*
The house that Shekhar lived in had a mango orchard. The mangoes were local and of poor quality; there was only one tree that bore hybrid mangoes.
The fruits were just about to ripen. Shekhar would go there every day and look longingly and dream of the day when they wouldn’t be on the trees but in his hands . . .
One day, when he saw a few ripe mangoes on a solitary tree, he said to the gardener, ‘Give me a mango.’
But the gardener was unsympathetic to this completely reasonable request. He said, ‘Young master, I’ll pick those mangoes tomorrow and send a basket of them as a present to the master.’
To the master! Shekhar thought it completely unfair that the mangoes be snatched from him, who actually wanted the mangoes, and given to his father who didn’t care about them. He said, ‘Will you give them to me or not?’
‘No, young master.’
Shekhar started to climb the tree himself. The gardener stood back and laughed because he knew that this child couldn’t climb the tree.
But Shekhar’s hands and feet had the strength of his anger. He got to the top, comfortably sat on a branch, picked out the ripe mangoes and started eating.
The gardener’s smile turned into worry. Watching Shekhar, he was even more convinced that the boy would eat up all the mangoes.
But his stomach gave up on him. So he started picking all kinds of mangoes—the unripe, half-rotten and ripe ones—and throwing them around after spoiling them by biting into them. With each mango he threw, he yelled to the gardener, ‘Take that! And take that! And take that!’
The gardener couldn’t take that, and he began to climb the tree to get a hold of Shekhar. Shekhar looked at him and said, ‘Come on, yes, come on!’ and he climbed further up and sat at the end of a branch which would clearly break if there was even the slightest increase in weight on it. The gardener shouted, ‘Come down or you’ll fall!’
‘No, come and get me. Let’s see.’ And he climbed further up.
The gardener was scared. He left. Shekhar gradually got down. He hadn’t touched the ground when he saw the gardener return with Father.
He became philosophical. He gave his plucked mangoes a once-over and then stood ready. He did a calculation in his head about how many slaps per mango or how many mangoes per slap he’d get. That he might not get slapped was not a thought that entered his head.
But he didn’t get slapped. Father laughed after he heard the whole tale. He said to Shekhar, ‘It was fine if you wanted to eat them, but why did you throw them?’ And then to the gardener he asked, ‘Why did you tell him he couldn’t have them because you were giving them to me as a present?’
This was the only time Shekhar expected a slap and got laughter instead. Normally, the opposite used to happen. Still, he had boundless love in his heart for his father.
*
Shekhar’s father bought a new house—in Patna, on the banks of the Ganga. Now Shekhar’s chief occupation was to cut down the banana trees in their orchard and use their trunks to float in the river (one has to call it ‘floating’ because he still hadn’t learned how to swim). Often, he would slip off the trunk and struggle in the water, but each time someone would see him and drag him out. Despite Father’s prohibitions he never gave up this habit because the idea of floating down such a big river without using his arms and legs was so attractive that he couldn’t shake it from his head.
He tied three trunks together and made a raft. He took it to the Ganga, laid down flat on it and used his arms to row it into the moving stream. Then he brought his hands in and lay still as he looked sometimes to one side and sometimes to the other.
The slower movements on either riverbank made it seem to him like they were going backwards. After he had looked at both sides for a long time, he started looking up at the sky. It had rained and small bits of clouds were running around every which way. Sometimes they would run into each other and become one. And he watched the vastness of the sky dissolve into azure. Oh, how beautiful it would be to melt into that vast azure sky and become nothing . . . Absent-mindedly, Shekhar thought, ‘This is how I will die, where there will be no obstacles . . .’
Obstacles . . . he felt as if the life he was living was nothing more than an obstacle. Today he got the chance to escape from its clutches. Today, with the help of three felled trees, he was going to that distant land where the Ganga flows, where it merges with the ocean, where there is an island of sunset-gold and where there lived a princess dressed in clothes made from clouds that had dissolved into the very same azure expanse . . . Shekhar would go to her and say, ‘I’m Shekhar. I’ve come from the land of attachments,’ and she would seat him next to her and say, ‘You are free here. You will live in that palace of sirissa flowers and you can do whatever you want . . .’
But maybe the princess wouldn’t notice him. Why would she waste her time on an insignificant boy from the land of attachment?
But there would be others there and other girls. Wasn’t everyone a princess in the land without attachments?
Shekhar closed his eyes . . .
Then he realized, ‘Goodness, that place is really far away. It will take days to get there, and the Ganga flows so slowly . . .’
But he had already passed beyond the point where worry had any power over him. The sky, the liberated atmosphere, the unobstructed vastness had all filled his veins. He was unobstructed, too, vast, liberated and reality was far behind . . .
He thought of a line of poetry in English:
O mother Ganges, vast and slow!
And slowly, with great concentration, he began to add lines to complete the poem . . .
The moment he realized the poem was finished was the moment he realized that his back had grown stiff from the cold and his hands were white and numb. He knew he had come very far from home.
Fear lives in the world of reality, not on the way to that island of sunset-gold. Shekhar slowly and unwillingly rowed himself to the riverbank. He somehow got on to dry land and lay face down in the sun.
