(Excerpts from my debut novel)
When Farook spilled the beans in Bombay Beats newsroom about his employment in an American magazine, everyone was surprised, some jaws dropped.
In fact, Farook himself was surprised to receive a call from Andrew Mitchell to inform him that he had been appointed to assist the features desk.
Farook had known Andrew Mitchell for a year by then, and had been in constant correspondence with him. They wrote on good writing, ethics and, faith. Interacting with Mr Mitchell had been a good learning process for Farook. He improved his journalistic skills in quick time.
Short, plump Mr Mitchell had two distinctive physical characteristics: a medium-size paunch that expanded around his hip, and the absence of a definitive neck.
Farook was drawing circles on a horizontal piece of paper when the office boy informed him that his editor wanted to meet him. It had been his way of preparing himself for a feature. He drew circles for each point to stress. After finishing the feature, he picked up the paper again and cross-checked if he had covered all the points.
A bald, middle-aged man who always stroked his earlobes as he spoke, Aroon Bhaweja was known as an imaginative editor who had taken Bombay Beats to be one of the most popular dailies in the city. The previous day he had assigned Farook to do a story on the people who were cheated by overseas recruitment agencies, and especially on that magical piece of paper called visa.
If it was two months ago, Farook would not have been assigned to do the job. There were a number of senior and more talented writers. But Farook’s last piece on street children and inmates in orphanages had generated such reader interest that the office mailbox was crammed with congratulatory letters and letters to the editor commending him on his insight to do such a story.
Bhaweja, who so far did not find Farook anything other than the another chip off the southern block, suddenly called him into his cabin and praised him in front of the news editor, who apparently did not like the sudden rise of the young man from Kerala.
“It was one of the best features I have read,” Bhaweja said, walking up to Farook.
“The way you conceived the story is brilliant. The choice of words makes your language refreshing and appealing to the readers. Excellent, and now you have to keep it up!”
Farook could feel the news editor turning in his chair. Restless and disapproving, he tapped on the table, removed his specs, fogged them with his exhale and cleaned them with the rough end of his kurta.
It had been less than a year since Farook joined Bombay Beats as a junior writer, a favour from an acquaintance who was a senior at the copy desk.
Farook would have never come to Bombay, he preferred call the city by its old name rather than the new Mumbai, but for that nasty, disturbing incident in that sultry March night.
After the intruders left, Farook found his mother totally devastated. She was crying all night. Only thing Farook checked occasionally was to make sure that she was physically steady. And, he left her to cry out her fear or grief.
She lay in the bed where she used to sleep with Farook’s father, facing the wall and sobbed, wept and cried in varying measures. She was desperate for her husband’s presence, which she rarely had in times of emotional low points even when he was alive. In the best and the worst of times for the 13 of 25 years of marriage, he was away in the Gulf, leaving her lonely with their two kids.
“Your son has grown up and taken a decision on his future all by himself. Now tell me, at least now, what should I do?” she asked her dead husband.
She knew her husband loved their son, and one of the last sentences he spoke before he died was, “Farook…Farook…What shall he do now?”
The relationship between Farook and his mother was the subject of all his friends’ envy. She was to him a friend, a guide and a window to the world and family history. They shared jokes and laughed out aloud. She followed her husband’s belief in secularism and did not give in to the imposing intrusion of religion in personal life.
They brought up their two children the same way. The celebrated Xmas and Onam, perhaps better than Eid.
As she was crying into the softness of her pillow, she was thinking of all this. She was thinking of their family pedigree—the long history of thinkers, teachers and writers—and those who went to the Far East and never came back.
She did not doubt the seriousness of the threat that her son would not see his mother if he repeated what he did on previous two Sundays.
After all, she did not understand why he attended a church service. Even on Fridays when the imam’s coarse and religious-tuned voice through the loudspeaker floated in with the breeze from the valley, exhorting the Muslims to understand the “world-wide persecutions” against them, neither Farook’s father nor himself felt the urge to join them in prayers. They either played another game of scrabble or watched India play a visiting team.
No imam dared to open the gate and ask Ibrahim and Farook to attend the prayers. No imam with a sense of history could be naïve enough to tell Ibrahim, the youngest son of the Moulavi Sahib, who gave everything he had in life—except his nine sons and a daughter—to uplift the community, the virtues of Islam or attending Friday prayers.
Only thing that Farook’s father wanted his son to become was a good human being, which his mother thought he was. Though he was never a topper in schools or colleges, he had never put his parents to shame by either badmouthing his teachers or by eve-teasing the coy girls in the neighbourhood or in his school. Neither was he involved in party politics. All he did was play cricket, and spend hours in front of the fissured mirror on the wooden almarah, which was one of the first things Farook’s mother bought when they moved out of their sprawling maternal house to the first of the four rented houses.
Farook spent long hours on perfecting his off-spin grip—getting his forefinger and middle finger spread around the seam—and getting his bend and balance right on a Sunil Gavaskar stance, and the way he should shuffle across at the time a bowler delivered the ball—not too much which would expose his leg-stump.
