Pilgrimage

So when sanity left its home leaving no address behind, in panic I cried, “Where shall we go now to cure our madness?”

I heard a voice presently, an echo of the most Absolute kind.  ‘Find Truth. Find Me. There alone you will find sanity.’

I looked around considering, and pawed at the emptiness surrounding me.

‘Find you? How? Where do you live?’

‘In the heart of a jungle, lustrous and green. Nature is my ultimate abode.’

Confounded and clueless, I said, ‘In a jungle? How do I reach there? Lead me to where you stay. I must not delay. I am losing my bearings fast.’

I waited as moments of silence passed, as if the voice was preparing a route map to its dwelling. And then it spoke again, its timbre resonating between the walls within which I was caught.

“You will be guided. But be forewarned. The journey is long and arduous, and you cannot hurry.” The caution in the voice made me tremble. It was ominous.

‘Know the perils. You must tread through dense forests where fierce aspects prowl, trek past dark trails where venomous snakes lurk, beat the wild creatures that ambush from behind blind corners and face hurdles that can break your resolve.’

I swallowed hard. ‘Will I make it?’

‘Most certainly. If you have the will and virtue. And a single-minded craving to meet me in my shrine.’

I thought of the rough terrains I will have to cross and felt jitters in my veins. I closed my eyes and reflected on the deep, dark jungle, the wild animals on the way, the jagged paths and the stumbling blocks that would lead to where this voice resides. That’s where sanity prevails. That’s where peace resides.

I meditated on what the voice had just said. My breath rose and fell amid a silken silence. And then in a passing instant, almost as if struck by a sudden awareness, I exclaimed, ‘Are you that, by any chance? Ayyappa?’

‘Yes. I am That. So Hum. And That you are too. Tat Twam Asi.’

I felt a shiver in my body. A lone tear waited to break the bund and I heard bells toll in my heart. Deep in my soul, beyond the sentient space, past the wilderness of thought, I briefly caught a lamp’s distant glimmer. As it flickered and vanished, I whispered, choking on my words, ‘Show me the way. I promise I will see you in your abode one day.’

‘I shall be waiting,’ the voice said, before petering out and merging with my heartbeat. There, in the wild woods, it rested.

A pilgrimage had just begun. One that isn’t limited by approvals and prohibitions. One where the destination is the source itself.

Those Fifteen Minutes

I would blame my eyes and not my heart for whatever happened, or didn’t happen, yesterday.

The eyes saw something that they should not have seen. And that’s absurd, considering how many times the blinkers have failed me in the past and got me into trouble. Like the other day when I almost rode into a jaywalker at a turning after I missed to see him in the waning evening light, and as I tried to evade a collision, fell off the cycle, and a car screeched to a sudden halt within hitting distance of me bang in the middle of the road. Anything could have happened that day.

It was at the same spot, sprawling on the ground, just below the door of a parked car, basking in the twilight that I saw it yesterday.

What I am talking about here is a 1000 Dirham note.

I could have passed without noticing it if fate had decided so. But no. Fate sometimes turns into a wily thing and cocks a snook at me. It loves to dare and deride me even when I leave everything to its volition.

“Do whatever,” I invariably say with resignation at the end of a fight that I know it will willy-nilly win.

“I do what is good for you. You are too naïve to know it,” it says every time I make my protestations, demanding my due in a life that could be spent in a much better way.

“You do what’s good for me?” I ask, smirking at its lame, goddam philosophy.

Nothing that I consider good for me has ever corresponded with what fate thinks is good for me. We are at logger-heads forever, and fate always chucks my favour and has the last laugh, making me seethe at its whataboutery.

But I must be fair. It isn’t always as mean as I make it sound either. According to my roommates, it was my good fate alone that saved me the other day from getting knocked dead by the car. The fracture in the thumb and the bruises came gratis, and it can be credited only to my carelessness.

Coming to what happened yesterday, I can’t describe it as anything less than bizarre. It is like one of those dreams where you are half awake but are completely helpless to act as per your will because you are in a supine state, and you squirm and grimace in the dark, and in the end, you hobble to the bathroom dazed, to relieve a sagging bladder.

There was no reason for the nasty thing to be lying in wait on my path, bearing its sensuous worth like the anonymous models on the massage parlour cards strewn around the place. But it was there, right in front of me, as if it had lain there all evening waiting to be rescued by me from the elements. I could have just been blind to the lure of the fallen lucre on the road. I could have crossed it in total oblivion. It could have caught someone else’s attention. But it had beaten these odds and eventualities, and I had spotted it under the nascent street light in which all litter look the same.  This only meant one thing and I was certain about it. Fate had a specific plan for me.

