Monday, August 20, 2012

Three Fingers - A short story

He was wearing a light grey sweater and had a hand-kerchief tied to his right hand. On further observation, I found that three fingers were missing in his right hand. The hand-kerchief is an attempt to veil his hand from sympathies or feared looks of mankind. Ramakant no longer feels the ghost fingers, which haunted him for the first few days since he lost them in a heavy machine.
He has learnt writing in left hand from then on. Inline with the rigorous traditional practice, Ramakant grew as a right-handed person since his childhood. But necessity overtook superstitions as he even started to offer flower to his favorite god, Ganesha, in left hand. Now he is left, but that is limited only with respect to dexterity.

Though not connected to this narration, it would be interesting to know how Ramakant lost three fingers in his right hand. It all begins with wit the dream of building a socialistic society by our first prime minister, Mr.Jawaharlal Nehru and his idea of experimenting with five-year plans copied from Soviet. It was after concentrating on agriculture and irrigation in the first 'five-year plan' in 1951 that Mr.Nehru shifted his attention towards 'Industrial sector'. He decided that industries are important proponents in a planned economy and spent a whooping amount erecting factories, importing machinery and building power plants. Naturally Soviets took interest in us, in the world infested in cold war fever. That particular machine, which had cut the fingers in Ramakant's right hand, was imported from Soviet in the 50's. The machine cuts papers of various sizes as per its calibration. 

All the machinery even to this day needs an inevitable human support. And those humans, after years of operating a machine, become a part of machine itself. They work like clockwork, pressing green and red buttons, feeding the machine one side with raw material, checking the oil level and all those things which engineering had considered human being as part of the design. These people work in shifts and always feel the person in the other shift operates that machine shabbily. 
Ramakant used to be very loyal employee, but just had his name enrolled in a trade-union. He never thought of being someone else other than that cutting machine operator. For an untrained eye, it may look even that Ramakant was born operating that machine. Ramakant would always smelt like a grease tin in those days, and his fingers would always be greasy-black even when not in work. 
It happened on a fateful day in a cold November morning, Ramakant was feeding sheets of paper from one side of the machine and it got in at a slightly tapered angle. The machine made a loud sound as the paper got jammed in one of those complex joints of the machine. As a reflex action, Ramakant tried to clear the jam with his hand. The giant shredder suddenly started to move down with all its weight. Ramakant was quick enough as he moved his hand out in a swift action, but cannot save his fingers. There the red fluid of life mixed with grey fluid of machinery and got splashed into the paper roll which got jammed. There was ambulance, there were doctors, the union leaders and then the factory manager, but all this remained like a piece of choir to Ramakant who were not singing to their tune. 
It was not the pain or grief which caught his thoughts in those initial days, but it was the fear of living without three fingers for the rest of his life. For those were the fingers which his mom held as he learnt walking, and those were the fingers which his wife entwined when they made love, those were the fingers which writes his half-baked poems, and more importantly for him, those were fingers which operates the cutting machine.

Ramakant was back from hospital after some days and spent time at home fighting against the ghost of his fingers. One day the union leader came with a box of sweets and a good news that Ramakant was offered a post as receptionist in factory guest house on compassionate grounds. Ramakant accepted the offer and showed monochromatic honesty and perfectionism in his job. 
As the vistitors checked-in to the guesthouse in holiday season, he would hand-over the heavy registration ledger with his shaky left hand (which sometimes offends some traditional right handed visitors) and ask them to enter their address, in-time,.. etc. Then shows them to their room with right hand firmly stuck inside pant pockets which throws an air of casualness around him. He warns them smoking is an offence inside the guest house and preempts them that the main gate will be locked at ten in the night. In off-season, the management had decided nowadays to leave the guest-house on rent even for those who were not employed in the firm. 

I met Ramakant today morning. He told me smoking is not allowed inside the guest-house and that the gate closes at ten in the night and handed me the registration ledger in his left hand. The portrait of Mr.Nehru was smiling at me from behind.

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