Bilkis Bibi walks into the house. It is nothing for her now, where once she could imagine the laughter of her children, the dinner table conversations, the nuzzling with her beloved on the sofa, now there are just Objects.
Not memories.
Objects.
There is a chair.
There is the hard marble floor.
There is the wall. Objects.
The ancient stain on the wall is just that, a stain, not the dried ketchup from when she was trying to make a sandwich and Amaan had surprised her by suddenly nuzzling her neck, so she had dropped the entire plate, ketchup and all.
She looks around, at the empty walls, devoid of all meaning, of all emotion. The whitewash, the paint, is as unthinking, as unfeeling as the numbness in some corner of her mind. There is very little to keep her here now.
A digression, to set the mood. This scene, one would imagine, plays out in black and white. On a foggy winter evening in the streets of Delhi. The house is dark, really, dark and damp. Not at all like the living, breathing entity it seemed to be when Amaan and Bilkis lived in it. When Amaan was still alive, that is.
She takes out their photograph, her favorite one of the two of them together. She always carries it in her kurti, it is her last memory of them together , where they seem happy. She wonders how life would have been. She imagines children, 2 , she thinks. A boy and a girl. They would have loved it here, she thinks. And she almost imagines Amaan playing with the children in the courtyard. And then , like it is being directed, in a movie, the scene of his death plays out in front of her.
Of the Riots , of last year, since that day, when there were voices on the street.
“Kill them, Burn them, loot them, pillage, rape, murder” The Viking calls of men lost high on blood and ideology. Savage beasts whom no music would soothe. They had surrounded the both of them, and always valiant, Amaan had made sure no blow had fallen on her as he pushed her into the alley and asked her to Run.
And just like that, all the poise which Bilkis had maintained through the last year, through the last rites, through the court hearings, the accusations of being not her husband, but her ‘client’, the death threats , the convictions – All of it. It all falls apart. And Bilkis Bibi cries. She howls and she screams in that empty house, with its chairs, its empty walls and its stains of ketchup .
The photograph falls from her hands……
…….Two small hands pick up the old black and white photograph lying on the floor.
Sureen follows her mother and father as they enter the house. “Look ma… Look … I found a photograph” . Alia looks at the old photograph in her daughter’s hand and smiles. The previous owners must have left it here, she thinks.
Parth snatches the photograph from Sureens hands and makes a face. “She looks so old and ugly”. Alia shakes her head and admonishes him – “Do not use such language in my presence, young man”
Next to her, her husband Aroop makes a grunt of disapproval. “That stain, looks like ketchup, that stain will need to go”. Always a perfectionist, her Aroop, she smiles.
A digression, then, to set the mood. The day is bright and sunny, and there is sunlight streaming through the window. And Alia and Aroop are here to take a first look at the house they may just be spending the rest of their lives in.
Alia looks at the empty house and almost imagines how it must have been when the owners were still staying there. The old furniture, the stains on the walls, the whitewash. All so alive, so fresh, as if it was just painted yesterday. They had got the house cheap, from a friend of a friend’s, who had inherited it from her mother.
Local history placed the house smack in the middle of the neighborhood where the riots had taken place 25 years ago.
That is where she had met Aroop. Then. In the riots. Her parents were Muslim who had been escaping from a mob of Hindu fanatics, when Aroop’s mother had given her a place to hide. Saviour and Messiah, they were destined to be together, Aroop always maintained.
While her parents had moved to another city, she had never forgotten the red faced boy she saw that night. And as fate would have it, they met again during college, fell in love, and over one rainy, tea time conversation, had accidentally pieced together the interwoven histories.
She looks at him and smiles… and then looks around the room. She imagines their life together, the sound of her children running through the room, , the movies they would watch together curled up in front of the Sofa , the dinner table conversations.
Suddenly Aroop is beside her, and he holds his phone in front of them and Says “Smile”.
And there is a photograph. Both of them, Smiling, happy.
