The Roots of Misanthropy

 

Dev tore open his eyes in the dead of the night, and he went with great intent to the wall separating the room he was sleeping in from his parent’s room. On reaching it he stopped and looked back at his bed hoping to find himself laying there. Filled to the brim with an unidentifiable storm, he found no real purpose for having woken up.

The sound of his father’s panting made his hand give the door in the wall a weak push. The door creaked open. A ray of silvery starry light along the long edges of his innocent face marked the presence of his parents. He saw Pyarelal, his father, violently humping into the cold-motionless body of his mother. An invisible hand pulled his body back into the darkness. The smoke was swirling inside his mind and did not allow the boy to stick to this obscene view. The heavy sound of his father’s panting faded away into memory, gelling with the other horrors from this young boy’s past. Dev wondered where he had heard such a noise before this. He must have heard it in this very house.

Yesterday, when Dev’s mother, Savitri had left from home for the factory, Dev heard Pyarelal telephoning unnamed ladies one after the other, bidding awfully small sums for their company for an hour. He didn’t trust his father. With walls so thin, Dev would often put himself in a closet full of thorns every day, away from a life in this world where innocent deluded visions are mistaken for dreams. Somehow, living inside this dark abyss, Dev still dreamt he could trek through a mountain of hurt. A mountain which choked out his thoughts, his breaths. He wished he could spend his nights without any dreaming.

Seeking cure for his afflictions he drew close to his father once Savitri left for work the morning after. Pyarelal could tell that the movement in his body and the dragging along of his feet was forced. His feet weren’t voluntarily moving but a churning within his soul, one which made him feel bitter pushed the right foot first, then the left foot, slower than any mind could imagine.

Pyarelal was on the phone and Dev suspected he was speaking with another one of those women who take money for sex.

With a newspaper under his plump thigh, with phone numbers underlined, Pyarelal was drinking. It took him a moment to fully realize that his son had quietly entered the room. Pyarelal asked the woman on the line to put the phone on hold. It was daylight, and not even one cloud could be seen in the sky. Such daylight could make the room look so blue, the walls in the room appeared blue too.

“What is it?” asked Pyarelal with the mark of irritation all over his face. He was irritated because he despised his son. Dev wasn’t unaware of the disgust his father felt for him. He drew a little closer still. Pyarelal drew away from his son as if he himself wasn’t clean enough for this interaction. Dev stumbled over an empty bottle which his father had lazily left there. Pyarelal lunged for the bottle with shivering hands and pushed it with the tip of his finger under the bed. The bottle went rolling away out of sight.

“How is it you don’t go to work? Mother works day and night to keep food on our plates?”, asked the boy. At first Pyarelal froze like he had seen a snake, then, realizing the boy had hit him where it hurt his pride most, answered, “I lost my job because I am a drunk.” “Do you drink, father, because something is hurting you?”, Dev asked but Pyarelal had nothing more to say.

And what of his mother? She was, to Dev, an inspiration. His mother was the ideal woman. Dev would see her in a light which rational love cannot define. He was not at fault either. She was after all his mother. She was the only one who had ever loved him. His father would only beat him, hurl abuses at him. It was this humiliation which made him value love. Pyarelal never shared any real feelings with his son. He was no different from a carcass disguised by the shadow of fractured identity. The world Pyarelal lived in was a carnivorous monster, pulling the strings in his muscles, pulling the muscles from his skeleton, till the man was disrobed and naked for the world to see.

Even now, in such a miserable state of living, he commanded respect from his wife, to live the life of a slave. That is what the world forces men to want. All men are blind if there was no world. This is what society has come to reflect upon men. Such is the decadence of ideals human beings have come to celebrate over the years. Dancing thoughts, like rivers full of life, resemble the roar of injustice. The song of the water is one of boiling. Anger is too weak a word.

What Dev really felt was fury. But a child’s fury when caved inside, renders the child incapable of expressing any emotion at all.

***

Outside of home, Dev saw that the world wasn’t inviting. It was a hot day. The sun was beating down and made his brows sweat. The farther away from home he went the closer he found himself to another kind of existential pain. He would often walk into the great beyond where no shapes or colours existed, only voices coming from the deep within. Here walls and windows too did not exist. This place wasn’t at all like home.

