Reflections
Dreams and <i>death</i> in October
They met in the pastoral calm of a rural afternoon sometime in the early 1950s. It was in a village close to the timeless Sitalakhya that the wheels of destiny took on a pace which would bring them together. She was young, pretty and bathing in the pond, circumscribed as it was by a profusion of date and coconut palms, mango and jackfruit trees and creepers and flowers and wild vegetables. He was young, a visitor to her home as friend to her brother. It was on his languid stroll, or call it a walk, toward the pond that he came upon the sight he must have imagined many times over in the fervour of his romantic impulses. He watched, in happy embarrassment, for a few seconds. Days later, he was asking for her hand in marriage. It was on an October day that they wed. Barely a month later these young people made their way across a subcontinent that had only a few years earlier been a country, indivisible and linked by the forces of history. Yet the indivisibility had given way to a murderous partition and history had taken a battering that had never been and was never to be replicated anywhere else across the globe. This man and this woman travelled to the farthest corners of a new country prised out of the old and set up home amidst the mountains, surrounded by people who spoke languages different from theirs. The summers were lacerating. The winters cut across the cheeks and through the numb hands. The sands were pitiless. The snow fell torrentially --- gravely, quietly concealing whatever remained of God's universe. It was in October that they made a home of this garrison town people called a city. And they grew to love this town, even as they missed the lush vegetation which defined the villages they had left behind more than a thousand miles away. It was in this city amidst the mountains and ringed by deserts that they raised a family. The children came, breathing warmth and good cheer and happy cacophony into the home. The milkman, a Baluch, arrived every afternoon with a rather big, deep can of fresh milk. Twice a week, warm, fresh-made biscuits were deposited for the family. And endless were the supplies of Ostermilk for the babies. Sometimes earthquakes injected fear and excitement into life. The seasons turned. The leaves changed colour. The babies began to walk and go daintily to school. Expenses went up, threatening to shoot though the roof. And yet these two people, these parents, managed, scrounged, scratched their heads. They did not let the children know of the travails that were upon them. Ailments, in a series, caught up with her. He made sure she survived. The doctor became a regular visitor. That was how the years went by. As the grapes turned sweet, as the heavens switched from blue to grey to dark to blue again, they sang old songs and took their children to watch good movies, to picnics in the mountains. In the garden roses bloomed, blood red and pristine white. She grew vegetables, looking to them with tenderness. And then came that inevitable historical moment when it was their country that called. To a bruised, bloodied country, to a land struggling to ward off the hordes of barbarians that clawed at their lives and their heritage, they returned. Life went through a renewal for them as the country rediscovered itself through freedom. The children touched the heights of adulthood. The man and the woman mellowed with age. A softness, of the kind that tells you springtime is gone and autumn is on its way, made its way into their lives. It whispered of winter, of life crumbling into dust, of silenced heartbeats and freed souls flowing out into eternity. He passed into the ages on an October night. The moon, his youngest child noticed, shone bright over the silent street. She made her own journey into infinity on yet another night in yet another October, fourteen years down the pathways of time. It was nearly time for the earliest of calls to prayer when the life slipped out of her. They sleep, for all time, beyond time, in close proximity to each other, in a sleepy little village called Noagaon. The crickets sing as twilight descends. The glow worms constitute a festival of light on the darkest of nights.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments