THE DISAPPEARNCES OF A WOMAN

The sacred fire of Havankunda near the altar, the recital of Mantras by the Pundit, and the medley of chitchatting, boisterous guffaws, hurried yelling of organizers, and a segue of film songs played through loud speaker in marriage ceremonies, always brought an ecstatic enthusiasm to Nimmi. These made her dream about her own marriage. Eventually, now the day of Nimmi’s marriage had arrived. In marriages, when the bride and the bridegroom performed Saat Phere, by circling seven times round the fire of Havankunda, Nimmi would invariably think that this marked the beginning of lifelong companionship of the two. During her own Phere, While Nimmi, with her bridegroom, was making Saat Phere round the sacred fire, it seemed to her that the fire of Havankunda, hallowed by the recital of Vedic Mantras, was knitting a relationship of oneness in her bridegroom's and her souls; as would the powerful center of a whirl do to the centrifuging water streams around it to bring about their confluence. Soon after the marriage, Nimmi’s husband and his parents returned with Nimmi to Birmingham. Upon coming and settling at Birmingham, for initial few weeks, Nimmi just ignored the hurting reserve that everybody appeared to be having for her. She believed that this won’t continue long; but soon her fallacy of this being short-lived, was shattered. She, then, knew that in her innocence like a naive little bird, enamored by the trumpery verdure of a huge tree, she had flown deep into the dense and the deceptive greenery of a dungeon. In there, nothing was the way that Nimmi's brother, in Punjab, was told at the time of her marriage. Nimmi’s husband was a drug addict and all that was told about him, was a gross subterfuge. The family treated Nimmi as a material item that was bought for their spoilt boy. Nimmi had become oblivious of the days and months that she passed in that calaboose. At nights, when the druggie husband, after slaking his hateful lust with her frightened body, slept with liquor reeking from him and the bed, she always would think of escaping from this prison in the darkness of a night. However like a real little and scared, arboreal bird with phobia for the light and colors of the outside world, she would find that all her escape conations caved in eventually. Nimmi was living with the truth that her soul and existence were eroding with each day passed, to spread a null darkness over her in an open slather. Then an unexpected, barnstorming moment fell into her life to claw the melancholy of the vicissitude away from her. The seeding of motherhood in her body, was no less in effect than a real renascence, releasing a surge of energy and hope in her. The news of her being pregnant left the family in a shock. After one of her several visits to the maternity clinic, where her mother-in-law always accompanied her, it soon was borne in upon her that some kind of medical violence to her unborn child had been done at the clinic. She went to another doctor for confirmation. The revelation of the truth by the doctor left her dumbfounded. She had lost much in life before, but none of the losses was as momentous as this one. They had slain mercilessly forever, the pulchritude of innocent feeling of motherhood in Nimmi, by a medical operation. From her severe agony, a forceful hatred was ignited in her mind for her husband and in laws; and she didn't balk for even a moment in severing her relationship with them. In the time that followed, she had been under a long spell of an experience, resembling the slow drift of a listlessly cruising ship: a ship with a crestfallen crew of sailors who had lost their most rip snorting member in some tragedy. Had she not met Harpreet Kaur soon after breaking off with her husband, she could never have come through her misfortune. Harpreet was an old woman with nearly a similar story. Her husband, likewise, betrayed her; but she decided not to go back to India to her widow mother in Punjab. She started up a small business and succeeded to some extent in her venture. Nimmi worked with Harpreet for many months, and all seemed to have settled for her. Nimmi didn’t have the foggiest idea that the quoit of misfortune was readying again to fall in place for her. This time it was a road accident, snatching Harpreet away from Nimmi. In her grief at this entirely unimaginable whammy, Nimmi stood in a stupor, gazing on the face of the dead woman. Death had humiliated itself and had failed utterly in peeling the steely sangfroid off the face of the dead woman. The pain of death had bent itself against Harpreet's unbeaten and pristine self-confidence and courage. The tragic death of Harpreet had cut Nimmi up terribly. It brought, a sad stillness in Nimmi’s life but now all responsibilities of their small cottage pickle and spices business had fallen on Nimmi. With the passing time, Nimmi found that her indulgence in work had an outweighing effect on her loss of Harpreet. It was one Diwali party, organized by an Indian businessman in a Birmingham hotel, where an Indian young man accosted Nimmi; and told her that Nimmi and he had met earlier in India when Nimmi was a college student in