Room

Huddled in a corner, his knees pulled into his chest, the boy shivered uncontrollably. The walls may have originally been slate or a darker shade of gray, but they were dark dark green now. The room was damp and cold; bars of frigid moonlight shone through the small window above the boy’s head. There was no door.

You are not the first.

The boy looked up, and cocked his head ever so slightly. The shivering abated, and his brow furrowed in concentration.

Yes. Are you surprised?

The boy was still. And then shook his head. His expression lightened and there was a ghost of a smile on his lips.

No. But we would understand why that might cross your mind.

One eyebrow raised.

Yes.

A haunted look took over his face. The shivering was back, in earnest.

You are to be straightened. Your kind are a jumble of paradoxes, a mess. Your poets and philosophers have argued this to be a positive trait, a raw and fundamental symbol of your race. That is a lie. You people are quick to pronounce judgement and slow to listen, even to yourself. If unchecked, we would have a disaster on our hands. The boy’s eyes widened. Yes, we have the capacity for humour. The irony may not be evident right now, but you will soon see it. There is reason to be afraid. Your life will unfurl before you, with no lies. You will see you for you. As it should be.

The boy tried to back further into the wall he was sitting at, scrambling at the stone floor.

Soon, you will see the truth.

The boy opened his mouth to say something and then clutched his throat in agony as no words would come out.

No.

The fear in the boy was palpable now, emanating from him in acrid waves. And then he noticed it. He mouthed a silent screech, his muscles tensed to a breaking point, and he turned around and tried pushing himself into the wall. His fingernails were raw and bloody, and tears were streaming down his clenched eyes.

You don’t like what you see?

The boy was racked with sobs now. He was pushed as far into the wall as his body would allow; he would not turn around to look at it.

There is nothing more for you. Nothing more we can show you. Nothing more you can see.

The boy fell and died in a horrible position. At the same time, there was a soft shatter and tinkle and right there, behind him, lay shards of glass.

 

Dream fragments

Why are you trying to kill me? I’m just masturbating you.

A sign to slow down on the scotch.

Time masheens

I saw Idiocracy a few days ago. What a fun movie. I was thrilled and told a lot of people about it, and their reactions were all exactly the same: “… ehhhhhh that movie was pretty crappy”. Hard to continue the conversation after that. So here I am, telling you. It was awesome. Watch it. The last scene with the time masheen was the best.

“We’re gonna take you back, to the year 1939 when Charlie Chaplin and his Nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world…”

Smoking room stories part 2

I have been working on this piece for nearly a year now. By which I mean I wrote some of it a year ago and haven’t bothered finishing it. I am finishing it now.

 

As I approach that place I worry a little. I have been so excited about coming back; it has been almost 6 months since I was here last. But will it be the same? I shrug away my worry; it will be what it is.

I find a cigarette, walk in and light up. The haze hasn’t changed, and neither has the crowd, for the most part. There is a little more wear and tear, and people seem to be oh-so-slightly more on edge, but that’s it. There is some small talk lazily floating through the room, but it’s not very loud. People are waiting for something. I take a small drag. Should I say something? Should I go forward? The silence was deepening – the small talk had died out, the shuffle of feet had stopped. The only sound was the gentle burning of paper as people smoked, and waited. My brows furrowed as I took another drag. What would I say? What would I talk about? A part of me wanted to give to this place, as an offering to a distant yet distinct memory of a man who had lungs of iron and a story worth remembrance. I wanted to give to keep this alive. I wanted to talk just because I didn’t want to leave without a story being shared. Without something being said. I stubbed out my cigarette and rubbed my hands. Just as I looked up and opened my mouth to break the calm, a man spoke.

There were two women. Two women I loved and who loved me.

I looked up, and followed everyone’s eyes to this man. He was seated, leaned against the wall. There was something about him that was sad. He had the look of a man who had been searching for something for a long time, and found a lot, but not what he was looking for. He took a drag, sucked on his teeth and continued.

But the feelings I had while in love were vastly different from each other. Someone once told me ‘you will remember me not by our conversations or the words exchanged, but the feelings I inspire in you’. My feelings for both of them were, are, strong. Strong like the mythic Titans, bolstered by my own want, my need, for belief and faith.

There was a fire in his eyes now. A fire of passion and pain.

