The neighborhood of Akash was a bit different from Madhavi’s, who lived in affluence, her plush villa set on the hillock overseeing the town. Neighbors pried into the personal life of the souls their next door. No information was hidden, or could be hidden. Particularly, if it pertained to anything like liaisons, illicit or otherwise. Also, the prosperity of one spelt angst to the mortal the next door in the neighborhood. The river careened across the length of the village, as if to render justice to all folks in all localities of the town. Almost every person in the town used it and abused it to the fullest extent. It was the top spot for many people to relieve themselves, for they found it impossible to do it within the four walls of a toilet, an unshakeable yet polluting obsession. The Maharashtrian governments had made a magnanimous gesture by constructing toilets in almost every house, for free or for minimal expense. Still, some spoiled the river, even if they had a water closet at home. Some did out of want of a toilet at home. There were a large number of people doing this, and at some points, the river reeked simply of human excrement. On a nearby playground, school kids played cricket. They made concession for these early morning river visitors by playing with the rubber ball. In case the stray ball hit these precariously perched spectators, who also extolled cricket while relieving themselves, it might not hurt as awfully as a leather ball would. Or in case a disgruntled chap refused to return the ball to their rightful owners, just because he was hit by it, then it might not accrue a big loss for the poor school guys. Also ubiquitous was a sight as a stinking carcass of a stray dog crushed under the wheels of a fifty-ton load of a reckless truck. If this was not enough, it was used as a bathing place of one’s cattle, and also a laundry by the washer men. And the same water the municipality supplied to the town folks, after chlorinating it. Never bother about the amount of microbes that might enter the common man’s body.
People of Sarangpur seemed to have developed some degree of tolerance to such levels of contamination in water. Those who didn’t showed up regularly at clinics. The poor headed to the public hospital, while the self-sustained ones afforded the private medicos’ fat fees. Almost equal was the plight of the government hospital. The doctor never showed up at the hospital, even though he was paid handsomely for the same. A few cynical nurses greeted and treated the patients. A middle-aged nurse was on a spree of giving shots to the patients who had queued themselves. Irrespective of the ailment, age or sex, she gave shots of tetracycline from a huge vial to all the patients with the same syringe and the same needle. She boasted about her newly bought plot of land in a newly built colony. Apart from doing the supposed duty of hers, she also delved into the intricacies of the land-deal to her colleague, the patients unaware of the potential risks they subjected themselves to by getting those shots. A poor and scrawny teenager from the squatters’ colony lay still on a wooden bench of the hospital. He was brought with high fever, and the same nurse gave him the same shot despite the criticality of the boy’s condition. He breathed his last, and the relatives were told coldly to take the corpse straight away. Presumably, a victim of malaria but certainly a victim of poverty. Yet everything about Sarangpur was not always disgusting.
Monsoon is the time, when there is a heightened activity in India. There is an abundance of greenery, extending over the vast expanses of land. It is the time that augments a poor farmer’s hope that he would get a better harvest the following year. It is also the time when the cattle gorge gleefully on sprawling expanses of grass with the crows, minas and cranes cavorting on them, picking symbiotically the pests from their fattened tummies. It is the time, when the rivers, lakes, canals, rivulets and streams get engorged with water. There is an aura of freshness everywhere. Rural folks flock to bigger towns to buy seeds, fertilizers, and agricultural tools. It is the merry time for the moneylenders, whose immediate preys are the poor farmers, who need money to continue their means of livelihood-agriculture. Others who also profiteer include the pharmacists and doctors, as cholera and dysentery are in endemic proportions. Kids take their first lessons in swimming in rivers or lakes in the villages, and youths ogle lasciviously at young nymphets bathing near the wells or in rivers, unwary of being watched thus. This of course does not take place everywhere, save for the countryside. Frogs hop and croak merrily, fresh and upbeat, having woken up from the long hibernation lasting over the hot summers. Many in the frenzied pursuit of their mates on the roads are flattened to death under the wheels of speeding vehicles on the roads. Their re-emergence in the monsoon reinforces the rural folks’ belief that they drop from the sky along with the rain. Kids romp merrily in puddles, much to the hollering and disenchantment of their mothers. They return home with their bodies drenched, and soiled in mud. Days are hot and sultry; and nights cool, the black clouds eclipsing the moon for most part of the season. The streets abound in black, the usual color of the umbrellas. Raincoats and other accessories inundate the local bazaars. It was one such wet day, when Akash was returning to his motherland from the States.