Saharanpur. Then Nimmi recognized him as the former engineering college student Avatar Bhandari of Ludhiana, whose sister and brother in law lived in civil lines colony of Saharanpur. His sister used to come to attend the tailoring and embroidery classes that Nimmi’s sister-in-law ran in her home. Avatar came along with his sister to drop the latter, whenever he came from Ludhiana to Saharanpur, in his short vacations. The brother and the sister usually came on a two-wheeler and sometimes, in a Maruti car. The brother would come back and sit in the outer waiting room much before the time when the class would be over. Nimmi used to open the door for allowing him in the waiting room. When she would open the door, she invariably found the young man standing in wait, grinning and looking spang into Nimmi’s eyes. He would annoy her with his smiles and eternal gaze. The same fellow was here in Birmingham, standing in front of her and reminding her who he was. Thence without a miss, he would come to Nimmi’s office in Birmingham every Saturday; and Nimmi had to accompany him to some restaurant for dinner. He would never let her pay for the dinner, though Nimmi knew that he worked extra hours after his research classes, to cover the cost of that weekly dinner. "Don’t tell me that you are besotted by my beauty," and Nimmi laughed like a drain on her own sense of humor. Avatar watched her laugh in his despair - the despair at her letting herself become so true to her self-mockery. Her beauty and attraction were completely overwritten by a hackneyed insouciance, typical of common half-educated businesswomen, who won’t be mortified by their embarrassing awkward appearance. On this date, Nimmi appeared to be just a poor painting done by a novice, of a beautiful natural lake which existed in the past, and which was completely dried up now. The over familiar silence of Avatar, in response to her peals of bucolic laughter, made her to take a pause, and she said satirically, " Oh, pardon me. I forgot that while one is with research people, awkward laughing is considered ill manners. This I must not forget in future." Avatar smiled just enough in substitution of an oral answer. A dull smile as the remains of her humor was all that Nimmi’s face showed. She lifted her wineglass, sipped and placed it back. Then an urge to suppress a vague feeling of insufficiency made her open the cigarette case, pick one and light. " It is disgusting to see you smoking." Completely ignoring his words, she said, " Did you notice Avatar? One of the American girls sitting behind is laughing on my being here with you or else your being with me." " How did you know? You can’t even look at her from your place." " Do you know what made her laugh? She thought that I am your boss and you have come with me just for the sake of your job." " Then how should she be told the truth? Shall I yell at you?" " No, then you would appear to her, a husband at the end of his tether and just short of divorcing his rich fat wife." " Then what do you say to enlighten her?" " Next time you should bring one girlfriend along. Then I may pass for the mother of the girl," and again she neared to fall about but Avatar’s eternal look held her. The silence that she had been trying to disallow again drew again between them; and as usual, she found Avatar regarding awkwardly her visage in his awkward studying manner. She picked up her glass and sipped, musing on what Avatar expected to find by delving into her expression. It used to be embarrassing but she didn’t find difficulty to pass it by. At the end, she would look at Avatar and grin. The precipitous change that made Nimmi of this day, an unbelievable transformation of the beautiful college girl Nimmi of Saharanpur, of just a decade before, would always recur a feeling in Avatar. He would think that something redolent of a film based on a poorly adapted story from an original classic, with an immune uncontrolled and absurd editing, was all that was happening before him. She was an awfully poor simulacrum of both original Harpreet and original Nimmi. And one day Nimmi resolved to do what she had been telling for sometime to Avatar, and what Avatar thought, was just another piece of her casual humor. She had planned to go to Punjab for good, where some regional party was promising her a political career. Avatar told her that she was going there only to lose whatever she had. In the unpredictable political milieu of India, even old hands were finding it hard to uphold their political base. In his personal opinion, Avatar believed that installing a successful business from a scratch was no way a sign and an assurance that it would be repeated in politics also by the achiever. Or was he always trying to play down the achievements of Nimmi. ? Perhaps frequently emerging fragility in Nimmi’s demeanor made him pick holes in her achievements. Or perhaps he berated her achievements because for these very achievements, she didn’t spare even a single shadow of the shy and beautiful girl Nimmi in herself. When Nimmi was stepping inside the small aircraft that would take her to London, Avatar experienced last bit of his sangfroid slipping away from