A Heartless Father

I must have been twenty two at that time, when a tragedy befell a mother in a sordid town everyone knew to be Rampur. There were many pieces of evidence collected from the scene, yet none was more compelling than the letter my friend Ravi had written to me.

“Yo, the hideous fatso bhaiya is here”. The usual baritone of Ravi. The stink eye assassinating any attempts of a warm pleasantry. His entourage giggling, some distastefully laughing. The sort you hear in cheap sitcoms after every joke. Most of the times, the surrogate laughter was funnier than the joke itself.

“You know you can almost lactate. But tell me, is your libido as big as your diet?”

He was obviously not big on euphemism and subtlety. Laughs that ring your ear followed, like a bat screech. Admittedly, the joke was good. Yes, I was fat, hideous. He was always mean to me, especially when with his entourage, yet he was my best friend. The sort of paradox that could only be compared to let us say a pimp saying he is on the verge of misogyny. Unsullied by his remarks I gave a wry smile, I wasn’t really good at comebacks.

Ravi was a charming, handsome youth. The sort who was “very good marriage catch”, as the town matrimonial center would say. Yes, in a town where you could hear the second’s hand tick all the time, if you were twenty two, marriage front-paged parents’ n towns’ minds. Although he was quite handsome, his nose quite bemused me, a big nose on a rather petite face. It almost seemed like putting a nose on his face was a mere afterthought – fixed right there.

He had a younger brother known by the name Kishan in the local government school. Ravi liked to call him his parent’s “Stepney” (a spare tyre), cause he was only ever asked to do household chores when Ravi wasn’t around. Funny, he was. The sort whose company you quite cherished.

“I’m a little scared, what will happen now. How will you marry?” he said, while he was counting money one day in our secret hideout, drenching his index finger in saliva, perhaps he quite enjoyed annoying me, I hate that habit.

“Quit doing that, dufus! And give me some pie”.

“You know a bald head would work magic with your huge stomach” he said and started chuckling.

Nonchalance was one way of extinguishing any verbal war, so I learnt. After he was done counting, he gave me half of his share. On good days, he, like his mother, could be generous to a fault. Invigorated by his gesture, I tied a friendship band I was carrying, around his wrist; yes “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” was running that time and was clearly a crowd-favorite.

He was a man of decisive action and adventurous disposition, the kind who wouldn’t discount making love in a cemetery. His adventurous streak did once take him to a cemetery, only alone. He frets talking about that incident, if he said something was scary, it really was scary. Perhaps it was his sense of adventure, more than his patriotism fervor, that took him to the Indian Army. He talked highly of the equipments, the early morning drills and ofcourse the nurses, to whom he feigned injuries to prolong his stay at the hospital. I only listened to the last part intently, honestly speaking.

Growing up with my neighborhood pal was much fun. Yet, as astonishing, as it may seem I was never ascertained I really knew him very well, one such incident shed light on the aforementioned allegation.

On a sultry August evening, the newly-teen-aged clan was sitting in the common playground, when a certain Shiv mentioned about kissing and hugging his father when he promised to buy him a remote controlled car toy on his birthday. Enveloped in anger, Ravi hastily left the place.

He disliked his father, he told me later. Never had he kissed and hugged him. He was emotionally barren, bereft of any meaningful relationship with the man he understood to be his father. Privately with me, he used to call him an ATM, money he would give Ravi in abundance, which was puzzling in the sense that his father himself led a frugal life. Ravi summed it up in his own dictum: If you let a dog keep a bone in between his teeth, he won’t bark at you. The dog, he explained, was him and his mother. Later on, he shared many of his father’s shenanigans. One of which was buying a television set in order to make his eyes weak and make him ineligible for army’s test.

Ravi’s father, as I knew him to be, was a shrewd shopkeeper .The kind who will give you four local brand candies, if you gave him sixty rupees for a bill of fifty six. There were better odds of me doing a full leg split than him having change. He obviously wanted his son to learn the tricks of the trade, but laundered in the exuberant air, with coltish legs and manes of sun kissed hair, Ravi never thought a job as a shopkeeper would quite resonate with his appearance. Instead, army seemed a better prospect.

I remember that war quite clearly, he wrote a letter once a week. Sandwiched between a sense of loss and gloom for the soldiers who died and sense of responsibility to fight for the country, he grew weak, he penned. His letters I saved for a long time.

I also started reading newspapers those days. The F-16s, the MIG’s, the large tanks and numerous missiles suddenly started making sense to me, as I rummaged through pictures in the papers.

I hadn’t heard from him for two weeks now. In the war, they said, a lost man was akin to a dead man. My heart sank, espousing grief, I stopped reading.

Quite clearly I recall, four weeks after I last heard from him, the war was over; both India and Pakistan had reached an agreement. For me, my mind had already reached an agreement with my heart. Still camouflaging the obvious gloom, I tried to look hopeful.

And the next week, I started sniveling.

Conjuring past memories, I saw his handwriting on the envelope, worse than even a kid who had learnt writing alphabets a day ago. I started crying like a baby even before I opened it. The envelope didn’t disillusion me in any sense and I had accepted the bitter reality.

I opened to find it strangely smeared with blood and found the friendship band I once gave him. I started reading it. The letter contained a phone conversation between him and his dad.

“Hello!”

“Hey!”

“I’m all good here, dad. Thought I should give a call back home since the war is over today. I’m fine. Is ma around?”

“Na, she’s asleep, she hadn’t slept for 10 days.”

“Oh, then let her sleep. Dad, I have a pal here. He was badly injured in the war. Lost his right arm and right leg in the war and does not have a place where he can go. I’m bringing him with me”

His handwriting was beginning to irk me now; I barely could decipher a ‘c’ from a ‘e’.

“What a scumbag. Don’t you see, even his parents don’t want him now. Who would want to keep a leech like that and watch him rot everyday, whilst feeding him and ferrying him to the toilet 10 times a day. Who would want to marry him? What a leech. I can understand why his parents no longer want him.”

The letter ended there.

The day before I received this letter, a body was found blood-bathed near the army base camp in Srinagar, it had no right arm, no right leg. In the same handwriting that made me cry when I saw the last letter he sent me was a small piece of paper around his left arm, that read, “It was me, not my friend”.

To assuage his father’s grief (if any) the body’s vital organs were all working. I wouldn’t be startled if he had already talked to potential buyers for his organs.

Why his father was like that, I thought about a lot, perhaps he took it upon himself to show him how the real world was. But, if you keep striking the knee cruelly and incessantly, you break it, you don’t strengthen it.

Ravi always used to crack me up. He explained to me the meaning of oxymoron by giving examples – slim Nipun, handsome Nipun, well I found another after the incident – A Heartless Father.