Washed Away

As Shekhar sat down to read the newspaper in his cottage verandah, the early morning breeze left the neat placement of the remaining few strands of white hair on his head disturbed. On any other day, he would grow grumpy on such a happening right at the beginning of the day and quickly reach for his small comb in his shirt’s pocket to put them back in their place. Today, though, he didn’t care. After all, the monsoons were knocking on the door. And this morning, with dark clouds splashed across the canvas of the sky, he could smell in the air that rain was on its way which he wished to watch pour from his verandah while reading the newspaper in his purple shirt. Milkman Shambhu, who was passing by Shekhar’s lovely little Ooty cottage after delivering milk in the neighborhood shouted out his greetings to the septuagenarian.  He had grown friends with Shekhar after seeing him with the newspaper every morning in the same spot over the years. “Shekhar Da, looking handsome. Welcoming the rains today in that shirt, eh?,” said an amused Shambhu.


Shekhar raised his hand to acknowledge his question and nodded with a smile while choosing to ignore the shirt bit of the query. It was a very personal choice, after all. Two months ago when Shekhar was on the hospital bed after yet another cardiac arrest, a part of him thought his time was nearing its end. And that’s when it struck him that locked in his wardrobe are shirts, so many of them, that he never ever wore in his life. In those moments, he promised to himself that if he ever got out of that bed, he would spend the rest of the days dressed like an absolute gentleman. Thus, every morning since returning from the hospital, he would get up early, take his bath, put on his favorite powder and get dressed like a man with a long day of work ahead of him. Except that after retirement ages ago and Sulochana’s death two years ago, he now had nowhere to go.


Today, however, looked perfect. Perfectly complementing the petrichor was the smell of the tea kept by his side on the table. As he took a sip out of it while flipping through the newspaper, Shekhar’s eyes fell on a piece of news from a city he had left half a century ago, but one that hadn’t left him all these years. A group of students from Mumbai’s Xavier's College had found themselves at the center of the national limelight after hacking the website of a New York clothing based brand and putting pictures of Indian politicians up for sale. “Crazy generation,” he thought to himself with a gentle chuckle and the newspaper still firmly in his hands as the darkening clouds started to look majestic in the backdrop of the cottage’s lush green lawns.


In the minutes that followed, though, a sense of unease had filled Shekhar. No more could he focus on the news that he had begun to read. The beautiful scenery behind the newspaper also seemed to pale as his mind kept going back to that news about the Mumbai College. A part of him seemed tethered to it. In a moment, he placed the newspaper on the table, took off his glasses and started rubbing his closed eyes with his hand. Suddenly, everything had converged on one thought “What was the name?”


Many years before he had met Sulochana, Shekhar had surrendered his heart to someone else. It was the kind of love that could never flower but one whose roots kept spreading deep beneath the surface. Maybe, it was the times. Maybe it was the circumstances. But the brief affair between the young editor of the city’s favorite daily and a fiery young college girl with dreams of the stars in her eyes had all the ingredients of the blockbusters that graced the silver screen in those days.

It all began with a letter that he had received one day in response to his editorial in the newspaper about the state of trade unions in the city. A young opinionated woman named Prakriti had reservations against some of the claims made in the editorial and minced no words in expressing what she thought about the writer of the piece in her letter to the editor. Taken aback by the response, Shekhar took it personally and quickly arranged for a meeting with this harsh critic of his who he was secretly impressed with as well. All his misgivings evaporated, however, the moment he saw her walk into the Kolar Café, the venue of the first of their many trysts. He knew he was up for a tough fight but the moment she sat down opposite him, he had surrendered arms. In the subsequent minutes, he discovered that the depth in her words was far more than the depth in her bright big eyes and he knew he had reached the point of no return. The writer and his critic would meet several times in the coming months, coming closer with every hour spent by the sea on the Marine Drive.


Soon, things fell apart as quickly as they had begun to build up. Work took Shekhar away from the city and Prakriti. A high flying Prakriti also found herself aboard a plane to Europe to study further a couple of years after they had first met. There were promises of coming back, but none said aloud. Equally muted was Shekhar’s expression of his hopes of her return.


In those days of no internet or mobile phones, the distance sounded a death knell to their rapidly growing story. To Shekhar, Bombay no more seemed the same without Prakriti. The vibrant, never sleeping city had turned into a desert sans his oasis. In his heart, he kept on hoping she would come back and try to put back on wheels what had been set in motion with that innocuous letter to the editor. In time, his hope faded too. His heart was crushed at how she never asked him to wait for her and seven months after leaving the country, sent him a letter exhorting him to move ahead in life with someone as she had chosen to with her new British boyfriend.


