un bref conte (a short story)

First it was a flicker and then it was a constant bobbing in the dark and finally it revealed itself as a tiny sparkling drop of tear. He had been standing beneath the streetlight, which was acting, funny and scary to add to the special effect to the thunderous roar and the pain in his heart. Seven months. This was the number of months he had been living in pain. This was the number of months he had lived in anticipation. This was the number of months he had nurtured a hope. And today he was free. Free of pain, free of anticipation and free of hope. And he started walking aimlessly on the sidewalk in the dead of the night. He reached the far end of Yamuna and slowly rested his torso by the railing and then he let himself fall. Free fall. “The baby is crying, why don’t you go and check on him,” said Nirjala, frail and short in height, she was sitting in the middle of the courtyard with her hands smeared in cow dung. Jagdish, the father of the two months old child was squatting besides the parapet pulling lazily at his hookah. He got up and went inside the rickety house and walked out with Sukumar, the name they had thought for the baby. Sukumar was quiet now and was sucking at Jagdish’s neck. Life was normal if not good for this couple living in Unnao, a remote village in the eastern province of Uttar Pradesh. Jagdish had attended school till class five and could write his name effortlessly. Nirjala was from Barabanki, a neighboring town and was illiterate. After bribing the local officials in the postal department, Jagdish’s father, Hukum Prasad had managed to get his son in the postal department as an orderly and in turn had solicited the hand of the beautiful Nirjala for his Jagdish. Hukum Prasad had died just six months after their marriage due to an unknown ailment, which the local vaid was not able to diagnose. They were doting parents, Jagdish and Nirjala. They had brought up Sukumar with all the love and caring that they possibly could shower on their little prince. Soon Sukumar turned into a handsome young man with sharp features and an aquiline semblance to his father who at the age of forty still had a straight posture. After attending the local one room school in the village, Sukumar showed an urge to continue his studies after he had completed the class five. Nirjala and Jagdish pondered over this request of Sukumar while they were sitting in the courtyard late in the evening. This had become a custom for them. Their day would start quite early. Nirjala would get up even before dawn and would check on the cows in the shed. Then she would quickly take a shower in the make shift thatch that they had erected besides the boundary wall of their home. By the time Nirjala had completed her bath and was chanting mantras around the tulsi in the center of the courtyard, Jagdish would saunter out squinting his eyes and would carry on with his daily morning chores in a systematic, timely and programmed way. After this Nirjala would serve Jagdish his breakfast of sattu parathas and sweet tea, after which he would quietly leave for his postal duties. Sukumar would get up after Jagdish had left and would leave too after having the sattu breakfast. Jagdish would attend the village council meetings after his duty at postal department was done and would return home late in the evening. By the time Jagdish returned, Sukumar would be sitting all by himself on the terrace and Nirjala would be busy in some household chore. They all would have dinner together and then Nirjala and Jagdish would quietly sit in the courtyard and feel the quite breeze of the calm village and then slowly drift away to sleep. “I think it will cost a lot of money,” said Nirjala. “But he has so much interest and he would be the first one in the family to study beyond class five,” said Jagdish. So it was decided that if Sukumar wants to study then he should study. Next day Jagdish took one of the six cows they had and sold it for a bicycle for Sukumar so that he could commute to the nearby city of Lucknow. Sukumar was ecstatic after seeing the fine piece of machinery, his bicycle. Sukumar studied hard and completed his high school with a distinction. By this time he had made up his mind to pursue medical sciences and become a doctor. But the state of the family was getting worse from bad. He needed money for his studies but their was no source to get it from. He used to set off from his house early in the mornings and would wander for the whole day on the outskirts of the village. He would sit at some rock and would see the traffic on the highway for hours. He wanted to find a way out but this deadlock, this twist of face had him in a corner and he was feeling lost and wasted. When he could take this blind swirl of black waves blinding him out of his senses, no more he left his village. He had packed all his belongings and all the books in a gunnysack and left quietly in the dead of the night. He walked all the night and in the morning reached the Lucknow station. He had five hundred rupees with him out of which he had stole three hundred from Nirjala’s closet. He spent all day at the station with the newspaper he had bought. He had already read it twice including all the property advertisements and all the matrimonial ads. He had bought the general class ticket for Delhi in Lucknow Mail. He reached Delhi at six in the morning. He bathed at the station lavatory and after having some tea at the nearby tea stall; he caught a local blue line bus and reached the All India Institute Of Medical Science. He wanted to meet the director of the institute but looking at him, the peon had frisked him off. He slept in the underground parking lot and after two days of monitoring