Mehendi

He opened the curtains that partitioned his compartment in the AC three-tier he was travelling from Delhi to Guwahati, to see what the commotion was all about. Several people were standing on the narrow corridor blocking his vision. The only thing he could make out was the ticket collector checking the tickets and identifying rightful occupants. Two girls had been mistakenly placed elsewhere and were being led by the TT. He wanted to resign for the night. Just when he closed the curtains someone ripped them apart to get inside. Two people came falling onto him, making him nearly loose his balance. Bewildered, he turned to peer at his new travel mates. He then stood face to face with her. Mehendi, the name cropped up in his mind almost instantaneously. His first love. Only love. Those eyes that he had last seen five years ago, were surprised to see him again. Their destiny.

She vaded in followed by another girl, her friend he was to find out later, who looked like an ‘arty’ type. The other girl dumped their bags onto the seater and appeared to be settling in but the girl who had captured his attention just stood there, near the window, facing away as if lost in her thoughts. He, on his part, stood looking at her.

All these years he had told himself whenever he had thought of her that perhaps she had not been that beautiful after all. He had told himself that a heart could play tricks on your mind. But here she was, in front of him to prove all the voices in his mind, wrong, yet again. She was the most beautiful girl he had seen in his entire life in 28 years. Though fading memory would make her face obscure at times but time refused to dull the vision of those kajal rimmed eyes, big almond shaped deep set eyes that belonged to her. Today she was wearing a ‘ghagra-choli’ in green cotton and her feet were in Kolhapuri chappals, typical of her. Her silver jhumkas , the dozen glass bangles in her wrist and the loose ponytail at her nape made her appear like a small child trying to act big in adult clothes. The thick fringe on her temple made her look vulnerable. He feared that she still was.

He remembered that day five years ago.

His mind was racing. The chest of drawers was open in front of his eyes and the passport lying amongst the clothes was hers. What made the blood drain out of his face was it read a name he had never heard her use for herself, and the person was a Chinese national! He wanted to look at the other documents tucked carefully in there but she could come in any time from the kitchen so he wasn’t really sure. He heard her come so in his panic he turned to flee from in there when he knocked the sides of the desk and her bag which had been hanging fell down on the floor. He knelt down to pick it up and found a 9 mm beretta lying there on the floor.

It was then she came into the room. He looked at her. She looked at him. They looked at the pistol lying there on the floor of her bedroom.

“Prithvi, are you looking for something here in my room?,” her voice was sharper than he had ever heard her before. “You should have told me what you wanted rather than look for it among my things.” It changed to a softer pitch now, as if deliberately. She walked across the room, picked up the pistol, took her bag from his hands, put the gun inside it and walked over to her closet and locked it inside. For a fraction of a second, she stood facing the closet before she turned to look at him, an old habit of hers, to allow herself to think what to say next.

“It is for my own protection,’ she fumbled with the words. She walked towards him very slowly then all the while looking into his eyes, trying hard to read his thoughts. “Protection from whom, Mehendi?”, he asked her. He wanted to hear it from her. A part of him was in denial. He wanted to be able to wake up one day and tell himself that it was all a nightmare and find her sleeping soundly beside her. “Are you in some kind of trouble? What is happening here? Why do I get a creepy feeling that you are not who I think you are and this whole god damn thing is very serious!!!”

She had cried then. And he had let go of the confrontation. He had consoled her through her tears and pacified his mind once and for all. Mehendi was just a 20 year old sweet girl who hailed from Assam with a Manipuri mother. And she would never do anything that would defy his principles as a soldier, she was as jubilant to get married to him as he was to her.

The train started moving so he went and sat down facing her in the opposite seater. She looked faraway through the adjacent window focusing nowhere in particular. The breeze toyed with her hair strands and memories came flooding to him without his consent.

“Shall I tie my hair or let them loose, Prithvi?,” she asked him standing at the dressing table all ready to go out. She was clad in Reebok shorts , t-shirt and sneakers, a far cry from her usual traditional clothes. “Depends on where you are going and the occasion,” he furnished an advice while he was engrossed in his paper work. “I have to go for my handball practice with the girls,” she informed excitedly. He knew she was a good athlete and played basketball and football too in school. “Tie it then,” Prithvi replied and got up to tie her hair affectionately. They lived together for the past 10 months in his house and were soon going to get married. She didn’t live with her family anymore, her father was long dead and her mother lived in some place in Manipur. She had been brought up by her maternal aunt.

That evening he followed her, making sure to keep much distance between them. He was bent on finding out what Mehendi was doing in this part of the town. The college handball practice couldn’t possibly be organized here!! She entered a tall iron gate manned by two big burly men who could pass off as rogues. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. She spoke to them briefly and dived into her bag to fish out an orange colored card that the man at the gate studied. He then let her go in. He controlled himself to stay and wait for a good ten minutes before he went there himself. He tried to appear as if he knew what he had come here for. At the gate, the two men just looked at him without saying a word to him. In this situation he didn’t know what to say either. As luck would have it, two men got down from a car to stand behind him. He saw them doll out a thousand rupee note. It then dawned to him that he was to do the same thing and opened his wallet in a hurry to dish out two 500 rupee notes to the men at the gate. Within no time he was handed a small scrap of paper that looked like some entry pass and was ushered inside what appeared like a dark tunnel of broken concrete. At the end of the tunnel to his surprise was an indoor stadium with a huge ring, the kinds you see in boxing movies. The seats in the stadium were all occupied down to the last seat and he had to wait for a volunteer to find him a place to sit. The energy in here was electric. He looked at the ticket in his hand, not having got a chance to do so till now. His jaw dropped- he had bought himself a ticket to see an illegal fight between two women from China. He felt dizzy.

