Shadows Of The Forgotten

The sight of kasturi flowers always brings a familiar ache, a mix of joy and sorrow.

Stepping off the express train at the central station, I see a kasturi tree just outside, shimmering in the moonlight. It stirs something deep within me. I set my bag down and reach for a branch to pluck a single flower. In that moment, a cloud, seemingly tangled in the green leaves, descends and sweeps me up from the ground.

Looking down from the drifting cloud, I see our village bathed in the soft light of dawn. Our charming home stands out. I see my sister and I walking with our school bags. Balaraju is there, herding buffaloes. In one hand, he holds a branch with a strange, beautiful flower, and with the other, he offers a tart, unripe guava to my sister.

‘Is that a rose?’ my sister asks, covering the guava with her skirt before taking a bite through the cloth.

‘No, it’s a kasturi,’ Balaraju says. ‘I got it from Shetty’s house on the next street.’

It was the first time we had ever seen one. A sudden, fierce desire for that flower overcomes me. As I reach out to touch it, I fall from the cloud. The light vanishes and is replaced by darkness. The village disappears, and in its place, a graveyard stretches before me. There isn’t a soul in sight. Only me, lost even to myself.

A solitary kasturi tree shimmers mysteriously under the moon’s glow. A single blossom detaches from its branch and falls, mirroring my own descent from that cloud of memory.

#

Every time I see a kasturi flower, memories of Balaraju flood my mind. Thoughts of my sister surface. My father’s face appears. Our village lingers. I remember transplanting a kasturi sapling from our village to our new home in another state after I married, only to watch it wither and die within days. All these memories bring a familiar cocktail of sorrow and rage.

If I board the next train, I could be in my hometown by morning. Will my father still be alive?

I am hungry. I crave a cigarette. Right now, I wish I could sit beside my father and ask him the countless questions that have no answers. I want to be home, sleeping beside my children, planting a kiss on each of their foreheads. I want to do so many things at once.

I am one person, but my thoughts scatter in a hundred directions.

My father will die. Today, tomorrow … soon.

Death is not new to me. I’ve seen it many times since I was a child. Being away from loved ones isn’t new either. I lost so much of what I cherished long ago.

I stand by the kasturi, smoking. As I bend to pick up a dropped flower, a shadow falls across the ground, as if someone has come to stand behind me. I know I would find no one there if I turn around. They are just shadows from my past, fragments of memory that never leave me.

It is the scent of the kasturi that always pulls me back. It is the key that unlocks the door to my past. Perhaps everyone has a similar key.

As I settle into my seat on the Narayanadri Express, my eyes drift shut. In my sleep, voices from the past call me. I feel the burn of embers I thought were long buried in ash. Newly awakened shadows chase me. Like the train, I am hurtling forward, knowingly, into an inferno.

#

Venkataiah’s body was brought to our house first. He had been electrocuted while setting up a fence to protect the crops from wild boars.

It was the middle of the night.

The local doctor insisted Venkataiah was gone, but my father wouldn’t listen. He demanded stubbornly that we take him to the hospital.

‘How can he die just like that?’ my father argued, his voice thick with disbelief. ‘A man who killed a wild boar with a single punch? How can a simple shock kill him? Check again! He’s alive.’

I was only seven years old. The sorrow of Venkataiah’s death was one thing, but I couldn’t yet understand my father’s pain, the deeper, piercing loss of a dependable person who had been his right-hand man for over ten years.

Venkataiah was the rhythm of our days. His mornings began in the cattle shed. He would guide the cattle to the fields, return by midday to fetch the food my mother cooked for the farmhands, climb the palm tree on his way back to gather sweet palm fruits for us children, and in the evening, bring the cattle home and give them enough grass to last through the night. He would then eat the leftovers from our kitchen and head to his home tired.

His absence left a void in every corner of our home. It was into this void that Balaraju, his only son, arrived. Balaraju was in the fifth grade when his father died. Venkataiah’s passing had left an emptiness in our lives, but for his small family, it left a wound that words could never heal. I couldn’t grasp this then; it was only years later, when Balaraju explained it to me, that I truly understood.

#

Balaraju was the full moon and the midday sun. At ten, he had the wisdom of a twenty-year-old. There was a light in one of his eyes and a darkness in the other, and he knew, somehow, how to weave them together. He carried two lives at once, the one he chose and the one he was given, and tried to make them both meaningful.

