Gone girls

As he ambled out of the Operation Theatre, barely being able to support himself, he felt his phone vibrate ferociously in his pocket for the umpteenth time that evening and knowing, who it was, he did not answer it. Seeing an empty chair, he slumped into it, allowing his tensed body to relax for the first time in hours. There was, however no scope of relaxation for his mind. Tears rolled down his lightly-bearded cheeks as his lachrymal glands succumbed to immense neural torture.

The dam had burst and now his mind raced through his life- flicking through image after image with an uttered word here and a heated argument there, sprinkled with generous does of loving moments and spoonful of disagreements , all garnished in blurred monochrome. Finally it stopped at a singular image, which had first popped into his head when he had returned home to find his wife lying on the bedroom floor in a pool of blood. The image of where it all started.

He still remembered the day he met her very clearly – it was a memory that his brain was not willing to forget. The setting was nothing dramatic. It had been a cool monsoon evening in Kolkata and his eyes had fallen upon her while he had been trying to locate his seat aboard the Delhi-bound Jet Airways flight. She had been seated on the seat adjacent to his and he had continued to take stolen glances at her while shoving his suitcase into the compartment above. Having made himself comfortable he had taken out his cell phone and was searching his pockets for his earphones when she had volunteered, “Lost something?” He had mumbled something inaudible and still embarrassed had vehemently shaken his head, which, as he remembered with a smile on his tear-soaked lips, had caused her to laugh out loud. The ice, having been broken and the earphones forgotten, that had been the beginning of it all.

As his mind reverted back to the present, he realized that it had been the beginning of the end. Five days together in Delhi had made sure that they knew each other too well to be simply acquaintances. On their return to Kolkata, they had exchanged addresses to keep the phone numbers, previously exchanged, company and one thing had led to another and a flight together had translated into frequent coffee breaks and stolen meetings in restaurants and lounges and soon their friendship had blossomed into something more meaningful and both had started to introduce each other to friends and family. He had attended her sister’s wedding and had quite a nice time too, dancing without a care in the world, under the groggy effect of alcohol albeit. She had in turn attended his mother’s funeral and provided ample solace to the grieving son who had been bereaved. Their closeness had become the talk of the lanes and by-lanes around their residences and the topic of hushed conversations in both their offices. These conversations annoyed him- could a man and a woman not be just friends? He had thought that the childish link-ups would have left his back once he had left the four walls of the college building but clearly he had been proved wrong. She, however, knew that she was falling for him and even though she had tried to talk herself out of it , slowly but surely she was losing control over her Platonic feelings.

As he looked at his watch, he realized that it was already a new day. Only two hours back, his life was about as perfect as it could get- a loving wife, two children who jumped onto his the moment he returned home and everything he could have asked for when he had passed out of college. A lot had happened in the two hours, however, that had wrecked his life and perhaps changed it forever. He thought back to how he had rushed home an hour back, ran up the stairs and opened the bedroom door with the sense of foreboding making his heart pound on his chest feverishly. The sight that welcomed him did not help ease the pressure on his heart but having been blessed with a cool head he managed to quickly dial the hospital and then his sister, the former to save his wife and the latter to take the children for the night. Perspiring heavily on a cool monsoon evening, he bandaged his wife’s slit wrist and cleaned the blood from her body and carried her downstairs. Without changing out of his blood-soaked shirt he accompanied his senseless wife into the ambulance and urged the driver to drive faster. In 10 minutes he ambled out of the OT.

His phone vibrated ferociously in his pocket. He sighed and taking it out, switched it off. He already had one uneasy conscience to answer to for now. He sighed again and cleared his parched throat. He was thirsty but neither did he have the strength to get up to quench his thirst nor could he brush away the fact from his mind that the sequence of events that threatened to turn his life into ashes had all started with a glass of water. His mind wandered back to the water-cooler near his cubicle in his office about two hours back when he had been taken aback. She was the last person he had expected in his office in the middle of the day but he suppressed his astonishment at her sudden appearance and proceeded to hear what she had to say. His sudden inability to talk had not been helped by the fact that she had been wearing the same shirt that she had worn when they had first met.

His pulse had quickened gradually, the smile had vanished from his face, his eyebrows had gradually arched into a frown and beads of perspiration had appeared on his forehead with every word that she uttered. He wanted to make her stop but he also wanted to hear the extent of damage that had been caused. When she had finished and sighed, gulping down the water from his glass, he had risen and cursing himself for forgetting his cell-phone at home, walked out of the office before anyone could stop him.

