by Roshan Ali
His bald head glistened in the watery morning light, and for an instant I felt the great burden that Amma had carried and the misery he had brought her and in that instant I suddenly thought, ‘What if I just plunged a knife into his dirty bald head?’ but thought better of it because Amma was there and she would be traumatized by the blood. I went out quickly before my mouth got the better of my mind, and was barely aware of the short cycle ride to the dosa shop; the steam that rose from behind the counter, five or six working people sitting alone staring ahead blankly as they hurried through another breakfast, in such a hurry, and going about the first food of the day with such little pleasure that they hadn’t even removed their backpacks from their rounded and featureless backs. I was back soon, and Ajju had moved to the sofa with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, and Amma sat behind on the table peeling garlics and looking utterly miserable. It seemed he had already begun the process of being angry. When I entered, Amma looked up but Ajju’s gaze didn’t move from his paper. I held up the dosas and Amma nodded sadly. ‘He ate,’ she said and Ajju smiled. I sat down and he finished reading the paper. Then he folded it and placed it carefully on the table.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked after a brief silence.
‘What, Ajju? I’m going to get a job and . . .’
‘You fool. How dare you? I was the one who got you into that college. You think you can just run away when you want? I’m on the board. What are they going to think? You know what Aruna said the other day? She said the board has to be more careful with recommendations. Do you know what she meant?’ Spit flew from his large mouth and his face shuddered. Amma’s head was even lower now and the pace at which she peeled the garlic had grown rapidly.
‘Ajju, will you listen . . .’
‘Shut up,’ he said, ‘shut up and you listen. This is the problem with you. You think you know everything.’
‘No, I don’t know everything but I do know this is not good for me.’ My voice was raised too and this seemed to surprise Amma who had stopped peeling and sat staring at us.
‘Again you’re talking as though you know everything,’ he said, getting up from the sofa. ‘How do you know it’s not doing good? The benefits of college are felt years later, not next day or next week. You young people these days, you think you can do your own damn thing, you think this world is some garden or palace where you’ll be welcomed and made comfortable? Nothing works like that.’
I felt like fighting and screaming. I felt like telling him that inside me there was something that needed to move about, to explore, to find things for myself, to look at things from high up and down below, to feel the misery of insecurity, the misery of poverty, the agony of unemployment, to feel at once, everything and nothing, high and low, Left and Right, the atom and the universe, the soul of a single child, and the collective sadness of humanity, all at once, and by myself, to be alone in darkness so one day I could climb out into a better light. And textbooks and engineering degrees weren’t going to get me any of these things. But I didn’t fight and was quiet as the torrents of his anger at being humiliated fell over me like a large and stinging wave. Because I was sure, he didn’t care about me or my future, rather the whispers among teachers and board members when they saw him in the hallways, whispers of maybe he wasn’t such a great man after all, because his grandson was a college dropout and these things run in the blood.
Finally he was finished and he wiped his face with a handkerchief that he always carried and put away in the back pocket of his pants. Then he tried being gentle and said, ‘Ib, you are young, you must learn the consequences of your actions. Everything you do now, will matter later. This is how you must live. Trust me, you have to go to college.’
He sat down again, and he looked tired. I had taken a lot from him that evening and I felt sorry for that old bald man. I apologized for raising my voice and he said, ‘No, Ib, don’t apologize. I started shouting.’ And then, after a minute, he looked at me again and said, ‘So will you join again? I can speak to them.’
I shook my head and his face once again grew hard and sharp.
‘I’m warning you,’ he said, ‘I’m warning you, don’t ruin your future, boy.’ With that he stood up forcefully and walked out of the room. That gentleness was also a tactic to get his way, but he had returned to his default anger. His tone carried that and it was evident that he was trying his best to save his careful, efficient, systematic image. If it wasn’t for this image, he would have begged, but appearances have to be kept up in many places at once, and in that way life becomes a web of appearances.
And he went out trying his best to appear unaffected.
