envydee
01-06-2010, 03:37 PM
My first short story ever. I request frank suggestions. Thank you.
Born With it
It was a different shade of pain.
She was born with it.But it was not a wound which would heal with an ointment.
She curled up the toes of her feet inside her thick,brown canvas shoes.After a minute they stiffened.A sense of foreboding fiddled with repentence in her heart.The chaos that surrounded her now seemed impersonal.Warm breeze of the late afternoon with the remains of smoke blew her crisp,curly thin hair.Vendors shouted with their shrill voices like they never knew speaking softly.A fat maid was dressed in dirty blue shaggy saree,tucked twice at her waist,so that it was raised at the lower end,was sweeping furiously in front of her.The dust was a painful reminder.Ananya covered her mouth and nose with her thin fingers and palm.When the maid was gone,she looked sideways,numb.The heat,dust and smoke made the red freckles on her white cheeks burn as they glowed in the late afternoon Delhi sunlight .She was wearing a plain olive Adidas T-shirt and a grey jeans.She now realised how cruelly chilly and dank it was last night at Connought Place,unprecedented, when she enjoyed strawberry scoop in butterscotch with Nidhi.That was now turning out to be a big mistake.A faint balloon was growing every minute in her chest.Just the fact that she and her grandmother did not have much luggage was a speck of a consolation.She had never imagined that the ice cream scoop would do such damage in the end of February.But now she cursed herself for being careless.Her doctor had said if it shows worse signs then she would have to use rotahalers.That prospect now seemed terrifying and very certain.The rumble of the heavy machinery of the train resounded on the station and Ananya knew it was time.The train stopped and she tried to pretend that she was normal and capable.She located “AS-1” and helped her frail grandmother into the train kept her lips tightly pressed and lifted the suitcase onto the floor of the train,then came the handbag and then herself.A small whiff of cold air struck her face as she entered the compartment while the world in front of her eyes swam.Their seat numbers were 1 and 2,so she did not have to carry the suitcase for much distance as their seats were right next to the door.The little old woman settled in front of her and Ananya put the luggage under her seat and finally she sat down.She kept her eyes closed and tried to breathe.It was five times more difficult than it was five minutes ago.
She did her routine to bring back the situation to normalcy.Took a deep breath. Deep into her stomach and held it right there for a minute.Then as she left it,she felt the blood flush back to the head and it swayed like a ball of lead. She had to keep her eyes closed while she did this otherwise the world in front of her would seem to be painfully soaked in red.Her grandmother sat in front of her,turning a necklace of small wooden beads in her hand while she said the name of a Hindu God under her breath which she never disclosed to anyone.Purple vein ran from under her arms wrapped in unpressed white thin blouse,right upto her papery knuckles.The only time when Ananya was close to her grandmother was as a child,when she told her tales of Ramdas Swami under large orange moon of the summer nights outside their house.Over the years the old woman had failed to interpret the actions and emotions of the young people and now she had given up.So she watched Ananya but resisted the desire to ask any questions and continued with her business with the beads in her hands.
The journey to Mumbai Central without the medicines was going to be slow and painful. She was not yet done with her breathing exercise and the train was yet idling on New Delhi railway station. People with their suitcases and bags and little children with their grandparents kept pouring in from the door. Two ladies stopped at the door with their larger than usual luggage.
“Seat number 5&6!” The elder one announced, as if for the general benefit of all around her.
“It’s not cold enough in here, Mom!” Pinki said as she put her bag under the seat which was perpendicular to that of Ananya’s.
Grandmother looked blankly on the floor, her religious business continued even if she was tempted to look at Pinki’s colorful handbag. They put their luggage under Ananya’s seat as well, as if it was perfectly alright and then counted all their suitcases and bags. They were dressed in colorful Punjabi suits whose thin papery chunnis had frills and red silken threads tied in knots all along the border. It seemed as if they were wearing deflated balloons for pants while long jootis whose ends were curled, jutted out beneath them. Their faces were whiter than Ananya’s and they wore pink lipsticks. With their every attempt to lift their luggage their colorful bangles made sweet crackling sounds. It became quite obvious looking at them that the travel of theirs concerned a marriage.
A middle aged man in sky blue cotton t shirt and khakis ushered into the compartment and immediately put his briefcase on the berth above that of Ananya’s. He climbed up and settled there, completely unconcerned of the rest.
The train slowly departed from New Delhi station. The compartment now seemed drowned in grey blue colour.
