In Times of Siege

by Githa Hariharan

  Though he and Meena have not spoken of it, Shiv has heard, over the last few days’ interregnum of peace, the countdown. The alarm clock muffled by the pillow, still ticking on. The promise has been floating between them, alive though it is only an embryo. Soon the choice will have to be made in real life, a choice that cannot be undone so easily; in words that cannot be taken back. The ticking can no longer be ignored.

  The doorbell rings.

  Babli, who runs to get it, returns with a letter.

  The envelope, a brown official missive delivered by a university messenger and sanctified by the university logo, is addressed to Shiv, not from the Head, not from his boss the Dean, but from the university’s shecurity-loving vice-chancellor.

  The letter is couched in the kind of officialese that pretends its contents have no mortal sender or receiver. All it recognizes is the voice of a god. Or the voice of a hollow god, coming out of a megaphone suspended midway between heaven and earth.

  This impersonal, unfathomable voice informs Shiv that “the recent incident with relation to our course material in medieval history has been most unfortunate.” It wags a stern if invisible finger and goes on: “This is the sort of thing that brings the university disrepute.”

  The sermon ends with a constructive suggestion, taking its cue from a B-grade Hindi film attempting patriotism with an eye on a tax-free certificate. “Everything we write and teach should illustrate, without leaving room for doubt or ambiguity, that we are one country. Above all, nothing we say or write should have divisive consequences.”

  It is like looking at an image where the photographer has made a deliberate choice of depth of field. History in the foreground—what happened recently in Shiv’s university room, for example—is entirely out of focus. The letter does not contain a single word about what the “unfortunate incident” is. The ransacking of Shiv’s room is clearly a footnote, a minor byproduct of “divisive consequences.” What really matters—the unfortunate incident sharply in focus in the background—is still the original sin. That his lesson, his words, invited an unwelcome spotlight, the lurid colors of scandal and controversy and “politics” into the university.

  “I wonder who wrote it for him,” Shiv says to Meena. “I wouldn’t have thought any of his ghostwriters knew the word ambiguity. It must have been the Head. Or the Dean, in spite of all his liberal-ethnic office décor.”

  But for once Meena is not interested in trashing a piece of official communication. “The real question,” she says to him, “will come soon, but not on record. Not in writing. Maybe the telephone will ring. Maybe it will be face-to-face. Shiv—whatever the pressure, whatever the means of coercion—” She pauses.

  Her doe-eyes turn shrewd and canny. Then she proceeds to a swift, neat attack. “Are you going to stop talking to the media? Extend your leave? Resign?”

  Shiv stands before the bathroom mirror, shaving.

  There is a lighthearted butterfly in his stomach, fluttering with tense excitement. There are many hours left for his visit to the university in the company of his bored bodyguard. But he feels, as he did all those years as a student facing exam day, that he must get every detail right. Perform every ritual that will guarantee the magical appearance of the right words, however difficult the questions lying in wait.

  He spreads the foam carefully with the brush. Then as he turns to pick up the razor, his eyes catch sight of the sky hanging outside the window. Though it is still summer in Delhi, the sky looks dour and anemic. The sun should be blazing, but it is playing truant.

  There is something familiar about the sight, the grayness leaking into light and blotting it out.

  Shiv turns back to the mirror and takes the razor to his cheek. Once he has finished, he examines the results closely. On impulse, he pats his graying mustache with the foam and shaves it off. The bare face that emerges looks astonishingly like his father’s last photographs.

  His father. What happened to him, where did he go?

  Shiv picks at these questions, familiar scabs that have grown back though he has peeled them off a thousand times before.

  He has an entire catalogue of scenarios in his head, indexed, ready to be pulled out and considered, over and over again. Speculative summaries of the past, written in a script that is now lost to human knowledge.

