Cover source: Behance // Ann Mathew
He goes from house to house in his belle ambulance that had all the markings of a normal one, except that, mentioned minutely with all the other ailments on the side of the vehicle is ‘love’, an ailment that had been killing people since the start of time. After 20 years of driving the van that is always nearly falling apart, and with more burials to his name than he can count; Shivdas still believes that he can save people who have suffered from the most violent virulence known to the world – love.
In the lonely lanes, age of the bent walls is betrayed by the heat of the summer and wretchedness of the lime paint. Shivdas walks along a scared row of houses hugging their roofs with the tenacity of trench soldiers, for whom this housing had been built decades ago, under the threat of the oncoming Japanese army. Even before the war had ended, the locals had a habit of putting up houses wherever they liked so that their village had ended up looking like a stalemated chess match. The buildings were forever creeping closer to each other, till they started kissing, forcing the passerby to hug the walls in order to pass. It is here, in the least glamorous part of Dilbaag that Shivdas’ services are the most in demand. Sometimes, in the dullness that grips Assam before the oncoming monsoon, the walls whisper phrases of love as people pass these lanes, but Shivdas hears only the static of overhead wire and smells the buried stench of rainwater mixed in calcified piss.
The barracks of Dilbaag were never built to last a war. These had been setup urgently during the war to house the incurable British soldiers, almost a century ago, the ones who had fallen in love with their brother soldiers in the treacherous swamps of northeast and had therefore defied the Raj with their love. The barracks were the last homes of those who couldn’t be cured and couldn’t be hanged and were ultimately condemned to live in a small colony that inadvertently became their refuge during the war.
The prisoners were condemned to build their own housing and they dug a canal that turned the town green, planted orchards, created archways, and secret tunnels that still connect the houses and seem to open up for all those who wish to cross the walls. The town was built with such beauty and hidden motifs that it is still impossible for its residents to fall in love and hide it. Though all of the original inhabitants were killed long ago, their art remains alive. If those who moved into the apartments of the lovers found blood stains, then they cleaned it, without seeking any more answers. But whenever an ‘incident’ happens, people are forced to reckon with something that they had long buried and never wished to be drawn up again. Shivdas feels the anger simmering along the endless windows of the lover’s town as he walks up to the site of the incident.
A dense crowd buzzes around the house, gripping the decaying news like fruit flies who can only live on pungency. Amongst those who are always present on the scene with their long handlebar moustaches is perhaps the only inter community group of Dilbaag — comprised of the rule bearers from each community, determined to keep everyone as far away as possible.
“Why do these cases keep coming up?” One of the priests asks Shivadas, mulching paan water. “It’s the lovesickness of the soldiers from long ago. Nothing that our people did.” Another one answers, not waiting for Shivadas to respond.
“The curse of the Peer.” Someone else murmurs, invoking the name of the fakeer who had been denied rest and water in the town and had cursed the people of the town to forever be deprived of love.
Shivdas knows his way around the worn stone steps and the wonderfully manicured parks, the girdled iron staircase with the faces of cherubs all chiselled out. He rings the bell and hears the cries of ‘Undertaker, undertaker.’ Even with the crowds gathered outside their house, the Sharmas would rather pretend that they were not the ones to have an ‘incident’. Not pretending would’ve made them seem like potential collaborators, and hence no one ever spoke straight about the case.
The ‘Undertaker of Hearts’ as Shivdas’s official title, for it is his business to conduct medical tests to confirm the incurable disease. He has the equipment ready in his leather bag and since it’s rumoured that the disease is contagious, no one stays in the vicinity of the patients when tests are being made.
He is led quickly, through a maze of rooms all standing on interconnected arches. In the absence of required number of bricks, the soldiers had ingeniously made use of stone balancing the structures against each other so as to make arches that spanned countless houses. Each balcony was connected to a room in some other house and each house had atleast ten to twelve openings into the rooms of people across neighbourhoods. Only the denizens of these narrow lands, who had grown up witnessing the varied turns could find their way around the maze.
Walking swiftly, Shivdas is thrust in a small room branching out of the main building frame, a boy sits with his toes curled inwards. His family had left him alone when he had told them about his love. He’s watched at a distance by the neighbours who no longer remember the boy whom they had seen growing up, but as a menace that they had missed uprooting earlier.
Shivdas holds his arm and checks the pulse. He asks him a few private questions and receives answers only in murmurs. He notes down the names spoken and then asks for privacy. The boy erupts with barely contained agony and tells him the details, and moans with that whimpering sadness that Shivdas could only associate with one thing.
