by Roshan Ali
The next day at school, Rohit was not apologetic or the least remorseful. Perhaps he was drunk but everyone said that was not possible because he drank quite often and one can of beer was like juice to him. I wondered how that would feel, to drink every day, and it scared me, because I too, liked being in control.
‘He’s just a bad guy,’ said Trishul, who was with us the previous night. ‘I can see it in his eyes.’
Manu said his father was a politician and was known in these parts to be a violent goonda who grabbed land, threw people off roofs. ‘He’s killed three people,’ he added in a whisper. However old we became, there was still someone to scare us. A few years earlier it was ghosts. At lunch in the cacophony of the dining hall, we discussed the evils of the Indian system; the judges were paid, the cops were evil, the politicians filthy with corruption. It was almost as if the worst of the worst became the ones who were meant to be the best of the best. ‘Nothing works in this country without bribes,’ said Pradeep, whose father owned a huge farm somewhere in the hills. He nodded sadly and ate his vegetable. Everyone agreed, of course. And everyone was a sceptic soon, and everyone hated the system, and everyone hated the rules because the rules came from the system. ‘What’s the point of paying taxes?’ asked someone else. There was no point.
I looked around the table and saw citizens who were already fed up, already hateful, already tired. How could India awake when she was already dead?
‘Anarchism is the only way,’ said Vipul with grim confidence.
‘Anar-what?’
‘Anar is a fruit.’
‘Not that anar. Anarchism. No system of government is good for the people.’
‘Ya, man, that sounds correct,’ said Manu, ‘I think I’ll be a anarchismist.’
‘Anarchist,’ said Vipul, but Manu was already talking about something else and Vipul went back to eating his rice and dal.
* * *
When school finished, everyone had great plans and no doubts. But I had no plans and only doubts. Suddenly I had to decide things instead of being pushed here and there and told to do things. But I had no idea where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do. I had no great interests, no passions, no guiding principles. I was a lost boy suddenly becoming hairy.
On the last day, everyone stood in groups discussing their futures: colleges, universities, countries, tests of various kinds, and I wandered around pretending to be busy and pretending to know what they were talking about. The teachers passed by patting me on the back: Only they knew how hopeless I was, because only they had seen my scores. To the others I was a smart guy because I spoke smart. The maths teacher, a smelly, ratty man who was always on time, travelled from group to group speaking words of encouragement and congratulations, and when he saw me, he pretended that he had a meeting and left. He had nothing to say to me because saying hopeless things was not permitted in these circumstances of celebration and melancholy.
I waved goodbye to my few friends. We hugged and shook hands. ‘We’ll keep in touch,’ said someone. I nodded and left by the back door, and the plants by the rear path said, ‘Another wasteful recruit. They always leave through the back door.’
PART 2
FOUR
Once school ended there was a buzz in the house as though something exciting was about to happen, but this feeling was rooted in wishful thinking and the dreams of my mother rather than in anything real. Once school ended there were supposed to be some things happening in and around your life—freedom and college, drinking and coming home late. But if you stayed at home, like I did, nobody came into your home and took you by the hand and led you out into the world. You had to do this yourself and this somehow I wasn’t taught, and was taught instead that the world was a wonderful place full of happiness and helpful people, but in truth it was a cruel and rude place and nobody looked twice if you fell from your cycle and nobody helped you up.
But I still stayed at home, even though I understood that the hand-holding of school was over, and the hands were all cold and unheld, and the warmth of holding hands was replaced by the callouses of trying to take a hold of life. That was the beginning of an adult struggle.
But soon Appoos began to get on my nerves and mother’s passivity was even worse and these two things drove me out of the house.
I began to wander here and there and in wandering I found a freedom that I enjoyed very much, a kind of freedom for which one didn’t really have to do anything or work very hard. All you had to do was get out of the house, leaving mental illness behind, and walk around and nothing mattered; yet you saw a lot, and smelt a lot. There was a lot to learn from the smelly world outside.
Some days I would walk past the school and see the kids—different actors in the same roles in that endless play—and try spotting the ones who were playing me; the losers, the low-energy misfits, the fringe-nibblers. They were always there—those border skirters, those edge shufflers—looking scared and trying to slip out before the teachers saw them or their friends noticed.