his hold. At the entrance to the aircraft, before walking inside, Nimmi turned and looked back. She was shocked to find an unexpected, statue like deadened expression on Avatar’s cast down face. His face looked as lifeless as stone. Only his eyes appeared to possess some life. There was terminal jitteriness in that pair of eyes. They were shrinking with some kind of phobia as if there these were going to be bricked alive into the shell of his deathly face. Had She ever set aside for a moment, her eternal self-engagement in shamming indefatigability in her manner, she could never have missed so apparent a truth about Avatar and herself. She took her eyes off his face and walked into the narrow aisle of the aircraft. She mused on the suddenly bared truth, while sitting and looking out. She found her thoughts disrupted as suddenly the plane commenced a slow motion. Avatar’s sight followed the accelerating aircraft until it took off and finally vanished from vision. It appeared to Avatar that he had been standing in a wild gusto, which had torn away the most beautiful page from the book of his life; and the page, in the thrust of the storm, was dragged flutteringly on the hard earth, farther and farther from him. Then, finally, this most loved page flew high into disappearance like the aircraft, in the crazy currents of the windstorm. Nimmi had been thinking of the unspoken revelation even when the plane touched down at the Indira Gandhi International Airport of New Delhi. Avatar was crazily in love with her. With her of this day or with the college girl Nimmi of the past? Was he crazy to ignore the passage of a decade since then? Time had made her older and unattractive. As she walked in an exit corridor of the New Delhi airport, she surveyed her own body. As a result of excessive drinking and ignoring medical restrictions, her body now had become laden with illnesses. She thought of her face on which her worldly lackluster shrunken eyes were set in swollen facial muscles; and there were hard lines close to her lips to complete the effect. Long back, she had bounded herself with a high defensive wall, blindly duplicating a Harpreet constitution all over her, for a failsafe disappearance of her original self behind secure altitude of the bulwark. It appeared to be an act that was inspired by finding a beautiful bungalow disappeared from sight by a deliberate, tall fencing wall, topped with barbed wires and glass shards. None remembered what she, like the out of sight sequestered bungalow, looked like in her originality, save Avatar who continued next to her whimsically with his unyielding belief of an ultimate self-demolition of this barb- wired fencing wall. Nimmi had returned to Chandigarh after whistle-stop tours of Rajpura, Patiala, and some other towns. She had purchased a big bungalow in Chandigarh. A few minutes before, some political workers of her party had left. Nimmi, quite done up by the election tour, reclined on a big sofa sleepily, thinking that she could do with an early dinner and sleep. Suddenly the telephone bell broke the peaceful silence of the room. Nimmi lifted the receiver. Her familiarity with the incoming voice told her that it was Avatar, heavily drunk as usual. What was Avatar up to? Why was he bent upon listing himself among the famous abnegators of love stories of bygone eras? " Avatar, why are you kidding yourself with your foolish ideas? This is the time of your going to Research Institute. Have you still not resumed going there?" Suddenly a peal of laughter rippled from the other end. Avatar went on and Nimmi listened in silence, as Avatar used to listen her. At length, he, with an effort, paused himself and said, " Research Institute did you say? Who will let me in there now? Nimmi, I wish you could see me, then you yourself would have known how humorous it is now to think that at one time I was a research assistant in University of Birmingham. I know what is going on in your thoughts. For a busy person, a telephone call such as this is irksome, isn’t it?" Nimmi knew that Avatar, like a stubborn lad not touching food for days at end, or like anyone of such type, had set his heart on bringing Nimmi of the bygone days into present. A complete submission to this raison d’être had left him totally defenseless. " What happened? Don’t you listen even telephone calls without prior appointment?" " Now that’s enough Avatar. I don’t know which world you live in and what makes you act like this and talk all this rigmarole. I don’t know as well what I should do to rid you of this rubbish and make you turn back to your research?" Avatar again laughed but this was a brief one, at the end of which he said, " Can you really do something for me?” A very long space of silence followed this. Avatar was preparing himself to take it off his chest. The telephone line was transmitting without fault, the turmoil that was let loose in Avatar’s heart. At length, he said, " listen to me Nimmi. I crave for one piece of land, which would have for me, an unspoiled shelter of my imagination that means everything to me. Call it your misfortune but wherewithal for all this comes from you; this is what you mean to