Genesis “You must write…a novel.”
Till the completion and full understanding of that sentence, Farook hadn’t even dreamt of being a writer.
But Fareeda, his 30-year-old Cambridge-educated second-cousin, stirred up an unknown desire in him.
The setting was perfect for a writer to wake up or be born.
She sat on the half wall in the first storey of the old, half-tiled library building, looked at the fiery blooms of gulmohar and prophesied the birth of a writer. The leafy foliage of jackfruits and acacias witnessed the moment.
Fareeda touched an inner chord in Farook’s heart. He felt a rush of a weird desire flooding his heart.
His heart began to crave, his thoughts had broken the leash.
It was eleven in the morning. December sun was mild and the breeze had a lethargic chill. Crisp white clouds floated in the blue sky. A cuckoo sang against some coarse crowing of crows.
Fareeda and Farook had come into the library not to pick up any books, but to sit on the half wall. The old library was right in the heart of the city, under a canopy of gulmohars, jackfruit trees and acacias, tucked away in a serene corner of the vice-chancellor’s office premises.
Leaning on the pillar with continents of peeled-off paint, she kept looking at the leaves fluttering in the breeze. Farook stood behind her pretending to look at the girls on the road below but was breathing in her heady European fragrance and looking at the line of golden hair climbing up on her nape.
Over her shoulders, Farook could see the soft beginning of her breasts. He wanted to look beyond the boundary of decency, but something within him said no.
That was his problem. He could feel a chip within himself that beeped when he meandered into flesh.
It happened the previous night too. Fareeda had invited him over to her house in Garden Colony. He lied to his hostel-mate that he was out to meet a journalist for his project on Indian writing in English, and rode his red 100cc Yamaha straight into Garden Colony, 15 kilometres away from the soul of the city.
Fareeda came out to the gate to welcome him. As he swung his leg over the bike, she smiled and said: “Oh, I forgot to ask you to bring one or two cassettes. We are home alone today. Mummy’s gone to her brother’s place.”
“What cassettes?”
“Anything interesting,” she said and winked at him. Farook felt a blade of fire splitting his heart. The chip warmed up. She closed the gate.
Fareeda had come down to India from Cambridge for two months. She was doing her field study in Sociological Interpretation of Cricket in Commonwealth Countries. She would be leaving Trivandrum in a week’s time for Delhi and Calcutta.
Since there were no interesting cassettes to watch after dinner, both of them settled down with their books, in her bed. Lying on his belly, Farook read through an AK Ramanujan poem. Fareeda lay opposite direction and thumbed through an old issue of Maxim.
Farook was restless. He missed the whole point Ramanujan was trying to make in a poem addressed to his wife. Here he was, all alone with a short, fair and beautiful unmarried woman with big breasts, voluptuous lips and a heartening laughter.
Fareeda bent over the magazine. Brownish-black locks of hair fell carelessly over her face. She was five years older to Farook. Often he had wondered why she was not married. She must have boyfriends at Cambridge. They must be living together. Then, she must have had sex.
Ramanujan did not come back into Farook’s thoughts that night.
Fareeda had never told him about her boyfriends. Whenever she was in town – mostly for a week or 10 days – she would come straight to the YMCA men’s hostel where he stayed.
Farook knew she liked him. But he didn’t know why. He didn’t speak fluent English, nor had he shown any academic brilliance that she might find his company worthy.
But she confided in him. She had told him that she liked rum (shock number one for him) and she liked Indian cigarettes (shock number two).
Late that evening, when darkness fell a couple of long hours after the sun had completely disappeared, she pulled out a pint of Old Monk from a bag under her bed.
“No one should know about this, understand?” Fareeda sounded like an elder sister. Farook looked at the bottle. He was not a teetotaler. But he had never drunk with a woman before that day.
She poured the rum into two glasses, flicked two ice-cubes into them, and said: “Cheers!”
She rubbed her glass against his, and sank into the sofa in the corner of the room. “I’ve been waiting for mummy to go. It’s been a while since I had a good drink.”
It was a cultural shock for Farook. He knew Fareeda must be up to no good. Born and brought up in Europe, she must know and do all these things.
The rum tasted bitter. It burned down his throat. The thought of drinking with a woman alone in a house at night dizzied him more than the Old Monk.
