...it's only words

One moment, the glass had been in her hand, the familiar etching in the crystal brushing against her fingers. The next, it was lying smashed on the kitchen floor with nasty looking razor-edged shards that could slash the skin staring up viciously. Quite like unpleasant memories. Manish, who had been watching from the bar, where he was pouring himself a drink, noticed her stillness and thought she was afraid of cutting her bare feet on the broken bits. But, that hadn’t crossed her mind. She just stood there paralyzed with shock; watching the snapped stem, the vodka spilling over, and the melting ice cubes slipping in the translucent pool that was shaping out like an amoeba near her toes. Of the six glasses that she had lost one by one over the past 10 years, that had been the last. And now it was gone. Just like the person from whom they had been a last gift.
                                
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She was 10 when she got the first gift she remembered. It was a navy blue A line frock with a cream coloured panel of hand embroidery around the neck. She would want to wear it to every single birthday party she was invited to. And when someone asked her where she had got it from, she would look away shyly and whisper: phoren. Back in those days in the small, faded  town of Agra where Mughal emperors once ruled leaving behind awesome ruins for the times to come, she knew only three other countries besides India - London, America and a place called China-Japan where people with narrow eyes lived and ate noodles with chopsticks. The blue dress had come from London. It was a gift from Munni mousi, the first in the family to get on the Air India Maharaja’s aeroplane and fly abroad. She was the first woman in the family to do a lot of things – like not get married, find herself a job, live alone in a big city, learn to drive a car and have a best friend who was a man.                                                                                                             

She was a small, thin kid then with skin a shade darker than was considered pretty by Indian standards and went to school with her hair braided in two long plaits bound securely by red ribbons knotted into perfectly symmetrical flowers by her mom. She was painfully shy, didn’t have many friends, wouldn’t speak unless she was spoken to and could never go to the teacher and tell her that the boy who sat behind her seat sometimes pulled her hair. Her favourite period was library where she would select a place far away from everyone else and bury her nose in a book till the bell rang and it was time to form two rows (girls and boys) and march back to class V A in the new yellow block near the big tamarind tree that dropped ripe brown juicy fruit for the children to pick up after school was over. She continued to hate school even after she changed to an all-girls convent later where the girls slyly rolled up their skirts from the waistbands to make them shorter and the boy who pulled her hair was no longer there to bother her. The only time she remembered laughing was when the mousy looking Chuah Sir with the neatly oiled black hair with a side parting and a pencil moustache (her physics teacher Mr Chauhan) stood up in the middle of a class and said, rather sternly, that he wanted all the girls to come to his desk one by one and show him their figures. (He had asked the class to complete a diagram). 

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When she was 14, a road accident left her on a wheel chair and then crutches for almost a year till she was allowed to walk again. She had a long surgical scar running down one leg and an ugly patch of mangled skin at the ankle that she could hide if she wore socks. Her body had a tendency to form keloids – big ugly scars - the surgeon had told her. Plastic surgery could help but she didn’t want any more operations. She could live with the scar though it made her even more reclusive.

That was the time when Munni mousi introduced her to Masterjee – a friendly old man with a few teeth missing, who came riding a sputtering old green Bajaj scooter and lisped when he spoke. But when he crossed his legs into an althi-palthi and sat down with his harmonium, his plump fingers with the many flashy rings flying over the black and white keys, he was transformed. Rich notes of Indian classical music filled the air and she would slip into a trance where ugly scars didn’t matter and a new maths equation worked that made quiet, lonely, reclusive people equivalent to confident, popular extroverts. Masterjee introduced her to Raga Yaman with its teevra ma, the deep throaty Bhairavi that always made the mood sad and Raga Malhar that brought with it the patter of raindrops falling on wet tree leaves. The music stayed with her long after Masterjee left.  

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When she finished college and went to Delhi, wondering what to do with life, Munni mousi coaxed her to join journalism classes. “I think you should write,” she said one afternoon, looking  over her glasses from the newspaper she was reading, her cotton sari crushed from sprawling on the one fat and one thin pillow pushed up against the wall. “Write what?” she had asked, taking a bite of the apple she had got from the fridge. “Stories,” suggested her aunt.

