History is a Silent Film - Short Fiction, Silent, 2006

Usmanbhai and his father Kaderbhai, both projector repairers, lived in one of the oldest and most crowded streets of India. The generation that repaired early projectors like Pathe, and Bell and Howell to modern ones, started diminishing by Usmanbhais times. His work dwindled with the introduction of most modern projectors that needed little maintenance or repair. Like the old projectors, his life also remained stuck in the mute net of forgetting.Usmanbhai's shop was close to Jama Masjid. It disappeared when old Delhi also started to be spruced up. The disappearance was like a key lost in Jama Masjid and its surroundings, like an ancient museum. Rickshaws, wrestlers, ear cleaners and prostitutes wandered about on that lost key.

Before that, Usmanbhai ran his shop in a tent opposite the Red Fort. He is not busy anymore. Gone are the busy days... the days of early sound cinema, and the days of Ashok Kumar, Raj Kapoor, and Nargis. The new projectors do not breakdown as fast. Even if they did, no one comes looking for Usmanbhal. Raj Kapoor and Nargis remain as frozen frames in his head. A projector is like the human body. If it breaks down, nothing will appear. The reels rotate as thoughts in a human brain... from it, the lights... movements. like life. Father Kaderbhai used to narrate stories about silent cinema. Will the people, once disappeared from life, return? Like silent cinema, Kaderbhai too disappeared into the darkness of forgetting. Will people, once disappeared from life, ever return? What if a wave of a million people were to march towards us? India-Pakistan partition... a sea of phenomenal suffering....Kaderbhai returned to Usmanbhai in the form of an image... a man inching towards the border. Usmanbhai could only fathom that beyond that image was another nation. His rather, thrown into the bottomless pit of forgetting... desperately attempting to climb the rope of memory... through the tiny windows of celluloid film.