AB KE BARAS (THIS YEAR)

It is customary in Indian culture that a girl returns to her parents’ home in the first season of the Monsoons after she is married. Integral to the institution of marriage, at least in the northern Hindi speaking belt, is the arrival of the girl’s brother to the home her in-laws and he takes her back with him, with the in-laws’ blessings and token gifts, and with the promise that he will return her to them once the rains have passed.

What follow are the lyrics of perhaps one of the most touching, soulful songs from vintage Indian films. ‘Ab Ke Baras’, literally translating as ‘This Year’, is the heartrending plea of a girl calling out to her father, begging him to call her back for the season. A part of an old film ‘Bandini’ (Prisoner), the song is sung in a women’s prison, the reference being that the Hindi word ‘Sasural’ – though it meant home of the in-laws – was used as a colloquial slang for prison.

Slow, rich with emotion and plight, the words tug at the heartstrings as the song is enough to move one to tears.

Send my brother to collect me this year, Oh father

Send him for the rains have come.

My friends from my childhood have returned home and they call me,

And the letters they send are wet from the rains.

So send him, oh father, to collect me this year.

Let me play on the swings beneath the cloudy sky again,

As the showers pour around me.

And with me will return to your gardens, oh father,

The soothing, cool showers of the rain.

Tears splash from my eyes and I hurt

As I recount memories of my childhood

So send him, oh father, to collect me this year.

This life this youth stole the playthings of my childhood,

And I have lost my dolls.

Tell me, oh father, after growing up on your pride,

When was it that I stopped belonging to you?

Ages pass, and I receive no letters from you,

And I see no boats on the horizon coming for me.

Send my brother to collect me this year, Oh father

Send him for the rains have come.

So send him, oh father, to collect me this year.

NOT ME.

“I need your pants.”

It’s strange waking up to a line like that.

“Dave, I need your pants. Now. Please.”

What’s stranger is realizing that in order to comply with the request (read order), I was going to have to take off the ones I was wearing and hand them over, and then either get to washing the others or hang around in my boxers until Matt returned.

“Dave! I’m not getting younger dammit! Christie is leaving, I need those pants!”

Her name jolts me awake finally.

“What?”

“I messed up man, and Christie is leaving. She’s on some flight taking off in a couple of hours and I need to stop her.” I’m finally on my feet dropping the pants, and handing them over. He puts them on.

“What happened, Matt?” I try and ask as calmly as I can.

“I said something when I was drunk. She got upset. She said she would leave, but who really goes through with it? I thought she was kidding and just needed some time!”

He rushes out; I stare out the door after him. My ass of a flatmate. I catch myself thinking about how he should try learning treating his girlfriend better. That’s when I hear his footsteps on the staircase again, and he reappears.

“Dave, what should I tell her?” An ass indeed.

“That you’re sorry? How hard is it to figure that out?”

“No not just that, I need something more, something fancier. You’re the one with the words, tell me something!”

“Say something like ‘All the stars would lose their lustre, if I am unable to muster, the courage to ask you to stay.’”

“That’s lame man. Poetry and all that. We’re a century past that, and I can’t screw this up. Seriously, something practical.”

“Matt, practical is exactly what she doesn’t need. Trust me, it’ll work.”

“Lustre and mustard?”

“Muster.”

“Right. Okay. Bye.” He runs off again, repeating lustre and muster to himself. Ass.

I find myself thinking about his girlfriend. Christie. Matt’s girlfriend, not mine. I wonder what will pass when he meets her at the airport. She will know that the words are mine, as are the pants, courtesy the fact that there’s a line of verse written above the knee which she notices when I'm wearing them.

I know she will stay back. I know she is dying to stay back. I know that Matt will think he’s the king of the world when he brings her back home tonight. I know that she and I will exchange perhaps even less than a look, and share a small truth. For I know she looks for something more than Matt in this house.

The painful part is, that something is not me.

SMILE

A memory so clear, it burns.

