Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  Her top has an inch-wide strap at each shoulder. The straps cross each other on the back and meet the rest of the fabric just below the shoulder blades. This arrangement heightens the perception of muscularity, something that he is aware of even though he has not seen her from behind today. He has always found this top incredibly sexy on her. And this is part of the reason why she has chosen to wear it now instead of one of his loose t-shirts.

  She is working on the eighty-seventh slide of a presentation which will be used in a strategy workshop for a client in Delhi. She has to travel to Delhi tomorrow morning for the workshop. The client, a gigantic energy company, is looking for focus in their renewable energy segment. Acquiring smaller, more agile companies is not ruled out and will most likely be the major recommendation. The exact question on her mind currently is the font-size for a text box which includes the three salient features of one such potential acquisition target.

  He knows and likes the intensity with which she does her work. He likes her attention to detail, her ill-disposition toward procrastination, her sense of possibility.

  Her lips are pouted in concentration. Her blond hair is slightly rumpled on the left side because she has a habit of itching there when she is thinking. Some strands of her hair have risen to form distinct, fragile arches. One side of her face is glowing in the morning sunlight that enters the room from the large sliding window on her left. Just below the window is the power socket to which a corded plug from her laptop is attached. The laptop has a faulty battery; it needs to be powered all the time. It irritates her a lot.

  He likes this mild irritation too.

  He is sitting exactly opposite her, closer to the wall that separates the living room and their bedroom, with his back to it. In front of him, on the table, lie a large dictionary and several sheets of paper strewn in disorder. The front jacket of the dictionary says: Harrap’s Shorter English to French || French to English Dictionary. He finds the ‘shorter’ in the title funny because the dictionary is massive; it is difficult for him to hold in one hand.

  Most of the pieces of paper are printouts he took from his office yesterday. He works in an insurance company, in an ambiguous role that is neither in sales nor in operations, and so it allows him many free hours. He can be unmindful of details, procrastinate; he is in the habit of using the office printer a lot—for printing short stories, poems, articles. Sometimes she scolds him lovingly for wasting so much paper.

  Some of the pages he printed yesterday have tables with two columns. The left column has French text:

  Nous étions à l’Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.

  And the right column has its translation in English:

  We were in class when the headmaster entered, followed by a new fellow dressed in common clothes and a school servant carrying a large desk.

  On the blank side of some printouts are his handwritten notes, a sample of which reads thus:

  étions = IMPERFECT {être = to be}

  j’ étais

  tu étais

  il était

  nous étions

  vous étiez

  ils étaient

  As is obvious, he is learning French. But his is a top-to-bottom approach to the language. Four days ago, on an impulse, he copied the French and English versions of the first chapter of Madame Bovary from gutenberg.org and placed them side by side in a word document. Thereafter, he classified all newly encountered words into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and common phrases, classified them to the best of his ability and put them in another document. After reading each paragraph twice in French and then gathering its meaning from the English text, he is now trying to absorb each word of the original—to remember its meaning—by building a memory of its usage in Madame Bovary, using either the word’s dictionary listing or, in case of verbs, the information from the grammar section of the dictionary. Verbs are aplenty and also the most cumbersome to get at because their forms keep changing. He works a bit differently with them, first identifying the tense in which he encounters them and then listing down all the variations within that tense. He thinks that he has made good progress with verbs. Out of repetition, the first part—tense identification—has now become almost automatic. He can also guess, with almost ninety per cent accuracy now, all the various forms of the verb in the identified tense.

  In the last four days, his persistence with this method of learning French has given birth to a quixotic sense of possibility in him, that of being able to read large novels in French all by himself. His aim is to finish Madame Bovary first. He believes that once he has trudged through the first hundred or so pages in this assiduous fashion, he will not have to depend on the dictionary at all. He will be able to scorch through the rest of the text then, he thinks, with a mastery of the imperfect and the past historic tenses. But somewhere within his mind, the possibility of losing interest midway and thus abandoning the project—like other similar projects of his life—has taken root. He also knows that this is how he is, a person who takes on a Herculean task with an indelible faith in his own doggedness, eventually ending up with mixed results.

