Five hungry men were warming themselves on the freshly lit campfire that was blazing, the winds from the north caused the raging fire angle towards Kasim who crept back a couple feet. The white 6-seater SUV onto his right was bespattered with mud. They could see the zebras grazing on the endless terrain of the Serengeti plains when the sun was just disappearing behind the horizon. The five were worn out after a hot day in a safari trip and couldn’t wait to begin cooking the lamb and chicken on the fire.
Kasim started, “What about your friend Kamal, you said you would tell us after the sun sets.”
“Oh yah, he was an amazing character,” I replied and ranted
The burning sensation he had in his chest was unbearable and yet he was unrelenting. He wouldn’t listen to his body and thundered past the 25 m mark, his final lap before we wound up for the day. Sardar Kamaljit Singh panted, undid his goggles and smiled at me as I was gazing at the minuscular sky blue bikini that barely offered refuge to the girl who just emerged from the pool.
“Why kill yourself man?” I echoed so that he could hear me.
Panting and holding up his hands, he talked in bursts.
“I need to keep increasing my lung capacity,” he would always say, and finish his work out with, “as long as I keep my father happy.”
We showered, and ran enough water until we no longer reeked of chlorine and gathered our gear that contained a couple Speedo goggles, damp swimming trunks, wet towels, and toiletries in a netted swimming bag that dripped chlorinated water as we walked out. The sun was already beyond our vision as we ambled through Maple Avenue and the neon lighting that hung over Jerry’s Smoke store was already lit up.
Every evening, whether or not we accomplished successful results on our research, Kamal and I swam in the college gym where Kamal covered twice as much ground as I did in the same hour. Swimming relaxed our nerves, cooled our body, and relived stress, not to mention the other benefits everyone knows including an excellent cardio work out and muscle toning. I enjoyed the walk home, as during those moments my lungs were generous in letting me suck in ample amounts of oxygen and that created a pleasant sensation in my chest. No yoga or other breathing techniques could create that effect I concluded.
Abdul interrupted my speech and I glanced towards the fire, which he was stoking with a huge rod. “The chicken will be ready in twenty minutes,” he said.
Kasim continued, “Was he your room mate?”
“Yes, Kamal was a great and an excellent roommate to Ravi, Abhay, and myself.
Wow! The chicken smells good, although I must admit, I was desirous of eating a partridge or a quail in such a wild place. Perhaps, plain simple chicken would do, which reminds me,” I said and continued
I paused recalling one night after such a heavy dinner. Abhay sat on the window ledge throwing his right leg out and chugged on his 10th cigarette of day and blew rings that spiraled upwards, partially obscuring the full moon that was in my view from the recliner where I lay dead tired. Putting down the beer, I wondered how people smoked and destroyed the bliss they could derive from their lungs in other natural ways. Well, we did try teaching the other two roommates swimming but after numerous attempts concluded they would sink even in mercury.
Kamal was staring at a picture and remarked, “My uncle Saawan Singh,” when I looked at him curiously. “My father’s cousin who died at Saawalpur near Lahore,” he added pitifully.
Sardar had immense talent as a raconteur and had us entertained many nights describing horrendous incidents that took place during India’s partition at Lahore and Amritsar, the blood shed and the massacre. It was a sin to have been born a Hindu or Sikh in Lahore and a Muslim in Amritsar. What shook us were tales of the ghost trains that arrived into platforms out of which none alighted. It was a wonder how the station masters hadn’t died after seeing pools of blood flowing out of the coaches and the compartments littered with decimated corpses; a few of whose tongues chopped, or eyes removed, and worst castrated. I tried not to envision any of those grisly episodes.
Yawning, I immediately blocked further gory thoughts from disturbing the beautiful evening when I heard a crack and a splosh! Abhay’s coke broke free from the can and spilled all over the floor.
Kamal uttered a single word, “bends.”
It was a diver’s slang for a condition they experience when making rapid ascent to the surface from deep sea.
