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Author - Naval Langa
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 country calls it the rainy season.
My encounter with such terrifying
scenes was limited to the viewing of post mortem reports on TV screens.
TV-people are perfect people. They wait tirelessly for days in the rain for a
single shot of a dead body floating. They know that a flood hardly recedes
without turning a score of humans into dead bodies. They would film people
buried under debris. They would 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 Farina look? She was the woman 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 a 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 a handkerchief on my 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 honest and not taking bribes. Vijay knew all about their
preferred occupations. Had he participated at dancing-girl floors, at a bar in the basement of his office, or at some late-night playing-card meetings, he would
have been up to their standard. Vijay lacked the 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 polluted water. The water
pool was so wealthy in chemical contents that one could try 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
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 the urgency of making good the losses that had occurred due to the
deaths by the flood. Even the beggars had started begging.
Vijay spotted Farina. The woman I
wanted to see.
She withdrew her clothes up to her knees
and ran into us. With a surge of pleasure on her face, her feet found spaces
underwater 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 like 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the word "you", she meant
my long-cut hair, an urbane woman’s get-up, and the cost 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 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 walk so freely together without
having the stamp of marriage.
I ran my eyes through the religious
frames swinging on walls; the air waved the 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 seeing 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 the sky, without any weight of suspicion, as if her father had descended from heaven in Vijay’s form and rescued her from certain death.
It made me settled on the 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 a 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 your father’s house.” Vijay
said.
“Besides this home, I’ve inherited his
poverty, too.”
They talked rain; they talked about 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 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 with a small amount of wheat flour and a big amount of satisfaction. 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 in God.” Vijay said.
*******
And finally: All of the poor people are not beggars.
[Image courtesy Thomas Sully [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons ]
