RUNGS IN LIFE

The nurse nudged him awake….’Sir it’s time to take your medicines. Could you please oblige. He did. Taking order, giving order, as had done, all throughout his life of eighty-five summers seen. Raising his head, he takes the beaker with the pills, and the paper cup of water, downing the medicines in one big gulp. Her tender ministrations bring tears to his eyes, vision blurred with the cataract. He finds in her a lot of similarities with his mother, faint and fading. And then he is drowned in grief and wants her to move on quickly to the next bed. Tries hard to block out those early stages, suffused with warm feelings, alternating with being dunked in a bucket of cold water, left shivering in the cold winter. Sucking at her breast, protected under her saree pallu, is one memory he always clings onto, tottering on the edge of life’s precipice. Then rubble all around, and him crying out for his parents, with the crows answering in response. 

1947 the year of partition! No village was spared of the atrocities both communities launched at each other, lives lost, children orphaned, trains piled with dead bodies and crying infants still suckling at their dead mother’s breasts. He was one amongst them, lost and lonely, picked up by the social workers at Attari railway junction at the Indian border. He was offered for adoption and a childless Sikh couple took him in, offering him food, shelter, clothing, and education. Yes…they filled all the gaps in his childhood, adulthood, and manhood. And with their passing away, he was once more orphaned.  Brought up as a Sikh, he knew his duty was to his country. At eighteen he joined the armed forces, beginning at the lowest rung and making his way up to become the commander of his forces. 

When his mates went home for vacations, he stayed back in the army barracks. He had no one to go back to, no wife, no kids, no relatives. His home was the army, his country his only possession and he would do anything to hold onto this possession. Years rolled by, surviving the Indo Chinese war and Bangladesh liberation, he had seen too much of the horrors wars entailed. At forty he took premature retirement and set up home in Delhi, running a small car repair shop, to earn a livelihood, though the army pension was enough to survive on. The business flourished under his supervision and with the help of few hands he employed. Akhtar being one of them.  Akhtar like him, was a refugee from the other side of the border, and like him orphaned during the partition. Jaspal took him under his wings and brought him up like the son that he never had. Father and son enjoyed a camaraderie that was the envy of the entire neighbourhood.

What history had written about the war and its ramifications on both sides of the border, never stood in the way of their relationship. Both served at the Gurdwara on Sundays, cleaning, serving food. On Fridays with the call of the Azaan, both spread out their mats and prayed for communal peace and harmony amongst all men. And then their boat was rocked in 1984 with Operation Blue Star. Mindless savagery unleased by the militants, tore their fabric into pieces.  Akhtar couldn’t be saved. Jaspal not only lost his adopted son, his shop, his home, but also his injured left leg that developed gangrene and had to be amputated. The aftermath of the militancy, left a huge void in his life, physically and mentally. He took up residence in the Gurdwara premises, helping to rebuild the place, with his one leg. Nicknamed ‘Dayadata’ he continued serving his people, his nation.

No one, apart from himself, and of course his adopted parents, had any clue, to his origins, a secret he kept closely guarded. How does it make a difference that he was born to Muslim parents, brought up by Sikh parents, and continued to live as a good Sikh and a good Muslim…essentially a good human-being. At every stage of life, he climbed rungs of different colours, reaching the summit with his walking stick, shoulders stooped, and confined to a hospice bed.