How much does an official box measure? It’s best not measured! The size of anything official is deceptive. Basket, casket, box. Dali, peti dabba. Denoting bribes and amounts! This box containing the son fits no idiom, what dimension then should be suggested for its size? Big enough to hold a fistful of ash? Or as big as he should have been by right, in his death, laid out in full? What was left to measure with inch tapes and weighing scales? Anyway size changes with age – the bigger I get the smaller he becomes and so does the box containing him!

How does one feel inside a box? Sometimes to give myself a feel of it, alone in my room which was his and is and will remain so, I get up in my imagination and double up to enter the box or chest or drawer or casket or container or urn or carton labeled ‘freight’. Flattened against its cold floor I wait in queue with other baggage at the airport, to go under the x-ray and flash my guts on the screen!

The government sponsored Father and Ma’s flight tickets to bring him and me back. Prize for freeing them of two files! I came in Ma’s lap to be her son, he came as freight hopping and skipping on the conveyor belt.

How does it feel to be freight? To bounce and jig and gambol along? Does it hurt? Ouch ouch! Or is it a joy ride? Whoops, whoopee! It is cold and dark inside. I hear invisible voices from outside. Trolleys screech, people shout, be quick, go slow! Last call, flight shall be closed. Panic, rush, babble. Plonked on to the belt.

All cleared, green signaled, off I go, bon voyage!

Does the ash give a tiny leap in the box? Or is it just the conveyor carousing on and caught at a curve, jumps and balances half in the air. Crammed inside I can’t do a thing, just feel the belt jerk on, thud thud, under me. Someone notices and gives me a push. Back on the rails, I go chugging along.

Does the guy who pushed the box know what he just touched?

The airport officials have no idea either. The box looks out of place. What is that, barks one at Father. For all he knows Father must be a terrorist and the box might contain RDX!

Father fumbles for the official letter. My son, hisses Ma.

The official has not heard or not understood. X-ray properly, he barks on.

He reads the letter Father hands him like he does not know how to read. Images flash on the monitor. Other officials rush up: let it go. It is ‘that’. Everyone stands awe-struck, and then in attention, as if ready to salute! Reporters, bystanders, security staff, workers, all freeze in poses that are struck when ‘that’ is in the air they have to breathe. Cameras are whipped out.

It is all there in the picture, the people and the poses. But not the hush in the airport that sent a shiver down each spine as the box was retrieved from the x-ray. What had shown up on the monitor? A thing or a human? Flowers or a bomb? Pebbles? Seashells? What clothes and skin did the x-ray strip off to see what?

I lie in my – or his – room playing ‘ash’/skeleton cavorting on the monitor in my imagination and I smile. The child I was then remembers a coffin-like box; the adult I am now, smiles at the little urn in Ma’s locker. But in both, the box and the urn, lay a pair of eyes, desolate and dry, like buttons in the ash from the cafe.

*

As might be expected in the scheme of such things, the town just could not have enough of this new sensation! To bring home a son in a box! And a brand new one in the arms. The ditty doing the rounds became the going of one and the coming of one and how and how and how!

Photographers, journalists, bureaucrats and leaders converged to receive them, the parents. Them, with the box looked confused. They needed someone to tell them how and which way to move. Today and ever after.

The consensus favored a pan-religion meet. A sarvadharmasabha.

Everyone gathered in an old old building. Pictures of dead leaders watching over them. While leaders of rival factions, who too looked like pictures, sat in a row representing a pristine new brotherhood. The hall was milling with townspeople. Amidst all that din sat the box, silent.

The bomb had burst in the public and the boy it burst made him a boy of the public. A universal son! His pieces belonged to all. The box sat on stage, the hero of the show. Behind it hung a life-size picture from once upon a time of its subject’s life.

In the picture he was in school uniform, mike in hand, making an announcement. In the box he was quiet sand. We were the chief guests seated right in front of him. I hid behind my rash. Ma’s incoherent gaze flitted from the photo to the box and back. Father smiled when he caught someone’s eye and cried when the box caught his eye, not quite certain which expression to settle on.

The priest, the maulwi, the pundit, the saint, the ascetic, the tunic, the turban, the beads, the mantra, the sermon, the bhajan, the song, the melody, all surged up to the heavens. In an invocation so beautiful. For this grief so beautiful, so quiet, so serene, so pure, glowing softly in the light of the lamps and the candles. Like the iridescence from a fine glass chandelier it fell like gentle rain in the hall.

[…]

These things happen. A sound escaped Ma’s throat. It could not belong to any language that humans have created. She held me tight, so tight, that my rash began to burst, and ripped past the queues and up the stage. Holding me still she sank to her knees and bent to her son and began throwing off flower upon flower to wrest him out. She pulled the box out from the depths. The stage became a sea of blossoms. I clung like a baby monkey to Ma. And then she spread her free arm to embrace the box and buried her face in it. Both her sons in her arms, her palms on either side, and her frame spreadeagled on the box. Enough, nothing else, I want no more, enough…

[…]

I move and so does the story.

