A Day Off

This is a tale as old as the test of time. No, not another fairy-tale romance, not one of those star-crossed lovers either. Well, there is love. Love that blindsided everything else. And today was the day I was to meet my beloved. The tingling of glee barely let me catch any sleep. It was the perfect moment, the first day of the fall. Patjhad. The fallen leaves, sleeping in the cradle of the earth. Lying there, unaffected, unbothered, letting the wind carry them all over. The delightful ~crunch~ of the roasted brown leaves. The nip in the air, dew caught in the middle of its descent. That's the day I was to meet my beloved.

Rows after rows after rows of Gulmohar trees, bougainvillea having taken over every space, shedding the weight of summers. Oh, the summers of this city. That takes getting some used to. The first few years as I stayed in a cramped-up flat I shared with some men, I was astonished by the ease of their demeanour as I tried every possible trick in the book. Days I could manage, you go to work, work has air-conditioning, work has work to keep your mind busy. The nights, however, made my skin crawl with the incessant beads of sweat that seemed to find their way out no matter how hard I tried. Drenching my sheets, drenching I myself, sleeping under the sky was a gamble I wouldn't recommend unless you like sleeping with the company of a million tiny insects committed to making your life worse.

Aftab, a young poet, who had also managed to escape the drudgery of a small town not far from mine took a keen liking to my project of defeating summer. Until one day, he sat me down and explained, ‘The summer is a pilgrimage we need to endure, to get to the fruits of autumn. The seasons of the city signify nothing but the cycle of life. Summer, autumn, winter, spring mean nothing more than life, death, conception, and birth.’ The wait for death he called. Hijr. And once you start thinking this way, it's hard not to fall in love with this city. The city of harsh summers and harsher winters, only to come alive for the weeks it decides to die. Without death, there is no life.

I came back, exhausted with the burden of knowing that this would be the last autumn day I would get to stay in Delhi. Crawling into bed, I slept with the bittersweet memory of wanting to dream about my beloved, my jaan, to relive the encounter I had just had.

It was too bright, or bright enough perhaps. The day seemed to move slower on a day off, doesn't it? On a day you have achieved all that you were meant to, you tend to feel the slowness of time passing through you, with nothing needing your utmost immediate attention. Lazy, slow, call it what you might, it did not stay for long. The time spent doing nothing just falls through your balled fist. Clutching air. That is all you end up grabbing at the end, waiting for the wind to lull you off. Is this too sombre? A bit too dark?

Maybe so, how is the world doing? Newspapers are best read over a choice of hot beverage, tea is mine, but one is at liberty to decide. The world is always on fire, it is better to wander around the ruins with a cup of steaming tea. Nothing really changes anyway, until the day it does and you can’t remember the first ceasefire signed. It all muddles down to the basic, a number, a figure, a graph perhaps. Depiction of the macro data in the most presentable manner, one to grab your attention, to maybe make you question your choices a few times. Don’t drink the aerated beverage. Carpool. Save the earth. Save some water. Save that animal everyone thinks is adorable.

It gets you a kick, of course. The negativity has a kick, it makes you feel alive to know and care about a violation happening 2000 km away from you. That's what they want anyway, hey, that’s what we want. But who is to judge?

I drag my feet across the hall, go by every room. I hardly stay here and yet somehow every room looks like it is alive, with something. A sort of liveliness that doesn’t just appear with a vase of fresh flowers, no, this takes effort. A woman’s effort. A woman with a mind of her own and no one to answer to. Sometimes I wish I had stayed married. There are some things that only a woman brings to your life. My flat in the city had this air about it, right after she left. It was mutual, we decided. We made that decision. Nothing great could come out of this. Try getting married at 13, you will see. It did not take long to realise how much of a mismatch our lives were.

It started small.

‘You did not come home last night’, she would say rather frequently.

‘It is the busiest of seasons’, said I, more often than not. It was a quiet death, a tree falling in an empty forest.

Between managing the stall during the day and the job at night, a marriage was hard to keep alive. What seemed unbelievable at that time, a separation had become all too common since I got here. Around me, no man seems to keep a constant companion, those who did often took one too many flats on rent, all over the town. An apartment for each mistress seems fair enough for the men of this stature.

Who doesn’t have needs?

