Finding his sky

The boulder that Maanas sat on towered into nothingness. Its contours, uneven and rough. Shaped like a crescent, it assumed the name ‘chaand’, the moon. When the brooding skies showered the barren lands and empty wells with fresh water that everyone said smelled of Jannat, a little of water that remained in its pit as if reflected more majestic white light than the moon itself. There were many legends and tell tales that the boulder shouldered. Some shuddering and some magical. Tales, like the sky, were of variations. They were subtly blown into with new illustrations and forgery, so much that the truth and the lie became indistinct, like in the sky he couldn’t tell where the blue disappeared into the purple. When the wind that was always turbulent refused to sing him a tune,

“Oh the wind that once gushed and sang me tales,

why must you be so reticent tonight,

what secrets do you conceal

and what stories do you not speak?

Did you watch the sunset

That painted the world a scarlet hue,

slowly letting the moonlight creep in.

Did you pass by the gigantic mountains

Non-existent to our kind and stay a while

to learn the trades of solitude and mystery,

Was it as enchanting as made out to be?

Did you feel the downy push of dandelion seeds

As they flew across the sky

And listen to the whispers of dreams and hope

That gave them wings.

Did you listen to the melody of the nightingale

That stayed under the shadows,

And watch in Awe, the dance of merriment

Of leaves that rustled and dust that whirled,

And shiver whilst you cut through

Fresh dew?

If I could, I would glide gracefully into

this thin nothingness and let you carry me

through million skies

and to tiny towns unknown and harmony muffled.

I would let you convince me of this world, from miles,

Nothing more than a speckle of minuscule existence

and relish the ignorance of all that

Once mattered and

Then realise that the only woe I should fear

Is setting my foot on the ground again

and forcing my wandering mind against

fleeing actuality and escaping into the

agonising yet alluring realms of

nonsensical fabrications.

Before this woe consumes me,

You must not stop

For there are stories unfinished

And worlds not discovered.”,

he would often sing. He would listen to the gurgle of the salt and the rise and fall of the stream flowing across the boulder, engulfing every noise that wasn’t created by itself. Leaves would twirl gallantly to that innate music, some green, some brown and others in a dilemma.

Maanas seldom did not dwell in the variety of sky. Every day he watched different light surround him. The sheer pleasure of ignorance of existence enveloped him cosily like a baby engulfed in a mother’s embrace, safe and secure. He could stay in that space for as long as time ceased to be. Maanas was only six when his baba had involuntarily carried his wailing son into the mysteries of a forest. “No! In the story Amma told me yesterday, the lion ate the boy. I don’t want to come baba. Please don’t go”, he was wailing, throwing his hands around like a child often did when overcome by the desire to have his way. With a greying beard that fell carelessly across his chest and a scalp not as blessed as his chin, Raamu intimidated his son even whilst his name contradicted his stature. For a man who was stout with a pot belly and burly brows that did less to diminish the image of a grumpy lazy villager, Raamu was one of the soldiers at the kingdom. As someone yearning for recognition, he understood his work better than his family. To be a worthy father and a husband, he assumed it best to provide his son with the best archery lessons and his wife, with artistically woven silk sarees and finest ornaments that could never fill the void in her heart.

Every morning when the branches and the roofs of the haystack huts seemed to float in the sky and the fog, so stubborn that Maanas would often ask, “Amma, I think when I slept I went to the skies”. Raamu would grunt, “There are no skies Maanas. Sky is singular. What do you learn from your gurukul?” Savitri devastated with her husband, would often in her head indulge in arguments with Raamu, against his ineptness to talk to a child. If she were as valiant as she were in her fabrications, she would have lived better. Maanas, traumatized at having let his baba down, would drag himself to his mother cleaning the front of his hut with cow dung. Savitri would watch her defeated son’s scrunched face through a sideway glance and smile.

In a hushed tone she would sing, “Oh little tortured soul, look across those misty mountains and tiny homes. Look at that vast oblivion, it has a colour now that will change like rivers change their course and birds their destination. There is an oblivion, a sky for every season and mind. Don’t be heartbroken jaan, tonight when your sky has the chaand, someone else’s will have the sun. When yours will bolt lightning, someone else’s will glare with light. Your sky has infinite possibilities. So go aye little dreamer, look into the skies and find yours. There is a sky for every season and you”

Maanas mesmerized by his mother’s voice would spiral into the far away whiteness of the sky.

The mirth of their laughter would vibrate in the air along with the magical noise of their anklets jingle. With vessels on their hips, Savitri would walk with her neighbours to the stream. Even when it was only half a mile from her hut, Savitri found her home in the movement of the stream and the absolute distorted voices of the wind. Her reasons were simple, in that half a mile, she could be whoever she desired to be. She needed no veil to validate her purity and no forced smile to prove her strength. She could glide into the fog and become someone else.

