Yaraana

by Hoshang Merchant

  You weren’t frightened then.’ I can’t

  Explain my fear,’ she said and wished

  She had worn her walking shoes.

  The rustle of dead leaves

  Caused by some small scurrying turned

  Attention to the overlordship of silence and

  The magnitude of the dwarfing rocks,

  Each frozen tree grappling roots in subterranean

  battle,

  Heaving stiffly under the impermanent road.

  My mother couldn’t bear how the sky narrowed

  Miserably like some concept or

  How the dark, deceptive road seemed so

  Untravelled, not stretching cleanly as conscious

  purpose,

  But going oppressively, oppressedly winding on

  Like a trick of the mind she thought

  She’d overgrown or just forgotten.

  Something happened. Did the sky turn blood red

  And the leaves crawl over her skin?

  The road, perhaps, shook like an old train,

  The silence filled her mind with the hollowness of

  bone?

  When she reached the car parked in the shade

  She grew calmer, remarking that it was lucky

  There had been space to turn it around.

  Apparently

  Dinyar Godrej

  Black dreams perch

  upon seven o’clock.

  They’re lost in the shower.

  Mouth open before the mirror

  teeth, liquids, lumpen flesh—

  What’s the point/I am bad.

  This gut simplicity

  tears through my ears.

  Simple the past.

  Motherfather bore no knife,

  the furniture was accepting.

  This to a friend—

  There is no reason for wanting to die.

  Apparently

  there doesn’t have to be.

  Rite of Passage

  Manoj Nair

  There are certain objects in this world that cannot be captured by the camera. Fireflies, for instance. Filmmakers over the years have used artificial means to show them flitting across the screen. So, every time you see them you are actually watching a few children holding candle flames and hopping across from one marked area to another as directed by the man in the chair.

  Reminiscences, a few of them, are like those fireflies. They cannot be imprinted on the retina of the mind’s eye. As a chief geologist at the National Geographical Society in Deogarh, he has searched hard for prints of those college days. His first days.

  They are for Prem like the moneyplant in his flat which has grown and crept into his drawing room. Every morning, he watches the leaves flutter. He observes the emergence of a new one, pale green, greeting him saying: ‘I’ll be your guest for a few days.’ Weekends are for sweeping out the fallen ones. Adieu, Adieu. Not a twist does he ever give the stem, so that it grows back out of the window to where it belongs.

  Souvenirs from his college at Trissur. All arranged and set in place by his mother. Mother, who had brought him up since his father died. He was barely seven then. She was the one he listened to, and went to with his needs. If anyone questioned the reasoning behind his actions, he would promptly reply: ‘My mother told me to do so.’ He can recollect all that with little embarrassment. His only reason to support a nationalist party’s call to replace a historical mosque with a temple was the argument which always came veiled in another question: ‘Who told you that the man you know as your father is your father?—Your mother of course.’

  Often, her education was never the reason behind her advice. The lack of it was in fact the argument in favour. In natural bondings, faith is blind. Reasoning is illogical. Logic is unreasonable. Mother to son. Usha to Prem.

  Going to college was literally climbing a hill to reach the seat of learning. But any thought of the three years he spent there were like the leaves of the moneyplant. They were not just his. They also belonged to Ramettan. Memory was not his right alone.

  ‘Do you live close by?’ was the first question Ramettan had asked when Prem went to him to collect his identity card.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied in a voice reciprocating the soft tone of the man behind the long wooden counter.

  Ramettan was a popular man in college. Tall, swarthy, with a square face that held a prominent toothbrush moustache above a round, drooping pair of shoulders, Ramettan was the only clerk in the office who would be at the service of any student wishing to check an attendance register, fill in the scholarship form, pay fees late but without fine . . .

  ‘You can come to me any time you have a problem. I live on the college campus,’ Ramettan had continued in the same vein. The softness stuck to him like glue spilling from an overturned bottle.

