The beauty of ignorance
(Based on a true event)
By Aadil Gulam Dar, M.A EDUCATION, Aligarh Muslim
University.
She knew her name and she
believed that was all her identity. Growing up must’ve taken care of that.
It was a slightly sunny Sunday.
The sun almost fought with the clouds for the little space that it managed to
look down upon us from. Sitting on the porch, dressed in a flowered yellow
frock, I looked up at the sky and almost immediately brought up my hand in
defense against the glitters that the rays threw at me. It must have been
around the middle of some month for the landlord had already dropped by our
house once. He had had his usual cup of tea followed by his routine of an
unwanted, dragging conversation. The tea was not the point, nor was the conversation,
the point was that he was still the owner of the house and he’d reiterate this
point twice every month; in the middle of it to remind us and at the end of it
to establish it. There was a hubbub of noise and activity in the neighborhood
that day. A huge truck was lying outside our gate and I could hear people from
the next door going in and out, shouting at each other and carrying and
dropping stuff. My brother having fought with me was standing on a pile of
bricks, gazing eagerly through the half broken brick wall, barely balancing
himself. Mother had asked us not to step out of the gate until the truck was
gone and our new neighbors had settled. The house next door was being rented as
well.
Hours after the noise subdued, my
brother was now bored for he couldn’t see much happening in the lawns that he
had access to through the broken wall. The luggage had been taken in and our
new neighbors were probably settling their stuff now. After returning the pile
of bricks he had collected from the backyard, he stopped by and looked at me
for a second, probably considering playing khaanan with me but decided
it was too soon to be in talking terms and turned away. In the afternoon, there
was a knock at the gate. The doorbell didn’t work anymore and nobody bothered
to fix it. The school kids on their way back home would stop by to ring it, and
run away- all that one could hear while hurrying towards the gate was their
resonating laughter. My brother and I raced to open it. He reached first. He
was three years older and a foot taller. A small girl at the other end, thin
and rather timid, offered us a bowl of halwa, pointing towards the house to
suggest where it came from. “These must be our new neighbors” suggested my
brother while I dipped my spoon in the bowl. The halwa tasted different, not
bad, not better; just different. “They are from another state” he later told
me, trying to make the missing connections. In the evening, he went up to the
hall to overlook the proceedings in their house. They were moving in big boxes
and throwing the empty cardboard ones out. He seated himself on a stool near
the window and cleaned the glass to have a clearer view.
On our way back from school, my
brother would hold my hand while crossing the busy road to the residential
area. At times, when we had fought over imli the other day, he would take a
second longer before holding my hand and give me a look to convey how important
he was to me and suggest that next time I should rather give him the bigger
apple. While holding my hand that day, both of us dressed in our now-dirty
uniforms, we noticed the little girl, our new neighbor. She was walking a few
metres behind us, looking at us timidly from a distance. Seconds later, my
brother was crossing the road as two little girls held onto each of his hands.
When back from school, we were
always greeted by an empty house. My parents were both working and would return
only after five. My brother would carry the keys to the big lock that our gate
wore every morning. At times when he had forgotten to carry the keys in his
school bag, we would both go and wait patiently at the bakery shop for our
parents to come. And whenever the uncle there offered us a bun, my brother
always said “Yes” though he had been taught otherwise. One day after coming
back home, while my brother was in the process of unlocking the gate and I was
licking my ice cream, the little girl from the next door came running out and
got hit by a cycle in the street. She fell down and hurt her leg while tears
rolled down her barely formed cheeks. Once inside, my brother washed her knee
and applied ointment to the wound and while doing so he told us how important
first aid was. He also said that if first aid was not given immediately, the
doctor might need to take the whole leg off. With that, he established the
significance of what he had done and how timely he had done it.
In our rented house, the fridge was one of our biggest luxuries. It
stored frozen chickens, vegetables- both raw and cooked, juice cans and biscuits.
My mother would lock the fridge and place the keys right on top of it. This was
to tell us that though accessible, the fridge was not easily or readily
accessible. It was to be accessed, probably, if guests dropped by at our place
in her absence. My brother walked himself to the fridge with an air of
confidence, unlocked it and stole some biscuits. I ran behind him to keep a
count of how many, so that I could later present the factual details of the
theft to my mother. He placed the biscuits neatly on a plate and offered these
to the little girl. She smiled and took the whole plate. My brother smiled
back; amazed that we could have something in common with the neighbors from
another land. Happy that probably we were now friends, he shot another question
at her to satisfy his curiosity, “Aap Musalman ho ya Hindu?” The girl looked up
from the plate, confused, her eyes fixed at my brother’s face. Her left leg was
still stretched as her right hand held the plate. She distanced the half
biscuit from her mouth. Her eyes were still watery and her lips parted,
exposing a missing tooth. Her eyes were a sea of innocence that rested at my
brother and then at me and then at the plate as if the question had to be
correctly answered for the biscuits, and said almost in a mumble, “Mai Saima
hoon”.
Aadil Gulam Dar
M.A Education
Aligarh Muslim University
