WALK DOWN THE ROAD…

This story is about one ordinary guy in an unordinary world. Let’s call this guy as A. The world in which A lived was different in many ways. It was like the ones that are seen only in dreams – strange visions, amazingly bright colors and where everything else is just hazy except for the illuminated thing that is one’s attention. So in this unordinary world everybody sees only few things, with rare clarity, and rest is all the haze at the background.
As everybody else A also sees only few things. He sees himself waking up every morning with first rays of the sun and then walking himself down a pleasant road. He is an artist – a stage actor who does meager roles in vast, incomprehensible play. But as with all other things it doesn’t concern, because what really matters in this world is just the object of immediate attention and that is the meager inconsequential role that one is playing. The play itself is comprised up of countless but equally meager actors and the strange thing is none seem to direct it or rather each directs it in a way or the other.
The other few things that A sees with exceptional clarity is the little café down the road, some little kids who live in the neighborhood, the one beautiful girl whose attention he has been trying hard to attract, the distant mountains over the horizons that is visible only at the mornings from his bedroom. A is a content man. Content in a strange way that there is happiness lesser so as a lack of sorrow.
One night he is sleeping and he has a dream. And he wakes up to the feeling of a magic wand with sparkles moving across his face. He rubs his eyes, at the sudden brightness as much as to be sure that there was indeed a magic wand moving across. But now it’s dark and A isn’t sure if he had seen it for real or he had had a dream something like it. And that day when he walked down the road, he noticed too many things. The haze was replaced by a clear canvas but didn't realize that the clarity was missing. He couldn’t see a o particular object as he could till then.
That day at work strange things happened. He started looking and finding new dimensions. He now thought that his was the most important part and that till then it was he who was directing the act. And yes, he started influencing everything. He changed what he didn’t like; he tried to prolong events that he wanted. It was as if he had a new power – a power to play with time as he wanted, prolonging pleasures and avoiding pains. He didn’t like his part in the stage, so he moved towards the center of the stage. He added to his act from others and from none as well. He got busy and immersed himself in the constant switching of parts and acts.
When the audience clapped he knew it was ‘only’ for him because he now had the longest and most important part. He was so happy to hear the applause and he knew he wanted it all the time. So he made his part bigger and longer. He moved even closer to the audience and they clapped, and clapped hard. He thought he had now worked for long. So A wants to take a break. The audiences were still clapping and with increasing rigor. He felt an enormous sense of fulfillment. He just wanted to turn back and look the ways he had walked since he had begun. He turned and his heart broke, for he was not in a stage as he did imagined. He was standing on the ground and the audiences were still applauding, there were countless actors on the stage and he didn’t know who they were applauding for….
He closed his eyes and found himself walking down the pleasant road once again; the road was more bright and illuminated, as he had ever known, and the backdrop hazed…

The Seven Ages

Oblivion:

Death is hardly familiar. You have never known it as it is on you. Yes you may have seen it closely – like when it parts the nearest or the dearest. You may feel the ‘loss’, but hardly would it mount to the feeling of dying, leaving everything that mattered, the whole of your life. Is your death an enormous sense of loss? Or a sense of equanimity, when you see your death as the end of a suffering and struggle, which was initiated with you crying as you were forced out from your mother’s womb? Or worse, is it an emptiness of knowing that you would dissolve into nothing, contrary to the sense of ‘ego’ that you preserved and nurtured through your life?

Death was just a moment away. The one to die was on his bed.

’Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’

Infant:

Birth - what do you think it is? The culminating mark of love, when two souls decide to unite in body as well? Or is it traced to a moment of wild passion and zest that leaves the feminine burdened? Maybe it is just the continuance of ritualistic existence thrust upon you before you even have had thought otherwise. But the one born to you is your blood, the one that deserves your love, your warmth, your adoration. You are ready to spill your blood, for your blood. You will fight the whole world to guard its sanctity. A birth gives your life new reasons.

