The window

The panes are translucent, dirtied by years of neglect. A yellowed vista stretches beyond. Far from civilization, the edifice of dereliction stands, a run down hovel; bent, beaten, and bruised. No soul has stepped to its door. The low, lone door is cobwebbed and gray. Husks of flies trapped in webs swing to the rhythm of the dry dead drafts that waft from the forest in a dance of death. A broken down fence creaks to keep up the rhythm. No bird sings here. Trees rustle death notes. Something howls at night; a hollow, fiendish freezing sound.

 

As is wont to pass in this world of men, life spread its wings, flying farther away from steel jungles in search of peace and quit. Men drove animals away from their homes so they could hide away from the world of prying eyes, in an oasis that could only be seen if one were a bird flying above it. Natural habitats receded and reduced, running away from a ravenous giant that ate and ate, that men may assuage their hunger.

 

“What?”

“it’s true!”, the man said, bearing his heavy boots down, muffled by grasses and bushes he reiterated, “it’s true !”. As he shouted, he found everything around him deafened by silence his words reverberated into a cacophony. The evening sun did well to hide his embarrassed cheeks he sent prayers to its salient colors. “Ahem!” he coughed his discomfiture into a phlegm, and spitted out a glob of discontentment.

 

The kettle smoked steam. The low ceiling bore down on the cat till it scratched to be let out. The squealing screeching grated on her ears and nerves she heaved the window open. It sniffed, stiffened, and with an ambiguous mew, it leapt into unknown freedom. “There you go!”, she mouthed soundless words into the night. “I guess it is time”. Even as the event brought her sadness and eventually resignation to truth, she was so taken by the sudden change in the same nature of things around her, she sighed in disbelief and shock.

 

“Did you see it?”, he pointed into thin air he might as well be pointing at nothing.

“See what?” , the girl cried in exasperation.

“the cat!”

“where?”

“the window!”

“What window?”, she flailed her hands in exasperation, eyes rolling in incredulity, face a crossroad of expressions. “Where is ever a window without a house?”, the hands now spreading out to cover the scene around.

 

She grated the window shut. Voices noises human. The finger pointing as if in accusation. The very knowledge! From an alcove she produced a transparent container with a translucent liquid. With a flourish and without a sound, but all the while lips moving on their own volition as one would think, she raised her palm upturned till it touched the base of the glass. The clear liquid turned from blue to blood red, and the thin film glazed. All that remained was a red crystal. They were getting closer!

 

“I tell you it was right here!”, he waved as if by doing so it would by his sheer will appear.

“A window without a house!”, she rubbed in.

“Yes!”, he answered. “It could be that the house was invisible”

“Your window was invisible to start with…and your mind cat”. She turned to leave the way they had come when she thought she heard a distant mew.

“You hear that?”, his eyes beamed. “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the…” Mew, it came now, distinct and clear. “There!” he waved, unsure of its source.

 

She took her hands away from the crystal. It floated in mid air. It rippled and waved till there was nothing but a wisp of smoke. “This should do”, she said hunching over the small table in the center of the room. “I never thought I had to use it again”. They were right. They had warned her. “Sooner than you think, you will have strangers at your doorstep”, the youngest and the brightest of the group had said. “I am too old for the journey. And I need to be alone. There is no more point in me continuing my routine”, was her reply.

 

“You will need more than all you know about this land to hide away” the words lingered and she was transported to the day of the farewell.

 

“I have made a choice and I will stick by it. Isn’t it what our rules say? Never to waiver?”, the faces around her plagued by her decision and yet glimmering with hope of their future. It had dwindled to a group from a race. They never saw this coming, and there was no seeing what would become of them. A tear made its way down her dry wrinkled face remembering the smallest face in the group, her favorite little angel. Now her heart hurt with images of her as a young woman.

 

Something scratched the window. Without caution she took the end of her cloth and wiped a clearing. A bundle of mist materialized into a living entity wearing a familiar face. Making the least of sound that could be possible, she let the cat in.

 

“you almost gave us away!”, the old woman said. “They were this close to the door!”, pinching the now clear air with her thumb and forefinger. Her left hand rested on the small table. As if in affirmation, something rattled against the panes on the west window.

