Author — Naval Langa
THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS stopped, a
python-like line of the city vehicles turned immobile, humming like the groan
of an injured leopard. The passage for walking blinked a green light. He turned
cautious; girded his loins. On any count it was not easy, for him, to cross the
distance between two roads within the stipulated time, thirty seconds.
The seconds started reducing. He
gathered all the pieces of courage he had and went on almost galloping, in his
style. But the people coming from his behind did not wait. They found it essential to push him aside, making their way through. He could not make it. He
fell down in the middle, on a white slash of the zebra crossing itself. Bag in
hand smashed. Stampede started.
Before he could collect himself and touch the other side, not a safer one
but another side, the traffic signal had opened. He was caught in between. Within
a few seconds, the entire current of vehicles got disturbed. Horns shouting. He
lost the sense of time and space. Survival. The survival of life became
paramount.
Until a policeman approached him, helping, he had experienced the nearest
contact with fear. In addition, he had known half of the dictionary of abusive
words, too. From the vehicle drivers’ mouths.
“O… why don’t people like you sit at home?” Another policeman shouted from
a safe distance and proved that he was on duty and awake. However, the man
managed to cross the road, but not without bruising on his left hand. The legs
were safe.
The policeman who shouted earlier was still throwing his preferred
syllables. Incessantly. He did not heed. Because only he knew how difficult it
was to cross the road, for a person having one polio-affected leg. Handicapped.
He did not thank God. He should have. Because he was in the midst of losing
something important: a leg, a hand, or even an eye. But he was happy that a
copy of the file he had in his cloth bag was intact, unspoilt. He had painted a
picture of his life to come in this file.
******
THE OFFICER-IN-CHANGE, on seeing him perhaps, took out his file. A breath
of relief for him. After a few moments, with unusual zeal, she, the officer
involved, picked up the receiver, dialled with her well-polished nails, and
engaged her authoritative lips with the telephone. The file waited.
He looked around, for a change, for reducing the heat of his growing
impatience. There was a red rose in front of him, in the lady’s table-vase.
Smelling good. Roses were rare commodities in a government office; he should know
that. Beyond the rose-lady, there opened a balcony. Narrow: as narrow as any
other ways leading outside of the government offices.
On the balcony, one earthen pot stood with a big cactus. Waiting. The woman
tele-talk lasted for a time during which a waiting man, a politely waiting man
would lose his passion, turn mentally deformed, and start shouting in
directions. Snatching hair, including one’s own, was banned in government
offices; the shouting was not.
But he kept waiting. Politely. He had another work to attend, too, mending
of his trouser that still had the dust of the road on it. When there was
nothing left to mend, he devoted his eyes to the lady’s face. Round, fanned by
her hair arranged in the widest possible manner, so it looked photogenic.
He was becoming progressively hopeful, on looking at her. Beauty has
cooling and encouraging effects, he realised. At last, the talk ended. She
smiled; not at him, but at the photograph of him attached with his application.
“Mr Sunil Desai?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hope was oozing in his heart.
“What do you want?” The question he had answered several times.
“Permission, ma’am. A licence to set up a PCO, a Public Call Office,
just a booth of two telephones, ma’am.” Standing in front, he answered once
more. The officer had not offered him a seat, even after seeing that he was
unable to stand for long.
She scrolled her eyes on the pages of his application, the file. First
thing: she tick-marked the area of the shop. As per rule. Then came the
certificate from a doctor, orthopaedic: he is handicapped. In order. One should
be a certified handicapped; it was a government office.
Finally, her enquiring eyes tumbled on a photograph of the proposed cabin,
the small cubical cabin for the public to talk in private. Still, he was
watching everything through the glasses of expectation.
“Colour of the cabin is not as per requirement.”
“I will just change it, ma’am.”
“Get it changed first.” The verdict. She threw the file on the left side of
her table, with the flair of regular indifference. There were several other
files, one upon another, looking like a heap of torn woollen shawls. His file
had become one more shawl.
It was over. It would take another week. He had lost the day.
DRAWN BACK, he returned. Home. Here he was within facilities. No troubles,
for him. Father would not scold him, even if he did come late at night.