You can write a story only when there is one inside you, asking to be written. Stories are born in the heart - from seeds quietly sown by people who have once walked in and out of it - and will come out only when they have grown so much that they start to choke it with their size and weight. They will hammer and kick and ask to be let out only when the eyes are moist with the pain of their birth and the fingers are ready to type with a muscle memory that does not involve the mind, thus giving it time to put floating, fleeting, abstract thoughts into words. Words that those-who-want-to can read and understand and form pictures with, since you can't  show them your thoughts, can you? You can't just sit down with a pen and paper one fine day and start writing a story. That was what she could have told Munni mousi now - after almost 20 years of writing - but she wasn’t around anymore. Back then, she didn’t know all this, so she stayed silent and went to the other room where Harold Robbins, Bertrand Russel, Prem Chand and people as unlike as Harivansh Rai Bachchan and PG Wodehouse stood stacked together in a small alcove behind the door.

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She would be hurt very easily by people, by loss, by small meannesses that life sends into every life; and when she was comfortable enough with Munni mousi to share this pain on a walk in Lodi gardens where the old stones of Sikandar Lodi's tomb reflected the fading orange tone of the setting sun and young lovers kissed furtively behind the bushes, she got a short lecture. “Life is difficult for sensitive people. But it is also more beautiful. Sensitive people see more pain in life but they also enjoy a piece of good writing, the colours of a beautiful painting or the finer nuances in an intricate piece of music. They understand the pain of another person which is what makes them more evolved than someone who doesn’t. Being pricked by the thorns is a small price to pay for being able to smell the flowers. ” She had listened silently and then lowered her nose to a half-opened  rose bud that was gearing up to bloom soon.

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Soon she picked up a job with a newspaper where bearded dropouts from JNU with communist thinking and shocking vocabularies; bright Bihari graduates who hadn’t been able to clear their Civil Services interviews and pompous Bengali intellectuals with khadi kurtas and an air of cultural superiority dominated the newsroom. She met a swashbuckling reporter who called her Beautiful Smile and tossed her his crime reports to edit when he went out to have a smoke and a sandwich. She tried to stay out of the way of the gorgeous, though nasty, Padmini who would sweep into the subs room with a toss of her hair and a swish of her long skirt causing even old Mr Bhattacharya, the chief sub editor, to look up and wait for his turn to be rewarded with a smile. She made friends for life with the romantic Jatin who fell in love with almost each new secretary the editor employed but considered her the backslapping buddy he could share work, heartbreak and Nirula’s chocolate chip ice cream with in the phase between two romances where he wore a stubble and scowled at the world. Five years passed while she changed jobs, learnt to make new friends, acquired life skills and found the courage to reach out to strangers and talk.

The best part of her life in those days was the time she spent with Munni mousi. On weekends, there were Bhimsen Joshi concerts at Kamani auditorium, plays by National School of Drama students at Sri Ram Centre, visits to the florist at Connaught Place to pick up fragrant tube roses at Rs 5 a stem. There were golgappa treats at Bengali Market; crisp Mysore masala dosas at Saagar Ratna in Defence Colony; home cooked curd rice with a tadka of mustard seeds and curry leaves left to cool in the fridge. There were lazy walks with Kala Moti, the black Lhasa apso, jokes about Sonu in the upper floor whose clothes dropped mysteriously in the balcony when she came over for a nightover from her hostel (that he came to pick up when he felt Munni mousi had left the building). There were train journeys made together to the old house in Kotdwar where a print of Georges Seurat’s  Bathers at Asnieres (brought back from the same London trip) hung in Munni mousi’s bedroom with a window overlooking the temple of Sidhbali perched midway on a green mountain from where bhajans rang out and bells tolled early mornings. There were afternoons spent sprawled on the sofa reading Ghalib’s poetry; evenings made richer by dipping crisp samosa edges in tomato sauce and songs sung sitting in the verandah at night, watching a lazy yellow moon flirt halfheartedly with the stars  – Yaman and Bihaag and Baageshwari; the flirtatious Shola jo bhadke, dil mera dhadke and the soulful Man tadpat hari darsan ko aaj, that she could never sing again after Munni mousi was gone because it made her throat choke and her eyes cloud over with an irritating film of moisture.

