Words

You will read the words on a cloudy August morning.

The smells of rain of the night gone by would slowly reach your nostrils. You would wake up, reluctantly, and the first thing you’d see would be drops falling down from the tin roof outside your window. The drizzle falling on the roof itself would make soft, pleasing sounds, and for some time, you will lie there, just listening. You will pull the blanket up to your neck, and contemplate going to sleep again. In a while, you will get up and look out of the window you had left half-open last night. The sky would be an all-white, and the air would be filled with a strange drowsy innocence.

The words, wrapped in paper, would lie on your desk, unattended, almost washed with the rain that had managed its way in through the window. You would pick them up, tear open the envelope. Some of the letters would have lost shape and form, smudged.

Yes, you will read those words on such a cloudy August morning.

And maybe then, if never else, they would make sense.

Tea & The Sky

Dear Mani,

Though there is no point in writing letters anymore, I just didn’t know what to do with the irrepressible temptation to do so tonight. It’s been quite a dull day, all throughout the clouds have stayed overhead, the rain teasing, without any wind. The sort of day that passes without making you realize that it has. The sort of day you love and hate for the same reason. And strangely, because I don’t know why, the desire to talk to you on such days becomes practically irresistible, even if it’s only one way, only like this.

Sometimes, on such days, when I lie on the bed in the afternoon, watching the white of the ceiling above, the blankness gives way to images and memories. Images in the form of memory. Memory in the form of images. And almost always, on such days, they are of you, and one other thing.

I see the both of us, like an approaching stranger would, sitting at the chai wala near the government school, the same which gave the tea in long, over-sized cups, more suitable for beer, which always made you feel that you were only being given half of what you paid for. Do you remember?

Maybe you don’t. It’s been a long time anyway. But regardless, the image of us at that joint remains fresh in my mind, and comes again and again on such slow, uneventful afternoons.

Why, I don’t know. I’m not sure why I even remember it so vividly. Does it bring me comfort? Pain? Ache? I have no answer. Maybe it is the feeling of timelessness we felt in our meetings there that fascinates me, the joint but unspoken feel of being suspended in time, as if the moment before and the moment after didn’t exist, as if the world was restricted to the few square metres of the shop, as if the world beyond was only a fantasy of our minds, as if anything we did before and after didn’t matter, as if this was what we were born to do, to sip tea beneath an empty sky and talk about anything outside the realm of consequence. How limitless and ecstatic would it be if our lives got frozen there, beside the chai wala, with the cups of tea in our hands, all the innumerable possibilities of our lives reduced to a beautiful, complete zero!

Consequence, consequence. How powerful and dangerous can that be! Yes, maybe it was the absence of this in our meetings and conversations that still make me remember it.

Do you remember? Maybe you don’t. It’s been a long time anyway. The shop doesn’t stand there anymore. The school authorities had it removed on the grounds that many students used it to bunk classes and have a smoke. But it is there in my mind, exactly as it was then - unscathed. As it will always be, as it will always come, on such days, which, in their stillness and completeness are quaintly similar to it,

Good Bye,
Manu.

Of Screams & Grunts, Scratches & Tears

Dear Mr. Verma,

It has been almost fifteen years since you passed away. But on this cold December night, with the fire burning alongside and me lying awake in bed, I still can’t help feeling that you have remained with me, like an albatross over my heart, soul and mind, all throughout these last few years. I want to make clear that this letter to you is not about this night only, or the last, but about many such sleepless nights I have spent thinking about us, about that fateful afternoon. The afternoon that gave us both new lives. Brand new.

Fifteen years in a normal man’s life is quite a substantial period of time, Mr. Verma. No one remembers the petty details of everyday drudgery such a long way into the past, like what he had for breakfast, whether he had bathed that morning, or whom he met, relatives and friends. Or strangers, with long, unordered hair and sideburns, a patchy beard. But this day was different, wasn’t it? What happened on this day, as I said, changed two lives forever, making us both, in a way, newborn twins, with intertwined destinies.

But really, it had all started as just another day. I had gone to work early morning, having eaten the leftovers of the dinner the night before. I hadn’t been that hungry anyway, one and a half chapattis and a bit of salt was all I needed for breakfast. Mai and Bhaiya were still asleep when I left home. It was still drizzling outside, last night it had poured as if the gods had suddenly emptied their bowels, having kept their piss preserved cleverly for the last few weeks, saving it for this special day.

