MATCHBOX

  So this is the place. Our city

     Into this city the three of them came forth. Panicked. Determined to bring everything to the fore: the crime and the criminal; the wounded and the dead. All of it. They would see clearly, and clearly they would reveal whatever they saw. Sharad, Shruti and Hanif, who had resolved that they would write. That this time they could not remain silent. That everything must be brought out into the open. That the blowing wind was no breeze but a gale. That they could not allow it to uproot them.

     It’s raining. Shruti has stepped off the train and stands on the platform. A vibration. A trembling agitation passes beneath her feet and departs with the train. People run stumbling, soaked, searching for passengers outside. The city’s cows and dogs have ambled in to laze on the flooded platform. The water flows towards the tracks. A wasteland.

     There was a time that year when such rivers flowed in the streets, but they didn’t come from the rains. They came from the neighbourhood water tanks that were emptied into the streets for fear they’d been poisoned.

     Sharad recognizes her from afar and approaches. She stands alone, waiting. They come face to face; their faces bound in an inhibited silence. They exit with measured steps.

     The three of them understood that everything making us restless and frightened was right there, outside. They faced the same fear that filled me. I, too, began to panic. They’d try to write, then stop midstream. They’d find their writing hollow and say, all these words have been written before, nothing will be accomplished by recording them; the words have become utterly useless, grown empty, like government slogans.

     It was then that I realized I’d have to do something, somehow or other. I’d have to write, whether I understood or not. If it couldn’t be the three of them—a professional writer and two intellectuals—it would have to be me. Me, who knows only how to copy down words.

     At that time, it was barely possible to string together two words of sense. Nonetheless, I, who had neither the experience to string words nor the tenacity, could write. If you call copying down writing, then that’s what I was doing. That’s what I could do. I would pick up the fragments that flew up in their wake. Whatever caught my eye, wherever. 

     Before my eyes is that house, that gate, that letterbox. The flap of the letterbox hangs open, shivering in the rain. Shruti hesitates at the gate. Her sandals are soaking wet, as are her feet, up to the ankles. Sharad opens the gate. The front yard is overgrown with wild grasses.

     Once a madhumalti vine had climbed here, and the sight beneath that vine, of a row of white teeth in pink gums, had sickened me. The pen had slipped from my hand, ink splattering. Later, I’d wonder why I hadn’t recalled the pink and white blossoms of the madhumalti vine when I saw the teeth and gums. Instead, madhumaltis now always remind me of those gums and those teeth. They nauseate me. Nor do I recall the rest of that face that used to blossom with laughter. That beautiful, hearty laugh. Instead, the face becomes a repulsive shape lying in the dust, its individuality erased, defiling all the beauty of the laughter, wiping out the entire existence of the person to whom it had belonged. Daddu used to say that if you recognize a thing by only a fragment of the whole then it becomes trapped in its own contour, a useless, lifeless caricature. True recognition bursts forth, spreading and wandering about in the open, enveloped by all things, melting into everything. It is light. If you trap it within a single fragment to purify it, you’ll simply extinguish the light. The shape will be rendered lifeless. A repulsive lump of flesh.

     But I kept picking up the fragments. I didn’t have the time, let alone the ability, to fill in the middle parts, to search for fitting links. There was no time to act deliberately. Fearfully, quickly, I simply copied it all down. I wrote of here or there, scribbled down unnecessities, pasted the fragments willy-nilly. When life itself had become a collage in which slivers and scraps floated about, sticking hither and thither as in the aftermath of an explosion, forming and deforming shapes, how could we escape the incomplete, the scattered, the broken?

     Who’s ever heard of a cauliflower crop growing in a field of corpses?

     But listen : 

     There was such a crop in our city, that year. Who’s ever heard of a crop of fresh plump white cauliflowers that can’t be sold for even a handful of cowries?

     But that, too, happened in our city, that year.

     There were many such things that made no sense at all, and I was incapable of gathering all the bits and pieces to create the true picture. For they were mere scraps, whose proper worth I could not gauge, nor did I have to. It was none of my business. I just had to copy.

     I am copying down from the beginning.

Excerpted with permission from Our City That Year by Geentanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell (Penguin Random House India)