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Our lost Mahatma
On Mahatma Gandhi’s death anniversary, ROOMA MEHRA
recalls how a grandma’s tale seems to have been rendered irrelevant in a day and age when a paradigm of humanity has died many times over in a scheme of things where people would rather repose their faith in God-politicians
There were five of us in the car that day, including little Rohit and his daadi. All of us listened quietly to the universal daadi’s story being narrated to the child.
The little one nestled his head further in his daadi’s lap as she neared the end of her fascinating tale. “They started calling the thin, bespectacled man with the smile of a child a ‘miracle-maker’ after that.” Little Rohit piped in, “And was he, daadi? Was he really a magician and was his ‘dandi’ really a magic wand?” “No”, replied daadi with a sigh, “He loved human beings, that is all.” “And where is he now, daadi? What is he doing?”
The petite old lady, with wise eyes and a toothless smile reminiscent of her story’s hero, fell silent.
After a heavy pause, she looked questioningly at me and whispered, so that her words would only reach me, “Nobody talks of him anymore. Nobody remembers him any more. In fact, I should not even be telling a child his story. It is too old and forgotten. Should I tell him that after weeping tears of blood, he died once again?”
My sister parked the car that very moment. Daadi’s words, magnified ten-fold in the dying noise of the engine, hit all the occupants of the car with the force of a sledge-hammer. They seemed ominously suspended in the silence that followed. Little Rohit looked close to tears.
There was the sudden squeak of three car windows being rolled down simultaneously as the minutes weighed heavy on our minds, in search of a suitable reply that could wipe out that expression from the child’s eyes. I wondered when my sister would return.
She had disappeared inside one of the shops in that quaint marketplace under the Safdarjung flyover. Quaint, in the sense that one moment a huge and intricately carved door flanked by two life-size elephants gazed benevolently at you and the next it suddenly gave way to a crumbling, moss-covered cement of the flyover. Bare wall – its monotony broken by five polythene bags hanging equidistant from each other.
There were three bricks holding up some ashes from a dead fire.
It was all rather curious, and the full implication of that bizarre relief of the bulging polythene bags failed to register in my preoccupied state of mind.
It hit me as my eyes travelled to the legends, in all their unabashed poverty, carved in the grimes of time on the bare wall of the flyover.
I read the first legend, “Bal Kishen, Jhuggi No 2”. A swallow later, my eyes moved to the next ragged polythene bag. Secured tightly at the mouth, it contained all the worldly belongings of “Bal Karan. Jhuggi, No 5”.
“Om Prakash, Jhuggi No 12” boasted two polythene bags – one bigger than the other. They were hung vertically so as not to encroach upon the territorial rights of the neighbour. The declaration (also in Hindi) common to all inhabitants of that cold bit of concrete that went by the name of “jhuggis” glared at me, “Ration card hai!”
Almost unbidden, the image of the thin, bespectacled man appeared in my mind from the cold heavens above. I wondered whether Bal Kishen and Bal Karan and their families also braved the cold winter nights in their solitary dhotis.
I wondered if the old miracle-maker could bring about any “miracle” in the lives of these children of God if he were here. I guessed, he probably would not have the time. He would be too busy, the solitary messiah, trying to convince people of their being human, too busy trying to find for them their lost gods.
That they had little food and no shelter and shivered their nights away could be looked into after bringing them to the level ground of sanity where they were not killing each other in the name of the gods they lost so long ago, when they entrusted their faiths in the keeping of the shrewd any ugly “God-politicians”.
Today, I wonder how many times our lost Mahatma has died in almost 55 years of my country’s Independence.
(The author is a freelance writer.)
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