Neon Noon

by Tanuj Solanki

  4. For writers, writing is dreaming. For dreamers, dreaming is writing.

  5. The slow pace of writing—slower than pure telling—forces upon the act of remembering the dream an excess, an over-remembering, that facilitates the constructive process of filling-in of the holes in that slowly-evoked memory.

  During our walk the next day, I find myself constructing sentences from what I observe, and also stressing to remember them for the evening scribble. I feel that I have found a way: If I can record experience in sentences and reproduce those sentences after a lag, there will be an aesthetic addition to reality. I might produce something akin to literature.

  We pass through some sun-drenched villages, each with a dozen or so hovels shingled with a black stone that I would like to name exactly. The men are away working in the fields or elsewhere. The women are inside the houses, cooking or weaving or idling. The narrow streets of the entire village are left for children to concoct games. As we pass, some children form a group and gape at us. They all wail namaste in a failed chorus. The youngest of them is no more than eighteen months old and he fails a bit in performing his namaste, one palm going higher than the other. The other children follow with their raucous salutations which we have grown tired of hearing: ‘Give me pen, give me balloon. Give me pen, give me balloon …’

  We eat a local dish called dhindo for lunch in the dung-strewn front yard of a village house, and from there we can see an eight-thousand-metres-high mountain, standing calm and patient and majestic, steaming a little cloud in the strong sun. Earlier, as we walked, this giant would sometimes hide behind a nearer mountain, with only the tiniest triangle of its summit showing like a bleached white monastery hiding a god. In this village there is also a real monastery surrounded by kerfs of black stone I would like to name the type of. Between the ragged triangles of those stones, the monastery compound looks like the epicentre of an earthquake. In the front yard of the house we are in, two belled and furred calves of a milk-giving animal I would like to name exactly (likely a cross between a cow and a yak) chew on dried stalk amidst their own knotty, fragrant dung. As I look up to the white mountain, I notice that my view is being obstructed by four parallel telephone lines and two strings with a pattern of Tibetan flags—green orange white yellow blue. Aware of the obstructions now, I see only them and not the mountain. I wish for the fluttering flags to be and for the solid telephone lines to disappear. But then I discover that one end of both the flag-bearing strings is tied to the pole that supports the telephone lines. I notice in this a symbol for something but I can’t make out what. The strings and the poles have learnt to live with each other, I tell myself, and I should learn to look at the mountain through them both. Then I look down and see the two calves gaping at me, and I notice how they are still and yet breathe so fast. Sometimes they twitch a nostril to shake off a fly.

  We move on after lunch.

  Things she said:

  ‘It is good to walk in the sun, no?’

  ‘It is good to walk in the shade, no?’

  ‘It’s beautiful, the forest, huh?’

  ‘We walk more in the morning. I think we also walk faster in the morning. It is good to walk in the morning, no?’

  ‘The first fifteen minutes in the morning are tough.’

  ‘You should not let your cardio come down. You should slow down and find your pace. But you should not stop. When you stop, your cardio comes down. It is difficult to start again after your cardio is down.’

  ‘I think we should take it easy today.’

  ‘I have to wash. My feet are dirtier than yours. Because my shoes are more open than yours.’

  ‘The vegetation is very recharging.’

  ‘You walk faster when you walk in the front.’

  ‘You are making a lot of dust walking in the front. I’ve to take all the dust.’

  ‘Having a light in the room makes all the difference, no?’

  ‘Fuck, there are mice in the room!’

  ‘The mouse bit my sock. Merde!’

  ‘And yours too. Putain!’

  ‘Dégueulasse.’

  ‘The view is beautiful, no?’

  ‘The people are so mean, they’re so money-minded, they think they have the right to loot tourists.’

  ‘What does that mountain look like to you? To me it looks like an owl, with its two peaks like ears.’

  ‘Crows in Mumbai do caw-caw. The crows here do aw-aw, no?’

  ‘Your writing is so …’

  ‘The camera batteries are dead. We should have got extra batteries.’

