A Sight of Walking Tiptoed

“There’s always two sides to a gate” his father had told him “and one side’s not equal to the other.”

“There are always two worlds”, he remembered his father had concluded. Like he always did. Incomplete. Inconclusive.  

His father had been a great political figure. A Political Force, as his comrades would call him. An inspirational leader, until one day a distaste caught hold of him. A bitter taste that lingers at the back of your mouth even after you go to sleep. A taste that you carry forward even into your nightmares. And your nightmares, all of a sudden, seem distasteful too.

His father’s death, as he still recalls, had been silent. One afternoon, he had been sitting on his chair in the porch and he forgot to get up and come back to his room to read the book he had last bookmarked on page number forty-seven. It was looking at that book that the boy realized that death was more powerful than an unfinished tale by your favorite author. Because, in death, you become your own author. And you write the two worlds for yourself. In one, you stay with your presence; the other, with your absence. And at once, you learn to invade both the worlds.

And the worlds, which have lives of their own, learn to rediscover you.

His father’s death, as he still recalls, had been silent. The last of the peaceful silences he’d know. In the constant din, that invaded his life, thereafter, he heard the sounds his father had left behind for the boy.

The din of people from his party house claiming his father had acted as a coward before his death at the face of such difficult times.

The din of people jeering at the boy.

The din of an agitated burning of father’s papers where he had scribbled things the boy never understood.

The din of an agitated burning of one of father’s photographs which had been there on the walls of the party house.

The din of an agitated burning of father’s ideals.

The din of a lonely fellow, only a few years older than the boy himself, trying to save all of those from burning.

The din of an agitated mob against the fellow.

The din of a gunshot, heard.

The din of a mob gone awry, trying to run away from each other.

Like cowards.

A few years later, he remembers walking on the yellow grass. He remembers the sunshine. The birds. He doesn’t remember the road that had led him there. It was one of those arbitrary roads that he took every morning, ever since his father died.

He remembers seeing the one vast field caged away from each other. Divided into two, by a wired fence, that ran from the middle till the distant unknown. Somewhere in the center of the field there was a wooden gate too.

The gate.

The two sides.

The two worlds.

And there was one more realization that dawned upon him. Frightening him.

The two worlds is a continuous vast field with yellow grasses. A gate exists so that you may choose sides at places where there are no sides at all.

He wondered if his father too had been to this field, before he chose to die, peacefully. Because death obliterates the gate that divides the field with yellow grasses. Such that one side equals the other.

The afternoon equals the half-read book.

Page number forty-seven equals the book itself.

The photograph equals everything he had scribbled.

The young fellow equals the mob.

The gunshot equals the birds in the vast field.

The coward equals the brave.

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