by Ram Sundaram
He raised his wand silently; the audience held their breath as he circled it over her head and then tapped her on the shoulder. “What’s the word?” he asked her.
She frowned in concentration and a heavy silence fell over the theatre. Then her eyes opened and she smiled. “Arraigned,” she answered.
“Amazing!” the old woman in the audience yelled and the audience erupted into applause. There were those that no doubt suspected the old woman had been planted there and been given a previously decided word, so he prepared to repeat the trick by tossing the notebook into the theatre at random again. It was then that Amelia suddenly uttered yet another word.
“Impotent,” she said.
He froze. The theatre fell into a heavy silence.
Amelia was looking right at him, with a look of disgust. “Impotent… Ugly… Small… Weak… Pathetic… shall I go on? Or are those words sufficient?” she said and then laughed cruelly. “What woman in her right mind could possibly love you?”
I stared at the bottle of gin… it had been so many years since my last drink, but the memory was fresh in my mind. The taste, the feel, the potent effect… Alcohol was forgiving in a way nothing else had ever been, or ever could be… it erased everything negative from within the mind and replenished everything that was good and heartening. I could feel my disheartened spirit calling out for help… dare I break so many years of self-control to answer its plea?
I took the bottle of gin and broke the seal. My hands trembled as I lifted it to my lips and then a moment later the heady liquor rushed past my throat, immediately lending vigour to my limbs. I placed the now half-empty bottle back on the dresser. The effects of the liquor were oddly short-lived, for no sooner had I felt a sense of renewed strength invigorating my limbs, that the sensation evaporated and I felt weaker than even before.
I glanced at the half-empty bottle and realised I was a failure… It occurred to me that this was the reality I’d glimpsed within the mirror, for hadn’t the bottle in the reflection been half-empty to begin with? The one consolation, if I could call it that, was that I had now probably matched the reality of my reflection. I was right, for turning around I saw that the bottle within the mirror was still half-full. My reflection, meanwhile, stood with his hands in his pockets, regarding me with a kind of pity. He looked better now, healthier, and even happier.
But I felt sick, both physically and mentally. I felt guilty about having had that drink, and I didn’t think my body had agreed with it. I felt intensely weak, as if my legs weren’t my own anymore, and they wobbled unsteadily as I tried to find my balance.
I glared at my reflection, at his perfect, unaffected appearance. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” I hissed at him. “You wanted what I had for yourself.”
Feeling oddly disoriented all of a sudden, I took my hat off the rack it hung on and placed it on my head; he did the same. Then I took my wand out and clumsily tapped my own head with it, while muttering an incantation. His hand was steadier as he echoed my movements and as we both took our hats off in a flourish, a rabbit sat atop his mane of lustrous hair, whereas the top of my flat, lifeless hair lay empty. I glared at him and hatred burned strongly within me. He had stolen everything from me: my health, my looks, my fantasies, and now he’d even robbed me of my magical talent—not just robbed it, but as he showed with the handkerchief trick, he’d even gone far enough to surpass anything I had ever achieved before.
I paced unsteadily around the small room, my anxiety deepening. He took the time to smarten his appearance by running a razor through his stubble, combing his hair and tidying his clothes. I watched him with fascination. He looked quite sharp when he was finished, and even I had to admit that it was a pretty impressive transformation. Colour had returned to his cheeks, his features were fuller, and his eyes sparkled with promise and talent.
He came up to the mirror and I followed to see what he was doing. Standing inches from my face, he straightened his tie and brushed the loose strands from his hairstyle back into place. I mimicked his movements, hoping to annoy him. But he wasn’t annoyed. His eyes, though fixed on me, seemed not to regard me at all. I don’t think he even noticed me. When he was satisfied with what he saw in the mirror, he turned and walked towards the dresser. The bottle of gin in the reflection was full again, and had even been resealed. But as I turned to the bottle atop my own dresser, I found that it was still half-empty. I couldn’t make sense of this madness…
He was living the life I had always wanted for myself, the life that we had always wanted. And yet now that he had attained it, he refused to share with me. It seemed that I would have to make peace with the fact that we were different people. We were inherently the same, yes, but we were living different lives, in different realities.
The door behind him opened and I saw Amelia enter the room again. I turned around expectantly, but there was no Amelia in my room. I listened to her asking him to be ready for his cue in two minutes. He nodded, and she wished him good luck with a kiss that told me their relationship was different than the one I shared with her. When she left the room again, he turned back to the mirror and looked at me… yes, directly at me.
“You’re it,” he told me, but did not explain what he meant. When he left, closing the door behind him, my eyes fell on his dresser. This time there was no bottle of gin on it, empty or full. A part of me wanted to turn around to see what I would find on my own dresser. But I no longer had the luxury of observing two realities. For somehow in the past half hour, I had stopped being the magician and the performer; instead I had become the man in the mirror, a reflection.
