Manu

Manu was a shaman, a psychic, a telepath, but his psychic condition was not his only torment. To describe him is as meaningless as separating two drops of water in an ocean. To articulate who he was is nothing less than a deep dive into his thoughts, and they were not at all coherent. It is simpler to say that he was bent. It was one thing to hear him recollect his encounters with other people, and entirely another to hear him talk about his contact with the spirit kingdom. He spoke with great paranoia because half of the time he was unaware of what might become of him. Sometimes he wouldn’t care what his own fate would look like. He was insecure because he was lonely. He felt lonely because even his most honest observations were invisible to the rest of the world. Manu kept a little black book with him at all times. He called it his companion. Tragically, the book could not prevent him from becoming what he was destined to become. Nobody could have guessed that he was destined to become something less than human. That black night, when the little black book came to life, Manu must have been in an unconscious state. It was that book which drew him out of a void that was eating away half of his soul. Nothing can be said with certainty about the state of mind he was in, though, because of how he remembered it; someone else was there in that empty room with him that night. He saw a shape in the shadow. He called it inhuman. As the shadow drew closer, its footsteps were clearly audible. Manu would often admit that many of his episodes were hallucinations. But that night, a chilling sensation had run across his body and held him in its grip. He said it had felt as if he had been bound by a rope, and the chair on which he was sitting trembled as if there were tremors in the womb of the earth. He said the room was dark, but the shadow had an iridescent aura around it. He said it had “the shine” of a diamond. Manu named it the Leviathan. He blamed himself for every episode. He believed that the Leviathan, which was nothing but a mental image of a failed state, had approached him with sinister slowness, and froze him with its terrifying reality. He didn’t wish to know anything about the Leviathan at all. It was his own suffering he was more interested in. How painful is it to be psychic! How utterly painful to be awake when the boundaries of space or time have been distorted! How miserable is the unconscious state of mind, and how incredibly lonely it is to be incapable of communicating the uncommunicable. But that night, when the shining force flowed through his mind and his body, he felt it leave its mark on his body with an evil grin. That grin, which belonged to the shadow, that appeared on Manu’s face, was meant to communicate that some great, irreparable damage had been committed against his soul. Manu said the possession left him with pains, aches, and a ghastly fever. When someone loses their will to live, fear of death becomes a natural consequence. His flaw was that he was a recluse and lacked any real curiosity about the material world. That night was the chaos this malicious spirit wished to normalise, making his soul self-sabotage and self-destruct. The shaman could neither wince nor twitch a single nerve. He was neither asleep nor fully paralysed. It was not a dream because this was not what dreams were supposed to feel like. Dreams have colour, and the Leviathan had the shining. On experiencing such psychic episodes, on most days, Manu talked to the little black book, and it led him to their triggering point, back to some lost symbol, or some mythical fable. But that night, even though he had no energy left in him of his own, it was the book which began speaking first out of its own will. Manu, being Manu, resorted to self-destruction. That night he wanted to find utopia. He could have laid his life for it. He found tranquillity in the thought of a life devoid of everything he ever wanted. He wanted to transcend his suffering. He had made peace with never asking for what he loved, and once the Leviathan had fully let go of him, he felt as still as stillness could be. Manu wasn’t a lunatic. Was the wailing spirit real? Maybe it was real, or maybe it was just a sign of his repressed desires for cosmic destruction. But then, from the abyss of that chaos, he heard the little black book speak to him in whispers that had neither origin nor end, neither rhyme nor reason. He did not recognise that language, at first. But as he held on, and once the terror passed, he saw the shadow crawl out from beneath his skin. It must have been something immortal, because, in the realm of the psychic, desires are never irrelevant. If the Leviathan had chosen to show Manu compassion, then surely there must have been some method to its madness. Else, how utterly absurd for any of this to have happened? How else could the Leviathan have wished to show Manu reality? Desires are often the subjects of expression, and the objects in question are almost always indifferent. Today, when I write this tale of what took place that night, both Manu and the Leviathan are still caught somewhere in the limbo, fighting each other with crossed swords in the distortions of space and time. Such is the damnation of the shaman called Manu.

After he gained consciousness, he was ready to cross swords with Leviathan again because it was in his character to revolt. Imagine, the torment! That night was different, though. The Leviathan did not wish to hurt him. It wanted to passivise him. It oppressed his primal instincts and rendered him helpless. It had only caused him disappointment afterwards, because there was no one else in that room but him. He would punish himself, but what was his crime? He couldn’t bear the weight of accepting work in the name of mercy and compassion. I was curious, though. Yes, I wanted to know why he would prefer extreme suffering instead of compassion. My circumstances alone torment me”, he would say, and he was convinced his circumstances were of his own creation. He did not even believe in the forces of the universe. It was already bad enough that he had been damned with the gift of intuition, that all his interventions too, he wished, would rise from his will. It damned all the rest of the consequences of his circumstances equally too. Sometimes, when the voices inside his head would get too loud, he said they were accompanied by a sharp, shooting pain in the left side of his brain where an untreated concussion had been sitting, something he had received from the push of an angry spirit from behind into the edge of his living room door. But the shadows never stopped wreaking havoc in his life. Manu never resisted them either. Though he did not believe in the existence of God, he was gifted with remarkable insight, and he would torment himself with philosophy. He wanted peace, not some absurd inner peace, but world peace. In life, when we are faced with conflict, we have a choice. What we choose is our character. All that we wish we had done is a shadow. It is our shadow. Sometimes, when we see the dark, we think there's someone there. Something that we cannot comprehend. But when that moment is past, we realise it was nothing but delusion. I still pity him because he was nobody. But I also dread him, because despite all his torments, he lived a life of good faith. He put trust in shadows because otherwise they wouldn’t have let him live. In a world crowded with poverty, his wealth was his real torment. Was he the only one to whom the nature of work in this modern world did not make any sense? No, I suppose not, because that is what he and I have in common. Manu was grateful, if not to God, then to fate at least, because he inherited what most aspired to achieve. But he believed that God was, after all, another one of humanity's greatest delusions, so he gave karma highest significance. We live. We work. This is our karma, he had said.

