The Old Footprints

Why do we want to read a book? And why do we want to read fiction in the first place? Maybe the lies are good enough to put you to sleep, or maybe because you find the truth between those lies. Does it irritate you when the smell of a book plays with your concentration, or do you read like the rest of us, a nonfiction? You and I are the rest of us and when I tell you the story, it is you and me, and not the rest. 

In The Old Footprints, the boy explores his relationship with his hometown, his crude memories of growing up in a violent family, town-walking, and street foods. The boy grew up listening to home-bound tales, in the times of gully cricket and forests freshly cut for abandoned projects of National Highway, and the sense of loss that comes ever-after. In a conservative town where you grow up to either prepare to be a government officer, or take over your parent’s business, a boy dreams of the adventures of Santio - to find his own treasure at the foot of the pyramids. Will he achieve his dream?

In a world where self-help books are filled with “Know Yourself” and the people travelling across continents to find their true selves, and in the cliche-est sense, The Meaning of Life - this boy of 19 sets out backpacking across Rajasthan, only to get lost, his photographs and memories erased while stargazing at the Thar desert sky. 

As the boy continues on his journey of self-realisation, missing his hometown at times, comparing the plateaus as far as sight goes with the gush winds flooding into the bus, it takes him to the pink stones, and his love for the landscape, all reigniting again as he sees vast changes in the life-forms and life-systems. 

But will these experiences remain with the boy forever? 

Or will he lose all he learns after coming back to his homeland, Hazaribagh, unable to find the intersection between the two truths - two real experiences, vivid, black and white, both just and unjust, and both of them him. The pursuit left him in even more complicated terms than he had left home with. Maybe that’s what pursuits do sometimes. Torn up between old and new ideas, only to grow slowly more maddened in his closed bedroom, suddenly unable to tackle the obnoxious air of discontent that used to be so familiar - and questioning all he knew to be true, the whats and whatnots, and how and how-nots.

The book closely follows the mind of a somebody taking refuge in landscapes and poems, because they’re the only thing that gets him. Trying to find his own meaning in life amidst reading storybooks and running away at night to stargaze on his roof. 

And the story explores the dreams of an ordinary boy and his relationship with everything around himself and with the inside of his own head. It is a tale of intersections, web mingling and secondary colours. 

Chapter 1

~ At the end of the world ~

At the end of the world, all the grasslands would have turned into sand, and all tropical forests would be submerged under the ice. The ocean would be another history and so would the continents, the stars breaking into smithereens and falling from the sky. And then, there would be altars of the lovers and their loves encircling the clove tree, the last tree left on the world. That would be the end of the world, with notes from undergrounds and letters with no addresses. 

In the end of the world, when you were done walking through the terrains dried out by an infinite ancient footprints, the ways are nothing but memories carried on by winds and countless lovers sneaking into the hearts. The poets went the same way as the rest of us, but they lied about their lovers. Oh, lovers might not have loved each other as much as the moon and stars, but they did love each other. And yet I cannot recall a song, and neither could the footprints, before they dug their own graves and danced under the starless nights, on the last living corner of the earth, the land of the loves. 

All as far as I could see, the memories and the silence were broken by the kiss of the purple dome sky and the violet plains. 

All the cold winds of the desert running against my face, and I can’t think of anything except the anxiety that has worn me out. The constant desire to heave and the sense of a race against time. Nobody came to tell me the time is up, or the status of the countdown into which I was bound. I thought I was free, free to fly and crawl through the winds of the sky, and over the humps of the camel which pushed you up and you lost control of yourself. I would think I was falling then, but at times I think I have always been. 

(At the end of the world, I am already there.)

I started to wonder if I had made the right choices, on the way, when I had my chances. I’d called my friends asking for locations, advice, bus stops, and the sweet shops. All I did was take photographs of the ruins, and only to delete them at the end. Today I was photographed. For the second time.

“Exercise your free thinking,” a teacher had said to me. 

The destination would be different if I had done so, but now I do not care anymore. Someone had offered me a gun and asked me to do whatever I liked with it. I could shoot myself in the head, and I did. I shot myself twice. The gun had no bullets. 

I survived death, but did I cheat?

Once, it was me asking strangers to take my picture, the second time someone took a photo of me without my permission. I took photos of people at places too but for me they were mere composition in my attempt to capture a moment in time. I would go on and edit these photos, to remove the anxiety of people, make it still and move at the same time. Moving on the piece of the paper but still inside the mind of the man. Now I am in someone else’s photograph, captured in someone else’s moment of time. I don’t think he will do the same as I do the rest of them. He is not God, nor do I claim the same for myself. I am though, at times, an editor and I try to edit photos and some stories which tend to make me feel sad. I wanted to shove all happy stories into the desert. 

Now I am in the desert and all the storytellers are gone. They come after the sunset to stargaze the lights and the bunch of stars encircling the deep blue canvas. Today I am here and there is no moon, and there are stars, more stars than my ten fingers. 

I could not stop thinking about the photograph. Someone had captured this moment and my feelings. The sunlight that held my face was trying to get inside my sunscreen. The sands were already dripping inside my shoes. My footprints, not permanent, I was slipping inside the dunes, running and slipping. I took off my shoes, for they no longer served a meaning. 

I was barefoot, feeling the warmth as I clenched my toes against the sand, trying to dig my feet as deep as I could into them to make them invisible. 

“Papa, I lost my feet,” I used to say when I played on the sands for hours, while making sand castles. 

The surface of the dunes was blowing slowly, coating one layer of the other, and over the other. The natives of the desert were absent. 

I wonder who would tell the stories tonight.  

I am photographed. I am anxious. I am no sane man and nevermore can I believe the same, whence I am lost and there are no words left because I puked them all the way coming to the end.

I want to go back but I have nothing left with me at the moment. What will I take back home?

“Kabir,” I said to myself.

“Write in Hindi, if you ever feel like English isn’t your cup. Why do you write anyway?,” my teacher had asked me once. 

“I don't know. But I believe in the circles. I start from somewhere, I go on till I can travel through the world and then fragment, like the dunes, like the stars. But I can't come back to where It started, nor can I hear the last people in the audience applauding for me. Can I really come back?,” I had said to somebody while walking through the gates of the museum. A woman had shown an interest in me, and she was persistent with aching questions. I was photographed afterwards. For the second time.

Ever since I have been wondering, what difference does it make? To come back home, or to return home. I could take refuge in a dictionary, or ask my grammarian girlfriend to always correct my grammar. 

“Ye to mera hafta hai” she said. 

“It is not grammer, it is grammar, baba!”

Anita had dyed her hair and she had nails painted black, the colour I always liked most. It distracted me a lot. I knew her name because it was written on her bracelet. In italic cursive. 

On her purse, there were faded engravings of Smirti. I gave up on my pursuit to know her name.

The anxiety again took over my mind. I could feel that I was overworked, I had skipped breakfast because Anuchka had asked me to join the museum. I had not been to a museum since forever, and had not been to the theatre for years. 

Anuchka was taking me to the theatre afterwards. After we were done with the museum. I loved museums. I had been inside my room for more than 3 months after graduating high school. After being bullied throughout my last year, I had given up on any remnants of a social life. 

At the last moment, Anuchka had called me to let me know that there had been some emergency and she would have to skip the plan. I was already in the museum so I decided to explore on my own. I had to take the pain to go through the hindi scriptures myself. Anuchka used to read them for me after school, whenever I felt sick of the subject. 

I tried to call her, to tell her I’d finally reached the end and there were stars, and deeps that engraved on my heart. 

But the desert knew no connectivity and then I was alone inside my mind.