The Revolutionary

“So why do you call yourself a revolutionary?”

It’s the wee hours of early morning, I splash some water onto my face and look at myself in the mirror. I try and look closely at my visage. I observe my eyes, the furrows just above it, the contours that run down from the corner of my eyebrows till the corner of my mouth forming a crater where once my cheeks used to be. Every time I look in the mirror I look for a different face. Sometimes I contrive to find it. Just the way he had said to me. Smiling, Smirking, Mocking, Laughing.

“Because I am mortal.”

It was about thirty years ago on a dark, sultry, inclement evening. The smoke from the barrels and the firings had covered the sky and turned it into a gloomy starless night. The atmosphere all around was tense. There were police constables and Black Cats ransacking the town and the state was in a mode of emergency. We were lying low with a tattered caravan covering us. The sweat from my body had mixed with the showers from above. The droplets that dripped from my mouth and my nose, I didn’t know whether it was my sweat or the rain and I couldn’t think about it then. He was lying next to me, bleeding, which is when I asked him that. The moment he replied to me it had not made much sense.

“When I look at people from your clan, I smile and the one thing that I am not is worried, for I know that in this country your clan is in minority. You are well-educated middle class men, you possess jobs worth in millions, you wear Che Guevara tee-shirts, you listen to hard rock and you smoke hash. You feel conceited about your education and grumble upon opening more institutions. You talk about progress and judge by numbers. You provide jobs and recruit your own clan. You remain awake with a coffee mug in your hand and stare at a terminal in front of you. You awe in shock when the graphs collapse and you take extravagant steps to secure your finances. You bring out candle light vigils when your clan is shot at and you turn your back when one of our men is killed, when one man from the rest of the majority is killed. Tell me, and you tell me very honestly, whenever you look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see your visage differently? Do you see the man in front of you differently? Do you see him smiling, smirking, mocking, laughing at you for not what you are, but for what you are not? Tell me.”

I remember these words as clearly as as a kid I could clearly distinguish between red and blue and blue and green and green and red, for a memory as old as this is now transformed into a recurring dream. A dream that I see even with my eyes open. As he spoke these words he smiled and took the last breath. He had a bullet in his heart with his guts, from the shrapnel, ripped apart. At that very moment, I was conscious that God doesn’t really exist, because if he had and if as a kid I could distinguish between the reds and the greens and the blues, he, with two people lying right next to each other, wouldn’t have mistaken between the dispensable and the indispensable. Of course, just like I hadn’t understood what he meant when he said he is mortal, I hadn’t understood that God does indeed exist, though in forms I couldn’t have imagined then.

It’s been thirty years now since the revolution started and every now and then I meet such revolutionaries. They cry out his name in vanity and they say they want to liberate us all. They say he is their God and this is not the country he had perceived for us. Today, I met another young blooded revolutionary and I asked him what I had asked thirty years ago. “So why do you call yourself a revolutionary?” He was a young lad in his twenties, perhaps a drop out from school. He looked at me and smiled. “Because I am mortal. I will die someday. But the revolution, it will live on and on and on....”