“This is a fatal case.” He faces the parents outside, trembling with the fears that they know have come true. The mother howls, and rushes into the room, where she finds sitting in the centre of the empty room, love’s latest victim. Shivdas leaves them be and smokes a cigarette with the father, chalking out the way ahead.
“Are you sure?” There’s pitiable pleading in the voice of the father.
Shivdas goes to the boy and this time, for the sake of his family, shouts at him. “Do you know what they do to those who profess false love?”
The boy neither responds and neither does he blink when Shivdas shows him the mural that he opens with a flick of his hand, a warning, a modern day martyr based not on visions, but snapshots of a real jail that has been built with the explicit purpose of scaring the pimply faced teenagers who have romanticised the idea of suffering.
His next tactic is a scientific one, and one that is an essential test for the younger victims. He drags the boy by his emaciated collar bone through the backalleys and into his ambulance, where waiting for him is the once famous courtesan, Maya, laying out her delirious curls, still thick enough to catch the full attention of the crazed boy. He leaves both of them to their devices in the back of his car, while he smokes cigarette after cigarette, hoping darkly that this one too, doesn’t succumb.
Shivdas knows that it is important to provide people a space in Dilbaag; even if it is in the 2×5 flatbeds of his car, so that two people could be their own selves and uninhibitedly love, think about loving, imagine its possibilities. Surrounding the squat bench in his van are the messages written by lovers and left for posterity, to reassure others like them of the possibility of love.
In these ambrosial hours before freedom, Shivadas prays, laying his calloused fingers lovingly on the frayed pages of an album filled with the pictures of those he helped carry to the morgue. There are several pimply faced young girls who hadn’t known what had happened to them; but had felt something so intense that they had resorted to cutting their veins, and there are decorated middle aged women who after having had lived off the most of their lives in sterility were unable to bear the terrible longing of the pleasure that was rightfully theirs but hadn’t come. There are wrinkly old men who had suddenly thrown off the cloak of decorum to fall hard for women fifty years younger than them. He repeats each of their names with a reverence without which he couldn’t have been the Undertaker.
He stays the longest at the pages of the youngest victims, the ones hardest hit by the severe rush of emotions that would seize their minds, curdling their blood and would curse them to a longing so strong that even death couldn’t cure it. These were the innocents, who had to be restrained in the same shackles as rabies patients. And all the while, he would play Nusrat Ali Khan’s swan-song, the only one gifted by God to sing about love; both divine and bodily, in the same breath.
The music stops when Maya appears out of the back, crying, and Shivadas knows what must’ve happened. Maya attends solely to the grave of the Pir, imbibing love from him, in the subtle scent of roses, still emitting their scent centuries after his death. She recognises it in the living, an approximation of the divine.
“It’s love.”
“How are the parents?” Maya whispers softly, her fear showing in her eyes.
“I don’t know. They don’t seem to be the types.” He feels his palms bleeding with sweat. “You never really know.”
Shivdas lights a cigarette and tries to remember the house that he’d just been to. If there’d been a wall hanging of swords, guns or flags, then it was a sign that he could not go back. That was one of the rules that he had made for Dilbaag over the years. It was important that he remembers, for the life of the kid now depends on the sense of honour that his parents would like to present.
“Let’s go.” He says finally and leans against the van, steeling himself.
When the new residents moved into the town, they set about chiselling lanes in the enjoinedness of their town. Walls were setup, channels were created and above all, gates. Tall prickly things, topped gates were setup wherever people could put them, so that people could live within their communities.
They could not erase every linkage, for the town would’ve collapsed if they had tried that. But wherever people could, they had setup separate colonies, each with their own sign, history complete with small differences in clothes and a unique accent. All this, so that people could take pride in their works. And now, pride dictates that the community with children infected with love had to kill them. For confirmation.
“Let me talk to him.” Shivdas says, reeling still with the agony of an ancient love, knowing fully well that his approach wasn’t meant to work. Much of his work had to do with making the lovers ready to face up with the inevitable.
Shivdas is a patient man. Born rotund with a prepossessing sense of calm, he has the God given gift of using silence to eviscerate responses even from the mute. For three hours straight, locked in a room, the kind doctor hears the moanings of love. No one in Dilbaag can bear to do it anymore, they’ve forgotten the courage required to take the unburdening of the heart.