It took a while for me to believe that I wasn’t hallucinating. The summer hasn’t peaked to that extent. It will be some more weeks before the sun gets into the head when I am out and about delivering parcels to people to whom 1000 Dirhams is money that could fetch them a few extra, unwanted things. But to me it is a month’s salary. And when it lands in my life idly, it means a lottery to me and the people in my life. It can make some of their wishes come true sooner than they thought.

I paused discreetly near the note and got off my cycle. I looked around warily, catching in the corner of my eye the gentle flutter of the currency beside my slippers, as if it was waiting on its wings. I put a furtive step on it, lest the wind sweep it away, and I stood awkwardly adjacent to the parked car trying to think. I squinted through the shaded window to make sure there was nobody in the car. Who knows? It could have been a bait set by the police to catch the dishonest and unscrupulous men in the city. It takes a long time to know what amounts to breach of law and what is punishable here. I have always lived in the fear of being caught for unspecified wrongdoing. Every time I see a police vehicle on patrol, I dismount from my cycle almost as a reflex, hold my breath and proceed only after the car has passed.

I remembered a cook at the restaurant telling me when I came here two years ago that there are cameras fixed all over the city and every move we made, every breath we took was recorded and scanned. Considering that, the task at hand involved great risk, but I was blissfully unmindful of it yesterday.

It was time for Magrib prayer, and men were trickling into the mosque at the end of the street.

As I stood on, uncertain about my next move, I thought of the man whose money it must have been. I consciously chose to believe that it had fallen off a rich man’s wallet bursting with unwanted money and he might not even realize it. I didn’t want to imagine that it had fallen off a meagre pocket of someone like me. There is a way to know, though. In this place, a rich man’s money smelled of perfume, and a poor man’s note smelled of nothing in particular. For the moment, I stuck to my theory, that of the money belonging to a man who had no urgent need for it. The clean, unsoiled looks of the currency confirmed its refined background. I didn’t feel ashamed or guilty about pocketing it. It wasn’t stealing. I was categorical about it.

Just as I began to stoop, making as if to strap a loose chappal, two fashionable women walked up to the car parked behind me. Returning to my upright position, I waited for them to drive away. But the women were steadfast in their conversation, rattling off English as if they were the last descendants of the English-speaking tribe. I became increasingly conscious about my lingering about. Men began to trickle out of the mosque after the prayers. There were more people on the road now than before and I lifted my foot a little to confirm that the money was in place.

“Bhai,” I was startled by a voice that came from my left. I looked sideways expecting someone to say, “You are standing on my money.” To my relief, the man was only searching for the post office. He looked to be my kind, worn with worries in life, else he wouldn’t have called me bhai. I wondered how heavy his baggage of unkept promises to himself and his people was. I was glad that the 1000 Dirhams had not revealed itself to him. He would have had an equal need of it as me.

“I don’t know. Ask someone there,” I waved in the opposite direction in a bid to bundle him off.

As I began to get restless and fidgety, I reminded myself to maintain sanity. I was giving in to temptation alright, but it wasn’t a crime by any stretch of imagination. There was nobody to stake a claim on the note and therefore it could be anybody’s. Including mine.

The two women who had got into the car were still not driving away. I was annoyed. Just then, a police vehicle stopped in front of the mosque, and my heart capered and my head tingled with unfounded dread. Why did I imagine that they were there to keep an eye on me? I felt weak and downcast. The circumstances were clearly not conducive to a clean, unsuspecting act, and with each passing moment, I began to feel like I was sinking into a state of imagined depravity. Spurred by desperation, I slid the currency under the car on which I was by now leaning and secured it from any rival eye. “Perfect. You did a sensible thing. Now, go around and come back in 15 minutes. By then, this place will be clear. I promise,” I heard my fate instruct in my ears. It was unequivocal. Fate wanted me to take home the jackpot. It was giving me the right directions.

Encouraged by its words, I swerved the cycle and pedaled on aimlessly. Past restaurants and Shawarma corners. Past people in haste and cats that lazed. Past the fragrance of neem blooms and the glare of neon lights. Past immigrant dreams and a city’s superfluity. Past 15 minutes of rising and falling apprehension.