As their voices rose and fell, their conversations would return to their family. “Savitri’s fate is the making of her karma in her previous life. Raamu bhai buys her the most beautiful ornaments and sarees. Oh, don’t be shy Savitri, no husband has loved his wife as much as Raamu. How I envy you”

Savitri would let their words ring in her head whilst sitting in a hideous corner and fantasizing about Raamu lovingly gazing at her as if she were the brightest star in the sky. She would imagine Raamu embracing her in his safe arms and then accepting all her whims. She would almost feel the tingles run down her spine as his lips lightly but fiercely brushed her forehead but then listening to their laughter would bring her out of her momentary trance.

“Maanas, are you listening to me?”, he heard a voice, soothing and kind. He slowly let his head droop to her face. She was sitting next to him, her eyes lighting him up with the moonlight that it caught. His lips lazily pulled into a beautiful smile. He marvelled at her heart-shaped dusky face and the freckles that ran down her cheeks, like the invisible dust in the air. She held his gaze and her eyes recited words unfathomable.

As he looked at her, he could engulf her in a warm cuddle and lose himself to the harmonious silence and the stillness of their wandering souls. He could otherwise hold her warm delicate hand in his trembling ones and escape from a future that seemed likely.

But as his baba had always said, “You are a coward Maanas, how will you ever be a warrior?”, tears glistened in his eyes and slowly ran down his cheeks. He could in his head, see his father shudder in disgust. Kaveri, without panicking, wiped his tears. She held his face in her huge rough hands, to him which were fragile and shook her head against him crying. He took her hands and in a hushed tone he hadn’t known he was capable of, uttered, “Kaveri”. Nevertheless the tremble in his voice, every syllable in her name that he whispered moistened her eyes. His fingers lifted her fallen face. She simply pushed his fingers away and shook the tears from her eyes.

“I have brought you something Maanas”, she announced. His dull eyes brightened at the words. She removed the knot in the corner of her saree and smiled at his eager face. It was a miniature sword. He was compelled into a time that was years go.

When Maanas was thirteen, Raamu decided that his son’s fate was of a heroic knight. Standing amidst other soldiers, he would spin fables of the future of his son. He would narrate how on sleepless nights he would envision the bright future of his boy. With the hugest smile on his face and his eyes twinkling with hope, he would narrate, “Maanas will become a valorous warrior. He is tall, robust and well proportioned. He could defeat death at war”.

But, who was telling the story? And whose story was it anyway?

The words fluttered and flew in the wind.

Nobody listened. Other men always spoke of other kingdoms and the economy of the village. All a soldier’s son could become was a soldier but he refused to believe in such an ordinary fate. In his head he would tell cynically, “Someday my son will be recognized and so will I”.

To everyone it seemed that he spoke of his son as if he were to succeed the throne. Maanas was physically able but in his heart, he was a pacifist. He could carry the weight of the armour but not lift his sword to take someone’s life or even to survive.

Against the will of Maanas, Raamu took him to a master who lived in the ghastly mountains at the borders of the village. In his forties, he was huge and vigorous. A man of few words, he never wasted them on situations that weren’t of grave importance. Him and Raamu were different. While Raamu demanded respect, Ravichandra was automatically greeted with it. His aura was of a leader, a leader who refused to be.

Ravichandra hadn’t taken a liking to Maanas. When he had realised that his father, a great warrior had been saved from the clutch of death by Govinda, Maanas’s late grandfather, he had agreed to teach Maanas. From the moment he became Maanas’s teacher, he had foreseen Maanas to be a diplomatic fighter. During the practice, his bruises never hurt Maanas as much as failing did. Through the struggle, one day, as he thumped to the ground and his body yearned to let go and his muscles screamed in pain, he saw her. Kaveri, with a mud pot that sat on her smooth waist. Sweat glistened down her neck and her jet black hair covered her forehead. His heart beat to her graceful steps. In that moment, he yearned to grab her by her waist, to take her to places unknown to the world. When he watched her eyes through a haze, everything else disappeared and all he saw was her.

The pot she held slipped and her mouth fell open in shock. She watched him lay still with his empty eyes wide open. Her father shook his head dismissively at the boy in pain. “Baba, before he loses his breath, we have to save him”. As she held his head that kept losing itself to the black, from that moment he knew that his mother Savitri and Kaveri were the only two people he would consider lifting his sword for.

Kaveri, he learnt was a better fighter than he was. She was an impulsive teller but also a keen listener. When he lost a fight, he would listen to her melodious laughter that didn’t make him insecure. To him, she didn’t walk, she glided through moments with an ease he hadn’t witnessed until then. As the sun kept rising and sinking in a loop, he couldn’t tell if he loved her or worshipped her.

He looked at the miniature sword in her hand. “Thank you”, he muttered.

As they watched the sky, he tried to cram all the infinite words he wanted to say in their bounded time, “I don’t want to go to war Kaveri. I cannot fight.”

“Then don’t go”, she whispered turning her face to him. He, pretending to be unaltered by her stare and still watching the sky, said, “Baba. I cannot disappoint him Kaveri. It’s a war against Soma’s, the one’s that killed his mother. I cannot deny him.”