me." Nimmi allowed few moments to let the words settle in her mind. She could not imagine why Avatar didn't want to admit that she was just a sepulchral aftermath of a completely obliterated event of youth and beauty of the college girl Nimmi. Avatar could not seem to do anything to mend his obsession. Perhaps it had been growing upon him without his knowledge. " You know Avatar, this is absurd. This is absurd not only because there is of incongruity of appearances but also because... because soon you will repent for having taken a naive step. I want to save you from future penitence. I am worried for you." "So you are worried for me? Nimmi, just try to realize. Even your saying so is making me happy despite my knowledge of this being a prevarication. Nimmi, if you really have a concern for me, then care for my happiness, of a man named Avatar, leaving aside your worries for my career and future." " Avatar, if the comely appearances won’t work on you, then there were several girls inferior in beauty to me in beauty, in Saharanpur. But you chose only Nimmi." " And there were several more beautiful than you. I didn’t choose them then, neither would I choose any such woman in present or future." Again a silence prevailed on the line. Avatar said at length, " now which of your troubles keeps you silent?" " I am thinking that leaving Birmingham and your company for the politics and the Punjab has done me no good. The public comes in my election gatherings, to listen not to me but to the senior leaders of the party. Even if I fail to win a place in the heart of the public, I will win the election because of the public’s preference for my party to be in the government. I will be a leader without any genuine support from the masses. I will even become some kind of minister. I won’t win a place in the heart of the public; but I have invited political rivalry very easily. Do you know there was a shooting on my car yesterday while I was returning from a tour?" Nimmi immediately realized her mistake in letting Avatar into the shooting incident on her. Avatar’s scattered voice, which was till then aimlessly straying between satiric mockery and accusations, was stiffened into his original pitch by the revelation of risk to Nimmi’s life. Avatar had said nearly the same what Nimmi could expect," Nimmi, I am reaching India. Till then you prepare yourself to come back here with me, giving over politics and India both. It is unless you think something else for you. Do you want to do anything other than this?" " No", not expecting her reply that revealed her heart of hearts, come through so easily, she, in her blushing embarrassment, placed the receiver quickly. After sometime, the intercom started buzzing; and the security inspector told her that two of the three security people deployed for her security, were being withdrawn. This was because the security guards of Agriculture Minister had to proceed on some other urgent task. The man informing this, a sub-Inspector of Punjab police, was the only person now attending to her security. Musing on the changed situations after her talk with Avatar, Nimmi decided that she would leave for New Delhi by next afternoon flight, after discussing with the Health Minister, who was her political guide. Secretary Manchanda would wind up things here; and hand over the settlements to her at New Delhi. She had laid out a total of 90 million rupee in this election. The money would just go down the drain. This was the money that she had earned with hard work, dedication, sacrifice, risk and occasional little dishonesty. This bungalow and a bank balance of some 12 millions would be the only assets she would be left with. Wasn’t this a gross mistake? She should try to explain to Avatar how impossible it was to step back at this stage. He would try to understand surely. They have true love for each other. They could marry after elections and formation of the government. Once included in the government, things would be in the palm of her hand. It would not be difficult to get Avatar appointed at a high position in department of science and technology. But Avatar would never agree. Oh, he must understand. Let it not be a government job; he could easily get offers from engineering academic institutions of repute. Would he not care to accept such a little adjustment for her? After all he had ruined his career for her in Birmingham. Thinking her thoughts, she rose and found herself standing before a huge mirror. Despite her being in a shapeless figure, she could spot on her face the till then unnoticed signs of beauty, which had not deserted her. It was not a difficult task to shed weight with modern health techniques. In just few weeks, she would make herself so beautiful that Avatar would consider himself blessed by heavens. But Avatar would be reaching here just next day. Alas, wasn't there any instant method to rid her of this de trop physical form? This had miserably obscured the beauty that was there in her. She wanted to be with Avatar the following day as the beautiful Nimmi of Saharanpur. She thought, her desperation was no less crazier than the wistful desire of a lost mountaineer, who had wandered without