When he awoke from his sleep, the sun had already set. He got up and dragged his tired body home. As he neared home, the moon was rising, and the house was completely quiet, even though the lights were on. As soon as he went inside, he saw his mother and father standing in the courtyard, looking outside with fixed gazes, as if they had suddenly grown old—there were so many lines on their faces . . . As soon as they saw Shekhar, their anxiety-ridden faces relaxed. There were tears in Mother’s eyes; Father turned right around and went upstairs.
Shekhar followed them and saw that the house was completely empty. The next day he learned that people had taken lanterns and gone quite far down the side of the river looking for him . . . Somehow, his parents learned that he had gone down the river on a raft of banana trees and everyone panicked. When he heard the news, Shekhar forgot himself to such an extent that even after a great effort he couldn’t remember the poem he had composed on the bosom of the Ganga, only the trace of the first line remained in his memory:
O mother Ganges, vast and slow!
*
How did one get to the island of sunset-gold when it was far away, when it took so many days to get there, so many days like the first one where in the first few hours your back grows stiff and hands go numb? How did one manage to see the princess who would put you up in a palace of sirissa flowers and sit next to you?
Shekhar knows that it will never happen, but he also knows that it has to happen, inevitably, something would have to happen to fill the emptiness in his life. And helplessly he’d think, why doesn’t something happen which would get me closer to that island? When he’d go out for a walk, when so many cars passed right next to him, why didn’t a princess peep out from one of them and say, ‘Shekhar, come with me to my island where there are no obstacles.’ All right, maybe not a princess. When he was walking in the field where there were so many girls playing, why didn’t some island-loving girl hidden in their midst come up to him and say, �
��Come. Why don’t you play in our carefree game?’ All right, maybe not even that. But how about when he bumped into something while walking, why then didn’t a girl from this very world come up to him and say lovingly, ‘Come, Shekhar. I can’t do much but I can bring something new into your monotonous world.’ Or if only she just asked, ‘You aren’t hurt too badly, are you?’
Secretly, he would draw colourful flowers and leaves on pretty paper and in the space in between he’d write a letter. To whom? He didn’t know. But he poured out the hunger in his heart into that letter, and the anxiety of being able to welcome that stranger . . . He wrote, ‘O imaginary one, O stranger, whom I can’t even see in my mind, will you read this letter and understand? I am Shekhar, I’m alone and I’ve been searching for you for I don’t know how long, waiting for you, only for you. You are on a heavenly plane, but does that heavenly plane want you as much as I do? O unknowable, O unimaginable!’
Then he would seal the letter in an envelope, put his full address in one of the corners and tie it to a stick before he placed it into the Ganga so that it wouldn’t sink as it travelled down. And wait expectantly for several days in the hope that someone would read it, they’d read it—and then he’d get a reply. Even if it wasn’t from a girl in the dreamland, at least it would be from someone he didn’t know! And when nothing happened for the next several days, he wrote another letter and tied it to another raft in case the first one sank . . .
But nothing ever happened, and he never lost faith . . .
Sometimes a butterfly would get trapped in his room. At first it would crash into the glass of the window or the door because light was coming in through them and it thought it was the way out, and then crash into it some more. Then, admitting defeat, it would make a few circuits around the room and then come back to the same spot and again crash its head against the glass and flail its wings helplessly, and even though falling wouldn’t completely fall . . .
Shekhar was in an identical situation. In his search for freedom, first he tried dealing with material things, things that he could see, and when he failed there, he tried to work in the realm of imagination, and when that frustrated him he came back to reality, to material and visible things.
*
Shekhar’s father is ill from typhus, and sometimes Ishwardutt gets on the phone to call the doctor. That’s how Shekhar came to learn a few things about the telephone. He realized that things that he couldn’t find elsewhere could probably be found by using a telephone—because it was new, mysterious.
Father was sick, and so the offices were closed. The watchman would lock everything up and give the keys to Shekhar to take to his father. But those were not keys to the office, but keys to Shekhar’s secret world.
It was about 5 p.m. The office was closed and the key was in Shekhar’s hand. The watchman had left.
Shekhar opened the door to the office and went straight to his father’s room. He picked up the telephone receiver and put it to his ear.
Those days they didn’t have an automatic exchange. From the receiver came a voice, ‘Number?’
Shekhar gave the number of a pharmacy.
‘How can I help you?’
‘Do you have thermometers? How much are they?’
‘___’
‘Tell me the prices of all of them.’
‘___’
‘And what about medical gloves?’
‘___’
‘Do you have a catalogue?’
‘Yes, sir. Should I send you one?’
‘Yes.’
‘What address should I send it to?’
Shekhar hadn’t expected—or feared—this question. He had been told that the person being called didn’t know the number of the caller until the caller himself revealed it, and it was on the basis of this belief that he had the courage to make a phone call. As soon as he heard the question, he panicked and didn’t know what to say. He said, ‘Send it to the office,’ and ran away leaving the receiver dangling.
Second time.
