by Gabbar Singh
The crucifix on the wall behind the vase unscrewed from the top nail and turned through a hundred and eighty degrees. The Anti-Christ. The vase shattered.
It wasn’t God I had signed the deal with. It was the devil.
2. The Creation of Love
Deepti Menon
It was a chilly winter’s evening and the silhouette of the Taj Mahal, the monument of love, shimmered in the haze, shining with an intensity that cut through the fog. Very few people dared to brave the cold, but an intense young man strode resolutely. His breath came in a whistle, as he willed the chill to clear the cobwebs in his mind. He was a playwright who loved to create life: his characters took birth and lived so realistically that at times, they would threaten to overshadow their creator.
His latest play was giving him heartaches. He had visualized the perfect love story- that of a budding young artist and a poor girl of such ex- quisite beauty that it wrenched the heart. He had brought it to life, the characters having flown off his pen onto the sheets of paper that drank them in greedily. The play was written, signed off with a flourish, but the girl refused to come to life. It did not help that he was a member of the aristocracy, and as is the case, had no first-hand knowledge of the impov- erished. He had come to the marble mausoleum, hoping to get inspired by it and its legend, but his muse seemed to have deserted him, leaving him bereft of ideas, as cold as the marble that towered over him.
Very early that morning, he had set out, determined to find a suitably impoverished girl after whom he could model his character. Thus, one found him, oblivious of the frost that seemed to creep into his bones, away from home, casting furtive glances into a section of the decrepit houses he had managed to locate. A whole colony of huts lay sprawled in abandon, outside which people, dogs and cows slept, all huddled up against the biting cold. Once the sun made up its mind to show itself, its golden rays would wash over them, waking them up only to face yet another challenging day.
He drew his coat closely about him, as he got closer to the stench of pov - erty, wishing that he were in his own home, in front of his snug fireplace, with a cup of tea in his hands. But a poet’s words, “Art is long and time is fleeting…” ran through his head like a refrain, galvanizing him into ac- tion. There was much to be done.
In one hut sat a girl, huddled over the tiny fire, as she gazed at the embers that glowed like rubies, but hardly giving out enough heat to warm her pathetic form. At intervals, sparks, like little fireflies, would fly upwards in a pathetic display, and as quickly die down again. She looked younger than her age; for she had forgotten the last time she had eaten to her heart’s content. She survived on scraps that the neighbours gave her, but there were days when the neighbours themselves went hungry.
The young man would have walked past without looking at the girl, if she had remained inside. But the fire had gasped its heart out, and she got up edgily, opened the creaking door and stepped outside. She put her arms around herself, as the wind tore at her ragged clothes, trying to keep warm. However, the moment she saw him, she assumed the stoop- ing posture of the regular beggar, whining in a singsong manner, “God bless you, young sir, and your wife and children! I have eaten nothing for two days!” He cast an impatient glance at her, retrieved a coin, and stood looking at her, wondering where he had seen her earlier. Her palm closed over the coin that he had thrust at her, and then she turned away awkwardly, her curly hair a-tangle, even as he perceived a strange earthy charm in her grimy face. A good wash and some warm food would make her a great deal more attractive, he thought.
Making up his mind, he beckoned to her to follow him, but her expres - sion became wary and she shook her head. She did not trust young gen- tlemen; her attitude seemed to indicate. There were too many ‘kothas’ into which girls had been lured, their lives blighted, where they existed till they were discarded like the pips of an orange, their juice sucked out slowly, but inexorably. She had seen their hollow eyes, filled with despair, as they cursed the men who had forced them into lives of iniquity. Most of these girls ended up in hospitals or as inmates of grim institutions. She would never allow herself to turn into them!
“You are safe with me. I will give you food!” he said, in a soft, cajol - ing manner. She gazed into his warm eyes, lowered her defences, and went along with him to a small teashop, run by a burly gentleman with a handlebar moustache. “What can I get you, sir?” his voice boomed out cheerily, pretending not to notice the odd couple that had walked in.