By the school there was a lake which was out of bounds when we were students, and because of this it became a place that everyone wanted to go urgently. For a month or so after passing out of that school the students made it a point to visit that lake, and since it was within the line of sight of the staff building, they thought that the teachers could see them and that they would curse and raise their fists at the window. But they could do nothing because we were out of their grasps forever. The lake itself was nothing special; special only in that it was water and water somehow is always special, as long as it was mostly water, compositionally. This lake was mostly water with some sewage but we could ignore the sewage with our innate ability to ignore dirt; this ability was essential for survival.
At the lake we met—old friends now fancy and adultish, with great futures and responsibilities. Everyone spoke of this college and those exams and factories and businesses, but I had nothing to say and was silent. A few others were silent too, not because they had nothing and were losers like me but because they were modest and spoke only when spoken to and did not have that desire to hijack, however gently, a conversation.
Finally, I would make an excuse and leave earlier than everyone else because the pressure to say something became overwhelming and it was tempting to lie. And they would say, ‘Ib, stay for a bit, man. Charu got some beer.’ But I couldn’t stay; not because of them, but because of me. There was something inside me that didn’t like other people.
* * *
One day Ajju was important and said officially, ‘Ib, what about college? That St Peter’s is very good.’
‘For what, Ajju?’ I asked. I had no idea what to do.
‘Listen now,’ he said, ‘it’s about time you begin to think about what you want to do. How long has it been since school? Three months. Rukku, why isn’t he writing exams?’
My mother muttered something weakly from behind the bead curtain in the kitchen.
‘Bloody hell! Is there no one in this house who cares what this boy does? Your father obviously can’t, at least the mother.’
He stood up heavily. ‘I’m going to speak to the principal,’ he said. ‘By next week, I want you to decide your subjects.’ With those future-killing words, he walked out.
But what about my dreams? What was the record for deciding one’s dreams? One month? One year? But I had no dreams and so had to start from scratch.
The next few days, irritated and angry, I roamed about, not with my usual laziness but with a great angry purpose as if the sheer force with which I hit the air would forge new paths in my future and close the gaps in my past. But the walking just annoyed me further. This was when I went first into a pub which I had seen many times before. In school I had heard it was the cool place to be, where everyone went to have a good time, and I guessed, to drown out the bad times. And what was it that attracted me to that smoky place? The smoke, the drink; a place in which the races were all put on hold and everyone took part with pleasure in the
ir mutual destruction. And it was beautiful—the hatred of health, the malevolence towards restraint, the letting-go as if in this space everything was permitted and nothing mattered. In this place god was truly dead and another god was in place, the god of pleasure.
In truth there was a race and that was to get in each other’s pants, but luckily everyone was so junked that nobody cared too much even if they were rejected and humiliated.
That was the thing about drinking, I found—that the alcohol drowns out discretion and facts until you’re just a clown in a smart pair of pants amusing the pretty girls and embarrassing yourself. It was a relief from daily life.
Appoos meanwhile was getting worse. One morning I stood my ground and said to mother, ‘We have to get him help. Yesterday he called me a traitor, accused me of conspiring with the walls to keep him trapped.’ She didn’t look up from the pan and was quiet. Then she said, ‘I don’t think we can afford it.’
‘What about Ajju?’ I asked.
‘You want to tell him that’s fine, but don’t blame me then if everyone looks at us strangely.’
‘It’s not about us, it’s about Appoos. I can’t bear to look at his eyes like that any more,’ I said. She turned around, surprised. ‘You’ve grown, Ib, I think you can make this decision yourself. I’m weak, I know I’m weak,’ her voice broke and she sobbed. ‘If only things had turned out differently with him. We could have travelled.’
‘I know, Ma, I know. Don’t cry like that. We’ll get him better.’
I left the kitchen, past the rosewood desk by the window, and it seemed to be watching in hard silence, and I felt like everything was watching, such was the seriousness of the moment. Appoos was by the window in his room, staring out. Sometimes he cried, sometimes he laughed. Today he was just sitting there, light on his crumbly face, with distant eyes and absent mind. I walked up behind him and placed my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t move. ‘Appoos, you want some juice?’ ‘Get me juice, get me juice,’ he said. ‘I told you to get me juice.’