It was raining cats and dogs on a typical monsoon night. Akash reclined on a couch in waiting lounge of a non-descript railway junction, Shirur, in the western part of the Indian peninsula, puffing away the pernicious cigarette smoke, nicotine simply diffusing into his circulation, and the long dreary hours of waiting-the inseparable part of traveling long distance in India by train, were taking a toll of his patience. A multitude of thoughts assailed his mind. The image of the furrowed face of his mother lingered in his mind. He was returning from an overseas assignment to his motherland after a lapse of five years. He had missed the train that could reach him to his natal town, Sarangpur, another nondescript town, so infinitesimal that it did not feature in any major map of India. Therefore, he had the Hobson’s choice of waiting the whole night until the dawn, when he could get the next train to reach his destination. He was browsing intermittently through a fictional crime thriller. A few moments later, he would be overwhelmed by slumber, only to be awakened by a shrill sound the next moment, and this happened umpteen times. The ambience of night was time and again shattered by the high frequency decibels of honking diesel engines shunting the tracks, or the jargon-filled railway announcements proclaiming arrivals or departures of trains and the patter of the raindrops striking and slaking the parched earth. Serenity would descend over that hall, though fleetingly. He scrutinized that most of the fellow passengers were lost in deep slumber, and this he considered as rather strange as the conditions were conducive to making him a restive insomniac. He did not have the slightest inkling of what was in store for him, the next few moments. This time though, the source of distraction was a different one-that of someone’s footsteps.
The next moment what he saw, flouted the wildest of fantasies, which he ever had, and left him agape. His icon, his lost love-Madhavi stood before him, as a matter of an unprecedented eventuality. Madhavi looked as gorgeous as he had seen her before: the same alabaster looks, limpid eyes with ethereal glint in them, and the purple-hued satin sari silhouetting her perfect physique. The radiant glow on her face, the disobedient fringes of hair wavering on her forehead at the behest of the breeze, and her dainty, yet futile bids made to fix them gave her mien a unique blend of sophistication and innocence. After a brief haggling with the porter, who squired her to the waiting lounge along with her baggage, she reposed on a settee. When she glanced pryingly at the fellow passenger, she reckoned that most of them were totally oblivious of her arrival, some were sonorously snoring in their sleep, while the altruistic ones slept in utmost quiet; nurslings snuggled close to their mothers (blissfully unmindful of the grown-ups’ anxieties and obscurities). It seemed a safe haven to her, with most of the passengers seemingly well off, because usually travelers have a paranoid sense of the risk one carries of losing his wallets or baggage, during train journeys in India.
Her greatest fears of spending a whole night at a remote railway junction with minimal amenities were put to rest by the presence of many fellow passengers in that hall. With a curricular book huddled close to her, she began to reckon her performance in the extremely competitive I.A.S (civil services) exams that required the peregrination to the mega-city-Mumbai. For many years, she had been looking forward to that day, when her talent and perspicacity were going to be tested, in the ultimate test for the masterminds of India-the civil services’ exams. She had fared well; still she was very much wary of the fact that the slightest of recklessness on her part could make the difference, in such echelons of aptitude tests. The stakes were high for her, because her personal life had been ruined because of an unsuccessful marriage, the hangover of which entailed a lot of anguish to her. Felicitations apart, she knew very well that if she succeeded, it would herald a new chapter in her life. She would thus be able to efface the ostracism any woman faced, after any cataclysm such as divorce, in an orthodox society. She knew it for true, that if she managed to make it, then every grimace and frown that greeted her, in her bad patch, would automatically metamorphose into smiles, the duplicity with which their society treated the same individual in different ways in different times. She knew the harangues would soon turn into accolades, the sheer ecstasy of which seemed to deprive her of sleep.
The only source of distraction for her was a guy to one corner of the hall, as he seemed to ogle at her queerly. His unkempt hair, heavily untended stubble and disheveled clothes were suggestive of the fact that life was bereft of any charm for him. He was profusely smoking, the very whiff of which peeved Madhavi. Finally, when she could not stand the exasperation any more, she felt like upbraiding the guy, and she gave him a stern glare. The miasma cleared up in her mind, and she figured that she knew the guy. Her anger evaporated in a jiffy when she realized that he was none other than Akash, whom she knew for having such a long association with, right from the kindergarten to the college, and with whom she shared outstanding rapport. Almost instantly, the whole of her events of yesteryears assumed the form of a scenario, wherein each and every memory was so vivid, as if the events had occurred a few moments earlier. Every memory of their childhood was relived: the charades, pranks, chaffs, frolicking during the school recesses, and romping back to homes after a hectic day at school; the ambience of country life, the picturesque view of the lakes adjacent to their homes, where they would spend hours meandering and confabulating endlessly on week ends. Both of them were strung-up for a few moments, and it took them some time to collect their nerves to break the ice. After a few moments of initial inhibitions, the pals struck up an unrestrained and effusive tête-à-tête. Everything in their lives was reminisced with quintessential nostalgia.
