Part 9: Spider Man
It wasn't like him to give so much away to get such scraps of information in exchange, which in his opinion was average reasoning anyone could come up with. There hadn't been any need to cite the one post she'd liked. For all its worth, it could have been a weighty arsenal to black mail with at an opportune time for him and not so opportune ones for her.
F*@#! It wasn't even like him to mull over things of the past.
Now, he suspected he'd been cursed, his third eye - to foresee her response and play out the conversation - compromised. There had been a time, he would would have seen through her lies even before her mind would have conjured them and then there was today, he'd gone and proved he was the average assuming male, typical in having been provoked by her snooping. If his past had been the ball and chain that had kept him tied to Guru's cot, then she was the eye of the wind tunnel on the other end, drawing him towards her with the same power as a consuming cyclone. In all honesty, it wasn't all her, when he could see all the makings of a story in the way there were still many details obscured to most people around their area and hence presumed conveniently to as much as their limited and small imaginations allowed that she was a widow or as others claimed, a divorcee. A lot of his curiosity was around her withdrawal, in her never wanting to socialize with the local women except a few teachers at school and the fact that no one had seen her anything except moderately genial. I have never seen the woman angry, Guru had told him the other night.
With that came the memory he'd been avoiding all of yesterday and that morning.
While he'd blocked her way and interrogated her like she was guilty of criminal
offenses for only having looked at his blog, a sudden breeze had come and
caught his attention and then seconds later he'd felt the squeezing pressure in
his chest as if he was being shoved under water. From watching her pull the dupatta
off her face, let the sheer cloth slide over her lips and stick to her skin
like she had sweet viscous honey all over her. And then the disobedient dupatta
had once again fallen off her shoulder, being ready to be carried away by the
wind, when she'd caught it by its tail and held it in place, close to her neck
until the mischief in the wind had died down.
Lord! He could still sense inside him the last vestiges of an illicit desire
that had aroused him then and he'd forced himself with great effort to stand
there and listen when every fiber of his body had wanted to run from that place
and never want to return. Surely, it had felt depraved and improper, but he
also found another part of him that argued it was only natural when he hadn't
been with another woman in the last couple of months. Yet, he felt he had never
thought of himself to be easily led by lewd self-indulgence, his interests
never been misplaced and that line of questioning brought to light the one
appalling realization. That he was being consumed by something mightier
than all of the possibilities he'd considered, something that he couldn't fully
come in terms with and neither compermentalize it as guilt or hatred or as mild
inclination towards the mysteries that surrounded her.
Right when his ears where aching with a buzz of those questions, he heard a low sniveling hum drift from the far end of the stair way. He got to his feet and leaned over the parapet wall to find Nanhi sitting down on the first step and cradling her face between the valley of both her palms.
"Oye...Chavanni..." He shouted out, "What happened?"
She twisted her head around to look at him and took off her glasses to wipe her eyes in a clumsy twist of the back of her hand, and thrust her round thick glasses back over her nose as she said, "I'm not able to find Bholu anywhere..."
"Bholu?" His tone was severe estimating Bholu to be her toy pet or a rag doll for he certainly didn't know of anyone by that name in their locality.
"Yes...he is Hari Prasad's baby"
What the F%$@? He got around the parapet wall and took the stairs, sprinting to get to her in less than seconds.
He hunkered down and shook her by the shoulders, "Is anyone looking for him? Does Hari Prasad know that his baby is missing?"
She shook her head, her movements lax in the way she drew it from side to side and her lack of earnestness in the matter irritated him. "Come with me? Where is his home?" He felt the sudden rush of blood to his feet and his adrenalin was kicking in by the time he straightened himself again.
Without losing time, he dragged her by the wrist from the sitting posture. Given that his tall form towered over her, it made the pair seem likely as though he was the ill-humored giant who was ready to punish the child for having tresspassed into the sanctity of his home. Shit! They had indeed done just that already by moving into his room and the unnecessary jolt of thrill and anxiety was just the bonus he needed when he was ready for his afternoon nap.
She kept on with her whimpers, though her eyes were almost dry now and he realized that was just how kids were - never quite done with their demand for attention.
"How old is Bholu?" He asked, when they were at Guru's gate.
"Three..." She tapped a finger on her chin as they walk and quickly corrected her calculation, "four weeks..."
He stopped, turned around and bent over so that he was at her eye level.
"Four weeks? Did Hari Prasad lose his effing mind leaving his baby with you?"
Just as he was beginning to break into a run, she cut in front of him and began running backwards, "But no one else plays with him...only I do..."
"Did you tell anyone that he is missing?" Even as he was asking her that question, she was shaking her head in the affirmative.
"Where is his home? How long has it been since you have seen him?" He couldn't stop with that spurt of regular interrogative kind of prodding that came from his decade long working style.
Chavanni took his hand and dragged him by the narrow galli that was bordered by the compound of his Chacha's home and she was gasping harder now as she doubled over. His eyes went searching all over the length of the street eying for a baby in a bundle or a stroller. The opposite side of the street was lined by a stretch of houses, all kept the same since the 70s to preserve that old-world feel of Luncknow with its red brick and grey stone walls and their long corridors and courtyards. He could see no movement in those houses they passed and he thought it didn't seem like a good sign that no one had been informed about a missing baby. When they reached the back-wall of his Chacha's house, Chavanni came to a sudden halt, jerking him more than expected, given that the street was still vacant, free of a worried Hari Prasad.
"Here..." She was pointing a finger at the junction where their backyard ended and the neighbor's began, each of which separated by a foot wide wall. The floor was covered with dried grass, growing in patches and scraps of leaves from the large mango tree on the other side of the compound that still stood aging from his childhood. On the wall itself was a torn poster of an angry Salman Khan from Dabbang in retro print, taking long strides with his arms swinging by his sides, as if he was ready to walk out of the paper and punch his guts to a mush.
