By Kalpana Negi

The rickety bed made a creaking complaint as he bent his body sideways to
look underneath it: The box rested easy, with a pompous air about it.
He took out his hand from the quilt and tried to reach out for the slick
yellow cuboid, but withdrew and sat back up rhyming with the orchestra of
the croaking bed. “Patience, patience,” he mumbled and smiled contently at
this exemplary show of resilience.

Most winter mornings he manifests himself from his snug room with the
unwavering regularity of a temple priest, on other rare lazy days he stays in
the bed until noon, waiting to take a dip in the yellow warmth of the sun that
falls straight on his bed. But the sun usually disappoints
him at this time of the year, as it merely flickers from under the clouds like
some faraway beacon.

It was these intermittently hesitant clouds that lent the town of Divyaghat its
gloomy aura. As if the weathermen couldn’t decide what label to file its
gloomy disposition under. It rained here when most hill towns in North
India were coloured white with snow. And dark clouds clubbed the sky
when the sun shined everywhere else. During the chilly spells, rags of white
blankets lay easy on the mountains that stood there like a newly appointed
leader of a platoon.

Winters meant respite from the incessant monsoon rains that blocked the
streets and gurgling sewer mouths that played around with the squish. And
for Bhawani Singh, the newly retired clerk from the Directorate, the winters
meant freedom to walk his dreamy walks and not waste time playing
cautious about the amoebic water-filled craters on his driveway. He wasn’t

afraid of the shoes getting wet or the water that made its way into his home-knit
woolen socks; it was only that Bhawani took it as a personal insult that
he could be surreptitiously deceived into a pit.

If Bhawani hated the muddy waters of monsoons, he despised the gloom of winters too. His
summery thoughts on extravagant pension plans shifted gears to the tragic transience of
life on the onset of winters and stayed on an auto-pilot mode thereafter. But this wasn’t it. The
mood swings were never the problem. Trouble makers were Bhawani’s ambition and age-induced
queasiness. He hadn’t lost his youth but his body had. This was aggravated by his incessant
idol worship. The unforgivable and dashing Rupert McCarthy. He was a green patch in the desert;
that rare pair of custom made shoes that were manufactured under some anonymous brand
name, so they could stay exclusive. He had the youth and resilience Bhawani
didn’t. Rupert was pushing sixty, had lost his hair but not his muscles. He liked watching Rupert march up and down
wearing smart shoes that ejected soft music when he walked around his
house with a young excitement that Bhawani so envied. Rupert, the lone
ranger in the Alaskan jungles of the movie “Lost in Woods”. Bhawani
longed to be like him and the desire seemed to have multiplied after
retirement set in. His stride, his clothes, his twitches, his persona and his
shoes had become irresistible for Bhawani.

But his eighty-year-old British manor that trounced him in a private
seniority contest resembled nothing less than an ancient torture hide and it
made it impossible to walk around in a shirt or walk around at all without
the cold-defying slouch. Mammoth rooms with high ceilings swallowed
whatever heat his shrivelled lungs breathed out. With no wood to burn, the
fireplace was rendered cosmetic and room heaters were out of question, for

they sent the electricity meters in crazy whirls.

But it was hard to tell if Rupert’s zing was natural or a mere
show for the camera, Bhawani. Power pills? Surgeries? Didn’t youth
come with a price tag after one crossed a certain number? Is that how Rupert
managed to walk around in a shirt at home? Expensive heaters? Electric
blankets? Bhawani quickly hushed the rationalist inside him that tried to
reduce Rupert to a poser. He looked under the bed again, stared at the
yellow box and smiled reassuringly. Only two more days to the new year, he
counted.

Going by the pace of the city, it was late; but he still lay in his bed, looking
at the fan and imagined what would happen if it began to move in this
unforgiving cold. He would go inside his heavy quilt, he thought and be
pleased at being shut out from the cold storm the swirling fan would create.
Warmth embraced him with this thought that could only have come with his
quilt, in his own bed. But a quilt, he thought is nice only after the body has
warmed it; the first few moments in a cold quilt are a price one pays for
what it becomes. Sometimes the feet stay cold for long and he had to rub
them against each other to get to sleep. On those unpleasant occasions he
imagined a hot water bottle against his feet. And to make it sound less like a
divine providence, he imagined the water boiling on the stove and pictured
himself pouring it in the bottle.