Shekhar again used the keys to unlock the office and sat next to the telephone. This time he called the fire station. He wanted to know whether what his brother had told him was true or not, that a fire engine could get there within five minutes of being called.
He screamed into the phone, ‘Fire! Come at once!’
A deep voice asked, ‘Where?’
As soon as he realized the consequence of his prank, he got scared. He put the receiver down on the table and quickly locked up the office and returned the key.
The next day, a report arrived from the exchange that someone had been misusing the telephone. Father questioned everyone, but got no answers save silence. That’s as far as things went. From that day on, the guard brought the keys to Father himself.
*
Shekhar started flying kites.
He didn’t know how to fly kites. But that wasn’t an obstacle in his path; it actually made it even more attractive. And besides, there was another pleasure in flying kites—he had been told not to. His father used to say that it was a dangerous game, that while flying kites several boys had fallen off the rooftops.
The way Shekhar would fly his kite was that he would go out into the garden by his house and call someone and ask them to launch it for him, and when it was soaring high in the sky, he would take the kite reel into his own hands and tug the string to make the kite dance and to convince himself that he was flying the kite (or rather, that he had launched it).
One of his chores was to sit next to his father and give him his medicine at the proper time. Not because he was particularly good at this job, but because his father wanted to keep him close by. But when he was flying his kite he forgot about everything else.
Father’s peon came and created an obstacle.
‘Master Shekhar, you’re wanted upstairs.’
‘Just wait, let me finish flying this kite,’ he said and then forgot.
‘Let’s go, Master Shekhar!’ the peon said after about a minute.
‘I already told you, wait!’
The peon kept nagging him.
‘Go, go and tell him that I will come once I’ve brought the kite down.’
The peon left, but came back in a short time.
‘Master Shekhar, the master has ordered that I’m to carry you if you don’t come by yourself. Let’s go.’
The peon called another servant to take hold of the kite string and bring the kite down, and then he carried Shekhar away. Only Shekhar’s legs were free; he began kicking them but they only struck air. Then with all his might, he tried to free his arm from the peon’s grasp, and when it came free, it struck the peon across the nose. The peon dropped him on the ground quickly, as if stung by a wasp, and ran upstairs because his nose was bloody.
Halfway up the stairs, Shekhar grabbed hold of the banister. He stood there, petrified, thinking about the consequences of that accident.
Father was quite ill, couldn’t get up from his cot, but his anger . . .
That’s when Shekhar saw his father coming down the stairs. A cane in his hand. His hands are trembling. He was bracing himself with his elbows against the wall and carefully stepping down. How thin he’s become! His eyes were not looking here or there, not at the ceiling or at the stairs, but were fixed on Shekhar. Behind him, Saraswati was standing at the top of the stairs, and she had an expression on her face that was making her unrecognizable. Her wide eyes were staring straight into Shekhar’s trying to tell him something, something that she couldn’t say with her lips. Shekhar understood that he had to stand there, not move, not raise his head, not talk back and not save himself.
He stood there. Six times the cane rose and fell, six times a shock went through his body, but he didn’t move. The cane stopped. Father cast an angry look at Shekhar’s face. The peon was the only one standing there who didn’t understand what it meant but who for some reason was embarrassed.
Shekhar couldn’t go upstairs. A little later, when Saraswati said, ‘Sh
ekhar, tell the peon to get the doctor,’ he was unable to ask her what had happened . . .
Two hours later, his father called Shekhar upstairs. To make peace. He never forgave; one only forgave one’s lessers. When he was angry, he didn’t consider his inferiors to be inferior, and when the anger subsided he still didn’t . . . His generosity was so pure, free from any hint of mercy, so expansive and all-encompassing! That’s why Shekhar worshipped him even when he got beaten, just as he never worshipped his mother. She never beat him, but when she forgave it always came mixed up with guilt or obligation or debt . . .
*
Shekhar got permission to go and see a play.
There was a troupe of actors in the village who put on performances twice a year—for Holi and for Dussehra. Shekhar’s father was an important man, the most important man who lived near that village, and so it was natural that the play would only commence after receiving his blessings and his permission. He wasn’t going himself, but because the play was ‘Harishchandra the Honest’ the boys were able to go.
In a theatre hall made of thatched walls, Shekhar sat next to his brothers in the front row. When the curtain rises and reveals a twenty-foot-by-ten-feet backdrop of heaven (Indralok) Shekhar was certain that it was close to his island . . .
Scenes come and go. And they take Shekhar’s critical abilities, his powers of judgement, with them. Enchanted, gullible and absorbed, Shekhar sits and keeps watching. Somewhere beyond this world where the drama of life is more realistic than life. A great conflict lies before him, an original opposition, and a mother’s lamentation for her dying son . . . When a dying Rohit tells his friends:
Tell Mother what happened—
A snake bit me, O tyranny, outrageous tyranny!
He isn’t indifferent at that moment. He doesn’t laugh, but he chokes up and begins to cry—very softly, so that no one can see his defeat . . .
The play ends, and they set off for home. But Shekhar can’t bear to be with his brothers. He walks separately, without paying attention, heavy and dissatisfied . . .
Shekhar Page 13