In the car, his mind had been not on the road and the drive home was all a blur now. All that his mind had focused on was the imaginary memory of his wife receiving the call on his cellphone and listening to a female voice exonerating her love for him. She was possessive, he had thought but perhaps she would not do anything rash. His hope had disappeared with time and by the time he had parked his car outside his front door, he had just prayed for her life. Having seen his cell phone on the floor, near the front door his hope had vapourised and he had rushed upstairs. Something had broken inside him as he had run in on his wife lying in a pool of blood.

As he sighed and stared longingly at the doors that opened into the OT, he wished, foolishly, that the doors would swing open and his wife would step out in her favourite sari, majestically sweeping her fingers through the air, showing off her Bengali pride but moments turned into minutes and yet the door remained firmly shut. As he took off his spectacles and allowed the tears to flow freely, he wished he had not forgotten to pack his earphones that day and how he wished he had not forgotten his cellphone today.

About ten kilometres away, she tried to call him again but his cellphone was still switched off. Her hands trembled as she withdrew a pair of earphones from her pocket, the same that had fallen out of his bag on that plane to Delhi, which she had never returned, and clutching them close to her heart she jumped off the bridge into the Ganges.

The doors of the OT swung open and he looked up hopefully, just in time to see the doctor walk slowly towards him.

“Sorry”,Dr.Dutta uttered, placing his hand softly on his shoulder, as he stood up.

He collapsed back onto the chair.

The Injustice of Equality

If half a century down the line a book is ever written on the wars that had been fought fifty years back, then the war-cry that must be featured in the book has to be ‘Equality’. No matter what battle is being fought, be it at the macroscopic global level or the microscopic societal level, it is based on one and only one war-cry and that is ‘Equality’. The global villagers are up in arms demanding equality in the workplace, in educational institutions, in boardrooms of multi-national conglomerates, in parliaments across nations and most importantly amongst themselves.

The most controversial demands for equality being made today are perhaps in the context of gender and sexuality. Now to start off, the very concept of ‘Gender Equality’ baffles me – it is confusing in its very core because it tries to equate to unequal entities which as anyone with basic knowledge of Mathematics will tell you, is not possible unless there is a ‘division by 0’ involved somewhere. Man and woman were created (by God or by a fusion of sperm and ova, depending on your religious inclinations) to be different in many respects. If you had paid attention to the Biology lectures in secondary school, you would have realized that men and women are physically different and are wired differently internally – both in terms of internal plumbing and mental acuity. Men and women react differently to different situations and think differently and beyond the similarity of white bones and red flesh barely any similarities exist. Having established, for the sake of the people incapable of complete use of their perceptive powers despite existence of all necessary senses, the fact that men and women are different, we can now focus on the second part of the problem.

The concept of ‘Gender Equality’ is absurd for the simple reason that it is not possible. Actions supporting ‘Gender Equality’ tend to me reactions against a patriarchal society which defeats its purpose completely. The present concept of ‘Gender Equality’ goes something like this –“If my husband cheats on me , it means I now have the right to cheat on him and he cannot say a thing about it” or “If a man molests and physically assaults a woman it is a crime but if a woman does the same to a man , he probably deserved it” or “If a man lecherously gazes at a woman it is derogatory yet if a woman does the same then it is unrequited love”. I can go on and on about such examples but that is not the point – the point is that equality is a utopic dream of a fool, not a possibility which can be successfully translated into reality. The aim of ‘gender activists’ seems to be projecting ‘women as the new men’ which is absurd and completely detrimental for society. Women don’t need to be men-like for them to be taken seriously or for them to deserve a place in society – they don’t need to smoke cigarettes to prove that they can, they don’t need to sleep around to prove that they can, they don’t need to be molesters and assaulters to prove that they can.

Men have made mistakes in the past and society has suffered because of those mistakes. It makes no sense for women to repeat the same mistakes in the name of ‘woman empowerment’ or ‘feminism’ – the concept of ‘If a man can do it, a woman can’ has to be done away with because I am sure a man can never do what a woman can. Women must be able to be comfortable in their own space, as women knowing that the monthly torture that they go through cannot be survived by an average male (“Mard ko dard hota hain”), as women knowing that they , only they, have been entrusted with the power to bring new life onto the planet. The ability of a woman to be a woman, who menstruates, who can give birth is not her weakness- It is her power.

