Featured Story: Fires and Kites by Prerona Basu

It was his only wish. The treacherous lottery for divine recreation conducted somewhere in a far off galaxy had made Chura who he was. His daughter had witnesses how every morning he would dutifully visit the village latrines with a thick old brown brush in his hands, whose every bristle, due to severe overuse, seemed to recede away from one another in fear of contamination. There would be a black bucket waiting for him. Rajjo had secretly watched him stoop, his back raised to the heavens streaming with rivers of sweat, scrubbing toilets clean with a brush, whose every bristle, though performing the same task, though dipping in the same shit had avoided each other in an arrogant fear of contamination.

Mukti he had told her. Mukti , or the ultimate liberation, is what could be attained if she cremates his body at the bank of the river Ganga in Banaras. That was his only wish. She had worked night after night at a factory, sold her thick black ropes of hair to afford a trip with her father’s corpse from Mughalsarai to Banaras.

Amidst busy naked feet, dread locked white skinned sahebs watching in absolute awe from balconies above with eyes red either from smoke, hash or spiritual epiphanies, stray dogs smelling their way through rough roads punctuated with cow dung and huge piles of innocent logs of wood waiting to share the fate of the dead, sat Rajjo. She was admiring the rich red fabric and garlands of flowers that adorned Chura’s shroud. All the while the mighty Ganga glided her way, caressed the banks and moved on, just glanced momentarily at the perpetual human bonfire and moved on; her womb had place for everyone. She accepted whatever was offered and moved on.

Rajjo was waiting for her turn. Finally when large tongues of fire, as orange as the blazing sun above, licked Chura’s mortal shell and released great serpents of smoke which moved seductively towards the sky did Rajjo trace their movements and look up. Cheerful looking restless kites with faces up towards eternity, but shackled to the ground by thin white strings held by maneuvering hands of scrawny little kids, mingled with the ash filled chains of smoke. The kites shone their faces in an uneducated sense of liberation as it came in the way of the smoke. Papery colourful obstructions from Mukti.

“There is no Mukti in death father. In fact there is no death at all. Death is just a moment which joins two eternities. There is no release since leaving here is arriving there. There is no end. That which destroys us shall salvage us when we refuse to look at life as a path that leads to death. The fire which you think is liberating you now could have freed you then as well if you only knew how to direct it. Of what use is Mukti if you don’t live enough to savour it?” She left the unfinished fire and took some of it with her. Chura had chosen the way he wished to die. Rajjo now knew how she wanted to live.


PRERONA BASU is a student of English who graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, with a degree in English Honours in 2009 and later completed her Masters in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011. She enjoys writing fiction and has one of her stories selected in the Chicken Soup for the Indian Couple Soul series which is currently in the pipeline for publication.