SHORT STORIES AND BOOK REVIEWS

SHORT STORIES WITH REVIEW OF BOOKS

2011-12-31T23:59:00.004+05:30

India owns a rainbow like cultural spectrum. Mirroring the same is a challenge for a writer. This collection of short stories evolves from the engagements of personal and social relations and from the contemporary conditions, which shape them.

On a stage where masculinity calls the shots, India being a male dominant society, some of the stories try opening emotional outlets for women, too. Lady protagonists occupying centre stage deal with the challenges in different ways.

Though the characters and situations in these short stories are drawn from everyday life, happening in instantly recognizable places, they are capable to spring surprises even for those who are familiar with Indian life and culture. In most of the stories, care has been taken to keep the characters ordinary, not making them extraordinary or unbelievable. Readers may find common themes running through some of the stories, feeling a sense of continuity. Nevertheless, each story stands alone in its own right. (Images courtesy wikimedia Commons)

SHORT STORIES

SHORT STORIES by NAVAL LANGA

The Primal Sword

The thread running through the story is fear factor.

THE NEAR RELATIVE

The short story narrating a reunion of the separated lovers.

THE WOMAN WHO STOLE A LIFE

The story narrates how a woman, standing on a strange curve of her life, finds out an unprecedented solution.

My Mother's Pencil Sketch

This is the story of a son who finds out a real mother in his step-mother.

The Handicapped

In The Handicapped a boy struggles for becoming an entrepreneur.

MY NEST ON MY WINGS

It's a story of a woman who shows courage to face the strange odds of her life.

The Salt of Life

The Parting Gift

Recalled To Life

When Fiction Visits The fact

The Transplant

My Mother's Remmariage

They Aren't Beggars

Fear : The Enemy Of Love

The Vicarious Wings

SHORT STORIES by NAVAL LANGA

2011-12-30T20:50:00.001+05:30

The Primal Sword :

The thread running through the story is fear factor, narrating how the rulers and religious heads use this factor for their purposes.

The Handicapped

In The Handicapped a boy struggles for becoming an entrepreneur; he has to wrestle for acquiring a licence for setting up his own small business enterprise.

THE WOMAN WHO STOLE A LIFE

What would a woman or a man do when he or she is responsibe to care for a child and is driven out of her/his house? Here it is narrated what a brave woman did.

The Salt of Life

Here a woman in her late fifties is ready to give her life a fresh start.

The Parting Gift

A young woman finds peace in a village house.

MY NEST ON MY WINGS
It's a story of a woman who shows courage to face the strange odds of her life.

Recalled To Life

It's story of a protegonist woman who along with her in-laws challenges the odds of life.

They are poor: they are not beggars

It's the story of the woman who endeavours to make her life on her efforts, and not by others' kindness and pity.

My Mother's Pencil Sketch

The young protagonist, a boy, finds his real mother's love in his step mother.

When Fiction Visits The fact

In this short story the writer has tried to narrate and show that sometimes we face a strange situation. We are unable to decided whether an incidence occuring before our eyes is FACT or a FICTION. Here by the word 'we' I do not mean only the writers and poets. If any one has encountered such an incidence in his or her life, please help me to know about it.

The Transplant

It's story of a young woman who has to struggles while donating one of her kidney to her motherly woman.

The Vicarious Wings

Freedom comes at a price : that is the lesson the protagonist woman teaches to her elders.

Fear : The Enemy Of Love

The protagonist goes through a series of mental tortures, as she fears that her lover's past lover would surface again and would snatch her man.

Your Nest On Your Wings

A woman caught in a strange situation attempts a novel solution for her breaking/failed marriage.

My Mother's Remarriage

A young woman who hates the 'men' flock en masse, faces a problem at the time of her mother's remarriage.

CRITICAL STAGES IN A LAWYER'S LIGS - A HUMOROUS TALE

It's a humorous short story concerning the lawyers' and their clients' life.

(Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

THEY ARE POOR: THEY ARE NOT BEGGARS

2011-10-17T20:22:00.004+05:30

WHEN FURIOUS WIND undertakes to falsify all the predictions made by economists and palmists whom people genuinely believed to be sane; when the clouds, with dense sheets of water, hurry to be off-loaded onto the earth-godown, as if their entire water-stock is expelled from the sky-office; when it is comfortable for a dead body to float and be forgotten, and when God forgets that these are the children of God, too, we in our region call it the rainy season.

My encounter with such terrifying scenes was limited to viewing of post mortem reports on TV screens. TV-people are perfect people. They wait tirelessly for days in rain for a single shot of a dead body floating. They know that flood hardly recedes without turning a score of humans into dead bodies. They would film people buried under debris and run behind the corpses floating on water. Then they make their deadly shots swallow-able on the tube surfaces, and inject the chaos into each and every living room.

“This is the D face of GOD.” Vijay said

We walked through that Three-D version of a destructive season, cruising through the streets and street-lets of mill colony area that was under Vijay’s supervision, exclusively. He might be on his evening work, but why on earth I was with him? There was one curious reason: how did the Farina look whom we were going to meet? She was, as reported by Vijay, an intelligent woman. Was she beautiful too? I wanted to check it.

One betel-shop owner ran at us asking us, where we wanted to go. Everyone who saw us would have thought that our car or bike might have drowned, and we were running for a shelter. In fact it was not so. Vijay wanted to be at Farina, the woman whom he had rescued when she was unknowingly standing under a falling roof.

“It’s stormy day, dear. Better you remain at home.”

“No. In my books, it’s the best time when I am with my odds.” I replied. He just smiled. A flood of offensive smell from open sewage, competing with lethal odour gushing in from a not-so-far cluster of chemical factories, filled the air and I had to put handkerchief on nose. City civic body, Vijay’s office, was still to do things for giving the area a human face.

“Your department is blind here.”

“My office is not an office as such. It’s just like a railway platform. They come and go. No one cares for their work.” He was right. Seniors at his office were not friendly to him, to anyone who were honest and not taking bribes. Vijay knew all about their preferred occupations. Had he participated at dancing-girl floors, at bar in basement of his office, or at some late-night playing-card meetings, he would have been up to their standard. Vijay lacked desire to ‘upgrade’ his standard.

“Vijay we live at different ends of a city, isn’t it?”

I could not pursue the idea of the ‘different ends’ longer, as he walked away, at a crowd of open-air bathers, telling the boys of misfit clothes not to swim in a polluted water. The water pool was so wealthy of chemical contents that one could try a suicide by drinking just one glass from it. But on seeing those bathing children, a doubt circulated in my mind. Doubt about the theory of Darwin: ‘The man is descended form the species of monkeys’, and something like that. I had never seen monkeys so unclean.

Once the rain declared an unplanned recess and retiring sun peeped through a cloud-hole, the roof-sitting people jumped down and began to spread over their reduced lives. They would cry, beat their chests, and then believe that they were not full-scale children of God. No sooner they would indulge in the practices of multiplying themselves, as if they were in urgency of making good the losses that had occurred due to the deaths by flood. Even the beggars had started begging.

Vijay spotted Farina. The woman I wanted to see.

She withdrew her clothes up to knees and ran into us. With a surge of pleasure on her face, her feet found spaces under water as a fish would find its food. Mud in her fingernails: she might be helping some neighbours to recall their life.

Then she walked ahead. Her down-to-earth clothes were proof of her culture-in-action. Her quasi-urban face was an old edition of a book. The book looked running in her thirties. A pair of blackish eyes, well-fitted nose with a tip and lower lip, slightly thicker than upper, hair-stock neatly parked behind: these were features that made her face credibly balanced.

The two lines of wounded walls and fallen shelters walked with us. Water was silent, silent like a herd of wolves sitting on their prey. I tried to walk on my own. But undisclosed land under the water made it hard to disconnect Vijay’s hand. One turn at an abrupt end of a narrow street and we followed Farina into one empty veranda.

She opened an age-old, stubborn door. Quite an old-fashioned house was made of cement, bricks, and fitness to survive. The plaster was aged and torn at places; so the red bricks underneath looked like wounds of a spade.

She opened one room that led her into kitchen. Another room was closed, its doors eaten by moths at lower ribs. The air in that corner smelt like an abandoned dream. Farina returned with one fresh cloth arranged properly on her head.

“Mine is an orthodox region.” She waved her palm around.

If maturity were wealth of a person, Farina was a fairly rich woman. But her limbs had features of a cat, the cat living among a herd of hounds. Her neighbours, living at a stone’s throw, might dislike her affiliation with a young man. Submitting her fearful eyes on the cultural barometer operating in that area, she kept chanting verses from Holy Qur’an.

“Ma’am, you may be feeling inconveniency…”

I could guess that by ‘you’ she meant my long-cut hair, an urbane woman’s get-up, and price of the dress I had put on.

“No, not at all.” I pretended.

It was easy to ascertain how difficult her life was, but it was difficult to believe that how effortlessly she could smile.

Along with her smile, the cups of fuming tea came out. Vijay put my introduction between sipping of the tea. Only thereafter Farina seemed to realise that we were not husband and wife. She could not swallow the fact that a man and woman can live together without having stamp of marriage.

I ran my eyes through the religious frames swinging on walls; the air waved presence of pure Islamic devotion. I saw no evidence of anyone else living in the house. “Where are your family members? I mean you’re alone in this stormy weather.”

“I’m used to both, ma’am, living alone and living with the storms.” Many nuts in one shell. Matter of surprise, as it was an area having a faint touch of literacy.

“It’s interesting. I mean you talk in a manner one can hardly expect in this area. People have their own dialects here.”

“My father was a teacher,” she said. “Died before three years.” A long gulp of air passed through her nostrils. “Sir, when you saved me, under that roof, I saw the same compassion in your eyes that I was used to see in my father’s.”

“He must be caring for you, here or in heaven.”

“Yes, I know. He looks after me from there, too.” She pointed at sky, without any weight of suspicion, as if her father had descended from heaven in Vijay’s form and rescued her from a certain death. It made me settled on an idea that Farina belonged to the land of faith and God. Vijay’s region. Was I able to peep into that region? No, not yet. It required less complicated mind, perhaps.

But shocking was Farina’s life-story: a stack of hard sticks. “My husband had kicked me out of his house and life by uttering the word ‘Tallak’ thrice; then he married one younger woman. Before four years.”

“Why?” I raised my voice.

“I have failed to produce a child in time.” I could guess that Farina had digested her ‘Tallak’, the divorce, and the reason for her ouster, too.

“So this is you father’s house.” Vijay said.

“Besides this home, I’ve inherited his poverty, too.”

