The Alternate Love Story Of An Old Man. (Part II)

His life, it seemed like a motion reel of fuzzy pictures. No father, a cantankerous aged mother. The one who wailed continuously, pitifully thin body, pitifully thin voice-crackly, screechy. She trilled on and on, all the time. In the first slice of dawn when she would wake u muttering, in the maenadic afternoon glares, the pashmina of twilight and the liquid blackness of night. She puttered, stewed and spouted brittle strings of words and laments.While sweeping the floor of their tiny house- soiled mekhela hunched up to her knees, hair scrunched into a greasy bun, while scrubbing the clothes-soap suds warily and gingerly touching her face, while chewing on her daily paan that left an almost permanent red spittle on the side. He did not pay much attention to her- he was a shy boy, a bovine demeanor. Harassed by his mother's sadistic pricks and pokes and sneers and thankless tongue- he lived, he played, he grew up.
His mother kept shrieking and growing thin- her body started hunching with age, her eyes cranky with cataract and yet her voice getting sharper with ever passing year. Soon she was bedridden but her voice never stopped its relentless parade of litanies. It got thinner and thinner, shriller and shriller and one day, in a savage rhapsody of a cruel life, she drooled and slobbered and choked on her own spit to an ugly, repelling death.
Hariprasad was 20 that time and he was relieved. His mother was the only woman he knew, and they had no relatives. Freed from the obligation of looking after a parent, and freed from the continuous high pitch drone that swirled in frenzy around his ears, Hariprasad started living his life.A life where no one was peeking over his shoulder as to what he was doing. Where he could sleep, arms spread out like an eagle and mouth sloppily open and not to be woken up to the distinct biting shrill of his mum. Where he could stare into the azure blue sky and smile at the clouds prancing like polished stallions and not be rapped on his head. Where he could go seek work, where he liked and not where his mother wanted to be- his mother's feverish mewl about what a man should be had burned an ugly feeling into his skin. And all in these 20 odd years of his existence, there was on quivering, persistence thought in his head, that stayed. Never ever to get married. 

She sipped her tea in a leisurely way- her eyes tiptoeing and taking into the street side scenery. He watched her while he drank his own- scrunching his nose as the steam waves tickled his it, every time he would lift the cup for a sip. His wife. He loved the way she looked in the morning. Frail, delicate. Cute sacks of mongoloid skin-Folds and furrows of skin. Fleshy long earlobes.That little mole on her left cheek which he found so becoming. Sunlight reflecting off her glasses.He did not know the color of her iris, but he hoped they were a brew of brown- he loved brown. Crispy autumn foliage. There was a sudden gust of air, and the curtains rippled with nervous laughter. She hurried to hush them.She tamed them to a more subdued state, running her hand along the curtain length, a little pucker playing on her forehead. He loved this little habits of hers. His wife's. It was always her left hand,  and how she would curl the fabric along her arm and pinch it in place with her fingers. How she would first tuck in the corners and then smooth the rivers of creases on her bed, wiping a palm across the bed-sheet. He could see her bed from his window. A single poster bed, with one fluffy pillow. How she washed the pillow case every week- wrapping the pillow in a gamocha till the case dried. Hair-washing days were Wednesdays and Sundays. Tea-dates those days, were with her wispy head of grey hair slowly frizzing and drying in the playful, boisterous sunlight. He knew she listened to Rabindra Sangeet, her crackly radio eagerly warbling the mellow lyrics. And that she liked birds.How she left her plate of rice on the mossy terrace after she was done eating, for the birds to feed on the leftovers. There was always a bird, who would hop cautiously to the daal stained plate left on the terrace. A darting glance here and there, ready to take flight if threatened and it would start pecking, little by little, inch by inch.That stray rice, the broken green chili, that pudgy piece of potato. 


Hariprasad Sharma was in love with his wife whose name he did not know and whom he never married. 

The Alternate Love Story Of An Old Man. (Part I)

The biggest and only regret in Hariprasad's life was that he did not marry when he was a portly fellow laboriously climbing the ladder of the thirties. But, in his late seventies now, he took care of it.

Cobwebs clung like shriveled skin to the sides of the wall . Like the sudden twiggy cracks that appear on an ice cube when dowsed with water, the walls were an expanse of spidery strands that yawned here and there.The ceiling was slapped with a hurried paste of congealed blue to cover up the soft bruises of dampness.  The walls were haggard and wrinkled ,painted with the crude washy blue of oil pastels. The wall was corrugated, so it seemed that the harassed pastel was crushed with an ugly fat palm, all over the place, leaving clumps, creases and the putty colored bricks jutting here and there. Feather weight, uncolored dust pirouetted in the apartment to settle down to greasy thick clods on the corners, sticking to chair legs and cloaking that one,solitary, forgotten showpiece on the desk. Weeds of soot dangled and fluttered from the ancient fan, as it creaked  and groaned and squealed, trying to blow a tiny tempest of air to the man on the chair beneath it. Hariprasad Sharma.

