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I HAD come across this couplet many years ago and had often thought as to how just one false step can make a whole life go horribly off-course. I had almost dismissed it as a product of a poet’s imagination till I met Bhaskar. Bhaskar is a driver with a local cab rental company. On one journey to Delhi, I got talking to this 35-year-old handsome man, a graduate, who could speak fluent English and who had a sound opinion on political and social matters. While abstractedly watching him manoeuvre through the heavy traffic on the G.T. road, I wondered why he was not working as an executive in a company or why he did not own the car he was driving. Surely, he could make better money if he drove tourists and visitors his own car. I was intrigued. Subsequent meetings helped me piece together his life story. |
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| He is a Bengali Brahmin. His birth was a
landmark event in his family. He was the first male child
in three generations. Fair, light-eyed and friendly, he
was like a foreign -made walkie-talkie doll. The family
transport business which had been languishing till now
picked up after his birth as if by magic. A fleet of
buses was added by the time he was of school-going age.
He was an outgoing child who drew people to him with his
spontaneity. By the time he went to college, his father
was busy planning his future education, shortlisting the
best universities, and even meeting educational
counsellors to identify a vocation which would suit his
son’s personality and skills. In fact, Bhaskar’s future had been planned down to the last detail. Once he took admission in a professional college and embarked on an impressive ‘officer’ career, he would be married to Revati, the daughter of his father’s best friend. The alliance had been fixed when the children were still in their cribs. Bhaskar didn’t question the arrangement. It was ordained. He was neither resentful nor was he overtly enthusiastic. However, what he hadn’t planned and anticipated was that he would fall in love with the vivacious Annie, a Bengali Christian who came from a not so affluent family. It was sacrilege, and he knew his father would not approve of it. He secretly married Annie and came home one last time from the back door to bid adieu to his mother. He knew his father, who was acutely caste and status conscious, would not forgive him for this transgression. He had therefore booked his train ticket to Delhi where a friend had promised him a job. He saw no sense in talking to his father and trying to get him around. Everything was tied up, irreversibly. Seeing him go, his mother was shattered. It was like severing the umbilical cord. Bhaskar went away. After six months she got news that he had moved to far-off Chandigarh, where he had set up a car rental agency. Meanwhile his father steeled himself into not reacting and feeling anything. It was as if he turned to stone. His eyes wore a glassy look at all times and the household no longer reverberated with his laughter. Revati was brought to live with them. She thought of herself as already married to Bhaskar and insisted on living the life of an abandoned wife with her in-laws. Her quiet uncomplaining presence was a constant reminder to the father that his son had failed him miserably. Every year the mother was allowed to go to Chandigarh to meet Bhaskar and his family on the condition that she would not talk about her visit. What broke her heart was not that she could not play with her grandchildren but the fact that she could not share her happiness with her husband. Bhaskar’s taxi business collapsed when his clients refused to pay up and his partners absconded with the cars and money. Within five years he was reduced to driving the owner’s car at another taxi stand. The mother could sense his despair and hopelessness over the phone but knew there was nothing either of them could do. She could not send him money and bail him out of his troubles nor could he return home and take over their transport business. I met Bhaskar after a long gap last week. Though he was looking haggard and aged, there was a change in him. He was on medication for tuberculosis which had weakened him considerably. His mother had died a few months ago. Before dying, she had rung him up to tell him that his father had divided the property between Revati and an NGO. She felt miserable because she felt that she had somewhere failed her son. Strangely, it was her death which finally brought home the reality that his home in Calcutta no longer belonged to him. Though he had done nothing in the past decade to change the situation, he was somewhere hopeful that his father’s heart would melt at some point in time and that he would reach out to his only child, asking him to forget the past and return home. Bhaskar for the first time questioned himself, "Had I taken my father in confidence before tying the knot with Annie, or had I met him personally before leaving or had I over the years tried to reunite, would things have ended differently? Maybe my mother too would have lived longer." There was a new found maturity in him. He suddenly appeared to be driven and committed. He said that now his ultimate aim in life was to provide for his family and make them financially and emotionally secure. He had now got a job as a company driver and, with the money he had saved up, he was opening an STD booth which his wife would man during the day. Before leaving, he said wisely, "Good parents give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what has been taught to them. I hope, madam, I can realise the goal I have set for myself." Having said this he also expressed a desire of going to Calcutta one last time to beg his father’s forgiveness. I could only shut my eyes and hope that a life which had gone awry so horribly would ultimately come to terms with itself and find peace. |
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Sirf ek kadam uttha tha galat
rahe shauk mein,