VI
An Apple Branch
Faisal Anwar waited for the garage door to open. The machine made a loud grating noise as the enormous metal door lifted laboriously into the slim space overhead. Anwar waited for the noise to end before he started his car. The ‘98 Prelude whirred to life and white smoke lifted into the hazy skies overhead. Anwar buttoned his coat, slipped on his gloves and picked up his shovel. City by-laws had been revised recently to dictate that the portion of sidewalk belonging to each home owner ought to be cleared within twelve hours of the most recent snowfall. Back home in Pakistan, Anwar never had to worry about snow, let alone clearing it. But he didn’t complain. There were many things that were different between his life in Rawalpindi and his life out west. It was, he realised, as if he had lived two distinct lives.
He ploughed his way down the length of the long driveway and stepped onto the sidewalk. He began the arduous task of clearing the white burden off the concrete, cursing every time the wind howled around his ears, and smiling every time his metal shovel struck the hard ground beneath the thick layers of ice. Within a few minutes he had cleared his driveway and the pathway directly before it. He now moved to the stretch of sidewalk that circled around his front lawn. To his great surprise, Anwar found that the sidewalk was bare, bathed in a soothing dark shade of concrete gray. He smiled and glanced at his neighbour’s house. Henry Maurice had beaten him to it. Anwar put the shovel back in its place, got into his ‘98 Prelude and slid out of his garage. Just before he drove off, he shot a quick glance at the enormous apple tree that stood proudly on his front lawn. Its branches were frigid and bare, but it still appeared proud and somewhat regal. It seemed as magnificent to him then as it had when he’d bought this house seven years ago. Anwar drove off into the cold, wintry dawn.
That evening, after a long day at WADE corporation, a procurement and consultation company where Anwar was a junior-level engineer, he returned home in his ‘98 Prelude and kissed his wife as he came in through the door. He had his dinner while they talked over his day at the office, and he detailed how difficult his co-workers had made his job for him, but how he had risen above them and won the praise of the lead engineer. Farah, Anwar’s wife of eleven years, listened to him with a smile on her face and a frequent nod of her head to show she was
following him. It was a reflection of her loyalty, Anwar knew, that though she had heard this story before (it was the same story he told her almost every night at the dinner table) she had never once succumbed to the temptation of asking, “If the lead engineer is always so pleased with you, Faisal, how come you haven’t had a promotion in six years?”
After dinner, Anwar spent an hour flipping through every channel on the television that was running a reality show of some sort. Soon after, Anwar and Farah retired to bed. Before slipping under the covers, Anwar reset his alarm clock from the daily call of 5:30AM to 5AM. When Farah asked why, he simply said, “I have an early chore to get done.”
Henry Maurice slipped under his rising garage door and and started his ‘94 Civic. The engine roared to life and white smoke lifted into the hazy skies above. He stared at the fresh layer of snow that had accumulated on his driveway and cursed to himself. Little Peter Maurice, all of seven years old, came up and reminded him gently that “Mom wouldn’t like to hear you swearing like that.” After buckling up little Peter and four-year old Jessica into the car, Maurice picked up his shovel and began attacking the driveway. He worked painfully to clear a path for his Civic and soon approached the sidewalk. In a few minutes he had cleared the sidewalk beneath his driveway and as he approached the stretch that curved around his front lawn, he was met with a surprise. Dark concrete beamed up at him. Maurice looked over at the Anwar house and smiled. He replaced the shovel and backed his Civic out the driveway.
As he prepared to drive off, Maurice’s gaze fell on the enormous apple tree that his neighbour proudly owned. Every fall, Anwar and his wife brough basketfulls of ripe apples over to his house and apologized for the leaves that had inevitably fallen over the fence and onto Maurice’s yard. But Maurice had never minded the leaves or the apples themselves that fell into his yard. The apple tree was the oldest resident in this neighourhood—rumour was that it was almost two hundred years old. If anything, Maurice considered it a part of his own yard.
Spring came late that year, and then summer reared itself over the city and memories of the bitter winter faded away in above-seasonal temperatures. The driveways and sidewalks around the Anwar and Maurice household were bone dry and their lawns were bathed in golden light. The apple tree, always a late bloomer, looked full and beautiful with the promise of a healthy yield of apples. Anwar and Maurice invited each other’s families over for barbecues almost every weekend. They talked, ate and laughed like they were best friends.
Summer waned slowly and by the last week of August, the tree was full of apples. That Saturday morning, Maurice collected the apples that had fallen off his neighbour’s tree and all over his front lawn. He put them in a basket and ushered them to the Anwar household. Anwar was wheeling his lawnmower out of the garage when the two met.
“Another basket for you,” Maurice smiled, panting a little with the weight of the basket. He placed it in Anwar’s garage for him. “Fresh off the lawn.”
“No, no, my friend, that is yours,” Anwar said, raising two palms politely. He then slipped into the garage and returned with a larger basket of golden-red apples. “These I had picked for you early in the morning. Now you must take both.”
“I can’t eat so many apples, Faisal,” laughed Maurice.
“Give it to the children, or to Marie.”
“How many apples do you think my wife can eat?”
“As many as mine, if she’s hungry enough.”
They shared a laugh and then settled on a compromise; Maurice took his smaller basket of apples back with him and Faisal took the larger basket into the house. This kind of exchange was a yearly ritual, and had been going on for all the many years that Maurice and Anwar had been neighbours. And perhaps naively, they expected it to continue forever.
