One wintry noon

 “I miss having a conversation with my window”, I said to Pothead. “I mean I’m not so sure about how much I really miss, but there’s this empty feeling”.

“You do know that you need to get your head checked, right?” Pothead mumbled with her eyes still shut as she rolled over, hugging her red blanket closer.

The oval golden clock in the light green room chimed nine. The light outside was a soft cold laidback one and the yellowing leaves of the guava tree next door had the soften and glow features of picassa generously applied over them. Not that it was the early hours of a wintry dawn, but the feeling still clung to the bare brick houses, the trees and the curling smoke of the coalfire from the laundryman’s chulah.

“Blackboots said it was much better having a conversation with a window than with most people around. When will you get over this mainstream intolerant mindset of considering only majoritarian ideas normal and pretending the fringe elements don’t exist, Pothead?”

“BB is a nutcase. He’d look at earnest eyed doggies and talk to them on his way back to his flat. And you are spending way too much time with social science students. Talk normal, not like some jumbled paragraph from a book on sociology.”

“You say that to social sciencies, they’ll eat you up alive. They are so in earnest about protecting the marginalized voices in society, the rights of the downtrodden and giving equal opportunities to everyone that if you hold views to the contrary they’ll make sure you don’t get to voice that opinion of dissent and teach you what a social monster you are. They are very very serious about their role in educating the unpad mass about universal brotherhood tolerance and sensitizing them to people’s feelings. So if you think what they are saying isn’t making sense to you, educate yourself till you dream/speak/eat in that lingo. That is the postmodern approach to life-the end of hegemony. And although I am not sure what exactly a subaltern is, but from your lack of holistic approach towards life, I can say you are one.”

Pothead giggled and yawned, winking and ended up getting more comfortable in her fluffy red blanket. I was rather annoyed at this unceremonious dismissal.

Now by all measures, I’m one of the unfittest homo sapiens to inhabit this planet. I really do not know why I think it is necessary to be fit enough to be able to cartwheel, but I think of it as an essential human qualification and I don’t have it. Never did. So, occasionally, on days like this I get real sore about my kamzori’s. Not that I do anything to remedy the situation, which makes Pothead cynically sneer at me and say that in reality what I really am, overruling anything that I think myself to be, is lazy. Dumb ass lazy and a pillow-and-blanket-potato if ever there was one. Not exactly flattering, but then diplomacy wasn’t one of Ph’s strong points.

It wasn’t my Window’s strong point as well, but then she had grander visions. As I said, I missed talking to her. I missed the way she thought she was Iron-Man and the next thing in evolution, making her treat humans as poor little under-evolved things. She was the bigger guy among us. So she indulgently forgave my shortcomings as that of a less evolved being. She didn’t chide me for being idle and unproductive and generally breaking all rules of normal living. Pothead of course thought I was a waster, as did everybody else, well, mostly everybody else. “My Window didn’t tell me that I was creating problems where none existed. “, I said out loud to Pothead. I was annoyed and wanted to fight. Ph’s calm practicality got on your nerves sometimes.

“Neither did I. Hobbes told you that. It’s true btw.”

“Hmmmppphh.” I stuck out my tongue at Pothead. Go, there, that’s what I think of your opinion.

“Don’t pretend you are this unrecognized, wronged, misunderstood excuse of a talent. I’ve never seen you interested in something long enough to give it a fruitful completion. And if you think having ideas in your head makes you anything close to out-of-the ordinary, you’re deluding yourself. Sticking to a job till completion requires determination and you have long forgotten what that means. It’s rather easy, isn’t it, this constant falling ill to get away from responsibilities and ridding yourself of any guilt you may subsequently acquire. People you see trudging at the daily grind keep doing it because they must.”

“And what makes you think I’m rolling in wealth?” This wasn’t really comforting of PH to mention it so casually and offhand. I was acutely aware of my financial crunch and got rather touchy feely at jabs directed at it by people who thought I was having a nice time feeding off other people’s money.

“You’re not, true”, conceded Ph. “But the rest do not have the luxury of quitting earning and still not having to worry where the next meal, the electricity and telephone bills and internet connection comes from. Not to mention the two silver lockets and earrings and brooch you got yourself. And a hoodie. A holiday too. Isn’t that where you got a lucknowi chikankari? And you’ve spent most of your time lazing around, sleeping, watching movies, getting meals delivered by the bedside, playing music, clicking photos and working yourself up into a frenzy or a fit of rage when staying comfortable became rather monotonous to you. What you are earnestly trying to avoid is hard work and you create all these subconscious illnesses to help you skirt the gruelling task that requires getting down on your hands and knees and concentrating your will and efforts to a single focus.”

