The whispering rooms

 Sunil Sharma

In rooms bare and large, the past lies curled up like the brown alley cat and faithfully follows the old man, in his tireless indoor- roaming.

Memories keep him connected with people dead or absent, and, make his aged mind meditate on the process of change. He visits and revisits them just to remain sane in an empty haveli.

Mostly, the early memories are of the happy childhood spent in the haveli with his brothers and sisters, now either dead or on the verge of death. The surviving kins talk occasionally. That part of the extended Indian family is dead. The echoing laughter of shared dinners and days with his caring brothers and sisters fills up his heavy heart with lightness and brings back a smile. The innocence is forever gone but the fragrance remains.

The later adult memories are not mostly pleasant. Strife, comparisons, status, domestic tiffs, generational gap between sons and fathers, changing civil society----well, it is a long litany of bitter woes. Breathless changes that leave him bewildered, broken, angry and confused.

But the old man continues interrogating. This is how it happens.

During the hot afternoons, the exhausted past reveals itself to him, in all vividness.

Daily, in these dusty empty rooms connected with each other with internal doors, the old guys recovers the lost voices from the underworld. A rough wind blows through the windows, dispersing the desert sand that enters via windows. Nobody sweeps this big village house, fifty kms away from Jaisalmer, Rajasthan. The red-tiled small haveli stands on the edge of an arid expanse of shifting dunes and fierce sandstorms. A young neem tree stands at the corner of the low outer wall. A dog barks. The old man feeds it every day with the leftovers of the frugal meals he cooks himself. The village has few men. The adults have migrated to the cities across India. Only the very young and feeble old are left. It is small decaying village. Calmness prevails at this hour. You can hear the song of the wind. At this quiet hour, images pop up. The departed moments float up like tiny shimmering visual particles for Kunwar Ram Bahadur Rana, the owner of the haveli and the proud brigadier who led the army against Pakistan in the war of 1972 and got decorated.

The tall proud man wanders these interlinked rooms built up in a line, along the covered veranda. The rooms are high-ceilinged and cool, despite the 42-degree Celsius on this late- May afternoon. Unshaven, the lonely brigadier paces up and down. He can see the dissolved moments with complete lucidity, thus shrinking the temporal distances between past and present.

The rooms are his province. The gone instants get freshly revived here, in the unadulterated solitude of the haveli and the village, details vivid. He can feel the breath of the people and see the curves of their faces across the yawning gulf.

They connect him with his history and India’s post-colonial history.

The old man has stopped dying hair these days, finding the long exercise bothersome. And accepted ageing. The crows’ feet, sagging skin, black circles, receding eyebrows and deepening frown lines can no longer be hidden beneath costly facial creams. The mirror reflects a hollow face. Being elderly in a youth-obsessed urban society is demeaning. The aged are new outcasts. In fact, this and other factors had compelled the brigadier to return to his forefathers’ locked haveli and live the rest of his life in their shadows in the village that still does not have a railroad station or a regular bus depot, decades after freedom from the British Raj. Folks have to walk a lot to reach the nearest station or bus depot. Two Indias, so different! But Rana prefers the uncomplicated life of the non-competitive village.

 I have found peace here, said he to his old friend, a village cobbler, now retired and dependent on his son’s family.

 The solid physical dimensions of the empty rooms get further amplified by the hovering gray-bluish silence. In the white antiseptic rooms, filled with expired moments, the old man can still hear rustlings of the dress of his dead wife and runs into his happy brood of young children.

All that is over now.

 Sleepless, the widower walks. The buried moments resurface. The rooms are his passage to yester years. The rewinding refreshes or alternatively, tires the widower down but he loves time- travelling, returning to a hidden continent of images, all stored up in a tiny cell of the brain.

Whispering rooms, he calls them. They talk to him and bring back the elapsed fragments of life.

And they contain a secret.

The old man is 65 and suffers from diabetes, osteoporosis, hypertension, a defective heart valve and glaucoma in his right eye. “I have become a faulty piece now, fit for junk yard,” he writes carefully in diary. “I am past my age of utility. A piece of trash. Awaiting death and redemption.”

 Mornings, he watches the criss-crossing sand dunes, finding meanings in their shifting patterns. Nothing is permanent. The desert tells us that. Watch the hot desert, the wind. It speaks to you.

And I can hear the others also.

And a voice travelling from the desert. The voice of his dead father, talking to his living son in the whispering rooms, where he had lived for forty five years of his simple life. His father whispers to him in these large airy well-lit rooms. His voice comes from desert into these rooms for a dialogue with him. It is the only comfort left for the old man who has no family to talk to these days.

