The Second Immersion

by Anand Mahajan

            The conventional definition of a terrorist leaves with plenty of doubts. In fact he is a paid performer as anybody of us. He makes a deal involving money for his act. His mistaken identity as belonging to line of Jehad and kafirs etc is perhaps a naive and silly fallacy- as naïve and silly as leaving the bus you are traveling in at a wrong stop seeming full well fitting to looks of your destination stop.

            Amrinder picked up one of two army medals from the briefcase and directed it with a steady, nonchalant motion of his hand to flames of the Amar Jawan Jyoti. The fabric of the medal caught fire and the flames ran with ease all over it. He held it till the flames burnt most of medal; it appeared as if a pain was retreating from his eyes as the flames turned the medal into black burnt flakes. In his impatience he left the remains of the nearly burnt medal near the foot of Amar Jawan Jyoti Column, and reached for the other medal lying in the briefcase. This too, he torched and held the medal on flames with an insouciant equanimity and a relief settling on his visage. He looked at the tall column of concrete that was Amar Jawan Jyoti with numerous names of martyrs of Indian Military written all over it, and then looked at his burnt medals. The relief on his face could hardly be mistaken: it was the relief of having immersed two idols of worship, possessed and held long in great respect, in the sacred river of Amar Jawan Jyoti . In the impending stretch of his years of ‘renouncement and atheism’, the idols could become an unmanageable burden to him.

Some three months later, Amrinder Singh was, as usual, drinking and sitting before the TV with a news channel on. He was now a peripatetic man with hotels as his mobile home. He would send enough money to his family to carry on with their lives. The remaining he would burn in drinking and living extravagantly in costly hotels. When his funds would drain away, he would just dial a number in Pakistan ; let them know that could do with some money, with surety in the face of “ come what may” in the execution of the assigned job. The contents of the job didn’t mean anything for him. Sometimes it was serious losses of life; sometimes it was a risky travel to Europe and America as he carried drugs with him. Lots of money to politicians, government officers and leaders were paid not to stop him to fly with drugs. Amrinder would pull the job without much of fine planning and ado about the details. When the money would drain in drinking and lavish living, he would be required to have to `work’ again.

It was a day in his `holidaying’ time that he was spending in a three star Bombay hotel. The liquor was good, so it was easing his mood as usual. On the news channel on TV, a newsreader and a government expert doctor were questioning and answering in their overly demonstrated tension about the authenticity of a possible outbreak of bird-flu in Bombay. Amrinder, amused, smiling at the stretched faces of the duo in TV, looked at what was left of a small heap of fried chicken pieces in the plate near him, picked one `deadly’ one and ate it followed by a harsh swig from his glass. That was how life meant to him now: his own life; life of common masses of this land steeply depreciated in value for him from the times when he had fought for this very land in two wars.

He would watch all crime reporting shows on TV news channels every night. Once, he, heavily drunk, could realize only towards end of such a crime story reported on TV that it was his own real time story.

It was just another evening of his leisure days, he drinking and watching television. A live reporting was showing a man surrounded by a crowd. The man had a can of petrol which he presently opened and drenched himself thoroughly with the liquid. The reporter was explaining the reason of self-immolation. An old market was being demolished and relocated at a place of disadvantage to the shop owners. The man, a shop owner, had been protesting for a long time, and was never heard by the municipality. Now self-immolation in public, just in the center of the market destined for demolition in few hours from then, was his last resort. The man stood there surrounded by a mass of people, all of them dismissing his resolve of self-immolation as an improbability of extreme unlikelihood; he would surely not burn himself; may be at the last moment he would change his now adamant looking mind; may be at the last moment, he would wait for his friends or relatives to come stop him; maybe he would wait for the policeman standing nearby to accost, rebuke and drive him away. They all looked at him skeptically with unbelieving eyes in the manner similar to that of a woman trying to single out the genuine one from an assortment of jewels all of which except one were good pieces of imitation; she dismissing the real one in the very first sight as it looked remotest promising, too `out of vogue’ and ridiculous as it looked in extraneous appearance to be the genuine.

The man appeared to be saying his final words before setting himself on fire. He had taken out a matchbox and was opening it. As the public kept watching him hoping for the fakeness of his actions to eventually unveil, the man struck the match and set a corner of his shirt afire. Flames ran in all directions engulfing his body. Only then two or three persons, probably his fellow shopkeepers ran hollering towards nearby shops to find cans of drinking water. Till they returned with the water, the man had been almost eaten away by the fire. The dumbfounded spectators had been jerked out of their inaction and indifference; but funeral of a living person was almost over. The man succumbed to his burns en route to a hospital.