You are looking away, your long silken hair covering your face. But I know how you smile behind that veil. A smile of freedom, of sublime happiness expressed with not a care in all the world. The sunlight dances as you turn to look at me, your hair flowing aside like drapes parting, and you smile at me.

The smile, the memory, so clear, it burns.

The smile becomes a laugh. You tell me to stop looking at you so, but how can I? You shake your head, your hair shimmering, dancing in the light once more. And you look away once more until your face is hidden behind your veil. But I know how you smile still.

Knowing that you smile is a memory so clear.

Like a view lost behind a fog set in too quickly on a cold night, you have faded. Like the ideas of a dream lost from waking up too suddenly, the things you did are difficult to remember.

But your smile, and the way the sunlight danced in your shining hair. They stay on, blurring my vision, burning me.


Smile for me, once more. Please just once, so the man that you see before you can pick himself up again.

OUTLIER, OUTFLYER

It was shortly after World War II that the British Overseas Airways Commission gave the go ahead for the prototype testing of the de Havilland Comet, believed to be among the first models designed for commercial travel. The Comet, designed a committee headed by Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, was put into scheduled service in 1952, and was regularly used by various airline service providers across the world until 1997. It was indeed a glorious model, and a visionary start to the art of aircraft design.

There was however, one small issue, which went unnoticed for a long time: Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, for all his grand visions, was himself a small man of 5’6”, and so, the planes he designed were designed bearing in mind humans of his dimensions. His company carried forward his legacy of building planes that were based on his earlier designs, and when the de Havilland Company was no longer at the forefront of aircraft design, its successors simply took its plans and tinkered around thereafter.

The result: modern day aircraft cabin are designed only to accommodate humans touching 5’6”, whether it be the default distance between two aligned seats, or the default distance between the floor and the overhead baggage storage units. A 5’8” being can squeeze about and manage, but anything taller than that is a marginalized outlier that the airline community really couldn’t care much about.

So whenever it so happens that I have to travel by air, a sense of cold engulfs me. At 6’3”, I get looks of disapproval from the lady at the check in counter as she labels me ‘Oversized’, and secretly wishes she could charge me extra. There is a genuine restriction in the seats I can occupy, for if I’m in the one by the window, I cannot compensate for the lack of space in front by stretching my legs out towards the side, and if I’m in the one near the aisle, my legs tend to obstruct traffic. I get equally dirty looks from the cabin crew that say “Every passenger around him is going to curse him, and I’m going to have to deal with it”.

And that is precisely what happens. Everyone does tend to curse me. The person sitting in front of me can’t recline, because my knees are jammed into the back of his seat, the person sitting beside me near the window cannot get out without having me get up and out into the aisle, and whenever that has to happen, the person sitting beside me toward the aisle has to get up too. When my knees begin to hurt, I have to shift around in my seat, and the rest of me is usually at odd angles after that happens, bringing my face uncomfortably close to the faces of one of those beside me (usually the one at the window, I get to see the view).

And don’t even get me started about what happens when there’s turbulence. That is a nightmare. For the poor bugger next to me.

If I’m lucky, I get a seat near the emergency exit, with a polite woman beside me who has a son as tall as me who also has to put up with similar discomfort and so she can completely understand the position I’m in and is willing to shift her legs to the left to give me some more leg space. If I’m unlucky, I get a window seat, with this gruff corporate man who is already in a foul mood because his company didn’t give him a business class ticket and is now placed beside a lamp post who will make clicking sounds with his tongue every time I have to move and wishes he could kill me with his stare when I ask him to get up so I can go to the loo.

But my troubles are not limited to sitting. While I’m standing waiting for a place in the queue in the aisle to exit the plane, the overhead bin is an obstruction, and I find myself bent so far that my head is either hovering precariously above the heads of those in the aisle already, or it dangling dangerously close to the person standing waiting in the seat in front of me. Either ways, not the best place for a head to be in.

So when I finally get off the craft, there is a sigh of relief on my part, and a greater one from my co-passengers. Apparently, tolerating me is a greater ordeal for them, than tolerating the craft’s dimensions is for me.

