Love’s Bannerol and the Priest

4

                       Love’s Bannerol and the Priest

The Muslim watchman was born at a nondescript village in the southern part of undivided Bengal decade-and-a-half before the independence and the fateful partition. His birth place was an erratically laid out fertile land by the rivers depositing Himalayan dust after a long, long journey. It was a land of rice fields, dotted with mango, coconut, banana orchards and gardens---the vast alluvial plain, the handiwork of many mighty rivers like Bhagirathi and its tributaries; full of deltaic marshes, swamps and bogs; washed by a high monsoon  rainfall over the freshly laid out sediments.

Bengal, as we know has been the original seat of the British Raj, where cultural nationalism sprouted forth from its medieval dust in reaction and response to a whole gamut of freshly laid out western ideas and culture which the burdened head of the colonists dumped for a rest during their civilizing journey across the globe. So the lucky land, the deltaic land, of White Man’s burden as well as the ravaging Himalayan rivers got a rich sedimentation of ideas and earth. What came out of this enlightening and revivalist churning? It was a distinct Bengali culture which opened its eyes to become the harbinger of socio-religious reform movements, which when out of its cocoon changed to cultural nationalism on its road to evolutionary national feeling. What next? Bengali bhadralok on tenterhooks for the freedom of mother India, of course. Aggressive nationalism, the militant nationalism, came in between. Then the independence and tearing partition.

It was in this State, credited with tomes of such important historical facts, our watchman fellow was born. Creaky chatter of cultural and religious exclusivism had slowly and slowly started to brews its tumult. However the common man on the street was still unaware of the weepishly regressive guffaw of such absolutism, the mother of full fledged communalism. So, communal carnage, two-nation theory, though just a decade away, hadn’t yet disturbed the whole-some Bengalese cultural cuisine. Paddy, inland fishing, coconut and jute coir-working, handicrafts and emerging industrial centres in their infancy in Calcutta, Alipur and Howrah had their own long, rough and rumbling history under colonialism. Yoked in this bitter and hard chain of survival the common man, the labourers still found the talk of caste, creed and religion less important than two meals a day.

His father did any type of labour as the situation or opportunity put forth. He was their only child, whose worn-off and almost suffering appearance brought more and more intensity in their parentage. He sat nearby without slightest trace of hip-hopping childhood curiously watching his parents planting paddy seedlings, harvesting the same ripened crop, making jute bags or mattresses. Unplayful melancholy always seemed to fend off a child’s merry-making rainbow from him. Seeing him thus the couple laughed sometimes saying he was a stoic in the previous birth, whose meditative trance had barged even into his next birth.

Their small hamlet situated along a tributary or distributary of one of the rivers criss-crossing the deltaic Bengal had its usual big grey area of stifling natural troubles. The damp, humid and rain soaked terrain frequently came under the sweeping storm of water born diseases like jaundice, gastroenteritis, amocbiasis and diarrhea. The last one had struck, almost fatally, the already weak infant nearing his first birthday, leaving his health in shambles. They stretched every sinew of their filiality to save the only precious addition to their small family. Always shooing away, through their love and care, the death cooking up a conspiracy to snatch away their child, they did all they could to conceive another child, so that their insecurities could be shared by another little lamp shining inside their home in all its sheen and glory.  But, as the fate’s stage-managing would have it he was not destined to share parental affection with other siblings. He remained their only child, growing up very slowly and precariously.

The weak child remained on the anvil of malarial bouts almost every rainy season. His parent’s anxiety and insecurity came in added installment on each new birthday of the star of their eyes. Still, the boy with his frail clasp to life, with his little Muslim tarboosh over his small head was the tango of their hearts.

According to the five fundamental Islamic tenets a Muslim must/should: first, hail the unity of God and surrender to the Prophethood of Muhammad; second, offer prayers five times in a day, Friday afternoon’s in a mosque; third, as a sacred act give helping alms to the unfortunate fellow human beings; fourth, during the month of Ramzan, fast every day from dawn to dusk; fifth, must try within his means to pay a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during the lifetime.

As for the first and the second, their faith in the Almighty had grown to be more close grained since the birth of their child for whose life the poor couple invoked His mercy; what to talk of five times a day, they did it whenever his pitiful face poked a sorrowful grimace. Third injunction was perhaps not decreed for them. The next seemed to be nothing short of a crest jewel for the poor family; as at least by the grace of Prophet’s fasting, crimpling ration of the house got some decelerating brakes during the holy month. The last one, even considering the infinitesimally long rope of ‘variegated resources’, was beyond even the wildest of their dreams.

The village mosque was years old. It smiled solemnly with its moss greenish dark walls. Dome stood sulkingly as if in clamminess to the older times. The pigeons flappering grubbily inside its vaulted interior sent out a gabbling echo. Plaster worn-out here and there showed bluish-red small bricks. Broken window arches and haggardly hanging minarets at four corners made the whole look of it as if it was in a sort of hallowed ancient chasm with its dim religious charm. It had the typical inventious heterogeneity of Bengali architecture groomed from the Sultanate period. Bengal at the centrifugal periphery of the Mughals; many local Muslim dynasties; medieval Sufism; Chaitnya’s primordially drenched keertans---so many twirling blithe historical facts which still seemed to suffuse a distinct Bengali fragrance during this last phase of colonialism.        