Manu felt insecure that night because his psychic abilities were no match for the brute force powering through the Leviathan. He knew no one was coming to save him. Had he not chosen the life of a recluse, maybe this tale would have had a different beginning. He was loveless and enslaved. His whole life was something of an absurd accident. But in a way, Manu's dharma was beyond life and death, beyond good and evil. His dharma was in becoming what he never thought he could become. But acts of grit and determination make a man who he wishes to be. Manu knew there would come a time when he would feel stuck in place and time, because he was speaking to the spirit kingdom. It might have appeared from a distance that he was talking to himself, but that was his slavery. That night he breathed as though he was counting his last breaths, and soon he had started to feel it wasn’t him breathing at all. Then he let go because he knew that shadows preferred to pass, that they loved to wander. Manu was just as stubborn as well, but his indiscipline, in some ways, could never resolve his lunacy. It was all so simple once these episodes would pass, but after that night, nothing could have remained the same as before, free from the complicated interpretations that spun in a disordered network of delusions; that was his existence. He tormented himself that night, because he never feared getting tortured by anyone other than himself. He sabotaged his story in the prose of the little black book because there must have been more than a hundred souls within him to wage war in the time of his vulnerability. Inside his head, Manu could not move from adharma to the path of dharma, because the cosmic order was conspiring against him, to turn him into an immortal master from a mortal disciple. The shaman had told me, on his way to the eastern highlands in search of the sun of a black night, that maybe it was God who had upheld an order in the disorder of chaos, and that everything, from the stars to the sun, reflected what God would will. But the sun hid itself from his life, casting an ever-long shadow over his existence. Even in that darkness, Manu could see what most could not see. Who am I, and how do I know what I know? Even the invisible and the silent are as clear as darkness in a mystical world. Certain roots cause certain effects to appear illogical because stories are never linear beneath the surface. The heart of a story is buried deep beneath the ground. It is suffocating to even remember how the story goes. Manu was not the flesh, and he was not the bones. His existence wasn’t even within him. He was in my imagination, in my paranoia, in my anxieties. He never talked to anyone about his world of ideas openly because his world was far from the utopia of his dreams. Whenever he talked to himself, he sounded like a book, like a good friend, and still, all he ever found was abandonment. He accepts it because he is a cynical pessimist, and that is exactly why I pity him. For some unknown reason, human beings think it's perfectly okay to leave abruptly; if they didn’t, why would they choose to go? And, as for the story, it is a real breakaway from the bondage to this boredom of existence, isn’t it? He lived a life of regrets, and yet never once attempted to retrace his footsteps back to those he loved. Manu never laughed at his errors. He took them all too seriously. He did not think this life to be a comedy of errors, but a tragedy. For him, after everything was set and done, where was home? That night, he fell from the grace of compassion into the depths of anxieties and frustrations. Manu would draw as much pleasure from restraint as he could, because he could never get too close to love. He philosophised romance, and maybe that is why he did not find love. Philosophy is a strategy for suicide, not for romance, he taught me. He said, “Life loses all of its innocence to a disturbing kind of shamelessness once the search for novelty sets in. Romance baffles us because it is the first thing we lose once we realise who we really are.” “Romance has lost all its novelty”, he had added to further distract me from the plot of his story. I remember he had also said that the renunciation of pleasure was the only way to accept those who live their lives without a worry for consequence. But from where has romance made its way into the story? So, one fine evening in the monsoons, Manu had gone walking to ease his anxious mind from the mundane matters of everyday life, when through the window of someone’s kitchen, he saw a mother teach her daughter, of about ripe age, how to cook. It struck him when he suddenly saw this that although what he had witnessed was customary in the Indian tradition, in modern life, in his city, this had lost all novelty completely. This wasn’t an encounter with spirits, but he could not easily let go of the sentiments showing on their faces as they bonded. The mother was stern, and the daughter was nervous. But it sparked in him the resolve to his torments. It sparked in him a deeply contemplative mood. He had been greatly tormented by a philosophical inquiry into the consequences of accepting compassion. But this episode reminded him how increasingly common it has become for human relationships to wane in ways that suit the virtues of selfishness instead of a romantic sentiment. 

We've built a closed world where our own privacy alienates and smothers us. How would life be if we could do away with our wrong perceptions? He had been inflicting great suffering on himself in search of a resolution to this philosophical inquiry, and it had made him super paranoid and hyper vigilant. There was something about what he had seen which he thought would bring him the noble truth. But there was, in all of this, an unacceptable self-importance that he could not justify with mere altruism because, under the shadow of a strange Leviathan, in an age when traditions are eating away the romantic sentiments in the human condition, an amateur independence of individual expression is being devoured by materialism. He thought about his circumstances, which had kept him tied down to the search for an answer to his long-time torment. He meditated on the question he once thought was unnecessary as if the answer would bring him life or death. But, possessed by the idea of novelty, he had already settled into the emotional richness of a hope that he might finally find an answer and liberate himself from the complexity of the philosophical question about accepting compassion. One thing had made itself absolutely clear to him: if he could resolve just this, the very reason for his enslavement could be defined and give his life purpose. Becoming had movement. Being had stagnation. Resistance had movement. Manu's torment was the imaginary disorder which he discovered every time he looked back at all the years he had lived with perplexity. He was a phantom seer, and he had to live in a world that was at war with both fiction and reality. Yet, he could not say which was enemy and which was foe. He was so terribly enslaved by his circumstances that he never wished to hide from any judgements. His manner was restricted and restrained, for he could not freely expend his character onto the lives of others without any knowledge of how modernity could fail so badly to mean anything more than an elaborate glitch in the spiderweb of lies and deceit. His dilemma was still confined to the logical development of his character because he hadn't a clue about the story in which he was playing a part. How can someone tolerate that his own character remains to him a very confusing mystery? He did not blame anyone else for how his own life would turn out, and although he was limited by his character, by the world of his experiences, he believed the human condition would always shape his perspective. The world he lived in had become increasingly hesitant to share with him a static reality on which he could shape any perspectives. Though he tried not to give up on kindness, accepting compassion thoroughly alienated him from his utopia because he, too, was a man of few words. He was forever in search of friendship too, but he did not have the luxury to express it; he had difficulty putting his faith in anything or anyone that promised to be real. His story cannot really ever be called a story because it is neither true nor linear. Manu's life was nothing but a paranoid monologue. Whenever any signs of life would begin to show, he would lose himself terribly in the fictional world of hungry ghosts. It might not be fallacious to think that he was an adharmi, a deceiver, because his existence and his strife were both birthed out of a lie told by his mother, and for him, she was the mother of all things. Then began the voice of the little black book.

“Wait a minute”, it said, “How dare you accept mercy when you know you have lost all innocence, that you are not fully deserving of mercy or compassion?”

"It is nothing of the sort", Manu thought. He had been aggrieved by the loss of all his ideals and dreaded any mental intervention of everything he had ever loved. There was pain in his voice and nothing but pain. "My mother was appalled. She did what she did bearing in mind what she felt was the best for her child. It was a mother's dharma to do what she felt was necessary to keep her son alive and to nurture him with what she thought appropriate". He seemed happy with himself for discovering the answer to the question which had caused him so much torment. 

“What about you, Manu? What is your 'dharma'?”

“My dharma is to honour my parents' struggle,” replied Manu.

“So, will you tell a lie every year?

“Does a piece of paper make something true or false?”

“But you testify, and that is what matters.”

“Humanity is lived above such petty accusations. Why make myth the foundation for humanity? We can arrive at the truth of each moment if we are willing to tolerate the differences in our perspectives.' Manu pauses for some time. He looks around uncertainly, then breathes deeply and continues with an expression of confidence. “It is true my parents bought this house. I was juvenile when it happened, and I had no say in the matter. My name appears in it, but being their son does not make me deserving of the fruits of their labour. I wish to make the world a better place, and that cannot be done through tolerance alone; to become worthy of executing punishments on myself for crimes not my own has somehow become my dharma. The struggle my parents once called their own has become my inheritance. My purpose is to tread the middle path which leads me home. Bricks do not make a place a home. It is the love and familiarity between the people within closed walls that makes a place worthy of being called a home.”

“Yes, but where you live, and the people you live with, have nothing of that sort but only dysfunction. Do you feel beauty? Do you feel love?”

