Rolling back by 42 years

He was standing near the policed barrier that was zero point for reaching Ram Janam Bhoomi Garbh Sthal. Mobiles, pens, radio- transistors, cigarette lighters and anything incomprehensible were to be deposited in a cloakroom here. Then as he proceeded beyond zero line, no of armed police and commandoes presence mushroomed. At strategic points, which the security analysts had worked out, the commandoes guarded the points in full alert bellicose position behind bulwarks of sand bags. The walkway was fully enclosed on all sides by heavy grilled alloy steel. Security check was multi-layered. At each end of the 4 security checks beyond the zero line, you are frisked very thoroughly and any objectionable item of flimsy doubt can be retained till the last security check. Every commando and policeman or woman has ruthless looking lethal rifles.

Then finally after half a kilometer walk passing successfully all security checks, when you reach the exact spot, a pundit from behind will say, “ this is Ram Janam Bhoomi. Don’t overstay here.” The prohibitive steel enclosure is even here some six feet away from the sacred rostrum on which an idol of Lord Ram is established. The sacred rostrum with the Lord Ram’s idol was as sequestered, inaccessible and prohibitive to get closer for any human being as is the character of Hindi alphabet Anga. No word starts with an Anga. No word has an anga in its spelling. That’s how it all looked.

The sugar mill where his father used to work had shut down a decade before. When his father died in 1967, they all had left this place. He had returned here after 42 years. All houses of the colony were still there- abandoned; long rusted; and completely dilapidated with outgrowth of wild bushes inside the houses with missing doors and windows. He was afraid that he would not be able to pinpoint the house where they used to live 42 years before. But Manager Khanna’s house, which was bigger and better than the rest proved to be a landmark. He remembered that his father’s house used to be right in front of Khanna’s bungalow. Khanna’s bungalow stood there just like a worn and wasted Moughal gun and his house as the bulwark ahead of the gun. He immediately knew his house from this lead and remembered every details of the façade of his house now. There was a lock on the house door but there was a small fractured hole in the wooden door. He peeped through the little opening and could see the courtyard, the living rooms, the storeroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom when he lived here at his age of nine.

Exiting the colony, he walked with his memory confirming that he was rightly moving towards his missionary primary school- James Harvey Memorial School. The school still functioned. He met the new principal of the school and gave him one of his literary publications. He just chanced to come across a man outside his hut who turned out to be a man living there since 1961 or so. He, Ram Laxman Sharma, studied in the same missionary school and knew many of his classmates. Two of his classmates stayed even now in the dilapidated colony. He bought a piece of art from Sharma, talked with him and his father for some time and then before leaving, he gave Sharma copies of some of his overseas engineering research publications and some of his literary publications to show to his classmates when he chanced to meet them. He was sure that it was enough to spread now after 42 years that the destitute child of late Hansraj and late Subhadra was now a world renowned engineer and literary writer. This would give his father’s soul in a long melancholy of 42 years, a sudden relief and equanimity. His father had died in 1967 knowing full well that his minor children might not have a suitable refuge or any refuge at all. This must have stayed in his father's mind as the last thought agonizing him untill his death. This thought might have impregnated into his soul and like a sepulchral source of eternal pain, it must have never let his soul rest in peace in these 42 years. Now with everybody knowing there in Nawabganj where the father died, that his destitute minor son at the time of his death had made into a research engineer and literary writer well known in the international cognoscenti, the son could almost feel that the guilty soul of his dead father was now resting into an equanimity. Do you remember carom game if you have played it in childhood. In a carom game, here only cover and queen coins were left out with the pocketing of cover never materializing after pocketing of the queen. It was now, after innumerable attempts, that it had happened.

After leaving the new Principal’s residence, he had been to his old primary school also for some time. This too he immediately recreated in his memory. The same row of classrooms in a line facing a covered courtyard made the little building of the school look like an old dollar bill still in transaction after 42 years. Only the details of the bill were getting faded now.

Now he had to go to Ayodhya so walked to the railway station of Nawabganj. The small railway station of Nawabganj stood there exactly as it was in 1967, only little more withered than in 1967 but less worn by age than other buildings. As earlier, few trains would stop there and take you to Ayodhya/Faizabad or on the other side to Mankapur. The railway staion stood there functioning ; but it had seen the sugar colony, at a stone’s throw, being vacated after closure of the mill; had seen the windows and doors of the houses being uninstalled and bricks of the floors removed; had seen the outgrowth of wilderness inside the thus deserted and decayed houses. So it stood there functioning al right; but with a pain for the destruction of colony’s life; as if a window on one direction was closed permanently to disallow sunlight from that side.

