by Roshan Ali
A few dull months passed and all the while in the back of my mind, like a permanent mist, was Meera. I had still to make any attempt to reach her—perhaps I was fearful of what I would find, the reason for her abrupt and reticent departure. But one day I could contain myself no more, and with the aid of that freeing elixir—Black Label, soda—I asked Major.
It was a Thursday, and Major was over, drinking and smoking, his chest heavy, he said, with tension and anger. I told him about the girl. He was lost for a few moments, and then suddenly he perked up and asked her name.
‘Meera,’ I said, and just saying the name out loud tickled my balls.
‘Wait a sec, I know this girl. She was in the publishing house, the one with Annie, the one with the . . . ?’ he cupped his arms beneath his chest . . . ‘the big ones . . .’
I nodded ‘yes’ despite the embarrassment and shame, and was about to be upset, when he congratulated me, and slapped my back heartily.
‘Good job, Ib, your first is a real class act. She was fired from there for being too good. Basically it was that—she was too artistic for them. I’ve read her stuff. Great stuff.’
‘Any clue where I might find her?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, and thought for a while.
‘Annie’ll know,’ he said finally, his mind slowed by the rivers of THC in his otherwise red-blooded veins. ‘I think Annie’ll know.’
I thanked him and was again struck by the strangeness of things, a strangeness heightened by the same ticklish stuff that had now driven Major into hoarse laughter at the sight of a solitary apple on the table.
How odd it was that the girl who had entered my body and possessed me was known to my best friend. But was it really that odd? Perhaps it spoke of how narrow our world was, how small in radius the circle of our world. I had heard people say small world, but what they really should be saying is small lives.
This dark thought, of the smallness of our lives, like the poem she had spoken, gave me pause. Suddenly I wanted to be in other places, but then I realized it wasn’t sudden, and it was what I had wanted to do all my life; to expand my life, to gain the greatest degree of omniscience possible for a man to have. How could I know everything, be everywhere, meet people I didn’t know?
I took this question along with me the next evening, when I went to meet Annie. She was late, as she usually was, and arrived with great pomp, waiter in tow (he held one of her half-dozen shopping bags), and with great pleasure she said, ‘Sorry, Ib, I can’t help being late.’ I knew she liked this attention, any attention, and her life revolved around getting attention, even bad attention.
I told her not to mention it, mostly because it made me very angry, but she took it as a pardon and sat down. Immediately she ordered her drink (the same unfortunate fellow who had carried her bags stood waiting, mesmerized by this beautiful woman who had come in like a high-energy wind). He looked meekly at me, his soul already crushed, because he realized he could never possess her body, and asked if I wanted anything.
‘Get him a small Black Label, soda,’ said Annie impatiently, as if the waiter was privy to my alcoholic preferences, and possessed the same knowledge as she regarding my tastes. As he walked away in a trance, she shouted ‘No ice’ at his back and everyone turned to look at her, which she enjoyed immensely.
Once she’d settled down as best Annie could, she took a deep breath and looked at me.
‘I heard some things,’ she said.
‘What things?’ I asked, knowing fully what she meant.
‘Come on, Ib, Major told me you got with some chick.’
I didn’t say anything and she took that as confirmation.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, her eyes and face glowing with the pleasure that comes when secrets are revealed.
‘Meera,’ I said.
It seemed to me like her face melted. First it was made of ice, Annie was ice, but the name from my mouth was harsh heat, and her strong and solid face melted and was liquid and soon a dark puddle and in the puddle swam dark and dangerous things. Immediately she realized what had happened to her face and attempted to pull it up by the strings of her cheek and mouth, forcing a smile, but nothing seemed to happen. So she gave up and just stared.
‘Meera from Rich & Coll?’ she asked meekly. In her voice was some hope that her understanding of the situation was flawed and perhaps there was still some good news to be had.
‘Yes, where you work,’ I said.
It was clear to me that something was wrong, but ego and denial prevented me from inquiring any further. Quietly she took a sip of water and strained her neck towards the kitchen.
Like this we sat till the drinks came. She gulped hers down in three quick motions. I too took a large swing knowing deep inside what was to come, that the one angel, the one who melted over my body like hot butter, was a devil in disguise.
Now she was loosened up, her hair in slight disarray, splashed and waved by the hasty movements of her hands on her head, that betrayed a kind of desperation, and a conflict within herself, as to what to say, and further, how to say it.
Summoning some kind of courage from god only knows where, I spoke first. ‘Go for it,’ I said, ‘tell it like it is.’
‘I’m trying, Ib,’ said Annie.
I lit a cigarette, and there again a cigarette was my only friend, my universe having been reduced to my immediate vicinity, and beyond that lay only darkness and murky things. The gravity of my life, the things that held everything together, seemed to be losing power, and it felt like at once everything would come loose and fly away and leave me floating in the darkness of space.
Suddenly she smacked her hands down on the table and looked me straight in the eye and her eyes were red and puffy.
‘Meera died, Ib,’ she said. ‘A car accident. On the way back from some hill station.’