After finishing her drink, Fareeda lit a Wills, and dragged in a deep pull. Thick smoke curled out of her mouth. He did not smoke. He had been having a bad cough for a few days.
“Cricket is an interesting game, isn’t it? I know you play. But I’m looking at it from a whole different perspective.” She began to speak about her study, without any provocation.
Farook was an uninspiring conversationalist, but an encouraging listener. He was too gentle to tell off a bore, even if he was a button-holing one.
His thoughts were flagged off. They bobbed on the sea of his imagination. Sure, the Old Monk was not effective. But the intoxicating thought of spending a night alone with a sexy woman sparked a revolution in him.
Farook stole a glance at her. She was reading an article on premarital sex. There was a two-column, tightly cropped picture of a boy and a girl locked in a passionate kiss. Two broad columns of nine-point Times ran around them in sober seriousness.
Fareeda was wearing a tie-and-dye wraparound. Farook could see her legs – creamy soft. His heart pounded. No. The chip in him screamed. He could hear his own heartbeats.
“What do you think of premarital sex?” Fareeda suddenly turned and asked Farook. She had almost caught him staring holes on her legs. He was not sure if she had realised that Ramanujan had gone for ever with his poem.
“I don’t know,” he managed to cough out a few words. Fareeda changed her position, and looked at him. Desire shone in her eyes.
Farook feared the next move from her. She could pull him closer and kiss him hard which would no doubt lead to a steamy session of premarital sex.
Her breasts were full under the T-shirt which said, “God’s Own Country”.
“Come on, Farook. Don’t be a dumb.”
“What? I think it’s wrong…sin,” he said, against the tide of passion surging through his veins.
Fareeda laughed. Under the dim, yellow light she was beautiful. “What if we have sex now? No one will come to know, and I like you,” Fareeda’s words exploded like a bomb in Farook’s heart.
He knew him the best. He had never had sex in his life. The lust for sex was strong, and he had often wondered whether to set out on an uncharted journey.
But a powerful string had always pulled him back.
Fareeda moved closer to him, and said: “Come, kiss me Farook.”
Farook felt a river of heat in his nerves. It spread across his body, and his pelvic muscles arched, and he throbbed.
Farook wanted to kiss her, take her in his arms and make love to her. But the struggle was within. The tug-of-war in him, which no one saw, was too animated. When his flesh and blood pulled him towards her, something else pulled him away.
He did not understand anything, but the inner struggle was as real as a bout of wrestling.
Sweat drops beaded on his forehead. He breathed fast, and his chest moved up and down.
Fareeda laughed again. “Relax Farook. If you don’t want to do it, let’s forget it. You’re my favourite cousin. Now, take it easy,” she put her arm around him and kissed him on his forehead.
“Goodnight,” she said, and the lights were off. The soulful fragrance of her body enveloped Farook, as he drifted into a sea of fantasies.
They both liked the old library building, especially sitting on the half wall.
“I like this place for its mustiness. It takes me back to a childhood I never had,” she said. Farook had always envied Fareeda and her siblings. Their father, Farook’s mother’s cousin, was a senior official at the UN.
They were in Geneva before Fareeda moved to England for her studies. He elder brother and sister – with whom Farook had only courtesy relationship, a brief chat on his studies when they make their annual visit to Kerala – were working in prestigious organisations England and France.
“Farook, you can become a writer. I feel it in my bones,” she said, again setting her eyes high on the swaying petals of gulmohar. “A good one among those who write in English here in India.”
Next to the gulmohar, there was a huge tamarind tree. Tiny tamarind leaflets shivered in pleasant breeze. A few pods were on the ground, and when the girls who came to the library stepped on them, they cracked with a crisp sound that mostly surprised the girls and made them smile sheepishly.
Farook, with the smell of Fareeda’s sun-block cream flooded in his lungs, felt an uneasy tribulation.
Writer…he had never thought of becoming a writer apart from writing some poems in Malayalam, and once or twice venturing into a few lines in English.
But, honestly, he had envied the fame and the stylised sluggishness of writers whose photos appear on the jacket leaf, and, the brief bio beneath where the writer is glorified into a rare specimen with a tint of romance.
But Farook had never dared to think that he can take up a project of such an immense scale to become an Indo-Anglian writer. It is by default that he studied Indian writing in English, the writers’ many challenges of cross-cultural communication, their so-called parochialism, their many tricks of the trade and their instant success in international market by package-selling India.
