Sreenath Sreenivasan

‘Tell me a bedtime story, bhai,’ pleaded Radha to her elder brother Raman.

‘I hope you remember you are going to get married tomorrow! And here you come with the same pleading as you used to as a child!’ said Raman with unmistakable affection.

Raman had shouldered the responsibility of their household since he was merely 10 years old. He’d never had the opportunity to go to school. Nevertheless, through his diligent industry, he had managed to provide well for his widowed mother and aurally-challenged sister. He’d had to grow up far too soon under the looming shadow of responsibility. But it was his sister who still had access to the child inside Raman.

Owing to her hearing disability, Radha suffered from learning issues early on in life. It was only after Raman could afford a hearing aid did her education take wing. With this elegant device, she could listen clearer than ever before. Gradually she learned to comprehend and converse in her mother tongue, Hindi. She began her formal studies in a school when she was 10. Today, at age 23, she was the only lettered person in their ancestry. She’d managed to find work as a teller at the local co-operative bank where she’d met her fiancé, Govind. She’d enabled other little girls in her village to dream big. She was the light of the household.

Radha, still a little girl around her elder brother, wanted to enjoy the last day at home before she gets married and leaves for her husband’s place, as was the custom in the village.

Raman was resting on a coir bed in the veranda of their freshly painted pucca house, one of the few in their village. She sat on the floor, rested her cheek on the bed and wore a look in the eye that she knew would melt her brother’s heart.

Radha had heard her first story only when she’d developed her aural comprehension to a fair degree, at around age 14. Perhaps the belated foray of storytelling in her life was the reason for her fascination for tales from lands far and beyond. So, on every visit to his village from the city, along with the gifts he would bring for his family, Raman would also lug a satchel full of stories for Radha.

The faint aroma of drying henna glistened Raman’s eyes. Hoping to find expression through a story than a teardrop, he took a deep breath and asked,

‘What kind of a story would you like to listen to tonight?’

‘Tell me about your childhood. What is the first visual memory you have? What’s the first sound that you remember hearing? Something that you will never forget?’ asked Radha.

‘Don’t you want to hear a nicer, happier story?’

‘No. Today I want to learn about my brother’s childhood.’

Raman wondered how to evade this innocent inquiry. That familiar expression, of a restless search for an excuse, surfaced on Raman’s face. Radha could read him like a book.

‘Come on, bhai!’ she wheedled.

‘It is a long story.’

‘I am all ears,’ she said, trying hard to muffle a yawn.

‘Look at you. You will fall asleep halfway like every other time!’

‘No, I won’t, I promise!’

‘Why the sudden curiosity about my first memory?’

‘Well, because I was wondering today, what my first visual and aural memory in life is. And I remembered the day when you’d finally managed to ride a bicycle without holding the handle bar. How boastful you were! And that day, while showing off to me, you’d bumped into the neighbour’s bull and gotten flung into a pit full of cow dung. I can never forget that image. And that squealing that even my deaf ear was able to feel! Your artificially amplified cries did little to help you gain any sympathy. How useless was that gimmick!’ Radha shared amid irrepressible bouts of laughter.

‘As much as I’d like to forget that, you would not allow me to, would you?’ asked a red-cheeked Raman.

Radha tried hard to stop laughing but the fruitless effort only magnified the mirth of the moment.

‘Shh… You’ll wake up Maa!’

As she recovered gradually, she said, ‘And the first sound I remember is hearing my name in your voice, at the doctor’s clinic, right after I got the hearing aid. The first time I heard laughter, yours and mine, at the clinic. That is a priceless memory.

I wanted to share this with you. My first visual and aural memory is of you, bhai!’

Raman smiled as he reclined onto the comforting cushion of nostalgia.

‘Does your first memory have something to do with me? My birth perhaps? You must have been a 5 year old then!’

‘Well, that would have to be my second memory in life, the moment of your birth. My first memory is of a day before you were born.’

‘Tell me about it!’

A solemn silence filled the void in the moments that followed. Raman seemed as if in deep thought. Not because he was trying to think hard about his first memory. That memory was indelible. He was wondering if it would be right to share it with her sister, a night before the auspicious day of her marriage. But he felt Radha deserved a peek into the recesses of his childhood. He heaved a sigh and spoke.