Looking around, Dev came back to his senses. He was lost. Greenery surrounded him. The branches of wild trees stretched, emerging out of a black soil which was familiar to Dev. It was as if the confused sketches of his darkest thoughts had manifested themselves before his eyes onto reality. Blades of grass, on which he leisurely rested his head, were moist and the aroma of the earth was fragrant. It was a Sunday afternoon and Dev could have rested for as long as he liked, but he could hear his mother calling him back home.

His mother was back from the factory, tired. With her friends, Savitri would smile and forget all about her troubles. At home, she would have nothing to smile about. She would walk straight into the kitchen and put the utensils over the flame. While the vegetables were cooking, she would wash the dirty dishes. While doing that, she would sleepwalk. It was something different from the focus she felt while working on the loom all day. Many times, she had run a knife over her finger or hit her head on the wall thinking about Dev wishes to become exactly like herself one day. She didn’t want her son to live the same life as hers. She was okay ending a long-standing tradition of weaving with the end of her own generation.

Though there was great emptiness in Dev’s heart, for his mother he had built there a peaceful burrow, where she was both queen and the castle.

Whatever love he had known came from her, but her own life wasn’t full of it. Though he loved her, he did not yet know what it was like to love someone or what the mysterious ways of love might be. She never stopped filling his heart with love, a certain kind of fire which could only be harnessed inside the body a breast-giver. Even though she wept, her tears never killed that fire. The tears kept on flowing whenever Pyarelal hit her in a drunken stupor.

Next to this great mirage of sorrow, which was Savitri, Dev spent his days and nights, veiling the fabric of his youth. There was one girl in his school, many girls in fact, whom he would observe and find attractive. It was something in their eyes he felt. He had learnt quickly from films that love was communicated with the eyes. He fell in love at first sight all too often. But there was this one girl. He thought, she spoke to him in the language of love.

They could never speak to one another in words. Their eyes met and their gaze fell in unison. In those moments, nothing else mattered. Dev caught her looking at him at instances he would have otherwise thought himself lonely. The gaze in her eyes told him she wanted him to go talk to her. Neither of them knew this feeling was called falling in love. They were truly innocent around each other.

Back home, Savitri would tell him that innocence was the most precious thing in the world, and he obeyed her without any questions. She tried to teach him how to cherish innocence. She played with him like there was no pain in her life, no suffering. Together they would laugh over the hills of the harvest of their sorrows. Sowing the dreams of a better tomorrow Dev imagined he was saving his mother from her misery. Finding his father passed out in a corner of their house and cleaning after his mess was routine.

He approached this filth knowing well that he had to tread with careful deliberation. Dev went close to his mother thinking he could make things easier. “Mother”, he said and then nothing more. She knew that expression on his face. But Savitri was exhausted. She detested her life. She turned away to hide the tears from him once again. He didn’t know what would come over her. “You inspire me, you are my inspiration” he told her innocently. Savitri laughed through the tears. “Is there no one else?” she asked her son. Then she went back to arranging things neatly. In the rectangular shelves in the wall few photographs were gathering dust.

Once daylight died and the dusty golden bulbs would get turned on in the kitchen, faces, figures, were painted in shades of yellow and blue reflections of the daylight were forgotten. The scent of sweat in Savitri’s hair and the dirt on her skin would have to be washed away once she came back home.

She jumped into the bathroom. Dev sat beside the door while she bathed. “I don’t feel hungry”, he told her as he watched her. “Should I cook something for you instead?” he asked. “What can you make for me? Where did you learn how to cook?” she asked and then shut the door.

Dev chased her all night afterwards. “I hope one day my little bird can go flying in a sky of his own”, she told him. Running her hand across the right side of his face she placed a kiss on his temple and gave him a loving smile. The edges of her untidy fingernails, rough with repeated injuries didn’t bother Dev. “One day I’ll be just like you”, Dev told her. That annoyed Savitri. “My life is all you have ever seen and so you think you should be just like me. You think my life is something which must be idolized. When truth is that I live just an ordinary life. Like that of every insignificant being. You see me, you see your mother, but there is more to me than just that. I am someone’s wife, a friend to someone, someone’s daughter, a handloom operator. You will know what I mean when you have seen enough of the world. Don’t just go on living this scar my life has given you. Don’t bury your days as they pass. Weave them. You will have something someday.” It was strange advise coming from a woman who crafted many beautiful things yet kept nothing for herself. “If I could dig up the time I have lost and undo everything, it would be this marriage. I would never have married that man if I had the faintest idea this is what it would become. He was never the right man for me.” She was speaking in a tone of vicious anger. She lifted her eyes to look at Dev, he couldn’t decide where to look. His eyes wandered about the room. He hated himself in that moment yet did not know what hate could do. “That would mean I would never have been born”, he remarked.