His efforts to play cricket or become a better cricketer did not bring any shame to the family but slightly took his focus away from his studies.
Farook remained in the front room, in front of the Scrabble board, staring at the unromantic but economical tube light under which two lizards stood still, both eyeing a velvet moth a hop away.
His mother turned in her weeping position and continued to shed tears into the pillow which by now had become wet in patches. The cotton inside the pillow had become hard after getting wet. She ran her fingers across the edge of the pillow as if she was running her fingers across the chest of her husband, which was her favourite unwinding exercise. She would stop by his nipples, and by that time the foreplay session would be hot and ready to take off.
The cotton inside the pillow had thick spots where the cotton was in knots. She tweaked them as if she was tweaking her husband’s nipples, and continued with her train of thoughts as if he was alive and lying next to her, eyes closed but listening.
One tear drop veered off the normal route along the bridge of her nose and seeped into her lips. She tasted her own sorrow. She pursed her lips, and continued to long for the presence of her husband to decide on Farook’s decision.
She knew what her husband’s stand would be. He would not impose anything on his son. By the way, how could he who had done in his life only what he wanted, all of a sudden dictate to his son what to do? Even if he was against Farook’s sweeping decision with far-reaching repercussions, he would not hit the roof with anger or throw the jobless son out of the house but be quiet.
He passionately believed in what his idol, Bertrand Russell, said—knowledge and love should guide your life. His reading was wide, and he was passionate in love.
Though Farook’s mother did not know much about his reading other than the titles, she knew what he wanted in bed. He explored every curl, heap and dip of her body with passion and taste. He had made it a point that they had no inhibitions in bed—and made sure she was naked. Undressing her was a ceremony for him. He did it layer by layer, part by part, with soft, considerate touches. Unlike most neighbourhood husbands who turned over and slept once they were through, he made sure she experienced what she wanted to experience.
He worshipped knowledge and practised passionate love. He celebrated humanism and proclaimed its values. So he would not disown his own son for taking a decision which was not an every-day decision but one which could get the entire family ostracized.
It was a year ago that they buried Farook’s father under a cashew tree, in the extreme corner of the cemetery at Kayaloram mosque. Though no one had visited the burial place or erected a memorial stone to remind others of whose remains were under that insignificant mound of soil, Farook’s mother knew if her son defied the men in veil and attended another Sunday service, her desire to be buried next to her husband would never be fulfilled.
She continued to cry, into the stroke of midnight when in the front yard a nishagandi blossomed with a waft of intoxicating fragrance.
She wept past the midnight into the wee hours of another hot morning. Sweat drops trickled down from her nape and channelled into her cleavage. She wiped them off with the hem of her sari.
She woke up at four in the morning with a sense of peace settling down on her. She rubbed her eyes, and got up from the bed with a decision—let Farook do what he wanted.
All that time, since his mother began her odyssey into her sorrow and thoughts till she got up at four in the morning with a sense of awakening, Farook was thinking of his state of no decisions.
He himself never wanted to attend a Sunday service till that Saturday evening when he stumbled upon the sleek edition of the New Testament which Fareeda gave him years ago while bidding him good-bye, which turned out to be their last meeting.
Farook was rummaging through a pile of old books as he had nothing else to do. He had not even opened the red-bound book, mainly out of lack of interest. But on that Saturday evening when yellow sunlight fell, through the window panes, on the bed he was lying, he opened the book and browsed through.
What was written in fine print did not make any sense to him. But his eyes stuck on one sentence. “God the Father…” Farook read the sentence again and again.
Again and again.
He stopped at each word. God. The. Father. Something was happening to him. He felt a brook of warm water breaking forth from the deepest point of his heart.
A sense of security wrapped him up. He was missing his father, who had died without leaving him anything to build his life on.
Farook couldn’t hold back his tears. That which brooked from his heart overwhelmed him. He sobbed uncontrollably. All the grief in his life was being churned to tears. He thought he was leaning on the shoulders of God, the Father. Ah, that security, that comfort!
Farook didn’t know how long he lay like that with the tiny book by his side and eyes wet. When he woke up he felt so light as if he was a feather floating around in the breeze. The weight of sorrow and grief was gone.
Farook felt good, and hopeful. Hopeful that there could be a Father. And, there could be someone who could lead him out of the cul de sac that he was in.
The decision to attend the Sunday service at New Life Church, where one of his friends attended prayers, was taken off the cuff. The next day he went to Trivandrum, his mother thought he might be meeting his friends.
Farook was hesitant to walk into the hall. When he walked in, a choir was singing Then Sings My Soul My Saviour God To Thee. Farook sat on the last pew as he did not want anyone to notice him. He closed his eyes, the lyrics gnawed at his heart. As the choir leader led the congregation from one soulful song to the other, Farook was sobbing, gentle and quiet.
