by Roshan Ali
‘Sir, was Jesus real?’ ‘What about the Mahabharatas?’ ‘Is India the greatest country in the world?’ Their voices rang with excitement.
I told them then that we will explore these and many other questions in the course of our term together, and preferably to not inform their parents about what they had learnt in this class because it would spoil their surprise at the end of the year. They agreed with great excitement and tumbled over each other and out when the bell rang.
The next morning, the principal cornered me in the main corridor and gave me hearty congratulations. ‘Ib, young man, you are really a good teacher. The students love your classes. And to think I hired you without a doubt. The other teachers need to know,’ he said and walked away, giving himself great compliments and encouragement.
And so this went on, day after day. The students loved the classes because their textbooks were shunned, and this kept the principal happy, and left the other teachers bewildered.
But after only a week, my ambitious project to liberate the minds of the next generation came to an obdurate halt in the offices of the principal. It was a Tuesday—I remember because Tuesdays have always had a strange bluish tint and the smell of sambar. I can feel now, as I look back, that bluish feeling, a little less dread than Mondays. The ten o’clock class was cancelled for undisclosed reasons, and I sat outside the school building nervously sipping tea (I was always nervous in those hopeful times). When the bell rang, I was summoned tersely by the principal’s assistant and I could see in her face that I was in for a hard time (it was a look of evil mirth). But the principal was nowhere to be seen. Instead his desk was occupied by a kind-looking man with a salt-and-pepper beard and maroon-framed glasses. As I entered, he rose and I saw that he was tall and wide and was trying his best to appear less imposing physically. When he introduced himself, I remember thinking that this man didn’t belong in any position that required disciplining, and for a brief moment, I let my mind ease into the fantasy of congratulations, promotions and prizes.
But it was not to be. As kindly and gently as possible, the director informed me that I would no longer be teaching there, even though the students liked me very much and were upset to see me go and had held a small and short-lived protest complete with banners that said among other things, ‘This is a Democracy’ and ‘Listen to the Voices of the Next Gen’.
‘Needless to say,’ said the director, ‘their brave and admirable fight didn’t work. The parents went wild when they heard that you have been ignoring the syllabus. Mr Ib, how did you think they were going to write their exams in four months? What were you thinking?’
It wasn’t like he was really scolding me. He spoke as if he was apologizing at the same time as scolding and his final question was more earnest than frustrated.
‘Sir, I don’t know,’ I told him as honestly as possible, ‘I guess I wasn’t really thinking of their exams. All I wanted was to make them have some interest in what was going on. They’re just children, sir. They don’t deserve to be bored. There’s plenty of time for that later.’
The director lifted his head and watched the ceiling for a few seconds.
‘Then perhaps this is not the school for you, Ib,’ he said, and he lowered his deep, kind eyes to my face and he seemed to be examining my eyes for something. I have felt this situation many times before and after, when people seemed to be searching my face for something that they thought was there, but maybe it wasn’t.
I left the office strangely relieved. It felt like the director’s final objection to my weak argument was more advice than correction and I was encouraged. Maybe I wasn’t a bad teacher but a different kind of teacher?
I went back home and it was raining the pleasant kind of rain that happens on pleasant days. Suddenly I felt an expert on matters relating to children, and now being an expert, a deep sense of dread and foreboding entered my abdomen and refused to leave. I felt fear for the next generation, and a sense of tragedy pervaded all my thinking. Everywhere I saw children, a dark fog descended and I couldn’t help picturing them packed into their buses and buildings like worms, even if at the time they were playing in a park or cycling around.
That evening I called Major and told him my troubles. ‘This is not the way to live,’ he said, and through the static I could feel his irritation, as if he had told a thousand people the same thing. ‘You can’t let some idea colour how you look at the world. It must be the other way around. Can’t you see how the children play in the park, how happy they are? Proceed from there.’
But isn’t everything we see coloured by who we are? ‘Yes, that’s why we should at least try to resist the natural tints of our species, of our family, of our friends, and try to be reasonable.’
I felt, when I hung up the phone, that it was much easier said than done. After all, it was only time, or so I had heard, that could blow away this dark fog that had entered my mind and lay like a blanket over every thought and every experience, and no amount of reason could chase it away and let the light back in. The dark fog was Meera’s death, of course, and even though it had been a few months, that pain lingered, like an anchor attached to the inside of my stomach, pulling me down and low.
That was the first night I felt completely hopeless. Not sad, or sorrowful, or depressed, but utterly hopeless, as if the whole world was packed with cement and I was stuck at the bottom, not able to move, not able to breathe. When I contemplated life, it seemed absurdly short and pointless: You are born, you die. And the parts in between, the parts that were meant to matter, were too hard to change, too violent to take a walk, too noisy to sleep, too boring to stay awake, too complicated to ponder and too stingy to have money. All the people were robots, programmed to feel unprogrammed, so they thought they were important and perfect, and carried on, and on their shoulders (designed to carry so much), they carried the sick and rotten world, forever and ever.
