What Honor?(Saket) What Honor?


“I will just come.”
Soni was as if on the wings. She was not walking on the ground, rather was floating in air. She ran and disappeared in the building. It was a non-descript three –storied building, painted dull yellow. They lived beyond those official three floors. It was a small room on the roof which people in the city called Barsati. It had one window through which rain would gush in this season of Monsoon. The roof was of asbestos over which the rain which fell created a melody of sorts. She would stand on the door, with rain drops splashing across her face. Some droplets would hang by her curly hairs and slide like happy child over their smooth, black texture. With a hint of longing, Rakesh thought of her face. It was a perfect oval, with eyes like boats in a blue lake under a benign moon. At the thought of that face, his heart would suddenly feel so full that he, at times, felt like crying with abandon and at the same time, felt like an idiot for having felt so. He told the taxi driver to wait.

Soni rushed to her room and a smile which has not left her face since yesterday evening, when that call came, seemed to have expanded and engulfed the whole world. She was overwhelmed. It was a monsoon evening. Weather was clear after rain which continued for last two days. They had bread which they mostly had. She looked at her abode for the past ten days with a sense of longing. A pang grew from the bottom of her heart and rose to her throat and stayed there. Her love was borne here in this sparse house. This was their world which breathed to its own tune. It was a limiting existence. Back home, such rooms were usually meant to be store for things for which no one finds any use or place. She wistfully thought how it applied to their existence as well.

She looked around and then below the clothes well placed on the rack, she pushed her arm. She took out a wrist-watch from there. She had bought it yesterday from Sarojini Nagar, for her father. She thought of those broad, powerful arms which used to hold her as if forming a fortress around her. Once in those arms, all the imaginary devils which appeared in her nightmare and woke her up, would turn to ash and take the flight in gentle village breeze. Her father was a handsome man, tall, with broad shoulders and thick moustache. A rustic honesty reflected in his face, which was fair and lean. He would pick her up as a toy and place her on his broad shoulders when he took her to the village fair. This watch with broad face will look so nice on his broad powerful forearm. She remembered how few years back when he had come to her school, most boys suddenly lost interest in borrowing her physics notes merely at the sight of his broad frame, clad in white Kurta and Dhoti. Most men in the village respected him, those who did not, dread him. But for Soni, he was her baba, who would hide her in his loving breast like last breath of a dying man, whenever she rushed to him.

“Little Birdie” Baba would call to her the moment he entered the house in the evening, his baritone reverberating in the house. She smiled to herself. She walked to the fence and looked down. Rakesh was standing near the driver of the Taxi and talking to him. She watched him affectionately as if she wanted to shower him with all the love she felt for him. He was tall and very lean. His had a fair face, which contrasted so well with his dark hair. She smiled when she thought that he seemed almost impoverished with a fatless body and how he would laugh it off and tell her to feed and fatten him once they got married. He would laugh easily. The ease with which a smile would hover over his face was almost incongruous to the definitive jaw-bones which looked serious and determined. She thought of the time when she saw him first. She was going to the college and the chain of her cycle slipped. Vimla also stepped down. She felt helpless at her own sudden trouble and even more at the fact that she held her friend, Vimla, back. She knew Vimla wanted to rush into the boundary of Girls’ Inter-college and disappear as Navin watched her. She had seen Navin throw a piece of paper towards them, which Vimla got down quickly to pick up. In this melee, she lost the rhythm of her cycle and the damn chain slipped. Vimla looked at her with a sense of conspiracy and concern. She wanted to read what Navin had written and this whole thing was holding them back. When the young accomplice of Navin walked to her and got down on his knees to help her with her bicycle, she first noticed him. He got the chain in place in time with a swift kick on the peddle, the cycle was up for the ride. Soni had then looked up to the man in front of her, with his palms all blackened with the grease of the chain. He was looking around for something to wipe his hands with and scouting the ground. As she was looking up at the man in white pants and blue shirt, with keen, honest eyes, he suddenly looked up and caught her looking at him. She was shocked with the sudden surge of feelings which rose inside her heart. Sinews of her heart seemed to tighten so hard that she felt it would stop breathing. For a moment, it felt she suddenly fell in a pit, a sense of weightlessness grabbed her. Rakesh suddenly looked up and their eyes met. She still felt the same magic in those blue eyes. Woolen clouds would float in those clear skies and write her name. She smiled. Rakesh waived to her to come down quickly. She was going home. She felt a shiver run through her skin; she didn’t know why.

She stepped down the steep stairs and reached the cab.
“What happened? Why did you rush back?” scolded Rakesh.
“Nothing. Forgot something.” Said she and opened the black bag in the luggage trunk and placed the watch in there. Rakesh saw, Soni noticed that, they looked at each other and smiled. She noticed there was some sense of nervousness in his smile. It almost bordered on sorrow. She touched her forearm in reassurance as she sat beside him in the Cab.
“Chaliye, bhaiyya (let’s go, brother)” she directed the driver as the cab began its couple of hours long journey to the small village in Haryana.
She looked at broad roads and tall buildings of the capital as they passed her by. The city did not touch them in last few days, nor did she reach out to the city. In the heart of her heart, she felt it was only a temporary stopover for her. Rakesh did tell her that they should rather resign to a lifetime in this city. He kept talking to her about the big riches people in the city could aspire to and attain. He took her in the metro train and she was awed by the clean trains with automatic doors. It ran under the earth. She remembered reading in the college about volcanoes and tremors that lived under the surface of earth. For some reason, whenever she remembered that she imagined earth as a woman, which remained kind and giving while fire and tremor breathed inside her, just like her mother. She loved the train, but found the silence in them haunting. But she was happy and a constant music played in her mind ever since they married in the temple outside the village. Rakesh and his friends were on the edge and the temple priest totally impersonal and hurried, but she felt the magic of the moment which lived with her and she believed would live with her for the rest of her life.

