Sometimes sitting all alone in this strange place, which you have started calling home, you do wonder what it is that had brought you here. There is comfort, there is absence of obstruction, but you wonder how it would be like if these had been a part of that distant place. When you were in school it was easy for you and your friends to go for a long run at four in the morning; all that your mother would ask you was to be mindful while crossing the road. When the days of boyhood were virtually over the place was filled with charades and the vigour in the vocal voices was astonishing; but you couldn’t tell what those charades were all about and wondered why the vigour was so intense; they were far off things and you were busy in your boyish life guided by an ambition. Perhaps you were too young to feel the impact and also to look beyond to foresee the consequences.
The Assam Rifle camp on the hillock used to be a pleasant place: you and your friends could go up and with sign language you could come home with jackfruits as big asyour little cousins. But you were just a boy, whose face wasn’t tainted and the mind was a white sheet upon which only good things were written. When school was over people began to talk about a not-so-far-place called Shillong; they said it was just the place for good education. What was wrong with your education at home? You only stored up the name but never gave a thought why people were so eager to dispatch their children;your mind was filled with travel stories.
Two more years in senior school; within those years everything seemed to have changed abruptly: friends from the same class disappeared and they showed with Marxist terms coupled with loaded pieces, the simple gathering of students had become too political, and they looked as ready as some chained dogs. Then they introduced picking up and dumping and the dumping became omnipresent; people pointed at those jack fruit-givers and other associated the dumping with unheard regiments: Dogra, Sikh, Gurkha, Maratha, etc.
You began to see them as a dreadful people, and they were as dreadful as they looked. Though they had started treating people like you as generalized-suspects you had a feeling that all was united against them. Then, the appearance of your own kind in their uniform, capable of more brutality startled you: at one point you thought they were a pack of Gurkhas whose Meiteilon proficiency was as good as yours. No they were the people whom you had grown up with playing football, but they had been put through something like an oven and churned out just like those slightly burnt bread. They displayed another form of unrelenting vigour: the pleasure in roaming the streets on motorbikes with loaded Russian pieces slung across the chests and one hand holding long, shiny bamboo canes, which old people in the village would use to herd cattle. They began to give random applications of the loaded pieces and long shiny canes on anyone whose face looked deserving.
While that transformation was in rapid progress, a new group of grenade hurlers and gate-shooters surfaced. Few years ago they would be hollering the Marxist terms, now they hollered for “donations”, how could that be when the people were unwilling? They even started taxing your old man’s hard-earned cash, but your old man wouldn’t know since the “donation tax” was sliced in collusion with those in the banks; he would only look at the thin wad and wonder. And when he approached others they also held out their thinned-wads.
People were now only lookalikes of people, people were not humane people: tigers with big appetites devouring flesh, while the sly hyenas always watchful of the leftovers; the herbivorous had been pushed out to one corner from where one or two would be pulled out whenever one among the carnivorous was awfully hungry.
Reminiscing those bygone days at so-called home and picturing every piece you read here, you think whether you should hold out till the end in this place upon which you can never mentally lay your claim. What would it require? Would it mean leaving behind everything? What about creating them in your own place? Or would you be happy drowning your grief-soaked life in a common pleasure and then to shrink, and fizzle out unknown, or as a known unknown?
Comments
Post a Comment