Shades of Satisfaction

For a moment, Raghu thought he could not take this any more. After all, 15 years of sweat and toil had to amount to something. But then the something that he was looking for was entirely different 15 years ago. He was a wild teenager then, just opening up to the world. Wild, at least that was what he thought. People around him, had different perceptions. His dad thought he was a misguided genius, a genius nevertheless. His mom thought he was irresponsible, and could never fathom the hardships she and her husband went through in even their day-to-day life. Lower middle class families in India always equate happiness with money. Although Raghu's mother would talk of values and the virtues of "santosham param dharmam" Raghu knew that she herself was never convinced of this age old saying. He could not really articulate the logic then, but he thought his mom's idea of santosham was completely different from his. His mother looked at it as an escape route. She could not face the fact that she could not provide her children with kellogg's for breakfast, cheese sandwiches for lunch, "MAGGI" for evening snacks and paneer ki sabzi, which was raghu's favourite dish, for dinner. She could also not let her children feel that they were deprived. And that was where the "santosham" came into play. Deprivation assumes different meanings at different times in one's life. That is when one needs to equate it with necessity.As the blaupunkt softly played "Thoda hai Thode ki........" smriti noticed the cringe on his face. He had been silent for the past 1 hour, and smriti knew what he was thinking.

Raghu was wont to silence when he recollected his childhood, when dreaming of a comfortable life in his dingy shack seemed to be sacrilege. Those were not always sad recollections that made him silent… the joyous… even some of the most funny incidents of those days got him into that state of frozen speechlessness. He thought of the kind ice candy man who unfortunately dug his index finger deep into his nostrils every time he saw Raghu.. as though he invoked all his kindness from the pit of his nostrils. And beaming with his neat, yellow teeth, he would always present Raghu an orange ice stick on those unbearably hot summer days. There used to be a boatman who ferried people across the river to the neighbouring town, where rich children looked condescendingly from their cars at the passers-by. He smelt of a concoction of freshly brewed country liquor, sweat of homo sapiens, some vegetable that his wife might have spilt on him while they were having a fight and pee, which his baby might have accomplished while he was rocking him to sleep. It often left Raghu aghast with sheer fright when he offered him one of those ‘just like that’ boat rides, but the temptation of the fresh Ganges breeze, the horizon spattered with purple at sundown, the riot of colours across the sky was stronger than any noxious odour. The river… vast and endless made him feel like there was nothing wrong with his life, the strange saffron streaks of the setting sun told him that he could dream… that dream was all he could do for sustenance… that life would be beautiful. And in that one eternal moment, under the purple horizon, the Ganges breeze blowing through his hair, the nauseating odour of human pee, sweat and liquor, he felt that magic word which his mother often cheated him into believing.. ‘santosham’… this was it... this was ‘santosham’!

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeccchhh!!! Honk… honk! He was no longer with the boatman or his ‘garlicious’ fumes. That was replaced by the fresh floral bouquet smell of his car perfume. The local song that the boatman sang was now replaced by Kishore Kumar’s baritone ‘Thoda hain.. thode ki zaroorat hain’ emanating from the Blaupunkt. “Doesn’t seem like we have a great evening ahead Raghu.. you don’t seem to feel like talking at all” Smriti complained. Raghu did not respond… not because he did not care, but because he would not be bullied into talking… not today. For a moment he recalled his mother’s face, laced with years of deprivation and neglect. He recalled hearing her speak for the last time and above all, he recalled the feeling of helplessness that gripped him when they had told him that it would require a lot of money to get her up and running again. She however… never got up again. Life had always been tough, but without his mother, it seemed intolerable. His father became an incorrigible alchoholic, his brother took to loafing excessively and he took to trying to tie all the loose ends together. That was indeed a long time ago… but it all seemed like yesterday. There are wounds that heal with time; there are some that get gangrenous as time goes by. ‘Time is the best healer’ does not really apply for all categories of wounds……..