Akash transcended the humble moorings of his childhood in a small township. His early childhood memories were of great trauma, the only memories, which he had of his father, been that of a drunken fiend. Bickering and strife-stricken atmosphere prevailed in their household because of his binge drinking. The ordeal ended when he died of liver-cirrhosis, leaving his children and wife to their fates. The end of one ordeal augured the beginning of another. Forced to fend for herself, Akash’s mother took up a job in a local school for eking out a livelihood but her pay was too meager to adequately subsist the family; and she faced great hardships in paying Akash’s school fees. He had the humiliating distinction of being the main fee defaulter in the school, because of which he would be frequently turned out of the school. Notwithstanding the odds, his mother was an iconic figure of feminine fortitude. She put up a courageous, though a feigned smile, on her face, even in the darkest hours of their lives, lest her child’s hopes might sulk, and he might not surmount the odds. She didn’t ever spare a thought for marrying again, despite being widowed in her prime youth. Apart from the financial constraints, she had to contend with barbs of fellow women that implied that she had devoured her husband, the vestigial remains of the draconian attitude the society had towards women in the times, when erudition was not rife in the society.
Amongst his siblings, Akash was the eldest one. There had been a plethora of sufferings in his mother’s life. The premature death of her first daughter, who had amaurotic idiocy, suffused her life with inordinate grief. Her second daughter too had a similar affliction; even though she survived, the retardation was too severe and even the most elementary tasks like feeding her were gargantuan struggles. The death of her husband, albeit a fiend, was the last jolt his mother received. Akash had no one, except his mother, to guide him in the vicissitudes of life. Life was never a bed of roses for him and he realized that his doggedness in studies could be the sole redemption from the abject penury, and the friendship of Madhavi was one of the few commiserating factors in his life. Madhavi too was a diligent student, yet they had different leanings when it came to curricular subjects in the school. What was Madhavi’s forte in studies was coincidentally the Achilles’ heel of Akash and vice-versa. Subsequently, theirs was a symbiotic relationship in the school. They helped mutually in their curricular assignments, and goaded each other to perform better and better. With the onset of youth, it was but natural for them in such proximity, to develop liking for each other, yet they knew their exigencies very well. The cherubic little girl who would turn up at his house on holidays in the wee hours of morning, and nastily pull the rug off his face, yelling, “Stupid! Get up. The Sun rose long ago, it is morning now”, had metamorphosed into a staid woman. Despite blessed with bountiful youth and sheen, she lacked the uppishness and whims, which most other girls of her age and with even a little semblance of her attributes would invariably smack of. They sang hymns of praises for each other in front of their friends, but when it came to admitting the feelings, when they came face to face, both were tongue-tied. They hinted only through allusions, the real feelings in their hearts.
Life was very unforgiving for Akash, and he did not want to compound his problems by having a relationship that would result in a lot of heartache, if things went wrong. Education was his first priority, and he regarded everything else with diminutive credence. Having passed the Intermediate Examination, they parted, opting different streams in different varsities. Letters filled the chasm of distance betwixt them for some time, but later on, they lost track of each other. Akash passed his degree course in Engineering, with good grades. Yet, there was an unfinished task ahead of him. He urged his mother to ask Madhavi’s hand in marriage for him. His mother sensing the huge pecuniary and caste disparities between their families, at first refused to comply, but ultimately she wilted to her only son’s demands. Her fears turned true when Madhavi’s parents snubbed the alliance with an air of condescension. Madhavi belonged to a family of orthodox mindset, wherein her personal choices mattered little.
