A Dead Hero
Raghuram Godavarthi
I was 9. School had closed early, and He had offered to drop me home, on his way home. It was the monsoon, and a cyclone was expected. Already, the first rains had hit the city with a foretaste of the disaster to unfold. The stagnating rainwater was just beginning to lap at one’s ankles. As I waved goodbye to him from the arms of my mother, he smiled, kick-started his scooter and was gone. School was closed for the month that followed, first due to the rains, and then due to the heavy amount of repair needed on some of the buildings. When I finally went back, I was eager to see Him again. They told me he was gone. I ran home crying. Mother and Father came to school the next day, and the principal told them simply that he was dead. They tried to explain that to the 9-year old me.
I am 23. I have come back to my hometown now that Father is retired and will not be transferred again. I visit School again. I meet the Principal, then an energetic 40-something, now a weary man waiting for retirement. I tell him I still haven’t forgotten Him. The Principal looks at me with a bemused expression. He asks me in a measured voice if I would like to know about Him. I say, unhesitant, yes. The Principal tells me of the first interview, when He first came to the school. He was all charm and kindness, a benevolent god who brought luck with him to the school. He loved the students, and the other staff loved Him. He was quickly promoted, and he took His responsibilities in stride without ever losing any of that charm or kindness. Five years on, He had become assistant-principal, and was virtually everyone’s Hero. I felt a nostalgic pang of envy – the 9-year old awakes again. The Principal continues – no one seemed to know much about His past, or His present. Like the gods of Hindu fables, He had come to the school at a time of great need. Unlike those gods, no legends were ever written about him, only one short obituary, composed by the Principal himself. His body had been found washed into the courtyard of a house the second day of the cyclone. It was presumed that He had had an accident. Then the Principal paused, looked hard at me, and said “But I thought it was murder.”
The Principal was 42. So, He must have been about 33-34. He was a champion swimmer, and if anyone could be trusted with rescue missions, it was Him. He had dropped me home, and then, reported back to school for more such trips. He had been sent by the Principal to take two other students home. All the staff had been asked to meet at the school after dropping off students, just to account for everyone. All came back, except Him. Then, the search parties were formed. They divided the city into six, one pie slice each for two teachers. That year, the cyclone eventually killed 68 people, and many more were lost. The house His body was found in was in the poorer part of town, and those stricken people had still dutifully called the municipality about His body. The crematorium staff collected His body on the first day possible, which was three days later. The full impact of the cyclone was only known eight days since it had begun, with very few services still active in the city. It was pure luck that the Principal even was called. “I went, and identified Him” the Principal almost whispered now, “and when I looked over him one last time, something caught my eye – it was a broken bit of glass near His ear – and it was jammed in His flesh. His whole body was swollen from water retention, but that piece of glass stuck – Why?” I winced, the mental image made me choke, and I shivered, not sure if I was ready to hear more. “And then?”I heard myself ask.
The Principal said he’d asked the morgue attendant about an autopsy. The morgue attendant had looked at him as if he were insane, muttered something about making a mountain out of a molehill and walked away. “Then, I called a police inspector – a neighbor of mine. It was a hard task convincing the morgue officials that it was a suspicious case, but the inspector handled it well. The autopsy confirmed what I feared.” He had been killed, his throat slit, and later left to drift with the rainwater. “The inspector duly filed a first investigation report on my behalf, but the case was never pursued, owing to lack of any leading evidence, and also all the pending rescue work –the concern for those alive or possibly so being greater than that for those already dead.” I stared, unable to believe that they had let it go at that. “But surely, they found some clue, some way of finding out who killed Him?” I said. The Principal looked at me with steady eyes, half-nodded, and then rummaging through his desk drawer, pulled out a threaded folder. He opened it, and flipped the pages, and handed me the folder, with a newspaper article stuck to it. “Perhaps,” he said” this will satisfy your curiosity”. I read the piece, a short one, but very heavy in its import. My eyes went teary as I finished and handed back the folder to the Principal, and crying, I said my good-byes and ran from the room.