  At our resting place for the day, I read bits of a novel. It begins as the protagonist, a man in his sixties, hears a strange rumble emanating from a distant mountain that is visible from his backyard. He associates the sound with that of approaching death. This beginning, its symbolic weight, makes me pause and listen to the high mountains in front of me. The nearest ones rise a kilometre above my eye level. As I look, the tops of the snowy mountains turn orange, then pink, then blue in the setting sun, but all there is to hear is the patchwork of inchoate sentences in my mind.

  I read on. I read on as the old man has conversations with various members of his family, as he senses a personal failure in the impending failure of his children’s marriages and so on … and everything in the novel is beautiful and flawed and subtle to the point of being hidden, and I look at the sky become lavender and swallow the remaining whiteness in the west, just above the highest mountain, and I read on and I suddenly think of the equanimity of this moment and the idea of my work life in Mumbai, sprawled in my mind like a monolith—neither the surface nor the depths of which I understand—and I worry over what to do with my writing, and my writing seems to me like a hard heavy brick made out of the glumly glued pages of many an interesting book, and I feel like pulling out my hair, and I feel that total lack of faith in all the sentences I have written and all the sentences I will write, and I grow convinced that I am not a writer but only a pretender, and my heart sinks in the way hearts have always sunk in life and in literature. And I read on, as the old man goes to his son’s mistress and requests her to abort his bastard grandchild …and my love, Anne-Marie, comes up and hugs me from behind and says it’s too cold outside, and I agree, and we look up at the sky and see Orion and we call it The Roman Soldier for the hundredth time, and we say I love you to each other for the millionth time, and I think I love her so much, as much as the Himalayas, but my heart is grey now and I am in her arms and I cannot read on.

  PART TWO

  The Bachelor

  Losing Face

  I am in the boss’s cabin listening to him, and suddenly I feel my face flee. It is as if it is drifting sideways, toward the wall, or toward the translucent board that is riveted to the wall for scribbling thoughts. What do I do? I pucker and grimace, if these things are even possible now, to hold my face in its right place. My boss looks at me as if his own face has tightened in response to the spectacle of someone losing a face. Unfortunately I can’t verify the feeling, because there are no mirrors in my boss’s cabin, which is only proper—the absence of mirrors is a necessity to delete erotic possibilities from the workplace. So I ignore my fleeing face and try to concentrate on the words that my boss is uttering. There is something about lead and lag measures. If you do the lead measures right, then the lag measures, which is to say the results, will follow automatically. He wants me to make a model to track the correlation between the lead and the lag measures. The whole thing is too obvious to reveal any insight, I think. But I don’t mention this, simply because my face is fleeing, or perhaps also because I’ve the notion that I’m wrong to think whatever I’m thinking, or perhaps I’m sure I’m thinking wrongly. I say nothing when the boss ends, not even Absolutely or Sure or Will be done or Understood, nothing in the vein of a parting remark whose sole purpose would have been to provide an artificial confidence to the boss. I know that both the remark that is expected of me and the confidence that is expected of the bos
s are important but empty gestures. I’ve nothing against empty gestures. It’s just that I feel I’ve lost my face, which is quite a thing if you think about it.

  So I just walk out of the cabin, longing for my palms to investigate my lost face. I reach my cubicle. I enter two sets of usernames and passwords into my laptop to reach the main screen. This entering of usernames and passwords is a reflex; I do it even when I’ve nothing to do on the computer. I stare at my screen—no files open, no files to open. Then suddenly I remember the story of my face. I poke with my fingers, then use my palms. The thing is there. It has returned!

  There is No Home

  The flat in Bandra became too big and too lonesome after she left me. The friends nearby were no help, lost as they were in their ganja and videogames. Now I have a bachelor pad in Goregaon, which is where I am right now. And right now I am naked below my waist, carrying a Manto book in one hand and a glass of orange juice in another. It is morning. There is nothing much in my fridge apart from the orange juice, and like all mornings over the past few months, I will not be having breakfast today as well. I woke up half an hour back, and now I’m waiting for the geyser to heat up the water. Some minutes ago, I masturbated thinking of her, my love, on top of me and whispering into my ear, ‘I like it when you hold my butt … hold my butt.’ Then I texted her.

