goodbye

You're facing her, in a bus terminal, or a train station maybe.
You forget sometimes, but you're both holding suitcases and you're talking and laughing, and one or other of you will remember when it's time to go.
This is how it always is, stranger-talk understood familiarly, on the way to the same place.
People criss-cross the station, shouting in bunches and singing and hurrying, even passing between you sometimes.
You get up to get some coffee from the stand, fresh from laughter, wait in line, and think about the conversation.
Talking and silence, and talking and silence, and you can't remember any more what it was about, as always.
It's like it never happened, the gap; or rather, like you'd always thought it'd be- the gaps didn't matter.
Ha.
After refusing to shove people at the counter for long enough, someone finally gives you coffee.
It's the wrong kind, and they charge you too much, but you don't have the heart to fight for the right kind.
Walking back, you realise you were carrying the suitcase all the while.
When you reach the benches she isn't there.
And you know that she's gone to catch her train, that it isn't the same one as yours, that she'll learn to manage to catch it on time, as you will.
Is it alright ? you ask yourself, sipping the scalding wrong coffee, blowing on it, whistling in between.
It isn't- you swerve to avoid a little girl insistent on running pell-mell into you- but it will be.
You pick up speed as you catch sight of a terminal clock, running onto the platform as the conductor starts yelling, get into your seat.
Everything is, sooner or later, and you will be.
Rummage for a napkin in a pocket, and wipe the coffee from all over your coat while drinking what's left of it, straight up.

The people clap, rather a lot. The announcer clears his throat, waits to say yet more pompous-sounding, adulatory things. He supposes he's earned the right not to be embarrassed.
"And So, for the Brilliant and Courageous Leadership that has Finally brought Us Victory, today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we the People would like to Honour-"

Applause rattles the asbestos roof of the massive stadium, hastily nailed on because the Victory Day Celebrations couldn't be held the way Victory was won in the first place- open-air.

He hadn't ordered the tribute, merely known it was inevitable. He accepted it, to an extent. The announcer reiterated for effect, and the words of unaccustomed formality penetrated to him through the roar of applause and beginning rain- 'Valour that has brought Honour to the Nation...'

In the meanwhile, he is being scathing in his head about the elite lot who are suddenly clapping their hands as loud as eliteness allows, who'd been virulently opposed to the Cause not too long ago, who by economics and education were no different from The Oppressor, whose exclusion of him had been part of the reason, he was free to admit, that he'd done what he had.

He was faintly irritated, though, at the repetition of the bravery theme, wished the announcer would stop. He wondered whether, if he raised his hands in addition to the standing up and smiling winningly-yet-humbly, the announcer would stop talking. On the other hand, that might've entail his having to talk instead.

Why this growing irritation? Shouldn't it have been lightheaded joy at the victory and recognition that he had earned in sweat and blood ? And it had come duly second to the acknowledgement of Those Who Fell, all ceremonial and correct.
Well, talking of their bravery was true enough. The torture in jails and police stations, the nightmare wounds they ignored in order to fight to the death... he shuddered, and wondered.

Wonders a thing he has prevented himself from unproductively wondering before, replacing it with immediate concerns, but there's nothing to stop him thinking it now.
He does have a talent for strategy, a brilliance maybe. The brilliance that led him to predict the enemy's moves, to mastermind unstoppable operations, to protect the core of the Organisation from brute force and infiltration. It was his brain that had kept him alive and virtually unharmed, and he was grateful to or for it. He'd never had any need for valour, really. The fight and chase scenes he'd been in had always gone according to plan.
And he'd wondered, of course, what would have happened if they hadn't. If the highly improbable had taken place, if he'd been caught and tortured, like Number Three, or made a Public Spectacle, like Number Six, or... or any of those things- an arm or a leg or an eye lost, brain damage or napalm burns... he shudders, suppresses it. Would this courage, this thing that every common soldier had, would it have come to him ?

A silence in his mind. His hands accept an enormous bouquet being handed to him, his smile hasn't moved. In front of these people, he is suddenly afraid of being found out- fraud, un-hero. He longs for his foot-soldiers, for those who are too close to the fighting to idealise war, to prate about valour. He clutches the flowers close. Those men sing only of victory and he is glad of it, desperately grateful as he crushes the stalks in his trained fingers- it doesn't matter how we got it, it doesn't matter, it doesn't make a difference. What do these bastards know of War ? Its historical significance, its moral dilemmas, its socio-economic something.
But how you win it ? How easily it's lost- how it isn't won by uniforms on white horses with silver swords- How difficult-?