Next he had to go to Ayodhya where he and his mother stayed for some time after death of his father in 1967. He reached in the vicinity of the place where they used to stay. From there, he could espy the narrow right angle turn from a distance that he remembered too well. Narrowly spaced walls of the arroyo making it a squeezing turn were in a much bad disaster by time and were standing erect with a struggle, badly aged as they were. From there he could remember all the turnings which would take him to this or that place. The house where he with his mother lived in Ayodhya after death of his father in nearby Nawabganj, would be at the end the gully after entering the 90 degree turn. As thought, the house stood there though modified in many ways with renewals. Then there was a cut out in the right hand wall to go to the other side where SHAKHA (RSS) classes used to be held in the court yard of a temple. Behind the temple, there would be a steep sloping brick road. In the days of 1968, when a challenge was thrown by a friend, he rode down on a cycle with brakes not much reliable. He fell having sustained a severe internal wound in the feet bone. That protuberance of feet bone was still there in his feet. It was as if one was recreating the entire history of his chronic illness to a doctor, gradually recalling in bits what happened after which.

Now he had to return to Solan in Himachal from where he had come. He had rented a room in Solan. At 5.30 he would be up and go out for tea. He would come out the room, go up and go down stairs to come out of the house, and then start up a steep sloping concrete road that would merge with the Highway above. Near the merger a teawala would open up his kiosk early in the morning. As he reached the kiosk, he saw these 5-6 no concrete pipes of about one and a half feet internal bore. The pipes were stacked disorderly on one another making a pyramid with their bores pointing towards the depths and swathes of valley. It looked as if some engineer had tried to align the topmost pipe’s bore with the most beautiful point in the valley by various adjustments of the axes of the stacked pipes.

He would walk up all the mall road early in the mornings and would stop at the only shop open at that time.He would open up first in market; he sold cigarettes, cigars, all junk food, and so on. Also he was a local Vaidya ( a Homeopathic doctor). He would open in early morning because people wanted the things he sold at that time and he believed that he would do better medicine work in early morning hours only. So patients would queue up outside his shop. He would equally divide his time in the two diametrically opposite activities in his shop. He would attend a customer of cigarettes and junk food; he would leave the next customer waiting and go to his patient client in queue. One he would attend there also and return to waiting cigarette seeker. For ensuring good quality, what they do in assembly machine shops is doing component and cast body inspections, completing the assembly of components on cast body with full tight fasteners and conducting a running test;then striping the assembly of components from body to back to see whether the components matched well and made injurious marks on the cast body sitting surfaces or not?

In the evening he would sit in a park that was situated just in the heart of the Mallroad of Solan. It was a clear uninhibited view of the tiny Solan railway station from this height in the Park. Under the site of the park, a tunnel ran to let the toy train pass. Presently without any train the railway station, fenced on one side by railway premises and on the other by trees perched at the acme of an upstream boscage of the valley, looked from the park’s height like an empty glass for drinks, which would be filled up gradually by pouring in of a fresh juice; that’s something what the arriving train would do to the scene as it would come trudging and halt at the station fenced on both sides as above. Then the liquid in the glass would deplete with the departing train as if somebody drank the juice in fast swigs.

Thus now he was alone in Solan ; disburdened from deterrents; enjoying and seeing his being sequestered bless him with equanimity of mind. Earlier he was buried under his problems; at the old place he was like a large mirror in which multitude of moving persons, vehicles, crowded offices, reprimanding proprietors, bullying juniors and what not left reflections without a break, hidden behind which his creativity had hardly ever any room for appearance. Now the mirror was all to his creativity. He could see just a single reflection of his creativity in the mirror; in the image’s isolation there was a tangible presence of plenary details and clarity.

He had come to Shimla to buy a notebook computer; but in the train only he changed his opinion and decided to spend just a few hours in the markets of Shimla, then return to Solan. He was roaming with nothing to do in Shimla’s Upper and Lower markets. He was just looking on the things displayed; not in the least having any reason to inquire any further in those shops. Had it been earlier times of 2006 backwards, he, his wife and his son would have mixed up in these crowds in the shops- admiring clothes, art pieces, even plastic ware, watches, music CDs, and what not. But now any purpose for doing this was sliced off his life. Here he was alone again, after 24 years. But it was of his own volition. He himself wanted to make him a sequestered entity. He thought rivers are dieing; there were times when rivers trespassed their banks, and went short distances sideways into swathes of the vegetation or sandy soil on their banks in addition to their regular frontal flow. Rivers are changing into canals, which flow only forward in restricting lateral walls.