  Last night I went to a seedy place called Shanghai Bar and had two big bottles of Kingfisher beer. That was dinner and lunch combined. On the little TV in the AC section, they had put on a channel that played old Hindi songs. I gaped at the TV and let myself feel lonely and schmaltzy. I thought of texting a girl I’ve come to know and whom I believe would be easy to sleep with, but I decided against it. Just as I paid my bill I felt a fear suck at my chest and I thought, there is no home. Then I went home.

  I’m twenty-seven years old and I feel I’m at an edge.

  In two hours I’ll be back in the office again, as if returning to waking life after a litany of lethargic dreams. Last night I slept in two phases. In the first phase my mind kept flitting between memories and dreams, and all of them, in some way or the other, were fragments of the books I’ve read and the books I’m reading. Literature took my sleep away, I can say, and I claim that I even heard its gears shift in my head. The light was on, and at times in my half-sleep, tormented by images whose genesis lay in words, I would think that all I needed to go to real sleep was to switch the light off. But I was too lazy, or sleepy, to do that. Then, a couple of hours later, the scene-switching stopped, and the void of deep sleep, a void made possible by the exhaustion of literature’s possibilities, presented itself with all its black beauty. I plunged into it and then emerged at 6:45 a.m., and the first thing I thought of was sex.

  Social Life

  I’m in my office again. I’ve just logged in. In half an hour, M, a girl from HR, will ask me to come to the canteen with her for breakfast. I don’t want to go with her, but I never say no. M is only interested in building sexual tension. She talks to me about sex, says things like—Size matters, or There are some guys who can’t get it up without a BJ, or You shouldn’t smoke so much, it will hamper your performance in bed. She irritates me with all this innuendo, the sole function of which is to test how I face it. But I never let anything show. I’ve even invited M to my new flat in Goregaon, twice, an act that to me denotes that my life is generally moving toward some catastrophe. But I made sure that M never came to my house alone. She came with one other woman on both occasions, either from the office or outside. We drink a bottle of horrible wine and mostly talk about relationships.

  These three—M and her two friends—are the only people who have visited my flat. They call it a steal, considering the rent I pay. I could call it a steal too, considering the rent I used to pay in Bandra, when I was living with her, my love.

  Introduction to ‘The Bachelor’

  After the breakfast with M, I get back to my desk and start reading. In the office I’m currently on to a pirated PDF of Bartleby and Co. by the Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas. The details of how I got this book on my office laptop are noteworthy. The insurance company I work in is very strict about IT security, but it somehow allows this one website that I use to download pirated e-books. That is how I got my reading material.

  Bartleby and Co. is about the Bartleby Syndrome, which has to do with writers who don’t write for one reason or another, basically the non-existing work of non-writers. A lot of writing writers also find voice in the book. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, posits that Herman Melville’s Bartleby was in character similar to the Kafka of Kafka’s diaries—a type that he called The Bachelor. And from all that Vila-Matas does to expound on that concept, I find myself believing that I, too, am a Bachelor now, literally and figuratively—the guy who has no prospects; the guy who says stuff like, I don’t care anymore, or I prefer not to, or I’ll do it but I won’t like it; the guy who is stolid in the daily confrontation with work and workplace; the guy who can write but is not a writer and is out of imagination, or stamina, or patience, or love, or libido, or money, or whatever it takes to be able to really write; the guy who is alone and who walks the streets looking down or looking up but never looking sideways. I feel I can’t write. I can’t write but I write. What a fucking paradox! I write on my office laptop, after reading some inspiring passage from a book, any book. I write hiding in my cubicle. I write, but still I’m The Bachelor, I’m convinced of that much. And my writing will not amount to much, and even if it does, it won’t matter. I’m dealing with the world with one face and excreting it as words through the asshole of my mind.