* * *
I couldn’t face Ajju any more and so avoided him all that I could. But sometimes things couldn’t be helped and I would meet him at home, and we tried not to look at each other. Mother couldn’t have been less bothered and was probably quite relieved that she didn’t have to do any more peacekeeping between us. Once we almost collided in the corridor and neither acknowledged the other. He made a huff, I was silent and we passed, but suddenly I remembered the stories he used to tell me when I was a child, and I felt sad. ‘Ajju,’ I called after him, but he had disappeared into the house and I was on my way out.
Later, mother told me that he had stopped when I called out, but only for a second. Then he was gruff the rest of the day, and worse than usual. Thus a meeting was avoided for the good of everyone and not just the two parties involved. And it was also good for me because I didn’t have to get tangled, even verbally, with Ajju’s new hobby, spirituality, which he insisted to Amma was completely different from religion, yet I didn’t see any difference in the way he spoke about it. Only the word ‘god’ was never mentioned, but other euphemisms and more sophisticated, polished words, like gems, words like ‘some supreme energy’, a ‘supreme force’, ‘higher consciousness’, things that did the work of that old and unfashionable word god were. There was a noticeable change in him after he took up this new pastime. He was less direct, more peaceful, but not correctly peaceful like the gurgle of a mountain stream, but peaceful like the silence in the corridor of a prison when a man is on death row and making his last walk to the galleys, a threatening peace, the kind of peace that says, ‘Soon you will suffer and die.’ He did things indirectly now, said things with deflection and falseness, as if we weren’t worth his anger any more, and since we were godless and materialistic idiots, the only good that could be done for us, was prayer and silence. When he wanted things, he would put it as if he didn’t really want them for his personal satisfaction, rather he wanted them for the general good of humanity as a whole, as though everyone would benefit if he was given a fried egg for lunch. Everyone knows the truest sacrifice is the one that is not talked about. But when he was inconvenienced in any way, he would make it out to be great sacrifice, never once saying either that he had sacrificed something great, or that he was upset by the sacrifice, but saying too many times exactly the opposite, saying, ‘It’s OK. The food was less tasty, but it’s OK, I don’t care about taste anyway, I eat for nutrition. A man must be simple and not have desires.’ This was coming from a man who told everyone every chance he got how the commissioner of police came to see him in 1992.
Sprouting from this new hobby was a greater interest in temples and holy men. ‘They are among us to show us the Truth,’ he would say about filthy and half-naked crazy old coots who begged at traffic signals and grinned horribly at children, hair matted with dirt, teeth orange with tobacco and shit.
There was a temple on a hill nearby. Ajju began to go there often and came back with stories of a sadhu who lived there. ‘That man is enlightened,’ he said. ‘I will build him a shrine.’ He began to make arrangements; called contractors, bought bricks, then came back one evening, face red with anger. ‘That crazy old bastard,’ he shouted, ‘he told me to get lost. He’s just a crazy old man.’ But the next week there was another sadhu who sat in some other temple for whom Ajju want
ed to build a shrine. ‘He is a true saint,’ he said at dinner, ‘a fully realized man.’ So work began on this updated shrine (the sadhu was only too happy to oblige), and Ajju spoke loudly of how the sadhu had blessed him and promised him a happy afterlife.
It was the fear of death that had got into his flawless bald head. Once an efficient and reasonable commander, Ajju had lost the confidence that reasonable men have, and was now afraid of everything. But still he pretended to be in control. It was pathetic to watch and involved a lot of lying and evasion.
To avoid Ajju, his curly temper, his heavy presence, it was no longer a sane or dutiful thing to stay at home because his visits grew more frequent, probably to scare me. And perhaps he wanted me out. Who knew? Even though I was his only grandson. And so I obliged and spoke to Amma in the evening and told her I wanted to go. ‘Not too far, babu?’
‘No, Ma,’ I said.
‘But who will you stay with?’
‘Major and me are sharing an apartment. It’s his uncle’s, so no rent.’
