Marked for Misery

 

There was a man called, or rather nicknamed Sant. Well, some names tend to summarise the bearer’s persona exactly in the manner of their literal meaning. So if ‘Sant’ means an ascetic or a man of religion then our protagonist did full justice to it. Right from childhood, he took the unexciting sidewalk, trudging broodingly on the unpaved path—but lost in its own charm of forlorn dirt unstamped by the stampeding crowd of other children and their beaming childhood—going along almost as a mismatch to the usual hilarity and mirth of childhood.

He remained aloof. However, his non-participating, inconspicuous nature still vouchsafed for some inner peace and contentment with himself. Jestingly people started calling him a ‘sant’ for he was never involved in the oft-repeated countryside nuisance of the childhood on rampage. A very decent boy they dubbed him. And he indeed was one.  

Nonetheless, those who walk by the sidelines of busy, bustling road are tempted sooner or later by the clarion call of commonality. But those who still prefer their sidewalk need to turn along some further isolated bylane to keep following their own path of solace or strife whatever falls in their lap by the hand of destiny. Thus his adolescence found him parting ways even with the sidewalk from where the constant hoot and holler of the buzzing mainstream was feebly audible.

His status as one of the two sons of a poor farmer helped him initially in following the path defined by his nature. Everyone could see that he was drifting away from the so called worldly ways involving earning, marrying and raising children like everyone else did. His family as well as the villagers allowed him this unconventional space under the presumption that the elder son, his brother, was sufficient to fulfil all these duties. They expected the other son to get married and sire sons to keep the family name alive and get moksha for the parents. 

A boy of average health, common capabilities and almost non-existent wishes, he completed his matriculation with regular marks from the village school. All along his studentship he had been helping the ageing patriarch in their small landholding to retrieve the morsels of survival from the earth.

Then the things took a serious turn. His elder brother too, though possessing the dominant nature of rural rusticity that enjoys its patriarchal status to the fullest, deviated from the country-folks of his age in the matters regarding matrimony. Despite persistent pressure of the early marriage diktats, he somehow dodged the schemes of near and dear ones and enjoyed his days as a bachelor. Then the parents were gone leaving behind two young, bachelor orphans with a patrimony amounting to a few hundred rupees and a small landholding of just couple of acres.

During the seventies of the last century, the arrival of youth among the rural ruffians was defined by their defiance of the family and after a few beatings running away from home to grab the ever-existent job of a truck helper. The night-life along the road had all its attractions for these scions from a very conservative society. Alcohol, opium and sex workers along the tireless roads across the length and breadth of this big country were the major incentives of the trade, leaving the salary as a poor bonus only.

Sant became a truck helper. But even on the roads, he obstinately remained stuck-up to his sidewalk, i.e., he didn’t do what others normally did accepting it as their right to relieve their sleepless, exhausted selves. So the stories of his chastity in the much maligned job reached the village from the mouths of fellow drivers and helpers and this indeed further consolidated the status of his nickname.

‘He is really a sant,’ they slapped the compliment as he walked in the street with his red face and a broad forehead that showed some signs of a prematurely receding hairline, thus making it appear still broader.

Till now the bachelor status of his elder brother had been accepted. If not ready for the crush of bones in the cart of domesticity, why then break one’s back in the fields? He thus gave out the land on lease and started a tiny provision shop in the front part of their house. As the days passed, his interest for the profits diminished and the beard on his face grew longer.

Quite surprisingly, the people still found the younger one more stoic and saintly though he kept his face clean-shaven. Saintliness is no slave to long beards. The people thus happened to accept their status as such. But then change did occur. The people had, after all, accepted the brothers as bachelors; and the younger one more so, given his bearing and record.

But then there was a big stone in the tranquil waters of the pond. The younger brother jolted the villagers’ senses. He became a news item in the village.

‘Sant is going to marry!’ most of them exclaimed as if cheated by him for keeping the decision up to the critical limits of his forty odd years on earth.

The people easily conjectured that someone in need of being eased out of her tough situation, most probably on account of scandalous nature, had been thrown in his lap. Was it his own decision to marry? Or his elder brother forced him? Or some too dear and overpowering well-wisher convinced him? Nobody could tell for sure. It was a big question.

Most of us come in the form of human packets containing something good and something bad. The overall goodness or badness is defined by what is good or what is bad for the takers. Sometimes there is bad which is supposed to be good and vice-versa. Well, his bride was no exception. The good part was that she was extremely beautiful—fair coloured, finely balanced features, tall, slim and extremely feminine in stature. As a shy bride in her bridal attire, only this trait was the most show-piecing one and many were the hearts that jealously begrudged him such stroke of luck at the fag end of his youth. But once she came out of her bridal attire, what was wrong with the poor lady surfaced with point-blank precision.

