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Mushtaque B Barq - Crocodile tears

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Crocodile tears

By:- Mushtaque B Barq

From my school days, God knows why in the backyard of my junkyard __ I call it brain for the grounds that I was never given approval to dissent; these crocodile tears had illegally occupied much of my gray matter like my nation. A notion I used to nurse that crocodile tears are insincere expressions of sorrows. But when my gray matter started to lose its viscosity, the rush ruined the old bridges and wrecked the towers that my teachers had once raised for me to touch the peaks of excellence had stooped too low. ‘Fall’ in this part of land is yet another narrative of prehistoric misconceptions and contemporary mishandling of facts.  I was there to stand before my fall like a forlorn victim of ‘might’.  It triggered my rush and I started to reconstruct tracks and by lanes that would take me out of cesspool of ‘yes man ship’. It was not at all easy to start, but then a good start is half done.

While I was on to bring on the skin all the impression of my newly found fineness, a storm took over and in no time the dust laid its eggs in the safest nests of human breasts. The progeny multiplied like my curiosity. The crocodile tears cascaded down the cheeks and as a sadist, a man tries his best to satisfy his selfishness. In the rat race men of class were on to explore the trade and trend of empathy.

From a village a doctor learned that his grey matter has been infected. He rushed to city and settled after pleasing many headless heads for whom the human body serves as a living treasure to take advantage of it. After his infected grey matter was scanned by the mastermind, he was found fit to serve. Service that needs contaminated nerves to unnerve a common man, a mutilated ego that molest the mass, an eye that eyes on termination and a man who nurses within him a verve to satisfy a political need.

He once asked, “Why the researchers need poor man?”

“Poverty is basic need to do the needful, it is a creation , lot of money is pumped in to create underprivileged lot, we invest to earn, every poor man is our requirement, go and fetch them”, the boss replied.

“If I deny”, he casually asked.

“Denial is death, submission is life”, the boss directed.

The storm was no more a laughing stock but a package of lethal infection to a compromised immunity stock.  The mischievous spirit of luxury summoned the village doctor and settled on to his infected gray matter. Thus both learnt how to shed crocodile tears. These crocodiles were in jolly mood for they had already predicted the outcome of doctor’s infectious mind. I could see crocodiles in human form wandering and weeping, shedding tears as their trade mark, but in disguise waiting for the feast.  

As the dust passed from an ignorant man to careless people, the doctor felt the pulse of devil and moved back to village where the general gender was already affected. ‘In the country of blind men, one-eyed man is the king’ the saying echoed within the empty cans of my consciousness.

“I have come to treat you” the doctor proudly announced.

Slogans filled the air, the echo puffed-up doctor’s malice and he smiled, but to gain sympathy, he started to shed the crocodile tears which people mistook as human salt leaking through his ice blocked eyes.  

The dust was whirling, sowing its seeds into the soil of human existence, but the doctored devil let it reach to every door, he let it grow and grow rapidly. Pace to ravenous raven is what wine is to drunkard.

The devil entertained the malice of doctor who while crossing a pond found a long line of crocodiles on its banks. He was terrified but the devil infused in him a consideration for beasts and the devil in the company of doctor started to shed tears for crocodiles, thus changed the maxim like a bitter truth erased from the chronicles. 

The dust in the village had reached every door to let the doctor step in.

He announced, “Death is inevitable, I cannot save all”

Initially an old man died, no one claimed his dead body. The devil knocked the doctor.

“Yes”, he declared.

A team of his favourites got clues to carry on shedding crocodile tears.

Only a few survived. Survival was a drama and death was a hit and miss fiction.

No funeral, no cremation, no burial, only a formality, but in the guise of formality various formats were followed. A protocol drafted by a sick mind.

With the fall of dusk a siren would mean: Keep counting. The siren would lock the people and the team would do the rest. Rest were arrested by fear, the horror was the only apparatus to put a ceiling on the foot fall.

These crocodile tears in the back of mind started to irritate me. My wits that I had after an unremitting persuasion flattened to the degree of flexibility somehow encouraged my wrath to take a forward movement. My newly found flow of intellect started to ooze the dew on my dry leaves that on the boughs of my repentance were looking for salvation.   

A graveyard and cremation ground in the outskirts of village after a demarcation drive got sanctioned and at the rear of their masks God knows how many crocodiles had been pissing on their cheeks. Pissing was a trade mark that behind the masks had choked t their taste buds to the extent sweet and sour had no stakeholders.   

A crocodile in me too stirred. It was a brawny push I felt in my thin grey matter. Graveyard and cremation too were shedding crocodile tears but unlike me there was nothing save a deadly silence. Bones and ash on one side and heaps and heaps of loose soil on the other side and a tin board reading: Death keeps no calendar was adding frustration. I got buried and cremated, yet I was breathing, breathing for the rest at the cost of my empty coffin.  

Hundreds died, no one claimed the dead bodies for the fear of infection. Fathers denied, sons claimed not, daughters and mothers attended not and the rest followed the suit. Mourners for the first time had put on the veil of silence. The screams of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives had long been died away. Silence and sorrow, sobs and shouts were on receiving end.   

What impulse brought me to the pond that day is still a mystery and shall stay perhaps. The gigantic crocodiles at the bank of pond were shedding tears. This time the salt seemed common and I realised crocodiles too wept and the empty graves too speak.  On my way back to home the ambulance had met an accident and human organs in a box were still pulsating like my lively heart.

 



Mushtaque B Barq is a columnist besides a poet and short story writer. His earlier translation work: Mystic Voices of Kashmir , Verses of Wahab Khar , The Wings of Love   were published by Jay Kay Books and Withered Petals was published by  Global Fraternity of Poets His poetic collection is available on Poetry Soup and Poem Hunter.Com. He teaches English Literature and is associated with various literary clubs and forums.  The author was awarded ‘Editor’s Choice Award’ for outstanding achievement in poetry presented by Poetry.Com and International Library of Poetry in 2007. In 2017, the author was awarded with a certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his poetry being published in The Criterion: An International Journal in English in February 2017. The author’s publications are available in New Age Islam , Shabnama.faiz-e- zabaan- org., Kashmir Lit ( On line journal of Kashmir and Diaspora writing)and The Tibet  Journal. Author is a regular columnist of Daily Kashmir Images, his column ‘Creative Beats’ is a regular feature of his writing. His short story collection : Feeble Prisoner, Aditiya Publications has been appreciated by readers. The author was awarded Late Ab. Rashid Farash Memorial Award by HF Foundation. He is a member of Jammu and Kashmir Fiction Writers Guild  

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