Kafka in Ayodhya

On 21st September I was at Tegel airport when I received on my phone an email from N., an Urdu poet who runs a small clothes shop in Varanasi: “The judgment, you know, is coming soon. The situation is tense here. Closing my shop and taking the train to Faizabad. Hope nothing untoward happens this time.” The email, it appeared, had been composed in haste. The reason was obvious.

The judgment from a court of law! I gave a gentle laugh, shaking my head at the cruel impossibility of the idea of justice emerging from a decadent bureaucracy. Joseph K. knows about it very well, doesn’t he? I wish he were here to share the joke with me. But he had gone for a legal consultation after dropping me off at the airport. I kept waving back at him for a while—the devil looked dapper in his dark suit and black bowler hat.

At the airport, I was waiting for the boarding gates to open for my flight to Delhi. There was time yet so I called N. and, cutting short my plan to surprise him, I asked him to wait for me at the Varanasi airport the next day. He sounded worried but hearing my plan he agreed. “Thanks,” I said, my voice oozing with the controlled happiness of a shy man.

Having made the arrangement with N., I could relax a bit. I tried looking at the women in the lounge, just like in my youthful days at Madame Goldsmith’s establishment in Prague. Ah, those were the days, I chuckled heartily at my own lustfulness, now more a memory than a sensation in my decaying body. With age, the deeper realm of sexual life was already closed to me. Two rows ahead of me, I saw a short girl wearing glasses sitting on a plastic chair and reading a paperback. She had plump little legs. Seeing her, memories of Hedwig Therese Weiler came rushing back at me. I was in love with Hedwig. Little did I know then, and that was decades ago, that my life would be a series of disappointments in love.

Gregor who I was taking along to India jumped about inside the suitcase. Perhaps he was hungry. I dropped a few slices of cheese for him and kept the case steady on my lap. I pretended to read a newspaper while listening to the scratching that Gergor’s little limbs produced. That was not music to my ears but was still better than the noise that my sister used to make by rubbing a card between her teeth. My house was the very headquarters of uproar and even the doors screeched as though from a catarrhal throat. Between my house and the sanatorium, between company and solitude, honestly speaking, I always preferred the sanatorium, and of course, solitude.

What is it about the sanatoriums that perks me up—I don’t know. Is it the Teutonic order that attracts me or is it the luxuries of the establishment? Hard for me to figure out. Or maybe it is the Luftbader, the hydrotherapy, the electric light baths—all these apparatuses to treat neurasthenia that produces the sweetness one experiences in a relationship with a woman one loves. Ah, how I miss Zuckmantel!

Ten more minutes passed. I patiently waited for the gate to open—it was almost time but the Chinese girl at the gate was busy chatting on a phone. How insensitive! Is the plane going to be late, I wondered. A stream of men, women and children visited the toilets that were just about a hundred meters from where I was sitting. I too felt the urge to visit the toilet but then thinking of Gregor decided against it. Poor Gregor was having his dinner and it was not proper to disturb him in that state.

Finally, fifteen minutes past the scheduled time, passengers were allowed to board the plane. I set Gregor nicely in the overhead luggage compartment, made a last call to Dora and switched off the phone. Considering the long journey, I was already feeling dazed and sleepy.

The long flight felt like a time in the sanatorium, only with very little leg room. A fat airhostess in a blue dress (she reminded me of the hostesses at Madame Goldsmith’s who performed professional services for a set fee of ten imperial crowns in pre-war Prague) insisted that I had a nightcap. It would have been impolite to decline her offer. I had a cognac from a small plastic glass and soon after I dozed off like a good old man, watching parts of The Unbearable Lightness of Being between waking up and falling asleep. The film based on my fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera’s novel was almost like soft porn, with a sex scene thrown in every ten minutes. The only insightful moment in the film was when Daniel Day-Lewis, the doctor protagonist, talks about Oedipus Rex: how Oedipus, after unknowingly killing his father and sleeping with his mother, was filled with guilt at his unethical act; on the contrary, the Czech politicians didn’t feel any shame or remorse after having raped their own motherland and having sold it to the Russians; they could see everything but their own crime—that was the point Kundera seemed to make.

As the airplane floated through the night, I lost the sense of time. I was woken up by the fat airhostess just before we were to land in Delhi. As the plane descended, I nearly lost my hearing. My ears buzzed and rang with pain. After getting off the plane, I cleared immigration without any trouble and took a taxi to the domestic airport to catch the connecting flight to Varanasi. I felt overtired in my bones when I reached my final destination.