Moreover, there had been no direct reciprocation of love between them, and hence elopement was an unthinkable proposition for them. Both were victims of a parochial brought-up. They could not muster courage to revolt against the traditions and prevailing milieu in their society, and the passions thus smoldered within their hearts. They grew up in a societal environment where love was a taboo word, and marriage out of self-determination, worse still, regarded akin to blasphemy. She rued for the first time over not speaking out her heart in front of Akash when she could have done so, and had thus stifled her desires. The incident left Madhavi crestfallen, and her parents sensing disaster married her to someone else, who turned out to be a tyrant; he watched with suspicion every move that Madhavi made, and subjected her to worst sort of atrocities. Living with her ex-husband-a habitually suspicious man, was a nerve wrecking experience for her. She had an overriding subconscious feeling all the time that she was under constant surveillance. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, when she decided to walk over the marriage.
Even though Akash had succeeded in his academic career, he was not jubilant. He left for the U.S with a heavy heart, tired of life. Life without Madhavi was an inconceivable idea for Akash, and despite his best efforts, he could not reconcile with the stark reality. The monotony of living in a foreign country, the haunting memories of his past, the limitless desolation took a heavy toll of him, and he became addicted to sleeping pills and subsequently to alcohol. Akash looked cadaverous and despondent, and despite all his pretensions, she sensed that he lacked enthusiasm towards life, and he seemed to be resigned weakly to a world shunning despair. She could not desist from musing that due to a strange travesty of fate she had become the source of debacle of the very person, whom she valued as her true friend, benefactor and someone she could confide in, at any moment of her life.
As the night segued into dawn, the two friends had delved into each and every intricacy of their lives. Their conversation was punctuated with deep sighs and some times when it took a lighter turn, they burst into guffaws, much to the chagrin of the fellow passengers and finally Madhavi averred, “Nobody should know better than you do, the wanton nature of man under the influence of alcohol, and the amount of nuisance he becomes unto himself, his family and the society, because your life has been imbued with sufferings as a direct consequence of your father’s binge drinking. Now, isn’t it paradoxical that you are in the same mould just because life has not turned out as exactly as you had wished it to be? Throughout our lives, we tend to long for happiness that is surreal and apocryphal, and when it does not come our way, we get disappointed and inflict harm unto ourselves in awful ways. I can understand that you have been wronged, humiliated and frustrated in life; that you have had more than the usual share of tribulations, most people have in their lives, but still you don’t have any right to destroy yourself. If you have even an iota of regard for me and the association we have had, over the years of yore, you would give up the self-destructing indulgences, you find yourself presently engaged in. Come out of this drug-induced stupor, and abandon this warped lifestyle. Drugs can’t ever be a solution to any human problem, nor can mitigate the sufferings of anyone, if he thinks thus. You have still many more years of fruitful utility. Don’t fritter with life as you are doing with it now. I believe you are strong enough to pull through these mires of drug addiction.”
They had recounted for the whole night, every tale of theirs, woeful or otherwise, and the next dawn marked the harbinger of a new era in Akash’s life. He vowed to leave behind his murky past and make a fresh start. The next morning, they set off for their native town. They felt buoyant and contented, having vented all the frustrations and trauma that had pervaded their lives over the years of separation. They experienced a sort of perpetual bliss that would linger in their lives. Akash resolved to end the spate of drug dependence that had been afflicting him for five years, and his emancipator could not have been anyone else but Madhavi, because the disappointment was related with her, if not of her own making.
After the rendezvous with Madhavi, Akash took treatment at a drug de-addiction centre. Madhavi came out successfully with flying colors in the civil services’ exams, and a grand gala ceremony was organized in her natal town to felicitate her. Despite the thunderous ovation that greeted her, she bore a wistful ex-pression on her face, and pined for the sight of her chum amongst the crowd, but he could not be found. Akash was then floundering with the agonizing ordeal of the withdrawal symptoms, and the rules of the institution stringently forbade the inmates from venturing out, lest they might flee or return inebriated. Six months later, he was off alcohol and hypnotics. After convalescing, and embracing sobriety, he met Madhavi, who by now, had taken charge of her dream-come-true job, and proposed her for marriage. This time though, she reciprocated, the world did not raise a brow either, and together they enjoyed the connubial bliss, ever after.