Rana Vijay Kumar was the village doctor. He treated villagers freely, having inherited properties in Jaisalmer from his childless maternal uncle. Uncle’s Vilas Hotel was a hit with the foreign tourists for its courtesy and local cuisines. Rana was his adopted son. He had studied the medicine, as he wanted to ease the pain of the poor villagers with no medical access. Rana Vijay Kumar was a revered figure. He worked hard for the upliftment of the poor and made the village his last home. When he was dying, he had called his youngest son Kunwar Ram Bahadur to his bed and said in a strong voice, “You are caring and loving by nature. Come back to this house after doing your bit for the country as a soldier. I am leaving the haveli to you. It is a debt that you owe to me. The parental debt is to be paid. If not, a curse follows. They will have everything in life, yet nothing and die unhappy.”

That scene is etched forever in his mind. The old doctor died three days later. He performed the last rites of his father, locked the haveli and then left for Rann of Kutch, his latest posting in the army, facing the enemy across the border, forgetting temporarily the last conversation with a dying father, of the parental debt and the curse. He rarely visited the big haveli in the Thar Desert. The place did not exist.

Then, the haveli in the Thar Desert called, after a long hiatus.

 One night, five years ago, he saw his old father in a dream in the New Delhi upscale apartment where he was staying for last six months.

 He saw the old haveli, in ruins, overgrown with weeds, doors ripped apart, furniture stripped, a neem tree in the corner…and the old man, a white shadow, walking in the ruins, eyes sad, smile gone from a gaunt face and clearly beckoning him with a hand. He followed him on an uneven terrain and the dead father stopped, eyes sad, saying, “My debt? Until you pay that, I will not get salvation and remain unhappy in the afterlife. So will you be, my son, in your life.” Then the apparition was gone, swallowed up in a dust devil. The desolate haveli cried, the sobs magnifying in his ears. Then, it disappeared along with the shrunk village in the desert. And the dream was over.

That morning, he got the clarity. Early morning, he washed his mouth by gurgling the water three times loudly, ran his thick index finger on his old gums, expelled the water and blew his nose three times, an unconscious act done daily. His youngest son came after five minutes and said, “Dad, your noisy actions disturb the sleep of the kids and wife. She cannot sleep due to the loud nose-blowing that is very nauseating for us all. It is very uncivil and offending.” And he went back to his air-conditioned room in a huff, slamming the carved teakwood doors fiercely on that second Saturday morning of February. The crude warning, the hatred implied in the loud tone, the vulgarity of its delivery to an army brigadier dad left Ram Bahadur badly shaken. There were signs earlier of hostility and pure negligence. You can fight external enemy but the internal enemy, your own son, a computer engineer and an MBA, now a senior manager in an MNC in Gurgaon, is a different story. As the dumped dad prepared his small suitcase, the dream came back as a divine sign and he understood the hidden meaning. He left the plush house of his second son quietly in flat ten minutes, without disturbing the sleeping family, sticking a farewell note to the refrigerator, “Leaving for good. My blessings, Papa.” The decorated proud brigadier reached the railway junction and booked a first-class ticket on the train leaving in the late afternoon for Jaisalmer, his heart broken, mind in spin. He composed himself in the journey, deleting the name of his second son in his heart. From Jaisalmer, he took a private taxi to his village set in the heart of the Great Thar Desert that continued calling like a lost kin. When he reached the ancestral house, he found it in ruins, in the same condition he had seen it in his dream. Time to redeem my pledge to my dead father. Along with grateful villagers, he cleaned the house and restored it to its former glory. The dream stopped recurring. He had picked up homeopathy and started treating the villagers for simple ailments, sponsoring the treatment of the poor.

The village was his family. When ill, the women would take turns to cook for him. They will clean the house and tend to him. The young ones called him the grandpa. What urban India had claimed from him, rural India had given him back.

“There is nothing called parental debt, Dad,” his eldest had son said clearly on the phone from Silicon Valley where, much to his dad’s dislike, he had gone and set up a start-up venture in software. That was two years ago. His wife had died last night. The eldest had expressed his inability to attend the rites, “It will take me at least 74 hours to reach the remote desert village. That will serve no purpose. I will come for the thirteenth-day ceremonies. Sentimentality will not do, Dad.”

“I need you my son in this hour of personal crisis. It is called parental debt,” said Ram Bahadur Rana to his son in America.

“I do not believe in this Asian crap anymore, Dad. Ancestral-worshipping, past-clinging, backward-looking ideology that has kept India a poor country. I am an American and believe in their values. These values can take us forward to the next century of tech progress and personal pursuits of happiness, money and democratic freedoms,” said his eldest in an American accent. Many years ago, he had suggested to Kunal, his eldest, to join army and pay back. Kunal had retorted, “Patriotism is dead. So is philanthropy. I want to live for myself only, on my terms. I want to see the whole world. Earn a lot of money and settle in USA, my dream country. Army is out for me. I do not believe in all this nonsense.”