Stopping my narration Kamal questioned me curiously, “You know how to dive and what was that term?”
“Bends!” I said.
While primarily requiring oxygen for survival, we also inhale other gases including nitrogen that constitutes roughly 80% of the atmosphere and deep under water we are under higher pressure. When we rapidly ascend, there is a drop in pressure and the nitrogen molecules in our blood stream try to escape out. Due to their fast rate of ascent, the molecules create air bubbles within our bloodstream where they get trapped and cause enormous pain and sometimes-even death.
Two years into our PhD program, while Kamal and I were interning in San Diego at a Biotech start-up, I was somehow convinced by Kamal into taking a three-month intermediate course in scuba diving. I couldn’t believe that he really wanted to do that but you could never tell as his whims very unpredictable; he often took courses outside the department and I knew for a fact that he had taken some lessons on Marine Animals II and Introduction to Tropical waters.
I said, “Dude! Are you crazy? I mean diving, sky diving, and rock climbing, while they all sound great are all meant for adventure enthusiasts and not for people like us. I mean you need to undergo serious training and proper body maintenance.”
He replied, “Nonsense, you can swim a mile easily and the requirement for the course is just 10 laps, that is hardly a fourth of a mile, and we both have the stamina to run a marathon. I mean, we are excellent swimmers, why waste the talent we have nurtured over these years, even if it had been aimless? Besides, we aren’t poor graduate students; we have money from the internship. And perhaps you know we may rediscover the Spanish Armada,” he said and winked.
Slowly he convinced me into doing it and towards the end, I realized there was no point in arguing with certain likes he had; for instance his passion towards his family roots. I spent that weekend reading everything I could about diving and familiarized myself with terms including frogman, scuba, buoyancy control (BC), and different suits.
During the first week, we just displayed our swimming prowess in a pool when they had merely taught us to identify the swimming gear. Sardar blew everyone’s mind when he swam 3 laps underwater without a breath. The instructor a blonde chirpy lady, Anne, with an aquatic streamlined back pointed to the mask and said,
“Spend some extra money and get a good mask as without a clear vision you are ruining your chances of examining rare specimens with perfection. Diving is an art, and like any other sport, it is imperative you begin properly. A good piano teacher would recommend shelling extra money and buy a digital piano and not a keyboard, likewise.”
She eyed on to her right and spotted the slipper fins a blue-eyed student with a swastika tattooed on his bald head was proudly displaying and vehemently added, “That is meant more for snorkeling, but we are going into the Pacific Ocean in 3 weeks from now so ensure you bring the right gear. I am sorry you need to get yourself open water fins that you must strap to your diving boots. And most importantly, get yourselves dry suits and I am not going to let you parade underneath semi-naked like a frogman.”
During the third week after classes begun, I realized in class of 40 rookies, I was performing in the top 10 while Sardar appeared the best. On a bright sunny Tuesday, the crew was divided into ten groups of four and we both boarded a green and white motorboat, turtles. We cruised along the along the La Jolla that was famous for seals and behind us the San Diego shoreline towered but none looked back in reverence. Anne, in our boat, made us revise the diver signals that we would shortly demonstrate underwater. In so far we were taught to don the diving gear and the maximum we went below was 12 feet – swimming the pool bed. I was excited and couldn’t wait to dive into the pacific.
I thought Kamal looked like one of those naval saboteurs while we signaled each other and with thumbs up dived underneath. Once inside, I sensed a transformation. Aquatic life was everywhere and the first thing we observed was silence; how the marine species over these years of evolution had managed to accept it as a part of life. A shoal of Angelfish swam undisturbed onto my right while butterfly fish floated by onto my left through dense planktons. A sea anemone taking a free ride on a hermit crab disembarked and clung onto a rock. Kamal was busy examining a sea creeper that was like the giant one in Jack and the bean stock. A lone catfish lazily drifted past me that was identifiable from its whiskers while a long serpentine slimy creature that slipped beneath the rocks was undoubtedly the eel.
