Abba

Abba was the kind of man you see every day, the kind you see, work with and watch him pass by, maybe even attend his daughter’s marriage reception. But Abba wasn’t the kind of man who’d incite any excitement in you to get to know him. So Abba was someone you don’t know and despite that, life seems to move on pretty well..what more to say?

Abba was a general physician, the doctor with a solution to every ailment in the world or at least the doctor you go to with every ailment in the world. I joined Abba’s clinic in the summer of 2000. It was my third attempt at trying to pass my nursing school’s final year paper, and failing yet again. Tired of watching his son eat and sleep and read Manto all day, my father took me to Abba’s clinic and narrated his ailment(me) to him as I stood next to my father’s chair and stared at the white marble flooring in Abba’s clinic. The flooring almost strung me with its sharp whiteness.

Finally, Abba sat me down and asked calmly, “Do you want to work here, son?”
Even though I knew this is why my father had dragged me to Abba’s clinic, I was sure Abba would’ve rejected me.. after all, who would want to keep a nurse who hadn’t even been able to pass nursing school?
“Son, answer me,” Abba was looking at me, trying to bring me back to his clinic and his question.
“Oh. Sir, I-uh-failed my nursing exam. I don’t think you would want me in-” “That doesn’t answer my question, son. Do you want to work here?”

Abba was still looking at me with his blank eyes and calm mouth. In my defence, I didn’t understand his question. My father stepped on my foot and eyed me sternly. I nodded feebly. Everyone in our little town knew my father as the humble and kind postman, but I never experienced any of those things. And honestly, I don’t blame him for his sternness. He was the first in the family to leave the well-established priest business, and all he wanted was for his only son to follow suit to the service industry and find a decent job in a government hospital. But as fate would have it, father got the exact opposite of a son- a boy who read Manto and dreamt of writing (hopefully about the mad futile world) someday.

For a man who wanted to raise a revolution through his words, my mouth never found a voice to go against my father’s wishes. Not technically, at least because I sincerely failed my exam every year, and my father’s rising disappointment gave me a sense of achievement. Maybe I did have it in me– to dissent.
“So then it is settled, panditji. Your son can start working here from tomorrow,” Abba took over as he always did. And that.. is how I came to know Abba. I still think about the clinic’s white floor. It reminds me of Abba, both their whites are too white for this world.

I started working at Abba’s clinic the next day. There wasn’t too much work for me. Barkat, the other nurse, handled the reception and the patients and their medicines all by herself. It was she who called Abba, Abba and I don’t know when I picked it up too. I never asked but I could tell Barkat was in her thirties. She was an average looking girl, but with time I began to notice little things about her- her looks changed like moods. My favourite one was the look she’d have when she had children to attend to in the clinic, it would almost feel like the kids knew her from before, the way she’d make them laugh and the way she’d giggle with them. At lunchtime, she’d have the lost look on her, chewing her roti absentmindedly as she stared out the window next to the reception desk. For those fifteen minutes when she ate, Barkat looked like she’d gone off the clinic leaving her body behind as a souvenir.

Despite the dark bags hanging down beneath, her eyes always shone like a diamond. Sometimes when Barkat felt generous, she would ask me to sort the injections from the other medicines and throw the expired or the broken ones but that was all. The visiting hours would end at 8 in night and it was my job to prepare for the next day while Barkat and Abba discussed matters concerning the clinic.

Months passed and I started to feel settled as a nurse in Abba’s clinic as I did back in my room reading Manto. One day long after the visiting hours had ended, Barkat and Abba’s meeting went on for hours. I sat yawning on one of the benches near the reception desk, waiting for Abba to ask me to lock the clinic for the day. After what felt like years, Barkat
finally walked out of Abba’s office, took her bag and walked past me. Usually, she would smile at the end of the day and on days when she seemed happy, Barkat would wave back too. No, I wasn’t in love with her, it just felt nice on days when she would smile and wave at me.