The girl looked around, her eyes glistening at the sight of all the food exhibited within glass shelves. A plate of puris along with spicy potato curry was placed before her, and she pounced on it, gobbling it down, licking her fingers in ecstasy after mopping up every morsel. She washed it down with a huge tumbler of sweet buttermilk, laced with thick cream, smacking her lips. Her face was animated, almost attractive, as she shook the last drop onto her pink tongue, emitting a soft belch to show her ap- preciation.
He observed her as she lay back in the wooden chair, an expression of satiation on her wan face, like a kitten that had eaten all the cream. As he began to talk to her, her face showed bewilderment. No one had ever spoken to her, treated her as human, before. He was different from the other men she had come across. Slowly, waves of understanding began to make their way across her mobile face, and she nodded. She was willing to do as he asked, but she pointed to the food that lay around. He would have to buy her a meal every day, and allow her to take the leftovers home. He was gratified that she asked for so little, a creature that grasped at coins but did not have the intellect to look at big money.
He met her every day, bringing her little gifts to encourage her to talk. A box of scented handkerchiefs, a little heart-shaped mirror that she loved on first sight, chocolates that she gorged on! She had no artifice in her, just like the character in his play. He bought her a cheap sari, which she wore so often that he bought her another just to stop her from wearing the first. The grime had disappeared, leaving behind a strange kind of beauty that seemed to shine from within. They met daily at the teashop. One day, he took her home as well, relishing her gasps of wonder at the opulence that he had so taken for granted.
Every time he met her, he would capture a piece of her persona in his memory and rush to his studio to write it down. When he had finally fathomed the child-woman she was, he went to his temperamental lead- ing lady, trying to explain to her how she was to act, and even react, to the situations in his play. He lost his temper when she could not bring out the nuances just so!
In desperation, he took his leading lady to the teashop. The moment he introduced the two, he knew he had made a mistake. The diva’s lip curled back in a sneer as she expostulated, “Is that what you want me to look like…to act like?” She turned a withering glance under which the poor girl blanched. The diva flounced out in a flaming rage, having announced that she would not stoop down to the level he wanted her to. The young man’s heart sank. He was back to where he started. He took the girl’s icy hand in his, and caressed it gently, cajoling her to eat. She began to regain her colour, and it was then that it struck him. He was in love with the little waif. Or rather, he was in love with the character he had created, but he felt that it amounted to the same thing!
He rushed out, wrestling with his conscience, and at night, he tossed and turned. On the one side was his career, painstakingly carved out of his hard work and creativity; on the other, his love, a wayward hope that had crept into his heart. Would he have to throw away his passion to nurture this little, fluttering flame? Was it worth it? Yes, cried his heart, caught in the throes of new found love; no, said his mind that desperately wanted to make him see sense.
The next night, he was ebullient, having decided to take her, into his life. He walked, a new spring in his step. As he looked at her, her eyes shone, large and lustrous, and her personality seemed to have blossomed out like a flower under his care. She was his creation, he thought, his alone. No one else had the right to poss
ess her.
As he revealed his feelings to her, she almost toppled off her chair. Could such a miracle take place? She listened, drunk on happiness, as he out- lined the wonder that was to be their life together, and how she would never be deprived of anything again as her past would never be allowed to overtake her future.
Soon, the joy drained out of her face, followed by resignation. He was still full of his own generosity, when she put a hand on his arm to stop him. Never had he seen such desperation on a human face, as she stood up, looked at him with her heart in her eyes, and then began to walk away. He followed her, reiterating his feelings, but her face seemed carved out of stone as she continued to walk without even looking at him.
Finally he lost his temper. His face reddened with the effort and he screamed at her. “Why do you lead me on?” She did not look back at him, as he continued to rant. “I picked you up when you were a waif, when you had nothing to look forward to. I transformed you. Why are you so heartless?”
She was silent, and as he tried to grasp her shoulder, she evaded him deftly turning into a by lane that led to her hovel. There were sleeping figures all over and he had to avoid stumbling over them. His eyes soon got used to the darkness, as the moonbeams shone down on them, creat- ing little niches of light on the walls.
