THE LIGHT OF a full moon had spread across the sky and was filtering through the open windows of Satnam’s room. He lay in bed, restless and unable to sleep. He hadn’t eaten a thing since morning but his mother’s cajoling and the anxiety writ large on her face had moved him into taking a few bites at dinner.
As he sat down for dinner, Krishna came around a few times on one pretext or another but didn’t speak a word. Satnam’s enquiring eyes could discern that the despondent expression on her face was an after-effect of the callous way he had responded to her in the morning. He sensed that she wanted to say something, she was looking for an opportune moment to pick up the thread of their conversation in the morning. He left his thali, got up to rinse his mouth and wiped his hands on a small towel before heading back to his room and closing the door.
His mind was still in a state of turmoil. Neither the novels nor Kanhaiya’s song had been of much help. Time had come to a standstill and each minute felt like infinity. He knew that this condition was untenable and if it continued much longer, he would either go mad or have a fatal cardiac arrest.
Lying in bed, his eyes went slowly around the room, looking closely at every object, large or small, asking them if they might have a cure for his ailment.
The three novels were still lying on the table and he looked at them for a long while before extending his arm to pick up the one closest to him. Maybe, just maybe he would be drawn into its storyline if he made a determined effort to read it, he mused. But the outcome was the same. He tried to focus on the text but the images that had tormented him since morning would again impose themselves between his eyes and the pages before him.
He kept trying but failed to progress beyond the first four or five pages. Annoyed with himself, he threw the book back towards the table.
Walking across to the closet, he unlocked it and examined some of his favourite books lying on the top shelf, an eclectic collection of well-known novels, plays, poetry, short stories, and some non-fiction. He picked up one and flicked through the pages, then another and a third. None of them tugged at that particular string in his heart that would have usually urged him to pick up and start reading a book right away. Disappointed, he left the closet open and slowly trudged downstairs.
There are times, they say, when a mere straw is enough to save a drowning man. But what is the fate of the man who himself is a straw caught in a whirlpool, condemned to keep swirling within its waters, neither drowning nor able to swim to safety. Doesn’t he wish that if he can’t escape the whirlpool, he should be allowed to sink into its abyss, that he might escape this netherworld where he was caught between life and death? Satnam was wrestling with ominous thoughts like these when an unusual idea came to his mind. His pace quickened and he walked across to his mother’s room to wake her up.
Kesar Kaur was also finding it hard to sleep. She felt a strange foreboding, a danger lurking in the shadows that she couldn’t decipher. She hadn’t been able to summon the courage to confront her son on the subject that was haunting her. Agitated and fearful, she decided that first thing in the morning, she would look him in the eye and…
Her train of thought was interrupted by the whispered call, ‘Bhabo!’ She shot up in her bed and queried, ‘What’s wrong, Kaka? Why aren’t you sleeping?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Can I have your gutka, please?’
‘My gutka?’ Kesar Kaur looked at him in astonishment, reacting as though he had asked for something completely alien. Satnam, asking for the small prayer book? He, who had always spurned her advice of drawing strength from the scriptures? He, who had never touched a gutka?
‘What are you going to do with it?’ she posed the pointless question, knowing that he was asking for the prayer book to read.
‘I wanted to pray for a bit.’
Kesar Kaur’s face lit up with a mix of surprise and joy as she heard those words from him. ‘Is my Satnam really going to turn to Gurbani for solace?’ Stirred by the thought, she got up from her bed and went across to her closet.
The gutka was wrapped in an azure piece of silken fabric and was nestled inside a small box. Satnam took it from his mother and went up to his room without saying another word.
The pale moonlight in the sky was becoming brighter as the moon emerged inch by inch from the shadow of a meandering cloud. Satnam sat on the side of his bed and untied the white string that ran around the box before opening it to take the gutka out of its sanctum. Years of use had given its clothbound cardboard cover the smooth feel of polished leather. Some of the pages were somewhat fragile and portions of the binding holding them in place had also come loose, allowing one section of the holy book to slip away from the rest. The cover itself had a somewhat tenuous hold on the rest of the book and was evidence that this gutka had seen many a summer. Satnam was looking closely at the indistinct lettering on the first page and his eyes widened with a new-found respect for its provenance as he deciphered the text printed in fading red ink. Despite the missing letters, he could make out: Gian Singh Arzee … resident of … on … 1917 gift … to his daugh … Bibi Kes … on the auspicious occas … of her … rriage.
He felt a shudder of joy as he realized that the gutka had been presented to his mother by her father as part of her dowry. She had preserved it for the last thirty years, scarcely a day had gone by when she hadn’t picked it up for her prayers.
Satnam had studied in a school where he was taught Gurmukhi as a language, but the teaching of the scriptures had never been part of their curriculum. As a result, he had never developed an interest in studying Gurbani and it was quite extraordinary that he could barely recite the first stanza of the Japji Sahib prayer.
