Summer Of Truths

The summer was as confusing as a Syrian Christian's set of beliefs, mingled with the austerity of rural dogmatic learning under the cool shade of banyan trees. Gamma had almost loved her perennial visits to her Aaji and Aajoba's house in Bhandara, until a few years ago.

Over her last few visits, she contemplated whether she had started outgrowing the place or at least, the collection of Gertrude's Princesses, the finest three-chambered musty little shop, on the main road in Bhandara. She tried on her dresses with silk lapels and wore them out on the swings hanging by thick jute ropes before her grandparents could convince her to take them home, to the city. Every time Gamma wore the dresses Aajoba got her, Aaji's jaws quivered and trembled in awe like raindrops on the edges of the asbestos of their roof.

Very little had changed, almost like she never grew up, only Aaji's eyes were a bit sunken now. They had always been old but hearty, strong and a sort of fighting fit. Everyone in Bhandara was old, the stray dogs always looked like drenched mongoose, flea-ridden and scared, flashing around, never resting, never yawning, never barking. What a restless, poor place, she thought every time, but also returned, every time.

Gamma was surprisingly self-absorbed for her age. She had deep, lunar eyes, and a voice clanging like furnace doors. Looking into the roads with countless, miniature and huge dry potholes, and the same faces working hastily, for nearly two decades now, she sensed a helpless anger pervading everywhere she looked. She sought for the same derided look on her zamindaar Aajoba's face, but it was only these workers, ploughing more crevices on their foreheads than on cement and soil. She wasn't fond of anything but the people who she knew from the time she was crawling on her front yard, dirtying her Aaji's crisp saris, stepping on them to prove things can change in one day. It was the people alone that made her return every summer or winter to Bhandara, depending upon the displacement and repair of train tracks.

She never quite got accustomed to the green heat of Bombay or the soiled bed-stands of Bhandara, she longed for a place in between, and inevitably her mind drifted to where Angami Kaki and Garo Kaka used to take her every summer until this one. The letter-man and his wife, who were a young couple when Gamma first saw them- always giggling and shy, and together on something that was bigger than a bicycle, with a collapsible hood and two extra seats at the back.

"Gammo, did you know we're both named after tribes?", Angami Kaki had told her once while blushing with a sugar sweet smile on a blazing afternoon. Garo Kaka waved it off instantly without looking back. He said he had fallen in love with Anjani and the world was a wicked place that it had to be Angami now. They had both boomingly laughed at Gamma's utterly perplexed face.

They always took her to the logistics centre, a very, very white building, almost blue but that was the sun and sky reflecting off it, as Aajoba had once said. The building had rich verdure around it and many deer frolicked in the empty grounds behind. It was far flung but had a decent populace, unkind and unmoving. They had peanuts together, Kaka always fed his ones to Kaki and Kaki fed her's to Gamma and occasionally to her lover while Gamma fed hers to the demure deer that nudged her arms softly. They were such a sweet sight.

She loved travelling around with the two, watching fishermen hoisting their magical electric blue fishing nets on their backs that glistened in the sun, and hailing to Kaka. She basked in the shared glory whenever they waved at him and Kaki. This also confused her as no one back home waved at him like that, no one even spoke to Kaki. There was a palpable terror bumming at the wheels of the rickshaw every time they went back to Bhandara, they made her sit away, right from between them to under the hood of the ricksha, far behind. She never understood but would be too appalled at the sudden repulsion, to question anything at all. She tried to bring it up once but when she met Angami's soft brown eyes and Kaka's flat-muscled face, it felt so rude at her mouth, that she swore to keep shut and not bring it up. She had understood though, that it had something to do with them and not her.

This summer she had returned to Bhandara, with half-a-dozen projects and essays to work on. For the first time, she realized that for over a week, she hadn't seen Kaka or Kaki and not even Aajoba would tell her where they were. Another treacherous week passed, as she meddled with her subjects and saw digressers and money-lenders and usury problems of the poor piling up at her front door, but the gleeful couple did not turn up.

