Jake was eleven years old when his mother died.

Life was mincemeat those days, but not necessarily savoury. It had a character of immense
incongruity like apples growing underwater or trees bearing animals, but still felt unmistakably
coherent as if the reality of it was as natural and habitual as life usually is. But there was some of a
helpless expectancy of life-sprouts blooming again over the years to come, as it had bloomed in the
years’ past.
When Jake’s father remarried he was worriedly sensitive about his son’s feelings, although there was
no reciprocation of the same apprehensions on Jake’s part; It was all the same to him. His birth
mother was ill most days of the month, and this monotonous illness regime had hammered her spirits
down and down, and her scorched irritability up and up. Every once in a while Jake had had a taste of
that irritability in the form of a broomstick, and this drove his character to a reserved and slightly
effeminate corner. In his own small world, he loved his mother, but he was never too close to her to
feel anything else on her death apart from a forced sadness and a tint of watery smudge under his eyes
that lasted through the entire funeral day, but no more. And hence it was all the same to him whether
his new mother would be good or bad to him or even if he didn’t have no mother at all.
Jake’s occupancy as a shoe-mender in those days of his prime had been unable to manufacture
anything more for him than a dogged lifestyle and a haggard life; but such life was as common in
those days as in the present day. He was tall. His legs were thin bamboo poles, and the ends of his hair
were stale meadows, but apart from these there was nothing oddly peculiar about him – a well-cut but
blemished face, an emaciated torso and unfeeling dark, dull eyes. His shoes, though, betrayed a vivid
contrast against his occupation as a ‘mender’ of shoes, and though his legs were biologically sane,
rendered him limping about all quarters, searching for occupation, for money, for customers; for
fellow sanely limping fellows. Searching for Life.
One Saturday morning he, on one of his parched drinking tours, happened to be limping through the
‘Mud-Market’, as it was popularly called, owing to the grubby sewerage alongside it, which splashed
and spilled and provided a soft mud-carpet to the prospect. A crackling, burly voice was singing a
feeble song:

O’ young soldier what brings you here?

The queasy smell of the Waters of Want,

O’ punctured dream what brings you here?