I had a job in the well-off houses on the other side of the pond, where every member of every family had a car or scooter to call his own, where the women had beautifully bordered red saris to wear every October for the Durga Puja, where the children had corn flakes for breakfast. My task was to finish washing their clothes, dusting away the dust from their exquisite bedroom drawing room artefacts, clean the floor, first with a broom and then with a wet piece of cloth, which more often than not, was the Saheb’s discarded vest or T-shirt. I had taken the responsibility of just one house, as the work was quite time-consuming and tiring too. I was only eighteen years old then, after all, a little girl with a restless mind and a restless body.

But oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Verma, maybe I’m digressing. Why should I burden and bore with such irrelevant details? How would you be interested in what I did before we met, how tired I was and what I had planned for the evening? Pretty foolish of me, I must say.

Let me come back to the point, to the epicentre, the afternoon that gave us new lives. Brand new.

So I went back home that afternoon, bolted the door from inside, joined two paav-rotis together and sat down leaning against the wall, watching the wet exterior through the little hole in our wall, munching away. Mai and Bhaiya had not been back from work yet, and there was nothing much to do.

Barely five minutes had passed when I heard a knock on the door.

It was you, wearing a pyjama-kurta, your hair long and unordered with sideburns and a patchy beard, smiling broadly. I asked you what you wanted and I suppose you remember what you told me.

Where’s your Bhaiya, you asked.

Not back yet, I replied.

And as I tried to close the door, you just stuck your hand in, and asked if you could get a glass of water. Sure you can, I had said and then went in. To this day, I can’t believe how you, without making any noise at all, got into the room and bolted the door from inside. All I remember is that you then grabbed me by the waist from behind. I was shocked, I forced myself away. But you just smiled, came slowly towards me again. Then I realised what I was in for, I asked you to back off. You didn’t and leapt for me again. I don’t exactly remember what I did at this precise moment, but I think I must have screamed (did I?), for you then took out a handkerchief from your kurta pocket and thrust it into my mouth.

What followed is only there as a blur in my memory. But I suppose we both know that too well. Why get into the details, the details of the event that gave us new lives. New. Brand new.

But to put it briefly, among many other things, there were muffled screams, violent grunts, a painful scratch or two and a piece of cloth torn so savagely that nothing remained of it after those fifteen eventful minutes.

Can you recall those fifteen eventful minutes, Mr. Verma? Can you recall the screams, grunts, scratches, tears? Can you recall anything?

Anyway, so much for nostalgia. Coming back to What Happened Next, I later heard that the villagers had come to know about our little meeting, about the screams, the grunts, the scratches and the tears, about how they pounced on you in an intensely grotesque realisation of the power and legitimacy of self-imposed justice, about how they punched and kicked you till you could breathe no more, about how they then threw your peaceful self into the nala, to be eaten away by dogs and pigs.

I offer you my condolences, for I have nothing else to offer.

For, to me, what they did to you afterwards held no meaning. They also could just have cut your penis off, chopped it into little pieces, and fed it to the crows, or something even more appropriate. But the issue is that it wouldn't have changed my life in any way. Lives don’t change twice so drastically in just one day, Mr. Verma. My fate, in other words, was sealed.

Fifteen years since that fateful afternoon, and it is still fresh in my mind. To this day, all I need is to strain my uneducated, illiterate brain a little, scratch my head a bit, and I can live it all again, I can feel you on my body the same way again, and again, I hear some screams, grunts, scratches and tears.

And I have a gut feeling that I’ll take those sounds to my grave, or even to my next life. Who knows? For those sounds are the irrepressible reminders of how everything can so easily change, how the ordinary life of a poor, village girl can be transformed so quickly into something absolutely new. Brand new.

In this, I feel that you are an integral part of my life, and my fate. In other words, if you would kindly grant me the liberty to say so, you are my best friend, my closest confidant.

And how do I end this stupid letter, this ‘The Story Of My Life’, Mr. Verma? One way would be to curse you, abuse you, saying that I hope your body rots in hell, if it didn’t reach hell already rotten, eaten away by the dogs. But that’s what’s expected, isn’t it? Though a part of me wants to wish the same for you, I would like to think otherwise. For I, fifteen years from that day, remember you with what I’m quite embarrassed to call a fondness, a queer closeness, and I think I know why. Because you, you alone, on that afternoon changed my life into something different. Something new. Brand new.

For the better or for the worse, is another issue.

God Bless You
The Girl
(For you wouldn’t know my name anyway)