The Inherited Custody

PART III - CHAPTER I

"Memory is a strange bell- Jubilee and knell."
- Emily Dickinson

Time passed.

It was as if the air had stopped peeping through the doors and windows, trying to knock by shaking them, asking for a tour, to run along the furniture and carpet and the family pictures hanging on the walls. Light had lost its relationship with the life of the dead in the building, not being able to make a path into the entity of brick once thought to be home.

Light only came as shadows in the day, somehow managing to touch the curtains, a little bit of the marble floor, the dining table and chairs, throwing the reflection of the window on the television that lay abandoned. Even the air, the light, the nothingness, the darkness were all witness to the creeping, quiet violence. That emotion of home was now like a plant on the verge of dying, just waiting to fall to the ground.

Days grew into darker days, nights after nights went by, growing thicker, darker, denser, lonelier. It felt as if time was still, and (as small as it was) they felt lost in a house so tiny that even the air couldn't pack it. The leaves of the trees began to leave their parents, the shadow of the lifeless tree crept through the window, the dim light of the moon.

(But Rumi, now a man, would sleep with the lights on)

***

The house was abandoned, humanly, not by humanity itself. Rumi and Rustom stayed, (or didn't, it never really mattered for they barely ever spoke too much, or sat together a lot) but there still lingered an emptiness. Emptiness dipped and lurched like the bending of wet leaves from weak branches after a thunderstorm, lurking and creeping under the foundation of this lovely, lonely house, tangling and untangling at its borders, at its centre two lives— one gray and one gay.

Stillness moved like the flame of a candle, from which dimness leaked like the rising of vapors, fondling the cheap china set, the stacked set of stainless steel plates and spoons, the dangling metallic glasses, the peeling stucco of the wall, the rusted and tarnished balustrade of the the veranda. Dust crept and stuck, and Rumi, every once a while, beat them off, blew them away and wiped them over.

***

Rumi had learnt to be outside, on the veranda— a table and chair he'd set for himself to sip tea or coffee (he was moody) and read or write or just sit. Every now and then, he'd come back inside the house, to fetch something to eat or drink, or to peep into the bedroom where Rustom slept and know if he was fine.

When evening came crawling, like the long summer day that came to an end, he walked inside and quietly came up to the room he didn't occupy and stood at the doorway. Listening to his footsteps, Rustom raised his head as much as he could, and with weak eyes and graying body, he looked at his son, fresh and as young as he ever was. He smiled senselessly at the sight of his wife's lost eyes.

Rumi walked taplessly to the other side of the bed and sat down, the weight of the mattress being pushed down, the old wood creaking ever so slightly. But his father didn't turn around to see. He laid there. Almost lifeless.

"Would you like me to read for you, baba?"

The silence wasn't even pierced, his voice was that delicate, that of the flaps of a fly's wings. And it remained uninterrupted, until he saw Rustom's head bop slightly from the hairless head to the delicate chin. Rustom picked up a very thin volume of Walt Whitman's Best Known works. He flipped it open, and the brown, ragged pages fluttered as his thumb ran out of pages to flip, and he began reading the text, very slowly, very soundly—

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

— and he read, and kept reading all the nine sections of that piece. By the time he was on the 4th section, he began hearing mild sounds of open-mouthed breathing. Yet he continued, for poetry was a ritual, once started, to only stop when it stops. This performance was kept private (nobody ever knew he could read so delicately, although everybody knew he read. What did he read was of no concern to anyone.) his voice too silent and naive, a lingering innocence that barely nudged the air or the room even.

But Rustom heard, and it was the only balm he had, not the poetry, but the sound of his son, knowing that poetry could never die. The balm eased the aches, and relaxed the mind, twitched the eyes with laziness, and killed the agony, if only for the night— temporarily.

Rumi did this every night, with dedication. Some people may have called that a routine. For him, it was a duty, like feeding medicines, like applying ointments, he'd reach by his father like clockwork, and read. He never asked which book he wanted to be read. He only picked up the book that he had stopped reading the night before, and had left it upside down, opened, and continued.

Since Rustom's shelf collected mostly Victorian Novels, he had fetched books from his mother's wardrobe, and read poems.

Rumi would often doze off with the book splayed upon his chest or the bedsheet (just like his father) but he sometimes would manage to walk out, without making any sort of sounds (he was used to that now, after all these years) or waking him up. He'd go back to his place to read, to light cigarettes, outside in the cold veranda from where the sounds of the sea roared at night.

It happened every night.

Upon Rustom's insistence, Rumi would often lay down beside him and read the poems. And Rumi would lay there, reading, or sleeping and would patiently wait for his father to sleep, for his head to fall back, back, into the pillow and chin risen and eyes drifted to the back of the head with the nose open and mouth slightly parted. It was not the poetry that Rustom wanted to listen to, or feel. He almost never concentrated on the words anymore. Once or twice, if Rumi would ever read Byron, whose works his mother loved, he'd listen to it very carefully and after the recitation, would give a silent praise. What Rustom looked for, in the grayness of those moments, was the closeness he never felt. That sometimes it was there, and then wasn't.

Rumi stayed, only to fulfill that closeness. He never kissed his father on the head or rubbed a hand on the back or shoulders, (they were clearly past that) but would just turn around, their backs facing each other, an indication of both affection and ignorance.

But when he would lift off his weight and stand, for a very brief moment, he would stop, fearing that if he moved too fast or too slow, that if he moved too far away from his father, the connection they had would stretch beyond its reach and rebound and break. He was aware of Rustom's age. He somehow, for some reason, and not so eagerly, would wait for it.
***