That night, we couldn’t contain our excitement and called our room mates and after hearing our deep-sea episode, we could picture them turning green and they screamed back saying a giant squid is probably on the prowl somewhere.
“Jelly fish huh? Wait until you guys are groped by one of those Portuguese man-of-wars.”
In the following weeks, we deftly handled the pressure valve to maintain the same pressure in our ears as the surrounding waters. The aqualung we carried sustained water up to 3 hours and the buoyancy control device, which we could use well now, enabled us to be leveled and enjoy our dive. Of course we began violating rules and the first instruction we flouted was by touching aquatic animals. We were warned not to touch any animals but held turtles, manatees, of course, definitely not the sea urchins. Our course completed in three months and we were certified as intermediary divers. My only regret was not having met a dolphin to which I had strongly desired feeding seaweed.
I paused and dreamily gazed at the billion starts that appeared crystal clear due to lack of pollution in Africa and took a gulp of whiskey from my flask. I scowled and scratched the back of my arm that was attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes. Abdul arranged 5 plates adjacent to the fire and our meal comprising grilled chicken and lamb smelled like heaven.
“Delicious,” I uttered with my mouth stuffed while Kasim eagerly gesticulated for me to get on with the narration. I proceeded.
In the following year, we had taken advanced lessons and now could dive anywhere in the world provided we displayed our certificate and the correct equipment. Of course, our aquatic forays off-season was limited to the swimming pool where we merely worked on our fitness. Our under sea exploration continued in the Atlantic along the coasts of Florida and the Caribbean Tropical waters. The greatest adventure, needless to sea, occurred at the diver’s paradise – the Great Barrier Reef, which contained enormous species of marine life ranging from softest harmless fish found in aquariums to wild ones inclusive of great white and the hammer head sharks.
A distant cry of a wildebeest on the southern side behind the Acacia trees momentarily stopped my narration, making me wonder whether a leopard was on the prowl stalking it. I continued. Just as were planning on diving off the coasts of Gibraltar, Kamal was summoned to Amritsar, his native town where his immediate family lived, as his father was terminally ill and was on deathbed. His father battled cancer in his pancreas but died shortly after Kamal reached there. He was in grief and needed comfort and therefore requested me to visit him, so I decided to use my vacation time this time in giving him support instead of diving.
After his father’s last rites had been performed, Kamal surprised me by saying he desired to visit native town close to Lahore and Wagah. Saawalpur, a small town where his ancestors had once thrived on agriculture, was where he wished I travel along with him. Having come all the way there, I thought why not? One more place I’ll be stepping on mother earth. We decided to take the morning bus to Wagah where we’d change another to reach Saawalpur.
In the morning, a rickety bus took us on a bumpy ride from Wagah, which was to the south east of Lahore, further southwest towards Saawalpur. The bus barely contained ten people who all appeared liked dullards. “How far are we?” I meekly asked an elderly corpulent man chewing tobacco on to my left who leaned across and spat outside my window. I held my breath as I saw the red arc that flashed out. “A couple hours,” he hoarsely whispered. While I carried my overnight backpack, Kamal had two and I began worrying if he had secret intentions of spending a fortnight there. We had earlier agreed on not staying there for more than two days.
Saawalpur wasn’t much of a tourist attraction or a place where we one could feel nostalgic about I felt, but Kamal appeared pensive, yet excited. The bus stopped, U-turned and left us stranded on a narrow dirt road surrounded by cornfields on both sides when I glimpsed a tube-well onto my right beneath an old bulbul tree. Ahead was a small knoll that was covered with shrubs and a few rare deciduous trees I didn’t know.
“Stone Age would barely seem a century away to the villagers,” I muttered.
“What till you get to the main square,” Kamal began protesting.
“Let’s follow the peasants who had gotten down with us,” I said, as I couldn’t spot any Tonga or a Rickshaw.
