REBIRTH ON A BIRTHDAY

When my wife asked me to post one of her  write up in my blog, I never thought translating a Malayalam story would be so difficult.....It took me almost two days to complete it.   

Delhi Musings:-  Rebirth on a Birthday. (Janmanalil  oru  Punarjanmam)

16 January 2002, it was on this day in Delhi, that I became a proud mother of a cute looking baby boy, Akshit. With his grand entrance into this world, we found our lives have become more blissful than ever before. We beamed with love and ecstasy. An addition in the family strength was celebrated with exuberance not only by us in Delhi but also by our relatives and friends in Trivandrum.  And eventually, two years later, his second birthday was celebrated in the same place, but this time with a miraculous rebirth of me, when I survived a nasty electric shock which almost took my existence away from this world; 

“Den for all Delhi”, has always fascinated me in my school days.  Whenever my history teacher elucidates in a theatrical way, the rise and fall of mighty emperors in their majstic palaces rivaled each other for those thrones made of most luxurious objects which reflects umpteen ‘paramountcy’, I dreamt about visiting that place, even for once in my life time. It was after my marriage was fixed in the month of November in the millennium year 2000 to a Special Protection Group Officer working in Delhi, I started reading more about it.





 

I never thought in my wildest dream that I would be marrying a person with a job outside Kerala.  As a reticent village girl born and brought up in suburban Trivandrum, I had my marriage dreams tailored around someone who comes back from the office in the evening and taking me out for a kitty shopping or to a second show movie in a nearby film hall in his scooter. My limited ambitions in life never allowed me to dream anything bigger than that. But as it is popularly said in my countryside, marriage of a girl is  being fixed in heavens under the fate and she has not much to do about that.  I was doing my second year post graduation in Malayalam literature when the fate and the heaven, both intervened in my life. I adjusted myself and re-wrote my dreams and ambitions to marry him and moved out from Trivandrum to a place where fortunes of history oscillated with every overthrow of regimes.

I held my breath to control my inner trembling and pretended courageous in front of my weeping parents as I stepped into the compartment of one of the oldest running passenger trains of Indian railways getting ready for a three days journey to Delhi.   The sudden ringing of bell followed by a long horn announced the departure of Kerala Express from the land where I lived for twenty five years. As the waving hands of my parents gradually diminished and vanished on the culvert, I glued to my husband and broke down silently to not to alert any passengers.  I was so emotional that my hands and feet went cold.

“Hey…See… what happened” murmured my husband in my ears, holding my hand with love and affection. That appeared as something soothing to my otherwise turbulent mind.

 “I...I don’t know.”

A concealed smile on the corner of his lips brought me back to normalcy and I felt ashamed about my stupid behavior on the spur of the moment.  

After three days of exasperating but emotional journey,  the train came to a screeching halt at the New Delhi railway station on a murky afternoon. A waiting friend of my husband received us at the railway platform. With heavy traffic, active pedestrians, lot of greenery and chilly weather, this place in its mid winter, made me feel like I’am in an altogether different world. Old fashioned palatial bungalows on either side of the road were suddenly replaced by ultra modern shopping blocks on a heavy market place.

 “This is Connaught Place”, his words were like introducing me to Delhi, his Karmabhoomi in an authoritative way.

 “How contrast this city is”, I thought. Sitting inside a Maruthi Omni van, gazing out the window and enjoying a new world beside a person new in my life, I was like –Alice in wonderland. “This is the Delhi I read in books.”  I murmured to myself. But all of a sudden it came to my mind, like an uninvited guest, the reminiscences of my serene village and my innocent neighbors, the Devi temple and my house thereby clouding the ecstasy and I lost in my thoughts and imagination. I felt like crying. Again the same caring hand came to my rescue. 

