Dara

 

P.M. Narayanan

Translated from Malayalam by Bindu K.C.

Dara was unaware,

He sat alone

In one of the many private chambers

Of his sprawling palace.

He held a quill

Paint dripping from it. 

A half-finished portrait

The painting of a young gardener

With her pitcher balancing on her hips,

Watering the plants. 

 

He remembered: 

Bygone evenings,

Past nights.

Those broken stories,

Shattered in the moonlight of Yamuna’s sands.

Those lilting songs,

Melting into the atmosphere,

While reclining on those flower-beds

Under the garden bowers. 

Her farewell

That drizzled down his chest,

Yesterday night,

When he sneaked into her humble hut,

Escaping the surveilling eyes of

His own guards. 

He sat, his gaze fixed,

On those long lashed, half bloomed

Pair of eyes on the canvas. 

With a deep sorrow,

With deep ecstasy, 

His hands drawing,

He didn’t hear the door unlocking,

He didn’t feel his younger brother’s sword

Descending on his neck,

Lightening swift. 

He was in the land of the moonlight

That never sets. 

He was in the land of flowers,

That never wither.   

 

* Dara Shikoh was the eldest son of the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan.  Dara was said to be a thinker and philosopher. 

 

 

 

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[1] Dara Shikoh was the eldest son of the Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan.  Dara was said to be a thinker and philosopher. 

A Prayer for that Little Girl

     I remember the wet, warmth that spreads between one’s legs.  It must be around three at night, an ungodly hour, when everyone is asleep.  I opened my eyes.  I had dreamt I was peeing.  Feeling the relief of the relaxing muscles, the relief when your bladder lets off. 

    The relief immediately turned into shame.  I had, yet again, peed in bed. 

    I was 12 years old, already in the 7^th standard.  I could not believe I had yet again, lost bladder control.  I imagined my mother’s angry shouting the next day, her face contorted in sarcasm.  It would mean extra work for her.  But, she would also be worried.  Her technique to hide anxiety was being angry at me. 

    My brain started working hard.  “Suppose I get up and wash the sheets now itself?  I could be caught doing that because I never wash sheets, let alone at 3 AM in the morning.  Suppose I drag my sleeping brother and get him to sleep on the wet mattress?  He might not wake up because he was a sound sleeper.  Yes, I will do that.  Of course, he would be blamed the next day.  He himself would not know he was not responsible.  But, that would be ok, because he was a child and children are allowed to pee in bed.”  I kept calculating the pros and cons of my con-job. 

    I knew just one thing.  I could not blamed for this.  I was no more a child, I was almost a young woman.  And, I knew one thing for sure - I had to face this alone. 

    I still don’t know why I lost control at that time in my life.  I can connect it to a particular teacher – Sister Ivodia.  A skinny, old and dark face comes to my mind when I utter that name to myself.  She hated me.  In a class of 60 odd students, she would focus on me to express all her violence.  I started failing in Maths, for that was her subject.  I had just forged my mom’s signature to return the progress card.  I had faced the shame of failing then, and developed a secret to hold, a self that I could not show to the world.  Now, I was facing shame again, by peeing in bed, and developing a secret to escape that shame.

    That was a period of shame, generally.  My milk teeth had all given way to large, protruding buck teeth.  My childish beauty had disappeared.  I never knew I had it when I was beautiful.  But, I knew my ugliness everyday.  I had turned into an awkward, ugly girl, sprouting one single breast (another secret I hid from everyone). 

    I felt nobody loved me, least of all me. 

    But, looking back, I am so proud of that 12 year old girl.  She handled her situation so well! 

    She went to her father, whom she feared, when he was resting in the outside verandah, and with much trepidation but some resolve, demanded money for Maths tuitions.  She had found the tuition class herself, run by a poor Christian woman who was staying in the convent she studied.  She started scoring high in Maths in just one month, with that little extra attention!.  She started greedily reading up Malayalam psychology journals and found that she could control her bladder.  She developed a ritual of emptying her bladder every night before bed.  She understood she could control her dreams!  The moment a bathroom appeared in her dreams she taught herself to wake up, for that was the clue she would pee now. 

    Somehow, she became an adult those days. 

    And, looking back, I hug that little girl.  She was alone, she had no one to share her trials.  Yet, she survived. 

    May that little girl in me never leave me.  May she always pick herself up and survive.  Amen!

A Visionary

     It was his 70th birthday. Relatives were all gathered. I was also with them.

    I am usually shy with public speaking. But that day, I felt I must speak.  

    People were remembering him as an individual. His humor, his weird habits, his sunny pleasant character, his Hindi songs ..all these were recounted and remembered. 

    But, I wanted to give a social speech about him. I wanted to remember him, not as an individual who had touched me (he had, very deeply), but as a "visionary."  I wanted to introduce him to all of us, as a person who could see the future.  I wanted to "place" his contributions to the world, to the next generation, especially the next generation in our larger family.  

    He used to work in a bank.  It must have been in his forties, that he resigned from his job, chasing dreams that no one understood.  He joined the first batch of Engineering graduates in Trivandrum Engineering college in a discipline that was just introduced - Computer Science.  

    He must have been older than all his classmates.  He joined the course because he was already knowledgeable in the possibilities computers represented in the world.  He could, unlike many of us, and perhaps his teachers and classmates included, see the future.  