She stirred a pot slowly, looking into it as if our fortunes were indicated in the cut of the curry, the spice or the thickness, the way it flowed.
‘Ma, I’ll visit so often you won’t even know,’ I said cheerfully.
Smiling sadly, she dipped a spoon into the pot. ‘Taste it, Ib, maybe it’s the last time.’ I protested loudly and she said she was joking and pushed the spoon in my mouth. The curry was tasteless and cold but I told her it was the best she had ever made.
‘Say bye to Appoos,’ she said. It had been a month since he came back from the hospital and almost back to his old self—nuts, but with 20/20 vision.
‘Should I tell him? Or should I say I’m going out?’
She looked sternly at me and said, ‘Ib, he’s crazy, not stupid. What if tomorrow he asks? Tell him the truth but tell him you’ll come back often and watch TV.’
I hugged her, halfly, side-form, because she was back to cooking, and left the kitchen.
Appoos was watching TV, a Discovery Channel show on volcanoes. ‘Ib, you’re back,’ he shouted. I smiled and sat next to him. We watched the show in silence. When it was over he said, ‘These people are brave, they go near the volcano, what if it explodes, baba?’ I told him they are willing to take the risk. ‘What about their families?’ he asked with great concern in his face, ‘do they not have families?’
‘I’m sure they do, Appoos,’ I said.
‘Then how can they leave like that? What do they tell their wives, their sons? I’m going to a volcano and I may never come back?’
He began to sob and I rubbed his back. ‘Appoos, they know when the volcano is going to erupt so they go only when it’s peaceful.’
He stopped sobbing and thought. ‘Yes, they know when the volcano is angry,’ he said confidently. Then he was silent and his eyes became blank and he slipped in and out of some internal world. I looked into that grizzly grey face and suddenly felt great pain. It was as if staring too long into the abyss that he was in would mean the abyss for me, a certain and black path into the depths of madness. And to think the abyss was in the midst of my father, like a black hole in the middle of our galaxy, was a pain so great that I got up with a start and looked away. He didn’t stir. I waited for a few seconds and decided I didn’t want to tell him. Let Amma deal with him, I thought, and slipped out quickly.
* * *
The apartment was in an old building, greyed and greened by age, hands, smoke, moss, graffiti in the elevators, scratched paint. The corridors and staircases were unlit and echoing and carried the collective muffled sounds of every apartment in the block. Crackling radios, murmuring televisions, crying babies, whistling cookers, shifting furniture, shouting men, shrill women, loud boys, hassled girls; and the scents—an unbalanced mix of sambar, fish, steaming rice and other unrecognizable things. Wilting plants were placed outside every door, and bored women in nighties watched from their barred kitchen windows as you crossed the empty corridors. Ours was on the third floor, bare as a desert, but cooled by lucky cross ventilation. Featureless, furniture-free, we sat and slept on thin grey cotton mattresses that were lumpier than a mud road, so one had to manoeuvre and sleep carefully. But quickly it became home, with the freedom that homes are meant to have, not with comfort and convenience, because they can never replace the freedom of having no oppressive and suffocating presence.
I was mostly alone because Major had work and things to do and I had nothing. If I wanted to, I could have had something to do, but the new-found looseness of freedom kept me relaxed and calm. Soon I discovered there was no one to stop me from drinking beer or smoking all day if I wanted to, yet I didn’t feel the need to drink a lot even though I could and in this I surprised myself. Major, returning from work, would begin drinking the moment he dropped his bag by the door. But I had no work, and nothing to hate, and so took it easy, lounged about and relaxed. Major would say, every evening, ‘Have a drink, Ib.’ We would drink together, sure, but he was quicker and was out before I was through my third. And every night I had to move his large and semi-solid form to his mattress. One night he suddenly opened his eyes and looked straight at me and he said, ‘That girl, Ib, Annie, get her, Ib. You’ll be good together.’
Later he told me Annie was a friend of his who was in college with us. I said, ‘I have no idea who you’re talking about.’
