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A digression, to set the mood. This scene, one would imagine, plays out in black and white. On a foggy winter evening in the streets of Delhi. The house is dark, really, dark and damp. Not at all like the living, breathing entity it seemed to be when Amaan and Bilkis lived in it. When Amaan was still alive, that is.
She takes out their photograph, her favorite one of the two of them together. She always carries it in her kurti, it is her last memory of them together , where they seem happy. She wonders how life would have been. She imagines children, 2 , she thinks. A boy and a girl. They would have loved it here, she thinks. And she almost imagines Amaan playing with the children in the courtyard. And then , like it is being directed, in a movie, the scene of his death plays out in front of her.
Of the Riots , of last year, since that day, when there were voices on the street. “Kill them, Burn them, loot them, pillage, rape, murder” The Viking calls of men lost high on blood and ideology. Savage beasts whom no music would soothe. They had surrounded the both of them, and always valiant, Amaan had made sure no blow had fallen on her as he pushed her into the alley and asked her to Run.
And just like that, all the poise which Bilkis had maintained through the last year, through the last rites, through the court hearings, the accusations of being not her husband, but her ‘client’, the death threats , the convictions – All of it. It all falls apart. And Bilkis Bibi cries. She howls and she screams in that empty house, with its chairs, its empty walls and its stains of ketchup . The photograph falls from her hands……
…….Two small hands pick up the old black and white photograph lying on the floor. Sureen follows her mother and father as they enter the house. “Look ma… Look … I found a photograph” . Alia looks at the old photograph in her daughter’s hand and smiles. The previous owners must have left it here, she thinks.
Parth snatches the photograph from Sureens hands and makes a face. “She looks so old and ugly”. Alia shakes her head and admonishes him – “Do not use such language in my presence, young man”
Next to her, her husband Aroop makes a grunt of disapproval. “That stain, looks like ketchup, that stain will need to go”. Always a perfectionist, her Aroop, she smiles.
A digression, then, to set the mood. The day is bright and sunny, and there is sunlight streaming through the window. And Alia and Aroop are here to take a first look at the house they may just be spending the rest of their lives in.
Alia looks at the empty house and almost imagines how it must have been when the owners were still staying there. The old furniture, the stains on the walls, the whitewash. All so alive, so fresh, as if it was just painted yesterday. They had got the house cheap, from a friend of a friend’s, who had inherited it from her mother.
Local history placed the house smack in the middle of the neighborhood where the riots had taken place 25 years ago. That is where she had met Aroop. Then. In the riots. Her parents were Muslim who had been escaping from a mob of Hindu fanatics, when Aroop’s mother had given her a place to hide. Saviour and Messiah, they were destined to be together, Aroop always maintained.
While her parents had moved to another city, she had never forgotten the red faced boy she saw that night. And as fate would have it, they met again during college, fell in love, and over one rainy, tea time conversation, had accidentally pieced together the interwoven histories.
She looks at him and smiles… and then looks around the room. She imagines their life together, the sound of her children running through the room, , the movies they would watch together curled up in front of the Sofa , the dinner table conversations.
Suddenly Aroop is beside her, and he holds his phone in front of them and Says “Smile”. And there is a photograph. Both of them, Smiling, happy.
Let us Assume, for a moment that all reality is suspended. There are no bills to pay, no responsibilities, no worries about the future. Just imagine your life in a montage of happy pictures playing like a slideshow reel, just like it does in an advertisement. Imagine then, you and I, two perfectly happy, perfectly normal people. No fucked up, self jeopardising self pity, no sir.
Running back in a bit of rain today, I had the most insane idea,nay, a revelation. This did not come from the tear strained romance novel I have been reading(rather intelligent I must say) . It is this. You should be here, with me, in India. Sharing every moment, you know, with a realisation that eventually, you and I, ME and you, will help each other pull through it. I am just a better person when you are arund. Self confident, funny. So here is my proposed plan
1. Leave that job. You never admit it, but you hate it there anyway. It is cold, horribly slow and let us face it, you do get a rather lonely.
