Truth Unlocked

 

What separates us from the rest of our fellow inhabitants of earth is that while doing most of the things that every living being does we seek justice in response to any hurt feeling or loss accruing on account of these activities. Justice! So to save the civil society from the blatant outrage born of our rampant passions, we have structured the notions of crime, redemption, justice, good, bad, moral and immoral.

Unlike other species that are led by the limitations of natural instincts for survival, we humans have motivations beyond mere survival. We have our set of choices that drive our activities in a way that these can shape our primal instincts into goodness reaching the heaven and badness touching the hell.

Justice, alas, has been the unattainable goal so far. During those long and protracted legal battles, the intention of redemption to the victim and punishment to the wrong-doer repeatedly gets severe jolts. Our partisan, bipolar system ensures that despite the best of intentions, the legal system is again and again undone by the class differential. Here again, the rich, famous and the powerful outsmart the investigating agencies. It proceeds as per the ‘law of the survival of the fittest’ to ensure that the less privileged find judiciary almost unresponsive to their plight.

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In the early fifties of the past century, a crime was committed in the nondescript surroundings of countryside. A zamindar’s accountant raped a peasant girl. For generations it had been going on like this. However, what made it a crime on this occasion was the fact that this time the victim lodged an FIR. Given his status, the zamindar won’t have allowed his munsi even to be arrested. A zealous officer, however, ensured that the arrest was carried out. Fearing that the relatively rich and powerful accountant—with the help of his master—would hijack the law, the officer tried his best to hold the baton of criminal justice firmly.

Nonetheless, we have an over-lenient and over-precautious system with its own oath of ‘not guilty till proven so’. Unfortunately, in its frenzied and deadly focused provisions to save every single innocent human being, it has been letting go scot-free thousands of wrong-doers, for the provisions that save an innocent person save many criminals at the same time.

There is mammoth area of discretion in the hands of law functionaries at every stage. Justice says, ‘I will base myself on the presumption of the witnesses not lying under the oath’; Criminal Procedure Code hesitatingly seems to say, ‘Commit a crime but don’t leave any circumstantial evidence.’

Justice has based itself on so many flimsy grounds: the witness—they turn hostile very easily, in fact it is the most expected turn of events in any case; evidence—it can be easily destroyed and fabricated. It can be easily presumed—as per the laws of class structure—the higher class involved in the case easily takes the justice establishment in its tow after cleanly, legally fulfilling most of the terms and conditions of police and judiciary. And like the mankind’s eternal quest for truth, the ‘quest for justice’ also remains elusive like ever before.

It happened exactly so in this case also. The supposed objectivity in the system’s functioning was easily hijacked. Many people had seen her being dragged away but nobody turned up as a witness. It put the entire onus on the victim to prove that she had been raped. The investigating officer, the inspector whom the zamindar invited to his night-long drunken regalia of music, dance and debauchery, smartly came with the report that the doctor’s observation does not find any signs of rape, rather the semen strains of her lover were found on her person.

During those days, the forensic investigations were yet to shine as brightly as these days to lay bare the dark strains of the evil-doer. As to the torn clothing that could have proved that she had been raped, the said crucial evidence was nowhere to be found. In reality, the rapist had burned her poor clothes and then turned her out of the barn naked to go beseeching justice for her wronged self. God behold the criminal jurisprudence because given the social taboo only the rarest of the rare rape case was reported during those days (out of the numerous happening around) and these solitary ones too became victim to the justice miscarriage.

****

Unbothered about this injustice, the time simply fled off. And now we come to the next decade. At the time of his crime, the accountant had a little daughter. Like all good and bad people, he dearly loved the little star of his mediocre household. The memory how he had committed a crime against a girl from the huts was long past him.

Skyrocketed by the generations of exploitation, the local landowner now had shifted to the city with gold pieces in lieu of the tears of the labour class. Here they had diversified the business to turn richer and more famous. The accountant was a manager of one of the master’s establishments. His girl fully blossomed like a girl should under comfortable conditions. She now studied in a college. The master’s son, with whom she had played in her childhood, now eyed her with the passion of first love’s purity and unadulterated possessiveness. It but became a crime given the earth-sky difference between the families.

‘She is the daughter of a wretched, servile, poor, rapist servant of ours, whom I once saved to enable him to continue surviving on our crumbs!’ the city-level famous father thundered.

However, it was that stage of love wherein the couple’s eyes emanated such light that they turned blind to everything around. Overexcited and no longer able to bear separation they eloped. Given his resources and reach he tracked them down. But only the boy was brought back, heartbroken and almost shackled like a prisoner. In his mourning, he didn’t know what happened to his wife—as he called her now—and how he had been brought back home.

The girl’s father was now at odds against a superior foe. He was not in a position to confront him personally. As law is the refuge of the weak (and suitable ladder to go higher to the strong), he went prostrating before the court to plead justice.

****

To say that judiciary has absolute powers would be quite justified. There are no checks and balances and in its safe corridors—for corruption, extortion and manipulation—thousands of weaklings cringe perpetually to get justice. There are hardly any checks and balances which can bracket, define or limit the system of justice at all levels from sending out verdicts based on most unjustified—but soundly authenticated by the stamp of legality through tempering, bribing, threatening—of occurrences and mishaps.

The conduct of a judge is not to be raked; he cannot be held responsible for the verdict as a human being. However, his verdict can be safely—from his point of view—revoked by the higher judiciary. The dispenser of justice is always beyond any scrutiny. His act may be trashed but not him. Even while a lower court’s verdict is overruled by a higher one, the latter does not find anything farcical, contemptuous or immoral in the former’s judgement.

The judge is accepted to be beyond any strain of susceptibility. So if a judgement is not upheld by the superior judiciary, it is from the point of view of insufficiency of implementation and application of laws. So the judgement (effect) becomes erroneous, leaving the black robe of justice (cause) spotlessly clean. No wonder, there are malpractices which stand clean on the scale of constitutionality. 

The legal fraternity boasts of its black gown! What a choice of colour! Pour any quantity of filth on it, it but will remain the same! The politicians perched at the highest level wield the rein in their safe hands. They directly indirectly recommend the names of the judges. In most of the cases in which some hapless individual is pitted against the mighty institution of the government, the very same lawyers whom that meek fellow hires at an exorbitant rate to defend his interest against a belligerent state dupe his client covertly—in majority of the cases—and hobnob with the governmental agencies. It happens so frequently that it virtually becomes a rule with law and judiciary.

