SIlences have a way of growing over almost everything. Like creepers. Crawling and covering the surface. Sometimes it manages to get beneath the surface as well. To establish a reign A symbiosis. F eeding a sense of false security and fed by a fear. A false calm. That Neither breaks nor remains firnly still. Throbbing inconsistently- with emotion fear and sometimes the urge to break through. But it remains held back by the turgid pull , keeping the status quo. And hence the silence grows.
My uncle didn't know what was he doing until he did it.guess like most of us. He made out with a random village boy. A boy his age. I dont know him so cannot possibly know his name. Let's give him a generic name. The most common name across villages in north india. Ram.
Ram must have been a classmate. May be a playmate. May be both to my uncle. There was a bond. And in more ways than one. His family served ours. And so he remained in the village as my uncle moved on.
He took along with him his experiences -to the high school, to his college, to his workplace...sometimes in silent glances. Sometimes very rarely in overt gestures, when he drew his hand close to another guy. and smiled. Perhaps both did. Perhaps neither.
Bonds that could have gone unexplained..but for his mother.She discovered and so did one of his six brothers. He knew it might not change. That It could not. The others were not so wise. But perhaps had greater sya in matters that mattered. He was married to a girl. Almost as tall as him. Perhaps lovelier. Adventurous and bound by convention.
Her mind moulded by her father.and the absence of her mother-Sita, who passed away when her daughter was only 11. The daughter adored her father. She was proud of him and herself. She could never bring him shame. Perhaps a flaw.
She discovered her husband. Heard his rants, abuses. His own unhappiness. And also all his other relationships. An orgy of them.
She continued to toe the line. The line she was taught to be the right one. To stick by her husband. "Reform him. Through Patience and perseverance. "
Wasn't she aware that it is his preference? Perhaps an unchangeable fact. Did she decieve herself? As the law does? Perhaps. The illusion often helps.
'It is only an anomaly. A diversion, Or something that one can be cured of. After all, it isn't in the order of nature. Or so says the law.
And what's a man to do when left with such a woman. A woman who was only following Sita (or was it her absence.) He could consult Ram. Remember. But Ram too has been gone for a long time now. Lost somewhere in the crowd. As it is, he never taught him, what to do in case he met sita's daughter. Ram anyway never had a daughter. Not until the time we knew him.
Perhaps get her married to another man. Perhaps find her an illicit partner. But all this stretched the silence. The silence left behind. The silence that hung over them like a thin cloud. A thick coagulation of constructed truths.
Both, too painfully thin to be stretched. And hence the silence remains.
But under it's firm surface some things break.Even illusions. Illusions long held.
The pus oozes out of the wounds. And spreads beneath the surface, entering other territories. Newer spaces. Spaces as yet undefined. Where the truth is not yet known. About whom he likes to touch. Whom would he like to lust after. But these truths can't be explored in a transparent bubble. The pus coagulates on the surface.
And new silences form.
