A BURRIED CIVILIZATION

A Buried Civilization

She exited the registrar’s office in Delhi. She had a divorce letter stowed in her purse. There was none to walk her to the car in the parking. She drove to her newly rented house. She looked at the name plate reading Sneha Gupta, IAS as she unlocked the door. Just then her mobile buzzed. Prakash Misra was on the line. Prakash was her batch mate from the days of her training in Mussurie. They had liked each other; much in their lives was similar. Both had worked hard, rejecting straying illuminations of the world. Prakash was an engineering graduate. They both were preparing to support their families- families; ill lucked, broken, with little finances to survive in new India. Then there was a sudden diversion. They had parted at the diversion.

Broken relationships, personalities, corruption in educated segments of India

Prakash Misra’s wife, Gita, had divorced him as he was not the man she dreamed of in her life. Her father had a big business in cement. One boring evening she packed her suitcases and left.

Winters this year were severe and had made Delhi a little more strong acid than before. Sneha stood in the window of her flat and looked out. In the freezing and flaky mist everywhere outside, only the electric pole and random catenaries of Power and TV cables hanging from the pole were visible. She looked at the hanging mass of black cables for a long time as nothing else was there to behold; not even a tree from which sudden random flight lines of files of black birds hidden in the tree could break the pall of closely knit tranquility outside.

Prakash Misra was suspended a year back from now. They had trapped him finally in a political angle. Why Prakash won’t rid him of his stiffness, thought Sneha. Prakash took things in his career in the manner of a long hardened tool drilling with an obsession into the filth of the politics.

A week later, while Sneha was locking the flat to go somewhere, her phone buzzed again with Prakash’s name on the display. Prakash’s services were terminated. He was coming to Delhi to join in an engineering company.

Prakash and Sneha had thought about themselves and ended up in the opinion that it was a long journey till the end of life. A marriage could save them from, at the minimum, the maddening loneliness. So they married.

The truck carrying household goods in packed cardboard boxes had arrived from Lucknow. This was what Prakash had brought from Lucknow from his previous residence. It had been packed a year before when Gita left for her father’s house.

This Sunday, Prakash was undoing the packets. He would open a packet and from a corner in the interior, something would materialize that he remembered too well. A week earlier when he joined office, he had some difficulty in working in the office because he had forgotten the values of the coefficients and allowable stress values used in engineering design. Then he had opened some reference books and with some effort, he could recall these values, memorized earlier in days of college and forgotten due to his being long out of touch.

He was a changed man now everywhere; be it home or office. Upright, behoove, blunt, affront, were all words that had now dulled, wilted or yet better recycled in a new sentence. Sharpness of the razor blade was reproduced in knife edges of supports that could now carry even stinking load of chemical equipment in some laboratory.

It was Prakash who bent Sneha’s al ready corroded thinking. She did like an isolated medium what Prakash asked her to do. Builders of Delhi, big or small, were now happy with the changes in the opinion of IAS officer Sneha Misra in the Urban Development Ministry. In just 3 months, these builders had dropped 30 million rupees in the pockets of Prakash.

How futile these millions had been proved. Just after a month, the stacks of currency notes were captured and taken back in half an hour in an income tax raid. Prakash was sacked; Sneha suspended. Suddenly their names sparkled into headlines of media. Then next day new things replaced their names.

Prakash and Sneha now live in a small apartment. They attend court everyday. Prakash would be arrested soon.

Sneha and Prakash hadn’t talked since last two days. Sneha sat watching a TV program. When the helicopter hovering over the verdurous swathes of Vietnam’s jungles left after the man clinging to end of the rope lowered from the helicopter had jumped down into the jungle, Sneha thought how strong she too used to be like this man being shown on TV who would survive in the jungle alone for 8 hours or so without food and water. She watched curiously. The man faced venomous cobras and scorpions without a needle in his defense. When thirsty or hungry, he would drink water from a minor rivulet or eat insects. It appeared to Sneha they wanted to test the original straits of human personality and strengths in a human being of present version. It appeared to her they were digging, excavating to reveal the truths of an old civilization that were not espoused and blurred to the historians, unbelievable as these were looking at the deteriorated present version of modern man.