At Varanasi, the airport was crowded and people walked around without grace, defying the idea of serenity that one hoped would emerge from a divine Ganges flowing through the city and holy men taking dips in its water. N. was waiting for me at the reception, wearing a green cotton shirt and blue jeans. “Herr Kafka, so good to see you,” he said and wrapped me in his embrace. I was already feeling the warmth of Indian friendship. “So lovely to finally meet you N.,” I told my friend. N. and I, we had started off as pen friends and had progressed to the next stage, becoming phone friends. Now, don’t you think I’ve changed much—I’m still not gregarious, I’m still very much a misanthrope, but after meeting Max and Dora, I have opened up a little bit more to friends from strange shores. As I spend most of my time in sanatoriums, sometimes the loneliness becomes unbearable. After all, how much could one read Kierkegaard and Chekhov and Dickens? Dora had gifted me a cellphone and it was easy to keep in touch with my friends in the East, N. in India and F. in China. F. had helped me during my visit to China when I was researching for my story, The Great Wall of China.

So, finally I was in the heart of spiritual India—the fabled land of wisdom. We used to discuss Indian wisdom at “At the Unicorn”, the Prague salon of Berta Fanta where intellectuals such as Meyrink, Franz Werfel, Willy Haas, Max Brod, Rainer Maria Rilke and Albert Einstein would assemble. And how could I forget the Indian dance girl in Prague who provided me with a miracle of a Sunday.

Luckily no one recognized me at the airport, so we had an undramatic exit. I wanted to avoid the marigold garlands and the Hindu religious mark on the forehead. It was such a cliché for a tourist in India. It was hot and sunny outside and the air was redolent with the smell of Indian soil. I took some deep breaths, checking the air if it gave me any coughs. Thankfully, the air did not irritate my lungs. I was happy to be in a new place and yet I hated my body that was so weak and brittle. I needed to be cautious.

We had a train to catch to reach Ayodhya. N. suggested that we should eat something first. I could hear Gregor scratching the surface of the leather case indicating that he too was hungry. We stopped by a roadside eatery and had roti and dal, the least spicy food available there. I threw some breadcrumbs to Gregor. The bugger heartily consumed it. The smell of pure ghee on the roti created a sudden urge in me for the Prague butter. I miss it, I miss it everyday.

The train ride to Ayodhya in a crowded non-air-conditioned railway compartment was a reminder of the Eastern suffering, even cruelty, of many bodies packed in small spaces, in the cartography of claustrophobia. Outside the train’s windows, the countryside passed in a blur, like a girl undressing in haste—its outward silence and stillness a reminder of my incapacity. Gusts of wind, laden with fine dust, came through the windows and I began to cough violently. N. looked worried and pulled out a bottle of water from his bag. I took a gulp of water. “I’ve always felt it my special misfortune,” I told him, running a hand over my chest, “that I literally do not have the lung power to breathe into the world the richness and variety that it obviously has.”

As the train kept chugging leisurely, N. and I talked about life and business. “I admire you because you have a business, you are your own master” I told N. “Before joining Assicurazioni Generali, I had toyed with the idea of starting an asbestos manufacturing plant in Prague. Well, it was more my brother-in-law’s idea than mine. But it never worked out.”

“Do you regret it?” N. said, running his fingers through his hair. “Not being your own master?”

“I don’t know. Life is a mystery. It was not meant to unfold like that for me.”

N. sat there smiling by the coach’s window, his long curly hair swept up by the wind. He had a burnished face, his round cheeks puffed up with fat and muscle. My old cheeks were sunken, his was a young face. “But more than that business thing, you know,” I said, scratching my chin, “I admire you for your luck. You have a wife and a son. Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come is the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.”

N. nodded his head and looked up, his hands in supplication, as if thanking God for bestowing mercies on him. Contrary to me, it was clear that he was a man of faith. “You never got married?” he said with an awkward smile.

“Unfortunately, I never had the good fortune of marrying and having children,” I said, sucking air that flowed through the window on my right. I looked out listlessly. Now, the train was pulling over at a station. The station was nothing but a cemented platform with a tin shade; a signal block and a small office for the station master with a ticket window punctuated the platform’s length. Vendors with tea kettles and fried food on trays ran through the train’s coaches hawking their merchandise.