If society is to truly move forward with both men and women leading from the front, then our aim should be towards ‘Gender Justice’, not ‘Gender Equality’ because in a country of over a billion and a world of over a hundred billion- where diversity is the be-all and end-all – equality cannot be achieved but justice can be extended. The steps must be pro-active rather than re-active and if any semblance of progress is to be achieved then serious efforts must be made to save the girl child, not to allow her a life amidst household chores and servitude but a life where she is educated, not merely schooled, allowed to love, not merely married off and allowed to be proud to be a woman, not merely ordered to look up to men. There must not be reservations for women in education or service but instead the ability of women to prove themselves as women amongst men must be respected. Women must be given every service made available to men, nothing more, nothing less because when two unequal beings are placed on an equal footing to start with then justice has not been denied.

Men and women can never be equal. They should never be equal because they, in their own way, shape our global village and in their diversity, their difference lies their strength. However, men and women can be given a just opportunity to prove their mettle, can be placed at the same starting line with none advantaged unfairly and to be placed at the same starting line, to be given the same opportunities to perform it is not necessary for women to lower themselves to the level of fallen men or for men to be pulled down from their pedestals but instead it is necessary for women to rise in their own eyes as women.

It is the collective duty of all men to ensure that justice is not denied because in a society where women aspire to be the ‘new’ men, there can be no place for us. Hence it is our duty to make us see women for what they really and truly are because without women, men will become extinct eventually. The society needs women and men of character, not pretenders and characters. 

The Last Plan

As the train chugged into Dum Dum junction, the crowd which had been thickening for quite some time now got ready for the daily ritual. Men grabbed onto other men and yet somehow managed to extend a few fingers towards the handle on the door of the incoming train. By utilizing the full potential of every finger, by pushing every sinew to the edge and by squeezing and twisting their flabby bodies into every available inch of space, modern men prepared for war. As the train shuddered to a slow halt, men rapidly placed feet on anything they could find. There were feet on feet, on metal, on leather, on cloth and barely any space to sustain more feet but still men found space not only to squeeze in more feet but entire bodies with heavy luggage. The heads inside the compartments let out sighs of exultation and those on the platform sighs of exasperation.

Amidst all the sweaty foreheads and flailing hands, Dinesh’s eyes, ever so ready to spot windows, literal or those of opportunities, spotted Mr. Bhowmick. The short and portly man had managed to secure a seat and his blue and purple checked half-shirt, laden with sweat and toil, hung loosely over his tired body. His fingers danced on his cheap leather bag which adorned his lap beneath which invisible to Dinesh was a pair of grey trousers torn in two places. His feet were dressed in a pair of sandals which he had worn ceaselessly for the last sixteen years.

“Bhowmick”, called out Dinesh over the sound of the engine which had hummed back to life. The portly man seemed not to hear as he stared absent-mindedly at the window. Dinesh was about to call out again when the old man standing in front of him, whom Dinesh knew only by face and not by name, interjected,” Leave him alone. He’s worried about losing his job.”

“Why?” asked Dinesh tentatively.

“Change in government is imminent”, murmured the old man.

Dinesh nodded knowingly and turned away.

As the train strolled into Sodepur station, Mr. Bhowmick got up and twisted and turned himself towards the gate and as the train stopped, the swarm of people pushed out Mr. Bhowmick depositing him onto the platform. Mr. Bhowmick started to amble towards the exit stairs as the train chugged out of the station. Dinesh looked out of the window hoping for an opportunity to wave goodbye but Mr. Bhowmick did not turn around. He simply looked up and sighed, peeked into his Sonata watch and sighed again. He knew exactly what he was walking home to, just like every other day.

After the routine 15 minute walk, as he turned left Mr. Bhowmick was not greeted by the usual dark, empty lane and the house at the end of it but a lane filled with people and smoke emanating from the house at the end of the lane. The house could hardly be seen by Mr. Bhowmick , partly because of the smoke which clouded his vision but mostly because all of Sodepur seemed to have gathered inside that tiny lane to watch a spectacle. As the bag slipped off his shoulders and his body went limp, someone placed a hand on his shoulder, someone else made him sit down on the road and some third person poured water into his open mouth. Someone else recognized the owner of the house and a sudden hush descended upon the crowd mocking the rising smoke. The crowd parted on its own to let the owner into his burnt possession. Mr. Bhowmick shuffled towards his house but before he could reach the front door his eyes encountered what they were searching for.

Mr. Bhowmick grasped his chest and withdrew a small bottle from his chest pocket .Hands shaking, fingers trembling, he struggled with the cap before finally opening it and poured the contents into his open mouth. The bottle, now empty, was disposed of into the gutter. He then knelt down beside the corpse covered by a white cloth and let his teardrops wet the cloth. He felt a cold hand on his shoulder and turned around to identify the face associated with the hand. 

Through his spectacles, now foggy with smoke and tears he recognized him to be a firefighter.