After twenty minutes we noticed the all roads merging into a central location into what appeared a town square and observed activity there, my vision settling on a squalid teashop.
“Civilization at last. Let’s get some tea first,” Kamal said elated.
What the hell are you going to do now?” I remarked sipping on hot tea not quite attentive to Kamal as I eyed a peasant whacking an old decrepit camel, fluid oozing from its nostrils. I noticed an eclectic assortment of candies sealed in glass bottles set on the shelves while bananas, apples, and sealed fried eatables hung from nylon ropes. Upon closer inspection, I found that the tea stall was more of a mini grocery store and along with sacks of rice, the shop also carried soaps, combs, brushes.
“I guess they got a K Mart in your neighborhood,” I smirked.
Ignoring me, Kamal extracted and unfolded a blank sheet of paper that was twice the regular A4 sized ones and peered over what seemed like an ancient parchment with irregularly drawn lines and marked letterings. Upon closer inspection, I incredulously stared at it concluding he was holding a hand drawn map of Saawalpur.
“Now what, you found this of the web?” I asked sarcastically.
“You’re looking at the town as remembered by my father who had a photographic memory. After all, isn’t it not my father’s wish? He expressed desire that I visit this place some time, before he died. That is why I called you. I hope things haven’t changed a lot after the partition. I didn’t know any sentimental phrases to attach to my reply but was rescued when a petite guy with black horn rimmed spectacles whose frame borders seemed larger than the lens appeared before us.
“Brother you need help?” he asked exhaling smoke from his beedi and peered over the map. He excitedly pointed to the hand-drawn contents and recognized the town center, the bus stop, and the post office. He indicated where we were standing approximately on the map and also identified the large well and the community hall.
I replied, “We are new to the town and wanted to check into a motel,” could you guide us? He said, “Unfortunately, the town doesn’t have any motels or inns, but instead visitors either stayed over either of the two mosques or the gurudwara.” Kamal asked, “How far is the gurudwara?”
Make a right at the newly white washed house down there and walk until you see a neem tree onto your left. Four blocks further, you’ll see a huge barren land where kids will be playing. The giant mansion overlooking the ground is the Gurudwara. A ten-minute walk led us a white building with large doors and huge seemingly ancient knockers that we used to announce our arrival. A bearded old guy with spectacles precariously perched on his nose warily approached us and Kamal greeted him, “Sat Sri Akal,” and he ushered us in. Inside we were informed we could stay there overnight free, of course, it was tacitly understood that a suitable contribution, rather donation, would enable them to maintain the Gurudwara.
We were shown our quarters and I had a quick bath by doling mugs of water from a rusted iron bucket and shivered while I toweled myself. I stepped out and found that Kamal had initiated the conversation with Satwinder Singh, the man who let us in, whom I assumed was the priest who ran the place and was startled to learn that he knew all of Kamal’s relatives, including his dad. Apparently, his father had been in touch with him regularly by mail and he shed a couple tears expressing condolences.
Drinking a glass of fresh buffalo milk, Kamal smilingly said, “Let us begin our reconnaissance and breathe some real air.”
“You know something? I regret not bringing the aqualung. God knows what I am going to be afflicted with when I leave this goddamn place.”
We walked to the town post office where the senior postman became ecstatic to meet Kamal. I was stunned by the ribaldry the cashier was exchanging with a man carrying a bundle of clothes slung on his shoulder whom I assumed was a washer man. After a good thirty minutes, Kamal was satisfied and we visited both the mosques the town contained and as I had guessed Kamal knew no one there. It was 2.00 and the sun was scorching as I sweltered and slapped my forehead in haste trying to avoid beads of sweat trickle down my eyes.