They talked rain; they talked religion. And when Farina talked about the subjects living around, Vijay went into deep. His duty call. Mention of the closed factory alerted him. He took out a small diary and wrote down Farina’s account: the factory owners were touchy about frequent strikes; certain crooks hampered the efforts of reopening; workers wanted justice; and before a delayed justice, they wanted bread. On daily basis.

“Sir, most of the workers are dying to resume.”

He underlined some names having some influence, positive and negative both, over the workers. While noting he looked like the grounds-man inspecting a pitch before starting of a day’s play.

“What do you do for your living?” I interrupted.

“Prayer, ma’am.”

“That’s the real power.” Vijay supplemented.

She taught girls at home, she said. Only some of them could pay fees. But it provided her a small amount of wheat-flour and much contentment. That was her prayer. “My income is too weak to keep the kitchen hot.”

I was undergoing a change of concept, the concept of not helping the poor in cash. I searched into my purse, and found out an amount that was nearly two months income of that lady. When I tried to give it, a broad smile spread on her face.

“No, ma’am. I can’t take money. If you want to help me, get me a job. I will be thankful.”

“We will find a job, suitable to your nature. Have faith on God.” Vijay said.

AT PARTING time, it was not the case that we were performing in an emotional drama, or it was a final scene of a tragic film, but Farina had tears in her eyes. I found it thrilling, not for the tears exactly, but for some different reasons. One: that there were people who regard their work as worship. Secondly the people always think that their departed fathers are in heaven.

And finally: All of the poor people are not beggars.

[iMAGE COURTESY Thomas Sully [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons ]

THE NEAR RELATIVE : A SHORT STORY

2011-08-09T12:24:00.003+05:30

THE CHEST PAIN has subsided, but coughing has not. It keeps me feeling like I am on a rock and going to fall in a valley. Mama is reading something. Good. Otherwise she would sing her song, targeting me: it’s all your doing. Other three faces are sitting silent, as if they have come to see me for last time.

“We need one person to talk with. Who is the patient’s near relative?” Two nurses with interchangeable heads come inside. Looking at the walls, one of them asks anyone of us who wants to answer. I fail to decipher what she means by the term ‘near relative’. But I am sure that all the persons encircling my cot have understood the meaning, as they are looking at each other. Everyone seems unwilling to be my near relative. My mother seems unaware of it, perhaps, as she is struck by the incidences taking place in her daughter’s life.

At the age of thirty-eight, I cannot be my mother’s responsibility. Nor she is capable to help me, too. But she has carved out a firm belief: had I been living with my husband, there would have not occurred such a painful situation.

“He was not a man to be left so gracelessly.” My elder brother opens his mouth. That is what he believes and says in front of my relatives, my maternal uncle and aunt, too.

“Do you know Rekha, how much your operation would cost?” My maternal uncle passes hand on his increasing bald, trying to educate me about the billing pattern of doctors. His chartered accountant-ship has made him a near relative of the figures only. He cites figures in thousands only, omitting three zeroes. In fact his whole vocabulary is targeted at me. But missing the target, it frightens my mother.

It is as clear as tears that my bank balance is too weak to bear the blows to come from the doctor’s billing computer. Nor my employers are in a mood to pay even a penny for my hospitalised expenses. They are modern minded; they are quite professional; and they want to reduce manpower. My illness may provide them a good pretext to throw me out.

“You are required to deposit the amount by tomorrow morning.” The doctors, I have heard so, hardly involve a patient in the hard talks about the diseases. But on failing to locate any near relative of mine, an assistant doctor tells me about three options of payment: in cash, by a cheque, or through a credit card. If I add all the three means, it would hardly be half of the amount needed. And I am still sane; so I am unable to fantasize that a saviour from the sky would come and pay the bill for making my heart suitable to last longer.

“If you still don’t undergo the surgery…” The chief doctor had not completed the sentence. But I am sure he meant that without doing the operation I would be a gone case.

“Bye-pass surgery is too costly.” My brother leaves the room.

“It’s all your doing.” Mama is still displeased for my past behaviour.

MY MARRIAGE WITH Sunil was not an accident. Nor it was an incident preceded by any noteworthy affair. I was still on the side of sanity, unmarried, until I met him. The night had not started yet, but the sun had set. I met him in a company meeting, and a simple file-pushing clerk in me became wife of a key figure in the city’s industrial group.

I was assisting my executive director in those days. “I like neat administrator like you.” That was what Sunil told me in a narrow lounge of the Hotel where our company held meetings with its clients. I took his words as a simple pat on my back. If taken in other way, it was a subtle flirting, too.

“You’re generous, Mr. Sunil.”

“No. I am serious, Ms. Rekha.”

It was early January. He was in a neat blue suit and my not-so-thin body experienced a tremble, even within a woollen wrapper. The season changed. Warmth replaced the cold. My company issued me a licence to meet Mr. Sunil, the top industrialist of the city, at any time I can get his appointment. The genuine invitations for dinner replaced our professional meetings. And by the end of the June, the day came on which we were accepting wedding gifts in the Reception Hall of the same hotel where Sunil and I had met for one simple business meeting.

IF MY SALARY INCOME was a pebble, then Sunil’s business income was a big rock. There were workers in his factory earning more than my salary. But for me, the calculation was different. Were my income and the independence to be added, it would have been a big amount. Hence I preferred continuation of my job. It was not a problem until the day we were returning from a huge party given by Sunil’s friend.

“Rekha, we do not talk so loudly among friends as you talk.” The reference to the friends was secondary. Primary was his emphasis on ‘we’ and ‘you’. Within the spell of five kilometres, the distance between the party hall and our home, he educated me about the precise meaning of the words ‘we’ and ‘you’. He counted all the incidences where I had behaved like a middle class woman.

The axe had made its mark. Only the blood was to come out. It came out on the day of our first wedding anniversary. It was an arid event of showing heartless joy and talking stereotype matters regarding Sunil’s business and friends. I had not insisted presence of my personal friends. Nor did he talk about my invitees.

“You know Rekha, these people rule the whole city’s economy.”

“Sunil, do you expect me to discuss economy? It is our first wedding anniversary.”

“Yes, and that’s why I have gifted you a new car.”

“I do not need a car for going to my office.”

“Rekha you don’t need to go to office at all. It’s middle class mentality. Better you manage our purchase department.”

THE LINE OF DIFFERENCE was clearly drawn from that day. On the next day he openly told me to resign from my job. I protested. But the next year involved Sunil’s tours outside the country and I had started forgetting about the difference between ‘we’ and ‘you’. I started believing that the class conflict was over. My nightmare did not last long.

“We should talk about a child.”

“Good.” I was not as cold as he thought, perhaps.

“Rekha, It’s impossible to look after a child and attend the office.”

“There are millions of working mothers.”

“All from the middle class.”

“Stop it Sunil. I’m fed up with this.” I might have shouted.

The days passed and we were not husband and wife, virtually. We were not a family, too. Merely sleeping in one bedroom does not make a man and a woman a family. The day of decision was to come, sooner or later. It came sooner.

“Choose between a child the job.” Sunil was not in two minds.

To have a child was not my dislike. I still want to be a mother, a good mother. But under the circumstances, my choice was simple. I decided against trusting a man who was unable to bear the independent income of his wife. I had my mother, a brother, and a house built up by my father to go back. They all became my enemies from that day.

Two years passed making the distance between ‘we’ and ‘you’ wider. I had heard, that too from my brother, that Sunil was preparing divorce papers. But there was no communication.

THE MORNING IS as lightless as it can be on someone’s funeral day. Doctors have not come yet. There are only nurses, wearing coffin-grey dresses, looking subdued after the sleepless night. Before selling all the gold I possess, and discounting all the finance-worthiness I have, to take a second opinion of another doctor would be better: that is what I am chewing with my morning tea and biscuits. Entire hospital is deadly silent. Had my mental traffic been able to blow horns, there would have been great noise around.

My near or the distant relatives would not come today. Mama might come at noon. So I feel relieved. But the hardest thing was yet to come. A nurse informs me about a visitor. I thought about someone from my office. Before the visitor comes, the assistant doctor stands in middle of the door, without looking at me.

“It’s time for final deposit. Who is the patient’s near relative?”

“I am her nearest relative.”

A man with the words of authority enters the scene. He stops near the doctor for a handshake. First thing I can see is his neat blue suit, and then the well-polished shoes. He is the man whom I had met first time at the hotel where my company held meetings for its clients. He is the man who had told me that ‘I like neat administrator like you.’

He drags the stool nearer and sits.

“Sunil, who told you…”

“No. Heart patients are not allowed to talk more, you know.”

He looks weaker, eyes pail, face ageing. It is almost two years I saw him last time. The vigour that handles his business single-handedly is missing. But the lively voice marks his presence, effectively. The doctor goes away. Sunil avoids talking about who informed him about my illness and everything.

“In fact I want to get second opinion about it, the bye-pass.”

“It’s up to you, dear. But I have arranged one week’s vacation. And this room is comfortable for a patient and one attendant. Isn’t it?”

Half an hour of his being here wipes out the factors of time and space, which have run between us. From the window I believed as closed, the brightness of sun enters. It turns the air warmer. It makes the patient’s room more comfortable for seeing the man’s face clearly.

Sunil’s hand is on my head, fondling my hair. END

[Image Courtesy: Pierre-Auguste Renoir [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons In the Garden. Wikimedia Commons]

Short Story: My Nest on My Wings

2010-03-29T10:21:00.013+05:30

-by Naval Langa

[Story of a woman showing courage while facing strange odds.]

I DO NOT CLAIM that I am not responsible for what has happened. I knew it would happen one day. I have not cooperated it openly, but I have not tried to stop it from happening.

I do not say I was unhappy by marrying him. Nor I had any objection for my husband’s multiple identities: Mr. Raman Kumar Shastri, a bank clerk, a chain smoker, a vegetarian, or a man always in blue shirt and grey pants and what not. You just come near, and would identify him by any one of these identification marks.

There were several other versions of his identities, available in his office, too. But it made no difference for me. At least it makes no difference for me now, as he is going to live in a separate house, with another woman, with a new set of pains; or even pleasures, perhaps. I do not know what kind of relationships is between him and me today, this morning.

OUR MARRIAGE WAS an arranged one, but we knew each other before. I was a typist in City College and had my account with the bank where he was a clerk. He is still a clerk. His clerk-hood was not a real problem, for me at least. My being a typist was supportive in running the household, paying the loan instalments of the house that is in my name, and sending small remittances to his parents who lived in a distant village.