Humans crave humans. That's how it got here, to 7 plus billion people. Alive. Kicking. And in my country, rioting on the streets. Theirs is a worthy cause. Any cause with the strength to move thousands of youth is as worthy a cause as they come. Another young girl dead, yet another investigation botched. I would be enraged. I am enraged. The words in the news, with all their uppercase headlines, screaming on top of the pile of newspapers, tends to grab your attention, and more often than not, your sympathy.

It wasn’t fair.

Eventually, people break. To be frank, it is not that hard to get people riled up over the easy thing, the natural selection thing, survive! If you gather them around and reveal to them that the people around them, the others were a threat, they will 9 out of ten times huddle up closer. Strengthen their offence. We aren’t here to be treated like shit!, you tell them. You give them a future where everyone is alike. No anomalies, they will buy the ticket and give a standing ovation at the end.

You got to start small, start by causing a stir, be controversial, stick to the guns, appeal to the masses. The next part is the tricky one, you need a sacrifice. A big pomp and show sacrifice. The soldiers have historically been a sacred sacrifice. Maybe a few rioters. Just enough to get the sacrificial fire playing along with your tunes.

But eventually, people break.

It was harder back in the day, to break them. Information travelled slower. Took days to get the news, if someone died. Took days to get that money. Time played hooky. Nothing was URGENT! Shouting from top of the rooftops, that's how far you got. The anomalies exist all along, and some just tend to be burning a little brighter, these are the people who are awoken from their slumber of complacency. And once these people get down in the streets, it's hard to resist.

And even screaming off from the highest building in my town did not serve any purposes in the town I called home. Stacks after stacks after stacks of stubbed homes, barely trying to reach over one another, touch the sky. Your usual sub-urban half-developed village that got tagged as a town only owing to a few administrative formalities. When I first saw a city, Delhi, I was overwhelmed, to say the least.

I grew up in harrowing lanes, in houses that didn’t let you fart without exploding. If you want to take a shit, the toilet was half a kilometre away. The toilet! It screamed out, well, the stench did. No one advertised that hole in the earth, its existence was proclamation enough. You couldn’t walk a meter without running into someone, someone elbowing you, others towering you. And all I was, was a ten-year-old with a kettle in hand, running through the streets offering hot cups of heaven.

My mother recalled endless tales of the glory of it. The brew of leaves with milk and sugar, she put something more though. I never quite understood how the tea my Pappa made never got quite the appreciation hers did. Pappa often told us the story of how he married her for the tea she brought in the day he went to see her. A tea that had stayed a secret. A tea that kept secrets. A tea like no other.

My only respite from the banes of this existence was the few hours I got to roam around, kettle dangling off an arm, a packet of plastic cups on the other. The few hours I was not riled on but sought after. My favourite point to seek the buyers of the sweet, albeit subpar, liquid my Pappa prepared was across the street from the Tana-Riri. Built in the memory of sisters who chose to die than to sing in Akbar’s court. Every day, as I poured the last drop, I would be tempted to cash in the labour of my parents, to rebel for once, and go inside. The endless rows of Ashokas beckoned me with their cool shade, the green grass begging for me to run barefoot. In a world that could not make space for me, the acres of land seemed like heaven I could buy a ticket for 4 annas. I cannot recount the number of times I stood in front of the gate deliberating whether the beating of my Pappa would be worth the moment of ecstasy I could run around in.

A place to take it all in, that's all I could ever dream about. A garden much like Eden. The idea possessed my brain until that's the only thing I could think about. Rows after rows after rows of trees, standing tall against the throbbing autumn sun. In a country of 1.5 billion people only a few get to live in the middle of a garden, lesser so if your parents leave a tea stall to your name. It took long enough, but I made my way to a place with trees I took days to meet. Months before I could name each one of the Gulmohars, the Semals, the Arjunas. A place to breathe in the summer shade, the autumn leaves, the winter fog, and the blooming spring. A place to call my own.

Oh what a shame though, came all this way, only to find out the power of the broken people. The ones that rebelled against my very existence.

Do you really believe, like the rest of them, that the country is burning just because of who is at the helm? Why would someone who is not okay with all this even stay in the ship, let alone choose its captain?

I have a theory, the evil was here all along, inside all of us, waiting to burst out. All that was needed was a spark, someone to tell them to embrace the evil. Someone who had seen it all, done it all, and worst of all, lived through it. The shame, the bigotry, the discrimination. So to all the headlines screaming out my name, bad mouthing me with words I cannot discern, I say it was all for a garden to walk in, everything else is just a game.