She looked outside the window. Clouds, blue and pregnant with rains, hung low over the earth and road in front of them pierced through the horizon. She was always telling Rakesh that they should go to Baba who will forgive her marrying out of her caste. And then, Bittoo was there, her two year younger brother. He had grown up to be a strapping young man of twenty, but she always remembered him from when he was five year old and had a bunch of mischievous young boys of the neighborhood who fought with him. She had picked him from beneath them showering them with the entire curse which she as a little seven year old girl was entitled to offer to those bullies and all the strength she had. He had opened his bruised little, pink palm to show the hair clips he held in his tiny fists. He had bought them for her for Rakshabandhan as a brother’s gift to his sister. She wept and kissed his palm as if those kisses would immediately cure those bruises. Fifteen years hence, he was still the same. She sighed. He was entitled to walk with her to the marriage, to be friends with Rakesh. She missed her brother, her home. Her mother would always affectionately say that Bittoo had Soni as his mother, she didn’t need to worry of leaving this world. She was a docile woman- God fearing and family loving. She smiled rarely, but when she did it comforted those she chose to bless with her smile. She would massage Soni’s head with oil and talk to her about her dreams. She ran her fingers through her hairs and smiled. Rakesh looked at him and a shiver passed between the two.

She thought about the last ten days as Rakesh would come home, after a futile search for a job. He was getting thinner and his smile, fainter. She thought of some way to comfort him, but she did not know how. She wanted to cook like her mother, but there was so little to cook. The money they came with was ending fast and the future looked desperate. But youth is a wonderful time when no difficulty seems insurmountable if one is in love. They were married and Rakesh treated her like a princess. The skies would dance and the winds would play a music which only two of them could hear, when he held her in embrace. The days were friendlier and nights less scary with her. She thought about her village and wanted them to see how much love and respect with which Rakesh treated her. She wanted all the world to feel and bask in the glory of rare love which she had discovered. She wanted to smile with the satisfaction of showing them the possibility of love in this world.

In this city, nobody knew her and nobody cared.
“You must learn to make friends with this city.”
“But we will go back. Our people are there, your lands are there.” She would counter and a question hung between them.
He would shake his head, helpless against hope and say, “I will find some job. You don’t worry.” And hold her in tight embrace.
“Baba will not leave me like this. He loves me a lot” she would raise her eyes from his embrace and look up at him. His eyes would move as if trying to break out of spell as he would answer in an unsure whisper, “Yes.”
Then yesterday evening the call came. The benevolent, baritone rose from her mobile handset and wrapped around her as protective as ever,” Beta (my child), come back home.”
She soaked in the voice as the voice on the other end soaked in her silent acknowledgement.
“Yes, Baba.” She answered with a voice which struggled against tears. The call had ended in no longer than five minutes in which those five words were spoken, rest of the time went in contemplation and elation of hearing and speaking those words. In those five minutes, her entire life played before her eyes. She remembered how he would lift her up like a little doll and place her on his broad shoulders when she was not able to watch Ramlila in the village fair due to the crowd. She would run her tiny fingers in his thick, black hair as she sat on his shoulders, towering over his head. As she grew, she believed her father would always hold her above the masses just as he did when she was five year old in the village fair.

She told Rakesh about it when he came back. He was worried. He feebly argued against going back but his meek opposition was overcome by the force of her happy anticipation of her reunion. She felt sympathy over Rakesh’s distance from his father. It was obvious he had no way of understanding the bond which she had with her father. He had only seen her father in public gatherings, and had seen him as a formidable figure. When his voice would rise in definitive roar, most men in the village would either fall in agreement or resign to silent disagreement. He had no way to see how she would jump on his shoulders as a child and he would merely laugh away, even in the face of mother’s admonishment, that he was spoiling the girl. He had not seen the pride and affection with which he had held her when she first put on a Saree for attending a wedding and whispered, “Mera bachcha (My child), may God always protect you”. She and only she had seen a tiny tear drop which had held itself in the corner of those eyes which had always looked at her with love. She could at that moment almost remember herself as a new borne held in her father’s hands for the first time.

“Madam, we are almost there. Where to go?” Asked the driver.
She remembered father had asked her to reach the river bank, near the village. He said they needed to first sit down and discuss about how to proceed on the whole matter with village elders. She directed the driver and held Rakesh’s forearm tight. The night was about to wrap the earth and the day fought a losing battle. They reached the bank and a slight drizzle began. She could see the tall figure standing there, it looked almost divine. It was Baba and as she stepped out of the cab, she could see his eyebrow furrowed in sadness. A pang hit her heart. She saw Bittoo, her kid brother, standing behind him and remembered that tiny, bruised palm. She wept and pulled Rakesh who walked behind her. From his hand he held his cane. She had never seen him walking by a cane. He had grown so old, she felt so responsible, and was filled with remorse she had never known before. She ran towards him, as she did so his hand went up. She felt he was reaching out to her and she remembered how some days he would come to school to pick her up and then walk her back to the school and tell her stories on the way. There was a deafening loud voice and she felt something falling behind. Another loud voice and she felt a deep, warm feeling dipping into her heart and mingling with her remorse and happiness. The heart of the blue clouds burst open with a loud thunder, louder than the two preceding sounds, and a grieving sky wept with abandon. The night had fallen and through rain, a moon, morose and melancholy, hung purposelessly in sadness. Blood from the two young bodies intermingled with the rain water which washed them and seeped into the Earth which held so many volcanoes and earthquakes. A watch fell in the mud and ticked against time. Death prevailed over the dreams with a fury which leaves no remains and remembrances.

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