When our car entered into a colossal complex through a large gate heavily guarded by CRPF men, my husband whispered in my ears, “This is the place we are going to start our new life.” With that concealed smile popping up again on his lips he continued, “This is where, the nation’s most elite and baffling commandos who are entrusted with the deadly job of protecting the head of the government of the largest democratic country stays.” He paused a while and with a swinging action of his hand pointing towards numerous apartments there, said, “Welcome to our family”. The word “our” for which he gave an extra thump was not initially understood to me. I have never had any idea what so ever about SPG or its high liability job of protecting the Prime Minister of the nation till my marriage was fixed. I thought.  ‘Protecting the Prime Minister of a country is not in any way a joke’. Even now after spending almost ten years with my husband I still haven’t much idea about this furtive organization as he never ever discussed about it even after he was repatriated from this organization five years back. S.P.G will remain as an organization ambiguous to me till one day he starts telling me about it, may be after his retirement from service.

I don’t know what a feeling I carried about the winters in Delhi when I started my ‘life as a wife’ in that heavily guarded fort at Pappankalan, Dwaraka. There the winters sometime becomes vindictive as chill fog swaddles its sprawling historic dominion.  The streets usually wore a deserted look late into the day as passers-by opt to stay inside waiting for the first golden rays of sun creeps through the old Jamun trees. Those who dare the chilling cold would be the hapless office goers or the diary farm workers from the nearby villages, wrapped in thick woolen quilts, reaching their permanent customers in bicycles. Early morning haze, thick fog at night, bone chilling breeze and murky afternoons had become a part of my life. I found myself draped in the bliss of a new married life, the experience, I only heard several years back in the corridors of my women’s college when my friends shared gossips of their or somebody’s newly married nephew or a cousin and giggle. Though I never showed any profound interest in listening to those frivolous pastimes of young girls, I too had a personal leisure pursuit of writing a note book about the silly romantic phrases and thoughts. In fact I had fallen in love with my cute little book and I wrote continually on it and filled its pages with my own day dreams. Apart from that I liked rain, that too, night rain. Admiring its soft sound, I gazed through the window of my small house for long, watching her dancing with the wind and making obscure patterns in the air.  I converse with stars when they twinkle. And yes..! They gave answers to my many silly questions. I never liked moon for that it often changes its shape. The moon according to me was an opportunist, till one day I fairly understood that it is not the moon but the dominant sun and the earth doing all the tricks at the cost of this poor moony.   Sometimes when my mother gave me a slap or an earful for scoring fewer marks in English or Hindi test papers, I prayed to god to stop the sun from rising in the eastern horizon for days and thus enable me to get several nights at a stretch to talk to the stars. Whatever I used to share with my lovely stars, I shared it with my dearly note book too. On one such night, when the stars glimmered and the sweet fragrance of night blooming water Lilly filled my heart, I wrote, by looking up at the night sky, my soul in my dearly note book.  A handsome prince from the heaven with a cute smile tucked in the corner of his lips coming to marry me in a golden chariot pulled by seven white horses, escorted by rain. When the chariot landed at my door step, the rain stopped for a while, I get into the chariot and above the clouds we flew to a mesmerizing paradise where the angels danced with us.  Oh my god, what iam into. It is an old understanding that I will not disclose anything I wrote in that tiny note book except to my prince who comes to marry me. I have to keep my word.








Special Protection Group

 For any SPG officer or in that matter any Police officer on his active duty, there is little regard for his personal safety and security. Initially the frequent tours and tedious duty hours of my husband were enough to make my days dreary. I have to admit I was angry about it too. But gradually I understood the dignity and importance of his work. He often told me, “Being a body guard is a thankless job and we are paid to be in the line of fire”. Even though he says that jokingly, I knew, no other jobs in the world require the stress and strain demanded incessantly of an SPG officer. As a newlywed I didn’t even know how to cope with my husband being called for odd time ‘extra duties’ when we planned an overnight dinner at Sector-8. But after spending days with him together I felt it’s all not just about us, the family, but it’s all about the job which he has been entrusted with. On the day I married a police man, my life as a civilian ended. And as a wife of an SPG officer, whose job is of clandestine in nature, the thought was always there in the back of my mind that anything could happen to him anytime. “Trained to be in the line of fire”, the phrase often used by him with an extra bit of pride coated on it, was enough for me to understand the threat of imminent danger always looming over his head in his day to day work. Every day when I see off my husband out into his job, as any women do to their loved ones, I carried in the core of my mind a strange feeling of scare for his life. That was the nature of his job as a Personal Security Officer to the head of the nation.

