Saraswati’s ducks can
fly!
***
It made a sound as if an angry little kid broke his bamboo flute
with single hard press of his both thumbs. ‘Well, No’ on another thought, it
sounded like the globe, which had dropped from the rotting wooden cupboard of
the geography lab, which undoubtedly smelled of a colonial museum, in which
Mrs. Chaugle kept asking her to locate Mongolia. Close enough, but then it
occurred to her that there is no other sound that ever can match with a breaking
sound of a human skull.
She lay down on the edge of terrace and peeped down. A map of
Australia, which she could very well identify in Mrs. Chaugle’s class,
appeared, colored in dark wine liquid, forming out of his head, growing,
distorting the map. He was dead.
***
Yellow light flickered above the dining table like a half dead
wasp struggling for air. Everything dark looked black and rest took a color of
pus. It was funny. None of them spoke but everything on the table made sound,
silvers, cutleries, wood, mouth and saliva in it, food getting crushed under
marshmallow like yellowish teeth of all three person occupying screeching
bamboo chairs which were on verge of cracking and collapsing.
All appeared like a normal happy disgusting regular family having
a lousy dinner, till a voice hit, crashing like a torture, on their unprotected
eardrums.
‘Maangu…oh Maangu…Maangu…’
A voice which chills once bones, filled the kitchen like ether, they
froze. Recovering, Kunal licked tip of the fork. Kunal, a nine year old, was youngest
and arguably smartest of four members of the Solanki Family. His father Shravan
sat on his left and mother Charu sat on his right, both glancing at each other.
Person, whose voice interrupted their dinner, was of Kunal’s grandmother.
Saraswati Singh Solanki.
‘Maangu…oh Maangu…Maangu…’
Kunal and Shravan both looked at each other with a questionable
puzzled and lamented look. ‘Which one of them is she really calling?’ Her son?
Or the grandson she thought was her son? Both the sons shrugged their shoulders
or rather thought of doing that. They waited by getting themselves busy with
the food which was so bad that it made their stomach churn.
Saraswati, with her laboring breath, with all strength she got in
her throat, snorted all her nasal mucus and snot into her throat and instead of
spitting or swallowing, she started gargling with it, her idea of a good joke. And
when saliva started flowing from the corners of her lips, she gulped it with as
much sound as she could generate. Her eye gleamed maliciously.
Charu spat in disgust, it landed on the sleeping cat, which in
turn shrugged its fur, firing tiny droplets of her spit back to her. ‘Your mom
is doing that on purpose just to piss me off’ Charu heaved a loathing sigh of
discontent, while she separated the beans on her plate from half cooked rice
grains.
‘Grand ma says she calls me Maangu because I used to ask for more
milk even after having it’ Kunal said apologetically.
‘It’s not you. It’s your papa, Maangu the beggar.’ Charu laughed
hoarsely. ‘Who in a sane mind calls his
own son Maangu?’
Shravan moved his jaws like an overstuffed old cattle, trying to
control the urge to spit the rice back in his plate or on her face.
‘Grand ma says she threw grand pa from terrace’
‘No’ Shravan, a stocky flaccid man with a shapeless punch, almost
jumped from his chair and protested with passion that was more like a plea.
‘Yes, she fucking killed him, trying to see if he could fly’
Shravan ignored Charu and turned to his son, ‘your grand pa’s death
was an accident’ trying to be as calm as he could, ‘your grand ma is sick. She
has this condition and she thinks you are her son. She doesn’t recognize us
anymore’ he glanced towards charu and continued again, ‘you see it’s the age.
She is old’
Charu could not keep any more penitence and almost shouted, ‘Old
my ass, you said she dropped you out of her when she was only nineteen, you are
thirty five now, so how old you think she is?’
Shravan gave Charu a stare and before he could open his mouth to
protest her use of words in front of their son, Kunal spoke,
‘Grand ma says you both tried to kill her’ he waited to see their
face turning white, ‘grand ma says she outsmarted you both by shitting all that
soup out’
Their faces, drained of blood, cracked as the clay of the dry
river bed.
‘She is nuts. You see it’s the age. She is old. Eat your dinner
and go to bed.’ Charu gained the color on her face back.
‘Thirty five and nineteen is fifty nine. Grand ma is fifty nine’
Kunal said and after putting all leftovers in his plate, on the ground for his
cat, Mogambo, walked slowly towards his room.
‘Maangu…Maangu…Oh beta Maangu’ came again from the other room.