“No, I do not feel any love. Neither do I feel any familiarity. But I do feel a sense of duty. Not even the passing away of my father could extinguish the light illuminating the dead end of my human condition. Beyond these borders, I take my flight of freedom. I am a messenger of peace, and my only prayer is that I keep my patience and my sanity, and remember that my purpose was always to make the world a better place. It is what I strive for every day. It is my paranoia alone that deludes me away from the right perception of reality. For the sake of my sanity, I have left in my heart an instinct for indifference towards the lie I tell every year. I am detached from the consequence, but at last I have realised the reason I tell that lie: that this is not my home. How the world might perceive the truth is a matter of indifference for me. If this is my crime, I am prepared to hear the judgement and my punishment.”

“Why do you torment yourself, Manu? You should resign, and begin again. Why do you torment your soul with such afflictions? I pray you, let go of vices and move towards the path of virtue and enlightenment.”

When he heard the little black book say what it said, his expression softened further into tranquillity. He had brooded often on the idea of beginning again.

So reaffirmingly he told the voice of the little black book what had been on his mind, “I am already on the path of virtue. I am told by this world how a noble man ought to be, and I am learning to walk on the path of letting go and renunciation. This is the only path that will lead me to the end of my tortures. It is true my soul weeps for my circumstances, but it also weeps for the state of humanity finds itself in.”

“Humanity seems to be indifferent to destruction”, the little black book continued.

“The world we live in has been swallowed whole by some disgusting sickness that does not seem escapable. But I must not deviate from the path this life has paved for me because I know if I keep going, I will erase some of the pain which lingers not only in my heart, but also in the hearts of others. I greet the morning sun and the shadow of the night with a smile because I know what my mind often urges me to take for granted is the happiness of my birth, and I am grateful to my parents for it. I have nothing of my own in this world, and I am right to declare it. If I momentarily forget to detach myself from any of the objects in my possession, then I am wrong, and my malicious intent towards other human beings must be addressed in a calm tone. I was very angry once, and I let that anger eat into my home. I lost everything because of my anger, but I must never let that happen again. That is why your enquiry about the truth may not be fruitful, because you are enquiring about my thoughts. I know that when the source of my suffering is brought to illumination for the world to witness, I will have to remember how the life and death of my father affected my grieving mother, and how its aftermath drove her to near madness.”

“Do you have any sympathies reserved for her?”

“No.”

“But then if this is what it was all about, why did you plant the seed of the Leviathan in your story? Where is the image of the failed state you promised?”

“It’s everywhere, and you’re looking at it right now”, answered Manu.

“Why do you still go on? What’s the need of it all? Why must you live at all?”

“I carry in me a seed of compassion, and I must not let it die. It was given to me by my parents, by the world, by my circumstances, by the natural order of all things in the universe, by the human condition itself. That seed of encountering the Leviathan was a mask I had to wear to enter into the realm of my reality. It was my rite of invocation. A terrifying curiosity is what torments me, and that is what I had to instil in the people who come to judge me.”

“None of this would have happened had a lie not been told at the time”, said the little black book in disappointment.

“I know, but this is not about me alone anymore. I am merely playing my part in the natural order of things. I will not break the logical argument even if it is born from deceit.”

“You’ve been deceived a hundred times, and how did it make you feel? Do you no longer care about consequence?”

“My mother was suffering, and when one person suffers, the whole world suffers. So, was it not the duty of the world to see her through the lens of compassion at the time?" Manu asked and then remained silent for a while in contemplation.”

“Are you not angry with her? After you did not have a happy childhood, and as you became an adult, she ruined your life by pushing you towards a life you have come to detest. Her fears and anxieties robbed you of your one true chance at freedom and love. Have you forgiven her for all the violence, Manu?”

“I was young then. Over ten years have passed since father departed from this world. It took me some time to see that she was suffering just as I was suffering. Yes, I exhausted my numbered days finding my way out of the filth that I find myself in, and maybe, if it wasn't for her, life would have been very different. Every breath she took resulted in life being a very specific way. When rigidity gives way, chaos reigns.”

“Then Manu, why has this life made you so lonesome?”

“Must be due to guilt and shame. Many acts of fate and destiny collide to birth beautiful gentle flowers of a romance. But that world of joy and happiness falls beyond all the suffering. I am lonesome because I have learnt to romanticise death. I wait for the end. My end!”

“I thought you were waiting for someone, Manu. I thought you were waiting for that woman you love.”

“She won't be coming, but my end will definitely come, and there is no doubt in my mind about that.”

“Maybe novelty might arrive; you never know.”

Then Manu replied immediately without a thought, "That is what causes me despair, that one day novelty might arrive. I always thought it was reserved for the young ones, and if I am to mature, I must give up on both youth and novelty. I have to become as long-faced as a man of this time can be. I would have to learn from the greatest novelists the art of rhetoric because, given the circumstances I find myself in, I cannot afford to lose sight of cynicism. I am a pessimist by nature, but a cynic because of my company, and how great a number of cynics roam free today. Our time is rife with cynicism, but my fatalism isn't cynical. This fatalism is my mother's gift to me, and she once confessed that the humanity within her is dead.”

“Are you a fool to not let cynicism overrule your dharma?”

“What is the need to procrastinate when it comes to dharma? One must only become aware of the human condition and one's own circumstances. Would the world stop to notice what I choose to do with the chaos of reality when it doesn't even wait or stop when death approaches at the door? My action will be right for me alone if I remember my reasons, and this is a good enough story for me. The story of Manu's dharma. My reasons are righteous, though my circumstances may have been born of deception. The story of the father who left an entire world behind for his son to inherit is only a part of the joys and the sorrows of my story. The story of the mother who spun a scandalous deception to nurture her son is only a part of her story. Gods did not birth me. The order of the cosmos is not my story to tell, because I give my life meaning, and everything outside the outlines of my life is nothing more than a lengthy tale to tell. My dharma is to see that when the truth is brought to light, I fulfil the duty of a son who has been summoned to defend the actions of his parents. To honour their lives is my greatest duty. I bow to them, not to false prophets. Yes, I know this turns me blind, but this blindness is the foundation of my impartiality, of my sense of justice, which I know might even criminalise me in the end. But the fact is that I have parts of my life I find abominable and detestable, and still, I do not deviate from the path of dharma. This is who I am destined to be, and as I outgrow the need to uphold my moral ground, I hope it does not seem immoral in your eyes. Would you say my sacrifice was righteous, and that I gave up worldly pursuits for honour, or would you say that the plague on Manu's dharma was his inheritance?”

Bhelpuri at Sunset

When I truly let go of the memory of the ideological suicide I’ve committed that day, and forget even the lust to fulfil my innermost desires, be they for revolution or for Bhelpuri, with exhaustion, I look up at the sky that is bubbling with the colour blue. The clouds are pale and frothing the way the waters froth at the shore. The golden sun, that is dissolving into the horizon where skies and waters unite, leaves behind a pinkish black hue that is yearning solely for the chase of that starless midnight blue that is a shade darker than cobalt. My eyes become purple with intoxication. There is nothing left for me to become but sleep. I wait for revolution when I dream. I wait for the songs of revolution to wake me up from my abysmal nightmare, but the sleep in which I am sinking does not let me awaken.

Outside the metro station, on some days, I munch Bhelpuri. These are the days when at sunset, on my way back home from the government office, I feel defeated by the anomalies of government. These anomalies intrude upon me like my fellow commuters in the metro. The commute wrings out the eternity humanity so often promises me, and the spices of Bhelpuri fulfil in me something I cannot describe.

