He felt it as soon as he set foot in his hometown- the water in the air hitting him with breathless intimacy, embracing him in its stagnant, muggy density. “You’re back,” it seemed to whisper to him in the hushed whisper of hot winds, even as it quietened every breath he took, threatening to muffle all sound if he dared to speak.
Now, standing inside the Lachit Nagar house he spent his childhood in, he felt the oppression of the humid afternoon more than ever. On the banks of the river that grew and changed and gave and took everything from his people, Guwahati has always been inundated, or on the brink of an inundation, in the middle months of monsoon each year. Whatever rain-free spells the inhabitants enjoyed were cast over by the vapour-filled heavy dank air, which ominously portended more rain soon, and which was now rolling off his face in little slivers and beads as he embraced his newly-widowed mother for the first time in years.
All great loss seems to grant women a strange sort of stoicism, he thought, looking at his mother’s age-worn face, held in unnatural composure in front of a son who was now virtually a stranger. Holding her back straight and throwing her chin proudly forward, Ma led him inside, her posture a silently shutting down all his inanities- How have you been? Are you alright? I’m so sorry..
“Deuta left his things here for you, this room.”
Standing in the skeleton of what was once an existence, the word Ma used so effortlessly to refer to his Father sent a pang of nervous energy and guilt down his spine. Deuta- the word every Assamese learnt to associate with their father even before learning that it really meant God- because your Father is your God, son- snaked a hand down into the ash of memories and bridges burnt and pulled at the cowering childhood evenings he spent with Deuta-Father, till the loud voices, the louder glares of reprimand, the shame of derision came tumbling back in the middle of a cobwebbed, musty room. Ma left him alone with his dusty inheritance, and he dutifully set to work.
Before Parkinson’s reduced him to a quivering, shaking mask, Father had been an artist- and a darned good one, at that. Even as he looked around, he could see the walls swathed in Father’s brilliance. Irreverent, passionate and visceral, his paintings and his addictions thrived hand in hand. He could picture the cobalt stain on Father’s claw-like hands, dotted with injection marks, like it was yesterday. And he was fifteen again. And Deuta- no, Father, Father- was asking him what he was doing at school.
“School isn’t that great,” he’d said. “I think I’d like to be a writer, or something.” (Mind you, he’d just discovered Fitzgerald and Eliot, and postmodernism seemed cool.)
His father’s hand had already begun to quiver over the palette back then.
“Write?” he remembered Father’s guffawing. “What will you write? There are enough books already.”
Near two decades later, here he was, a half-there poet, and almost-there academician, looking at the weary witnesses of a once-person, still reddening over an offhand remark from half a lifetime ago.
Adolescence is tricky, he knew. But even as he looked through old letters, doctor’s prescriptions, journals, the angst sedated by separation reared its head once more. He had forgiven, if not entirely forgotten, his father’s drunken escapades around town, his unapologetic philandering, his gambling, his debts- but he still could not swallow the nonchalance and indifference Father had meted out to his only child. Time tempered the wounds of neglect, but they never really went away.
He lit a cigarette, puffing away as if his life depended on it. Father had belittled and scorned him- his work, his lifestyle, his political stance- everything was whittled down to irrelevance; even when he couldn’t move without help, and the tremors shook his limbs with every movement, he’d slowly, dully jest, “Ah, Puna, still trying to write? Ah, when will you ever learn,” and every pause in his scanning speech would drive bilious seeds of resentment deeper down his son’s throat, passive rage threatening to burst through carefully-held floodgates.
He looked around Father’s room again, every surface layered in soft, silty dust and mindless neglect, and almost by reflex, began to rearrange and sort and wipe away the rheumy testimony of their owner. The room was a study in inconsideration, full of half-finished canvases, dog eared books and correspondence, the shelves groaning under the weight of dried paint and cobwebbed easels. “How does a broken man fix things?” father often quipped, clearing just enough space on his rickety cot to ease his larger-than-life-frame into sleep.
And Ma, oh, the paragon who was left toeing the line between her life and her husband’s, silently bearing betrayal and castigation with unnerving equanimity, accepting Father’s indifference as her lot in life, and the upkeep of his survival, her duty. Oh, Ma, the silent sturdy fixture that tried to bridge the cracks in the earth separating him and Father. What made her tolerate
Him, he’d once asked in affronted half-whispers after a particularly loud disagreement with Father. “He loves us in his own shattered way, Puna.” She had smiled and he still remembered that smile, beatific and gentle- and he realized how he had not seen her smile like that since he had move out of his home, and a dull ache crept and settled in the corners of his heart he hadn’t visited for years.
He continued doggedly dusting the paintings hung on the wall, wondering if there was a graveyard he could bury remorse in.
His reverie was broken when he reached the end of the portraits lining the wall. Father’s paintings were flamboyant, shocking the viewer with the audacity of his imagination- but this one was somber. Demure. It was a portrait. Of him. Puna at 18, declared tiny letters at the bottom, shivering grotesquely in hands too weak for the job they’d undertaken.
One look at the painting showed him it wasn’t a masterpiece. The strokes were broad, jagged, broken in the middle. The outlines blurred into one another. The paint was smudged before it had dried.
No, this wasn’t a masterpiece.
It was Deuta’s last gift to his son.
Outside, the first drop of rain angrily splattered down on the roof.
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Shivering in the flimsy loincloth custom had handed down over the ages, he carefully walked down the slippery riverbank, both hands raising their precious offering to the torrid current.
Almost hesitant to make this final parting, he slowly allowed the silvery dust in the clay pot to be consumed in the yaws of the ever-hungry waters.
At that moment, he could almost feel the Son of the Creator swell with sympathy for the son-of-the-dead, as He drank in the burden of silent atonement.