Finally Ananya was feeling better, the striations of shivers through her body had receded but the balloon had grown. Studies, chess and asthma were the main concerns of her little life. She was glad she found Nidhi who could help her know that she was right in the way she thought about these three. But sometimes she wished if she learnt basketball from her younger brother in the evenings, then maybe she would have been better off health-wise today. She looked out of the dark blue window of the train as the slums of the Delhi suburbs passed by. She was completely uninterested in looking around and observing other people. She didn’t care if the Punjabi woman put luggage under her seat. She didn’t care who sat in front of her. She was just staring numb at the dark blue window of the train and looking at half naked people washing clothes and bathing as they flitted by. All of them must’ve been breathing like it was a matter of perfect ease, she thought.
Kailas was 48 years old and like he had been doing for past 30 years; he distributed bed sheets and blankets all over the compartment to each passenger.
“It’s not cold enough in here!” Pinki demanded him as soon as he had given them their packet of bed sheets.
“I’ll look into it madam” he replied calmly.
The door repeatedly kept opening and closing every time someone went by, much to the discomfort of grandmother even if she was sitting more or less diagonally opposite to it. Vendors brought chocolates,chips, coffee and so on for each of which they had unique way of shouting.
“Chai chai chai chai chaaaeeyyyyaahh!!” for example, for tea.
Pinki’s mother made a couple of phone calls and told them that they had now safely boarded the train. Both of them seemed very cheerful as they animatedly chatted about the wedding. They talked perhaps about how the bride and the groom were dressed and how cute was groom’s aunt’s nephew. And then they munched homemade cookies, still chatting about the wedding as if it was one of the most important events of their lives.
The world outside was on fire. Bright, orange rays of the setting sun swarmed the barren brown fields of Uttar Pradesh. A small, solitary temple stood in the middle of the farm under the skeleton of a tree as an orange triangular flag flapped in the wind on top of it. Inside the train, the people sat, with their feet crossed or splayed, talking about the stories and times of their own or others’ lives or simply looking into the void and listening to the voices inside their heads. The dark blue window in front of Ananya had sucked all the life out of a world that danced outside in its own silent passion and rapture. It had filled that world with a dullness that made the people inside ignorant of its beauty. In front of Ananya’s unmoving pebbles of eyes, the forests behind the farms seemed to revolve. The sweat under her feet had dried and she felt the stiffness ease from her body but felt no urge to move. She just breathed. Something so simple in general yet it was sweeping every bit of energy out of her body. She listened to a menacing hiss with every breath as the pitiless venom dragged it back. She could feel it through her lungs spreading and paralyzing her while she just numbly stared at this macabre void between her face and the window pane. She was so vulnerable and weak. She was not weak anywhere else, not on chessboard or in the classroom. Here she was, stifled, smothered and on her knees, begging for every bit of air for her lungs.
The mother and daughter had had enough of each other and they had exhausted the stories of the wedding. Kailas passed by and Pinki lurched,
“Have you checked the AC or not?” her barbed voice cut through to him loudly and he stopped in the passage instantly.
“No madam ...I was busy with other work I will look into it right away”
“What! This is ridiculous! Look into the AC this very moment! Whatever problem it has! It’s hardly cold here!”
It was the mother, this time, and as her voice rose and eyebrows shot, people around felt concerned. Pritam, who had turned around and curiously looked at the matter between Kailas and the Punjabi ladies, was sitting back to back to the Punjabi lady on the next side-berth. The loud voice of the lady shook Ananya out of her sad trance and for a moment she looked to her right, and in that fleeting moment, she caught his glimpse.
“I will look into it at this very moment, madam, please relax.” said Kailas and rushed to the other end of the coach where in front of the exit there was a cabinet for the electrical connections of the AC. To a sinking feeling and consequent dismay of Kailas, the red and green lights among jagged circuitry flickered in front of him with a sly irregularity, and he knew that something was terribly wrong.
At that end of the coach, on the berth near the door Chinu sat above his parents’, as his recently cut thin sheath of hair of the head touched the roof. Barbers, Chinu thought were evil people who bobbed and swayed his head around while using the dangerously sharp things, and made him feel that his head did not belong to him anymore. A yellow lion roared back at him from Champak as he read it nosily sitting on his knees.
Below, a dark fat man, sitting in front of Abhijeet, chomped on a samosa. The man’s lips separated as he ate and Abhijeet looked up from his newspaper, his eyes shooting above his glasses onto Mithali, his mouth half open and a wound up expression which she quickly understood was the annoyance caused by the sound of the munching lips of the stranger. Mithali beamed back the caring smile. This was one of the many little things which annoyed Abhijeet every now and then and disrupted the calm flow of his life. The woman of the house always knew what troubled the two ‘men’. For both of them the school inadvertently made trenches into the home. Mithali sure had a tough job keeping things in places as the tone of Abhijeet’s household talks sounded like that of the Physics lectures. Physics, Abhijeet completely loved and deemed himself extremely lucky that he was doing something which he loved- teaching physics and was getting paid fairly well for that. And about quite a few other things in life, he bickered, in a manner that Mithali thought was very lovable, for not being the way he wanted them to be and never thought twice about sharing his wisdom about ordinary things.But sometimes,like now no matter how annoyed he was, he cudnt help but smile back at the gentle lady.He shook his head and got back to his newspaper.