The departure left a gaping void filled with a myriad of unanswered questions. For months, he remained awake in his little Bombay room staring at the ceiling for hours and asking himself questions of all sorts and imagining a host of 'what if' scenarios. One day, when the endless loop of sleepless nights and cruel mornings juddered to a halt, he decided to leave the city for good with a promise of never looking back at it again.


From that day onwards, he waged an exhausting battle to keep everything that was Bombay at bay. Except that the battle kept on defeating him. They say time heals. But that's a lie. Time only pushes moments and events behind in your memory. Years, newer events and people fill life to help put a distance between you and the memory you want to hold on to or forget. One such new addition to Shekhar’s life was Sulochana, an endearing woman his parents chose for him when they began worrying about their son's extreme dedication to work.


A calm and quiet Sulochana was the perfect foil to a now workaholic Shekhar who settled seemingly smoothly in his marriage but kept feelings of anger, hurt and despair in his heart. Truth be told, emotions like these are water, that when kept in a cold heart freeze into unbreakable masses. The memory of his time with Prakriti and his days in her city had turned into another such unbreakable mass of anguish, one that he kept hidden from the world and even Sulochana. The page of their story that she had torn from her book, Shekhar merely folded numerous times to make it invisible to the casual eye. But it existed. And on many a sleepless nights, it would all come flooding back to him and he would play those moments back in his head. Not before the couple was blessed with a lovely daughter that he decided to lock those memories in a nondescript corner of his heart.


Today morning after so many years, that teacup overflowing with memories left still and untouched for ages had been disturbed. As Shekhar once again tried to play back those memories in his mind, a little piece of information kept eluding him. "What was the name? What was the name of her college?"


It had been 15 minutes since that piece of news had forced him to dive deep into the pool of memories but upon landing he found himself trying to swim in a frozen creek. It was suffocating to be not able to remember. It was as if he had locked himself out of his own secret house of memories. The key that he thought was tucked in his back pocket all this while had gone missing when he started looking for it.


Dark clouds now had filled the skies completely over the little cottage and the grass in the lawns had begun to get moist, now wearing a more soothing tinge of green. But it had all blurred for Shekhar. The silence of the early morning was punctuated by Shekhar's angst-filled mumblings. He had grown angry at himself like a child who had carelessly lost his precious possession. What was it that took away from him that memory? He wondered. Was it the travails of time and age or was it he himself who was to blame?


"How could you forget, you damn fool?" For once, it seemed the most important thing that was ever there to know to the old man. "You did it. Yes, you." Shekhar mumbled to himself with his head arched backward and eyes closed. The voice in his head screamed back at him in disdain, “Didn't you always want this? To forget? Look, It's happening. The monster of memory, it's going. It's leaving you. Finally. For how long have you yearned to forget? Rejoice! It's liberation. A long pending one.”  


Sweat beads had started forming on his forehead as Shekhar experienced the excruciating pain of being torn between two emotions on the opposite sides of the spectrum. Truth be told, he didn't know how he felt. A knot developed in his throat as his heart started racing. There was a relief, a sense of lightness that he hadn’t experienced in ages. But there was a grief too, the kind that a kid experiences when he loses his paper boat in the stream, knowing that the stream never flows backward and it’s gone forever. Did he want to retrieve what was lost? Maybe. Would he retrieve it anymore? Maybe not, for with the pain of the loss, there was a tiredness he couldn’t take anymore of burdening this memory alone. But there was a pain, nonetheless. A lot of it.


And then there were questions. Perplexing ones that never came with answers. Not even today. What was causing this consternation when this should have been a source of relief? Why was he trying to hold on to what was never his? Long buried, the questions had started raising their ugly head once again as the tea went cold beside him on the table. An avalanche of memories had now been set in motion. While his mind was still scrounging through the mountain pile of memories, there was a pain in his heart that he hitherto didn't know of. Tired of digging the burial grounds of his past, he closed his eyes. Sleep, life had taught him, was the most underrated anaesthetic, a refuge he had often sought from unforgiving questions.


It was close to noon and the skies had opened up to give the little hill station its wettest morning in years. It was the kind of rain that Shekhar would start waiting for at the beginning of every summer. Post-retirement, his longing for it had grown stronger as age had made summers all the more unbearable for this pluviophile.


The rains had arrived but there was no Shekhar to wait for them today.