AN ODYSSEY TO RECUPERATION Sarangpur, a sleepy town in the Western part of the Indian peninsula in the state of Maharashtra, was not very much different from the rest of towns in the region. But to Akash and Madhavi, it meant a lot, for it was their birthplace. They grew as any other child of their age. Childhood was full of fanciful thinking and euphoria that impart life all its pleasures. It was like any other town that boasted of a few colleges, a few schools, a river, a police station, a railway station but the trains never showed up in time, a municipality that was flagrantly insensitive to the town’s sanitary conditions, a civil hospital that was equally as callous as the municipality, a lower bench court, a sprawling market, a few dilapidated cinema hills that showed medieval movies, and also a whorehouse. The trains were perennially bloated with people, particularly in its carriages without reservations. One could not imagine even a semblance of comfortable journey, without having to pay the extra bucks for the reservations. The town also boasted of a huge dairy farm that had long ceased to be one. Many of the cattle had long died, while the living ones in the dairy were in a state of utter dereliction, perhaps waiting for their ends to come. Also there was a huge a state owned farm that had similarly ceased to be one. Much of the flora was seen by people as an easy source of firewood, while a little of fauna, viz. rabbits etc were poached and devoured mercilessly.The neighborhood of Akash was a bit different from Madhavi’s, who lived in affluence, her plush villa set on the hillock overseeing the town. Neighbors pried into the personal life of the souls their next door. No information was hidden, or could be hidden. Particularly, if it pertained to anything like liaisons, illicit or otherwise. Also, the prosperity of one spelt angst to the mortal the next door in the neighborhood. The river careened across the length of the village, as if to render justice to all folks in all localities of the town. Almost every person in the town used it and abused it to the fullest extent. It was the top spot for many people to relieve themselves, for they found it impossible to do it within the four walls of a toilet, an unshakeable yet polluting obsession. The Maharashtrian governments had made a magnanimous gesture by constructing toilets in almost every house, for free or for minimal expense. Still, some spoiled the river, even if they had a water closet at home. Some did out of want of a toilet at home. There were a large number of people doing this, and at some points, the river reeked simply of human excrement. On a nearby playground, school kids played cricket. They made concession for these early morning river visitors by playing with the rubber ball. In case the stray ball hit these precariously perched spectators, who also extolled cricket while relieving themselves, it might not hurt as awfully as a leather ball would. Or in case a disgruntled chap refused to return the ball to their rightful owners, just because he was hit by it, then it might not accrue a big loss for the poor school guys. Also ubiquitous was a sight as a stinking carcass of a stray dog crushed under the wheels of a fifty-ton load of a reckless truck. If this was not enough, it was used as a bathing place of one’s cattle, and also a laundry by the washer men. And the same water the municipality supplied to the town folks, after chlorinating it. Never bother about the amount of microbes that might enter the common man’s body.
People of Sarangpur seemed to have developed some degree of tolerance to such levels of contamination in water. Those who didn’t showed up regularly at clinics. The poor headed to the public hospital, while the self-sustained ones afforded the private medicos’ fat fees. Almost equal was the plight of the government hospital. The doctor never showed up at the hospital, even though he was paid handsomely for the same. A few cynical nurses greeted and treated the patients. A middle-aged nurse was on a spree of giving shots to the patients who had queued themselves. Irrespective of the ailment, age or sex, she gave shots of tetracycline from a huge vial to all the patients with the same syringe and the same needle. She boasted about her newly bought plot of land in a newly built colony. Apart from doing the supposed duty of hers, she also delved into the intricacies of the land-deal to her colleague, the patients unaware of the potential risks they subjected themselves to by getting those shots. A poor and scrawny teenager from the squatters’ colony lay still on a wooden bench of the hospital. He was brought with high fever, and the same nurse gave him the same shot despite the criticality of the boy’s condition. He breathed his last, and the relatives were told coldly to take the corpse straight away. Presumably, a victim of malaria but certainly a victim of poverty. Yet everything about Sarangpur was not always disgusting.
Monsoon is the time, when there is a heightened activity in India. There is an abundance of greenery, extending over the vast expanses of land. It is the time that augments a poor farmer’s hope that he would get a better harvest the following year. It is also the time when the cattle gorge gleefully on sprawling expanses of grass with the crows, minas and cranes cavorting on them, picking symbiotically the pests from their fattened tummies. It is the time, when the rivers, lakes, canals, rivulets and streams get engorged with water. There is an aura of freshness everywhere. Rural folks flock to bigger towns to buy seeds, fertilizers, and agricultural tools. It is the merry time for the moneylenders, whose immediate preys are the poor farmers, who need money to continue their means of livelihood-agriculture. Others who also profiteer include the pharmacists and doctors, as cholera and dysentery are in endemic proportions. Kids take their first lessons in swimming in rivers or lakes in the villages, and youths ogle lasciviously at young nymphets bathing near the wells or in rivers, unwary of being watched thus. This of course does not take place everywhere, save for the countryside. Frogs hop and croak merrily, fresh and upbeat, having woken up from the long hibernation lasting over the hot summers. Many in the frenzied pursuit of their mates on the roads are flattened to death under the wheels of speeding vehicles on the roads. Their re-emergence in the monsoon reinforces the rural folks’ belief that they drop from the sky along with the rain. Kids romp merrily in puddles, much to the hollering and disenchantment of their mothers. They return home with their bodies drenched, and soiled in mud. Days are hot and sultry; and nights cool, the black clouds eclipsing the moon for most part of the season. The streets abound in black, the usual color of the umbrellas. Raincoats and other accessories inundate the local bazaars. It was one such wet day, when Akash was returning to his motherland from the States.