Wars of Life turned my heart so gaunt…

A withered girl, of an unknown age, in a roast white neat top and a scruffy leaf-blue skirt was the
spring of the song, by the damp wooden doors of a crude Bar. It registered a poking twitch to some of
the passing hearts by way of the remembrance of a bygone era. This typically attracted a drunk Jake,
and he limped nearer to the source for a more soothing and crisper concert. Without any movement he
stood in front of this girl in her faded bonnet, listening – or more so observing her about her
performance – intently and keenly looking at the rim of her bonnet, as if searching for her eyes. When
at last, the girl noticed him and, applying a shy dampening to her voice, looked up, and their eyes met,
Jake briskly wavered them around, and looking down at his baggy outfit, took out from under his shirt
a couple of cents – his entire day’s earnings, excepting the drinking expenditure – administered them
quickly to her, and went his way.
The next day he found her at the bridge, preparing to get carried away by the misty wind that was now
setting in. He walked straight up to her now and spoke in a hoarse voice carefully smoothed over,
“What is your name?”
Her gaze seemed to be fixed at some unattainable point down the river, unwavering. After an eternity
of silence, she turned to him, determined, then dropped her face, and with it few strands of her straw
hair, and said in a wet tone, “Dear respected sir, I most heartily thank you for the cent you gave me
yesterday ”,(she did not encounter much of cent droppers everyday), and then hushed, blew out a
heavy mist, and continued, “But I would not think it proper for a gentleman like yourself, dear sir;
quite improper, to ask for a maiden’s name, a wench of a maiden like myself, dear sir!”.
“I daresay I am no gentleman!”, Jake softly snapped at her, as if ‘sir’ was the most disgraceful word
anyone could ever had spoken to him.
Her gaze dropped to his shoes, and with flushed cheeks behind sandy bangs that dropped again to the
jerk of her head, she mumbled, “I meant no harm, kind s-sir, its true, true, I meant no harm, kind sir”,
and kept mumbling unheard apologies further.
“Never mind that! Your name? What is it? Your name?”
“Bisty, just. Remember no family for a surname”
“Bisty, eh? Not singing today? Quite well were you yesterday, the Bar? You achieve much shillings
that way? You earn much the yesterday to stand here out of work –
But lo! She so friskly, quietly flung herself over the parapet, almost in a wink, that to Jake – it had
been like an apparition he had been speaking to suddenly disappeared or he woke up from a dream –
only to be caved back into the reality by the sound of a sharp muffled slap of water. Looking about
him in an obscure way, he banged over the parapet, stared a moment at the frothy and airy burbling
water, and then he flung over too – quite to the astonishment of the sparse evening commuters nearby.
He swam with great assiduity, and (to the derogatory “Too Obvious!” remarks of the readers) when he
had saved her, and flipped her over the stone bank, and regained his normal raspy breathing from the
houndlike gasping, snapped into an utter vexatious fit of writhing anger. Bisty (as we have chose to
call her), now regained her consciousness, her bosom heaving and spluttering, lying on the scungy
mossy black stony bank. Jake at once plunged onto her in his fit, pincered her chin in his palm,
violently jerked it and bust his face into hers, shouting:
“FOOL! You damned seventh hell FOOL! You hope to die? Hah?! You loose up there?! Hah! Y-You
Halfwit! FOOL!”
Bisty was trembling under the grip of that hand – the coarse, rough hand that mended shoes – her face
was up in hot blood, and her temples, her carotids were in a peppery burn. She muttered a sedated “I-I
wasn’t, I-I-I”, with her same as ever downcast lashes, and looked about from under her eye-umbrellas.
Jake, now the more infuriated, rattled her face roughly about, giving a few imploring jerks and
irritated jiggles to that poor face.
“I want to end my life; I can’t take it no more! It is a PAIN”, she suddenly came up in a piercing cry.
“What? Hah?! You want to die-mmm, Hah? Hear me OUT! Whatever yeh do, yeh do, don’t drag a
poor man into it! Heh? Don’t take his life with it! You! You damned You! Rot in Hell!”
Bisty now lifted up her eyes into the dull leaden lustre of Jake’s for the first time. For the first time
Jake looked into her eyes, and for the first time, embarked upon the depths of the green sea, with all
its mysticisms and perils. Her drenched skin was soft and crumbled under his rusty meat. She was
heavily breathing, and her hot skin on the cold water steamed her up. Her lips, beaten, but soft;
somewhat scratched, but moist, were quivering with an outburst of emotion, and this vivid outpouring
of emotion at Jake’s insolence, outpoured her very features which once would have commanded the
word ‘beautiful’, or would ever so command – the very recessive pangs of her beauty burst forth –
and this was too hard a blow for poor limping Jake to stand up to. He took the full force of the blow,
with the added calmness of a soft river wind and October sun to the weariness of the day’s work – or
perhaps the weariness of a lifetime.
Oh! how a very skillful co-conspirator beauty is! Conjugate Beauty with Pride, and they turn out to be
complementary. Stir up Beauty with solemnity, or with liveliness, and you’ll find cupidified lovers
writing unending letters that are never read. But cook up some beauty with pain, and a slight pity, and
Voila! You’ve prepared the perfect recipe for a dismal intoxication with even more horrifying after
effects.
We won’t go into finer details of how the upcoming situations came about, or how and what led Jake
to take Bisty up into his own dismal den – for Bisty had no relatives, and no parents (people under
such dispositions usually don’t, and/or otherwise how did she come round to taking her own life?) –
and established her there. Also, we won’t allude to speculations on what reasons had initially led
Bisty to take her own life, and what induced her now not to attempt at it ever again – unless of course
if the limping monster Jake had threatened to kill her of his own accord if she ever made a run for it
again.
But that Limping Monster Jake, kept her at his own home, although it seemed more like Bisty was the
master of the house, for Jake always kept a degree of servile sentiment in dealings with her. She was
denied any kind of work, both of the housekeeping or the financial nature, and Jake worked tirelessly
day and night, without fatigue, without fail, to bear the increased expenses, and this in turn increased
his own financial dispositions to a merely tolerable amount for him to be able to sustain the ‘princess’
of his den (as I’m sure he would have liked to call her) – for indeed she was induced to live like one;
every article of a cosmetic, or educational, or musical turn was made ready at her side, and every
request of her positively processed, and every want, wish and craving most humbly supplied.
Although, it was not such that Bisty was a prodigious or a financially barbaric pampered and spoilt
little child; her living requirements were quite less, and wishes and fancies of but a basic kind, were
never expressed. On Jake’s part, what prompted him to his actions since the incident at the bridge, is
astonishing; what is even more astonishing is the tenderness and the gentlemanlike solemnity and
benevolence he observed in all his interactions with Bisty, and with such warm a maternal care he
kept her that though his own desires and the hopes and desperations of his heart were of a carnal and
passionate nature, it was never made even slightly evident. And so, to Bisty, he was always like a
father, or a mother. But, to poor Jake, (Oh! If all monsters that exist were such) she was always a
princess, and he the prince, of his own dark kingdom.