he finally got hold of the Toyota corolla in which the Director used to travel. In the evening at around seven thirty he waited for the Director. As soon as the Director of the institute reached his car, he sprang towards the car and intercepted the old man just before he was entering the car. In a breathless tone he narrated his story of how he would like to study at this institute and how he had come all the way from his village and had no money. By this time the institute’s security had already surrounded Sukumar and were jostling with him. The director looked at him and then quietly sat in his car and left without saying anything. The security guards took Sukumar outside the institute’s premises and threatened him to stay away. Heart broken he sat outside and with his ragged sack. For the past two days he had eaten only two meals and had slept only intermittently throughout. He lifted his jaded soul and started walking towards the institute’s gate. The guards saw him coming and alerted each other. Now there was a wall of seven to eight guards. Sukumar maintained his gait and as soon as he reached the guards, there was a lull. His face was stone cold and the guards were now smiling at this lunatic. There is a saying, “The most dangerous man is the one who has got an aim and is willing to go to any extent to achieve it.” The guards started shoving him back and then they all started thrashing him. He just stood there in the beginning and afterwards he lay still on the entrance gate and took all the beating without any resistance. When it was all done they picked him up and threw him on an empty plot of land besides the premises. When he got up it was already morning and the crust of blood that had formed on his face cracked as he squinted at the sunlight. He washed his face and again went to the main entrance of the institute gate. The guards were confused. They again beat him up and again threw his unconscious body at the same spot but he was back again in the evening for getting beaten up and thrown in the dirt like before. When he returned in the morning he was in a bad shape. One of the security guards took him in their check post and made him sit down. He then took out the first aid kit and applied ointment on his bruises after washing him up. He gave him tea and bread and asked his story. The name of the guard was Hashim Azmi and he was from Meerut. He was an old man in his fifties and was impressed with this young rebellious boy. He took him to his kholi in Paharganj where he stayed alone. His wife had died of cancer and his sons had left him alone. He preferred not to talk about them and so Sukumar did not pester him with any more questions. Sukumar called him “Sir “ and Hashim used to smile at this strange salutation but nonetheless enjoyed it. They ate rice and fish curry and slept on the carpet on the floor. In the morning, Hashim took Sukumar with him to the institute and arranged for a meeting with the Director, Mr. Harish Wardhan. Harish himself was an astute academician and had himself come from a very poor family in Kerala. He looked at Sukumar who looked much better in his clean white shirt nicely tucked in his blue cotton trousers. “I can’t promise you anything as of now. We have very high quality standards and only the meritious are selected after a rigorous selection process.” Said Harish. Sukumar was quietly sitting and listening very attentively at each and every syllable that Harish spoke. “ I can arrange for some books for you and can get you the entrance form, if you get selected we can arrange for the loan. This is all I can do for you.” “ I will be more than happy and obliged for this gesture of yours, Sir,” said Sukumar. After three days Hashim brought Sukumar the books that Harish had sent him. The date of the entrance was only two months away. For the next two months Sukumar did not come outside the kholi. He studied, studied and then studied some more. On the day of the exam he got up early and went to the nearby temple. After this he took a local bus and sat at the corner seat with his hall ticket nicely folded in his hand. He was very calm and was looking at the early morning calmness of the Delhi streets on a Sunday morning. Suddenly there was light everywhere and this blinding light numbed him and he slept off. Suddenly after all these months of hard work he was in a dreamland. There was his father in his crisp white dhoti sitting in the courtyard puffing at his hooka; his mother Nirjala was at the stove making parathas of sattu. The sweet cadence of trinkets from the bullock carts, the rickety one room school, the rock from where he could still see the highway traffic. It was all like a movie. He was lost in time and space. When he opened his eyes, everything around him was blurred. He opened his eyes and with a very confused look scanned his surroundings. Harish was standing near him and so was Hashim. He smiled at them but they were all very sad. Suddenly he realized that he was in the hospital. The bus he was traveling in had a bomb planted in it by some terrorist outfit and all the twenty passengers had died on the spot. Sukumar was the only one who could make it to the hospital. His limbs were badly mutilated and they had to amputate both his hands so as to save his life. He was listening to the same heavy tone of Harish’s voice as he narrated him what had happened. Sukumar felt nothing. He had no expression. He was not crying. Now both Harish and Hashim were saying something but he was not able to understand what they were saying. It was like a distant murmur. Sukumar was released from the hospital after fifteen days. Now he had crutches fitted to his sides and he slowly found his way outside with the help of Hashim.