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In a parallel universe (when it rains)

23/2/2012

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It is a girl. She is walking down an uneven path on the barren hillside, placing her feet carefully on the loose stones. Her thin brown fingers are curled around some ferns with white spore smeared undersides that she uses to stamp Christmas tree shapes on her skin. She places a leaf at the back of the hand clasping the bunch of green fronds and uses the other palm to give it a hard slap. Peeling the smashed leaf off, she smiles at the white print left behind. She turns left to enter a gap in the rough undulating stone wall that she has been following all along. A house stands there - stout and serene under an old walnut tree that has spread its arms out like a giant brocolli. The house is made of grey uncut stone slabs and has a faded red roof with the paint peeling off in places. Someone has carried large boulders to the roof and used them to pin it down so that the wind will not blow it away. This is the roof that the rain drops make music on on those stormy nights when she lies in bed with an oil lantern near her pillow, so engrossed in her reading that she doesn’t hear the wind scream.
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Every afternoon, the woman with the baby in her stomach sits on the steps outside the small hut and watches the opera. It starts with the hills in the distance change colour from green to grey as the dark clouds, pregnant with rain, smash against them to dunk the place in a downpour that clogs the earth and sends the snakes slithering out of their holes. If snakes could have memories (which she has been told, they don’t) she guesses those would be different from hers. Twice she has heard the wet grass rustle and caught a glimpse of a shiny black tail even as she sat with her feet just outside the protective umbra of the roof, watching the rain drops slide down the bare skin and trickle into the clefts between her toes. The unhappy ones sometimes slip off the arch of her ankle and  kill themselves by jumping into the brown muddy depth below. For an onlooker from the narrow tarred road, that turns just beyond the hut and leads to a wooden gate where the locals live in their stilt houses with pigs squealing underneath, she is a woman getting her feet wet in the rain. They won’t see a girl traipsing down the uneven path to her grandmother’s house that has a faded tin roof, pinned down by stones so that the wind can’t blow it away. Outside there would be a walnut tree that has spread its branches out and drops green fruit on the ground. These, the little girl will pick up and crush under a stone to reach the soft white pulp inside that she will pluck out with her fingers and place in her mouth, letting the bitterness of the green seed spread on her tongue. 
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Her hair is streaked with grey in places where the colour has faded and when she smiles the fine lines around her eyes deepen into furrows that weren’t there some years back. She has told herself they add character to her face and they no longer bother her when she looks into the bathroom mirror. It doesn’t rain much where she lives but today the sky is dark with possibility. She leaves what she is doing and goes out into the balcony to hold her hands out for the drops that will splatter on her palm. She tilts her face to the sky and feels the water trail down her nose and make her eyelashes heavy with its weight. She tastes a raindrop and watches the others splash the slim leaves of the bamboo thicket where the parrots live. The rain still puts a spell on her with its sounds and smells and  tricks of the trade that make mist appear from around the bend in the road and a heady earthy fragrance fill the air. Only lately she has realized though that it doesn’t take her back to the stone house on the hillside anymore. That memory has been stored away in some invisible drawer that she has to pull open to reassure herself that it is still there. It has been replaced by another that now pulls her by the shirt sleeve and takes her back to a little hut on a curving tar road with moss green hills in the distance and a generator-lit street light in front that stains the purple night with a circle of pale yellow to entice the bugs. That is where the little kids with shiny black eyes gather each evening to pick bugs that they carry home in transparent polythene bags for their mothers to fry with the dinner rice.

If she turns her head just a little to the left, she will be able to see through the glass window, the little boy who is reading a manga comic on the computer, his plump fingers curled around the mouse. Some day she will teach  him to make fern patterns on his arm. Today, she just walks in leaving wet foot prints on the floor.