  Prem smiled, trying to shake off the vice-like grip the eyes had on him. Eyes that appeared to be speaking a language, though uncommon, yet familiar to him. Like a recital by Kalamandalam Hyder Ali as he described the churning of the sea for nectar—the amrit manthan.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. My eyes are the only cool things in these yellow interiors, between these yellow walls. And they are not jaundiced,’ Ramettan was enjoying his own joke, the timbre in the voice still comforting.

  Prem’s voice rose to say something. But he could only utter them months later when he met Ramettan the second time.

  He had joined the group of students gathered in the college auditorium for the selections for the dance competition. He was a bit nervous. Not that he was ever to get over this stage fright. But this was a totally new place for him. Nervousness came from a fear of the unknown—new stage, new selectors, new environment. Though dancing was his first love, he was no veteran. That would happen only later, with some help from Ramettan.

  ‘You inspire me,’ Prem returned Ramettan’s coy smile after his performance.

  ‘You have been selected,’ he told Prem.

  Ramettan, he discovered, was also the college dance team’s make-up man.

  ‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t have been selected,’ he added after a moment’s silence. That was reassuring.

  In the days to come and after several practice sessions, Prem realized that Ramettan was always reassuring. There were moments when his limbs did not respond, when he felt that the floor beneath his feet would give way. But Ramettan would be there, gently stroking a lock of hair away from his face with a smile that packed words of comfort within it.

  Ramettan was coolness personified. It was layered on his face like blankets in a hotel laundry. Remove one from the top and there is a similar one in white below. Impatient-cool. Angry-cool. Happy-cool. Sad-cool. It was as if his personality was just an expansion of the word.

  Once they went for a film—John Abraham’s Amma Ariyan. Prem recognized for the first time the resonance of human emotions in the sounds of the tabla. And his skin flinched when the fingers that played on the tabla were crushed beneath the boots of a policeman.

  Perhaps to relieve him of the monstrosity of the situation, Ramettan said: ‘Percussion attains perfection in the tabla. It fails with the mridangam, timila, edakka, chenda . . . They are all single instruments. The tabla, unlike them, is a twin object. One cannot be played without the other. Like emotion . . . an expression of it is futile without the complement of the receptor. Love, hate, pity diminish into thin air if expressed singularly. You need an other. One to the other and back. Like playing a tabla. It is not a soliloquy. It is dialogue between two. Like a marriage.’

  The thought rested in Prem’s mind for a long time. But both—the long cylindrical one and the other, short melon-like one—were instruments that were male in nature. How could they mate, he wondered. Yet the sounds were magical, in harmony, in unison.

  Ramettan was not an exponent of such things, nor a master of classical dance. He had, Prem learnt, inculcated all he knew about dance from his father who was a make-up man at Kalamandalam.

  Ramettan sp
oke lucidly on dance. And when he spoke, he somehow emanated authority. ‘The beauty of a performance lies not in what you have shown, but in what you have chosen not to,’ Ramettan would tell him.

  ‘The height of expression is not in letting go but in holding back. The secret is in holding back the lines, creases, crevices on your face, the curls in your fingers and toes, and not getting carried away.’

  Prem never forgot those words of advice.

  ‘I’ll be away for a week,’ he told his mother. He was to leave for the state-level dance competition at Thiruvananthapuram.

  ‘I know,’ she spoke with dissent.

  Earlier, she used to accompany him on such tours. It was something she cherished a lot. But this time, he was going with the college team—perhaps an indication of the son drifting away.

  She shrugged the thought away and said: ‘Take care of yourself.’

  Prem’s team won the first prize in the group dance event. That night, in the hotel room which they were sharing, Ramettan seemed very pleased. The individual event was to be held the next day. Prem was exhausted from the day’s performance and the rigorous rehearsal. He lay down after a shower and soon slipped into a slumber.

  Strong fingers rubbed his back. He turned his head and looked up.

  ‘Lie down. I’ll give you a massage,’ Ramettan said. His massages had come good before every performance. It loosened the tired muscles and relaxed the mind.