A hearing alone would suffice for most of the cases, like that of an old woman who suffered painful pangs of regrets for dying without ever looking her one true love in the eye, and as her imminent death would’ve incinerated the secrets in the hidden cavities of her heart, she started crawling on all fours, scraping her nails on uneven ground to reach the house where he once lived. She took the painful journey so many times, that her bleeding knees created a tract, a pilgrimage of her regrets.
Shivdas had to hear only with his eyes, rendered large with the aspect of his experience; for having had gone through thousands of such confessions — so many in-fact that they merged together like an abstract painting with the hues of pinks, violets, violent blues, and dazzling white — he had realised that he had the god given gift to absorb the pain, much more than what people could bear to tell.
The hearing had done it for several patients, after which the unloaded patients would often sit dumb-stuck at hearing such outpouring which threatened to upend their lives. Shivdas sat listening sympathetically to the innocuous tale of exchanged glances across the street from the mismatched windows, a foot apart, and even though they had been part of different colonies. Two doors between the colonies had remained unsealed, and it so happened that the two lovers opened the door, always at the same time and filled the hours of the day with the tiny space that for them was their universe. The words start faltering, sputter and then stop. Rasesh doesn’t know how to conclude his own story. Shivadas has to cajole, convince and conspire.
He had once spent 3 days in silence with a young woman who had gone on endlessly about her love and it had only taken Shivdas a single sentence to find a devastating loophole in her story. The girl would never forgive Shivdas for breaking her adolescent heart, held together only by her fear to disconfirm for herself what she already knew.
The truly difficult cases are the ones where Shivdas has to break his own heart open, to search for answers, because he believes that if there is a yearning in the heart that has been placed by the Gods themselves, then there must be a solution too hidden somewhere. Shivdas can see the mobs getting restless outside the house and knows time is running out.
“Listen to me. This isn’t a possession of some sort or an incurable disease. Your heart has been joined to someone else. There’s no reason for it. What matters is, do you feel it?”
The boy nods. Shivdas grabs him tightly by his arm.
“You may choose to forget, in which case the pain might remain, and you will live. Or you may attempt to unite with your lover, in which case you will die.”
Shivdas doesn’t have to hear the answer, he can see it in his eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Rasesh, Aman.” He invariably gives the name of both himself and his beloved, the only way that he feels that he can now complete his name.
Shivdas walks slowly towards the anxious family standing in wait on the balcony. They are all afraid to enter a house defiled by love. The boy’s embittered mother whispers terrible swear words, and his father stands alone near the kitchen sink, trying to repair a leak that is beyond help.
He sits down on the verandah, as the pitter patter of unseasonal rains begins and asks for 3 cups of strong tea and a savoury snack. He brings Rasesh out, who’s crying no more.
With all the experience of the thousands of cases, Shivdas still asks the boy the very same question that he had asked to the first person he had treated.
“What made you feel that you’re in love?”
“I felt it, the moment that I saw him, I knew, and so did he.”
He knows that these are the most difficult cases, the ones about straightforward love, complicated by the uncrossable boundaries set in stone of the constitution of the little city’s heart.
“His name is Aman isn’t it? Did you know that his left eye has a small squint and that he suffers from a limp and a stammer… “
Shivdas stops at the third defect, for he felt as if he is burning under the heat of unmitigated hatred and he knows that if he utters one more word, he will be permanently stonewalled against all hope of being heard.
Shivdas smiles, for in these moments all he can remember is Parvati. In a not too distant past, Shivdas had encountered a soul so pure that he still reeled with the impact of knowing her once in his life — Parvati. Even before the heart had made its decision, his mind had worked upon the limitations that stopped him from entering the garden of love. They had been separated by their creeds; a distance so great that it was unpardonable for them to be even seen together in the city. They had met by accident, as she passed in a bus and their eyes had met with a spark so electric that it raised not just his hair, but those of everyone around them as well.
Their love remained within the realm of the bus-stop: the litany of introduction and cares, the yearnings for meetings, the bickerings and eventual resolutions, all flowing from their eyes without ever needing a word to sanctify it. And so they remained, waiting for a bus that would never come, staying on either sides of the road, just so that their eyes could converse for the brief moment that they saw each other. In all his dreams, Shivdas has never crossed the road.
They had found peace in their love, and for years they lived their lives around the bus-stop. Till the day, by pure accident, a bus rammed the stop and crushed her.
Parvati’s father could not comprehend the sadness of the hospital orderly who had helped them through the difficult days and seemed more heartbroken than anyone else in the family. The shy girl had never once mentioned the feeling of love but had repeated his name so many times that it had puckered her lips in that shape of Shivdas.