He was born as an unwelcome bundle. An arrival that none had awaited with eagerness. His mother unable to bear the labor succumbed to it. His mother – young and gullible, led by fantasies and surging hormones, fell for a prince charming. She was led into a dream, away from everything she had ever known (her home, her parents) and before she even realized her prince had deserted her. But not before completely shattering her. She came back, senile and broke. She breathed her last as he his first. The grandparents, when they first held him, couldn’t see the fragile, delicate form of life. They never saw its innocence crying and yearning for its mother milk. He was sign of all humiliation. He was his father’s betrayal. He cried a lot, in want of tenderness and warmth that a mother would give and that which he never found in a nurse’s hand.

‘Mewling and puking in the nurse’s hand’

The School-boy:

How did you see the world as a child? What excited you? What made you happy? What did you love? What were you afraid of? Were you vulnerable? What did you learn? What did you hate? What were your imaginations? Why did you grow up as you are? Did anything trouble your life then? Were you loved? Why were you loved? You learnt the world? But when did you realize it? Were you pampered or thrust into adulthood? Was there a dream? Were pulled out from one? Were you molded or were you the explorer?

Boarding schools are not always the right place, more so at the tender age of eight. Even more when one is dark skinned, with a peculiar flat nose that is not particularly attractive, when one cannot speak without stammering and when one cannot tie the shoe laces properly. So at eight, amidst a hundred boys as a new one– dark skinned with an odd nose, unable to speak few words without a stammer and inept at tying shoe laces!!! At home, he wasn’t exactly the loved one, but at boarding school life was even bitter. Soon he was called a hundred names; he was being frowned upon thousand times. He became the laughing stock – the other boys wanted him to be mocked at. They loved playing their childishly devilish pranks at him. They all were friends, with each other because he wasn’t friends with them. Agony, anguish, despairs – too much for an eight year old. But strangely, all of it didn’t take the form of submissive tears rolling down his cheeks but morphed itself into a more rebellious kind.. As a boy he didn’t cry – perhaps he never felt vulnerable enough. His reaction was anger; the more they laughed at him the angrier he became. Often he charged at the mob, as a warrior giving his last charge when surrounded by the rivals. The mob would inevitably crush him, but not his anger…

Not exactly the ‘whining school boy’…

The Lover:

Love is so natural of all our feelings... We are ready to bare our souls for the one we love. What makes any one so special and deserving for the love of the other? Is there anyone who hasn’t ever felt it? Then why do we keep searching for the one to be loved? Is love elusive or illusion? What is more real – to love or to be loved? Lovers say that only love is the truest of all emotions. Then why is that we often lose love? Perhaps, to discover it again…

As a child he was invulnerable, unlike others around him. But the years somehow managed to wear it down. On the outside, there wasn’t the slightest indication of the tenderness inside. To the world he was rather cold, devoid of emotions that one would expect. Even his appearance reinforced it – the empty stare, the insensitive look that he carried. The beard that he wore was for his disapproval with the ways of the world, which gave him the rough look. He would always dress in pales; he would express himself rarely and whenever he did, it would be subtle, missing the attention of others. He preferred to be a part of the backdrop. His mind was thousands of thoughts that collided with each other such that nothing of the chaos was reflected outside. He led a life within his head, within himself, rather than with the world.

Strange occurrences are rather common in this world of contradictions. It is perfectly natural, but then it was strange because it happened with him. She was beautiful in many ways. She was the centre of a universe beyond whose periphery began his withdrawn existence. For her, he never existed, for him a rule for existence… He started having recurring visions, of holding her in his arms and dancing, of distant mountain peaks where they would together watch the sun going down together, of kissing her…

He wrote for her… a ‘woeful ballad’, that he never sang…

The Soldier:

At 30, his hairline was receding…and receding fast. By 30 he had lived a life. At 30, he was expectant – of life, of dreams. Sometimes he wakes up at the dead of night, with the same recurring visions of dancing with a girl, of the distant mountain peaks… He turns and finds somebody sleeping besides him and for a brief moment he seems to not recognize her. She shares a ‘life’ with him, she bore him two kids. But the girl in his dream felt more familiar than the woman sleeping next to him. He toiled to get the few shillings home every week. The days were lost at the sweatshop; and when he came home a cold super awaited him. His kids would see him from a distance. For them papa was something unfamiliar, something that was to be afraid of. They wouldn’t know the tenderness within him. He had hopes for them.

