The Dried Apricots

A sense of belonging traversed his body as he turned the bronze-coloured doorknob. The frigid wind of december that had crept in through the window sliced into his face. After dropping the backpack on the wooden floor with a soft thud, Uday switched on the light in the room. The dropping temperature struck him as he slipped out of the jacket. Outside the misty glass pane he could discern the outline of a train passing through the pine trees with snow dripping from the branches. He placed his specs on the bedstand next to a vintage alarm clock. His stiffened back muscles slacked as he sank into the fresh linen, covering his feet with a quilt. His eyes drifted through everything in the room- the yellow curtains with floral prints that trembled whenever a train raced past, the silk carpet that lined the floor, the humming room heater, the window that that faced the railway station, a lone cactus on the sill with a blooming flower. Something in him whispered, ‘I’m home’.

 As usual, his eyes stopped at the framed picture of the teenage girl in a blue cardigan, her one hand trying to steady the unruly hair while the other rested on the handle of a bicycle. A dog stood at her feet, raising its face towards her as she gazed absent mindedly at something at a distance, her boot sinking into the thick blanket of snow that lined the ground.

He closed his eyes as another train slowed down at the station, his mind slipping back into the snowstorm which he had outlived twenty years back.

That day, he had made his way towards the nearest village after being stranded for four hours in an unexpected snowstorm. He was nineteen when he came to Jammu on a trekking expedition but had got separated from his group on the way. He knocked feverishly at the first door that he had seen, his body turned numb by the storm. A middle-aged man with small eyes who was dressed in a grey pheran opened the door after repeated knocks. The storm had cut off the power supply in the region and Uday could hardly make out the man’s face in the dim light of the candle that he was holding. He noticed that the man had sea green eyes and for some reason, they appeared sunken and bleak, like a turbulent ocean at night. Uday’s stood gripping the handle of the door, his legs starting to feel like logs of wood.

The man helped him inside and sat him down in a wooden chair at the dining table. He removed Uday’s boots and placed his feet in warm water after wrapping a blanket around his shivering shoulders. The living room in which he found himself had two sofas and a shelf that was filled with wooden statues. The walls were lined with frames which he couldn’t make out in the dark and there was a school bag at the corner, with books spilling from it. An old dusty chandelier hung from the ceiling, its glass crystals swinging slightly.

The man placed a bowl of soup in front of Uday and sat down across him. He grabbed onto the warmth of the bowel, letting his palms regain the colour that they had lost before lifting the bowl to his lips. After he had finished, the man pointed at a room on the first floor of the building, his lips trembling. Confused, Uday climbed the stairs and made his way towards the bed in the first room that he saw. He dozed off as soon as he rested his head on the pillow.

The next day he was woken up at dawn by the sound of train as it rattled the window. He sat on the bed, feeling the sensations in his body returning. He noticed that his backpack was placed at the foot of the bed. Uday laid back on the bed and gazed at the ceiling with wooden carvings. There was a deck of textbooks on the table next to the window that was neatly wrapped in brown paper. A metallic box that was cluttered with dried apricots and pine cones rested on the bedstand next to an antique alarm. The shelves were lined with clothes and colored scarfs. A creased school uniform hung on the cloth stand. 

On the wall, he noticed a picture of a teenage girl with her hand resting on the handle of a bicycle. The rays of the sun at dawn casted streaks of light on her face. As he stepped closer to the image, he heard a soft knock on the door. On opening the door, he found a tray of breakfast- Kashmiri roti, butter and a glass of milk. Uday walked downstairs where he found the man at the dining table with a plate of untouched breakfast in front of him. He crept into the chair opposite to him as the man nodded. The house had an eerily silence that sent jitters down his spine. As he tried to swallow the bread, he kept thinking about the picture that he had seen upstairs.

The man stared blankly outside the window, his fingers resting on the edge of the plate in front of him.

‘Thank you’, Uday said as the man gave him a short nod.

 He parted his lips to say something but decided otherwise and shifted his eyes to the piece of untouched roti on his plate.

As Uday tried to decipher his silence, he was oblivious to the fact that the bed that he had slept last night belonged to the man's daughter, who loved to collect apricots on her way back from school. He didn’t know that her name was Norah, which meant ‘light’ in Arabic. He didn’t know that she used to wake up at dawn just to watch the trains racing by her window. And also, he didn’t know that she was killed in a gunfire on her way back from school four days before.