It is usually in the taxi ride from the airport home, when I’m nursing aching joints and a battered ego that I begin to wonder how much it would really take an airline to increase the distance between two seats. An inch here, a couple there, and life is so much simpler. And then usually my thoughts go on to higher planes, and more abstract notions, of how over-standardization never did anyone any good, of how people who don’t fit aren’t really allowed to say anything and what a helpless state that is, and of how best I should fire Sir Geoffrey de Havilland if I ever met him.

I finally get home, I’m greeted by my family, and in case there happen to be visitors who haven’t seen me in a long time, there are the usual expected comments about how tall I’ve gotten and how they have to crane their necks to see me and how that is uncomfortable for them. Really, someone’s got to start putting themselves in the shoes of the outliers and look inwards, and take a good look at how easy life is for them. Really.

MEMORY

The train pulled into the station, slowly drawing abreast with the platform.

Gigantic clouds of smoke issued from the engine, but the eager people both inside and outside the train didn’t seem to mind.

He sat alone in a corner, in one of the last carriages.

He seemed to be there almost by mistake, like someone had noticed some empty space and put him there.

And he needed just the smallest of empty spaces to fill.

It had been a long time since he had consciously allowed himself to think about what this day would be like.

Through the hole in the rotting wood of the carriage he silently looked outside to catch little glimpses of what the world looked like.

The world had changed, changed beyond recognition.

No, the absence of recognition was not due to overwhelming all-encompassing change, but his own inability to recognize it.

His inability to imagine, to think.

The train drew to a halt, and the doors were opened by attendants.

There were some people who rushed out like breath exhaled, others came forth slowly like a sigh held back too long, and there were yet others who remained inside, too afraid of what to expect, like their breaths still held inside in fear.

It was a long time before someone noticed him sitting in his corner, and held his bandaged hand and led him out of the train on to the platform.

The sudden flurry of sights, of sounds, caught even his attention. And he dared to think back of a time long forgotten. Mercilessly forgotten almost four years ago.

Slowly, fearfully, he guided his thoughts, focused the essence of his mind towards what he remembered of this place.

The station had changed; wreckage and novation seemed to stand side by side.

There were marked distinctions, newspaper stands, small food outlets, and the smell of French tobacco.

Very carefully, so as not to scare himself, he thought of the last time he was here. It had been different: barking dogs, innumerable wooden cattle carriages behind locomotives on all platforms, the smell of fear, and the filthy scratches of orders being shouted in German.

He thought once again, of the things he had left behind when he stepped on to that train. A home, he presumed and then remembered, a family perhaps, yes yes, he was remembering. A mother, warm and wise, a father, aged and able, a brother, strong and sure. And someone else.

Who was it? A woman, yes, a woman. Why couldn’t he remember her?

Because he dared not think of her. Lest the airs he breathed for four foul years found out.

A beautiful woman, was she not? Yes, very beautiful, something that could make him smile so contently that he would have a tear in his eye.

And in that moment he remembered, her face, her eyes, her hair, and his eyes searched the platform for her.

Would she be here? Would she remember him after all this time? Was she even alive herself? He turned, and looked at the other end of the station, searching for the one face he remembered so vividly, it burnt him.

Would she still love him? Would she care? Would she have found love again? What would he do if she wasn’t there?

And then he saw her face. Standing at the far end, at the end of the platform, at the end of her hope. He saw a face that had been seen on that station ever since the announcement that the camps were to be liberated. A face that had waited and watched as every train returned to her without him. A face that hoped and prayed it wouldn’t have to live alone. A face that saw him now.

A face that put on its bravest smile now, but yet could not hide its tears. A face that slowly came to him, and gazed deeply into his eyes looking for the man it knew all those years ago.

A hand came forth and held his. Not tightly, but firmly enough to say that it would never let go.

There were no words spoken.

And in that silence, while she prayed and thanked, he remembered.

Sheryl...