The Best is Not Enough

As he looked at the crumpled note for what must have been the fiftieth time, Raju heaved yet another tremendous sigh. It seemed to me that his lungs would burst if he kept doing that. “Maybe you should have some water. Or go back home and rest”, I suggested.

“No sahib, I wouldn’t be able to do that,” he replied in a low voice.

“Raju, my name’s Anand, not sahib”, I reminded him yet again, knowing it was futile. He looked annoyed.

“Well, you are in a fancy suit, and you have a fancy title adorning your fancier office desk, so you must be a sahib,” he replied, not without some rancour.

I wanted to say, “But Raju, we are friends, remember? We used to play gully cricket together, not so long ago.” Instead, I keep quiet. It is obvious that the passage of time has implanted a far greater divide between us, than his dirty clothes and street talk ever did, when we were children. Raju made a move to look at the note again, and I hastily plucked it out of his hands.

“This will be needed for further investigations,” I explained.

“Hah. Investigations. What will you be investigating, sahib, that you already don’t know?” he sounds very sarcastic as he says that. I don’t blame him. He has lost his closest friend, the one person he could perhaps call a brother and get away with it, and here I was, talking about investigations into that soul brother’s death.

Raju, Karim and I grew up in the same city. We lived in the same neighbourhood, except that my residence was a lovely bungalow with a huge garden, while theirs were shanties in a neighbouring slum. Raju’s mother worked at my house as a maidservant; she would bring Raju along on school holidays or when he complained of tummy aches or chills. That is how I got to know him. And Karim. Karim was Raju’s neighbour in the slum. He was roughly the same age as Raju and I, but infinitely more mature. A quiet boy, he was always gentle with others and more or less a peace lover. While Raju and I squabbled about incomplete overs bowled, or lbw decisions, Karim tried to restore peace. He told me once that the only thing he even wanted, was to improve his station in life.

“I have had it with this poverty and this hunger, Anand bhaiyya. I want to do become rich. Do you know how?” I was all of thirteen. I gave him some sage advice about studying hard.

“Do you think that will suffice?”

“But of course, look at my father. He is a renowned doctor, and he is rich, isn’t he?”

That seemed to settle whatever doubts Karim had. So while Raju whiled away his time playing truant at the government school they attended, Karim laboured diligently. He wasn’t a scholar by a mile, but he persisted with his hard work and managed to finish school with a decent score at the final examination. His mother suggested that he take up driving lessons and continue with their family tradition of becoming a driver, but Karim wanted to do better than that. When he asked me for advice, I suggested that he study some more. By then, we had outgrown our passion for gully cricket, and rarely ever met. There was an air of awkwardness, and the innocence that accompanied our games and camaraderie in childhood was amiss. Nevertheless, a college student myself, I advised Karim as best and in the only way that I could… to continue to study and work hard. In retrospect, I wonder if things would have been different if he had never asked me for advice.

Three years and a lot of hard work later, Karim was a graduate in commerce. When he came over to tell me the good news, I had felt very happy. At that time, I was a trainee in the police department, having cleared the public service commission exams. Karim had more questions for me. This time, they were about potential jobs for a commerce graduate. I had not the faintest idea, so I suggested that he register at the employment agency. That was the last time I saw him in person. That was two years ago. Today, all that there is left of Karim, is a shattered body lying in a morgue. And a crumpled note that was found next to it, on the railway tracks. I steal a glance at it, and by the end, the tears flow out without restraint.

“I tried hard ammi. I tried so hard, and I tried for so long, to give you the best. I tried my best, ammi. But that was not the best for any of them. Had I known that a college graduate is as hapless as a school dropout when it comes to gaining employment, I wouldn’t have enrolled at college, ammi. I wanted so much to become rich, and a successful person by my own merit that I decided to give it a shot. I am so sorry I didn’t listen to you and become a driver instead. Perhaps I would have saved myself from the disappointment of being rejected countless times because of my inability to speak fluently in English. This college degree that I had hoped would be our saviour, has become the biggest headache in my life, ammi. I hate going to the employment agency and repeating my sorry story about being a commerce graduate to the sahibs in there, every time. I wish I could give up on the degree and the dream ammi, but unfortunately, I can’t…. And so I must go, ammi. Because I haven’t got it in me, to be the best that these people want. My best is not good enough for anybody, ammi…”

The Unfairness Of It All

Unfairness. Everywhere I look, I see that monster rear its ugly head. I see it in the eyes of the hungry child begging on the streets. I see it in the limp of that beautiful girl arduously making her way down the over bridge. It taunts me when I spot an old couple walking down the busy road, holding on to each other as they try to stay clear of the rush hour traffic. Unfair. Life is so very unfair, I decide.

The hungry beggar boy thinks living in a two room shanty and having three meals a day is the biggest blessing of them all. He currently lives in one and has two meals a day; just a little more effort, and he’ll get to his dream spot, he figures. Does he think life is unfair? “Well no, look at some of those other kids who don’t even have a home to go to. My mother works in three houses, and feeds me lunch and dinner,” he says, not without a hint of pride in his voice.

