by Gulzar
Old friends and new playmates, uncles and aunties, games and videos, dancing monkeys and waltzing bears and what not were paraded through Gagi’s room. Gagi was not given a moment to think, to mull over her disease. Vikas and Aruna did not let the grimness of the hospital waft into their house. I would often marvel at their spirit. Gagi had become an expert in antakshari. When medicines stopped working the doctors began to talk about operating on Gagi’s leg. Vikas and Aruna took her to America. Now Gagi knew that she had cancer.
‘But why in my leg Papa?’
‘It’s the cancer of the bones, beta. It’s in the bone of the leg. They are going to operate on your bone, scrape it out of your bone before it spreads.’
In America, Gagi’s treatment stretched over a few months. She lost all her hair to chemotherapy. She would dread running her hand over her hairless pate and look at her parents through eyes filled with fear. Aruna and Vikas would do their best to laugh it all off.
‘Baldy … don’t you be scared … your hair’s gonna grow back in a matter of months.’
‘I love you this way. This is the current trend. The in-thing. Haven’t you heard?’
‘Hi, Yul Brynner!’
I think Gagi had immense faith in her parents’ laughter and believed that she was going to get better soon. That was the hope the doctors in America had rekindled in her when they plastered up the leg they had operated upon and sent her back to India.
But soon after her return from America, a foul, putrid smell began to emanate from her leg. She was in great pain. This time instead of Dr Adhikari another doctor was consulted. He had the plaster on her leg cut open. Her leg was festering with pus. The doctors were of the opinion that it was not cancer, it could not be cancer, but nobody was able to treat her back to health. Doctors began to be changed like medicines on their prescriptions. Within three months they sawed her leg off in the fear that the cancer might raise its ugly head again. The amputated limb was cremated in an electric crematorium with all the rites accorded to the dead.
When Gagi’s glance climbed off the ceiling, she asked in a very quiet voice, ‘Papa, why is God punishing me? I haven’t ever done anything bad.’
Aruna had placed an icon of Krishna in her room. She would light joss sticks and the fame in the lamp would be kept up all through the day and the night in front of it. They had given up eating meat or fish as penance. However, when Gagi asked for kebabs or tikkas they would never refuse her. They had even asked her doctor and taken his permission.
One day when a new doctor entered her room, Gagi asked, ‘You have changed the doctor again, Papa?’
‘Yes, beta … that doctor could not do anything.’
She looked at the Krishna idol in the room and said, ‘This god too can’t do anything … isn’t there another god, Papa?’
It wasn’t like Aruna to say this, but somehow she just blurted out, ‘He’s like Superman only, beta … in the books he can do everything.’
Ghugu and Jamuni
High up on the branches of the tall, leafy suru tree, Ghugu would stealthily perch himself and patiently lie in wait for a glimpse of his beloved, every day. She would fly in from the orchard side, strutting her colorful plumes, carelessly trolling his patch of the sky. He had fallen in love with the kite, fallen in love with its shimmer of yellow and purple. He would sit mesmerized, watching her soar and dive, now to this rhythm, now to that. He really thought her to be a bird.
A number of times, he would flap his wings and fly past her, tweeting sweet nothings into her ears: ‘The colours on your two wings are not the same … one’s a brilliant yellow and the other is just the shade of ripe jamun berries I so love! May I call you Jamuni? You are so pretty!’ And every time she would flutter her wings and fly away in one smooth move. He thought it to be her bashfulness. Once he had even invited her to his nest. But she flounced away from him, soared away into the vast expanse of the sky—in silence, absolute silence. No chirp, no cheep, not even a tiny little tweet. Whenever he winged himself near her, she would prance away. Now he had learned to keep his distance, and whooped at her from a respectable distance: ‘You look lovely when you strut about like this!’ But even then she did not utter a single coo. And he yearned and longed to hear her voice—a trill, a tweet or a chirp—anything at all.
