The Boat Ride

I
Maryum - Afzal

She sat uncertainly on the edge of a chair, firmly clasping the bare wooden arm with one hand and holding the tiny hands of three year old Afreen with the other. A faded scarf carelessly covered Maryum’s head, her soiled pheran bore the signs of a wretched life and her vacant eyes stared at something invisible on the table in front of her.

On the other chair, Bilal her five year old son sat in the lap of his grandfather. Rasool Bhat, looked much older for his sixty five years, his backbone having curved under the weight of years of miserable poverty. In a faint and feeble voice he was pleading for mercy. The officer had been kind to them, having made them sit and even ordering tea, a privilege that other ordinary petitioners were not accustomed to. But he was firm and refused any consideration. Rasool Bhat tried to make another attempt, but the officer stopped him and put a hundred rupee note in his hand. His words – safety act, three years, prison - kept reverberating in Maryum’s head. She could feel the emptiness growing inside her, it was sharp and stinging. Looking at Afreen, her uncombed hair, her untidy clothes, her broken shoe, cheap trinkets, her ignorance about her own circumstances, a sudden burst of self-pity filled her up as she tried to sweep it away with the last reserves of her strength.

When Maryum turned to leave the police officer softly asked her “You still want to go back to him?” A single tear rolled down from her eyes as she again looked towards Afreen, who tugged at her pheran and stretched her hand towards her. Perhaps nothing could have given Maryum more strength, more hope at that moment than the little outstretched hand. An unsaid word hung in the air between them as she walked out of the room.

The mini bus was cramped with people, heavy conversations and a seventies Hindi movie song but Maryum was oblivious to all this, her own thoughts were crowded. She kept looking out of the window as images from the last six years, some blurred memories, and a few moments frozen by time kept flashing past her. The first time she had seen Afzal from a distance; their eyes had met; her shy, his expressive and dreamy. The day of their wedding when she wore her anxiety in a red embroidered shalwar suit, the first words they exchanged that day, the promise of enduring love. The day he had taken her to Pahalgam; she had sat close to him, self-conscious and perplexed, talking incessantly in a low voice about her naïve and unassuming demands of life. He had talked about mountains, about an imaginary world beyond them, about the river, its momentum, its undaunted will. She had liked his exuberance, his optimism but her simple mind was unable to comprehend his fantasies; worse she was scared of their fragility and his vulnerability.
A winter later, the realities of life had struck hard shrinking Afzal’s large canvas of dreams. He had tried his hand at many odd jobs but was unable to find a proper employment. Now he ferried people across Jhelum from his village to the next in a decrepit boat. After the militants had burnt down the old wooden bridge people had fallen back on this ageing mode of transport. In those days he had made sufficiently enough to provide for their basic needs of survival. But the monotony of a mundane existence along with added responsibility of Bilal, who was born in the first year of their marriage, seemed to have diminished his appetite for dreams. He no longer spoke about them to Maryum. She never asked.

II
Afzal - Naheed

Attired in various shades of dark, clouds had suddenly started assembling on what had otherwise been a bright sunny afternoon. The capriciousness of the weather could perhaps only be matched by the vagaries of human nature. Ever since the makeshift bridge was built, fewer people used Afzal’s boat now. The few who came were either old or infirm or those who would want to avoid the bunker at the other end of the bridge. Noticing the rancor in the sky, Afzal decided to start for home early with just a couple of passengers. As he began to untie the tethered boat, a soft shout called out from behind, he turned to see Naheed pacing towards him. The glow of her sculpted face, the rhythm and the grace of her movements, the dark waving hair and the distant and blurry gaze gave her a mystical look. She was beautiful, so beautiful that it would make Afzal conscious of himself as he gently rowed across the river. Naheed remained absorbed in her own thoughts.

For many days Afzal kept waiting, hoping to see her come back, hoping to see her sit at the far end of his boat, hoping she would hear the stirring’s inside his heart. The day she came he held out his hand to help her sit in the boat, their eyes met, his expressive, her silent and melancholic. When she was leaving he asked her, if she would come back again. Her eyes answered.