It was nine in the morning and unusual for him to still be in the bed. He
wanted to urinate but lay there in the blessed heat of the quilt. And then he
heard a sound: “Thud, thadak, thud thud.” Bhawani was distracted from his
need to urinate and the perpetual thoughts of the yellow box under the bed
to the sound that startled him. He wanted to get out of the bed but for the

fear of a thief, but decided to stay in. Couldn’t have been a thief, he though. And then
he had a premonition: it was his favourite Australian fern pot that’d fell off
the roof wall. Last night he’d dreamt of a huge sea of caterpillars washing
against the insides of the roof walls. Could they have pushed it? Two
hundred for the plant and one hundred fifty for the fancy pot: three hundred
and twenty five rupees. The math was easy. His head quickly summed up
the loss.

As if the financial loss had put a muzzle on his languor, Bhawani sprung out
of the bed and headed for the toilet. To wash the floor, he let out the water
from the bucket in a big sweep and the water hit the bathroom walls like a
tiny sea wave across the beach. The motion of the water put rest to his three
hundred and twenty five rupees worry but at the same time, as if another
door had been opened with the sweep and a zillion thoughts began to
clamour his head: the promises that youth had, plenty of money, how he’d
looked at life like a curious boy of three looks at a new toy and then the
resolution to not end up like his father: a clerk in the government office.
Even a mechanic is better than a clerk. There is, Bhawani thought,
something very drab and unromantic about a clerk. The profession resisted
the very nature of life, the very thing life is made of : metamorphosis. But
Rupert Mc Carthy had cautioned him of such “philosophical bullshit” that
caused nothing but glumness; and so he dismissed depressing thoughts and
indulged in the fantasy of the beautiful box with his elixir beneath his bed.
Holding the thought, Bhawani squatted on the commode.

He had to do something about the caterpillars. They should not lurk around
his roof any more. He’d squash them all, he thought. And when the summers
came he also had to deal with the lizards on his wall. There were two in

particular who chased each other the whole day. May be retired from work
like him and no kids around to take care of, he thought. Their whole day was
spent swallowing cockroaches and insects that swarmed around the bulb.
And the moldy patch that monsoon had left on the walls had to be hidden
with a poster. And yes, the pot inside the drawing room had to be shifted out
before the plant turned yellow. Retirement had kept him busy, he thought.
The bell door rang. He resisted getting up from the commode but the list of
“To Dos” was long and that left him with no choice. He opened the door to
find a Bible lying on the floor, as if trying to sneak from under a Hindu
door. The work of a local Christian missionary he knew. He cursed the Jesus
for cutting short his time on the commode, picked the newspapers and came
back into the house.

It was eleven by the time Bhawani set himself up for his day ahead in the
sun, with a pulpy Hindi daily, a glass of tea in a steel tumbler and two
Britannia Marie biscuits. Most days, the tea was allowed to sit long until a
shimmering brown layer of cream floated over it, which he blew to the side
for a sip. The bliss of winters — the dry air spared the biscuits from turning
soggy and the old man lived it, one bite with every snippet of the paper.
With the first sip he dwelt over the picture of a skinny but pretty woman
with a brain-damaged look and a slit on her hem. A tiny drop of tea fell on
her thigh, which he didn’t care to wipe and it soon dried, looking like a wart
on her fair skin. The picture cut at her knees. He was sorry it didn’t show her
shoes. He turned the page to an aesthetically contrasting picture of the
recently elected Chief Minister with a huge nose and bathroom slippers that
peeked from underneath her white sari, which was tied higher than usual. He
went over the whole newspaper, the text and the pictures distracted him and
took the rail of his thoughts away from the shimmering yellow box under his
bed.

The tea lost its warmth with the frequent dipping of biscuits. He went into
the kitchen to get himself a little more warm tea. Passing through his room he was
tempted and distracted by the smell of fresh leather that came from his
bedroom.

“Why, Why?! No. Why?!” he murmured and clenched his jaw. Unable to
resist his temptation any longer, he picked up the tea cup and stormed into
his room, pulled the yellow box from under the bed and stared and smiled at
it for some time. He took a sip from the cup and kept looking at his new pair
of Doc Martens that lay cosy in the generously sized box. He took a deep
breath, held one of the shoes in his hand and smelled it and then put them on
walking across the room admiring them like a lover’s face.

He put them on and marched back to his newspaper holding the tea tumbler he’d come to
fetch.
He sat on the chair, raised his legs and put them on the table to get a better
view of the shoes. Cautiously positioning one leg over another, he brought
back his attention to the newspaper in his hand. The scantily clad women in
the newspaper couldn’t hold his eyes any more and he kept stealing glances
of his gleaming Doc Martens from over the paper. His legs changed
positions for a better view and the eyes flattered the shoes and the smell of
the leather pleasantly mixed with the taste of the biscuit in his mouth.
“Hello, Rupert Mc Carthy”, he said and laughed out loud. The tea-cup on
the table matched the rhythm of his laugh. The orchestra of the croaking
chair played on.