Usually people want a story told in a way that they can lose themselves in it. So they can forget it is a story. Pitch dark film theaters and the 3D celluloid screen with characters looking so real that we can leave ours and get into their skin. Momentarily. To enjoy the illusion of living lives other than ours and escape from the creature grating under our skin for a happy while.

And feel the relief (what relief!) that the flood of tears do not need to be real, that our fate is not as lousy as that. That the grief we are watching or reading or hearing is not real; it is a dream, a video, a film, a book. The story over, we shall be back in our lives! On screen or on the page will flash ‘the end’, the lights will come on, and the world familiar to us will return with all its security. This body will be ours and will be ‘whole’. Not splintered like Father’s or Ma’s or the dead son’s.

That is up to them and their times. I refuse to get into a quarrel about all this. Enough quarrels around! In fact this storyorwhateveritis has itself emerged precisely because of these quarrels. But I cannot tell the story like them. Just out there and over. I move with the story, the story moves with me. No god or goddess this storyteller – know-all, be-all, omnipresent, omniscient. Let an act be what it is. Let us not pull on a skin colored suit like the actress gyrating nakedly on screen and wanting to claim she is not naked. Pooh and bah at her game and how is she not naked?

The life I am recounting is over but going on still and on screen and here as well and has to be said just so. My life masquerading as his. It is his life if it’s not mine! But if he is dead is it his life? How are we to define a life that does not exist and does? Like the act of love which one felt in all its intensity and tactility and then found was just dust in the mouth! When was it what?

Usually people want the story to be obvious, to unravel its mysteries. But different times have different obsessions. My time insists on an ambiguity behind each clarity. I chase the story, the story chases me, time’s chasing its characters, they’re chasing time. And behind and ahead of them is the bomb. Bomb to the right of them, bomb to the left of them, charge of the bomb brigade!

[…]

So there I was, all spruced up and exhibited on his birthday, in front of his favorite cinnamon and cardamom cake, in the shape of his unfinished dream, the guitar, all iced with gooey chocolate. Blow, they said, and I would not.

There was a single candle, bidding no doubt to bridge our gap of when he turned – would have – nineteen and I turned a full four, and when I become five, and he a complete twenty. And they said blow and I would not.

For I had understood whenever I was old enough to understand that the guests did their own maths and kept adding his years up, laughing and remembering with jollity that jolly child. They could not shroud him in sadness. That would be giving in to the murderers. He would want everyone to be happy. Think of him with a smile. So let us.

He chuckled from the photos up in the walls. Grew a bit more each year. There would be just one candle on the cake but people knew how to count the ones invisible. From the first time they said blow I refused.

Puff out your cheeks so, they got to coaxing me, coaching me. His friends went pff-ing like monkeys and boars and all of them looked such idiots!

Blow my child, whispered Ma. Right into my ear. But it felt like her voice was entangled somewhere far inside her dead-fish eyes and coming from there not from her lips and was not for me at all.

He does not know how to blow, Father said. Not in the way one says such things to challenge children to do it, but the way he would say of me: he doesn’t know anything… can’t even speak at his age… while he… He would not utter anything beyond that and yet say it all with his eyes. I felt like a mold in which someone else should have been and how inexcusable of me to have got in instead.

[…]

His friends had done up the dining room, telling his stories afresh. They tied a bunch of balloons in a knot above the table. A riot of colors waved in my face. Yellow, red, blue, green And purple.

They started to turn black in front of my eyes.

Pepsi, Limca and beer did the rounds. Father pulled out a photo of the dead son from some album and began recounting its story.

Weaving a shred that had wafted down from the galaxy!

[…]

I stared silently at the balloons going black. The balloons lurking in my dark recesses began to roll out soundlessly. About to explode. Any moment. Splitting all. Ma, Father, me, friends, the party, pictures… all sewed with a single thread, waiting the same, for the balloon to burst… for the tatters to fly…

What, after all is a bomb? A needle that goes through the splinters and sews them together. A cannon ball that falls from the sky. A sack that tears open and scatters. A love story that breaks and makes. A he and a me… A life which… which… and then… then…

Then someone picked up a fork. The balloons began to burst one by one. Burst… exploded… I began to sob uncontrollably.

Everyone was struck dumb: why, what’s wrong with him? Hey, stop, dear, do you want a balloon, do you? Leaping up they pulled at the balloons to hand them all to me.

[…]

Someone tries to thrust a toffee in my mouth. He eats nothing, spits everything out – Father says. Don’t worry. He takes my hand and lets them all hear, will get you a balloon shalloon in the market.

Once we are in the market he lets go my hand and gets lost in his galaxy again, of distant stars. The balloon forgotten, I hope.

Apprehensive, I look at the shops. They have balloons. But they will be sealed and wrapped in packets. All shriveled and safe, not blown out.