But being an average student all through his school and college years, Farook had never had the brilliance to write a novel. He had never topped his university, college, school or class. But his teachers thought he had it in him to bring laurels to their institution.
Often he pitied their poor judgment. Their absolute lack of insight.
Farook knew himself better than anyone else. He was not bright, forget about being brilliant.
He had always been an average in everything – be it cricket, his burning passion, the subjects he had studied…or to be intimate, he even had an average-size penis.
But his neitherbours liked him for he had always been a good, well-mannered boy. His teachers liked him for he had always respected them and never got into any trouble. His friends liked him for he was a warm person. Girls liked him for he was a chubby boy with whom their virginity had never been threatened.
But Farook had laughed at his neighbours on the sly. Only he knew how he disliked some of them, or even hated. How stealthily his eyes had fallen on the cleavage of his friend’s mother across the street. How many times he had had momentary romance – some called it crush – with the girls in his neighbourhood. How many time his parents, sister and himself had gossiped about others.
In fact, he hadn’t found enough qualities in his teachers to respect them. Their English – his favourite yardstick – was poor and pronunciation horrible. He had seen his social studies teacher and physical education teacher in a tight hug in an empty classroom. Or in the college classes, the professor’s stare falling lustfully on the girl in the front row.
He knew how badly he often wanted to dumb some of his friends. He just couldn’t like them. Their coarse jokes made him sick, their passion for political parties, especially the Communist, made him throw up. Their constant company made him believe “familiarity breeds contempt”.
The security that girls had felt with Farook – he knew – was because of their innate inability to see what was in a person’s heart. Farook, unabashedly, had fantasised about almost all of his female friends. He had imagined their physiological details.
But all these currents and deluge of passions were beneath his charming smile. What the world saw of Farook was a well-mannered young man of values. His parents were proud of their first-born, his sister wore her brother on her salvar sleeves.
The cuckoo, which hid herself in the thick foliage of gulmohar, had lost patience with the unruly crows and flew away with an abrupt note. The unharmonious crows were unmindful of the loss of music in their surrounding, and continued to carp on their black issues.
The students inside the library picked and chose from the old books. The bespectacled librarian – a woman in her 40s – clinically entered the titles on a dog-eared ledger. She kept an eye on her watch to decide on her lunch break.
“Are you joking?” Farook asked. His English was stiff. He spent time on each sentence, formed it in his head, rechecked if the grammar was correct and carefully spoke it out.
“No. Not all. Why should I make fun of you? I have a gut feeling that you can come up with a novel set in Kerala.” Fareeda looked into his eyes.
He laughed. “I have never written a line of prose in my life,” he said, and felt shy.
“No one does until the first sentence,” Fareeda said. Her accent was correct – RP – Received Pronunciation – which he had learnt in his language classes. The intonation fell so perfectly correct that it was music to an English-lover’s ears.
She got down from the half wall and stood facing Farook. She was a few inches shorter than him. He looked into her eyes.
She was pretty. Her brown eyes were shining in the bright light. Farook felt an urge to kiss her. But a sudden flutter in the belly reminded him of his boundaries. He knew he couldn’t do it. He was sure Fareeda had understood his struggle – the tug-of-war in his heart.
Farook remembered a sentence he had read somewhere…”to say no is the hardest thing though most of the time it is the right answer…”
He had to say no to his flesh to calm down the ocean within him. He knew it’s the right thing to do even though he may look stupid to his friends – at times to himself.
But the unseen, unconfirmed chip in him seldom failed to sound an alarm.
Fareeda moved closer to him, looked deeper into his eyes and her fingers touched the tip of Farook’s fingers. She looked a gorgeous woman to make love with. She was waiting for one small move from him. Farook badly wanted to do just that.
But someone…someone…there was someone who was stopping him. “It’s not right.”
He knew his father would understand him even if he took Fareeda to bed. He was a liberal, a former teacher of English literature and a hard-core fan of Bertrand Russell. Love and knowledge were, for him, the mainstays in life.
He was not sure of his mother’s views, but he was sure that she would forgive him. But Farook’s stumbling block was the unseen guardian, who spoke to him in soft voice. The gentle tap on his inner man, a comforting stroke of an invisible hand.