She froze. “It’s just the wind, moving the dead flowers”, the cat said nonchalantly. “You almost gave us away!”, the woman reiterated, which she seemed to do a lot of late, given her age.

 

“No! I drove them away”, the cat grinned. “They were too close to the house I had to risk it! You don’t know what they are capable of. And besides, I wanted to see I still had it in me!”

Two boys

A pair of bright blue slippers disappeared in a confusion of other footwear; now hidden by a pair of black Bata shoes, now showing ahead of a pair of Kolapuris, a never-ending hide and seek. The kid follows it, head bent, eyes screwed with concentration, the object of his fancy now within and now at the periphery of his myopic vision. The din of the roadside vendors crying out their wares, each trying to outdo his neighbor in decibel, reaches higher and higher to a crescendo of chaos. For now, his ears seem to have blocked everything out, the brain ignoring the messages from the eardrum.

Scratching his head, he looks about. This has caused a small traffic block. Hundreds of feet scurried this way and that, like ants on an important mission, not one pair stopping in the middle as his did. A dhoti clad man issues an expletive in Bhihari as he collides with the small inconspicuous body that forms a rock around which eddies the sea of feet.

Another collision puts him in front of one of the stalls selling a myriad of things; safety pins, handkerchiefs, cheap colorful sunglasses for kids, leather belts, Abibas pants and Live’s jeans. There is no perfect order in the arrangement of the stalls. An open air barber sandwiched between two cloth stalls offers to cut your hair for 3 rupees. An autumn astrologer sits with an air of authority near a tea stall; the cards with written horoscopes as ancient but stately as the man; the green parrot who would rather be flying in the open relegated to the small cage, which has after years of moving about clipped most of his tail feathers, with a small cup of water-soaked gram.

A small shack offers sweet Indian tea and cookies. A cobbler has found a place too; new soles hang from strings behind him; old shoes, polishes, brushes rest on the wooden box that contains the tools of his trade. Despite all this chaos, the explosion of colors, people and noise, to the little boy, everything put together makes one interesting symphony, with an invisible conductor, a symphony of life.

The alley is cut short by the main road. He looks left, right and struts across the potholes that litter the road. An empty truck misses him by an inch, giving him time enough to sigh which turns into an expression of disgust, disbelief and anger at the driver, for a missile of sludge hits him squarely in the face; the muddy water drains down his smooth skin leaving only dregs which cling to him like flaking skin. He raises his tiny fists in the air and, not finding the right invective to fling at the disappearing truck, kicks something on the ground thinking it a mush of paper. The toes curl and his hands bring his foot off the ground. Cursing the gods for the misfortune, he hops and hobbles on one foot, a brown little impish character, to the shop.

The antics were not lost on the crowd. A group guffawed and soon a handful of children joined in the laughter feigning knowledge, the object of the outburst long gone from the scene. A new comer who only knew a crowd forebode ill tidings, asked, “was there an accident?” bringing forth a louder fit of laughter that rippled through the crowd, the image of the performer now a faint shadow in their minds. Discomfited by the humiliation and given to a strong sense of empathy, he put on an expression of complicity; a grin which was a cross between a smile and frown, beads of perspiration reflecting his predicament. Sheepishly, he slunk away from the melee.

“Sorry boy!” said the big man, wringing his dark hairy hands. “You will have to bring a clean note”. Indicating the mud splattered paper in the little hand with his pudgy forefinger, he went back to shouting at his two scrawny little workers who scurried there with a ranch, here with a tire. The only one unaffected by all the confusion around him was the old thin man in the shade, working slow but deliberate; one could see he had worked away his youth and more here at the shop, whose big sign, “Ram Cycle Shop: Repair, Hire and Selling” announced its imposing shape in bright bold colors, the letters further emblazoned by gold highlights and bright shadows. It was second to none; the embossed hoarding could be seen from miles, whereas the other signboards were mere blobs of insignificance in the distance.

“Dada, any strays today?”, he asked the old man.