Shravan finished his dinner and took a bowl of soup to his mother’s
room. ‘She must be hungry’. She was on the bed, under the blanket like a dead
vegetable. He pushed aside the blanket. A sharp unbearable smell of shit filled
his nostrils and then the whole room and soon the whole goddamn world smelled
like shit. Bile rose in his throat and threatened to choke him. He ran out of
the house holding breath in his stomach.
He puked all over and also heard while puking all over, ‘you are
going to clean your mess too along with your mother’s’ He vomited some more crushed
beans from his nose. He realized he was covered with vomit along with the soup
he carried. ‘I guess no food for her tonight’ He pinched on his chest and
separated his soup soaked shirt from his skin like an old damp book page. ‘She
is suffering and she needs to be freed’ he sympathized. ‘We need to be freed’
he added.
***
Charu jumped out of the bed, ‘yuck you filthy pig’ and got a new
blanket from the shelf. ‘It’s those rotten beans you make us eat every day’
Shravan sniffed and let out a whale sigh. He turned his back to her and closed
his eyes and a tear drop crossed his ear and disappeared into the cotton of the
pillow.
‘She is my mother’ he said under her breath still eyes closed.
‘Yes, your creepy mother, who killed your father. I get nightmares
of her broken tooth stuck in my neck like a bloodsucking demon and don’t whine
as if you don’t want it.’ Charu was almost shouting under her breath her face
turned pale and brittle like sandstone. She continued, showing a hint of
empathy, ‘We both know it’s not her age. She has always been a mad devil with a
minced brain in her fucked up skull. I swear to my dead mother if, like last
time, she ends up pooping for so many days, I will kill you too.’
He didn’t speak. The silence turned grotesque. Night passed while
three pairs of eyes stared to the ceiling above, waiting for what was coming
the next day. Only eyes slept peacefully were Kunal’s.
***
She opened her bleary eyes when the cat, all seven pounds of
squirming flesh, climbed onto her belly. Squinting into the sunlight streaming
in from the open window, she discovered that she was now the weary possessor of
a pounding headache, and at some point, had managed to lose both a tooth and a
spouse.
‘Tooth?’ When did that happen? ‘Oh yes’ she remember that now. It
was a really hot day like it is today.
Saraswati was on the floor. Her bare legs stretched backwards. She
counted. ‘January 31… February god knows… March 31… April 30… May 31… June 30…
July 31… she counted, looking at the approaching knuckles, the number of days.
She had learned this trick in her school. Mrs. Dasgupta was her favorite
teacher and taught her how to count number of eggs when Raju from the book ate
few of them, raw, without cooking, yuck. Yes, so mountain knuckle on the fist
would be 31 and the valley between them would be 30. She always hated month of
February. Mrs. Dasgupta said she was not smart enough to calculate it so she
asked her to mug that up. But she always kept forgetting it. Anyway it doesn’t
matter, nothing really changes. Everyone dies in the end irrespective of how
many days in the month. She was not dead yet and she was already nineteen.
When another fist appeared, she didn’t want to count the days. She
wanted to duck. Yes, Duck. Ducks are wonderful. They get shot all the time.
Their children are eaten by Raju all the time. Irrelevant here, no one is
getting shot. No one is eating anyone’s kid ‘Why are you naked?’ yes that was
the question she remembered now. Very stupid question indeed, its summer, isn’t
it? She loved summer. It makes us sweaty, smelly and sticky. ‘My dress was
always sticking to my breasts and it made them visible all the time. I didn’t
want my breasts to be visible all the time so I got rid of the cloths’ but she
didn’t say that. She didn’t want to count the numbers in the months again. ‘It
was hot’ she finally said. ‘May have 31 days’ she counted. ‘You are sick’ He
shouted and left the house. ‘Don’t go’ she thought of stopping him but then if
she asked him not to go, he won’t let her complete her painting she had started
making on the floor with the blood coming out of her broken tooth.
‘Yes, that was all that happened and I lost my tooth’ she said. She
touched the gums, under the broken tooth, between two of the unharmed tooth. A
sharp pain rushed through her nerves. She felt good. For a fraction of second
the headache felt different in a good way. She touched it again and then again
and then one more time again. ‘I should get rid of these clothes. They are
always sticking to my skin. I don’t like it.’ She thought. ‘Oh yes, he is dead.
He was sick. I told him not to go out’ she explained to the kid, who she
thought was her son Maangu but now she doubted it. Kunal was sitting on the red
chair near end of her bed, away from the streaming sun light, which was making
a bright tilted image of window on her grandma and on his own legs.
‘What was the question?’ She inquired again confused. She held the
cat by skin and threw it near the lamp. It didn’t cry of pain. She was disappointed
in it.