* * *
At first there is a numbness, always, when such things occur. Then the thunk! between the chest and the stomach. Then we look around, perhaps outside the window, if there is one, to see if anything else has changed, but the trees continue their merry dance with the wind, and traffic flows according to old rules and new haste, and the sky looks on with that wide idiotic smile. And inside, everyone goes on with their dinner and drinks, laughing and talking. Not once does anyone stop their activities, put down their knives and forks, or glasses, look with great sadness at me, that lonely boy in the corner, and come over, pat me gently on my back and say, ‘It’s OK, young man, time will heal all wounds’, or ‘I feel your pain stranger’, or simply with a silence that words cannot fill, sit beside me and stare into the nothingness I felt.
For by that time I was alone. Annie had cried and left. She urged me to go with her but I couldn’t move. She bought me another drink and paid the bill and left after giving me a tight hug.
And I sat there and again it struck me how strange life was that the woman who told me a poem about the smallness of our lives, had shown me how small our lives were, was now dead and gone, and nobody cared, in line with her theory of how small we were.
Drunk, but sober, I went down the stairs after an hour and stood on the road. The streets were quite empty now and I remember a distinct feeling of someone watching me. But the shadows revealed no shapes, the darkness no form or figure. The light from the street lamp glowed orange and weak and seemed to have given up on things too, as it stood strangely bent and tired like an old man. Not knowing where to go, or if there was any point in going anywhere, I stood there for a few moments that stretched to some longer moments and I was passed by a variety of odd people, some with crutches, one with a green eye that smelt of cabbage, a meaty boy who was screaming at a beggar. And on my right there was a tree on fire, and the wind made it dance, and its hair was on fire, and the hair was a woman’s, dark and thick, and I held it in my fist, and the sky had erased its silly grin and was now saying with her dark and misty mouth, ‘You are the right person for this particular spot because you belong nowhere, to no
one. Yesterday there was a man here but somebody picked him up, his wife perhaps, but you, you’re going nowhere, no one . . .’ And then George Constanza said, ‘I like thick hair’, and a salad formed from the remains of a dead body from World War II, red and stringy, with white crunchy bits, like a poem about death.
When I woke up the next morning I realized first that I was not at home because there was a cloud of the smell of food in the air, thick and buttery. Second, to my right was a shelf with a vase of pretty yellow flowers, some little plastic figures and a grey tin box with pastel-pink pictures of London. These were unlikely objects to be present in the house of one so morally and socially destitute as myself, and so I woke up with a start, like somebody had lit a firecracker near my bum, and looked around. The room was small and had just the one bed on which I sat confused but relieved and soon memories of the previous night began to run through my brain. But that instant Annie came into the room and looked relieved too. She sat on the side of the bed with a cup of coffee which she handed to me.
‘You look like crap,’ she said. Her eyes had a sad twinkle—twinkly outwards, but a layer of deep darkness below.
‘What happened last night?’ I asked her quietly, ashamed by the things I saw.
‘You got so drunk, and did you have something else, acid? The restaurant called me and I brought you here because I realized I have no idea where you live.’
It took me a moment to understand and then it was clear that I hadn’t actually come down the stairs of the restaurant.
‘No, I just had too much to drink probably. What time did you pick me up?’
‘An hour after I left maybe.’
An hour? I couldn’t arrange things in my mind. Had I imagined everything while in the restaurant, or had I come home?
‘You were asleep on the table, Ib,’ she said worriedly, ‘and you were saying something about dark hair, and . . . some other things.’
Memories again struck me and I began to sob. She sobbed too, and wiped her tears with the bed sheet.
‘Sorry, Ib,’ she said. And she got up and left, closing the door behind her.
It was the last thing I wanted, to be left alone, but perhaps she felt she didn’t know me well enough to console or give words of support. I felt like calling out to her, but something strangled my voice, and my action.
I lay back on the bed, pressing my thoughts to other things, against the dark spectre of the job I was to begin the next day, but try all I would, there was only one spectre in my mind, the spectre of Meera lying torn and broken, blood and bone, in the midst of mangled steel. That same firm, musty body, those fiery eyes, and that thick black hair, and that voice like dark rum, were lying in a heap on some dark and lonely road, just lying there unknown for hours before the ambulance showed up and packed her pieces into a bag.
These images were too much for my sensitive mind. I pushed my face into the pillow, angry, tired, disgusted, and I think I made a half-attempt to kill myself but instead I fell asleep and woke up to darkness.
The sun had set—it always did, no matter who died—and the lights in the room were still off. A solitary mosquito whined and hung about and had probably had its fill of my thin blood.
How long could I do this? I jumped off the bed, turning on the lights, and wore my sweatshirt and went downstairs. The house which I had always seen from outside, was small with shiny floors and complicated lights, and was quiet. I found Annie in the kitchen looking distraught but when she saw me she smiled.
‘Dinner?’ she asked cheerfully.
I nodded and sat down on a chair.
‘How are you feeling? I called Major; he’s coming over.’
I didn’t say anything and briefly considered the possibility of leaving the house.
‘Sorry, you don’t want to meet him? I thought since he is your best friend . . .’