He dreamt of a life for them…” Even in the cannon's mouth”

The Judge:

Sometimes he missed his wife, who slept in her grave. Thinking about her he realized that he had grown used of her around him. His kids had flown away to their lives. He spent his time all alone, talking long walks. He observed the world around him moving. It seemed that everything had a purpose. Perhaps it does, when you don’t have one. He loved the kids in the park, the street busy in the mornings and evenings. He loved watching young men and women walking with an air of energy and eagerness. He loved the songs that were aired on the radio. In the mornings he read the newspapers with vigor. Each passing day seemed wonderful. Memories of his past evoked stranger emotions in him. It excited him – he sometimes wanted to live it all again - once again be mocked at by little boys, even the agony of never realizing his only love, also the walk back home from the sweatshop to the cold supper and the distance between him and his kids.

‘And so he plays his part’

The Sixth age:

His blurry vision gave him a physical sight of an old creaky fan, rotating against the ceiling. The creakiness didn’t matter to the one below because the sense of sound in him was losing. The white of the ceiling was given to it years ago; most of which could not sustain the dampness in time. It peeled off and whatever was remaining would not last long. But this pale backdrop was the canvas against which he saw flashes of his life. Some random moments, those that were still left clinging to his memory. He couldn’t care more for life than death. He had lived too long to realize his physical degeneration and grown too old to be conscious of the emotional void that had overcome him.

‘Turning again toward childish treble’

Paper boats, rain, the man...

He saw them every day, on his way to school and back home. They were there – besides the big cement pipe and sometimes under the trees. He often wondered at how high the pipe was. It was just enough for ‘the man’ to stand in and also enough for his two girls, always running inside and outside it. Sometimes he noticed them sleeping inside the pipe. They looked filthy, with untied hairs, unlike his sister whose hair was always tied in a knot. They wore old and torn clothes. The man looked strange, with white bandages around his hands and body. The man was always in the same lungi, old and soiled and no shirts. The man walked in an even stranger way, with a funny limp. Amma had said that the man was sick and he was lame, so he walked with that ‘funny’ limp. Sometimes on the way back home he would see a lady cooking under a tree, the third one along the pipe. The lady would burn woods to light fire between the stones on which a vessel would be there. Few utensils (some with water) and other things would be strewn around the large cement pipe.
For long he wondered at what they were doing there. He never saw them before his summer holidays. Once he had asked Amma about it and she had said that they were homeless and destitute. So they lived in the streets. They had no money to buy a house.
He asked “why don’t they have money?”
Amma replied “I don’t know. Maybe they don’t have jobs or they are not ready to work hard”
“If they don’t have money, then they are not begging…. like the woman near the school gate???” he asked.
“Oh chellam!!! Why do you think about them? There are lots of people in this world like them… You should thank God that you have such caring parents and that God has given us everything. Today do eat your lunch properly and I should not see anything left in your lunch box when you are back…”
“Amma, but why has God not given them everything???”
“To punish them… for their sins… Now stop asking about them… tell me what would you like to be in the fancy dress competition?”
He wanted to ask that what their sins were, but he knew amma was not happy answering his questions. So he asked “what if I become a policeman, with a big moustache and a stick? And I can also have a gun…”
Amma said “…mmmm… you would look really frightening…” with a happy smile across her face…
But he could not get 'them' out of their mind then… and as he entered his classroom he was wondering if he could dress like them – as a ‘destitute’ for the competition….

