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.