The curve of the street was like a horseshoe magnet. The houses pressed so close together that you could read the time from the neighbour’s kitchen clock, if you cared to look. Even the aroma from the adjacent kitchens wandered freely past the curtains hung between the homes. The muddled configuration of the houses was bound to give a stranger a tough time finding allotted destinations.
Habib uncle had lived across from our house ever since I was born, slowly turning a permanent fixture of my eyes. Just as a tree becomes part of the window frame, his daily movements became a twinkle to my eyes. The lamp of his sitting room always marked my awakening and the chair aligned exactly at an angle of my view point that filled every thought he held. The creak of his chair, the occasional cough, and, more often, his yawns were sensory niceties I would freely hold onto. For some reason, he was a topic at our dinner table. My mother would often describe him as a man from another state living in a vacuum, traceless and clueless. He lived like a dot in the cosmos, completely devoid of family. He was the very epitome of tranquillity, held together by stillness and solitude. It was evident from his room that an infinite, calm and silence was the family he had left.
The wheel of time eventually landed me at a university campus out of state. That four-year gap was more than just a stretch of time spent with books and campus friends; it was a void where Uncle Habib still lingered in the furthest corner of my imagination. When the turning wheel finally dropped me back in my homeland, it was enough to show me how relentlessly things shift with the passage of time. Returning to the street, the changes were stark. I noticed, for instance, that the Kapoor roof had been patched with a slightly different tile—the way a wound heals in a shade that is almost, but not quite, the original skin. I noticed that the elm outside number seven had been trimmed on one side only: the side that had once blocked Habib’s view of the far corner. But the washed-off walls, the little street shop, and, most visibly, the water tap at the end of the street had all faded into oblivion.
None of these announced anything. They just pointed out for serious reflections.
As things began to unveil, I realized our street possessed a collective memory that lived entirely within him. It wasn’t a recorded history, nothing written, nothing spoken aloud. It was simply the memory of a man who had remained constant, while the rest of us were swept up in the restless hustle and bustle of our own lives. To a bard, these vague descriptions might have served as living verses; to me, they were just another page of the journal I had left behind four years ago on my writing desk, perhaps a lingering memory carved onto those glossy pages, revealing my secret confessions and observations. He held his eyes on us the way gravity holds things: invisibly, without intention, simply as a consequence of what he was. Deep within his sunken eyes, he carried the faint impression of an elusive hope, God knows for what!
Until the lamp failed to ignite one random evening, grey Tuesday in February. It remained off that night, and the next. By the end of third day, I noticed the curtains still hung in the same position as always, but the chair was empty, and the room behind it held nothing but the tickling wall clock and the heavy presence of his absence. There was a continuous conversation between the ticking wall clock and the surrounding silence. Every stroke was heard, every quiet breath felt; more than that, his absence became the very medium through which the emptiness of the room was translated. Without him, the street looked different almost unfinished, like a sentence left suspended by a dying man on his deathbed…
Days passed, and his absence finally became undeniable when a neighbour I barely knew mentioned to my mother, in a casual tone, that he had been hospitalized five days prior. A fall. On our street, a fall was a fracturing metaphor. His fall was purely physical, but ours was moral and ethical. A fallen angel with broken wings may no longer soar in the heavens, but his dignity remains uncompromised. He had lain on his kitchen floor for nearly a full day, unnoticed, before anyone even thought to cross the threshold. Perhaps then, God sent another angel to carry him away. For though our houses stand neck-and-neck, our hearts live too far apart to carry a fallen man to the hospital.
I stood on the pavement in front of his house and though about every moment I had witnessed from my own window, every ambulance, every argument, every pocket of grief the street had generated. I understood then, with a shame that washed over me like icy water, that there had been one person on this street who always noticed, yet never spoke. That solitary lamp, those still curtains and Habib himself had held the custody of the ordinary. The silence was monstrous, swallowing up my degree and the collective wisdom my professors and co – scholars had infused in me. I felt the burden of the document labelling me postgraduate, but within me the inclusiveness had not yet been cremated. It was breathing, however feebly.
He survived. He came home six weeks later, leaning on a walking stick. For the first time, I stood at my window deliberately, with the intention of watching for the taxi to emerged over the ridge. I watched him pay the driver, his hands trembling as he drew money from his wallet. He stood at his own door for a long moment, key in hand, as though questioning whether the house still belonged to him. A chill branched through me. His slow steps and my racing hearts beats were mismatched, yet they marched ahead together. In the space between those movements, so many slipped away. He looked up. Our eyes met, but neither of us waved. But I left my curtain wide open that night: turned my lamp on, pulled my chair to face him.
It was a devastating language, spoken entirely in yellow light and wide open curtains, the only way to communicate and reach a soul already halfway buried in isolation.
BY: Malikzada Salman 11th E