'Man with the White Beard': Of violence and nightmares

Nightmares left Gurmeet Singh aka Goldy like a restless soul trapped inside a listless body since he was five years old.

Two men and two women come uninvited and unannounced to his thoughts, night after night. The four faces remain nondescript, but their actions definitive, like professional actors working on cue.

The four live happily somewhere deep in Goldie's head, like a snake camouflaged among leaves scattered on a forest floor, ignoring till it chose to, but ready to bite when it wanted.

A new book "Man with the White Beard" revolves around the lives of Goldy and his parents Balwant Singh and Kulwanti and how they deal with the nightmares of the young boy.

Balwant Singh is a prominent face of the Raja Garden auto market and he is aware of his important position, a position that inched him closer to those who mattered within the Akali Dal in Delhi.

The man with the white beard is one of those who came in Goldy's dreams. He had muscular, hairy forearms, and wore a black leather watch on his left wrist. He looked stern, and even as he smiled, his big lips with the white beard showed no movement.

Truth is like a nervous pedestrian undecided on whether to cross a busy street or wait for an opportune moment.

"Man with the White Beard", written by Shah Alam Khan, a professor of orthopaedics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and brought out by LiFi Publications, is the story of that nervous truth which evades Kulwanti and Goldy.

The book also talks of the times during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the Kandhamal violence in Odisha in 2007.