The first woman came into my life when I was young, when I was still tripping over my enlarged pubescent feet and squeezing pimples every morning before school. I couldn’t get enough of her, for nearly 7 years that followed our first meeting. We shared everything. She taught me how to love, and I adapted what I learnt into the perfect mirrored travesty. I hurt her, repeatedly, justifying it with undying love. We grew up together but she was the only one that grew out of the relationship. What was I supposed to do? I begged, I pleaded, all for naught. I was too fickle, too unstable, too dependent. Here we were, emerging fresh from the bosom of youth together and she was just throwing me out into the cold, dark wilderness. I stumbled, I fell, I got up. She was right.

He took a drag, and his hand was trembling as he raised the cigarette to his mouth. A single tear dropped in a wide arc down his cheek.

For a long time after, I lived in a bubble of anger and hate. And in the midst of this haze, I met the second woman. She was broken, like me. She looked to me for approval and a comforting love. I strongly felt something for her, and looking back on it, I’m not sure if it was longing or loathing. I was hurt, and broken, and so was she, and I was angry at her. It wasn’t her fault that I was broken, and I was breaking her further to fuel my own hatred for someone who broke me.

His gestures started to get erratic, and there was anger lining his face, like a red hue.

My feelings were getting tangled to the point where I couldn’t tell the difference between them. To the point where I can’t fully remember most of that period. But I near the end of this story. I have carried these burdens for a long time, and I wished to get rid of them. It is easier to tell a story when you don’t expect anything at the end, and you can only expect nothing, and thus everything, from a group of strangers.

The end of the road

3 years of addiction. It ate away at me, I didn’t notice. I got sick, I didn’t care. I became mean and nasty, I thought it was me adjusting to my environment. I feel like Gollum, had he realised his folly prior to his untimely incineration at Mt. Doom. Taking a step back, I feel better. I sleep without worry. I realise my life has been a sham, my decisions made for me. For the first time in a long time, words pour out of me without me judging myself constantly. I am beginning to see happiness. I am beginning to enjoy my life, like I should have so long ago. I am learning to enjoy the company of others without ulterior motives.

I have so much to catch up on. If you’re reading this, I am sorry. For whatever I did or said to you. I’m sorry even if you aren’t reading this. I spent most of the last few years burning bridges like the Malazan elite force.

Goodbye nicotine. I won’t miss you.

The books people buy

If someone was to ever ask me, “Raghu, what is your favourite place in the world?” I would, without hesitation, reply “A bookstore”. The type of bookstore matters, but not to a very large extent; I would enjoy second-hand and antique bookstores slightly more than I would a Borders. Today, I went out into the city to pick up a book (I ended up buying four and would have bought at least fifteen more had I the capital to do so), and visited two very different bookstores to look for it. One of them can be best described as an Indian analogue of Borders, while the other is a far more cramped second-hand store. In addition to browsing and inhaling that lovely aroma of old books, I decided to watch the various people who were also engaged in similar activities.

Now, I’ve always held to the notion that a lot about a person can be gleaned from the books they read. My grandmother, for example, is a big fan of crime fiction, and is also one of the craftiest women I know. It never occurred to me, until today, that there could be a much stronger correlation between the books people buy and their personalities than the books they read. I noticed today that people can be very self conscious about the books they appear to be interested in and the books they ultimately buy. I saw a few people pick up a book, look around to see if anyone was watching them, read a few lines and quickly put it back in its place before anyone noticed. The most obvious example was this stud who walked in wearing a leather jacket and leather pants, tattoos on his arms and a beard with equal parts oil and attitude. He shuffled around the magazine section, probably looking for a sneak peak at some skin and then sauntered, very casually – too casually, in fact – to the fiction section, at which point he looked around to make sure no one was watching, and then picked up a copy of “New Moon”. He turned his back to the rest of the bookstore in the hope that he would be able to hide his fantasy, and it didn’t help that the entire shelf (and the two flanking it) were filled with Stephanie Meyer’s exclusive brand of bullshit. The poor guy was probably just looking for something vaguely sexual. In the three minutes that followed, he either found what he was looking for or felt exposed because he dropped the book and literally ran to automobile section where he looked to be far more at peace.