He started reading the first few lines somewhat half-heartedly, uncertain if this attempt to distract his mind would work when other books had failed. But he tried hard to focus on the text and its meaning and as he went beyond the first couple of pages, he found himself drawn into it.
He read the hymns for half an hour or a bit longer with full concentration, his mind alert and curious as he soaked in the deeper message of the text. He read the sections penned by the first Guru, then of the fifth Guru before moving on to the verses written by Sant Kabir and Baba Farid and the sawayias composed by the tenth Guru.
As he absorbed the simplicity and essence of the message, the cobwebs that had clouded his vision began to dissipate. He felt a new sensation permeate his body, a kind of bliss that he had never experienced. A new picture was being framed in the window of his mind, one in which he could see Guru Nanak, Prophet Mohammed, Lord Ram and Krishna, Jesus Christ, Kabir, Farid and Guru Gobind Singh—all sitting together in one harmonious group. It was hard to make out who among that group was a Hindu, who was Sikh and who a Muslim. Each face bore a profoundly spiritual expression, each glowed with the same halo.
‘Ek noor se sabh jag upjaya, kaun bhale kaun mande (From one light, the entire universe was created, how can some be good and some bad).’ Kabir’s powerful hymn echoed in his ears as he put the gutka aside to reflect on the message.
He read the scriptures for another two hours before gently placing the gutka on the table, wrapping it in its silken fabric and putting it back in the small box. He felt that the huge boulder of lead that had been weighing him down had suddenly melted over the last couple of hours. His heart and mind revelled in the extraordinary lightness that had enveloped him.
But there was an unresolved complication that was still nagging him. Towards the end of his session with the gutka, he had read a small part of the Akal Ustat, verses composed by the tenth Guru in praise of the Lord Almighty. His line ‘Manas ki jaat sabhe eke pehchanbo (Recognize all of humanity as a single creed of mankind)’ was resonating in his head with the power of a nagara drum. And once the nagara’s drumroll had stilled, a new question was rumbling insistently, ‘So, are we all really a single creed of mankind?’ And his mind was going over the other verse that he had just read, ‘Dehura maseet soi, puja o namaz ohi (God is in the temple and the mosque. He is in Hindu worship and the Muslim prayer).’ He repeated it on his tongue a few times as his mind played a reel of images—the burnt mosque of Chowk Parag Das with just a couple of walls standing amid the debris; the collapsed roof and twisted metal girders of the temple in Phamban waala bazaar; the devastated gurudwara at Guru ka Mahal.
His mind spun as it played a longer film of all the horrific incidents that he had witnessed over the last three months and the ones he had read about in the papers. It was like a macabre play being enacted before his eyes, a play that had men being stabbed and hacked with kirpans as fountains of blood spurted from their bodies, that had entire bazaars and mohallas being reduced to rubble as flames from burning houses and shops touched the skies, that had men using guns and bombs to kill fellow human beings.
For a moment, that flow of thoughts and images came to an abrupt halt. He was lying in bed, his eyes closed, feeling as if his heart too had come to a standstill out of sheer exhaustion. His breathing slowed as his mind started to germinate some new seeds of thought. Very soon, fresh green shoots were growing and spreading in all directions. Then a pause, as his eyes replayed the morning’s incident, the bloodied corpse, the toy and sweets.
He leapt out of bed and reached for the table to grab a letter pad and pen and started writing something in neat Urdu script.
After he’d written a page and half, he kept the pen and letter pad back on the table and walked across to the still open closet. He pulled out the striped canvas bag and took it to the small toilet outside his room. The bucket nestled under the tap of the handpump was almost full and without wasting any time, he took out the two khaki paper bags carrying the red and white powders. He emptied them into the drain and then slowly poured water from the bucket to wash the stuff away.
The he reached for the bag containing the broken and crushed glass and tipped it into the garbage tin that always sat in a corner of the rooftop. That left the fourth bag, the one with the gleaming revolver. Holding it in his hand, he grimaced before breaking into a quick smile.
But he had missed something important. He went back into the room to retrieve the can of petrol and emptied that in the drain as well. Assaulted by the foul smell, he crinkled his nose and started working the handpump to flush the drain properly.
He heard his mother call, ‘Kaka! Why are you using the handpump in the middle of the night?’
‘I needed some water to drink, Bhabo.’
‘That much water? You’ve been working it for quite a while.’
Satnam stopped drawing water from the handpump and tiptoed downstairs. He quietly opened the latch of the main door and walked barefoot to the well situated at the rear end of their lane.
Returning home after flinging the revolver into the well, he ran into the nightwatchman who looked closely at him and exclaimed, ‘Sardar ji? Is that you? I was wondering who was out and about at this hour!’
‘I had a small errand to complete,’ he mumbled, as he slunk back home.
Tiptoeing back to his room, he lay down with a sigh of relief, the kind that comes when a huge weight has been lifted off your chest.
A minute or two later, he was fast asleep.