Today it was a holiday, for everyone… they said it in TV. Appa, in the morning said it was holiday. Even the newspapers said. But he could not go out and play as yesterday. Yesterday was a Sunday and he loved Sundays. There would be church in the morning and an ice-cream from ’Milk & Creams’ while coming home. Sunday evenings he would play cricket with his friends in the park. But today was not Sunday, though it was a holiday. And appa said that there is going to be a storm – with very strong winds and rain. So nobody would go out. But there were no rains yet, or even winds.
Just as he was thinking if he should go to Kutty’s house, the wind picked up. A strong wind and he could hear them. He sat besides the window. The coconut tree was almost dancing with the winds. He saw the tall coconut tree bend and swing with the winds. And that moment the heavens started pouring down, and they poured heavily.
He watched as the first droplets fell but vanished leaving their mark on the soil. Within no time he saw water flowing, forming a brown colored stream that carried away the leaves and paper, toffee wrappers and chips packets, polyethene covers and plastic bottles. His sight followed the litters as they were carried away, till it was beyond his sights. Before he realized, the whole road was submerged under a brown and muddy stream flowing rapidly. The water in the drain across the road was gushing away. The gushing sound is nice, or he thought so. He saw the mile stone down the road already half under the flooding waters. The mile stone which had ‘41’ written on it. He did know what did that ‘41’ mean, neither did amma or appa.
So much water!!! The school ground must also be under the water now. There would be puddles everywhere. Tomorrow he and his friends can make paper boats and float them in the puddles. The road to school will also be now under the water. Will the water flow away by tomorrow or will he have to walk in the flooded streets, as that day last monsoons? That day he had walked in knee deep water. Amma had held his hand all the way to school. Water flowed through the big pipe. The 'destitute girls' who live near the pipe cannot sleep in it today. But they can play in the water. How will they light fire under the tree to cook? And, what about the man? Amma says getting drenched will make you sick. So what will happen to the sick man? Will he get even sicker? Maybe not. He is already sick to get sick again. He will stand in the rains, holding an umbrella. That would be fun - standing in the rain...
Just then he recalled amma’s words saying that they lived there and that it was their home. ‘What was it like to have water inside your house?’
He looked around his house. Oh no… Then they should have to keep everything up, on the tables and chairs, on the beds and cupboards and the shelves. Lying on his bed he wondered if their house was flooded too then, where would they sleep? On the beds? Yes they could. But they will have to keep all those things on it. Maybe they will have enough place to sit and if not he will not mind getting down and standing in the water. It would be fun to move around in the water or splash it and yes make boats and float it. Yes he will make boats and it will flow down to the road and all the way to ‘man’ standing in the rains with an umbrella.
The man was indeed standing in the rain. But before his boats could reach the man, he was asleep….

When he Died...

When he opened his eyes, it felt strange. He woke up in the open, amidst a park or he thought so. The surroundings were very unfamiliar and yet he thought he had been here. Everything around him seemed as an intimate part of his memories, but he had never seen all those together. He felt weird, very weird - like the horizon was so familiar, yes he had watched it countless times from his bedroom balcony smoking cigarettes.

He saw few people around, an old man sitting on a bench - it struck him, it was the same bench where he had seen her for the first time, sitting and reading... and what was she reading then, he couldn't recall now. He had proposed her exactly at this spot on a lovely full moon night - after the best ever dinner of his life. But that was a different time, different place. He had taken her to the theater before that; it was his date, the first of his life with the only woman he had ever loved, more than himself. She had leaned over his shoulder all through the play, she laughed and she even cried - he chose not to watch the stage. He had something better, more divine, he kept looking at her and since then he hadn't seen or done anything more joyful.

Except for few instances, like when he held her for the first time as crying tiny little one, and what did they call her???? Priya, yes they named her Priya... and what a darling she was... the candy of their eyes, the most cherished gift of their love. She always thanked the Lord for this life, but he never understood it. He never understood it even when his mother stood with folded hands. Mother - he recalled how his mother would comb his hair even when she was just to his shoulders.