I remember the day he came to stay. His mother, Anakamma, was talking quietly with my parents while we children played marbles under the neem tree in the backyard. Balaraju joined our game without hesitation and, by dusk, had won marbles from every one of us. One boy started crying, demanding his marbles back.

‘I won them fair and square,’ Balaraju said firmly. ‘A game’s a game.’ But the boy ran and got his mother.

The children’s squabble quickly became an argument between the adults. ‘Why did you let that boy into your house?’ the child’s mother shouted.

Anakamma shot back, ‘Why not? What is wrong with my son?’

My mother stepped in, her voice final. ‘Balaraju is staying with us from now on. If you don’t want your children playing with him, then don’t send them here.’ The woman snatched her son’s hand and stormed away.

From that day on, Balaraju was part of our home. It is strange how we never realized that our lives were incomplete without him. Within days, he became our closest friend.

Every morning, we embarked on our separate journeys together: my sister and I to the school, Balaraju to the fields with the cattle. Every evening, he would be waiting for us by the water pump outside the school, ready to share the berries he had gathered. He taught us that ghouls and two-headed serpents were just stories. And that chewing a dried gooseberry could make a sip of water taste miraculously sweet. He knew things we didn’t, and we couldn’t understand how a boy who had dropped out of school to become our servant could be so wise. He used to say he learned more in his mother’s lap than he ever did in a classroom. But deep down, he wished he could have kept on studying.

One day, Anakamma came to see my mother. ‘The boy wants to study,’ she said. ‘You are his world now. Please, tell me what to do.’

My mother was worried. ‘Who will pay for it? If he goes to school, how will you and your daughter manage?’

Balaraju interrupted them. ‘It’s okay, Amma. I don’t want to study. I’ll keep working.’

But he started his studies that very day. My sister became the keeper of his dream. When we sat under the lantern light with our books, he would join us and sit beside her. She shared her lessons, her pencils, her knowledge. My mother would often sigh, ‘Why cause trouble by teaching him?’ But my father would say, ‘Let him study. It might at least bring him some peace.’

The three of us, my sister, Balaraju and I, were an unbeatable team in every marbles game in the village. But one day, they pulled my sister away from us. She had ‘grown up,’ they said.

I remember that day vividly. It was the day we first saw the kasturi.

I didn’t understand why my sister went home from school that afternoon without telling me. I didn’t understand why, after she had ‘grown up,’ they stopped her from going to school at all. I asked Balaraju what it meant, but he didn’t know either. That evening, when he came to sit with us to study as usual, my mother said sharply, ‘You’ve studied enough. Go to sleep.’ He left without a word.

From that day, our paths diverged. The three of us, who had walked together for so long, were suddenly forced onto separate roads.

#

After the seventh grade, I was sent to a hostel. I didn’t return to the village until I finished my tenth-grade exams. By then, the village had transformed. Electricity poles stood like strange trees, and in front of nearly every house, a kasturi bloomed, its pink flowers glowing under the new street lamps.

Balaraju had transformed too. He had grown a moustache and stood tall like a man.

‘What’s with all these kasturi trees?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘I planted them.’

That summer, my mother passed away unexpectedly. In my grief, Balaraju was my anchor. He took my hand and led me through the village, gathering kasturi flowers from every house. At the Rama temple, he offered them to the priest. As the priest wove the blossoms into a garland, we sat together in silence, watching until it was dark. Balaraju told me that he borrowed books from the priest and studied through the night, that he still dreamed of finishing his degree.

They sent me back to the hostel after two months. Balaraju saw me off at the bus stand. ‘Why aren’t you speaking to my sister?’ I asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, but I knew it was a lie. They hadn’t exchanged a single word in two months. As the bus pulled away, I asked him again. ‘Did you two have a fight?’

He just smiled, his eyes sad. It took me two more years to understand that what had passed between them was not a simple quarrel, but something much larger.

#

After the entrance exam for my degree in engineering, I took the evening bus back to the village. My father had gone to the town nearby, and the house was empty. I walked into the backyard and saw them by the well, their heads bent together, weaving a garland of kasturi flowers. They were so lost in their own world that they didn’t notice me.

‘Why do you love this flower so much?’ my sister asked, holding up a flower.