Everything was normal till the day my principal called me in his cabin. He was a fatherly figure for everyone in our college. I was Vidya for him, no Miss, No Mrs., just Vidya. He congratulated me. “Hey Vidya, you are promoted as departmental head.“ I was to head the non-teaching staff, fifteen in all, including the peon Babban who hardly remained visible.

Mr. Raman Kumar J. Shastri, a bank clerk, a chain smoker, a vegetarian, congratulated me for the promotion. But his behaviour was changed from the day. From his physical appearance, it looked that someone had reduced his height by half a feet.

For me the new assignment meant a wider cabin, an option for interest free car loan, and one hour of increased responsibility. But my colleagues were unexpectedly co-operative. Co-operative in the sense, no one ever threw books on the tables, or threw their boots while coming in, or thrust the doors while going out. No one talked with me keeping eyes outside of the room, or no one was against sharing a dining table with me. Mr. Raman Kumar Shastri did all these things.

Within a month he had cultivated a strange habit of coming late at home. The man must have some inbuilt mechanism for finding the ways of torturing a woman so subtly. Within a spell of two months, his habit was simply upgraded. He started coming very late, sometimes after midnight.

“Don’t purchase kitchen stocks from your money.”

This was the sharp arrow that made me sprang on my feet. At first I could not make out what Raman meant by it. In fact I had forgotten the definition of ‘my money’. We were married since five years and money we spent was never coloured as ‘my’ or ‘your’.

YOU DO NOT need a crowd of enemy to be unhappy. One is quite sufficient. I had one. And the name of my enemy was Time: the time I had to pass waiting for Raman. Once it was late evening, I would sit in my third floor balcony, hoping to catch the noise his scooter made.

It was now clear that Raman disliked my promoted position. He talked with me only in words, not in full sentences, when we were alone. While sitting among friends he would certainly talk about Elena, our first floor neighbour. He would say that ‘she is promoted as Sales Manager because of jeans and the upper buttons of her shirt, which she keeps unbuttoned’. Lately he defined her as CCTV of her boss. I knew, and even Raman also knew, that Elena was little bit modern but she was a good girl. I was clear in my mind about what he wanted to convey by cooking the falsehood about her.

“Come home before eight o’clock or arrange your dinner somewhere else.” That was what I told him on one Sunday midnight. Was it out of frustration? Or hate? Or was it an offspring of the apathy I was brooding? I did not know, but I wanted to see my home disciplined.

Raman did not stop coming late. He stopped dining at home.

I CONTINUED TO sit in balcony. Not out of desire to wait for him, but for some unknown reason. Raman’s late coming was terribly shameful for me, too, as the neighbours had some idea about our cold relations. Six months passed in this manner.

The passing time made me thinking about what a man like Raman would do in such a situation. I was expecting something worse to happen. And it happened. I heard that Raman went regularly to a woman’s home.

It did not take much time to know that the woman was a divorcee, having a girl of three with her. She needed a man. She might be in search of a man who could pay for her kitchen and the clothes, a man who had almost lost his own home, or a man who needed a woman only for his body-needs. Raman was the best candidate.

Since the day I knew about Farina, it was her name, I feared that Raman would not come home one day. When he really came, I thought it was for the last time. Every morning, when he left for office, without taking the scooter that was purchased with ‘my money’, I feared he would not return tonight.

Days became months, and the fear of losing him permanently became my bedfellow. Was I waiting for the day he would stop coming home? Would I be relieved on the day he would be out of my life? Every evening the strange thoughts made thick nest in my skull. Every moment a new thought-bird would fly from the nest, and its fluttering became tremors in my body. The birds flew high and followed me up to my office. The came in various species: ‘Is Farina beautiful?’ ‘Is she more kind than me?’ ‘Would she be feeling comfortable to be naked on demand?’ I had forgotten to count the flutters and the tremors.

I decided to talk about everything with Raman, about everything, as I was not ready to go insane. I was not ready to live with the fire of fear, the fear of being alone, the fear of my husband going somewhere and not returning forever. I wanted to be free; I wanted to make him free, too. I was not in hurry to be tagged as divorcee. But I wanted a good sleep after a stressful day. I needed a piece of time I could say as my own.

But the circumstances took a strange turn.

IT WAS SUNDAY. Raman was on tour for two days and was to return in the morning. A knock at the door and I wondered, as Raman and I both kept the keys; and we have stopped knocking for each other since long. The second knock and I opened the door. A cheap pair of shoes, simple but neat dress, and a dry face without any make-up: this could not be other than Farina, I thought. Once I recognized her I lost my speech mechanism, my thought mechanism. Without a word I came inside. She followed me. After a glass of water and her shaking of head for denial for a tea, we set facing each other.

“Ma’am I think we need no introductions.” She was right. Surprisingly I could not hate her. Silence ruled the air until I regularised my breathing. My eyes posed a question to her.

“Ma’am, I… I am pregnant.”

The earth beneath my feet quaked. It was the remotest thing I had thought about—my husband’s child in some other woman’s womb. That was what she exactly had conveyed to me. The woman put my whole married life in a fragile plate. Her single sentence made me thinking that I had lost everything. I was childless, but it was our planning.

“Where… where is HE?”

“I don’t know.” Her red, swollen, and tearful eyes and abrupt start of sobbing blocked my other queries. After a coffee, a good coffee, and reluctant chewing of some biscuits, she looked a little bit relaxed. At least by then she was not fearful of me. But I wanted hard talks.

“What do you want? I mean from me.”

“I want abortion.” She was straight and on right track, too. “But… he… he wants to have the child?” And she started crying.

I had never imagined myself being put into such circumstances. Within no time Farina had changed her character in my mind. The woman I had never met, the woman I had hated as hard as possible, the woman who had never seen the steps of a high school, was educating me about how a woman can be victimised.

RAMAN DID NOT turn up. After another two days he came home, at my home. I did not care about what he would think on seeing Farina and her girl at my home. He was yet to encounter other hard facts. The fact was that I did not offer him a glass of water. The fact was that I had kept divorce papers ready, divorce by consent. And the fact was that he was no more a part of my life.

“Sign it.” I threw the bunch of papers against him.

Farina was in kitchen. The girl was playing with the toys I had purchased for her. The man, Mr. Raman Kumar Shasti, a bank clerk, a chain smoker, a vegetarian, or a man who wanted the child that pulsated under Farina’s belly, was left with no alternative. He very well knew the options he had. He was to choose either a possible stay in jail, for polygamy he practiced, or the divorce.

He chose to sign the papers.

IT’S MORNING WITH a new light and a fresh sun. Farina is cleaning my drawing room. I do not know where Raman has gone after sighing the papers. But I am sure he would return soon, for Farina. Farina puts coffee before me, arranges my bookcase, and then starts filling water pots from the tap. After an hour she would go.

“Do your trust him?”

Had anybody asked this question I would have preferred silence, a confused silence. But I want answer from Farina. Farina, a woman who has not seen her mother’s love, a woman who has grown up before the eyes of a drunkard father, a woman who is thrown out of home by her husband because she has failed to produce a male child on demand, is asked about the ingredients of the trustworthiness of a man who has just ended his married life.

“Ma’am, you are fortunate. God has given you options.”

The End (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

SHORT STORY: THE PRIMAL SWORD

2009-03-20T23:55:00.004+05:30

AUTHOUR : NAVAL LANGA

THE DENSE CLOUDS lowered their stocks washing out the surface of the earth. Midnight. Rain. The darkness went into every drop of the water. Hopp spurred his horses to run high. The chariot was not good to run at its best. It was un-oiled since the ages. But it was valuable for him, made by the great grand farther of his great grand father.

Right-side wheel of the chariot tumbled on a stone. He saw his body flying in the air. Dhaddada… dhaddam… dhad, and he was thrashed again on his seat. Reigns still in his hands, but limbs trembled on seeing the death so near. On a crack, he shifted his gaze on back seat of chariot. Shudders took hold of his body and mind. Soul, too, shaken.

He saw a woman, sitting in the back seat.

Hopp was a pundit, an owner of a temple, only temple in the kingdom. King visited the temple on occasions. People revered Hopp. They looked at his chariot with devotion. They believed his words as the translation of God’s will.

“Who… who are you?”

“Carry on. I am not your enemy.” The woman spread her lips wide and showed her teeth. The teeth were bigger than a wolf’s teeth and sharper than a lion’s. Design of her face made his navel pulsating with horror. He was a man of courage and the holder of faith in God. But the flood of darkness, his flying in the air just before a moment, and the sharp-teethed woman squeezed out every drop of his courage.

No words were exchanged until the temple gate became visible. He gathered remnants of his courage. Fearing though, he turned his eyes on the woman.

“Where do you live?”

“I am homeless.” Again her teeth sparked. It made the darkness darker. He came down the chariot, his legs still unsteady on ground.

“Go into that hut. And leave before dawn.”

“No. Find out a home for me. A permanent home.” The teeth. She gazed at his face. The gaze was sharper than a deadly sword.

“What’s your name?”

“Feara. Feara, the blood sucker.”

Every hair on his body straightened. The woman disappeared in the hut. Hopp heard the clinking of teeth. No, it was not her teeth, he realized. It was from his own mouth. His teeth clinked again. He walked up to the temple steps. Sat there. No one was awake in his house, in a far corner of the temple yard. A cat mewed and it shook the whole universe. Again the deadly silence took hold of the whole surround.

* * *

HOPP WAS THE owner of high respect among people. They respected him for his sacred lineage, for his ownership of the temple, and for the kindness he showed by distributing food on festival days.

People were happy with him. But he was not happy with himself, with what he had. The cause of is unhappiness was a two-legged man with one eye on his face. Goldie was his name. He traded in things and had erected a three-storey house. King’s palace was the only building taller than the Goldie’s. Hopp envied him. He envied his horses and the stable and the score of chariots he possessed.

Hopp was a man of mind. Before daylight replaced the stormy night, he found out a strange utility in Feara. Feara, the Blood sucker. He desired her presence. He gave ample food and drink to the hungry and thirsty Feara. He promised her a permanent shelter, too.

“Keep you teeth covered until I say to open.”

“My master, I will obey your words.” She agreed to be his prisoner.

* * *

THE PRESENCE OF FEARA ran like the fire in forest. People talked that Hopp had enslaved a demon incarnated into a woman’s body. It was his magical power that saved them all from the wrath of Feara. Otherwise she would have engulfed all who went for work in dark; she would have killed every woman sleeping with a man; and she would have eaten all the children who were ill. It was because of the divine power he possessed, the Pundit of temple, had saved all from the deadly claws of Feara. Hopp was a man of mind.

