Silence reigned again. Static of the rain. They stared out at the darkness together.
“Samar.”
“Hmm.”
“Did you do tarpan kriya for your mother and father?”
Samar looked at him with narrowed eyes. He had gone crazy.
“No. Why?”
Atharva was solemn. “Do it.”
“What’s that got to do with this? And I would rather die than do anything for that man.”
“Tarpan kriya is not just for their souls but our grief too. Grieve them, whatever they were. Your father did whatever he did in this life and left. You are still holding onto him. Let him go. He will pay for what he has to, end your karm with him. You don’t deserve to torment yourself.”
Samar opened his mouth to argue but he went on.
“And even if you didn’t know your mother, you knew her soul. Your soul chose hers to come into this world. Let her go now.”
“You believe in all this?”
“It’s not about belief. I did all the kriya after my father passed away, without knowing what it meant. When my mother passed, I was too broken down in grief when we buried her. But Iram was there, and with her, I slowly let Mama go. Hayat too. Now, ever since I shifted to Shimla, I have realised the value of my ancestors. My Dada used to do tarpan during Pitrupaksh every year. I didn’t know what it meant then, except what my Dadi used to say — that it is to make the souls of our ancestors happy. Now I know what it also means for us. It is cycling through every year’s grief and setting it free.”
Samar stared at Atharva.
“Finish their tarpan kriya. Go home to Udhampur and do it.”
Samar exhaled, then turned when a crack of lightning hit his peripheral vision. It was gone by the time he looked but the rumble reverberated.
“Let’s hope things work out by October next year, or I am a lost man again.”
“It will work out. There is no world in which it wouldn’t.” Atharva said with such confidence, that Samar had no option but to believe it. Like he had always believed Captain Kaul.
“And I’ll send you a book, read it.”
Samar rolled his eyes.
Atharva slapped his thigh again — “You’ve had treatments for everybody, why won’t you find one for yourself, Daaxsaab!” He got to his feet and traipsed inside, pulling out his mobile from his back pocket — “Does anyone have a power bank here?”
Samar stared at his back. The rumble’s echo remained in the sky, and Daaxsaab remained in his ears. He tracked Atharva move through the door and around the Nandi idol, and his eyes opened wide. Samar looked up at the temple’s roof and around at the sculptures. He couldn’t make much out in the dark.
But wasn’t a Nandi idol supposed to sit outside a Shiv temple?
55. He knew the way to his home…
He knew the way to his home, and still used GPS. He took the right towards Shakti Nagar and drove down the tiny lane that would veer towards the house where he was born. He still looked at the GPS screen, the sun not even mildly hot yet, even for a doldrum October day. He passed the gate of his house in his quest to follow the GPS and quickly reversed. The GPS would take him around to the next bend and bring him back. Instead, Samar cut through the gap in the divider that used to always be the shortcut to enter the gates of this house.
The road was deserted for so early in the morning. He cut through the two-way lane and halted outside the closed gate. Disintegrated wood and rusted iron. It was surprising that it had not been broken in yet. He had come here last before the blast.
Samar got down and unlocked the gate with his key. He opened it to the small porch and the two-storey structure that had never been anything but a prison. It used to be a drawing book home once. The slanted roofs used to be tiled in red, the body white. Now it was crumbling. The red tiles had fallen off and broken, the grass and bushes all gone from the gullies. The garden was dry. It had always been dry in his living memory. But he also remembered his mother scolding him for picking flowers after sunset. So it must have been flowering at some point.
The only thing that still survived here was the pair of peru trees. Annual rain must have been enough to let them sustain. Samar walked back and drove his car in, then closed the gates.
He opened the back door and stared at the bags of raw material.
He had conveniently blocked Atharva’s suggestion for months, keeping it off the forefront of his mind as he had gone on with therapy, work, workouts, tours. And then this month of Pitrupaksh had arrived. Atharva’s suggestion had started hammering inside his head. Samar gripped the bags in both hands and lifted them out, shutting the door with his hip. A heavy weight fell out of one of his own bags and he caught it before it hit the ground.