Farook breathed heavily. His curly locks fluttered in the breeze. There was a look of disappointment in Fareeda’s face, though she laughed out aloud.
“Farook, relax. You look so tensed.”
Words failed to inspire any voice in his vocal chord.
“See, I have to go to Cochin tomorrow. I heard I could meet some oldies who formed one of the very first cricket clubs in Kerala. Do you want to come along?”
Farook badly wanted to go with her, breathing in her fragrance all the way. But he said: “No. I have something to do here. A writer is in town, and he’ll be speaking on Indian writing in English tomorrow at the VJT Hall.”
A sad, white lie.
“Well, that’s good. But more importantly, you better start writing,” Fareeda tapped on his shoulders. “You’ll make it.”
Farook wanted to laugh. What’s she saying? Does she have any idea of my writing skills? A writer is born – with a God-given talent – not made out of compulsions or encouragement.
A writer should be able to make love to a girl, after all. If he cannot pursue his basic instincts and enjoy unbridled love and sex, he cannot write. He must lead a loose life to write about the morality of the society.
Fareeda came still closer, thrust her hand on his chest and said: “There is a writer in here. Bring him out."
Fareeda took the first train next day morning to Cochin. Farook was in his hostel room, lying in his bed, thinking about becoming a writer.
Augustine Alex, his room-mate and post-graduation class-mate whom friends called Yeye – short for Augustine Alex – had been sitting up from eight in the morning with a PG Wodehouse book. For the last two hours he was completely lost in the book that he didn’t care if Farook wanted to have his breakfast before the mess was closed.
When Farook first heard of PG Wodehouse, he thought of a wooden house. Often Yeye pulled his leg for his innocent ignorance. Yeye was a third-generation Anglo-Indian from Thankasseri in Quilon, about 80 kilometres from Trivandrum.
Farook couldn’t understand the distinction. All of the Yeye clan – his cousins and friends in the family and picnic pictures – were just as plain as any other Keralite: the same tropical dark skin and unimpressive hair, trademark moustache that begs for significance.
On the other hand, Farook was fair and hailed from a family of English teachers who discussed and dissected English literature for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Yet, they were not Anglo-Indian, but this un-English Yeye was.
Ridiculous.
Farook turned to the other side and stared at the wall. It was ten, and surely he wouldn’t get the cold bread and the colder omlette. Even the tea was uninspiring – a lukewarm liquid with a hint of milk and tea.
Farook thought of Fareeda. Yeye would even break off his friendship with Farook if he told him about the squandered opportunities. He might call him a wimp in public.
“Give her to me, and I’ll see that she doesn’t go after another man,” he would boast, tugging at the dark strands of his moustache.
“It always happens like this in this part of the world,” he would curse the Third World Destiny as if he was born in the cradle of Europe. He had never travelled out of Kerala.
Farook lay there still till Yeye finished Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.
Soul-searching for any chance of becoming a writer, as Fareeda had boldly prophesied, Farook thought of his father.
Can he be of any help to make his son a writer? He had had streaks of creativity, but he quit his teaching job in the early 70s to go to the Arabian Gulf. With the profession he had quit the world of literature too, to become an insurance clerk in a dusty Gulf state.
Could he have become a writer? He was a voracious reader of English classics and philosophy – one who did a portrait of Bertrand Russell in charcoal and hung it in the drawing room of their house. Farook grew up seeing the white hair and narrow lips in the black-and-white picture.
His family had been a happy unit till three months ago when an insignificant doctor raised a suspicion over an x-ray of his father’s chest.
Farook remembered the evening and how his parents came out of the doctor’s house at dusk, a couple of months after his father had come back from the United Arab Emirates. He had left the Gulf country for good after a two-phase span of 13 years. His reason to quit the job was a recurring and often intolerable pain and numbness in his right hand. He could no longer draft any letters nor type reports, which his job at the insurance firm was mainly about. The pain was so intense that he did not consider the reality that he had not succeeded in saving enough money to see the family through the rest of the years.
“A small blob near the lungs,” his father told him and his sister. Before any of them could relate the word “blob” to a malignant growth, he said: “It’s not anything to worry about. Just a small operation and it will be gone forever.”
His father lit a beedi, and puffed out the thin smoke. The all-too familiar reek of hand-rolled tobacco leaves spread in the air. Relieved, Farook and his sister, Shabnam, looked at each other. She was five years younger to him, but their mother said she was more mature and stronger than him. Maybe.