Higher the treason to the real spirit of a common man’s justice-seeking cause, the greater the rewards, including appointments to the posts of judges. It won’t be surprising to find a practising lawyer suddenly sitting as a judge—the tier of his seat being directly proportional to the treason or compromise with morality.

****

The unfortunate father whose daughter was missing ran from pillar to post for two months. The report had been filed against the rich and famous by the lesser mortal. And who cared for such non-issues during those days, after all the belligerent media of the 21^st century was a far cry when even the radio news was out of reach to the masses. The city police colluded with the accused. How could they dare to bring him to the books for he, to add little contribution to the general rot of the system, was in hand-in-glove with the local politicians and musclemen.

The sessions judge tried to play a proactive role to ensure conviction and find the truth. But if one cog hasn’t been corrupted, the other can be tried. In this case, the stronger party had a go at the police and they systematically and diligently weakened the case. The police produced the accused before the court with much flimsy and untenable evidence—as if it were acting like defense. This help plus an astute amount of legal time purchased by the rich man made such a weighty defense statement that the judge, fully convinced of the accused’s hand in some wrongdoing, merely ogled in shock, despair, resignation and helplessness while granting bail. He knew the important and defining role of police in ensuring conviction. The fact here was that the girl was missing, but the police was investigating the case from a partisan, biased and improper angle. As the case went ahead, he just stared in mock exasperation at the deliberate lapses in the functioning of police regarding the missing girl.

Nevertheless, the quest for truth and justice was the court’s duty, so despite the severe handicaps of the system, the honourable judge continued to put pressure on the police to find the truth behind the missing girl. However, the path to truth was obstructed by the best of legal advisors. These are the luminaries who can make and break witnesses and turn the truest of evidence into most pathetic nonentity or change a speck of dust into something that can make or break a life. Under their sustained and dexterous onslaught, the judge had to quell the spirit of justice and he declared the accused free and innocent for lack of any tangible evidence. The puzzle of the missing girl was left as an open riddle so that people could ask the question, ‘What happened to her?’

Her father and their well-wishers were devastated. Their combined baggage of grudges went somewhat like this:

‘...money and muscle power has ensured miscarriage of justice...she was such a charming nice girl, look it has hardly led to shock and anger against the farce.... It is jungle Raj, her family has been devastated while the perpetrators are roaming free and happy.... Mere slogan shouting in private won’t help, we should hold protests, demonstrations to make justice time-bound, make system transparent—it was a law student. Shame on Shyam who turned hostile to the memory of his love and said under oath that he had nothing to do with Sarla!’

Many had seen the boy and the girl going around as a couple but nobody came forward as a witness to the alleged love affair between them. For months they had been dilly dallying with the mute requests, to no effect, made by an almost inconsequential prosecution staff in the case. The girl’s father was no more in a position to take the legal battle at the next level.

****

Following our trail of justice or rather injustice, we now come to the seventies. Aspirations soar and spiral upwards. Following this law, the hereditary zamindar drifting along the developing India had become an absentee landlord and based himself as an influential businessman. Still looking upwards, he sent his daughter—the youngest of his brood and the peach of his heart—to a college in Bombay, the city of dreams and development.

She was really beautiful, its whole feeling seeping into the very pores of her skin. She carried an aloof, dismissive air.  Her flirting coquetry raised many an aspiring eyes towards her. Over all, she didn’t appear to care a rap even about the most handsome, powerful and influential face of any man around. She thus became a coveted trophy on the campus and who’ll win her heart became a matter of gross, illogical, infatuated war among the lovers.

One of her suitors was the scion of a prominent national level industrialist family. Arrowed and slain by the criminal negligence shown by her to his humiliated, arrogant, slithering advance, he would shriek into the ears of his friends:

‘She is a fool. Puts on so much of air...even our servant’s status would match her father’s!’

As can be naturally estimated, theirs was a politically linked family. His father had twice been an MLA. Being brought up in this evil opulence of money and politics, he had all the devil’s pampering to his young and budding ego. His ever-agitated soul thus went to the lowest gloom of unrequited love. After his decent, balanced advancements bearing no fruit, he like an ever-obliging lover went on his knees to plead his love; wrote his heart’s demands on a paper with his real blood. And like the intensity of fire mysteriously, stealthily burning for the decimation of the moth around the flame, her secret enjoyment in tormenting him by her feigned manners of ignorance about him, she brought this pampered spoilt brat to the brink of his inflamed passion’s blind fury.

Reaching the next stage of frustration, he began intimidating her. The more he tried to stalk her, the more aloof, withdrawn, dismissive and cold she became to his treacherous advances. The poor girl was fully convinced that he was merely putting up a showy drama—for how could someone harm somebody whom he really loved—so like a fire prolonging its burning in order to tickle and flirt with the moth’s wings, she got out of fuel, rather say, she burnt herself out.

Lost in the hopeless pit of his unrequited love, he stabbed her right in front of the hundreds of horrified eyes on the campus lawn. For each of his innocent pinch to his heart, he gave her cold-blooded murderous stabbings. Her father was crushed beyond imagination at the sight of his decimated rose. Like all who have money and muscles, his first instinct was to romp home to the portals of justice by taking the short-cut of doing it himself using the resources at his own end. However, whether we do it or not is determined by our relative strength (money and muscle wise) vis-à-vis the opponent. Hence after the initial fretting and fuming, this fact dawned upon him and the aggrieved father ran to the institutional law to seek justice for his slain girl.

Many a time, the law had been at his side because by the grace of God his interests had pitted him against the weaker ones. Now but he was up against a bigger force. As a true conniver himself regarding where and how the case can be deliberately weakened, he took utmost care to avoid such a pitfall. However, the proximity among the top cops and the boy’s prominent family ensured almost a tardy and wilfully neglected investigation right from the beginning. (It will remain so as long as the ramparts of endless paperwork lie between the cold-blooded murderer and the victim.)

The evidence was criminally mucked up by the investigating officer. His acts of omission and commission ensured that the weapon of murder was never found. The police officials bombarded the trial court with wrong information; then shrewdly deflecting the case of justice, they made the prosecution’s case so weak that within six months the murderer came out on bail. Once out of the jail, he regained all his former luxuries in full style. During the ensuing long and protracted dates during the coming months and years (fetched by the deceased’s father using his level of clout and money) the ugly nexus between police and prosecution made the defender’s case so weighty that the fabric of justice was once again torn.