‘Dark, dark eyes, quiet.’
I shrugged and he became hassled and tried to describe her again and again.
‘OK, fine, I’ll bring her one day, OK?’ he said finally.
I said OK because there was nothing disagreeable about the idea, although the thought of putting effort into canoodling with the other sex just seemed an awful lot of trouble.
But I began to look forward to a visit from this dark Annie but it was constantly postponed by Major and his busyness, hurrying away. And every time it was delayed, my imagination filled in a little more, till finally the day she came, my mental picture of her was of some Amazonian goddess, a comic book superhero woman, with perfect, firm, powerful legs, smooth, perfect form, deep and piercing eyes, a flowing river of hair, holding a spear and floating above the ground from pure greatness. When I saw her, I was disappointed for a few minutes and then my brain adjusted. She said hi and we sat down. But it was soon clear that she had no interest in me and was more into what I was not doing, rather than doing. She thought I was wasting my time. I should be contributing to society, she said. The word society, which I found to be quite an expletive, turned me off and my mood dropped. She was a career woman, she said, and was being promoted, etc. Where did she work? In a publishing company. What did she do? Edit.
‘I’ve thought about writing,’ I said, and she gave me a sarcastic nod.
‘Why don’t you, then? Anyone can write.’
She sniggered and Major laughed and said, ‘Hey, Annie, don’t mock my friend. He has that kind of mind maybe, although I never thought about it.’
‘Mind, no mind,’ she said, ‘makes no difference. Writing happens on paper, not in the head.’
‘Ib, give it a shot,’ said Major, ‘I think you might do well.’
She was forcing her smile now. It seemed to upset her that Major thought I would make a good writer.
‘You have to work at it,’ she said again, ‘it doesn’t just form in your head.’
I was silent, and when she left, I thought about it. Would I make a good writer? The idea made me laugh. I was a shallow, lazy, cowardly little shit. How could I be a good writer? That was the last of that.
This meant that my relationship with Annie (whose name was Annamma) improved. We no longer had that bone to fight over—who was the better writer—and I found we got along well. She was trying to write a novel, she said, but her bread and butter was editing. ‘How does it feel to edit other people’s work when you want people to edit your work?’ I asked her one evening at the old Watson’s bar on the corner of our street.
She blinked her large dark eyes
and looked into her drink.
‘It sucks, Ib,’ she said, ‘but what can I do? If I quit work, I’ll be broke and miserable. How do you survive without work?
‘I manage,’ I told her. ‘The trick is to lower your standard of living.’
‘That’s even tougher than writing a novel,’ she replied, looking around at the rich young people wasting away their evenings in booze and cigarettes.
By the end of every one of our evening meets, we were both drunk and some games were played, the kind that two young single people play when they’re drunk enough to flirt, yet not drunk enough to abandon all reason and tear each other’s clothes off. And though there was nothing more I wanted to do—when she got close, I could smell the scent of her skin and feel the weight of her body, her face waiting to be held, her mouth close enough to see the moisture in the middle like—there was just enough brain in me to foresee the complications, Major, Annie, her other friends. I didn’t even know if she had a boyfriend. That topic had never come up. And so we usually hugged and she clung on a little longer than was normal, I in my awkwardness, a little less than was appropriate, and as she drew away, she left the scent of her hair around my head like an ether of some deadly concoction that almost made me pass out.
But when Major was around, there was a sharpness to our interaction, all tightened up and cleaned, almost as if if we let go a little, we would collapse on to each other and then Major would be privy to the dirt in our minds, the filth in our dreams. Of course I assumed that this is what she felt, and as far as I know, it was accurate.
Before long, we were better friends than to be jealous and she began to encourage me to write, based upon the content of our conversations. She said I had something in me—a glint of quartz (not gold; gold was too precious) in the river mud—that made her sometimes sit up at night and think that I would be a better writer than she. This was quite a confession, she said, for anyone who harbours even the slightest creative urge; to admit that somebody else, especially someone close, was probably a better writer than they were.