“Raghav… I don’t think this is funny! I mean what have you been doing all these days? I thought you were a bright boy, I thought we were bringing in a genius in our Ad agency when we hired you. You disappoint me… you gave the industry some of the best animations ever and your recent work is so unbecoming of you! Pray, why? Why must I always remind you that this is an unforgiving world… you don’t have space for too many mistakes,” and with that Sandeep went on and on with his tirade for another half hour. Raghu did not listen, he did not have to. There were some things in life that mattered… some didn’t. There was always this thin line between the things that mattered and that didn’t, the only difference being that with Raghu the parameters to gauge what mattered and what didn’t never matched with the rest of the world. The horizon, clean and beautiful, free of the ugly view-blocking skyscrapers mattered to him, the distinct taste of his mother’s delicately cooked lentils mattered to him, his sister’s inexpensive hand made ‘rakhi’ mattered to him… his job didn’t ! And he knew it full well that this made him a weirdo. He knew he would not last long in this job… it was way too congested to contain his creative excesses, there were too many limitations. It was like asking an eagle to fly from latitude x to longitude y, when that majestic bird would love the have the entire sky to himself. His loan bills piled up every month and in the midst of it all, something in him nudged him to dream on, because he knew somewhere in his mind that fifteen years of sweat and toil had to amount to something. He knew full well that not all dreamers made it to where an average man would call ‘success’. Some dreamers go on to become Bill Gates; some became Van Gogh while some just continue dreaming till they shut their eyes to eternity.

The next morning he woke up to another riot of purple and red across the sky at dawn, the twitter of the few birds that were left alive in the unforgiving cityscape, and decided that he no longer wanted to write Ads. He didn’t exactly know what he wanted to do for that matter, but he was sure about what he did not want to do… which in many cases is more important than the former. So it all ended with a brief farewell to Sandeep, a crisp resignation letter, a crisper release note and some last cake smearing ceremony at the office. His colleagues told him that he would be missed… he knew full well he would not be and he really didn’t want that either since he would not miss any one of them. Like always, very few people mattered to him and the ones that did mattered to him to the level of an all-absorbing obsession! Smriti loved him. She was one of those lovely women whom any man would feel blessed having in his life, yet Raghu could not bring himself to feel that way. She was perhaps too perfect for his taste, too conventional… too much like ‘what a good life partner should be’ kinds. That scared him! There was nothing weird about her… she never wanted to go out for aimless drives at 2 am in the morning; she never wanted to eat roadside food in her best clothes, she never swore when India was lousy at cricket… she had done no weird thing ever! Raghu could never love her. Leaving this city and all its associations behind would not be difficult at all………………………………………

“If you don’t hurry up with your milk, you will not be able to catch up with Raghu saab today,” was what little Krishna’s mother told her every morning when she fussed over her breakfast. “But Ma, I do want to meet Raghu saab. He makes me see,” she would reply back and immediately hasten pace of consumption………
………”Ah, so are we all here today?” Raghu beamed at a crowd of tiny heads smelling of coconut oil and neatly combed hair. “Nandu, lets see what you have got with you today,” he called out to a child in the crowd. A thin little boy in the cheapest and cleanest pair of cotton shirt and shorts stood up, and turned his head towards Raghu. He had an a lovely brown face, a beatific smile and where he should have had a pair of impish, sparkling eyes… there were two smooth mounds. He was born that way. He sensed his way out of the other seated children, counted his footsteps, kept his ears cocked up towards Raghu and approached him neatly, without tripping, without making any unnecessary mess. He presented to Raghu what he was carrying in his hands. In the picture Raghu could see a tree, it was sometime around dusk. A mother bird was flying home to her nest with food in her mouth. The chicks had open beaks in anticipation of dinner and the sky was the loveliest shade of orange that Raghu had ever seen. This child created marvel with crayons! “You are amazing Nandu. Someday you will be famous. You will be a painter someday!” “I will be?!” Nandu gasped. “They tell me I am blind, they tell me I can’t see. What is blind Raghu?” To Nandu and to all the other thirty children that Raghu tutored in his little school, ‘sight’ was an unfathomable word. They had never had it, they did not what it meant or what it was like to have ‘sight’ or be able to ‘see’. They only knew that Raghu saab could make them ‘see’, he could weave dreams for them, bring alive meadows and every blade of grass it contained, the tiniest dew drop became larger than life when they were with him. They smelt spring and autumn in the air… Raghu coloured it for them! And there he was… back to his village… back to the riverside, the boatmen who ferried people across, the fishermen’s colony and the tiny shack he had shared with his family years back. It was no longer inhabitable, yet the remnants were enough to recreate his childhood days for him. Another day was drawing to its inevitable end. Raghu was by the riverside emblazoned in a fire of the golden red setting sun. There was a riot of colours in the horizon. Fishermen were sailing back home singing strange, tuneless songs. Nandu, Krishna and Leela sat in the cool evening breeze beside him, their little ears turned towards him, their tender faces smiling and full of trust, lit up in the gold of dusk and immediately Raghu knew that fifteen years of sweat and toil had finally amounted to something. He had found the meaning of his life, this was it… this was ‘santosham’!