In the year 2019, when I received the sacred ‘government job’, I was unaware of the shit I was getting into. The city was burning at the time with protests. Blood was flowing with freedom.

Silence has always been my personal form of protest. When I was a child, the photography of dissent I saw in a certain magazine captured my political imagination. The dissent I befriended makes sure I will never walk alone. The power of the page impressed upon me a scar that I wear with pride.

The mind is a dangerous place to be trapped within when it is at war with itself, and all the wars I wage are with myself.

Government slaughters individual freedom quietly and dissent at once. Especially here, where it is difficult to find a moment’s peace. It is so overcrowded everywhere we go. To be able to think is to be mute, and to be mute is a saving grace where the mob is winning.

In the metro, on my way back home, the evening sky tells me and my fellow commuters, I think, the class to which we belong. Every time the political environment of our nation heats up, I am reminded of the time I signed up for a government job and stabbed my old self in the gut. The government office is a hotbed of hatred. I remember how I barked within the four walls of the government office when I saw that bigotry and fascism had no shame. Eventually I stopped barking, tucked my tail between my legs, and learnt to sigh with my eyes closed. Now and then I try cheap tactics to agitate people around me, but as I write these thoughts down, I am aware my thoughts have started to sound tyrannical. Today, a majority of people are indifferent to the barking of a mad dog, because even a bullet in between the brows wouldn’t make a sound. The sound of silence that is so deafening has become for me a close friend.

On some days, when I do not want to face the same dilemmas I’ve often faced, and do not wish to eat a chunk of my own body with agitation, immediately after exiting the metro station, I ask for Bhelpuri and insist on extra green chillies.

How I see it, the reason someone protests are personal. So, in that strain, altruism is at the root of solidarity. Those unaffected by injustice always have something or the other to say. Even an old friend of mine, someone I no longer talk to, misunderstood my definition of protest and solidarity for years. I agree I am passive. Today, when I am confident in my politics of resistance, I can assert that solidarity matters. Resistance does not always have to be revolutionary to spread its wings. Small acts of disobedience exercised every day sometimes have more power than something historical. Change must come from within. What the government denies is the opportunity to ask important questions at the right moment because it is both insecure about its ability to help others and, at times, incapable of doing so entirely. But we must all wear our red flags with pride so that the world around us knows who we are and adapts to our ways. We have to be master strategists to be peaceful in this country.

Our society has this weird mentality of self-interest. As a consequence, our government simply does not care about repercussions. There is something about the power of leading that is susceptible to becoming corrupted with tyranny. I am afraid that is what is happening within me as well.

The taste of green chillies gets the heart pumping again. I am no longer reminded of the catastrophe which befell me that day. I am more concentrated on huffing and puffing in a manner which appears less ridiculous and more sophisticated. But even after hiding for hours behind a few important books of human civilisation, I am afraid of my own convictions the most. Even that tiny piece of newspaper in which my Bhelpuri is wrapped wears its stains more confidently than the news printed on it in ink.

Even a fool must be aware that to be a rebel without a cause is stupidity. To what extent then must we educate ourselves and how? Will we hear from a government which itself does not know what is good and what is evil the definition of good and evil? This isn’t about the voice of any one person or a handful of people. This is about we the people.

The days I reach out for Bhelpuri are days when I wish a fanatic mob to erase the existence of disorder from the face of the earth. Anger is injurious to health. On such days, if I learn about a fresh set of detentions or police brutality, I feel dystopia closer than the kingdom of heaven. But what is the way around anarchy? Annihilation is something strange my mind follows my discontentment up with if I choose to remain passive in the face of the government slaughtering my guilty soul.

That day, protests had erupted again. I was busy dutifully commuting between home and the government office. Metro stations were shut down. There was unrest in the crowds. My mind had started to feel suspicious once again. I began getting visions of nuclear destruction. Death is a great leveller. Violence was wrecking my mind with impunity. I was reminded by an omniscient voice that our struggle must be non-violent. There are many colours of revolution in the world of ideas, and every whisper counts.

I was overreacting. I calmed myself down a little. From a space of varied emotions, when I was counting my breaths, I came back to my immediate surroundings and found myself sitting in my office chair. The walls were moving, and the fog had disappeared. The exhaust fan was spinning with a wobble. I alone was complicating things in my head.

When the daze lifted off my mind, a brand-new doubt emerged as to why, despite empathy and solidarity, the collective conscience could not improve the human condition. I was musing quietly over how strange a phenomenon humanity must be for its evolution to be this incomprehensible, when from the noise occupying that room, I extracted the message that everyone present was gathering around for chai and samosa. When I am at work, I am hypervigilant and on autopilot. I saw this particular development as a threat to my freedom. I did not wish to let go of my dream of revolution because at least my dream possessed logics real life did not. There are days when Bhelpuri is a much more responsible decision than disobedience, but I simply cannot accept the samosa at the government office. I felt as though I would have to pay for it with my life, so I refused and did not move an inch from my seat. My heart silently wept with the craving for something spicy. This was the same wagging of my tongue that so often led me to ask for Bhelpuri. I sank back into thinking about what would awaken the collective conscience. I think it is selfless when self-harm is inflicted for the wrong that has been done to someone else. I see nothing wrong in that. So, why should I keep dissent to myself, and why should the government refuse to remain a member of the audience and jump in with its machinery to interfere with my right to free speech?

Right at that instant I felt a sharp pain shoot up in my stomach. The thirst for revolution does not disappear as the craving for Bhelpuri. Although it is true I am the opposite of an activist, I am a passivist, if anyone had seen the questioning look on my face, my contorted brows, the raised cheeks, the thin straight lips upon which a string of questions sat waiting their turn, and the frowning chin, they would easily tell how uncomfortable I was with the silence I forced upon myself out of fear.

I know that the excessive force the state uses on some innocent, some malevolent dissenters is in fact reserved for passive servants like me who take less than a second to turn a blind eye to responsibility. The madness of the apolitical government servant has to stop. It is madness, I know, and I am not the only one with this ideology. Anarchy mustn’t have to prevail for the sake of being apolitical. Peace does not have to be a suicide mission. Is it not tyranny to shovel war on the grave of peace, the way I shovel Bhelpuri down my throat with a tiny plastic spoon?

It was not time yet for another one of my celebratory eves of defeat. People in that room were idly chatting.

I wanted to share that despite studying philosophy, politics, and literature, I had not yet understood if government was necessary. Laws speak otherwise, and I understand we shouldn’t move against laws for our own good. Why then are people ordinarily distrustful of bureaucracy, of police, of courts? I think that some mysterious arrested development of the mind is to blame for the apathy and the sycophancy.

The screen I had been staring at aimlessly for two hours suddenly falls asleep, and I am forced to turn to the gathering due to the interruption. I am exhausted from mental fatigue. It's hot outside. Everyone is having fun, but it appears as though grief has decided to creep beneath my skin. I feel appalled at the state of the government and at humanity. Someone asks me what I am thinking. I say I am only watching the clouds travelling the sky. I do not ask whether someone retired, got transferred, or wished to celebrate their anniversary. I keep my voice to myself. Samosas are the currency of the government office, something from which I refrain because I know I will have to die to digest it. I know that neither the chai nor the samosa is for free. Everything comes at a cost.