The mosque was the only educative point to name in its capacity as the maktab, Muslim elementary system of education wherein the maulvi taught Urdu and Bengali syllables, alphabets and numerals in communion with sacred Quranic principles. Classes were held for just two or three days in a week. Shorn of any childish twittle-twattle, sitting absently before the teacher was the easiest thing for the boy. Teaching with preaching being a hassle free thing for the children as the idealistic serious injunctions were out of the imaginative sphere of their softly scintillating little hearts. The boy carried an odd pal of seriousness around him and by the look of it only he seemed to smell the importance of holy words. It is however another matter that the inanimate statue like face ogling without batting an eyelid at the maulvi’s face was in fact lost in the gutergooing pigeons above in the alcoves, niches and cornices; without looking at them, just lost in the ominous noisy aura without thinking or feeling anything. Others meanwhile passed their time in suppressed giggles and faddish, naughty manoeuvres completely invisible to the cocking maulvi.

The students of all grades sat together. So, in between those talimi moments (purported for the elder children), the younger ones were given cramming lessons of Urdu alphabets. However, such engrossed parroting chorus could be heard for too little a time to leave any firm and lasting imprint on the children’s fleeting memories. For the rest of the time only pigeons seemed to squabble over the alphabets inside the mosque. At such an impressionable age learning has to be continuous and somewhat repetitive with the effectivity of a playful newton force so as to leave a permanent imprint upon the unblemished and clear surfaces inside their curious minds. As did the invention of movable types by Johann Gutenberg, stamping the printed word’s fundamental axiom with a million newton force upon the weepishly regressive face of illiteracy; upon muckraking medieval dogma; upon guttural, poorly pathetic oratory with its limitations and gossipy spool of tricksteries. Joyous and firm synergy of tip... tip... tap... tap... click... click carried with it an air of liberation, of revivalism, of renaissance.

Without any fault of theirs, children in the maktab learnt almost nothing of Urdu. Self-obsessive air of vanity about the ragged, stagnated and moot system was too trivial to do any justice with the great literary corpulence lurking from the Urdu’s huge coffers.

Urdu being the crest-jewel of poetics with its vocabulary, idioms and literary traditions almost touches the primal song of softest of emotional hearts. Its grammatical structure based on Western Suraseni Apabhramsa allowing it to draw heavily from Central Asian, Turkish and Persian sources. Its genesis in Allaudin Khalji’s military camps, bazars, monasteries, salons, court rejoicings gave it enough pathos and softly suffering pangs. As naturally it grew to be an ample companion to the heart’s multi-hued outpourings. Ghazals and nazms of Mirza Galib, in their profound mystical mystery stretched it to the extent of moksha or liberation. Devotionally drenched medieval Bhakti saints took Godly sips from its big bowl which contained the emotional pinnacle of the human heart and the mind’s linguistic reach.

Unfortunately, inside the maktab carelessly inane introduction to the alphabets, now and then, was nothing but a slap in the face of this great and lively language, which was dangerously growing old for want of lively fresh breath.

The boy who seemed sagely in his sworn silence, by the look of it, envisaged the nearest possible talent or prospect—if left alone in his own world with only Urdu as an accomplice without any disturbance—for a new whiff into the literary panorama of Urdu : Who knows in masnavi, in ghazal, gasida, marsia, rekhti or in nazm? But unrelenting fate as well as supine society very rarely allows the most potent seed in a human being to burst out in its full blossom. Harsh realities snuggle around the most fitting seed burying it deeper and deeper with each passing day. And most of us with our ordinary fortunes grow-up to be the helpless human beings without the protective courageous company of that specialty buried deep beneath time’s sludge.

He too was to grow up in a similar fashion. And the traditional Urdu poetry which reached its pinnacle under the Delhi School forgot to even guesstimate about the promise and potential of some odd creative urge buried in the shallow grave of his uninteresting childhood. He just grew up, showing a peculiar agnosticism to life. His parents never made him work leaving him slouching idly at their little hutment. But he didn’t even seem to enjoy his idlehood. Even the growing communal monomania and bristling pace towards freedom wasn’t sufficient to instigate a human chasm over his face which could at least indicate that he wasn’t in a coma.

Then one year before freedom, when communal tumult as well as the hasty urge for freedom were at their combined peaks, something happened which unfailingly happens to all human hearts, at least once in lifetime. His sleeping senses of yore got a sweet tug as cupid struck him confirming that he in fact was a human being. At the age of fourteen he went crazy for a girl from the same hamlet. His senses so meek and unresisting were almost awefully infatuated under this surrendering soft pining stupefaction.

Opportunity for such love in Islam is very, very frugal. Muslim men in their narrowly taut interpretation of hadis in the Quran treat women very unfairly. Religious skullduggery dances in its full pyrotechnics when it comes to the interpretation of holy laws directing women’s place and way of life in the society. Putting them behind the veil; forbidding them from leaving their houses unless guarded by a male relative; getting them married at a very early age; yoking them into the duty of bearing maximum number of children while sharing a husband with other women; while the blue-beards cracking a whip at the pick of a second. Add to it the negligible chances of education. When on the social scene, it’s almost equivalent to a jihad against the kafirs.

His senses by consenting to the heart’s murmur could infringe upon any one of the sacred doctrines about women. Also, if according to Koran, nikah becomes valid only when the bride nods in affirmative to the groom, then his infatuation too was valid, at least in the eyes of God, provided her heart too beat the same way. Whether it did or not he wasn’t sure or hopeful about his luck.

