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…

Two black stones and an old God

---Sunil Sharma

They were an ordinary pair of two black stones.

Lifeless. Solitary. Forlorn. Buffeted by strong winds sweeping down the hills. Two  tall stones only: Sprouting forcefully from the ground like an upraised twin closed fists of solid granite. Propped up precariously by an unseen power, under the spreading old banyan tree, in the open, exposed to the elements. Hardly different from other odd stones of black found in plenty in the desolate area beyond the border of the rows of white neat bungalows arranged a-symmetrically on a rising mound on the property of the mills. They seemed to be hurriedly abandoned stones; left behind by somebody in a tearing hurry, on the left-hand corner of our Raj-era bungalow with a medium-size compound wall. Standing vertically, as two thick ram-rod columns, in the swaying grass, under the tree. Looking forever, across the green vegetable patches, in the direction of the tiled cottage with a covered veranda. We called them the double sentinels. The two had deep sockets in them, gazing steadily at the world, out of the gouged spaces. One of their eyes once, I am pretty sure, blinked at me! I was stunned! I looked hard again. I saw only the deep sockets. And, then, slowly but surely… a pair of wide eyes, drawn indelibly on the stones, staring at me. The eyes made by some crude hands. Two large fish eyes each, inscribed on the rough surface by persistent labour. The pupils large in the round eyes, as if swimming in them! Permanently etched, unaffected by the elements. You have to look hard to see them but they were there. When I looked again, I saw the round eyes smile at me, on that lonely hot May Sunday afternoon. The place was deserted. I had this creepy feeling. Of the presence of somebody there, whom I could not see but feel strongly around me! A similar sensation can be experienced easily, standing in the ruins of some forgotten old tombs, dotting the countryside and suddenly feeling the eyes of the long- dead guy on your sweating back! It has happened to me often, in those rubbles from the past. So that day, scared suddenly, I ran away from the shady spot, into the welcoming sanctuary of my dark home.  I told Pa. “Stones do not have eyes. They are lifeless. They cannot blink. It is all rubbish,” he said. “I am sure, it blinked,” I insisted. Pa smiled, “Your fertile imagination, kid. And stop listening to those funny tales of granny or Moti. Go, play outside and do not disturb me!”

I got confused. Stones do not blink. Pa claims so. But it did. I am very sure. I went straight to granny’s dark room. She was snoring on her large iron bed. A large table stood near her croaking. It was filled with different-sized medicine bottles. She got up after hearing my footfalls. “Come on in, my poor child. Come here to your granny,” she said kindly to me. Her voice was like that only---always soothing and gentle. She was never cross with me. Unlike Ma or Pa. I told her the incident. She smiled. “Do the stones have eyes?” I asked.

“Yes, Dolly. The stones breathe. They have eyes. Those two stones are very special. They are not stones but a breathing and benevolent old God. They keep an eye on us, protecting us from harm.” She told me in the manner of my class teacher Ms. Mukherjee, always confident and serene, knowing things we never knew. I was thunder-struck. God in the dead stones? “But pa says they are stones and stones do not have eyes, grandma,” I protested, a nine-year kid, many years ago, on that May afternoon, in that huge officer’s bungalow.

“Oh! Ramu does not know many things. He is my son but very different. He has no time for me or you. Always work, work and work. Always after money and nothing else,” said the white-haired granny to me. I still could feel the pain in her voice. The pain of being left behind by your own! But god in those stones! That was really surprising for my mind.

I felt very confused. Who is right? Pa? Granny? Me?

For pa, they were just stones. For granny, they were not. For me, surely these two were alive. It was a deepening mystery now.

Two black stones for others.  But an old God for the granny!

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I am. I talk to Him daily.”

“What!” I was hit by a punch in my stomach. “You talk to God?”

“Yes. I do. Daily.”

Gaping, I thought, it is too much now!

“Can I talk to God?”

“Yes, you can. He is kind to us. More for the children.”

“How can I talk to Him?”

“Close your eyes. Draw deep breath. Then, begin talking. Tell Him your woes. I always do that.”

“Does God listen to you?”

“He does. Go and find out. Listen carefully. You will hear Him soon.”

I was fully intrigued now.

I decided to find out for myself.