“Do you want some tea Herr Kafka?” N. asked politely.

“No, actually, I am fine,” I said, fearing infection of some kind from consuming the hawker food.

Some villagers climbed into our coach and for a minute or so, the bogey came alive with murmurings. The new passengers found their seats or squatted on the train’s floor, after adjusting their luggage in the crooks between people’s legs. About two minutes passed, the train whistled and jerked into motion. A painful stillness descended.

When we got down at Ayodhya, a small ancient town with a Hindu mythological past, I was struck by its simplicity. It was a place that seemed to be content in its ordinariness, a featureless wasteland. Looking at its topography, the misalignment of structures, the smallness of its huts and buildings, the dirt and the dust, the idea of justice seemed asymmetrical to this place. The town seemed readymade to bear injustice and violence.

“This is Ayodhya where Lord Ram was born,” N. said, as we walked towards the controversial structure which was claimed by both Muslims and Hindus. The structure, which used to be a mosque built in the time of Mughal emperor Babur, looked like a mottled dolphin, torpedoed to death, lying lifeless at the bottom of the sea of hatred. “Ram, the hero of the legendary epic Ramayana, was a mariyada purush—a man of principles. When his wife Sita was rescued and brought back to Ayodhya after she was abducted by Ravana, people doubted her purity. Ram listened to what his people demanded and asked Sita to prove her purity by walking through a bed of fire. So judicious and public spirited that great man was.”

“Oh, how tormenting is that…to doubt love…love’s purity!” I thought.

As we continued walking through the streets, we saw police and army formations dominating the town’s streets. For a moment I thought I was at Checkpoint Charlie. It was neither easy nor safe for us to go near the disputed structure. At a distance, we stood under the shade of a peepal tree where some half-naked sadhus were drinking tea and taking puffs from a chillum. “Jai Shri Ram!” they greeted us. “Hi!” I said, surveying their grey and white flowing beards and admiring their shiny dark skin partly wrapped in saffron gears.

Gregor was jumping again inside the suitcase. I took out some cheese from my pocket and threw it into the case. He enthusiastically lapped up the food and expressed his gratitude by twitching his legs in the air.

“For nearly sixty years,” N. continued, “Muslims and Hindus have been fighting over this Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi structure. After Independence of India, some Hindus suddenly developed a belief that Lord Rama was born at the same place where the mosque stood. So, in 1949, they forced themselves into the mosque and placed Ram’s statues under the mosque’s dome. In 1992, they demolished the mosque. Thousands died in communal riots that followed the demolition. Nobody was punished. Hindus and Muslims went to court claiming title over the land and now the judgment is imminent.”

“A judgment… a judgment…” the words rolled on my tongue. “What chance does a judgment have in the face of faith’s absolutism?”

I felt like telling N. about the Old Synagogue in Prague, the same synagogue that Hitler wanted to preserve as a mocking memorial to a vanished people. “You know N.,” I said, “the Nazis wanted to grind the synagogue to dust by destroying the Jews themselves. Here, it seems history is moving backwards. Watch out for the yellow patch for your people.”

A TV crew emerged out of nowhere and pounced upon us. A journalist wearing a kurta shoved a boom mic into my face. He seemed ecstatic at his foreign catch. “Who are you sir? A foreign journalist? From England? From America?”

I moved away from the TV journalist and turned my face, my hands clutching the rough barks of the tree trunk.

“No, no,” N. said, coming to my rescue, “he is not a journalist and he is not from England. Please leave us alone.” The sadhus, drawing their pot, waved at the journalist. “Jai Shri Ram!” they shouted jauntily.

Our intransigence emboldened the journalist.  “Then who are you, sir? A tourist? A spy?”

“He is a writer,” N. said, joining his hands in a polite refusal. “From Germany. Now, will you please leave us alone?”

“Here is a writer from Germany,” the journalist looked toward the camera that was being carried by another man. “Roll the camera!” he shouted. “Here’s a writer from Germany…Gunter Grass…you must be Gunter Grass, sir, right, sir?”

The man strode nearer to me but I was being shielded by N. His back was toward me and he faced the TV crew.

“Gunter Grass…Gunter Grass…Tin Drum…Tin Drum!” the man shouted childlike, mock-drumming in the air, his eyes wild with excitement. The camera’s red eye was blinking under the gathering dusk of the peepal tree.

