The Weight of August
A wooden rocking chair oscillated quietly in the vexing dampness of August. Its arms turned gracefully inwards, its arched rockers at the base moving poetically in a sacred rhythm. A rhythm repeated every afternoon. “August carries a heaviness like no other, the sky cries and cries and cries, the weight of it all is what we feel”, said my Daadi while moving back and forth in front of my eyes, staring right into the gap between two Ashoka trees in our garden. I looked at her both bewildered and enchanted. A part of me thought it was maddening to sit in the verandah in the humid afternoon of August and gawk at the gap between two trees while mumbling sweet nothings. But there was also a part of me that wasn’t foolish enough to accept what my eyes showed me, so I patiently waited for a story. There had to be a story. Something about August or the Ashoka trees, or the gap between them. “Isn’t that the place where most stories are found anyway?”, I thought to myself. Daadi maa had the ability to look at everything and make a story out of it; an omen, a charm, a ritual, a custom, a habit. My uncle called it a slow descent into madness, the doctor called it a side effect of her medicines for gum ache. For a long time I told everyone at my school that rain was a phenomenon of grief and its aftermath. The sky sobs uncontrollably and the humidity next day is the heaviness that stays. Learning about evaporation at school was thoroughly disappointing for me. As a child, I always found more comfort in Daadi’s makeshift stories and faith rather than the reality. Stories made me feel something, stories made me kinder; to the sky, to the bibi ji next door who died of heart attack as per medical facts but actually died of perpetual loneliness as per my Daadi’s story. I was often told that the time I spent with Daadi would eventually corrupt my mind with delusion and distract me from reality. I found myself agitated by how easily men separated logic from feelings as if one were truer, holier than the other. As if there’s a device or a divine presence that differentiates between the two. Perhaps this habit of differentiating stemmed from the exercise of making differentiation tables, a line or chart to show how two things differ. Herbs and shrubs, 3 differences, a line drawn in between, a 3 mark reward for doing it correctly.
But here’s a thing about the line that differentiates; it has shadows too. When two separate objects are close to each other and the light source is diffused (like sunlight on a humid day), their shadows can overlap or merge into a single form. In August 1947, Hindustan was divided into two parts, two neatly demarcated areas, differentiated with a pencil. August carries the weight of everything the pencil marked permanently. Hands held and unheld, tears and the aftermath of tears. When my grandfather first came to India from Rawalpindi, Pakistan, he carried a red metal suitcase with neatly tucked white kurta pyjama sets, safari suits, a thick black and white family album with a rugged photo frame of his guru. Along came my Daadi, and her white cotton suits with floral patterns, her sewing material in a cookie box, her books and her diary tucked in the smallest corner of the suitcase, and a potli, with a special place for her gold bangles, a murti of goddess Lakshmi and her unbridled trust in a man and a nation not even built yet. I spent my childhood in a house where my grandfather’s chronicles of Partition descended proudly on the walls of our temple room; the picture of his guru, the black and white album and the silver coins. No guest could leave the house without knowing how my dadaji arranged the transportation for the migration or how many miles he had to walk to get food or what his business was back in Rawalpindi. His accounts were stamped with credibility. As for my Daadi? Her stories were different. She mostly stayed tucked in corners of the room, just close enough to the kitchen in case she had to run and fetch water if Daadu coughed while narrating the part where he re-enacted a speech. My grandfather's stories of Partition and independence were loud, large and adventurous. My Daadi? She mostly nodded in strong agreement or talked about the food they carried on the journey. Saag and achaar, items that won't rot for days. She always spoke highly of food items that'll last for days, ‘it's healthy and it lasts long, better than having nothing. Tasty items rot sooner than you think’. I couldn't help but think if that was all she had to say. A woman who was a walking radio broadcasting stories of Gods, monsters, neighbours and unfaithful wives had so little to say about a life changing event. One day, while I was sitting in the drawing room watching a YouTube video, my Daadi came running outside when she heard a song that made her break into a kind of laughter I had never seen before.
The Pakistani song called ‘Gwandne Gwandne’ featured two women from India and Pakistan who sat adjacent to each other in their kitchens separated by a wall in between. Throughout the song they lovingly ask each other about their lives, wondering if their lives are any different on the other side of the border if they cook the same saag and daal, if they sleep looking at the same moon and live similar lives, wondered if they actually hate each other or it's just politics. My Daadi listened to the song almost everyday after Daadu left the house. My Daadu believed Partition was our destiny, an evil for the greater good. But watching my Daadi listen to her new favourite song everyday, I figured how she did not think the same or maybe she wasn’t allowed to. The story of saag was the safest one she could share. Unlike Daadu, her opinions couldn’t possibly be staunch, she couldn’t possibly talk about the destiny of a country, so she sufficed with the story of saag and faithful nods. I thought of the friends she must have left behind, the ‘accounts’ she must've gulped for the greater good. I saw a line becoming more visible than ever. A differentiating line between my Daadu’s testimonies and my Daadi’s stories. I wondered if anyone ever saw the shadow of this line; where a man’s chronicles stamped with credibility quietly merged with the stories and songs of women often marked with madness. I wondered about the man who drew the line, the man who announced the drawing of the line, the man who first got to know about the line and the man who announced the line was valid. My Daadi wasn’t present at any of these 4 places at any time. So at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon, she sums it all up by mumbling that “August carries a heaviness like no other” while staring at the gap between two fully grown, country sized Ashoka trees. I think to myself, maybe just maybe if I stare deep enough into the gap, I’ll find the story she hides religiously, a story only she knows, a story only she can follow, an invalid, irrelevant mumbling of a story that she could only find in gaps, in songs, in loneliness of a neighbour, in heaviness of a month and in the rhythm of a rocking chair.
About the Author:
Ridhi Bhutani is, at her core, someone who pays attention: to the pauses between conversations, to the quiet gestures people rarely name, to the long, invisible threads that tie memory to the present. She writes because language is the one place where she can hold love, loss, longing, and laughter without having to choose between them. Her work has appeared on Radio Mirchi, The Wire, The Boomerlit Mag, Kommuneity, and was recently showcased at the Houseguest Gallery in Louisville.
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