A comfortable silence settled between them.

“Your strength is that you are a good man Maanas. You don’t overestimate your skills, rather you underestimate them. You aren’t an obnoxious over-confident fool and don’t lose yourself to the heat of moments. You are careful and aware of yourself like a predator that isn’t starving. You Maanas, aren’t a survivor, no, you are a saviour. There is a fighter in all of us and yours is a saviour”

From the moment she had started talking, a grin had played on his lips, “You sound like the astrologer that my father brought home last week. So insightful yet stupid. In a war, being a good man won’t save me Kaveri. If men went to fight, I go to last. You are a better warrior than I am, by miles and distances”

“If Baba would let me go, I would but one shouldn’t ever believe one can fly Maanas, we have no wings. I have no words to comfort you. All I ask is for you to return, please return. I don’t care if you fight or hide timidly in an unseen corner. When the war ends, I want you to survive”, a sad smile played on her face.

Pulling her closer, he buried his face in her neck, “That’s the thing Kaveri, you cannot just fly but you can also soar heights”.

Listening to his breath and feeling it tickle her neck with every breath, she tried to memorize his presence. Like the scent of a flower, presence never lingered long.

He kissed her neck and ran his cold fingers over her collarbone delicately. The leaves of the trees across the boulder played a veil for them and the world.

As million stars aligned and unaligned, sensing time slip away she stopped him, “There is not much time left”. His heavy breath on her face, she sat next to him as he reached for his pocket. She gasped. In his hand was a pair of silver star charm chain anklet. “How?”, she was dumbfounded.

He smiled. Motioning for her feet he said, “If I could, I would give my life for you and amma. I cannot. This one’s for you and the other for amma”

“And for baba?”, she wondered out aloud about Raamu kaka.

“I fight, even in death”

She couldn’t talk or smile. She wanted to cry, shout but she did nothing as he placed it over her ankle.

“If I don’t return, I don’t want to say a goodbye Kaveri”

He held her by her shoulder and they stood looking at each other. They had so much to tell each other, so many promises to make, so many tears to share. Even if they had time, doing it all would feel as if it were their last time. They stood there like that under the million stars and skies, none of them aware for how long they did. In that moment, the next moment had boundless possibilities and they could only live them all until the moment arrived.

As the earth transcended different angles and many months snuck their way into the past and trees became mere branches, twigs only to again become full and green, they won the war.

But, the sky was grey and void of quirks, flaunting an abstract nothingness. It wasn’t terrifying, it dawned on people as the silence that settled after a storm. The village that was once brimming with life was now dead even with the little life left.

Kaveri and Savitri, their faces pale and eyes sad, sat in the corner emotionless. Their eyes were the kind of empty that terrified you. They did not cry or yell, they sat there in a haze, unable to think. Raamu kept saying, “My son died fighting, I told you, he was going to be a warrior”

Maanas had been stabbed while he wept in his armour on the boulder.

Kaveri read the leaf that Maanas had left behind if he were to not return,

“Dear Amma and Kaveri,

I couldn’t talk when I left. As I walk out of the village, I know every breathing and aware part of me will cease to exist. When I go to war wearing my armour, I will stand there in a body that has no life left in it. I am not brave like baba wanted me to be but I am not a coward just because I did not want to walk into a war-field with a will to sacrifice for a greater good. Perhaps, I am selfish. I am not as scared of death as I am of not meeting you both again.

I won’t say goodbye, in a universe that never ceases to be, how our tiny endings are insignificant? There was time before us and there will be time after, its forever stretching into dimensions hard to decipher. So, as I reach my ending, I know I will tumble into another beginning, quickly. If you were to stand on the edge of these dimensions and conceive the time between the endings and beginnings, you would watch it all happen in the blink of an eye. So, I might as well say a hello as I say goodbye. Until then which is very soon, I will hope for you.”

Maanas wasn’t celebrated a martyr but as his remains turned to ash and his ash floated in the stream which often was music to his ears, his mother sang,

“Oh little tortured soul, look across those misty mountains and tiny homes. Look at that vast oblivion, it has a colour now that will change like rivers change their course and birds their destination. There is an oblivion, a sky for every season and mind. Don’t be heartbroken jaan, tonight when your sky has the chaand, someone else’s will have the sun. When yours will bolt light, someone else’s will glare with light. Your sky has infinite possibilities. So go aye little dreamer, look into the skies and find yours. There is a sky for every season and you”

The clouds that had gathered ruptured and fat water droplets raced to the barren ground. Maanas left with a sky that wept at his departure.

But, for the villagers Maanas never really left. He became a tale, a ghost that lingered forever at the boulder. When his blood seeped into its cracks and the water it collected was often a light red, he never ceased to be. Even while he never fought, Raamu kept saying all his life, “he was my son” but really, all he was and all he became was a tale between his end and another beginning.