52 Comics

Each night when he got back from his drinking binges she fought with him. Each night when he didn’t drink she fought with him. Each night he was bad to her she fought with him. Each night when he wasn’t, she fought with him. She fought with him with a vengeance. It was almost as if she had decided in her mind that she wanted to hate him for what he was, or maybe, for what he wasn’t.

There began the crux. She was all the things he wasn’t. But then, don’t they say opposites attract? I suppose when they framed this thought, maybe they forgot to add that opposites attract initially but finally, they attack, as it was in their case. She was the Director, Doordarshan, after having been a reporter and news reader for 15 years. Hers was a face and a voice every person recognised in the town of Imphal. The husky voice which everyday at 7.00 PM read, “You are with Sharmila Salam for the evening news,” belonged to my mother. At 49 she was a beauty to reckon with. Graceful, tall and elegant, educated and savvy was mother. Father was a mediocre in a government department office which didn’t notice his absence for 20 long years. He went to office on the 1st of every month to collect his salary. He never worked liked mother did. He would tell me he was happy staying at home to look after me and my sister, what was convenient initially with mother gone most of the day, became a bone of contention between the two eventually. Maybe it is true that women need men who they can respect. I understand this now, I didn’t when I was small. Maybe she found it difficult to respect a man who wasn’t as successful as her. That was when the fights began.

Father never spoke up. He probably blamed himself though I wished he didn’t! I wish he had fought back to relieve me of the pain I carried for so many years. I wish I didn’t have to feel protective of him when I was still small unable to protect myself. Father never fought back, he didn’t do anything to improve the situation at home either but he started to do something worse-he started drinking.

People would call us two siblings children of a drunkard father who dragged himself every night to be met by an unrelenting wife who wouldn’t let him want to get better. She only made things worse. Some whispered that she was the reason for all his drinking.

The drinking and the fighting brought a change in our lives one day when we two were sent off to different hostels in distant parts of the country. Father tried to save us from getting affected by his stormy marriage but he didn’t succeed and the two of us were sent to different schools and hostels in distant parts of the country. For my eldest sister Tamphasana it was okay as she had turned 13. When I was admitted to Doon School in Dehradun I still remember how I clung to mother and had this bad feeling in my stomach as we sat across a big bear of a man, who was apparently the principal of the school. The bear peered into me and exclaimed-“Mrs Salam, don’t you think he is rather small….err….I mean to be in a hostel?” To this mother said, “He is a big boy!” and so big boy I became that day.

Mother and I headed towards a large building at the eastern side of the school (I learnt later it was the hostel I’d be living in) holding my hand with hands that shook slightly. She started speaking to me in small undertones and I saw a tear that she hid so well. Mother told me, “Tombi, you may at times feel I didn’t love you and that’s why I brought you here but I want you to know that I wanted to protect you.” She tried to explain that it was her love for us that made her send us away from a home which had ceased to be a home for so long now to help us grow just like other kids. She said it was like a bird making her chicks fly far from the nest to a safer place before the monsoons came or the cat came to eat them one night.

I tried hard to understand what she was trying so hard to explain but I couldn’t do much good if she cried so hard, could I?

11th June 1984, Doon School, Dehradun took away my mother, father, my sister and all that was familiar to me. Since I had difficulty in understanding much of what was happening around me, I never cried.

I woke up in the middle of the night in a dormitory which had 35 boys sleeping in cramped bunkers. I cried out, “Ema!!” and waited for the familiar footsteps in the corridor but none came that night. I didn’t hear father come either. I never called out for my parents again from then on. No one would be coming to lift me up in their arms and shoo away all my fears of the dark. I wasn’t home, you see.

Mother visited me every June. When she got down from her taxi she was quite a picture to behold with her sunglasses, expensive chiffon sari draped around her slender frame and an unusual grace as she would smile and call out to me, “Tombi!!” Please don’t take me wrong when I didn’t run to her. It wasn’t as if I had not missed mother. It was just that I was afraid to love her and miss her when I knew at the end I’d just be left on my own to fend for myself. She would open bags all day to give me gifts, small and big. In the ten days she would stay in Dehradun she would buy many things for me, “The best and the costliest for my son!, she would say cheerfully. I must admit she got me the best colors, scrapbook, clothes, sports gear and bicycle and the rarest of toys but I didn’t have what I craved for the most-my mothers affection. Now when I look back I don’t remember mother ever asking me if I’d missed her or offering me to stay with her in the hotel with her. Maybe she wasn’t strong enough to deal with what I might have said in reply to her questions, had she asked them.