  What gives him joy is playing with the new language. He has jumbled some of the new words he has learnt into new phrases and sentences. Often his phrases seek rhyme at the cost of meaning. At other times he just follows the permutations that his heart provides readily. What comes out in any case is interesting, and the rhyming serves him as a tool to remember the trickiness of French pronunciation; it reminds him how he cannot read French like English.

  Some of his creations, his jumbled rhymes and phrases, are typed on the back of one of the papers. Below each of these lines are written, in English, their meanings. These are written in a handwriting different from his. Compared to his sharp-edged letters inside the parentheses, this handwriting has shorter, rounder forms, with a lot of space given to the twirls of the l’s and the circles of the r’s, but with hurried m’s and n’s which merge with the next letter almost a bit too soon. This is her handwriting.

  d’un coup de coude, et le casquette de loutre, tomba tomba tomba! (adaptation of a line from Madame Bovary)

  a nudge, and the otter cap, fell fell fell!

  Cependant c’est pendant … (the pronunciation of the first word and the next two together is the same)

  However it was during …

  Le ciel parle en demi-voix, pendant la nuit, garnis par douleur. (invented, just like that)

  The sky talks in whispers during the night, garnished with sadness.

  Paris, sans la Seine, à peine, existe. (invented, just like that; I suppose it rhymes in the middle)

  Paris without the Seine hardly exists.

  peur par le toupet de cochon … (random combination, ha ha ha)

  frightened by the cheek of pigs …

  She first saw these creations last night when he gave the sheet to her and asked her to note the meanings. But precisely because she was closer to the meanings than he could be, she couldn’t help but marvel at his inventiveness. She found the last construction funny. ‘It is something that,’ she said, ‘no one French can ever come up with, for it is so absurd to be scared of the bravery of pigs. And why pigs, suddenly, out of the blue?’ He told her that all the words were from the first chapter of Madame Bovary. At this, she remarked that his was an extraordinary attempt. The one about Paris and Seine was the most poetic, according to her. She then called him un garçon mignon and other sweet nothings. The added tenderness in bed last night can be attributed to his novel attempts at playing with French.

  Currently he is wearing a yellow t-shirt, a bit faded from repeated washes. She had gifted this shirt to him when they had visited Bali together, about nine months ago. Next month, they are going on another vacation, to trek at high altitudes in Nepal.

  Proud of the tinge of mental fatigue he now feels, he tenderly moves his palm over the many papers in front of him, t
hinking of just how much he loves her, how his learning French is his way to belong even more to her. In her dreams she sometimes babbles in French, and he knows he wants to understand what she says. But can he really learn French like this? This question exists, but does not sting at this moment. It seems a mellow question. Or a question flooded in some benign waters. Somewhere in the back of his mind, an amorphous swamp has taken over. Or not a swamp but an idyll. This idyll may be the space of a feeling, or a realization, or the kind of epiphany that one experiences in the most banal of moments, moments in which nothing extraordinary happens, moments which can be called ‘coagulated,’ moments which are loaded with the present, moments referring to beautiful histories, pointing to futures perfectly devoid of destinations. The idyll in his head, its smooth inebriation, is a product of living through the happiest moment of his life.

  Just now, on this Sunday no different from other Sundays.

  But behind the idyll, behind the apparent beauty, there lurks something grey. He wants to be a writer. He wants to be a writer, he has known that for some time, but he often finds himself with nothing to say. Every second of his leisure that he spends learning French is a second he is not writing. His biggest fear is that he may have no story to tell. But he also knows that the only way to find one is to keep at it, the writing. His ambition for writing is the grey element of all his moments.

  Moreover, the knowledge that he has just lived the happiest moment of his life brings with it the idea of the imminent loss of that moment, the idea that no other moment will ever surpass it.