Sadness had become this unfortunate, comfortable indulgence. Till now she lay submissive in the lap of sadness. She had accepted her defeat from the disease, and with every breath, stared at the visions of a bleak future. She had lost any will to move ahead. She felt like her legs were amputated. She lay on this cacti ridden desert on her face letting the thorns reach her bones.
As the shadows overpowered the light outside, Ananya was now getting weary of that comfort. She felt sand slipping out of her hand. A new thought was enticing her. She had had the glimpse, which made her feel good. And the times when she and Nidhi talked about someone that they saw in the canteen, she was usually the listener. She never completely could identify with her affected demeanors. She had to shrug off this placid inertia first. Finally she had lifted her face. She had turned slowly at last to search and look up to a face. She got to see it. He was by the window with half of his face hidden in darkness. And she felt herself grow small when she saw him smile. She could know the prominence of his cheekbone under the soft skin, which slid, sharply to the side of his chin. His eyes were small and hazel and his hair flown back in curls behind the large forehead. His eyes seemed to her the glittering reflection of affirmation, the radiance of hope just like the sunshine. She felt that he had lifted her from the brutal desert. But she was also made to feel a trifle too smaller every second that the handsome stranger smiled. She let herself get soaked in that radiance of his eyes. Her eyes grew wider at his sight and suddenly she was conscious that other people surrounded her too. She immediately looked away, back to the face of the window. A thoughtless moment passed and then there was a gentle flash in her head, she tried not to smile. She faced the dark window behind which yellow dots of lights had flared to form miniature luminous clouds, hanging in the pitch dark very far away. It now seemed lifeless and uninviting to her. She could no longer stare at that void. She had allowed hopelessness to strangle her few minutes ago. Groping in the darkness would be poisonous for her; she couldn’t let herself wither away with weakness. The windowpane was now unbearable, a reflection of the mistake she had committed. She had to feel good about herself; she vowed not to slide down that grime again. She was now drawn toward that radiance so much that she had to turn back to him. He seemed to be talking to the person in front of him with the smile that was ever so enticing.
Kailas was in panic.
“Sunil, that cunning drunkard!”
The electrician at New Delhi was supposed to have verified the condition of the AC before the train had departed. He never did.
“What can I do? God help me! I don’t know what to do with this!”
Pinki was washing hands at the washbasin on the other side of the passage and asked about the AC again. Kailas was speechless and gave some answer that he never recalled. Pinki was furious and sped back to her end of the coach, loudly announcing the breakdown of the AC. She told her mother that the AC was in complete shambles.
“How are we going to go through this horrendous journey if the AC won’t work? This is disastrous!”
Pritam turned back to look at the two women and talked to them about the problem of the AC. All the three of them walked to the passage outside the coach to where Kailas was. They wanted to know what was the problem, how long will it take to fix the thing and Kailas said that it would take around half an hour. He was absolutely unaware of how he was going to handle this situation but for now he had fended them off. Three of them walked back talking among themselves what a terrible situation it was.
Kailas had seen the electrician fix the AC many times, and had known a thing or two. He tried something that he had seen Sunil do always, but it didn’t work. He was helplessly trying everything that he could.
In the next fifteen minutes the three reappeared and inquired again and Kailas couldn’t answer. They were furious. They shouted, spat, barked and bellowed. They cursed his ineptitude, blamed his inefficiency and worthlessness. Then they left. Rest of the passengers were now alerted, they too arrived at the scene and asked the thousand questions. Kailas was made to look small and useless in his own eyes. He sat on his knees. Wealthy men looked down upon him. He spoke some arbitrary words to tell them that it will be fixed soon.
The Punjabi woman had not much to do. She and her daughter were dabbing their silken hankies on their dry foreheads and cheeks, such sullen moods were stretched on their faces that,
“The heat in this chamber is awful, it’s suffocating! It’s disastrous! I think I will faint by the end of this journey. Oh! We have been trapped so poorly! Bure Haal Hain!”, this they said to each other and then they called their relatives on the cell phone and repeated all the details of their pathetic journey. She complained to the Chai vendors and the chips vendors and every other person who passed through the door. Ananya didn’t care about anyone other than the stranger whose sight made life easier for her, Pritam. She longed for him the minutes that he was not on his seat. She was captivated.
