He didn’t know what it was—this headache. The doctors called it a migraine. He knew it wasn’t. There was unresolved matter inside his head. Memories, thoughts, experiences, ideas, survival skills, everyday life, unshared dissatisfactions, sorrow, loss. Generally, they were well adhered, these thought-layers. Then, abruptly, something essential would shatter, break loose and fall away, carrying loosened terrain down its route. A trigger, there was always a trigger. Sometimes unseen, sometimes undetected, but there. How long could one turn oneself away.
Sooner or later, often or seldom, some force not entirely knowable or faceable would force a turning back, a returning to, a turning on itself, on the axis of that trigger.
Some memories he goes back to, some memories return to him.
Like his father’s typewriter reaching the end of a line only for the carriage to be pushed back each time, retracing the same path, following the same line, returning to that sameness till the origin became obscure and therefore immune to erasure, incapable of ending. How long could one turn oneself away.
Bheem Singh felt ill. A familiar nausea travelled through his insides. His body broke out in a sweat; eyes narrowed into slits, shutting out light as he felt his way down the stairs to an office room. A chain of intense low growls, more animal than human, released themselves into the walls. Shaky fingers, still on the latch trying to bolt the door right, curled into fists as he finally crumbled onto the floor, knuckles tapping at his head, his groans responding to the unbearable pain exploding inside him.
It happened often enough. Most times he knew it was coming and went into isolation earlier. This once, he was taken by surprise and didn’t know what to do. The process was similar to that of an avalanche that had no control over how much it would roll till, weary, it finally came to an end. Bheem was at his most vulnerable, the pain bringing him to his knees, his mind racing dully, convinced he couldn’t be seen like this. Too private. Too human. Too weak.
He didn’t know what it was—this headache. The doctors called it a migraine. He knew it wasn’t. There was unresolved matter inside his head. Memories, thoughts, experiences, ideas, survival skills, everyday life, unshared dissatisfactions, sorrow, loss. Generally, they were well adhered, these thought-layers. Then, abruptly, something essential would shatter, break loose and fall away, carrying loosened terrain down its route. A trigger, there was always a trigger. Sometimes unseen, sometimes undetected, but there. How long could one turn oneself away.
Sooner or later, often or seldom, some force not entirely knowable or faceable would force a turning back, a returning to, a turning on itself, on the axis of that trigger.
Some memories he goes back to, some memories return to him.
Like his father’s typewriter reaching the end of a line only for the carriage to be pushed back each time, retracing the same path, following the same line, returning to that sameness till the origin became obscure and therefore immune to erasure, incapable of ending. How long could one turn oneself away.
*
Street lights were dim, if at all they were there.
In the area where I lived soon after the crossover. Open drains, garbage heaps, peeing human beings against the building walls, who could look into my windows if they were positioned there. Most knew I was an immigrant. Most knew I was out all day trying to make a living. The police with their batons, and criminals with their knives.
His turban was unfurling on the road, his hair breaking free. His hand clutching at the small dagger his body wore. He attacked the three leaving his house. A baton rained down on him. Two knives slashed at him. He lay silenced and still; blood gushing from head, back and chest. A bruised, very pregnant wife dragged him in.
*
Bheem Singh’s eyes were shut tight. His mind was trying to shut itself down too. The apperceptive nature of memories! Words… image after image…associative, willed. He was never free of them. But didn’t he desire them? He was made of them. Of every painful shard or fragrant scrap or the coloured whole.
But frequently, they were unsolicited, darting in without warning, throwing him off balance. As in now.
1.Municipal no 1188-D.
2.Municipal no 1189-D.
3.Municipal no 1190-D.
4.Municipal no 1191-D.
5.Municipal no 1193-D.
6.Municipal no 1196-D.
7.Municipal no 1198-D.
8.Municipal no 2001-D.
9.Municipal no 2002-D.
10.House adjoining 1196-D.
11.House near the junction of Gumti Bazar and Sutar Mandi opposite Multani Pharmacy, Lahore.
12.House adjoining the House no.11.
A list of all the properties he had left behind. That he may now inherit.
*
It had been hours since Bheem Singh had locked himself up. This fuelled curiosity, then concern, that prompted knocks on the door. No. This liberty could not be given. So, the door remained closed.
Waiting for a lapse between the knocking. Opening the door silently, leaving. Getting on and off a tram, almost absent in mind. Winding his way through streets and lanes that grew congested and narrower as they turned one into the other, he stopped at the decrepit, bright, paint-peeling door of a three-storied house.
His walk down an unkempt Gour Dey Lane, disturbed by the alien sounds of gold jewellery-making tools which marked the many ground-level jewellery workshops that lined it, disconcerted him. He was glad to take a right turn further in. This was his first visit during the day.