‘I was living with our father in Nagpur during that phase of my life. He used to work as a labourer at a food processing unit. One day, father received a message from a fellow-labourer who’d just returned from a visit to our village.

Our grandfather was not doing well at that time. He was due to leave the earthly plane anytime soon it seemed then. Our mother was nearing the end of her third trimester while she was pregnant with you. Father had borrowed beyond his means from money lenders in the city and had no money left to buy a train ticket back to the village. So, in utter desperation, he decided to bicycle all the way to our village. Since he couldn’t leave me alone, he strapped me onto the carrier of the bicycle and I became the clueless pillion rider.

I don’t remember much of the week-long journey to the village. I was semi-conscious for most of the journey due to hunger and exhaustion. It was on a rainy evening that father and I reached home, two days before you were born.

Our mother was overjoyed to see us back at home. She could barely walk at that time, with you in her womb. At that moment, she must have thought that the days of pain, sadness, and separation were finally over. But fate had other plans.

The rain grew intense with each passing hour. The thatched roof of our house was bravely fighting the onslaught of the wind and rain. But soon, father realised that the roof had to be secured, else we’d end up without a roof on our head in the middle of the night. Father, even with his deathly exhaustion, worked all alone and secured a tarp over the roof, aided by the flashes of lightning on that dark night.

He came back inside the house and went straight to see our grandfather. In the feeble light of a flickering oil lamp, he tried to converse with his ailing father. Their shadows shivered ominously on the weakening mud-plastered wall. Our grandpa could hardly see anything. He touched and felt my face and a smile surfaced through all the creases of pain engraved on his face. Our father sat on the ground and watched over grandpa all night. Mother and I fell asleep watching that pious union, with a hazy picture of a complete family in our memory.

The next morning, the whole neighbourhood woke up to a deafening cry. Our mother bawled hysterically while trying to wake our father and Grandpa from sleep. But both of them had transcended to the plane of no return.

I remember being whisked away to the neighbour’s house through the slush of mud on the streets, in an attempt to shield me from the horror.

Our mother was inconsolable. The whole village had come to a standstill.

Later in the day, I remember being handed a burning log of wood. I lit a fire on two piles of wood on the banks of the Saryu river. I stood there quietly and saw the flames engulf the cold bodies of my ancestors.

That visual is the first vivid memory of my life. An inferno that roared to reach the sky. And the first aural record is my mother’s spine-chilling scream that I woke up to that morning.

The next morning, after painless labour, she delivered you. It seemed as if pain, as an act of compassion, had decided to not inflict itself on our mother anymore.

In a few months, it was discovered that you couldn’t hear so well. Some villagers saw you as a bad omen. The legend grew that the absence of cries of labour pain during your delivery, our mother’s still silence, was the reason for your near deafness, for the silence in your life. But mother never saw you the way the villagers did. She believed that you will learn to hear and speak soon.

She felt guilty for the silence in your life. The whole village was convinced of the reason behind your deafness. But mother knew, as I did, that the reason for your deafness could well be, her deafening scream the day before your birth.

But the hearing-aid has changed everything, hasn’t it, Radha?’

The bride to be had succumbed to a night of beauty sleep. Raman added a number to all the stories that Radha had never heard in its entirety.

He gently took off the hearing aid from Radha’s ear. Bearing a satiated soul, he fell asleep looking at his sister’s seraphic face.

When Sheela held her hands up to undo her hair from a bun, her blouse could hardly contain her tender voluptuousness.
Kartar Singh, seated on the bed with her, was sweating profusely. And that wasn’t because he had never been with a woman before, or that he was in a brothel for the first time in his life.

While Sheela had ample experience in the sleeping business and was due to undress at any moment now, Kartar felt underprepared and overdressed for what he had come to accomplish.

Nervously, he got up and checked if the door was properly bolted. Sheela couldn’t contain her fountain of laughter on seeing the flustered rookie. She was used to men with raging hormones who’d be spent within moments from when they stepped on top of her. But this case would be much longer, she surmised. Maybe she’d have to undo his pants herself, so she thought.

She dimmed the lights of the kerosene lamp. In a slow, inviting manner, she undid a hook of her blouse.

There had been a power outage in the neighbourhood. The dark room smelt of damp wood, betel nut and cheap perfume. The growling clouds in the sky gave an ominous forecast for the night.

