ADDRESSEE THIS TIME

ADDRESSEE THIS TIME

Giriraj standing on the temple stairs looked all round in the huge congregation of people with his scared and anxious eyes. It was a sight of innumerable human heads packed till the end of line of vision. Giriraj went short distances randomly into the crowd and returned dismayed without finding any signs of his son and daughter-in-law. The couple had deserted them there, miles, towns, cities and states away from their native Gujarat in that crowd of Kumbh Mela without bothering any oddity of embarrassment. The innocuous cover of the crowd had simplified the disappearance of the son- an easy simple escape like the fast disappearing sprinkled water for relief from heat in the rivulets of sweat running allover a man's body in a burning summer.

Giriraj had been living with a suspicious mind with a foreboding unease since Giriraj, his wife Maniben, and his son had traveled to Lonavala, and then returned to Surat the same day a few months before. This had happened after a nasty altercation between his daughter-in-law and Maniben. The purpose of their journey remained unexplained to him. Their train had taken 12 hours to reach Bombay, due to incessant rain water deluging the tracks here and there. Giriraj had been asking his son why they were going to Bombay in that uncertainty of train traffic. The son won't breathe a word. He just told them that their destination was Lonavala where he had some urgent work to do, and that he wanted the parents to have a change of place by the journey.

Upon reaching Bombay, they had waited in that nonstop rain for their onward journey to Lonavala. There was a near deluge situation in Bombay. They had reached only Thane when most of the local and long distance trains including theirs were cancelled due to water logging on the tracks. So they were now stranded at Thane station till the situation could improve a little. The announcer would speak something in Marathi, then in Hindi, from time to time about non-availability of trains. The tracks on which trains ran at the interval of just 3 minutes were now deserted. The platforms wore an abandoned look, with fewer passengers waiting hours before a train would come braving the rains to pickup the stranded people out on their very urgent errands.

Then some train bound to Daund came which would take them to Lonavala. On reaching Lonavala, the son left the parents in the waiting hall and proceeded to the old house he had heard about in Surat. The expenses of accommodation for the old people that the old house management told him were beyond his reach. So he, dismayed, returned to the railway station. The three of them started back for Surat, the old people wondering what their trip to Lonavala was about.

A week later from then, there were heavy rains in Surat also. The released dam water had inundated all adjoining areas including Surat. Entire town of Surat was half submerged under the flood water; only taller buildings could venture out of all round water with their altitudes shortened by the surrounding deluge, and were thus identifiable; smaller structures and vehicles were either out of vision or just showed their tops. Most of the city residents had seen for the first time such a swathe of near, half and full submerged buildings, shops, and transport vehicles in their lives. It appeared one stood looking at the mess of a large ware house of abandoned scrap items with some of the items protruding significantly from the huge confused mass to lend them an identifying comprehension.

Giriraj's son's shop and their house both were in the areas of maximum damage. They stayed in a relief camp till the flood water receded. The government compensation was skimpy; the son had to borrow heavily for reinstating the business. The usual altercations within the family had assumed greater proportions, and the son had to again think of taking some extreme step to bring the disgusting family contretemps of everyday to an end.

And thus the family of parents and the young couple were in Alahabad for the ostensible purpose of visiting Kumbh Mela. Then, in the huge crowd, the young couple had disappeared abandoning the hapless, helpless old people.
When Giriraj fell in a faint in the market from starving for three days, a man, who appeared to have seen this happen plenty of times before, came out of the assembled crowd with rescuing steps. He hailed a rickshaw, and with the help of a young man, walked the now recovered a bit old man to the rickshaw. He, knowing well that it was more a restaurant case than a hospital, took him to a Dharamshala with an eatery. There in the eatery of the Dharamshala, Giriraj started returning to normal as the meal going down his throat started restoring his primary energies. The meal followed by tea and tobacco, prepared the ambience for asking personal details of the hapless situation of the old man.

But the old man won't go beyond giving his name and his hailing from Gujarat. He added that if the gentleman, Kripashankar, would show the kindness of helping him further, it was any kind of employment that the old man needed most.
Thus Giriraj had found an employment in the readymade apparel shop that Kripashankar ran. It was more a non-profit organization than a shop; many of the customers that came paid only when their other priorities of expenses came to almost nil. Many of them turned defaulters, but the small business was too strong morally to succumb to such defaults of payments. Some of the customers won't deign to dishonor the temple of a shop by going elsewhere where better variety existed. Variety and style of attire of big showrooms was perhaps humiliated by the customers only here, in the small shop of Kripashankar.