However, the old man had not reserved such a facility for his younger
son.
For other children, he was as fatherly as other fathers, the pension drawing
and stick holding fathers, would have been: hawkish, spitting instructions, and
firmly believing that the children were mere extensions of their parents’
bodies.
His mother lived in a different slot. She had built a safe hut under the
shadow of her husband’s line of instructions, by following it dot-by-dot. “Why
don’t you do some less sewing?’ his father would ask her.
She would not hear much. She had her easy tears and small pieces of cloth,
which she would convert into garments through an old showing machine. She,
however, never insisted on Sunil’s contribution to the family’s kitchen
expenses.
He was the lone child when he entered this house by birth. Then came his
younger brother. And the last entrant in this low-roofed house of two rooms and
a kitchen was his little sister.
His younger, a footballer and college student, and the sister, a high-school girl who kept her hair untied, would not mind the extra facilities
exclusively set aside for Sunil.
Sunil disliked these facilities.
He knew it was all due to one thing: his being handicapped, his left leg
two inches shorter and visibly thinner than the right. Had he not been so
handicapped, he would have been a good candidate for becoming a wrestler; he
had such a stout build. Polio. Polio that visited him at the age of seven
spoilt the game.
People in the street greeted him, unfailingly. On seeing him the girls of
his college would wink among themselves, but would certainly smile at him.
There he saw hate, the hate turned upside down, the hate walking on its hands
instead of feet. There were institutions, the herds of do-gooders, waiting
eagerly to help him.
“What I dislike to see is the show of pity on me, the show of barren
compassion,” he had replied to a letter from an institution set up for helping
the handicapped persons.
Only the music teacher, living in a rented house, third from his house, was an exception. She was fair and genuine to him; and he, too, respected her as a young man of twenty-one would respect a lady in her mid-thirties.
While out of the home she put on decent clothes, mostly the ironed, with strong buttons and classical embroidery. On the belief side she had a sermon, close to her chest: help yourselves first, if you want to help others. At her home, sitting on a handmade cane chair, put under her musical shelf, Sunil felt the presence of peace.
On weekends, they would walk on the beach; drink coconuts, and he would
tell Zena about every stone thrown at him. Zena, that was her name.
“Why don’t you try at some influential man’s door?” she would ask him,
sitting on her swing, coming near and going far. She knew all about his
mapping, the running for the PCO and et cetera.
“It’s all because I refuse to play the card my destiny has served to me.”
The die was cast: he would play his own cards.
Since the day he had vowed to stand upon his feet, disappointments were in
his close contact, regularly pouring in. Why should he do only the tasks
reserved for disabled persons? The question roamed in his mind. Making cane
chairs, packing things in packets, or having a typists’ chair before a
government office: these were the works he did not dislike. But these things
bored him. He had a fire in his heart to be an entrepreneur, to start a small
venture of his own.
Owning a PCO, a telephone booth, was a worthy first step.
He was not on a fancy tour. Otherwise, he would not have gone so far on the
actualisation of the project. He had a good habit, a childhood habit; while in
school, he never went without doing homework.
Space: his father had no regret in sparing half of his bedroom as a
proposed shop. Partition was done. Infrastructure: in the beginning, a chair, a
small table, one half-glass and half-wooden cabin, and two sets of the
telephone instruments would be enough stock.
Finance: Fardeen, the grocery trader living at the corner of his street,
would not mind lending him money. Otherwise, why would he waste hours in
helping him to keep his shop accounts in order? But the trader would part with
money only on the day of delivery of the instruments from the department. That
was a precondition.
******
AFTER A WEEK, the story was different. A qualitative change. Though he
reached there in neat and unruffled clothes, without falling at any of the
traffic signals, the inner scene of the office was materially altered. It
looked tidy, and the harsh and hygienic smell of phenyl used in floor washing
had replaced the smell of the rose. Window curtains changed, from hard grey to
soft brown.
The lady in the central position was transferred. And the person holding
reign over the floor, now tidy, the staff, and the heaps of files was an
unknown concept. There sat an aged, pot-bellied man, clearing the files.