As they were getting into the taxi, his mother said: “Oh, what a relief! I just wanted to know what it is. The doctor has shown us on the screen that little blob. A small one – as small as my thumb.” Farook sneaked a look at her plumb thumb.
His father was thoughtful, and remained silent for long.
* * *
It is Monday, and Farook hadn’t heard of Fareeda for the last three days since she left for Cochin.
It’s like that. She was not in constant touch with him. She came to Kerala once a year, with many short trips across the state stitched together. She would be at home hardly for a week.
At home, she was left with her mother. Her father died five years ago of a heart-attack while delivering a keynote speech in a Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi.
Since then she had made it a point to visit her mother every year. “Sometimes I feel like leaving everything behind and settling down in Kerala,” she once told Farook. “But I’m not sure if that’s what I want. I don’t want to regret. I’m afraid I may end up in a cul de sac, a point of no escape.”
Most of the time, Farook did not understand her. His relationship with her was his efforts to understand her world, her views and her plans.
Farook knew that she liked him. She herself has told him that. “You’re so handsome. You’re tall, and I like your curly, unkempt hair,” she once said, sitting on top of a black rock at Kovalam beach.
She sat close to him. The locks of his hair danced in the strong breeze from the evening sea. Fareeda’s hair went crazy in the wind. The sea was neither calm nor rough. Blue waves ebbed and flowed. They slammed against the slimy belly of the rock they sat on.
Fareeda had never said that she loved Farook. She always used, though sparingly, the word “like”. He too couldn’t love Fareeda, but he liked her.
They used to go to Kovalam occasionally, mostly to satisfy her love for rides. She liked to ride on his Yamaha. Farook was apprehensive. What if mother came to know? The chip within him did not approve the trip. He knew – it was not right. But he cherished the ride with her sitting behind him, wearing a helmet with a tinted visor. No one could make out it was her. Her breasts were pressed hard against his back as they zipped past the traffic light in front of the Secretariat Building. The policeman on the traffic island stared at them. His eyes were glued to her shapely bottom. Farook revved up the bike at that thought. The policeman lost Fareeda’s butt in thick nimbus.
When they were perched on the rock, Farook had an urge to ask Fareeda about her love life in England. He was sure she must have a boyfriend there. A Brit? An Indian? Or a Paki?
No idea.
Fareeda enjoyed the salty breeze. She squinted her brown eyes and looked long into the horizon. Was she mourning the love in her life? Was she longing for him?
Farook’s mind was crowded with thoughts. Often he was fed up with Fareeda. “Why I’m stuck with her? What’s my gain?” he asked himself. He could have sex with her any time if he wanted. He could be more intimate with her, perhaps, taking the relationship one step closer to an affair.
But he did not want it. The voice deep within was soft but he could hear it clearly. “No. It’s not. She is not your girl.”
And, when he heard that voice, mostly in the night when he lay awake staring out of the window at the thick, liquid darkness, he had peace. He felt security and comfort.
In the opposite side of the room, Yeye would be fast asleep dreaming of Jeeve and his many girlfriends. Farook often wondered if Yeye had ever had any trouble in his life. He was always happy. He either played ping pong – he was a state player – or smoked beedis over a few books. Yeye believed in bedding any girl. “That’s what they want,” he boasted, mostly to ridicule Farook.
“Do you really have a dick?” he once asked Farook. The point of reference was Fareeda. Yeye saw them riding past the hostel towards Kovalam in the afternoon.
And when he came back in the night, Yeye said: “So tell me, you Casanova. What did you do to her? Tell me in graphic details. My ears are all yours.”
When Farook said nothing had happened except they drank three cups of Nescafe and ate two sandwiches each, Yeye was furious. “Tell me, son,” he put his arm over Farook’s shoulder, “do you really have something down there?”
Farook smiled, and said: “You may have nuke weapons but you can’t use them without discernment.”
“Ha ha ha,” Yeye laughed out. “This nuke will explode within you. I’m telling you,” he said and walked out of the room. Farook searched for the voice within. Though he could not hear the soft whisper, Farook felt good that he had obeyed his bosom friend.
It was true that any other man in his place would have by now had many steamy sessions with Fareeda, and she richly deserved them. But he was happy to fall in line with the unknown friend of his solitude.
