Out of Print Workshop at MAP: 'Untitled, Red' by Suchi Govindarajan

Untitled, Red

Suchi Govindarajan

Karthik wishes he were tall. He also wishes he looked different. Not better, just different. He wishes he did not have to bear, in his face and his body, the burdens of his family. He has his father’s dark eyes, his mother’s cleft chin. His forehead is broad like that of his paternal uncles. When he was younger, it had seemed outsized compared to the proportions of his face. Teachers had told his parents it was a sign of wisdom. When it did not show in his work, he came to believe he would be a late bloomer. What age this blooming was fixed for was unclear. The blooming always walked ahead of him.

Now, on the crowded platform of Banaras station, Karthik feels especially small. He does a kind of quick hop to look above the heads of the pilgrims, to where the coolie walks ahead. He tries to keep that one figure in focus, blurring all else. 

 

Is the coolie tall? Or does he just seem that way because of his red turban stacked with cases? Karthik wonders if he should start wearing a turban. That would teach his family. 

The thought cheers him up, quietens his anxiety. He walks a little more confidently. He feels sure he will not lose his luggage.

At the edge of the station, having found the coolie and paid him, Karthik buys a cup of chai and stares out into the town before him. There is no holy river in sight here, only a stream of people. It is dusk by now, and the phosphor lights of the station are just coming on. A group of women, all in yellow sarees, are rushing somewhere. Karthik watches them board a beat-up red bus. The bus windows become frames of yellow. 

The driver shouts something and then the bus jitters, begins to move. It rushes past him, a little too close. Everything turns red for a moment. He is amazed by how easily the women’s colours and faces disappear into the larger animal of the bus. 

His mother had told him that the colour of this city was white. White of purity, white of priest’s clothes, white of widow’s sarees. He remembers one childhood night, walking behind his father in the narrow lanes, trying to keep up with him. He had smelt it first. Flowers and death. He had heard footsteps behind him, and then the chants. Ram Naam Sathya Hai, Ram Naam Sathya Hai. Four men walked by, carrying a bundled body on a makeshift cane stretcher. There was an agility to their movements, as though they carried nothing. Petals from roses had fallen to the ground like blood.

Now, with the heat of the chai on his fingers, Karthik thinks the colour of Banaras is red. Its power has always made sense to him. Some would say it is the colour of danger, the colour of stop lights. But who, in this country, stops for red? Red is the colour of things that courses through people and then drains from them, leaving them weightless.

Tomorrow, he would take a boat out on the river at this time. And let his father’s ashes be consumed by the red sun rippling in the water.