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Prakash mausi's new toothbrush

17/2/2012

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Prakash mausi, who ate iron nails and occasionally people like milkmen and newspaper boys for breakfast, and her younger sister Urmila mausi, with the frizzy hair that flared like the late Sai Baba’s, shared a room in the Government Working Girls’ Hostel on Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi. One day the two of them went shopping to Bengali Market, made famous by Bengali and Nathu – across the road eateries run by two oily black-moustached guys with identical fat bellies, white kurtas and jangling gold chains Bhappi Lahiri would have loved to own. This was where Delhiites, who liked their food to hurt them, forgot bad words like blood sugar and cholesterol and queued up for chole-bhature, dahi bhalle, alu tikki, paapdi chaat and gol gappe that seared the lips, set the tongue on fire and sent humans home panting like puppies.

The sisters came back without realizing that they had acquired identical blue toothbrushes with two little whirls of white bristles in the centre that were supposed to clear off plaque, keeping the teeth squeaky clean, the breath baby fresh and the smile dazzling white. Not that the last mattered to Prakash mausi who had smiled only twice in public memory. Once when Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India and once when she bullied the hostel management into banning male visitors. She had performed the lip stretch once also for the dentist cleaning her teeth but I guess that won’t count since it wasn’t brought on by the required emotion.

Returning to the story, both sisters dropped their new toothbrushes into the red plastic mug with the faded flowers that sat on their bathroom sink, holding two tongue cleaners (one shiny steel, the other white plastic), a quarter squished tube of Colgate toothpaste and some twigs snipped off the nearby neem tree that Prakash mausi chewed every morning in a display of east meet west in dental hygiene. A few days passed. And then, one morning, Urmila mausi was summoned from the bathroom by Prakash mausi, who was practising yoga under a blanket since it was a bit chilly. The doodhwallah was whining from behind the jaali-wala darwaza for his monthly payment.

To visualize the next scene exactly as it unfolded, you will have to lend me your imagination and let me set it to slow motion just the way it is done in action movie climaxes.  At the exact same split second (to a rising crescendo of music) Urmila mausi walks out with her toothbrush in her hand (her mouth spouting a volcanic eruption of white foam that would have made the Colgate company pat themselves on the back) and Prakash mausi emerges from under her quilt on the floor. Her eagle eyes spot blue toothbrush and she lets out a shriek that makes Urmila mausi drop the change in her hand and the milkman (squatting outside the wire meshed door) his steel dallu, sending a winding river of white trickling down the hostel corridor.

Yoga forgotten, she sits on the bed and proceeds to tick Urmila mausi off for using her toothbrush. Urmila mausi rushes into the bathroom and emerges with the other toothbrush in a bid to prove her innocence. There is shocked silence when both sisters realize they own identical brushes and unbeknownst (can't tell you how many blogs i waited to use that word :-) ) of the fact have been using each others’ over the week.

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After the outrage had died down, Prakash mausi folded her blanket and knotted her hair in a stern bun; Urmila mausi rinsed the magnificent bubbles out of her mouth (and the doodhwallah left empty-handed, realizing today was not a good day to do milk maths with the sisters). Later that evening while the ladies were watching the 9 pm news on TV, Prakash mausi declared that after many hours of thought she had found a solution. “Urmila, tie a thread on your toothbrush so that there is no confusion anymore,” she commanded. When the gentle Urmila mausi (in a rare argumentative mood) walked across to the TV to turn down its volume (they didn’t have remotes in those days) and said: Didi, tu ne dhaga kyun nahin bandha apne toothbrush par? Prakash mausi was really, really surprized. For many days after that she went around telling people this story and said the most amazing thing was that it had never struck her that she could have tied that thread herself.

Didi, tu ne dhaga kyun nahin bandha apne toothbrush par: Why didn’t you tie the thread yourself?

Moral of the story (since Prakash mousi was the moralistic kind I thought she'd like one): Life is short. Don't let a good toothbrush go just because you couldn't tie a thread.  

                                            Author’s note 
Prakash mausi is no more. But when I sit groggy in bed with an early morning cup of tea, she sometimes walks into my head – stern and statuesque in her long night gown - with a half-chewed neem twig in her hand and shakes it at at me saying: Tanni, tie the thread. And don’t swagger around with your hands in your pocket. You are sure to fall on your face one day.

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    Rachna Bisht Rawat is a full time mom and part time writer. She is married to an Army officer whose work takes the family to some of the most interesting corners of India.

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