Junkyard
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It was one of those days that started in noisy eccentricity and could have ended in a frantic madness. My husband’s impulse didn’t seem to have any full stop then. One of those days that ran too long, like the grand trunk road. A day when the sunbeams stretched in my yard to the pinnacle of their strength and shooed away the dusk farther. And one when Girish was on the top form of his lunacy.
Such days weren’t common, though. And thank God for that. Otherwise, I could have seen the dead-as-log corridors and icy walls of an asylum. Or worse, I would have met my mother-in-law and my mother together up there. Such a meeting was hellish; the two women could fry your nerves. Sigh, this was one of those rare times. A loud clank woke me up. Girish wasn’t around. His side of the bed was tidy, his quilt folded inside out. The ambience shook with the slamming cupboard doors and rattling drawers. I cursed my murderous morning feet as I stepped out of bed. Pulling a deep sigh, I staggered and peeked into the kitchen. A loud knock or throat-clearing wasn’t enough—nothing was ever sufficient—to break his rapt focus. So, I lightly tapped on his shoulder and pantomimed good morning. He shrugged when I asked him what he was trying to do at dawn. He must have forgotten the new idiosyncrasy that would keep him busy today. After all, what does a man do day after day when he is retired and clueless? Sometimes I thought if his plan, or rather my repressive encouragement, of retiring five years earlier was a cynical idea? Anyway, he would have attained the age criteria to receive a pension by now. Only days like this were difficult when he tumbled into an abyss of tangled memories and unrecalled names. After all, how long could a woman toil in solving annoying mysteries forged by her forgetful husband? Especially when his clueless questions sounded like an infant’s blabbering. I repeated my question, hoping to rescue my kitchen fittings. He explained what he was looking for. First, I anticipated that that thing had some color he couldn’t define—fuchsia, mauve, or Prussian blue. Then his description vacillated to a dull gray. Nah, he couldn’t pick the right color from an imaginary pallet. Yet it looked shiny on most of the normal days, I perceived. Maybe silvery. With his hands moving in the air, he made haphazard shapes of several possibilities. When its size varied from a pea to a penguin, I was sure he wouldn’t recall the name of that object anytime soon. Uma, he said, I had its name at the brim of my mouth, but it evaded me the moment you kissed me good morning, and your fingers did salsa on my shoulder. Then he started looking into the round steel box of spices. Manic that he was, he inhaled into one of those small round containers and sneezed. In his hotchpotch of shapes, sizes, and colors, we finally agreed it was bigger than a laptop. Then how could it fit into a spice box of ten-inch diameter? But who could tell him—the adamant man—that he was pushing an elephant up the stairs? I thought his craziness had worn out as the time slipped by. We read the newspaper and sipped morning tea in the garden amid our usual chatter. When I was finishing my morning prayer after the bath, I heard the wild disco of drawers and hinges again. I slapped my forehead and continued my intermittently interrupted prayer. As I closed the Bhagavad Geeta and got up, he came out of the study, his face haggard. Uma, he asked, did you move some of my books from the study. I shook my head. I had no business touching his staggering collection of boring academic books and the ones he had written. Those theorems and their analyses still spooked me with the agonizing alphas, brutal betas, and grotesque gammas of physics; the blinding optical rays and deafening sound waves could kill me just by their names. I dropped out from my graduation course in the second year only because physics had a frequency I could never catch. If you asked me about novels and self-help books, I would have told you everything—every single thing from unknown authors to banned books; tear-jerkers to rusty romance; killing mysteries to fables. Classics were my forte. During my days as the librarian at the same university where Girish wrote research papers in physics and took lab assignments, I never hovered into the academic aisles beyond fiction and self-help catalogs unless begged or bribed. But he wasn’t looking for any books, I knew; I just knew. And not so surprisingly, his focus shifted back to that thing from his lost book by lunchtime. After dilly-dallying in the entire house and not finding anything that suited his requirement, he again interrupted me. He picked a fritter from the bowl I filled with a fresh batch. The fritter jumped from his left palm to the right, back to the left, and after blowing air on it a few times, he popped it into his mouth. The sizzling heat infused a bounce in him. Or was he trying to hide his burned mouth? Uma, I needed this thing for some work, he said in an unclear voice. From the kitchen window, I nodded towards the garage without even looking at it. My gaze remained fixed over the bubbling oil where onion fritters were dancing up and down in perfect harmony. Junkyard, we used to call our garage. Or rather, I named it so. Girish never parked the car there. The open place next to the porch, in front of the garage, was Ford’s resting place. And the garage became our dumping ground… a junkyard of all things that needed no care, maintenance, or our time. Uma, he said, you’re my savior. Within a few minutes of his departure, rattling noises and thudding sounds again captured the air around me. He must have rummaged through every shoebox, carton, and shelf and drawer of the tattered chest in the junkyard. The cacophony of fracturing things, falling objects, metal rustling against metal, and wood scraping on wood was accentuated by the obscenities he hurled at the walls. Then the sounds stopped. My golden fritters were also ready to be gobbled up, a bowl of green chutney by their side. When I reached the epicenter of the tempest, balancing a tray, he was sitting on a wooden crate. Calm and poised. I stationed the tray on his lap and pulled myself a caned chair, its white wires frayed and yellowed. A photo frame with its broken charcoal-colored metallic edges glinted in my eyes. His eyes were misty. He made no attempt to hide the thin film in his eyes. Uma, he smiled and said, she looks so cute here. Our daughter had her ears pierced the previous day. Her pain had subsided by that time of clicking that picture. And she was bubbling with the joy of wearing tiny red crystals. She still wore them to her university at times. Didn’t she grow out of old fancy stuff like other young adults? A residue of our love, maybe, those stones. A leftover from her past. If this was the picture he had been looking for, I had a fresh copy in an album. But I guessed he needed the frame, the very frame because I had gifted it to him on his birthday. A decade and a year ago. We finished the fritters as lunch, shrinking our dinner to a mere glass of milk now. Knowing his search was over, I happily got myself busied in sketching a new portrait. The house ricocheted with the noises again before the day ended. Phew! It wasn’t over yet. Uma, he said, I was looking for something this big. His hands parted by a foot or so. The thing had a wooden box with a conical something mounted over it. And then he finally recalled the name. Gramophone! I brought out my father’s old record player from the loft, an heirloom of sorts. A leftover from my past. He brought out some records from his study. Uma, he said, I wish I could… He slid a record, and the music caught the air, my ears, and his glazed eyes. One of my favorite records of ghazals and Sufi songs. I’m your ears, Girish! I pantomimed and touched my chin and showed my fingers out in gratitude. I expressed how much I loved him in sign language: the only language I could speak, the only one he could hear. |
Rashmi Agrawal
lives in India and writes by a big window, enjoying the diverse seasons. She has recently won the Strands Publisher Flash Fiction contest for December month. Her words are available or forthcoming in Full House Literary, Door is a Jar, Alien Buddha, Inked in Gray, Dollar Store Magazine, and others. Her short stories have found space in various anthologies. Nudge her @thrivingwordss. |
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