OpticsManini NayarWhen I was seven, my friend Sol was hit by lightning and died. He was on a rooftop quietly playing marbles when this happened. Burnt to cinders, we were told by the neighbourhood gossips. He'd caught fire, we were assured, but never felt a thing. I only remember a frenzy of ambulances and long clean sirens cleaving the silence of that damp October night. Later, my father came to sit with me. This happens to one in several millions, he said, as if a knowledge of the bare statistics mitigated the horror. He was trying to help, I think. Or perhaps he believed I thought it would happen to me. Until now, Sol and I had shared everything; secrets, chocolates, friends, even a birthdate. We would marry at eighteen, we promised each other, and have six children, two cows and a heart-shaped tattoo with 'Eternally Yours' sketched on our behinds. But now Sol was somewhere else, and I was seven years old and under the covers in my bed counting spots before my eyes in the darkness.After that I cleared out my play-cupboard. Out went my collection of teddy bears and picture books. In its place was an emptiness, the oak panels reflecting their own woodshine. The space I made seemed almost holy, though mother thought my efforts a waste. An empty cupboard is no better than an empty cup, she said in an apocryphal aside. Mother always filled things up - cups, water jugs, vases, boxes, arms - as if colour and weight equalled a superior quality of life. Mother never understood that this was my dreamtime place. Here I could hide, slide the doors shut behind me, scrunch my eyes tight and breathe in another world. When I opened my eyes, the glow from the lone cupboard-bulb seemed to set the polished walls shimmering, and I could feel what Sol must have felt, dazzle and darkness. I was sharing this with him, as always. He would know, wherever he was, that I knew what he knew, saw what he had seen. But to mother I only said that I was tired of teddy bears and picture books. What she thought I couldn't tell, but she stirred the soup-pot vigorously.One in several millions, I said to myself many times, as if the key, the answer to it all, lay there. The phrase was heavy on my lips, stubbornly resistant to knowledge. Sometimes I said the words out of con- text to see if by deflection, some quirk of physics, the meaning would suddenly come to me. Thanks for the beans, mother, I said to her at lunch, you're one in millions. Mother looked at me oddly, pursed her lips and offered me more rice. At this club, when father served a clean ace to win the Retired-Wallahs Rotating Cup, I pointed out that he was one in a million. Oh, the serve was one in a million, father protested modestly. But he seemed pleased. Still, this wasn't what I was looking for, and in time the phrase slipped away from me, lost its magic urgency, became as bland as 'Pass the salt' or 'Is the bath water hot?' If Sol was one in a million, I was one among far less; a dozen, say. He was chosen. I was ordinary. He had been touched and transformed by forces I didn't understand. I was left cleaning out the cupboard. There was one way to bridge the chasm, to bring Solback to life, but I would wait to try it until the most magical of moments. I would wait until the moment was so right and shimmering that Sol would have to come back. This was my weapon that nobody knew of, not even mother, even though she had pursed her lips up at the beans. This was between Sol and me.The winter had almost guttered into spring when father was ill. One February morning, he sat in his chair, ashen as the cinders in the grate. Then, his fingers splayed out in front of him, his mouth working, he heaved and fell. It all happened suddenly, so cleanly, as if rehearsed and perfected for weeks. Again the sirens, the screech of wheels, the white coats in perpetual motion. Heart seizures weren't one in a million. But they deprived you just the same, darkness but no dazzle, and a long waiting.Now I knew there was no turning back. This was the moment. I had to do it without delay; there was no time to waste. While they carried father out, I rushed into the cupboard, scrunched my eyes tight, opened them in the shimmer and called out'Sol! Sol! Sol!' I wanted to keep my mind blank, like death must be, but father and Sol gusted in and out in confusing pictures. Leaves in a storm and I the calm axis. Here was father playing marbles on a roof. Here was Sol serving ace after ace. Here was father with two cows. Here was Sol hunched over the breakfast table. The pictures eddied and rushed. The more frantic they grew, the clearer my voice became, tolling like a bell: 'Sol! Sol! Sol!' The cupboard rang with voices, some mine, some echoes, some from what seemed another place - where Sol was, maybe. The cup- board seemed to groan and reverberate, as if shaken by lightning and thunder. Any minute now it would burst open and I would find myself in a green valley fed by limpid brooks and red with hibiscus. I would run through tall grass and wading into the waters, see Sol picking flowers. I would open my eyes and he'd be there,hibiscus-laden, laughing. Where have you been, he'd say, as if it were I who had burned, falling in ashes. I was filled to bursting with a certainty so strong it seemed a celebration almost. Sobbing, I opened my eyes. The bulb winked at the walls.I fell asleep, I think, because I awoke to a deeper darkness. It was late, much past my bedtime. Slowly I crawled out of the cupboard, my tongue furred, my feet heavy. My mind felt like lead. Then I heard my name. Mother was in her chair by the window, her body defined by a thin ray of moonlight. Your father Will be well, she said quietly, and he will be home soon. The shaft of light in which she sat so motionless was like the light that would have touched Sol if he'd been lucky; if he had been like one of us, one in a dozen, or less. This light fell in a benediction, caressing mother, slipping gently over my father in his hospital bed six streets away. I reached out and stroked my mother's arm. It was warm like bath water, her skin the texture of hibiscus.We stayed together for some time, my mother and I, invaded by small night sounds and the raspy whirr of crickets. Then I stood up and turned to return to my room.Mother looked at me quizzically. Are you all right, she asked. I told her I was fine, that I had some c!eaning up to do. Then I went to my cupboard and stacked it up again with teddy bears and picture books.Some years later we moved to Rourkela, a small mining town in the north east, near Jamshedpur. The summer I turned sixteen, I got lost in the thick woods there. They weren't that deep - about three miles at the most. All I had to do was cycle forall I was worth, and in minutes I'd be on the dirt road leading into town. But a stir in the leaves gave me pause.I dismounted and stood listening. Branches arched like claws overhead. The sky crawled on a white belly of clouds. Shadows fell in tessellated patterns of grey and black. There was a faint thrumming all around, as if the air were being strung and practised for an overture. And yet there was nothing, just a silence of moving shadows, a bulb winking at the walls. I remembered Sol, of whom I hadn't thought in years. And foolishly again I waited, not for answers but simply for an end to the terror the woods were building in me, chord by chord, like dissonant music. When the cacophony grew too much to bear, I remounted and pedalled furiously, banshees screaming past my ears, my feet assuming a clockwork of their own. The pathless ground threw up leaves and stones, swirls of dust rose and settled. The air was cool and steady as I hurled myself into the falling light.光学玛尼尼·纳雅尔谈瀛洲译在我七岁那年，我的朋友索尔被闪电击中死去了。
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