The system of justice has been lampooned. A cold-blooded murder in broad daylight is not supposed to take place unless corroborated by some witnessing eyes. Let’s hope under the hawk’s eye things have changed these days. The mechanical eye does not need to get scared of a bullet as a witness. The human eye pretended not to see so many wrongs in the past; to save troubles; to save its own poor skin. It makes the whole society literally a conniver in hiding the real witnesses in its safe crowd watching from a safe distance.

The power and stature of the boy’s family was such that it intimidated the whole college. The students’ petrified families admonished them to desist from any imprudence. All said they were not around the scene of the crime when it happened and the law (so easy to fool it) was blind-forced to suppose that the lawn must have been empty that day; somebody was in the classroom; somebody in the canteen; in laboratories; everywhere except the lawn.

It dragged hopelessly for five years. The additional sessions judge, fully aware of the inevitability of the impotency of justice under his hammer, made it a means of getting advancement in his career. So without perpetuating the agony and farce of it any more, he gave the verdict of not guilty in return for posting as a High Court Judge.

The girl’s father approached the High Court. However, by now the crime was too far both in time and space. In the misty distance, the prosecution itself had left so many unexplored and untouched issues and left it in such a terribly messed up farcical way that it was almost impossible to put together the pieces of circumstantial evidence. The defense case appeared almost super-strong in the absence of any deposition by even a single eyewitness.

From the FIR to the post-mortem report, everything had been messed up in such a manner that though the court accepted the girl died but as to the fact of who committed the murder it stayed beyond the possibility to know and prove as per the known facts in the files. The girl’s father knew that all he could do—at a great cost to himself—was just to drag the case on and on. Disgusted and almost crippled old, he left it to die after his natural death on the sick bed of judiciary...to be lost in the misty corridors of law full of webby provisions, clauses, sub-clauses, conditions, statutes that have the stealth and expertise to acquit a cold-blooded murderer.

Meanwhile, the more influential family of the murderer, after trapping the system to commit deliberate lapses through fabrication and conspiracy, thrived as per their power and status allowed them. The fact of the girl’s death existing only on papers now. It has to be noted that even the blood-stained clothes had disappeared of late.

How can we blame judiciary only, after all it is a game of disproving (majorly) the crime? The major thrust of the application of judicial mind is towards whitewashing the truth, for both true and false parties have equal means to exploit and the superior (mostly the wrong-doer) avails himself of the better application of laws. All it boils down to is the superior legal skills irrespective of the moral debate of right and wrong.

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Now we move onto the next stage of crime at the next hierarchy. In the ebullient eighties, when the revengeful politicians were inciting mobs to communal murder, loot and arson in Delhi to increase their quotient of loyalty in the darbar of the first political family in the country, one high profile crime happened in the pink city of Jaipur.

Efficiently guided by a don-turned-politician, the father of the absolved murderer of the girl managed to get the grand patriarch of the family elected as a member of parliament. In the mercurial political waters following the killing of the iron lady, a get-together of politicians, industrialists and bureaucrats (who all wanted to discuss aftermaths and strategy for their own better future) was held at Jaipur. The convener was an all-powerful scion of Rajasthan royalty.

The royalty no longer existed in its direct form but thousands of years of history brimming with all powerful monarchy, magnificent palaces, marching armies of staff and servants, unchecked opulence and the consequent unrestrained enjoyment of the same, display, exploitation, rewards and punishment were just less than four decades old. Even though the iron lady had abolished the privy purses, the erstwhile ruling families still wielded considerable power. By the way, they hated her for this and hated PM Nehru even more for usurping the throne of the whole of India, depriving them of their principalities and provinces, putting India as a mass-stricken poverty plagued democracy under elected sovereigns.

Perks, wealth, stature and respect still existed in the desert state for the former rulers to be called princes and kings both in letter and spirit. These foreign educated and alumni of Mayo College Ajmer were in towering businesses, senior-most offices in bureaucracy and foreign services thanks to their regal past. So there were ambassadors, commissioners, judges, secretaries and ministers among the different scions of former royal families.

In the agitated and excited aftermaths of the killing of the PM, with scared, flirtatious excitement this important mass of the choicest section of society gathered in the magnificent audience hall of the glittering palace (now turned into a heritage hotel by the prince) to condole the death and still more importantly to know (without baring the truest thoughts going in their minds) what others thought and how better options could be chosen for future in order to safeguard their self-interests.

Except the humble waiters, who moved servilely and mechanically, without any outer show of interest in the luxurious feast and talk, not a single less important persona was present in the august gathering. The gathering talked as a whole, then in still smaller groups drifted as per carefully chosen interests, then in still smaller ones as they came to the specifics. They were trying to measure up the common frequency. Then in the wee hours, with flushed drunk faces they entered still more seriously into the more private recesses, in two, three and fours to stand trial for their own interests and prospects.

Late next morning, the industrialist-cum-politician was found dead on the bed in his magnificent room. His eyes with a look of acute surprise popped open and blood from the left temple had trickled down to darken the velvety soft bedspread he’d lain himself upon so happily, with stars in his eyes for a better tomorrow. The unlocked room from inside and the presence of no weapon made murder self-evident.

Then started the long and mammoth approach of law for on that night of murder so many important and influential personalities were sleeping and luxuriating in the rooms of the same palace-cum-hotel. The owner prince fretted, fumed and repeatedly emphasised that it was suicide, finding it less stigmatising than a murder on his premises.

‘What has happened, has happened! Now make it a suicide case. I don’t like too much of your policing and snubbing around my palace!’ he fumed at the Joint Commissioner (Crime) a distant nephew of his.

Given their stature, the police could do it in a routine, fair manner to arrive at a convenient report. Mostly the servants were forced to depose in a way to suit the suicide theory. Very conveniently the pistol involved in the suicide had surfaced. The evidence was padded in a manner, amply testified by false witnesses, that the culpability of anybody other than the dead man himself in taking his own life was beyond question. So there were waiter witnesses who deposed before the judge how they had broken the door and described in great detail the suicide scene. The pistol was presented. The real bullet was changed for the innocent spent cartridge taken out from the said pistol and sent for ballistic and forensic examination in its nascent stage in India of eighties.

In this battle of justice, the individual was pitted against the class. So ‘class’ as a superior entity ensured that the murder passed as a suicide. The FIR had been registered on the complaint of the deceased’s friend, the don-turned-politician who might have had his suspicions early on but settled to the fact that the muck was settling down in the jar. So that was that.

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So the game of justice goes on. All this talk of justice seems another means for the superior to manipulate his will, to cover his evil-doing. Only God seems to be doing justice through his incidental hammer through chance occurrences in which the crime doer of yesterday gets outwitted by the superior wrong-doer of today (through manipulation of police and judiciary of course) who in turn gets undone by some more superior person at the next hierarchy.