The stones were craggy, rugged, heavy and black. They were found placed haphazardly under the spreading banyan tree many years ago, in the back of the rambling bungalow. Resting against the gnarled tree trunk of the moving banyan where ghosts lived according to Moti, our ageing servant. Evenings, I was terrified of the knotted tree with the drooping locks and stout branches. The tree stood in a corner of the big bungalow. The forest started at the back of the bungalow, behind the outer compound wall of the mills. The long summer afternoons, a hot wind danced in the forest, shrieking mad. Then, it would come down to the bungalow, stark mad, dancing and whistling, driving the leaves away, knocking the tiles on the roofs. Creating a huge ruckus on the way. The wind is like the mad woman vagrant I found near the colony’s main gates.

The stones weathered all this. And more in the years long past. They stood erect. Two huge stone tablets under the whispering ancient tree. Immovable. Fixed in that desolate spot.

There the old granny found God in those two derelict black stone tablets daubed with crimson by somebody long ago. I went there and looked again, my heart beating fast.

The round eyes were resting. Two round eyes and large pupils. The fish eyes! I peered closely. The round eyes moved suddenly and blinked. I stood transfixed. The wind howled in the forest like a wailing baby. There was nobody around except the rustling of the leaves and the singing grass in the hot sun. The tree was my shield from the attacking fierce sun. I peered again. The still eyes moved again and blinked at me! The stones, granny was saying, were alive. She was right! There was a god residing in these two stones. Happy by this strange discovery, I rushed back. The granny’s room was in the extreme corner. She was now lying awake, breathing hard.

“Grandma?”

“Yes, my precious,” she said kindly to me.

“I saw the God move His eyes and blink at me from one of those stones!”

She smiled her toothless smile, her lines deepening on her small forehead. “I told you so. Only two kinds of persons can see the stone god.”

“Who are they?”

“The old women like me and the young simple girls like you.”

I felt very lucky and privileged. I could see what others could not.

“Granny?”

“Yes.”

“Who lives inside that stone tablet under the banyan tree?”

“The great God Shiva. In the other tablet of stone is Nandi, his carrier. The bull-carrier is also His manifestation only.”

I was taken aback. The mighty Shiva in the stone and I could see the God.

“But how can the God slip into such a small stone?”

“The Shiva is very kind God. He can reveal himself in any form you worship. He can live anywhere. In icy caves or small stones. He is everywhere.”

“Even in the dead stones?”

“He is everywhere. Everything is His creation only. You search the sacred in humble objects and you can feel and find the divine in them also.”

“How can we make objects sacred?”

Granny---the well-read retired science high-school teacher---paused, moving her rosary in her gnarled stick-like hands, then said, “Emotions. Your doll is precious to you, is it not?”

I nodded. “In the same way, these stones are precious to me. They are sacred to me. I saw the crimson on them, put up by some tribals, years ago. Smearing the stones with the crimson is an act of sacredness. It means for the Hindus, it is a holy object, not to be trifled with or defiled by any crazy person.”

“Ordinary objects can be turned into holy ones thus?”

“Yes. Crimson can do that.”

“And, if somebody tries to fool around or, defile these holy objects?”

“Disaster follows soon. “

It did very soon in our own family. This is how it happened.

Excited by the discovery, I would go daily to the site…to talk to the God. Often, granny would come with me. She would wash the stones carefully, daub them with crimson, burn incense sticks before them and then sit cross-legged, chanting hymns in Sanskrit, eyes closed in complete reverence, engrossed in worship, completely away from the world, into a different higher realm. I was always intrigued by her far-away look during these intense moments. She would mumble something in this trance-like situation. “What did you say to God?” I would ask. The white-haired granny, thinning and stiff, would smile very serenely and say, “Shiva is my father. I share everything with Him. I petition Him for everything. All my wishes get fulfilled by such a caring father.” Wishes! I also did the same. Closing my eyes, I said earnestly, “Oh, Lord, my father, I want to become a boy. Please make me a B-O-Y, please Shiva. You know my Pa always wanted a boy. Even my Ma. They are not happy with me. Pa hardly talks. Ma is always cross. She yells at me. Often, beats me for trifles. Only granny loves me. So, please turn me into a boy. Then, my parents will start loving me again.” I would sit cross-legged, eyes closed and talk to the stone-God in a sincere tone. The morning breeze would play with my curly hair and caress my thin oval face. In the deathly stillness on the bungalow---Ma was busy with her chores; Pa was in the office---I could hear my own voice loudly and clearly against the rustling, whispering leaves of the banyan tree. Daily I would pray to Shiva for a dramatic transformation that would delight my unhappy parents and make me the BOY. Whenever I would open my eyes, I would see the crude fish-eyes looking at me and find them blinking at me in an instant. One morning, I found granny crying silently. “Please, end my sufferings now. Nobody wants me to be here. Nobody. I have no other place to go. I feel very insulted. Please, end my sufferings by making me dead.” I cried, too. I got scared. Granny, my beloved granny, as dead. Who will then talk to me? I will become lonely again. Both of us grew closer, without realizing it. And then, one morning, the stones were not there!

