No one knew his name. He was just the mad old man of the mohalla. Mad because he laughed through the days and cried through the nights, and spoke only to himself in either Sindhi or Urdu. Though most of it was just gibberish. Unless he was reciting Ghalib:
Koi veerani si veerani hai
Dasht ko dekh ke ghar yaad aaya
(What kind of desolation is this desert?
When I see such a wasteland I think of home)
For a moment when you listened to him recite, you saw the line between wisdom and insanity shrink.
His home of decades now stands at a far corner of the mohalla. A raised platform of a deserted, dilapidated house where he kept vigil with two street dogs.
No one knew when he had come to make this his home. No one knew his age either. But old was written all over a wrinkled face that bore the look of a crumpled map of India.
There were stories. Some say he was separated from his family during partition, others say his family was massacred in the riots much later. Yet others say he was once a businessman who lost his fortune and sanity after his wife and two sons were deported from the country. No one knew if he was a Muslim, with that beard and the dirty green cloth wrapped around his head. Or he was a Hindu who lit a lamp in the little alcove next to his ragged mattress every evening, and muttered something that sounded like a prayer. No matter what, they took pity on him and fed him leftovers. When rations were tough to get, they still gave him a little of what they had.
In the last few days though, he had not had a morsel. Hadn't paced the streets as he used to. It was as if he was chained there. He did not light the lamp nor remember Ghalib. He shrunk inside the corner more and more, without letting anyone come near him. Not until he was dead. Some claimed that they had heard him complain that he had swallowed a barbed wire and it had got stuck in his throat. Another said, that must have been COVID.