But it was a sad attempt at recapture,
the past is just a dream and memory just a sense of reality we attribute to it.
From the numerous conversations we had the only thing I remembered were a few
phrases and some sour comments, form the many visits to this house only the
taste of his green tea lingered somewhere in my head. Only two things stood out
from this background of faint remembrance. The first was the longing both of us
felt for India, our motherland. That insipid and rather forced patriotism that
we both had while we were in India had turned into a feeling that permeated our
every breath once we crossed her borders. The second was how little I knew
about this man. I had never asked him about his past even though during many
occasions I had given him long animated lectures about the lush, green beauty
of Kerala and the taste of my mother’s cooking. Deep down I knew why I never
asked him. I was afraid of a nostalgia more poignant than mine, memories
merrier and food even tastier. It was important for my sanity that my
reminiscent motherland remained the best and in Kumar’s memories I was afraid
of finding one even better.
The door soon opened and a familiar bald head lined
by white wispy hair on the side peered out. I was expecting a scream of
surprise, a friendly hug, but I was met with sad eyes and a forced smile.
‘Ah Roy… Come on in’ he said.
He lead the way and I followed him perplexed and I noticed
the sadness in the air, the walls duller, the lights darker, the furniture
lifeless, the curtains heavy. We sat down on either side of the dining table
where he had received me many times before, during much happier times. Times
when the screech of chairs being pulled on the floor wouldn’t be noticed above
the noisy laughter of friends. I noticed his eyes, red and covered by a lens of
tears.
‘What happened? You done look so good’ I asked him.
He looked at me with those eyes and I felt dry gusts
of great sadness on my face.
‘I got a phone call from Delhi… About 10 minutes
back. My father died’ he said, his voice choking in between.
Uneasiness in the worst of all human feelings,
neither pain, regret nor sheer rage can hold a candle to the bitter concoction
of unease that lodges somewhere between your stomach and heart and then refuses
to come out. I was feeling it right then, boiling in my gullet.
‘Sorry to hear that. Had he been ill for a
long time?’
‘Yes’ he replied. His eyes were fixed on the palm of
his hand.
‘How old was he?’, I asked, cursing in my mind the
moment I choose to visit my old acquaintance, eager to run away from the
situation after a few cliqued enquiries and words of consolation.
‘Sixty five’ he said, still staring at his clenched fist, I
noticed something shining from inside it.
‘I’m sorry for your loss. What was his illness?’
He looked at me and then showed me what he was
holding in his fist. It was a silver anklet, a simple one, a thread of silver
with two hooks on either end, the type that adorned almost every female ankle
in India.
‘This killed him’, he said to me. His voice weighed
by remorse ‘I never told you about her…’
‘No, you never did’, I had no idea who he was
referring to.
‘My sister’, he said, his eyes had left the room and
were once again fixated on the silver thread in this hand, from his meditation
of despair he spoke
The village I was born was in one of the
remote corners in India. While India had her tryst with destiny and winds of
change swept through the country, my village was relatively untouched. We still
lived a 100 years back, refusing to give in to the pressures of the time,
stubbornly resisting change, choosing with callousness to live in the dark. But
things beyond our power were at work all around the country, and change was trickling
in at snail’s pace.A government school in the village was the first
manifestation of this transformation.
But
the stinking hierarchy of the caste system still ruled us, and my family was at
the bottom of it. My father was a chandala, the keeper and the sole owner of
the local cemetery, like his father before him, leading up to the time when one
of my ancestors were given the forsaken job of burning corpses. My father did
his duty, his dharma as he called it, with devotion and diligence. And by his
submission to the system he condemned us to be the poorest of the poor, people
considered to be equivalent to corpses.
My
sister and I were born a year apart. My father wasn’t very happy with having a
daughter but I like to think that he loved her in his own way when the thoughts
about her future didn’t plague his simple mind. I, his elder son, was expected
to be a chandala like him to take up the divine duties of our family. The
duties which entailed disrespect and contempt from the whole village. My father
wasn’t happy when social workers came to our hut to enroll us for the new
school. He feared that education might put dreams of a different, better life
in my head and he was sure that my sister had no use for books and letters
since her future husband was probably going to be illiterate. But he let us go
when they told him that we would be given free lunch every day at school, and
lunch meant that the only thing he had to give us was water to drink before we
slept at night.
School
was painful. Equality and compassion existed only in the social science
textbook and even that was denied to us as buying a book meant starving for a
week. But me and my sister made do with what we had, we tried to study because
deep down we had a feeling that it would be the way out of our miseries and
also because alphabets and numbers were a welcome relief from corpses and
pyres.
Soon
my mother was pregnant again. The local seer saw in his inked leaf that it was
a boy. My family rejoiced, my father even more. A son for him was someone who
could continue his cursed existence, a sacrificial animal for the sake of
vocational immortality.
Three
months after the good news my mother had a miscarriage. My father was sad, but
not devastated by the news. In those days of meagre medical care an infant
dying before being born was a common thing among the poor. Almost everyone in
my village had that sibling no one talked about, who was mentioned only in
uncomfortable pauses that occurred during uncharted conversations about the
past.
Six
months later my mother was pregnant again. A boy, according to some random and
mundane act that was supposed to tell the future. Seven months into it she gave
birth to a stillborn. The distressful silences at my home was becoming louder
and louder filled with cries of my unborn brothers.