A stench of wastedness, rankness, greeted him. The tiny bustling shops or stalls lining his lane were shutter closed; gutters open, overflowing with remnants of the night before. Dirt of the morning from human and animal alike. Garments drying on bars of windows. Amplified sounds – noisier and different. Everything seemed louder. Trams obsessing on their fixed metallic routes, the explosion of soot from the backs of the pug-nosed double-decker buses with their curving stairs languishing behind, taxis and lorries at loggerheads with the main road. Carping horns of vehicles; desperate hawking of vendors; frequent, raised voices from houses where windows banged onto each other. Arguing, abusive, fighting, screaming.
Yet. There is no world for us outside these four walls. Whether dead or alive, our fate is within this premise.
It was night and darkness that dressed up this house and its neighbourhood. Soaked it in the thick, overpowering fragrance of wilting flowers and cheap alcohol. Painted in dim yellow street lights. Brought it to life with the echoes of ghunghroos of women in gaudy colours moving to the rhythm of kotha music and percussion. And more painted women singing, entertaining, welcoming, enticing. It was night that washed the windows of rooms with pink or mauve or promiscuous green light. Or strung it with multicoloured bulbs that moved in rapid succession. Night, when the shutters of the tiny stalls in the lane flung wide open, vending an array of ware to aid or satisfy desire.
Day simply uncovered squalor.
*
With her I feel whole. My mind. My senses. My body. Thoughts. interests. passions… They exist together. None of these need to wait…they don’t wait for an afterwards or a henceforth or thenceforwards or a hereinafter in an unknown space.
No excuses. No. I will not make excuses for either my choices or my behaviour or my habits. I work hard. I provide for my family. I do not cheat people. I am better today than I was yesterday. At least I think so. Do you know what it’s like to be an only adult… in your family? It’s lonely. It’s troublesome. Not being able to behave normally or share or laugh or joke or cry or feel sorry or … just talk.
Second wife, daughter, sons—all too young. It’s only about them all the time. Home is a house filled with duty where I must be infallible.
No excuses. I love her – her ways, her abandon. She knows… she knows how to love. I need a woman. Complete. Not fragmented into body or mind or soul or act or speech. She brings a delight that is unequal. And her poetry – those thumris, kajris and dadras. And the few drops of alcohol. For these moments I live. I live only for myself.
It is my world of ‘I’s. I am. I experience. I am given pleasure. I sleep. I laugh. I am drunk. I enjoy. I am not judged.
It’s her voice that drew me to her first. Her song, the sarangi, her gestures. Her flirtation … and the sheer temptation of a few hours… of forgetfulness… freedom?
*
His father had protested. He would not leave his house.
‘I will not leave my home,’ he had said. He would not leave the land of the house in which he lived.
‘I will not forsake the land of my home,’ he had said. He would not go.
‘I will not move.’
Bheem Singh was on his knees begging. His father was standing upright, affirming.
‘Of course, you must leave,’ he told his son gently. ‘You, your family have to be safe. I have, at the most, a few insignificant, weak, ailing moments left within me. They will soon pass…’
Bheem remembers the rolled-up parchment in his hands. A photograph of his father in his wallet. Fleeing, running feet. The canvas was carried often by the two children. Sometimes by his wife and one child. Most times by him. He tied it up on the sides, made a rope handle and slung it on his back. But that was only when some load was off his back, or when one tired child could be put down from his shoulder to run on her own two feet again, or when he wasn’t holding some hand in one of his.
The canvas, he had been determined about, with a painting of one of his ancestors on it. The one piece of his history he refused to leave without. The other one got built at the bottom of a pipal tree in Khalwana when a small vertical stone, a monolith, was placed there after his father died.
Khalwana, his chosen village, a name he associated with his ancestor-on-parchment. There were remnants of a fort there; remnants from a story that said his illustrious ancestor was gifted a small part of the fort and some land around it; remnants of memory that referred to him as a kilewala or ‘of the fort’.
*
It had been a harrowing month and six days since Bheem had found a roof over his head – the stinky, decrepit quarters he was currently occupying with his family. A few more days since he had left his old home across the border. A hard worker, he knew it wouldn’t be long before he escaped from this hell-hole, settling into a more habitable place. His hours knew no night or day. He needed only snatches of minutes to grab a bite, nap a bit, and get back into the driver’s seat once again. A far cry from his life in Lahore.
Acquaintances of friends and family in Lahore had recently been on the lookout. But since he was always on the move, it had been difficult to find him. He was, at the best of times, reclusive. And of course, there was as yet no phone he was connected to. Nobody really knew where he lived. But this was urgent. Very urgent. It had been three days since. It was past twilight on Lansdowne Road. An overtaking vehicle abruptly screeched to a stop right in front of his taxi. Emerged a familiar face.
‘Your father died, Bheem,’ the voice said.
Bheem kept hearing the words through the flashes of headlights, above the din of passing traffic, above the frenzy of angry horns.
Babuji nahin rahe, Bheem! In a voice, loud, bouncing off the buildings, echoing off the skies, reverberating through the universe. That is what Bheem remembered.