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At work, she moved on from subbing to reporting and then features. And then one day, she gave it all up for a handsome young Army officer with gentle brown eyes and crew cut hair who she had first noticed looking at her from across the hall at a family wedding in Dehradun. He had managed to trace her hostel address and had wooed her with one card waiting patiently in her mailbox every evening (and two on Mondays) when she got back from work, for nearly a year; never prodding for a reply. She left journalism for a place called Kimin in Arunachal Pradesh where there was no internet or electricity, only unending grey rain, tall grass where snakes slithered with unfounded guilt and tribal huts  that sat on stilts with pigs squealing from makeshift sties underneath. The favourite part of her evening was spent watching local kids with fat, pink cheeks and shiny eyes gather around the street light in the Army cantonment (lit up by a generator till 10 each night) to gather insects that they took home in transparent polythene bags and their mothers fried for a crunchy snack to go with a candlelight dinner of salt and rice.   

When her young husband left her to climb over the hills for five days to reach Tame Chung Chung, the mountain of poisonous snakes on the China border, she spent her days in the temporary house, where the lights went off each night and telephone connections were so bad that she could never speak to him more than once in a fortnight. She discovered she was pregnant and had to wait for 12 days till she finally got him on the walkie talkie to tell him the good news. He said “What?” so many times and the line crackled and buzzed so much that at the end of that tedious conversation she wasn’t even sure if he had understood. So she finally swallowed her pride and told the soldier managing the exchange that she was pregnant and would he please pass on the message to “sahab”. “Bahut aachi khabar hai memsahab,” he said with so much warmth that it brought a lump to her throat.

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Life became a little difficult after that. She spent the days puking into the bathroom sink and nights cradling her stomach that was growing each day. And then, one evening, she got a call that told her Munni mousi was no more. She had not cried. Just hunted in the kitchen cupboard for the beautiful crystal glasses that had been her last gift; that she used only when someone special came over for dinner. She filled one with water from the steel filter and sat on the step outside the hut, next to a smoking mosquito repellant coil, watching the dark clouds sieve the fading sunlight and the rain falling over the mountains that her husband had crossed and gone so far from her, when she needed him the most. And now Munni mousi had gone even further.

She didn’t have dinner and went in only when the kids around the streetlight started making their way back to their homes with a noisy chatter that meant it was going to be lights out soon. She locked the door after a routine check behind the curtains and under the bed with a steel rod clasped tightly in one hand. That was the first night there was a knock on the window. And then it started happening everyday. Sometimes, she would hear utensils clanking in the kitchen, sometimes the flush turning, sometimes a swish of starched cotton and a whiff of Chanel no 5, the perfume she easily recognized. She felt she was being haunted by the aunt she had loved all her life. The evil, constricting fear that parched her skin and didn’t allow her to use the toilet after dark, stayed with her for more than a month, till she thought she would die under its suffocating hold. And then one day, she sat on the steps in front of her house with a pencil and an old diary and started writing a story that seemed to be telling itself to her. It was about a girl who had to teach herself to let go of her memories. That day the fear disappeared. And then slowly she realized that when she wrote, she stepped into a world where there was no anger or sadness or hurt about people that did and scars that didn’t go away. She slipped into a  world where she lost all her fears and inhibitions and found the power to stretch her imagination and take what she wanted, to give what she wanted, to touch raw emotion fearlessly and to convert into typed text the experiences and personal battles that made life so unique. She learnt to write stories.

A few years later, a journalism fellowship took her to London. On a free afternoon, she took a tube to Charing Cross and walked down to Trafalgar Square, where children were clambering over the lions for a picture. She walked up the steps to the National Gallery, asked for a map and found her way to the Impressionists section where she spent some time gazing at Van Gogh’s sunflowers like all other tourists and then found what she had been looking for all along. Seuret’s Bathers at Asnieres was a single print covering one big wall. She waited for her turn to sit on the bench  and looked at it for as long as she wanted to, at peace and never closer to the aunt who had gone away.

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“Why don’t you go and wear slippers before you cut your feet?” Manish had walked across to the kitchen and was bending down to pick up a piece of broken glass. He saw the grief on her face; the tears that were running into the furrows between the curved fingers of the hand she was holding against her  mouth and trailing in small rivulets down to her chin from where they were leaping down to be swallowed by the wet patch on the kurta she was wearing. “That was her last gift and I broke it,” she said. “No, it wasn’t,” he answered firmly, straightening up to catch her eye. “The stories you write - those are her last gift. You’re just feeling bad because you spilled your drink. Go watch TV my drama queen, I shall get you another one.”  She smiled through the haze in her eyes and left him to clean up the mess. It wasn’t often that he offered to do things like that for her.