Visiting my grandfather wasn’t the most exciting or pleasant experience a human can have. First, you had to make sure you had your speech ready. He was a very formal man, and believed in presentation and appearance, and first impressions. But his house was strangely bare. Perhaps Ajju was one of those people who pretended to be living a life much more luxurious than the reality of his surroundings, or perhaps he cared less for things than we thought. Past the thin metal gate and the low white wall was a tidy garden, thin and clipped, not a shrub more than a foot high, green and maroon leafed plants and aloe vera horns, a strip of yellow and red flowers, and towards the house a line of rose plants that never flowered. The house itself was a large white structure, with simple and obvious angles, without any modern architectural trickery, or any traditional bling, just white chunna, red tiles and brown windows, black bars. I knocked on the door, brown and plain, yet imposing as if it knew on whose orders it stood straight-backed, a wooden Janus, watching the inside as well as the outside, watching, watching and protecting. Ajju opened the door and Silly was out in a flash, Silly the excited, old Beagle, the only creature with whom Ajju spoke gently. I shook Ajju’s hand and he let me in. Silly was in in a flash, bouncing on his hind legs, reaching for my face. I stroked his head and he calmed down, licking my hand. I said, ‘Ajju, Silly’s grown so old!’ He smiled tenderly. ‘Yes, she’s an old dog, but has the energy of a younger dog,’ he said and I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the dog. ‘So what do you want?’ he asked. He was always getting to the point of things. We sat down.
‘Ajju, Appoos is very sick. We need to take him to a doctor,’ I said, trying to keep my voice objective and planned, but inside I shook like a flag in a storm, cold and alone against black clouds.
He was silent for a minute. Then when the silence was over he said, ‘I don’t know what you want from me. I’ll give you the money, but it’s stupidity, I tell you, this ridiculous thing of going to a doctor to get your mind right. All he needs is some discipline and some calm. Tell your mother to leave him alone for a few days at the ashram. I have been told many times how the Swamy has cured people of the so-called mental illness. Send Kamran to a doctor, any doctor you want, and let him talk to anyone, and if that doesn’t help him, send him to the ashram.’
I nodded and couldn’t speak. My throat felt frozen, as if cemented with the anger of this moment, of the ignorance of the powerful, at the same time with the relief from the years of suffering. I stood, and Ajju patted me on the back. ‘I’m glad you came, Ib. It’s nice to see you in my house. Here I feel calmer.’ I crouched and played with Silly for a minute, then got up to leave. As I shut the door behind me, I turned and saw my grandfather leaning against the wall and looking down at the unfriendly floor.
On my way home, it was getting dark and the wind began to do its dance. I felt a great burden lifted from the back of my neck and I walked freer. I was angry still with Ajju’s ignorance and old-fashioned ideas, yet he wasn’t a cruel man, I knew, because he didn’t force his ignorance upon us. When I stopped at a cigarette shop, the man looked at me strangely, as if he knew I had overcome a great obstacle, defeated a large enemy of happiness and progress, but he was probably just looking at my hair, which looked like a home for a small animal. He looked puzzled too at my dirty jeans and my ironed shirt. Who is this strange looking man in my neighbourhood, he must have thought. I reached home late, and mother was asleep. I could hear Appoos’s snores, and silence. I sat down, tired and happy. Should I write mother a note to tell her the good news? I couldn’t decide, wondering if it would be a waste of good news. She wasn’t good at taking good news, and usually received it with the same face as bad news. Finally, I decided that I should. There was always a notepad by the phone. I picked it up and scribbled on it. I wrote, ‘All done. Ajju says OK.’ Then I snuck up the stairs, careful to avoid the wind chimes at the top, and collapsed on my bed. For the first time in my life, it felt like I had achieved something worth collapsing for. The next morning, it was all the same, and I felt a brief moment of anger at Amma for being the way she was. She was making dosas and Appoos sat at the window, watching something outside, chuckling to himself. The note lay there by the phone but I could see that it had been handled. I decided not to say anything about the whole matter but Appoos turned suddenly to me and said, ‘Your mother is sad, Ib. Ask your mother why she’s sad.’ Mother was standing in the kitchen pouring out coffee into small steel glasses. ‘What happened?’ I asked. She didn’t say anything. ‘Did you read the note?’