  Maybe when they have their first child he will reach a level of happiness that he cannot even conceive of right now. He spends a whole minute thinking of making a child with her, a possibility that they have discussed many times. Then he rises from his seat, goes up to her. She is startled, but then they kiss passionately.

  Flashback to Nepal Holiday

  It is the fourth hour of the journey now, and we have just entered the mountains. She has the window seat, but our heads are pressed together as both of us look outside. There is green and golden paddy on distant hilly terraces. A white passenger two seats ahead, excited by the sudden picturesqueness of the view, takes many pictures.

  I think the picturesque has only a stale, postcard beauty. A contemporary artist is probably not interested in the entire valley anymore, but in bits of the valley, bits that are indecipherable and could be from anywhere. I imagine zooming into that system of paddy terraces. Zooming in, not going close, so that the details are fudged. Zooming in enough and then framing three to four levels of paddy. Three to four terraces, that is. And then click. What? Blurry goldenrod. A work of art.

  The mountain path is uneven, dusty. The bus struggles through it, sometimes tilting so much as to make us tense in the opposite direction. I place her hand over my thigh and caress her fingers. Some of the passengers cough from the dust whirled up by the grinding tyres. The dust is fine and powdery, the kind that sticks to the throat.

  The bus finally stops for a break. The passengers get down and clear their nasal passages and spit. Aakhthoo. Like in Hindi literature. Always the Aakh- before the -thoo.

  We see two European girls titter at this carnival of spitting. She, my love, Anne-Marie, also spits. Without the Aakh-. Her spit falls on the dusty road and becomes beady. For some reason I frame that image in my mind.

  After the break, the bus starts its gritty maneuvering again. Soon members of the six-seven-eight-thousand-metres club appear suspended in the sky. She grows excited, points at them. Then they hide behind the groves of pine on the nearer mountains.

  There is an obscure song playing for the umpteenth time in the bus. A woman on the seat in front of us is about to puke. A sleepy man on a seat to our left bangs his head on the seat in front of him. Someone farts hideously. After some zigzagging, the snowy peaks reappear. ‘The nearer you go, the taller they become,’ she says. ‘They become impossible, no?’

  ‘That’s trigonometry,’ I point out.

  The town where the bus eventually drops us, and from where the walking will begin tomorrow, is a one-road town, like in Western movies. The town is like a Mexican town. The town is like a Peruvian town. I don’t know. The town has many places to eat and drink and none of these places have more than four tables, and all of them serve momos. The town has many sparkling children. The town has many snotty stars. Looking up from the middle of the road, I can see the Milky Way cloud the black sky. ‘Not many towns look up like that,’ she says. The town is ugly. The town is so foreign, so beat-down, so melancholy, it terrorizes me to imagine the lives of the townspeople. The town is a one-night town. The town has street dogs. The town doesn’t have streetlights. Apart from the crickets and the dogs and the loud river running parallel to it, the town is quiet. The town sleeps early. Now and then the dogs cry.

  Our first walk the next morning is on a trail littered with mule shit and the footprints of trekkers before us. The river gushes a hundred or so feet below on the right, flowing opposite to the direction of our advance.

  In the beginning there were villages and fields. Paddy, sugarcane, soybean. Colonies of radish. A soybean pod is like a pea pod, in case you didn’t know.

  At times a system of golden paddy terraces ends at one side of the trail and then continues on the other side. Up close with the paddy, touching distance, she says, ‘This is going to be beautiful.’ And I wonder: How does experience become literature?

  She pauses and takes pictures of the path, of the river, of the vegetation around us. She asks me to take pictures too. Sometimes we ask our guide to take pictures of us together. The pictures, whether clicked thoughtlessly by the guide or with much artifice by her and me, turn out fine.

  Yesterday I thought I could zoom in on three to four levels of paddy and frame so as to make a work of—what?—abstract art? Today, inside the valley, having it unfold before me with the pace of one step following the other; today, with our pictures of the valley, with our story in it, that thought seems stale.

