Bird with a Broken Wing
By Preeti Seshadri
Grappling with the loss of a partner and his own growing loneliness, Abhay finds that he is able to move forward only by going back in time
Standing in the balcony, Abhay watches the the afternoon light go from bright to sudden shades of grey, as the sun and clouds play hide and seek. He stands there, far above the noise, traffic and crowds, and can almost (only almost) pretend that he is in a quiet space surrounded by the sounds of birds and silence. The morning spent with his young patients, talking about their stomach aches, fevers and vaccines, are long forgotten. Shekhar always laughed that he remembered his patients by ailment and the medicines he prescribed, rather than by name or face. But it made him lucky, Abhay would say; he could afford not to bring work back home. Water from a tap inside the flat brings him back to reality and he steps back in and sits behind his pottery wheel. Wheel and clay go round and round, as light and shadow morph on to the shape forming in front of him. Suddenly, it becomes all dark and despondent. The clouds have won and it is now drizzling steadily, forming a mist.
Distracted by the lack of light, Abhay realises that the shape on the wheel is wobbling and it is no longer a firm cylinder. He plays around with the clay a bit giving it abstract shapes, like he used to as a child. During the summers that were always spent at Bharat mama’s house with his cousins. The slow 45-minute walk from the station to mama’s house at the peak of summer. All of them whining and complaining, so mama would finally lead them into the fields to walk along the river. And the walk would eventually become two hours long because all the kids would play on the banks of the river, get muddy, and then dash in and out of the river on the pretext of washing up. So many days of the holidays were spent just running around, playing catch, hide-and-seek and gulli danda. Abhay remembered sitting in the soft soil making mud houses and shapes, like the one he was making now. He decides to stop with pottery for the day and thinks it may be time to go back to the family home. It had been more than a few years.
***
Leaning back against the old chikoo tree, Abhay closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He needs a break from all the chaos inside the big house. Being back home to the siblings was entertaining, fun even, but not always relaxing. Couple of deep breaths later, he opens his eyes to find a little girl standing in front of him but out of arm’s length, staring. “Five years old, BCG vaccine,” he thinks. Her dress is too big, faded, probably a hand-me-down, and her hair is coming out of what had clearly been two braids earlier in the morning.
“Hi, Doctor Uncle. I went to school but the teacher shouted at me. I don’t like her, so I ran away and came here. Mamma is working inside but she will shout at me for missing school again if she sees me. Are you going to give me an injection now?”
Talking to children came easily to him but the chatty ones with no filters were the most fun.
Laughing, he said, “What’s your name?”
“You know my name. You said ‘Ananya, I’ll count to three and give you the injection’ and gave it on two only, last year!”
“Do you want another injection, Ananya? Are you feeling ill?”
“Nooo, I don’t want one. I wasn’t ill last year also. But you still gave me an injection.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll catch you and give you one now?”
“You have to catch me first. Baba says I run too fast for him to catch me. Why are you sitting here? Are you going to climb the tree?”
“Why would I climb the tree?”
“To pick chikoos!! I like climbing this tree. I fell down once from it last year but mamma said the more I climb, the less I’ll fall from it. Shall I show you how to climb?”
Without waiting for his response, Ananya steadily climbs up a couple of branches and then looks back to see if he is following. Abhay decides to follow. Within minutes they are many feet above the ground. Ananya continues to chatter away, while Abhay lets his mind drift.
Memories come in flashes. Greenery. Birds. Houses. And he is soon remembering their last road trip, from three years ago. They had stopped at a tree in a tiny field to have a picnic and he had climbed the tree there to see what could be seen all around them. He smiles, thinking what a wonderful trip it had been, before everything was overshadowed by doctor visits, tubes, and hospital stays.
A voice calls out for Ananya and she scrambles down like a little monkey, without even looking back at him. He climbs down sometime later and goes back into the house, bracing himself for all the clamour. He finds everyone in the kitchen or at the lunch table, some new faces amongst them. One of them looks familiar but he cannot place her immediately. Once lunch is over, like all the other adults, he retires to his room to nap. He thinks he should extend his holiday by another week and just drive around for a few days. A solo road trip might not be too bad to manage if it was for a few days. It felt like the right time to try. As he starts to drift off, he remembers why the face looked familiar. “Diarrhea, 10 years,” he mutters to himself before dozing off.
***
Sunlight filtering through and making the day brighter.
Enjoying the calm after a happy and fulfilling day.
Reading nook on a lazy Sunday.
Like the opening sequence of a movie, to reveal something.
***
Abhay brings the car to a slow stop in front of the hut. As he steps out of his air-conditioned car, the humidity envelops him instantly, immediately soaking him in sweat. The late afternoon sun hits him hard.