"Here?" His face scrunched with anger, frustration and a little of something else that he didn't choose to voice to a six year old.
"Yes..." She nodded and turned to point at a haggard cur lazing in the shadow of the same Mango tree on the other side of the galli, "That is Hari Prasad"
He blinked at the cur and then he looked back at Chavanni. In the slow closing and opening of his eye-lid he reckoned he'd been worried crazy for a three...no four week old puppy. He slapped his forehead and sighed loudly for Chavanni to hear. With his eyes still closed and his head titled up towards the sky, he meditated to not lose his nerve on the little girl.
What on earth had he gotten himself into? This Chavanni and her mom were indeed his personalized hell, packaged to deliver the best of torments for his misdeeds of this and all his previous lives.
"Hari Prasad is a bad dog" He faced her now, taking in her censuring hand gesture at the cur that didn't seem to mind that he was being reproached by a three foot tall human. "Chameli would be worried for Bholu. I'm sure she is already looking for him..."
"Come..." She caught his wrist again as she turned and cantered to the far end of the street before he could react,"AB man...help me find Bholu"
When they rounded the corner, they indeed found Chameli nudging at a round black object. No...Hell no! He thought, as he made sense of his role in this cosmic play of search and rescue of Bholu, son of Chameli and Hari Prasad.
It was a half-opened man-hole at which Chameli was kicking, hoping that her stalky front leg could move the 30 kilo iron lid and it was sign enough of all things that had happened to Bholu and of all that were to happen to him. They could hear a whimper, a drone from under, but they still weren't hovering over the manhole to confirm that Bholu was indeed alive inside. Chavaani took a few seconds to react to that sight and only after that she exclaimed,"See...even Chameli is here. We should help her, AB man"
Her eyes were suddenly gooey again, almost as if she was the long lost twin of Puss-in-boots from Shrek; her lower lip puckered up and trembled like she was the one in the sever. Her voice was low and heart wrenching, her tone crushing and he felt the weight drop right there in the middle of his chest as she spoke again, "We should get Bholu out"
He looked on, still keeping their places, but he crouched once her face tipped forward and had her eyes on the ground while big drops of tears ran down her cheeks to make thick brown circles on the mud in front of her feet, "Hari Prasad won't help Chameli...", she said shaking her head, her movements signifying a lost hope not just for Bholu but for her too.
There was something starkly pricking about her choice of words. Possibly he was reading too much, but as he gazed into the child's eyes, he could see a part of him who had lost himself in the same roads when he'd been five. Perhaps, even now he was still searching, looking for the white ambassador that would never return and he realized nothing had changed in all those years of growing up he had to do. Nothing at all.
He couldn't tell what had come over him then, but he was unbuttoning his shirt and rolling up his jean in a flurry of moves that would have seemed to another woman of age, as if he was particularly adept at undressing, but nothing short of a superhero to Chavanni. The next instant, he was rushing to move the iron lid by himself while he shouted orders to Chavanni to get help or at least get Guru. She disappeared the next moment, keeping up with the superhero theme and unable to keep himself from rolling his eyes, he did just that.
He pushed Chameli far from the man-hole and she ran with a howl, a cry of pain, but turned on her heel soon after and came running towards him again. A mutter of prayer and then he was gone, slipping into the slimy underworld after confirming that Bholu was still there, making certain that there was still some use to his heroic measures of being willing to be covered in all things imaginable and some unimaginable too.
In the dark, he groped for anything that moved and the stench around there acted as the catalyst to get the job done sooner. Eventually after what seemed like eternity of having fallen into a black mass of their locality's despicable waste and sewer, he found a small, soft brownish black bundle. Undoubtedly the puppy had taken a happy dip at the river of excretion that ran along the sides in a small naali and regardless of its state, he could feel the relief flow free into his limbs. He'd never been more happier sighting a puppy covered in shit.
Lifting the puppy in his arms, he maneuvered his way back to the spot where he saw a beam of light flooding into the crypt. Guru was there and so were a few others and he raised to hand them the puppy first. With loud grunts at having to pull his own weight up and a few scrapes to the side of his arm, he was out in the open, the rush of clean air into his lungs never more savored or focused upon in how the thin clean air spread through his chest.
Bholu was already being hosed down by Guru from a pipe connected to a tap from his backyard. Nanhi saw him as the small crowd cleared after their initial inquiries of is well-being and she ran to him. In the meantime, he looked around himself and found patches of unsightly goo over his arms and the rest of his body, his hair being streaked with a clotting glob of brown or moss green something, the color of which he couldn't tell apart as he smoothed it between his thumb and index finger.
A small force tugged at his legs and he found Nanhi hugging at his knees. He jerked a bit, but steadied soon as he saw Nanhi break into giggles of glee, the little one not minding his stench or the crap he was covered in, one bit. "I know...I have always known...You are not AB man...", she said.
He arched his brow at her, surprisingly smiling back in response while a thorough eagerness to hear her theory surfaced all over his ears.
"You are my spider man" She spoke in a whisper, as if it was only meant to be their secret, her eyes glinting with pride and a deep rooted joy, a state of complete surrender echoing in her smiles, as if she hadn't a thing to worry anymore in her life.
As they walked back to Guru's home, it was still unclear to him who Chavanni had found. Was it the Dhruv from ages ago, who still believed in such perfect untainted friendships or was it Dhruv of the latter time, who still couldn't trust his own shadows at any time of the day?
Of course, there was always that question to answer...but for now, he was sure whichever Dhruv Nanhi had found, he will forever be Chavanni's spider man.
Edited by 6th.Element - 12 years ago
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