He walked ahead, stood at the hinged door, looked blankly.
“Are you Mr Sunil? Oh, have a seat. Please.” The replaced
officer kick-started the notion of humanity, the device that had been lying
dormant in the office.
The balding figurehead of humanity, the new officer, rechecked all the details involved. To Sunil’s eyes, the man looked uncontaminated from the virus of red-tapism. Hope swelled.
On seeing the manner
in which the man was nodding his head while reading the application, Sunil
could not help imaging that he was sitting in his PCO chamber and outside it
was a long queue of customers, waiting to talk.
“You know Mr Desai, we are here to help you, especially
handicapped people like you. Take it for granted. Unfortunately, we are in
short supply of the instruments this month.”
“Sir, I am here for six months.”
“Oh. But why don’t you wait for one month more?
Otherwise, it will be more expensive for you, if you buy these instruments from
the open market.”
The past revisited. The trend confirmed. Nothing was changed, perhaps. Futile were the efforts to say that the instruments available in the market were cheaper and better than the government office would provide.
Had there been no procedure of pleasing the officers, by purchasing the
government-supplied instruments, he would have bought the entire set from the
market. So he desisted from speaking out the reality. Anger. A long breath. He
walked down the steps, almost feeling defeated.
The traffic signal, the metro train, and finally the
steps leading to the terrace: that was his route.
“I knew a politician, a member of the civic body.” Zena
put a cup of coffee before him, keeping one for her. “If he can be useful.” She
seemed to show enthusiasm, burying her scepticism under the hopeful words.
“No Zena. It’s a rule. Every locality should have one
PCO. And they take full payments. I don’t pray for any concession, my being
handicapped and all that. Then why this… I…I can’t think more.” In small
pauses, he opened himself.
Zena did not stretch the subject further. Instead, she
talked about how he was doing in his occasional library work, and his final
year’s study, and other items on their conventional list. Literature being
prime. He liked reading literature, and he had taken it as the main subject for
his bachelor’s degree.
She would not mind talking with him till midnight. On
terrace. The terrace of her house was without tiles, but it was helpful to buy
an escape from the whole world and for putting openhearted talks on the plate.
Since the day he was running behind his project, he needed the plate on daily
basis.
*******
NEXT month did not come easily. But it came. And the man was climbing steps of the office. Half defeated: half hopeful. It was too early. No one had come yet. Only a peon puffed his bidi, sending smoke in every corner.
One hour passed. All other persons were in their seats. The pot-bellied-officer had not arrived.
“Mr Pande is on long leave.” One assistant officer replied on his agitated
query.
“There must be someone in his charge.”
“I don’t know. Better you come next week.” The officer in question answered
uninterestedly. He had his betel nut to chew.
“Then what the hell you people are doing if one man is on long leave?”
Sunil’s voice caught an unusual height. “Answer me... Or I will contact the
ministry. Just now... And that too from your telephone.”
The words were gushing out like a flow of lava. The hope in his heart had
been torn into pieces; and the names of the pieces were despair, anger, and
protest. It was his outcry against those who tried to make people feel like
dwarf before them.
All the staff members rushed in. Shocked, they made a semicircle before
him. No one except a lady clerk, looking a senior one, dared to talk.
“Mr Sunil, have passion. Please. Come tomorrow. We’ll do something for you.
Okay? Please.”
Handing over a glass of cold water to him that he swallowed. Tea offered.
His denial. Eventually, the woman’s seniority succeeded in easing the tense
atmosphere. The man, though agitated out of bounds, now touched by his own
sanity, walked out of the office.
Blank minded was he; the sea beach was nearby. He
wandered on the beach. Empty beach. No boats were visible up to the horizon.
Only the mass of water rose and fell against the burning sun, making the beach
muddier. With some dry berries in hand, he sat on a pyramidal stone; wetting feet
in the water, not listening to the ticks of his watch. Whole day.
He could sanitize his mind only at the fall of the
evening. Again, the traffic signal, the metro train, and finally the steps
leading to the terrace: that was the only route he would take while in
distress. He took it. Mechanically.
