Angad Johar, Notes from a Funeral

Notes from a Funeral

Angad Johar

Manmohan Rai Johar, retired fighter pilot and avid golf player, grandfather, leaped onto his barely functioning steel bicycle—rusty knobs and wobbly screws, much akin to his own joints—one December morning, never to come back home …

… and I could already see her, History, smoking an old bidi, standing in the corner behind his desk, and she was laughing at the all too probable repetition of that other day seventy years ago, that day when ancestors unbeknownst to me hurriedly packed up memory in an old, leaky suitcase, and when …

… and that desk, old and mahogany, had, over the years, become a reflection of him, as withered pieces of his soul inevitably leaked from all the orifices of his ageing body, with the cracks in its varnish reflecting the wrinkles on his sagging skin and scattered inkblots rearranged to mirror its discolorations, and on the very desk where he kept that photograph of Montgomery, a non-place, phantom town …

… ah, the inkblots! I wonder what words they would have been if they weren’t flicked off of his Russian fountain pen during his many uncontrollable fits of shaking anxiety…

… I’m anxious, tugging at the tufts of my whitening hair, a premature curse, as my bedridden grandmother wails in mourning, surrounded by her old friends in flowy white salwars, like a confluence of lilies…

… it was our curse, to live and die, in exile or in escape. And she was sniggering at me, History. There she stood at the exact spot where he, in his last fit of deliration, decided to find his way back to a non-home that lay beyond razor fences and border security forces, skies overcast with bullet fire, when they left the door open and the table set. I’m left with the remnants of his memory, scattered in a room, whispering to me a tongue I don’t understand …

Manmohan Rai Johar, survivor of Partition, was heard calling out the names of friends he hadn’t seen in seventy years, his eighty-three-yearold body trembling as his bicycle sputtered along.

He never saw the truck.