Savitri burst out laughing! She tried stopping the laughter not once but twice but couldn’t stop laughing. She reached for her son and put her arms around him with glee. Another night had passed.

***

Soon the thought that maybe Savitri did not love him consumed Dev. He couldn’t let go of the idea that she regretted having him. This of course wasn’t true, but his naïve brain was puzzled. He became restless because of it. The roots of misanthropy had spread deep within him now. Home no longer possessed gravity for him. That girl in school he fancied, who would make him happy just by looking at him, became the only person he thought he wanted to trust. He would gather courage to speak to her and fail. Her name was Sarayu. She thought of him at once as someone who was curious and immature. Wide eyed, he would talk to her but only ever in brief encounters. He felt envious whenever he saw another boy talk to her. But he walked past her as if she wasn’t there.

He was good at pretending to be strong and indifferent. What he was bad at was hiding his strong liking for her.

How strange is this love if all it can show us is how to be good? Is something so complicated really meant to be so simple?

As time passed, Sarayu thought Dev was dishonest because once he would gather the courage to talk to her, he would not stop there and start conversations with whomsoever he thought interesting like a fool. He offended every girl in sight because he would compare them to Sarayu. They were no match for him. He thought so highly of Sarayu that no one could ever be as good as her. All this while, he never brought her name to his tongue. Instead, love gave him a bad name. When these two spoke with one another he left all the words unspoken and unconfidently backed off from her till he found someone or something else.

This confused Sarayu and she began to dislike Dev. Soon, she didn’t care enough for him, but he was okay being friends with someone who didn’t care.

Other boys were interested in Sarayu. They said she was easy. Dev would get into bloody fights with them every other week. Beaten and bruised, Dev developed yet another relationship of hurt. Sarayu told Dev one day that she had been seeing this one guy who was serious about her. The next day Dev didn’t feel like going back to school.

After a week of skipping school and exploring the rustic city, Dev stole ten rupees from his mother’s wallet to go to a cybercafé he had found. He sat at a computer in the last row. It was a desk hidden from all the doors and the windows. Dev was in the middle of an online game when the shopkeeper handed the counter over to and stranger and left for lunch. The stranger minded his own business for some time then sat at the computer system next to Dev. It drew Dev to restlessness, and he wanted to have a look at the man out of curiosity. First, he looked at the stranger’s face. He looked at least five years older than Dev. The stranger never flinched. Dev took a deep breath and steadied himself for another peek. He caught the stranger watching pornos.

Dev pulled away from the computer screen in shock. He had never seen anything like it before. He was shivering like a prisoner being taken to the guillotine. Aroused with curiosity, Dev couldn’t stop himself from looking at the screen again and again. The stranger offered him to come and have a good look. Not a word was said between them after that. Dev was stuck to the screen and lost in the eroticism of the film. Dev noticed the stranger had put his hand into his trousers. This episode kindled for Dev a flame of lust.

Dev could be bold with Sarayu about his affection for her now. He confessed to her his love and dared to touch her body without guilt. What would earlier be a struggle with an inability to express any love turned into a spirit for exploring boundaries set by society in the guise of love. They would often elope to kiss one another passionately, hold hands in public and even undo each other’s clothes with potent senselessness.

***

Even the most broken of individuals need company. Savitri would have broken down to irreparable pieces if an episode in her life hadn’t dragged her out of a colossal inferno of disbelief. One day, while coming back from the factory, a handsome man had got on the bus and occupied the vacant seat next to her. The bus was crowded. As passengers were performing disco to the rhythmic braking and acceleration of the bus, Savitri found ample time to lift her gaze to meet the eyes of the man seated next to her several times. Each time she stole a glance from him, she felt happy. Life was a game. The wide smile on her face was evidence to the stranger of her happiness. They both knew this was love at first sight.