It was the same old thing of course, reminding me of all the inadequacies I knew all too well I had. Maybe Ph was being a good Samaritan and helping me get out of my comfortably numb zone. Maybe I ought to be really swallowing the bitter pill, accepting I was a rotten failure and get out of the cave and face the consequences. But I didn’t want to get out of the cave on the same side that I came in. I wanted to wander through the unknown darkness, damp and a little scary, and find a way out of the other mouth of the cave on a different side of the mountain, where I wouldn’t have to go back to being me, but could just start off being anyone. Quite possibly there wasn’t another outlet. Could be that new place was a filthy world I didn’t want to be in. Or this cave was so long and had so many paths all leading to dead ends that I’d be exhausted midway and just sit down at a random place and want the tired sleep creeping over my eyes to never end.

It was close to noon and I found sleep wrestling with my eyelashes and thought, trying to shut down both. I had had a filling brunch in what I thought was English style, because I used a spoon and fork and had buttered toast, small little boiled potatoes and a boiled egg in opal plates and bowls. There was some raw sliced carrots and a couple of bananas too, and a pretty flowery glass of milk. It wasn’t exactly an English breakfast, but it served my sense of romanticism of sitting idly on a verandah overlooking the Mediterranean and gazing out into nothingness while philandering with a sizeable brunch. I’d have to be in that dark blue dress ofcourse, the one Deepika wore in Corsica in Tamasha, with loose windswept hair, to complete the feel. But now the thought processing centres were shutting down one by one and the information acquiring ports were going off and on, so I gave up the futile struggle and snuggled back under the covers with my embroidered sidepillow.

There must exist a parallel universe, mustn’t there? What does it even mean? Atleast there exists a universal consciousness, I am fairly certain of that. I worked out the details, but I don’t feel like going over all that proof again. Of course you shouldn’t take my word for it. I’m not asking you to. Here I’m just stating an innocuous fact, well, a theory, no-a hypothesis.

Sleep was a good listener. I liked her. Except when she was unavailable at the right hours and available at the wrong ones. I forgave her for her lack of sense of time, because I shared that trait, but sometimes I was mad at her. She complained I never really listened for her arrival sometimes and indulged her too much at other times. We were both unscrupulous about our jobs and absolutely unreliable, so we forgave each other and got on fine. These days I had tried to time her arrival by sending chemical signals. Now, as it happened, the machine which housed me wasn’t a first rate product. It had a screw loose almost everywhere and somehow managed to jog along. Its fuel processing mechanism was one of the worst, and it was taking infinite time and indefinite numbers of chemical and biological signals to set its trigger well. For the past few months I had been experimenting with frozen live bacteria- ingesting some millions of colonies of these microscopic creatures and introducing them to my internal environment. The seller assured me that this re-introduction of habitable species would bring a balance to the locality, as long as I steered clear of introducing harmful products which took an enormous energy to process, recycle and finally get rid of. Oh well, what was the harm in trying?

I broke a long standing barrier today. Haven’t had a talk with Pothead over it, but I feel so much at peace with myself. I had never played my music loud at home. I had always known how I needed to be considerate about other people’s tastes and not cause them discomfort at home. Maybe I was a little too considerate for my age. I played matargashti loud today and danced to it. At home. With Dad on the same floor. He started out saying he was not in the mood for music. It took me 31 years to say this finally, but I did. I told him, did I ever cause a disturbance at home by playing the music I wanted to hear? I had always known I had to play it softly, too softly, just barely audible to me, so as not to make anyone else feel disturbed. He admitted, I had always been good. So I said, I didn’t want to be that good any more.

At the end of the song he said, I should do more of it. Every morning. It would take the plump out of my gained fatness and make me fit. It was better than exercise, he said.

Maybe I should have stopped being good a long time back.

A boy decided to quit this life. He was 27. A phD scholar from Hyderabad University. The newspapers are all up in arms and some dalit faculties submitted their resignation because he was a dalit student. For the past one year he hadn’t received his stipend. Nobody, ofcourse had thought of remedying that. I read his suicide note. I knew what he wanted to say. It’s just an empty feeling. Just that sense of being when you want to fall asleep forever and never wake up. There are protests and political blame games going on and his caste issue becomes the centre of focus. Meanwhile, he silently decided to quit because life was becoming a much too difficult to solve maze without an end in sight. It doesn’t matter whether you are brave or courageous, there’s a state of mind where nothing matters anymore.