Abhijeet felt concerned, he walked up to Kailas and inquired to him about the AC and offered to help. He took a look at the circuits and worked on it. Kailas felt tremendous relief. Abhijeet too wasn’t completely sure about the AC but he wanted to help, he knew that he could at least try. While he worked on the repair he talked with Kailas about his life, though not in any sense of empathy but with a genuine curiosity.
The Punjabi ladies were getting more restless every second. Now the mother put her feet across the passage and rested it on the berth in front of her and didn’t allow any vendor.
“Go tell your boss to fix the AC otherwise I will not allow any of you to pass though! Every time you open this door the place gets hotter and hotter.”
Abhijeet told Kailas some basic things to work on the AC while he was at it. He was trying but wasn’t getting anywhere. Then Mithali called for dinner and he had to go. Kailas was alone again but now he had the direction and a slight ray of hope.
Red plastic dinner trays arrived and all across the coach people crossed their legs and opened aluminum foils that rolled white chapattis. Ananya too ate the dry thick chapattis with paneer curry, which held strong favour of turmeric and thick cumin seeds.
Pritam finished his dinner and went outside. Kailas was nowhere near fixing the AC. Pritam launched his own brand of tirade. He was unrelenting in his accusations, unstoppable. Humiliation, now reached a new height for Kailas as the vile youngster made him hang his head in turbid silence. Kailas didn’t know of it was really him who had held out his hands clasped together to him and begged him forgiveness, that he will try his best to fix the AC as soon as possible. And Pritam left.
While eating dinner Abhijeet told Mithali about Kailas.
“All his life he’s done this same thing you know, distributing blankets and taking them back from passengers when they were leaving, and he cant think of anything else that he can do later in his life. And his father, who died two years ago, was a coolie, lugged suitcases and metal trunks on his head all his life. His father’s help got him a job here, and since then Kailas has been the way he looks right now. And maybe his son too will be stuck somewhere in a menial job related to rails which will enslave him for the rest of his life in submission. Such problems with AC or any other such thing might seem like a little adventure in his inert life. This poverty seems like a curse which men are born with, doesn’t it? They are born, bide their time and then just die in ****. But the part in the middle of this course is unacceptable to me. How deep is that pit of poverty that they cannot shrug off the pessimism…” He took a moment to think as Mithali listened with patience,the way she did everytime. “This hopelessness born out of poverty is a greater curse. They just find this comfort in this inertia of hanging onto a single noose of work all their life, no matter how menial and small it is. No matter how unjust it is to their ability.”
Kailas stuck to the repair fruitlessly. He felt numb after all the insinuation. He felt that there was nothing else for him to do now in his life than to fix the AC. The night continued. Punjabi women had tried everything but now they lost interest in the gripe as well. Lights started to go off. People took out their bed sheets and blankets and went to sleep. The blue lights were turned on and there was the silence with occasional footsteps of a vendor who went across coaches carrying used dinner trays. At the end of the coach the 51-year-old attendant went on.
In the dead of this night, surrounded by metal wall, in the middle of the passage Kailas was unrelenting in effort and the connections were stubborn. Nothing was working still, but Kailas went on, he never thought he could stretch himself like this, till 3 am. He never knew that he could do this much more. The insults were venomous.
And finally it happened! Insertion of a yellow wire in an arbitrary socket and there was a buzz. It ran trough the corridors of the coach and Kailas stood still. He watched the hitherto lifeless green light in front of him light up with an almost spectacular vigor. He finally stood up. He entered the compartment and put his hand up in the vent in the roof and felt the icy air touch his palm. He could not yet believe that he had done it. He was never completely hopeful about it. He waited for the next five minutes in the hum of the engine, to make sure if it was still working persistently. And he then lied down on his plank near the door. He smiled at the smudged ceiling. But he had to wake up at 6 in the morning, distribute blankets and bed sheets, make sure every passenger was all right and take note which people were leaving the coach.
The fragile girl with the red freckles was dreaming of her savior, she was in a magical land and dreaming of lovely things with her companion. She thought this was for real; this dream! She could touch his face and kiss his lips.
“Thank you, dear stranger; you took me from darkness to light.”
She was fast asleep when the icy cold air surrounded her.
With every breath, the chilly air slithered into her lungs and so the curse which she was born with was spreading through them once again with a devilish verve.
Sometime later she would wake up in horror, choking, breathless, sucking through her throat every little bit of air, groping in the darkness, helpless.