He felt they would never reach their destination. Dogs howled in the distance. Finally, she stopped in front of her tiny hut, pushed open the creaking door and looked back at him. There was a look of utter despair in her eyes, one that made him hesitate. She beckoned him inside.
He followed unwillingly, into a space that was bare. A lit kerosene lamp, whose glass was rimmed with soot, made the room seem tinier than it was. Their shadows danced on the walls. He looked around, wondering how a human being could actually live like this. As his eyes grew accus- tomed to the little light in the room, he looked at the pale oval of her face that glowed in the near-darkness. She looked back at him, and then lifted a slim finger and pointed to a corner of the room.
He could see the faint outlines of a cot in the corner, with a huddled form lying on it. She held his hand and drew him closer. A gaunt man lay on the cot, covered with a thin worn sheet that must have seen many winters. The man was still, his face immobile, as spittle flecked the corner of his mouth. He lay there, staring blankly at the mottled ceiling. She went to him, and spoke gently, but there was no response.
The young man stood rooted, trying to conceal his pity. A gush of ten- derness overcame him, as he turned to her. “What is wrong with him?” “He was involved in a motor accident. A huge tanker struck him from behind, and he was left lying on the road for over two hours. When some kind stranger finally picked him up and took him to the hospital, he had lost too much of blood.” She stopped, tears flowing down her cheeks, which she flicked away impatiently. She continued, trembling, “His brain was damaged beyond repair. The doctors tried their best, but the verdict was that he had been left bleeding for too long.” She sighed, “He is just a vegetable now.” As she moved closer to the bed, half her face disap- peared into the shadows. The next question dragged itself out of him, even as he dreaded the answer to it. “Who is he?”
Her only answer was to swivel, pick up the kerosene lamp, and walk to the wall furthest away from him. The lamp cast its light on the grimy wall, on which an old photograph was hanging askew from a rusty nail. As he peered at it, crinkling his eyes, he could see the people in it clearly. She was dressed in bridal finery with the red kumkum bold on her forehead. The smiles were resplendent, and the man by her side was neither gaunt, nor immobile; his large eyes sparkled with love and pride as he looked at his brand new wife. And then he knew, even as she looked at him long- ingly, that the chasm between them had widened beyond description.
3. Wintersong
Anuj Gosalia
“You’re cute,” chuckled Anusha over her third glass of brandy. “So are you,” he quipped followed by a large, gregarious laughter that echoed through the melancholic expanse of the Malhotra mansion.
The mansion, built with stone and gravel was a colonial bungalow that the erstwhile British Empire had left behind with Mr. Malhotra’s grandfa- ther, for being a loyal servant of the Raj. Mussoorie, the royal Himalayan hill station, was dotted with many such old crumbling properties and owners struggling to keep them afloat.
Like many broken things, the mansion too had its origins in glory. It was home to a romance that often found itself sprawled on the stone floor after drinking and loving the night away. A playground for young love, it was.
Mr. Malhotra was a man who had walked his early youth desperate to find a vocation that met his inner flight. He had an impeccable rhythm to the things he did. A masterly eye, a trained hand. Unfortunately, in small town Mussoorie, these skills were of little merit. The letters he wrote in the bank, as part of his job, were so carefully crafted that the bank even- tually had to let him go. Even a leisurely place like Mussoorie couldn’t afford an employee who spent four of his eight hours writing one letter.
What work never evoked, love did. And the mansion became an emissary of his loving. Mrs. Malhotra had been gone thirteen years now. On a perfectly innocu - ousMonday evening, the chandelier above their dining creaked, pulled a part of the ceiling with it and draped her fragile body in shards of glass. And just like that, a marriage of twenty years came crashing down.
Sometimes, life takes away the cadence of a heartbeat. Everything feels the same and yet, nothing is.
Mr. Malhotra moved to Delhi after the accident. A friend was kind to offer employment with the government to help him file his life away. But Mussoorie’s mountains had been as forgiving as they were harsh. So, he packed his life in three suitcases and walked up the winding Himalayan slopes to his large but broken mansion. To build home again.