Seeing as I am making an observation and need data to back it up, I should include my own experience today at the store. I was looking for a few books – “Dust of Dreams” by Steven Erikson, “The City and the City” by China Miéville and Dante’s “Inferno” – when I stumbled upon a book called “How to Charm the Pants Off a Hot Woman”, author unknown, which means I didn’t care enough to look. I was holding a bag in my hand that had some books purchased on the non-fiction floor and I came upon a brilliant plan to read a few lines without being noticed. I moved closer to the book in question and in one movement dropped my bag, went down on my knees in order to retrieve it and pulled the book down with me. Of course, I made very little relative noise as the walls of this bookstore are inhabited by a massive number of very industrious and boisterous pigeons. Armed with the knowledge that I had very little time, I quickly turned to the introduction and began reading. “Why are there so many single guys?”, it began. “There really shouldn’t be. Did you know that you will, on average, meet at least one woman a day who would like to get naked with you?”, it professed. I did not know this. But furthermore, I did not believe it either. A soft cough from behind quickly reminded me that I was seated on the ground of a bookstore attempting to secretly read a book titled “How to Charm the Pants Off a Hot Woman”. I turned around with a sheepish grin, redolent in embarrassment, and saw an elderly white woman standing there, a look of surprise on her face. I mumbled something, got up in what was supposed to be a single fluid movement but ended up being something entirely worse, and ran. Half way across the store, I realised two salient things. One, I had forgotten my bag of books. Two, I still had the book, THE book, in my hand. “Ooh er”, I thought to myself. Dropping the book on a random shelf, I ran back, found my bag still there, along with the woman who was still staring at me. I smiled again, for some stupid reason, picked up the bag, mumbled again and ran off.

So, as I was saying, much can be said about the books people buy. I did not buy that book, so clearly nothing can be said about me. Do not attempt to theorise without adequate data. Sherlock Holmes said that. Or something to that effect.

Integrity

I found my old blog today. Well, I had always known where it was, I just never bothered to look. Today I did, and this was my first ever blog entry. It is dated September 06, 2005. I enjoyed it, so I’m reposting it here.

He looked out onto the street. The crossing was crowded, full of cars edging dangerously into each other. The air was a thick soup of noxious fumes, mixed with the urban cacophony of a thousand cars. He sat in the small tea shop, holding his little cup of steaming tea, and watching passively, as the cars barely managed to obey the rules of traffic. The tinny radio was blaring in the small, brightly lit, barely furnished tea room. The night was false outside; there was too much artificial light, a sea of pin pricks, marking the source of so many beams. He sipped his tea and thought of what would happen if he just sat there, and let the traffic take its own course. As the scalding brew washed down his throat, he already knew the answer. The cars would go wild, everyone would be selfish, everyone would want their own way. There would be chaos. He knew all of this, yet he let his mind wander on the different possibilities. Maybe, maybe just once, there might be a handful out there with integrity. Maybe there would be those who could stand against the crowd. With true souls. With the courage to see their own thing. And so every night, he came into this tea hut, pretending to leave the traffic to its own devices, just for a little while, hoping. But never had it happened. The same thing always happened. Chaos reigned. But he still came away every night.

And so tonight he watched, secretly, the tea going cold in his hands. The traffic waited, confused; like a blind dog who’s leash has been removed for the first time – an unrecognised freedom. Like every night. He still waited, waiting for the realisation to hit. Waiting for the first guys on the line to feel the raw unadulterated power that one feels when traffic laws no longer apply to them. And even from here, he could feel the tension build. But he did nothing. He just waited. And then everything happened too fast.

The tension reached a climax, and things suddenly went completely chaotic, like a sudden flash of lightning right in your face. But just before it happened, in a space of a thousandth of a heartbeat, a child ran across the road, a small little girl of no more than five. She had been waiting on the other side, aware of the tension, but oblivious to the magnitude, and so she ran, just a tiny instant before everything blew up. And from the small little tea hut on the side of the junction, he saw it all, but it rushed into his head like a number of sledgehammer hits, from a machine gun. Pinned him to his seat, and he watched chaos burst and then the small girl’s eyes wide open as she was simultaneously hit by three cars, tossed one way, and jarring into a car coming the other way, her body sickeningly stopped but her head kept going, and she was wrenched in half at her torso. He saw all this, and he was totally helpless. He was pinned in his seat, in the small little tea room, watching outside. He had seen a girl die. He had seen the wide eyes of the girl as she was wrenched in half. He had watched as chaos had burst. He had done nothing. And here he was, sitting in a small tea room, voyeuristically watching for someone with integrity, when he had none. The realisation hit him just then. He had let a girl die. He had killed someone. He could’ve saved her.