  ‘It was the lead you took at the right time that saved the day for us,’ Ramettan said. His fingers had begun from the inside of Prem’s toes and rounded off with the kneecap. Prem relived each moment of the day. His team had faltered in the midst of the recital. The other five members had miscued a step and moved ahead of the background vocals. With a twirl of his finger, Prem had motioned the singers to repeat the last verse and stepped to the front to take the lead. No hitches, nothing out of tune, none noticed. As the chorus was repeated, his mates made up and the singers moved on to the next stanza.

  Ramettan’s hands kept up the languorous yet strong movements. Sprawled across the bed, Prem was like a hillock stretched across a barren landscape. He was tall, five feet ten inches, and unusually fair among the boys in his class. He had broad shoulders and a physique that would put any athlete to shame. It was his faintly feminine face that hid his masculinity. The wide lips, the shapely eyes and high cheekbones lent his persona a girlish mien. Otherwise, he was man enough.

  Ramettan’s caressing spread like a mist over his body. The fingers curled under each curve. They even created a few where there were none. They had moved down his neck, over his back, down towards his buttocks. Prem’s objections disappeared into the pillow.

  The hands pressed the supple skin of his parted lobes. Dancing had made them more prominent. At times, he had been embarrassed by the girlishness they gave his gait. A drop of sweat dropped onto his bare bottom. He did not know when his body had been shorn of the lungi that covered it.

  The heat in the room engulfed his limbs. He turned around and pressed Ramettan close to his chest. That was to be his first act of adulthood.

  As he wrapped himself around Ramettan, his eyes rested on the ceiling before shutting out consciousness.

  He was dressed in silken white shining before the footlights. He was Mohini to Ramettan’s Shiva. Prem’s body drank in the philtre. He pressed and paced to Ramettan’s beats. He floated from one corner of the stage to the other . . . following Ramettan’s butterfly-like hands gliding through the air, his eyes uniting with Shiva’s like the seductress Shwetambari.

  The heat swam across his body. He could feel something moving up his thighs followed by an excruciating pain. A pain never known before. A pain similar, but much more pleasing than the one at the end of a long, intense performance. The pain turned rhythmic. The dance continued into the night.

  Prem was overwhelmed with joy. Never had he known the ecstasy of exchange. What was it that emerged from the other being, the other body? What was it that made the pain so intensely enjoyable? Where had it been it hidden all these years? Was this love? Why hadn’t he known this earlier?

  At moments such as these, words become staccato. Incomplete . . .

  He said: ‘Rametta . . .’

  ‘You will do well, my beauty,’ he replied, cool as ever. Panting, but cool.

  That night, unlike others, did not evaporate, neither did it recede. Dawn was just an enjambment.

  When Prem returned victorious from the championship, he had changed. Facing his mother, he was a heap of shame. But beneath the pile lay a little piece of velvety triumph. With trimmed sides and an initial stitched into a corner, that piece of cloth was one he would retain when he threw out the trash from the residence of his emotions. It was this cloth that he would use to wipe away the look of the boy from his face.

  The cloth still exists. Not burned, not tarnished.

  ‘It was in the newspapers,’ Prem’s mother said. ‘They also carried your picture in Mohiniyattam vesham . . .’

  Prem was not listening. He did not want to. The guilt of keeping something from his mother haunted him. It sealed his lips. There were moments when he wished to be alone. Then he sought refuge in the toilet. But that night the closed interiors of the four walls could not provide him solace. There was the piercing sound of droplets of water dripping from the tap . . . the humming of the tubelight . . . It was unbearable, but he thought hard. Through the sounds. Throughout the night. What was he? Why did he not, like other boys of his age, look at girls, talk about them, think about them? Occasionally, he had been distracted by the movement beneath his mother’s white blouse and he had cursed himself for those sinful skirmishes inside his mind. Why was he like this? Was it disinterest, morality bindings or sheer difference in the structure of his self? He tried to reconcile his mind, brain and body with his existence. He had always cursed his mother for the turmeric baths she gave him. But he had always savoured the feel of her fingers over his wet body and had admired his immaculate, smooth skin, taking pride in the fact that there was no hairy growth on his face. Never needed a shave. A moustache would have been a blotch on a white linen skin. But why? The thoughts continued . . .