There was only a sliver of time between the 1000 Dirhams and me, I thought with mounting excitement, and this time I was unwavering. I had gathered enough courage to scoop up what was destined to be mine. As I passed by the mosque, I made sure that the police had left. And then as I neared the spot, I saw the inconceivable.

Fate had replaced the car under which I had slid the money with the motorbike of a Pizza delivery boy. Baffled and beside myself, I put my cycle on stand and scoured the place frantically. Semi clad women from the massage parlour cards looking at me invitingly. My eyes swam amidst their seductive poses, pausing at some unintentionally, and searched for the elusive currency. Cameras atop the buildings around must have caught me squatting and combing the place like a crazed animal.

It was unbelievable. The 1000 Dirham note had vanished in 15 minutes.

“Are you looking for something?” the Pizza boy asked as he walked up to his bike.

I looked at him head to toe with choking disappointment and anger as if to assess his scruples, and wondered if he could have stolen my 1000 Dirham note. But on what grounds could I have confronted the man? I shook my head as if to say, ‘nothing’ and began to cycle back to the restaurant. My phone showed eight missed calls from the arbab. He will be livid and I knew I had an earful waiting for me. I raced through the sidelines, past insignificant things.

In the night, as I lay on the top tier of the bunk bed in our twelve by twelve room, staring at the flaking ceiling, I asked fate, “How spiteful can you get than this? What would you have lost if you had let me had that money?”

Fate replied, in the most sorted manner, like a mother would tell her ignorant child, “I did it in your interest.”

“In my interest?” I guffawed theatrically. “Losing that kind of money? Do you even know what it meant to me?”

Fate laughed softly. I wasn’t sure if the laughter meant derision or pity.

“Losing? How can you lose something that wasn’t yours really? Sleep now. You have lost nothing, not even a shred of your conscience. I made sure of it.”

I don’t understand much of what my fate says or does. Its cryptic nature will continue to confound me for as long as I am alive. We share an equation that makes us strange bedfellows. It will have its brazen ways and I will bicker with it like an impertinent child. I will resist and throw tantrums. And in the end, I will surrender, more out of fatigue than favour.

“Do whatever.”

A Girl, A Stranger and A Bouquet (Published in Readomania.com)

Three months is equal to 92 days. It is a long period to spend waiting at the exit of a metro station, with a bouquet of red roses in hand and a silent appeal in the eyes. Each day was a fresh reminder of past rejections. Hope, in those days, was just a passing emotion that I momentarily experienced around 6.30 in the evening on week days.

I am not new to rejections. It is such a natural part of my life that I now look upon acceptance with great suspicion. No one says ‘yes’ these days without a motive of self-interest. The first time I knew rejection was when my mother left me for reasons that I still don’t know. I have my own theories about it, which I keep changing to insulate myself from the feeling of hurt it brings every time I think of her. It is so long now that I can barely recall the actual day of her disappearance and the immediate emotion it evoked in me. I am not sure if I was shocked, sad or scared. I must have cried then. I must have felt betrayed. It’s an old pain that now surfaces only occasionally.

I haven’t met my father, which thankfully spares me the ordeal of seeking reasons for his rejection. To me, he didn’t exist. He was merely a cause for my birth, ‘a disgraceful way to be born’, in my mother’s words. Every time I asked my mother about him in the years before she disappeared, she would threaten to sell me to the kabbadiwala if I ever spoke about him. The horrible prospect of ending up in the kabbadiwala’s sack that I was certain was infested with cockroaches stopped me from asking anything more about my father.

Ask me my age, and I will not be able to tell. Age is an account of life for people who celebrate birthdays. And I have never celebrated one. I am not exceptionally good looking either. Beauty thrives on women who nourish it with powder and lipstick. I have a lasting grouse against my mother for not bequeathing her good looks to me. Every time I look in the mirror, I feel disappointed that the man she allowed to father me has left behind his traces of uncouthness on me. Nevertheless, at some point, I realized that I was worthy of being ogled at, at least by idlers hanging around the place. Although the lechery in their eyes used to make me cringe, it also made me feel like a woman of some desirable beauty. It isn’t a comfortable feeling entirely, but I have now learned to deal with it internally. I have steeled up to the depravity of the malevolent male gaze.

It was when my life was waltzing between everyday rejections by the decent people I approached and gawking by the lewd men I shunned that he entered my life. What it was that made me take notice of him amidst the scores of people I see every day, I don’t know. It would be ridiculous to claim that I fell in love with him instantly. Women like me cannot fall in love with men like him.  At the most, we can stand and stare, imagining life and love in the arms of handsome men like him.

