Four times it had died. Four times its little heart had crumpled.
by devashish makhija
I T IS SAID that the silkworm dies four deaths. It moults four times during its life, stiffening each time like a cadaver, the skin bursting open at the head before it re-emerges, bigger and stronger than the last time. Each time though the chances of it living again are as high as the chances of it dying. But it is in its nature to take that chance. So it does. Perhaps, much later, in retrospect, it realises that all the four chances were well worth the taking, when its silk cocoon breaks and the worm emerges a silver moth and spreads its wings for the first time.
That first flight must be truly exhilarating. Four times it had died. Four times its little heart had crumpled. Four times it had seen the dark, stifling confines of its sticky shell. And four times it had struggled to push to the light. And now it had wings. Soft star dust blew off them as it crinkled its wing tips to flap harder and arced into the sky. For it, for too long, life and death were interlocked pieces of the same whole. And suddenly neither of the two even mattered.
This thought seemed to blow through my head each time I inhaled the highway breeze. I had died many times too I think. Pieces or whole, how does it matter? When a piece of me died, the rest of me seemed to shut down in mourning. That counts as a full death I suppose. So I think I have died before. I had died when my mother died. I had died when I had been struck a full blow to the head and told that I was different because I prayed in a different place from the man who struck me. I had died when the joint family we were a part of, fragmented. I had died, and still die, each time I look around me and wonder what all the desperation everyone feels is for.
I die.
But then I find myself breathing. And breathe some more so I have some breath to lose when I die next.
I inhale the highway breeze now. Where I stand, the breeze is confused, like the bafflement at the point of contact between two rival armies, whose foot-soldiers charge at each other without fully knowing why they do. One breeze has come from the sea. It has travelled over sand, negotiated brick buildings, slipped under car-wheels, rushed through open windows and doors and now sprints along the potholed road, slowing down once in a while, confused by the chaos. The second breeze is the result of a sea of cars, bikes and buses, angrily surging in the other direction, driven by obstinate headlights, leaving behind a current of smoke. It is confused too, but its bewilderment is of a different kind. It has no idea how it came to be.
Where I stand, these two breezes collide. But when they meet, they interlock. The smells mix, their natures merge. What’s left is a whirlpool of what was, what is and what could be. I stand there for a long while, inhaling all of it, hoping to die a little. But it’s not my turn yet.
I write all the time. She had only written something once before. Words were my wine. Wine to her was more than just a word, and when she’d had more than her fair share of it, she couldn’t even spell it right, she said, and laughed. I asked if I could read it. ‘I don’t think I want you to,’ she said. We seemed like two starkly different pieces then, roughly hewn from dissimilar substances. I sent her a little poem I had written. I had called it ‘smudge’. I presume it shifted something inside her because several hours later she sent me a small poem she’d written. She wrote it after reading mine. It didn’t have a title when it arrived. I asked her what she had called it. She said ‘Fall.’ I bit.
I replied ‘Fallen…’ and sneaked in a tentative smiley.
And somewhere in the ether around us, we interlocked. Something of me fit into her spaces and something of her into mine.
Now I see interlocks everywhere. Over the sea is a scattering of crows, flapping so low that their feet skim the water’s surface. They flap their wings hard but face the wind. This keeps them static in mid air. It makes no sense why they do that. Does the reverse direction of the flow of water below them delude them into believing that they are indeed moving forward? Or are they revelling in the delicious pointlessness of the activity, doing something that leads to nothing else, simply to defy the inherent ruthlessness of this ambitious city? I’ll never know. But sitting there and watching them, they seem to me like big black butterflies. In those few minutes they have elevated themselves from the dark, sooty urban scavengers that we deride them for being. In those few minutes the crows have died. They have become beautiful. And perhaps a few minutes from now the same crows will live again. But their two identities will have interlocked. And nothing this city does from this day on, can ever disengage those two realities for them again.
I am with a friend. We sit facing different directions. Our silences are distinct. The reasons for them even more so. But the soft shuffle of the grass near our feet is the same for us both. And in that common sound our presences interlock. She is in love with a man whose love is divided over two women. I look at the back of her head and want to say that I am in a similar predicament, but I don’t. On our way here, we were part of the breeze that the sea of cars blows with. She slipped her headphones on my ears and made me listen to a folk song that she had composed. It sounded pure, as if I was inside her head while she gave birth to the tune. Through her song I heard her wail. Two verses into the tune, I caught her in the rear view mirror. She was murmuring to the confused breeze. For a strange brief moment the breeze died, as if she had whispered some heart-breaking truth to it. But soon it blew again, and with it her eyes closed. I watched her devour the wind in the rear view. And when the song had ended, we were sitting here, our feet on grass.
There were interlocked lovers along the whole length of the promenade. They were all in different stages of fitting into each others’ lives. The paved path along the sea front was made up of dark and light red curved bricks, each one’s convex side fitted into the other’s concave. The pathway seemed symbolic of the entire city. The bricks were interlocked. But when the rains were harsh they’d come undone. The very nature of their interlocking would work against them and the bricks would slip out, get washed away by the floodwaters, and crumble to pieces somewhere else.
She broke our interlock then. She slipped out a silk scarf, bunched her hair and tied it with it. Some part of the breeze died again. It had lost its reason to be there. She touched the silk and said, ‘its so soft’. It reminded me of a silk moth out there somewhere. I told her to turn to the sky and say ‘thank you’. She looked at me strangely, but didn’t ask why. She turned to the sky and said ‘thank you’.
The breeze changed direction.
The crows were crows again.
A silk moth on the other side of the world flew a little higher on the wind.
She leaned in, cupped my face in her hand, and repeated ‘thank you’.
I died.
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Devashish Makhija has researched and assisted on Black Friday (dir. Anurag Kashyap) and was the chief assistant director on Bunty aur Babli (dir. Shaad Ali). He has written numerous screenplays, notably Avik Mukherjee’s Bhoomi and Anurag Kashyap’s Doga; has had a solo art show “Occupying Silence”; written Tulika’s bestselling children’s books When Ali became Bajrangbali and Why Paploo was perplexed and a Harper-Collins collection of short stories Forgetting. He has also written “By Two”, a story featured in the omnibus Mumbai Noir; written and directed the acclaimed short films Rahim Murge pe mat ro, El’ayichi, Agli Baar, Absent and Taandav, and the full-length feature film Oonga.