  He had relished each second of that night in the hotel. How he hated the morning for breaking the trance. For bringing him back, apart. For waking him up.

  He did not go to college for many days at a stretch. And when he did, his path deliberately did not cross Ramettan’s.

  He heard from others that the soft-spoken, smiling clerk was not his usual self. One day, it seems he had come made up to the office . . . And then he disappeared. They said he had shut himself inside his room. That he refused to see anyone. That he may be taken to a psychiatrist . . . to an asylum.

  ‘He had come here,’ Prem’s mother said. ‘You had gone to the market.’ She was collecting wood for fire from the backyard. ‘He was such a nice man. What happened to him all of a sudden?’ she asked.

  How could Prem tell her? How could Ramettan tell anyone?

  She drew a deep sigh and continued: ‘How long can a man continue all alone, with no one to look after him, no one to talk to . . . has to crack up . . .’

  Prem had disappeared from beneath the coconut tree he was leaning against. It was now a habit for him to leave behind only a space where he was supposed to be. Even memories were a void. How could he remember that which was not his; be what he had no right to be?

  The road on which he cycled lengthened into the evening. He sifted through the falling light to reach the doorstep of Ramettan’s room. The room was open in invitation. As if Ramettan knew.

  Prem stood at the door. The sight before him tied his feet to the ground.

  The stage had been set on fire. Flames leapt up to meet the ceiling from all sides. In the centre, Ramettan was a column of frenzy. Shiva dancing the tandava. With the third eye open and burning, he was consuming himself. The dancer and the dance . . . a denouement of destruction. He was prancing around on one leg with the othe
r raised to his chest. His right hand held a small drum which tapered from both sides to the centre. Tied from the centre on long strings were beads that he was beating on. The damroo . . . a single-piece instrument.

  With the other, he was shaking his member. Beating away . . . jerking away . . . fire in his eyes, fire in his limbs, fire on his body.

  Prem turned around and ran, not knowing what to do. Or did he know exactly what he was doing? Was he afraid that the leaping flames might catch him too into their fold? He distanced himself from Ramettan’s last act of self consummation . . . self annihilation. As he ran, he kicked an empty tin of kerosene into a hollow compartment of the night.

  Did it actually happen? Or had he imagined it all? He had no proof to verify his thoughts. The fire could have been captured by the camera. Later, he tried to wish the thought away. Forgetting is not always the same as not remembering.

  How could he look at those pictures of togetherness, holding them with hands of solitude, hands that were guilty of not having stretched out to hold another that had longed for them. Not long enough. Not longing enough? How could he remember moments he had no right to recollect?

  He was still a loner—never able to come to terms with his inner urges, his sexuality. At thirty-eight, it no longer mattered. He was, after all, just another scientist succumbing to his own ambitious experiments.

  And if someone asked why he had not married, he would reply with his boyish smile: ‘Because my mother never asked me to.’

  Prem’s mother died twenty years ago. Two years later, Ramettan died.

  The Sweetest of All

  Frank Krishner

  The darkness enveloped me. I sat on the bench taking in the cool outside air. The long power cuts of Patna made remaining indoors unbearable, unless one lived in an apartment that ran a generator.

  I was alone. What the hell, I was here in this godforsaken B-grade urban conglomeration of humans that passed for a city. And on a Saturday night to boot. Like the song goes, I ain’t got no buddy, I got some money ‘cos I just got pay, all I need is someone to love me, I’m in an awful way. I wasn’t out there cruising or waiting to be chatted up. Sure, I heard about what happens on dark park benches late in the night, but the small playfield was deserted, and I was in no mood to be pawed by some Bhojpuri speaking, betel-juice squirting Neanderthal. To be honest, I was in no mood at all.