The Inherited Custody

CHAPTER VI

Along the Queen's Necklace rested the beach to which Rumi always wandered off to when he was younger. At times, his father accompanied him. Other times, he walked alone. He preferred the loud splashes of water that climbed up the shore and with every drenching wave, took a bit of land with it. That sound for some reason, echoed his peacetime. Nothing sounded as smooth or soothing as the water, not even music.

On the marshy, shallow end of it, people stood with the inseams of their pants folded above by their knees, the water skimped and pushed their bodies off balance while they remained intact. People sold cobs of roasted corn, toasted on stoves of raw coals, with salt and lemon sprinkled over it's charred edges.

Rumi bought two of those and gave one to his father. He walked beside Rustom, one of his hands clutched in his pockets, his father's swinging back and forth, the others holding the cob by the stick. They didn't speak at all. All that was spoken were from a handful of people around, the seagulls that flew above the Arabian Sea, the roaring waves, vehicles beyond the shoreline roads, the crabs crawling in secret, the insects below the deep and thick grain of soft sand and the caking of the wet sand among their toes.

He looked at the descending sun and then at his father, his eyes sharp, and then chewed wildly. He was quiet. So was Rustom. They just kept walking. Every step taken forward was a footprint left behind in the sand. Rumi was the inverse of Rustom. Both of them young and old, lost and found, alone with desire and alone with circumstance.

A whole life summed up in a space so limited, a life so torn apart, Rumi often thought of his father as a broken doll, misplaced in a pile of garbage, dug under the burden on the outskirts. Overtime, it corroded and eventually disappeared into the crowd and never was seen again.

And so Rustom Irani, father of Rumi Irani, like a mistaken hermit, never saw the whole wide world. He only learnt what happened outside— in Delhi, in Calcutta, in Cricket, in yet newly formed Bangladesh through stupendous wiring of the radio box. Who was to say, that perhaps it'd have been worse for someone like him— an undivided lover of literature, to die alone, wifeless of childless.

Was a lifeless body to be valued in the number of people that stood by it? Even Gatsby had a few people who attended his funeral. Who would visit Baba's?

***

There was still anxiety that built up and puffed his chest whenever he reached home. Knowing that the three of them would be together— together, with nothing to be spoken, to be done, made his stomach twist and heart pounce out of place every time. Nothing in the stars could ever satisfy that quench, or annihilate that scenario. It was something that happened as naturally as the sunrise— no matter how cloudy it got, it happened.

When they entered the lane, they realized that the power of the area had been cut. It was dark in the evening, the sun already pulled into another day, in another time. Rustom settled on the couch, dusting his feet off the mud. Rumi walked into the old creaking house, torn yet clean and perpendicularly set. He walked past his tiny room and the claustrophobic kitchen and saw his mother's figure sleeping on the bed. He sighed and entered the kitchen quietly. He found a couple of candles tied in a bundle and removed three and lit them with a thin matchstick.

He first placed one in the hall, the other on the dining table. He took the third one to his parents's bedroom and tilted it slightly to let the watery wax fall on the wooden surface of the lamp-table, and set the candle there, steady, the light flickering from the flames, cutting swathes throughout the walls of the room, his own shadow looming longingly on them.

When he went back to the kitchen, he realized that his mother hadn't given a thought to dinner yet, and so he opened the very small fridge and filled two cups of cold milk for them. He handed one to his father, who was about to doze off with his sound, open mouth and stuffy nose.

In the room, when he kept the glass beside the candle and bent, the flame— blue at the centre and orangish-yellow on the outside, danced due the pressure his body created and the light piercing the room dwindled. Rumi sighed and then called out, Maa. He reached out to her shoulder and shook her a little, and thin strands of her dark hair moved, her shut eyes like bulbs of bougainvillea, and her limbs cold and limp. When he moved her, her entire frame shifted together, lifelessly. In the darkly lit room, he saw gashes of stains on the bright white sheets that covered her, where her hands laid under. They were red— blackish red, he reckoned.

His breath suddenly dwindled like the flame, and he sucked in and puffed out in such a hurry, it barely took a second. Everything he never knew he feared skyrocketed into his veins and his body jolted with a fear so fierce, he froze as he rose, his body in some sort of paralysis, mind unthinkably shivering and heart pounding with such sparity, he must've been dead for that moment. But it wasn't him. It was her. It had always been her.

His voice sank. He screamed so loudly, nobody heard it. Not even Rustom in the hall.

When blood finally rushed through his mind and body very slowly, he picked up the sheet to check whether his eyes had fooled him for the last time.

It hadn't. Like always, his sight always told him the truth.

***