TAO'

I couldn’t understand why some people always find a small corner in your head. Though they never speak anything but they rest there and make their presence felt. I am not talking about memories. Memories are intangible; you can only feel them emotionally. But that presence is a tangible feeling of somebody’s existence in your head. Tao is one such person in my life. With unexcited eyes, trembling hands and bony structure, all he could do was sit and gaze. Gazing just like a cool and tranquil lake stares at the sky. You can hardly saw his eyelids because he tempted to not to use them. His eyes were always open and attentively searching some point around his vicinity to knot an invisible cord between his eyes and that point. The cord vibrated and produced beautiful rhythms. To me it seemed a sin to break that knot by passing in front of his eyes. Though I doesn’t mind passing in front of my grandmother when she offers prayers. But Tao’s attentive and constant gaze always seemed more sacred to me than my grandmother’s prayers.

I don’t know whether or not he practiced some kind of meditation in his room. May be he didn’t even know how to pronounce the word ‘meditation’ but I guess he naturally established a kind of harmony with that small space around him. May be that’s why I never found him out of his room. Either he was hanging his eyes on some unseen hooks or playing with lots of winding wires, used speakers, small electric motors and lots of junky mechanical parts of different household machines. He was good on technical stuff. He could tell you the diameter of a steel pipe by just holding it. My father, in other words Tao’s brother used to say that there is a great engineer in Tao but others just gave him the status of some technical worker who can tell you how to install a ceiling fan or give you an advice about what things to check while purchasing a new washing machine.

That day, however, his technical expertise frightened me a lot. I was in 7th grade and working on an assignment. I had to draw the famous Minar-e-Pakistan (Minaret of Pakistan) on a big chart paper which I completed without adding any creativity on my part. I still couldn’t figure out what thing brought Tao in the living room that day. He just sat over a sofa and started staring at my ridiculous version of Minar-e-Pakistan. Some kind of tension started growing in him. His muscles were stretching and he seemed bit confuse. At last he spoke;
“Where is the lift, the elevator?” He was repeating the same line with the constant frequency and his confusion was transforming into anger. He was furious but still repeating the same line;
“Where is the lift, the elevator? Where is the lift, the elevator?” I grabbed both of his arms and shook him a little bit, as waking him up from an uncomfortable sleep.
“What’s this heck about the elevator?” I asked annoyingly.
He lapsed right away. Like a tide falls after a very high rise. After the twitching of few muscles and some synchronized movements of his head and hands he mumbled something;
“I installed the elevator in that tower, and it has vanished now. I did that with my own hands, we all,,, we all put it in that high tower…” And then he recited all the names of associates and subordinates who finished that uphill task of installing the elevator in that strange tower. The recalling of that event brought a strange shine in his eyes. From that day I know it in the time line of mankind there exists a particular series of events which resulted in the fitting of an elevator in our national monument and my Tao also played some sort of undefined role in it. After a tough negotiation and sketching few lines over my drawing he satisfied that the elevator still exists in it and running perfectly fine. Now when I recall Tao I want to be in that elevator, the elevator which might be another focal point of his steady and holly gaze.