It was raining cats and dogs on a typical monsoon night. Akash reclined on a couch in waiting lounge of a non-descript railway junction, Shirur, in the western part of the Indian peninsula, puffing away the pernicious cigarette smoke, nicotine simply diffusing into his circulation, and the long dreary hours of waiting-the inseparable part of traveling long distance in India by train, were taking a toll of his patience. A multitude of thoughts assailed his mind. The image of the furrowed face of his mother lingered in his mind. He was returning from an overseas assignment to his motherland after a lapse of five years. He had missed the train that could reach him to his natal town, Sarangpur, another nondescript town, so infinitesimal that it did not feature in any major map of India. Therefore, he had the Hobson’s choice of waiting the whole night until the dawn, when he could get the next train to reach his destination. He was browsing intermittently through a fictional crime thriller. A few moments later, he would be overwhelmed by slumber, only to be awakened by a shrill sound the next moment, and this happened umpteen times. The ambience of night was time and again shattered by the high frequency decibels of honking diesel engines shunting the tracks, or the jargon-filled railway announcements proclaiming arrivals or departures of trains and the patter of the raindrops striking and slaking the parched earth. Serenity would descend over that hall, though fleetingly. He scrutinized that most of the fellow passengers were lost in deep slumber, and this he considered as rather strange as the conditions were conducive to making him a restive insomniac. He did not have the slightest inkling of what was in store for him, the next few moments. This time though, the source of distraction was a different one-that of someone’s footsteps.
The next moment what he saw, flouted the wildest of fantasies, which he ever had, and left him agape. His icon, his lost love-Madhavi stood before him, as a matter of an unprecedented eventuality. Madhavi looked as gorgeous as he had seen her before: the same alabaster looks, limpid eyes with ethereal glint in them, and the purple-hued satin sari silhouetting her perfect physique. The radiant glow on her face, the disobedient fringes of hair wavering on her forehead at the behest of the breeze, and her dainty, yet futile bids made to fix them gave her mien a unique blend of sophistication and innocence. After a brief haggling with the porter, who squired her to the waiting lounge along with her baggage, she reposed on a settee. When she glanced pryingly at the fellow passenger, she reckoned that most of them were totally oblivious of her arrival, some were sonorously snoring in their sleep, while the altruistic ones slept in utmost quiet; nurslings snuggled close to their mothers (blissfully unmindful of the grown-ups’ anxieties and obscurities). It seemed a safe haven to her, with most of the passengers seemingly well off, because usually travelers have a paranoid sense of the risk one carries of losing his wallets or baggage, during train journeys in India.
Her greatest fears of spending a whole night at a remote railway junction with minimal amenities were put to rest by the presence of many fellow passengers in that hall. With a curricular book huddled close to her, she began to reckon her performance in the extremely competitive I.A.S (civil services) exams that required the peregrination to the mega-city-Mumbai. For many years, she had been looking forward to that day, when her talent and perspicacity were going to be tested, in the ultimate test for the masterminds of India-the civil services’ exams. She had fared well; still she was very much wary of the fact that the slightest of recklessness on her part could make the difference, in such echelons of aptitude tests. The stakes were high for her, because her personal life had been ruined because of an unsuccessful marriage, the hangover of which entailed a lot of anguish to her. Felicitations apart, she knew very well that if she succeeded, it would herald a new chapter in her life. She would thus be able to efface the ostracism any woman faced, after any cataclysm such as divorce, in an orthodox society. She knew it for true, that if she managed to make it, then every grimace and frown that greeted her, in her bad patch, would automatically metamorphose into smiles, the duplicity with which their society treated the same individual in different ways in different times. She knew the harangues would soon turn into accolades, the sheer ecstasy of which seemed to deprive her of sleep.