Till then, she dreamt on.
Thank you, dear stranger
Born With it
It was a different shade of pain.
She was born with it.But it was not a wound which would heal with an ointment.
She curled up the toes of her feet inside her thick,brown canvas shoes.After a minute they stiffened.A sense of foreboding fiddled with repentence in her heart.The chaos that surrounded her now seemed impersonal.Warm breeze of the late afternoon with the remains of smoke blew her crisp,curly thin hair.Vendors shouted with their shrill voices like they never knew speaking softly.A fat maid was dressed in dirty blue shaggy saree,tucked twice at her waist,so that it was raised at the lower end,was sweeping furiously in front of her.The dust was a painful reminder.Ananya covered her mouth and nose with her thin fingers and palm.When the maid was gone,she looked sideways,numb.The heat,dust and smoke made the red freckles on her white cheeks burn as they glowed in the late afternoon Delhi sunlight .She was wearing a plain olive Adidas T-shirt and a grey jeans.She now realised how cruelly chilly and dank it was last night at Connought Place,unprecedented, when she enjoyed strawberry scoop in butterscotch with Nidhi.That was now turning out to be a big mistake.A faint balloon was growing every minute in her chest.Just the fact that she and her grandmother did not have much luggage was a speck of a consolation.She had never imagined that the ice cream scoop would do such damage in the end of February.But now she cursed herself for being careless.Her doctor had said if it shows worse signs then she would have to use rotahalers.That prospect now seemed terrifying and very certain.The rumble of the heavy machinery of the train resounded on the station and Ananya knew it was time.The train stopped and she tried to pretend that she was normal and capable.She located “AS-1” and helped her frail grandmother into the train kept her lips tightly pressed and lifted the suitcase onto the floor of the train,then came the handbag and then herself.A small whiff of cold air struck her face as she entered the compartment while the world in front of her eyes swam.Their seat numbers were 1 and 2,so she did not have to carry the suitcase for much distance as their seats were right next to the door.The little old woman settled in front of her and Ananya put the luggage under her seat and finally she sat down.She kept her eyes closed and tried to breathe.It was five times more difficult than it was five minutes ago.
She did her routine to bring back the situation to normalcy.Took a deep breath. Deep into her stomach and held it right there for a minute.Then as she left it,she felt the blood flush back to the head and it swayed like a ball of lead. She had to keep her eyes closed while she did this otherwise the world in front of her would seem to be painfully soaked in red.Her grandmother sat in front of her,turning a necklace of small wooden beads in her hand while she said the name of a Hindu God under her breath which she never disclosed to anyone.Purple vein ran from under her arms wrapped in unpressed white thin blouse,right upto her papery knuckles.The only time when Ananya was close to her grandmother was as a child,when she told her tales of Ramdas Swami under large orange moon of the summer nights outside their house.Over the years the old woman had failed to interpret the actions and emotions of the young people and now she had given up.So she watched Ananya but resisted the desire to ask any questions and continued with her business with the beads in her hands.
The journey to Mumbai Central without the medicines was going to be slow and painful. She was not yet done with her breathing exercise and the train was yet idling on New Delhi railway station. People with their suitcases and bags and little children with their grandparents kept pouring in from the door. Two ladies stopped at the door with their larger than usual luggage.
“Seat number 5&6!” The elder one announced, as if for the general benefit of all around her.
“It’s not cold enough in here, Mom!” Pinki said as she put her bag under the seat which was perpendicular to that of Ananya’s.
Grandmother looked blankly on the floor, her religious business continued even if she was tempted to look at Pinki’s colorful handbag. They put their luggage under Ananya’s seat as well, as if it was perfectly alright and then counted all their suitcases and bags. They were dressed in colorful Punjabi suits whose thin papery chunnis had frills and red silken threads tied in knots all along the border. It seemed as if they were wearing deflated balloons for pants while long jootis whose ends were curled, jutted out beneath them. Their faces were whiter than Ananya’s and they wore pink lipsticks. With their every attempt to lift their luggage their colorful bangles made sweet crackling sounds. It became quite obvious looking at them that the travel of theirs concerned a marriage.
A middle aged man in sky blue cotton t shirt and khakis ushered into the compartment and immediately put his briefcase on the berth above that of Ananya’s. He climbed up and settled there, completely unconcerned of the rest.
The train slowly departed from New Delhi station. The compartment now seemed drowned in grey blue colour.