N. took me aside and we quickly left the scene. Gregor was silent—either he had sensed danger or had fallen asleep.

Next day in my hotel room in Varanasi, where I was registered as “Joseph K.”, I saw the judgment that was being covered live on TV. Gregor too was watching the news, hanging upside down from the roof—his favourite position. In an astonishing judgment, the three judges divided the disputed land in three parts, giving one part to Muslims and two parts to Hindus.

Hearing the judgment Gregor nearly fell down from the roof. This startled N., who was arranging last night’s dinner’s leftovers on a used newspaper for my companion. Gregor’s little limbs buzzed for a while and then he scurried to the leather sofa, making some animal noises throughout the run. He settled himself on the sofa near the window and fell silent like a ponderous sadhu.

N., who was sitting grave-faced in my room since morning, said, “This is no justice Herr Kafka.” His voice rumbled with excitement, his eyes were teary. “But Muslims had expected this. Good thing is at least there would be no riots, no bloodshed this time. But both the parties would not accept the verdict: they would go to the Supreme Court to appeal against it. Again, this monstrous issue would rest for 20-30 years to raise its ugly head in the future.”

For hours, our eyes were glued to the TV screen, following the TV studio debate. The anchor paraded a number of opinionated people who were hell-bent on justifying or invalidating the verdict.

“The judgment vindicates the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. This clears the path for building a grand Ram Temple at the site,” said a bald-headed politician who sported a grey toothbrush moustache.

“The view that the Babri Masjid was built at the site of a Hindu temple, where’s the proof for that? Now this view has been maintained by two of the three judges, but I must say that it takes no account of all the evidence contrary to this fact. One just has to study the Archaeological Survey of India’s site excavation reports,” said a historian with the obstinacy of a Soviet comrade.

“What is ridiculous is that no proof has been offered even of the fact that a Hindu belief in Lord Rama’s birth-site being the same as the site of the mosque had at all existed before very recent times, let alone since ‘time immemorial’,” said an agitated white-haired sari-clad woman.

“The judgment is yet another blow to the secular fabric of our country and the repute of our judiciary,” lamented a bespectacled gentleman in a safari suit.

“I completely disagree with this gentleman,” said a clean-shaven fair-skinned man, raising his fist in the air, “this is the best judgment there could have been; wise and secular.”

When I switched off the TV, I told N., “You know N., Lord Ram is so revered all over India. There are shrines devoted to him. But what about the thousands who have died due to the movement to build a grand temple at his birthplace? Will there be a memorial for them? Do you know how do the children of Germany remember the Jews who were gassed by the Nazis? Every school-going child is given the task to find out the biography of a Nazi victim. When the biography is ready, a plaque is made with the victim’s name on it and children go and bury it in the place where that person lived. I hope when your son grows up, he gets to live in a large-hearted India where victims of riots are memorialized like that.”

With these words, I sent a teary-eyed N. home. Before leaving the room, N. hugged me and bid farewell to Gregor who was still enjoying the fresh air wafting in through the window.

Next day, at the Delhi airport, somehow word got out and I was mobbed by journalists. There were dozens of them, hounding me like a pack with their cameras and boom mics.

“Mr. Kafka, what do you think of the judgment on Ayodhya?” they asked me in a chorus.

I stood by a wall and covered my eyes with my hands and rocking back and forth, I said, “I’m afraid of the truth…. One must be silent, if one can’t give any help.”

“But Mr. Kafka,” an aggressive-looking middle-aged male journalist asked, “Do you think it is unjust to build a temple where Lord Ram was born?”

I was feeling tired. The airport’s bright lights and flashes and sunguns from cameras made me uncomfortable. Then I remembered a Hasidic parable that seemed to suggest an apt answer to the question.

“How do you know young man,” I said, “what is more pleasing to God? Your temple after destroying a mosque or the suffering of those whose place of worship you destroyed?”

“Then what should we do?” asked a young journalist who, in her pleated hair, looked like a school girl.

“Leave the structure as it is. Incompletion is also a quality, a facet of nobility. It has a capacity for silence. At least, that’s what I do with my work.”

At my reply, the female journalist’s eyes twinkled, and her lips curved into a smile. I smiled back at her and waved my hand. Then turning away from the crowd, I pulled out my phone to call Dora that I was on my way to board the plane.