Once upon a time, there was a little girl, who was all blue.

Her ears were blue, and her hair was blue, and the skin all over was blue, and even her eyebrows were blue. Different shades of blue, but all blue.

Only her eyes were black, and her teeth were white.

Or atleast, they used to be white, until she stopped caring about brushing them- 'Nobody likes me anyway', she thought.

And it was true, too.
All the other children were coloured in many colours, brown eyes and black hair and pink or cream or brown skin, and pink lips, and still-white teeth, and when they got cut or hurt it went red or brown or purple.

And they didn't think it was- nice- no, right- no,- [the word they were looking for was normal, but they didn't know it] -that someone should be one colour, just one colour, all over.

When they got older, they learnt the word, but they learnt how to make not liking her sound nicer. It's not interesting, they said. Everyone is many colours for a reason.

She didn't want to cry because it looked so silly, as though she were leaking out of her eyes.
And she wasn't much into crying anyway- she tried looking sad instead, but she saw herself in a mirror and started laughing.

She didn't even have any of those talents which make you popular even if you are weird. She wasn't a genius, she didn't sing brilliantly or play the guitar or run very fast or talk very wittily or look beautiful despite the colour. She was just okay.

Nobody notices okay people, she notices.
Everyone left her to it.
Which is a good idea, you know, with children- because they think about it, and wonder why, and get to understand things.
Which is a lovely thing, because then you get little girls like this one-
a little blue girl who refuses to be blue. And almost makes you wish you were one too.

Samaypur it was called. The place of time.

The student visited it with articles in his eyes, Inverting the structures of Dimensions, the dimensions of Structures. In between the hardworking huts he found a truant dangling his feet in the river who could've been subverting hegemony.

The government official visited it with the census clipboard, recorded what he could've been finding. Literacy rose, some huts were repopulated, but not overpopulated, especially among the castes on the Scheduled side of the pond.

The tourist visited it with hi-res camera and chlorine tablets, relied on its hospitality and recycled its cliches. Would remember a genu-wine tenth century temple and not the face of the urchin pointing it out, who relieved him of a wad or two.

The social activist visited it with a video crew and a rolling-pin, rolled up her sleeves and pitched in. The women discussed it in early morning hand-pump vernacular- good when working was the verdict, but a bit of a pain when she opens her mouth.

The headman, chewing reflectively, rocking back and forth on his haunches, waits for the sun to sink, the smoke to rise and congregate, the stories to tell themselves into question, over tea and coca-cola. Coke better in this season, upon consideration. Spits; a paan-stain shaped like a comet glistens, the sly last light winking before it dies in a last desperate secret.

"Kuch toh samai ka khayaal rakho!" his wife will say when he returns.

Par Samai toh apni hi khayaal rakh leti hai.

I am always watching.
Peering through windows, peeping around the side of the house, even a flash of a glance out across the street before I collapse into bed and turn out the lights and pretend that was what I wanted to do.
Watchful, waiting, convinced of disappointment.
And what else should I deserve, to what else will I give credence when it happens ?

If I were now to display the badges of my empowerment-
to flip fresh-cut hair, wear the come-hither and let lilting, hearth-warming laughter fill rooms-
Would they believe- and would I believe- that I was secure ?
But then,
I know that when the world meets my stare with interested eyes,
I blink, long-lashed, abashed.

one girl, missing.

Where o where has the little girl gone ?

Empty seat and tousled bed
Shake their heads, it's worrisome.
Let's worrisome.

The doll's hairbrush just smoothed her hair,
The pins were dropped- now she's not there.
No, she wasn't just hair.

A little lamp has toppled down,
The pen and exercise-book frown.
So small the girl, so big the frown.

Window is open, door is shut,
She cannot go out, cannot soar up.
She tried, but she didn't go up.

for D.

They reach a circle, encircled by the path, walk away in different directions, meet again on the other side, at the same time, sometimes even in step, which she loves. which reassures her.

Sitting there, he talking of mountains. She asks how people live without beauty, the utterly external kind. He says they don't, don't have to. "That's why photographs- I want to make them see it, the beauty in ordinary, real things." She watches him, both still, his chin against the light. She wishes she could.

They walk back in complete silence. Her footsteps irregular, a slow, deep, crunching on crusty tarred road; his steps light, regular, firm, with a whisk of jeans-legs against each other. She wonders if this quiet is uncomfortable- She cannot be, she never is.
What can she do ? He is beneath her skin, embedded close to the bone.