All hell broke loose. The mother wept with the boy in her arms, never laying him down. What discussions had been going on, and quite the opposite had occurred! Death revels in deceit. It does not come when people are waiting for it. Death strikes when the sick person begins to recover, when he starts partaking normal food, sitting and moving as usual, when the house starts celebrating, and everyone believes that the worst is over, right then, the preying Death strikes its deadly blow. This is the cruel game that Death plays on Man.
How deft we are in planting orchards of hope. There we sow the seeds of blood and sweat, and consume the fruits of ambrosia. We water our saplings with fire, and ourselves sit in a cool shade. How ignorant Man is!
The mourning went on for the whole day; the father cried, the mother was tormented, and Madhavi was consoling both of them by turns. If she could have brought back the child by sacrificing her own life, she would have felt fortunate. She had come here determined to cause mischief, and today when her wish was fulfilled and she should have ideally felt elated with joy, instead, she was suffering far more than she had when her own son had been jailed. She had come to make others weep, but now she herself was weeping inconsolably. A mother’s heart is a storehouse of kindness. When you burn it, it emits the fragrance of love and kindness, and if you crush it, it will only ooze compassion. A mother is a Goddess. Even the cruellest moments of adversity cannot malign this source of spotless purity.
Translated from the Hindi by M. Abbasuddin Tapadar and Kalyanee Rajan
Theft
Childhood! One cannot forget childhood memories! This dilapidated house, this straw mattress! Roaming around in the fields bare-bodied, barefooted! Climbing the mango trees! All these moments flash before my eyes. I was happier wearing rough-hewn leather shoes rather than the flex shoes that I wear now. The taste that the hot panuaye juice had, one doesn’t find in the rose drink now. The sweetness that was there in the chabena and raw berries cannot be found in grapes and kheer mohan.
I used to go with my cousin Halder to another village to study with a maulvi. I was eight years old then, and Halder (he now lives in heaven) was two years older than me. Every morning both of us would eat stale chapattis, carry the chabena made of peas and barley and leave the house. The whole day lay ahead of us. There was no attendance register at Maulvi Sahib’s place, nor was there a fine to be paid for being absent. What was there to fear then! Sometimes we watched the soldier’s drill in front of the police station or spent the whole day following the juggler who made the bear or monkey dance. Sometimes we headed to the railway station to watch the endless movement of trains. Even the timetable did not contain the kind of information we had about the timings of the trains. Once, on the way back to our village, we saw that a moneylender from the city was getting a garden made. A well was being dug. Even that was an interesting spectacle for us. The aged gardener would very lovingly make us sit in his hut. We insisted on helping him out with his work even though he resisted it. We either carried the bucket to water the plants, or used the shovel to scrape the ground or trimmed the leaves of the creepers using scissors. I felt so happy doing that work! The gardener’s behaviour was childish. He used our services but in a way that seemed as if he was obliging us. The amount of work he could finish in a whole day, we completed in an hour. Now that gardener is no more, but the garden is still green. As I walk past it, my heart wishes to cling to those trees and cry and tell them, ‘Dear, you have forgotten me, but I haven’t; your memories are still fresh in my heart, as fresh as your leaves. You are the living example of selfless love.’
Sometimes we remained absent for weeks but came up with such excuses that Maulvi Sahib’s knitted eyebrows would soon relax. If I had such an imagination today, I would have written a novel that people would have been amazed by. But now the situation is such that even after much persuasion I can barely think of a story. Actually, Maulvi Sahib was a tailor. He pursued the role of a maulvi as a hobby. Both of us praised him a lot in front of the unlettered villagers. One could say that we were Maulvi Sahib’s brand ambassadors. We were proud of ourselves whenever through our publicity Maulvi Sahib got some work. When we could not think of a good excuse, we would take some gift or the other for him. Sometimes we picked up a kilo or half a kilo of seed pods or five–ten sticks of sugarcane, or carried fresh green sprigs of barley or wheat. A look at those gifts would pacify Maulvi Sahib’s anger at once. When it was not the time of harvest for these items, we would think of some other solution to save ourselves from punishment. Maulvi Sahib had an interest in birds. Cages of blackbirds, nightingales and crested larks hung in the school. Whether we remembered the lessons or not, the birds certainly remembered them. They also studied with us. We showed a lot of enthusiasm in grinding chana-dal powder
