Mulberry Trees

Bhushan Singh had just been on his way to the loo when he visited the phone call he was not waiting to receive. It had been the hottest day of that summer in Delhi. He had drawn all the curtains, and yet, the day outside was bright enough to make it impossible to have a dark room in the house. Outside, in the middle of the day, the roads wore a deserted look. Along with the constant buzzing he had just started to hear in his right ear a few days ago, coupled with the noise coming from the luxury sedan commercial on the television, the sad screeching of the ceiling fan, and the low humming of the air conditioner, he could hardly make out the ringing of the cell phone his granddaughter had gifted him last month on the occasion of his seventy eighth birthday.

He dropped the rolled up newspaper he had been planning to take with him on the rather fashionable glass-and-steel coffee table in the sitting room, and sat down on the couch. He couldn’t find his glasses, but he did not need to see the number to know where the call was coming from. He put the television on mute, and pressed the faintly-visible green button on his phone.

“He’s gone”, said woman’s low-pitched, broken voice reluctantly. “It would be great if you could come and visit. There was no friend he valued more than you.”

No dramatic tears dropped from Bhushan Singh’s eyes. He did not gasp, and he did not look down. Instead, he just let out a sigh. This had all been a long time coming.

“Take care of your mother, Adiba. She was his favourite child. I’ll try to be there as soon as I can”, he replied. He heard a sob from the other side, and was just about to cut the call when he heard-

“He asked me to tell you something a few hours before he went. He could barely speak, so I’m not sure if this is what he said. He said that he stole the watch and buried it.”

Bhushan Singh was at a sudden loss. The words made him feel a light, bubbling feeling he hadn’t felt in what seemed like his entire lifetime. His brain zapped back to the earliest of memories he had, stopping at a point in the long thread of his remembrance that stood out perfectly clearly amongst the rest of the muddled images. He let out a mumbled “thank you”, cut the call, and let his nimble body bury itself in the cushioning of the couch as his mouth remained propped open.

It had some of those particularly rainy days in October, and he was eleven years old. Farooq was obviously ten, and obviously a little more stupid in Bhushan’s eyes. As Farooq’s thin, slightly longer legs (“Slightly? I’m at least two inches taller than you, Bhushan!) climbed up the low bench to reach out to ripe, black mulberries, Bhushan had other things going on in his mind. His eyebrows formed two thin, heavy arch-shapes, and he could not get rid of his smirk despite the muddied slippers which were going to land him up in trouble with his mother later that evening.

Farooq and Bhushan had grown up like the only two brothers in the neighbouring homes amongst the army of siblings they apparently seemed to have. Farooq’s father was one of the lucky ones to be still having a two generation-old bakery in Old Delhi, thanks to the influence Bhushan’s father had in the market, who had shifted to Delhi to take up odd-jobs and slowly move to trade instead of bangle-making and made a fortune bigger than he had ever imagined out of it. The fathers never failed to tell the sons that they had the bond they shared in their bloods. They grew up to believe it.

“What are you so happy about?”, Farooq asked Bhushan as he handed him over a bunch of mulberries. Farooq put his bunch all at once in his mouth, having taken the little branch off beforehand, feeling a burst of the sweet flavour of berries in his mouth. He had kept the riper ones for himself. “Is it the gift you kept telling me about? Did you finally get it?”

Bhushan flashed out all his mulberry-smeared teeth. “Yes, and you won’t believe what it is.”

He straightened his chest, and proudly pulled a wristwatch from the pockets of his shorts. It had a round and fairly big dial for an eleven-year-old’s thin wrist, with small lines instead of numbers and arrow-shaped hands. The strap was made of thin black leather.

“It’s exactly like the one father wears”, Bhushan exclaimed. “Do you know what this means, Farooq? It means I’m a grown up! See, grown-ups are not given toys. They are given these watches with round dials. Father knows I’m smart enough to figure out the time without the numbers. He knows I’m the smart one of them all.”

Farooq grinned back at him. “Of course, you’re the smartest. But hey, grown-ups don’t pick mulberries from trees and eat them right there, either. They don’t play in their backyards. Go home and read the newspaper, why don’t you?” Farooq snickered teasingly through the speech, and stuck his tongue out to Bhushan after that.

Bhushan’s chest slumped a little, and the smirk finally disappeared from his face. “You know what? You’re right. From now on, I’m going to act like a grown up, too. Come and join me so that you get your own watch,” he said, rushing angrily through the words while trying to deepen his voice. Then, he dropped the mulberries on the ground, stomped over them, and walked towards his house. He did not realise that Farooq wasn’t following him. He kept the watch on his wrist the entire day, and went to sleep, content, after keeping it besides his pillow.

He woke up and found the watch gone. Farooq was obviously there handing him mulberries that afternoon, after Bhushan had had the entire house search by all of his siblings and had cried to no end.

Farooq had lost his mother, a sister and two brothers when he had travelled to Lahore a few years after that, when they had started settings houses everywhere on fire. He had found Bhushan Singh’s phone number only ten years ago, and they had never missed a day of their hourly phone calls, even when Farooq got really sick.

He was the younger one, Bhushan Singh thought that afternoon in Delhi. He was the stupider one.

Bhushan Singh went to the loo and never called his son to ask him to arrange his trip to Lahore.