“Number 14 hasn’t come back, the blue little one”

“Which way did he go?” he asked, pulling a rickety cycle form the line of old ones stacked on the left. On the right you could see a few smaller cycles positioned in the shade and protection of the bigger ones. New shiny ones hung from below the signage, plastic wrappings still on, which with a whiff of a breeze let one see the clean bright color inside, adding mystery to the wares on sale. The middle opened onto the main road and made for the working space; ebony boys sweated amid parts of broken cycles. Dark oil which were no more in use, seeped onto and finally into the brown earth turning it black, and yet for a brief moment, before it did, one could see beauty on its surface;colors came to life, and rainbows danced.

“Hey boy! did you hear me!?” somebody shouted. “Get out of the way!”. So absorbed in observing the colors on a rivulet of oil that ran down an incline, he did not see the front tire come too close to his face it disrupted the oil flow, the river rainbow now swirling this way and that in the wake of the second tire. He had just enough time to pull back before the big feet hit his head and in doing so did not see the stagnant pool of oil behind him, colors uninterrupted. A brief confusion of chaotic colors and he was on his feet, little fingers going back to his back, confirming what he had already knew; the earlier humiliation at the hands of the crowd now overshadowed by a greater humiliation. As he turned to look at the pool, the boys that seemed a little while ago devoid of expression burst into a sing song laughter accompanied by the clanging of metals; a ranch on an empty container kept up a good base while the other brought together smaller metals into relief.

The old man looked up from his bench with a wry smile which soon disappeared. “Will you cut that racket before I cut from your wages?” he shouted at the boys. At the mention of the wage or from the sudden realization they were not alone even after the boss had left brought their musical to an abrupt halt. They were not empty words. They had seen their boss nervous as a little boy in front of him. He had been here as long as the tree across the road had been everyone said.

“Couldn’t find it anywhere,” he came back huffing, white shirt stuck to his body, dews of sweat hung onto the hairs on his hands

“What did I tell you!” the old man retorted. “They pay you for half an hour, load it on the truck that is about to leave, and there! You are one cycle short and they have a cycle for a rupee!”

Setting the cycle aside, the man sank onto the mat in the shade away from the old man. The silence that followed grew into the buzzing of bees and the sudden honks in the streets that pierced it seemed to point at his mistakes.

He shot up suddenly, and pointing his gold ringed finger at the boy who was now turning his back on the shop and walking away, shouted: “ Don’t come back again! We are not hiring anymore!” The boy looked back in shock. What would he play now. There was nothing that he liked more. “If you want to ride, you have to buy it!” so saying the man sat down again, an affected expression hiding his indignation, sulking.

“What the….?”, the woman shrieked and moved away from the door. “Get away before I call my husband! We don’t give alms…” before she could finish her sentence and close the door, a small whimper caught her ears.

“It’s me, mother!”, came a teary voice.

the corridor with two rooms

Not much of an affair, the small room. Four ordinary walls painted ordinary colors; nothing rakish, nothing bland : just ordinary as every gray day is. What met and impressed the eyes were what were contained within those four plain walls. The only windows faced the east to catch and contain the morning rays. The west wall, for all its attempt at anonymity, was aglow most of the day with a golden veneer it shied from its brothers. Four gold rectangles adorned it while daylight lasted, shifting and skewing in shape as the day wore on. As the sun traversed its trajectory, the floor beamed, if only secondary its light, the three walls gray in their envy.

The books everyday a sunny day lent yellow perfused spines to weary eyes; the library was lucky to be on the west wall. The titles painted ordinary yellow now gilded beveled fonts soliciting curious fingers. Your fingers came off warm after running through them, and continued with the investigation of what lay behind and beyond.

Against one wall rested an aging mirror. What it reflected were true of the past and present; the future were rendered in refractions. Everything that had not passed yet would be montages of a hundred probabilities you would be safe not to rely on the bits of images that made up the what-could-can-be collage. Just when you were sure what an image was, another image took its place, or worse still, it morphed into something different altogether!

