Zameer: No Man's Land

2.

"Baaji what are you writing?" One day, when I was hardly 7, I asked out of curiosity as I saw baaji lost in one different world handling two brushes in same hand but between different fingers. His eyes were shifting from canvas to beyond..beyond materialism. He was humming something I didn't understand and he never really sang it, always hummed.
I asked him while clutching the corner of his kurta from behind and pulling it towards me to grab his attention. After like pulling tow-three times, he looked back at me and smiled his usual one, the one he always puts on his face whenever he knows someone knows lesser than him. He smiled and turned back to his work and said nothing for a whole moment. I kept waiting for him to answer me but he made me wait even more and then finally the moment came and he said "aayat" very softly, it came to my ears as kitten's fur. I stared at him confusingly for few seconds trying to figure out the word he said but couldn't deem out and finally giving up, I asked, "what's that baaji?".

He turned around and taking me up in his arms, took me to another corner of the room. I was watching him still confused as to what was going on. He went to another canvas of his and un-curtaining it, he presented to me a beautiful canvas painted with several colors brushed into some forms...like letters. It seemed almost same like I had seen in shops of urdu bazaar. I looked at it for a whole minute, trying to grasp it's beauty but couldn't get it of course. He was staring at it like he hasn't made it, like he was seeing it for the first time like me, like he was also trying to grasp it's beauty.

"ye kya banaya hai baaji?" {"What have you made baaji"}.

"It's Fabi Ayyi Alaa'i Rabbi Kuma Tukazzibaan" he said looking mesmerisingly towards the canvas, probably fitting himself in the gaps between the curvy long moulded ribbons and folds like letters, and finding himself in those colored stroke of something written so powerful to work like a maze for him. He was so lost. I kept looking at him and for a moment I felt like I was in arms of a MUSLIM. Not like I couldn't recognise him my own, but tragedy is, I started recognising him theirs too. He was there, on that edge. I started fiddling in his arms to get down and away from his grasp. Amma had taught me enough almost everyday to get away from them, but he wasn't listening to my fiddles. He was deaf and mute.
I didn't understand his language, his eyes, his directions, his faded smile probably smirking at himself like a jailor smirks at a prisoner, except.. he was both.

I started crying. For no reason. Or probably because my baaji was lost and I was scared. He looked at me with horrified expression as if he woke up afters years of slumber. I was sobbing and honestly, at that age, you don't fake cry. I was genuinely scared, although now I understand him in bits, pieces yet to conquer, but that day I was scared to feel like I lost my baaji. Couldn't feel his familiar aura.

He held my cheeks and tried to shush me down asking me what happened and why was I crying. After a minute's sobbing I wiped myself and mashed my eyes for a while and then with little hiccups told him "aap......aap kho gye the......aap....mussim ho gye the" {you...you were lost....you....turned Muslim"}.

That was the day and today, when I've actually lost him and I have no idea whether his soul became muslim or stayed hindu, but what Im able to understand and feel is what he had written on that piece.
He held my cheeks and looked in my eyes straight for a minute, like he was searching for my fear.

"Aiza....meri jaan....aapko Muslim shabd kisne bataya?" {Aiza...my love, who taught you the word MUSLIM"}. He asked me and the image of Amma dragging me behind the door and preaching me to not talk to other people, to stay as far away as sun is to us, from them. Her whispering scared voice recalling every evening the same word MUSLIM. It all flashed before my eyes and I couldn't stop telling him the truth.