Not Yet Dead...

I could not save her.

At night when the sky is lined with broad strokes of the darkest charcoal, and sketchy shadows form under the street lamp… I hear her cry like a haunted soul; she calls out to me in a cold-blooded shriek, her repeated screams splitting my core into pieces of hideous self-pity…

“Mother! Don’t you love me anymore? Won’t you save me? Come fast!”

I did not betray you, sweet child… I had no place to hide your little body… forgive me, won’t you? If only I could hide you in my empty womb… warm and safe…if only I could place you in my vacant eye… if only…

Yet I hear her sob, “Will you let me die then mother? They are burying people into knee deep graves… and trampling on those not yet dead…”

I have searched for you in vain for days and nights, and at last the rain dissolved all hopes. Why didn’t you return to me little one? I have lined your pillows with down feather… the hearth is yet to cool down… we will play your game of hide and seek later…

And she wouldn’t come. Out of the darkness I heard her reply, “But I can’t stop the pain mother… my eyes, they hurt…they burn and no one gives me water here, not a soul left to help. You told me once that God doesn’t harm the faithful lot… then I shall be safe. They won’t be able to push me into the pond- several of us have drowned there already… I have seen their bodies, pierced with bullets and charged with sticks…”

Muffled sobs rack my frame.
I asked you to hide somewhere, I asked you to run. Why didn’t you listen to your mother? And now I survive, while you are gone forever…

“I dragged my limp body to the fields mother, but you were not there to guide… they had forced you into that house, tearing your sari into pieces, reducing it to rags… hitting your swollen face till blood oozed from the corners of your mouth… you asked me to run, you asked me to hide… but where could I go?

The muddy lanes now wore a garb of sickly red, and I saw men digging graves, their faces twisted with wild glee. I escaped that gruesome end too… but how far could I run mother? I must have fallen in that field, while the world seemed to hiss and glow… spinning in circles… round and round…
They set me on fire… remember this dress? The flower-pattern you made for me… I could not salvage this while I burnt…”

I did find you sweetheart, in someone’s field. Your face charred and black… a bullet that had pierced your weak chest and a mangled body which no one could recognize… it had been days… they could not bury you alive, nor could they drown you like countless others… they set fire to your little frame and watched your life ebb away… my phantom child…

I have summoned the ghosts of the past to keep me company sweet one… while I covered you with a cloth caked with my blood, and once again your blood mixed with mine… without the umbilical cord this time. Should I hold you against my withered chest? Does that lend you comfort anymore? I pressed my ears to your distorted mouth, to your dead tongue, and waited for your response…

Silver streams…

The water danced around her feet, in streams that meandered effortlessly… and it reminded me of wind chimes, hundreds of them, all dancing to the errant wind that threatened to rage on till its thirst subsided somewhere out in the sea, oblivious to elements, and hidden from human eyes.

Her soft laugh hung around us, perhaps separating us from the rest of human habitation. To me it seemed like a spell that would ensure something infinite… it would hold time back in crystal vials and pause this moment…

She drew figures on the sand with her toe, and the water would come time and again, erasing her initials, her footprints, throwing up shells that she would gather in the fold of her skirt to string them into chains… chains that would lie unused, gathering dust in some corner of her room… but she collected them merrily, singing a tune that I had never heard before…

At night I found her at the small desk in our room. She seemed to write something with passion, her pen seldom stopped for an occasional pause. The words appeared to flow and countless thoughts filled those crisp white pages of her diary.

She would never let me read what she wrote in that red diary of hers… yet at the darkest hour of night she seated herself at the desk, a little flickering candle by her side. She would pen down something and then look outside and sigh. The trees seemed to reply with a hushed whisper, and that soothed her. She would blow out the candle and tread her way back to her bed, dreaming perhaps of the silver streaked ripples that danced when she stepped into the sea…

She assured me that she never craved for wings. That her world was wine-coloured and she felt music all around… and at times she caught herself in those rhythms and let herself be swayed…

That was all I knew when she took her life, leaving behind a red diary for me. Allowing me to glimpse the world encased in that book, a world she had guarded jealously…
I leafed through those neatly filled pages she had never let me see.

