“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....”
White walls, green windows. Pink walls, novel platitudes. Woman in queue, pricking fingers. Serpentine curves, gazing glances. Shoddy roads, heightened anticipation. This, while on way to the 19th century. The more I see of the above, the more I am reaffirmed that this road does indeed lead to the 19th century. Half and hour; that’s how far this place is from the previous one. And I have kept track of every single minute in the past twenty-five minutes. For I don’t want to miss out on my trip to the past. The closer the minute got to half-past, the further my anxiety grew. More walls, white ones, pink ones, green windows, more platitudes, woman and more shoddy roads. Unanticipated wilderness, out of the blue. Anxiety grows into an apprehension. Apprehension discernibly visible as my countenance. Did they exaggerate?
They said it’s British. And the Queen once lived in it. Is still owned by one from Jamnagar. Even Swami Vivekananda lived in it. On the long stretch of curvy road, not a single indication to portend that. Finally, my worst fear. A relatively large edifice, having multiple doors. Very traditional Indian. Phew, the jeep turned away from it. More serpentine curves and the jeep halts in front of what I saw a minute ago. Pink walls, large edifice, I am forced to convince self that a hundred years ago pink was in vogue.
I pull out my luggage from the hatch, load myself and start following others towards the entrance. I don’t bother to look towards the foyer. I focus on my steps and the grass and the trail underneath when I realize that I have moved alongside the entrance and still walking ahead following the trail. I lift my eyes with astonishment and hope. And in the next five minutes, my hope was envisaged. Rusted auburn roof, Rugged stony white walls. Creepers all over the walls and roof. Grape vines hanging over, rhododendrons, hibiscus, tiger lily, flowering currant. Green plants, florescent sprigs. Florescent plants, orange fruits. Time-honored fiddleback chair inseparable from the red-bottom bird’s nest. Blood-Red pomegranate trees, lemon yellow ones just next to it. In those five minutes, for the very first time I saw the nature and the man-made homogenize. Hence forth, since that day, every day I wait for the mackerel sky to restore its original azure so that I may have my date with the eternal Trishul and Nanda Devi, up close and personal. Ofcourse they didn’t exaggerate!
