Page 212 of The Circle of Exile
Take him back.Backwards.
He jumped back to 2nd October.
Atharva went in reverse order of sections. Read the underlined words. He went down the sheaf of newspapers, deciphering Adil’s message. This jumble of encoding was a tactic he had developed back in SFF — to have one code mean two different things at once. Like a random sampling, but one that only they knew was not random. Adil had refined it with him and they had kept it to themselves. Neither Qureshi nor Samar understood it.
“Baba carcar!” Yathaarth toddled to him and weaselled his way between his legs. Atharva turned his eyes from the newspapers and widened them playfully at his son — “Car car? You want to go out, Dilbaro?”
“Car car!” He banged his palms on his knees.
“Did you hear that?” Noora screamed. “I taught him car!”
“You did not teach him anything,” Atharva balanced the baby bouncing on the balls of his feet between his legs as he went back to the last newspaper.
“I told him I came in car!” Noora’s screechy voice yapped. “Iram! You heard it. You are my witness.”
“Whoever taught him, now Janab has learnt how to demand to go O.U.T.”
“Car-car!”
“I taught him!”
“Dani car!”
“When did Dani bhai use the car, Arth?”
“Dani car!”
approval rating down
king struggling
Jammu yours
Ladakh head yours
Srinagar yours
party planning to use you for Polls
Will ask
say no
————————————————————
His son learnt to say the word car-car and Atharva didn’t know if he knew the meaning of it or they, as a family, made him establish the connection by taking him out the moment he uttered those words out loud — but it became a norm to go out almost every second day. It could be something as small as a drive around town or a short day-trip to a place not more than 30-40 minutes away from their house. Sometimes it would be the entire clan, on others — just the three of them.
And Atharva couldn’t be happier. That his son seemed to come alive on these drives, that his wife laughed and sang along to his grandfather playlist, and made their car — his prized possession from his bachelor days, so much more precious.
His beastly Land Rover was now so lived-in that its interiors could pass for a toddler’s cot. The backseats had stains and spit-ups that refused to go away even after his rigorous scrubbing. The bottle holders always had one or more baby bottles. There were wet wipes and snack packs always stocked in the dashboard. Atharva opened the glove box to grab his book of mileage and had to wade through packs of homemade jaggery crackers, ‘baked’ potato chips and something that looked like toasties but were so dark brown in colour that he shuddered to try them and see.
“You have turned my car into a pantry,” he groaned, stretching across the gearbox until his fingers snagged the pen he remembered storing in there.
Iram finished snapping Yathaarth in his baby seat, shut the door and slipped in. “I don’t see you complaining whenyouare hungry.”
He kept quiet. He valued his life. And he did not have a good enough rebut to that. Hedidenjoy Yathaarth’s snacks, especially when they were returning from day trips and were too tired to stop somewhere for a break.
Atharva continued to note the kilometres that his car had run this week against the entries of fuel. He had seen his father do this often when he was home from deployments. Mama was a little easygoing with refuelling but Baba had taught him to keep track of the mileage manually. Always. He hadn’t used this car enough to do that but now that it was their daily car…