One quite afternoon, hotter than Dutch-love, sinister and scorching, she got to her feet to find her way back to the logistics centre in hope to meet Angami and Garo. It wasn't easy, too many people knew her as Aajoba's grand-city-brute, and she always stood out, with her pretty nose and clumsy lean arms and the curiosity in her eyes, that shone a rich, shining blue. To evade possible questions from onlookers and people following her, she tried a stony crooked face, to look determined and sure about where she wanted to go.

A little later, she saw the white edifice from afar and broke into a sprint as though she could already see Garo Kaka dropping his packages at the sight of his Gammo. The vision grew fuller and bigger and weirdly enough some tears welled up due to the overwhelm, that she knew better than to blame the wind for. As she ran past the workers there, their indifference felt rather amusing. They looked like a driven herd of sheep, undulating, confused and dissatisfied. She felt that pervasive subtle anger on everyone's face she crossed, they were all workers. They all worked more than her Aaji and Aajoba ever had. They looked older every year and there. There! There beyond the centre, she saw Kaki's silhouette, draped and slightly bent, sitting alone on the deer-crowded field. She stopped to wipe her eyes and focus on the glistening zari of her sari, but nothing caught her eye. But that had to be her, . Heaving and coughing and panting, she tried to call out her name.

"Kaki!"

"Kaki!"

Her butter-soft skin gleamed in the sun for one quick second as she turned around. Gamma wondered if her luscious hair would rustle like ramen on the top of her forehead, but they remained matted at the ages. Her eyes had sunken deeper than Aaji's would in ten years. She didn't exactly look old but all traces of youth were gone. She couldn't steady her glance without fighting the impulse to look away. Kaki was increasingly unfamiliar by the moment. She tried to return the smile Gamma's moon-like face greeted her with. She was trying so hard and Gamma could somewhat see. Without waiting for Angami to say anything, she fell down at her side to complain about how Kaka didn't love her as much as she loved him, why would he not come visit her for over two weeks. Did he not know she came back to Bhandara every year, only for them.

"Where is he? Kaka? Still working?", Gamma asked looking around exasperated with Kaki's cold and lackluster welcome.

Kaki's lips formed the words many times, but she could not speak them. After the sixth failed attempt, Gamma gave in to her reading of Kaki's very tired face. She scoured through every stray wrinkle, the corners of her mouth spoke of day-long grief, her face looked like she couldn't have ever found anything funny at all, couldn't have ever giggled behind her lover on a bicycle. Her forehead was derided of the colorful glass bindis, a very disturbing but indelible mark of widowed grief masked her face.

"They beat your Kaka to death Gammo, ten times in my poor man's stomach."

What had escaped Kaki's mouth as barely a whisper, came down on Gamma's ears like a deafening thunderbolt.
Months of pent-up angst rattled out unstoppably like hornets from Kaki's mouth.

"I was a Gadkari, Brahmin. My father preached about sins and God and Kings and evil men and Garo met me amidst all that, and negotiated optimism with some real compassion and hard work. The men in his house died with clouds of usury debts, Garo was Dalit, Gammo, you know them right? Just like everyone here. It didn't take me long to rename myself, I had sworn allegiance to him for all my life, I stayed away from Bhandara too. I loved him everyday..."

Angami didn't stop to even breathe, Gamma was barely listening anymore, it was too much grief to wrap her head around. She fell so silent while Kaki raged and raged about the world and zamindars being so wicked, so twisted, so selfish. I loved him everyday, rang in and out of her ears like a triumphant and tragic capering, a proclamation of love that was louder than quartet of trombones. Gamma had always thought love was careful, calculated and cautious. She had always pushed it aside as a subject of pure whim and choice.

"But they found us", sobbed Kaki.

With every word Kaki spoke, the numbness in her limbs thrummed with grief and anger. Gamma may have been wrong about knowing when one falls in love, but she was certainly right to understand that love had everything to do with honour. Loving was always more honourable than killing could ever be. As the sublimated red of rage and red of love, mingled in the open skies, Gamma looked beyond the deer specked greenery, into the horizon where she saw Garo Kaka waving his letters at her and an ear to ear glinting smile, as Kaki crouched into the space between her arms, redundant from the summer of truths.