The judiciary thus comes out to be the means and mechanism of meting out justice (though by giving wrong judgements) by the divine agency. For if judiciary does not fail today, how will a wrong-doer of yesterday be punished? That’s how it goes fella!

We shouldn’t throw too many bricks at the system of law, for its fallibility ensures that justice is somehow done in the longer sense of the term. However, it is dependent upon the divine intervention—of putting a former evil-doer against a superior wrong-doer of the present.

The Mountain Mist still Exists

 

Dal Lake is indeed the pride of Srinagar. During the winters when the temperature goes below zero, its waters freeze allowing the children to play on the slippery playfield. The quayside along the road circuiting the famous lake gets buried under thick snowflakes. The frozen lake appears like a huge runway cradled in the lap of mountains. The boulevard facing the frozen water body is wet and muddy under squelching shoes and skidding vehicle tyres.

The surrounding hills appear like huge snowy tents floating in the skies to shelter humanity from the tough weather elements. The weather-beaten chinars defy these snowy diktats. The higher mountains shine feebly in the background of greyish haze. Their tops lost in the misty maze of clouds. The slopes appear as if flour has been sprinkled over them.

Here on the icy playground the dwarf played. Then one day the ice cracked a few paces from him. He saw a child being drawn into the water. His small, stunted, robust figure lunged forward showing surprising agility. Although he got hold of the child’s hand, the congenital challenge to his physicality prevented him from applying bodily force matching his soul’s will. The child drowned. Anguish whiplashed his face as a chilly wind hit his puffy features.

In Kashmir people wear a type of great coat, a long coat of wool or tweed, called Pheran, during the winters. But he was so endowed with his particular faculty concerning height that even during the summers the smallest of shirts kissed his heels.

The next day, the authorities forbade everybody from playing on the precarious snowfield.  The shikaras stood like ships stranded on treacherous sandbanks. Little icicles were lying here and there waiting for the children to be picked up, kicked, thrown at someone’s woolly cloak or to be hit with a piece of wood. But death lay in waiting somewhere below some weakness of frozen molecules, where some playful foot might get into the chancy snare. The leafless trees bordered the lake in a continuous blackish zigzag like a peculiar barcode of winter.

****

In a shivering frenzy, the winter had unsheathed its icy fury that was symbolized by the sword-like icicles hanging down the eaves. The snow-sabred foliage of chinars stood like greyish spectres in countless swathes of white. The snowfall had been so heavy that the accumulation outraced the slip-off from the slanting roofs. As a result, many roofs looked painted in white. The soil on the palm of mother earth seemed replaced by the snowflakes. The ice becomes the soil in winters. Shivering bones, drooping figures and chattering teeth was all that we could make of the phenomenon of being human. The people tried to carry on with life hidden under as much wool and animal skin as possible.

Still the religious festivity and fervour pumped up warmth in the soul. The spiritual warmth, fraternity and soulful hilarity seemed to defy the cold, frigid dictates of life on the eve of Bakr-Eid falling in the second week of January. The arrival of the holy day suffused the marketplaces with new energy. The finely carved, pillared balconies and the ornate arches above the ground level shops witnessed a fine spectacle below. The uppermost balconies crowned by the overhanging ice from the roof top patronisingly loomed over the busy marketplace. The people were excitedly busy in shopping for the festival. The excited voices of the vendors flaunting heaps and heaps of exquisite bakery and meat items spiced with the soul of Kashmiriyat made it up for the lack of sunshine.

Eid is the festival of fraternity. Its charm is multiplied when the weather gods shower snowflakes as gifts. The Hazratbal shrine, its precincts clothed in cottony snowflakes, has a special charm during the Eid prayers.

Passing through or rather letting the people overtake him, for he had very short strides, he hastened to add his low, gruffly voice to the undercurrents of the teeming faithful.

There were women in cloaks. They wore the traditional hijab, a black cloak from head to ankles with its face flap (having eye slits). Some had a black cloth tied as a hood over the face and the head leaving only the eyes open. However, now the tradition seemed adapting to the newer times. Brightly coloured—yellow, red, green, chequered—headscarves could also be seen. Though tied in all protection, these colours left at least half of the face open. The burqas also had minimal embroidery around neck and cuffs.

A woman in a multi-coloured scarf and a long brown jacket over her cloak passed him and he was struck by her beauty. But she was too tall for him. The feeling of his short stature hit him really hard at such times. After all, he had the full heart of a man. A heart is seldom crippled by any physical shortcoming in the body. It’s its own master.

From a distance he saw the women praying, their arms stretched in front, the palms cupped out to beseech love, joy and prosperity in life. He too bowed his large head, contemplating over the Almighty, and prayed for peace and normalcy to return to this place. After all, it was once known as the ‘heaven on earth’.

****

It was a snowy Sunday. The National Highway had been closed due to snowfall leaving the valley isolated—even the Srinagar-bound flights had been cancelled—in its white icy cradle. The valley would now survive on the stocks of essential commodities, kerosene and LPG. The snowfall continued till afternoon on this Sunday; then it stopped leaving alleys, side-alleys, main streets and the cross lanes in Srinagar under a thick layer of snow.

In this quaint alley, boasting three-storeyed buildings having glass fronted wooden-framed windows overlooking the street, a rut had just been created by a cumbersomely driven pony cart. There was snow everywhere, snow on the fencing grills encircling the open fronts of the ground level shops, snow on the roofs, snow on the leafless chinar branches in front of houses, on a hand-pulled cart lying almost abandoned in a pile of snow. Only the electricity poles and wires seemed to escape the icy onslaught. Pigeons in hundreds were flocking out. Many flying, flapping mid air, others sitting lined on the wires stoically, some sitting and walking on the whitened ground, and many others cooed from the projecting ledges over the upper most balconies.

****

Like weeds and pests, the insurgents threatened the agriculture painstakingly nurtured by the Indian State for almost six decades. Hence these needed to be eliminated. After all, no hardworking farmer would like his hard work to go in vain and won’t dither from using poison to do away with the nuisance. The army was fraught with the tough task of neutralising the terror capabilities of the militant organisations.

The LeT with its parallel cells (functioning independently) was a big menace for the security forces. Its stealthy structure was expertly funnelling funds to the parallel cells through informants operating so disguisedly that even their family members had no clue to their deeds. So the snow kept on falling, the army busy in cracking codes; the messengers and informants busy in whisking away secrets to and fro; the code names cracking over the radio call with its tick tick ‘Cheetah 786’ and many more.

