Riverside Reflections

By Devraj Singh Kalsi

I was eating a protein energy bar by the riverside, looking at the serene flow of water and absorbing the positive vibes. I find this therapy more potent and relaxing than meditating as the evil faces of my enemies appear in front of my closed eyes, dancing with swords and breaking my concentration.

When it comes to letting things go, the riverside is the ideal spot. It carried the ashes of my beloved parents and since then I believe it can carry almost everything from life — including guilt, burden, failures, and memories. With less philosophical ramblings about spiritual encounters associated with ghats, I would like to share some interesting takeaways the riverside trip offered.   

The sight of lovers stretching and entwining their legs on the steps leading to the river, hiding their faces under the black umbrella, kindles the desire to emulate their masked boldness. Before I can soak in their leisure moments of passion and pleasure, I am scared to imagine the consequences of a disagreement between the couple, with one of the immature lovers suddenly getting up and jumping into the river. What I tried not to think about has happened in a jiffy. Reality imitates imagination or it is the power of manifestation at work.   

I consider this to be a hasty act of suicide committed in a tearing hurry to exit this painful world. A few minutes later, his hand becomes visible like a party symbol trying to stay afloat. He swims to the shore and flaunts his survival skills, going against the tide, against the flow, with the girl clapping and cheering for him. She offers him a chocolate as a token reward of acceptance and plants a kiss on his cheek with her hands cupping his wet face. Her black umbrella grabs the chance to take flight like a broken kite for a while and then tumbles down the stairs to join the mighty river. Another bystander tries to clutch the black umbrella and he himself slips and slides into the river, shouting for help.

I sit wondering whether this is a classic example of extra dark humour. How a stranger meets his tragic end while trying to save an umbrella and the couple engaged in kissing remains totally unaware of how their umbrella has led to a death by drowning in front of them while they celebrated love and union.   

Trained swimmers dived in at last but it was too late to rescue the man alive. Cops descended on the scene to launch a raid – to arrest the lovers engaged in obscene activities but they were burdened with the boring job of identifying the victim and gathering witnesses and evidence to prove it was not a case of accident but a cold-blooded murder.

I became engrossed in what I had seen before me. My relaxation gave way to creativity as I began to imagine fresh ways of interpreting this episode. The lovers staged a futile attempt to escape from the riverside. The police chased them to gather an account of how this had happened. They could not reconstruct the scene as they had seen nothing. They did not confess they were lost in amorous activities in a public place. The girl showed nervousness when the cops threatened to inform her family.

It was getting dark. The guy feared torture and arrest. He became selfish and was ready to forget the girl forever if he was set free. His folded hands praying for release melted the senior officer’s heart and the lover who made tall promises seemed to run for his life and freedom.

As he ran fast without looking back at the girl, the sleeping dog on the bench woke up and chased him faster than the obese cops could have managed. Before he could exit the park gate, his leg was bitten by the dog. Perhaps it was karma instantly paying him back for deserting his beloved in the hour of crisis. He limped out of the park and hired a rickshaw to take him to the nearest hospital.

The dog came wagging its tail to celebrate the triumph. The aftertaste of a fleshy leg bite kept his salivating tongue hanging loose. A beggar boy in a torn shirt shared his biscuits with the dog while a young influencer made a reel out of his act of kindness for millions of viewers to boost his own income.

The cops grilled the girl in the park. Other people loitering around were asked if they had seen anything. Though I had seen it all, I did not utter a single word to avoid interrogation. The girl was clever to embroil me. She said I was a key witness who saw what had happened, right from the start till the end.

I told them just like the guy, the girl was also innocent. My brief testimony set the girl free. She rushed forward and hugged me to thank me from the bottom of her heart. So heartfelt that the cops found reason to suspect something fishy again. Her behaviour gave inconsistent signals.

The cops were under the impression – before I confirmed anything – that the girl and her lover had brought the victim, who was probably her groom, and then she pushed him into the river to get rid of him forever. Their theory was a possibility as there were similar incidents recorded in the recent past. I dismissed all of that like a prime investigator and the cops believed every single word of the narrator. Nobody in my family had ever believed me so fast, without a shred of doubt.  Did I speak the entire truth or had I concocted a portion of it?

The baton-wielding cops quit the hot pursuit to nab the murderer at the crime spot and went away with the dead, bloated body zipped up in a white plastic cover along with an unidentified black umbrella as a piece of circumstantial evidence and registered it as a freak accident due to negligence.  

The girl started abusing the guy who deserted her. Then she changed her stance. She thanked her stars she got the chance to identify a coward. She fell in love with my brutal honesty and expressed gratitude for defending her and proclaiming her innocence in front of the cops. It restored her faith in humanity.