Days passed and Hopp sent a message to Goldie: Meet me at night. No one ignored Hopp’s words. Goldie too did not. His chariot arrived at the temple. Hopp embraced him.

“Feara wants to meet you.” He told Goldie. He knew that Goldie owned everything. He was wealthy next to the king. But he did not own one thing: the courageous heart. On seeing Feara and her face, the land beneath Goldie’s feet slipped. Clink of her teeth made him shivering. Hopp watched his face. The arrow was on the target.

“But why she wanted to see me?”

“I don’t know. She is an evil soul. Look at her nails. She can tear open anybody’s chest, at one stroke. But for the wellbeing of all the people of our kingdom, I hold her as prisoner. She can go out only at my will. And by her power, she can convert gold into dust. You understand what I mean.”

Goldie understood what he meant.

Months passed and Hopp employed a crowd of labourers. He wanted a three-storey house behind the temple, the house higher than the Goldie’s. Some articles of gold had walked out of Goldie’s coffers and were parked in the chest of the temple. People offered even free labour to the temple. People knew that they could go in dark only because of Hopp’s magical powers. Woman knew that their children were alive because Hopp was on their side. Hopp gave food to all the labourers. He was a man of mind. Now he was a man of gold, too.

* * *

THE KINGDOM WAS small. But the king Crowna was a tall man, tall as a tree. He could catch a wolf by running behind it. He had killed a leopard by a single stroke of his fist. His hands were long, long enough to catch anyone living within the borders of his kingdom.

When the king summoned Goldie for a purpose, the trader of the things had become a little bit poorer. He stood in the court with folded hands. His hands and neck still sparkled a golden light, but Crowna saw grim over his face. Goldie sat under the shadow of the king’s sword.

“Pundit Hopp is your good friend.”

“He is everybody’s friend, My Lord.”

“Hmm… Have you seen the Feara?”

“My Lord.”

“How she looks?”

Crowna collected data about Feara and her master, Pundit Hopp. With the Feara under his command, Hopp was a man of limitless power. He could send tremors into the hearts of anyone, merely by talking about the Feara and her powers. Hopp enjoyed influence over the multitude.

“Call him.” The king ordered.

* * *

THE KING CROWNA was used to call a man for two reasons only. One: when a man colleted wealth more than the king’s eyes could bear to see he would call him. And the wealthy man would lose his wealth. Two: he would call a man when the man enjoyed influence over people more than the king’s ears could hear without displease. That man would lose his wealth first, and then his head.

Hopp was summoned to the court of king. Hopp was a man of mind. But he consulted Feara, his partner in trade.

With the help of her fingernails, Feara wrote on a wall of the hut, ‘the king had a divine sword. Get it anyway. His strength will devolve upon you.’

“How can I get his sword?”

“You are a man of mind. Think.”

Hopp started thinking. On the way to king’s palace, he dragged out a design from his mind. But on seeing the king’s court he was baffled. It was full of candles. Candles were on every brick of the walls. And under every brick, there was a human skull. Bricks lighted, skulls highlighted.

“You are a pious man, Pundit Hopp.”

“My Lord, I am a citizen.”

“So be protected by my sword.”

“My Lord is kind to this temple-man.”

“You are a temple-man. This king bows his head before you. But you are not a warrior. So hand over Feara to your king and be happy.”

The king had a bright face, brighter than Hopp had presumed. And he was owner of a sweat and poisonous tongue, too. Hopp looked at the king’s sword and went on his design.

“My lord, I am also worried. Feara is enemy of all. I seek your sword to kill her with my hand. My Lord may honour me with possession of the divine sword for a day.” Hopp was a man of mind.

The king leaves his throne. Came near to the temple-man. The sword was in his hand. He raised the sword and made it falling on Hopp’s throat. King’s tongue had failed to work on the man of mind. His swards did not. Hopp was beheaded.

The king took possession of Feara. He became her new master.

SINCE THE DAY, Feara is in custody of the king. Whenever he needs to fear the people, he releases the power of Feara upon them. It works.

THE WOMAN WHO STOLE A LIFE

2009-03-17T23:55:00.009+05:30

AUTHOR : NAVAL LANGA

EXCEPT TINA, ALL subjects in my life is dead. When I came into this city, my new home, Tina, my daughter was one and half years old.

I am not so attractive that a man or a just-out-of-the college chap would look at me and try a whistle. No. That is not the case. Even if the young lads and elderly, too, hardly miss to rub their eyes on me, while I go for shopping or for a walk in garden.

There are people, generally young ladies, who prefer to widen their lips at me, looking like they are smiling.. The shopkeeper, the washer man, the black smith, the goldsmith… all have found pleasure in this looking occupation, and perhaps talking about me.

I am not a politician or a member of local body or the council, but those who faintly know me, raise their hand in acquaintance when I am seen in market. Why do so many people are so much interested in me?

Everyone has found me unique. In fact I am not.

The sole reason for the people’s behavior is simple: I am an un-wed mother. To be more simplistic, my child, my daughter Tina is not a child borne out of a legally married man and woman. And to be a single mother in a small town like ours is not less than becoming an unwelcome revolution itself.

Now let us forget the last decade.

BEFORE TEN and half years I had acted in a decisive manner. That night, midnight in fact, was as dark as it could be and the December wind was as cruel as it could be. I moved on a barren road, having no feel of the chilling wind. The perspiring provided me with sufficient stock of heat for body, my body that was slim in size and fearful in shape.

Bubbling fear assisted the blood-stock to run fast in the veins. My hair might be considered black, silky and effortlessly curly, but I knotted it in backside, so tight that it could not split on face. It could frighten me more.

The city had no reason to worry for a woman of young anatomy and trembling limbs. They hardly take notice of those who are unable to inflict any damage upon them. But I had reason to hide my oval face of thirty-two years, enveloped in fair complexion of skin.

One turn at a grocery shop and I stumbled on cobbled pavement. The stones were slippery as there was unexplained rain. A passing vehicle splashed dirty water on my clothes; a policeman having fine teeth and ruffled clothes groaned at the vehicle. There was no other sound, except the not-so-encouraging clinking of my own teeth.

The policeman’s eyes, resembling to an owl’s, rolled over my physique. I mended my clothes. Anyway I disliked being stamped as a wanderer-at-night. With a quick shiver that ended in belly, I tried a domestic-woman smile. He swung his cane. I smiled at his cane, too. I do not remember how I could manage acting like that.

My target, a dark blue building, slept calm. The electricity pole, standing as a mute fielder on point, sent pathetic light all over porch of he building. The porch had nothing but empty cans, old newspapers and dirt.

Ten-minute distance between city railway station and the house was mountainous. Why was I apprehensive of the neighbours while entering that house? The neighbours, all except a short woman residing just opposite the pole, regarded me as a domestic bird. Had anybody seen me, had there been daytime there would have been a quick and long shout: ‘Hi Sheila Ma’am’.

Wristwatch alerted me. I was in the house, in the porch. It was not a good idea to enter in such a way at one hour past midnight, and that too when I was on a mission for which no one could be proud of.

Looking around cautiously, I searched out the iron key. Anyway I operated a key, the key about which I had no idea how it was in my purse. The keyhole marked its non-use by a squeak. It seemed unopened since a month perhaps.

Swiftly entering in, I closed the door from inside. I went immediately on my target and rechecked the materials in my hand: a small cupboard-key, short purse, some hairpins, and silken hand-gloves. I managed my fingers into the gloves. No switching of any light. No window opening.

To walk in dark was not difficult for me on that floor : I had passed years, five years there.

DARKNESS IN HOUSE was not as dark as my life. A groaning vehicle stopped at corner of the street. Feet to head tremble shoved me into a corner. Blood ran as water in a tap; thirst captured throat. I had full confidence that I was not a woman of courage. But it was the call of time.

I immediately swallowed the poison of dislike, the poison of hating myself for what I was doing. Got collected within minutes, and looked out from glass shutter of a window. My presence was not a target of the car. I slipped in interior, the interior of house I used to call ‘my home’ before two months: the house that had thrown me out for no reason. All the walls smelt intimacy. The velvet wall-piece, that I had designed, spurted out acquaintance at me, but I opted for neglect, pretending I knew nothing.

The bedroom with scattered papers on floor had a slice of light though a window. I was not there to sleep on the bed. It was the thing I hated most.

One man, one man having thin moustache but hard hand, a man who had lived with me, promised to marry me, but had remained committed only one thing: money. He had raped, yes raped, me for five years on the same bed. People called the man as my husband, de facto. He was the man who had all the observable ingredients of a gentleman, if fidelity to his job and attachment with family were to be excused.

Hoping for a married life, I had suffered all of his tyrannies until he kicked me out, up to the pole at the street-corner. ‘I will kill you if you come here again.’ He was not drunk on that night: he was on barking spree. He gave me nothing, nothing from my gold ornaments and bank balances. Only he allowed me to keep Tina.

The cupboard was before my eyes. No one was there to stop.

I wanted to steal all the contents.

The trembling key entered into heart of the cupboard, but my hands acted precisely. I collected the entire available paperweight, the money, from an inner box, securing everything in a purse I had tied on my belly. While doing so, not a single trace of regret or sense of guilt visited my mind. Search for my own golden ornaments ended in a corner drawer: two rings, a chain, and four bangles.

Had I been alone I would have not taken such a step. Stealing from the house that was not my own, now. But I had a daughter, too; the daughter that was given to me in exchange of not demanding anything from the joint property. But the little girl, with uncontrolled smile, liquid blue eyes, and golden hair must have a future: that was what ‘Ma’am Sheila’, I, had resolved.

I was executing the resolution.

I clean swept the drawer.

If newspapers were to be believed, my husband, husband de facto, was absconding. No one resided in the house. I waited for sometime, until duty of the policemen ended, till the milkmaid had gone. I waited for some activities to start on the road. It would make my street loitering simpler, a morning walk in early hours, I thought.

It took no time to fetch my little fairy from the place I had left her sleeping. The child was still sleeping like a fairy. The fairy had pleasant eyes, charming face and a history of one and half year’s breathing on the earth.

The mother took next breath after stepping on railway platform.

“Mom, where are we going?”

The mother had no idea about the answer. I had no address of my own. But I knew I was going out. Out of the place, out of the life I had lived, and out of the city I had been.

The train’s whistle alerted my one-and-half-year hope of the life. I went to a milk stall, bought half a dozen pouches, an empty bag, and a towel. Travellers must have some luggage, I recalled.

The train ran on its track. When the woman, who even feared in darkness of night, boarded train she had money in purse, her daughter in arms, and a future that was not promising in any respect.