It
was during the third pregnancy that the Aghoris started visiting our cemetery.
They were a few at first, taking the pilgrimage road to the Himalayas that
passed through our village. I had never seen them before as my father never
used to let them in to the cemetery fearing that they would violate unburned
corpses for their rituals. But this time he let them in. When I saw them for
the first time, their trishuls, their chillums, their hair in chaotic medusa like
tangles, their mouth blackened by human flesh, their skin covered in ash, I
felt inside a fear so ancient that it belonged to dark nights spent in lonely
caves, listening to the howling of wolves and watching the occasional lightning
illuminate the forest around in a moment of eerie brilliance, the fear of the
shadow you see out there in that microsecond of illumination that you hope is
that of a tree or a branch, that you hope is not of some beast lurking in the
shadows waiting for the dark to make a carnal dash for your cave, a fear that
was not from this millennium or the one before it.
But
what made my fear worse was my father’s eyes. In them I didn’t see that same
fear reflected but instead I saw a glimmer, which I later realized to be the
twinkling of admiration, an acceptance of powers higher than hitherto unknown.
He let them camp in our cemetery, brought them ashes for their rituals, unburnt
femurs to make chillums. He used to go to the cemetery grounds late at night to
meet them, something he never used to do before. And the following mornings I
used to find mutilated corpses there. I preferred not to think about the signs.
Five
months into the pregnancy my mother gave birth to a piece of flesh. It was
after this that the skulls started appearing. In every house, hut, shack and
palace in India there is a hallowed place that is somehow different from the
desolation surrounding it. When me and Anarkali came back from school that day
we found our father, legs crossed. In the corner of gods the pictures of Rama
and Krishna were replaced by a solitary skull. My father was chanting something
in a language that we did not understand, but each syllable of those mantras
oozed so much evil that we could not stand there listening to it, we ran
inside. I came out sometime after the chants ceased. My father was nowhere to
be seen, the skull was still there and on its eerie whiteness there were two
dots of blood red.
Within
a few days there were so many skulls stacked, one over the other, in that
corner that the rest of us began to wonder about their source. My father spent
less and less time in the hut during mornings, he spent daylight talking to the
aghoris, smoking from their chillums and lost in the primeval trance of their
company. Nights he slept in the hut, perhaps he was yet to get used to the
nocturnal activities of his new comrades.
My
mother was pregnant once more and we all sensed that it would be different this
time around. But nothing could have prepared against what was to come, not even
the lunatic glimmer in my father’s eyes that heralded it.
I
still remember that amavasi night. Amavasi nights, bathed in darkness were filled
with the sounds of aghori chants. But we had learned to sleep through those
sounds, though I now wish I hadn’t. Had I been awake I would have known that
Anarkali was missing from the usual spot she slept, snuggled between me and our
unborn brother. Had I been awake I would have noticed the cries of a 9 year old
girl being consumed alive by the flames of a newly lit pyre amidst the aghori
chants.
But
I had slept and was woken up in the morning by whispers of my father. Through
my half open eyes I saw him, both his hands covered in ash held over my
mother’s pregnent belly in a solemn gesture, his lips moving to the syllables
of some macabre black magic chant. The scene startled me out of my half slumber
and I noticed that she was gone.
‘Where
is Anarkali ?’ I asked.
My
father looked at me, his face happier than it ever had been for the past few
years, and said ‘Forget her, she is gone. What name should we give your
brother?’
He stopped his narration, his eyes were bloodshot, and
his face was glistening from a thin layer of sweat through which two solitary
tears tumbled down each of his cheeks.
Me
and my mother both knew what had happened. For two days we lived between my
father and the aghoris, who were now practically living in our house,
performing rituals for the birth of my brother. The school noticed our absence
and sent someone to check on us. After the news got out the police soon
followed. They found Anarkali’s charred remains from a pyre few hundred meters
behind our hut. They took whatever was left of her to exhibit in charades of
litigation between my father and the state. I think I foresaw this. For the
previous night I found her pyre and from the bones, ashes and burnt pieces of
cloth I found her silver anklet, the search was difficult due to the tears in
my eyes.
‘My father’s mercy petition was rejected by the President a week ago. Today they hanged him’ he said
He fell silent, lost in a universe of sorrow at the
nexus of which was the anklet he held in his hand. I knew I had to say
something before his sorrow and my uneasiness devoured both of our sanity.
‘What do you think the Aghoris told your father?’ I
asked him.
I had, in my crassness, touched upon the very
question that had been plaguing him for years. He answered me with a voice not
his own but of his memories.
‘In a country of a billion gods it was only natural
that my father thought he had met one in the form of an aghori. A benevolent
deity that would gift him another son and placate his misfortunes, for a
nominal price. Perhaps he thought that at the last moment the skies would break
open and god himself would stop him. But that didn’t happen, my sister was burned
alive, no demiurge saved her.’
I realized that the answer was the reasoning he had
been using for all these years to try and forgive his father, an uneducated
man, floating between life and death halfway across the world.
Then in a tone laced with perfect lucidity, he added
to his answer the phrase that he always used to defend failed philosophies and
doomed schools of thought.
‘My father believed in many gods, and he thought he
saw one. When you believe in a million miracles, probability dictates that you
see at least one’.
-AJ