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SHORT STORY

The Sound of Weeping

SURENDRA PRAKASH (translated by Sadiq Hossain)
A flower under a tree is carefree.
Only a short while ago he had been sitting on a chair facing me and singing. Now only the depression in the chair testified to his having been with me. How well he sang. I don't much care for western music; I don't have the ear for it. But that wretch sings so well that I am completely won over. He had left me musing over the line: Can a flower growing under the shade of a tree ever come into its own?
Now he is gone and the tune that he sang has lost its echo but my mind is still entangled in the words of that son: A flower under the tree is carefree.
It goes to prove one vital point: words outlast their sounds.
When he came to my room in the evening he was quite drunk. A group of students had waylaid him during the day urging him to sing for them the songs of his region. They had regaled him with liquor. Subsequently he had recounted me the story, placing his hands on my shoulders: 'I left home with the resolve that I would go round the world to discover someone who bore a close resemblance to me and could be taken as my second. It's now almost eight years that I left home and I have yet to find my second.'
'Did you meet anyone resembling me? I asked in jest.
'Yes, I did. It was in Scandinavia,' he replied offhandedly.
We kept knocking about on the roads till late at night. When dead tired we made for my home. Entering my room, after some casual talk, he started singing his favourite song.
'Do the words of this song denote something special?' I asked.
'Meanings mean nothing, only words do,' he replied. 'They impose their own meaning on the mind.'
Then he got up from his chair and surveyed the room while going out. It was in great disorder. 'Why don't you marry?' he suddenly asked. 'You look quite a mediocre.'
The suddenness of his question threw me off my feet.
'The fact is,' I said, 'one Vishnu Babu, our landlord, lives on the first floor of our building. Many years ago when he was just an ordinary man he married a girl by the name of Saraswati. Subsequently, he came to know a rich woman called Lakshmi and realizing his folly, eventually married her. Now Vishnu and Lakshmi live happily together while poor Saraswati cries all night. I have not married till now for the simple reason that I whether I should marry a Lakshmi or a Saraswati.'
He looked steadily at my face. The red lines in his eyes gave him a terrifying look. He shot a 'goodnight' at me and quickly descended the stairs. Because of his strange antics I am sometime led to feel that he is not a man made of flesh and blood but just an embodied idea pitchforked here from across the seas.
*
All the rooms of the building I live in have common walls so that one can easily overhear what one is saying in the adjoining room. I suspect the occupants of the other rooms must be hearing my voice and even my silence must be carrying to them. A short while ago they must have clearly heard the lilt and boom of my friend's singing voice.
Outside, the night had started this journey towards the morning. Darkness crawled in every direction like white ants. I bolted my room and putting on the dim nightlight got into my bed.
In the faded light my own body looked to me like a corpse wrapped in a shroud. In the dark silence of a lonely room such a thought can strike fear in one's heart, akin to falling from a height in a dream. I felt I was slowly falling down and then I had a bizarre feeling
that my life had suddenly been jerked back into my body.
I heard someone crying outside my room. Perhaps Saraswati and Lakshmi again had a squabble. It seemed as if Saraswati's sound of crying had trickled step by step down the stairs and had reached up to my door. But no, it was the cry of a child; perhaps a neighbour's hungry child asking for milk while his mother slept on by his side, oblivious of his hunger. Or maybe she was dead and beyond hearing her child's cry.
Then the sound of the child's crying became louder and more distinct as if the child was lying in my own bed while I lay dead by his side, wrapped in a shroud.
If a tree is the symbol of civilization then we are like flowers which although free yet shed tears in the shadow of the tree. The meaning of these words whose tune my friend had carried away with him blossomed forth in my mind suddenly.
The child keeps crying. Gradually it takes on an agonized note as if it's already aware of its mother's death. But who had told him that she was dead? Not its father. He is still sleeping for there is no hint of his voice mingling with the child's cry. People instinctively come to know about death. I myself knew when my mother was on the verge of death. Oh, how closely the child's cry resembles my own voice.