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Copyright© 2010 Rachna Bisht-Rawat. All rights reserved. Reproduction, or re-transmission, in whole, or in part, or in any manner, without prior written consent of the author, is in violation of the copyright law

Chust had Durust and Ikki had Duggi but Sust didn’t have anybody, which is probably why he was the way he was: sad and sluggish and forever hanging around the bottom of the tank. If you haven’t guessed it already (which - I’m sorry to say - means you haven’t been paying attention) all five of them were fish that Manu mama had so thoughtfully gifted Isha with on her 11th birthday. But then, just like everything else, that was a matter of perspective. Mom, who was a busy doctor, felt it was quite thoughtless of him since it meant extra work cleaning up the tank, changing the water and ensuring they got their tonic in time when she already had so many other things to do. But the birthday girl, who had been yearning for a puppy for a long time, had been thrilled and Manu mama had shrugged Mom’s complaints off with a grin and a slice of rich chocolate cake lowered gracefully into his mouth. His popularity ratings with the little niece had soared.

Since she was 11 now (almost a teenager), he reasoned with Mom that she was old enough to own a pet. Or five. Dad saw the logic immediately, but added, rather seriously, that with new powers came new responsibilities. So Isha would have to clean the tank everyday to ensure that the glass was sparkling at all times. She would also have to feed her new pets the specified number of tiny balls of coloured food that came out of a tall cylindrical box. She had tasted a few one day when Mom was not around and they felt like chalk dust on her tongue. No wonder, she thought, Sust never wanted to eat any. His lack of appetite had started worrying her. She asked Mom if she could give him some chocoflakes or maybe even an earthworm that she could easily catch from the puddle near the park where she had seen a few slithering around, after the rain. But Mom told her not to. Since Sust was born and brought up in an artificial environment (which meant a tank in a pet shop instead of a river or a lake) he would not be able to eat anything else. It made Isha a bit sad but then she told herself that maybe Sust was just a small eater, like Dad. Chust and Durust, the frisky goldfish couple, loved the fish food. The moment the little pink and white globules were dropped into the tank, they would dart across like bullets, outswimming the one-finned Ikki and arriving neck and neck with the double-finned Duggi who would have to resort to pushing and shoving by breathlessly flapping her two fins and nudging the pair to get at the food. They would then splash around in the water and chase tails for a while in celebration of a good meal. The slower Ikki would dart around swallowing leftover granules that were gently making their way to the bottom of the tank.

Sust would just hang around the bottom rubbing his mouth mournfully along the glass or gaze silently at Jack Sparrow the plastic crab that would twitch a lip every few minutes and emit a stream of tiny bubbles into the tank. Sust reminded Isha of the two love birds her dad had got for her one day when mom had sent him to the pet shop to check about a dog. Nani, who had been visiting at that time, had named the birds Pheuli and Hariyali (one of them was bright yellow like pheuli the pretty flower that bloomed in the hills of Garhwal, while the other was bright green like the hariyali (greenness) that filled forests after the monsoons). Both Pheuli and Hariyali were not very social. They rudely turned their backs to people in the room and would abruptly stop their loud chirpy conversation as soon as Isha approached their cage, making her feel they were discussing her. One day when Mom tried to put a hand in to coax them to come out of the cage, Hariyali lowered its neck and gave her a sharp peck that hurt for two days and had to be covered with a bandaid. When Isha pushed in an empty toilet paper roll for them to play with, Pheuli promptly put her head inside it and refused to take it out for one whole day, preferring to be a recluse than to mix around with humans in the household. Then for a few more hours she just hopped around, wearing it on her head like a big crown that fell right over her eyes. Finally, the pair were given away to an uncle in Jaipur who had a big aviary of his own and Isha hoped they were happier with other birds for company.

Now Sust was displaying similar anti-social behaviour and it made Isha unhappy too. She would think about his sadness in school and even when she went for a swim in the pool in the basement. Then one day she got a parcel. It had been sent by Nanaji all the way from Lansdowne. She tore open the cardboard binding and out popped a colourful hardback titled A Fishy Tale. Isha flipped through the pictures and the beautiful illustrations that showed her how fish breathe (from small slits called gills) and how they swim. Suddenly, she came across a picture that made her stop turning pages. Staring back at her from the page, looking characteristically sad and depressed, was Sust, or someone who looked just like him. Suckermouth catfish (said the caption at the bottom of the picture): Slow and sluggish fish that stay near the bottom of the aquarium and feed on algae. They are shy and help keep tanks clean by eating algae deposited on the tank floor. Great additions for freshwater aquariums.