The train ran safely; the train ran without any accident; the train ran for ten and half years. No one snatched my purse; no one asked what I earned and how I lived. Nor anyone inquired about the luggage, the inadequate luggage. Only some thirsty eyes targeted my body. My not-so-small breast failed to be a non-target.

I was well on guard. The train passed through long tunnels; it crossed the bridges, laden with unvisited risks; and stopped at stations for giving me some time for respiration. The rolling of iron wheels had led me into a land where I was allowed to earn, I was allowed to eat, I was allowed to breathe and cook—whatever I preferred.

During the running of the life-train I heard that Tina’s father had been absconding from the eyes of the debtors. The government had sealed his house after my visit on that dark night. They had seized all the assets in the house. Tina’s father, it is rumoured that, had gone to another country, living with a woman who is older than him and a wealthy widow.

Now I had no reason to say that I had a man in my life. I preferred to be known as single mother.

I have now one home—at the address of my choice. The thief in me had managed it in exchange of ‘the paperweight’ and the gold. It was my desire, a deadly desire to give my daughter a future, the future brighter than mine.

Tina is hope of my life.

Tina is the name that is four and half feet high and as long as twelve years. The name is really beautiful, sharp tongued, and capable of riding on a bicycle for a race.

(Image courtesy John Singer Sargent [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons wikimedia commons)

MY MOTHER'S REMARRIAGE

2009-03-16T23:55:00.006+05:30

Theme: Mother's Love, A Daughters Love for her Mother. The remarriages at later stage in life.

AUTHOR : NAVAL LANGA

HAD IT BEEN a normal day in office, I would have called my assistants in my cabin, in order of their height, their intellectual height. Then each one of them would get sharp-bordered printouts, with deadlines bolded on top left corner. Their day’s work. It was my formula by which I had made my official journey smooth. My life was not my planning. It was not like that I took a piece of paper, sketched a portrait of my choice, and then animated it on a canvas with soft brushes dipped in blobs of pleasant colours.

My initial spell at job was easy, as easy as walking on a sword. I didn’t find it strange for me—that walking on a sword. But today’s sword was the sharpest blade. The blow had come from my mother, my only surviving relative. In her early fifties with a recurring back-pain, she worked in a school. The school’s head master was kind enough to adjust her working hours. I hadn’t seen him, but she held much respect for him.

On that day she talked with me on quite a shocking subject. I was an event manager, but in my memory I had not handled such an event. My mother had thrown me again on the memories of my childhood.

My first memory of childhood is the collapse of our roof. Our house was nothing more than an assembly of tin-sheets, used out boards, and hay. Everything was either collected from the municipal garbage or acquired by theft. It was nothing more than a patch that covered the space of a cot, a tight mud plastered corner, and a broken suitcase that had migrated with my mother. We called another corner as our kitchen that ran on my mother’s meagre wages. In addition to my mother and me, the space, the suitcase, and the tight corner, there lived a man. People called him my father. When the roof had lost its strength against the Rain Gods, and fallen on us, I had a struck on my head. I was of three or so. I don’t recall whether I cried or not. But I do remember what I had thought. I thought there would be no sky next day, as it had fallen down—half on me and the rest on my mother.

Another incidence I still remember bit by bit had occurred when I was in high school. It was fag end of my girlhood, the days of bordering womanhood. Seventeen. In those days, I respected one man. He taught me language. My English teacher. He owned a lot of things: his own house, a two-wheeler, and good repute among women. That was luxury in the town we lived. He gave me books to read and paid my library fees, once or twice. If his age were considered to be a meter, he was just like my father. Though I had no such respect for my own father.

I went through a tremble as I recalled the day. I was at his home. On that day I had completed my last lesson on ‘Feminine Gender’. As his family was away, I offered help in kitchen. ‘Let us cook and dine together,’ the teacher said. The student followed.

I was unaware of a waiting volcano within his skull.

It was hard to believe how the man whom I trusted most had put on the skin of a wild animal. Our beliefs are so lame: we require clutches of our past experiences to help our beliefs stand. But here, unbelievably, the interior of the kitchen, the utter loneliness, and one powerless female body prompted the devil. Double in body-weight and strength, as he was, he threw me first on floor and then dragged me on a bed.

The beast pulled out my clothes: the skirt, the blouse. All: one-by-one. He had time; it was his time. Once he pressed my knickers tightly into my mouth, I was sure I would die. I could not protest; I could not fight back in defence; I could not shout for help. I was being crushed within the walls, and the walls did not come to my rescue. He was mad. He licked all over my belly and chest like a hungry dog. The naked beast ruptured my body, my soul, everything, again and again until froth appeared on his lips.

Stroke of two o’clock at night, and I was running alone on a naked road. Madly. With blooded clothes and lost virginity.

I did not see his face again. But I had speared a chit at him that struck his head. The chit warned, ‘Do not show bravery to come within the range of my eyes, you coward. Otherwise I will slaughter you.’ He did not. I knew he could translate the word slaughter, which I had underlined in red—in its true colour. By slaughter I did not mean murder. It would have been less painful for him. What I meant was this: given a chance, I would cut his penis and burn it in a public square. But why I did not go to the police? The policemen and trustworthiness never resided side-by-side in our town. They were unreliable, unreliable for a young girl, for a poor young girl.

The days passed; the body-wound healed.

But I was not the same person after the day. It was the day; it was the night that had impregnated me with the seeds of hate, deep hate for entire gender of the men, the males. The cycles of time went on and on with swelling hate. The time-camel ran on desert, leaving its footprints on sand. I left my hometown; I walked in and came out of my college-study; my father died; and I caught the train to this city. The incidences and the years escaped, flickering as scenes on a theater screen.

But what my mother talked in the morning still occupied my mind. She talked about a man, a member of the species I hate most.

“Sweta, I need your permission for…” That was how she started. It was unbecoming of her, to talk so reluctantly. “I don’t know how to start but…”

“Mama… Please. Is it money matters? Then don’t ask. Take it from my purse, okay?”“

No, no. I… I mean… I and Panditji, our head master…”

“What? What happened?

“We… we want to marry.”

That was the landslide. Failing to believe what my ears had heard, I was still in my cabin. Entire staff had left the office.

“Ma’am, will you sit late, today?” My peon asked me, perhaps second time. Had I been in my normal state of mind, I would have shouted at him. Instead I looked at his torn cap, khaki dress, and gaping mouth that looked as cigarette ash. I avoided looking at his nose that was not fitted well.

I RETURNED AT HOME before time: first into parking, and then twenty steps of a fatigued walk. Had it been a normal day, I would have followed a ritual in three stages: I would kick the door first, throw my leather purse away on a table; and finally I would stand in middle of my drawing room, tossing sandals in any corner—preferably the distant one, that too with flair of a Russian ballet dancer. The door, the purse, and the sandals never complained about my routine. I went through the two stages, and then put sandals quietly in a corner. My body, head to feet, was never so aching: the walls of my home were never so uncomfortable.

Falling flat on bed I again fell into my childhood. In those days a shopkeeper, who always gave me a chocolate, used to come at our home. His hair had colour of white waste paper. On his arrival, I would indulge myself in the chocolate, and my mother would close the cardboard door. Then she would recline on cot. The man would remain on top of her and press her so forcefully that I thought she would be flattened like a long slice of sweet bread. My mother was so sweet. Otherwise he might not be biting all over her face, I thought so while chewing the chocolate.

My mother kept a purse, silken, but torn out one. It was the sole relic of her remote past—her birthplace, her country. She kept it under her blouse, between breasts. Whenever she opened it and found no coins, she would first cry a lot. In this crying ritual I was used to accompany her, keeping my arms stretched at her. Thereafter we would go to that biting man’s shop and return with a small wheat-floor bag and a tiny can of groundnut oil. The chocolate would follow us after an hour or so.

I ate the chocolate once a week, at least.

My mother had biological connection with borders, too: the borders, which the generals with heavy medals had drawn, and the fanatics had washed with blood. Why then, after two decades, the two pieces of great earth—India and Pakistan—with undefined borders had wobbled again? And why did they turn into three pieces? Failed marriage? Arranged marriage? I had no idea, but my mother had to run by night, from east to west, from today’s Bangladesh to India as a refugee in the year 1971. My mother was a daughter of the father who was killed while working on a paddy field; my mother was a daughter of the mother who was killed on rooftop of a running bus; my mother was sister of the younger brother whose rib was crushed by a soldier’s boots and scull cracked by the butt of a gun while he tried fleeing into the Indian border.

I still don’t know why my mother married my father. He had thick moustache, a face like a big goat without horns, long-legs, one hand like a yellow stick—another hand lost in an accident—and a black spot just below his right eye. In short, frightening. On the mental front he kept safe distance from the notions of sanity. I could still see him: first walking on his unsteady legs, with a country liquor bottle in his solitary hand, and then kicking my mother as hard as he could. There stood a little girl, trembling, pressing her soul between tiny lips. On his beating, there would be two simultaneous fallouts: the mother would scream a bleeding wound, and the daughter would urinate and get her knickers wet.

My knickers kept wetting everyday.

He kept inquiring about my father—my real father. I had my mother’s features, but my bright-bluish eyes were the materials he doubted most. He thought my mother was used to sleep with every man living in our neighbourhood—meaning I might not be the fruit of his seed. In a way he was right. I am not his child, exclusively. I am offspring of several parents, simultaneous parents: the poverty, the breaking of a country, the war, an unstable marriage, and what not.

I never condoned my father for his satanic brutality. ‘Hit him back, Ma,’ I shouted at my mother when I was half of her height. She never complied. Had she hated my father in the first year of their marriage, and strictly maintained that hatred at nights, too, I would have not been on the earth.

I was fruit of a failed marriage.

THE FRUIT OF THE FAILED MARRIAGE was ascending steps of the school where my mother worked. My steps were heavy but not faltering. My target was the head master’s office. I went inside a semicircle cabin. There sat a man clad in glowing and spotless cream-coloured suit with a light blue tie and thick moustache that overshadowed his lips. With greying stock of hair, he looked walking in late fifties. From his instant smile I understood that he recognized my face and perhaps was expecting me, too.

“Are you Mr. Pundit?”

He tapped his finger on a nameplate.

“Do you love my mother?”

My gunshot query was bound to confound him. It did. It took several moments to get his bafflement subsided. When recovered, surprisingly soon, he seemed to have filtered the connotation of the words bowled at him.

“Do you LOVE her?”

“Yes.” No more words offered.

“Would you marry her?”

“She can fix the date.”

“Would you keep loving her?”