It was a gruesome thaw in the snow. The mentors across the border kept busy in expertly pumping intrigue. Shady characters with blooded hands zealously engaged in jihad and organised terror attacks as per their version of service to God. The army going, as a result, overenthusiastic in countering the threats.

The army top brass was nudging their heads in puzzlement about this commander having the authority to issue Lashkar communiqué. The faceless man was known under a different identity to the over-ground cadre. There were various alias about him. His operational secrecy was impeccable. Even the long-standing operatives were not too sure about the real identity of this planning, guiding force.

The public relations chief of the outfit, working under a covert identity, himself had vague ideas about this inspirational figure, as he sneaked threats and fatwas to the newspaper offices and expected the said great man to be hidden somewhere in the command bunkers in the hills. In the cadre itself, there was a talk that ‘the chilli in the Indian eyes’ had been spotted giving a hell-raising speech against the Indians. Some said he organized a training camp in Sumblar forests. There were also talks of his movements in the forests of Bandipora mountains.

****

The dwarf didn’t remember his parents. As his short, stubby limbs grew in their stunted roundness, he realised his status and put himself in a world distant and apart from the rapidly, furiously, long-striding mundane life. To the latter, he was just a show-casing object to be laughed at and ogled at with mocking muse while with his short, stubby legs he put up an effort to catch up with the fleeting scene around him. But Srinagar on the eve of the new millennium was running away still faster. Terrorism was at its peak and so was counter-terrorism. Attacks, counter-attacks, gun smoke, rattling shots pulsed in the throbbing veins of this once majestic capital of the heaven on earth.

Dwarfism is a unique effort by the God to make Himself understand the ideas and persona in the cramped self inside the tiniest of a cell. Here soul is ever hitting against the body’s narrow confines. It’s a tragedy while the society finds something fit for some leery, jesting moments as in a circus. But then these days, even the circuses were vanishing rapidly.

He was aware of this fact that his mere presence somehow enlivened people’s spirit, as if they forgot their bigger worries after looking at someone so different and sidelined. Sometimes they felt pity and pity being a sublime emotion made them feel better. Usually, the people were amused directly and as amusement lightens the mind instantly, its effect could be seen in their easier spirits.

He was doubly unfortunate. One, he was a dwarf; second, he was homeless and all alone. Whatever care that could have been spared for him was robbed by the panicked environs of this worst decade in Kashmir’s history.

In the busy big bazaars having gun-totting security personnel, in the lanes and bylanes smelling of intrigues, in schools, offices, houses and shops the life overall chugged ahead with a scratching, itching ambiguity. Who will come out to be who could never be guessed. So people went hurriedly, guarding their innermost feelings to themselves.

Then a corner-side tea stall operator took fancy to this trundling, slogging character and gave him the job of tea-boy. Across the square, the military picket found it a bit refreshing to get tea from this circus item but not before he would take a cup himself from the kettle. These battle hardened soldiers wearing bullet-proof vests, clad in intimidating fatigues and crowning helmets certainly eased their pent-up tension while joking with this ‘aflatoon’—as they called him—while his employer, so gentle in manners and words, looked on with certain satisfaction from across the square.

One day, suddenly even this new-found niche of some stability and dull dignity was robbed. The military intelligence had spotted the amicable tea-shopper as a highly suspected cog in the underground network of the mysterious Lashkar commander.

Before they could pinpoint him, he brought out a pistol from almost nowhere and fired, hitting a young soldier in the face before he himself was riddled with bullets. His body was now lying sprawled in a most horrid manner. Around him the gun-totting security men stared with mechanical, emotionless eyes; the urgency of the operation robbing them even of the few moments left to the colleague with whom they had spent many moments of their imperilled life in the valley. The last pulse gone and the dam of patience and control was broken. A friend soldier ran and fired a volley into the militant’s dead body. Others scampered to take control of him. After all, the military is all about discipline.

Aflatoon stood paralysed. In one strike, the destiny had snatched away the two human beings whom he had come to like the most, the dead soldier and the tea-shop owner. Both of them spoke to him without the least glint of mock and entertainment in their eyes. They saw him exactly like any other human being around. The eyes of the tea seller and the young, ever-smiling soldier carried a comfortable openness for his dwarfed self wherein he never felt pitiable or an object of jest. He could feel it. It made him feel so normal. Whenever they looked at him, he felt like a normal human being. He had lost two friends. Both were two helpless cogs in two different countries and set-ups.

The very same friendly Sikh soldier, who earlier jested and bantered with him, now prodded him with his deadly gun.

‘You too owe some answers, for you aren’t as much above earth as you are under it! You pygmy Muslim, you never gave any hint of the suspicious nature of your master!’

He was tortured; though in its milder form because the interrogators themselves took fancy to the jibing game of interrogation with this unusual suspect. He created ripples of laughter as he winced with pain to slaps and cigarette butts on his skin or pull of ears and hair and kicks. It was over all good fun to the soldiers. 

As he came out beaten, ashamed and humiliated, the locals spat at him, suspecting him to have played truant in complicity with the military.

He had been taught a bitter lesson:

‘I’m a dwarf, but more than the punishment of God, it is the inflated egos on both sides that squeeze life out of me. My Kashmir also bears the same fate, being grounded between these two heavy millstones! God was far less punishing in throwing my life in this little bodily cage than hurling me in this corridor of uncertainty and making me a suspect in all eyes. I’ve become an eyesore to all. One can hope to survive by taking sides but I’ve been robbed even of that!’

The Voice of Insult

 

He belonged to one of the low steps on the caste ladder, and as it happens usually, he was very poor; so his place in the world was now limited to the pitiable existence of an insect in the dust while the higher world fleeted more importantly. Absorbed in countless agonies at every step of life, he had his little share of some tiny ecstasies. After all, nature does very little discrimination in opening her smile on the persons of various castes and classes.

At his nondescript settlement, as it opened its idyllic eyes in the second half of February, a whole array of mist, fog and dew danced on the bucolic stage in the pre-twilight aura. He got up early and visited the fields to relieve himself of the nature’s call. So early in the morning, his mind less burdened with the worries of survival, he peeked into the rising hues of light across the fog. Without any discrimination, the light, fog and mists became his playmates.

An hour before the morning twilight, the sky was clear and visibility on ground was perfect, then some mysterious climatic wand would be swayed and the fog arrived like a silvery bluish pall of strange expectance. As the twilight broke over the light fog, it appeared as if the day was breaking from the sky overhead, illuminating a bluish circular stage around him, making him the undisputed king of this small sleepy world.