She was a simpleton. As a female, she didn’t know how to put up a fine, showy covering over the naked pangs of desire. People usually have nice covers to defang their desires and present themselves as nice beings. To be frank, the humanity carries this naked desire in its still more naked form inside as the most predominant element of existence. But then we are sophisticated, cultured, refined enough to keep it attired in genteel socialising and stealthy prowls, keeping it hush-hush, all going in full throttle under the covers. She but was no expert in keeping the scandalous passion under the coquettish robes of morality and make-believe mannerism. Before the eyes of others it danced as nakedly as it did inside her.

Some said she was dim-witted; enough to be snared by the ever-spawning male desires. Within no time, there were many dandies in the village who wandered the streets and credibly claimed that they had tasted the sweetest fruit. To pamper their swarming passions, she was gutsy in her simplicity to go to any length. She was so bold regarding it that it could not have been credited to any other trait except dim-wittedness.

The elders said she wasn’t a fool. She just playacts being a dim-wit to feed the devil, they maintained. As a matter of fact, the lady was incapable of reining in the chariot of her rampaging passion. It was not in her capacity to turn it to marvellous, subtle, stealthy sojourns along the sideways and by-lanes like almost everyone else did. She thus went full throttle along the crowded street in broad daylight, making a mockery of all social endeavours to clad our passions under social fabrics, mores, conventions, ethics and the basket of moralities.

Then her history surfaced. She had been married thrice earlier; came out of each marriage as scandalously as she had entered a ‘house desperately in need of a bride’. Poor Sant was her fourth husband, while the number of lovers might have gone into hundreds. All along these natural satiations of her basic desires, the lady hadn’t conceived even once. Mockingly, they—thus—branded her a barren field where all eligible ploughers could dump their seeds without any prospects of a crop.

Her status of being a woman being jestingly hurt, she branded all the men around as impotent. Further poked by the puns, she flatly declared that she is yet to come across a real man. Thus her search for the real man continued, while the poor spouse suffered the society’s condemnation for being the husband of such an errant wife. He walked like a corpse lost in his thoughts of the other world—thoughts of grave. Already there were very loose strings through which he was related to the society; but now even those feeble sinews were snapped, leaving him drifting away and away from the society with each passing day.

Then one day the news busted.

‘Sant’s wife is pregnant!’ The news did tornado-kind rounds in the dusty streets. A great game of guess now occupied the people’s minds.

‘Who sired it?’ was the puzzle to be solved.

As the legal husband, Sant had every right to be called a father, but who cares for such legal norms; so even if poor Sant could have been easily the real father, the stompings of her free-wheeling passions took the searching trial far and wide. Failing in the quest, they left the answer to be settled by her only. But with a mischievous smile she guarded the teasing secret. Naughty and tormenting glint in her eyes always seemed lost in the wild imagery of that real man. Nonetheless, the truth was that even she had doubts.

She gave birth to a girl. Here, but, she showed the littlest bit of her wifely duty towards the tormented husband.

‘You are the real father of this girl!’ she had enough wits to declare it to the wronged husband, and his eyes glinted after so many lightless days and nights, as if he had finally achieved some compensation for all those horrid wrongs against his person by his wife.

For this moment of happiness, he even rewarded his wife by absolving her of all her past sins.

‘Maybe she went off the path to become a mother and now that she is going to be one, she’ll definitely mend her ways!’ he drew some solace.

Despite the society’s constant suspicious hen-pecking regarding the real father, he loved the girl child with all the emotions allowed by his soft heart. However, motherhood didn’t change her ways. Now that her matrimony had been further strengthened by the new-born daughter, she became even more liberal and free-spirited in the pursuit of her agonising desire. These days, she would vanish with her latest beau for days on ends; but would always return after each escapade.

In these hours of desperation, he was clinging to the girl for support with as much filial affection as his pathetically sulking existence allowed. Whenever she returned from a furlough, he tried to close the door in her face; but there are limitations to the opposing force put up by a gentle soul. She would easily break in—either using her own strength or with the help of some lover of bad repute who threatened the poor husband with dire consequences if he kept the wife out.

