Chapter 40 #2
It started with Mama, ended with Mama and had high notes and low notes in Zuvzuv.
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“Baba,” Yathaarth handed him his empty water bottle.
“You want more water?” Atharva sat back on the folding chair and reached for the thermos.
“Ello,” he pushed the bottle up. Atharva frowned, eyeing the empty bottle.
“Arth, beta, what do you want?”
“Baba ello!” He pushed again.
“Wait, I will have to check how hot the water is…” he began to reach for the thermos again but his son let out a wail.
“What is it?”
“Baba ello! Baba ello!” He cried, thumping his hands on Atharva’s thighs.
“He wants you to say hello to his bottle,” Iram came out of the tent they had set up on the edge of a step hill, now layered in ice like dusting of white frosting over chocolate cake.
The sun glinted off bright and heavy and Atharva pinched his eyes, looking at the bottle.
He brought it to his face. Yathaarth stopped wailing.
“Hello,” Atharva said to the bottle like a fool.
And his wail resumed. “Baba ello! Baba ello!”
“I said hello to your bottle, beta…”
“Baba ello!!!!” And this time his eyes teared up.
Really, really teared up with a deluge. Atharva went to pick him up but he fell down on the snow on his bum, hard and resisting.
His snowsuit was thick but still Iram reached for him.
He refused to be picked up. Atharva gaped at his bottle in helplessness.
“Maybe he is hungry…” she guessed. “The terrible twos are coming.”
“Let’s get lunch…” Atharva reached down again and forcefully plucked his son up, kicking and screaming with snow in his fists. “Baba ello!” He flailed his arms and brought one to Atharva’s ear. He hissed, the snow sticking to his bare ear.
“Ooooh!” Iram exclaimed. Atharva’s eyes widened.
“Dil-ba-ro!” He mock-growled, holding him down with one arm on his lap and using the other to grab his bottle and bring it to his ear.
“Hello?” He said into the bottle, pretending it was a phone.
Yathaarth whooped in glee, wet eyes suddenly lit up.
“Can I talk to Yathaarth, please?”
And his son bounced in delight. Atharva brought the bottle down to his little ear.
“Ello!”
“Ask if you can talk to Baba now.”
“Ello! Baba ello!”
Atharva smothered his tiny tantrumy toddler with kisses, eliciting louder, happier sounds. The bottle fell to the ground and Iram must have reached for it because he was busy wrestling and mock-biting his way through the cutest, sassiest, happiest little boy.
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The sun was mild, hanging low on the horizon in the distance. It flared up the last of its warmth into the sky. His wife sat with her head on his shoulder, a shawl shared between their shoulders. His son slept peacefully in her lap as a small fire burned in front of them.
“Did you go to sleep?” He asked.
“Mmmm…” her head rolled from his shoulder to his chest. He adjusted his position to let her rest there.
“This is beautiful,” Atharva murmured, knowing she was half-asleep and hardly registering his words.
“I had travelled the world and still called Kashmir heaven. The fact is as indisputable today as it was yesterday. But you have opened my perspectives to newer versions of heaven. I was the one who contested Kashmir’s physical beauty with its intellectual beauty once.
Then forgot it myself. Skies, winds, waters, birds, trees…
they settle in different combinations across this earth.
Each beautiful in its own right. And yet where we settle with our people is where heaven begins to settle.
It’s all here, myani zuv… It’s all here.
Jannat and swarg. Nark and patal lok. In Mumbai and Delhi and PoK and London, in Jammu and Yorkshire and Shimla.
Inside me. And inside you. It’s all here…
And it’s taken me a lifetime to realise it that heaven and hell are what I make of my life. ”
“Our life.”
Atharva swallowed, craning his neck to meet her sleepy, half-closed eyes.
“I thought you had gone to sleep.”
“You keep talking…” she mumbled, a sweet smile on her mouth. He reached down and planted a kiss there.
“We forgot to get your guitar.”
“Next time,” he pressed a kiss to her temple.
“You are giving us so much time…”
“I am fortunate to get this time to give to you. If I was in Srinagar, I wouldn’t have been able to see all the ways Yathaarth’s phone says hello.”
She giggled. He kissed her again — “Or steal snacks from your stock. Or sit like this on a weekday with you both, in a place that is so different but so peaceful.”
“You have work. I see you working at nights.”
“There is work, myani zuv, but it’s mostly desk work, research, admin. And I like to work at nights to not spiral into negative thoughts again. That’s the most vulnerable time.”
“I know… mmmm…” she wiggled her arm. He reached out and slipped his hands under Yathaarth.
“What are you doing?”
“Give him to me, you have been holding him for a while now.”
Iram relented, and Atharva carefully brought his son into his arms. The boy was already tall for his age.
Now he was outgrowing his arms. A year more and he would have to curl to fit in here.
Atharva reached down and nuzzled his son’s hair.
His face was so beautiful. He tried to see his mother there sometimes.
And ended up seeing his father. If he searched for his father, his mother would make her presence felt.
“What are you thinking?”
“How surreal it is that we spend our entire life escaping our past and then search for it in our children.”
“They bring life full circle, isn’t it?”
“They do. You know, when I was coming for you to PoK, everybody tried to dissuade me from taking Yathaarth. But I had to bring him. I thought you wouldn’t come back just for me.
I thought, if I had him, showed his face to you, maybe I would have a chance at convincing you to return.
It was like waving my Bhagwad Gita to you, asking you to recognise it, feel it, and come back — if not for me then for it. ”
Iram’s head lifted off his chest.
“I didn’t mean to dredge up old wounds, myani…”
“Not for your Bhagwad Gita, not for your son, not for anything else in the world,” she attested solemnly. “I always come back to you for you.”
His eyelids dropped. Sometimes she did make him shy away from the intensity of emotion she so easily unleashed.
“Hmmm… mmm mmm,” she hummed the song that they had played on repeat in the car on the way here, courtesy: their son. “Ke jee chaha, yahin… mmm hmmm… umar saari guzar ke…”
Atharva met her eyes and their smiles were identical, synchronised, as flared as the setting sun.
“Sambhal jaao, chaman walon,” he sang under his breath, careful not to disturb their sleeping son. Her head dropped back on his chest and he continued to sing. “Ke aaye din, bahaar ke.”