Sometimes the layers of mist would just float in pre-dawn tranquillity, hiding the lower canopies of the trees and then slowly, playfully, gently the scene around him would change, determined by those naughty floating particles carrying tiny load of condensation on their backs. His imagination would float with their ease, making him totally oblivious to the fact that he was born in the scavenger community—the bhangi or balmiki caste.

Well, on August 15, 1947 India won its freedom; but it was decades to go for the dawn when the proud Parliament of free India would first bring in the legislation to emancipate the manual scavengers—the community to which Ramu belonged—engaged in wretchedly degrading and criminally dehumanising task of manual scavenging at the lowest rung of Hindu caste hierarchy; and many decades still further when the pious intentions of Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 would in fact percolate down to practice.

It was a province in India where the freer sun of India dawned a bit hesitatingly because the instrument of accession was still to be signed. The ruler was dilly-dallying with a multitude of interests. For decades, the people under the double shadow of authority—English and the ruler—had grown dispirited under the squeezing, oppressing talons of the two masters whose respective spheres of powers had sharp edges to tear their easy meat.

The monsoons had more or less done their task of turning the countryside lush green. Just like any other person of his caste, Ramu felt the brutal, confining chains of the obnoxious system of casteism. The real freedom appeared almost an unattainable dream. He wistfully looked at the casteless groups of birds flapping their wings in this natural pool of water on the outskirts of the sleepy township, which boasted of all the materiality of the ruler’s power and ordain.

The seven-year-old boy knew that theirs was the meanest and the pathetic most existence on earth. His father was employed as a manual scavenger to remove human excreta from the dry latrines of the training centre of the Maharaja’s little army under the tutelage of his British masters. Well, so much had changed in the form of lifestyles and fashion before the eyes of Ramu’s father. However, one thing remained the same which kept the deprived section pitted into the same horrible, ill-branded work of picking up human faeces manually. Ramu’s forefathers, the so called untouchables, slave chandalas, who were employed in cleaning the society of its most pitiable and dirty by-products, had a positive outlook towards the arrival of the Britishers. They believed that the enlightened white man will definitely do something by bringing some science in the domain of sanitation.

‘After all in their country there cannot be people like us. And still everyone must be purest and cleanest!’ his father wondered oftentimes.

However, why should the Britishers be unduly bothered about the mode of disposal of human excreta? In the enslaved country, they were fighting for bigger stakes, which demanded they must look over the social prejudices prevalent among the native population. So when urbanisation and industrialisation took first tentative steps under them, scores of manual scavengers were needed to clean both private and public dry latrines.

The twentieth century had seen decades of political movements in India and their patriotically charged reverberations echoed in princely India as well. Ramu’s father had his own dream-like versions of these andolans led by the Mahatma who had given them the name of Harijan, the people of God. Pocketed in this tiny province, where the free rays of India were still to shine, on this free morning, his fate came to be crushed by a British military expert, who shamefaced for the defeat and boiling in mood for packing his bags, found an outlet in this poor scavenger. The Englishman saw the cleaner affectionately offering a pure rose to his still purer girl child with his dirtiest of hands after he had removed the night soil from the apartment. He punished the cleaner by holding his face in the night soil. It proved a sacrament to his soul; this dip in the karambhoomi of his forefathers enlightened his soul. The humiliated man, as if unafraid of death and taking many clues from the freedom fighters, whose stories reached his ears through hearsay, got up, the filth dripping over his face. With a heaving breast, he yelled in the man’s face:

‘I’m not willing to live after this insult but I’ll live on to see you and your whole clan along with your shit being packed off forever from our land!’

He spat; not at the white man but on the ground, his soul heaving against his body. Meanwhile, his fellow scavengers trembled with fear. With firm steps he moved towards a water faucet, took a bath—all this while recalling what he had heard about the Mahatma—and once clean he thundered: ‘Safai Karamchari Andolan!’        

Ramu saw—as he came from the playful walk or rather jaunt—his father’s head and face turn a mass of pulpy red under the brutal strikes by the Maharaja’s sepoys, who under the spell of hurried loyalty went overzealous for the cause of their sovereign.

‘India gets freedom and even these dogs here in our Maharaja’s dominion start barking!’ a Brahmin sepoy gnashed his teeth. But he could sense the inevitability of the fall of his cherished sovereign.

Crying and shivering for the same fate, Ramu ran full 20 kilometres to his village, where the rest of his family lived. It was very late at night when Ramu beat his furtive palms against the rag-tag reed thatch door of their hutment. As fire was lit up and the monsoon clouds rumbled still at the tail end of their rainy orgy, he shivered in the lap of his blind grandmother, fatigued, torn, tattered and almost dead.

Next day, two of his fellow scavengers brought the body in a cart. ‘The word doing round in the city is that he turned a traitor,’ one of them said hesitatingly and his cowering eyes seemed to believe what his tongue was hesitating to put forth.

His grandmother, the old wrinkled black fairy, who couldn’t see but created and weaved a whole world through her words, was the one to whom he felt nearest in the family. In his otherwise ever-prostrating and servile childhood, sitting in her lap and listening about a world fantasised by her hollow-cheeked babbling, he would become the prince sovereign, who was casteless and beyond any stigma.

Of all her stories he remembered the one about herself with most vivid colours. She had once told him:

‘Even though not in the least ashamed of being a balmiki, somewhere deep down the heart, I feel that I’m a Brahmin, for I wasn’t born to your maternal grandfather. Years ago someone had dumped a newborn girl in a dry discarded well, half of which was full of waste and garbage. Blessed be Lord Hanuman for a herd of monkeys gathered around the well and started mocking at the human buffoonery in chattering, screeching voices. And who later became my father and the man who became your great grandfather rescued me and took me home for he had a big flock of boys only. He had some love in his heart for a girl child. Thus I was raised as a bhangi!’