When a draft of this narrative was shown to Franz Kafka, he repudiated its authenticity. He only conceded that some of the dialogues were direct lifts from his diaries or were part of his reported conversations with his friends. He gave a hearty laugh after reading the draft, and said it was a joke of Borgesian proportions.

Published in two parts (part 1 here and part 2 here) in The Daily Star, Dhaka

The Lone Fighter

“That’s all trash, brother. Why are you wasting your time?” a voice accosted me, catching me midway between a sentence and the next in The Rachel Papers.

On that evening I was at Kinokuniya. After browsing through a number of classics, I was standing in front of a shelf full of contemporary works. Amid scores of novels dealing with adult themes by writers I didn’t recognize, two titles, one by Martin Amis and another by Ian MacEwan, grabbed my attention. I was especially interested in Amis’s work. It was his first novel, The Rachel Papers that I was looking at. It was at that point of time that Asato’s voice reached my ears: “That’s all trash, brother. Why are you wasting your time?”

The intrusive voice offended me. I turned back and saw this little bald man in disheveled clothes standing right behind me. He had a bespectacled oriental face resting on a slender neck. I couldn’t remember seeing him before.

In a hectoring tone, he started an unsolicited commentary, “and the shelf next to it, and even the one next to the next…it is all trash, brother” the stranger said, pointing his small fingers toward the neighbouring shelves in the bookstore.

What rubbish, I thought. I had just seen a Dr. Zhivago on one of those shelves.

“This is not literature brother. This is all sex and trash,” he remarked.

I felt my raised heckles calming down. In a moment, the man’s sincerity had me enthralled.

But I was still thinking who this man was: a deranged college professor or an over-enthusiastic local writer? Or was he a government representative, the Singaporean version of a real ‘thought police,’ a man in charge of guiding and informing public taste in literature and arts? Whoever he was, he had managed to win my attention.

“Let me show you some real literature,” the little man said, as though daring me, especially emphasizing on the word literature, and started walking towards a corner shelf. He was so sure I would follow him that he did not even look back. He was right. I did trail behind him until we reached the corner of the hall and stood in front of a shelf. It was full of poetry titles.

He pulled out a hard-bound book and quickly leafed through the bastard and the title pages, his fingers finally resting on the contents page.

“See how many poems are there? Only four! You see here. No good book. And look at the price of the book. Thirty-five dollars! These four poems which are useless cost you thirty-five dollars when put between the covers. Are they worth that much, brother? Tell me, are they?”

While I nodded in agreement, analyzing in the back of mind whether he was justified in his assessment, he continued his dirge.

“I am a poet too,” he blurted, pulling out a chapbook from the bunch of papers and books that he was carrying. So the secret was finally out, I thought. He flashed the book in front of my eyes and then held it vertically to let me have a good look. The chapbook consisted of photocopied papers, neatly stapled together, with a yellow sheet as a cover. On the cover was printed: “An Orange Door.” Below the title was his name. Asato. Near the bottom of the page, where one would expect a publisher’s name and logo, was this inscription in capital letters: A Traveller’s collection of Poems. “Traveller’s” and “Poems” were in bold letters.

“I am selling it for twenty dollars,” he said with a smile. His teeth were uneven and dirty.

His gumption astounded me. Standing in one of the biggest bookstores of Singapore, there was this little man declaring shelf after shelf of books to be trash and pitching his chapbook of poems as the only worth-your-money-and-attention literary gem. The guy had some guts!

Before I could gather my nerves after being exposed to this sudden sales pitch, he pulled out yet another book. “You see this book–this is my novel. A Brush with Luck. Doing very well at the Amazon.com.” To corroborate his claim, he even showed me a printout of the website’s bestselling list. True. His novel was there at the top of the list.

I looked closely at the novel’s cover. Unmistakably, his name was there. The copy looked ill produced and soiled. The reason, I guessed, was that this trophy of a novel kept company with the itinerant author all the time.

Without letting my attention swerve, he pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and thrust it into my hands.

“Read it,” he said, slightly bending his head over the piece of paper that my fingers were unfolding to its full-size. His tone was collegial and it seemed that what we were doing there was the most natural thing to do in a bookstore. I saw people moving and flitting from shelf to shelf, browsing books. So far no body had objected to our discussion. How noble and decent people become in a bookstore!

The piece of paper was actually a letter of recommendation by one Professor Harpal Singh of National University of Singapore. The content of the letter praised Asato’s works in great detail. The sentences could have easily been used for the blurb of Asato’s novel.