Sheela took Kartar’s hand and put it on her chest. The wayward wind rattled the ageing windows, startling them both. The rain felt just moments away. Sheela got up with a sigh and turned around to close the window.

When she turned around, what she saw made her shriek like a frightened mouse. Kartar Singh had lost a garment.

It wasn’t his pants. It wasn’t his shirt.

It was his beard and moustache.

Sheela was shocked to find the greengrocer across the street, Vinod, seated on the bed. For long had he been watching her in hope from his shop across the narrow street in this damned red-light district of the city. They’d never spoken before. Sheela didn’t speak Hindi. But what does language have to do with communicating an intense longing? She had been observing his furtive, love-filled glances for far too long. Their eyes had been meeting merely once a week, the only time when she came to dry her laundry in the balcony. Mondays at noon.

Sheela could understand why he was on that bed. But couldn’t understand why he had to come in a disguise. Confused, she sat on the bed.

Vinod took her hands in his. They were cold as ice. He rubbed them gently to warm her up. She didn’t breathe a word. The cold nonchalance in her being had deserted her.

She shivered from the draft seeping through the cracks in the window. Vinod undid his bright red turban layer by layer and draped it around Sheela’s half-naked body. It was the same shade of red as her saree.

The sultry seductress felt a nakedness she’d never experienced before. She shed a tear, then she whimpered, and then it began to rain.

Amid blinding lightning and deafening thunder, she cried.

Vinod put his hand on her thigh. It had a tender touch that had no intention of venturing anywhere beyond. It was a touch of reassurance, from a gender that had only broken Sheela’s spirit ever since she’d known life.

She was crying not because she’d been robed respectfully for the first time in life. She cried because she realised that she’d begun to see everyone in the world, especially men, as heartless beasts. She had begun to look at herself the way other men did, as a body meant to be derived pleasure from.

Through Vinod’s gesture of draping her in the turban’s cloth, she felt the possibility of having dignity in life. She felt the weight of all the men she’d had to sleep with, on her soul. She breathed heavily amid snuffles.

Vinod smiled. He took out a tubular plastic toy from his pocket. He uncorked the top of the cylinder and took a little plastic handle out of the toy. It was dripping with a soapy solution. As he blew into it, a flurry of bubbles floated in the room.
Sheela felt distracted and attracted, from and towards the right things.

Vinod dipped the handle in the solution again and held it in front of the crevice in the window. The incoming winds gave rise to more bubbles in the room. The wind was changing.

Vinod dipped again and held it in front of Sheela’s face. She breathed deeply, perhaps for the first time in her life, and blew.

Thus they played, as the rain pelted on the roof above. They felt as if they had spent a distant childhood, in a distant life, together. That’s what bubbles do to a suppressed soul.

It took them an hour to finally embrace each other. It was a new feeling for both of them. Vinod had never embraced a woman, and all the men Sheela had been with had never bothered to embrace her. Had it been an ordinary night with a customer, Sheela would have had to undress and sleep with a stranger, like a draining day at undignified work. But today, she curled in the warmth of the long red turban, and Vinod’s shy embrace.

What was this feeling? Was she ready to accept it the way it was?

Time flew. But Vinod had only reached halfway in the execution of his plan. He had his eye on the clock. He took a letter out of his pocket and presented it to her. It was written in Telugu, the language Sheela spoke. But alas, she couldn’t read. All she could understand was the little heart scribbled at the end of the short message in the letter.

For the first time that night, Sheela looked straight into Vinod’s eyes. Vinod allowed her to read him. His gaze was a disarming surrender. To Sheela, it felt like an invitation to a place called home. After an eternity, she nodded and held Vinod’s hands wanting to never let it go. That was all Vinod had been seeking all these years.

It rained all night, flooding the entire red-light district. The next morning, as the brothel owner came wading through the water on the street, he felt a rude shock. Not from the electric wires dangling from the poles into the water . It was a different kind of wire. A red saree and a red turban were tied end to end and fastened onto the window sill of Sheela’s room. That garment just managed to reach the puddles of water on the street. A familiar slipper was floating near the runnel.

In a frenzy, the brothel owner hurried up to the first floor to check on Sheela’s room. A pair of fake beard and moustache lay on the floor. A letter blotted out by tears fluttered on the bed.
Only the little heart at the end of the letter remained.