They hadn’t intended for their hands to come so close. They began to feel each other’s skin with their fingers. There was no use in wasting any more time. Pushing their palms into each other’s hand they held on real tight. The bus gave their grip many jerks. Amidst the swaying of bodies of unknown beings and through the noise of honking from impatiently driven cars on the road, there was this deafening sound of love ringing for the two of them. The song of happiness germinated courage in the lives of two complete strangers. No other music had ever caught up with the rhythmic beating of their chests like those moments of silence. This was a strange juncture in their meaningless adult lives. When Savitri’s stop came, she shrugged off the stranger’s hand very rudely and let go of that drunken feeling of love herself. She never saw that man again.

***

Once Dev would leave for school and Savitri for the factory Pyarelal would go back to telephoning the prostitutes. Dev returned from school on many days to see his father continuously be an unfaithful husband. Dev never identified with men because of his father. He saw that in our world, men are expected to be drawn towards women and women towards men, and since he did not identify himself as a man yet, he could not completely associate the sexual desires with any specific gender.

Pyarelal on the other hand was losing a lot of their family money. He would go out in search of prostitutes, buy lotteries, or simply drink away at the pubs. His habits had landed him in a debt trap. Debt collectors would often thrash him up and threaten Savitri in front of her son. She would promise them every time that she would pay off her husband’s debts and she always did. She was the man of the house, but to even think of that would mean to bring so much disrespect to being a woman. She was the reason that family survived.

Dev had learnt to live his own life. He was going to place a modest proposal of marriage before Sarayu. She was after all the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Since he had no one to ask for advice, Dev thought he will ask his father for some. Pyarelal, who was otherwise a pervert, knew Dev was asking him very sincerely. Feeling magnanimous, Pyarelal told his son to simply tell the girl the truth and have heart if she rejected him. “Don’t confuse her with needless things, say you want to marry her. Tell her you love her.” Dev decided that is what he will do. Sarayu later would go on to accept spending her life with Dev. But that day before Dev left his father to his own sad condition, he had asked him why he lived the life he lived when Savitri had broken her back trying to provide them a good life. It was well known that Pyarelal didn’t know how one dealt with confrontation. Dev had caught his father sober that morning. This was an anxious, weak, middle-aged man who had been defeated many times over in his life by everyone and everything. His mind commanded he reached for a bottle of alcohol, but he knew he would have had to answer his son anyway. “I cannot escape this imaginary world of excuses, illusions and lies, because the mistakes I have made sit heavy on my chest. Regret eats me on the inside. I have lost all the love I have come across, yet I cannot encourage my son to give up on love.”

There was still a degree of disbelief and mistrust in those young eyes Dev possessed. The same eyes with which Dev had stared at his father so long and so hard to make sure that this was indeed the man who had abused his mother and beat her every opportunity he got. Surprised by the great amount of tolerance Dev found in himself he asked his father another question, “Is that true?”

Pyarelal nodded.

Dev had gone to his father in desperation. For him, this affection he felt for Sarayu wasn’t whole. A part of it was his hatred for his father and his distrust of his mother. It was also indifference towards what he would find in the mirror. Love for Dev was a reaction, instinct, in the face of the mockery of love his parents had revealed to him. But, his wish to distance himself from his mother, who perhaps, needed him the most, was his mistake. One he would never be able to amend. There was nothing wrong in trying to be like Savitri. She had shown Dev how to nurture others and sympathize with their miseries. She had led his behaviour by example. It is easy, in our society, to say that her character is that of a conservative who does not have an escape even if to evolve, where in fact the contrary is true. She stayed and fought not for herself but for her son and for what was right.

Contemplation is the ailment of a curious mind. A life spent contemplating is a life wasted. One who thinks does not live. But dreaming, another symptom of contemplation, comes naturally to a curious mind, and tries showing the dreamer that life is no different from a dream. All desires which keep the fabric of the dream intact get immortalized under the shadow of love.

Dev stood before his father, daydreaming. “What happened? What are you thinking?” asked Pyarelal. Dev didn’t know any other way when it came to his father. He had to be brutally honest and never once regret his opinions. “I don’t want to appear weak to anyone. I am strong like mother, I am weak only in appearance, just like her.”

