Exile

by Akhilesh

  A criminal dragged Manbahadur Singh out in front of a crowd of thousands of students, teachers and citizens. He forced the poet’s head on a tar drum belonging to the Public Works Division and severed it with a chopper. The assassin killed the poet but everyone watched mutely. Another was Rajesh Sharma, who one day scribbled on a piece of paper, ‘I have lost interest in life.’ He climbed to the tenth floor of the fourteen-floor apartment block where he had spent a few years. He leaped off the building and died. The third friend, Nasir, was killed when his head was crushed under a truck. The fourth, Vinod, went to the Rajimwale river to bathe and drowned. The fifth spirit was my uncle who doted on me.

  All of them loved me and I also loved them. But when I am alone in an unfamiliar place, I am afraid of them. I turn on the light and cover my face with the blanket and sleep. I have never understood why fear diminishes when one covers one’s face and sleeps. However, I do not know what form fear takes and through which paths it makes inroads into a man. Some issues are beyond me. I have no belief at all in the soul and in rebirth, but I am afraid of spirits. I am afraid of snakes, mad men, dogs and lizards. Why do they send shivers down my spine? I am also afraid of any old man in an isolated place. If there are many old men, I don’t fear them, but dread seeps into me whenever I behold a single old man in a lonely place.

  ‘Don’t fall asleep, Suryakant,’ Nilratna said all night. At that hour of the night, what terrified him in the presence of a friend? Fear, hunger and Nilratna’s pleas disturbed me the entire night.

  There were few such long entries in the Mayfair notebooks. Gauri was bothered not by their length but by the undertones. Anxious, she started pacing the room, but the act only magnified her anxiety and she sat down, worried. She thought, I believed I knew Suryakant inside out, but he has this bizarre chaos, this terror, inside him. Things affect him so strongly, and I was completely unaware of it. But this is only a part of Suryakant. I’m not aware even of his totality. She was filled with a vast desperation. And then an idea came to her: Surya also must be unfamiliar with most of things within me.

  During the initial days of their love affair, they had designed a code for their love letters in which the first letter of a word was actually the letter following it. For example, if one had to write ‘lose’, one should write ‘mose’. Since there was no letter following it, the last letter in Devanagari, jna, was used without any change. Gyan (knowledge) would be written as gyan. The code was invented to keep their relationship secret even if the letter fell in someone else’s hands. Suryakant had written in the code in the notebook:

  ‘Dhauri there loop aanek. Khabhi tu hita vagati hain, khabhi tu ladha ki tharah yast vagati hain. Khisi dhin dhurga dhikhti hain khisi dhin pharwati. Khabhi tu partakiho jhati hai khabhi thapaswini. Tu hi idiwasi hain, tu hee yahasamragyi. O jhadugarni, man there jadu se haikron halonse bhindha hun kshajaron sharshon thak bhidha lahunga.’

  (Gauri, you have multiple forms. Sometimes you appear like Sita, and sometimes you are blithe like Radha. You look like Durga today and tomorrow like Parwati. What can I say about you? You are sometimes nimble like a dancer and sometimes serene and grave like a meditating woman. You are a part of nature like a tribal and grand like an empress. O sorceress, I have been ensnared by you for hundreds of years, and will remain so for thousands of years.)

  Gauri felt good. She took small sips of the wine quickly and resumed reading. The notebooks were full of innumerable details – reminiscences, incidents, blessings, curses, etc. Gaurav had been blessed several times. He had been called ‘the most valuable jewel of the world’, and he was also given names like ‘Gaurisutam’, ‘Vighnakarakam’, ‘Vastuvinashakam’, ‘Rudan Praveen’, ‘Television Prabhakshakah’, etc.

  The notebooks revealed that sometimes Suryakant turned deeply emotional about his family. When Gaurav was small, he had written: ‘It would be better if he does not grow for a few years.’ But he expressed another wish in the latest notebook: ‘How wonderful it would be if our son grows up quickly and joins a college or university!’ In the latest notebooks, opinions and thoughts about the chairman of the tourism department, Sampoornanand Brihaspati, were expressed using adjectives and phrases like ‘a clown who thinks himself wise’, ‘national shame’, ‘the Himalayas of wickedness’.