In the brief period where her body was under observation, Shivdas had prayed fervently, donated his hair, money and time to the priest who catered to such lost souls, and it gave him no succour. The priest had told him half way through that there was a god who would help him, but also that the god was expensive to please and meticulous about the rituals that needed to be followed. Shivdas had followed the superstitions unquestioningly and in that process, Parvati had died.
Her parents had later said that she continuously repeated only one name in her fevered state and that when she had finally opened her eyes for a brief moment, it was as if she was searching for someone who wasn’t there, and that she died with the most unspeakable agony held in her eyes. Two days later, when Shivdas returned and learnt about her last request, he knew that he had been cheated out of his last chance to be redeemed.
Shivdas gave up on religion that instant and had instead embraced God. He wanted to die immediately, but before that could happen, there was the matter of the death report that he wanted to see. The results were astounding – for Parvati’s heart had swelled to an enormous size with engorged veins punishing her body by beating with a yearning too strong for her frail body to contain. It wasn’t the poison that had killed her finally, but the heart that had burst.
The doctors were fascinated by the case and asked the heart to be kept in the damp darkness of the hospital room where it was preserved in formaldehyde, drained of every last drop of blood. No one disturbed the little corner in the anatomy section where Shivdas setup a shrine. He remained there for so long that the putrid smell of formaldehyde became for him the most precious fume, reminding him of his unfulfilled love. He would’ve remained in that room had it not been for the widowed nurse who understood Shivdas’s pain and had transformed his suffering by asking him just this, “Would you rather face the pain of bereavement yourself, or let her face it alone?”
From that day onwards, Shivdas embraced his pain, for if it was to be done in the memory of Parvati, then everything was bearable. In time, Shivdas became a container for the love, not just of himself, but those of others. In time, he set about on ambulance rounds to ask specially for the hopeless cases, where the source of the illness was unresolved and the hopelessness of the patients was confirmed. These cases were marked with a circle and a cross, the secret markings of love that the medical staff had adopted amongst themselves.
“We may have to shift him back to Ruhbaad.”
Shivdas told the father, conveying also the helplessness of the case in the process, for it was only the terminally ill who were left on the outskirts, with a pretend funeral to help the family move on.
The bureaucrats of Dilbag had used the logic of cost to prevent people from deviating from norms. The more crucial the norm was, the higher was the cost of flouting it. The highest cost was to be paid in the cases where people eloped outside of their communities, since the city didn’t have space for the intermixed couple to stay, by design, therefore, they camped in the outskirts still unrecognised by any official map under a makeshift banner of ‘Ruhbaad’.
Ruhbaad was the only aberration where mixing could take place. No one liked planning in the new city of Ruhbaad and its growth happened in circles of love. In the centre, there were the two mounds; the grave of a Pir and the second mound in which lay his divine lover. When bulldozers had tried to run over the grave, they had been rolled back, as if by some unseen force which also broke the spades that had tried to breach the earth, and the bewildered contractors had to write up a report stating that the topography was unsuitable.
All that the contractors were able to do was to break the walls surrounding Ruhbaad and fix warning flags there. This was misinterpreted by eloping lovers as signs of invitation. Long after the government had given up its claim, the site became the flourishing quarter of the refugees who had come from the various corners of the city, to finally live.
There is no electricity, water or even roads that lead to Ruhbaad. It has to be discovered afresh for each case, as if the only way for true love to establish its resolve is to believe that such a thing can exist. The city and its officials are constrained by the boundaries of logic and rationality. They can never acknowledge that hundreds of lovers live life in a state of permanent bliss in this city that does not exist.
The lovers arranged the city according to their own logic. It is as if they can see the love emanating from the two mounds in the centre of their town. They ask each newcomer to have faith in this magic of seeing love, for everyone in Ruhbaad has seen so many miracles in the ragtag colony of ignored beings, that they cannot imagine living any other way. Everyone in Ruhbaad can do exactly as they would do if they loved the town in the same way they loved each other.
The colony had been bulldozed several times in the due course of official performance of duty to offset the suspicion. Not that there was any political support for Ruhbaad, but each time the police tried to enter, the lovers emerged and stood guard, with their chests bared to the metal prongs, ready to die with a forgiving look and a smile. Dilbaag officials couldn’t understand why they were not feared and instead they felt fear while facing the rag-tag crew of lovers. Ruhbaad, in the final official assessment, was unworthy to be demolished.