Pyarelal looked at his surroundings. He lacked the depth for any reflection over this conversation. He sighed deeply to tell Dev that he was done talking. Before he thought he was done, Dev added, “I never imagined I would come to you to ask for something.” His words muddied the stream of his father’s consciousness. Then Dev quietly left the room.

As the noise of footsteps faded away somewhere out of the house Pyarelal’s shaking hand reached once again for the mobile phone. On simply redialling the line rang and a young lady answered.

“Hello…”, she said.

“Hello…”, she repeated in a tense voice. It sounded like she was panting. She must have gotten over with one of her other customers. She sounded tired.

Though Pyarelal had many affairs, this one woman was someone he thought was special. She was the only one he could talk to over the phone even if it wasn’t business.

“Are you there?”, she asked knowing well Pyarelal was listening.

“It’s your son, isn’t it? What’s wrong?” She casually guessed.

“Yes. He stood here a couple of minutes ago and asked me about love”, Pyarelal said in his meek voice.

“Has he found himself a woman?”, she inquired.

“He thinks he has”, Pyarelal replied.

“And what did you tell him about love? Did you tell him love happens when hungry ghosts ravage each other? Has he ever touched a woman, kissed her, made love to her?”

Pyarelal broke down in tears and started to bellow wildly. The sobbing suffocated him. Though he wished to scream, his weak sniffling hardly left the room.

“I didn’t know you would break down this easily!”, said the woman. A brief silence that followed was disturbed by her own voice again. “Why does your son think you would know anything about love? It’s not like you ever loved him.” She was enjoying the sound of a grown man crying. In her profession, that’s all the kicks a woman gets after a certain age perhaps. She wanted to remind Pyarelal how he had ruined his own life. Step by step she wished to tell him just so that she could feel a little better herself.

Pyarelal cut the call and flung the phone at the wall in frustration. It immediately smashed to pieces. The great hollow abyss within him now spiralled and the rush of blood in his brain caused him severe pain. It was guilt he felt. The feeling overwhelmed him. Beating his limbs around like a butterfly somehow, he got up to his feet without any support. He charged out of the house in a frenzy. Nothing could cure his pain. He needed a release from this tension building within him. Sad as it was, sex was all he was dreaming about. Drenched with the sweat of lust he beat his fist upon the prostitute’s door.

The woman let him in. He went and sat next to the table fan by the window. The wind blowing through the fan cooled but the jarring sound it made annoyed him immensely. Still, the noise was nothing compared to the ruckus of all the floors of the building. Old women with grey hair fanned themselves sitting by the stairs. Younger women hung their clothes and attended to their children. Some odd pimps quarrelled with each other, and some girls were getting dressed to go out. The jukebox in the woman’s room was playing at full volume. Together, the whole establishment had drunk the hemlock and forever become a slave to its intoxication.

Pyarelal stared out of the window, the woman went back with a wet cloth to clean out stains from the sides of the bed and the floor. Many tormented men had laid there since morning.

“I don’t have the whole day”,  the woman declared.

“I won’t take long”, Pyarelal reassured her. Fooled by lust, Pyarelal felt cheated by where live had stranded him. But this was his own doing. Now was the time he redeemed himself.

When Pyarelal returned Savitri had already gone back to sleep. It was almost night. He called Dev. Dev stumbled numerous times on his way to his father out of fear. Pyarelal had a bottle of alcohol in his hand. “Have this”, he instructed Dev and held the bottle in his direction. Dev hesitated for a second but reached for it without any second thought. He put the poison to his lips. He drank it too fast. In a few minutes everything seemed blurry to the young man. In her sleep Savitri heard someone knock themselves over on the floor. She got up and went to check what had happened. She found her son collapsed at the door. Her husband was not there.

The stars shone bright, and the crickets made that unbearable noise. Savitri stood there, watching her son collapsed on the ground. For a while, she couldn’t guess what had happened. As she went by her son’s side, she learnt of the alcohol which had taken hold over his body. Placing her arms around him, she quietly dragged his body back inside his room. He was suddenly too heavy for her. That was the first time Savitri felt her son was no longer a child.