Nostalgia

Farooq Shaukat was sad after he returned from the burial of Lady Fatima. Suddenly, it occurred to him that death was the absolute reality. His contemporaries were leaving one by one. First, it was Justice Kaisar Imam who died, then Ghulam Ali and now it was the turn of Lady Fatima to break the shackles of this mundane world to proceed to the world of the unknown. Shaukat was worried—did not know when his own soul would start out on a new journey? He did not want to die in the colony. He wanted his death to come when he was in the peaceful backyard of his own birth place. But roads leading to that were hazy. With the passage of time thorny bushes had sprung up on its way.

Shaukat was a retired IAS officer. He had retired almost a year ago from the post of Joint Secretary. He was keen to spend the rest of his life at his birth place, but to Madam Shaukat the place was steeped in muck she could do without. It only elicited a disapproving frown from her. As a matter of fact, Shaukat’s father was a school teacher and Madam was from IAS background. She wanted to have her house built only in the IAS Colony.

Shaukat found the atmosphere of the colony as inhospitable. Everybody seemed closeted in his own hamlet. He was particularly piqued at the requirement of having to contact over phone if ever one wanted to meet someone. No one interacted freely. That openness of the ancestral place was simply missing here. It was just not possible to informally interact with anyone in the colony.

“Hey you….? Have been looking for you since morning….?”

“Oh hell, Shaukat…? When the hell did you come…?”

Who was there in the colony who could have addressed him thus and Shuakaut could have slammed him on his back…? People would shake their hands that did not touch their heart. One never felt the feelings of neighbourliness here, no sense of camaraderie that one felt in a well-knit locality…that willingness to share the grief and happiness of one another…this sentiment was simply missing in the colony. He felt people here were leading the life of alien settlers.

To him the ladies of the colony too appeared to be identical in many ways. They all seemed to have got that conical, rotund faces and egg-like lips…the whole day they would keep knitting sweater and talk sex. Shaukat felt greatly incensed at their futile attempts to speak in English. While pronouncing English words their lips would acquire circular shape.