A wide smile spread across Isha’s face. She ran down to the sitting room where a light was on in the aquarium. Chust and Durust were taking their usual laps around the tank. The single-finned Ikki was nibbling Duggi’s second fin enviously. And Sust was sprawled at the bottom on the tank, as usual, soulfully nibbling away, completely disinterested in the world around. She peered in at him and he peered back at her. Was it her imagination or did she see him wink? Tonight, he didn’t look sad to Isha, just seriously busy at work.   

Moral of the story: Someone you think is a fish out of water might just be chasing different goals

Or: Believe it or not, some people prefer eating greens to processed food

Chust: Agile; Durust: Correct; Ikki: Single; Duggi: Double; Sust: Lazy; Pheuli: A yellow flower that blooms in Garhwal; Hariyali: Greenery; Nani: Grandmother; Nanaji: Grandfather 

It’s an old friend. And he’s calling to tell me that he has found the pretty Kashmiri girl he had a big crush on in college. (Well, actually he just, sort of, casually mentions it towards the end of 25 minutes of waning conversation with a self-conscious cough that  warns me something important is coming up). “The one you tossed a chocolate to at your friend’s wedding; who caught it with a lilting laugh? Who you could never tell how you felt about her? You found HER?” I ask, completely captivated. “Yes, yes. And YES!” he says. I can hear the smile in his voice and it just widens mine. 

In a moment, we’ve gone back 25 years and it took just one name to do that. Time travel is the biggest gift of a first crush or a college-time romance but you’ll know that only if you met an old heartthrob recently. The object of our once-upon-a-time affection  takes us zipping back (at the approximate speed of 19.5 years a second) to those days and those feelings that rushed down our veins at age 20 (plus or minus a few years) but no longer do since we now have blood sugar and bad cholesterol coursing there instead.

You might be a serious investment banker or a lecturer in a college or someone that sounds equally un-intriguing but let that special somebody take one step into your life (why life, even conversation) and suddenly your dimples gets deeper, your eyes get shinier, your heart starts beating faster than after a cardio workout (skipping/jogging included) and you actually start hearing violins and romantic Rafi numbers playing in the stereo inside the head.

If I were Stephen Hawking, I would call them black holes. These gals (and guys) who can make us time travel back into the past. When you enter at one end you are – a perfectly ordinary middle-aged person with greying hair, a little paunch, a quivering double chin, a delicate sprinkle of crows feet around the eyes – a responsible mom or dad, a devoted partner, a goal-oriented career professional with a big car, a flat in some hot location, an enviable collection of music or books or liquor, a dog and a kid or more. You are any (or all) of the above. But when you come out (more shaken than stirred – a bit  like the older James Bond’s favourite martini), you are a breathless collegiate stuck for words with the heart beating just a little faster, hoping for a chance to secretly run a comb through the hair. Just the way you were decades back, returning from the library and suddenly locking eyes with that special someone walking around the school or college building in romantic slow motion. When you recover your breath from that encounter you find that like Spiderman bitten you have suddenly found the power to enjoy a romantic piece of music, a seductive perfume or the fragrance of a flower that you thought had stopped blooming in the garden of life long back. Long time since you felt like that. Right? And it does feel good to be 18 or 19 once again. Particularly when you are 40, or 50, maybe even a few decades older. Wouldn’t be able to tell you for sure right now because I haven’t been there yet (but plan to since I’m taking my vitamin pills, walking down the right side of the road (which, here in India, is the left) and going for daily aerobics). 

Don’t read me wrong. I’m not advocating hitting on an old heart throb. Actually, I doubt you would have even felt this way if you had gone ahead and married those people and spent a few years smelling bad breaths and looking at sleep-swollen faces. When young, we seldom look beyond  that quirky style or those melting brown eyes for those delightful qualities that make relationships special. Like intelligence or sincerity or or sensitivity or sense of humour or even the ability to laugh together (that most of us now value higher than looks - even if we just want to have a good conversation with someone, leave alone spend a lifetime together). These are the little things that keep the magic alive in old relationships. If you've found all that with a present partner, you don't need this blogger to tell you: hang on to them. Because that's true love - so much more precious than time travel. 

So does that mean, you pinch yourself to sanity and look the other way when an old crush passes by. No, of course not. I would say receive them with a smile. They've got their own life and you’ve got yours. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. And if  someone's gifting you the power to time travel, happy journey! Viva old heartthrobs. May they live forever, even if only in our memories.