SPECIAL PROTECTION GROUP

I remember, barely an year after Akshit came into this world, one day I woke up to the news about a serious security breach in the Prime Minister’s cavalcade and gun shots fired by SPG men. Stared at the television news channels, I watched a shattered car which intruded into the cavalcade of the Prime minister and few animated descriptions by the news reader on how the incident had happened. The whole nation was by then glued to the satellite news channels. I knew it was on his night shift duty that the incident had happened and as PSO to the Prime Minister he would be in the thick of events.

I got my breath in order only when he returned back home safely the next morning several hours after the incident. He never told me anything about this incident till this moment, neither have I asked him about it.  But I knew it was his team that opened fire and he was very much associated with that incident.

The weeks give way to months and months to years. When Akshit was born in the year 2002, we were little bit surprised by his extraordinarily fair colour. Our good neighbors, particularly those from north India, often tease me saying “it is because that he born in Delhi, he has got his fair color”. Though I knew that my son got the colour of his paternal grandmother, we never intended to deny their version so as to make them feel happy as they were so affectionate towards him.

 His first birthday was celebrated with great grandeur in Delhi amidst a huge gathering of neighbors and our relatives from Trivandrum.  This event was a great opportunity for me to see how the armed force members live with utmost harmony and brotherhood and with that association among each other. They organized everything, from decorating the house to arranging the furniture, from welcoming the outside guests to distribution of food. It taught me the power of an organized community. It was on that day I understood the meaning of that “our family” my husband told me the first day when we entered the complex.  

One more eventful year has gone in the history of my new life and came the second birthday of my son. This time it was a quieter event. My husband took one day leave from his duties and we woke up bit late in the morning and missed the sun rise. He told me and I agreed that between three in our family we can make this birthday really special. A simple vegetarian ‘Sadya’ in the afternoon, a visit to a temple in the evening followed by a private dinner at sector-8 was what we fixed as our programme.

I remember, it was a bleak and blustery winter morning. A thick veil of fog that engulfed the national capital at night was still swirling around mysteriously. Sun, the redeemer was struggling to chase it away as if to illustrate the virtues of benevolence still persists on the blissful face of earth to those hapless but rare breed of eternal optimists.

My husband  was getting ready in his room and my little son, who would do anything for an outing, was fervently pleading his father to took him along,  was what I saw when I entered his room to hand him over the list of items to be purchased from the vegetable shop nearby. A glance at the list, I found him truly amused at that.

 “I may need a translator to convert the names of these south Indian vegetables in Hindi…It’s going to be a tough time ahead with that Haryana vendor”. 

He was worried because he was sure that he wouldn’t be able to locate many of those vegetables in the shop and thus couldn’t help the vendor identifying it. For that I said “A ‘Sadya’ is not a joke. It took some seven vegetables for a ‘Sambar’ and almost same number for an ‘Aviyal.” But still he felt apprehensive about items in the likes of “Kachil’, ‘Koorka’ and ‘Koval’ to name a few. 

My son literally won the battle and was already on the shoulder of his father in a tight hug. I didn’t know when he would be back from the shopping arcade, so I told him to call me to bolt the door from inside and said a bye to my son with a kiss on his red cheek which I normally do. I sprang inside for the bath room with an electric immersion rod to arrange some hot water for a bath.