He looks towards the solitary hut, in front of the fields. It is neither fully kutcha nor fully pukka, made of mixed material. The door is made of strips of wood. The front of the hut has a customary rickety bench. Sunlight casts a slanted shadow on the doorway of the shop and Abhay sees a wrinkled old man in a white pajama kurta stepping out of it. The old man covers his eyes from the sharp light, bends his head and walks slowly towards Abhay. Abhay wonders how he is so clean-shaven; does he lift each wrinkle to shave? Abhay can smell the strong cologne as he approaches the car.
“What is problem, saar?”
“Car had a puncture and I changed the tyre but I want the punctured tyre fixed.”
“Where you going?”
“Nowhere in particular, just driving through till evening.”
As both Abhay and the old man walk towards the car’s trunk, Abhay asks, ‘What is your name?’
“Kandaswamy. C. Kandaswamy.” Abhay wonders if he did that on purpose or it was just a habit to say his name that way.
As he examines the punctured tyre bringing his face close to it, Kandaswamy’s bushy eyebrows furrow into a frown.
Still looking down, but glancing sideways at Abhay, he says, “Take time to repair. I call my son.”
Abhay says, “That’s okay, as long as it is done properly. Is there a tea shop nearby where I can wait?”
Kandaswamy, still refusing to look Abhay square in the eye, points to the shop and says, “You sit in, I make tea.”
He pulls his phone out from his kurta pocket and dials his son’s number, as he starts to shuffle back towards the shop. Abhay follows him, walking slowly and in step with Kandaswamy.
In rapid Tamil, Kandaswamy shouts into the phone. Abhay hopes that he’s telling his son to hurry. Just a few steps before the shop’s doorway, Kandaswamy almost trips and grabs Abhay’s shirt. As Abhay steadies him, Kandaswamy stands up, smoothens Abhay’s shirt and says, “Sorry saar, eye not good.”
Abhay follows Kandaswamy into the shop. He blinks a couple of times to adjust to the dim light and notes it is neat and clean. To the left of the doorway is a stove with essentials to make tea and a beaten-up dabba with what he thinks are biscuits. In the middle of the floor are a couple of little stools. And next to the doorway, on the right, is a little radio, plugged in and playing Tamil songs. Suddenly Kandaswamy breaks into song, singing along with the voice on the radio, “Illaya nila…”.
He looks at Abhay for the first time and says “SPB saar singing. Best songs”. Abhay nods and realises he knows this song and the singer. He’d been made to listen it many, many times, along with other SPB songs. (They’re classics, Abhay. He’s a genius. Tamil Nadu’s Rafi and Kishore combined. Bollywood didn’t really get how good he is! And the songs, in a language he didn’t understand, would play late into the night.)
Kandaswamy points to the stool and says, “Sit, saar. I make tea.”
As Abhay sits down and listens to SPB crooning, a young man arrives on a two-wheeler. Kandaswamy says, without looking up from the stove, “Son has come”. Abhay gets up to meet the young man at the doorway. Before he can say anything to him, the young man says, “I’m Kumar. K.Kumar. I repair tyre”. Clearly a family habit, thinks Abhay, and walks him to the car trunk. Kumar sees the tyre and says, “I repair, you sit,” pointing to the hut.
Abhay returns to the hut and can hear Kandaswamy singing even as he nears the doorway; the song has changed. And a hot cup of almost-black tea waits for him.
An hour later, tyre fixed, as he gets back into his car, he turns on the radio to find the station with the SPB songs. Abhay increases the volume and drives away, smiling to himself. Shekhar would have so enjoyed being serenaded by SPB and Kandaswamy, kindred spirits of SPB’s genius.
***
Waiting.
Shadows abound and cross each other, cutting through the light.
Despair and sadness even though surrounded by light.
Waves of darkness amidst the colours.
***
Abhay steps into the balcony of his hotel room, with his glass of whisky in hand. It is a little early in the evening, but he had decided to stop here for the day. The room is comfortable, the view isn’t great, just a few trees in the hotel’s courtyard. Traffic sounds are few this time of the day. Abhay is in a state of quiet happiness that comes from having meandered all day through unknown roads and changing scenery. His eye catches a movement on a tree branch, and he squints to see what it is in the fading daylight. He can see a small yellow bird hopping about, its head bent and beak under its wing. It takes him a minute to realise the bird is trying to nudge the wing. “Tiny bird, broken wing,” he thinks, intently watching the bird. It hops about in a circle for a while, one wing still unmoving, the other flapping. As darkness starts to descend, the bird tries a few jumps on the branch, to see if it can still fly with one wing. It cannot. Abhay knows this, just as he knows he will not be able to help the tiny bird. And in minutes, it is completely dark, and he can no longer see the bird.
Preeti Seshadri has spent almost twenty years working for large and small companies, loves to travel and has been trying her hand at pottery for the last couple of years. She is currently based in Bangalore.