The only source of distraction for her was a guy to one corner of the hall, as he seemed to ogle at her queerly. His unkempt hair, heavily untended stubble and disheveled clothes were suggestive of the fact that life was bereft of any charm for him. He was profusely smoking, the very whiff of which peeved Madhavi. Finally, when she could not stand the exasperation any more, she felt like upbraiding the guy, and she gave him a stern glare. The miasma cleared up in her mind, and she figured that she knew the guy. Her anger evaporated in a jiffy when she realized that he was none other than Akash, whom she knew for having such a long association with, right from the kindergarten to the college, and with whom she shared outstanding rapport. Almost instantly, the whole of her events of yesteryears assumed the form of a scenario, wherein each and every memory was so vivid, as if the events had occurred a few moments earlier. Every memory of their childhood was relived: the charades, pranks, chaffs, frolicking during the school recesses, and romping back to homes after a hectic day at school; the ambience of country life, the picturesque view of the lakes adjacent to their homes, where they would spend hours meandering and confabulating endlessly on week ends. Both of them were strung-up for a few moments, and it took them some time to collect their nerves to break the ice. After a few moments of initial inhibitions, the pals struck up an unrestrained and effusive tête-à-tête. Everything in their lives was reminisced with quintessential nostalgia.
Akash transcended the humble moorings of his childhood in a small township. His early childhood memories were of great trauma, the only memories, which he had of his father, been that of a drunken fiend. Bickering and strife-stricken atmosphere prevailed in their household because of his binge drinking. The ordeal ended when he died of liver-cirrhosis, leaving his children and wife to their fates. The end of one ordeal augured the beginning of another. Forced to fend for herself, Akash’s mother took up a job in a local school for eking out a livelihood but her pay was too meager to adequately subsist the family; and she faced great hardships in paying Akash’s school fees. He had the humiliating distinction of being the main fee defaulter in the school, because of which he would be frequently turned out of the school. Notwithstanding the odds, his mother was an iconic figure of feminine fortitude. She put up a courageous, though a feigned smile, on her face, even in the darkest hours of their lives, lest her child’s hopes might sulk, and he might not surmount the odds. She didn’t ever spare a thought for marrying again, despite being widowed in her prime youth. Apart from the financial constraints, she had to contend with barbs of fellow women that implied that she had devoured her husband, the vestigial remains of the draconian attitude the society had towards women in the times, when erudition was not rife in the society.
Amongst his siblings, Akash was the eldest one. There had been a plethora of sufferings in his mother’s life. The premature death of her first daughter, who had amaurotic idiocy, suffused her life with inordinate grief. Her second daughter too had a similar affliction; even though she survived, the retardation was too severe and even the most elementary tasks like feeding her were gargantuan struggles. The death of her husband, albeit a fiend, was the last jolt his mother received. Akash had no one, except his mother, to guide him in the vicissitudes of life. Life was never a bed of roses for him and he realized that his doggedness in studies could be the sole redemption from the abject penury, and the friendship of Madhavi was one of the few commiserating factors in his life. Madhavi too was a diligent student, yet they had different leanings when it came to curricular subjects in the school. What was Madhavi’s forte in studies was coincidentally the Achilles’ heel of Akash and vice-versa. Subsequently, theirs was a symbiotic relationship in the school. They helped mutually in their curricular assignments, and goaded each other to perform better and better. With the onset of youth, it was but natural for them in such proximity, to develop liking for each other, yet they knew their exigencies very well. The cherubic little girl who would turn up at his house on holidays in the wee hours of morning, and nastily pull the rug off his face, yelling, “Stupid! Get up. The Sun rose long ago, it is morning now”, had metamorphosed into a staid woman. Despite blessed with bountiful youth and sheen, she lacked the uppishness and whims, which most other girls of her age and with even a little semblance of her attributes would invariably smack of. They sang hymns of praises for each other in front of their friends, but when it came to admitting the feelings, when they came face to face, both were tongue-tied. They hinted only through allusions, the real feelings in their hearts.
Life was very unforgiving for Akash, and he did not want to compound his problems by having a relationship that would result in a lot of heartache, if things went wrong. Education was his first priority, and he regarded everything else with diminutive credence. Having passed the Intermediate Examination, they parted, opting different streams in different varsities. Letters filled the chasm of distance betwixt them for some time, but later on, they lost track of each other. Akash passed his degree course in Engineering, with good grades. Yet, there was an unfinished task ahead of him. He urged his mother to ask Madhavi’s hand in marriage for him. His mother sensing the huge pecuniary and caste disparities between their families, at first refused to comply, but ultimately she wilted to her only son’s demands. Her fears turned true when Madhavi’s parents snubbed the alliance with an air of condescension. Madhavi belonged to a family of orthodox mindset, wherein her personal choices mattered little.