Often, I feel convinced that I will join the communist party, but these ideas are too grand even for myself. The enchanting smell of samosas fills the room. It is met with cheers and cries of being brought to the table at once while they are still hot. For some reason, I feel disgusted and nauseous. I wondered if there was something wrong with me because I could not even dare to look at those little pyramids of India.

By the end of the day, I had been overwhelmed by negativity I inflicted upon myself. Literally, no one had said anything awful to me, and still I made myself feel this way. Before the disrespect for the rudimentary and backwards mentality began to show on my face, I picked up my bag and left for the metro station at once. I could not bear becoming two-faced. Somewhere deep within, I also knew that, despite all its flaws, no matter what, the government had also given us a long glimpse at a welfare state, or at least the ideal image of it. We all know what utopia might look like. We are still full of idealism. Most of us, if not all of us.

What about them, those who have lost all hope because they suffer every day and every night, while I roam freely with my belly full? On my way back home, in the metro, I sink into hopelessness once again. But I am glad I left that room in the government office for a silence which is equal to the silence of mourning for the revolutionaries who brought us our freedom from our past. Every wound the state inflicts on innocence is a wound inflicted upon itself.

The ordinary government servant is lost in the way of progress, in noting observations, in bridging the gaps of conflicts of interest with unappreciated diplomacy. When reason dies, insignificant people like me resort to ideological suicide because blind obedience is the foremost religion of the government servant, and the disorder in the office is the evidence of his atheism. This fruitless tree must be uprooted with a reimagined civil disobedience because obedience is at the very root of this collective indifference. My heart weeps as I watch humanity die a slow and painful death. The lust for control has corrupted the ethical foundations of government. When a handful outweighs the majority, it should be painted on the walls that the function of the government is only to protect the tyrants. On some days, I do not regret leaving my work desk empty because I know I cannot perform this ideological suicide any more. Not many people relate to how I feel. But I cannot stop grinding my gears and thinking outside the box. I know I am not the only one who feels, at times, I am no longer aware of why I am performing the work I am performing anymore. What is work anyway?

I feel my head spinning as I exit the metro station. I reach for Bhelpuri. I find my tongue wagging wildly with craving. The munch of this rich snack quietens my anxiety a little, but only briefly. I am suddenly wondering why I did not accept the samosa earlier that day. My conscience is screaming at me, and there is not a sound. Existence inside this cave is heavy. From this hollowness within, I wonder if I have always carried this shadow of ignorance. This shadow is the absence of the impressions this world can wash over me. This existence is nihilistic. The world impresses its cosmic dance upon my experience of life. I no longer resist. I allow them to flow through me as we are one. 

Raison d'être

In an anarchic metropolitan, Suraj was quietly brewing Kangra Masala Tea in the kitchen of his adobe restaurant, The Juniper Tree. The yellow petals of the calendula floated over that bronze elixir, which smelled rich with notes of black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper. The ayurvedic aroma of the tea often helped soothe his overwhelmed mind, but that Friday night, he could not stop brooding over the meaninglessness of life. The kitchen had two doors. A white, heavy metallic laboratory door with round glass windows, fixed in a terracotta jali, which separated the orchestrated calm of the kitchen from the clamour of the dining area. The other resembled a barn door and opened to the quiet lane behind the popular restaurant. Waiters entered and exited the kitchen through the laboratory door in a frenzy. The natural tones of terracotta accentuated the white-pearl colour palette of the kitchen. The chefs crafted each meal with impeccable discipline and finesse. Suraj strained the tea, hung his apron and escaped through the back door with the small white cup in his hand. He wanted those thoughts to stop, but the formidable questions of a meaningless existence had begun to spiral in his mind again. He did not know how to prevent them from deeply disturbing his solitude. He had the restaurant built exactly as he wanted, using earth, clay, wood, sand, and stone. He loved to walk on the black, unpolished stone path that led past the warm lights fixed in the gravelled floor where giant clay vessels were displayed, where the wooden benches found their resting place. The wavy textures and odd rhythms of the walls hidden behind the cover of frangipani and heliconia were an expression of his odd sensibility on existence. All the arched doorways and the windows cut into the earth-rammed walls offered a view of the old juniper tree, which was rooted in the centre of the restaurant. The tree spread the aroma of its berries across the courtyard. While sitting under the thatched roof built in a corner of the courtyard, those waiting their turn to enter the dining area could fall in love with the serenity the small pond dug beside the juniper tree emitted. A yellow stone stairway descended from the courtyard to the dining area inside a modern cob house built underground by digging out the earth. Three of the walls of the dining area were naturally ochre and roughly whitewashed to a textured finish. Old terracotta figurines and utensils were displayed on the shelves carved into these walls. The mud house also offered cosy floor seating for those who preferred it. The masoned terracotta jali balanced intimacy and privacy between the dining area and the kitchen.

The vents and wiring for the air conditioning were neatly hidden with customised jute hangings and covers. Two large glass windows were cut into two walls, and a narrow wooden pergola was built into a glass panel fixed in the middle of the ceiling for natural light. The wood represented tradition, and the glass modernity. Suraj’s life had turned out exactly as he wanted. The restaurant helped sustain something larger than life, but Suraj had burnt himself out bringing it to life.

As he sipped his tea and pensively stared at the dense fog gathering over the deserted street, he knew it led to nowhere. He felt lonely. He felt convinced that this street would bring him nothing. The pain caused by failures and losses within him felt terminal. It hurt him to hold on to this lack of identity, and it hurt to let it go. The world within him, as well as the world around him, had become one giant cosmos devoid of meaning. He would give it all away for something that could add meaning to his life.

He wondered how any of this could have happened, but he found no logic to his actions that led to this essence of nothingness that had become the meaning of his life. Doubts and contradictions consumed him. He found it impossible to break the habit of overthinking. It was dreadful. He was scattered, and the confusion drew a frown all over his face. Confusion fuelled his rage, and the rage further confused him. Something had gone horribly wrong, and he could not quite say what. What was it all about? Why was he alive? Why could he not see the beauty of his life? Why did he wear this frown on his face? “What’s it all about?” he kept whispering into the void with frustration.

This purposeless unrest he felt rise within him had a sense of urgency. He felt desperate for meaning. The tea tasted like home, but once it was over, he wanted to break the little white cup against the wall. Tea had not solved his angst; he felt discontented. With each blink in his eyes, sudden flashes of disconnected memories shrouded the meaning of his life.

The sky was black, and he felt the chill of the smoke in the air press against his skin. An eerie silence spread all around him. There was no sign of life as far as his eyes could see. Somehow, he placed the empty cup beside the barn door and quietly walked towards his new quest for meaning. He began drifting off into the night. But, before he could go very far, a familiar voice called out his name.

“I sensed you were troubled, so I came to check on you. It is almost closing time. I have told someone to cover for me, if needed,” said Shanti, one of the waiters at his restaurant and approached him. Suraj was short of breath. “I would like to go for a long walk,” he added as he continued to drift. “Can I join you?” Shanti asked in her quirky voice. Suraj sighed.

“I want to run away.”

“How far will you go?”

“I was thinking I’ll catch a plane to nowhere and never come back.”