Her thoughts haunted him throughout the day and he kept hovering over the orchard. That was the direction she always flew in from. His eyes would scan the rooftops, the trees, the entire horizon—maybe he would get a glimpse of her, spot her roosting on the branch of some tree, or perhaps find her pecking on some rooftop. He would even forget to feed. He few for hours on end with a grain or two stashed in his beak—thinking he would feed them to her when he found her. He had begun to hoard tufts of grass, lengths of thread. He was thinking of building a nest, to bring her home. The male of the species always did so. He wanted his to be the best, better than anyone else’s.
And then, a few days later, he got to know that she wasn’t a free bird. She was someone else’s prisoner, tied at the back with a bright glistening string—thin as a thread, and pretty sharp. His wing had brushed against it, only once—and the thread had cut right through it. A few feathers had cut clean from his wing, and begun to sashay down to earth. It was then that it hit him—the realization—that she wasn’t a free bird. She came with strings attached, a string that someone else pulled. That must be the reason she did not respond to his gestures, that must be the reason she did not make a single sound. Perhaps she was scared of her owner.
Her owner would let her fly for a while in the open but when a bird tried to come close to her, he would pull on her string and haul her back to his roof, take her by her ears and banish her into her cage. He had seen him holding her ears but where on earth did he keep her cage? If only he knew … if only he could find out … he could then at least try to free her.
That day too he sat high up in the branches of the tall suru tree. It was then that he saw the clouds, gathering ominously, rising together in a silent pact. He knew the clouds always belched out the wind in their bellies before they rained down. The wind would soon pick up speed, and no bird would dare fly with such a wind under its wings—not even someone as strong of feather as the crow. His Jamuni surely would not be able to withstand such a wind, such gusts. Her constitution was too delicate. And she had just spread her wings and flown off her roof. She was still finding her winghold, still seeking her balance in the sky. The winds were becoming increasingly strong, rattling the doors and windows. Ghugu few to warn the kite—all care for his own safety tossed to the winds; his only concern was for his Jamuni. And then a strong gust of wind slapped his wings, tossed him around. He was still far away from his Jamuni but he kept flapping his wings, kept propelling himself forward, steering himself in the direction, kept squawking at her, ‘Go back Jamuni … head back home … Jamuni! A storm’s brewing … the clouds are soon going to burst … and the rain, you would—’ Something lodged itself in his throat—the wind began to push him backwards. He could hardly see in the gathering darkness but he could still steer himself in the general direction of her house. The clouds now began to swoop down on him and the gust became too strong. He suddenly lost his balance. All his flapping was of no use. He was falling freely, rapidly losing his altitude—and then the wind picked him up once again and dashed him against an electric pole. That was when he lost consciousness.
When he returned to his senses, he found himself inside a wooden almirah, enveloped in soft clothes. It was still raining. He could make that much out from the dampness in the air. The pitter-patter of the raindrops was distant but distinct. And a strange smell arose from his body—the kind that he found when he alighted on the skylight of that hospital across the road. He could also hear the voices of children. And then it all came back to him. He remembered colliding against the electric pole. Some kind child must have found him. It must have been the kid who was looking after him. He closed his eyes as the pain shot up his little body.
This pain he could bear, but what about the other pain, the one that refused to be healed? The moment he closed his eyes, Jamuni’s face sprung to his mind. Was she alive? God forbid she had fallen in the storm. Did she manage to reach her home safely? He kept his eyes shut, kept nursing his pain—and the pain kept him alive.
After a few days in the almirah he was transferred to a wiry cage which was hung up in the balcony. He liked the feel of the sun on his feathers. He felt alive, felt life returning to his wings. He still couldn’t flap his wings as he could earlier but he was now able to spread them. The pain had not all gone away, not yet, a little still remained in his shoulders.
Within a couple of days, he identified the voices of the other birds, and felt good. He was still in the same old neighbourhood, still on the very same side of the orchard from where Jamuni would fly in. A new hope began to throb in his veins, renewing his zest for life.
Days passed in waiting. He had begun to tweet and prattle all to himself, intermittently calling out to Jamuni: ‘For a few days I will be here, staying with a few children … down here in the building, in Montu’s house … don’t look for me in the sky!’
‘How have you been, Jamuni?’
‘Where are you, Jamuni? Jamuni!’