As she was alone, she asked me to drop her home, which was not very far. I told her she could have asked the cops for a lift in the van. She said she did not trust them. Besides, alighting from a police van would have raised family suspicions. Here was a stranger, a young girl, completely trusting me without knowing anything about me.

I was feeling elated with this booster dose as nobody in my life, neither my bosses nor my publishers, exhibited such absolute trust. I decided to accompany her and drop her at the entrance gate. I thought she would invite me in and introduce me to her family as a saviour of sorts. I was thinking of such positive things when there was a phone call. She said I need not bother as her brother was already looking for her. She gave him the riverside address and he came on his motorbike soon. She knew she was not going to find me again but she forgot to ask for my contact details. I told her I come here every evening around this time. I was confident she would be there the next day.  

I went to the riverside at the same time with the fond hope to meet her. She did not turn up. I repeated riverside visits for seven consecutive days like a penance. Then I decided to stop as it was causing undue stress. What was supposed to be the equivalent of meditative experience had added to my anxiety. I was always reminded of her, whenever I saw a girl with a black umbrella seated on the steps.   

A week later, she came to the same place and sat beside me on the bench. I was taking a nap. She waited for me to wake up. When I opened my eyes, I saw her smiling face. She was restless to share a lot just as I was eager to know about her long absence. 

I wanted to know if everything was proceeding well in her life. Without answering me, she confessed she knew I came here every day. The beggar boy — an untrained spy(?) – had told her.

I was wondering why she did not show up earlier. She said she was waiting for the outcome of her divorce proceedings before meeting me with a proposal. The case was put in abeyance, if not dismissed, since her husband went missing and nobody from his family living overseas suspected he was dead. His horoscope predicting a long life prevented them from jumping to any conclusion. She was busy with legal consultations. The unclaimed body recovered from the river was finally consigned to flames by the riverside. This was another abrupt turn of events – beyond my imagination. But this was her side of the story.   

She was young and married and divorced and probably widowed. I asked her how she would like to live the rest of her life. She said she was required to wait for seven years before she could tie the knot. A live-in relationship was okay for her as she had inherited sufficient wealth to support herself.

She was quick to respond with a decent proposal, checking out if I was free and willing for a live-in stint for seven years. I told her I was a writer working on a big, fat novel and for this arrangement she would have to support me financially on a salary basis. She approved that instantly and chose to call it a conditional love affair with full mutual benefits. Much better than unconditional love that comes with more baggage.

I felt relaxed now as my prime worry of financial support for the next decade was taken care of by her. I decided I could lock myself in a room for seven long years to complete the magnum opus without the haunting fear of commercial failure. Sometimes both of us could come and sit by the riverside in the evening for the sake of nostalgia, down memory lane and also meet the beggar boy and the sleeping dog on the bench.   

I disclosed to her that I was stuck in a key character development and I wanted to make it breathe. I planned an evening near the riverside. But she refused to go to the riverside again.

I escaped domestic confinement and ventured out for riverside reflection alone. I saw many couples in intimate postures in the presence of strangers. I wanted to take a boat ride and looked for an able-bodied boatman who could anchor safely. As we reached the middle of the river, dark grey clouds gathered in the horizon and the boatman said we should return to the shore.

When I came back and reached the steps, I saw my live-in standing alone by the river. She asked me who I had come with. I said I was alone. She asked the boatman for the full truth after giving him a handsome tip. He said I dropped the special lady guest on the other side of the river and then came back. For the lure of a bribe, the boatman put me in a difficult situation.  

She came home without creating a scene and wanted to know who was Niru in my story. I called her a character in my imagination but she called it my past. She suspected she was the same lady the boatman referred to. There was a clear mention of the girl who crossed the river to meet her lover in the story in the making. I was trapped in my own creation.

I said the river takes everything from you, whatever clings to you. She did not get the layered meaning and cried a lot over my betrayal. I told her since we were not married, she should not get emotional. We were just in a temporary phase of togetherness and then separation was bound to follow. She found it impossible to accept compromises and demanded loyalty while I raised a parallel demand for a life without suspicion. We were like the two banks of the river that could never meet.

She promised she would not let me complete the novel so that my fate continued to hang in balance. She began to make it happen and, within a year, I noticed my creative burnout and slow down with useless chores and nonsensical issues. Seven years passed, the novel remained incomplete and she was delighted to have won. I was offered another lifeline of extension for seven years and I chose to avail this chance and bring my novel to a definite end.  

In case I could not manage to do so, I would go to the riverside and immerse the incomplete manuscript. Like the river carried my all, let the stories also perish in its flow and find a new direction.

Devraj Singh Kalsi works as a senior copywriter in Kolkata. His short stories and essays have been published in Deccan Herald, Tehelka, Kitaab, Earthen Lamp Journal, Assam Tribune, and The Statesman. Pal Motors is his first novel.  

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