It’s been a year since I last met Rashida and I fly down back to India. After a couple of days, I decide to check up on her when I go to Pune. I have been busy with the family and it almost slips out of my mind… I drive with a friend down the lanes of Kothrud and see a completely changed landscape. The guys and chawls are gone, flattened out. A skeleton of an upcoming high-rise building is already in place. “Himalaya Towers”, the name reads.
I walk by to the nearby tea stall. There are a bunch of people chatting animatedly with the owner who is a Bihari man, around 60.
“Do you know about an old lady called Rashida who used to live in chawl 32?”, I ask slightly loudly. I am already agitated by the surroundings.
The group suddenly goes silent. They all stare at me for a bit, complete silence. Finally, a big guy steps out of that group looks back at the owner, and then nods.
“ How do you know her?”. He asks with naked suspicion.
I tell him about my connection and he nods. He scratches his beard for a second.
Finally, he clears his voice.
“ She is in Pimpri now”. His voice is flat telling me to leave. He has nothing more for me.
I stand there. I am not leaving. He stands a foot taller than me inches away and yet he sees the look in my eyes. He finally sighs and pulls out a chair and dusts it with the handkerchief from his shoulder. The other guys form a circle and close in. I am not sure what I have got myself into. He tells me about the goons who came in December to vacate the chawl. Rashida’s son, Mehmood, a tall well-built chap who resisted was pulled from his house by the crowd and knifed 10 times, right in front of his mother who watched helplessly, pleading with them, this thin 70-year-old woman against a crowd of men with weapons. Those old eyes watched as they made an example of him by dousing him with petrol and burning him alive.
“They burnt him Saab (sir). His screams will haunt us to our graves. You couldn’t bear to see it. It is horror. Oil drips from his body, his eyes become huge, huge, the white shows, white, white, you touch his arm like this”, he flicked his arm — “the white shows. It shows especially on the nose” — he rubbed his nose with two fingers as if scraping off the skin — “oil drips from him, water drips from him, white, white all over. He was still alive and he tried to get up but they kicked him back into the fire”, he says as he vigorously scratches his nose, trying to wish that thought away. The big guy who tells me this is a 6"5 Pathan, solid as they come. Yet he is shaken, just at that memory as the others watch him, slightly dazed.
“As if that was not enough, they picked her up from her bed and threw her on the concrete floor and broke her back. She was paralyzed from her neck downwards.”. He points to his legs and then up to his neck.
These were the same guys who were friends of Mehmood, who used to visit her home during the festival of id, feasting on mutton biryani at her place every year, laughing with Mehmood, and hanging out every night. She beseeched them, begged them, asked them to spare him in the name of god. Gods never existed in slums. Transactions have no friends or alliances. The entire chawl is vacated in a week.
The Pathan finally stands up tall and puts a hand on my shoulder. He calls for a paper & pencil and draws me a crude map and writes the name of her chawl, in Hindi.
I take the next available metro bus to go visit her. The city is a blur of activity. The sun beating down in the afternoon does not slow it a bit. The bus picks up speed on the outskirts of the city and so do my thoughts.
“You will never be able to take care of the women you love”, the old astrologer’s words ring in my ears, his eyes looking at me with aggravated sympathy. I never understood then what he had seen, until a long while after.
It takes me a while to figure out the address until a creative well-versed rickshaw fellow lands me at the right place. I bend down to enter the shady looking chawl, navigating through their open gutters, the naked children, the bored housewives washing clothes. A jobless man in a dirty vest points me to an old broken hut.
I am about to knock on the door until I find there is no door. Just a curtain hanging in its place. Rashida’s daughter, Rukhsana recognizes me and drops the plate from her hand. She rushes over to hug me as a sister would after a long-lost brother returns home. She is half crying, half laughing. I am too.
“She is inside”, she says almost in a whisper.
I lean down to enter the low door frame. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see her thin frame in the corner. The stench of feces is overwhelming. She is lying there and as she opens her eyes to look up at me, I can see the flicker of recognition, of excitement. She cannot speak anymore but she holds my hand — tightly, her thin frame showing superhuman strength. She was always a tough one.
I get a wet cloth and start to clean her gingerly. Her skin is starting to show signs of developing deep sores. I work my way around it for the next hour. I slowly change the sheets with the help of her daughter as she steps out to fill water from the nearby local tap.
I remember what she had said when I had taken her for the first time to the nearby mall on the first cab ride of her life. “I’ll remember this day until the day I die Saab. This is the best day of my life!”.
I doubt she had any good days after.
I look at Rashida and see the pain in her eyes. She stares back at me and tears stream down, faster than I can clear them before mine too mingle with hers. Those eyes, like mine, have seen things she cannot erase. I am wrapped in my own hell while she is lying there, wrapped in her own filth, wrapped in her memory of her son burnt alive in front of her eyes while she was helpless, wrapped in a world she cannot escape from, not yet, her mind as sharp as a blade even though her body has given over, awaiting death, for days, months and years, but even that refuses to come by. Suffering like no other.
For a faint second, I eye the pillow next to her and I eye the closed curtain that acts as the door. I know where my thoughts are headed and I step back. I have to leave now and I pull her grip off my hand. She holds me tight, but I wrench free. I lightly run a hand over her hair as I kiss her forehead lightly.
“You can close your eyes. It’s over now”, I whisper to her and she looks up with blank eyes for a while before she breaks into a toothless smile, and then her gaze is stuck over my shoulder.
It’s a picture of Mohammed smiling on the wall.
I blink as I step out into the sunlight. Rukhsana is still out yet.
I don’t wait up for her either. I’ll not be coming back.
Three days later she is dead.