And then, one day, finally he did spot the familiar half yellow-half purple figure, high up there in the sky. And what a knot he wound himself in! He frantically began to flap about in his cage, squealing, pleading, clamouring to be let out. But there was nobody in the house to hear his pleas. He kept banging against the bars of his prison. His cage kept swinging, but that was all. He squawked, he cawed, he whistled and hooted—but Jamuni did not even cast a glance downwards in his direction.
A few minutes later, Jamuni disappeared from his sight. And then when he spotted her again she was frenziedly gliding down towards the bazaar. Her string was hanging down limply behind her. She must have broken free from her captivity. For him—to be with him! Slowly but surely, she had begun her descent. And below on the ground, a few kids had begun to run, jumping up now and then to try and catch her trailing string. Ghugu called out to her but his voice did not reach her. It got drowned in the cacophony of the bazaar and the shouts of the children. Then suddenly a big kid grabbed her string and ran into the narrow lane. He saw Jamuni straining to break away from him, trying to soar up, to fly away. But the kid’s grasp on the string was very strong. She just couldn’t break free, not this time.
And then …
Ghugu would not have been able to dream up what happened next, not ever. His heart skipped a beat. Montu ran into the house, brandishing Jamuni, his Jamuni.
‘Ma … Ma … look, look! A patang … I found a patang!’
It was then that he got to know—his Jamuni already had a name: Patang. Everybody looked at her affectionately. Montu put her up on the wall in the balcony—the same balcony where Ghugu’s cage was hung. All through the night, he kept calling out to her: ‘Jamuni … Patang … Jamuni!’ But she did not make a single sound, just swayed with the wind a couple of times. That was all.
Ghugu understood. She must have been born mute. That was why she never chirped, never cheeped, never tweeted, never said anything to him.
The Orange
Mamu, Amjad’s maternal uncle, had a wonderful style of telling a story. He would start telling a story while talking about something else, and start talking about something else while telling a story. And quite effortlessly too.
‘So, when in the beginning spacecrafts from the outer worlds came to study our solar system,’ he said, ‘they found this round earth of ours like an orange, but a blue and green orange …’
Amjad’s attention once again went to his orange.
About two or three days ago, some oranges had been brought into the house. One orange fell to everybody’s lot, but for Amjad’s. He had a cough and cold and was also running a little fever. Amjad began to throw a tantrum and Ammi yielded. She let him have one, but he was forbidden to eat it.
‘Don’t eat it now. Till your cold gets better and your fever subsides just let it lie here.’
Amjad was consoled: at least he had not been deprived of his share. But now the orange had begun to lose its sheen—it did not look as fresh and lustrous as it had two days ago.
Mamu was still talking about the orange.
‘The colour blue fascinated these men from the outer worlds and they deduced from its blue colour that more than two-thirds of this earth was made up of seas of water. And then they also found similar strips of blue running across the dry surface of the earth—as if the water from the seas were flowing into them … into those rivers …’
‘But, Mamu, it’s just the opposite … the waters from the rivers flow into the sea, not the other way round.’
‘Oh … one thing you have forgotten … they were looking at the earth from way, way up. Now when you are looking at things from that far up, can you make out which way the flow is? You can’t blame them, can you? All they saw were the colours … as if the earth was sprayed by colours … like this—’
Mamu pulled up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a spidery spread of blue veins on his fat arms. Amjad did not find such a spidery web on his orange but yes, the fresh lustrous rind of the fruit had begun to feel soft to his touch and he could see grey–black spots threatening to burst out on the surface, like the ones on the face of his other uncle, his old, weathered Phupa.
Mamu’s stories would run at a feverish pace for days on end. He would never give up on pushing the frontiers of his stories further, stretching them out over a few days. He would move the end a notch further and yet further. But this time he moved up not a few days, but jumped ahead a few centuries.
‘As the spacecrafts kept returning to their observation posts above the earth at regular intervals of centuries, the condition of the orange kept deteriorating, kept worsening. It went from bad to worse, from worse to worst. They few closer to the earth … and found beautiful jungles. At places they found boxes of settlements, and inside those boxes they found earthlings, crawling like small little insects. But those boxes were few and far between, far away from each other.’
