~K. Anish Pokharel~
It was one of those cold, windy mornings of January of the year 2001; seismic waves got manifested in their worst possible form in the Indian state of Gujarat. It was the movement of the Indian sub-continental plate against the rigid Tibetan plateau that resulted in the jolts.
Parthiv got weary; he was not accustomed to the spontaneous rocking of his chair, nor was he in the mood for any deliberate rocking. His chair was swinging; like a pendulum — to and fro. But this uneasiness couldn’t last for long — the tremors waned off with the same swiftness with which they had surfaced. This gave him back the unmoved ambience, which till moments earlier he’d just taken for granted. He thought everything happened to be nothing but a momentary lapse of his sense of position.
But everything was as true as was the sun shining that day. The same sun which suddenly seized to be real for thousands of people; since peering at the sun and feeling its warmth at the same time from within the graveyard was virtually unthinkable. They had perished in thin air! The whole of the sub-continent was plunged into immediate despair; Ahmedabad city being the worst affected. Nature has always been the greatest leveler. The opulent and the less fortunate, the weak and the powerful, and the privileged and the deprived — everyone had already bowed to nature’s wrath! So many souls lay buried in the rumbles of human achievements, which moments earlier boasted the supremacy of mankind against nature.
“7.9 on the Richter Scale,” the newsreader said.
It wasn’t until Parthiv heard this that he was cognizant of the situation. The tremors he felt had been real. He riffled various news channels on the television, and everything that he saw was horrifying and saddening at the same time. So much had happened just across the border, and he was residing in a place where people didn’t even know what happened next door, let alone being aware of the cataclysmic seismic waves that had occurred in a land so far! But then, he wasn’t amongst them nor did he ever try to identify himself with them. Being alive when everything around is dead can never be painless… Moments later, a sudden thought of having a close relative in the clear vicinity of the place worst hit got him disturbed. He took no extra minute in trying to contact the people from whom he could get some information about the actual state of affairs.
The outcome of his inquiry left him contented. But it was momentary. What he heard afterwards, sent the seismic waves whirling through his spine, which had a magnitude of such a great extent that even the Richter Scale would have failed to record it!
On the other side of the telephone was his father; Parthiv exasperatedly shouted, “Is Yogendra’s father alright?” This was a leading question in response to what he had just heard from his father. Yogendra’s parents — his childhood friend’s parents — had just met with an accident. Considering that the person who’d undergone triple vessel by-pass surgery just years earlier had been in the driving seat, his interrogation did not sound insufficient at all. Parthiv’s father replied back succinctly, nothing more than what was actually inquired about. Perhaps there was something he didn’t want Parthiv to know until he returned back home or perhaps there were some other reservations… but an unexpected change of the voice (someone else had taken the receiver at the other end)… And the message that followed…
“Yogendra’s mother is dead!”
As with so many people who died in Gujarat and with whom Parthiv shared no relation except that of humanity — it was the same bond with this lady. He had known her for years — since the day he could actually demarcate who was his and who was not. And she inadvertently had been the one to hold his hand and to make him crawl over this line of cognizance.
She was his peer’s mother. This relation, however, fails to convey the depth of intimacy he shared with her. Perhaps she was just more than a friend’s mother or a good acquaintance. Perhaps there was something undefined — an amalgam of respect and obligation. And to talk about Yogendra — he had been a part of his childhood, his adolescence and in his entry into early manhood.
Some people are born simple. They get amused by simple events and almost always have simple aspirations. The everyday rise and fall of tides or the mundane sunset amuses them. They live life with an ordinary cycle of events. She had lived her life prosaically. In spite of her social prominence, she never really flaunted anything that could actually foretell her stature.
Determined yet humble, careful yet caring, scrupulous yet loving can be some of the expressions to capture her demeanor.
How people can get so empty handed at times even when they have everything?
But is there any state of complete acquisition? In fact, human wants never get satiated. So we have dreams and extension of one’s reality; an avenue, a platform, an entrance to somewhere so as to exercise beyond our worldly limitations. Dreams. They are something sine qua non to existence. An escapade from reality.
No mortal is an exception, and likewise she had a dream. Ordinary yet very emotional. Nay it was not the addendum of her own desire rather the dream was to see her son grow up to be a fine doctor. And had it not been for this lady’s subtle desire, Yogendra would have been doing some easy business instead.
Alas! She could not wait.
Bereaved Yogendra, who’d gone home for a two-week break from his final phases of medical graduation, landed up spending thirteen days in Barakhi (a ritual of mourning which the Hindus of Nepal practice)… only few people can get to spend the holidays in the manner he did!
“Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of darkness through Not one returns to tell us of the road, Which to discover we must travel too.”
Parthiv’s bedside dairy read these lines of Omar Khayyam and got him nostalgic about the whole sequence of events. He started to weigh the implications of so many deaths over one indolent one, which, unfortunately, had happened on the same chilly morning of January… for him that single death far outweighed the perishing of so many lives…
No. He did not share any blood relation with either!
“Loss of a single life is a tragedy whereas hundreds make a statistics,” he thought to himself.
He left the diary at the bedside and moved towards the window, unlatched it and gazed at the dark, empty-looking sky. And wondered in vain… Where do people go when they finally die?
(Source : Sulekha.com )