Until the break of midnight, he could not disconnect his
lips. Repentance, too, carries some weight, he realised, the repentance for his
unruly behaviour. Dumb was Zena; silent were the sandwiches they chewed. When
the midnight bell struck, she came closure.
She kept her hand in his hair and fondled it until he put
his head on her chest. With a sob of an undefined length, he pressed Zena in
an embrace. As tight as possible.
It was his first desirous touch; she was the first woman
to be so near to him, breath-to-breath. She knew it, too. Zena, a woman in her mid-thirties, was not uneducated in the subject that would follow.
She had bruises of a failed love on her body, on her soul. In her youth, she
was chased, allured, and cheated. In the process, she had lost her virginity in
daylight, on uncut grass, under the shadow of a big garden bench.
The embrace.
The woman unbuttoned her stiff blouse; the man brushed
his nose at the foot of the hot, heaving hills. He felt speaking something
unintelligible, unfathomable, like calling someone standing on the other side
of the river. The river was in her full swing, making everything standing on
the bank to succumb to the force of the flow.
His nostrils smelt a new life under the shadow of the
woman. But blind was he on the land of love. She helped his virgin desire.
Moments passed. The notion of time disappeared; the feeling of space vanished.
They were not two. It was a union; it was the neat absence of two-ness.
The moonless night slipped into protective darkness,
making it easier for the humble stars to mark their identities in full.
******
FOR SUNIL, the morning came late. One hour later than
usual. Still on the terrace. A surprising, soft, pillow comforted his head; a
protective silken shawl guarded his body against the cold. For a few moments,
his eyelids shifted positions, opened and shut, as the sun rays were so
intruding, illuminating, and surprisingly fresh.
Zena, he assumed, was engaged in tuning one of her musical instruments, the
violin, downstairs. Coming down the steps, he just waved a hand at her. She
smiled. And he went straight to his home.
He had weight in mind; the weight of the deed they had performed last
night. He had pleasure in his heart; the pleasure of being educated that how
easily a partner-in-life could reduce the stress. The coal dark and
star-studded night, the newly acquired education, and the reduced stress: these
were the aspects, which were enough to revive his faith.
He felt someone had fine-tuned the strings of his life; someone had
injected music in his veins. The music teacher. He pressed his lips, not in
pain, but with deep pleasure.
For the outside world, he felt that the shapes of his house and Zena’s
house, though standing at a distance of three plots of land, were merging into
one another. The disappearing walls. Melting distances.
Other views were static, time-centric: at a far corner, Fardeen opening the stock of trade; Ehsan, the washerman still fighting with his donkey; and Kanu, the barber was yawning as usual.
But for Sunil, they collectively posed a scene
of hope.
At home, the story was a confusing one. Every member of his family was part
of a ring; sitting around a man packed in khaki uniform. When he identified the
man in question, the man with a slanted cap as a postman, he felt relieved. The
uniform was waiting for his signature. A registered letter addressed to Mr
Sunil Desai: that was the man’s sole purpose. There must be something from his
college, he thought.
Of late the principal of his college had cultivated a generous habit, the
habit of sending him cheques of smaller amounts. Sometimes for scholarship and
sometimes for the hours, Sunil assisted the college librarian.
But the letter was not from the college.
It was from the telephone authority. Apprehensively, he
opened it,
Blah blah blah
blah blah
blah
Your application for setting up a Public Call Office
(PCO) is sanctioned. You are requested to collect the necessary instruments
within a week. You can make the required payment in cash, too. It’s optional
for you to purchase the instruments from the department.
We hope for your success in the business.
Yours truly,
Blah blah
“Zena…” That was a cry, the cry of utter joy.
The loud happiness crossed
the door; crossed the street, and knocked at the door of the third house. Zena
came in running. Still in her nightgown, but looking decent. Forgetting all the
public manners, the man embraced the woman, Zena. She, too, did not ask the
reason for his being so delighted, trembling with pleasure. The waving of the
letter at her was sufficient to cause for them to rush in an embrace.
The tears they released were not of grief.