“Your wife, right?”, he inquired.

Mr. Bhowmick nodded and removed the cloth to look into the charred remains of what was his wife.  As he removed more of the cloth, his searching eyes failed to find what they were looking for.

He looked back up towards the firefighter and asked, “My son?”

“Sir before we answer that question , we are required to tell you that your wife had left the gas on , filling up the kitchen with inflammable hydrocarbons and striking the lighter one time too many had resulted in a blast which had charred her beyond recovery.”

Mr. Bhowmick nodded at the ground and thought back to that morning when he had walked into the kitchen and walked out sighing deeply. His wife had looked at him and smiled, a smile which remained unreturned. He had then walked over to the bed where his son was sleeping and smiled. His sleeping son had not smiled back.

“So where is he?”, asked Mr. Bhowmick again.

“Sir luckily your son had gone to school and hence was not here when disaster struck. He’s sitting in the truck right now”, assured the firefighter.

As the contents of the bottle spread through every artery of his body rapidly, Mr. Bhowmick looked up in despair- his sloth-like movements contradicting the rapid biochemical reactions disintegrating his body. It took some time for the ramifications of the firefighter’s words to register, for them to seep deep into the nooks and recesses of his mind and when they did, his blood was beyond recovery. His shaking hands betrayed the coolness with which he had executed his plan but his trembling heart knew that something had gone horribly wrong. He tried to get up , using his last remaining quantum of strength but couldn’t and fell back onto the street .

As his skin turned rapidly from the light brown, that it had been for the past forty-one years, to red and quickly to purple and finally assumed a bluish hue reminiscent of many Hindu Gods, all Mr.Bhowmick could discern were the sounds of panic around him, the sounds of whizzing brains not knowing what had happened and the silence of stunned hands not knowing what to do. All he could think of as his mouth filled up with froth and foam was that his last plan had failed, failed as horribly as he had in life. There were only two dead bodies where there should have been three.

In the fire- truck, 7-year old Anurag Bhowmick waited for his father to return and his mother to wake up.

The Solitary Helper

As she continued to gather the grains of white rice that brightened the dirty staircase, another pair of hands – less rough but equally effective – joined the act. She did not look up, she was too embarrassed already but her eyes darted in and out of the huge frame of the man crouching beside her – searching for some semblance of similarity. She found none.

From what she could gather from repeated stolen glances, she found only differences – his shining black leather shoes a distinct contrast to her bare feet which had almost turned to leather from the miles it covered every day, his expensive suit, whose cost she could only guess but which he obviously knew exactly to one hundredth of a rupee, an awkward deviation from her crumpled sari bought from the village haat .His spectacles seemed to mock her unprotected eyes which were myopic , his smooth , fair skin make fun of her sun-burnt and dilapidated one , his wavy hair laughing out aloud at her dirty greying mane and yet there they were , two very different pairs of cupped hands trying to achieve the same destination  in the middle of a dirty staircase on an over-bridge in an Indian railway station.

The stranger continued to pick up rice silently and pour it into the bag, emulating the woman alongside. The woman wondered who he was; the man wondered why no one else helped her. She urged her tongue to agree to her mind and express a gratitude born in the deeper realms of her body but her underdeveloped language skills and years of chipping away at her self-confidence hindered the transformation of thought into action .She silently went about her task although now, a storm raged inside her body – it was like someone was churning her insides.

The man wanted to tell the woman that she needn’t worry – most of her rice could be recovered and consumed or sold later but years of English vocation and detachment from his roots hindered the transformation of the same to actual words. He was sure that the woman would not understand English and he knew too little of the regional languages to effectively communicate with her. He wondered why no one else stopped to help her although about a few hundred pairs of feet passed them – some slow, some fast , some running , some strolling, some galloping , some wearing shoes, some wearing sandals and some wearing nothing at all but none of them stopped. He silently continued his task although now a storm raged inside his mind.

The last grain collected and put into the sack, the woman stood up, clutched her bag, balancing it expertly between her armpit and hip walked away as rapidly as she could. The man stood up too and walked away. The place – a dirty staircase on an over-bridge in an Indian railway station- however could not get up – it remained, to tell the story, the story of two strangers, one who received help and got embarrassed and another who gave help and got disillusioned, two strangers from opposite sides of the social spectrum united by the staple food of the country- rice, two strangers who did not exchange a single word but went back with so much more.

Even today the place exists and stands as a testament to the existence of goodwill in a fast-paced world as well as the existence of a ruthless world which doesn’t stop. In deference to the protagonists of the story, however, the place chooses to remain silent.