Story:
Bhupen
The Old Paper Note
Many of my dreams are incomplete but I am imprisoned in a closed box.
Have you ever experienced the agony of suffocation inside a closed box? That is what I have been experiencing now.
You will not accept my point for I can speak. But I will speak today without sound. I will tell you the truth. Being suffocated I am trying to lessen my weariness after a long journey. I lived a life of subservience throughout. In spite of being inside a closed box today, my freedom is unrestrained. Mahabharata, the most favorite book of human beings is exhausted beside me in this box. As per my knowledge, there is a story of a character named Bhisma in Mahabharata, who being prisoner of his own promise throughout in the later phase of life, like me, gets the death of suffocation. He is obliged to favour the wrong though he transparently sees wrongdoings. Similar types of obligations have brought me to this suffocating atmosphere.
Mr. Death hasn’t succeeded to enter this closed box. You can sense the smell of so many people within me. Many kinds of these sweat-impressions help me analyse the layers of my life-journey although I can’t clearly recall the touch of hands of my creator. I am an abandoned existence. My youth has accumulated a lot of feelings of sweet and bitter touch as every human does so in his youth-period.
I still very clearly remember the moment when the youth carrying me had spent his night in the cell of a harlot and he could feel orgasm with my help. After the night the youth left me at the harlot’s, in the similar fashion, many youths and old ones of various facial patterns spent their passionate nights over yonder. The harlot would offer her every dark night to those men who were not her husbands and every morning she would collect the price of her night with those male customers. After their departure, she would bitterly weep putting me on her bosom. In reminiscence, the warmth of her bosom even today gets my heart melted. At that time I would find myself weak and helpless along with the harlot. I would like to console her by wiping out her tears.
But I was not made wipe out tear.
Many place I have roamed around. Many people I have travelled with. I have experienced from the narrowed light in mansion to the sweetness of the night expanded in the hut. In feudal master’s house I have seen the worker thinned down and the shelter-given dog fattened. I have accumulated my feeling of shyness being offered to the idol inside the temple letting the hundreds-of-hands-raising beggars around the temple be covered in dust. Most of the time my master has spent me in buying perfume and alcoholic drinks rather than in jeevanjal. Every winter, wearing the tattered clothes many parents have spent me in order to brighten up their children’s future. In course of time, I have been subservient of those descendents who spent me in order to buy the lock of door in order to bar their parents entering their mansion. I have witnessed the fangs of girl-scratching religious teachers with their celibacy at night coaching the lessons of renunciation to their students throughout the day.
After living for a long time with a harlot I reached to a doctor.
The doctor would involve in the check-up of his patients round the clock. Patients of similar countenance would put their hill of agony on the doctor’s table. I would easily notice it. The moment they opened their money purse their face would reflect their anxiety of managing the evening-round meal. Most of the patients would earnestly request him to minimize his treatment fee because of their insufficient money. But my master’s a short moment of time would be far more expensive than a month of those poor patients. The doctor entrusting the medicine-prescribed note would request them to see him again for further treatment. But most of the patients never returned to him. Every morning I would patiently wait those patients who had given a word to see him. In the evening the doctor would, by the help of those notes, gladden his wife buying expensive condoms and CDs full of sexual postures. I would think how weak I was. I am under obligations. A large number of sensibilities and sentiments touching me every day and night commit suicide. The moment I would like to leap up from the doctor’s pocket I wished to tear his neat and clean pocket and reach to the dirty pockets of peasants and laborers. The shabby purses would feel beautiful to me. I would like to shout, “I want freedom from this tedious subservience”.
But I lacked voice.
Once I reached to a remote village.
My master was a merchant in the village. I saw people willing to see him would come to him bending their body in his honour from a distance. One evening a shabby loin-cloth-wearing peasant along with his pregnant wife came to see my master. He asked for loan with my master as there was nothing to eat at his home. A sense of pity grew on me as I saw his pitiable countenance but his plea couldn’t make my master’s heart melt.
“What do you have to mortgage?” My master asked.
“Nothing ,sir. Everything you have”, He said.
“You bloody fool! How do you pay back the debt if you don’t have anything?”
“Sir, I will labour hard. Next year, I will pay it back by any means.”
The master’s psyche didn’t change. He began to think something different. However, his wife was clever. She found a way out, “You mortgage the unborn baby in your wife’s belly.”