Anusha, his youngest niece, had been the light in his fireplace. All of nineteen years, she was spending her winter holidays with him. She loved the mountains and the tall, musty ceilings of his mansion and the walls lined with dusty books. Her camera had found a magic his eyes never could.
Tonight, the gramophone played Pakeezah. The fireplace cast looming shadows of the two. A moon the size of two suns peeked in from the large French windows in the south. It was an evening so cold it crawled underneath the skin and ate on their bones.
Anusha leaned in to hold Mr. Malhotra’s trembling hands. The half-baked fire now emanated a consoling warmth. Maybe it was the brandy, or the haunting song, or the melancholy of the mansion but her touch moved something old and lost inside him.
His eyes longed to hold her and weep into her bosom, but propriety held him back. She rubbed her gentle palms against the back of his hand, try- ing to keep him warm. The glow of the fireplace danced a slow rhythmic waltz in the living room. Desires laced with ancient memories walked out of the heart’s closet.
By the fireplace on that winter’s night, warmth took over.
4. My Grandfather Shirt
Shikhandi1
Skin is contagious. Approximately 38 degrees Celsius and a humidity of 77% should make you envy a one-year-old’s attire. Ruffle through pages of antiquated photographs where sepia-tinted women bedecked in noble and other metals have the fortune of not wearing a blouse. Their cotton and silk sarees crumple in their soft, brown folds, trained to drink sweat off the human skin. How they carefully chose their blues, reds and yel- lows! Those bikini-clad people who have the luxury of being on the other side of a television screen take the same degree of envy. You wish to roll your sleeves up to the sky and let Skin infect you. Skin. Bare. Breathing.
In an era, a couple of hundred years ago, British foreign direct invest - ment was the norm here. It was then that a certain Morality boarded ships, travelled on pickled food for months, and reached the warm coasts of India. It unloaded from its trunks vaccines for Skin. Churned out by kind-hearted machinery back home, these vaccines arrived in fashion cut, sewed and sleeved to modesty. Morality was prompt in joining the other officials in their m
id-noon siestas, tucked away from the daily sun and their summerly escapades to nearby hills for refrigeration.
And these vaccines seem to havesurvived to this day. If you walk through the railway stations of certain South Indian cities, you shall confront its significant cross-section. A cross-section that establishes the kind of at- tire clad in which you may enter roads, parks, malls, subsidized eateries, schools and colleges, such that a minimum even number of eyes turn towards you. Stitched clothes are a must. You may choose the extent though. Front-buttoned blouses; shirts and kurtas that drape you at a respectable distance from your body; trousers that are free-size; and such. Unstitched additions secure you in case-specific ways. If you are a man, your shirt collar is protected from your neck’s precipitates by a layer of napkin. A dhoti, a lungi, a veshti, a sarong or creatures of such variety may substitute for a pair of trousers during occasions of cultural solidar- ity. A towel, an uttareeyam or an angavastram on your shoulder comes
1 Pseudonym in handy either to establish your status or to wipe off different kinds of socially acceptable body fluids. It may also adorn your head during mo- ments when you toil your skull with heavy baggage or an undesirable sunbath.
If you are a woman, you call it a saree or a duppatta. The functions of the two are clearly delineated and their appropriate usage may save you from sexual assault. Drape the saree only in the style that the Indian National Congress chose for the nation’s women such that they may walk the long anti-British marches pure, with no stains of caste, occupation, language or region. One convenience of this style is that your blouse’s front buttons are secured away from any man’s eye; it lets you walk upright. Running or lifting heavy weights in case of an emergency might require significant maneuver. The duppatta, occasionally elevated to a petite ‘stole’ or to the thickness of a ‘shawl’, may be half as long as a saree. It nevertheless performs a higher function. It either ruffles or straightens any medically acceptable curves. It is mandatory to assure the onlooker of the kurtaclad woman’s moral status. “No, she is not a bra-burner, foreigner or an alien. She shall be of no threat to the attire choices of the women of your house or to the sexual composure of the men of your house.” Safety pins, here, insure you against accidental infections of Skin.