It was drizzling. Farook got out of the hostel building, and walked into the thin rain. Raindrops pinched his face. A few fell on his lips, sending a refreshing sensation into his heart. A few fell on his cheeks, and a few on his hair.
He walked past the Corporation Stadium, under the line of ancient mahagonys, ignoring the beggars who scan the pedestrians for tourists, across the Mahatma Gandhi Street, and ambled into the British Council Library.
Farook took his eyes off his favourties lines in Jane Kenyon’s Let Evening Come as someone tapped his shoulder.
It was the thin, bespectacled librarian. His father’s friend. “So, Farook. It’s been a few days since you came in last. Were you in Kamana?” he asked. Kamana was Farook’s home town, 45 kilometres north of the city.
“I was around but was busy with some visiting writers from Delhi,” he said, sliding back the thin collection into the shelf.
“How’s he?” The librarian – Kumaraswamy – and his father had been friends since his father was a student in the University College.
“Can’t say he is getting better. The pain is still there. The doctor said he can remove the growth through an operation.”
“He’ll make it. You don’t worry,” Kumaraswamy said, but his face betrayed his thoughts.
The growth was malignant. That’s the latest news.
It had shattered the family. Farook’s mother broke down, sobbing in a hush, when she revealed the biopsy results to her children.
“Now you don’t cry. Pa says his children should not worry,” she told Farook and Shabnam. Farook felt a cold numbness creeping up his body. Shabnam held her brother’s hands and looked at him.
Poor girl, Farook thought. “How can I console her?” She had been a brilliant student till her Pre-degree but now she had willfully dropped out of the college to be with her mother while she nursed their father.
Farook was against the decision. “She must go back to her college. We cannot spoil her future,” he had argued. But Shabnam was adamant. “Please, it’s my decision. I’m not going to stop my studies. I’m doing a distant-education course. That’s good enough for me,” she said.
“Come on, Shabnam. How can you do that? Ma will be alright here. Pa will definitely get better after some time,” Farook told her.
“No. I can’t leave Ma alone here. I’m fine with the decision.” That’s it.
The primary biopsy was inconclusive as the growth was tucked somewhere between his lungs and vertebrae. Like the tiny tourist cottages tucked between the hillocks in Ponmudi. Doctors at the Regional Cancer Centre prescribed painkillers. Farook was silent for a while when he read “morphine” on the case file. Tears welled up in his eyes, but he did not cry.
“Pa, it’ll be alright,” he said as he held his father’s left hand. The right hand was almost numb by now.
His father looked at him through his specs and raised brows. He pursed his lips, and smiled. “How’s your project shaping up?”
Fareeda came back from Cochin after a week. She called up next day morning at the hostel.
“Hi Farook, how are you?” she sounded chirpy. “How was the trip? Did you meet the oldies?” he asked.
“Yes, I did. Some octogenarians. So, where, when in the afternoon?” she asked. Farook looked around. There was only a lonely administrative clerk in the room. The warden’s room was locked. There was an unusual quietness in the office room.
“I really want to see you,” Fareeda said. It was like that every time. She had so many things to tell him, and Farook had so little.
He enjoyed playing the role of a puppet to her strings. There were two facts that attract him to her – she was sexy and she lived in the UK.
“At the library,” Farook said. He had to go to the library to return some books and meet a professor who had done some research on Indo-Anglian writing.
The library building too was an old construction, a remnant from the colonial past of the city. The wooden doors were large, and widows wide. It had an air of spaciousness and old-world charm.
Farook didn’t quite like the old library as much as the neat, new British Library where he could find a good collection of modern English poetry, the only literature he read with some gusto. The pick of his writers was Jane Kenyon, a New Hampshire poet whom he met a few years ago when she and her poet husband, Mr Hall, came to the city.
Farook hit it off with Kenyon during the evening reading session. He liked her refined elegance and more refined lines. He had her collection “Let Evening Come” autographed in her shaking handwriting. Farook read Let Evening Come late into the night and then the next day early morning and imagined the pen-pictures that the poet presented…Young Kenyon lying on the grass, walking the dog, the arbour, her love, women sweeping away leaves at Kremlin station in a tribute to Akhmatova.
Reading Kenyon had always inspired a small poet in Farook, and he scribbled down the first poem in his life one ruddy December evening poignant with memories. He wrote about his first love, a lost cause.