If forms of divorce, remedies for widowhood, of remarriage, of sexuality, of property and inheritance laws (regarding women) were originally treated favourably, or at least equal to the men by an unbiased Prophet, then why did the sub-continental Islam threw an opaque light on the straight lines in the pages of Quran, making the reality look the other way? He was thus in store for a few kicks in his weak ribs and a few slaps to his beloved if she chose to be one.

Twanging bumps inside his rejuvenated heart ordered his sense of sight to be interested in seeing just her. She was of his age. Religious conservatism and all the taboos left aside, most fatal fact was that she was the daughter of village strongman, under whose patronage his father worked and almost cringed whenever he saw his employer.

Mustering up all his courage along his spines, he’d ogle at her whenever he got a chance to visit her home. She was of average looks. But to him she was an angel from the jannat, in its full opulent beatitude.

“Is my father still at work?” he’d stammer out shyly and abashedly to the queen of his dreams standing before him. “Mother needs him at home for some work,” he almost choked due to his love-lornness.

The girl somewhat blushed. Infatuation was oozing from his face. She saw it. The emotions’ vastitude was too overbearing for him to hide it. The girls have more control over a gay heart’s joyous symptomaticity. She quickly dispelled the blithe blush; then almost teasing him said with a serious, effeminate and uncaring voice, “For what work?”

Struggling with his imperious heart he managed to say, “Mother wants some money...she’s going to bazaar.”

She was now sure of his spellboundedness, so with a flattering pride said unabashedly, “Going to bazaar. For what?” her tone changing to ‘caring a littlest fig about him’ as if to keep him on the track.

That sounded somewhat assuring to his reddish buzzing numb ears, “For purchasing rice, salt, and...” he stopped with a faint smile caressing her feet.

In Indian sub-continental societies love thrives on faintest of gestures and almost invisible chaste symptomatic guesstimates. Mystical murmur of pining hearts goes on ripening, blossoming with changing seasons, when only nature in its full candour seems a sharer of all the pain. That is why nature is such a hallowed subject in the ‘love part’ of the folk-lore here in this part of the world.

To share his agony, on a certain day, he decided to go to the fishing pond of the girl’s father; as if to quench his love thirst by watching at least some part of her world. His heart was beating with wildest of curious imaginations about what she was doing at that time. The pond was about a kilometre away from the village. But the intervening landscape baroquely dotted with bushes and trees over the uneven surface increased the perception of distance as well as the loneliness of the path. Its dull vestigial aura seemed to pleasantly sulk like his heart.

“If I meet her coming from the other side,” he once again lost himself in dreamy thoughts.

A tart sensation sauntered across the pores of his darkish skin.

“Here in this loneliness, will she smile at me or not....”

Inside the heart of his hearts he’d a faint glimpse of a tiny flower inside her secretive heart which threw a romantic raylet piercing through her make-believe coquettishness which on the surface of it seemed to naughtily chide, saying ‘she didn’t care a rap about him’.

“Not only smile, she will even speak out her love for me. Without caring for the world as no one is around,” a sweet wave swayed across his body.

He looked around to confirm the unblemished solitude of the place. The thought of she speaking of her love for him, gave his overworking heart the biggest and most ingenious thump of his life.

Contemplating heart’s zealotry like this he reached a place from where a portion of the pond’s water became visible to his eyes. But what he saw there made his heart beat still faster, thus beating the previous record.

“Was it she!” his throbbing self wasn’t sure.

His courage gave in and he stopped. How to face her here in this loneliness? He kicked himself for this cowardly indiscretion which pushed forward his hesitant legs.

“What if she is really there? My father would be there as well as hers. And suppose she’s alone. If someone comes after I reach there,” his heart sank and legs prompted his afraid self to show a clean pair of heels from the scene.

Under the spate of such purple thoughts and emotions he moved forward. Pond’s vision went on increasing towards its full size.

“It’d be far better to face her here than at her doorstep,” he braved himself up.

The pond was mostly visible to him now. But nobody came into his view. Suddenly, to a mighty hiccup of his heart, there in a far corner, which until then had been left out of his eye-shot, was standing the pearl of his heart in a boat, chirpily upbeat with an oar in her hand.

His starlet had rowed haphazardly, as zig-zagly as his love thoughts and—as if to spring a surprise—evaded that portion of the pond which fell within his increasing eye-shot. Full view, however, undid all his overwhelming doubts. In hush-hush silence and soul-stirring solitude opportunity had gifted some precious moments of togetherness.

“Where have the fathers gone?” the question gave him a realistic nudge, spoiling the charm fancy’s feather-touch somewhat.

She, in all her girlish spirits, was playfully balancing herself in the small boat which slippingly shook at the subtlest of wayward push from her nimble heels. She seemed more of a ropewalking acrobatic girl dodging the crisis with the oar. This pleasing dissonance between girl and boat showed her newness to the adventure. Her chirpy balance and oarwork made the boat swerve and circle around in its watery histrionics. She let out the feministic laughing cries of fear, adventure and surprising mirth in all their joyous synergy of body, mind and spirit. Completely unaware of the onlooker she was enjoying each and every moment in rapturous harmony as if to redeem all the losses which the Islamic women suffered in their role as the bonded servitors in society.

The breeze played around her faded blue ankle-length kirtle, flapping it around her maturing legs. Upcoming curve around her bottom excited him for the fraction of a second with almost a feather-touch of sexuality as he gloated over it. But love at this age is beyond lust. Heart’s vastitude is too suffusing for the growing up sexuality. And the pleasurable proximity of that excitement was gone even without him having an inkling of it. The Bengali Muslim damsel, lurking between girlhood and womanhood, in the boat, among the fish jumping above the water surface occasionally, stood with her slenderest of sexual charm like a mythical mermaid, half woman and half fish. God knows how many virginally fresh young loves have been inspired by the woman and the distinctness hallowed around them, leaving ever memorable and inspiring impressions, which affect and mould whole of lives.

If Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, infatuated Julius Caesar and Mark Antony with her beauty, bravish charm, scintillating skills and scholarship; if great poets and philosophers sang and marveled at her physical, emotional and almost mythological secretness inside her heart, then this girl in a boat with fish flopping around in the water was undoubtedly capable of leaving an indelible, everlasting imprint on a virgin heart fallen in love for the first time.

She had removed her coarse, big and broad head-cloth (which usually covered almost the whole of her upper body) and dumped it by her side as if in disgust over its veily weight. Her narrow shoulders, long arms and the upcoming breasts covered under a full-sleeved kurti made her appear more charming than she really was.

“How I wish if I were there in the boat with her. Holding her hands...” he sighed. “And then suddenly a fish flop up, frightening her to fall in my embrace!” a sweet sensation caressed his genital area, as the growing seed of virility sprouted forth its little sapling.

During these dreamy moments, the girl during one of her swirling sweet manoeuvres caught a glimpse of the love-dazed boy, worshipping her with his ogles. Shyly she stopped her learning efforts at rowing. The boat meanwhile continued to circle around under her feministic inertia. Conscious of the fact that she was now looking at him, he blushed bashfully and was almost flabbergasted. His heart pounded with such ferocity that a toad jumped into the water from the corner of the pond as if the vibrations struck him. Emotional convulsions almost brought him at the brink of entailing the frog into the water with a bang.

If the feministic pinpointing impression, particularly smile, streaked inside the creative insight of Leonardo da Vinci and metamorphosed into the ever-active mythological smile of Mona Lisa, then this mermaid of the boy too thunder-bolted an everlasting impression inside his empty heart of yore. Love painted itself on a spotless canvas. Even if the time had the swiping potential to wipe away all sand dunes from the desert, it must’ve felt helpless before this painted oasis inside his barren heart; the ever defying traces of subconscious impression from the chaste, subsurface world of love: the girl, the fish inside the pond’s murky water, boating, pisciculture. Such everlasting and unmiffed colourisation of the heart with its vaticinal aura becomes a life force; the only purpose of being on earth. And small scalps like him never let such divine impressions slip away as a mere transient casualty, rather these are stored in a secret niche inside the immortal crate.

He didn’t know what to say to the girl whom he was thinking about day and night for the last four or five months. She looked somewhat embarrassed of the way she was playing. He, meanwhile, was perpetually failing in his efforts to force out a word. His heart’d leaped inside the pond, twisting and tossing around the boat and a pal of utter dysphonia enclouded him. Subtly blunt hesitation glued to his tongue preventing love’s first syllable to come out; the first word of real consequence and affectivity. Steamrolled under this physical and emotional muteness, he stood with his five senses intermixed in such a way that he only perceived a big, buzzing and vacuous zero.

She was standing in the middle of the boat with her legs somewhat apart along its width to keep it in balance. As only natural happenings can break such deadlocks of love, of minds, of hearts she suddenly lost the balance thanks to some uneven force born of either the left or right foot. The small boat shook violently with the propensity of dislodging her off the deck. She let out a cry.

“T...Ta...Take care!” momentary time’s snooty chaos broke his muteness. “Don’t move. Stand still in the middle.”

Regaining her composure, she stood motionless. The oar dropped over to one side balancing the wood. The boat now moved obliquely in his direction. Finding her so harmless, so innocent like an astonished fish, caring boyhood surfaced over his placid heart, making him somewhat bold. She stood so beautiful, so helpless. Care for her erupted inside his heart.

“I’ll row it properly for you, if you like,” he blushed more than the girl.

She couldn’t say anything. Teasing chirpiness which came so naturally to her when he came to her house was nowhere to be seen. She was conscious of the loneliness as well as the small raylet emanating from the secretive chamber of her heart.

“Actually I came to see my father. Where’s he?” he tried to calm down his love-lynched, shaking limbs as he softly stepped into the boat beside her.

With her ‘I don’t care about you’ naughty gesticulation she shrank away, very cautiously though, fearing a fall and sat at the other end of the boat. Pointed end of the gunwale was topped by a triangular sitting board. Sitting on this, she looked in the other direction.

“Came for money to purchase ration,” she said coming to her normal ease.

Much to his huge comfort she’d straightway jested making a face. It was his standard query whenever he came to face her.

“Oh no! Not this time,” he said shyly easing himself at the other end handling the oar. “I just felt eager to help him with his work today.  But where’s he now?” Once again he fell back to his punch line.  

By the look of it he seemed more womanish of the two. His heart’s coweringly babbling buoyancy was too much.

“But all say that your parents never get you to work,” she said flatly.

Though she said it in full innocence, still it seemed a bit taunty. He felt himself quite low when she mentioned the common fact known to all the villagers.

“It’s been like this since my birth. They never want me to do anything for them,” he said ruefully.

To an extent his loving fancy dithered from its earlier exciting flights. He pondered over his idlehood, temporarily forgetting about his haunted heart. He wasn’t rowing the boat. It just wafted away into the pond, guided by little waves. They didn’t look at each other, nor said anything after the unromantic drift of their conversation. Gliding over the wavelets the wood reached midway into the pond. They were looking in different directions. He to the right and she to the left. Water beneath their eyebeams, in all its versatility, seemed eager to proclaim its oneness, regardless of the eyes casting looks in different directions. This silence gave enough time to their hearts to exactly ponder over what they thought and felt about each other.