The hate groups which did the lynchings did not enter Ruhbaad, for in doing so, they would have had to cross the limits of their own city and they couldn’t think of something so radical as that. Shivdas and the boy’s father work out the logistics and even the mother, wailing, agrees, for even in her state, she understands that this is the only chance for her boy.
The wailing from the next room alerts Shivdas. The grandparents who have gotten to know about the entire affair cannot hold themselves. Shivdas knew that the mobs won’t be far, ready to kill. He hears something else, and trusting his intuition, he opens the opposite window and brings in the crying boy hanging on the cloth line, technically on the other side of the community divide line, listening to every word that Shivdas had exchanged with Rasesh, and in one stroke breaks down two impossible taboos.
“Aman?”
“Yes.” The boy stares at him with defiance.
“Are you ready to die for Rasesh?” Shivdas looks into Aman’s unblinking eyes, even more determined that those of his lover.
“Rasesh.” Aman screams. He doesn’t have to wait for an answer because wafting in from the other room is an overpowering stench of formaldehyde, that can only have been love.
Shivdas calls Aman’s family to the common door and calmly, with the last dregs of his tea, he explains the scientific nature of the affliction that has now permanently taken root in the two families. He can see that the father has gone into a shock and isn’t able to listen.
The decision in this case has fallen solely upon the mother, who has kept her senses. She rises, to the surprise of everyone and gives the boys her blessing. No one stops her when she leads them out of the secret way in the kitchen. A mob has gathered and ask for the boys. Shivdas can see the family repairing the joint door, stuffing it with rocks and cement.
“They’re dead! Both of them consumed poison.” Shivdas wails with a voice filled with poetic grief, piercing the bricks that have not yet congealed. Maya has opened the portable coffin for the locals to see. Hundreds of angry eyes witness the event, angry that they are deprived of so good a beating. Shivdas knows that if any one of them asks for proofs of death, then the game is over.
“Shame on you, for dividing the lovers and making them take this way. You’ve lost countless children because of these divisions. At what point will you stop.” An aggrieved mother asks, the pain of her loss surfacing at this retelling.
The surfacing of the guilt and the drama shakes the crowd and Shivdas can start moving away. Stones litter their way, but no one blocks their path. No one picks up the stones, and that is more important.
Most go inside, but some, fuelled by the tension of the scene start throwing stones. These come first in fusillades. As the ‘dead’ bodies are moved through the streets, Shivdas can swear that he can hear the sounds of people weeping. A rose is dropped in his path, though he doesn’t know from which window or which community it comes from. In total 111 roses land on the bodies, each probably representing a lost cause. Shivdas transports the two at great personal risk into the bleak land of lovers. The procession is stopped at the end by a boy, not older than perhaps 17-18. He must’ve set himself up as a local goon.
“We want to see.” They have tridents longer than themselves. Maya slides the wheels out of the coffin and Shivdas knows that only surprise can save them. He pushes the coffin with a mighty heave from above and sends the three of them down steerlessly. He himself runs into the backalley with the hooligans chasing him. The surprised group scatters at first and then chases the undertaker into the impossible lanes. Shivdas crosses the boundary and finds himself face to face with the hooligans of the other community. He winds through lanes, alternating between the communities, to run further away. He’s stopped at the ancient bridge, now disused, and, unused to the running, collapses at the centre of it. The boys from both sides reach him, but instead of attacking him, attack one another. Shivdas jumps from the bridge and floats down, to the bank where his van is.
“You made them fight again?” Maya laughs through the concussion of cigarette smoke that she’s released into the van. Shivdas is too shaken to smile. He starts the van and stops only when he’s reached the far end of the city.
When he sees them rise from his coffin, he forgets his own pain. In the unmapped land, their steps are loaded with springs, their eyes look at the dark sky like caged animals returning into the jungle for the first times in their lives.
“Let me help you.” Maya says as she heads for the shrine, where she’d wait till the next case.
“I can see the path.” One of them speaks. Shivdas has heard of this invisible trail of roses from the mad residents of Roohabad. The boys hug him before they run off into the darkness of the place.
Alone, under the banished sky, he feels her eyes on him again, a feeling that haunts him every single time that he takes an unrequited love to the grave. For that instant, he’s alive.
Anit Singh was born on the caravan of an army Cantonments and ended up collecting stories from all over India. He studied Liberal Arts from Ashoka University and currently lives in Pune with his lovely wife.
Beautiful story. ♥️