Of What Remained
Part-1
Nascent flesh is blue. It turns pink, slowly, when pressed against the bare maternal body. This tethered newborn defeats death, for the first time, on his mother’s chest. The colour pink must then be the colour of victory, of life.
The aching inches of his crumpled skin hummed a tune, faint and almost lost. And as they sang, the harmonies shrouded his body in a blanket of absence. The phantom touch reminded him of being held between the warm, viscous threads of brown honey. He had been missing his mother a lot more these days. Tariq, like a man newly blinded, floundered and fell into this familiar mess. His flesh had been reeking of lone, corroded youth.
Tariq lived. His ears had become turgid. There were ghosts living in them. They would yell and cry for help and call him a traitor for not dying with them. If only his ears had hands of their own, then they would have ripped themselves apart from his temple and bled away until empty. But since they had no limbs, they had no one to put them out of this misery. So, they remained there, hanging on those hinges, listening to the empty ghosts howl in pain. They were all dead. The men he worked along to protect the forested town. Killed.
Tariq lived.
One evening, after maghrib, he was quietly watching the setting sun. The birds sat down with their hairless chickens, falling asleep and the bats were leaving to hunt the swollen rats. The sun was pink and the air, quiet. Between these moments when the sky was static and ripple-less, he begged the heavens to show him mercy. His voice, small and quaint, echoed like the trailing remains of a bell in an empty school. The heavens answered. A boy with oceans and embers in his eyes came to him. He named him Haleem.
Haleem was a beautiful little boy. When Haleem was born, the dying men in Tariq’s ears disappeared. Haleem was his miracle. Tariq didn’t want to die anymore. Haleem was the compassion he was shown.
“Those weren’t the eyes of a living person, Lila, I know because I have seen thousands…”, Mr Pereira ashed his cigarette in the white ashtray. It was filled with grey dust and it looked filthy. Mr Pereira hated it when the colours crossed boundaries. The carvings on his face had gotten very deep and indelible. Each line translated a dialogue held within. He had been staring at the white, messy ashtray for a while now. A gift to the landlord. The children crawling about the verandahs always seemed to have the grey dust on their palms, so on his birthday last year, Haleem gifted Mr Pereira a white ashtray. He must’ve disliked him ever since then. His face bellied up and, like a stomach filled with pus and dread, appeared painfully held together. His bones were brimming with disgust. His skin remained crumpled under this weight. The lines on his face, today, had muffled the dirt he had wished to smear across this man’s living.
Mr Periera was famished. He had barely eaten anything today. Discovering his tenant dead in his room was certainly not how he had wanted to begin his new year but now, he even had to convince his innocence in this homicide! But what concern had thrown him under the boulders was listing the apartment back on market. Would anyone want to live here anymore at all? He grabbed the ashtray and threw it under a huge tree. “A writer? Ha! Only wrote stupid stories about some stupid wars, he was never gonna survive the real world!”, he flicked his half-burnt cigarette and walked away.
The building was infested with men questioning Haleem’s motive. No one dared to step out of their apartments. The evening had darkened. The rooms lit up slowly, some went blind. The building looked like a weeping man. The air had gotten thick and hard. Haleem’s room was filled with scented smoke. They were profusely burning incense sticks to keep the smell of rotting flesh away. One could smell the heaviness of the fragrance from the dirty entrance. A man sat on the floor, wailing through the scented fog. His cries were begging for someone to return home. People came to him but no one among them was the one he cried for. The flaccid skin had turned blue. He had to be taken away. “Beta, please come back!” Tariq cried, hoping his son would return to him. Tariq sat by his son’s blue body. Nothing could make it warm again, soft again, pink again. He sat there, unable to breathe anymore, ramming his rigid chest so it opened up at once.
The skies were no more merciful to Tariq. Haleem had killed himself.