Whenever he thought of her after that, he could feel something flower inside him, something he thought had decayed long ago; he could feel his heart throb again. He would restlessly long to see her, but when she came they never spoke, the silence between them did, making each aware of other’s inner thoughts. Slowly they could feel the unspoken, unnamed bond between them grow; slowly they discovered togetherness and the vitality of companionship.


It had started drizzling when Naheed came one afternoon; she asked Afzal if he could row deep into the river, into obscurity. Together they looked at their flickering reflections, listened to the sound of the oar breaking the flow of the river and watched the tiny droplets of rain hurling down only to be swallowed into the unfathomable depths of the river. In that moment they wanted to find themselves in each other before they too were swallowed into anonymity. The solitude of the river was magical, it was liberating.

Afzal would share the constellation of dreams he had created, about the imaginary world that had come alive once again. Naheed too had found a repository, she would tell him about her childhood, about the child in her, about how both were usurped by cruel destiny, about her brother who was a mujahid, about how she had begged the soldiers to spare his life, about how she felt betrayed by life, about compromises; about how she found purpose in working as a courier for the mujahids, about the solace she found in rebellion, about how she wished she could erase everything and live her life, just once. She also told him about her claustrophobic marriage to Rashid, twelve years older; about how he had become a symbol of her mutilated life; about humiliation; about her hatred for him; about paranoia.

After soaking in the rain and into each other that day, they met more frequently but now every separation felt longer. Love was tormenting. He wanted to leave everything behind; any thoughts of Maryum were barricaded by his desire for Naheed. He wanted a new beginning. For her the beginning wasn’t possible without erasing the past, without annihilation.

III
Rashid-Afzal/Naheed-Maryum

Every day at twelve twenty, Rashid would pull his cart to the same corner beneath the benevolent shade of the Chinar Tree. Ten minutes later the bell at the Islamia School would ring and small boys and girls, in various shades of green, would flock to his ice cream cart for their favorite flavor. Rashid was of a sturdy built with a protruding belly; his bulging eyes, with the balding head and an unshaven face gave him a rigid and grim look. His reticence added to the stern countenance in a good measure. In his strife against poverty words were of little use; he had built his life brick by brick, layer by layer to a relative comfort. When it is a fight for subsistence, concepts of love and such have little meaning, the equation with life is simpler and more straight-forward. So when a distant relative proposed Naheed’s hand for him to his mother, he looked for happiness like everyone else would have. It was only abbreviated by some of his doubts that had accumulated after many rejections.

On the day of the wedding, he had walked to her house with a slight anticipation in his step but overcame it as soon as she had said ‘yes’ thrice. For the next few days he clumsily tried to get used to her presence but failed to notice her indifference. It took him sometime to realize that something was amiss; gradually the indifferent look in her eyes had turned derisive. At first he was dismissive of it as just his imagination, but the intensity and the consistence of her contempt made him feel small, his fears about his inadequacies had snowballed into a huge self doubt. Unable to cope with this, his angst and helplessness turned into aggression. Often Naheed would wake up with bruises and humiliation. She never retaliated, letting it just simmer inside her.

A thousand thoughts and a thousand conflicts jostled in Afzal’s head – about Maryum, about his kids, about life with them, about life without them, about the world without Naheed, about the world beyond the mountains, the translucent water, the desolate river. The entire trajectory of his life spread in front of him as he stood, unsteadily, opposite the Chinar tree waiting for Rashid’s cart. His hands were trembling when he put his hand inside the pocket of shirt and trying to remember the directions from Naheed: pull the pin, throw in 6 seconds. He could feel its coarseness, its absoluteness, its violence; he could feel the life in it and the death in it. In one moment he had made his choice, in another he wanted to turn back. But the mesmerizing beauty of Naheed and escape from a dreary life stood in his way. When he saw Rashid in the distance, he could feel the turbulence in his head pulling him apart. He felt a churn in his abdomen and a pungent fluid rose through his stomach to his head, his eyes were blurry and a haze spread in front of him. Everything was indistinct except the beautiful face of Naheed, everything was abrupt, his pulling the pin, the bell ringing, his falling to the ground and the dust rising. When it settled the Chinar had been maimed forever, its leaves were burnt and the shades of green had turned red.