“Lock the door, we are leaving” I heard him closing the door from outside as I was just checking whether the powerful electric immersion heater I mounted in a bucket full of water in the bathroom was functioning or not. Those tiny bubbles confirmed it was working. Just as I was about to bolt the door from inside I heard him coming back in a hurry.

 “It’s very cold outside…. let him have an extra pair of woolen socks and a shoe”.  I went inside and came back with a pair of tiny woolen socks, handed over to him and returned back to see the condition of the water again.

 What happened next was like a blitzkrieg for me. I remember, I touched the water in the bucket to check if it’s too hot, the way I normally do. The next thing I remember was lying flat on my back on the corner of the bathroom with that immersion heater, with current still flowing through it, clasped in my hand. In between I knew I made a horrific scream, it was a loud screech of a dying person for help Iam sure. Next moment everything was calm. With the immersion heater still clasped in my hand I was lying in a pool of water with a bucket broken into two pieces. I was in a semi conscious state and was wailing in pain. I felt like my right hand was being torn out of its socket. It was already black in colour. I couldn’t get up. In my blurred vision I saw him rushing towards me. I felt difficulty in breathing. He carried me carefully to our bed and laid me out on the covers. By now it’s an endless stream of tears flowing from my eyes.  I try to keep them inside, because I know that my husband hates to see me cry. He sat down next to me, wiped my tears and started consoling me. It took me few hours to get back to normal and to realize exactly what had happened to me. When I asked him later how miraculously I escaped from that terrible shock, he gave me an answer so vivid and so simple that I will never forget it in my life.

He said, “I was sitting on the sofa and putting shoes on his legs. The time I heard your loud squeal in a strange manner, I was sure that you have got an electric shock because I knew that you were getting ready for a bath and was warming the water with an immersion heater. I jumped off the sofa, took a small dive to the main switch board and cut off the power supply before rushing towards you. Simple”.  And that is the reason, I thought, how I have been able to pull free of the circuit in a couple of seconds time. I was in his deadly clutches for, may be, two seconds.  I didn’t ask him why he put off the main switch first, instead of rushing inside to see what had happened to me when he heard my shriek. Still I believe, it’s his persistent training on reflex actions and years of experience in the elite SPG saved my life on that day. I won’t argue, and iam sure many civilian, may be with little training, act in an identical manner under similar situation in the same speed, but then I have to say, it is for them the word- exceptional-already there in the dictionary. 

After that incident, few questions still remain unanswered. Why my husband took a leave on that day? , Why he returned back for a pair of woolen socks for my kid? What would have happened if he went alone leaving behind my tiny tout inside the house? Why my father at Trivandrum, miles away from Delhi got a tremor in his chest matching the time when I had the shock and called me later to see everything is fine?  I know these questions will remain unanswered forever. People often say, life is an experiment and everything happens for a reason.  That day I will never forget; A day that still haunts me. Iam just beyond grateful that it was not my time to leave my loved ones and that iam able to share my story with few of you.  It has been a long time since the incident has happened but  the tremors of that violent shock still emanates from my right hand when ever iam into writing about it. I am happy that I could complete it this time. God bless you all. 

                                      Chithra Nair.

Just a minute…...  I  have few points to those who think that meddling with electricity is funny.

1.   When your body is moist, there is a radical drop in resistance. When water is present in the environment you should exercise more caution.

2.   Suddenly tensed muscles can throw your body across a room hard enough to break bones or cause concussions.

3.   Medium range currents (in our home appliances) are more dangerous than low currents or high currents because medium current trigger heart fibrillation.

4.   People who receive an electric shock often get painful muscle spasms that can be strong enough to break bones or dislocation. This loss of muscle control often means the person cannot let go or escape the electric shock. The person may fall or thrown a distance.

5.   For more details you can log on to several sites available. One such is http://www.osha.gov/.

P.S:- I salute those great men who translated the bulky and thick volumes of Russian literature represented by the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky and Pushkin in English. My Salute….!