My friend's words again ring in my ears. He had said that I was a mediocre person. 'You're mediocre'--that's what he had said.
Yes, mediocre--that's what I really am.
Every morning I get ready with the intention of going away for good. I bid goodbye to the door as if I'm closing it for the last time. then I turn my face towards the sun and keep running the whole day. But as the night approaches I again find myself standing outside my door.
Early every morning, flapping my arms like a crane I fly to a building to have a glimpse of a woman who sits in her cabin in a revolving chair, her arms, white and smooth like marble, resting on the glass top of a table lying in front of her. She dyes her hair every morning and her arms, as they rest on the glass top, create the illusion of a woman's bare legs.
There is a spiral staircase taking off from the cabin. While climbing those stairs I peep into the cabin on the sly and wonder if they were really legs.
A big almirah rests near the landing along which that spiral staircase goes up. The almirah has many pigeon holes like lockers in a bank's safety vault where people keep their valuable belongings. Every morning I lock my 'self' in one of the pigeonholes of the almirah and then bodily climb up the stairs. In the evening, before I go I retrieve my 'self' from the almirah.
A car of the theater company where I work waits to pick me up every evening. By a gesture of the eye the driver tells me to get into the car and in a moment I am whisked off to the most prominent theater hall of the city whose auditorium resembles a circus arena where I have been performing the same role for the last eighteen years. The stage is in the middle of the auditorium. Rubbing off the earlier remnants, I hastily put on Gulliver's make-up. All the dialogue is projected from behind the auditorium. My role consists of taking a serious drubbing from the Lilliputians. Their needle lances pierce my body. The tiny arrows shot from their bows make the blood pour out like sweat
from the pores of my body. While being tortured like this I do not wince even once or give vent to my feelings in any manner. This specialty of mine has kept me on this job for the last eighteen years. I am not paid for my job; it has just become a pastime with me.
When the show is over they take me to the bathroom on a stretcher and throw me into a tub brimming with alcohol. My body shudders with pain and then a cold current passes through it which completely revives me and I feel as if nothing had happened to me.
A funny thing happened the other evening. As usual I had gone to the other building and was just coming out of the toilet when, to my horror, I found its door closing upon me. I banged on the door like mad and it was only then that a man opened the door for me. I was feeling greatly shaken. My mind boggled at the thought of remaining confined in the toilet the entire night. While going out I did not even care to look into the cabin to find out whether the woman was gone or was still there. I even forgot to take out my 'self' from the locker for down below the driver was frantically blowing his horn to take me away.
I was greatly agitated. How could I do justice to my role without my 'self'? But my surprise knew no end when at the end of the performance I saw the audience rushing towards me. They praised my acting for being so spontaneous and natural. I was really astounded at what they said.
Since then I have allowed my 'self' to remain in that locker.
A gust of wind has flung the window open and I can once again have the real feel of my room. To the sobs of Saraswati and the heartrending cries of the child a third voice has been added--the voice of the child's father. The child's father has woken up. He has not been able to stand the sight of his dead wife and bear his child's weeping.
Like a good neighbour it is incumbent upon me to share others joys and sorrows. We are free flowers that have blossomed in the shade of the tree.
I feel like pulling out one brick from each wall and peeping into each room and watch its inmates in their moments of joy and sorrow--to see them shedding tears and laughing. For in each state a human being just lets himself go.
The sound of weeping had by now become louder and it had become difficult for me to remain confined to my room.
I wrapped that shroud-like sheet round my body and putting on my black slippers advanced towards the door.
As I put my hand to the door latch someone knocked on the door and I flung it open.
Saraswati, who had bee sobbing on the stairs, the crying child, the dead mother and her helpless husband--all the four of them were standing outside the door.
They asked me in unison: 'Why have you been crying all this while? Like good neighbours it is incumbent upon us...'
Surendra Prakash is a Bombay-based writer who has two collections of short stories to his name. Sadiq Hossain has translated prolifically from Hindi and Urdu.