The third wall boasted a huge painting. A figure haughty and tall pointed into the distance. The angled light caught a part of his face, a face regal; determination for eyes, a proud nose and hard set lips. In the distance, fields ran for miles, yellow and russet in the evening sun, shadowy figures in the act of working the earth. What he pointed was not these but something out of the picture. One could never know. Did somebody crop the painting to feed a need, or was it meant to be a mystery? Nobody knew. She remembered asking, when there were people around, about the history, but all they remembered it was as it was. Now they were gone, the painting evoked the same feeling every time she came into the room, every time she came away from the other room.

She didn’t know exactly when she became alone. When she wasn’t, she never realized. It was as if she woke up from a dream full of people. Solitary, she wasn’t sure. Did these people exist? Or did she dream up something which her consciousness failed to fathom as the truth. A light throb at her temples made her wish she were ignorant. Dreams fused with reality and all that remained were grey shadows of doubt, doubt which deprived her of sleep, and all the shaking of her head in the face of the unknown did little or nothing. Over time, she learnt to ignore the impulses engendered by her senses, her rationale taking the helm of her life’s journey.

The corridor of no windows. It started grey and picked up nuances of beige, ever so lightly the subtlety was lost in its plain function; that of connecting the two lone rooms. Still more slightly, the walls angled so that standing in front of one room, the other room would be lost at the bend. The room came into view when one came about half of its length. The parallel lines parted as they neared, and a thin line emerged, getting thicker and thicker until the realization of a rectangle which fit the end of the corridor.

The bigger room. In keeping with its volume, there were more things here; a big bed at a corner flanked by a big bare table; the ceiling made to look and feel like a dome, the work of a fine artist who had made concentric patterns of blue which graded into a circle in the center; a wide wall-sized glass window frosted most of the time except on clear nights when the mist seemed to rise off the panes rendering them transparent and a universe of stars greeted the viewer’s eyes; a big mural decorated one wall. It was here that she would spend her nights, her days in the smaller room.

“The corridor!”, the reflection in the small room whispered. “the rooms are there to keep you away….”, the little girl in the mirror morphed into an aging woman. “remember!”, was all she could say as she transformed into herself.
She shook her head in surprise. The reflections were mimes till now. How had they found a voice?

As she lay in her bed, her head felt heavy. Rubbing her smooth temples with her porcelain hands, she closed her eyes.

“If you hear anything, don’t listen to it”, some one had warned. Who? A searing pain shot through her head. “The voices will take you back”. When? Where? What had warned her she could not recall, but a vague brittle memory lingered at the edge; a faint ember glowed in the dark cave of her subconscious.

“remember!”, the little girl began aging, became her, and the old lady.
“the corri…”

She woke up to find herself in the corridor, facing the smaller room. What was she doing there in the middle of the night? Something had wanted her to go to the mirror in the other room, she was sure.

She avoided the mirror. The voices were no more. Everything came back to as it was. Days convoluted into months. One day she noticed a change in the mirror. A sliver of crack ran from the middle to the top right corner. The origin was at the height her head was. She thought nothing of it but the ember in her cave gave off a faint glow.

“Shut up!”, a man’s voice said. “How did you come to the entrance?”
“Our collective thoughts are powerful”, a voice of a little girl which now became a woman’s and now a raspy old woman. “We know about the…” A loud crack put an end to the discussion. She must have sleep walked again to find herself at the door, privy to a conversation she wasn’t a part of. The ember glowed through a crack.

Retracing her steps deliberately, she put her hands to the two walls of the corridor, the textures now amplified to characters her eyes had missed. Eyes closed to the warmth of the glow inside, she let her hands guide her. With each little bump and hollow the glow intensified and images emerged from the depth of her subdued memories.

Her finger came off the wall with a prick. A dark glob balanced on her finger tip and fell, as she fumbled in the dark. “There you are!”, she whispered to herself, taking the piece of mirror from a tiny chink in the wall. Her nails traced a vertical line which took a right turn. Putting her palms together, she pushed open a door, and all the images that she thought were the makings of her disillusioned mind came back clear. “Nooooooooooo!!!!!!”, she could hear in the distance, as the door let in a blank white light.

Unmarked flesh wrinkled into weathered skin, blue veins transparent. Grey crept up slowly from the follicles and vision blurred.

She brought her withered hand to her withered face.