  I am, or my gaze is, at the site of a bomb explosion. I see a hanging man. He is blown. All burnt flesh and scraps of cloth. Then I see a man standing to my right. He is the hanging man come to life. This man standing next to me is almost naked, save the smoking rags holding his body. The shirt used to have checks, I can make that out. Then to my left there appears an asphalt road on which there is a man on all fours. This man is different, a new character. The lower half of his body, facing me, is naked and scalding red, so red that it makes me shiver in my dream. Like confetti ribbons, bits of his shirt hang on the upper half of his body, but this time I cannot make out what pattern it used to have. I presume he is dead, somehow transfixed in that position by the explosion. But then he starts moving! His leg moves, then his arm. I’m stunned. He is moving in super slow motion. Each movement of his tightens my throat. I’m confused. Where is he trying to go? I want to know by looking in the direction of his movement, but the frame of my dream refuses to shift. He moves again. I’m terrified now. Not by the sight of him, but by his movement. Why is he moving? Where does he want to go? I want to know. I want to know.

  I wake up. It is two or three in the morning, I reckon. I realize I need to take a piss. It is dark in the single-ply room we are holed up in. I can hear her calm breathing. I tiptoe, go outside. The sound of the river shakes me a bit. Sound-wise, a river is steady and infinite, a sea periodic. There is grey light all around, moonlight and starlight. Still dazed by my dream, I smash the big toe of my left foot on a stone and it hurts stupendously. I take my piss. When I return to the room I’m thinking of my toe and my dream. I should disinfect the toe, but I’m too lazy to locate the med box in the room’s darkness. My toe throbs. I’m worried about it. Maybe it will give me gangrene? I try to remember the dream again, to be able to write about it. I close my eyes and reconstruct it. The river goes on like a fire. Then I sleep.

  The toe isn’t too badly hurt. She bandages it in the morning, after berating me
for not waking her up in the night.

  We walk alongside the river, on and on, sometimes to this side sometimes to that, crisscrossing on bridges, always against the flow of water, like scientists intent on discovering the root of a thing. As I walk on in slight pain, I try to understand my dream by wrapping it in words and making a sentence out of it. Hot destruction, dreamt from a cold, dark, peaceful room. Once I make this sentence, I deliberate on the process of making this sentence. The desire to be a writer is probably the desire to compress reality into sentences. Or vice versa.

  And at the day’s end I write some sentences in a diary:

  1. Mules panniered and packsaddled pelt the stony path with pensive eyes, but be careful and lean on the mountain when giving way, for these mules here are innocent enough to unknowingly nudge you into a hundred-metres gorge down which you will rumble and tumble till your unhinged insensate body meets the marching river and the number of fractures in your skull alone exceed the number of god-given bones you had in your unbroken version.

  2. Flowerless magnolia, flowerless rhododendron, this is not the season for flowers.

  3. Barren bistre bluffs. Military-green hills. Mountains girting a cloud forest. Mountains leaking filamentous waterfalls. Mountains separated by a river. Mountains separated by a river and joined by a pendulous bridge. Ecru cliffs running beside the river with black tops as if a huge box of black paint were spilt carelessly over them. Mountains populated with straight dark-green pines that grow only till a certain altitude. Lichen-mottled mountains. Dark chocolate mountains. Pewter mountains suggesting the excess of some mineral. Black mountains. Black mountains scratched by a celestial claw revealing their white frozen scab. Snow-draped mountains that would make excellent ski stations if only you could reach them. Mountains like a many-edged object wrapped tautly in a terrific white sheet. Incandescent mountains. Mountains nudged by cirri. Cone heads, buttes and mesas. Mountains with eskers tracing avalanches ancient and recent. Nacreous glaciered mountains neutered of life. Mountains reflected in lakes. Mountains that bequeath stillness and resolution, and educate of the concept of littleness. Youngest mountains in the world.