No, he thought bitterly, tears streaming softly down his cheeks and his heart suddenly going all black, I couldn’t have saved her. A man of integrity might have, I could not have.

Change

It’s amazing how change is, for most people, their greatest fear. Most will admit that a static life is boring and unfulfilling while maintaining that change is rough and difficult. I’m at a point in my life rife with change. I graduate in 3 months, after which I have a tentative plan but of course nothing is concrete and that scares the living daylights out of me. What will I do? How will I manage without the support line that is my parents? Do I have any marketable skills? If not, how quickly can I acquire some, and which are the ones that I should focus on picking up? These are questions that have plagued me for a while, and as graduation day comes closer, I find myself worrying more and more. In addition to this, I have finally found someone amazing to share my life with but, as Murphy’s Law will have it, the circumstances are less than ideal. What is the best way to cope with all these new feelings and expectations? It is at times like these when I wish that I had the power of lucid expression, but my thoughts are cloudy and the only certainty lies in asking questions.

This is not the first major threshold that I have had to cross and I’m sure it isn’t the last, but I hope that any maturity, wisdom and experience that I may have got over the last three and a half years will help me refine my methods for dealing with this massive milestone in my life. The answer, I have convinced myself, is in doing what needs to be done for now. Changing my focus from the bigger picture to the details and making sure I do all that is in my power to garner new opportunities that will allow me to pass through this threshold with as little pain as possible. Will this work? Only time will tell.

The benefits of Amreeka

The last time I was home this batty friend of my mother’s comes to visit and finds out, after much prodding, that I go to school in the US. She pulls at my cheeks with vigour and begins to tell me how shiny I look. “The true benefits of school in Amreeka,” she tells my mother, while spitting all over my face, “is the fact that the children come back looking so fair and lovely.” Fair & lovely is an Indian beauty product aimed at girls with low self esteem (if you get the Arrested Development reference, I applaud you). It proclaims to, after an arbitrary period, make its user fair and lovely. It does nothing of the sort, but this is India. With a massive population comes a VAST number of people who should make bubble-blowing their life goal. Either way, I found it ironic that the only thing I seem to have received from the Great Amreeka was a distinct (she thought so, at least) lessening of melanin. But she isn’t done. With my cheek, now soaked in spittle, still in her iron grip she goes on, “See, when I was young, I wanted to find a good husband, but who would marry such a darkie? Ha ha!” More spittle as she laughs. I feel like I’m being pulled apart by a team of horses and drowned at the same time. All because I’m fairer than I was the last time she saw me – which was 8 years ago.

Ok, enough was enough, I thought. I should try getting a word in explaining the glories of an education procured in the Nation of Hope and Freedom. I raised a finger and an eyebrow, and opened my mouth only to have my face smothered in her other hand. “Look at this bootiful face! No pimbles, no scars. Poonam, if I were a girl again, I would marry him right away”. Ok, that was a poor decision on my part. After I extricate my face from her, I look over at my mother for support only to find her doing everything humanly possible to avoid bursting out into laughter. This was entirely unfair. I decided to do what any manly man would do in this situation; roll up into a tight fetal ball in my brain and wait for the storm to pass.

Eventually she did leave, but only after promising to find me a “sootable wooman”. My mother still hasn’t forgotten.

PS – Fair man looking for suitable woman partner. I am very sunny, and like foot massages and hot food.

Quiet contemplation

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. Been busy. And lazy. For most of my life I’ve burnt bridges, not thinking twice. Most of the time, it bites me in the ass, but I don’t seem to learn. I wouldn’t really care right now, if it weren’t for the fact that I think I’ve forgotten the protocol for forging and maintaining a healthy relationship. How do you do it? What do you say? What do you avoid? I meet one person, who I would love to give myself to, and all of a sudden I realise I’ve forgotten how to do it. Not only that, but I’m reminded in an indefinitely extended moment of lucidity all the past relationships I’ve trashed on impulse borne of fear. Something needs to change, but what? I feel no need for malice anymore, no requirement for an inflated ego, and I just want to learn to love again. After four months of actively trying it, and countless months prior thinking about it, I feel quiet contemplation is not the answer.