That day, Amjad picked up his orange and hid it behind the flower vase. He was not willing to let anybody throw it away till he got a fresh one in its place. Amjad’s fever too was stretching out, like Mamu’s stories, over days. The next instalment of Mamu’s story began the next day.
‘So I was telling you … yes, after another hundred years, another spacecraft came and swooped closer to the orange. This time it took them some time to find the blue orange. There was a lot of dust in the atmosphere. A thin thread of ozone had begun to leak out and float like a piece of cloud. On closer inspection they found that because of the constant travel of the earthlings, permanent lines were scrawled all over the planet. These lines started off at one settlement and disappeared into another. And on these scrawls, the earthlings had begun to move faster. It seemed as if one earthling had hauled another earthling on his back and had begun to run. Perhaps the earthlings had learnt to ride animals. The settlements too had expanded and multiplied. At places they could see small golden suns burning: the earthlings had discovered fire. But where they had seen jungles once, now they found rivers of smoke, spiralling skywards. Perhaps the earthlings were burning jungles to clear more land for themselves, to build more of their boxes. The orange of the earth was no longer looking as fresh and lustrous and as inviting as those travellers before them had remarked.’
Amjad knew the secret. He had discovered the pricks in his orange, tiny holes, and had seen long queues of little ants crawling in and out of those holes. Where he had earlier seen spots of discolour now he found black and white mouldy overgrowth.
Mamu had once again flown away in his spacecraft. A few days later when he returned with his story a few more centuries had gone by.
‘When those people of the spacecraft returned this time, they found the earth—which only a few centuries earlier they had disc
overed to be a lustrous planet, full of freshness—was wrapped in a thin film of poisonous gases. The layer of ozone was threadbare, like the cloth off the back of a poor beggar. And the atmosphere below it was filled with smoke and radioactive noise pollution. Only a few patches of green forest remained. The boxes of civilization had multiplied many times over and now covered the entire land. The entire earth was crawling with insects.’
Amjad’s orange was now completely rotten and infested with worms and insects that kept biting into it and devouring it.
VII
I run and I run to keep in step
But look at this life
How quickly it marches on—
Under the Earth
He had no idea how long he had been lying in the darkness. When he slowly came back into consciousness he felt the ground beneath him quivering. After what seemed to him like a long time, the ground stopped shaking. It was only then that he opened his eyes for the first time. He was enveloped in darkness.
The ground had begun to shake again. He willed it to stop and then opened his eyes for the second time. He tried to stand up but the huge concrete slab on his back once again pinned him to the ground. He could not see anything in the dark.
When he opened his eyes again, he found both his hands burrowed into the earth. This time he let his head lie on the ground. Slowly his consciousness tossed and turned on its side and he remembered the earthquake—and he felt the ground quake all over again.
He was fast asleep when his bedstead had begun to shake. The continuous thud-thud kept drumming into his ears. The steel almirah had begun to quiver in the corner of the room as if in the grip of a malarial fever. He could hear the clanging of the utensils in the kitchen, faint at first and then clanking on the floor, rolling, crashing against the wall. At first he was a little scared at the strange sounds and then suddenly it all sank in—it was an earthquake. He had shot up from his bed, tried to switch the light on. It flickered to life, deigned to glow for a moment dully, and then died out. He could now hear the panicky cries of his neighbours. He had pushed the door open and ran out. The lift was not working. Somebody had switched the mains off. He ran for the stairs. There was absolute bedlam. Women were screaming. More and more people were pouring into the stairwell, running out of their homes, bounding down the stairs towards safety. He did not even realize how quickly he had climbed down the first two floors. On the landing of the next floor he felt bits and pieces of plaster, ripped off the ceiling above, fall on his head. The staircase had begun to tremble. The earthquake was perhaps rumbling through the ground right now, or maybe it was burping. Or perhaps it was still growling in its throat. His knees began to shake and he fell down. A few more toppled over him. And then with a sudden explosive boom, the stairs under his feet began to slide through the earth and sank into the netherworld.