Blind for the last 20 years, the sudden flashes of reminiscences would take her to childhood when during the scorching heat of June, the whole family dug a deep pit on a dry river bed to collect water. They had to fight for the protection of their pit, which was now moving laterally after going straight into the earth for 6-7 feet. Water quarry (open pit) we may call it. On this merciless hot day, when even the sweat beads won’t surface on their skin, for they had been dehydrated too much, the wind blew a sandstorm on the foot-printed soil around the pit. Twigs and boughs of dried bushes littered around like a cemetery. The water level was plummeting down rapidly and so was increasing their thirst. The father taking all responsibility on his head—for it was now very risky to get below the crumbling roof of the pit as the hole went laterally into the earth, while they anxiously watched from above—sat inside the cave precariously soaking a piece of gunny sack in the mud and step by step squeezed the coarse cloth to collect muddy water in an earthen pitcher. Their hearts beating under the impact of the risk hovering over the patriarch’s body they looked water-mouthed. There was more water in their mouths than in the fearsome pit’s guts. Much to its irritation, they had opened it too much and in trepidation it snapped its jaw. The earth overhead caved in and the family upkeeper was buried alive. Even with their maddest scamper, they could not bring him out before many minutes. The man had been buried under the fine sand for enough time to suffocate him to death.

Later, a similar shock of ill fate took her eyesight two decades back.

The family patriarch named Musla, her husband, was a man of kaleidoscopic libido that allured him to have illicit relationships with many ladies of his caste. However, it became a crime when a lady of the higher caste took fancy to his titillating escapades. It became almost cataclysmic news. It’s as good as the natural laws reversing overnight. The society feels threatened and they react very vehemently.

After getting caught, the lady had the right to accuse the lower caste man of rape. Since then the man was incarcerating in the riyasat jail. They were already outcaste but now the whole family cowered under the additional stigma of rape also. This kind of position squashes you among the lowest of the low.

As a mark of further revenge beyond the state’s formal judgement, the upper caste males along with their servants raped the family females for as long as the hissing snakes of their anger and lust allowed it. In desperation and unbearable agony, his grandmother banged her head against the stone mortar repeatedly and went blind at least to the visual aspects of their miseries.

To prove their human side, they gave a job to the rapist’s son befitting their hereditary profession. All it fetched was one meal a day and in addition carried perpetual humiliation and punishment to the soul as bonus. So Ramu’s father, right from the start of his boyhood, became the manual scavenger doing his duty anywhere the overfed aristocracy decided to scatter its excreta.

One tragedy had closed the doors to light. Whenever fate punished her, she further punished herself by striking her head against anything her searching fingers found. It became a habit.  As a result, her forehead and skull had many scars, perhaps even more than the ones she bore on her soul. In order to prevent the final fatality, they kept an eye on her lest she struck her head almost as an instinctive reaction to her quirk of mood on account of some bad news. Apart from these sudden volcanic eruptions, she was cool headed otherwise, smiled ironically, talked gently and told numerous stories to children.

Now when the dead body of her son arrived, the people around failed to notice her picking up the grinding stone bowl and hit it against her skull with as much force as she could manage. With a mourning cry and equally fearsome burst of blood she fell unconscious. One tragedy had sealed the doors of light to her, now this one brought her out of darkness. The sense of sight that had been exiled by the striking judgement of some precarious time was now restored by the hammering judgement of the tragedy of her son’s death. On opening her eyes she gave a strange cry of joy and sorrow.

‘It’s you Ramu!’ she pointed towards a child of his age, ‘Oh...Oh...where is...umm...let me guess...’

Those around her thought she had gone out of her senses after the gruesome self-strike. Then with a new purpose in her life and the light back in her world, the old lady cried her heart out over the darkness hovering around the dead body of her son.

****

The poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low hardly perceive any further fall or the degradation or the wretchedness caused by the leaps and bounds of ill-fate and tragedies. They take it for granted, a kind of habituation to humiliation. Although Ramu grew up among ever-increasing adversities, overall the life seemed more or less the same to him. The once obstinate Maharaja had, without wasting much time, signed the instrument of accession to India. So Ramu was now a subject of free India, where very soon untouchability would be declared illegal. However, he was many years from the glorious dawn when the mammoth banyan of casteism, standing sturdy and sprawling from many centuries, would finally yield to the face-lifting, almost artificial, stop-gap legislative measures.

There was a new police station in place of the old one. However, the family that had witnessed so much came across one more onerous turn of fate. All records pertaining to the condemned rapist were missing. When some liberal elements, too happy to attain freedom, took up the poor old man’s case, his bail plea was rejected on the grounds that all records were missing. So the trial court could neither grant him bail, nor take up the case to its conclusion without any reference material from the old office. Now the prison authorities at the district jail were worried whether to keep him as an undertrial or as a prisoner. They sought directive from the court regarding it. Almost famished and finished, the rape convict was presented before the additional sessions judge sahib. The latter was much puzzled and directed the district jailor to prepare a fresh charge sheet based on the memories of the still surviving persons and relatives on both sides. The old lady, allegedly raped, came out of her shy, traditional shackles and after a single performance the new court of free India, basing its unbiased judgement on the base of fresh assessment of the victim’s testimony noted:

‘We are sorry that the cause of justice has been delayed so long given the situation prevailing; we owe an apology to the victim because the offender has been enjoying life in jail, so to put up the insignia of free India, we sentence this man to death for the rape of ... held culpable under section ... based ...’

The over-enthused judge felt heroic and proud for accomplishing this—for drawing this first blood—marvellous judicial feat for the cause of mother India.

An overzealous law of a still overzealous new nation ensured that the message of justice should reach across the masses. After the sentence was upheld by the higher judiciary the old man was hanged. A widow now his grandmother took first tentative steps to survive as the family matriarch.

****

The urbanised pockets with their squalor, filth, mud, garbage and stinking wastes offered some opportunities to the scavenger community; and they, with bright hopeful eyes, ogled at the filthy stage which looked brightly and alluringly lit up by a beneficent new sun. To play their scavenging part, the family—consisting of malnutritioned children, spent out and worn out middle aged persons and almost dead but somehow living old bodies—moved to a filthy slum stinking and sticking like a lice to an urban body. And once settling here, saving the pittance that they salvaged from the filth, they lost the rest of the things which were available so far such as an unhindered view of the nature’s beauty, the pond’s water and free walks through the countryside provided it didn’t cross the interests of the higher varnas.

The grandmother during her youthful, seeing days had been a proud participant in the community festival linked to the caste’s not too proud, almost animistic, belief system. Being very near to Mother Nature, the folk dance was rustically gleaned to the proportions of a mysterious exoticism. With new spirit in her eyes, she recalled how for months they prepared artificial animals like lion, horse and tigers using the complex yet so simple folk art. First a cane frame was prepared using water-soaked switches and later it was stitched with a covering of animal skins and clothes of all types. The final shape could put to shame any stuffed tiger adoring the walls of a rich aristocratic hunter. It used to be in the form of a huge mask (the animal torso) to be worn by a man on his head, while the other man stooped at almost right angle carrying the rest of the body on his back.