In a very mild tone, almost to the extent of a whisper, she said at last, “Abbu and your father have gone to the town to bring a new fishing net and fish seed.”

Her understanding eyes were now fixed at his almost sulking face. His features weren’t so bad. But permanently tragic grimace masked over them made him look broodingly piteous. Yes, she cared for him. The boy had his own kind of sorrowful charm, at least for a girl of his age. His piteousness and ill health didn’t seem to be on the side of vulgarity or bad appearance. He seemed to be a prince from a gerontocratic state where all subjects were too serious as if none of them had seen a childhood, and he had been by mischance exiled to this clacking and gruffly gesticulatory world.

“At what time they’ll be returning?” he asked still disheartened.

Initial throbbing impulse of his heart had been reined in by the reflection over his passive part in a human society. But she wanted him to recall his heart’s wave-storm.

“Unmnn...I don’t know, but abbu was saying he’s some more work in the town. A meeting with a baabu I think,” she softened the corners of her lips letting a faint encouraging smile hover around there.

Supportive ledging in her voice broke his reverie anchored in the water. He turned his face in her direction and looked apishly into her eyes. Proclaiming oracle lurked there. Her smile seemed to graft up the sorrow penitently layered over his face with her love.

“It may take them till evening,” he seemed in control of his heart as well as mind at last.

A love-talk with presence of mind! How difficult it may get! But thanks to her, she was easing him on the right track.

“Ooomn...as if you know the real value of time,” she teased in her normal way.

He smiled away the naughty pun. “You were rowing the boat wonderfully,” he gave a smiling soft retort.

She smiled a bit embarrassed. “As if you can make me learn to row it properly,” she made a face, half blushing.

“I’ll if you ask me,” he shyly whispered becoming possessive about her, with almost the sweetest satisfaction of his life.

“Why’ll you take the trouble of getting me learn this,” she said trying to keep her butterflying secret of which she was proud.

Perhaps, sub-continental girls cherish this dodging secret—which occasionally shines over the crazy lover’s heart, leaving it in a pal of gloom for rest of the time—more than the love itself. With a naughty secretness, they make the best out of this process itself. But, unfortunately, by the time they are over with this hide-and-seek and surrender to love’s full blossom, it’s too late. Love in such situations just tries to make the best of a bargain. After all, if it knows beforehand its conviction and eventual kiss of the gibbet, then it prefers to fissure out slowly, slowly as a romantic springlet which almost immortalises the lovers’ Indian sub-continental folklore. And the whole world knows, history proves this, that this love is the greatest on earth. It is like a lotus sprouting above the muddy, sordid surliness. The ever smiling, fundamentally chaste love unfazed by the sneering fault-finders; the purest white light, immortally burning with the oil of so many lost-loves, softly asking the misanthropic paranoids to sheathe the bloody sword; love in its divine cloister incessantly immersed in a yajna throwing so many broken hearts into the sacred fire as the oblations to keep it going, and the rising warmth ever trying to fight away the worldly cynicism.

He’d not been able to express why he should take the trouble of getting her learn boating.

“What if somebody sees you with me in this boat,” she said testily, putting up a dilemma.

In affirmation of inherent fears and suspicions on the path of love, he almost shivered. The consequences scurried over his mind for a moment.

“Abbu’ll kill you and beat me mercilessly if not kill me altogether,” warned the girl, getting her share of fear.

He remained silent looking the other way.

“Afraid of my father!” she pouted followed by a twisting narrowness of lips which indicated feminine defiant spirit for the protection of her love.

There was an imbroglio. Their hearts had been caught in a net. Imbued in the same colour, both wanted to say the same thing, ‘I love you.’ But it was the most difficult thing to do. They wanted it through a mysterious symbol which the other might not take as an openly proclaiming consent to love. Two hearts; two nonconsenting halves of a single love being taken on a singular journey by a boat, while the forecasting angels looking uneasily, for the world was no sea where a boat could carry two hearts for ever.

He was rowing the boat in a big circle in the middle of the pond.

“What if my father comes?” she cautioned again.

“At the most he’ll kill me,” much to her pleasure, this time he spoke boldly with an unwavering voice.

“And me too,” she mimicked playfully with a hidden confidence, as hidden as her liking for the boy.

This newfound possibility of sharing her father’s fist-work seemed to energise his hands and he rowed as quickly as he could. She giggled girlishly, looking at him fixedly. He diverted his eyes after short spells, as if her love smitten look was too shiny.

He stopped rowing to give some rest to his aching muscles totally new to such a tiresome work.

“Are you tired? Now, give me the oar I’ll try to do it,” the other half of his heart sweetly proposed to bear his burden.

Suppressing his breathlessness, he protested as the male companion ought to do when in company of a lady. “Oh no! I’d just stopped to look around. I’ll continue with it,” he assured her.

“The fish have grown quite large now,” he noticed a big, noisy splash in the pond.

“Yes, it’s been sometime since the net was cast. It was to be done two weeks ago, but the old net was bitten by rats. That’s why abbu is in the town today,” she giggled.

Suddenly, a soli fish, small and shiningly agile, too luxuriously agile in fact, splurged out of water. Hitting the wood’s border it flipped into the boat. Its silvery incandescence dancingly struggled in two inches of water inside the boat.

