His Heart Burst
For a man I never met, whose name I never learned.
I.
It was a whisper, the way Sunita said it — not flat reporting, not loud declamation. A man had died of IVDA, leaving two young kids, a wife, an early death. His heart burst. He was only forty.
HariOm heard it and took it as a sharing — not only of a salacious story, but of death, of untimely death. It was a proper setting for thought.
Did the children know they were left bereft? The man had likely been a burden. The wife had probably hated him — but she must have cried. He was her man, however repugnant. That is the human heart’s empathy: the swelling that sometimes makes you feel that if the tears had not come, an ordinary heart would burst.
And the man himself — hating his predicament, but the habit called. Powerless, given over to habit, yet conscious that death may visit. His heart sometimes tortured by the fate of his kids, a responsibility he could not take up.
II.
It was Rajesh who filled in the rest.
He had come to do the putty patching — a day’s work, maybe two — and HariOm had brought him tea and something small to eat, the ordinary hospitality of a household that knows how to treat a working man. Rajesh sat with his back against the freshly patched wall, cup held in both hands, and talked the way men talk when the work has paused and the tea is warm and someone is listening without demanding anything.
He spoke of the dead man without grief, which was its own kind of tribute. With fondness, rather — the specific fondness of a man remembering a colleague who was excellent at the work and present in all weathers. Whatever else he was, Rajesh said, he was a great mortar man. You could rely on the wall. You could rely on him showing up. That counted. That counted for a great deal.
They had eaten together many times — the lunch brought in a tiffin, eaten at the base of whatever wall they were building, the city going about its business around them. And sometimes, in the particular quiet that falls between men who are comfortable with each other, the dead man would talk.
He talked about the sameness. The way each day arrived wearing the face of the day before. The trowel, the mortar, the brick — not said with bitterness exactly, more with the bewilderment of a man who has noticed something true and cannot unfind it. It goes up, he said once, and then it is done, and then there is another one. Always another one. And I will do it the same way I did the last one. And no one will think this is strange.
Rajesh had laughed. What else is there, he said.
The dead man had smiled. Exactly, he said. What else.
He had read somewhere — Rajesh could not remember where, was surprised a mason had been reading at all, said so, and the dead man had shrugged with the particular dignity of a man used to being underestimated — he had read of a king condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, and each time he neared the top the boulder rolled back down, and the man went back to the bottom and began again. They meant it as a punishment, the dead man said. But I think he understood something the gods did not. That the pushing is the point. That there is nothing at the top worth arriving at. That a man who knows this and pushes anyway — he paused, looking at the wall — that man is free.
Rajesh sipped his tea and said nothing. He did not fully understand. But he remembered it, the way you remember things said by people who mean them absolutely.
Living a life is a practice in the mundane — the doing of every day. It is the thrill-seekers who feel it most: the day is dull, so let us run. Carry out a chore, do hard, meaningless work. Trowel, mortar, brick. Trowel, mortar, brick.
And imagine him happy.
We who need not imagine have our happiness in a syringe, and people say: abuse, abuse.
We say: thrillsome adventure, baiting death, keeping ennui at bay —
cried the man, when his mind clouded and his heart burst.
III.
And what is courage, truly? To leave the beloved sleeping, to forget the food, to let the senses starve — the ascetic is also an addict, only his hunger wears clean robes.
The obsessively clean hands, the monk’s bare bowl, the syringe — all three are the same reaching. All three say: the middle is unliveable, I cannot bear the grey undramatic day, the soup cooling in the bowl, the child asking the same question twice.
The Buddha sat. Not in ecstasy, not in deprivation. He sat in the unbearable ordinary and did not run. That is the rarest addiction of all — the addiction to nothing, to the middle ground that stretches infinite and featureless and asks only that you remain.
Most of us cannot. We tip — toward the syringe, toward the fast, toward the scoured skin, toward whatever makes the ordinary briefly, brilliantly, stop.
The man with the burst heart knew this. In his way, he was also seeking the middle — only his path there ran through fire.
IV.
And what of Sunita — the one who whispered it?
Watch her again. The leaning in, the lowered voice, the particular pleasure of terrible news delivered well. She showed her arm, made the gesture of the syringe — and was satisfied. The story had travelled far to reach HariOm and she had brought it, intact, still warm.
She trusted him. That too was its own thrill.
HariOm was the architect’s last wall, the final ear before the story stopped moving. But how many lips before hers? How many leaned in, lowered their voices, made the gesture? Death is news — and the gorier the better in the telling. The burst heart, the young children, the wife — these are not details that diminish in the passing. They grow. They acquire texture with each whisper.
We are all in this. The dead man fed us. His tragedy was our intimacy, our currency, our moment of being trusted with the unbearable.
HariOm took it. He took it and he thought about it and he wrote it down.
V.
When the children came to know they were bereft — that the father was no more — they did not know how to react. To laugh or to cry. They did neither. They remained unreactive, waiting.
Then the first mourner came, bawling.
They smiled at the scene — not cruelly, not knowingly — just without expression, watching. And then the precinct filled with bawling and they stood inside it, still.