This year, the old lady hoped they will soak their miseries by dancing all night in the heart of this merciless town. With clever fingers and a quickly recalling mind, she started on her long forgotten folk art. Much to Ramu’s surprise, the shape of a lion emerged from those cane switches, rags and hides leaving two openings in the lower part. She also prepared beautiful dolls of sawdust and clay and painted them bright. There was also a lovely cart of dung, mud and clothes. He was extremely happy to get toys for the first time in his life.

****

Who cares about the health, hygiene and sanitation of those who are expected to be among the filth? The waste water of their dirty unpaved alley drained down an open dug-out nullah and emptied its odorous self into a pit. And there the mud sank into a mysterious pool leaving a grimy layer of water above.

Taking a plastic bottle cut in half to serve as a mug, Ramu went to collect this water, walked a bit further and eased himself of the thing that his forefathers had been carrying on their head. He then realised how blissful were those days when he used clean waters of puddles and ponds to wash him after his toilet. While his bowels emptied to add to the filth around their huts, he was lost in the gloomy darkness in the mug. However, it was still relatively clean water because theirs were the hands that had been assigned the role of carrying human faeces, dead carcasses of animals and stinking mud without any feeling of contempt and revulsion.

These littlest bits of gloomy reverie were driven away by his excited heart that was now galloping at the prospect of watching the clapping dance performed by the grandmother’s lion in the evening.

The afternoon but witnessed a heavy rainfall and it continued to rain towards the night, raising squelching mud around their huts in the narrow streets. The little open space among the huts that was to serve as the ground for the event now bore the nasty look of a mud quagmire. Undeterred they came out. The shiny and beautifully painted lion came in full majesty. But very soon the rain and the splashing and flailing mud turned it into an ugly monster. Even the playful lion of a scavenger has to look dirty. Even nature seemed to be kow-towing the human discriminations. It appeared like a horrible deity worshipped by the savage and filthy people.

The excitement and verve in Ramu’s frenzied senses was short-lived as the favourite lion became an ugly monster. The beautiful appliqué cloth—purchased with the whole community’s donations—turned tabby and evil looking. The success of this dance depends upon the foot coordination between the man bearing the head and the bending man bearing the body. The mud however spoilt the rhythm and the second man tripped and went down. The first one with a stick tied to his back that held the animal torso above his head continued to drag the legless mass behind him. A very strange warmish creature it appeared now. Many of them took turns to enter into the frame. After a time, both the humans and their made-up lion were unrecognisable. It appeared a gathering of muddy ghosts. Ramu, his face and clothes bespattered with mud, wept inconsolably.

That night his mother consoled him:

‘Don’t cry son! A scavenger should be the last one to weep for getting his things, clothes and body including face muddled and spoiled by the filthiest of things. That is the karma and dharma of a scavenger. If you don’t soak muck into your soul then it will go against your karma as a balmiki. I’ve heard that no amount of filth on the body can touch the soul. It always remains clean like these higher castes!’

‘But the beautiful, shiny, clean lion was destroyed by mud,’ he sobbed.

‘We’ll make another for you, son.’

‘But again it will go all muddy. Gods want us to be filthy with even our playthings.’

‘Well son, may be a day will come when clean balmikis playing with a clean lion on a clean ground won’t appear unclean to the God, the rain and the society!’                           

With the cleanest emotion of a mother, she took him in her arms to calm him down and he slept. The old woman kept awake for a long time.

‘Will such a day really come?’ she thought.  

The Blueprint of a Common Man’s Truth

 

Carpenter, vendor, construction labourer, hawker, electrician and much more, he has been through the rough and tumble of many professions at various points in his life. Now he seems contended to serve as a night watchman at a construction material godown. Here he just has to sleep and say ‘Who is this?’ from his room if he hears any noise at night, thus indicating the property is well guarded and under observation.

He is ready to take up more, some new assignment to add to his pocket’s weight. So during the day, he is the municipal committee’s official keeper of the ill-kept, stinking toilet booth. He loiters around in the dusty, noisy chaos that most of our cities are. Most of those who pulverize the property with their sprouts and defecations are his acquaintances, the wage labourers well known to him from the area. They would cajole him to give him a tea party instead of giving him a rupee they owe for their misdeed. So he is scouting for any chance visitor who is under the compulsion to enter the stinking box. The torture over and just as the poor person comes out dazed and swooning under the attack of stinking smell and disturbing sight, he attacks and demands the charges. To the strangers he is very authoritative.

Take as many avenues to earn a bit more, it’s never sufficient for a poor man. However, with a rich haul of experience, this 75 years old man looks content, like a battle weary soldier, happy in the knowledge that he has successfully fought at many fronts. A lifetime of grit and grind is barely sufficient to make a little story of few lines. Like meshing whole containers of mud, you get a gram of gold particles. It may not be sufficient but those decades of engagement as a faceless entity give rewards that are felt within if not acknowledged by others. It’s always worthy to have fought in a sub-world where you dig a well for a day, only to start digging another for a new dawn. There was hardly any destination above the one and only ‘seeing through a day’. A tough process but it’s all-consuming, it absorbs you completely.

Six decades ago, he arrived at the district town at the age of 15 from a small village in the countryside of the same district. During these six decades, he saw the district town changing from a big village to a proper city as it’s today, witnessed its changing colours, in the professional sense, and learnt to adapt to the swiftly changing circumstances and times.

His life-long dedication to the cause of setting up a family has entitled him to ‘a bit bigger than a slum hut’ kind of house in a poor locality. He had three sons. One of them died before marriage. The other one died, followed by his wife, after marriage. He left two kids. One he keeps, most probably a son. The other one, most probably a girl, is under the custody of her maternal grandparents. The third son plies an auto in the city and whom he sometimes sees and raises his hand to acknowledge their relationship. The son however keeps his eyes reserved for more passengers in his auto.

Though staying within the same city, the old man doesn’t visit his house more than twice a week. His wife stays with the son. On being asked why he doesn’t stay with the family, he says that it’s just to be independent and free. Possibly his daughter-in-law is a tyrant. He however doesn’t admit it openly.

He tells that one’s eyes should have patience and respect for a person at whom you look at. The other person will surely reciprocate. He will get into a pause and will listen to you at least. ‘Eyes, eyes!’ he emphasizes.

To kill time he has plenty of decades from the past to bask in their nostalgia. He doesn’t find even a single moment in which the present scores over the past.

‘It gets just worse from bad,’ he appears missing his youth.

And he still wants a new job.