  Sometimes Shiv thinks it must have been a peculiar progressive sort of amnesia. His father loses his memory; bit by bit first, then chunks at a time. Maybe he consults a doctor. Maybe the doctor tells him to go to a psychiatrist, or tells him it’s nothing, he is imagining things. Maybe the doctor has a diagnosis, a hard, cold name for it all. An -itis or an -isis that can never be escaped. His father decides to make his own arrangements. The details are immaterial; what is important is that if his past is to be moth-eaten, filled with enlarging holes, it might as well be taken away from him immediately. He might as well go forward (or backward) to meet it; become part of it; become the past.

  That’s the heroic scenario.

  In the other, the more poignant script, the central image is that of his father, back bent. Here he is not suffering from a loss of memory. The diagnosis is a loss of heart. The country he fought for has turned its back on him. The world he knew has gone, left him behind. Why linger if his voice is unheard? If he is such a dinosaur, he may as well be one of his fellow freedom fighters, their lives extinct, their dreams congealed in stone statues, mute receptacles for bird droppings.

  Nehru, the symbol of independent India his father believed so passionately in, is losing his aura. It’s no longer 1947, glory glimmering in the midst of the ruins of partition, hope raising its tired head though it lies on soiled, bloody ground. It’s 1962. The sheen of nationalistic fervor is long gone. The fabric of the new republic is fraying rapidly. Even the relatively privileged, those who have the luxury of acquaintance with concepts of freedom and independence, can see this.

  Or Shiv could put all these imaginary cards back into the cupboard, reject their hieroglyphics as so much indecipherable nonsense.

  In the only scenario left, the story is a particularly banal one. The man does not choose to disappear. He has no control over his fate; he does not lift a finger. He is a mere victim, a statistic. He is there, fragile, vulnerable, inviting disaster. He is shuffling along the platform, maddeningly slow. The train is to halt for five minutes. He is looking for water to fill up in his bottle or something to read for the rest of the journey. Or he has wandered off the platform, looking for a stretch of field by the track cleaner than the train toilet.

  Then, obliterating past and future, severing the connection between them forever, a fist meets his chin; or a knife his back. Or a dirty rag is thrown round his throat and tightened. A commonplace robbery, a commonplace murder. All it takes, finally, is a few minutes, just a few minutes when the world goes crazy, for a freedom fighter to fall.

  The stain spreads, the gray deepens. The sky turns a shade darker. The storm Shiv’s life has been caught in for the past few weeks has tired of buffeting him about. It has now moved on. It has found a worthy opponent in the sky, the trees, all of nature, bent on survival despite the costs.

  Shiv goes downstairs into Rekha’s garden.

  The unseasonable storm has only just begun, but already several saplings look mauled. The green-brown summer lawn is a whispering, shifting sheet of dry leaves.

  Secrets. Whispers. Then the terror of a permanent silence.

  There is another storm he remembers, an unseasonable storm embedded in his memory, a signpost tailor-made for crossroads. The storm broke the day his father did not return from his journey.

  Shiv has spent a lifetime trying to reconstruct what his father did, what he said, what he was. But he has lost the day he lost him. All reconstruction ends at the point when the sky abruptly grows dark in the late afternoon.

  It is this storm Shiv remembers vividly, not the words his uncle used to break the news, or his mother’s wails, or his own reaction. His childish grief. What he r
emembers instead is what he sees again now.

  Trees sway. The wind rustles wordless, horrific secrets. Once again he hears rain before he can see it. Droves of dragonflies trace the same agitated circle. The light is strange, silvery. It is a light in which dreams grow, thrive, and turn into nightmares.

  Shiv freezes; his muscles grow taut in anticipation. Then Meena calls him from her room, as if she has sensed the nightmare memory plans to unravel for his benefit. He turns and sees her balanced on her crutch, standing at the window of her room.

  The curtain is open, and so are the glass panes of the window. But the mosquito screen comes between her and the stirring world outside. It reminds Shiv of old black-and-white films in which gorgeously dressed upper-class women sit bored to death in their palatial rooms. Their only entertainment is looking at the world outside, the real world where men live and act, through the patterns of peepholes cut into the wall.