Kunal spoke, throwing his legs carelessly in air front and back
like a walking in a parade, ‘Did you push him from the terrace?’
She lifted her eyes, affronted and didn’t like him whatever he
looked like. She didn’t care. Her husband was dead and she should be upset
about it. She was not. She felt good from inside. No harm in showing that if
you felt good. ‘I feel really good. Do you like cats?’ she asked.
‘I do. Tell me about papa?’ Kunal had become smart.
‘Oh I loved him. But he was sick. He told me when he left the
house. I was making a painting of ducks. They were flying. I told him you can
fly too, just try. Everyone can fly, even ducks can fly.’ Saraswati chuckled
mellifluously with resonant disdain.
‘The other guy in this house puked all over. It makes me sick. The
smell of beans covered in stomach acids make my head burst like a dhol. I like
Dhol, but not in my head. I like ducks in my head.’ She, instantaneously,
thought that sleeping for hours, covered in her own shit might have triggered
the pounding in her head. ‘No, it’s because of that man’ she convinced herself.
‘I think I will get some sleep now. You can feed the cat, I know
you love cats’ She turned and closed her eyes still thinking to remove her cloths.
It was very hot that day.
***
Mogambo landed near the lamp and ran for its life ‘fucking few
more inches and I would have been out of the window’ it must had thought if it
could. It ran to the kitchen. If it was to die why die hungry? It hugged Shravan’s
leg who was standing near the dining table. ‘Everyone dies’ Shravan thought
when he saw the cat. ‘And there is only one way to find if it is working’ he
kept the soup bowl down near his legs.
Charu looked him, her eyes wide open, ‘what in hell, this poor
bastard have done to you?’
In Saraswati’s room, Kunal gnawed at his fingernails with
appeasable anxiety. ‘You know why being after so damn superior, human can’t
fly?’ Saraswati said looking out of the window.
Kunal looked in the same direction as if drawn hypnotically toward
the window. Few ducks, into a distance lake, jumped from the cliff into the
water.
‘I am hungry’ Saraswati said chewing her torn sleeve, looking back
to him. He knew this look of her. He also knew that her mother was heating the
soup but he said nothing. He had no control of when his grand ma would be fed.
In past, he remembers all, grandma loved him, more than now. She fed him. She
played with him, before she started suspecting that he was not really her son
but someone who looked like him. ‘I love you grand ma’ he said.
‘You see those ducks?’ Saraswati pointed to the lake which lay as
a streak of glass among the trees. ‘They can fly and they are the only ones who
love me’
Back in Kitchen Shravan picked the cat and took it outside. ‘I
can’t handle another pooping joe in the house.’ He thought. 8…7…6…5…4…3… by the
time lift reached 2nd floor, Mogambo turned limp like a rope in his
hands. He pulled up its rear legs, ‘no poop’ Lift door opened. He looked left
and then right and threw the cat, like a leftover pizza crust which has no
cheese on it, in the garbage bin and closed the lid. ‘At least it didn’t die
hungry and pooping that out’ he thought while returning to his apartment. On
the entrance of his house he touched the foot of Goddess who was stuck on the
wooden door through some manmade glue. Charu saw him walking in the kitchen
with her eager eyes. He poured another serving of soup in the same bowl and
looked straight back into her eyes. She cried.
‘That’s what your father said’ Saraswati argued Kunal. ‘Now you
say you love me? Well, I don’t give a shit’ she lay back on her oil soaked
pillow and said, ‘you are with them. You are not my son’ Kunal stood up, like
flame of a candle and then walked, passing through the kitchen, to the hall and
out of the door.
Shravan took the soup and walked into her mother’s room. ‘I am
hungry’ she whooped. ‘Why did you push him? He had loved you so much’ Shravan
shouted back in bitterness.
Saraswati kept looking into his moist eyes trying to process.
Trying to remember, if her husband was trying to fly or if it was she who
pushed him? She failed to get an answer. It all was like distant memory of a
five year old girl. She stretched her hands for the soup, which Shravan was
still holding and trying to generate enough courage to pass it over to her.
And then he heard it. She heard it. They all heard it. A huge
sound of something cracking, followed by wailing of people. He ran to the
window and saw a pool of dark red liquid filling up the cracks in cement pavement.
He was flabbergasted. A scream died in his throat. It was Kunal. He saw, in his
blurred vision, his mother drinking the soup. Her ruddy colossal face softened
with contentment before she dropped dead on her pillow. Her last words, ‘At
least my ducks can fly’
***