“Till the date of my death certificate.”

It was not the time for bold strokes. Nor I desired to inflict any wound upon ‘the man who simply wanted to marry my mother and live with her till the date of his death certificate’.

I squeezed my brain and arranged words in an utmost rational form: “If you both are so inclined… then please, come at my home today evening, at eight o’clock. There will be dinner of your choice.” I said, holding the door half closed against the whole world outside.

“Remember, sharp at eight o’clock.”

THE NEXT WEEK witnessed a simple ceremony of marriage of a school head master and the woman who had migrated again to another country. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

(Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

MY MOTHER'S PENCIL SKETCH

2009-03-15T23:55:00.006+05:30

Theme: Son and Step mother's affection. Faulty Child upbringing

AUTHOR : NAVAL LANGA

THIS IS NOT HIS first attempt of running away from home. First time he did it when he was thirteen, studying in standard eight. He had run to the bridge, but failed to beat the cold that had sent tremors to his spine.

He had again tried it in first year of college. This time it was for the reason of Sheena. Sanity recovered in two days. Retired hurt. Sheena still lives in the street, in the same house in whose back yard they had passed hot afternoons. Her windows are still transparent, but her big brother keeps hard cloth curtains.

But today is a different day. He determines to be homeless, finally. He has no plans in mind, no weight in the pockets. In his bag he takes a few things. One pair of clothes, one pair of football shoes, and an old photograph of his mother, his dead mother.

Past. The word makes him uncomfortable. Why people can’t live with the past? Though his stepmother, Bijaya, has never hurt him. Nor she has considered his presence as upsetting, despite his poor record in schools and never attending college properly. But that is not enough. She never helped putting off his shirt after he played in rain. She neither scolded him on coming late at night, nor she shed tears when he was ill. His mother, before she died, did all these things.

But today is a different day. Bijaya removed the pencil drawing of his mother. She wanted the space for an embroidered wall-piece. His mother was a drawing teacher and the pencil drawing, a self-portrait, was her work displayed on the wall. For Amit it was like a relief. When surrounded by loneliness, he would go near to the pencil drawing, put his nose on the frame of the portrait, and smell his mother’s presence.

Today the smell is shifted, from drawing room to storeroom.

When caught in a web of worries, people remember their relationships, old relationships. Amit goes to Sheena. Now he can meet her freely. She lives in PG Hostel, as she has got admission in a post graduation course. Amit could not. While giving admission, they consider only the marks, and not the height of the students.

“It’s not a good ground for leaving home.”

“Sheena, I know. But I… I want my own life now.”

“Okay, I will tell my brother to find out some job for you.”

Amit still dislikes her brother’s face, especially his fan-like moustache. But he prefers silence.

MR. GOPALKRISHNA IS a well-known lawyer. The city knows him by his talent and the high fees he charges. He loved his first wife, Amit’s mother. He gave her money to spend, but failed to give her time and care when she needed. She died. Amit was in standard five then. There was time when people believed that Gopalkrishna had a soft corner for his secretary, Elena. But they had no evidence for proving the softness. They suspected the joint tours ventured by him and Elena. But they were unable to put hands on the particulars of any hotel bookings they did while on tours. Mr. Gopalkrishna is an advocate. The lawyers are good at destroying the evidences.

But now the Lawyer Gopalkrishna respects his second wife. He gives her money to spend, but do not give time. He loves his son, too. But he has no time for him.

Only before a week, Bijaya had succeeded in dragging him in a mall. And to celebrate this unique event, Mr. Gopalkrishna purchased a costly wall-piece for her, as she had showed willingness to own it.

The wall-piece built up a wall between her and Amit.

***

THE TIME DOES NOT stop for anyone. It did not stop for the wall-piece that separated Amit from his home. Nor it stopped for the hardships he faced in initial spell of his job, the job sponsored by Sheena’s brother. The clock ticked for a year.

The day starts from Amit’s feet. A sharp strip of sunrays, that an open window allows in, heats his feet. It makes him to presume that the day should be Sunday. He follows such a strange timetable only on holidays. The milkman is late as usual. As the bell of his one room apartment cries, he walks to the door. The door opens. Surprises visit: shocks happen. Amit finds himself sandwiched between a shock and a surprise. He fails to believe the scene.

“Mam… Mama, you please come in. Here, sit… sit here please.”

Bijaya looks around the life of her stepson. The bed, the sofa, the clothes, and the articles in kitchen: these are as disorganised as they would be in a home of a young man who works for twelve hours, eats at wayside restaurants, and commutes thirty miles daily in public transport buses.

It takes Bijaya’s full hour to turn Amit’s home into the home of a normal person. He passes this hour with a swirling turmoil in his mind.

“Mama, I am sorry… I should have kept talking with you… on phone at least.” The hot coffee that Bijaya made provides him a room to talk more. “You know Mama, I come late at night, and…”

“Your Papa is living with Elena. Since a week.”

The story is painful. It goes on with Bijaya’s incessant tears. Amit feels ashamed and angry, too. Elena lives separate from her husband and serves as secretary to Gopalkrishna. Since his remarriage with Bijaya, the talk of the romance had died its natural death. But it has surfaced again. Bijaya took their joint tours as part of her husband’s business. But after returning last time, he told her that he would pass nights at Elena’s home. No reasons given. For Bijaya it was a crack on the earth. After burning in the fire of suffering for a week, she is before Amit.

“He is powerful man. I… I’m alone in this world.” Bijaya sobs, heavily.

“Oh, how… can you say so, mama? I… you… you have a son, Mama. Look at me. I am your son. And no one can hurt my mother until I am alive. Okay? Please, now don’t, don’t cry.”

Amit sits besides, and the mother puts head on her son’s shoulder. She empties everything she has in store.

***

Mr. GOPALKRISHNA’S OFFICE remains cool at noon. But it has a visitor today, a young man. “Sir… sir is not here. He is in the court.” Elena finds no other words to welcome the unusual visitor. A file drops from her hand.

“Mine is a simple work, ma’am. A secretary like you can do it.”

The young man sits on an opposite chair. Looks straight into her eyes. Waits silently until she returns from cabin. Perhaps after phoning her boss.

“Amit, you know…”

“Look. I am not here for my Papa. I want to talk with you. Please, try to understand.” From his cool words Elena gets some peace of mind.

“Better we talk in sir’s presence.”

“Ma’am, I would have been the last person to raise objections against the relationship, if you were married to my Papa. Just after my mother’s death. But you didn’t. Why? I don’t know. Had my father still been a widower, I would have comfortably ignored your adventures.”

“Amit, I… I am…”

“Sit down, Elena. Just sit and listen. You have problem with your ears, perhaps. Otherwise you might have heard from someone that Mr. Gopalkrishna is a married man. He has a respectable wife. And he has a son of marriageable age, too. Do you know? No, you don’t.”

“Amit, you don’t know…”

“Yes, I know nothing. I am still in cradle, just a boy, okay? But I know that today you will visit my mother’s home. Today. And will ask for her forgiveness. Your boss may be coming late, and there is no use of consulting him. He is a big lawyer, and this is very small case. Isn’t it?”

He leaves the office. Quietly. He does not know how he has managed his head cool. The stake was high: prestige of his family. And he knows that on being challenged openly, how Mr. Gopalkrishna, the big lawyer of the city, would use his influence and power. He knows his father. To drive Bijaya out of home was not a big call for him. Had Bijaya agreed to live with him at his one room apartment, Amit would have got a bigger ring to fight. But she wants a peaceful solution. Peace at any cost. Bijaya does not know but Amit knows that before his remarriage, Gopalkrishna had bought a flat, in Elena’s name. She lives in that flat.

***

Arriving at the line of depression, at Bijaya’s home, Elena is sitting in front of her. Pleading. Bijaya gazes at her, specifically around her belly. It is flat. Bijaya takes a long breath of relief.

“You know, Mrs. Bijaya, I had worked as a teacher in a community school before I joined here. The community people still need me. I have decided to be a teacher again. And I… I thank you for not making anything public. Amit and you are good people.”

After tea and chewing of some silent biscuits, Elena empties her case. Bijaya goes up to gate to see off her. Elena’s car generates a cloud of dust. Bijaya waits until the dust is settled down. .

Amit, sitting in another room, is attentive to the scene. He does not surface until both the ladies have arranged happiness in their lives. While sitting inside he does something with paper and pencil. After all he is son of a mother who was a drawing teacher. He draws a woman’s face.

On completing the drawing he names it as ‘My Mother’.

It was Bijaya’s portrait.

And when he hangs it on the wall, tears gush out from four eyes.

On that moment a son is born: on that moment a mother is born.

(Image courtesy See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons).

SHORT STORY: Painting Bravery of Women

2009-03-14T23:50:00.011+05:30

Short Story: Narrating bravery and wisdom of women. Author : Naval Langa

“YOU’RE YOUR brother’s enemy.”

That’s the limit. ‘I am my brother’s enemy’. But accusation is flogged on me. And it is by none other than my husband. How can I be so? I had no reason to hate my brother. He had never slapped me when I was young; he never curtailed my pocket money when I was in school; nor he objected to my going to swimming pool, even if his number one enemy Mr. Khan’s wife was a trainer there.

“Don’t talk more with that meat-eater woman.”

That was what he commented about Mrs. Khan. My brother is a simple man. In fact only my relatives know that he is my bother. All other people in our town believe that he is my father. And they rightly believe so. When my father died I was of two years, and when mother passed away I was of ten. My brother and his wife are my parents de facto.

My father was a goldsmith. My brother is a goldsmith. My father employed men from our caste only. My brother does so. My father trained these men in making ornaments by putting so much strain on their eyes that they would get eyesight almost lost. And when they were nearly blinded, my father would gift them the spectacles with the glasses of the color of his choice. Only after that day a worker, the man with the green glasses, would be branded as a skilled worker. It was talk of the town that my father respected only the blinded men. My brother is my father’s son. He has changed nothing. He has total ten men out of which seven are blinded. My husband is one of those blind men.

I IGNORED WHAT my husband told me. He was my brother’s man. Had I been in no hurry for the venture I was to under go, I would have flogged him back for taking my brother’s side. But I was in hurry for completing my mission. The train for Delhi was to depart at six o’clock morning. And I was the only person to go for seeing off Madhuri, my brother’s only daughter. My brother was unaware about her journey.

“Do you know Sudha, what people do with young girls in big cities?”

“They are not man-eaters. And Madhuri is quite mature.”

********

MADHURI HAD JUST completed her high school. She wanted to undergo a degree course in fine arts at Delhi. The talks about studying outside the town created a cyclone on our family floor. It destabilized several objects. My brother tried his skill.