While I was reading the letter, Asato looked intently at me. I could see that from the corner of my eyes. An idea struck me. “Why don’t we discuss whatever you have to say over a cup of coffee?”

“Sure, brother” he said, with an eagerness that’s hard to find in strangers in big cities.

We started walking towards the café in the bookstore, past the life sciences, IT and travel books sections. On the way, Asato kept whining: “Today’s publishers, they are not interested in genuine books, in works of literature. They are only interested in pushing trash to the readers.”

From his description, publishers didn’t sound like publishers but a picture emerged of drug peddlers who were injecting the innocent public with the poison of trash, destroying their reading tastes forever.

That sounded so true. I kept nodding to whatever he was saying. I was interested in him. I wanted to unravel the mystery that he was. His voice came as though from a vacuum, mixed with the tenuous hum of the shuffling of pages and human bodies in the bookstore.

“That’s why I have decided to reach my readers on my own,” he said, and with a flourish shoved another piece of photocopied paper into face.

The warrior was showing me his weapons, one by one.

This was a piece of declaration. Declaration of war against the publishers of the world. A writer had decided to shun them all and directly reach his readership. “I am the lone fighter,” he declared, his zest akin to that of a diehard communist, a literary guerrilla in a capitalistic bookstore.

As I was going through his declaration, he started complaining about a Chinese lady who he had met in a photocopier shop that very morning. “I just wanted her to photocopy my poems and bind them together in a book but she could not understand a thing,” he said. “So irritating!”

His yakking stopped when we reached the café. It was a small corner of the bookshop that had been turned into a cafeteria. A few couples occupied the seats here and there. Shiny colorful volumes rested on the table in front of them. I chose a corner table for us.

After ordering coffee, we sat face to face across a wide wooden table.

“Where are you from Asato?” I asked him. I wanted to know this man who seemed to be so passionate about books and writing.

“I am a Japanese,” he said, tearing the sachet of sugar.

“Interesting. So, you are coming from Japan?”

“No. I am coming from a trip in the UK.”

“So, where do you live? In Japan or in UK?”

“Neither, brother. I live in the USA.”

“Really?” My fingers stayed put over the milk pot for a moment.

“I was fourteen when I fled Japan. That was thirty years ago. I went to the USA to become a writer.”

“Why did you flee from Japan? You could have become a writer there itself. Aren’t writers like Haruki Murakami flourishing in Japan?”

“Yes, but I realized Japan was not the place for me. The Japanese society is an empty shell. People don’t respect each other there,” he said with an unpatriotic nonchalance.

“So, where are you staying here in Singapore?”

“At the airport.”

“At the airport?”

“Yes, I have been sleeping in the airport, and you know brother, since I have no money, I went to the Japanese embassy to seek their help but they didn’t help me.”

“Oh, that’s terrible.”

As the conversation flowed, I thought, Asato was like one of those writers of yore. Roaming saints. Recounting their poetry from village to village, feeding on people’s generosity, driving pleasure and satisfaction from the praise that came their way. The way of the travelling poet, as one of his chapbooks alluded to.

“Tell me about your first novel, Asato?” I asked him, changing the topic. “How did you get it published?”

“I got it published here in Singapore. My girlfriend financed it. I gave five grands to a publisher here and he printed 200 copies for me.”

Oh, so it was a self published novel, I realized.

“Asato, you are a lucky man,” I teased him. “You have a girlfriend who finances your work.”

A shadow passed over his face. He was about to take a sip from his cup of coffee but he stopped midway. “She has left me now.”

“Oh, I see. I’m sorry”

Both of us fell silent for a while.

“Never mind,” I tried to break the silence. “Self-publishing is not that bad Asato. So many great writers started their writing careers with self-published volumes.” I hoped my words would comfort him. “Do you know that James Joyce self-published his magnum opus Ulysses?”

“Did he?” his eyes brimmed over with excitement.

“That’s right. And so did Virginia Woolf and many others.”

“Really? Virginia Woolf too? I didn’t know, brother.”

“And in contemporary times, even Vikram Seth. He self-published his first collection of poems when he was in college.”

“Who?”

“Vikram Seth, the Indian novelist and poet.”

“Never heard of him, brother.”

