A Short Story by Ravikumar Pillai
Most friendships are tenuous, though we pretend they are forever. We acquire and nurture relationships for a while and cast them away, not deliberately but more due to tedium or dwindling proximity. It may be that newer acquaintances with clearer perceived value to us crowd out the old ones. However, some strands of affinity endure in the long term.
Harish was one such friend for me. Our closeness defied the tendency to sweep away ageing relationships.
Our closeness sprouted when we were classmates in the school of the idyllic provincial town where my father was posted on one of his frequent transfers. Harish belonged to an aristocratic family with an enviable tradition. The local folklore gloried the array of bullock carts loaded with paddy, coconuts and haystacks that trooped into their front courtyard in the harvest season. As the Onam festival arrived, the place buzzed with celebrations, song and dance. How the mundane people discarded their jealousy, gossip and frivolous hostilities and plunged into revelry and enjoyment, albeit temporarily, was amazing!
Harish and I would give a slip to the fun and frolic and sneak past the dim-lit chambers in the Zamindari mansion filled with a mysterious eeriness pierced only by the fluttering of the wings of crickets and baby bats.
I noticed from the early days that he would often be lost in the world of fantasy and imagination. He was gifted literary classics whenever his father visited, such visits being quite sporadic and dwindling over the years. Harish and his mother stayed back in their native village while the father was away at his place of work in North Malabar. When he was in the care and company of his mother and grandmother, Harish relished the stories and lullabies. His favourites were the tales of valour, mysticism and fantasy.
Harish introduced me to the world of the occult, mantra, and tantra and narrated many stories of rituals and propitiation of spirits that were done to avenge wicked enemies. The tales of black magic were crude and frightening, and the story-telling skills of my friend made them even scarier. Narration is a fantastic skill and who better than grandma to immerse us in the world of imagination early in life?
He would often prompt me to accompany him to the oracle at the local temple who was believed to have ostracised many evil affectations on simple folks. In the lonely, dilapidated temple by the side of the overgrown bushes, the oracle did his offerings and rituals for the ostracization of spirits, even as Harish and I would watch in awe, with heightened curiosity, careful to keep our eyes away from the skull he used for rituals. I used to wonder about the mortal being who once lived in flesh and blood whose cranium now served for the ritual offerings of the exorcist!
My friend’s obsession with spirits and rituals led him to a parapsychologist researcher who lived a few miles away from our town and when he proposed that we make a visit, secret and exclusive to meet him, I agreed, though with a nagging hesitation. The Professor narrated experiences from his rendezvous with exorcism, life after death and the phenomenon of psychic activities.
In the following days, Harish invited me for an exclusive meeting with an obscure group of like-minded people. It was a revelation to me that in our laidback town tucked away obscurely from the din and bustle of urban life, we had a motley crowd that pursued their interest in life and power beyond the obvious, however weird that might have been.
My father was a left-leaning person and our upbringing and parental narratives centred around rationalist thinking, denial of God and an unabashed admiration of the ultra-socialist thoughts. No wonder therefore that I was not predisposed towards admitting, let alone admiring, Harish’s obsessive bias toward psychic powers.
Harish was near-delirious about the afterlife and post-death realities of the soul. One day he forwarded to me a book ostensibly by one who experienced death first-hand and returned to life through some quirk of destiny. I tried to trivialise the idea and even teased him, but he got offended by my non-serious response to a great ‘revelation’ by him!
There were moments, of late, when I was troubled by a rising self-doubt on the possibility of powers of the mind on the extremes of the spectrum of consciousness. Like the ultraviolet and infrared rays, the idea of peripheral consciousness strangely appealed to me increasingly as a distinct possibility.
Repeated assertions would tend to make irrationality appear rational!
Harish to me was more than a fiend. We confided most of our fears and apprehensions in each other. In our no-holds-barred world of brutal openness, we shared our emotional vibes and everyday experiences which meshed together into an intricate net of continuum.
He was versatile and vast in his knowledge of things metaphysical and surreal. He talked profusely, during our frequent trips to the serene countryside, about the layers of consciousness that we traverse in life and the afterlife. He pictured the scenario of consciousness on the other side of death.
Harish was insistent on the existence of an interim stage of translucent consciousness called the astral body phase where the soul, upon death, hovered around for a few extended days of ethereal proximity to the near and dear ones before merging with the universal spirit.
His reasoning and assertions were more like Greek and Latin to me, but I was aware of the sensitivity of trampling on his strong beliefs and so opted to remain silent, even nodding to his assertions to signal that I was interested in what he spoke.
The last time we met, he sounded distressed and unsettled. Something eerie was bothering him. He told me that he was due for a medical review to follow up on the post-operative state of his health after the major intestinal surgery he had a year back. I tried soothing his nerves in my toned-down way without sounding artificial. Was he seeing into the future that awaited him with scariness and uncertainty?
It was a Sunday morning and I was lying idly in my post-sleep hangover when the cell phone rang. It was Harish’s wife on the other end. She sounded drab, bereft of her usual liveness. She said that Harish did not wake up in the morning and his body was ice cold when she shook him. She broke down lamenting that though she was lying by his side, she couldn't get any sign of Harish passing from life to the afterlife. Possibly, he passed away in the dead of the night even as the stray dogs might have been howling at the shadow of death looming around.
I hit the road to Harish’s place and on the way picked up our common friend, school buddy, Thomas, who was among the few classmates who had a sustained friendship with him. We reminisced about our school life and shared moments of joy and intrigue; both felt sorry at the passing of a good man, a noble soul who took care not to offend anyone by choice.
I brooded over the teenage romance that Harish had shared with me long back, which to be true to our friendship I had kept deeply preserved in my mind, without ever hinting to anyone. She was from a mundane background, the daughter of a rubber tapper employed in a private estate. Her father’s earnings were meagre and like his counterparts, he lived for the day and stared at penury in the harsh days of monsoon fury when the trickle of income dried up. She was married off to a young rubber tapper from the plains who came to the hill tracts in search of livelihood.
I remembered Harish telling me of a couple of kisses and hugs he exchanged with her in their school days, even before they knew what courtship and romance meant. It was perhaps the sublime innocence of the gesture that left an indelible mark on his mind and endured the memories through all these years of bumpy trails of life and career.
As they approached the bungalow by the hillside to which Harish’s mortal remains returned, there to get incinerated and let into the other side of existence.
It was nearing twilight, and the body was about to be taken to the pyre for cremation. I paid my solemn and silent homage. When I turned around, a pair of eyes caught my attention. Eyes do not age! She was the girl who coloured Harish’s childhood memories. I was not sure if their eyes ever met in all these years of interlude since the early school days. They would have lived in the same vicinity, but the invisible walls of societal stigma and segmentation might have corroded the possibility of any interaction. Her haggard face and greying hair did not give away the desperation to have one last look at the face that logged back to her long-faded childhood.
Harish’s wife was sitting by the body, staring at blankness and not particularly noticing what was going on around. I looked intensely at the closed eyes of my friend. I saw a single drop of tear rolling down his frozen cheek. In the glow of the traditional lamp that was lit as a sign of the last rituals, the teardrop shone like a starlet from eternity.
Was it a sign of his bidding farewell to his childhood flame? Was it his repentance for keeping this one secret away from his wife all through their togetherness?
I looked intensely at his face one more time. The tear was gone, could have evaporated, flown down or it could be that it never was there in the first place. Was the illusion of a teardrop my friend’s last, succinct message to me that his love for the lonely girl from his childhood endured through his lifetime and would survive into the afterlife?
One never knew. Neither will we ever. Because we are lesser mortals.
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