LIFE OF A CENTURY, FOR THE WARS OF THRONE,
IN ASHES AND DUST, WE’RE MERE TOMBS UNKNOWN.
Of all great things we wish we had, only some are “granted” to us. For everything else we have crawled, fallen, scratched a knee, broken an arm, tumbled a government, started a revolution and some probably even died. The idea of achievement is a mere silhouette shadowed by a darker companion I struggle. But, what after it’s all done? Is it really important to live a life that gives us a name worthy enough to be etched in white marble with emeralds and golden borders?
I was fourteen when my aunt shifted to a small town in Bihar. As a kid, I used to visit the place to meet my cousins in the summers and just the usual holiday a kid spends with extended family. Scorching days and humid nights would summarize the weather reports, if there were any, for the place. The damp air would revel with the chatter of the bazaar every evening as the adults would sit in the verandah for some cool air to comfort the hide, and chat about the regrets of past and expectations of the future, while the kids would run through the narrow streets yelling out of joy as they outrun the thoughts of the truncating future. By nightfall, a vivid canvas of twinkling lights of yellow bulbs and flickering lanterns would come up as if challenging their monstrous counterparts across the dark horizons. When we were visiting my aunt, after dinner every night, I would sit with my father in the verandah , and while the bazaar’s revel slowly faded away into a comfortable silence, I would look across the grills of the verandah onto the dome of a wearing structure, with falling bricks, rusted crests, a shaky spire, patches of fungus and a million stories, as if struggling to breathe.
One morning, my father took me through a cluster of huts and crowded streets full of people busy with their mundane, blinded runs towards “something big”. A rush to make it; nobody knew what “it” was to be, but they believed that when they got there they would probably be a little less blinded and little closer to their names in the marble. After a walk of about 10 minutes, we reached the stairs of a mosque-ish structure – dilapidated to ruins – with the names of lovers who wished relationships were as easy as lines carved in stone, some hopefuls who wished their names would remain alive in the slowly breathing walls and those of a few straggling souls, carved into the stones of this ruin. According to the locals and a few old men sitting around the central enclosure, which could not have been more than a 7 ft. by 7 ft. room with a stone tomb in its centre, the structure was present from times well before their great-grea grandfathers were born, and the remains buried under this magnificent architecture were of someone who could have been a Sufi saint, a local hero, a respected elder, a Mughal ambassador, a local chieftain or just anyone with evidently no more renown than an emperor, yet no less than a commoner, for amongst a million little bodies there was only one lying under a dome, with his tombstone still intact and a name still echoed while every visitor tried his wits at reading the inscription in Urdu on a couple of hundred years old piece of stone. But what’s a name that doesn’t carry a reputation? He must have been a person of immense potential. Yet, today he lies equal to any other being with time eroding the letters of his story with every passing tick of the clock.
The sun was overhead, and after a little waving to my aunt standing on the verandah, barely visible, it was time to head home for lunch. While we walked home, my father asked me if I liked visiting the place. A kid who was a reader (nerd), I absolutely loved it. So, I hopped with joy at the question and told him I loved it, while we walked back home humming songs to forget the hassles of the path. Fast forward to today, I have pondered upon it in a corner of my head. Every one of us is blinded, running crazy in a crowd of 7 billion others for thrones that can only seat one at a time, and have no more worth than a few decades of luxury. We condone our “now” for a tomb that will be dilapidated for a kid to visit, who will know no more than the story that once there was a throne.
The crowns that we wish to adorn for our kingdoms in time, know qualifications in our passion for today, and just hopes for tomorrow. These crowns have just one jewel – sitting firm under them – and those crowned have but one scepter: their present. I’m sure the one lying under the tomb doesn’t worry about how many know his name. I’m sure he didn’t even see himself being buried in a lavish room of royal dispensations and lengthy prayers. Yet, I am sure he saw himself rising in the strata of those watching him struggle for some imbecility that others considered an effort in vain. Yet, I am sure he was born the same as any. He was as able as any one of us. Yet, I’m sure, on his deathbed, he didn’t see any maze or blinded runs through them. He might have seen an unpleasant present in demise, but he closed eyes blinded to a calm past, which he had enjoyed and relished, irrespective of whether he was destined to a tomb with a corona of studded diamonds or just an earthen spot. He lived himself no more than a commoner, yet no less than an emperor, for I was just another failed visitor who tried to read his name carved on a stone that was laid a couple of hundred years ago, still eroding, and a watch forbye it, still ticking and humming the song of the journey and forgetting the roar of the destination.
IF THERE WERE A MULTITUDE, IMPATIENT TO BEHOLD,
I'D RATHER HAVE MY STORY, THAN A NAME TO BE TOLD.
-The quater master