That day no food was made in the house. They were sent to eat outside with cousins, so that the pain of the loss would not linger in them.
It lingered in them.
VI.
There was a river in front of them, and across it, the dead father.
They were left in the middle of the river without oars. Perhaps that is the one thing certain — the rift. And when they were put to sleep that night, in the middle of the river they found themselves again.
And they wept.
VII.
Separation entered their hearts, and fear of the future. What will happen to us — that thought arrived, and they wept more.
The next day they were quiet. Affection did not reach them. Blessings did not reach them.
Here starts another story.
VIII.
Before he let go of himself, the father was something to see.
He was a mason — a man who worked with his hands, who knew how to make things hold. And he had held on, longer than anyone might have expected, to both his habit and his craft, balancing them the way he balanced his sons — one in each arm, carried against his chest, Vijay in the crook of his left and Bittoo on his right, the man laughing at something, strong enough that neither boy felt like a burden.
He was good looking. This mattered. It always matters and no one says so.
Suman was good looking too — better than good looking on certain evenings, dazzling, her lipstick precise, her clothes chosen with the care of a woman who knew her own beauty and felt it was owed something. She was quarrelsome, black tongued when the money didn’t come to her in full, sharp in the way women become sharp when they sense something slipping and cannot name it yet. She derided him. She had reasons and she used them.
But there was an evening — Bittoo remembered it the way you remember things that only later reveal themselves as last times — when they went for ice cream. Vijay held in the crook of their father’s arm. Bittoo holding his mother’s hand. Suman walking beside her husband, dazzling, her lipstick catching the light, her clothes perfect.
They were a family that evening. Whatever else they were, they were that.
The children were proud of him. This too mattered. A boy who can look at his father and feel proud is carrying something that will hold him for years even after the father is gone, even across the river, even in the middle of the water without oars.
Bittoo the moss. Vijay the taxi man. Perhaps this is where they came from — that evening, that ice cream, that strong man with both his sons in his arms, not yet lost, not yet gone.
Not yet.
IX.
Suman had not waited long to become herself.
The government job had come through sympathy — a word put in by someone who knew someone, the machinery of compassion and influence that moves quietly in offices and corridors. She was a widow with two young boys and she was good looking and she was capable, and these things together opened a door that might otherwise have stayed closed.
She walked through it and did not look back.
She rose. Not meteorically like Vijay, not moss-like like Bittoo, but steadily, with the particular determination of a woman who has been told by circumstances that she is worth very little and has decided to disagree. The early promotion came because she was able — the sympathy had opened the door but ability had furnished the room.
And then there was the widower.
He was in the government too, senior, comfortable, his own grief tidied away into a kind of dignified solitude that Suman recognised and knew how to approach. Whether it was love or its reasonable approximation, whether it was loneliness meeting loneliness across a desk or a canteen table — it became something. It became a marriage.
He was rich enough. He was kind enough. He did not carry a habit that swallowed money and men whole.
Suman wore her lipstick still. Her clothes were better now. She had become independent in the way she had always suspected she could be, if only the circumstances had allowed it — and now they did, and she inhabited her independence without apology, without excessive looking back.
The boys were free agents. She had given them childhood, survival, a mother who did not collapse. That was not nothing. That was perhaps everything.
Whether she thought of the mason — his laugh, his strong arms, the evening of the ice cream — is not recorded. Some things are carried quietly and set down quietly and never spoken of.
She was dazzling still.
X.
HariOm called a taxi.
The driver was Vijay.
He did not recognise HariOm, but HariOm recognised him — or rather, recognised the shape of him, the energy that had once been a naughty boy’s and was now a man’s restlessness turned to enterprise. Vijay talked the whole way. Four taxis running. A wife. A house. He said these things not once but several times, in different arrangements, as men do when they are proud and also still proving something.
He spoke of Bittoo with the particular derision reserved for those we have defeated — the elder brother caught in a blood-sucking, sapping nine to five, a good man going nowhere slowly.
The father did not come up.
The mother did not come up.
Suman had remarried. The dead man’s place had been filled, quietly, practically, as life insists on doing. The brothers were free agents now, their brotherhood a facade they maintained at the appropriate occasions — weddings, perhaps, a phone call at festivals.
The taxi arrived at HariOm’s destination.
Vijay was already talking about something else.
XI.
Bittoo was happy too.
No younger brother to worry about, no facade to maintain at close quarters. He existed like moss on the clerical job — stable, unhurried, requiring very little light. The nine to five that Vijay derided was, to Bittoo, a kind of peace. He was self sufficient. He was organised. He knew where everything was.
He heard of Vijay’s four taxis and reflected on it — the meteoric rise, the restlessness converted to rupees, the younger brother’s hunger that had always been slightly exhausting to be near.
And he decided.
He liked being moss.
Moss does not race. Moss does not prove. Moss simply covers the ground it is given, slowly, completely, and outlasts almost everything.
The father’s absence had not broken Bittoo. It had perhaps made him this — a man who needed nothing to be dramatic, nothing to accelerate, nothing to burst.
His heart, unlike his father’s, would not burst.
IVDA: intravenous drug abuse. This began as a whisper overheard. The names are given. The rest is imagined.