It was the saddest day for both of us!

The most precious stones of our lives were missing. We cried bitterly. “The one who has done this will face the wrath of the great Shiva, the destroyer!” Pronounced granny, mad with grief. I, too, was broken in spirit and body. I lost my appetite. The corner looked plundered and empty. It was sacrilege. Somebody, granny said, had dared remove the deity and violated the moral code of conduct. Now, that somebody has to pay heavily for this transgression. I stopped looking at that favorite corner of mine---it looked empty and meaningless to me.

Three days later, quite inexplicably, Ma fell down and fractured her hand and Pa fell ill. He had come back from office in the evening, tossed a few drinks and then gone to sleep. In the night, he developed high fever and chills. The fever continued, despite the medicines. Ma called us and said, “Pray for him.” We did. The fever will not go. Both granny and I got worried. Granny prayed earnestly to the Shiva. I also did that. Then, he was rushed to the City Hospital. We both followed him there. Granny kept praying, hardly sleeping.  Pa started muttering in his sleep, on the hospital bed, fever running very high. The doctors said: 48 hours only. Ma cried a lot, so did the old frail granny, sobbing and wailing. Death was inching forward. Pa was in delirium now. Fever did not go down. The docs were all worried. Life hung by a thread only. Our destiny could alter suddenly by this tragedy. The two women were praying and praying to all the Gods. Granny hardly ate anything during those days. I also prayed to Shiva.

And then I saw the dream.

The great Shiva, trident and snakes and matted hair and damrus in hands, striding towards me and saying, “Get those stones back there, otherwise the defiler gets death.”  His eyes were flashing in anger. The snakes were all uncoiled now. They were hissing. The great Shiva was in his Rudra form, dancing angrily. The earth trembled. Thunder struck. I woke up, shuddering in fear.

I told my granny. She understood. Then, both of us went back to the bungalow. We searched and searched and then finally, unable to locate two stones, picked up two other similar black stones, much lighter and smaller, found in plenty in that area and cleaned and washed them. Granny placed them under the whispering banyan tree and again daubed these ordinary stones with the standard crimson colour, turning them into two sacred objects! We burnt the sticks, scattered flowers, poured milk and prayed with eyes closed.

“Please God, save my Pa. He is very dear to me. He is my Pa. I love him very much,” I said, tears running down my cheeks. I had seen Rupali, my chum, crying often, after she had lost her father in an accident a few months ago. She was forced to drop out of school and sell vegetables on the streets. Crying, I dropped to sleep, in the lap of my frail granny, before the newly-anointed stone God.

The healing was quick.

Pa was finally discharged from the hospital after a month. Ma’s fractured hand got healed up also. The life slowly returned to normal. I continued to find solace in the stone God. Granny would talk daily to Shiva under the banyan tree.

To-day, after twenty-one years, as a 30-year-old police officer, I stand before those two stones, under the banyan tree, in the big bungalow. There is no forest left now. It has all been cut down by the timber mafia. The mills have closed down. The bungalow is abandoned. The nearby bungalows are also closed. There is no body living here anymore except the security guards.  The mills’ property is on sale. I was posted as the Deputy Commissioner of Police, the first woman police officer in the state so far, in the town near Ranchi, where I had spent my childhood. I decided to visit the property…and my childhood. The bungalow looks forlorn. Only cob-webs and dust are there where we once lived. The stones are still there. And surprisingly, daubed with fresh crimson. On every Wednesday, people come to apply crimson to the stones. “A whole cult is there now, madam,” informs the chief security officer, a retired colonel, “Every day, women come to pray and on Wednesdays, full crowd comes to pray here. People say all their wishes are granted by these stones.”