Perhaps she wrote of summer dreams or sparkling wine that passed those lips… perhaps she wrote of the salty sprays of the sea… she might have mentioned the troubadour’s song we heard last year… of halogen lights seen on city trips and the fisherman’s boat she loved…

With all these lingering thoughts I opened her diary. And she wrote:

‘The salt here hangs like a shroud over me… I wash myself again and again, yet the white salt bonds with my skin, blocking my pores, my soul… if only I could peel off my skin… I need a breath of spring, a breath of green… I need the hills!’

‘I smell death here. The prophet said it too last year and in words of crimson fire he sang of the rain of blood to follow. All is decaying. He whispered the truth… he told me:

‘‘And you will suffer for what never belonged to you. They’ll hang you on twigs of dead trees in the market… and they’ll wrench your soul and see it smolder like molten lead… they will cut out your tongue too, making sure there are no more dissenters… yet cries emitted from hollow hearts and echoed in the dead air… they chop off dead tongues…”

I must set you free…’

I turned over the pages in a trance; almost afraid to believe what I witnessed…
Was this brilliance or insanity?
It seemed impossible that she had harboured such thoughts in that little frame of hers, that she had carried words streaked with fire… I thought she was contented.
And I kept reading:

‘They are burning the flower shop, their crimson swords slash at your throat and a blood-laden whisper drops to the ground from your lips like those dewy petals do… the swords slash still…mercilessly, and blood pours in torrential streams… the shop at the corner now destroyed… my flowers too…’

‘Stabbed. Twenty-one times. And they blistered my soul with their fevered hands… he spelled out dreams for me to lend comfort… and gave me fresh roses. White, fresh, pretty roses. He tied them with a golden ribbon.
I tore the petals, one by one, and pressed them in my diary.’

‘But take me to the dark side of the moon, my house drenched in twilight caught unawares… and I’ll bring back silver showers… freezing brandishing swords and hanged men shall come back to life…’

She was my wife. A woman I thought I knew. I looked into the silver framed picture beside me and she smiled back. Yet I noticed the wedding band, too tight for her fingers, cutting into her delicate skin, I noticed the smile that seemed watery to my eyes now. Her locket was shaped like a maple leaf… ‘The hills’…I heard her cry now. And her eyes heavy with inherent sadness, a melancholy I had never seen… never tried to see…

Hesitantly I looked at the last entry on that page.

‘You remain blissfully ignorant another while,
And I crave for a little respite,
A little bliss myself...
You might never know-
Of the muffled sobs at night
As you lie asleep in a drunken torpor.
Tears stain letters written in ink…
So shall mine be rendered indecipherable?
Perhaps. Perhaps eyes unknown shall
Shall read over these and conjure up
Visions…

Silver streams of water… silver nooses around my neck… strung together with shells, and he too collects them for me… the choirs mourn… a last swan song for me.’

Ready to go...

She’d leave soon. Perhaps this is the last time we would be sitting here, in the feverish buzz of the almost decrepit canteen, sipping on a cup of soup… till the thin paper cup threatens to spoil it all by sagging under the pressure of your palm. Gloom hangs heavy here. And I could catch emotions from thin air… for the first time perhaps we forget to laugh. Or discuss something unimportant, irrelevant. Like the reason why you are leaving us behind. Or what would eventually happen to the boy you had a crush on, or why we always spoilt it all by laughing at him. The last time for the five of us.

I do not see you emote. Is it because you have always been the most sensible of the lot? Or is it because your new future beckons alluringly, and you would rather not be moved? I know not. None of us do… there are emotions too deep playing inside us.

The final words remain unspoken, even though we talk about the bag we promised you for your birthday, and the biriyani treat we were supposed to give. Then what did we not say?

We will miss you girl…