This distinct feeling, that the world was on autopilot, went with me everywhere. People seemed inhuman, walking on fixed paths that were unmarked, lest the whole trick was given away and one of them stopped, looked down, and asked, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’
And what the hell was I doing there? Was I any better? I had begun to drink regularly, wandering from home to the bar, and wandering back, a cigarette in hand, every night. On the weekends I went to parties and touched every woman I could, rubbed against every warm female body available. Major was worried and I could see him watching me, brow knitted, instead of dancing or smoking, but I didn’t care, even though he was my best and only friend. Such was the depth of my nihilism brought about by my sudden awakening to the cruelness of planet earth.
How old was I? Old enough to die. But old enough to live again. Yet I lacked the energy, the inner upward gravity to stand up and throw away the cigarette and get strong, get fast, get smart. My body sat crumpled on the couch, lungs full of smoke and glass full of whisky, not in possession of a single good faculty, not one good quality that could make me live again. After a while, everything became the same: Wherever I was, there was a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, and the places this wasn’t possible I avoided as best I could. And so it became impossible to buy fruits or go to the supermarket for anything. I relied on my friend Javed to bring me Maggi, and when he came in, I pretended to be sober and working hard on a project. It’s funny when I think of it now: I had the energy to pretend to be OK, but not the force to even begin to get OK. Perhaps there is a use to bothering about what other people think.
My house, meanwhile, had turned into a collection of things that had only one thing in common: grime. The kitchen counter, once a nice, shiny black-marble slab, was a battlefield of spent bananas and dead cigarettes, bones, bloody plates, opaque pools of unidentifiable liquids in containers that had long since changed colour. And the smell: that sour, violent stench of old food and hopeless piles of dishes that I had somehow become used to. Every day there was a new fungus: first green, then yellow, and even pink. Event
ually, the smell was too much and I locked the kitchen door and stowed the key. Actually, it wasn’t even that. The reason I locked it was I couldn’t use it any more: every square foot was covered.
I did my best to keep Major and Annie from visiting, having that much sanity and self-awareness to realize they would probably call the mental hospital. I knew they were worried because every day one of them would call, pretending they didn’t know the other was calling too, and ask nonchalantly if they could come over and chill. Every day I made up a new excuse: at first, valid and believable things such as ‘I’m looking for a job’ or ‘I’m going to pay the electricity bill’ and then over time more and more ridiculous ones like ‘I got a job’ or ‘I need to conduct research on the relation between poverty and football skills’. Even I knew they were stupid, but such was the desperation that now drove my life that nothing mattered except that my best friends never see what I had become.
One day, a few weeks since the kitchen was out of bounds for humans, Major knocked at my door in the morning. He had had enough and shouted, ‘Ib, I can hear you inside. Just open the fucking door or I’ll break it open.’ He banged on it a couple more times, and just when he was taking a run-up (or so I thought) to charge at it, I opened it. He looked relieved and massaged his shoulder unconsciously. ‘What the fuck?’ he said, and he was angry and relieved at the same time. I called him inside but he stopped and said again, ‘What the fuck, man?’
I told him I was sorry, that I wasn’t free. ‘No, what the fuck is that smell?’
Already he was tracking the source to the kitchen. ‘Did you lock it?’ he asked after trying the door.
I nodded.
‘Where’s the key?’
‘Forget it, Major. Listen, man, I’ll sort it out,’ I said, rising and going towards him to escort him out, but he stood firm and his face changed to pure anger.
‘Keys,’ he said through his nostrils.
I got the keys and turned around as he opened the door. After the sound of the scuttling of rats, there was silence. I went and sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. I could hear him calling someone over the phone, then he came back out.
‘Give me one,’ he said.
We sat smoking, and after a while, Major coughed and went out. ‘I can’t stand the smell, Ib. Let’s go down and wait. The cleaners are coming.’
On the street, the heavy heat and dry dust were a welcome feeling, and the open space stretched our lungs out. We bought some tea from Javed who looked relieved that I had come with someone instead of alone. He smiled and saluted Major, who was too preoccupied.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked me.
I shrugged and couldn’t speak.
‘You know what I feel?’ I said after a period of silence. ‘I feel like all life is pointless. The only thing that really matters is sex. And death.’
He shrugged as if he’d heard it all before from the mouths of babes. ‘Nihilism and hedonism. A dangerous combination,’ he said, ‘perfectly lethal combination.’
Of course it was perfectly lethal, because it was killing me, and I was almost dead.
‘What you going to do?’ he asked.
‘Go away.’
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘As far away as possible?’ he asked.
I nodded and looked into the dust in the distance.
‘This country, man, this country is too cruel, too hard for a coward like me.’
Major put his large hand on my shoulder. ‘You’re not a coward, Ib,’ he said, ‘You’re just too sensitive, like a Richter scale that registers footsteps. Your brain goes off in alarm all the time. You have to toughen up. I’ve told you so many times.’
‘It’s too sad, it’s too tough, it’s pointless . . .’ My words were caught in my throat and I couldn’t speak.
Major stood quietly by my side, and then finally he said, ‘Go away to America, or Europe. You’ll see how things there are bad in different ways. This is the way the world works, Ib, maybe you’ll learn to love your home when you’re far from it. Maybe it’ll do you some good.’