During the course of the afternoon and early evening, Kamal met nearly most of his father’s close friends and we were happy to return to the Gurudwara. Satwinder Singh had cooked a pleasant meal and had been waiting for our return at the gurudwara. Being famished, I was in no mood to begin conversation and immediately attacked the plate stacked with 5 circular chappatis, pickle, onions, and raw-green chillis. I didn’t care if others would watch me while I dunked the chappatis into daal and buttermilk soup and noisily chewed.
Yawning, I said, “A lot wind blowing today, I guess, so let us not close the door. Trip’s been not bad at all I must admit. Not much of a difference in the way they lead their lives here in comparison to your relatives, even though we expected it.”
Kamal lay to my right and immediately fell asleep as I begun thinking about the bus ride, inhabitants of the town, the gurudwara, and his friends. His father must have been a remarkable man no doubt I concluded, after observing the respect the town folks had for him. I smiled as I pictured him dictate and describe the landscape of the town and the different places in it while Kamal took down notes and drew the map. No one would plan a vacation the way Kamal had, even if were to visit a place his forbears once ruled, I concluded. Somehow I got the vague feeling he had been here before. Or was he really that smart to memorize a map and understand the bearings of a town? He had been uneasy when I talked about the well today afternoon when I suggested we take a dip to cool ourselves. He quickly talked me out of it and I wondered if it was haunted or whether any of his relatives had committed suicide in it.
My eyelids wouldn’t wait any longer and I dropped down dead on the mattress and began dreaming. A scraping sound woke me up in the middle of the night and my right hand traced through empty space atop Kamal’s bed. Alarmed, I opened my eyes and noticed him exiting the room. Perhaps he’s gone to drink water or take a leak I surmised, when I noticed his second bag missing. I panicked wondering if he’s going to leave me stranded in the town.
Noiselessly, I exited the room and spotted him leave the courtyard, which was surrounded on three sides with guest rooms, kitchen, and the office, and exit through the back entrance. I tiptoed to the edge of the door and peered outside when I heard sounds of rummaging and seconds later a clicking sound turned on a flashlight. I saw the dim outline of his receding figure fade into dark but was aware from the noise that he had cut across the weedy section on the back yard and was walking towards the flat grassy terrain. The skies were clear with a million stars and the moon shone bright and as I stepped outside, I could observe Kamal walk with quick paced steps and the light emanating from the swaying torch creating patterns on the fields. Situated about 100 yards from the Gurudwara, along the direction he was heading, was the well, the huge one indicated in the map that seemed like the only attraction at the silent town. It was this well that he was against us swimming that afternoon.
I didn’t walk in the open fields directly but skulked through rows of trees onto my left maintaining sufficient distance between us. He stopped near the well and I strained my eyes to get a good vision of what he was attempting and could see him empty the contents of the bag and spend the next fifteen minutes donning on the aquatic gear; dry suits, helmets, flippers, and weighted belts.
“Holy mother of god! He was talking a dive into the well, I exclaimed.”
A splash was heard and I leaned backwards onto a banyan tree, the upward roots giving me extra protection in remaining invisible. I stood there for a good half hour of what seemed like eternity. From the same spot behind the Banyan tree, I spotted Kamal emerge dripping wet as he pulled the walls of the well and dropped flat to the floor. He lay down tired for a few minutes gasping. So much for his lung capacity, I thought. I crawled through the grass and the gap between us lowered to less than 20 yards. I watched him gulp water and empty the contents of the water bottle before throwing it back into the well.
Patiently, he removed his flippers, aqua-lung and other diving gear and stowed them away into his bag. His hands shook as he fished out his prize that he had safely secured in an oilskin bag some minutes before. I could see what resembled a bible was a casket made of metal, the lid fastened by a lock I assumed. Kamal hammered open the box and slowly lifted the lid. I covered my mouth in shock as I watched blue, green and multicolored precious stones gleam in stillness of the night. The precious stones were his family heirloom and during partition, his father I reckoned safely deposited the jewels under the refuge of the well. They were lying deep down ever since patiently waiting to be rescued. Indeed, he had satisfied his father’s desire.