2. Come to India, shift, get another job, I don’t know. And then we could you know, even be flatmates. Provided you can overcome your sexual attraction to me that is. Or I could just lock you in your room in case you can’t. Imagine, you and I, together, in the same flat. One endless round of parties and booze and maybe even some drugs. And after a few years we will have life changing epiphainies which will remind us that drugs make us bad people and we will quit altogether.
Isn’t that the greatest plan you’ve ever heard of in your life?
Ah, typical Dexter you say, isn’t he forgetting something? Money! Plane tickets don’t grow on trees and what about social security and the work ethic etc. etc. Well don’t worry, I’m paying. Yes, I’m paying, I’m going to wire the money to you for your plane ticket (I’ve always wanted to wire money) and I’m going to pay for everything when you’re here which sounds swanky but isn’t because it is so DAMN CHEAP here. We can live for months, Em, me and you, heading down to Kerala or across to Thailand. We could go to a full moon party—imagine staying awake all night not because you’re worried about the future but because it’s FUN. (Remember when we stayed up all night after graduation, Em? Anyway. Moving on.)
For three hundred pounds of someone else’s money, you could change your life, and you musn’t worry about it because frankly I have money that I haven’t earned, and you work really hard and yet you don’t have money, so it’s socialism in action isn’t it? And if you really want you can pay me back when you’re a famous playwright, or when the poetry-money kicks in or whatever. Besides it’s only for three months. I’ve got to come back in the autumn anyway. As you know Mum’s not been well. She tells me the operation went fine and maybe it did or maybe she just doesn’t want me to worry. Either way I’ve got to come home eventually. (By the way, my mother has a theory about you and me, and if you meet me at the Taj Mahal I will tell you all about it, but only if you meet me.)
On the wall in front of me is this massive sort of praying mantis thing and he’s looking at me as if to say shut up now so I will. It’s stopped raining, and I’m about to go to a bar and meet up with some new friends for a drink, three female medical students from Amsterdam which tells you all you need to know. But on the way I’m going to find a post box and send this before I change my mind. Not because I think you coming here is a bad idea—it isn’t, it’s a great idea and you must come—but because I think I might have said too much. Sorry if this has annoyed you. The main thing is that I think about you a lot, that’s all. Dex and Em, Em and Dex. Call me sentimental, but there’s no one in the world that I’d like to see get dysentery more than you.
When Tanvi was seventeen years old, she fell in love. It was a mundane moment, really, one that would hardly be written about in a romance novel . You see, in movies and sitcoms, when one falls in love, it is usually accompanied by some slow motion camera work and a changing of colours, maybe even soundtrack in the background, No such thing happened for Tanvi though. She saw the boy in her school bus, sitting right at the very back. This was a space reserved for seniors, ones in their final year of school.
School buses, on their way back, are usually a hub bub of activity. Children laugh, shout, sing, get bullied. It is a world within a world, one that is insulated from the vagaries of teachers, homework and generally making tahir way about the real world.
For reasons entirely her own, she decided to follow the boy home. Let us now, dear reader, shift perspective. Imagine then, a camera that moves from focusing on our heroine, to the other introduced character of the story.
The boy was 18, bald and tall, not attractive in the conventional sense of the term. His mother was Bhutanese, his father was Bangladeshi, and the boy had grown up under a very religious influence . He stayed in one of those areas of the city which seemed to be a perpetual state of construction. Tanvi followed him all the way to his house and hid behind a tree as his pressed the doorbell and entered his house.
From then on, the boy seemed to occupy her thoughts. She walked home thinking about him, went to bed dreaming about him , and woke the next day with a delirious fever chanting his name .
There was not much that could be done from then on, as her fever grew progressively worse. She could not go to school without the help of an attendant, and eventually stopped going altogether. From a straight A student, her grades suffered and slipped . She took to spending her waking moments disconnected from the world. Drawing and painting, everything from landscapes to portraits, she brought her vivid imagination and delirious dreaming to life on the canvas. And always, everywhere, there seemed to be the boy. And one day, one of her paintings showed two people coming to her door. One looked Bhutanese, the other Bangladeshi.
deviantgene 