The man had so much to say that it was like he lived with us. Or exactly the opposite. It wasn’t romanticism, for there was nothing there to build upon. It was fanciful to the point of being absurd, but it wasn’t like I was trying not to laugh for the sake of being dignified in a gathering that, clearly, was meant for something else. I was moved too by his performance and yes – it was a performance. The tone was robotic, synthesized; almost like medicine, prescribed and paid for.
He was just the undertaker, after all. He couldn’t have meant the things that he said. And yet, no one seemed to resist belief.
He mounted one glorious thing on top of another, inventing ways to venerate someone who’s definitely not done as much. Someone associated, in his time, with more disrespect than honour, his presence a burden be it lovable or loathsome. Someone who had my Father question his integrity as a son, and it was like he almost needed a forced regression in this twisted good-cop-bad-cop routine where you play all three roles of Cop and Fugitive; to indict yourself and invoke the guilt.
Someone who lay dead and cold in front of us.
My Grandfather.
It was every other morning of waking up in my bed in the room that I had to myself for the whole of two semesters, my final two semesters at college which were busy spent making plans for elsewhere – like planning dessert when halfway through the main course; as if there weren’t enough ways to objectify life even more. It was earlier than usual; my usual. It was a Saturday. There were calls from my Mother in the morning that I had missed and there were calls from my Father as well. Usual, again. They’ve always alternated with their efforts to reach out.
What was peculiar this time was the time they had called – early to be ‘early’ but not too much so. It was like they were waiting for me to wake up or at least be in a position to wake up; where it wouldn’t be unfair to wake me up, if you get what I’m saying. You’re woken up at 2 in the morning, you know it’s an emergency. You’re woken up at five, you know someone has died.
It’s something I assumed as I’ve seen neither before.
I knew this man was sick, almost crippled. I have seen him sick; demented, broken, blind and living in shambles. And except for those times that I’ve fancied myself to be from this family of Superheroes where no one has died (on my Father’s side, at least), I’ve expected it; I had to. Some day, I knew, he was going to die. Some day, I knew, I had to quit laughing about it and take it with a straight face.
I thought about the interview, then, in a rush of thought. There was this interview that I had to go to the very next day. I had to go to another city, report at this place that I was supposed to stay and get myself prepared for the day after. And I had had more than one reason to go to this place, to the interview.
Now I had another.
xxx
Every time she saw me, she would turn away. It wasn’t even nice anymore; it was an act that had surpassed its glory and gone on to spaces I wouldn’t dare explore. I had my guilt subdued, if I ever felt it, and it irked me to find that she had hers intact.
Actually, I didn’t know if it was guilt or embarrassment or anything of that sort.
At first I thought she had gone anti-social. I didn’t see her in class, I didn’t run into her in the corridors, I didn’t see her at the hangouts, I didn’t see her up and about.
I thought she was depressed because it was so like her to be.
And she also had this nervous condition that gave her migraines and I knew she ailed – yet another demon to ascribe her abduction to. She hadn’t called, she hadn’t responded to my calls. But I knew she was around; I was told so. If only those people knew how it felt when they knew something that I didn’t know about someone I thought that I knew best.
One thing that I did know is that she was to act in this staging of Stoppard’s play ‘the Real Inspector Hound’, where she was to play the seductress Cynthia, one who has wooed many a men in the audience and beyond with kisses showered on those on stage. Those kisses that got catcalls and cheers from an overawed crowd; kisses that were but caricatures that meant nothing compared to the tenderness for those we shared.
Kisses that were never shared, for it was a college stage, and yet they drove me mad with sheer malicious intent. She knew I’d watch, she knew I’d be there. I searched for a sliver of recognition beyond walls of lipstick and lotion, amidst a sea of people in forced orgasm that bordered on hers. If anger were orgasm, I had my share.
I wasn’t past confrontation, though.
In fact, it was all I wanted, but I wanted it chanced. She wouldn’t listen to plans, I had to run into her. She wouldn’t listen to whispers, I had to cry. She wouldn’t pay heed to tears but I can’t fake smiles in a massacre of emotion.
I told her all this when it finally happened because I made it.
It was like watching a concept take shape in form of her face, when what was merely a reflection of my energies transformed into a person who could sweat and weep, for she did both and I saw her do that.
“Shit”, I said to myself. “She’s a girl.”
She didn’t say much but she said enough. There was someone in her kettle she was drying to drown and I knew that. The water was too little, the pressure was too weak and the kettle, that’s herself, didn’t allow it. All she had done until that point, with me, was let off steam with the smoke she blew.
And it was like nothing had ever happened.
xxx
I’m a single stroke person.
If there’s a reason I wouldn’t write something, I wouldn’t want to write it twice. Thoughts are obscure as they are and I wouldn’t want them to repeat. It’s something that the observer doesn’t permit in me out of compassion for the writer who doesn’t want himself out there. There’s nakedness in every exposure, every moment on film.
So I sat myself down to write, got distracted on the go.
And I left one ejaculation for the sake of another.
I like bathrooms when they’re dry; I don’t prefer virgins, if that’s a contradiction.
I looked around, I stood my ground and I figured myself out. It felt like verse, as always. Quick, quiet and comfortable.
“Screw writing; rub one out instead!” could become a slogan with a catchphrase that quotes the classic “it’s sex with someone you love.” Woody Allen would endorse it.
Writing is for people who take their time, I thought.
Like Virginia Woolf.
Like Annie Dillard.
Dried-up old ladies who came to mind when the deed was done and I was glad they did for they helped keep afloat on a sea of hormones. I doubted that I’d dive again.
It was then that it happened – as though a cosmic force had propelled him, “fluttering from side to side of his square of the windowpane” before he fell right in front of me, there by the side; almost exactly like she wrote.
A Moth.
The Acoustic version. The Night-Prowler. The Bastard Child.
Life would have had him fly; but then, he had fallen. It must mean death, surely.
In a surge, I had a haunt of everything that had passed me by up until that point. His Death, the Break-Up, the Interview, the classroom discussion – a host of such things that needed a Moth to remind me of them.
In a second, they all came around.
I looked at the Moth again. His wing was broken, his legs twitched. I could almost swear that he was one eye blind.
He stirred, he stood up; he looked around.
He then took flight as though he had always been meaning to. Out through the window, and I would never see him again.
I stepped outside the bathroom, my head buzzing with the air-conditioner, my mobile phone alight; I had a call to answer, I had a deadline to meet. I had water outside my door, threatening to break its way in.
Then, I thought, was a good time to write.
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