Another Hero perishes
Last week, Mr. ____, a resident of the Cantonment, wrote to us with this incredible story. He had been travelling home with his family on July 9th, the day the cyclone hit the city. On the way, he saw this man with 2 kids on a scooter struggling to keep the scooter going in the swirling rain. What followed, in his words: “Soon afterward, both the car and the scooter were stuck in the water. Until that point I had not thought of rolling down the car windows, or even started thinking of a scenario where I would need to get out of the car midway. It was only after the car got stuck that I realized how fast the water was rising. Then the car’s battery died, and the electronic windows wouldn’t come down. The doors were jammed too, and I started panicking. My two children were already very afraid, and they started crying. I then heard this man knocking on the passenger window and I saw him gesturing towards the kids he was travelling with. I gestured back to him to try and tell him that the windows were stuck. He understood me, I think, because he waved to me and my children and then disappeared with his children for a moment. Then I saw him knocking on the windshield, and he gestured to me to move into the back seat. When he saw we were covered, he smashed the windshield with his elbows, and managed to free some space to jump into the car. He then pulled my children and me out into the open, and even as he tried to follow, a sudden surge of water pushed him over, and his neck stuck in the narrower part of the glass. The surging water also meant I was pushed away, and I did not look back for a few minutes, and then I saw what had happened. He was stuck, and the water rapidly carried him away. I do not know if he survived, but someday I hope I can thank him for saving our lives. He was a true Hero.
Imminence
By Raghuram Godavarthi
Imagine the pain of a leaf, bearing upon its tip,
the very last drop of rain
is it the pain of separation?
or is it the last bit of pain suffered from carrying so many raindrops?
Imagine the creak of a door hinge, about to be shut for the day,
and locked up for the night
is it a sigh of relief?
or is it yet another gasp at being swung about all day?
Imagine, the thudding of a felled tree,
upon the unrelenting, hard ground
is that the final utterance of an unrewarded life?
or does the tree finally express its anguish at having to stand motionless all life long?
For voices never heard, for actions practiced only in shadows,
and for thoughts formed only within cerebral walls
there is but one release – Imminence
and such is the travesty therein!
the overwhelming cry of chaos, the chitter-chatter of change
drowns all other sounds in its crashing wave
none can ever truly distinguish
an utterance from anguish
relief, from disbelief
separation, from transportation
In the gushing wake of Imminence
life hereto, and hereafter, could very well just be
an empty box, devoid, desolate, disparate
A day that approaches… approaches the past
Indeed I was a youngster then, indeed am no wiser now
Sure, you were the smart one, no doubt, the more adapted
But perhaps I understood you then, and not so much now
or perhaps it is the other way around
either way, the lion will never catch it’s tail
the circle will never cease at a certain point
the unfortunate misunderstandings of Friendship’s past
will perhaps come back to the limelight
as a future content to share nothing but what was
The years between us were an unshakeable truth
the memories between us oases in a desert
the space between us, the emptiness between the stars
sooner ignored, safer forgotten, best unremembered
and yet there were these far-flung innuendoes
the embers of a fire that burnt itself
and it that burning, consumed universes
fragments of these now lurk in distant minds
occasionally do they meet, upon the cross roads of time
the same paths that we never chose to walk on
now, angered (cross), offer us no room to pass
A day approaches, and brings another floating charcoal piece
the companion of which was flung upon me post-haste, early
that vanguard sleeps for a momentary eternity, safely defeated
yet the unuttered noises of the coming fleet crowd my mind
they refuse to offer a fight, nor do they volunteer to walk swiftly past
they shall be the guests of the winter perhaps, hibernating, snoring
until the freshness of an as-yet-unsprung spring time leaf shall sweep them away
and going forward, forward, forward… they shall once more approach the past
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