Have you gazed out of your
window? Of course you have. But have you seen beyond your little world of fears
and losses and possibilities and refurbished hope? Maybe you did. You have a
broad heart then. My heart, on the contrary, has always been of a rather
unimpressive dimension. It has always locked the world away so that it can toy
with its own compartmentalized issues. Should I blame it for what it is?
Probably not... After all, this place that I live in- the town, the state and
the country does not reveal too many encouraging pictures. I have stopped
taking a look at the newspapers. Even when I do, it is mainly to read some
sports or celebrity news or to see the economic developments, though the
economic trend is generally negative. I hail from a business family and my job
at present is to figure out relevant marketing strategies for our
software-related services. In short, when everything around seems to be in
shambles or at least going towards that direction, I am to look at the growth
of my company and make sure that I manage to deliver the results at any cost. I
see nothing wrong there as our company is only responsible for the security and
benefits of our own employees and the satisfaction of our clients.
What about the responsibility
at large? Who is to blame for the general suffering? Now, these are highly
clichéd questions and similar ones fill up the pages of the newspapers which I
tend to avoid. So, why do I suddenly feel like wasting my time? It is a known
fact that writing requires more effort than reading and here I am indulging in
an act of writing such things that I didn’t want to read. Let’s see if I can do
justice to that instinct which compelled me to take up the laptop and start
typing in the first place.
My house is an old one in a
town where neither agriculture nor industry rules. It is one of those utterly
confused products of Indian history. Nobody seems to know what this town was
all about before the birth of the first Bengali novelist. In fact, nobody seems
to know what became of it after the death of the great man. Nowadays, all that
steals the show is the highly imposing structure of an educational institution
which never gets tired of expanding its territory, both on the ground and above
it though the academic intent behind this is clear. It is yet another confusing
phenomenon that Indians have become immune to observing.
Now, it is this institution
that opened my eyes for the first time to see the world outside in a new light.
My old house has an old window that brings in fresh air from the south. It has
always done so, even before I was born. The early morning southern breeze has
been an old friend that soothes my selfish heart and gives my dreams the wings
of wild imagination to embark upon mightier journeys When I return home at
night, sapped by the day’s work as also on days that I stay back home, I view
the world through that window again. At night, it shows me a different picture
of myself- a person whose dreams are but dreams. The street light outside used
to be pale yellow and horribly morbid for such a weary mind. But thanks to the
otherwise ineffective system, that street and my mind both get the aid of a
bright white light. This gives me the strength to pass the night with fortitude
and wait for the morning cup of coffee and the sunlight to fill me up with a
new aspiration to greatness.
On such a morning, a few days
ago, my inward gaze switched off for a while and gave way to a sight that completely
startled me. As I sat on the chair with rejuvenated ideas about how to make my
life a success, my eyes caught sight of a sun-burnt, lean figure of a man who
looked much older than his years. His rib cage shone bright in the sunlight and
when he bent over to pick up the bricks he looked like the keys of a strange,
brown piano. I had known this person all throughout. But his lack of
achievements never really made him a man to be considered. He was the son of a
rickshaw-puller and he himself was a goldsmith of limited means who toiled day
in and day out for a paltry wage that couldn't allow him to hire masons to
build a little house. I remember how his father used to take me to the station
on his rickshaw when I was a little boy. This rickshaw ride was one of the
three phases of my rather long journey to my school. The old man was so proud
of this borrowed contraption of his that he would keep telling me how he is
going to make it the most attractive rickshaw in the whole town. His taste,
even at that age, was not very favourable in my eyes. The synthetic flowers on
the handle, the loud paint at the back, the glittering ribbons wound round the
spokes were too garish for my eyes to bear. In fact, I used to feel a sort of
latent shame when he took me to the station and it was not long before I shook
him out of my life and moved on to a fancy bicycle that more suited my boyish
sense of vanity. As the years passed, the old man could no longer pull the
burden of other men and he took to his feet to drag his own weight for the
remaining few years of his life. The vehicle was gone, probably rent out by its
owner to a fresh pair of legs, and so was the spirit of the old man. He was
found dwindling away- gambling by the street drinking cheap liquor and coughing
up blood.
My life moved on from school
to college to university to office and my taste kept growing narrower. The
chosen shirts and the trousers, the cufflinks, the ties, the blazers, the
gadgets, the music, the movies, the cigarettes, the friends, the women- all
were narrowed down to a selected few. This choice was not based on the richness
of heart but rather on the theory of material and intellectual relativity. I do
regret at times that my education charted out a course for me which made me
close down all the windows instead of open them all up. Thankfully, my
ancestral house standing tall on the good old soil of this good old town, still
drew me to that window so that someday, my education could reach a state of
completion. So here I was, standing there and seeing for the first time in
nearly two and a half decades, the dignity of honest labour. The son of a
rickshaw puller, himself a poor man, trying to build up a sturdy house for his own
tiny son, his wife and his ailing parents caught my fancy like never before.
When my mother came into the room with the carefully brewed cups of coffee, I
asked her about this family. She informed me that the old man was suffering
from cancer and the land on which their humble hut stood, had suddenly been
claimed as the property of a rich man and was being sold off to the mighty
educational institution. His son, after literally begging for days, had managed
to draw the sympathy of the authorities and was allowed to have a little
stretch of green on the fringes of the disputed acres and was building his
house with his own hands.
I went off to work that day
and kept track of the progress that the man made over a span of seven months.
Now, the land is sold, the huts have been razed to the ground and the families
have moved off to new places and there seems to have been some compensatory means
that were arranged for the relocation. The entire expanse of land upon which
nine families once lived, looked like a cemetery of rubble just four months ago
when the huts were all broken down and the area cordoned off by a massive brick
wall.But what pulls me to that window these days is the unceasing fight of two
mighty forces against this destruction. One of these forces is definitely the
brown-skinned man whose brick house is now complete, though his father isn't alive to have seen this miracle. The other force is that which the
grand old novelist once referred to as sujalang
and sufalang- the strength of
nature to re-establish order by bringing about the birth of dashing greenery
out of the dead pile of huts. No matter who claims what, nature ultimately
claims it all back and this wall-bound land is now home to a beautiful
wilderness that seems to shout out the story of the man whose ribs played out a
cheerful tune under the sun even in the face of calamity. He took
responsibility of four heads and never complained a bit. Though he lost one of
these dependents in the battle for life, his son now has a good house and goes
to a decent school.
What I now see is the fresh,
green land and the little boy in his uniform, holding his father’s hand as he
takes confident steps towards his temple of education. I hope with all my
heart that he grows up to be a man, not closed in his own world of dreams but,
strong enough to take on huge responsibilities and not just of four heads, but
of millions. Maybe I will get back to reading the newspapers someday. Until
then…
Aritra
Chakrabarti
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