Finally Ananya was feeling better, the striations of shivers through her body had receded but the balloon had grown. Studies, chess and asthma were the main concerns of her little life. She was glad she found Nidhi who could help her know that she was right in the way she thought about these three. But sometimes she wished if she learnt basketball from her younger brother in the evenings, then maybe she would have been better off health-wise today. She looked out of the dark blue window of the train as the slums of the Delhi suburbs passed by. She was completely uninterested in looking around and observing other people. She didn’t care if the Punjabi woman put luggage under her seat. She didn’t care who sat in front of her. She was just staring numb at the dark blue window of the train and looking at half naked people washing clothes and bathing as they flitted by. All of them must’ve been breathing like it was a matter of perfect ease, she thought.
Kailas was 48 years old and like he had been doing for past 30 years; he distributed bed sheets and blankets all over the compartment to each passenger.
“It’s not cold enough in here!” Pinki demanded him as soon as he had given them their packet of bed sheets.
“I’ll look into it madam” he replied calmly.
The door repeatedly kept opening and closing every time someone went by, much to the discomfort of grandmother even if she was sitting more or less diagonally opposite to it. Vendors brought chocolates,chips, coffee and so on for each of which they had unique way of shouting.
“Chai chai chai chai chaaaeeyyyyaahh!!” for example, for tea.
Pinki’s mother made a couple of phone calls and told them that they had now safely boarded the train. Both of them seemed very cheerful as they animatedly chatted about the wedding. They talked perhaps about how the bride and the groom were dressed and how cute was groom’s aunt’s nephew. And then they munched homemade cookies, still chatting about the wedding as if it was one of the most important events of their lives.
The world outside was on fire. Bright, orange rays of the setting sun swarmed the barren brown fields of Uttar Pradesh. A small, solitary temple stood in the middle of the farm under the skeleton of a tree as an orange triangular flag flapped in the wind on top of it. Inside the train, the people sat, with their feet crossed or splayed, talking about the stories and times of their own or others’ lives or simply looking into the void and listening to the voices inside their heads. The dark blue window in front of Ananya had sucked all the life out of a world that danced outside in its own silent passion and rapture. It had filled that world with a dullness that made the people inside ignorant of its beauty. In front of Ananya’s unmoving pebbles of eyes, the forests behind the farms seemed to revolve. The sweat under her feet had dried and she felt the stiffness ease from her body but felt no urge to move. She just breathed. Something so simple in general yet it was sweeping every bit of energy out of her body. She listened to a menacing hiss with every breath as the pitiless venom dragged it back. She could feel it through her lungs spreading and paralyzing her while she just numbly stared at this macabre void between her face and the window pane. She was so vulnerable and weak. She was not weak anywhere else, not on chessboard or in the classroom. Here she was, stifled, smothered and on her knees, begging for every bit of air for her lungs.
The mother and daughter had had enough of each other and they had exhausted the stories of the wedding. Kailas passed by and Pinki lurched,
“Have you checked the AC or not?” her barbed voice cut through to him loudly and he stopped in the passage instantly.
“No madam ...I was busy with other work I will look into it right away”
“What! This is ridiculous! Look into the AC this very moment! Whatever problem it has! It’s hardly cold here!”
It was the mother, this time, and as her voice rose and eyebrows shot, people around felt concerned. Pritam, who had turned around and curiously looked at the matter between Kailas and the Punjabi ladies, was sitting back to back to the Punjabi lady on the next side-berth. The loud voice of the lady shook Ananya out of her sad trance and for a moment she looked to her right, and in that fleeting moment, she caught his glimpse.
“I will look into it at this very moment, madam, please relax.” said Kailas and rushed to the other end of the coach where in front of the exit there was a cabinet for the electrical connections of the AC. To a sinking feeling and consequent dismay of Kailas, the red and green lights among jagged circuitry flickered in front of him with a sly irregularity, and he knew that something was terribly wrong.
At that end of the coach, on the berth near the door Chinu sat above his parents’, as his recently cut thin sheath of hair of the head touched the roof. Barbers, Chinu thought were evil people who bobbed and swayed his head around while using the dangerously sharp things, and made him feel that his head did not belong to him anymore. A yellow lion roared back at him from Champak as he read it nosily sitting on his knees.
Below, a dark fat man, sitting in front of Abhijeet, chomped on a samosa. The man’s lips separated as he ate and Abhijeet looked up from his newspaper, his eyes shooting above his glasses onto Mithali, his mouth half open and a wound up expression which she quickly understood was the annoyance caused by the sound of the munching lips of the stranger. Mithali beamed back the caring smile. This was one of the many little things which annoyed Abhijeet every now and then and disrupted the calm flow of his life. The woman of the house always knew what troubled the two ‘men’. For both of them the school inadvertently made trenches into the home. Mithali sure had a tough job keeping things in places as the tone of Abhijeet’s household talks sounded like that of the Physics lectures. Physics, Abhijeet completely loved and deemed himself extremely lucky that he was doing something which he loved- teaching physics and was getting paid fairly well for that. And about quite a few other things in life, he bickered, in a manner that Mithali thought was very lovable, for not being the way he wanted them to be and never thought twice about sharing his wisdom about ordinary things.But sometimes,like now no matter how annoyed he was, he cudnt help but smile back at the gentle lady.He shook his head and got back to his newspaper.