I don’t know what came over me when I first saw him on the escalator descending to where I was standing trying to get people’s attention. Transfixed, I let him pass by me. Once. Twice. Thrice. On the fourth day, I went up to him, extended the red roses and said, “Lelo na saab. Sirf pachees rupaye. Aaj boni nahi huyi hai.”

It would have made no difference whatever the price might have been, for he had no apparent interest in it. But for my heart’s sake, for the three days that I had spent waiting for him at the entrance of the metro station and for the red roses that I had saved for him without peddling it to anyone else, I made a massive concession. It was inducement I made for my own sake.

Looking at the manner in which people avoid me, I wonder if the days of red roses are over, and with them, the romantic seasons too had ended. Don’t men and women buy flowers to each other these days? Champa, my friend, who does henna and tattoo designing outside the Hanuman Mandir, says flowers are things of the past.

“People exchange more fashionable and pricey things these days. Things they buy from the malls,” she would say every time I complained.

“Like what?” I asked curiously.

And she, like me, with no exposure to the world of the wealthy, had no clue.

“Many things,” she said dismissively, “but certainly not roses. Why would anyone waste money on something that will die in a day?”

She always gloated over the fact that her henna lasted longer on people’s hands than my roses. And the tattoos will be there forever. It made me feel less privileged than her, as though she had a better claim on life than me by virtue of what we did for a living.

It was true that roses were rapidly losing their appeal among people, but I was determined to sell my bouquet to the man for whom I had at some inexcusable moment pledged a curious fascination.

I don’t know anything about him except that he arrived by the metro around 6.30 in the evening every day. I waited at the station exit to see him walk past hurriedly, and on occasion, I managed to grab his attention in a silent, unsought manner. On days when I felt emboldened, I extended the flowers half-heartedly towards him, muttering an entreaty which he either ignored or dismissed with a casual shake of head. But on most days, I just stood impassively. To me, just standing there content in the knowledge that he saw me as he passed by was enough. The roses were witness to an unspoken sentiment that I was still trying to understand.

Waiting has a value that craving doesn’t have.  It has greater chances of settling into acceptance. However, the fact that my subject of waiting was obscure made each day fraught with anxiety. I didn’t know what I was expecting of him – just a passing connection that a flower vendor will have with a random, prospective buyer or, as it occurred to me in flashing moments of heightened hope, something that would last longer? I feared to give the tenuous liaison that I was beginning to imagine a convincing name.

“You must be insane,” Champa said to me when I admitted to her that my single objective in life was to sell a bouquet of red roses to the man whom we now call ‘saade cheh.’ Curiously, the time he arrived at the station was the only reference we had to tag with him. She had no doubt that that I was hopelessly infatuated with him and made no bones about its absurdity.

“I am not that mad,” I retorted, not entirely convinced of my pronouncement. There were times when I had hoped love could happen to me too, with someone like him.

“Good for you if you are not decking up wild dreams. Who knows, he might be married too, or have a girlfriend. Moreover, no sophisticated young man would even spare a glance for girls like us. There has to be some kind of matching,” Champa added, a bit tartly, rolling her eyes.

“How many times should I repeat that my only objective is to get him to buy my flowers, at least once and nothing else?” I snapped back at her. It worried me that secretly I was wishing for something beyond my means. Was I smitten with something imaginary?

It annoyed me to think that he might already be in a relationship. With a girl better than me in every respect.  The kind who had better and richer things in their lives than mere rose bouquets. It irked me to think that I was no match for him. But what if our conjectures were false? What if…? I didn’t let Champa know what was on my mind. I remembered a line from a Shah Rukh Khan movie and smiled on the sly.

“Agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaho to puri kainaat use tum se milaane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai.”

Movies are such hope givers. Looking fondly at my roses, I promised them, “He will come for you one day.”

And he did. Ninety two days after I first saw him.

It was a Sunday. Being a holiday, chances of commuters stopping by for a bouquet were higher than on other days, and I made extra efforts to coax people to highlight their holiday with my red roses. Happiness thrived on human faces on Sundays, and love, at long last, seemed to find its rightful place in their lives.

My heart missed a beat and I squealed inwardly when I saw him walking up to me with certainty, as if he had always known where to go if he ever wanted to buy a bouquet. I tucked my loose lock of hair behind my ear and lowered my eyes, pretending to have not seen him, and held my breath till I heard his voice in front of me.