I secretly smile. The stone-God had granted my desire. I had become more than a man in a force known for its male ethos. “She is the only man here,” my superiors say by way of introduction. My Pa also revised his opinion about me. I thank my granny for all this. She told me to turn two stones into sacred things by applying crimson and worshipping them faithfully.

They are no longer mere stones but two sacred objects for an entire town. “Humans need sacred objects in their lives. If you do not have them, you are doomed. You must have two holy stones to guide you,” my granny had told me once.

I had found them years ago. The town was finding them now. I understood the message to-day, delivered by granny many years ago. I bowed before them again and stood up.

The fish-eyes were smiling at me again!

The moon

On the roof of
My high-rise block,
I caught the solitary moon,
In the cup of my trembling veined hands
But it soon
Dissolved.
In the slanting
Silvery rays
That lit my shaking adult hands,
The way it
Illuminates,
The many
lands forlorn,
On the lonely and cold
Wintry nights.

It filled up
My heart
With
White hopes again,
As it did some
Fifty-five years ago,
Through the cracked windows
Of a poor peasant’s cottage,
At the edge of a lost village,
And it still does,
I am pretty sure.

The
Moon I remember
Of yore,
Always
Looked down from its heavenly perch,
Always smiling
And talking to an orphan
In gentle tones.

The big-eared rabbit
Standing on its legs,
The only resident allowed there,
Waved at me,
From the moon
And then
Came down to my room.

I would chat
And complain a lot,
The rabbit/ moon
Will listen to a
Ten year’s heart,
And invariably
Make the crying motherless
Kid sleep with
Its white wand.

For many years,
I forgot,
As struggle I have to do a lot,
About a caring and wandering

Moon.

Once I fell gravely ill,
In my little flat in the city,
Remembering my village,
My dead Pa and Ma,
My living brothers and sisters,
Who hardly cared
Whether I lived or died,
As I cried, as an abandoned baby,
I again found the moon
In my drawing room,
It had stealthily slipped in,
As it always did then,
Via the open windows
Of my tiny flat,
It flooded both my heart and hearth,
With its milky bright light
And gently touched
My tear-stained face,
With its
Ice-cool
White fingers,
The way my poor Mama
Did only once,
Before
She permanently
Died.
Everybody then said,
She is happy and sleeping at last.
I tried to wake her up,

Saying desperately,
Mama, Mama,
Please wake up
For your Chandu,
But she did not.
Then they took her away,
On a bare cot.
I searched her everywhere
In the village and home
But in vain.

In the cruel city,
I daily lived and died,
Fighting many battles
And about
The shining moon
I just forgot.
In fact,
Hardly could I see it
Above the worsening smog
Or
Through the seat windows of a
Crowded local or a noisy smoky bar.

To-night, however,
As there is no light,
I climb up to the roof,
After many long years,
And finally
See the moon

As always,
Smiling at me.
As
I gather its silvery rays
In my cupped excited hands,
And
Feel very light in spirit and body
And break into a rare
Smile
At my friend,
The big-eared rabbit,
Who stops
And grins,
Thus
Lighting up again,
In white light,
All my opaque insides.

---Sunil Sharma

To: A real friendly Dane Kasper Andersen
It is—
Kasper, Kasper, all the way,
The superman—
Perpetually,
Moving around home-hunters,
Locals and foreigners,,
He, this democratic youth, takes them—
Folks and their little baggage,
Driving them to new
Shrinking sublets;
The friendly, gentle Dane—
A true brother for the valiant but
Lonely internationals, most of them,
Already low on income and their spirits;
Kasper helps them shift up/down
The cold Aarhus;
And sets them off in new quiet
Neighborhoods,
Where icy rains and wind dances,
His warm smile lighting up—
Their small universes!
A reasonable-n- real mover-n-shaker,
He facilitates re/ re-locations,
And enables the floating ones,
Realize their human- n- just dreams,
Poor frightened young learners,
Overseas and locals,
Stepping off a Dickensian novel,
In and around academic Aarhus,
Where officials, as usual,
Do not care for these Others!

The Hauntings

The Hauntings

---Sunil Sharma

I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant, (Emphasis added)

There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son's weak mind. (Emphasis added)

(A Christmas Carol: Charles Dickens)

 Uncanny!

The moment I stepped out of the shower, I felt it.

The room was no longer the same.

Something had changed; it was in the air--- a slight disturbance, a subtle alteration somewhere? Some bad vibes?  