To augment her case further, all the carefully manicured laws to protect the women rights were in her favour for she belonged to that category of humanity that has been historically harassed and exploited by the male-dominated social system in India. Whenever he threatened to put her out of the house, she spoke out her more dangerous threat of going to the police. Since as a father now he had more responsibilities, he did try to put check-dams across the course of this freely gushing mountain river; and whenever checkmated, she responded with a hissing and sinister look. So to all her forte of easy morals, a newly fanged trait was added.

She then found someone whom she could clutch onto for months. This time she was away for many months. All along the period, the poor husband kept on praying for a satisfying life for her somewhere else. But then she returned and to add to the incessant flow of news, she was rumoured to be pregnant again. Carrying the child of that lover, she had tried her best to cling to him but he had very efficiently vanished into thin air. She thus returned with a heavy heart and heavy belly. This time the husband did his best to keep her out of the house.

‘I’ll not allow you to remain under this roof with that bastard inside you!’ he hollered against his otherwise calm and composed demeanour.

‘If you can keep one bastard then why not two!’ she hissed like a snake.

The fort of his resistance caved in and she entered triumphantly. All through those months of pregnancy his face turned graver and graver. He was at that stage of his parentage when he couldn’t stop loving the girl. He constantly convinced himself that he was the real father of that girl and she was just lying to punish him for his resistance to her freeways. The more he pondered over it, the surer he became of his fatherhood.

He was now living separately from his brother, who witnessing the deeds of his sister-in-law had distanced himself from the whole episode.

Without any jest and urge for life, Sant now survived on the tiny plot of land falling in his share. Sadly, there was hardly any farmer’s excitement as he worked in the field and the child played nearby. To earn a few morsels for the kid seemed to be the only aim left in life.

This time it was a boy that was delivered under his roof. Again she took to her natural ways as soon as she was out of bed. During such absences he, now, had to take care of two children. But even after drawing out all the niceties in him, he could not help disliking the boy at least because he was sure of its illicit origination.

As if to draw the last nail in his coffin, she then eloped with a relative of his and didn’t come back for months. During this period his health went plummeting down; but those around barely discern the changing colours of a stone. To them he had become a perennially sulking statue. A stone he was while feeding and taking care of the daily needs of the boy and the girl. His only moments of being human silently surfaced only when he cuddled his daughter. Every passing day convinced him more and more that she was his real daughter, while the very same day further added to the gulf between him and the boy. It is not that he was always a stone to the boy. Sometimes the moisture of pity and piety would emerge on his stony surface and he would mutter:

‘A poor orphan! Both his father and mother are as good as dead to him!’

It would have gone on like this for we don’t know what period of time, but then something snapped inside him one day. The girl was aged five at this time; the boy was just two. Through one honest instinct he knew that storms of circumstances finally lashed the crewless ship of his life. The life inside protested for his criminal negligence of himself; for such is the bird of life in this cage of body—it goes on ever making the cursing noises against the confines and limitations, but when the cage gives in, it turns fearful of the vast freedom, and cringes over the broken wires.

Poor Sant knew that he should consult a doctor. But there was no money (less importantly), nor was there any will to live (more importantly).

The boy had never appeared more than an orphan to him. He thus took him to an orphanage and returned only with the daughter to the village. The stony mountain inside him that had steadily built up precipitously over the years had gone too high and steep for its bearing capacity. Shaken by the unnaturally heaving soufflés of his heart, he knew it might collapse any time, any day. His heart now seemed incapable even to carry those fatherly palpitations for the daughter, like a panting mule, heavily saddled, giving a laborious jerk to its brittle bones. During these moments of peril, he clung to the child for support, for no other support was available. Strangely, to the villagers he was the very same Sant who had been always like this—unassuming, unobtrusive, introvert, almost deaf and dumb.

For the last two months or so, his pretty wife wasn’t around, so nobody cared to talk about him. But some soul, which hadn’t the hardest, insensitive shell of self-interest around it, sometimes mentioned in group gatherings that today Sant looked at him in a strange manner. Yes! Stared he at certain faces in the village who he considered had never mocked his circumstances. And it fell like a blessing upon them. Its meaning, but, nobody could interpret.

One day, then, the slope gave away under its own overbearing weight. At dusk, when the sun was gathering its last ray-lets to play with them in the other world, he died of cardiac arrest. The girl was playing in the street while her father collapsed in the room. The door was locked from inside. The people’s attention was drawn to the crying girl who was pulling at the window from outside.

The initial thought of the people was that he had committed suicide, taking a clue from the door bolted from inside. We know for sure, but, that he hadn’t died the way they thought. But why he had bolted the door from inside? Maybe in his stony contempt for this pretentious world, he wanted to keep himself away from its prying looks even after his death.