‘It’s all right, Annie,’ I replied.
She sighed with relief. I had always thought her to be hard and efficient but now with a miserable person in the house she was on edge and nervous, lest she say the wrong thing.
I preferred not seeing Major because we were not tender, him and I, and the present circumstances called for tenderness, for kind words and intimate expressions. We never did that, mostly because of me, and the thought made me awkward. But at the same time I understood that I needed tenderness, and it was probably that thing, the comfort of blindly comforting words, that I had missed so far in my short and one-event life. So I stayed, and we ate dinner—chapattis and a yellow dal—though my appetite had left, and eating was like trying to fill a container that was already full.
Major arrived late. He saw my face and I could distinctly see his left eye turn liquid and melt with the lights of the room. Then his right eye. Finally he couldn’t help it, and hugged me awkwardly. And thankfully he said nothing, either because he didn’t know what to say, or he felt it unfamiliar—this tenderness. But either way silent affection, I have found since, is the best tactic to comfort the remains of the dead. Words are cheap and cannot enter so deep.
* * *
Months passed in that dull and dreary fog, and I walked, I felt, low to the ground and stricken-bent, like a destitute person, with no money or dignity. The world felt unworthy of attention. After all, why should one so hurt by his master pay any more heed to his moods, his movements, his unpredictable realities? The world was crazy and mad. It deserved to be locked up and studied from outside through glass walls. Nobody deserved this world, not even the worst among men, because even the worst are shaped and moulded by its crooked claws, from slimy birth to shrivelled death.
Of course I must note that this downward form was strictly on the inside, like an old peanut, with the shell, my outward appearance unaffected, but the real stuff inside shrunken and alone. And to the others with whom I rubbed shoulders—Annie, Major—I appeared almost back to my old normal self, which itself was always mildewy and low energy, and so they soon were accustomed, and thought me to be doing much better. ‘He’s OK now, time passes,’ I heard Major say one day, when I visited him at his house. And I pretended for the rest of the day to be excellent, not just OK, to prove to him that his mistaken notion of my well-being was in fact correct, and in that way, I tried to convince myself that I was fine, by having others think I was fine. Obviously, this had the opposite effect, because the moment I went back home in the evenings, I went straight to the bed, with its unchanged and brown sheets, and cried.
You’re perhaps wondering: You barely knew this girl, why the grief and despair? And to answer, I say it’s not a matter of quantity, but of quality, and the rude awakenings from bliss to the sharp and crooked claws of the world. This jolt had a double effect in my case. Everyone has some unpleasant shocks—for a while things are humming along like a Tesla, seemingly driving itself, then suddenly there’s a man in the sky, and your life crashes to a halt. And many such instances many have had; happiness, comfort, bliss and then unexpected events that bring sadness. But in my case, first it was the bliss that was unexpected, and to my mind, already tender with this shock, came the horror that cut deeper into this tenderness like a knife through a bullet wound. Or the other way around. Either way, the whole thing had left me pulped and smashed and thoroughly soft.
And the school? I barely recollect that period. I began to work a week after that night at Annie’s. But hardly any memories remain crisp, and hardly any come back to me. But I remember the students who perhaps provided the few sparks and laughs that were needed to keep me from putting out the spark for good. There was a nice teacher also, a Mrs Aletty, who seemed to sense the layer of dank air between the shell of my body and the substance of my mind, an empty, silent gap, but she never said anything regarding this and spoke instead of our mutual interest, which was birds. I liked being around her, as she was an elderly woman with a kind and sunburnt face, and was always slightly more cheerful than you would expect anyone to be. And because of this quality, I felt balanced when I spoke to her because I w
as the opposite.
But I was never unkind. Bad mood, bitterness, hate of the world, and exhaustion at such a young age, does not in all cases lead to unkindness and revenge. In some cases it can lead to great tenderness. Such was my case, especially with children, whom I felt deeply must never go through unprepared for the horror that had so recently struck me. But how do I prepare them? I could by no means barge into their class and recount to them chronologically the horrors of history, going into the most intimate details of blood and bone, dead children, burnt animals. Nor could I narrate my sob story in song, prose or poetry.
This was vexing. And till I crafted that perfect curriculum, I thought I would do the regular stuff, from the books, and add helpful advice when appropriate.
I remember vaguely my first class. There were about ten girls and three boys. I was told to teach them English grammar, but instead, as I stood there, I felt an overpowering urge to make them understand things. I watched their expectant faces, which quickly turned bored. And I stood there blankly, with too much I wanted to say, and too much I was supposed to say. The doodling began; faces fell and eyes were diverted to their desks and to the windows.
I opened the textbook; immediately I shut it. Then I opened it again. A girl in the front row raised her hand. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘what are we doing in class today?’
Her little face was still bright with expectation and suddenly it seemed cruel to subject her tender, curious mind to the sheer boredom of unchanging texts and musty wisdom.
I stood there not knowing what to say when suddenly my mouth opened.
‘God doesn’t exist,’ said my mouth.
‘All adults are miserable,’ said my mouth again.
They sat silently, confused, amused. And suddenly multiple hands shot up.