A knock at the door aroused him from his sleep. He reached out for his specs and checked his watch. He pulled over his jacket and stepped outside the door. The smell of fresh butter emerging from the kitchen clung to him. He stopped short midway in the stairs, and looked at the living room of the house which has not changed much in the past twenty years. He stopped the foot of the stairs, his fingers still resting on the hand rail.

 It was on a Friday night last month that he had come across an article in a website reporting the attack of a homestay in Jammu, accompanied by a picture of the man and the living room of the cottage. It was reported that a group of five had barged into the house at midnight, striking at the furniture in the living room. 

Uday found the man next to the stove, slicing onions, his fingers moving swiftly. He stood looking at the man’s shrunken frame, thinking about the years during which he had come to know him.

On that day twenty years back, he had walked towards the grocery shop at the end of the lane after his breakfast, leaving the man at the dining table. He learnt about the death of the man’s daughter from the shopkeeper who talked to him in length about the girl. He also got to know that the man’s name is Raheem and that he sold wooden sculptures for a living. On his way back, Uday had to stop midway on his return to catch his breath, his eyes tinging with tears. As he entered into the warmth of the house, he had found Raheem at the same position at the dining table, his hands grappling with the roti, his eyes still stuck at something outside the window. Uday felt an urge to move towards the man and hold him close. But he lingered at the door, gripping the grocery bag in his hand as a snowstorm started to materialize somewhere away. He left the house two days after that, only to return next december. Since then, he had come to the house many times, arriving at odd hours at night and finding his way straight to the room on the first floor. In between, Raheem had changed the house into a homestay which was open round the clock. Tourists fretted in and out of the place during winter. Every single time he entered Norah’s room, he found that the bedcover was changed and a new bunch of flowers awaited him on the nightstand.

Uday embraced Raheem from behind, clasping his hands in front of his chest. He turned his face towards Uday with a smile.

‘I’ve made your favourite breakfast.’, he pointed at the table with a grin.

Uday seated himself at the edge of the table, savoring the Kashmiri rotis that were layered with butter.

He noticed the remnants of the broken plates which were swept into a corner of the kitchen. A huge crack ran across the window at the kitchen. The board which read 'Find your home’, was cracked at the middle and rested on the floor of the living room. The aftermath of the attack was evident when he searched intently for it. Uday swallowed hard as the man turned towards him.

‘Did you register a complaint?’, Uday asked, moving toward Raheem, who was lowering the flame of the stove.

‘What use would it be?’ he replied with a shrug.

Uday looked over at his face as Raheem stirred the onions in the pan. He looked at the wrinkles on his forehead, at the pheran that hung lose over his body and his sea green eyes that had darkened with years. A family of four descended the stairs and waved at Raheem as they passed by.

Uday strolled around the neighborhood for the rest of the day with Raheem, waving at the shopkeeper at the end of the lane and many others he had got to know over the span of the years. They passed through busy streets with tourists crowded around pashmina shawls and willow baskets. He watched Raheem cook lunch and dinner in the house, effortlessly switching his attention from one dish to another at the same time. Uday made a note of the damages that were visible in the living room and estimated an amount which he slipped into a reluctant Raheem’s pocket after the dinner.

He grabbed his backpack from the room and closed the door behind, pausing for a second to inhale the scent of the place before drifting back into his fast-paced life back in Delhi.

Downstairs, he saw Raheem securing the board that read ‘ Find you home’ to the door. Uday stopped short, looking at his face contorted in concentration and effort. He realized that the most radical act of bravery that he had ever seen is people choosing to be kind over and over when the world hasn’t been kind to them.

He walked over Raheem and helped him fix the board.

 As Uday was about to leave, Raheem hugged him tight and whispered as always, ‘ Promise me that you will come back soon.’

Uday nodded, patting his hands.

 He walked down the lane, past the bushes that had overgrown his height over the years and stopped midway, just before the bend. On turning back, he saw the Raheem at the door, his hands resting on the handle of the door. He let the world as he knew it fade for a moment. 

Uday imagined Raheem when he was young, with his eyes carrying a darker shade of green, looking out for Norah as she ran towards him with her palms stuffed with apricots, dropping some of them on the snowy ground beneath her. He saw her pacing towards him as the cold wind filtered through her hair, with specks of snow clinging onto her scarf and shoulder, her voice echoing through the silent pine forests