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| Kathmandu, Sunday May 18, 2003 Jestha 04, 2060. |
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Ancestral homelands
By YUYUTSU R D SHARMA
"O Raven, scavenger of skeletons, you have
eaten all the flesh of mine. /Pray do not touch these eyes, for a glimpse of the beloved
one they pine."
Portrait of a scantily clad bony saint/poet with
a long flailing gray beard addressing above quoted lines to a crow hangs on the wall. This
twelfth century Sufi / Bhakti poet Baba Farid (1173-1265) defines the secret ethos of
harsh Punjabi countryside I have been brought up in.
From the idyllic valleys of Himalayas back to my
birthplace I feel summer heat thrashing the landscape. Life is fraught with dangers: The
same Frontier Mail I missed by chance caught fire, claiming 35 human lives. Awestruck, we
watch TV, how train caught fire, how passengers scrambled to come out of this inferno.
In spite of its material affluence, the town
looks deserted. Like my own ancestral house. It’s a studio of ghosts. It’s first
time I’m back home to live alone, without my mother. I realize how I had ignored her
anxiety about her funeral rites .She had been preparing everything in advance, her death
rites. I open her Almirah, seventeen glasses, sixteen plates, and five sets of steel
utensils to be donated in her name, clothes, and umbrella. Virtually everything.
My Mohalla is an abandoned settlement; most of
the inhabitants have left, for Canada, the US, Australia or the Great Britain. Not many of
them have come back to claim these dilapidated buildings or money freezing in the Banks.
My own house. Would I never again return to my
birthplace? Would this house become another abandoned building? On the mantel I watch
portraits of the Dead pile up— Grand parents, my father, my mother, my aunt, a whole
generation of them.
Wasps have made their nests in the corner.
Glasses have cracked like dreams of mothers who waited all their lives.
One Two Three Four Five—Shrijana counts
queasily. Shakti, my brother hardly lives in the home to ward these intruders off.
Like mad men. Or like poets claiming their dead
masters’ words, we take charge of the house. Shrijana stirs up a move of cleaning
this huge house my grandpa built in the early 20s of Twentieth century .A wasp ferociously
charges at her face. "Don’t worry, they won’t do anything, just don’t
bother them." Shakti says.
We buy her bed, her quilt, her pillow, her cot,
her bed sheets, her pitcher of water, in case she gets thirsty in the Other world. Live in
peace, Mataji! Tomorrow priest will come. Every object reminds me of the past ,each brick
has a story to tell .I notice cracks have appeared in the walls.
I move out of the house, looking for a passage
that I used to take in my childhood to go to the green fields. I notice there’s
hardly a soul that recognizes me. Strangers have occupied the area, raising posh villas
out of green fields. I can no longer find the path along the fields to reach the water
well where I used to take bath every morning. I take a more obvious path and reach the
groove where water well used to be.
Over the years that I have been away they have
mindlessly pumped out all the sweet waters of my earth to feed the greed of their paddy
fields. They could have had these fields full of sunflowers or other crops. Now the water
well has dried, says Shakti. Bhani’s water well, my favorite, whose water’s
taste I could tell even if placed secretly among millions of pitchers has dried up. Water
wells of my birthplace have dried.
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