Giriraj was required to travel also in connection with the business. The creeping, jolting motion of the state transport bus would hardly embarrass Giriraj; waste of time and physical trouble now meant nothing to him. He would rather enjoy it as would a bored office clerk, tired of sitting idle in his chair enjoy some unwelcome yet happening change.

Thus months passed in ease during which bonhomie and conviviality grew strong between the two men. In the lazy stretches of afternoons with no visitors, the two of them would indulge in gossips refreshed by breaks of smoking Charminar and drinking ersatz tea brought by a lad from the mobile tea-stall cart. Giriraj would occasionally lapse into a long silence, Kripa now recognizing when to let the silence flow on till an edgeless winding up of suspended conversation could be allowed by way of Kripa's proposal for a round of that restoring ersatz tea and fulfilling sticks of Charminar. In these steady, uninterrupted flows of silence, Kripa's seeing without looking would build up his curiosity to know the hidden in the crow's feet around sunken eyes of Giriraj. And one day Kripa's insisting on knowing more about Giriraj made the latter's reluctance recede, to bare his clandestine silence.
His story ran thus. It was in the midst of peace of night after a hot summer day that weary retiring residents of the town of Bhuj were caught flatfooted in the apocalypse of the quake. In a matter of few seconds, the corybantic fury of the quake had razed a complete settlement of workshops, offices, shops and houses, and wiped out a bulk of human lives. The doom had irrupted into the entire expanse of concrete that looked too permanent to be destroyed in seconds: as if an enormously accelerated damage rendered by the crazy revolutions of a huge geo-centrifuge had done it with it's 100s of G force, concrete structures of the town like models having been uprooted and installed on the testing basket of the centrifuge.
The residents of the wrecked buildings ran out like scared jungle animals. Giriraj, Maniben and their two sons, struggling in the crowded mass on staircase, found their way out of the building. They had not thought in the least about the old and ill father of Giriraj who could, in their convenient opinion hardly be expected to emerge alive from the crowd on the stairs if he were helped to escape from the dilapidated building. Giriraj with his family stood at a safe distance from the building. Then Maniben remembered of her jewelry, which she would retrieve at any cost. She told Giriraj that if he won't go to fetch her jewelry, she herself would venture upstream on the stairs. Cursing her, Giriraj proceeded to find his way in the frenzied exodus on the stairs. He, inching against the tide of mob, finally reached his apartment. With jewelry box in hand, he ran to join the escaping crowd on the stairs when he found his old man sitting on his bed and looking with extreme aversion at his son carrying the jewelry box. Giriraj's steps were stalled there, a long moment passed between the ashamed son and disdaining father. Giriraj at length, asked the old man to come with him to escape from the building, which could be wrecked yet further by any impending shocks of quake. The father averted his face in extreme contempt and said screaming, "Go away or your filthy presence here will kill me before the quake returns. Giriraj stood for some time with his ashen face, and then decided to do what the old man had told him. He struggled back his way to his family, standing safely away from the building.

Giriraj's father, on return of normalcy after the quake, moved to his village and after few months died in his ancestor's home. Giriraj with his family had migrated to Surat from Bhuj. With a decade passed from then, Giriraj retired from government service; his one son had studied well and was settled in a job in USA; another son was in a clerical government job.

Then Giriraj made an account of how they had traveled to Lonavala and returned to Surat, and then a few months later, how they were disowned and abandoned in the crowd of Kumbh Mela by his son.

Giriraj looked at Kripa's face in hope of finding if a little of bonhomie and conviviality had remained after Kripa's knowing who Giriraj was under the skin. The expression Giriraj was looking for had arrantly evaporated from Kripa's face, and had changed place with a softer version of contemptuous spurning. Kripa withdrew into a stir for departure from the scene. He rose and walked to a stool that stood in the far corner of the shop, lifted a match box lying on the stool and lit the cigarette dangling from his mouth. While retuning to some ease by the inhaled smoke, he looked at the rain outside. A lad nearby in rain without shelter was opening his tool box; he had a flat wheel in his scooter. The lad appeared not bothered in the least for his having to change wheel in that rain; he was even singing in undertone a popular song while he applied spanners to the fasteners of punctured wheel of his scooter. He readily opened three of the fasteners and moved on to the fourth fastener. This was where a reversal of ease of the situation awaited him; the fourth worn fastener kept on slipping and stubbornly rejected to accept the torque of the spanner. The rejoicing, easy, mood of the lad was not prepared for this unforeseen trouble. He, defeated and nonplussed, looking helplessly at the unassembled wheel, rose with water dripping from his rain-soaked clothes. He came inside the shop, found a stool and sat near Giriraj. He too like Giriraj, waited there for the rain to stop, to go out and find an alternative elsewhere for restoring his situation to normal.