what the daughter said

Mother and i used to alternate going to the hospital. She had become very quiet after father was admitted - and detached. She used to lock herself in the big bedroom for several hours every day. After the day on which father screamed at the nurses, she stopped coming to the hospital. I used to go there alone, and sit as far away from father, because i was scared of him. The chemotherapy had changed him. All the serenity that comforted me had disappeared. He often cursed loudly in his sleep. On many days, when I stood silently watching the blood squirt from his veins- so much blood- he would rant at me, wishing that he should die. However much I tried, I could not turn away: from his wild eyes and his neck filled with needle marks, and the blood. The nurses said his memory had started failing him. 
After he died, it all seemed a waste: all our efforts and prayers, and the hope that father would once again lift me onto his shoulders and take me to the park, that I would once again hide in the landing and surprise him when he came home from work, that we three would have dinner on the balcony in our small flat, with me running between mother and father, narrating tales from school.

the train at the bend

As the train rounds the bend, we watch it with the mild disinterest of youth. We realise that the train is disappearing, will soon be lost to the eyes and ears, but it doesn't really seem to matter. We turn at the sound of a bird and in those fleeting instants that pass before our gaze returns to the bend, the train has vanished as also its muffled clangour. A faint emotion rises in us, or does it? We can feel the rushing wind, observe it, even, in the fluttering leaves of the saplings beside the track. Otherwise, there is silence. It lingers.
We recognise that the intention of this silence is to prolong the moment at which the train disappeared. Perhaps the silence is really a coincidence. But it is charged with an indescribable emotion. We do not attempt to analyse it. The silence deepens and the moment stretches and stretches. We have already forgotten the intention of this silence. There is only an absence of sound, and the absence of the train.
Absence...
That thought brings a heaviness to our hearts. We know this emotion. We do not have to anaylse it. We know it. It is the feeling of loss.

what the elders said

She would sit in the small square area in one corner of the room, her knees drawn up to her chest. It was a kind of raised platform, smooth and dark in contrast to the rough, grey floor. Beyond her were the windows that opened onto the garden- the netted windows whose doors were never closed. She would sit this way after dinner. The servant would be filling the iron bucket from the hand pump under the window for her bath. In the feeble light from the bulb above the outside latrine, the compound wall would appear to be alive, shadows moving across its face. The sound of splashing water would fill the air, drowning out the sounds of the night, trickling through the triangular holes in the netting. The vessels would still be on the table under the glare of the tubelight, waiting for her. The other three would be in the room in the front. Later, the children would call it “old room”.
Laughter! Was that him? Now his father. How loud it must to be travel through all those rooms! Her father was never this loud. Always only a quiet chuckle. Even when she would fling her arms around his neck and rock him back and forth, not letting him read in the evenings, he would slap her wrists lightly and call her his ‘chellam’. And her mother would remind her she was 23, no longer a child. It seemed so long ago, in a different life. And krishnan would start a fight with ambi, causing amma to scream louder. She would continue to rock, laughing at her brothers running around the small hall, her cheeks soft against appa’s rough stubble.
The servant would turn off the light outside.

afternoons

how many afternoons were spent!
your eyes tired from weeping,
the rustle of bedsheets like drowsy leaves,
your lips parted in soft sighs, leaving
the lazy wind in the mango tree unsavoured
your hair spread across my face, my eyes
my eyes that would suddenly turn moist.

what the old woman said

some songs you associate with conversations, places, a certain group of people, an event, birthdays, other functions, joy, triumph; and some - with sadness and death.
the last brings with it a silence, where the song has slipped into the background unknowingly, and the eyes stare distantly, filling up slowly, as the mind recreates images: scenes of dinner, playgrounds, quiet streets, coffee, laughter; and then you weep into your hands, like a schoolgirl, kicking at the sheets, at anything, sobbing loudly into the loneliness.
you wouldn't know about this, would you son?

kumkum

Perhaps, I was tired of relentlessly pursuing tasks that seemed to me to offer little pleasure but were enjoined upon me by circumstance and, several times, by a certain weakness in my character to comply with expectations.  It is quite possible - even, perhaps, highly probable - that I had convinced myself thus and sought to view myself with that most beguiling of all emotions: pity. That my motive was purely selfishness was evident to me from the beginning; however I strove to distance myself from that reality. Days passed - days in which I found myself behaving in a manner that I had always thought alien to myself - and we fell into awkward, stumbling conversation. I watched myself anticipating each and sensed my disappointment when one ended on a less than satisfactory note.

Though we grew more familiar with each others company with the passage of time, it still seemed strange – talking to Kumkum, I mean. There was something about her whole demeanor. Soon, I found myself at a point where I wanted to speak to her, knowing fully well that she wasn’t really interested. She adroitly sidestepped all my advances; but the fact is that, despite knowing this, I persisted in talking to her – a sort of self-humiliating act…It was almost as if I had resigned myself to her whim, and in that very resignation -or acceptance of defeat, whatever – lay a very curious sense of satisfaction, such as, perhaps, one that is derived from a routine or habit.

the aftermath of departure

 “…my grandmother is uneducated, though. I grew up at her place, a sort of farmhouse. When it rained, the wind would scream through the house and the windows had to be closed for they would bang noisily…”

Something stirred in X: memories of heavy incessant rain drenching the roofs, long-forgotten conversations with Kumkum, their sullen aftermath, made disquieting by the abruptness of her departures; his only solace the cook’s hot, sweet tea while the wind beat against the tall trees just visible from their front veranda.  

After Kumkum left - “for a better life”, as she said - his life settled into a quiet, lassitudinous rhythm, filled with long aimless walks in the day, random naps on the rocking chair in the veranda, interspersed with numerous cups of sweet milky tea. He found himself reading late into the night: Kumkum’s poems and writings – on love, sex and despair - that he had found insipid and tripe, overindulgent, but had stolen from her cupboard the week before she came to bid adieu formally. In the evenings, he would walk all the way to the main road, and sit on the cornerstone at the entrance to the colony, watching buses with lighted interiors roar past.