Transforming pain
Have you seen a forest exploding in riotous
colours of autumn with the deciduous trees
letting leaves flutter away with light breeze?
Have you seen a lonely road, stretching away,
narrowing and wobbling at infinity?
Then, remember and realise,
my pain is like them.
At times, cyclic, at times linear,
at times habitual, at times accidental.
Perhaps, you will never know the chemistry
of my sorrow, the piercing pain of my pangs.
I cannot blame you either.
We have been revolving in unknown orbits,
revolving burnt-away suns, and adoring
far-away stars, comfortable in the cosmic chill
and finding ways in its expansive darkness.
But today,
as you are comforted by words of friends around,
hardly finding a moment’s hideaway to
express your love,
I become a monsoon night,
whimpering, murmuring, and
disturbing like an insomniac.
Farook thought many times of showing the poem to Fareeda. But he was, each time, ruled by a numbing fear of criticism and letting himself down. He thought the poem was mushy and a bit yellow in quality. But there were lines which he liked…but no…he didn’t have the courage to show it to Fareeda who, he was sure, had read much better first lines and may really look down upon him.
He didn’t mind losing Fareeda as a friend if it had to happen. But he didn’t want to lose her because of his poem.
Fareeda was in her usual vivacious self. The old library building and the timid students mugging up the ancient text in reverence could not hold her beaming personality. The moment she walked in, enveloped in her enchanting CD fragrance, the boys struggled to take their eyes off her. The girls often stole a glance at her style.
Farook was, as usual, seemingly passive. But his heart erupted at the sight of her or by even the gentle waft of her fragrance.
But his saintly façade had convinced himself that he hadn’t fallen head-over-heels for the woman.
“Farook, I’m afraid I’m winding up my stuff here. I have to leave day after tomorrow for Calcutta where I’m supposed to meet a historian-cum-cricket writer. Have you heard of Gautam Das?”
Farook had heard of him, but found his writing boring and style stilted.
“Yes, I’ve read a couple of his articles. He seemed to be good.”
Fareeda looked into his eyes. “Farook, my friend at Cambridge is a friend of Mr Das, and has arranged the meeting. I think he can give me some good stuff.”
Farook wanted to ask her of the “friend at Cambridge”. He or she. Boyfriend? Lover? For a moment, Farook’s mind flitted across many oceans and reached Cambridge where the “friend” was a lover of Fareeda and had kissed her hard on her lips.
“Why I wanted to meet you today is to give you this,” Fareeda pushed a brown A4-size envelop across the desk.
“What is this?” Farook asked.
“Open it and see it for yourself.”
Farook peeled off the flap. There are three copies of The Writer magazine. Farook hadn’t even heard of them.
“I’m sorry I haven’t heard of this magazine,” he said.
“You silly, country pumpkin, this is one of the best magazines in the world to help young and beginner writers. They will definitely help you in mastering the art of fiction.”
Farook wanted to laugh aloud. What is she doing? She seemed to be serious about making him a writer.
“I thought you’re joking?”
“You dumb, why should I? I’m serious… you must try to write a novel set in Kerala. It will sell,” Fareeda said.
She the pulled out the magazines and showed him the articles and tips on how to become a good writer.
“In the West, Indo-Anglian writers sell like hot cakes. You should give it a shot. You’ll never know, it might click.”
“There is another gift for you,” she said, and pulled out a small red book from her vanity bag. She put it on the desk.
“A Bible?” he asked.
“Yes, but I don’t know why I’m giving you this. It was in my box – I think a friend in Delhi gave to me last week. I don’t want to throw it nor do I want to take it back to Cambridge. So, you keep it.”
Farook didn’t want to throw it either. He slid it into his jeans pocket.
“So when are we meeting next?” She asked. “Whenever you come to the town next,” he replied, passive as ever.
A gush of wind peeped in through the window and the strands that fell over Fareeda’s forehead flickered.
Fareeda looked into Farook’s eyes. She expected him to be more romantic. But Farook was preoccupied with not being one. He knew he could not love her nor could he bed her. But whenever she came next, and if he was around here, he was happy to meet her, take her around on his bike and sip coffee and munch sandwiches with her.
“Farook, let me reiterate. You must write…a novel set here. Write about your own lineage.”
He smiled.
