THE KEY

All the town’s buses had been painted yellow so that they could enter and move easily in the traffic-controlled areas without any restrictions. This made it difficult for the daily passengers who travelled by bus to recognise their buses. The eyes of unemployed roadside Romeos and street vendors selling their wares (footpathiya), gazing up at the young college girls on the school buses, used to be happy and they used to stare at them till the buses passed, but now all the buses were the same. Kishan used to watch this game of sadness and excitement daily while he waited for his routine bus or tempo (3-wheeler).

However fast you move, or run, time always passes in front of your eyes. Kishan remembered a proverb from his childhood – keeping his head at his father’s feet when he was laying on his cot, his father, looking at the stars, said that hair is always ahead of time. Son! Know. Kishan believed that in spite of his father’s instructions he could not hold the hair of time. And father had been taken away by time. He himself had gone.

The heat of the sun causes the seed to germinate and produce a tree which stands on the body of the Earth, laughs, blossoms and spreads its shade all around. As the sun becomes warmer the cotton plant fibres reveal their silken softness … so white and bright, slipping into hollow eyes to get absorbed in a corner of the fluttering mind. Silent! Like the tree, however much sunlight is absorbed by the body of a man, the more sensible he becomes. A man who has absorbed much sun is never quickly surprised. To tolerate heat becomes his habit. Fire becomes another name for light. As the road is heated by the sun it becomes more and more empty. The hot, dry winds (loo) of the Indian summer bring desert-like fear with them. The footpath becomes empty of the vendors, as if the vehicle announcing curfew has passed by. There is a silence everywhere. The sun melts the emptiness.

Kishan found that Ramadin, the parched grain vendor, and his almost permanently fixed punctured cycle-trolley had been pushed and hidden somewhere else. In the city the helpless find little or no patronage or shelter. Ramadin stealthily hid his rusted, jammed trolley behind the boundary wall of Kuber Complex and locked it to the strong iron mesh fixed there with his ten-rupee chain and five-rupee padlock, then without any worries went home to sleep at night. He did not run a tea stall, which had to stay open all night to serve tea to those people who came on their way to the station. Even while sleeping he stayed alert all night because he had seen his father’s murder. His father’s death had woken him up forever. His mother’s cries had opened his eyes. His soft hands held no dreams but only the boxes of matches he used to light his chulha (charcoal oven). While he parched the grains he dreamt of burning his father’s murderers.

He was short, much shorter than his age. Small, slim Ramadin had one ear much smaller than the other. Ramadin had converted his ear into a hook. He used to hang a key ring