Every evening I had promised myself never to return to this city, our city, and after years of promises, here I was, searching for her, carrying under the folds of my jacket the handful of flowers I had picked along the way.
All through the journey, on the flights and in the waiting areas, I had imagined this moment a thousand times, but always thought this graveyard would be small, like the one where many years ago my grandmother and then grandfather were buried and where, before them, my father had lain in a corner forever. I had, in fact, seen it as the same square graveyard fenced by low brick walls, and I hadn’t thought I would have to search for her. I had seen her all along at the centre, as if all the dead in their graves had made way for her. How foolish it had been of me to imagine her like that, dignified and distinguished in death, exacting a special treatment.
The graveyard spread out in vast brightness. Afraid all along of running into someone here, now I looked around for help, and it offended me that amid all these dead that meant nothing to me, my love could not guide me, that I was looking for her now in these rows, mechanically, as one looked for things.
Row after row, no trace of her among all the names engraved on the stones. No sign anywhere. The sun climbed higher, not one leaf fluttered on the trees. I walked on with the flowers in my hand.
She loved white roses. We had grown them tall in the narrow flower bed that ran along the wall of our small home. How she looked at them, lingering over each one, telling me that if I really looked, I would see that no two were the same. How many times had I seen her bring her face close to the flowers, with her eyes closed, that wart alive on the corner of her eyelid?
And for years, after she was gone, I smelled all the white roses in all the gardens and vases, and all of them smelled of her. Now here she was, in a place where the dead lay in little families: husbands, wives, children, huddled together, some even enclosed by iron fences. It suddenly occurred to me that I had yet to read a woman’s name on the stones. All along, while I had been looking for her name, I should have been searching for her husband’s name. I feared I might have walked past her already, left her behind in one of the rows, and if it was true, that I had trodden over her and felt nothing, then what was all that love and hurt that I had proclaimed for years? Was she right, then, that I went around seeking pity, that in love with my misfortune, I was afraid to live without my halo of victim and martyr?
I walked slowly, reading the names out loud, looking around for water, beginning to feel lost in the sound of my own strange voice. My shadow dragged beside me like a small dark animal. I had arrived here clear in my mind and now I walked on in a parched daze, the bright expanse ahead of me growing bigger.
Had the whole city died? Was there no one here to show anyone around? It would take hours to walk all these rows and even then I might not find her. Maybe I had really left her behind.
I murmured her name, again and again, the way years ago she had read the ninety-nine names of God on those green beads that shone through the nights. What did she seek through those nights, counting away the darkness? She must have found what she wanted or she wouldn’t have left those beads behind when she departed for her new home.
I stopped in the slight shade of a willow tree, looking around for some sign of water. In the distance were old brick houses, their tin roofs glinting in the midday sun. The air quivered in the heat. A young man’s grave lay near my feet, its white stone almost fallen over. Born in ’73, killed in the spring of ’96, he had been younger than me when he died, by seven years. Was I ready to die? But maybe he wasn’t ready either. Maybe no one was ready to die. What would be left of him down there now? Did the skin disappear in twenty years, what happened to eyes, to teeth, to hair, when did the bones start to give way? Whoever he was, he must have been someone. Did anyone even think of him now? Not far from this grave, purple irises glimmered under the noon sun. I wondered if the same flowers grew by her grave. The roses I had brought were misshapen already and limp. I should have brought something with roots instead, something that wouldn’t die in hours. Even this had turned out to be a mistake. I had come to sit by her grave, not to complain, not to offer apologies, but to meet her in silence, and here I was, already reduced to tears. Some cruel hand had pulled out the years from behind me and abandoned me again into a child. I knew I should calm down and look for water and find someone to guide me through this dead city. I wasn’t a boy anymore. That was over, an entire life stood in between.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Flowers from a Dog’ in The World With Its Mouth Open, Zahid Rafiq, Penguin India.