The peasant looked at his wife for a moment but nothing he could say. His wife drooped and caressed her belly. Finally, as per the master’s interest, the peasant was compelled to mortgage the baby waiting to be born. Exasperated me from the chain of harsh slaveries, again, through me ,somebody was going to be a slave before stepping on the earth from mother’s womb. The moment I wanted to tear myself asunder. I wanted to destroy my whole clan.
But I didn’t have limbs.
Time rolled on. I got aged. Human thought kept changing. My shape began to wrinkle as if I was an old man. The value of my beauty began to decline due to the dirt of many people’s palm and tongue’s saliva. I was weakening day by day. As people forcibly grabbed, my zinc-like size began to twist. Some layers got torn. I spent a long time in the suffocating mansions of aristocrats and always remained trapped. I got trapped by my relatives as human beings trap human beings. I got trapped as one among crores.
I possess some moments of delight, too.
After a long time, I got an opportunity to smell the scent of sweat that was considerably different from the smell of perfume produced from my ex-masters’ bodies. He patiently caressed and patiently kept me in his pocket without causing any pain. In the evening, he took me home and cautiously joined the parts of my body that were somehow separated. He handed over me to his mother. For the first time, that day, I felt I met someone dear to me. My earlier masters very often would be in hurry and frustration. They never had time to caress me lovingly and protect my going-to-be torn body. I was extremely happy that day. Perhaps that was the first earning of Birja Bahadur. His mother lovingly folded me and put me in a box. After a long time, a loving touch I felt. The same night, touching her bed-ridden coughing husband’s forehead, the old woman in a low voice, said, “Right tomorrow, I will go to the hospital and buy a cough syrup for you.”
I would love such moments when somebody would feel delight though it was through my slavery.
When I got robbed that night, my master was painfully going to a public house to buy alcohol after his wife didn’t show any desire to involve in copulation. On the way, somebody hit him on the back. My dear master fell on the ground. I can clearly recall the image of the youth who looted me out of the grip of my previous master. I was scared that night and I spent the night by sticking on the boy’s bosom and he didn’t move his hand from me even for a second. He caressed me the whole night long. On the morrow, the youth went through the same way where my master had been looted. He handed me over to my master and took his daughter along with him. Afterwards I understood the reason why my ex-master had been looted. My psyche, terrified from the last night, was more peaceful that day. Once again I wished to get stuck on the youth’s bosom.
But nobody heard my silence.
It was just last year, leaving his octogenarian mother and newly child-delivered wife home, my dear master Rame Damai flew for abroad putting me and his family photograph in his pocket. The evening he reached his foreign destination, he closed me inside his box. Every evening he would take out his family photograph from the purse and put on his bosom.
One day, Rame Damai didn’t wake up in the morning. He didn’t open the box. Somebody else opened it. Afterwards I got the point, he had fallen asleep forever. Along with him, his dreams too, fell asleep not to wake up anymore. I wanted to wake my dear master up. Pathetically, I lacked voice.
I have so many such experiences but I can’t tell you all in my exhausted condition. However, some questions I do have.
Perhaps my journey has ended. Nobody will take trouble of transporting me. I don’t know how much meaningful my life became and what determines my value. Commodity or its usage? The price of condom needed for copulation to those men and the price of a palmful of leafy vegetables needed for the meal to the harlot was the same but mostly the condom-buyers spent me. I was cheaply used. Why are my ex-masters so much thirsty that their well is almost about to overflow? I have been made to stay silent inside a closed box similar to a bedridden old man. Nevertheless, I would like to make an exit. I would like to stick again on the bosom of the youth who had patiently caressed me. I would like to spend me in order to fulfil his incomplete dream. I would like to wake Rame Damai up from his dream. I am pondering on the old man if he continued consuming cough syrup after my departure. I have again a wish to get plundered. I want to speak to the master. Demanding the price of slavery with the cruel master I would like to spend myself in hunger, affliction and diseases. Why did I undergo such a cruel slavery throughout life? Why did human being, throughout life, made himself my slave and vice versa? Am I security-providing eyelashes to the beautiful world-showing eye of human or a blindfolding black piece of cloth of entangle human in darkness?
Me, an old paper note that is in the later phase of life.
Translation into English Suresh Hachekali