Moreover, there had been no direct reciprocation of love between them, and hence elopement was an unthinkable proposition for them. Both were victims of a parochial brought-up. They could not muster courage to revolt against the traditions and prevailing milieu in their society, and the passions thus smoldered within their hearts. They grew up in a societal environment where love was a taboo word, and marriage out of self-determination, worse still, regarded akin to blasphemy. She rued for the first time over not speaking out her heart in front of Akash when she could have done so, and had thus stifled her desires. The incident left Madhavi crestfallen, and her parents sensing disaster married her to someone else, who turned out to be a tyrant; he watched with suspicion every move that Madhavi made, and subjected her to worst sort of atrocities. Living with her ex-husband-a habitually suspicious man, was a nerve wrecking experience for her. She had an overriding subconscious feeling all the time that she was under constant surveillance. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, when she decided to walk over the marriage.
Even though Akash had succeeded in his academic career, he was not jubilant. He left for the U.S with a heavy heart, tired of life. Life without Madhavi was an inconceivable idea for Akash, and despite his best efforts, he could not reconcile with the stark reality. The monotony of living in a foreign country, the haunting memories of his past, the limitless desolation took a heavy toll of him, and he became addicted to sleeping pills and subsequently to alcohol. Akash looked cadaverous and despondent, and despite all his pretensions, she sensed that he lacked enthusiasm towards life, and he seemed to be resigned weakly to a world shunning despair. She could not desist from musing that due to a strange travesty of fate she had become the source of debacle of the very person, whom she valued as her true friend, benefactor and someone she could confide in, at any moment of her life.
As the night segued into dawn, the two friends had delved into each and every intricacy of their lives. Their conversation was punctuated with deep sighs and some times when it took a lighter turn, they burst into guffaws, much to the chagrin of the fellow passengers and finally Madhavi averred, “Nobody should know better than you do, the wanton nature of man under the influence of alcohol, and the amount of nuisance he becomes unto himself, his family and the society, because your life has been imbued with sufferings as a direct consequence of your father’s binge drinking. Now, isn’t it paradoxical that you are in the same mould just because life has not turned out as exactly as you had wished it to be? Throughout our lives, we tend to long for happiness that is surreal and apocryphal, and when it does not come our way, we get disappointed and inflict harm unto ourselves in awful ways. I can understand that you have been wronged, humiliated and frustrated in life; that you have had more than the usual share of tribulations, most people have in their lives, but still you don’t have any right to destroy yourself. If you have even an iota of regard for me and the association we have had, over the years of yore, you would give up the self-destructing indulgences, you find yourself presently engaged in. Come out of this drug-induced stupor, and abandon this warped lifestyle. Drugs can’t ever be a solution to any human problem, nor can mitigate the sufferings of anyone, if he thinks thus. You have still many more years of fruitful utility. Don’t fritter with life as you are doing with it now. I believe you are strong enough to pull through these mires of drug addiction.”
They had recounted for the whole night, every tale of theirs, woeful or otherwise, and the next dawn marked the harbinger of a new era in Akash’s life. He vowed to leave behind his murky past and make a fresh start. The next morning, they set off for their native town. They felt buoyant and contented, having vented all the frustrations and trauma that had pervaded their lives over the years of separation. They experienced a sort of perpetual bliss that would linger in their lives. Akash resolved to end the spate of drug dependence that had been afflicting him for five years, and his emancipator could not have been anyone else but Madhavi, because the disappointment was related with her, if not of her own making.
After the rendezvous with Madhavi, Akash took treatment at a drug de-addiction centre. Madhavi came out successfully with flying colors in the civil services’ exams, and a grand gala ceremony was organized in her natal town to felicitate her. Despite the thunderous ovation that greeted her, she bore a wistful ex-pression on her face, and pined for the sight of her chum amongst the crowd, but he could not be found. Akash was then floundering with the agonizing ordeal of the withdrawal symptoms, and the rules of the institution stringently forbade the inmates from venturing out, lest they might flee or return inebriated. Six months later, he was off alcohol and hypnotics. After convalescing, and embracing sobriety, he met Madhavi, who by now, had taken charge of her dream-come-true job, and proposed her for marriage. This time though, she reciprocated, the world did not raise a brow either, and together they enjoyed the connubial bliss, ever after.
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