Afternoon readings

I would sit at my mother's elbow after the Sunday lunch and fill up the page. Find your way out of the maze. Spot the differences. The complex Shabdkosh, which I would fill with my grandma's help.

Mum would open-up the in between pages of Mumbai Samachar and for more than an hour I would sit on the bed, head down, rummaging through the supplement. And then, if there were still some time for the gully cricket to commence or if the marble game had yet not begun in Champak kaka's garage, mum would read to me the short stories from out of the paper. The fiction stories of Kanti Bhatt, Suresh Dalal, Gunvant Shah would shape in front of me, just below the teek-teek of the rotating fan.

Their vivid stories would fill in the room and mum's narrative pitch would rise and fall behind Jayshri bai's washing of utensils. A nurse helping a patient to get to feet... An old uncle living an independent life... the stories always having a moral, a learning, which mum would stress after the reading. And when at times, a friend would ring the bell and the match was about to start, mum without reading further from the paper would spin her own tale, and even in her quick ending, there would be a message that would remain with me, like the change that would lie in the front pocket of the school bag.

I do not quite clearly remember when these afternoon readings stopped.

Hiatus

Nobody came. Not Shankar. Not Krishna. Not even the Monkey God, whom I visited religiously, every Saturday, for last five years. I was received rather plainly, by a plenitude of sharp penetrating light, the one which I had often seen while shaving a beard, staring into a hundred volt bulb from a foot's distance. It blinded me instantaneously, but leaving enough room, so as for me to know that nobody came.

And in this blindness, when I meandered about, eyes shut and hands stretched, I gathered that I'd missed the floor, which ended quite abruptly not far away from where I'd started. It reminded me of my seventh standard English teacher, who often threw at me humongous words like a pestilential child! who did what was not to be done, who more than once had attempted to convert sentences into indirect speech, which were to begin with in the required format. But she, with her virtue, still kept at her best, showing off her profundity in vocabulary, which I found tedious to ears. Whilst admiring the wisdom of my professor, I had, momentarily forgotten my current crisis.

I fell to an eternal falling. Not the ones you stumble upon in your sleep, a quick short fall from a bed or staircases, which would shiver you to wakefulness. It was rather a controlled fall, with such severe tranquility, that I, who while at my life, beseeched to digressing from mundane could not but acknowledge its creator's sincerity. While I did appreciate its temporal anomalous setting, I was, within a brief span of time, thoroughly equipped with not only its slowness of speed but also the erratic shift of direction in the fall. And for a man, to gauge this, who did not ever understand the sequential pattern of the songs, which shuffled on an I Pod, was a remarkable achievement I believed. So, while I was boasting at my own achievements, I did a fear a trap, perhaps, a crafty plan to put me back from where I came.

Will I be split into multiples of myself to keep-up to the spilling earth? Or will I, one fine day, drop into a mother's womb?

My marrows began to tense. The water from below the skin tansuded through the small pores. And with a sweaty feeling in my palms, I was beginning to fade. My knowledge trapped into the layers of these falls, lost to its ambushes, permanently. My worries ceased.

I was born.

Savitri

I stood at her pyre, hands clasped. I’d seen those faces, which now stood straight, circled around her burning flesh. I’d seen them while crossing the road, and while buying stationary at a nearby store, and while waiting at the doctor’s clinic at the end of the blind street.

With an eight year old and a sack full of belongings, Savitri took a bus from her village and alighted in Mumbai the next day. This, she told me while mopping the floor under the bed, and into the first week of joining the housework. “Kishan needs to learn,” she said between her chalk-white teeth. “Kishan needs lessons.”

When Savitri completed one month, father enrolled Kishan’s name in a municipality school. So he studied in English, whilst Savitri remained at home performing house chores and lived with us.

One day, when I sat at my room, pensive and tears dulled in my eyes, Savitri strode through the door left ajar. She sat squatted next to the bed and scolded in her husky voice, “Kai re, Kashala radtos?” (Oy! Why are you crying?) She told me her own story. About her drunkard husband and his squandering habits and about their daily fights, which I listened to uninterestedly.

It was much later, when I was over the gloomy mood and had forgotten the break-up with my girlfriend, that it struck me that Savitri came to Bombay perhaps not only because Kishan needed lessons.

I indulged with her in short conversations now and then, and she began to pick a bit of English from me. She would use in her sentences words like spoon and table and plate. It fascinated me how quick she would grasp these words.

Savitri got accustomed to city life. A couple of years later when she got a kholi of her own, she moved out and joined work at two more houses to earn better living.

She called our house the first home in Bombay, and did the extra bit of work for us. When mother went to the market to shop for vegetables and grocery, Savitri would wrap the dried clothes and pile them on the bed and wash the evening vessels, which would accumulate in the sink after tea. Often, while sweeping the floor or dusting the room, she would pose in front of the cupboard and look at the mirror, adjusting the festoon of ghajara clipped to her coconut oiled hair.

It was her calm demeanor that made her likable. Never had I heard her shout or fight with mother, except when she occasionally raised her voice to negotiate for a twenty rupee increase in her salary or when she wanted a week’s leaves to go to her village and mother denied.

