The Confession (The Garden of the Dead - 2)

Strange things happen sometimes. Like this early dawn, when I was dreaming past my windows, not seeing the hills beyond. When all of a sudden this young girl - tight little thing - went jogging past my front gates, crunching the grass that had only just woken up from sleep. Call it an old man’s fancy for life, or just plain senility, that girl bounced her steps right into my thoughts and I found myself awake in a cold spring evening, years back, up on those hills with my Martha.

It was yet another of those long walks we used to go on, almost everyday till a year-and-a-half before Martha died. It was so cold, Martha had begun to suggest we turn back. This I found unthinkable, the air being so crisp and somehow strangely persuasive. I remember saying we’d go on till that abandoned graveyard among the hills. “It’s too beautiful an evening. Let’s pay a visit to The Garden of the Dead, then return,” I said.

So we walked on, old man and old wife, shivering yet sweating slightly. That was when this strange thing happened, right here inside my head. Looking at those half frozen violets by the roadside, I touched Martha’s cold palm and made a suggestion: “Martha, do you feel like hearing out a confession?” She gave me her teasing look and said, “If you’ve been gambling with those retired boys over a drink, I’ll forgive you, but only if you agree we go back now. I’m cold and tired.”

And then I began. I began by telling her that this was far worse than rounds of rummy with other pensioners at the club. I went on to tell her about the relationship I had with my boss’ secretary once, and how I had sworn to myself to never tell her, Martha, about it. And I remember the way Martha just heard me out without a word, while we walked far beyond The Garden of the Dead.

“When was this?” she asked once in between, and that was the only interruption to my confession. When she asked it she had that half-blush half-accusation look that easily made her the world’s prettiest old woman.

“Yes Martha, it was after I had met you,” I said, probably confirming her worst fears. “Remember the time I went to Delhi looking for a job so we could get married? Well, she was my boss’ PA in that small joint I first worked in. She was a tight little flirt.” This was during the two-and-a-half-year gap after I had met Martha and before we were married, and that made it worse. But I went on. There was no stopping me today, as we walked on against the breeze, and perhaps against Martha’s desire, but I’ll never know.

I went on ruthlessly, telling her it got physical just this once. Perhaps I expected the vast cushion of time – some thirty years – to take the sting out of my confession. But the most disturbing thing was Martha’s face as she just stared ahead at the small road, walking on, not cold not tired, with not so much as a word.
So I told her it got ‘slightly physical’ just this once, and added because I couldn’t help adding: “I was thinking of you, Martha. She reminded me of you.”

“The tight little flirt? I don’t think she should’ve reminded you of me, Mark. You couldn’t have been thinking of me,” she said with a smile that bore in like a knife. It wasn’t that she was angry or even jealous (come on, it was way too long back to cause jealousy now). That smile came from a clear, irreversible belief. An innocent but unshakeable understanding of a person that can only come from a lifetime spent together. No, not that she could ever have guessed I had kept such a secret to myself for all these years. Or that I could have shared a relationship with two women at a time, anytime, however young I was. I still think she always thought I was incapable of such things.

But on our walk back down the hills she never asked: “Was she pretty?” or “Do you remember her face now?” or even “Why did you never tell me, all these years?” She just walked on, like she wasn’t shocked but only felt a numb pain that she knew was silly and would soon go away.

Because once you’ve spent your life with someone, you were a part of him. You shared his guilt. His misadventures are yours too, past or present.

All these were only my wishful interpretation of Martha’s mind that evening. She was silent most of the way, sometimes holding my arm, sometimes plucking a leaf to twist in her fingers, sometimes mumbling absently: “It’s nearing winter, we better get the woolen stuff dry-cleaned.”

Martha lived another few years after that evening, but she never once raised the topic of my confession. Neither did I. And now, as I see the day growing up against my window, my mind again walks among those hills, alone this time. And I ask myself what made me confess in the first place. Was it a purely self-centered desire to come clean, perfectly clean, once and for all? And did Martha forgive me? If she did, was I forgiven too easily? But of course, the answer to all that lies up there too, where she lies now. The answer to that will perhaps be there in The Garden of the Dead, among the beautiful little wild-flowers that clothe her grave.

Strange things happen sometimes, but I think this evening I’ll be the world’s oldest man to ever climb those hills again.

Reality - A Show

I don’t cry often. But the other day I was moved to tears by nothing more consequential than a reality show on TV. I saw Asha Bhonsle crying. Yes, the same legend who moved us to tears with her magnificent Umrao Jaan numbers! In those songs were contained enough pathos to move a nation of fans to tears, and we didn’t need to watch Asha herself crying that time.

So what made Asha Bhonsle cry on TV now? No, no great leader had passed away. It wasn’t a show about the hungry children of Somalia either. It was just a reality show. She cried because one of the participants – sure, one of the more passionate and deserving ones – was disqualified from entering the finals. Because, guess why? Why, he didn’t actually sing quite well enough! And it was a competition. Someone else sang better. So the camera focused on Ashaji, tears flowing down her cheeks, while the whole show went dead silent and a tragic, deeply melancholic music played in the background. Going by the moroseness of the situation, the participant himself should have neatly committed suicide, or at least plunged into chronic irreversible depression.

I mean, what else can life throw at one? It can strike one with a torturous, slow-killing ailment, dish out hunger, insult, deprive one of his near and dear, or even prevent one from qualifying for the finals in a reality show! Wow! So many reasons, one better than the other, to switch on the old lachrymals.

And that’s the point when my own eyes welled up with tears. How pathetic, how degraded must a society be, if we think it’s time to cry when someone fails in a game. Haven’t the same people gone out on any of India’s streets? Haven’t they seen the suffering, hungry masses who share this planet with us, shouldering an unfair amount of simple bad luck? What keeps the same people from having their hearts broken immediately at the sight of so much unmistakable suffering? If they are indifferent to the real suffering out there, what is this reality they are switching on and airing on TV?

I agree that the value of a TV show shoots up phenomenally when the stakes are shown high enough to be worthy of a celebrity’s tears. If a candidate fails and people, including the esteemed judge, shed tears, it means success would have been that much more sweet, more coveted. It means it’s tough, very great, very vital to win at such an important show. Loss is unbearable. Defeat, unthinkable. So let’s all cry because someone lost. Someone else won, but that shouldn’t stop us bawling. We are such simple souls, we can cry when someone loses at a game. And yet there will be no Buddha reborn among us while the real woes of the world continue to call out to us, from all around, from day to night.

The act of crying is a God-given way to manifest one of our deepest, sincerest, most spontaneous emotions. Should we train ourselves to cry at will? I think not. And purely for show sake, what do we do if we exhaust this symbol and then come across a genuine reason to cry? If we are really sad, really sorry, we’ll only have to shed the same old tears if we want to show it. All the world is a stage, but we simply won’t be able to live up to the drama of that one moment. Would we make poor actors then!

So it’s time we stopped crying and tried to help out those in real misery. Meantime, if we need to watch something more real than the world around us, let’s play the Hiroshima bombing over and over again. 1,40,000 people were burnt to death in that one. Surely that’s more of a tragedy than what a reality show can entail. And the tears that’ll come from watching it will not be entertaining. They’ll be scalding tears we would rather not have shed. Of course, our hearts would still be unbroken. We’ll still get on with our lives. But in all probability, we’ll learn to cry a lot less frequently, a lot less in vain. We’ll learn to cry with a lot more respect for the real reality that surrounds us.