The coldness of his tone and the calculative rationality, the blind obsession with money and power had left the army man stunned. The same remoteness in Kunal’s unfeeling tone left him hurt, angry and bitter. “Listen, young entrepreneur from USA. Your mother is dead, not some other woman. It is your grieving dad calling. Do not worry. Do not come here at all.” And he had disconnected.

Ram Bahadur Rana knew he had lost both his sons. Kunal, of course, did not come. And Ram Bahadur never talked to him. He was an extra. Parental debt was a notion beyond their money-dominated mindset. They lived in an instant, followed by another one, in an unending series of instants, day-to-day basis, mere consumers, drifting in a world of gratification, titillation and hyperacidity only. Everything was replaceable. Five years, car gets replaced. Six months, cell is replaced. Exchange economy. Exchange the old for the new. The process is endless. Deleting everybody past their use value.

The whispering rooms were calling.

“Why are you so sad?” Asked the voice of the dead father.

“I am feeling low again. Discarded. With zero value. Worthless as a human.” Said the son aloud to the whispering rooms.

“No. You are not. You are a sensitive and kind person. You follow the dharma.”

“Who cares for such old moral concepts these days? The past is getting invalid. The youngsters live in to-day only. That old philosophy is irrelevant to the changing country.”

“The past catches up soon. If they flout highest ethical norms, they will pay for their acts of defiance and moral transgressions. Every age has its code of conduct that cannot be trifled with so easily by the greedy wanton youth,” said the dead father, adding, “The past is important as it leads to your present. Nobody can live in a detached present. It is cumulative; everybody has to live in a continuum. Deeds of yesterday visit you to-day. Caring, compassion and concerns can never be outdated or outlawed. If they are, that selfish society is headed for disaster soon, moral, physical and ethical.”

“I do not see any logic in this. It is all nonsense. The young India finds it a bogus philosophy. Only money matters. Money and power for them.”

“Beware! Do not insult the ancestors who lived by these holy principles. Do not mock your heritage. Your own sacrosanct world-view so flippantly. Those who flout these sacred principles of life will meet a tragic fate. This will come true soon,” thundered the hollow voice from the land of sleep and peace and retreated quickly, leaving the 65-year-old Ram Bahadur Rana quivering with fright. Supernatural wrath will visit us now, he wrote in the diary, late in the afternoon, after this encounter with his deceased dad. The voice, issuing forth from the womb of the whispering rooms, could be heard by him only and mostly recorded in his diary, in the Socratic dialogic form. These hurried jottings he read leisurely and found them illuminating to a questioning mind, away from civilization, living in a desolate deserted village in the middle of the blazing Thar. The cool evenings brought the sounds of the desert to him and he could clearly hear the snakes and the lizards and other insects who have found a home there in the arid region. The camels’ sounds greeted him in the early mornings. The anklet bells of the women produced a soft symphony for his ears. The thorny trees, the alive desert, the changing landscape, the variations in temperature in 24 hours taught him how to live in extreme conditions and find nirvana in most frugal lifestyle of the hardy villagers who grew crops in a parched land under most tough circumstances. The deities in rude shrines gave hope to the ever smiling villagers leading a simple existence under a merciless sun.

Through diary, he communicated with his doubting self and a father who was still alive to him. Evenings, he chatted with the cobbler to remain in touch with toiling humanity.

In next 48 hours, the phone rang twice: The first call was from USA.

Kunal, said his grandson Sammy, is in ICU. “Too much work, insane competition, earlier devastating divorce with my mom, irregular eating hours, sedentary style and too much drinking led to the fast burn-out and a massive heart attack. He is on life support system and often, in drugged sleep, cries out for you. Can you come, Pa?” asked the teary 15-year-old Sammy in American drawl, voice pleading.

Next call was from Rita, the wife of Arvind, second son in New Delhi. “Papa,” She cried, “He has been sacked. Recession, you know. They just sacked him. No farewells. Nothing. He got hit inside. Never shared his anguish with me. Pretended to be working as usual in his old firm but snapped up under the pretense. Thought of committing suicide. To avoid the liability on us, this step he took. He consumed poison in the morning. Chances of survival are very slim. So many bad debts. No friends have turned up in the hospital. He wanted to take easy way out. We are broke and alone. In the suicide note, he asked for your forgiveness. Kids are scared. They are crying. We need you, Papa. Can you come, Papa?”

For a quick answer, Brigadier Ram Bahadur Rana looked at the whispering rooms of his dad’s two-storied silent haveli.

He heard only a moaning wind in the rooms and no voice from the land of dead to help him arrive at an answer to their cries of help from different geographical locations but having a common cultural centre.

 Torn and undecided, the old father stood up to feed the barking dog outside, while the ominous wind shrieked in the whispering rooms, signaling the imminent death of somebody nearby or far, as the villagers always believed after listening to the mournful wind…