  Surya appeared quite worried about his job. Most of the space in the latest notebook had been taken up by this anxiety, the struggle between unemployment and Sampoornanand. The greater his tension regarding his job had become, the more effusively his love for Gaurav and Gauri had flourished. This fondness contained concern more than passion. He trembled thinking what hardships Gauri and Gaurav would have to face if he were unable to find some means of income. The moment the worry caught hold of him, his love started overflowing.

  Gauri’s heart melted as she read the diary, and then she was puzzled. At one place, a number of words had been jotted down under the heading ‘Words I Have Not Used for a Long Time’. The list went like this: inara, henga, rahat, baradha, mehraru, mania, osara, banskhatia, phatphatia, johnari, ordawan, batuli, tharia, bedur, aunghai, ujjar, tarkari, mansedu, karia, seepar, lalchahu, chimi, lora, sikhar, saintana, ankana, batkucchan, birahini, nimkai dena, bhinsaar, bhinaukhe, mer, lahura, looga, kharmitaw, bihan, matarmala, kiriya, chanha, machiya, jangar, gor, berana, bhuinya, batas, herna, patar, khaderna, chaila, berana, khotna, pathana, kathri, tarai, afor hona, thur dena, bhalmanai, goru, hur dena, natai, nakkati, non, anchara, bandi, dahijara, gadeli, newar, bakhari, borsi, meel, neemr, kathkarej, gherrana, daiu, chokarna, anhiyar, hikna, malai, baraf, khushiyali, korilla, sohari, pisan.

  Gauri was not familiar with a single one of these words but she was aware that these were words Surya had heard in his village and the house of his parents. After the severance from that life, many of them had gone out of his use gradually. It was nothing unusual, but she grew tense when she beheld them in the notebook because it struck her that the words that were supposed to have been buried were still breathing within her Surya. This meant the old relationships too must be vibrant, those she had naively taken for dead. The past must still exist in Surya. Rather, it must have become more tempting and vivid after such a long separation.

  What would transpire when Surya met his family again? Sweat gathered on Gauri’s forehead. The very next moment a doughty sentiment overcame her – what if Surya’s father behaved in the same manner as he had done the other night? What if Surya was shoved out, not allowed to enter the house? And she wished obdurately that her husband’s reunion with his kin after all these years should occur amid a deluge of hatred, insult and fury!

  11

  FORGIVE EVERYONE BUT YOURSELF

  Suryakant had risen so early after many years. Did his sleep patterns recall the fact that he used to get up at this very hour in Sultanpur? Those were the days when Babuji did his ablutions, washed, got ready and awakened every member of the family at the crack of dawn. After ruining everyone’s sleep, he sat down to worship. Winter, summer, rain, Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday, 1972, 1980 – it was a perennial routine. Chacha, Suryakant, Shibbu and Nupoor were forced to open their eyes and made to sit down to study.

  They left their beds reluctantly in the winter, but Babuji would fling their quilts off and threaten, ‘Get up, or else I will pour water on you all!’ However, when they grew up, they woke up by themselves. It would be a unique morning sight: Babuji reciting Sunder Kand or the Hanuman Chalisa loudly in the pooja room in the house, while the children would resolutely be reading out their individual chapters. So many voices and sounds assaulted one another that there was a great tumult.

  As soon as the sunlight fell on the ground in the winter, each would run shouting to claim the spot to read. In the summer, when the sun rose during their studies, they went downstairs with their books and notebooks. Suryakant had not forgotten: as soon as dawn broke, the world was filled with the chirping of birds.

  Suryakant gazed at the morning sky: the ruddy ball of the sun floated there. But there were
no chirps or tweets. No flocks of birds flying in the sky. He wondered where all the birds had vanished to. He envisioned his own house in Lucknow. Sparrows did not alight on the roofs to pick grains lately. Crows did not call out from the balconies. Cuckoos did not sing from the branches of the trees, and pigeons did not coo from the skylights or flap their wings. Where had they all gone? Not even bird poachers with their nets were visible, and children did not hold slings in their hands.