Sadness had become this unfortunate, comfortable indulgence. Till now she lay submissive in the lap of sadness. She had accepted her defeat from the disease, and with every breath, stared at the visions of a bleak future. She had lost any will to move ahead. She felt like her legs were amputated. She lay on this cacti ridden desert on her face letting the thorns reach her bones.
As the shadows overpowered the light outside, Ananya was now getting weary of that comfort. She felt sand slipping out of her hand. A new thought was enticing her. She had had the glimpse, which made her feel good. And the times when she and Nidhi talked about someone that they saw in the canteen, she was usually the listener. She never completely could identify with her affected demeanors. She had to shrug off this placid inertia first. Finally she had lifted her face. She had turned slowly at last to search and look up to a face. She got to see it. He was by the window with half of his face hidden in darkness. And she felt herself grow small when she saw him smile. She could know the prominence of his cheekbone under the soft skin, which slid, sharply to the side of his chin. His eyes were small and hazel and his hair flown back in curls behind the large forehead. His eyes seemed to her the glittering reflection of affirmation, the radiance of hope just like the sunshine. She felt that he had lifted her from the brutal desert. But she was also made to feel a trifle too smaller every second that the handsome stranger smiled. She let herself get soaked in that radiance of his eyes. Her eyes grew wider at his sight and suddenly she was conscious that other people surrounded her too. She immediately looked away, back to the face of the window. A thoughtless moment passed and then there was a gentle flash in her head, she tried not to smile. She faced the dark window behind which yellow dots of lights had flared to form miniature luminous clouds, hanging in the pitch dark very far away. It now seemed lifeless and uninviting to her. She could no longer stare at that void. She had allowed hopelessness to strangle her few minutes ago. Groping in the darkness would be poisonous for her; she couldn’t let herself wither away with weakness. The windowpane was now unbearable, a reflection of the mistake she had committed. She had to feel good about herself; she vowed not to slide down that grime again. She was now drawn toward that radiance so much that she had to turn back to him. He seemed to be talking to the person in front of him with the smile that was ever so enticing.
Kailas was in panic.
“Sunil, that cunning drunkard!”
The electrician at New Delhi was supposed to have verified the condition of the AC before the train had departed. He never did.
“What can I do? God help me! I don’t know what to do with this!”
Pinki was washing hands at the washbasin on the other side of the passage and asked about the AC again. Kailas was speechless and gave some answer that he never recalled. Pinki was furious and sped back to her end of the coach, loudly announcing the breakdown of the AC. She told her mother that the AC was in complete shambles.
“How are we going to go through this horrendous journey if the AC won’t work? This is disastrous!”
Pritam turned back to look at the two women and talked to them about the problem of the AC. All the three of them walked to the passage outside the coach to where Kailas was. They wanted to know what was the problem, how long will it take to fix the thing and Kailas said that it would take around half an hour. He was absolutely unaware of how he was going to handle this situation but for now he had fended them off. Three of them walked back talking among themselves what a terrible situation it was.
Kailas had seen the electrician fix the AC many times, and had known a thing or two. He tried something that he had seen Sunil do always, but it didn’t work. He was helplessly trying everything that he could.
In the next fifteen minutes the three reappeared and inquired again and Kailas couldn’t answer. They were furious. They shouted, spat, barked and bellowed. They cursed his ineptitude, blamed his inefficiency and worthlessness. Then they left. Rest of the passengers were now alerted, they too arrived at the scene and asked the thousand questions. Kailas was made to look small and useless in his own eyes. He sat on his knees. Wealthy men looked down upon him. He spoke some arbitrary words to tell them that it will be fixed soon.
The Punjabi woman had not much to do. She and her daughter were dabbing their silken hankies on their dry foreheads and cheeks, such sullen moods were stretched on their faces that,
“The heat in this chamber is awful, it’s suffocating! It’s disastrous! I think I will faint by the end of this journey. Oh! We have been trapped so poorly! Bure Haal Hain!”, this they said to each other and then they called their relatives on the cell phone and repeated all the details of their pathetic journey. She complained to the Chai vendors and the chips vendors and every other person who passed through the door. Ananya didn’t care about anyone other than the stranger whose sight made life easier for her, Pritam. She longed for him the minutes that he was not on his seat. She was captivated.