The girl let out a cry of excitement. She had many things in common with the awfully acrobating fish. She saw her slippery, small shiny replica. Her eyes glowed as if out of wonder after suddenly witnessing her grayish-dark complexion turn to a silvery, agile glow. She stood up and clapped out of scintillating sensation. Her small breasts curious and eager to bob out against the cloth, thin slender back and all those things which’d already envisioned a womanness about them danced in a secret harmony with her fish replica. The fish in a tizzy seemed to struggle for a new crack of dawn for Islamic women after centuries of dusking squib. Its hypnotic twitch and twirls seemed to symbolise a torn and tattered revolt against numerous Koranic misinterpretations concerning women. As a sojourning, rejoicing memorabilia of Islamic women’s liberty and empowerment the girl seemed to jingle amidst those ancient chains. Her diminutive lover watched this glimpse of freedom which was inexplicably surrealistic yet so far away in the future. A lavish sensation sprawled across his mind’s aisle. How beautiful the Islamic woman seemed when on an equal footing with man; when a genuine womanish smile attired her face instead of thumping pain resulting from medieval sly digs at her. Flip-flapping soli and the joyous girl spellbindingly raced across his empty, indoctrinated mind as well as heart. The rendezvous impresario danced with its humanistic doctrines. For the appeasement of which God? We don’t know.

He adored her, in all her mirthing fish continuum, with his worshipping looks. She appeared so compassionate, lovely, gracious and worshipable like the Virgin Mary or any other Hindu Goddess. This’s what the true love does. All those inhibitions and enslaving misinterpretations inside this human being born as a Muslim were nipped in the bud by a small strike by the enlightened scythe of the true spirit of a true religion. There was a look of marvelous ease and satisfied peace on his face; to the extent that he looked like a true sage of an authentic religion; a primal revisionist who could recall all the original Prophetic injunctions, putting aside the dusting hadis, thus allowing the Prophet’s true sheen to glimmer not just for his followers but for the humanity at large.

He was thus sitting on the tiny hull of the boat in a trance over his love spraying around like the fish. The boat meanwhile jerked slowly from one side to another as if in a stark admonition that this love’s glimpse of epic proportions could be as momentous as the life of little soli if thrown at the shore. The fish could gaspingly survive in the shallow water inside the boat. Same was about their togetherness. It could hope only to survive as long as those floaty moments clandestinely stole out precious seconds for them.

The flapping, flirtatious love-crave imprinted immortal vestigials on his crystal clear conscience, where his barren past had left no mark: forever shining marks (in their infancy) of liberal romanticism, pure humanism, religionless soul apostled by the girl and the fish. It was such a lofty milestone in his life, almost the peak point of his body, mind and spirit’s creative synergy. It seemed as if his uncheckered past was waiting for this lofty phrase, for this lofty proverbial light whose gleam and voice would fade into the dimness of his old days.

Lost in a dream they’d spoken a few words. But the number of words can’t and shouldn’t be made to count the amount of love.

Defining moments of life are after all just moments. They suddenly crop up in all their fledgling luxury and then taper off in a hurry, almost tragically.

“Shabeena! What’re you doing there?” her father shrieked from the shore sending down soaring repercussions across the pond’s water.

For a moment even the soli fish shuddered under the impact of this hell raising voice. His single sentence gushed so much fire that he off-balanced everything. Like the perplexed round eyes of a fish fearing death she turned her head in that direction, then a littlest eye-contact with the boy and then again faced the inevitable eventuality, expressionless like a lifeless statue.

“In Jahannum’s name, why’re there? I’ll kill you. Come ashore!” he barked clenching his fists and grinding teeth.

The Prophet’s dearest child was his daughter Fatima, love for whom inspired Him to say filially that those who showed special favours to their girl child, they willn’t be touched by the fire of hell. Alas! These words had no meaning for the girl’s father, who was shrieking out fire to burn her.

Devastated by the hopeless situation she was on the verge of fainting for a moment, but then like the ever suffering Muslim woman regained her senses to bear the burnt without letting out faintest of whisper.

“You bastard, bring the boat to the shore, or I’ll drown you right there!” he directed his life-threatening voice at the boy.

Dumbfounded the lover stared at his beloved with a pleading look of what to do.

“Father’ll kill you,” she declared completely dead-white, forgetting her own fate.

He thought of an escape by jumping into the water. But he’d a realistic assessment of his swimming prowess. Knew it too well that by the time he’d struggle out of any corner, the monster will be there waiting like a deadly butcher. Under the deafening spell of an excruciating fear he once again looked at her. Life had vanished from her face. Surrendered to fate she nodded passively. Like a calf going to the butcher house he tried his trembling hands at the oar. Numerous uncertainties as well as certainties waited at the shore. First stroke took the boat in opposite direction. An idea struck, as it always does when one is fearful for life. Why not race ahead in the same direction? And then run into wilderness with his first and perhaps last impression of love. But his untrained hands and already stiff, weak muscles ruled out the adventure beforehand. Fully aware of confirmed inevitability, she helped him row the boat in the direction of her father. In all meekness she had picked up a bamboo lying inside the boat. She was learning to row; learning to face the loveless hard reality.

Watching them meekly coming to him the man kept mum. He seemed more dangerous without his bellicosing verbosity, for it was a like a lull preceding a ferocious storm. He seemed to be gearing up the spurs of his murderous angst.

“Will he beat you?” he whispered penitentially for getting her in this trouble.