 I stood still and then saw.

It was a book, placed vertically, the cover facing me directly, on the side table, half-open in the middle, very obvious as a reading invitation.

A Christmas Carol.

The famous book was not there earlier.

Somebody, it seems, sneaked in and placed the novel strategically. A craggy visage looks hard, eyes penetrating; a malevolent presence.

Scrooge.

An apparition swirling up from the mists of 1843. The cadaver- figure suggesting emptiness, decay and sterility. The chilly glare, across the gulf of time, is still a turn-off. I feel the misanthropic hostility radiating from that leathery face, despite knowing well that it is just a painted face, a mere artistic representation. But the representation becomes real. I involuntarily shiver and avoid the unrelenting gaze. I feel Antarctic winds sweeping down my being.

Who placed this book?

 An hour ago, I had checked into the Swan Hotel in Staffordshire and come face-to-face with history. It is a place where past and present are conjoined. Footfalls echoed from the hoary past: The coach- wheels stopping at the former coaching inn, the din of the streets and tired passengers, the neighing of the horses, the bustling halls and stables, the hiss of the wind sweeping the desolate backyard on wintry nights. It is a different era. I am in the remote 1840s.

 Bivalved time can be felt in certain contexts. I witness the un- spooling. There are echoes from the past rising up like bubbles on the surface. Staffordshire. The ills of industrialization were seen here in ample by one sensitive and early acute observer---Charles Dickens.

I was in search of this man, Dickens.

He was a father-figure to me, an unsuccessful Indian writer and man. Two quick divorces, a fiery temperament, treating others as garbage, inability to hold any job for a day, excessive smoking indicated a paralysis that was frightening. I was shrinking fast. I wanted deliverance from a system that ensures atrophy of soul. When a caring friend in his early 30s died of a massive cardiac arrest in a New Delhi super-specialty hospital within hours of admission, leaving behind a sobbing wife and two pretty daughters asking their dad on the stretcher to wake up and play with them on the terrace and everybody was crying openly at this tragic sight, I, the only dry-eyed, could feel nothing. No pain or sense of loss. No fellow-feelings. No bereavement for a young life snuffed out cruelly. I felt nothing, only a gaping, widening void inside. A tall wall got erected inside. I felt like becoming concrete and very solid and hard inside. And when the dead body was finally being carried to the burning ghats, followed by loud and terrific commotion, pitiful wailing and crying around, and, amid this universal loud weeping and violent beating of chests, I could feel nothing but stasis of the frigid inner icebergs, I got real scared. In fact, I real panicked. What is happening to me? I do not feel anything. No cold, hot or loss sensation---nothing. Only a developing desert inside. It was frightening!

I was turning into early Scrooge, the selfish Scrooge before his final redemption through the ghosts. I needed ghosts to cleanse my toxic soul. I was searching for identical salvation and moral re-generation. A complete transformation.

Only one man could deliver---Charles Dickens. My relation to the writer runs deep. I read him in my college days and found him captivating. A great narrator with whom I had felt an instant Karmic connection. In my present crisis, he offered hope. Re-reading Dickens was therapeutic and an anti-dote to my fast decay and degeneration. In March, I booked my ticket and flew to England---on a long pilgrimage. The great Victorian was calling me. I wanted to meet him in 2012---his bi-centennial year of birth. Staffordshire and the Swan were good choices of this historic tryst. Dickens had visited the town and stayed in the hotel, then a coaching inn in 1852. I was sure to meet him there.

My intuition was proving correct.

The versatile Master had placed A Christmas Carol as the first beckoning sign; he was ready to speak with a seeking fan…finally.

 Let me share with you another sign, an interesting coincidence, my dear reader, that it was the same room where Dickens had slept in 1852 after a visit to Copeland factory in the Potteries, in the Black Country.

I just could not believe my luck. I was staying in the same room. Another positive sign. I was elated. Those who have visited Stratford- upon- Avon, told me of adult tourists coming from four corners of the globe---and there are three million of them annually--- crying in his birthplace or other consecrated venues. I can understand their state. If it was a fulfilling pilgrimage for me, then this room was my ultimate shrine.

It was sacred space.

Post-dinner stroll, I retired to bed with the book.

And my journey began.

The first message from the Master: There is a Marley to every Scrooge, and, a Scrooge for every parched soul that does not listen.