Abhijeet felt concerned, he walked up to Kailas and inquired to him about the AC and offered to help. He took a look at the circuits and worked on it. Kailas felt tremendous relief. Abhijeet too wasn’t completely sure about the AC but he wanted to help, he knew that he could at least try. While he worked on the repair he talked with Kailas about his life, though not in any sense of empathy but with a genuine curiosity.
The Punjabi ladies were getting more restless every second. Now the mother put her feet across the passage and rested it on the berth in front of her and didn’t allow any vendor.
“Go tell your boss to fix the AC otherwise I will not allow any of you to pass though! Every time you open this door the place gets hotter and hotter.”
Abhijeet told Kailas some basic things to work on the AC while he was at it. He was trying but wasn’t getting anywhere. Then Mithali called for dinner and he had to go. Kailas was alone again but now he had the direction and a slight ray of hope.
Red plastic dinner trays arrived and all across the coach people crossed their legs and opened aluminum foils that rolled white chapattis. Ananya too ate the dry thick chapattis with paneer curry, which held strong favour of turmeric and thick cumin seeds.
Pritam finished his dinner and went outside. Kailas was nowhere near fixing the AC. Pritam launched his own brand of tirade. He was unrelenting in his accusations, unstoppable. Humiliation, now reached a new height for Kailas as the vile youngster made him hang his head in turbid silence. Kailas didn’t know of it was really him who had held out his hands clasped together to him and begged him forgiveness, that he will try his best to fix the AC as soon as possible. And Pritam left.
While eating dinner Abhijeet told Mithali about Kailas.
“All his life he’s done this same thing you know, distributing blankets and taking them back from passengers when they were leaving, and he cant think of anything else that he can do later in his life. And his father, who died two years ago, was a coolie, lugged suitcases and metal trunks on his head all his life. His father’s help got him a job here, and since then Kailas has been the way he looks right now. And maybe his son too will be stuck somewhere in a menial job related to rails which will enslave him for the rest of his life in submission. Such problems with AC or any other such thing might seem like a little adventure in his inert life. This poverty seems like a curse which men are born with, doesn’t it? They are born, bide their time and then just die in ****. But the part in the middle of this course is unacceptable to me. How deep is that pit of poverty that they cannot shrug off the pessimism…” He took a moment to think as Mithali listened with patience,the way she did everytime. “This hopelessness born out of poverty is a greater curse. They just find this comfort in this inertia of hanging onto a single noose of work all their life, no matter how menial and small it is. No matter how unjust it is to their ability.”
Kailas stuck to the repair fruitlessly. He felt numb after all the insinuation. He felt that there was nothing else for him to do now in his life than to fix the AC. The night continued. Punjabi women had tried everything but now they lost interest in the gripe as well. Lights started to go off. People took out their bed sheets and blankets and went to sleep. The blue lights were turned on and there was the silence with occasional footsteps of a vendor who went across coaches carrying used dinner trays. At the end of the coach the 51-year-old attendant went on.
In the dead of this night, surrounded by metal wall, in the middle of the passage Kailas was unrelenting in effort and the connections were stubborn. Nothing was working still, but Kailas went on, he never thought he could stretch himself like this, till 3 am. He never knew that he could do this much more. The insults were venomous.
And finally it happened! Insertion of a yellow wire in an arbitrary socket and there was a buzz. It ran trough the corridors of the coach and Kailas stood still. He watched the hitherto lifeless green light in front of him light up with an almost spectacular vigor. He finally stood up. He entered the compartment and put his hand up in the vent in the roof and felt the icy air touch his palm. He could not yet believe that he had done it. He was never completely hopeful about it. He waited for the next five minutes in the hum of the engine, to make sure if it was still working persistently. And he then lied down on his plank near the door. He smiled at the smudged ceiling. But he had to wake up at 6 in the morning, distribute blankets and bed sheets, make sure every passenger was all right and take note which people were leaving the coach.
The fragile girl with the red freckles was dreaming of her savior, she was in a magical land and dreaming of lovely things with her companion. She thought this was for real; this dream! She could touch his face and kiss his lips.
“Thank you, dear stranger; you took me from darkness to light.”
She was fast asleep when the icy cold air surrounded her.
With every breath, the chilly air slithered into her lungs and so the curse which she was born with was spreading through them once again with a devilish verve.
Sometime later she would wake up in horror, choking, breathless, sucking through her throat every little bit of air, groping in the darkness, helpless.
Till then, she dreamt on.
Thank you, dear stranger