Fall came much too soon that year. Barely two weeks after Maurice and Faisal had exchanged the baskets of apples, the golden green stretches of endless lawns and fields had turned to a rusty bronze. The enormous apple tree though was still full of fruit, even though it had begun shedding leaves on either side of the wooden fence. Anwar had just come home from work to a lawn that needed more raking than mowing. Farah wasn’t home, and Anwar didn’t feel like watching television—he knew what news would be on every channel. Deep in thought, he decided he would tackle his lawn and get some chores done. He was standing in front of his garage, rake in hand, when he noticed Maurice striding up his driveway, almost red with rage.
Anwar regarded his neighbour with surprise. “What’s wrong, Henry?”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Henry yelled. “Your damn tree, that’s what’s wrong.”
Faisal gazed over at the two-hundred year old apple tree, at the leaves steadily falling off its expansive arms. “Yes, I don’t know why the leaves are falling so early this year.”
“It’s a bloody nuisance, Faisal, and I’ve had enough.”
“Enough of what?”
“That pesky tree. It’s always dropping things on my side of the lawn and I’m through picking up after it. Either you start making sure that no more leaves fall on my side of the lawn or else I’ll have to call the city and lodge a complaint.”
“A complaint?” sputtered Anwar, in utter disbelief. “You’re joking.”
“This is no joke. Like I said, I’ve had enough of that damn tree of yours.”
“But Henry, that tree has been here for two hundred years!”
“So what? Now it’s on your lawn and it’s affecting mine.”
“But you know that I can’t control where the leaves fall, Henry. I’ve lived here for years and until today I’ve never heard you complain about it.”
“Look Faisal, enough is enough. Clear my lawn right now.”
Anwar bristled with indignation. “I will not.”
“Then I’m lodging a complaint.”
“Be my guest,” said Anwar, calling his neighbour’s bluff. “There is no judge in this world who would give credence to such a complaint.”
The two neighbours stood there and argued for several minutes, before retreating into their houses under fits of intense rage. Maurice never did lodge a complaint but the damage to their friendship had nevertheless been done. From that day onwards, Anwar and Maurice never spoke to each other. There were no more baskets making rounds between the two neighbours, nor any invites to barbecues or dinners. Every winter after a snowfall, each neighbour cleared the sidewalks up till their respective property lines, but never an inch more.
Maurice and Anwar parted ways that afternoon, forever. And the 200-year old apple tree was cut down in anger that very evening. The evening of September 11, 2001.
VII
Touch of Reality
There is something undeniably cathartic about being in the midst of a large and boisterous crowd. It might be the sense of community that produces the catharsis, the overwhelming gratification one obtains from being an accepted member of a large group: an evolutionary throwback perhaps to the age of hunting in herds. Or it might be the endless assault on the senses: the hundreds of faces, expressions, gestures, and clothes to study; the barrage of noises, music, screams, laughter and conversations to observe. At the very least, the mood of a large crowd is infectious—it imprisons every member of its group, participant or not, within its communal energy. Standing within that crowd of several hundred, perhaps even over a thousand, I felt intensely alive, as though every inch of my body had been set alight by an invisible current. When they laughed, I laughed giddily; when they cheered, I screamed myself hoarse joining in; and when they clapped, I pounded my hands together till they turned raw.
At the moment though, the crowds were subdued. We were gathered outside a large stadium, where the performances of some of the top celebrities from around the world were scheduled. A glamorous red carpet (glamorous only in terms of the societal connotation a red carpet holds, for in a
ctuality the carpet looked worn and unimpressive) stretched from the steps of the stadium to the ends of the street, where limousines and expensive cars would soon pull up, carrying the few individuals who alone dictated the sheer importance of this night.
I will admit that the entire occasion echoed with frivolous vanity, of over indulgence and empty gestures. I found the idea of celebrating individuals—people who were no different to the thousands gathered here, nor to the millions glued to their televisions around the world, except through mere circumstance—mildly absurd at the very least. From the ridiculously large stadium, furnished lavishly, decorated with expensive, glittering objects, and outfitted with high-tech media equipment, to the outrageously monstrous limousines, most of which resembled buses and yet carried no more than two passengers, the whole event reeked of excessive waste.
But standing amidst that crowd, I was in a position to witness firsthand the sheer power of blind, unyielding devotion. Many of the fans around me had flown thousands of miles, spent anywhere from a tidy chunk of their vacation budgets, to even a few months’ worth of wages, and had suffered through unimaginable inconveniences quite simply to share in this event. They didn’t lament the excessive waste or the frivolous vanity of the occasion—they were here to simply share in a tiny portion of the celebration. What saddened me though was the knowledge that when the night was over, when the celebrities would return in their limousines to their five-star accommodations and luxurious lives, that these loyal fans would have to return to their realities, to their unglamorous lives, and work even harder to regain the ground they had yielded to this occasion. They would spend days, weeks or maybe even months recovering from the financial, physical and emotional impacts of the night. A few would perhaps never recover. But none of that mattered to them at present; reality would always find them tomorrow. Tonight was about fantasy, about stars and divine circumstances; tonight, they would dream.