Major, with his kind and soft heart, had turned emotional that evening, and we drank and smoked till the sounds of traffic faded and were replaced by the howls and barks of homeless dogs.
The next morning, he hugged me tight.
‘I’ll get you your visa, Ib. What about tickets?’
‘No, I can’t go away,’ I said. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for running away.’
He smiled and shrugged.
‘Do your best, Ib,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter where you are finally.’
Now I smiled and shrugged.
‘I think I’ll go see Mom and Dad. I haven’t seen them in years anyway.’
‘Years? Really?’
Yes, it had been years, and I felt it in my blood and bones, this vacuum between sons and mothers. And maybe the vacuum had become too strong, the deeps too dark, to fill even partially, and maybe that darkness would suck us in, this one last time we met, and destroy us both. But that was a chance I had to take. Nature commanded so.
Major was watching me carefully. Then he gave me a side hug and left.
* * *
It was one of those mornings when the emptiness of the city was most apparent, though filled with such lofty stuffings. The smoke and dirt rose earlier than the sun, and when the sun did come up, there was nothing much for it to do, because ordinary light was no match for this muck and madness. The lane of my childhood was unchanged, as if the day I had left, everything had stopped growing, or, the society had hired a gardener to trim the plants, which was more likely. Between those tall silver oaks I could see patches of blue sky, but not enough to cheer me up. I made my way down the street and then stood in front of my house for a few minutes, unable to move.
There I was, returned to the place of my stunted growth, returned to the people of my childhood misery, after having grown out of blaming them, and now recognizing that they had very little to do with what I was, what I am, and rather than making me look forward to meeting them, the realization dawned quickly that, not being responsible for the misery of my life made them less and not more important to me. Suddenly as I stood there, I felt them to be strangers, and at once the guilt and slight love fell away and I felt free and happy. ‘Why shouldn’t I meet the people whom I knew briefly as a child?’ I thought to myself. Perhaps they would see what I had become and feel the guilt and regret that I had felt for so long. In this lonely, handicapped part of the world, the two people who had given me birth were still tiny and walked about very little, and the reach of their arms was so short that not even their neighbours knew very much about them.
Feeling thus superior and triumphant, I knocked on the door. It was the same cheap wood, the same faux-brick facade and I felt a deep disgust with where I stood.
Mother, older, greyer, with the same nice face, opened the door and we stood there looking at each other. At that moment, the previous ten minutes were nothing, and I began to cry. And so did mother. But we didn’t hug, no, not even then. She called me inside, sobbing and wiping her mildly weathered face. She was also slightly bent, like a tree for whom the weight of the atmosphere was too much to bear.
Once again, words were no match for the moment. We sat on the same maroon sofa and she brought me coffee in the same small steel glass. Finally, swallowing the grief and regret of years, I asked if Appoos was around. She began to sob again and she crumpled like a sheet of paper on to the sofa. I touched her back awkwardly.
Between sobs she told me that Appoos was much worse now and he could barely talk sense.
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
She pointed upstairs. ‘Your room,’ she said. ‘It’s the only room in which he doesn’t scream.’
I left her crying on the sofa and went upstairs. The door to my room was ajar and I could see Appoos sitting on the edge of the bed. He was talking to himself, and when I entered, he didn’t even notice. The room
had changed; the walls were plastered with drawings I had done as a child and the cupboards were missing. Appoos, it seemed, was having a conversation with somebody about Mother Teresa.
‘And yet she had the best care, and yet she never ate the same food. And the needles, reused needles, you think she used those on herself. Where did the money go? Saint, my arse, more like a god’s personal thief . . .’
‘Appoos,’ I called out.
He looked up straight into my face and he said, ‘Somebody sounds just like my little Ib today. Who is it?’
I said, ‘It’s me, Ib.’
‘I know it’s you,’ he said rudely, ‘but who is it really? Machupichu, is it you?’
I sat down next to him but he continued to stare towards the door where I was standing.
‘Appoos, Appoos,’ I said, and nudged his shoulder and then I saw a tear roll down his left cheek and he was silent then.
‘My little Ib,’ he said softly to himself, ‘my little Ib went away to a volcano and never came back. Please don’t be Ib, be someone else today.’
I hugged him from the side, putting my face on his shoulder. But he shook me off and complained to his friends that it was hot that day.
When I left, closing the door softly behind me, Appoos was laughing, and for an instant I thought he caught my eye but it was nothing. I stood outside for a few minutes and went downstairs.
Mother had made some chips and sat at the table waiting.
‘Now will you go away again?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Here and there. Where else will I go?’
‘You need money?’
‘No.’
‘But take it, take it all, Ib. What am I doing with all that money that Ajju left? I care for your father, that’s all I do.’
‘Take a holiday. That’s the whole point of money. Leave Appoos in the home.’
‘So cruel, Ib,’ said my mother, ‘you were always so cruel.’
I sighed and shook my head.
‘Is it so cruel? You’re miserable here. You have nobody to talk to. Appoos . . . he’s in different worlds.’