against the wall seemed to strike to discordant note. Ratno saw and felt him in distress and brought lassi for him, he heard the footsteps but didn't look. He was not just a bastard, he was beyond bastard, more than a mere hramdaa he was born of unwed man and woman, yes, but also of different castes and on top of that from the same village; he was an absolute pariah. Ratno placed the lassi on the table and stood gazing into his eyes and face; his eyes saw but the heart refused to acknowledge her. An eruption is preferable to a freeze--a soul erupting is a soul alive, she thought and rubbing her temples, she walked away.
Upon the bungalow the rupture of the mother son bond loomed like death death of truth that she had told him that had been the glue of their bond and she was in danger of losing him, her life's work.
She walked back.
"I'm sorry Jaggi. I wasn't a Principal then, just a smitten teenaged from Qaadian. I wasn't an actuary and mine wasn't a cold cost benefit analysis. I was the initiator. He allowed himself to be loved. You are nobody's fault but the result of my love for him which refuses to dim. He loves you. You are his son. I hadn't told him of my pregnancy or you. He found out about us from Ajit the rickshawala. Please, try to understand."
"Leave the hramdaa alone mom! That's what I am, a hramdaa," he gnashed his teeth.
Jagat felt a charlatan, a near murderer of his rapist Jewna and now a proven betrayer of Qaadian's rule against Qaadian's born and bred sleeping with each other. Had the country known of his sin against Qaadian it would've laughed him out of the independence movement.
Hours later Jaggi was still in the yard meditating on the freshly blossomed roses, pondering the distance between them and his turmoil within when his eyes chanced upon a withered rose, shrunken and dried, atop the tallest branch filled with red roses, it earlier having escaped his eyes just as it had survived Jagat' deadheading shear. It encapsulated the moment for him: He wasn't a rose in bloom in Jagat's garden and if so at all, he was shriveled one his father had forgotten to tend.
Ratno made another round of shuckered tea. She gave Jagat his cup.
"I needed this, thanks," he said getting up from his bed.
"Talk to your son because he wants to be alone which is dangerous; he needs you. I've tried," said Ratno as she walked to the yard to give Jaggi second cup of tea.
"Puttar take this tea while I make your favourite pranthas," she said.
He looked at her and she glanced at his and saw a fury. She left walking past Jagat, as with tea in hand, he advanced toward Jaggi. He placed his cup next to Jaggi's.
"What were you thinking papa? Didn't you know a hramdaa would be born?"
"First of all no child is hramdaa; a child is born when a man and a woman sleep with each other, whether married or not and you're born the same way as are all human beings; so you aren't a bastard, a hramdaa. Thinking? No we weren't, we're young and she'd decided to have her way. I liked her too but being of Qaadian I couldn't confess to loving her. I would've married her and gone far away from Qaadian but by the time I returned to tell her so, she'd disappeared."
"But you don't understand, I'm hramdaa, unable to proclaim my father because truth doesn't always set you free."
"You may proclaim me dead because I did die long ago, perhaps even more than once. If and when you feel up to claiming me I'm ready."
"It is not as if after declaring the truth we are all going into to the solitude of the Gujranwala jail cells, immune to Qaadian's venom. I better get out of your lives."
Jaggi was now calmer; in the evening the lights in the bungalow burnt long enough to cook and eat the evening meal. In the morning Jagat woke up to Ratno sitting at the kitchen table holding a piece of paper she had picked up off Jaggi's bed. Extending it toward him she said,
"When I woke he was already gone."
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