“How much?” he asked, with a half-smile. It wasn’t as much a smile of familiarity as it was of politeness.

I looked up with a start and stared, not knowing what to say. How much? Suddenly, I didn’t want to sell the roses to him. I wanted to give them to him as a present. But that would be preposterous. I couldn’t have gifted him the roses. I was a stranger to him. And he was only a customer who knew nothing about how I had been stalking him mentally for 92 days. There was no scope for mutual love in a proposition like this. Suddenly, all that I had conjured up in my mind in the past three months seemed to dissipate in a moment’s realization.

“How much is it?” he asked again interrupting my wobbly thoughts.

‘It’s the last piece left, saab. You may give me anything for it,” I blurted, handing out the bouquet. I wondered if he heard the tremor in my voice. It pains when something you want to give for love goes out for money.

“Do you have change?” he asked holding out a 500 rupee note.

“No,” I lied without looking at him. “But you can give it to me later, Saab. I am here on all days.”

“Are you sure?” he asked without betraying any emotion, before putting the currency back into his wallet. “I don’t like leaving dues. But there is no choice now. I will pay you tomorrow. Thank you.”

I was elated at the thought that there will be a tomorrow to wait for. And it will be a different kind of waiting. It will not pass unobtrusively. This anticipation will have a meaning and a certitude, although it was not clear what lay beyond the tryst for me. For the first time in my life, I felt the genuine thrill of acceptance and I wondered if the roses too must have felt vindicated after all these years of anonymity.

“Don’t worry, saab. The world isn’t going anywhere. Neither are you and I,” I said, barely managing to look into his eyes.

As he nodded and smiled, I wondered in a flash of fluster who he was the taking the roses for. I could have let envy consume me, but I ducked it successfully, and watched him walk away with my present. Yes, present. It will be so till I took the money from him. I had my eyes pinned on him till he melded with the city outside. I don’t remember having rued my poor, seedy state so much as I did on that day. And I don’t remember having loathed myself for coveting love as much as I much as I did on that day. But there was the assured hope of tomorrow. And there was the universe that could conspire for me.

It took a long time for it to be Monday, and even longer for it to be 6.30 in the evening. I kept a bouquet of crisp red, partly bloomed roses for him. It will be easier to persuade him to buy one today with the familiarity of the previous day, I thought. I sprayed water on them from time to time to keep them from withering in the peak noon light.

The evening crowd morphed into a mass as I fixed my attention on it, shifting my glance from place to place. My eyes began to hurt with search as time passed from 6.00 to 6.30 to 7.00 to 7.30. The sweat that gathered in my underarms began to sully my senses and I felt its pungent odour permeate in the air around me. The old feeling of rejection returned and enveloped me, even as the crowd slowly thinned and melted away, unaware of the miscellany of human agonies scattered in its midst.

“He didn’t come,” I said to Champa later that night, holding back my tears. Champa simpered, as if she already knew. I looked away, unable to bear the look of disdain on her face.

“Tell me now, honestly. What did you expect of him? Love? That he would have come back and taken you home with him to tell his mother that he had found his bride?” she said mockingly when I asked her what she thought might have happened to him.

I had no answer to her questions. I had no expectations of him. He didn’t owe me anything. Not even the money for the bouquet. I had given it to him as a present. Yet there was something that had remained unsettled between us. Only the bouquet that he took with him on that day could have said anything definite about the sentiment that I still cannot categorically say was not love. I lived with a feeling of disquiet that settled in my heart with time, neither nurturing the agony nor uprooting it completely.

It’s nearly two years since that Monday. I cannot say what might have happened to him, although I have made many conjectures like I did for my mother to escape the pain. Lies are good palliatives. They keep a broken heart beating. A city can do many things to people, I said to myself. It can abduct them, make them disappear forever or change them beyond recognition. There are no certainties in a city, no allegiances. The only thing I was determined not to think was that he the universe had failed me and he had found love elsewhere.

I cannot say that I am still waiting for him to appear before me one day and say, “Here’s the money I owe you.” Such improbabilities happened only in the movies. For once, I dismissed movies as nonsense. They weren’t hope givers. They were a hoax.  Bakwaas, I said to Champa, dourly.

Father. Mother. And now saade che. Together they taught me that there is a blurry space between acceptance and rejection. A space as undefined as my existence at this metro station exit.

A space where hopes, like red roses, wither and die every day.