“He’ll kill me,” she said stonily. “And me too,” he united their love’s futile fate.

In the raging gripeness of his fury, her father watched the wood approaching him. His chewing looks not able to discern whom to prey upon first, he, she or the whole boat itself. His bursting, swooned mind was gearing-up to give most vengeful orders to his thick fists, which clenched involuntarily.

The boy’s eyes caught upon the little soli, still dancing as a symbol of their love. He stretched forward to get his hand at the jolly creature as if to exclude it from their doomed dark fate; save the moments of his immortalised love; the symbol of his love. He tried to catch it but it slipped away. He tried two, three times but failed. She was watching silently. Then without thinking or feeling anything, prompted by a mysterious sensation, she stepped forward, stretching out her hand to help him.

Her father gruffed volcanically and catapulted vulgarest of an obscenity he could manage.

Their joint effort caught the slippery fish. His fingers and hers webbing around the shiny fish. With a swash they threw it into the larger freedom of water; like an oblation at the altar of their love; liberating those moments of togetherness; freeing away the indelible impression of fresh, virgin love; away from anyone’s reach.

As the boat neared the shore, the man lunged into waist deep water. All his cursing anger fell firstly on the girl. Holding her hair he shook her violently as if to fear her life away. After a few hard hits at her back and slaps at her soft cheeks he grabbed the main culprit. Pulling him off the boat he pinched him down underwater; his facial convulsions showing that he might even drown the poor boy. He then propped the boy up, who gasped for life. After an exhaustive watery session, during which both water and the child bore the punishment, he dragged him on to the land to bestow punishment upon earth for its own share of the crime. His kicks danced macaberously. At least for the moment, saving her life the girl ran towards home to get her due share in the confines of the house. After venting out his full fury the strong man left him like a dead wood and hurriedly set out for his house to drag her out of her mother’s meek grasp and give her what she still owed for her crime.

All ye social researchers, who’ve guts to analyse the comprehensivity of violence against women may start cudgeling up your brains about what might’ve happened to the poor girl.

As per thy psycho-analytical theory, accruing feelings and emotions during a female child’s upbringing in such societies make her almost passive to biases and tortures. Her response to violence is a stereotypical sheepishness. Taking heart by this argument, we shouldn’t loose hope. She would definitely come out alive.

According to social learning theory, she and her father in their respective roles of ‘mutely helpless’ and ‘boiling aggressive’ just played their normal and expected roles. The socialisation processes as well as the family relationships are such that the aforesaid roles become almost sacred, inviolable definitions of the two genders.

And as the all powerful patriarch of the socio-political critique, his subjugative and unflappable hold to avoid any misdemeanours on her part didn’t count as violence. Rather it was the duty of a worried father.

As the victimised child valiantly survives in a survival theory, she did survive. Batterings and victimisations at physical, emotional and psychological levels hadn’t stalled her suddenly. It’d all evolved, since her early childhood, in perfect harmony with the cycle theory of domestic violence. Her bearing power of victimisation had been growing with her.

Her little lovely adventure in the boat made her family jump-start to the conclusion that she was bursting with youth and desire. Fearing lest her raging passion might hatch an adulterous conspiracy, they deemed it fit to get her married off. So, she was to be married as soon as they could manage it.

He was left with a symbol of his love in the form of a small soli fish and the girl traversing amidst the wavelets inside his heart. With passage of time its grandiosity was to remain the only leading light of his heart. Duty for his love would mature to such an extent, enough to wake him up at nights hearing the flapping fish near the shore and by decoding their mysterious signals he could estimate wind direction, temperature and salinity of the water.

His parents knew that the strongman’s heart had become an ever-active volcano now, which will continue to pour lava over them. So with the prized possession of their parenthood they left the place and took shelter in a filthy hovel in Calcutta’s slum area, where poverty let loose its fury on the packed crowd.

Hard facts of life were too tortuous for his soberly calm heart lit by a single starlet. Destiny’s propensity is always to put us in shoes we haven’t ever worn. Just as a small personal hurricane whiffed away his beloved, a greater tornado awaited numerous combined fates. India got independence, but along with it ran into a mercurial heavy weather of communalism. Muck-raking insinuations of the communalists reached dizzying heights in fresh and independent air. Cataclysmic fire of mayhem was all around and fate of humanity just a mere fish in a futile pan. History’s biggest forced migration took place. Monstrous birth pangs and ramifications occurred as a different nation-state was born along the two diabolical fractures in Punjab and Bengal. The tissues of two wholesome socio-cultural entities were torn apart to suit the changed nationhoods: inking of a ghastly deal; like the cosmic cricket’s one ball chance or mischance; so many fates decided by one single rash shot. Eleven million Hindu, Muslim and Sikhs were uprooted from their ancestral homes. One million got perished while seeking refuge in a new nation.

His parents became just two unknown numbers in the list of one million dead persons. His name didn’t figure in the list of those who’d been sacrificed at the altar of a new Goddess called religious nation-state. He watched all this with a resigned passivity. At numerous instances incidental spin of the coin or the accidental throw of dice fell in his favour and he survived. To the other side of the border a new religiously spiced nationhood was up for grabs. Muslims from the Indian side of Bengal were in for a heady rush to their redefined motherland. But one needs something to take along to a new destination. At least one runs to a safer place to save even the trivialest of possessions. He hadn’t anything except a lotus light inside the farthest corners of his heart, which no communalist could blow out. So he remained in India like a tiny sinew strengthening the torn and tattered out secular nest of free India.