  Shiv goes to Meena and helps her down the single step into the garden, not an easy thing because she is heavy. He staggers as she leans against him. “No one can accuse me of being a lightweight,” she says with a grin, then falls silent as she takes in the splendor of the garden in disarray.

  They hear a drawn-out groan and a rattle, as if a decrepit man is dying. Then a series of creaks, the last words of a sturdy house cracking at its foundations. But it is only a skinny papaya tree, its trunk snapping neatly at its waist. The tree trunk splits, the top half falls lightly to the ground like a dispensable twig. The very next moment they hear a wheeze of relief.

  The fragrant hedge of Night Queen bends low, sweeping the ground.

  The peacocks set up a screech. Their wail begins on a griefstricken note as they scurry for safety, half-running, half-flying, their long tails tripping them up. But once they are safe, clinging clownishly to their swaying branches, their cry changes pitch. It is now a gloating, triumphant chorus of exultation.

  Meena turns to Shiv, raises her hand to the empty skin where his mustache used to be. Then her hand moves up to his head, picks out the dry leaves from his hair with a gentleness he had not thought her capable of. He quells a passing moment of self-consciousness about his thinning hair; she has already seen more of him than incipient paunch and baldness.

  Babyface joins them. He too has been drawn by nature’s dramatic boogie-woogie in the backyard. He has deserted his wildly flapping tent in the front of the house, his chronic boredom forgotten. He has the same boyish, hopeful look on his face that he usually saves for his favorite TV show.

  Together they watch the storm, Meena, Shiv and Babyface. Meena leans against Shiv, her upturned face filled with frank, sensuous enjoyment of the sound and fury about them. Storms, or Shiv’s memory of them, will never be the same again. This is what it must be like to perform a funeral rite for a father.

  As the cry of the peacocks fades, as the wind dies down, Shiv feels he is saying goodbye to his father for all time. He is finally ready to let go of his patchy memories of him—memories made up of frayed bits and pieces, blank spaces, stitches coming loose, knots unraveling. Just when Shiv is on the verge of living up to his father’s ideals—though in a mock-heroic way—his father leaves with the storm; this time, it would seem, forever.

  A few months after his father disappeared, Shiv tried, just once, to communicate with him.

  Shiv’s mother was sure her husband was alive, that she would hear from him in a day or two, a month, a year. She didn’t just believe this; she made sure she put her act of faith on record. She sustained her belief for three years, spending most of her waking hours praying in the puja room. Then she slipped away without anyone in the house noticing, as if ashamed she could not stay on to prod her husband to come back, or plead with the gods to let him return. Shiv found her dead in the puja room, sitting rigid on the floor, eyes closed. She gripped the big brass puja bell so firmly that he had to pry it out of her lifeless hand.

  Shiv’s uncle, never one for exercises of the imagination, disapproved of this show of determined hope. As far as he was concerned, Shiv’s father was declared dead a month after his disappearance. The uncle became Shiv’s surrogate father; Shiv resented him, but secretly he took the uncle’s part against his mother. Shiv believed his uncle the instant he said Shiv’s father was dead. Shiv wanted his mother to give up the hope that festered like an open wound in their midst. But he also wanted her to have something else, something in place of what would be taken from her.

  The uncle’s daughter Rohini, two years older than Shiv, boasted that she had made a planchette board; she claimed she knew how to talk to the dead. One night, they sat in a circle in a locked room, the cousin, her sister, Shiv and two of his friends. The lights were switched off. The lone candle cast the appropriate flickering light on the board with its letters of the English alphabet and a rupee coin to be used as a counter. Shiv’s right hand was on the board; the others placed their right hands on his, inches away from the coin.

  “Uncle,” the cousin whispered to the coin. “Do you have something to tell your son Shiva?”

  They waited. The candle spluttered; they heard nothing else, except for their collective breathing.

