AUTHOR: NAVAL LANGA
“MAMA YOU DON’T know how hard it is to earn
money.” Sammy hurries for reaching his factory.
“My child, it’s your father’s death
anniversary. I need some money for offering puja at the temple.”
“You can do it here in the temple of the city, too.” Sammy’s wife suggested a practical way-out. Sitting on a high cot, she dangles her legs and looks at the old woman as if she is a recurring cost. Vijaya the old woman sits back. She is on a costly sofa, but with a rundown face.
The amount she needs is a peanut for her son, a reputed exporter of garments. For him, his father is a thing of the past, and to chew the past is a ‘wasting of time’. He remains so busy, so occupied, so unconcerned about family.
But for the old woman Vijaya, her husband is still the present, present like the tears in eyes, which have not dried yet.
She remembers how they were caught in the fire of worries. She recalls how
jointly they had recollected the lost tunes of life and composed a song of
happiness. She rubs her eyes first and then rubs her spectacles. Her cleaned
glasses help her to see the scene of her past.
*******
THE BELLY OF THE dam was torn open. Water
had run into in the streets, the homes, and the destinies of the villagers who
were not left with a single cloth dry. The Rain God had displayed its wrath.
And the wrath was flooding everywhere.
What worried Sampat was the stock lying in his shop. The entire stock was weak against water. Water is Sampat’s enemy in a novel way. Here a touch of it, and his whole trade would meltdown.
On
seeing the oozing flood in the street, his face turned white as the crushed
rice. He feared for the loss. He feared for the struggle ahead. Vijaya, his
wife was still driving out the water from the kitchen.
Sampat traded in single stock: the salt. No
one other did it in the area of seven villages. The storeroom for salt was at
the lower level. The water entered his shop as a serpent would enter the hole
of its prey. When he waded through the floodwater, crossed his veranda, and
reached in front of the shop, all of his fears had materialised. His stock had
made the whole street salty.
“How is your luck, Sampat?” Bhima, standing
on a raft-like thing and oaring with a long bamboo, fired a joke at him. As the
streets and fields were underwater, the village was full of such rafts. They
made rafts from the tree branches fallen before the rain. On Bhima’s joke two
children, half-clothed, standing on a nearby roof giggled. Sampat groaned at
them and the duo was silenced.
He would need a raft, too, Sampat knew. To reach a temple was like to cross the Bay of Bengal. But he needed to go. Only the Kama sold wheat flour in the village.
“Flour has run out.” Vijaya had told
him. Saving himself from the household articles swimming in the water and the
walls waiting to crumble down, he however reached the temple. At the curve of
the road, he saw the Kama.
“O… God, I am dead…” The Kama was beating
his own head, ignoring his wife’s incessant solaces. His old mother had drowned
and the dead body was missing. His trade was no better than Sampat’s: blown
off. Everything had gone with the flood. Only he was left with a pair of a
bullock, and three walls of his house, one wall washed out completely.
“Now I shall close the salt business,” Sampat spoke to himself. “The selling of plastic goods is a safe business. No threat from the flood. Water comes and water goes. Plastic remains plastic, dry."
On the way home Sampat saw water receding. It was knee-deep when he
opened the rusted gate of the home.
“Vijaya… now boil the rice only. No wheat
flour. The Kama is bankrupt.” He told his wife.
The firewood would be a problem, he knew.
But he also knew that he had a clever wife. Would manage it. She did. She had
also borrowed a small pot of drinking water from a neighbour.
********
THE MUDDY LANE was unsteady under Sampat’s
feet. Vijaya helped him to walk through the temple street. The slippery mud was
his enemy. Had he been alone, it would have been like walking through a war
zone for his slightly obese body.
“Everything is gone. How will we live now?”
“We will start a new business. Clothes. “
Vijaya applied her tailoring strength for responding to the challenges the
devastating rain had put before. Her husband was sceptical, not about her
courage but about the success of the new venture.
“One machine, several metres of cloth, and
our shop are sufficient for starting. And now a day I do not wear my gold
bangles. Sell it.” Sampat looked at Vijaya’s face. It was brighter under the
sunrays.
The bus came after a recess of three days.
The couple went to the city. The gold was sold: hopes were purchased. The money
procured was not a stirring amount. But they could collect the materials for
their dream business. The materials were light-weight; the dream was hard. On the way
home, carrying the weight of their new ideas, the couple discussed how they would
make their dreams true.
A SHOP OF
ready-made clothes in a small village were like a festival in the desert. People
of the surrounding three villages came to see courage. Wider were their eyes on
seeing a woman, working in a shop. Women in villages sat at home, produce
children, and cry for the losses. They did not fight like Vijaya.
“Where is Sampat?” A customer asked.
“To the city for selling the clothes.”
Vijaya would answer. Her little daughter was not a problem. She played near the
shop. A seed takes time to sprout and become a plant. It took no more time to
become a sheltering tree in Vijaya’s shop. Before their son Sammy was born, the
people of three villages had started calling Sampat a Sheth, a respectable
trader.
And the day of reckoning came. Vijaya got her
golden bangles back, her gone assets back. New bangles were brighter than the
old ones. The couple’s sweat had added more shining to it. It was the day they
rejoiced: it was the day they felt like the winner. It was the day on which
they gifted one pair of clothes to every child studying in the village school.
The months became years, and the years made
a decade. Their increased business, and the education of children: these factors were
the compulsions, which brought them to the city.
********
THE OLD WOMAN, Vijaya, a widow for ten
years, looks at the sky. The tears fill her eyes. There is no rain; there is no
village, and there is no poverty dancing around. But there is pain. And there
is no company of her co-fighter, Sampat, her husband. Since the day he died after a heart attack,
Vijaya is dry as a lake without water.
Today it is ten years, his tenth death
anniversary.
Vijaya looks at her golden bangles. The past-scene re-created. ‘And now a day I do not wear my gold bangles. Sell it.’ She remembers how they had turned the page of their life, before twenty-five years. Standing on the muddy lanes, even facing the wild claws of the flood, She was the master of her affairs. But today she is helpless before her son.
The time has changed. But the gold is still gold.
The bangles are sold, the second time,
again for the purpose of her husband. This time it is for the happiness of his departed soul.
She remembers how she had climbed the bus for going to the city, to sell the bangles, and to purchase the happiness ahead.
Today she rides a bus to the village. Is it a return journey? Is she
leaving something behind? Or is she going to achieve something in the village?
She has no answer. But the gushing tears wash out all the queries roaming in
her mind.
*******
THE RITUAL
ENDS and Vijaya distributed alms to the temple Pundits and serves a feast to
the school children. Sampat liked children. The villagers remember the days
when Sampat, the sheth of
the village, was among them.
During the stay of two days in her old house, Vijaya feels that the walls are crying for someone’s presence. She gets the whole house mud-plastered and the grass grown in the veranda weeded out. The roof again saw the colour of a home.
Standing within the four walls of the
shop she smells the salt Sampat was selling. Sitting among the village women of
her age was a rerun of her life, the life in which she was managing the events.
The recess of two decades melts as the salt had melted in the floodwater.
She had sold the gold and bought happiness
in past. Now she has sold the gold again and has regained the happiness,
perhaps.
She sends a one-line message to her son
Sammy: I need a company of the walls that still smells the salt; the walls
of my home, too, need me, perhaps.