***********

One fine morning, when the sun was still low and rising from a stormy sleep, Bisty walked into Jake,
into his small corner of the house where he did all his work, and presently was found beating a tight
heavy sole into a ganky leather boot, and after whistling some air through her small parted lips,
started,
“Sir, I have a favor to ask you” – she always had called him ‘sir’; that little distance of formality had
always remained between them.
Finding Jake stopping his pin hammer midair, and looking at her with a tired dullness in his eyes, she
continued, “Sir, I-I am getting married!”
Love, especially of a romantic turn, never takes its time before a bad hit; where successful romantic
endeavors take their time to progress, the unrequited and unsuccessful kind never take any more time
than is required for a heavy blow in the face of all expectations. Jake, who was used to heavy blows,
slowly dropped his hand in the air with a deadening calm, and passed his fingers slowly observing the
rugged leather, lost in thought. How many of us haven’t experienced blows of such classes, and how
many of us have not borne it with a deep unrevealing tolerance that shows neither happiness nor
sorrow, but only a perpetual melancholic flow into the sea of time, of past and present. Jake, after a
long sail into that very same sea, now returned with the same waters in his eyes. He lifted the leather
close to his face now, with a trembling hand, and feigned to observe a crack or a sudden deformity –
although his view was all fluid – for quite a while. He then put the leather down, picked his pin
hammer and started beating it again – probably with an increased force, and also a little of wrath.
Bisty, aware of Jake’s desolation, but unaware of what it was made of, put her hand to her heart.
“S-Sir, I, who have no parents, and have no worldly relations, is the same I, who has no privilege of”,
here she paused a second, gulped, continued, “who has had no privilege of anything such as ties to
anyone in the world; is the same myself, the same I, who has never known what human sentiment is
made of – what affections, what fondness, what love, what pain they speak of in the songs – what
care, what protection, what worries, what caution, what any of those words have ever meant, and what
they mean to the people of the world”
Jake’s incessant beating of the forlorn leather was now turned to a muffled trembling note, but still
continued without any movement or word from him.
“S-Sir, I have seen, I have seen poor mothers put their child to sleep on a soft lullaby caressing their
smudgy hairs, and I have seen them being hauled by the same hairs on the occasion of misconduct. I
have seen fathers dying of work to pamper their children, and I have seen fathers mauling their own
little ones to death. I have seen the so called lovers kill for each other and I have seen them kill each
other. I have seen, sir, such contrasting measures of human propinquity and such inexplicable
mannerisms of human-relationships – what they like to call such things – that I have no idea, sir, I
have no opinions about -”, here she was cut in by Jake.
“You say you’re getting married, Bisty, and yet you venture to say, things to such effect; senseless,
senseless Bisty!”, the hammer went on without disturbance.
“I may have come out unmeaningful or double-meaningful, sir, but what I meant to say, when you
stopped me… I, sir, may have exaggerated my sentiments, but what in effect I meant to say… What I
meant to say I have no idea, no idea of what human relation exists between – between the two of us”
Although she did not admit it, but all that she said in the uproar of sentiment, of not knowing what
constituted the block of human relationship, was true, as is in most cases of confessions with powerful
thumps of the heart. The more observant reader would be moved now, to declare Bisty’s attitude of a
delirious complexion, but they should keep to mind that marriage, is not a declaration of love, of any
form of human affection or sentiment, but a contract, only a contract. Affections, admirations,
fondness, do not need marriage at any point of time – the society does. Also, in Bisty’s defense, in the
heat of any proposal or a confession, the less awarded and less experienced and unknowing of the lot,
the poor soul – poor of money, poor of mind, poor of any attachments or connections – is always
submissive, and gives in, perhaps, for the hope of atleast a single human link or relationship they can
show the society; also, presumably, they are driven by the expectations of a new and different life
with different experiences and prospects of more connections – but not necessarily more happiness.
The hammer had stopped. Jake got on his feet, dusted off his shoulders, and softly and quite solemnly,
“Look here Bisty,”, he took her hand up in his. “Whenever your marriage is, I’m sure someone would
need to hand over the bride – hand over you – to the groom. I know you have no relations in the
world, and I would be quite happy to accept that role.”. And now his voice turned graver and softer,
“And about what the relation between the two of us, let it be of a master and her servant. Let it be of a
Knight and her Esquire. Let it be of a princess and her maid. Or, if propriety would allow, let it be, of
an honest and kind man, to a poor and broken woman. But, now, that we see each other again is not
nearly likely, let the relation, the connection between us, be, now, of one lost stranger, to another,
slightly shattered stranger..”, and his voice died away.

*************

Many-a-times in life, we find ourselves standing alone at the crossroads of the past, and though the
times have been changed, at such crossroads, we often find ourselves momentarily transported back to
the same time, the same conditions, that first etched the memory into our brain. It had been four and a
half years since the incident at the bridge, and the Limping Monster – or should we call him “Poor
Jake” – although calling him either would be incongruous, for he neither limped nor was poor now –
on that same path, same old bridge once again – from which path he had strayed, and had vowed to go
far away, forever. The sun was harsh. The wind was hot, almost stifling, with a sooty flavor. It was
the month of October again. The water was no longer pristinely clear blue as it had been five years
ago – it was filthy, and black. There was quite a rush, and Jake found himself struggling to hold on to
the edge of the bridge as he stood there, in the center, drinking his environment in. His face was soft
and unblemished now, and he was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a roasted white clean shirt.
His hair neat and glossy, eyes resolute, and no sign of weakness escaped his stance. He was a
Exchange Officer now, did we not mention that?
He closed his eyes, cupped his ears with his hands, lifted his head to the sun, and rode the wind into
time. Someone was singing a song in a sweet voice :

O’ young soldier what brings you here?

The queasy smell of the Waters of Want?

O’ punctured dream what brings you here?

Wars of Life turned a heart so gaunt.

O’ sailed ship what brings you back here?

The winds of reverie that spared no one?

O’ broken lover, what brings you here?

Sins of Love rendered me always alone.