Jammu Bandh: Synopsis and Prologue
['Jammu Bandh' is a serialized novel written by Vikram Grewal. It is published periodically on the blog 'Besan Ka Halwa'.]
Synopsis
August 2013: The question of religion had never bothered Ishwar, for since the beginning he had been a man of science. He felt safe behind the towering shelves of his college library, interminable streams of chemistry equations and endless piles of incomprehensible notes. Away from his habitat in Delhi, he finds himself thrown into unfamiliar territory- the disturbed city of Jammu, currently simmering on the flames of communal clashes in Kishtwar. His scientific theories seem redundant and inapplicable as he encounters tranquility and violence spiraling into and from each other in the city of temples. Temples and mosques; questions and answers. Monsoon is when it rains a little more; pains a little less. Entropy pervades and chaos takes control.
It’s someone else. Always. A different person. A stranger. Though a familiar face, the same hair, identical ears, matching torso, the exact phlegmatic grin and the unchanged repugnant shameless gaze. His consistently variable plight alienates me from him.
I stare at those headphones and discern their blueness that perhaps acts as a tag that affirms my recognition of him. Otherwise it’s always a battle bringing myself to acknowledge his presence the way it is. That shabby being! Always timely obscured by different people who stand in between us as we sit (we rarely do- but when we- it’s always opposite each other). Those headphones- messiah against monotony- salvaging me (not sure about him) from the infuriating announcements which feasibly ruin the already ruined feasible travel that is the Delhi metro.
He gets cloaked by bulky bellies of men who stand. Their paunches are held by steel buckles of upwardly buttressing leather belts. Different men stood. Always! Because there were just too many of them. Women were seated mostly. They were supposed to be. (Actually, everyone was supposed to be.) Or at least I thought so…assumed so. For when I sat I didn’t wander my eyeballs even an inch away from where I stared at him.
Different people. Same crowd. Always.
Staring at him- squinting time and again as if those headphones were cowboy hats and an empty red sandy barren landscape had replaced the sturdy fibre glass windows on both the sides. As if the crowd ever so volatile had transfigured into tiny particles and shingled off. Ammonium Chloride sublimating in Wild West!
It was just the two of us. I always thought what it could be that he might be thinking but never asked because of the noise and the distance. (Those paunches acted as efficient obstacles in a Doppler’s experiment.) But something intuitively assured me that he knew what I was thinking. That he knew what was there inside my head. He knew that whenever we met it went blank. That that odd quarter of an hour I did nothing but look at him- at the face which resulted as a reflection of my body on anything courtesy the sensation of sight.
Headphones stopped producing sound. The playlist had come to an end. I closed my eyes only to realize that I had been randomly staring at myself for past many minutes. As the metro pulled out of a random station, I inhaled deeply and tasted the air in my mouth. It was pungent like hydrogen sulphide emanating from rotten eggs.
My tongue tasted like her. As I roiled it inside my closed mouth, that filthy tang seemed to spread to other parts of my ingestion mechanism. Then perhaps it travelled to the whole of my digestive system. Now churning my intestines the filthy flavour had dug up that last morsel of rajma I had managed to comfortably gulp a few days ago.
Involuntarily my hand began to scratch my grassy black chin. Gaining control over it smoothly slapping the surface of my smutty beard, I rebuked myself.
The paunches in front of me had disappeared as the train pulled out of Kashmere Gate. The unkempt drowsy man I saw before me was wearing a mud-splattered jeans. His dirty shirt was drenched with sweat. He had this strange habit of tapping the seat when not listening to music on those blue headphones. An air of restlessness surrounded him. However, when he put them on he became calm. His fingers got settled coolly on the silvery plastic plane of the seat. Music brought him composure.
For me, at the same instant, music was deception. A perfect detractor of the present situation, it was a means of facilitating escape. Escape to a separate time frame. It bombarded me with fragments of memory. Bits and pieces flying around like Rutherford’s alpha-particles, it serenely deposited or perhaps gave into chaos. Floating in that chaos would be me. Meanwhile, he would sit sturdily feeling the tilting and bending of the plastic seats due to the movement of the coach. I would wander in the past.
I would wander.
He would stay.
Yet we were one and the same.
Those inner alpha-particles would strike me in random order in an incomplete, incoherent and insolent way. Incidents, events occurred in extreme entropy. I still held on to the time-frame though. I had gradually learned to. The tangible tie with the seat was never lost; nor was the knowing of the sounds that poured out and into my ears- however the tie always seemed to sever.
Recent past had been unpleasant. Present was being spent in knowing that.
