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.
