Akhil Sharma - An Obedient Father

From the recently plowed field outside our yard I heard women crying. In my head I immediately saw my mother dead, with the village women crouched around her on the floor. But I did not really believe this until I entered the house and saw my mother's body. Then I gasped.

I gasped and, still gasping, started doing the things which must be done when someone dies. I brought the jeweler, who pried the stud out of my mother's nose with tweezers and clipped the silver ring off her toe. I helped carry my mother to the crematorium. Nothing made me cry. Not even the unbearably foul smell of hair and flesh on fire, and the way my mother twitched in the flames

when her muscles contracted. In fact, everything caused my grief to burrow inward. Collecting her ashes and bones to pour into the Ganges only made the gasp more solid. I became so quiet that I could not even answer people's questions.

The madness came later. I welcomed it because it brought relief from the bang I kept hearing, which was my mother's stomach exploding in the funeral pyre, and from the image of my father shattering my mother's skull with a staff and chunks of sizzling flesh heaving out of the fire and onto the ground. For months after Ma's death, I woke at sunrise and immediately felt the hole her absence had created in the world and began to cry. The more I cried, the more I needed to cry. The first tears of the day would be from sorrow and despair, but these excavated a greater anguish. By wishing for my punishment to occur, by thinking on my way home that Ma had died, I had incited God to kill my mother. I could not say these words, even though I knew them, because saying them would make the guilt ridiculous and so end it, and therefore perhaps end the hole which kept my mother with me. I wept and wept. It was as if the tears were my flesh's attempt to grow and cover the neat, round hole my mother's death had punched in me. But every time the hole was camouflaged, the skin twitched and broke and the hole revealed itself Sometimes my brothers grew tired of my weeping. "Go cry in the fields and scare away some crows with your noise," one said. The indifference they had shown to our mother's death (neither had wept) made my unhappiness denser and made me think sometimes that I was the one good person in the world. I would walk crying through the fields and hills until I passed into hysteria. Then I became so exhausted that I lay down wherever I was, next to a well, in the middle of some farmer's crops, and slept.

During this period, India became independent. One afternoon everyone in Beri was gathered on a flat field by the local Congress worker. Someone from a nearby town was there and gave a speech. Then the children lined up and the Congress worker passed out balloons and copper coins with Mahatma Gandhi's face stamped on them. People began to eat. The village women had prepared sweets

and filled large clay pots with sweet drinks. After a little while, the larger children tried to steal the smaller children's coins and balloons. As the balloons were knocked out of hands and went floating up, I thought of my mother not seeing this day and not receiving the saris that she had imagined the government would give. I wandered away sobbing.

When I returned to higher secondary, the town was nearly as it had been before the violence. Hindu families were living in the houses the Muslims had owned. Classes started and I took up wrestling once more. But it was as if I had been sick a long time and had become easy to confuse. I had also developed a fear of pain. The idea of being slammed into the ground and maybe cracking my head panicked me, and so, when I was in a difficult position, I found myself giving in, hoping to make my fall easier.

The only thing that took me out of myself was my first woman. Two friends and I hired a prostitute. I paid fifty paisas and they paid ten each to watch through a window. The idea of being watched did not bother me, since my entire family had lived in one room and I had often seen my parents having sex. We didn't tell the woman about the watching, because then she might have wanted to charge extra. I met her outside the school one Sunday afternoon and led her around the back to a hut used by the groundskeeper. The prostitute wore a sari, which I had asked her to wear, and men's thick rubber slippers. I found their inappropriateness erotic, but her feet were cracked and yellow. I was anxious and sad as I led her to the hut. Whatever excitement I had felt in arranging for the woman had been replaced by the sense that I was being forced to admit some deep wrongness in myself I began to apologize to the prostitute.

Once she was in the hut, I told the woman to remove her clothes. I took off mine and sat on a cot. After she finished stripping, she stood before me. The only light was from the small barred window. She was short and deep brown, with long black hair and large breasts. Her waist and thighs were in the dark. I made her walk back

and forth in the narrow aisle between the cot and the sacks of cement which were leaning against the wall. I weighed her breasts in my hands. My shame vanished. No matter what I felt about myself, this was the actual world. We were only bodies and I had more power than this woman. I put my fingers inside her.

"Do you like this?" I asked, wanting to know the range of my strength.

"Whatever you like," she answered. To have power after so much unhappiness and confusion made me feel as if the world could be mine.

I laid her on the cot and got on top. As I started moving, I saw my friends standing outside at the window beneath which they had been hiding. Their watching excited me.

The orgasm didn't feel like much right then. My penis trembled and spurted and that was it. But for the next few days, I was crazy with happiness. I would run and slide down the shaded gallery outside the classrooms. I kept finding myself talking loudly or humming. I had discovered a way to happiness which sidestepped all the demands life made of me.

I went to the prostitute several times after this, paying with a five-rupee wrestling award. Soon I couldn't feel my guilt. I think my mother's death had distended the elastic cord which ties our actions to our conscience and the cord hung slack. The prostitute was eighteen and named Rohini. After I gave the money to her husband, he would sit outside their cottage smoking bidis while I visited. As we had sex, I could hear their children in the courtyard. But I soon began to love Rohini in secret. She had a slow walk that made me think she was heavy with sweetness. Once, Rohini told me I had very handsome eyes, and when I looked in a mirror I noticed that indeed my eyes were quite large. Rohini's husband thought I came from a well-off family and I went along with this. But when he began asking me for cigarettes, I realized that his demands might increase and I stopped going. Once after this, I saw her on a path outside town, but I hid myself in a cane field before she could notice me. My falling

in love and then quickly abandoning her felt like a working-out of my destiny.

I failed eleventh standard. Nearly half the students with whom I had entered higher secondary had failed at least one year by then. There would have been no shame in repeating the year. But failing eliminated what little confidence I had remaining, and I decided to leave school.

We were at war with Pakistan and I wanted to fight for my country. I also thought joining the army would provide me with the opportunity to rise quickly in the world. I began imagining myself a general and grew a thick mustache such as I imagined a general might wear. But I had flat feet and ended up in the navy. As soon as I learned I was going to be in the navy, I became happy with the choice that had been forced on me. I saw myself traveling all around the world. I shaved my mustache.