A DEFLATED DREAM

A DEFLATED DREAM

He would take a turn from the gate of the colony and thread his vehicle through barriers of Haryana traffic police. Then it would be the sudden emergence in sight of the short segment overhead busy railway line allowing vehicular traffic below it from the colony to connect to the main highway, that would shake out rigorously the listlessness of his previous night’s bad sleep, and the trudging sense in his driving to his office. He would think- you are wandering in a deep wood sancuary since daybreak for your objective to see the beautiful tiger living in it's natural habitat; it’s the sudden moment of brimming enthusiasm as you spot the animal hidden in the boscage of the wilderness.

He , the father, had just copy-pasted the time-block of his young fatherhood and his son’s early childhood of 17 years before, into the present time of his fifties and his son’s early twenties. In between, there had been a rough weather through all so many years, which the father and son had both experienced from the world around them. The fifty one year old father, with the repairing time-block of 17 years before incorporated into the present time, could feel now the exhilarating pleasure taking the bitterness off him. It was the pleasure of a young village postman who still loved his job of letters at the end of his youth; recently his old worn letter stamp was replaced by a brand new; and he looked enamored to now fresh and clear alphabets of his post office’s legible name on the letter hammered by this new stamp; as if his name stood silent on the now clear stamp mark.

The father was posted in Orissa when the son was born. Thereafter he had been posted in Bihar, Maharashtra, Bengal, Tamilnadu and so on. He had been longing to be posted in Punjab. - his own homeland where he had never lived. He had spent long 5 decades of his life beginning from birth and childhood listening around him unintelligible languages; now in Punjab here, he could know what was being talked around him. He wondered wasn’t it like a fetched foreign made imported item fitted in locally made plant and machinery; local made equipment changed from place to place with him-the imported item- remaining the same everywhere. The noise and vibrations of local machinery would sound different from his vibrations. Now here in Punjab, it was all homologous, homogenous.

While his widowed mother changed shelter from his this brother’s house to that brother’s, due to his own genuine inability to offer her a permanent shelter with he himself, he could feel that he and his brothers are dishonoring a rare classic book by not reading it as it was irrelevant in present day literature of easy skills of writing. If he could not manage this problem and his and his brothers’ mother died on a road, then he felt that at least he would consider himself disqualified from using his surname-the very surname that appeared in his signatures; the signatures that he would need to sign on the bank cheques to operate his huge bank accounts, when his published papers will take the shape of marketable patents. So he arranged a house for his mother and she died in honor, again for the sake of not soiling the name of her son, big as it was.

He had made money from his sold patents; but he didn’t intend to use this money for his own needs. He traced the place where his mother was born in Jallandhar. He used the money from sold patents for buying the land next to his mother’s paternal house, and he got one huge building made there. He named it as “ Subhadra Devi Bhandari Memorial Widow House”.

This day, at the inaugural of the Ashram, he looked at the vast gathering of widow women from Punjab and neighboring states, which waited before a decorated rostrum from where he had to deliver his short speech. He, standing at the rostrum, suddenly lost hold of his sangfroid as his sight fell over the gathering. Behind the superficial pellicle on faces of all the widow women, there was the tortured face of his mother. His mother who was born on this very land, played here when a child in her immunity; married to his father in her early teens, and then shifted to remote places where his father worked. Then further to the death of his father when she was only 45, his mother lived torturing her self and being tortured for 30 long years with he himself and his brothers, with no moment of happiness, and she finally breathed her last in an unknown corner of land in Chennai while reluctant travels in sleeper classes of his sons were midway to make them reach their mother on the death bed- the very sons who spent on air tickets for fun and holidaying. The disgust and torture that she suffered copied it self, and flew underneath the facial pellicle of all those widow women waiting to listen his speech. Suddenly his sangfroid of moments before got dented as if moments before he was a piece of strong costly steel in which a defect ultrasound machine had detected a serious impairing flaw, and his strength and value had crashed manifold to negligible levels. He delivered his dim speech, editing strong-lined paragraphs into short lines of weak words and almost ran from there in his disgust. The 65 millions rupee priced “ Subhadradevi Ashram” in this land of Jallandhar – his mother’s birthplace- was now hardly a worthwhile contribution of his dreams.