And this had taken place in a small town of Punjab , belying the general opinion that materialistic inertness in public had spread only in metros. The man who burnt himself, certainly deserved the coming forward to stop him of those who were his fellow shop owners. They were not just shopping machines of western super markets where one inserts a coin, and the article requested is thrown in the delivery spout of the machine, or, were they? But why was he asking this to himself? Was human life yet of any value to him? After his treating people as worms when he killed them? But there was some difference. Why there were  violent attacks on Northerner settlers in Mumbai, why police was killing  innocent students showing their anger; why hordes of north Indian were selling in Mumbai and buying in Delhi digesting huge losses in their these migrations. Entire north Indian society in Mumbai was looking with hope to Delhi for refuge. Amrinder to rid himself of the garbage coming to his mind switched the TV on. A Xerox peon in the TV program was asking his manager why the manager had asked to Xerox an altogether new paragraph from an age wilted long paper replacing the usual paragraph. The manager was rebuking the boy. Amrinder switched the TV off

            The warring words again hurled their edges on him. He had never spent any moment of his life with the one he had killed. He had just reached a building, planted a bomb or whatever it was and never tried to know what happened later. He had taken care of his family, saved them from rotting without refuge and shelter. But what did that matter? How could a murderer justify his being responsive to extreme human pain of the ones he knew, and be arrant callous to the many times multiplied pain of strangers that the murderer himself was inflicting?  He didn’t have an answer; well, he didn’t give a damn to not having an answer to all the damn questions of the world.

Moreover he had fought to defend his country and thus done all acts of goodness in the past; but even after fighting his case in the court and winning the court’s decision in his favor, he was denied pension by the administration of Army. He was continuing to do at least one good act in present also in that he was providing for his family. But there was a clear, wrong and unreal element adhering to his extrapolation of past actions into his present actions. The two didn’t in the least compare. Rather he was diverting privation and ill luck of his family, multiplying it enormous times and inflicting it on strangers. But earlier too when in service he killed and received salary for that, and his family survived on his pay. If equating his past to the present this way was ridiculous, let it be so. He would go his own way. But this was the time since when dreams started torturing him. 

The dream arousing him every night would invariably be a replay. Soon after sleep would come, the dream would commence showing him walking past the cowered visages, hung in air, of the ones he had killed in the two wars and now in Indian cities in his new ‘profession. He knew without seeing that eyes on those faces were staring at him- eyes quivering in fear of death likening to unsteady, oscillating pointer needles on dial-gauges of some giant machine. Further in his dream those miserable faces would clear away making way for a zooming in face with a pair of eyes with a difference. He would immediately know these as the eyes of that old physically handicapped soldier who had divulged some political secret involving traitor army persons, and  who at the time of Amrinder’s fatal assault on him in that posh colony flat of New Delhi, just stared laughingly at his murderer without any trace of fear. Those fearless, scorning and knowing eyes with the lacerating laugh in them for Amrinder- laugh born of old man’s knowing Amrinder as a former army man now turned a ‘professional’ terrorist for a living- would not need too long a presence in the dream to arouse Amrinder from his hard won sleep.

Guilt had invaded his mind and he could no longer think with his infected mind- infected like a severely infected throat for which speech was a terrible torture. The night before when the dream knocked him out of his sleep, he had thrown his guns in the same briefcase in which he carried his medals to Amar Jawan Jyoti, and once again he set out for another `immersion’. This time he had walked to a bridge over a river and thrown the guns in water.

The fire of penitence like the heat of a fever had caught his soul. He must cleanse his soul and would go to a place for this if there was one in the world. And then he saw the photograph on the front page of a newspaper of the holy bath being taken by the devotees in The Ganges at Haridwar. 

They all stood waist deep in the holy and crystal clear water of The Ganges; their eyes closed in devotion; their hands folded together in prayer to almighty; their consciences laden with weights of evils crept in their souls; and then for purification from their worldly sins they all took a dip in the holy river to emerge exonerated. Amrinder standing amid them, yet in some indecision on magic healing by the holy dip kept this time his resolve intact as the congregation prepared to take another holy dip, and he too, in unison with them lowered his un-soaked body in the river, wondering how it would occur should there be actually any healing of soul. His mind remained in a blankness for a while with water all round his submerged head and closed eyes, then catching from the surroundings that it was time to complete the ritual by rising up, his head broke the surface of the holy water and he stood there dumbfounded; some where something inside his soul had grown larger or refreshed itself into a fullness; something that was like a slice of moon before the holy dip with the unseen segment of the circle dark with gloom and guilt of his sins that had grown into a full moon at emergence from holy waters- a full moon of a holy rebirth and flawlessness of a new beginning.

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Anand Mahajan is an engineer from NIT Jamshedpur and has been publishing in technical and literary lines both. He is author of several literary short stories like “ A Star Manque”, “ The Shattered World”, The Recluse” etc published in US based Chowk; as well he has published in Indian magazines also; some significant publications are “ Sons of The Soil” in IJPCL, “Superseded” in MuseIndia.