She nodded and finally a sob broke through her defence. ‘Thank you, Ib,’ she said. I smiled and said nothing. Appoos banged on the chair. ‘Breakfast,’ he shouted. ‘Ohhh breakfast.’
* * *
If Appoos was being shifted to a hospital, which the doctor advised us to do, would I need to stay at home, I asked mother. At first she didn’t say anything, which was normal, then she changed her mind and insisted that I leave. ‘You need to live your life,’ she said, folding clothes into a small, black suitcase. ‘Don’t waste your youth on your mother.’ I tried to argue but she continued, ‘Don’t pity me, please. This is what I want. For years now, I’ve only been cooking and cleaning for Appoos. Now that he’s gone, I want to read books and watch TV. Have you seen all the channels these days? They say I can watch wildlife channels all day.’ ‘And I’ll visit him, of course,’ she added hastily, looking embarrassed. ‘Once a week at least.’ Finally, her packing was done. She was to stay with Appoos for a few days to settle him in, then she would come back and begin her life. Already I could see a kind of freeness in her, like when a dog is released from his leash, but doesn’t know it for a few minutes, yet his movements become more and more till he suddenly realizes and bounds away happily. And maybe she would bound away happily, but I couldn’t see it. Mother, unlike a dog, was not a happy thing. It had been too long since she had felt the sensation of an open wind in her hair, or had heard the rustle of dry leaves by a summ
er breeze. The house had become a crucible of its own sounds and smells and her brain was cooked by this lethal hyper-local mixture.
There was a shop by the bridge that sold cable TV, a miraculous technology that brought channels from America and Europe right into our living rooms. Or that’s what they said at least. It was expensive but if I was to leave home, I had to leave something appropriate behind. There was money left over from the registration process at the hospital that everyone had forgotten about. I paid in full and the smooth-faced, oily-haired man, with his background of hanging objects, pencils, paper, tape and other motley items, smiled the kind of smile that come from somewhere bad, and said, ‘Two days, guarantee.’
A week later, a grumpy, pot-bellied creature appeared at our doorstep with a reluctant expression and half-tucked brown shirt. He grunted and carried a carton full of wires and a wrench up the stairs. When he finished attaching the cables on the roof and finally plugged it into our TV, there was a gasp from Amma who was standing quietly behind, as channel after channel flickered on and on, on the old box. The technician clicked the remote and was utterly bored, looking up at the peeling ceiling. He left as unhurried and upset and grumpy as he came. Amma was transfixed and excited. She even dragged Appoos into the room like a little child showing her father a butterfly.
A few cold months passed with Appoos in the hospital. He was blind now (the medication had some unfortunate and unforeseen side-effects), and they said (those white coats still white at the end of the day) that he was prime material to be a torturer to his caregiver. Amma heard this and her lips quivered as if to say, ‘What? It’s been a while since someone told me something I already know. It’s been like that for years. What do you know? What do you care?’ all in one little quiver. (I am a watcher, did I mention, and do not react to the screams of my little subjects.) When we went to the hospital to see Appoos, the Malayali nurse who was assigned to him gave us the wrong ward and that took us through the entire length of the hospital that delayed death. She was gone later and Amma couldn’t glare at her (which was the most any of us would have done), and when we did find Appoos, Vikram Uncle was there, on his phone. He looked angry and annoyed and left without saying a word. The room looked out over a middle-garden, surrounded on all sides by little rooms with small square windows in the white walls. The sheets were white, too, the steel was cold and some flowers were never dead—they were plastic. Someone had scribbled: ‘Who watches the watchers?’ by the toilet door, a question that I was afraid would never be answered. At least life had a simple answer, made clear by the building I stood in; and if death wasn’t a direct answer to life, perhaps it was more of a footnote, as one can see in serious papers about meaning and reality.