I steal another look at Father. No plans to blow out a balloon?

The sun has faded. The lights in the bazaar come on. The garish bulbs twinkle away. Its fun passing through these lanes. In all this market of lights I am but a speck of darkness. Indistinguishable from the dark. In any case people don’t look at you when they have these shop windows to stare at. Things on show in there draw their gaze like a magnet. They all walk ahead, legs marching forward, eyes swiveling sideways! Look that American model has reached here now. And see, that’s a tribal design – the crème de la crème of society do up their homes with it.

Through this hustle I walk, invisible in my darkness. My eyes move as if on an axis, turned mostly inwards but swinging occasionally outward to make sure no balloon makes a sudden appearance, dancing anywhere in the air, round, swelling still, ready to burst. No such thing, whew.

That is how I stay. Inside myself. Crying, laughing, speaking to myself, hidden away inside, and by the time I reach the top, the time is up and I am blank again!

A lump, a kaddu! Or a Buddha!

Carrying inside me the same scenario. A round something lying forgotten in a corner, the rest is emptiness…the round thing swelling, desirous, gluttonous, coveting the sprawling empty space …why should it be left empty, how dare it lie empty…why not roll in, roll in and burst and fly asunder in all directions like flags and festoons and balloons in a fair.

Fearful , hopeful, I stumble and knock into Father and fall in the mud. A car goes honking past angrily.

Can’t you see, yells Father. At me.

Does he yell because I fell on him? Or because I was saved from the car? He does not say.

Saved. Again. Each time he is saved! That is how Father looks.

[…]

One should say goodbye.

If you don’t you end up like Father. Trying in despair to rekindle life, searching searching away for an excuse to carry on.

Ma had said goodbye. To herself. Had retired to some place where her son was. The rest of the world was just a moment of waiting.

Listen, I will tell you something about waiting…

Everyone waits. The dead and the alive. The one dead wants to come alive again and the one alive waits for death.

And

In everyone’s life there is a happening which forever becomes the reference point. In it his memory gets frozen and he recognizes nothing else but the color and shape and tune of the happening and waits again for that. In fear or in joy it matters not.

For example

There was once a jungle, the inmates of which became so hungry that they wanted to eat meat and felt tempted to kill an animal or two. But the moment they raised their hands, drooling at the mouth, the animals pleaded: no don’t kill us, we are like you and together. So they got into a meditative reverie, which is also a form of waiting, and decided that the animals should forget the language they spoke same as them. Do you know what happened then? This is what happened then, that they raised their hands to kill and the animal turned to stop them and at that very moment forgot the language they had shared till now and looked uncomprehending and bent their heads to be chopped. Since then the natives of that jungle are in waiting to kill the animals and the animals are waiting to have their flesh rubbed in salt and pepper.

Because

In each one’s life some such thing happens which becomes forever his destiny and forever then he waits for it.

Then hear this as well. That then never again will you be freed from this wait. In urban parlance it, the wait, sits inside you preparing to fling the same destiny at you again. But preparing how? Face pack, massage, manicure, pedicure, gold and diamond facial, it is doing it all. Sprucing itself up, preparing to shine and pounce. Biding its time to ground you and get your throat again, again, again…

While you like an idiot forget this and get engrossed in imitating life around.

You dolt! You don’t realize this is the only living now for you. This waiting. This wait is your caretaker, your sentinel, your light, your Ma your Pa, your kith and kin, your child, the music in your blood, the desire in your empty places, the bolt that can destroy you, the bomb that can flame you… Think about it, I am not wrong. I am a wise one from this jungle, and so is he, and would have spoken the same, if he could, from the box or the photograph.

Listen, grief makes and destruction constructs. A bomb too. And what happens once has to happen again and again. Just once is not enough to make me feel it. My skin will not know it.

That is why again and again I will run to it, even if I am trying to run away from it. It is my simile, synonym, nomenclature, proverb, act, sun moon star thirst and seasoning.

Confused? The bomb becomes my language and life, my dear innocent girl.

Once it has happened we just pour ourselves into it and flow with it and flame with it and tear with it.

My hands burned, and my mouth too, and I longed to burn her with them.

That, I told her, is how I have been going on, invisible in acts outside, hiding the bomb inside. All the time, in all the crowd, in all the quiet. Never for a moment have I forgotten it. That no matter what I read from which book, the only word registering on my heart was b-o-m-b. No matter where I went, to a film, meeting, festival or party, the only word which formed on my lips was b-o-m-b. Someone would say something, I wanted to reply b-o-m-b. Ma said speak son, I mumbled b-o-m-b.

Yes, a new language begins to form, squeaking and bouncing inside and for a long long time no one can guess. Not even Ma.

What… What did you say I heard something… Yes yes… beta… speak… you said mom…

She picked me up and kissed me – beta said mom.

No, beta did not say mom. Beta’s language is another. Beta said bomb. Skippity hoppity b-o-m-b!