sleep for days on end in unknown snow deserts for signs of human life; and who, on finally reaching civilization, wanted to refresh himself and recover by a sleep of just few minutes, in his desperation to resettle in his world. The incident of firing on her car had scared her but senior leaders of the party had assured her that it was just one of the old methods of scaring away recognizable new candidates out of the election race. The party due to the strategy already drawn for her campaign esoterically knew that she would win the election eventually; but for common people and opposition parties, she was just one strong beginner. Why should they bother so much as to arrange killing of a tyro in politics? At that stage, none would go that far. Nimmi had believed the senior leaders. She telephoned to an expensive health club of Chandigarh; and inquired about the time schedule for private visits, which were some six times costlier than routine membership. Only very rich could afford such private visits. She readied herself and asked the security guard to send the car. The security officer, a middle-aged sub-Inspector of Punjab police, was sitting on the front seat alongside the driver. The sub-Inspector needed a smoke every five minutes; and usually, his breathing reeked of liquor. He surely had not touched his service revolver for last many years. Nimmi’s car was waiting for the signal to turn green at a traffic signal in sector 12. Nimmi asked the driver to turn off the AC and open the windows, as the smoke and liquor-laden suspiration of the sub-Inspector could no longer be tolerated. The numeral traffic signal showed 132, which meant more than 3 minutes of waiting for the green light to appear. There was a battered Maruti on left of her car. On the right side, an Enfield motorcycle with its chugging engine on stood with the vehicle’s two silent riders. The pillion rider was unzipping a bag. It all happened with the alacrity of lightening. An automatic gun appeared in the hands of the rider with the bag and he rained bullets from it on Nimmi. The indiscriminate spray of bullets on Nimmi had immediately killed her, leaving her body a clumsy affair of bleeding lacerations, which in dead flesh and bones, weltered her body and the car’s rear seat with her blood. Mercilessly and hastily fired bullets had slain her, with lacerations all over her body that had opened the flesh deep into the bones. The ghastly scene horripilated even the sub-inspector who had witnessed massacres of Punjab terrorism for more than a decade in Punjab. What he saw was so ineffaceable that it necessitated double his regular inebriation for a sleep that night. Manchanda was leafing through some file when the phone bell started whirring. The display line showed that the caller was Avatar. This was the only man to whom breaking the news of Nimmi’s murder was a real difficult task Manchanda, in deed, hated to draw the short straw but he had no choice. He lifted the phone. " Hello, I am secretary Manchanda speaking from Madam Namrata Sharma’s residence." " Ask Namratajee to come on line. I am Avatar Bhandari speaking from Birmingham." Manchanda remained silent until the voice from other end spoke again, " what is the matter? Give the phone to Namratajee." " Sir, a tragic unfortunate incident has happened here. Some unknown people have opened fire on her." The shock that the man listening at the other end, had received had made him speechless for a long space of time, then an infirm self-doubting voice asked, " is she not out of danger?" Manchanda again took few seconds to decide how best he could communicate, " Sir, I have the unfortunate task here to inform you that the shooting left her dead. They shot her with an automatic weapon resulting in her instant death." A silence ensued on the line. Manchanda waited for a long moment. At length, a rent voice came through, which was speaking volumes of the speaker’s hard mental effort to choose and force the words into his speech " wasn’t there any guard with her?" " Sir, there was a sub-Inspector of Punjab police with her but they had opened fire on her with an automatic gun. Sub-Inspector was no match for them. None could have done anything with a service revolver." A gnawing silence again clamped on the line. At length, Manchanda said, " Madam didn’t leave a will. Under this situation, the property and money belonging to her will go to her only kin, her brother, whose correct address is not available. He is posted somewhere in Karnataka; this is what madam told me once.” Suddenly Manchanda remembered that Nimmi had given him a letter with Avatar’s address written for sending the letter by courier. The letter was still there in the pocket of Manchanda’s coat. He told Avatar about the letter. Avatar asked him to send the letter to him by fax. Manchanda asked again, “ By the way, do you have any idea about her brother’s address or any phone number etc sir?" " No, I have no idea," and Avatar placed the receiver back. Avatar walked unsteadily over to the fax machine and sat there in wait. His mind was held by blankness statically; and he fixedly looked at the fax machine, with his eyes bled white of