Multiple shades of a mundane day

 

From the mirror of the past: a long-forgotten entry from an old journal.

September 21, 2007. World Peace Day. Maybe. For I am not sure of it. Even if it is, it’s just like any other mythical, unattainable thing, like the unreachable calls from the traditional past because there seems to be no real peace. Though they try to impose this mass illusion, this concept of peace. It’s not even a tattered veil to obstruct the rays of pinching reality from reaching us. It’s a make-believe, see-through medium through which we hoodwink at the aggressive eccentricities glaring down from the ebullient, hotter, fiercer, unclean face of the modern sun.

The new slogan ‘Chak De India’ is infusing fresh energy into Indian sport’s hitherto lethargic body. But now floods of adrenaline seem to be pumped through the sluggish veins injected with the big doses of catalyst brewed in the pumped-up hysteria of the triumphanism-hungry masses of a resurgent India who want to forget the past inefficiencies and present’s injustices to jump into—pell-mell stampede—the bandwagon of progress and materialism. They grab at every sinew to float their puny dreams to majestic distances in the choppy seas. Even if it means butchering, pruning, cutting, slaying, trimming the mammoth, majestically uncertain, saggily bearded tree of the once ‘gentlemen’s game’.

After all, modern dreams, passions and nostalgic hoopla are best carried piggyback on the fiery lean-mean, unsparing back of a utilitarian, fast, unclassy rocket. Twenty 20 is just such a machine, capable of carrying the hyper-sensitively frothing, bubbling dreams to higher and higher orbits. Cricket in its traditional form is too senile and classy to offer its back with limited, specified, specialized seat capacity to carry the mass, modernist passion. So the horde is humping down enmass to the faster trolley.

Last night we defeated South Africa to enter the T20 World Cup semifinals creating a mid-night hoopla all around the country. All the fears, inhibitions, pricked conscience born of inefficiencies firmly rooted in every nook corner of our beloved country were unbridled and the traditional elephant roared with the throat of a lion and galloped with the agility of a horse. It had galloped still higher when on the night before the last one Yuvraj Singh hit six sixes in one over of young Mr. Broad from England. An overarching swipe of jubilation across the length and breadth of this big country; burying the overstrained creaking, nervous, painful voices of its floorboards and wheels; turning the masses oblivious of the systematic perforation into its sheets, of tiny noises, of puny mutinies.

So on this day (September 21) when India celebrates the ecstatic lynchings of mass excitement among the cocaine-snorted, lion-hearted rabbits enjoying the mirthful bat-ball slaying in the unsparing, brittle, brisk, crisp version of the once gentlemen’s game, one little tragedy (on the scale of the nation) has fallen, crashing on my tiny being with its mammoth force. Cousin brother Andy alias Pintu alias Pardeep completed his journey on this eventful, fateful, excellent, majestic, tragic day.

The tragedy took place between eleven and twelve in broad daylight on the railway track at our local town. The place where there used to be the railway crossing for the district road, which but now speedily flies over the railway tracks carried by the massive concrete blocks and pillars of a new flyover.

Here poor Andy met his unknown, silent end while frenzied media blared the songs of sporty excellence. The tyres on the flyovers sped with burning hot rubber. The long metal snakes, the centipedes of common pride and individual pains hurtled over the merciless, straight, aloof, lifeless, cold, hot, hard, steely tracks. All these busy in making it another day.

Cousin brother Pintu, somehow, deliberately as well involuntarily (what else is alcohol addiction?) came between (like a comma unwanted in the metallic sentence’s rod rigidity) metallic speed and ever-receding destinations. And it swiped him over in one stroke. Just brushed him away.

His left foot mutilated, the symbol of cold, hot, hard grip by one of the rolling feet of the centipede of death and destination; his head smashed on the planks, rails, rail boards of concrete, wood and metal; his roundish bearded face lined with blood from the ears, mouth and nostrils.

By the time the rail workers took his body to the civil hospital, all the hoopla of the world peace day, sports victories, flyovers, railway tracks had ceased to exist for Cousin Pintu. And there his body lay in the emotionally immune, stony, unclean, depilated hospital mortuary. In an abandoned corner—overgrown with bushes and weeds—of the hospital premises. On the lifeless, mute, post-mortem concrete block.

The small frame of the thick set, heavily bespectacled doctor emerged after performing the task. Stone dead tiled walls stared at cousin brother’s peacefully, tragically laid out body on the post-mortem block. The last stage of hospital formalities for the corpse before packing it in the white body bag. And we the little punctuation-mark brothers of our swiped-away comma brother lined, wept, mustered up courage to roll him into white sheets to carry him home for cremation.

People say that he over-drank himself to death. But given the honesty of his conscience I would always spare him this flaw, chronic drinking. Even though he would have been a very successful householder without it, instead of leaving this world as a 35-year-old bachelor, weak of health and with a bit strayed mental balance during his last fortnight on earth.

Whom should I blame? His madness in love for a girl belonging to a different caste whom he wasn’t permitted to marry and which basically caused his fall into alcoholism? Or the unsparing, caste-based society? Or his family’s inability to adjust his offbeat love chemistry in a society cast in rigid, conservative mould?

If I try to answer, so many ghosts from the past will come alive, a whole lot, with their pointy cause-laden fingers into the troubled, stifled relations in our family. I will talk of it sometime later. Presently, the death of a nice childhood playmate stares in its chilly abstractness.  

Childhood memories arrive like sunrays cutting across a curtain of fog—some carry sharp stakes of pain, some beckon with a pearly hiatus, some like bland soup, some like fidgety foragers, some heart rending, some making a passing reference.

Only the air is left, the air of memories, of what was once cousin Andy.