“Madhuri, my dear, you have studies much more than any other girl in our caste. Now be practical.“ By ‘being practical’ he meant to start working in kitchen, learn some needlework, and get ready for marring a man the family would be finding out for her.

“Papa, I want to get a degree.”

“Dear, only those who want to be servants need degrees. You are already the master of ten servants working in our shop.” This was the text. The subtext was: no college study, no going away from hometown. It was the resolution on the issue of her future. Had her father known that she was going to study fine arts, the wording of his resolution would have been stricter, perhaps. Madhuri did not object, but her eyes turned on me.

“But brother, now a days many girls go to cities for studying.”

“Don’t you know she is my only child?” My voice was silenced.

IT WAS NOT the case that my voice was silenced for the fist time. The air within the walls of our home always felt it uncomfortable to hear a free voice. I recalled my high school days. In those days I had pledged my heart to a man who wrote poetries, kept his hair well-plaited, and did my homework of English language. He did all these things while sitting with me under a banyan tree. By passing of a year, the tree had become wider in air, deeper in land, and thicker in size.

And then came the hurricane. One day my brother scolded his wife heavily, as he believed that she had failed in keeping careful eyes on me. The wind of his rage was so powerful that it would have razed out all the banyan trees on the earth. I saw and heard everything the couple transacted. The issue was mine; the life at stake was mine; I was the last person to be consulted. One week passed, event-less.

“Sudha, my dear, come. Sit here.”

My brother started fondling my head. It was not new for me. He loved me so much. “Look dear, now you should learn everything a good woman should know. Be practical.” By this he conveyed to me a one-line order: Go to the kitchen and forget what is going on outside of it.

Without uttering a single word about my affairs, my dream-canvasses were torn into pieces; the ongoing study was axed; and within a month my marriage was arranged. He chose a man, a pig, who worked in his shop. The boy was an apprentice and was yet to be blinded. He got his salary upgraded and was gifted a good house in our street.

********

“WHAT WILL YOU DO now?” I had not yet left the battlefield where Madhuri was fighting. We were in a secret meeting, on third floor terrace of my brother’s house. Madhuri was a thinking face and her mother a soundless, a helpless onlooker.

“I will go for the study.”

“Your father would kill me.”

“Mama, nothing like that would happen. I know Papa. He would not tell anyone in the town that his daughter has gone for study without his permission. He is such an egoistic man. But in that case I should not take money from our home.”

The girl was bold. But the honesty for the money was surprise of my life. The air was conducive for the freedom. The decision was taken. Only the money for the initial cost remained an issue. The girl firmly denied taking money from home without telling her father.

I still remember how her mother was trebling when I had gone to my home. I had conceived a decision, too. I returned soon. Under a scheme, Madhuri was supposed to go at her maternal uncle’s home for three days. In fact she had decided to board the train going to Delhi.

“You keep this money.”

“Aunty, but…”

“No ifs and buts if you want to study ahead.” I gave her a weighty wade of notes and a truckload of good wishes. Her mother was a fearful soul.

**********

A YEAR HAD PASSED since Madhuri boarded on the Delhi bound train. She frequently talked with me on phone, and sometimes with her mother, but never with her father. He was still a rock, red with anger. But Madhuri was right. He said to every one in the town that he was very much proud of his daughter studying at Delhi.

It was vacation time, yearly vacation, and Madhuri, instead of going to her home, had come at my home.

“Aunty, let us go to our shop. I have purchased gifts for everyone in our house, even for the workers in our shop.” She told me when the morning whistle blew. The girl was bold. I accompanied her. On seeing us the shop was dead silent at all the corners. The blinded and yet to be blinded men just smiled on receiving the gifts from her. All were pigs before my brother. Madhuri went near to him, fearlessly.

“Papa, I have painted Goddess Durga. It’s for you.”

It was the crack. The man with rock straight ego crumbled on hearing his daughter’s voice after a long recess of one year. My brother, being a staunch devotee of Goddess, first bowed his head at the painting. Once he took it in his hands, his eyes failed to contain the flood of tears. The flood washed out all the anger and dislikes he had kept inside since a year.

MADHURI IS TO return to Delhi today. Her vacation walked on the talks about the life in Delhi. She made us wandering on the roads and streets of Delhi, its gardens, its slippery streets, full of cars and cows running on. The railway station of our small town, the town where only the blinded are considered as skilled, is ready for witnessing the flight of a girl. We all are present here, including my practical brother, along with all of the blinded men.

When the train whistled I saw a bird flying in the sky, flying and singing a song of freedom. Madhuri has earned her freedom. She got it not due to anyone’s concession. She did not get it as a gift. She acquired it by courage and her desire to be free. She flies out of our age-old platform. And who is that? Someone is sitting on her wings. Who is she? It is Sudha; it is I, the woman who has lost the wings.

I am flying with her. I am flying on her wings. (Image courtesy Wikimdia commons)

The Transplant : The woman who paid her bill well

2009-03-13T23:55:00.003+05:30

Short story narrating the force of gratitude.

Author : Naval Langa

PEOPLE WERE UNABLE TO SWALLOW the idea. Nor my staffs working under me could decode the thing. It was not the case they were unconcerned about Madame’s health. They loved Madame, our boss, too much; they all were worried about her illness, too. Doctors had said that her kidneys were non-functioning; she lived on doses of regular dialysis. My assistant Kapila had vowed to go to temple of Lord Shiva for whole of the month, walking barefooted; Shariff, our peon had vowed to fast for one week. But no one understood my decision: my decision to donate one of my kidneys to Madame.

But I worried for Vijay, the man who had conjured up a life with me. It is just one year before I had met him. But from the very first day he is a non-erasable impression on my soul. Whenever I see him, I feel that I am not alone in this world. I felt I needed an explanation to him regarding why I was donating my kidney to Madame. Coping with the weakness of my tongue, I decided to use pen and paper. I wrote about my past, everything about my life before I came to this city.

Dear Vijay,

If you are planning anything about your life keeping me in mind, this is what you should know. You know I have decided to donate a kidney to Madame. My life lives on two opposite sides of a border, ‘the border day’ of my life on which I had contemplated a simple act to accomplish. Do you know what was that contemplated act? It was suicide. I remember my past life as one would remember the moments passed after being crushed by a heavy truck and before turning unconscious.

Our house was at the end of a closed street, perhaps the narrowest street of the town. It’s fading colour and falling plaster were good excuse for the people not to look at it. The only prominent thing about it was my stepmother. My late mother, a music teacher, told me stories about stepmothers: stepmother is a symbol of misfortune; she beats the children; she bites them; she sucks their blood, too. And finally the children either die or run away from homes. My stepmother followed the story-lines word by word.

My father was weak before her young skin and high voltage voice. She came to rule my house when I was ten years old; she started to hate me when I was ten years old. However she had given me an option, the option to choose between home and footpath. I chose home. She showed me how the pink cheeks of a tender girl could be turned into crimson red by pinching, and then dark red by blind slapping. She did it regularly: she did it extensively.

Do you think I’m reading my prison record or writing an autobiography? Then let the next decade be axed: the years of no change in climate. Winter: three hundred sixty-five days’ winter. But before seven winters, the season took an unpredicted turn.

Firoz: it was his name. Our neighbors talked that we were in love. My hopes were on the Mount Everest, while counting midnight stars on the bank of the lake near to our city. Firoz talked about our marriage. The river of joy was flowing over my reason. Glittering of the city lights from a distance obliterated presence of all the guiding stars in the sky. The nature the loneliness of the lake, and the pleasure-heated bodies did their job.

After a week he went to Japan on his business tour. ‘I will return within one month,’ he told me so. I was up in the sky, dreaming about the costly clothes and golden ornaments like Firoz’s mother wore. I was happy, as my one, at least one, relationship was going to be successful. Happiness has its own power. I forgot my mother’s death; I forgot what I had suffered at the hands of my stepmother. A ray of hope had cracked the age-old crust of sorrow. Those were the days I regarded myself as the happiest woman on earth. My nights became fearless; days started assuming meaning.

But the tower of rapture took no time to crumble.

I found I was pregnant.

The dark night at the lake had put its signature on my body. The signature was growing within me. It shook me at every inch. Fear arrested me at once. My town was a small place, and the premarital sex an unforgivable offence.

I called Firoz, at Japan. He was not so responsive as expected. His tone of talking was a deadly blow. Each word he spoke sharpened my fright. One month passed over my stiffened mind. I had lost communication with him.

The weight under my belly was increasing day-by-day. One thing was certain: my God-fearing, society-fearing, wife-fearing, father would not help me. I decided to meet Firoz’s parents. I went. There Firoz’s sister, keeping suspicious eyes wide open, informed me that her parents had gone to Japan—for attending Firoz’s marriage.

Her words ran over my body like an army of biting mice.

The arranged marriage had been solemnised before a week. Firoz had married a girl, a daughter of his mother’s friend who was a millionaire in Tokyo. Firoz or his father had a little say before his mother. Perhaps they, all the three, preferred money above all other things. Firoze’s parents were to return soon; but the newly wed couple was to settle in Japan. Permanently.

The blow was fatal. Land under my feet was robbed: dreams crushed to the dust. I had known the ruthless reality. I was enticed; I was cheated. I had failed at my last hope. I ran to the lake, up to a black stone point. It was a point where women like me ran madly, stood on the highest stone, and then jumped in the lake, not to be seen alive again. I stood on the stone. I cried as loud and as long as I could.

I was there not for leaping out of existence. Strangely, I did not dislike the thing that was growing within me: the child. Perhaps it was the only belonging I could define as ‘my own’. I decided to save that was exclusively mine. It was one and only possible order to rescue my shattered life. My thoughts, my feelings, my expectations from my life melted into one thing: the foetus, the unborn. My desperate eyes figured out a hope-scene: there would be a plant shooting out of me; it would become a big tree, and it would be my shelter. I wished; I longed for; and I preferred to have the baby. (Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

TO BE CONTINUED AT NEXT PAGE

SHORT STORY: Narrating the Force of Gratitude

2009-03-13T23:50:00.001+05:30

AUTHOUR: Naval Langa

Shot Story: Continued From Previous Page

I CHOSE TO LEAVE the home, the city, the air, and run to quite a new land. No one would miss me: that was clear. And for the belongings, apart from my own body, I had one asset—a golden bracelet that my maternal uncle had gifted me on my twentieth birthday. I sold it.

I left a chit for my father. ‘I am leaving home, not to return.’