animation. Avatar looked dumbly at the screen of muted TV. A film was running on that TV channel. It was a scene of repeated appearances and disappearances of a flock of birds in the sky, as the patches of clouds swathed and bared the birds. Avatar looked dumbly again at his wrist where a healing wound had opened up at the margins the day before, as it got rubbed against the corner of a table. When the wound recrudesced the previous day, Avatar wiped it clean with a kerchief. For few seconds, it would stay clean. Then tiny drops of blood would appear at the edges of the wound. He again would wipe these clean. After few seconds, the drops would reappear. Avatar clambered to his feet and trudged to the side table that stood near the bed. He found a whisky bottle, opened the lid and impulsively drank from the bottle. At length, the hard knock of the liquor made him collapse on the bed. Somewhere inside him, something was choking him. It appeared to him that it was death that was closing in on him rapidly. He remembered the day when years back in India; he was traveling in a train despite knowing that there was risk to passengers’ life in traveling through that area, because of Hindu-Muslim riots in the aftermath of Babri mosque demolition. The train was somewhere near Aligarh town. Through the window shutters, which the passengers of the train couldn’t close, stones hurled by the Muslim rural mobs standing on either side of the tracks, stormed inside the compartments, striking the interiors with an ominous noise. Every few kilometers, the Muslim gatherings on both sides of the tracks could be found waiting for the train to appear. As the train neared, they hollered abuses and contemptuously threw the stones in their hands on the passing train. Every 10-15 minutes of travel, the violent stoning on the train, the ominously obstreperous anger and abusive hollering of the Muslims outside for the majority Hindu passengers of the train, the risk to the passengers’ lives and their fear, collectively appeared to have a shade of similarity with a dramatic scene, showing a patient laid up with fever, whose body shivered at brief intervals as the high fever surged through it. Finally, the train reached Aligarh station and ground to a halt. Suddenly a mob of armed Muslim rioters reached the platform; and entering the compartment Avatar was traveling in, they indiscriminately attacked the passengers. Avatar was one of the seriously injured. Before fainting from excessive bleeding, he felt the death nearing him exactly the way he was feeling it approach this day. Only bits of his consciousness chivvied in his sleeping mind not to put up any resistance to approaching death. It was however, just a fast and long sleep that the liquor had forced on him. The fax machine suddenly received activation and started delivering the letter written in Hindi. It didn’t have a letter like start. It was written as if the writer considered it a page from her diary. " Avatar, forgive me for my abandoning you in Birmingham and coming here. I promise, now only my death will take me away from you. If you could wait for just one month, it would have been a surprise for you to find me completely changed. I am fully engaged to become the former Nimmi of Saharanpur. You will say that you don’t care how I look. But I want to look good. I want to look good because I want you and I to look good together if not made for each other. You know many fears have crept into my mind. The fear of my sickly looking unattractive personality, the fear of my inability to detach from and erase the disgrace of my past. But I know that despite all this, you would never give my place in your life to some other woman. This is where a true man never fails. The attractions of the world wield their pulls on him and return ashamed, leaving no mark on his integrity. Avatar, if you can make so many sacrifices for me, then please be kind to agree to come to India and settle here. We were born here; our roots are here only. We can live here as happily as we can in Birmingham. I agree that there are more corrupt people than honest in politics. But there is a future in politics. It would have been my luck if you could make some allowance for disagreeable things of the world of politics. Then nothing would be difficult for us in India. In the beginning, you yourself had been thinking to return to India after your research studies. I don’t know why you have now become determined to stay back. I don’t know whether this letter will reach you before you set off for India. When I left Birmingham, I knew that you would make your life disorderly without me. You can’t understand Avatar. How much it means to a woman that the man she loves, cares for nothing and ruins himself due to absence of her from his life. How selfish the woman is. She has no sympathy for the man who is anxious and is troubled by her absence. On the contrary, she takes pride in that she is the only one in the world without whom, her man can imagine no happiness in his life. I am not an intellectual like you, so I am uncontrollably writing. Now I stop here and start waiting for you to come and take reins of my life. Only yours Nimmi."