The chair overlooked the window. A threadbare holey shawl was slung over it, in the faintest and failing mimicry of decoration. There was nothing spectacular about the view.Clusters of tired buildings, hunched and huddled with age. The rain had washed over the original paint, the sun hammered an unrelenting soprano on them, leaving them looking bedraggled and pale. You could see staircases with rusty banisters and stairs speckled with red spit and desolate toffee wrappers.Clothes hung on wash lines, multicolored pegs keeping them in place, as the wind ran long, seductive fingers through the damp,limp fabrics. Delicate's peeked over the grills. Tiny alleys and roads, where rickshaws wheeled by carrying the tittering teenagers and the sedate mothers. Coils of rubber wires lay on the roofs, dish tv setups looked like alien wings fanning from the terraces. Plant pots stood bored on the porches- terracotta tubs filled to the brim with the sluggish brown rain water and  singular stalks of neem growing from the bog. Thin, yellow children in thin cotton clothes, pudgy harried mothers in worn-out saris, men with bristly mustaches and cellphones in pouches stuck to their belts, Maruti 800's and scooters in garages. Fuzzy shrubs here and there. Little nests of hibiscus on straggly hedges.  Overflowing garbage of gaudy plastics and pungent wastes. Rag-pickers. Mongrels with skinny, droopy tails.A common man's street-view from a common man's room. 

He sat on the chair, a little slouched, his feet outstretched and the wet towel still slung on his neck. The 7o clock river of sunlight made gentle forays into his room, the creamy yellow tumbled from the soulful blue sky and splashed softly on the streets, and on the tree next to her apartment. An old old tree with a gorgeous plumage of green, whose leaves shone like it was pickled in mustard oil and sprinkles of fat fresh white flowers sitting jauntily in it, resembling succulent juicy spices. He sat with his morning paper, the one he picked up everyday at 6, left hand pressed against his arthritis-riddled back as he stooped to fish it out from the doormat. A quick warm bath later, he would sit down with it, in his chair placed right in front of the window, his bifocal-ed eyes slowly reading through the tiny prints. He was a neat man, his clothes were old but clean, the shirt pressed to a sharp crease near his shoulder blades,his somber brown pants flapping and flopping at the straight lines that the iron had stressed along its length. His hair was sparse, grey strands slick with jaborand oil and separated from each other, the same distance as the teeth of the green comb he used to run through it. Every now and then, he would pick up the paper to swat at a fly that would buzz noisily around him-he hated flies and that monotonous  irritating way they tattooed an itchy hum right next to his ears.

He knew she woke up at 8. He could see the curtains being parted, the puritan blinds in white. The quick glimpse of her face, washed with sleep, eyes caked with grease- sagging cheeks making pouches. That old nightie with a bib of pink. He got up from his chair slowly, knowing that she would go for her ablutions now- across the terrace lay her bath. A tiny room she lived in, right opposite his window- a rectangle, with tinier rectangles slashed for windows and a huge terrace.The terrace was not stone colored, but shod in what seemed like molded furry velvet with slimy spawns of moss swimming haphazardly. In the corner, there stood a marble slab where she had kept a tulsi plant and a pair of conch shells. A broken chair stood woebegone on the sides.

He lifted himself up, placing the newspaper on the table next to the chair and tried straightening his wizened frame. To the tiny kitchen across the room, he shuffled- slow steps; the slippers  smacking weakly on the stone floor. He knew it took her twenty minutes to take her bath and make her tea,and he knew it took him twenty minutes to make his. An elaborate affair, he had made it. Bring down the kettle with its rings of pale steel on the inside. Boil the water, drop the tea leaves and watch it stain the liquid with its iron tint. Look at his watch and wait for its pointed hands to circle for exactly 10 mins. One spoon of sugar-wait another five. Agitated bubbles simmering to the surface-angry transparent blisters sprouting, while the tea leaves swam serenely in circles at the bottom. Pull out his cup from the hook;he loved the cup-a black porcelain coffee bug inscribed with his name-a gift from his office mates when he retired.  Marie biscuits piled on plate( just two), he would pour the black tea into his mug and carry it back to his chair. And wait. 

And sure enough, she would sit by her own window,- her face fresh, her hair freshly braided to a tiny rat's tail end, her eyes staring vacantly out of the window, the cup of tea perched on the windowsill. 

And then she would take a sip, old woman's finger's clasping the enamel handle of her cup and bringing it to her lips. Her hair frizzing at the sides, her eyes magnified by her glasses, a flat chain of gold on her neck. A red loose cotton blouse. And lips closed over a toothless mouth, shriveled skin that gathered around it. And she took a sip. So did he.

It had been 2 years, and Hariprasad never missed one tea-date with his wife whose name he did not know and whom he never married.