The pretty girl with polio shrugs noncommittally when I repeat my query. “Unfair? Why do you think so?” I am tongue tied; I don’t know how to ask her the obvious, without articulating it, and somehow, I feel she would be offended. Except, she seems oblivious to something that obviously must be causing her discomfort. Or is that a perception of my mind? “Well you know, having polio might have been a dampener,” I venture. “Oh that. Well, it was so long ago, and it’s not polio by the way,” she goes on to give me the name of some other condition, which I can’t recollect now. “One learns to adjust, you know. And one forgets that one has a disability, until someone comes along with a reminder,” she continues, almost with a hint of reproach in her voice. “I don’t remember having felt that it was unfair; uncomfortable, yes. Unfair, no.”

Wow! These people must be Gods. How is it possible not to perceive the unfairness of it all? The old couple looked at me as though I had lost it. “What is this, young man? Some survey, or some joke?”
“Oh no, I was just…. You know… a little curious…”I falter.
“And why do you think life is unfair to us?”
“Oh well, at your age, you should be.  sitting comfortably at home, and someone else should be doing the running around for you. At the very least, you should be driving around in a car, instead of walking, especially when it is so hot” I reply confidently.
“Have you ever considered that this is perhaps what we want? This running around, this walking and holding hands, this companionship?” he pulls at his wife’s hand and they shuffle down determinedly.

“That guy is surely crazy, eh, Radha? Imagine stopping people and asking them such weird questions; nobody in his right mind would do it.”
“Ah yes, Manohar; I think so too… Looks like a fine young lad too. Poor thing, life can be so unfair!”

I notice the old man and his wife look back at me and steal glances before shaking their heads and moving along.

Beautiful Today, Gone Tomorrow

                                                                                      I

There’s a stream that flows through my parents’ farm, a good distance away from the farmhouse. It is of the classic fairy tale variety, with sparkling bright water that gurgles over smooth pebbles and myriad jagged stones as it rushes on merrily. The banks of the stream are no less picturesque with wild flowers blooming in abandon amidst lush green grass. My parents don’t go there often, encumbered as they are with the chores around the farm and the house. The fact that they aren’t growing any younger probably adds to their reluctance in straying from the routine and giving in to idle whims. That stream caught my fancy the first time I saw it, on a visit to their newly purchased farm a decade ago. I was mesmerised by the beauty in and around the stream, and I felt cheated at not having been privy to this bounty when I was still a child.

Each time I sat on its banks, I would pour a bit of myself into the stream. One time, it was the agony of a breakup with my then partner. On another occasion, it was the joy of becoming a parent. I have lost count of the umpteen times when I vented my anger on the various people in my life, into the stream. Each string of abusive words hurled into nothingness would bounce off the jagged ends of the stones in the stream. Each stray tear that fell off my cheeks and into its gurgling waters, blended my angst into its sublime beauty.

                                                                                        II

My parents are long gone, and the farm house looks old and tattered. The people in my life have receded to its periphery and I find myself quite alone as I steal my way to the banks of the beloved stream. My fifty eight year old eyes and their twenty year old twin companions must be playing tricks with me, I decide; for the water seems lacklustre and there is no enthusiasm in its journey over the pebbles and the stones as of yore. I miss the sound of the gurgle, and the glint of the sun as it hit the jagged edge of the stones in the stream. The edges have all smoothened, and the water seems older and wiser as it proceeds carefully and listlessly down the beaten path.

I cannot help but wonder whether the years of listening to my diatribes and woes have taken its toll on the stream. Beauty, like everything else in life, needs nurturing, I surmise, as I walk slowly back the pathway to the farmhouse.  

Escapades

                                                               

The sun beats down harshly on my back, as I labour in the fields. Any moment now the skin will peel off my back, I muse. I dip a towel in the water in a bucket placed nearby, and wrap it around my bare back. I can’t begin to describe the relief that sets in; it is so exquisite in its wholesomeness, that I think that this must be the grandest pleasure available to man. Given that I am a poor lad farming on a semi parched piece of land in rural India, there are very few pleasures that I am privileged to. Love and belonging are not on that list. They disappeared the day she walked out on me. Tears threaten to stream out of my eyes when I think of that day, and that moment; and this happens infallibly, each time I revisit that dark corner of my memory.

She was all I had, and I was all she had; or so I used to think. The meals she cooked were made extra tasty by the love that went into their preparation… or so I imagined. When she walked out of the house each day, I felt a deep sense of loss; but I would comfort myself by the knowledge that she would come back to me in the evening, when the cruel sun had set. Only, one evening, she came back to leave forever. When she told me she had to leave, I was dumbstruck. I don’t remember asking her why, but she had explained nevertheless. She wanted to have a second chance at life, she said. One in which she wouldn’t feel fettered by her bond to me. She wanted to feel young and free again, and to feel loved. She reckoned I would survive.

As she walked down the curved path leading out of our tiny hut and onto the fields yonder, she had a spring in her steps…one that I had never seen before. Maybe she had really found love. And I wondered at the power of that newfound love, because it had made her oblivious to mine. She had said she wanted to feel loved, when all of my life, I had done nothing but love her and trust her blindly, as only I could. At fifteen, I had lost my mother forever. And all that remained were memories; but memories don’t bring pleasure, do they?

The coolness of the soaked towel on my sun drenched back though, is a different story altogether. I believe I could work like this forever, if only to have these brief moments of reprieve.