  Shiv couldn’t bear to have his father fail him again. Shiv moved his hand slowly toward the coin, the weight of the other hands on top of his. He touched the hard edge of the coin and pushed it gently toward the letter Y. Just as they got to the letter E, the silence broke; the room resounded with an exultant bray, loud and endless.

  They had forgotten to shut the window; they had also forgotten the donkeys that grazed in the maidan nearby. The cousin looked up from the board; her eyes met Shiv’s. Then her mouth twitched and she burst into uncontrollable giggles. Soon they were all shaking with laughter as if they had never heard a donkey bray before.

  Shiv never found that message in time, the right words he could carry to his mother, to fill her hands with something more than empty hope. He never found a way to lure his father back in solid flesh, or in audible words that would banish his own grief forever. But all these years later, he knows that when he remembers his father, he is speaking for his father as well as for himself. The father’s voice, the voice of the remembered, is a part of his own voice. This is his father’s legacy to Shiv: the gift of remembrance. He is in the past; in a closed room, the door never to be opened again. But Shiv can see him; he can know him, and anyone from the past he remembers, as part of himself. Whether Shiv is adulatory or critical, the remembered and the rememberer are bound together.

  Shiv decides to postpone his visit to the Department. Instead he goes for a long walk alone. The air is fresh, as if the summer has finally admitted to being used up and made way for early winter. It is time to take stock: Shiv is now a living, contesting historian. Kin to the heroes of our times, a newcomer in that family peopled by reluctant, accidental members. His father, wherever he is, would have approved. But he is gone. Meena too will go, go back to her life, leaving him to hold on to his raggedy bit of heroism as best he can. And Rekha—she will be back soon to be treated to a close-up view of a husband who has momentarily shed predictability. Will she surprise Shiv as much as he will surprise her? Or will she want to pick up the pieces and restore order instantly?

  But something will remain; something new must remain entirely his own. There is a time—the space of a day, a year, a moment—waiting with the patience of fate in every human life. A moment of discovery, irreversible, so that when you try to return to the business of ordinary living, you find your old life has been misplaced.

  Even Shiv, despite a long record of lost opportunities, has found his way to the brink; from where he can, if he dares, make the necessary leap off the precipice. He has used his father’s memory like a walking stick en route to this first-time risk-taking venture. It is Meena who put this stick in his hand again, coaxed his limping legs in the direction he knew—better than she—must be taken. Now the stick is superfluous. This is what Meena and her unlikely allies in contingency, his father, Bas
ava, and the thought-policing touts of the Itihas Suraksha Manch have forced Shiv to see. Once he throws away all safe crutches, he can truly walk in the present. Be free to be curious, to speculate; to debate, dissent. Reaffirm the value of the only heirloom he needs from the past, the right to know a thing in all the ways possible.

  TWELVE

  OCTOBER 14–22

  Once more Meena is getting into the Maruti with her encased leg. It is amazing how easy it is this time. Meena does not groan or grimace or use the foul language Shiv hates associating with those ripe fruity lips. It helps that he can hold her as she crawls in, without having to be careful to avoid skin-to-skin contact. They have finally learnt how to make the entire operation simpler.

  In the hospital too, everything goes smoothly. They are told they need not wait for the busy doctor. A junior doctor and a nurse will take care of removing the cast.

  Meena is delighted. “Perfect!” she says to Shiv, “I don’t want that creep ruining such a happy morning.”

  Still, when the young doctor arrives with what looks like an electric drill, Shiv longs to go looking for the seniormost fellow in the place, someone who inspires more confidence than this puppy whose medical degree is probably ten days old. But he forces himself to keep still. He contents himself with standing close to the table Meena lies on. She looks at Shiv, takes in his palpable anxiety, and grins teasingly. But when he takes her hand, she lets it rest in his.

  Meena pulls up her skirt.

  The drill splutters its way down her thigh, then her foreleg. The plaster gives way; the nurse removes the cast and drops it on the floor.

  Meena props herself on her elbows and looks down at her leg. “Awful, isn’t it,” she says dispassionately.