As I opened the book, I got pulled in by a magnetic force beyond frail me. My fingers, it seems, had activated the static landscape between the covers of the iconic book with a rare afterlife. The black marks on white pages became alive and dancing and the Victorian Age started becoming real before my startled eyes with lightening speed. And I became a part of that dismal landscape, Unseen by the Scrooge and party but they, seen by me.

And then, I saw DICKENS---the father-figure, creating and immersed in his created world.

His spectral presence floated up from the dim mists of time and overwhelmed me completely. I started crying like a child who gets united with a lost father after years of abuse and social neglect. Although Dickens said nothing, I could feel his compassion for crying me. It was a land of non-verbal communication. You sensed messages being transmitted by that kind-hearted gentleman. I could see materializing all the characters from his writing table---full-bodied round characters, utterly believable, some eccentric, some roguish, some loveable, some hated instantly, making you laugh and cry. It was unbelievable---the phantoms, these fictional creatures, taking an autonomous life and becoming uber-real and cool than their biological counterparts that served models for the observant writer.

Only Dickens could do that---with his master strokes on a very wide canvas.

Real is fiction; Fiction, real. Second message.

Then there is the whirlwind: Dickens sticking the labels in boyhood due to the incarceration of his father in the debtors’ prison; financial upheavals, law clerk; journalist, and, finally the writer. Nothing unusual. There were and are hundreds of thousands of such less-fortunate and ordinary people but only one towering Dickens.

There are more circulating images around me in the space.

The answer comes fast: Dickens’s empathy and haunting memory of those early dark days spent in the labeling factory, turning him into a life-long ally of the Undead of the industrialized England. At the cusp of a historical change and called upon as a true and reliable witness by Life, a sensitive and caring Dickens uplifts above ordinary circumstance by reading the present correctly, giving a correct diagnosis of the malaise afflicting his own robust age and giving a cautionary moral tale for the cynical succeeding ages as well. The clairvoyant writer is seen wandering among the poor quarters of London, visiting factories and prisons, talking to the overworked workers, taking up their causes with the real conviction and passion of a current journalist. And highlighting these social issues through his writings.

His involvement in the community, his immersion in the lives of the underdogs, his questioning the whole narrative of material progress at the cost of human soul---in brief the inversion of the Renaissance ideals by the 1840s and onwards---lays bare the naked motives of capitalist England---sheer wealth-accumulation minus a heart and soul.

After lifting the veil off the face of reality, the residual moral core is art that shows the ugly face beneath the painted one. It shows the wrinkles and warts of the age but also gestures towards the upcoming ages with the same message: Material gains sans any matching morality is like early Scrooge. An empty house.

Then another buried image pops up from the deep abyss: Dickens, successful writer and cult figure, making reading tours in England and America. He is still connected with his reading public, a celeb status notwithstanding.

Any writer divorced from his reading public or host community is unredeemed soul walking the ramparts of the fort in Elsinore.

Finally, Dickens confronts me. He looks directly at me. As shown in some of his pictures. He points to the beginning of the Carol book. I re-read it and get my final answer: There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

So, it is a story; about hauntings, that have a literary precedent in the haunting of the perplexed Hamlet, the prince, located within the Gothic tradition that Dickens inverts.

Hauntings are important visitations from the other side in ages defunct and will keep on recurring in future also to make us confront the self-manufactured ghosts from the past, and, unless they are laid to rest, we mortals will function as the walking ghosts of our own ideal selves from an earlier age.

Any book that fails to affect a deeper moral transformation of characters due for that cleansing process and a concomitant and parallel purifying process in readers will remain a hoax, a sham, a counterfeit, a minor and largely forgotten product…

As I furiously type out these words on PC, I feel I am being dictated by the spirit of Dickens. It is a desperate struggle to catch the ghostly words of a receding spectral Dickens before he exits completely at the crowing of a crow and start of a fresh dawn…

As I was leaving the Swan Hotel, completely cured of my insomnia and apathy, I asked the porter, “Who placed A Christmas Carol in my room?” He smiled and said, “It was left by a previous guest whose name incidentally was Charles Dickens. It was there. You might have failed to notice it upon your arrival.”

I did not have any answer to this.

The Finale: It is meta-story. Dickens made me write it. I never visited Swan. You can believe it or leave it as another yarn.

 (Courtesy: The Delightful Dickens)