Thinking of mother he was taken back to those dusty streets of his childhood. They would play near the mango groves, from where they used to steal mangoes during the summers. His younger brother didn't like mangoes. What a idiot he was? What about his brother now? He didn't seem to remember much except for the fights he had with him, some innocent moments from a far off childhood. Estranged and just a part of some hazy memories of a time far away and place long ago, he hadn't spoken to his brother since ages. But he remembered how eagerly he and his little brother would wait for 'Papa' every fortnight. Papa drove a lorry, in a far off port. When papa came home he would smell of the harbor. And when papa took them to harbor he was happy to see the ships, they looked monstrous unlike as in books. And then one day papa did come, in a black van with bandages all over his body. They said he was dead. He couldn't understand, but his mother wailed beating her chests, her hair disheveled. They carried papa away and made him burn the pile of woods with papa in it.

The next time he lit a pyre he wasn't afraid, but burning with guilt. It was his mother's death. She was ill , he wanted to go back, his vocational committals didn't let him, he sent her cards along with dollars. He foolishly hoped, against hope, of that providing some warmth to a longing soul. The longing never ceased but she did. Suddenly anguish overcame him. He wished, for once, to go back - go back all those years and live through it once again. But he knew, it is possible only in dreams now... Dreams... he had followed his, all the way to the land of opportunities. Opportunities he had; he used them and made big, but just a small regret - not many with whom he did share a drink with. He lived his world only with her.

And then, Priya came, became their world. Sometimes he thought that even 'she' had grown jealous of Priya. But he was not sure. Priya grew up, but the distances too grew between them, he knew that Priya would always called 'Pa' when she needed help. Today she is miles away - pursuing her 'dream', she required him no more. He felt sorry about himself. He wanted to stop her, she had resented it.

Since then, she was the only one left for him, she had been with him all these years. She was with him when he landed here, in unknown country, she was with him when he bought his first car. She was with him when he won his first major contract. She was with him when he needed her... He felt happy, because she was with him. He knew, the happiness for her was also a longing sadness for something more. A sadness for his mother, a little for his brother and little more for Priya. A sorrow for all that was, for all that was not...

The sorrow... it grew... no it wasn't just that, it was also a pain, intense, growing on him. He could not feel anything else... he wanted to let out a cry.... but only a small gasp of air escaped from his mouth... He felt he was dying, and it made him more sad. He didn't want to die now. Not leave her alone. He wanted to see Priya once before he would. He felt as if he had things to do before he could die.... but, why is it he is dying now? The pain was getting unbearable. He closed his eyes...

Tightly and with a huge effort, as if he was holding on to something, something that was being pulled away from him and which he didn't want to let go. Darkness grew, there was nothing else... not even the pain, but only his anxiety. He now knew that he was dead and he wanted to cry. Cry for everything he had done. Cry for everything he hadn't. He felt like weeping for all that he had left behind. He had loved his life... but he couldn't. Something wouldn't even let him cry. 'Nothing' else mattered now...

beep-beep...beep-beep...beep-beep...beep-beep... eeeeee.... what is this suddenly? beep-beep...beep-beep... Something was pulling him away, from whatever he was trying to hold on. He was being pulled away from the darkness. From his past- from the dusty streets of childhood, from the theater and from the park. Now he could open his eyes. It was the familiarity of his bedroom ceiling. beep-beep...beep-beep...beep-beep... ahh... the irritating alarm beeps, he thought getting irritated at his 'sad' dream. He was feeling heavy. She was still sleeping , besides him, without a worry. The 'beep-beep' possibly wasn't her concern... The clock showed 6.00 am. And he knew he had long day ahead - big meetings, business trip and an official party. He knew he couldn't afford to keep thinking about his mad dream... he had better things to do... 'Everything' else mattered now...