So much for the demonization of drunkards, he was an extremely affable man even after he consumed copious amounts of arrack all day. People saw him and wondered how a man could operate in just one state – drunken bliss, despite his sordid profession.
When they were newly married, his wife objected to his being perpetually drunk. She had obviously grown up watching drunken men beat the daylights out of their wives and was pandering to the biases her own experiences had taught. He gave a single sentence answer - “Do you want a sane husband? If you do, allow him to drink”.
As far as occupational hazards go, he had the worst of them. People wailing, crying, shouting, cursing, beating their chests and banging their heads was passé. There were those who’d maintain a stoic silence throughout the ordeal. He respected them. But the ones he despised were the crazy ones who would even try to jump into the pyre, disturbing the perfect pattern he built so carefully for the body to burn properly and wholly. “Hysterical idiots who neither respect their own life nor another man’s professional diligence!”, he thought, about their emotionally charged acts. That was about the closest one could get, to seeing him angry.
He prided himself on being cheerful and having never cried. “I’ve seen thousands of dead bodies and not once have I cried. Why! I didn’t even cry when my parents died!”, he’d often tell people at the arrack shop and elsewhere.
For the most cheerful man in the slum, he had the most cheerful child too. His little one was the apple of his eye. She was born after 12 long years of marriage rife with wild rumour tinged talk, sometimes of his lack of manliness and sometimes of his wife’s infertility, invariably circulated by “them”. Yes. The same “them” who think that I am a show-off and you are a moron, behind our backs of course.
Despite all the death and arrack he was subjected to daily and his elderly age, he was an imaginative and energetic father. When he wasn’t spending money on arrack, he was getting her brightly coloured toys, sweets and chocolates of various hues.
He even shifted his residence from a hut in the cemetery to a small shanty slum nearby, immediately after his wife told him that she was pregnant. All he had to do was to find a second source of income, which was duly provided for at the firewood dealers’. A few hours a day of carrying loads there, to raise some money for the rent.
Every night his daughter, all shining in a talcum-powder kissed pretty face and well oiled plaits could be seen sitting on her father’s broad shoulders, taking a survey of the slum. And during their sojourns he’d tell her jokes, stories or anything else that he could conjure up to hear her tinkling laughter and giggles, amidst the typically buzzing noise of a locality filled with labour class populace.
Once she slept, it was his daily routine, to let out deep sighs of relief and love, gazing at her serene face for about an hour as she slept, disbelieving his own good luck at having fathered such a beautiful little girl.
That his little girl soon became a teenager, all of 16 years, changed nothing. He was still perpetually drunk. The gifts had graduated from toys and sweets to clothes, bangles, flowers and earrings. Her place during their daily sojourns changed from his shoulders to his side. She still laughed loudly at his jokes. He still gazed at her face in awe every night, as she slept.
As he returned home one night, he found her slippers missing. He went in to find his wife weeping in a corner, burying her face into her knees. He implored repeatedly, only for his wife to let out a howl, “It seems she has eloped with the neighbour’s son! You spoilt her with all your pampering and see what she did to us”.
Tears welled up in the eyes of the man who never wept. And he understood what could make a man jump into the burning pyre of a loved one.
It was now his turn, to sink to his knees. He has never smiled ever since.