Shanti burst out laughing. She knew his love for escapes well; that is how they had first met. Soon she realised he was experiencing one of those moments again. She saw him gazing anxiously into the distance. She held his hand and helped him walk a little.

“Let’s find you someplace peaceful to sit down,” she caringly put her arm around his shoulder as they walked deeper into the white winter night. They must have walked for about an hour in silence. Without purpose or direction, they walked as far as they could. Shanti sat Suraj down on the footpath opposite someone’s bungalow.

His voice trembled when he asked her, “What is the meaning of life, not mine, not yours, but all life? Why the hell are we all here? What is the reason we are in this union with life?

“It is so that I can look you in the eye and save your miserable soul from drowning in the reflection of your own face in the pool of your tears,” she replied and blessed him with a kiss on his head.

Many years ago, far from home, Shanti was on her way to work one day when someone hit the back of her head with a stick and knocked her unconscious. When she came back to her senses, she did not remember anything. She found her wrists and ankles tied to a chair. The room was clean, but the window did not have a view. The masked man who forcefully fed her three times a day told her this was only temporary and she would soon be free. One day, she woke up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. The sun was beating down, and she felt dead inside. She wanted to live. The first thing her heart told her was to reach the Ganga. For a few years, she lived an outlandish life on the Ganga ghats. She begged, but she lived. She never went back home. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not recognise who she saw. The life she once lived was no longer hers to claim. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live.

Suraj had wandered off to Shiva’s city to heal from heartbreak. The city, which is balanced on Shiva’s trident, was a spiritual mystery he wanted to experience.  It was winter. It was before sunrise. From a corner of that Ganga ghat, smoking her chillum, Shanti had been watching Suraj gaze deeply at the river. She was not afraid of him. She jumped on him from the dark depths of her mind and began to ask him all kinds of questions about who he was and where he had come from. She had no reason why she did what she did; she just did it. She offered to show him around if he paid. She knew the narrow lanes well. He agreed. They waited for the sunrise, which arrived with a sense of ritual.

The priests arrived on the ghats, kicking away the wandering dogs, to unlock their temples and recite the scriptures. Birds animated lifeless trees with songs. Cows came to life. Every living being in the city arrived on the ghats to greet the river and the sun with prayers.

Even the ascetics who were in the comfortable embrace of their blankets awoke from the darkness which is known as sleep.

Suraj rose from his seat on the floor as the reflections of the city lights on the river disappeared. All he possessed was a backpack and a few delusions about love.  With the sun rise rose holy smoke swirling in the air where Suraj and Shanti had been sitting shoulder to shoulder, dazed and confused about life. Sunrise brought with it the many pilgrims who dipped themselves in the Ganga to cleanse themselves of sins. Bells began to toll, and the mantras captured the whole atmosphere. The scent of sandalwood incense sticks uplifted the mood of the ghat. The sunrise colored the river in gold. Ripples in the water could soothe the mind if one meditated deep enough to listen. The young ones arrived to perform advanced yoga.

“Can we take you for a ride, sir? We will take five hundred only” The boatmen started to invite tourists onto their boats. Some agreed and disappeared into the mystical horizon.

When she saw that Suraj was bewildered, Shanti suggested she begin her tour. She was no more than an ascetic there. Over the years, the map of the place had replaced a large chunk of all her traumatic memories. She could find her way around here with her eyes closed, she swore. However, she could not find a way back to her old self, no matter how hard she tried. Eventually, she had stopped trying and embraced this new identity that Mother Ganga had gifted her.  

“Could it be possible that all life was merely a glimpse of the unknown?” he wondered. “Could it be possible that the purpose of life was to bring what is in darkness to the light?” he doubted. He found an odd satisfaction in watching all life hang in a kind of balance by some invisible string, but he needed to see the network of logic. He could not see it, no matter how hard he tried.

For the next four or five hours, something bound these two souls together; perhaps it was their pain and suffering.

Orange flames were rising from the pyres. A long string of crowds was pacing on the ghats like ants because the water was low. Small doors and smaller windows that were at least a few centuries old gave a view into the lives of ordinary people who were living a rather extraordinary life. The trees grew in the oddest of places, and their shapes were drawn out of fairytales. A mosque and innumerable temples told over ten thousand tales if one had the time to listen. Erotic sculptures decorated the walls at times. Engraved verses and scenes from holy scriptures brought time to a standstill.

He ate a dosa at a tiny restaurant, and she ate two. As soon as they stepped out, they were approached by an old man.

“Would you like to eat a paan?”

“Please buy garlands for her,” requested another boy in nothing more than a blue half-pant.

With garlands made of marigolds around their necks and roses in their hair, they saw people getting massaged vigorously and sunbathing and laughed together for hours at how pilgrims look once barbers shave their heads by the Ganga.

x

Ashamed of the Truth

 Driving through the rain at fifteen minutes past midnight, he was listening to the piano recitals of Chopin’s nocturnes. That was when he saw her. It seemed she was stranded on the side of the highway. She was hiding from the rain. The headlights pierced through her eyes, and she was angrily staring back at them. She was unbelievably beautiful. It is true, it was her beauty that caused him to act on first instinct and stop right beside her.

The car had come to a halt, and her body gravitated towards it. She questioningly stepped forward just enough so that she could prevent her feet from getting wet in the rain. Her skin was white like snow and pure like ash. The thumbs of her feet were long and the nails on them had been perfectly painted red. The black straps of her sandals were tightly grasping her fair feet.

Lightening struck the moment their eyes met. Amidst the deafening sound of rain, their inner voices were faint yet unusually curious.  “Why has this man stopped here? What does he want from me?”, she was wondering. “What’s a woman like her doing out here all alone at such a late hour?”, he thought. “Stranded?”, he asked her. His breath smelled an awful lot like cigarettes, and it was burdened with the weight of true emotion. His voice had hardly reached her, so he leaned towards her and repeated himself. Upon hearing that word, ‘stranded’, she immediately drew herself away from the car. She even stole back her gaze from the stranger. He was desperate to look into her eyes just one more time. “Are you on the run? I can give you a ride”, he said. She immediately turned to leave, but her feet were rooted to the ground around which heavy rain was falling. She spent a few seconds gazing at the trees.

“It seems she is stuck in some situation”, he again thought. She noticed he hadn’t driven off yet. Her eyes had widened in anxiety and her jaw had begun to drop with fear. It was easy to tell that she was indeed stuck. The expression on her face suggested that he had caught her doing something very wrong. Raindrops gathered on the road reflected the colour red originating from the taillights. The cicadas were creating an incredible noise, he realized. For her, they had been singing all this while. “I do not intend to bother you. I only offer help, because it isn’t safe.”, he said. Her defeated gaze slowly turned back towards the car and she checked the seats inside for signs of anything suspicious. Her fingers reached for the handle on the door of the passenger seat without her consent. She mindlessly pulled the door open. Cold rain caused goosebumps on her forearm, so she hurriedly left the shelter of the roof under which she stood, and jumped into the car like a cat. She pulled the door shut harder than needed drowning the singing of the cicadas into Chopin’s nocturnes. Although she had heard the choir at her church play the piano quite well, she had never heard Chopin. The music immediately soothed her overwhelmed senses and she firmly rested herself on the seat.

“Where do you have to be?” he asked her. “Away” she replied.