But each time she left and her taxi waited for her in front of my hostel to take her to the airport, she’d suddenly turn very silent and her tears would return. She would never say bye or tell me to take care, she’d just look at me through her tears and turn and leave. If it had not been for those silent moments I would have believed mother didn’t love me.

Father brought me joy each time he came to visit me in the month of December. I still can’t figure out whether it was the season or the love he brought that made me feel elated every time. He would get down from an auto and call out, “Tombi, run to baba!!” and I’d run to his open arms which never wavered. I would happily chant about my days in school. Father would take me to the guest house to stay with him the 15 days he was in town. We would picnic, visit temples, shop and eat gulab jamuns on the roadside. We would cycle in the rain on cycles father would hire. Fifteen days would fly by as fifteen minutes and it would be time for father to go back and then my depression would return too. I would ask him when he would come next. For a four year old all his attempts to make me understand time and space was unsuccessful. Till one day he took out a packet and I saw he had bought comics for me!! He said, “Tombi, each Sunday read one comic and when you finish the 52nd comic it will be time for me to come !” and that was how our little tradition started of waiting for the last comic to finish and it would be time for father to come.

Months flew by, now I had a number attached to my waiting. I waited with the help of my comics which heaped as fourteen long years just went by .I passed out from school in flying colours and had a four- month long break before I joined IIT Kharagpur. I was finally going home.A child I left, a man I was returning.

It didn’t occur to me that I had not heard much from father or for that matter, from mother for four months now. The last time mother was visiting me she looked tired and almost old. And father had not come in December. He later told me over the phone that he wasn’t keeping so well. I’d then volunteered to come home on my own with some of my batch mates on a train. That trip on a train was memorable. I was happy on going home though a bit anxious because I wasn’t certain if I was wanted.

Don’t ask me how I felt when I reached my house. Don’t ask me if I was met as if I’d been gone for years. There wasn’t any celebration or merriment obviously from the silence which greeted me. It was so unusually quiet in there. Had things got so bad in these years? Where was every one? Father had retired last summer and so had mother. Certainly, they weren’t working today, were they? I walked into the empty house till I walked into the living room to find a straw mat covered with a white sheet. Slowly it sank into me what the frame of father’s picture meant with a garland made of fresh flowers around it. The fresh incense sticks told me I was late. The man who had kept me waiting for years was gone. It was the last rights of my father.

I couldn’t cry a single tear though my heart was ripped open that moment. I suppose fourteen years of separation and misery of waiting to be with father and mother had dried my last tear. I only felt a physical pain I can’t explain now. Why hadn’t he waited for me?

My father died a sad death fighting with a liver which couldn’t wait for his beloved children to come home. He didn’t have his children by his side when he died. Nurses asked me,“Are you the son of that man who called out Tombi before he died?” He only had mother who could not extend the love a person in his death bed deserves, irrespective of his success or failure in his life. I felt sadder to think of his last moments.

I stayed for my holidays all the four months with mother and my sister. I helped her to sort out her life after father was gone. After that I went to IIT Kharagpur and for years I never went back home till the day I needed to go for my own marriage to Tracy. I met Tracy in college at a time in my life when I was lost and helpless emotionally. I was empty. She gave me hope. She gave me love. Just like my father had. The day we got married in my parental house, after the ceremony and the reception got over and the last guest left I held my wife’s hand to walk into my attic. Together we dusted off the white sheets that covered the old wooden trunks that sat there waiting all these years for someone to walk into my empty life, for her. I showed her the heaps of comics lying there. She was taken aback perhaps because I had never mentioned them to her or perhaps because it’s not ordinary for a man to take his newly wed wife to see his books. But I guess Tracy sensed this was important, “Tombi, each heap has 52 comics in them. Were you waiting for something at the end of it?” she asked me. The woman I married understood.

I held her tight then and told her that my wait was finally over. With Tracy in my life I never felt empty again.

We were at a friend’s place all sprawled out in the lawn sipping coffee one bright morning. We were planning a theme New Year party with common friends. Some one was suggesting an idea when I heard Sushmita ask Tracy, “Hey, can any one tell me how many Sundays are there in a year?” Before any one could work that out I heard my wife smile at me and say aloud, “52 comics!!”
* (As told to me by a friend)The writer works in an IT Consultancy in Bangalore as a HR Manager and she can be reached at urmila.chanam@gmail.com

1-Jan-2012 / 12:53 AM / Urmila Chanam / 5 Comments