If It Happens

As of now Maa is still alive. And I haven’t exhausted my imaginations of her death. Her train is crossing over M.P. and it has started raining here heavily. It subsides for a minute and pours all over again. Stops again, and starts again. The moisture in the air, all around, makes the road ahead haloed like a slow-motioned world. The evening is caught between the scent of mortar and puddles reflecting the nearing night, shining like light on fish scales. A chanawala runs into the crossings, the moment the lights turn red and the traffic halts. Inertia hits. The world is dead for a minute. It’s the moment of life for many. Two local eunuchs lean against the window of an SUV and gesticulate their practiced misery. The chanawala elbows his way, a thick black thread looped around his neck, a small metallic ganesha dangling mindlessly as he lets his head in and says, ‘Chana, Sahib?’ There’s a moment of stillness. We look into each others’ eyes like long lost lovers and then he withdraws. And runs ahead without another word. I turn around, and look out of the window, calling him back. The lights turn green and the rain washes the salt off my face. If Maa had been here, she would have said: He picked up your sadness, Dhon.

But why would she say that? It’s Bipul’s birthday I realize. I’ve been calculating for the last many days. And feeling sad all over again. Birthdays make me sad. All the time. Last year, around the same time, I was working in a small dispensary in Bhomoraguri as an intern. Women there complained of being raped by armed militants in their dreams, and the village men of their penises vanishing overnight. That year, I could only manage a late birthday letter for Bipul. Our house, like all others in the colony, was a two-bedroom Assam-type with gabled roofs. Just outside was the namghar, the community prayer-house, where women from around the neighbourhood gathered in the evenings to sing kirtans of Srimanta Sankardev. Maa never liked going there. She didn’t like to participate or talk about her son with the other women. She only liked to sit in front of the dressing table mirror and sing old Hindi songs loudly as she combed her hair in the pale light of dusk. Nights came early like the far away songs of the boatmen, returning home, injecting a strange melancholia into the air. A mango tree loomed like an old guardian outside our window, swaying and fanning us down on nights of load-shedding. Maa would often say, how it must feel the same in places near the sea.

“Dhon, please take me to Bombay once before you leave,” she said to me one night, leaning on the window-sill. “It’s a beautiful place, I’ve heard. I want to see the sea once before I die.”

I told Maa that once the scholarship letter from Dartmouth arrives, I will write to them to book the tickets from Bombay. We shall fly a week before, spend our nights in a low budget lodge by the sea, and then I shall send her back on the Brahmaputra Express.

“You’ll be able to take the train, right?” I asked, imagining another horrifying scene.

“Don’t worry, Dhon,” she smiled, pulling my cheeks. “Nothing will happen to me. Don’t think I’ll die. I’ll be all safe.”

She would pull me closer and I’d dig my face into her breasts. She smelled of old cotton. And of dried jasmines and boroline. Later that night at twelve, I lit a candle and wrote a belated-birthday-letter to Bipul.

By the time we reached Bombay, all the hotels near CST were full. We couldn’t find a single low budget place near the sea. So, we rented a service apartment near Thakur Village in Kandivli. From there we booked a cab and went all around South Bombay: Gateway, Taj, Bandra, Colaba Causeway, Chowpatty, Siddhi Vinayak, Haji Ali, Juhu. All of these in the flash of a day. But the real fun, like all adventures, began at night; when for hours we sat by the sea in marine drive sipping instant coffee from plastic cups. And chatting about our imagined future. My life in Dartmouth, her life back in Bhomoraguri, the distance separating us, the resilience to live through. And whenever her voice quivered, I placated her with the re-assurance of returning every year for a month. Like the poets who wrote pages over pages about “returning”, but never did.

The rains have finally stopped. Kandivli is almost shutting down. Maa must be the only person awake in her compartment, thinking of me. As I walk past the watchman, through the rows of buildings rising up like a single giant wall, as sounds die and the lamps bathe down the night, as brown wild moths rise up to life before my eyes and as the world changes darkly outside, I think of Bipul and his last mail on “deprivation”. How in his signature straightforward way he had told me, that we learn to desire, to love, only by deprivation. We strive to fill the gap and the inability to do so is called “missing.” When I corrected him, saying that he must be talking about nostalgia he dismissed it with a loud sigh, calling it overused and literary. “We are defined by what is not there.” His voice plays in my head, as the elevator lifts me up to the seventh floor. And thinking of deprivation, I begin to imagine of Maa once again. Soon I’ll walk out of this lift and see her drooping face, sad with the knowledge of my departure. She’ll catch the smile on my face and know that I’m thinking of someone I’ll meet soon. She will not ask. I will not utter a clue. Instead, I’ll begin to pack things up hastily; plug in my headphones as I do so and think of wishing Bipul “Happy Birthday” with a wet kiss, for the first time, at the Hanover airport. And thinking of him, within the imagination, my mind will drift into a childhood, I haven’t lived in real. Not in this current life. But that which I remember again like the familiar halo of a slow moving parallel world – where I’m still a child. We, Maa and I, are in an old house by the sea in Bombay. I’m writing a poem on the thing about leaving, and can smell old cotton somewhere. I have a habit of lying face down on Maa’s chest and listening to the sea outside the window while she pats my back and hums the words of an old Hindi song. Almost inaudible and broken. But then I know it’s her favourite from Dev Anand’s House no.44, “teri duniya mein jeene se to behter hain ki marjaaye”. Against the roaring of the waves, the smoothness of air meandering through the contortions of her windpipe is inviolate. There are dogs in the beach scavenging at each others’ advantages – copulating at the hour of the routine. The howls rip into the wild notes of the sea. She is beginning to fall asleep below me: un-snoring, quiet and young. She is slipping off slowly. To death.

Gaurav Deka is a Delhi-based writer and a psychotherapist. His fictions, poetry and reviews have been published in the Himal Southasian, Papercuts, Livemint, Out of Print, Hindu BLink, The Bombay Review, Open Road Review, among many others. He was the winner of the Open Road Review Short Fiction contest, 2014.

(‘If It Happens’ was previously published in The Four Quarters Magazine.)