  When I get tired of all this or of thinking of all this, I try to write a poem. I keep them short, very short. The one that I wrote a few minutes back reads like this:

  You flowed out of my eyes last night

  And mixed with the air in this city.

  Now I look for those lungs you might have touched,

  Those leaves you might have tended,

  Those clouds you might have blown.

  Tomorrow it will rain,

  And I will drink you again.

  A Small Critique of Capitalism

  I lost her, or she lost me, or we lost each other because of our professions. It’s just the way capitalism operates. It commands us to fully enjoy our lives, while insinuating all the time that this enjoyment is deserved only when we participate, only when we seek a critical part of our overall search for meaning and fulfillment in the work we do in corporations. Five days of work, two days of enjoyment, and love in the little wrinkles of time that may not have been smoothed. And then the near-dystopian clichés like Thank God it’s Friday, or It’s Saturday night, yay! or Damn, it’s Monday again, or There is a feeling that bisects happiness and sadness, and it’s called Wednesday, et cetera. Our professions led us to different cities, separated us for weeks, sometimes months, and with all that distance she realized that it was okay to be distant, that there were better places in the world, or better lives to live. All along, the injunction to enjoy led us, or rather her, to different people, which is to say men. Though I’m not sure of the last part.

  What does it make me feel? It makes me want to write. It makes me want to write a novel in which the protagonist is our unborn son, trying to locate that paradise where there is no injunction to make the most out of this one life, and where people don’t find it impossible to love someone more than themselves, even if for a day or two.

  Perhaps, if I were to write this novel, it would end up being about the impossibility of love. Which is funny because in the book Bartleby and Co., the narrator calls himself a non-writing writer who nevertheless once wrote—twenty-five years back, as he says—a novel on the impossibility of love. Has some of him drifted into me? Perhaps yes, but there are extra shades here. And as for the novel, I’ll definitely add more shades to the protagonist. I will make our unborn son a Marxist.

  She

  She is somewhere in the world, vacationing. I cannot think of he
r doing anything but vacationing. And I’ve just received a message from her:

  Why do you ask me if I still love u? That’s nt relevant anymore. And yes, you can visit me in Interlaken. As a friend.

  The Bachelor Incarnate

  As I’m as yet not used to either, my love handles get scratches from the doorknobs in my flat. In the cramped bathroom the two translucent buckets swallow my shower space, and get filled with dirty, soapy water. In the bedroom there is a thin full-length mirror to which I sometimes present my body sideways, to examine the delta in the radius of my incipient belly. A Royal Stag quarter bottle serves as an ashtray, its narrow mouth demanding extreme concentration. Another Royal Stag bottle with liquor inside awaits, always. There are metal grills covering the three sliding windows in the flat, and sometimes pigeons camp in these overnight and make a ruckus that disturbs the narratives of my dreams. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 lies on the armrest of the sofa closest to the main door; its terrorizing cover always raised at a forty-five angle. And from the first exposed page, Bolaño’s emaciated face looks up at the ceiling, with nothing to say, nothing at all, except that literature is its own abyss, which is in fact more nothing than nothing. The flush in the tiny toilet is kaput and water keeps dripping into the commode at all times, and at night this dripping acquires the sound of liquid doom. In the kitchen the only piece of cutlery is a knife and the only things the knife has ever cut are three out of four mangoes that were bought too early in the season. The refrigerator hums all the time, like a hibernating demon waiting for a fool to break the spell of entrapment. Inside it lie a rotten mango and a container of food that was ordered a week back and remains untouched; the rice inside the container must be hard as it must have been before boiling. There is a laptop on the bed, used for pornography and writing, porn that never gets me up and writing that never fails to take me down. Now the laptop has a virus that has corrupted all the word files, which is to say all the stories that are still unfinished, and I can’t help but have mixed feelings about this. I’m roaming around in the flat, naked; this man is me, and he has no clue why he sometimes roams inside the flat, scratching and scribbling, pulling his pubes and spreading them all across the floor, getting scratches on his virgin love handles, ever ever ever convinced that he can’t write, and still writing.