The next day Barkat didn’t come to work. I kept looking at the clock. Barkat never took an off, she and Abba looked like machines to me, working every day with the same calming zeal. Abba called me into his office and sat me down.

“Son, it’s been nine months since you joined my clinic. How is it going so far?” “Oh, it’s been umm, it’s been okay, Abba. Where’s Barkat, Abba?”
“Yes, I wanted to tell you. Barkat is leaving the town. So she won’t be working with us anymore.”
“Um, she’s leaving? Doesn’t she have her husband and kids here?”
“Yes. She..” Abba paused considering whether he should go on.
“She’s leaving her husband, filing for a divorce. We found her a job in the city, don’t worry, she’ll be happier now that she’s free.. It’ll be easier.”
And just like that, Barkat left the clinic and..us.

Now that I think about it, with Barkat we had become a small family that ran a clinic together. Once in a while, on her kids’ birthdays or the next day after Eid, Barkat would get cakes, biryani, seviyan, halwa, whatever she had cooked the night before, for me and Abba. Eating Barkat’s kids’ birthday cake, it felt like we were having a little party of our own. Abba had a sweet tooth and the sight of cakes and halwa was enough to get him to take a break from his patients.

After Barkat left, something happened. I think it was because I missed her so much, that I took up all her jobs in the clinic and made sure the clinic ran smoothly. I knew Barkat wouldn’t believe her eyes if she saw me working all day like her but then I don’t think I would have even had the need to, had she still been here. The man I became in the memory of Barkat gradually started to make me happy as well. I had never thought of myself as a good nurse but Abba’s occasional “Shabash, son” took away all doubts and failures from my mind. I still missed Barkat, in fact I know Abba did too. We would talk about her some days while I prepared the clinic to close for the day. He told me the doctors at Barkat’s new workplace, who knew Abba, had even called to thank him for sending her. We already don’t know how we’d run the nursing home without her, they had told him. Abba and I would smile at that for we knew what they meant.

Some days, I would read excerpts from my poetry to Abba. It became a ritual like Barkats’ food parties and once a week during lunch, Abba would come out to the reception desk and ask me to read to him, something new that I’d written. It helped me too because I started writing more in anticipation of our weekly poetry recitals in the clinic. Once when I complained I had nothing new to read as I had been too caught up at the clinic, Abba hadn’t said anything throughout the lunch. But as he got up to go back to his office, he turned around and said, “There’s no such thing as being busy for a poet who wants to change the world with his words, son.”

It had been a few years and it was still Abba and me running the clinic. We just never felt the need for another person. Abba had increased my salary, and my father smiled at me after what felt like ages when I had told him about it. There were a few neighbours who’d smirk at my father for his son was not only a failure, but he also worked at a Musalman’s clinic.. my father would just quietly walk past them. I couldn’t care less either, but it made me laugh at them and then it made me angry because they were the same neighbours who would often ask me to get medicines free of cost for their sons suffering from stomach aches from Abba’s clinic. They were the same neighbours who’d be the first in line when Abba organised his monthly free check-up drives.

I wish Abba weren’t so kind to everyone. I wish he hadn’t run those check-up drives. Maybe things wouldn’t have gotten as bad then, I still tell myself. Or would they?
It was one of Abba’s free drives that day. The clinic was swamped with people when a lady barged in and asked to see Abba immediately. I sensed she had the same entitled tone as my neighbours who asked for free medicines and also made faces at a Brahmin boy working under a Muslim. I had heard it way too many times to know that tone well. I asked her to sit and wait for her turn, but expectedly she didn’t sit. Instead, she told me her husband was a big man in town, and she wouldn’t even have come to this god-forsaken clinic had her city doctor visited her for her regular check-up. It didn’t make sense to me, so I kept quiet and asked her again to wait. The lady’s already high-pitched shouts turned into growls. Abba came out to see what the commotion was about, and after hearing her out, he paused thoughtfully and asked her to come in for the check-up. Abba was the fairest man I knew, and it made me angrier at the mad lady for doing what she did, using her growls to skip the ‘cue of fairness’. I sat in silence, trying to calm myself, when the lady came out with a prescription paper towards me.