People around him suddenly began cheering and the host announced the entry of the two opponents in the ring. The first girl to enter could be anything between 21-23 years , lanky , more of bones with a mean face. The second was the girl he had sought to protect since the time he had laid his eyes on her. She couldn’t see him from where he was sitting but he could see her clearly for what she was- a liar! The name announced was the name on the passport. His knees threatened to give way, tears of disbelief flooded his judgment. The fight began and he watched in half horror, a part of him anxious for her safety, a part of him unbelieving to see the mastery she had over her opponent.

The fight didn’t have to prolong because the bony girl fell unconscious in a pool of blood and was whisked away in a stretcher. He feared she was dead, or fatally wounded. The beautiful faced girl won the fight. She looked confident as she waved to the crowd while being led away by her trainer.” Wang Wei is unbeatable”, the mike blared into his ears loud. As he looked sadly at the retreating figure of the girl he had thought he knew better than any other person in his life, he decided there was no similarity actually. This girl in the ring was a fighter, a killer. Mehendi was the most gentle and vulnerable girl he had known and loved. How he prayed someone would wake him up from this nightmare.

When he reached home, he was half crying, half angry and breathing heavily. He ransacked all her belonging in trying to look for that passport. He couldn’t find it today but he found some documents and letters. Wang Wei hailed from a place in Yunnan in China. She had a Manipuri mother and a Chinese father. Everything in the letter spoke of a revolutionary army operating out of China in Manipur. It involved Wang Wei to an extent where the success and failure of some operation depended on her movements. The information was all vague and the references used made little or no sense to him. But whatever was in front of him all indicated that Wang Wei was an underground. His Mehendi was a militant.

She wouldn’t face his questions and kept on going to the other room while he followed her insistent on getting answers to his questions. “Tell me Mehendi, are the papers telling me the truth about you or your lying mouth?” he had slapped her across her face twice in the argument and she had pleaded him not to ask her anything. “I am into this fighting bit and I didn’t want to tell you about it because you would disapprove, but that doesn’t make me a militant!!”, she screamed back at him. Nothing seemed to make sense that moment. His heart and mind were not at peace and were contradicting each other and it didn’t help to have her bent on concealing things from him.

In his last attempt he said, “Mehendi, I am an infantry officer, the first to go to war and the first to go every time the country is attacked. It’s beyond just a job for me. I love my country. Please understand I cannot have two masters. I cannot compromise on my loyalty. Please don’t make me choose between you and my country. Please tell me if you are involved and tell me, you are going to leave them. We will go somewhere far away and get married, away from every one. No one can find us. We will make our own world. Have children……….”, his voice trailed off seeing her face turn hard. He couldn’t penetrate her thoughts and beliefs, he knew then.

He was scared to lose her so he held her tight to him the entire night while they sat on the floor pushed against the wall and slept in each other’s arms. When morning came, he found himself alone.

Following day in the newspaper he read about a bomb blast and the death of two innocent people. There was a report that the city had seen increased violence and activities of militancy in the recent few months. The police were on a hot trail chase and claimed to nab the miscreants soon.

There had been no news of her since that night. He hadn’t made an effort to trace her and she never reached out to him. It was a bitter sweet feeling, having loved someone so deeply and never getting to have a life together. On several occasions he asked himself if what he had done was right. When autumn came, when he was on his own, and when he missed her, he would be tempted to shed his reservations and go running to her. In his inner turmoil five long years had gone by. And today on this train, on his way to Jorhat where he was posted, Mehendi walked into his life yet again and destiny gave him yet another chance to make up his mind.

Her duppata shifted and he was sure he saw a deep scar across the base of her neck, which ran from the sides of her shoulder all the way to her neck. It looked like a burn injury. Could it be a splinter injury? His heart went out to her, as she straightened her stole, not wanting him to know what all she had borne while she had been on her own. A tear fell down her cheeks and she looked away. She got up to collect her bags. Obviously her destination had arrived earlier than his. She was leaving.

“Mehendi, be safe,” were the only words Prithvi uttered in his final good bye as he shoved his personal weapon into her tiny hands, a .32 revolver.

From where he stood at the entrance of the train bogie he saw his lady love walk past hundreds of faces on the platform. Carrying her travel bag , with her ‘duppata’ now covering her entire face, she looked back once and their eyes met . She smiled at him with all the love she had in her heart for him. And disappeared into oblivion.

The writer us a humanitarian, journalist and campaigner with World Pulse and Voices for Human Rights, USA and she can be reached at urmila.chanam@gmail.com

3-Jun-2012 / 01:53 AM / Urmila Chanam / 0 Comments