Now, he wasn’t related to anything. Fisheries were the only occupation or worldly thing he could’ve related to. As a poor labourer he worked in the fish farms. Netting, pulling, separation of the fish, markets, boating, inspection of seeds all done in a lifeless, mechanic proficiency but guided by a faint, murmuring crave emanating from the only lively thing inside his heart, which stretched his engagedness in the job to the extent of a mad craze, yet so silent, sober and stoic. Physical debility is no opposition to such soul driven passions. Multi-hued reflections of life, soul and spirit just danced at only one surface. Mastery in the field was inevitable. But perfectly unassuming mastery—without being related to anything else—fetches nothing except subsurface streaks of genius which are harnessed by someone’s dexterity and social-skills, leaving the master just an unsung and pauperised fortune maker. He was just of similar type as far as the fisheries were concerned.

He worked in inland fisheries in West Bengal; tasted the salinity along coastal Orissa; pulled nets in fresh water of the Ganges in Bihar. With the independent march of India, he’d moved to the western side with the spread of pisciculture from its eastern side along the Gangetic plains. The profession became food for his secretly diminutive thoughts as well as frugal thoughts for his food. His expertise groomed to such and extent that even the officials at the local fisheries department developed cold feet when they came to know an odd surprising, almost out of world tit-bit about the fish from his mouth which would sometimes open only when the matter at hand concerned the agile water dwellers. It was with such a septuagenarian status, about a year ago, he was spotted by his current employer at Jama Masjid market in Delhi. The pisci-farmer from the village had some other reasons too to bait-in the old genius, in addition to what a Bengali friend of his in the market told him about the old man. It was in such circumstances the new watchman-cum-adviser had reached this Haryanvi village about 2000 km. away from his homeland. It was a virtual pardesh; literally, a totally different socio-cultural set up in comparison to the polished culturalities of Bengal. After all it was the land of sturdy villagers, the descendants of indefatigable Central Asian settlers, who cleared mighty forests for agriculture about 3000 years ago. Simple, straightforward without any urbane etiquettes rasping around their edges, these hardworking people found it easier to grapple with bulls and buffaloes than softer—or as the urbanites call them finer things of culture—things of life, like say holding a slippery fish in hand or talking and behaving with a greater role of mind than the heart. They were led by a rustic, simple, straightforward heart’s instinct.

His arrival in the village, where the conventional green revolution dictated agricultural activities predominated, was an indication of diversifying modes of occupation being adopted by the people in the struggling countryside. Mushroom farming and inland fisheries were two emerging important factors which were providing some succour to the countryside put at unease by the increasing needs of these changing times.

Efforts and guidance by the Fish Farming Development Agency had given some hope to the educated unemployed youths of the district. Almost all the villages in Sonipat district, thus, had their village panchayat ponds leased out for pisciculture after an open auction. The ponds were thus serving twin purposes of pisciculture and buffalo wellowings.

Traditional beliefs about vegetarianism were losing ground and commercial proposition seemed to prevail over the conservatism and stigma springing up with a mere touch to meat.

District Fisheries Seed Farm situated along the road to the eastern side of the village also provided some half hearted incentives and vague clues about the blue revolution.

As an active player in the new scheme of things, the watchman had been happily employed by the villager. There was however another possible impact of his trivial, almost ionic addition to the State, where a nationally emerging Hindu rightist party had become a tiny force to reckon, with its new religio-political manifesto in coalition with an influential state level party. The political party was trying to instigate the sons of the soil to come out of their thousand-year-old repressive shell over a defensive, coward core which bore numerous attacks from the North West frontier. Irony was that a particular qualification was needed to be a part of this new found enthusiasm—at least be a borne Hindu, if not a full fledged practicing religioner. To the capacity of its vocal chords it was giving a clarion call for Hindu pride.

Back in his home State, the communist monolith erected on the principles of socialism was getting some jolts from a resurgent Congress as well as the rejuvenating Hindu pride. If someone heard the old Bengali watchman whispering—provided he knew politics at all—that he was a Congressman from inside but a Communist from outside, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Congress was surviving in Bengal inside some pathetic chamber fearing to come out in open against the Communist musclemen and bullies ever ready to vanquish any anti-Communist sentiment. They’d do anything like crop burning, thrashing, poisoning the pond to kill the seed of any Congress related idea as well as any private initiative to reap capitalistic profit. Of late however, the Communists were facing someone who was not as submissive as a Congressman. Beholder of Hindu cultural pride, RSS, had arrived in West Bengal. Its defiant khaki clad workers were holding shakhas, or camps, around the state. Its founder, K. Hedgewar had studied medicine in Calcutta during the militant-extremist phase of freedom struggle. He had some flirtations with Anushilan Samiti. But his rightist Hindu nationalism couldn’t find favours with the leftist overtures of the Marxist supporters of the Samiti.

Inertia of this new religious connotation of nationalism was spreading out to virgin lands. Watchman’s fellow Bengalese could absorb it in their State as the transitory phase ruled out any sudden social-shock. But far, far away from his home State, where the tsunami was accumulating in the land of his emigration, there was every possibility of being absorbed by a flood. While, for the political and ritualistic practitioners of fundamentalism it was quite easy to ride the crest of this new tsunami. Here in this part of the country where last of Muslim seeds had been pulled out after the local battles at the time of independence, this iota of Muslimness had every chance of being made a weed to achieve nationalism, patriotism, religionhood or just to satisfy the plain greed of a selfish heart.