a sky red

RAINS AND DESTINY

A sky red…

..at times far from then, I reminisced those thirteen days of demented passion for rituals, mixing up events, re-constructing a chronology, while Comrade my soul as we called each other mutually, read aloud lines in a diary, as old as his first visit to my place, almost the age of his love, lying in a bliss of amnesia till he touched a page where pains of her going away shrouded in mysterious forms of absence.

Forgetting her
After her
Is like a suffering
Asleep
In a chink between
Not finding her after returning home
And not searching her after not finding

Comrade’s gaze was fixed on the wall as he picked these lines. He had invented a habit of understanding the walls, as flakes of quicklime scraped off from it. And beyond the walls were gods. Gods of different kinds whistled boons, as mother arrived mounted on a bamboo chair. They looked at her. So did I. Painfully. I remember her frail limbs, ones that had slowly refused to work, a receding hairlines, and eyes so placid, they simply didn’t want to see anymore, all within an year of torturous ailment. The pundit awaited her, with a holy pyre ignited before him, Maha Mrutunjaya Jap it was, designed profusely to bereave death of its timeless possessions. My mother was one of them. No one ever heard what did she say in that festival of her death. People were all so busy, medically and spiritually conserving her existence on a bed with numerous pillows arranged to bate the pain. ‘this one this side’ she would say and briskly a pair of hands would move it to her wish. How easy it was to die, she explained through those placid eyes and a voice reduced to a groan. Malignant cells grow in a progression of squares. I imagined, her stomach billowing of tumors and bursting into an amalgam of red and yellow, with so much death stippled in it like cells. At a distance father talked to my aunt, a doctor by profession, a saint by practice. ‘we’ll have a fortwin’ she buzzed. Father nodded. Mother watched them silently. The morning after she had to die. She knew it perhaps, cause she talked at length, and that my father a one sided deaf could make out her speech candidly.





Death teaches intimately, I heard him remark, Comrade had understood another wall, leaning by a pillow where
Her being
In her death
Was always forgotten

And thus broke a dawn belligerent under a sun almost red, ten years after she ceased. What does the death of a woman, one’s wife and another’s mother, who served the Government mean? Nobody asked. It meant 58signatures of the husband and 23 of the son, alongwith LHF, left hand finger impressions duly attested by a gazetted officer, or a respectable person of the same area , send by registered post in triplicate copies attached to form no. X,Y, Z, of P,Q,R ministry, addressed to Mr. L,M,N, principal of U,V,W, college: where the person deceased served before he/she started existing like a void amidst a flood of people, R,S,T, who claimed to love her, care her, know her, feel her, but never talk of her, in a decade after her death.

‘obselete’ my father commented, in aversion of the country’s bureaucracy. The authorities had beleaguered him enough to obtain his wife’s death gratuity and provisional pension. Forms came as pamphlets in an ad-campaign of a new product being launched, followed by reminders and more reminders. Those sick brown envelopes containing of six to eight pages of awfully typed literature , the crux of which more abstract than a sky almost red.

‘fill it up neatly, and more importantly fill it up today’ lest we don’t run short of time, and a week later another brown envelope arrives with yet more abstraction. I was burning in a mid June heat dripping visibly in shafts of yellow from the roof , the wall, the window besides which I usually sat and constructed words on a black woman’s back, till I heard the instructions, belabored thoroughly through a timid old man’s mouth.
‘his pressure is up’ bedu pinched my elbow. Pinto da returned from the bath. We three were supposed to receive Guddu at the station. He was coming after an year. His arrival meant hard cash soaked in a week of hard booze , culminating in a hard truth of bankruptcy, when he returned back, on money borrowed from me, sought from my father, an old man , thrust upon the racks of red tapism, struggling like a galley slave, to get bequeathed of the death gratuity and provisional pension of a wife , so dear evaporating from his world like vapors of helplessness, into a sky almost red.