  His brain buzzed alive in the fresh morning breeze: one does not find crows hanging dead from naked electricity wires any more. Have their numbers shrunk so badly that there are not enough even to die? Sparrows, nightingales, pigeons, mynahs, parrots, were they all being herded somewhere for a carnage or could it be that they were assembling at some desolate spot to commit mass suicide? Perhaps the birds lost their lives by being scorched in the summer, frozen in the winter or drenched in the rains because they had found nowhere to build their nests? Without trees, where would the birds trill, where would they hop and where would they roost? After all, where had these tiny birds built their nests? Had they decided on self-exile, upset by the truculence and savagery of mankind? Or had most of them moved to some secret spot, scared, fretful? Or maybe they still lived somewhere close but we don’t have the spare time to notice them and to avenge this indifference, they have refused to be visible despite remaining around us. We see only some pigeons at the Gateway of India in Mumbai or around the historical monuments in Delhi. They glide down in hundreds, and fluttering their wings, fly up again. They hang about at places of national importance because we let them live there to impart loveliness to the scene. Had they not contributed in this manner, had they not adorned these great memorials, they would have possibly been shot down to protect the buildings. The pigeons would have been sprayed with bullets and their corpses would have been swept away in the morning.

  A new theory flashed and startled Suryakant: there is another possibility! Maybe the birds alight on the trees at the tourism directorate. Quite possible that they chirp on the tree at the back of my Lucknow house. Maybe there are millions of birds in Lucknow District but I have never paid attention. We see only the moving and sitting men and objects and vehicles and buildings.

  He consoled himself: perhaps he would catch a glimpse of the birds in the evening; but he was disappointed. If the morning has changed so radically, how can the evenings from the past recur? If the birds do not fly out of their nests in the morning, how does the question of their returning home in the evening arise! Or, if we do not have the leisure of beholding the birds leaving their nests in the morning, how shall we find time to gaze at their flight rows in the evening?

  And right then, he spotted a gigantic flock of birds in the sky. His eyes followed them. Hardly had they moved beyond sight when another approached, and then another - he shivered. He wondered if the legend heard in his childhood was true! His grandmother had told him once that trees and the leaves do not understand human language but they perceive the language of one’s heart. If you spoke to them with your heart, they would know immediately. He had tested it during his entire childhood. He would be calling out in his heart – come, sparrow, come. And a sparrow would soar down and start hopping before him. When he pronounced – sparrow, fly off; the sparrow took wing. If a crow cawed and he ordered, ‘Shut up crow’, the bird would fall silent. If the leaves of a tree were still, his heart would implore – let the wind blow. And in a little while, but surely, they would start swaying. Once he was stretched under a blackberry tree. He opened his mouth like a bird’s beak and prayed: let a blackberry drop in my mouth. A berry plopped down in his mouth. Had the birds also come out of their nests this morning because his heart had called out to them?

  The birds had taken off, he kept wondering about their exodus for some time. When he batted his eyelids, something pricked his eye. He had fallen asleep quite late at night. One of the reasons was that he was missing Gauri and Gaurav badly. He had called to find out how they were faring. Gauri’s mobile was switched off and the landline was busy. He tried several times, but it was as if the receiver had been removed from the cradle.

  It was Kamana who opened the door yesterday. For a while, Suryakant wondered if he had come to someone else’s house. He had arrived adequately prepared for any possible scene at the threshold or across it. He had devised a strategy in case he met Babuji at the door. One of his fears was that Babuji might get infuriated and slam the door on his face. In that case, he would leave, never to visit this house again. Although he had taken this vow the last time as well, he had returned.

  Suryakant was most apprehensive of the fact that Babuji might open the door and embrace him. He was afraid he would grow sentimental and ask Babuji to forgive him. He knew that it would then be the ultimate insult to Gauri and to his own love for Gauri. He had resolved that he would talk proudly of his love, his marriage and his conjugal life. Suryakant also had planned a tactic for another possibility in case his Babuji opened the door silently and turned and went back in. What would he do then? Would he follow him in? Or would he call out, ‘Babuji, it is I, Suryakant!’?