“Here, put this injection, c’mon lad, I don’t have all day,” the mad lady said to me. I took out the prescribed injection, and as she gave me her hand, something inside of me rushed my blood, and I thrust the injection into her vein, almost in a vain effort to purify it. Shocked at the intensity of it, the mad lady shouted and slapped me with the same hand. Strong grasp for someone who’d just gotten an injection, I thought to myself. She stomped out of the clinic, wailing like a wolf. The clinic returned to its normalcy as suddenly as it had tensed when the mad lady had entered. I tried hard to suppress a smile, but I let it come out into the world. It almost felt like I had just written a powerful verse. I smiled and continued managing Abba’s check-up drive.

The sun had almost set, and the patients were gone. Abba and I sat down to eat a late lunch. It just felt nicer to eat after finishing a good day’s work. A good day it indeed was, I smiled again.
“What is it, son? You seem happy today,” Abba smiled at me.

“Uh, Ha-ha. Abba, I think I made a difference today in this mad futile world. I taught this world, or at least someone who represented it well a lesson today.”
“I see,” Abba didn’t ask more and continued with his lunch cum supper. Suddenly a huge black jeep stopped in front of the clinic, and out came five huge men. It happened all so suddenly it is still a blur to me..Someone slapped Abba’s hand as he was about to take a bite and grasped me by my collar. Another man hit me on my head, and the mad futile world turned black in front of me.
When I woke up, I found myself on a hospital bed, covered in white sheets and surrounded by white walls. The unfamiliarity of the white took me by surprise, and I think I must’ve shouted because when I opened my eyes again, I saw Barkat in front of me. Oh, it really was Barkat, Lord what a wonder! I looked at her, she had a beautiful strand of hair covering her beautiful face..but her face, something was missing from her face. Before I could say anything, Barkat broke into tears. Startled, I couldn’t find words, and I just continued to watch her weep for a whole minute. At last, she gulped down air and looked at me unflinchingly. At that moment, I knew what was missing, Barkat’s eyes had lost their shine, her face looked pale and withering, and suddenly, she looked old, really old.

“You don’t know what you’ve done, Ved Pandit, what did you do, Oh Ved why..,” Barkat’s voice broke as she sobbed, and tears clasped her face again.
This was the first time Barkat had ever taken my full name, and I had always fantasised about this day. I had always imagined it would be a nice day when she’d call me by name..something romantic about that. But..what had I done? Before I could ask her or say anything at all, Barkat covered her face with her hands and ran out the room. That was the last time Barkat ever took my name. In fact, it was the last time Barkat ever looked at my face. Even when Abba’s last rites were being performed, Barkat did not look at me, and soon after, she left town and returned to her life in the city.

After Abba was gone, the clinic shut down. It was I who went to clear the clinic before Abba’s wife, Mrs. Rashid got the broker to open it for prospective buyers. The clinic felt empty. Painfully quiet. I remember sitting there for hours until the sun had set again. My eyes kept drifting out the window, almost on a lookout for black jeeps and huge men. That evening as I got up to pack up all the things and leave, something inside me made me stop. The same adrenaline that had consumed me that day when the mad lady had come- the day she had destroyed Abba’s clinic with religion and power and hatred- the day my anger had destroyed Abba- took over me again. This time it felt more compelling yet subtle in its approach. Without thinking, I took out my diary, the one where I wrote my poetry and read from to Abba. I kept it on the window sill near what once used to be the clinic’s reception and walked out in the darkness, away from the clinic that once housed my small family.

It’s been years since Abba was murdered by those hateful goons. But it wasn’t just those goons who killed him, it was the whole town, the town that appeared innocent to a passerby. I hated it, I hated the town that turned a blind eye when my hero was attacked by monsters. I still live in this dreadful town with my father. I never heard from Barkat again. And the poetry I used to write? I left it on the clinic’s window sill.

I couldn’t write anymore…for a world that had no place for a man like Abba.