    He knew this thing that he was currently obsessed with would profoundly change the world.  He gave up his job and never got into any private company at that time.  Instead, he became an entrepreneur and set up a small computer centre in the middle of Calicut town.  

    This became a place where young boys (I notice the gendered story here) from the larger family came to play with the machine.  He smilingly indulged them.  Night after night was dedicated to the play - solving of some abstract mathematical puzzle in newer and newer languages coming up that the machine was throwing out.  I heard strange words like "Cobol" etc being bandied about in the house those days.  

    Now, looking back at the path the world took, we can clearly see, that he could see then - the next turn the world would take.  But, he was not instrumentally using this knowledge.  Like all visionaries, his pleasure was in the game itself - it was hardly in the winning!  

    I wanted to say  all this, and much more.  But, somehow, I didn't.  

The Cobra Game

     

When I want to remember something happy, I remember our "cobra game" best - Gabriella's (or Gaby as she is called) and mine.  

    Gaby, all of three years old, would start coming from one end of the house.  

    I was supposed to act like a stupid and complacent person, loitering in the sofa.  All the while, I would be going on an incessant, on-the-spot commentary.  So, it runs like this:  

    "I am sitting in my house.  It is very peaceful.  Sunny."  I am sipping my tea. " (I might actually be sipping Aneta's green tea while speaking). I keep improvising these dialogues for each game.  

    I might add as if talking to myself:  "There is nothing to worry!  All's well with me and the world..." or something like that.  

`    Then, Gaby will appear  from the next room.  I have to pretend I am seeing something suspicious coming from very far away.  Sometimes, I make up a landscape filled with hills and trees and treacherous corners.  Sometimes it is a view from very far, where Gaby is appearing like a dot, coming closer and closer, like the inevitability of destiny.  

    Of course, the fun for me, and Gaby, lies in my incessant commentary:  "Oh, what is that thing crawling towards the house?  I can't see it well..."  By now, I am screwing my eyes to see better and acting it out.  Gaby is mirroring my excitement by coming very fast towards me.  I will continue the dialogue by again, pretending complacence even at face of danger.  I might say things like:  "I hope it is nothing dangerous.  Maybe a dog.  Maybe a bird...nothing to worry."  

    By now, Gaby's face will be all flush with the excitement of the game.  Its a hunt for her.  Now, she would be coming with speed, seriously drawing herself forward.  

    By the time she reaches me, I will act totally surprised and cry out:  "Oh, it is a cobra!  It is going to bite me.  Somebody save me!"  

    By now, Gaby would be so excited, and she would be aiming to touch my face all the while gnashing her teeth, more like a dog than a cobra (but who cares?).  Once she touches me, I have to die, supposedly with a snake bite.  

    I am her reward, her hunt. And, I happily die for her.  

    This is our own little "cobra game."  We restart the game, the moment I "die" with the cobtra bite.  We play it again, and again and yet again.  Never tiring, never ending it, in an endless loop of love.  

Giving Up

 His body was not under his control anymore.  The steps he took had reduced to half his former strides.  That made him walk like a marionette - a doll controlled through invisible strings, almost like an automaton.  

    He had deliberately reduced his life to this.  He told himself it was because his body was giving way.  But, it was also his self.  

    He had been feeling irrelevant for years.  He had spent his youth chasing after the beauty and meaning of something so ephemeral - words. Words in poetry.  

    His own father was silent for years, weighed down with the grey weight of depression and spent his life starting into the heavens on an armchair, unaware of his surroundings, stewing in his private hell.  He was never available to him as a boy, emotionally.  Yet, his father became his unfortunate role model.  But, even while he had to pick up the broken pieces left by his father, he could not be angry with him.  

    His mother became his responsibility at ten, when he was a mere boy.  That day his anarchic but passionate father had come home, holding the hands of his teacher.  The father declared his love for the woman teacher to his wife and son.  The house was already hell because his gentle mother had already fallen down in illness, not able to bear the irresponsible but powerful weight of her husband's anarchies.  

    The entry of the new woman stirred the muddied waters again.  The sickly boy that he was, asthma stricken and struggling to breath, suddenly had to grow up.  He understood that it was upto him to save his mother from that house, for she (nor he) had nowhere else to go.  

    So, he killed the poetry welling within him.  He got into a banker's calculations of numbers. He was never at ease with money.  He could never play with it, like some of his colleagues, invest in stocks and shares and become rich.  He only knew hoarding, like his mother, who hoarded one week's worth of provisions and stretched it for a whole month, often giving up on her own comforts. 

    His own life became interesting only in the evenings - in the verandahs of the local intellectuals. There he found the father he had, but never had.  He found the stable, strong and kind brilliance of minds - men who mentored him, disciplined him and whose quiet grace and careful use of words appealed to him.  He found a home, finally.  

    But, today was a world were those words were hardly important.  This was a fast world.  This was the world of very short attentions spans, where loud YouTube videos themselves became too long to engage and people were scrolling from one video short to another...he, and his world had receded.  It had become irrelevant.  

    He retreated without a fight.  He gave up reading.  He could not sit for hours anymore, so he also gave up writing.  He had already given up walking.  His ambition was to give up thinking and then give up, being itself.  

    Now, he just waited, lying down in the meantime.