Her breath was heavy. Her chest was wildly rising and falling. She had walked perhaps, or even run a long way. Her gaze was still set on the forest. When she felt a warmth caress her skin, she finally realized that she had accepted help from a stranger. The inside of the car was oddly comforting.

 “She is mesmerizingly beautiful!” he thought and turned his gaze to the road ahead and found a deer had been standing close to the headlight. It was looking right back at them. The animal hadn’t come to her notice either so he exclaimed, “Look!”. His surprise must have freaked the creature out and it leaped wildly back into the forest. He breathed in heavily and exhaled.

He pushed the clutch with his foot, put the car in gear, and accelerated, lifting his foot off the clutch. The car began to quietly move.

For the first several minutes she kept fidgeting. So, he asked her, “Are you running away from somewhere or someone? Are you in danger? Is someone following you?” His words were shredding her heart to pieces. She turned her head away from him to look out of her window. The dense forest she was running away from was passing them by. But she was scared it would still last forever. She couldn’t say anything. Her head was spinning. Briefly, he wondered if he was in trouble for giving her a lift. But he could sense that she was comfortable, so he kept quiet for a while and kept his eyes peeled.

All this while a word he had uttered kept spiraling inside her head. It was that word ‘help’ which did not stop echoing. Everything else was a colourless blur. Only the rain falling on the windshield and the windows made her feel like she wasn’t dead yet. She felt dead otherwise. Nothing else made any sound, not even Chopin. But something reassured her she was safe. She could sense it in the air. Suddenly, she was nervous and pressed her finger between her teeth. The pine trees were black and whizzing past one after another. “I’m headed home,” he told her. His words helped break the cycle of wicked thoughts inside her head, so she didn’t mind hearing his voice so much. But still, she couldn’t stop thinking. Tears began to swell up in her eyes. She was looking the other way, so he couldn’t see them.

Thunder and rain were continuing. Even the wiper arms were struggling to do their job. He had to switch the safety lights on, concentrate twice as hard on the road cutting through the mountains, and drive slower than usual. He would scrunch up his face every time a car went past them in the opposite direction. Drops of rain blurred bright lights from the few that did appear out of the black void into images of soft cold suns. Cars and trucks came and went like vessels in orbit around the hills. Only headlights illuminated this highway that cut across a dense forest and the rain was busy eating away the hills on which this forest dwelt.

He was orphaned at a young age and didn’t have any real sense of family. He had once been seriously in love with a woman, but she went on to marry someone else. The last time they met he was certain he would never hear from her again until a week ago when he received an invitation from her for dinner. It had felt like an invitation to a beheading at first because the house where she lived with her husband was twenty-seven hours away by road. But he promptly accepted without thinking.

He felt ashamed standing at her doorstep waiting for someone to answer the doorbell. It was a beautiful wooden cottage, painted white, surrounded by trees, and tucked away on a hill in the forest. He had to wait a while by the stairs leading up to the living area because the couple was busy preparing for dinner. The woman was chopping vegetables and arranging them into a salad bowl according to their colour. She had spent all evening cooking rice with meat and grinding fermented dry fish. While the food in the kitchen smelled delicious, the flowers she had bought that morning and mindfully arranged in a glass vase had spread their fragrance in the dining room.

Her husband was busily ironing the tablecloth in one of the three rooms on the floor above when the doorbell rang. When he heard the doorbell ring the second time, he set the iron aside, switched it off, and took to the tablecloth downstairs to lay it on the dining table before heading towards the door through the corridor in the living room. It was quite a big place her husband had acquired from his parents.

By the time the door opened the cold air had already sent shivers down his spine. “Good evening, I’m Saumya”. “It’s good to see you, Saumya”. The two men firmly shook hands. Her husband then led Saumya inside. The kitchen was right beside the living room to the left. The woman appeared out from there and gleefully hugged Saumya. Her arms left a heavy impression around Saumya’s neck, like an albatross.  They briefly caught up but it felt like an empty conversation. “Why don’t the two of you sit, and I’ll bring food from the kitchen.”

“So, you drove all this way?” sternly asked the man.

The adrenaline rush caused by the highway was still fresh in his blood, “It was quite something,” Saumya said anxiously tapping his heel on the floor without control. “Would you like some time?”, asked the man. Saumya shook his head. There was awkward silence in the room for some time. “I’ll go see if she needs help,” said the man and walked into the kitchen. He stared at the walls blankly while the three ate together in silence. He saw their lips move but he couldn’t hear any sound. Even the couple felt he was awfully quiet.

The couple had reached a weird point in their marriage where their discontents were obvious. Saumya had meant a lot to her and she wanted her husband to know that since she was once capable of love, she had it in her to keep on loving. Saumya could not have cared less about their marriage. Saumya was depressed and ashamed because he knew he still deeply loved her. He had never been able to move on with his life since their separation many years ago. He no longer knew what it meant to love. He shivered in a rhythm. The picture of that lonesome cigarette on the dashboard kept coming back to him, he was going to cherish it later. By the end of the night, they had eaten and drunk to their hearts' content. Their conversations were dull and utterly lifeless. There wasn’t a single instance of joy or laughter, not even if it was phony. The couple did try to make pleasant conversations but Saumya didn’t partake in any of them. When it was time to bid Saumya adieu, the woman did it with genuine kindness, even though she could not remember why she had ever loved him in the first place. She was finally ready to move on, she thought, because she was certain that this was the last time, they would speak with one another. She saw him off from the door at the top of the stairs and her husband came down to drop Saumya to his car.

When Saumya got back inside his car, he gave his last cigarette a long stern look, and then looked back at the cottage behind which a big silvery moon was hanging in the sky. The moon must have been three times the size of the cottage. It was staring back at Saumya like a ghost from the dark. A thin line of silvery moonshine ran across the pointy-tipped tall trees and over the car. The forest was swaying with the wind, and dark clouds had begun gathering in the sky. Saumya felt deeply abandoned. He was twenty-seven hours away from home, he hadn’t had any sleep, and it didn’t even matter to him.

He looked at the passenger’s seat and he was once again bemused by how extraordinarily beautiful she was. Her skin was fair but glistened like the colour of honey. Her neck had wrinkles around it and each crease intrigued him about her past experiences. He hadn’t found out yet that she was crying. He knew he shouldn’t look at her so closely and so he brought his attention back to the road. But his eyes began wandering again. This time he caught a glance of her maroon blouse. It seemed to have been stitched so tightly around her breasts that cloth and flesh seemed inseparable. Her breath was unsettled and had a broken rhythm. His gaze then went slithering towards her naked waist, then towards her thighs, and to her slender arms. The chador draped around her was a brownish mustard. The creases on it were as intriguing as the ones he’d seen on her neck. Taking note of how it aroused him to look at her in that light he decided that from now on he would only keep his eyes on the road. Still, he could not tell that she was crying. Maybe it was so because of the sound of the rain which came crashing down from above. That sound the rain made had healed him. He had been driving for over three hours now. The cigarette on the dashboard was still waiting its turn. As time passed only wilderness would come their way for the next seven hours.