“So, I’ll see you next year…and hopefully to read some of your manuscript,” Fareeda said, and got up from the chair.
Farook shook hands with her, and saw her off getting into her white ambassador. Her driver nodded at him, and drove into the evening traffic.
Farook walked back to the hostel along the busy Mahatma Gandhi Road. The evening crowd was in its unmindful rush-back-home ritual. He loved walking in the city in evenings.
As usual, there would be some cultural function or the other at the VJT Hall. A few cars, mostly Maruti, were parked in the white-sanded front yard. The who’s who of the city’s cultural cream would greet one another, once again.
The bus-stop in front of the University College was usually crowded with NGOs and college students who at regular intervals ran after the buses and got rammed into one of them for their journey back home to call it a day.
As he walked past them, he sharpened his ears to catch the funny Trivandrum slang from the women. The slang had an illogical use of plural nouns. It was always buses, rices, teas, etc. even if they meant singular.
The state election was held the previous month and the faded flags had lost their relevance but they still fluttered in the breeze. Candidates on the posters had lost sheen and their electoral promises had lost their charm.
The Left had won the elections and formed a cabinet for another term. Irrespective of the change of government life seemed to be the same for everyone.
Farook hated the invasion of private buses in the city. Till five years ago, there were only the red-and-yellow City Service buses, giving the state capital an elite status. Now the city was flooded with blaring, speeding and indecent private buses.
He walked down the road in front of the University College and ambled along under the nine patriarchal mahagonys in a row.
He was not sad that Fareeda was gone. In fact, he was relieved that she had left the town. He liked her company, but somewhere there was an uneasiness in being with her. His unseen friend, the chip in him, did not approve of the relationship. He felt constant flutter of butterflies in his belly.
At times he did not understand his own dilemmas. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t make a move to make love with her. He could place his heart on a table and dissect it into two halves. One would be throbbing with passion to make love with Fareeda but the other half would reject it outright.
Farook didn’t know if his one half was spiritual or religious. Farook, for that matter, his family, was not pronounced in its religious practices. He had never seen his father or mother pray, forget five times, at least once. While his father had more faith in humanist values and socialism, his mother believed goodness begets goodness. Secularism was the cornerstone of the family’s thinking. Churches and temples had equal importance as mosques, perhaps more.
Farook was in front of the old Secretariat which was the symbol of political power for many years till the Assembly was relocated to a new, expansive building a few years ago. He walked up to the square where the busy newspaper and magazine agent spread out his stock on the floor. Farook normally picked up a Sunday Observer or Outlook from there.
He bought the latest edition of Outlook which yet again had Indian women’s approach and outlook to sex as cover story. Farook thought it was one too many for the magazine. He had read with interest when the weekly broached the subject for the first time, even though it was evident that it was a marketing ploy. And, there is no better subject than sex, especially if Indian women were talking about it, to promote a publication.
Farook had no opinion on the issue. He didn’t have any proactive take on anything except cricket.
He was surprised to hear that Fareeda was doing her research on the social impact of cricket in Commonwealth countries. Fareeda and cricket? No way. She didn’t follow the game at all. But her brother did. In fact, he would tell Farook and Aamir, his cousin, stories about his visit to Lord’s to watch an England-India match.
Azharudeen scored a brilliant hundred off 80-odd balls. Sachin was superb as ever. Chris Lewis fielded splendidly at cover and Darren Gough swung in dangerously.
“It was pure magic from Azhar, you know,” Fareeda’s brother, an astrophysicist, would say of his hero. There was a Hyderabad connection to him. His second wife – the first one left him in two months – was from Hyderabad.
“When he is in form, even Sachin cannot match him,” he would make a statement.
Farook, a tall middle order who loved to flick off his pads, believed the Mumbai batsman was sacrosanct. But he held opinion close to his heart.
Thoughts about Fareeda brought back her bold prediction of a writer living in him. Farook looked around. A dark, thick-set prostitute with big lips and curls of brown fat on either side smiled at him. The statue of Mahatma Gandhi looked leaner and lonely at the crossroad of day and night. The evening light that fell on everything made the city look surreal. Farook began to observe people who walked across him or stand at the bus-stop.
A writer? He looked into him. Was there another man in him who could write of other people. A writer who can live by writing. He was not convinced but when he reached the hostel he felt more like a writer.
He decided to give it a shot.