The post office had closed. He had to go to the house of someone he hardly knew, book the long-distance telephone call and wait for it to come through. He was not allowed a private thought. It became public knowledge that his father had already been cremated and that he, his only son, had been denied the duty of the ultimate ritual held sacrosanct for son and parent alike. People looked at him in a strange way. Many eyes looked at him in many ways. For days. With contempt, with accusation – as though not being there for his father, not going back was something he desired or had chosen.
*
Some words leapt out at him.
Appendix xxix, Govt of India, Ministry of Rehabilitation
Certificate of payment of compensation
1959
Office of the Regional Settlement Commissioner. Patna in handwritten ink. And underlined.
No.
The holder of this certificate was paid compensation towards satisfaction of his
claims for immovable property left by him in west Pakistan and verified under the
Displaced Persons (Claims) Act, 1950, as noted below: –
1.Name
S/O or W/O or Wd/O
2.Present address
3.Registration No.
of application for
Compensation as
given by Settlement
Office
4.Index No(s) of Claim(s)
5.Total assessed value… Rs.79,724/-
of his/her claim(s)
or share
- Particulars of Refugee … not registered
Registration Card/Census Card surrendered: –
Becomings, micro-becomings, re-becomings, which don’t have the faintest regard for a person’s history. Not the changes he has known and lived thus far. Which is why he found family reminiscences facile, false. They filled him with unease, a lurking sense of betrayal, of having failed the past.
*
It was raining. Not hard and vertical as in the monsoons. But rain gone awry, slashing through a collision of extreme heat and sudden cold. Tempestuous, erratic winds circled and howled, gathering and dispersing clouds thick and ominous. Where uneven lines cleaved the cumulative blackness before crashing down upon both tree and tenement. Kaal Baisakhi it was called—the most theatrical of storms—taking over the skies as soon as their sun had left. It moved centre stage every evening putting on a show of nature’s wrath and might. Twenty to thirty days one gave it before it travelled elsewhere totally spent or whimpered to a stop.
Kaal, that fateful thing in black, in the month of Baisakh.
In this season of Calcutta’s insanity, a crazed bird reappeared to seize the sky. Reckless. Unfettered. Soaring through the darkness, slicing through its sound, cutting across its fury. Scorched by desire, single-minded in its purpose. The need to possess at the centre of its madness. Storm and bird complicit in their act of crime.
Bedraggled, yet not spent before they raged again violent, unpredictable, city and woman ravaged by man and storm alike.
The winds tearing at all raiment, denuding body, ripping away windows, throwing open doors, pulling apart roofs, blowing shame and false honour away. Leaving behind the wreckage of love and play.
This once, it was he who was active, he who performed, he who didn’t want a preamble, he who heeded no warning. It was he who did not care, he who did not hide, he who was without any pretences.
The expanse within him was seemingly without limits when nothing occupied it. He sought to fill up this emptiness; grabbed at things to fill that space – something, anything he could settle in with. If only for that instant, it takes a mad, errant raindrop to escape, hit the earth and perish.
*
You may cast me in iron… but this face that you’re seeing, this man that you’re acknowledging, cannot fit a rigid frame. The outlines that hold me are porous … subject to the unknown, the unexperienced, the unimagined, the disallowed, the not yet lived.
We imagine only the permissible; fixed shapes such as father, provider, elder or husband. It is as we reach closer to that Rubicon of the censored that we either draw back or we break the barriers or we break ourselves.
*
Bheem Singh sat on the floor. Still. His back faced the door to his office room downstairs. He sat underneath his desk, an open carton in front, newspaper clippings littering the floor.
Bheem Singh, muzzled by the agony, closed into himself with the anguish of the unspoken.
Stark black-and-white pictures. Trudging wearily to what would be their new homes. A never-ending caravan of apprehension. One single convoy. Ten miles. Beginning without end. Emaciated bullocks. Heads down. Dragging the weight of a diktat behind them. Sparse belongings, withered humans.
Still, he was still. Then a teardrop slid slowly down his face, movement unsteady, staining his cheek, breaking defiantly through his formidable reserve.
Paragraphs, now history, deadened by repetition.
Trains awash with blood.
‘Rab jaane how many remains we had to negotiate over. My wife, pregnant and retching and fainting at the smell and sight… Two young ones, eyes masked, being piloted by us…
Headlines: Too few police and soldiers to check the ensuing violence… Protection of British lives first priority…
The sound of hammer to ground…Tent cities sprouting all over the country.
Headlines: Some 200,000 refugees in squatter colonies in the eastern city of Calcutta alone.
The terrain of pain knows nothing but repetition. A nagging pain that starts travelling through his head …
‘Tu ja puttar…’ His father’s words. Permission which was at once a command and an entreaty…
. . . looking for other wounds that will never heal.
Image Credit: Author’s family archive.