She negotiated for what she deserved, until she quit. At sixty three, Savitri put a period to her home-making. She did however for a while visited residences to massage babies and bathe them, until her bones gave up on her. Even years later, she would get us raw mangoes from her village to make pickles. This year there would be non.

Standing at the pyre, I could envisage her figure when she first entered the house with her eight year old. Her bindi, big and round, stuck permanently at the centre of her forehead. I could sense a trail of nilgiri she would linger behind every day when leaving the house at night.

Standing there, amidst vague acquaintances, and tears welling in my eyes, I felt as if she would emerge from amongst the wood and scold me, “Kai re, kashala radtos?”

Office

But what can you do?
This mind is not your own
It scurries away
Like a rabit
Unto the recesses unknown

So while you are at
your morning tea
or into the day busy
This mind of your yours
Yours but not your own
Is out in the open and
it flees before you see

What can you do
but follow?
To and fro
to and fro

And it
Not wanting to be caught
leaves you a little trail
to halt and slow
for your thoughts frail
to grow

But if you keep your breath
and not rue
and catch its tail but briefly
And let it go
you'll pick a virtue.

But now my dearie,
Please prick your skin
You've got job to do.

Weep

And at times, when you do don that armchair, or sit in a lea under a tree where not a single shaft of sunlight fall upon your lap, look back… through the vicissitudes of time and into the passage of past. And in this solitude, in this forlorn longing, when you feel the void and a growing lump in your chest… twist your arms, clutch your hands, twirl your toes, thump your feet and weep: to a friend or a neighbour as you wish, over a phone or under the bough in lone. Weep until your arms, your hands, your toes regain its rest; weep until your feet are worm. Weep until you find repose: to rise and walk unto daylight.

I stand on my balcony

I stand on my balcony on one of those languid summer afternoons. The sun is bare and bright. The city is in slumber. The house is still and the roads are quiet. From the summers spent in this city, I know that the puling taxi drivers are whining about the narrow bumpy roads and the scorching Mumbai Sun, toweling their foreheads sucking the beads of sweat with a rug. Chains of cars are lined at the zebra for the signal to turn from a red to a dotted arrow. I can hear the low hums of the engines. Men and women, cabined in cars, toss from side to side and cuss the reckless motorcycles, which careen carelessly over the giant hunch of the Opera House flyover. It stands slouched, blocking the view of the magnificent Arabian Sea, until one begins to descend the slope.

The spread of lustrous water sends a warm greeting. Ambling to its mouth, the pair of shoes is cushioned under the torrid sands. The billowing waves clothe the stretch of uneven rocks. The sunbeams penetrate the shallow rim of the sea, unveiling the sunken city grime. The shore is conspicuously clear of the trail of footprints; couples are sheathed under the trees across the road. Lovely leggy ladies dressed in lingerie fail to lure eyeballs. The billboards overcrowd this dimly trafficked Marine Drive.

My mind saunters like the unhurried wind, and even as I stand under the lee of the roof, the sun pricks my skin, and I feel the heat in my head as I let my palm plunge into the puff of my hair.

I’m done with reading crime thrillers, which otherwise occupy the most of these slow summer afternoons, when I would nestle on my bed and envelope myself with the softness of quilt, and set the air-conditioning at its high. I’m done with these incessant readings; the stories with similar layers and sub-layers of plots. I’m tired of Grisham’s courtrooms and Baldacci’s Camel Club and Brown’s codes. And I wish Jhumpa Lahiri had written one more book. I’m done with tapping fingers on the television remote, and playing with neioghbour’s kid. I’m done with watching my sister let her hand run flawlessly on a sheet of white paper and bring it to life, and I am done with wishing for more hobbies.

And so when the low tuned dhinchak radio songs have blended into the stillness of the room and when my mum has stopped hovering over the maids: washing utensils and cleaning the kitchen floor and clipping the clothes to the clothesline, and when she is done with asking for her Divya Bhaskar and Chitralekha, she recedes to her bed; and when nothing is left to be done at all, boredom creeps into my spine, and I walk unto the open of my portico and thoughts come automatically, waywardly.

Lies

Mamma’s belly no more pops out like a flower pot. Daddy says she can do the horse rides from room to room again, carrying me on her back.

Sitting at the dining table I am colouring a painting when guests arrive, brining gifts wrapped in shiny papers. They hand me the presents kissing me on both cheeks. Matching suits, stockings, plastic toys for teething, napkin sets, bedding… I pile them all under the bed.

Mum sits on the garden bench talking to aunties. The Peepal tree is huge. I try to fit myself under the shadow of giant leaves. Ashutosh digs the soil near its roots to hide marbles. He throws the marble from out of the puddle, looks at me, and cries. Mamma comes running towards us.

Dad puts his ears to Mummy’s tummy. It kicks, he says, putting my hand on the bulge. “You will have a sister to play with Ashu,” Mamma says, smiling at me.

Geeta masi has come from London. Sitting on the bed, she chit-chats with mama while I stitch my handkerchief, tucked in a sewing ring. “Ah, he has such butter cheeks. Isn’t your brother beautiful, Ashana?” asks Geeta Masi. I stop my stitching and look up. Geeta masi plays with Ashu, cupping his chin with her thumb and forefinger. Mum looks at me fixedly, until my mouth cracks into a smile and whispers an approving yes.