‘Because its colour is the colour of your lips,’ Balaraju answered softly. ‘Kissing them is like kissing you.’

Listening to them, I felt a strange unease, but also a swelling of happiness. That evening, they spoke of their love for each other, and in that moment, our bond felt stronger than ever. In the garden my sister tended and Balaraju nurtured, I was once again the playful boy, and the three of us were whole.

Later, under the moonlight by the lake, I asked him, ‘When did you fall in love?’

The moon was hidden behind the clouds, and when they drifted past, its light danced on the water illuminating a single, perfect lotus.

‘Do you see that lotus?’ Balaraju asked.

I nodded.

‘Has it always been there?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘But I’m only just now noticing it.’

‘That is how it was with my love,’ he said. ‘For ten years, your sister was my light, the person who held my hand and guided me. Then one day, I truly saw her, and it was like discovering a marvellous flower that whispered, “I belong to you.”’

As he spoke, a gentle breeze swept over the lake. Despite the summer heat, it carried a deep, unnatural chill. In that moment, a cold fear took root in my heart, a certainty that something terrible was about to happen.

My fear came true.

A few months later when I returned from college, the atmosphere at home was thick with rage and silence. My sister’s face was swollen from our father’s beatings. She hadn’t eaten in two days and cried like she would never stop. Balaraju was nowhere to be found. My father’s fury terrified me. No one said a word, but I pieced together what had happened.

Two days later, Balaraju met me by the lake.

‘Are you angry with me?’ he asked. I was, but I refused to admit it.

He grabbed my hand, his voice desperate. ‘I can take care of her, I promise,’  he said. ‘I’ll graduate soon and find a job. Please, don’t let him separate us. You have to help.’

I didn’t know what to say. When he asked again if I would help, I nodded.

That was the last time I ever saw him. Rumours spread that he had left the village with his mother and sister. With his departure my sister stopped eating. She stopped watering the plants. The kasturi in our garden wilted, then vanished. And one day, just like the flowers, my sister faded away too.

#

When I finally arrive at the hospital, relatives are waiting, their faces etched with sorrow. Father is still alive. I sit beside him in the ICU. He seems to recognize me, as if he has been holding on just for this. He struggles to speak.

‘I have to … tell you something,’ he rasps.

I lean closer.

‘Balaraju…’

‘What about him, Nanna?’ I ask, gripping his hand.

‘Balaraju … is dead.’

‘I know,’ I whisper.

My father’s eyes are brimming with tears, and they widen. ‘I killed him,’ he says. A lifetime of guilt is carried in those three words.

‘I know,’ I repeat softly.

For the longest time, I had believed the rumours that Balaraju had simply left. Then a kasturi tree began to grow in the middle of our cattle shed. No matter how many times my father pulled it out, it would sprout again in the exact same spot. Unlike the flowers of all the other kasturi in the village, the blossoms on this tree were not pink. They were a deep, dark red. Sometimes, when I picked them to take to the temple, I would feel a shadow following me, and I knew the truth.

With my mother, sister and Balaraju all gone, I no longer had the desire to stay on in the village. One day, without telling anyone, I left. I had only met my father a few times after that.

Just a few hours after unburdening his secret, my father passes away.

We carry his body to the cremation ground in our village. As we near the site, we lower the bier from our shoulders. There is a tradition I had forgotten, where one whispers a final, loving secret into the ear of the deceased before the pyre is lit.

I lean close to my father’s ear. Everyone watches. A secret known to no one else burns inside me, urging to be shared. I whisper Balaraju’s last words into the silence between us, words from a letter he had given me by the lake more than twenty years ago, a letter I had never delivered.

‘Pain, sorrow, anger, tears: I send this invitation woven with all these things, and I will wait for you. What more can I give?’

‘We share this guilt, Nanna. The same wicked desire to keep her from him ran in our blood. If I had given her that letter, perhaps their lives, though full of hardship and joy, would not have been cut short. The shadows might not have haunted me all these years. I am as guilty as you are.’

I take out the brittle, folded letter I have carried in my wallet for two decades and place it on my father’s chest. I watch it turn to ash in the flames, severing my final bond with the village.

Before I leave for the last time, I break a branch off the kasturi tree, the one with the red blossoms, and wrap it carefully in cloth. As I walk away, I glance to my side.

There is Balaraju’s shadow, and beside it, my sister’s.