On any other day, he wouldn’t have even stopped to help a stranger, man or woman. The pace of modern life is just too fast to stop and help someone in need. It wasn’t like him to care. He would have left a woman stranded at the mercy of the wilderness. His lover’s invitation had reminded him that life was full of uncertainties. He craved that cigarette now because that little thing would remind him that one day he would die. Death is a certainty and he feels disinterested in life. He found someone beautiful in a forest when everything around him was shrouded with darkness. He couldn’t drive past her.

He shut the music off. It was hardly audible anymore anyway. Insomnia had championed romantic feelings for the nocturnal. She combed the locks of hair that had till now hidden the tears rolling down her cheeks behind her ear. The sound of the rain had cured the nausea of uncontrollable thoughts. “I… uh… was driving back from dinner” he blurted out and looked at his wristwatch. It was nearing three a.m. She remained silent but her tired gaze fell on the cigarette lying on the dashboard. She fancied cigarettes. Her fingers yearned to reach for it but she crossed her arms and drew them into her waist with some awkward fear. He saw that and rolled down the automatic windows. “Have it”, he offered. The air smelled like earth, rain, and burnt diesel. A few drops of rain splashed inside the car, some even wet their skins, but their clothes were safe. The touch of raindrops on her skin was cool and exciting. She grabbed the cigarette and placed it between her plump lips. The moon was bright and she had its silver lining on her lips. He passed her the lighter. She lit the cigarette and released a heavy smoke from her lungs. “Who did you have dinner with?”, she asked. Her question immediately reminded her of her house and her children whom she had abandoned fifteen hours ago. “We were together for a few years; I saw her one day become my wife. She is married to someone else now.” He paused and said, “Her husband was also there, at the dinner, I mean.” Then she smoked the cigarette in peace. When she was done, she had an intense desire to smoke another one sparked in her heart. She sighed out the last cloud of smoke softly. 

The people of her town had called her a witch. They spread rumours that she was the reason her husband abandoned her and their children. He left them exactly one year ago. Escaping what her life had become was all she ever dreamed about. She did whatever work came her way to keep her children alive, but did she have to live this way? If the father of her children can abandon them, so can she, she felt. How old was she when she had them anyway? Her mother passed away when she was still just a child and her father was a drunk who would mercilessly beat her. She hated that she felt no love for her children. She hated that she was no longer capable of any love. Love was only an emotion and she just did not feel it anymore. She was on a great escape to discover a new life. She was running away from herself. She had become crazy. What sort of a mother can a crazy woman be, she often thought.

The memory of her house and her children caused her to tremble all over again. She turned around to see the highway stretching into the distance leading towards her past life. She heard her children call her. But she was only hearing their voices inside her head. The empty darkness towards which the car was heading was proof of her escape. She imagined that the neighbours would find them and raise them as their own. Her disappearance would cause them great grief. That might still be much better than all she could ever give them, she thought. She was scared these voices inside her head would one day convince her that her life had no point at all. She began to hum some song softly to keep these frightening thoughts out of her head. Her cynical lust for another cigarette reminded her of the first time she smoked. She was lying in the grass on her stomach next to a river. Her knees were bent and her toes tickled one another. She was carrying firewood in a basket whose strap ran across her forehead and she had stopped to rest for a while. She had a long uphill climb ahead of her and she had stooped to read a book. The aroma of the cigarette had settled itself on her sweaty clothes.

Saumya rolled the automatic window back up again. They approached a bridge underneath which a Brahmaputra roared. There were Victorian lamps along the bridge. When she saw the light of the lamps fall on the rolling river her eyes peeled off in amusement. Her mood changed a little. The banks must have been approximately six hundred meters apart. The rain was still coming down hard. She turned to him with wide eyes as if she needed affirmation for what she was seeing. The lamps passed them one after another. She was indeed the most beautiful woman he had ever met. Her skin was the colour of sand. He felt a fire ignite in his body. He turned his eyes back on the road with embarrassment. She was like a dream. The car stepped off the bridge. The sound of the river faded into the distance. The light of the lamps was no more. They were under the cover of darkness of the forest once more. His heart had begun sinking. He thought that it would stop altogether. “Would you mind if I stopped at the railway station to buy a pack of cigarettes?”, he asked. She didn’t say anything. “I have to drive for another twenty-four hours. I’ll see if I can find a hotel when the sun comes up”, he rambled on.

She cleared her throat after some considerable time had passed and said, “We can check if cigarettes are being sold anywhere.” He looked at his wristwatch and it was going to be four o’clock in the morning. He got off the highway and took the road going towards an insignificant railway station. All the shops were closed. There was however one open tea shop. He parked the car next to a shelter, pulled out an umbrella from the back seat, and went out to buy cigarettes. She sat still for a while. Then she thought that maybe it would be better to run away. She hurriedly stepped out of the car and walked into the shelter. It was a cabin made of bamboo. There were logs of wood piled up on one side of it. In the middle, there were a few sticks tied together into a bundle. She looked around. There was nothing besides the forest for as far as she could see. The railway station was deserted. It was very dimply lit. She saw him make conversation with the shopkeeper. He wasn’t looking in her direction. She began anticipating when to run. But she felt confused. What would she do? She felt like going back home. Tears began to fall from her eyes again. She felt stupid.

When he came back with some food for her and cigarettes, he was shocked to see that she was not there inside the car. His heart jumped into his mouth for a second. He felt like he had lost a pet dog.

“Hey!” she shouted at him from the bamboo cabin. “In here!”

He shut the door to the car angrily and walked over towards her slowly. They did not speak for a while. He unwrapped the pack of cigarettes and lit one for himself. She took the lighter from his hand and squatted down. She had stacked a few wooden sticks together. She set them on fire. “There is a creature eating into my soul”, she said staring into the fire. “I can feel it cause decay to my life. I have nowhere to go to. I have no one. I don’t know what I will do, or how I’ll survive.” It was at this particular moment that it occurred to him that he wanted to lay in a comfortable bed with her and hear from her the story of her life. He wanted to know everything there was to her life. It was true he felt great sympathy for her, but he was ashamed of the truth. He was burning inside to hear her speak to him in silence, to see her reveal herself to him, to make herself bare before him. He wanted to know who she was when she made love. He had been so utterly fond of women all his life that he could recount all the encounters he had had with every single one of the women he had been with. That was the only language he ever really understood. The language of love. He found it attractive that she was warming her bones beside the fire. Everything blurred in the rush of these emotions. The cigarette made him dizzy. The sound of the rain drowned his lust for her. He wondered as he flicked the butt of the cigarette to the ground how he could want such a thing. He felt connected to her, but the colours did not shine in his eyes. What difference would it make if the sun were to rise? But, just like magic caused it to happen, the rain stopped falling and the sun came up. Nothing had changed.

She wanted to remain a ghost and ghosts could only come to life once the body gave way. His desire for her was useless. He had become exhausted chasing happiness all his life. It hurt him that she was not sinking along with him.

“I’m terrified of the unknown”, she said. “I always have been.” “You helped me so far because you knew it would make you happy. Thank you.” She had the look of helplessness on her face. She did not have a reason to ever fall in love again in her life.

“How are we going to spend the rest of our lives?”, he asked her. “We live making home inside of each other’s minds”, she said and walked towards the passenger’s seat. She got in and pulled the seat belt around her body. She was waiting for him. He bitterly came and sat in the driver’s seat. She turned to look out of her window. The fire she had started was slowly dying. “Can you believe that this morning the sun could also rise?”

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.