And both of us co-existed.
Yet, he stayed.
And I wandered.
Synopsis
August 2013: The question of religion had never bothered Ishwar, for since the beginning he had been a man of science. He felt safe behind the towering shelves of his college library, interminable streams of chemistry equations and endless piles of incomprehensible notes. Away from his habitat in Delhi, he finds himself thrown into unfamiliar territory- the disturbed city of Jammu, currently simmering on the flames of communal clashes in Kishtwar. His scientific theories seem redundant and inapplicable as he encounters tranquility and violence spiraling into and from each other in the city of temples. Temples and mosques; questions and answers. Monsoon is when it rains a little more; pains a little less. Entropy pervades and chaos takes control.
Prologue
It’s someone else. Always. A different person. A stranger. Though a familiar face, the same hair, identical ears, matching torso, the exact phlegmatic grin and the unchanged repugnant shameless gaze. His consistently variable plight alienates me from him.
I stare at those headphones and discern their blueness that perhaps acts as a tag that affirms my recognition of him. Otherwise it’s always a battle bringing myself to acknowledge his presence the way it is. That shabby being! Always timely obscured by different people who stand in between us as we sit (we rarely do- but when we- it’s always opposite each other). Those headphones- messiah against monotony- salvaging me (not sure about him) from the infuriating announcements which feasibly ruin the already ruined feasible travel that is the Delhi metro.
He gets cloaked by bulky bellies of men who stand. Their paunches are held by steel buckles of upwardly buttressing leather belts. Different men stood. Always! Because there were just too many of them. Women were seated mostly. They were supposed to be. (Actually, everyone was supposed to be.) Or at least I thought so…assumed so. For when I sat I didn’t wander my eyeballs even an inch away from where I stared at him.
Different people. Same crowd. Always.
Staring at him- squinting time and again as if those headphones were cowboy hats and an empty red sandy barren landscape had replaced the sturdy fibre glass windows on both the sides. As if the crowd ever so volatile had transfigured into tiny particles and shingled off. Ammonium Chloride sublimating in Wild West!
It was just the two of us. I always thought what it could be that he might be thinking but never asked because of the noise and the distance. (Those paunches acted as efficient obstacles in a Doppler’s experiment.) But something intuitively assured me that he knew what I was thinking. That he knew what was there inside my head. He knew that whenever we met it went blank. That that odd quarter of an hour I did nothing but look at him- at the face which resulted as a reflection of my body on anything courtesy the sensation of sight.
Headphones stopped producing sound. The playlist had come to an end. I closed my eyes only to realize that I had been randomly staring at myself for past many minutes. As the metro pulled out of a random station, I inhaled deeply and tasted the air in my mouth. It was pungent like hydrogen sulphide emanating from rotten eggs.
My tongue tasted like her. As I roiled it inside my closed mouth, that filthy tang seemed to spread to other parts of my ingestion mechanism. Then perhaps it travelled to the whole of my digestive system. Now churning my intestines the filthy flavour had dug up that last morsel of rajma I had managed to comfortably gulp a few days ago.
Involuntarily my hand began to scratch my grassy black chin. Gaining control over it smoothly slapping the surface of my smutty beard, I rebuked myself.
The paunches in front of me had disappeared as the train pulled out of Kashmere Gate. The unkempt drowsy man I saw before me was wearing a mud-splattered jeans. His dirty shirt was drenched with sweat. He had this strange habit of tapping the seat when not listening to music on those blue headphones. An air of restlessness surrounded him. However, when he put them on he became calm. His fingers got settled coolly on the silvery plastic plane of the seat. Music brought him composure.
For me, at the same instant, music was deception. A perfect detractor of the present situation, it was a means of facilitating escape. Escape to a separate time frame. It bombarded me with fragments of memory. Bits and pieces flying around like Rutherford’s alpha-particles, it serenely deposited or perhaps gave into chaos. Floating in that chaos would be me. Meanwhile, he would sit sturdily feeling the tilting and bending of the plastic seats due to the movement of the coach. I would wander in the past.
I would wander.
He would stay.
Yet we were one and the same.
Those inner alpha-particles would strike me in random order in an incomplete, incoherent and insolent way. Incidents, events occurred in extreme entropy. I still held on to the time-frame though. I had gradually learned to. The tangible tie with the seat was never lost; nor was the knowing of the sounds that poured out and into my ears- however the tie always seemed to sever.
Recent past had been unpleasant. Present was being spent in knowing that.
And both of us co-existed.
Yet, he stayed.
And I wandered.
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