  And if there was Ma across the door? He would just smile, Ma would take care of the rest. A third possibility was that he might find the doors of the house already ajar. As was usual in the past: the doors would be unbolted at the hour of the arrival of the Varuna Express. His heart quivered. Did the doors remain open at the Varuna Express time even after I left house? Did the floors inside the house eagerly wait for my footsteps?

  But nothing of the sort happened.

  The Varuna Express reached Sultanpur around the same time it had that fateful foggy night. But tonight was a summer night. It was the eleventh moon and the shine itself was no bigger than the moon. Suryakant walked out of the station. Darkness prevailed everywhere. Rickshaws were waiting outside for passengers and people stepped towards them using the light of their mobile phones, which twinkled like fireflies. He climbed into a rickshaw, it moved and the town started going past him. Saloons, medical stores, textile shops were using emergency lights or generators. When he reached the vegetable market, he saw vendors selling vegetables on the ground on either side of the street. Hundreds of candles were burning between the mounds of vegetables which lent the atmosphere a festive look. As if it were Deepawali.

  The rickshaw slowed down a little ahead because a number of cows, bullocks, buffaloes, and oxen were reclining on the road. It was hard to tell whether they were sitting or reclining. Cattle do not sit or recline like human beings. Their sitting and lounging postures are alike.

  ‘What are so many animals doing here?’ Suryakant asked the rickshaw-puller.

  ‘Are you new to the town? You’ll find them everywhere.’ The rickshaw-puller said that since ever even the low caste people in villages had begun to plough their fields with tractors, oxen had become useless. The same logic applied to the cows and buffaloes. The native cow did not produce more than a seer of milk, so most people didn’t see why they should waste money on such idle cows. Their calves were also worthless. It was affection for them or the strictures of religion that stopped the owners from passing them to the butchers. So, they were driven away from the villages. They ran to another village, but they were driven off once again. Finally, they drifted to the towns to roam, only to be beaten, thrashed and insulted.

  The rickshaw hit a bull but regained balance.

  ‘The electricity has not come back yet?’ Suryakant was fed up with the darkness.

  ‘How can you expect it so early? It’ll come by 1 a.m.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There is regular load-shedding from 3 p.m. to 1 a.m.’

  ‘For ten hours?’ Suryakant was surprised.

  ‘It’s just like this, but there are power cuts in between too.’

  ‘Stop … stop here!’

  He paid the rickshaw-puller and the man left. Now there were only Suryakant and his house before him. The space between them was filled with darkness. He tried to
locate the doorbell by the light of his phone, but remembered that there was no power. He rattled the chain on the door. God knows after how many years he was touching this chain, rattling the door with it.

  On the other side of the door was Kamana, who he did not know and who did not know him. There was inquiry in her eyes. There was a question in Suryakant’s eyes also, but it was Kamana’s privilege to undertake the query with a lantern in her hand.

  ‘I’m Suryakant, from Lucknow.’

  The lantern shook wildly at his words, resulting into a tornado of light around it. But Kamana composed herself quickly. She touched Suryakant’s feet and ushered him in.

  Awadh Narayan began fixing his dentures after taking it out from the water in a bowl when he heard the footsteps of a guest. Ma put on her spectacles. Dadi was unmoved. She swung a hand-held fan that swung with a creaking sound, wafting a breeze to her.

  First fear appeared within Ma and Babuji, then astonishment, then warmth, but they were silent despite the surging emotions.

  ‘Who is this fellow?’ Dadi asked, swinging her fan.

  ‘I am Suryakant, Dadi.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Suryakant,’ he spoke loudly.

  ‘Which Surkan? Who’s your father?’

  Nobody spoke. A stillness rapidly marched in, but it was short-lived like a frame freezing momentarily and then unfreezing.

  Ma was the first to move. She stepped close to Suryakant and started fanning his face with the hand-held fan. Then Dadi said, ‘Someone hand me my kubri.’ Kamana handed the walking stick to her. She rose in a bent posture and shuffling with the help of the stick, she stood in front of Suryakant. Suryakant bowed to touch her feet, but she stayed him and felt his face. Rough, loose skin rolled over Suryakant’s face.