The path was undefined. I reached at station. At the ticket window, I failed to decide the name of my destination. I bought ticket for the last station.

The whole world was at standstill until the train had run for more than a day. I was sailing in an ocean that had no other bank. When it stopped, I came down on platform. I wanted some food, not for me, but for the life that was developing under my belly. Heat was at its peak. Debilitated from head to feet, I was at zero point of strength. It knocked me down on the steps. I might have rolled on the steps, remained buried under stampede, or been crushed with a wall. I had no memory of what had happened.

When senses regained, what I saw was not the part of a bad dream. It was hard reality, harder than I could imagine. I had no luggage, no money. No address. Nothing. My sole companion was the pain.

I was in a solitary room of a maternity ward, on a bed clustered by nurses. The fall had spared me, but not the innocent being. The unborn that was going to be a plant had gone; the seed that was to be a big tree had been rooted out. The shelter I envisioned had fallen down.

It was abortion. The wound was still leaking blood. Doctors rushed. Nurses hovered. They were trying to save me. I had no reason to remain alive. A policewoman in starched uniform stood beside my bed. Writing something. I knew what it meant. Mine was a complicated case.

When left alone, I passed an hour or so, looking at a ceiling fan. The zone of darkness was condensing. I saw my mother lying on floor. People were tying strings over her body. My stepmother, sitting on my mother’s chest, was beating me with a stick—on my legs, on my thighs, on my knees. I wanted to scream.

The fan was still moving.

A feeling of total loss had wrapped up my being; my body reduced to a bundle of bones, skin, and pain. I had all types of pain, which could be on the earth. I wanted love from my family; my stepmother stalled it. I wanted a job and live independently; I failed to get it. I wished to be loved; I failed dangerously. The man of my dream had disappeared and married a rich girl. I wanted to have an illegitimate child. It was thrown out of me. Failing at every genre of human relationships, I was at the end of my life-journey.

A deadly flash in my mind… I had no reason to prolong the life that was reduced to a naught. The room was closed in every respect, and the air was conducive for a death wish. Obeying the air, I tied my long dupatta around my neck and thought about how much time it would take to stand upon the cot, tie another end with the ceiling fan, and then to jump down the cot. A copybook suicide, a dependable spade to rout out the self.

Before I started executing the idea of routing the self out, a strip of sunrays lighted the expanse before my eyes. Someone entered in and get the closed window opened. I saw a face, the face that had outline of a full moon. Her hand went on my head. It was a touch; it was a motherly touch. She stood beside me for some moments, caressing my head, instructing something to hospital staff in few words—soft words. The voice was sweet, sweet like the bells ringing in temples.

She was Madame. Madame Lataji.

AFTER TWO HOURS, I was transported to other side of the river, into the big house owned by Madame.

It was the last day of my life: it was the first day of my life.

Vijay, Madame rescued me from my certain death. She gave me job. My life belongs to her. Donating a kidney is nothing for me when her life is concerned.

I am still yours, but with one kidney missing,

Seema.

TODAY, BOTH THE OPERATIONS are over. Both the patients are out of danger. But Mr. Vijay, the man who waits for me on Sunday mornings in his disordered bachelor house, was sitting by the side of my bed, fondling my head. His eyes have the weight of a sleepless night.

“Seema, I’ve got one month’s leave sanctioned. I think we need each other’s constant presence.” There sings a cuckoo, on a distant tree. (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

THE PARTING GIFT : Narrating Parental Love

2009-03-12T23:55:00.003+05:30

SHORT STORY, narrating love for the basic values: parental love and love for children.

AUTHOR : NAVAL LANGA

TRAIN WAS RUNNING fast. But it was not as fast as the train of thoughts running in my mind. Anger: that was the word that could only describe the colour of my face.

‘Why should your mother live alone at village?’

It had become our usual scuffle, whenever Kumar talked about his mother’s old age and worried about her. But I knew that Mama, as Kumar used to call his mother, would never reside with me.

‘She is a meat-eaters’ girl.’ Mama had objected to our marriage. I am a staunch vegetarian as Kumar, and it was not my choice to be born in a family that ate meat. Kumar overruled the objection. We got married. Mama was now on a wheelchair. But she never lived with us, not for a single day.

On that day there was one line message from her: I want to see you both. ‘She must be ill,’ I called Kumar, as he was on tour. He told me to reach there directly. It was one hour’s journey. Morning journey was not my line of preference. I went for it. Anger.

MAMA WAS NORMAL, sipping tea on her wheelchair. Below the chair there were remnants of a just finished breakfast. But real trouble started after an hour. “Let us go to temple, Neeta. ” Mama told me. Thrashing rain, scorching heat, or shivering cold. Nothing could prevent Mama from going to temple. I drew her wheelchair on the temple street.

I had no desire to be noticed, as I was feeling as comfortable as a first-timer to a temple would. The men and women, twenty odd in all, chanting prayer had a reason to fix their eyes on me. My urbane get-up.

On seeing Mama, a pundit ran in; he helped me to get the chair inside. I knelt before the idol of Lord Krishna. I closed my eyes, folded my hands in right fashion. Mama kept one hand on her stickhandle and another on my head.

There started the surprising movements. Mama took off one of her golden rings and rounded it on my head for seven times—clockwise. Chanted some verses in Sanskrit. I knew it was a religious rite, performed for protecting one’s beloved person from the evil spirits. I failed to understand why she was doing that. Then she called one elderly pundit nearer and gave him that ring as alms.

“Pray for my children, punditji.” Mama told him. “And pray specially for this pretty young woman, punditji. Today is her birthday.”

“Mama, who… who told you…? Oh…”

Neeta Keshavani. The receptionist, who never referred a telephone diary while dialling her company-clients, had forgotten to look at calendar and had no idea about her birth date. But there was a man on the earth, Kumar, the man who cared for me and cared in such a dignifying way. Certainly he would have called at village. And here was a loving lady, blessing me.

“Long live my child. May the sun give you energy; may the moon give shining to your eyes; and may all the stars favour you… And may the almighty God give you all the happiness on the earth, my child.”

I lost command over language, failed to find a word to answer the onslaught of affection. Had I been at home, I would have cried loudly. Here in the temple what I could do was not to prevent the flow of tears welling out of my eyes.

It was becoming hard for me to believe that I was loved and desired in such a grand way: with alms and blessings, and a special prayer for me in temple. My parents did not belong to a clan of non-believers in God. But they had kept a safe distance from the temples.

The elderly pundit chanted Sanskrit mantras. He arranged fresh wicks dipped into ghee, ignited the series of holy lamps again, and chanted verses for blessing. He offered a short prayer before the idol and then blessed me for good health, wealth, and long life.

***

AT HOME Mama told me how she and her husband had saved money and had built the house. It was quite spacious: a small garden behind it, with a well in a corner and a high compound wall. It would not fetch much money, but it was good for a vacation spending.

“Mama, why don’t you take sugar-less tea?” Heaping three spoon-loads in a cup I asked her.

“Do you know what the doctors told me before twenty years?”

“What?”

“Leave sugar or you will die, soon.”

“And…”

“And do you know what happened? My three doctors died during these twenty years.” Mama closed and opened her eyes thrice.

“Mama, you are so funny, I can’t believe.”

The lunch walked with joy and family talks. Then to my utter surprise Mama gave me a document. My God!! It was a Gift Deed, in my favour. Mama had gifted me all the rights and ownership of the house.

“My child, this is all that I have. Kumar’s father and I were teachers in this village. He was as noble as Kumar. God had gifted him everything… everything except…” Mama’s lips trembled, “except a long life...” She stopped for a while. It was painful reminder of the sore that had not healed yet. Kumar’s father had died at thirty only.

“Kumar talks sometimes about selling this house. I have built up it with my sweat and blood. It’s my desire that my children and family should use this house and be happy. “

“Mama but why should you, we sell this house?”

Then she took my face between her palms and spoke in a subdued tone. “Neeta please, tell me, you will not sell this house. Tell me…” Columns of tears ran out of her eyes like the prisoners would run on their long awaited release.

“Mama, you are coming with us.” It was the hardest event to manage. “No. I will not leave you here, alone.”

“I will be always with you, my child.”

“Please, don’t speak like we are departing.”

“How… how can I depart from you?”

“Mama, I…I will be the happiest woman if you live with me.” Once I said so, she drew me closer, kissed my forehead, and embrace.

THE CLOCK in Mama’s room was robbing the light, tick by tick. Kumar had come at noon. It was not the day; it was not the night.

Kumar told Mama to take her tablets. She denied. When she returned teacup, I saw a strange breed of peace on her face. While I arranged a woollen shawl on her feet, she pressed my hand and smiled at Kumar and me.

Everything went in slow motion when Kumar and I were in kitchen. Kumar sat facing me, but not looking at me. Sadness. We, Kumar and I, had a plan in our mind. We were yet to tell Mama about it, the shifting plan.

“We will not ask Mama. I will get her into car and you will drive straight.”

“Kumar, your bedroom is the big one. It will be Mama’s room.” I tried to paint my dream arrangement; it made the air a little bit lighter.

“And…”

“We will arrange our fighting in another room.”

Outside the defence of the home, life had taken a stormy shape. Wind had turned merciless for the roofs. Curtains billowed fearfully. A violent blow of wind crushed one glass shutter. Kumar gathered the pieces of broken glass. As I lifted plate, the knife slipped from my hand. I walked into Mama’s room, with the apple chips in plate. I entered the room and looked at Mama.

The evening had turned into night.

“K… U… M…A…R.…”

My scream shattered the air. It went through the room; it went through the walls; it went through the gate of the house. Kumar stormed in. Checked Mama’s pulse, the heart, the eyes.

The bird had fled without a flutter. Empty was the cage, lying on bed.

Mama was dead.

“Mama I… Mama, see…Talk with me...” He collapsed on her chest. “Neeta, look... Mam… Mama is not hearing…”

But I was not there. I did not cry. No tears. Sitting in a corner. Wooden. As if the whole mechanism of the senses had deserted my body.

“Neeta… Mama has gone. Neeta, talk… talk with me.”

He caught my hands, gave me a strong shake. I collapsed. When I cried, it was a scream of undefined length. The hard ceiling had a shatter. The cry crossed the streets, struck on the roofs, and torn the air into pieces. People of the village rushed to the cry.

SINCE THE DAY, we go to the village, twice in a year. On my birth date we go there, unfailingly. On that day we go to the temple. We give a golden ring to the pundit as alms. Not for my birth date, but as it happens to be Mama’s death anniversary. And when I sit alone in Mama’s room, I hear her voice:

“I will be always with you, my child.”