“That’s strange. His novel, A Suitable Boy, is world famous. It is one of the heftiest novels of the world. Heftier, if not more admired, than Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”

“Really, brother?” he interjected, his voice tinged with a childish excitement.

I nodded, taking a deep sip from my cup of coffee.

“I know Tolstoy,” he said. “I love him.”

“Who else do you love Asato?”

“I love Hemingway. And Faulkner. And I like the Russian writers. Gogol. Pushkin. Dostoevsky.”

“What about Chekhov? Do you like him too?”

“Who did you say, brother?”

“Chekhov. Anton Chekhov.”

“No. Never heard of him.”

I began to get the creeps. This man who claims to love the Russian writers has not even heard of Chekhov, the greatest short story writer of the world.

“You must have heard of Raymond Carver then. He was known as the Chekhov of America.”

“Raymond Carver. Nope. Brother, I have not heard of him too.”

My doubts were now taking root. Was Asato really a writer or a charlatan masquerading as a writer? Or was he like Arjuna in the Hindu epic Mahabharta who could see nothing but the eye of the bird?

But then I reminded myself not to judge a person too soon. It would not only be difficult but even unjust to dismiss a person just like that.

I tried to change the topic of our conversation. I asked him about the places now. America. London. Singapore. Dublin. St. Petersburg. Asato liked America the most. “At least people there let you be, and writers are generally respected.”

“London?”

“I love London, brother. Londoners love poetry.”

“And St. Petersburg?”

He was overjoyed when I mentioned St. Petersburg.

“Brother, people just love books there…their drawing rooms are full of books…I’d love to live in a place like that.”

Then I told him that Chekhov first began to publish his stories while he lived in St. Petersburg. He nodded absentmindedly.

Asato said he desired to go to Dublin, the city of James Joyce. About Singapore, he had a different take. He again launched into a tirade against the Chinese photocopy lady.

“That lady, she had the dare to call me a comrade…am I her friend? She was treating me as if I was her equal? She, a photocopy lady, and I, a writer, where’s the equation? Brother, it is like communism, where everybody treats everyone the same way…I don’t like this.”

It was getting late and we were the only ones left in the café. The waitress, fiddling with the cutlery, was tossing reminders at us, silently beseeching us to leave the place. It was time to close the cafe. I went silent for a moment, thinking how to extricate myself from this Asato.

Asato was perhaps waiting for a moment like this. “So, brother, which one would you like to buy?” he pointed towards his chapbooks.

I had not made up my mind yet. In fact, I was not even sure if I wanted to buy any of his books. I was not ready to commit to anything.

“Brother, I am flat broke. Please help me. Buy at least one of my books.”

My heart melted at his plea. I thought: imagine if I were in his shoes? What would I expect from the other person?

I bought his book of haikus for twenty dollars. He gave me another book for free. In return, I gave him some free advice.

“Asato, why don’t you write to writers’ foundations for grants? Write to PEN. They will help you.”

“I don’t know brother. Can you help me with this?”

“Yes, sure.”

I promised him that I would send him some addresses soon. The moment we exchanged our emails, I knew we would never write to each other.

“Brother,” he asked me, “how do you know so much about these things?”

The moment had come for one ghost to surprise the other ghost.

“I am also a writer.”

“Oh…” he said, his mouth agape.

“What do you write? Novels?”

“No, no, not novels. I write travel books. I have written a few novellas though, but they haven’t been published.” I did not want to wax eloquent about my travel books and how they were selling well in the local market and in Thailand and Malaysia.

“That’s interesting, brother,” he said with a dull smile. I could see the effort but it was natural. Writers only like readers, not other writers.

I thanked him and came out of the café. The bookshop was anyway closing now for the day. People were filing out of the store.

On the courtyard outside Ngee Ann City Mall, as I lit up a cigarette, I saw Asato pass me by. He was taking hurried steps as if he had a destination to go to. Where was he going? To the airport? Or to catch another customer for his poems somewhere else? I had no idea. I didn’t even know for sure if whatever he shared with me in the cafe was true.

Published in the Star Weekend Magazine, The Daily Star, Dhaka.

The Rats

7: 00 a.m.

It was like any other week day morning, grubby and dull. Delhi’s early summer sun cast its dust-laden rays on the wilting creepers, which had run wild all over the balcony’s iron fence. Not many green leaves were left; most of them had yellowed and wilted like useless memories, waiting to be plucked off and thrown away. The film of dust and smoke on the synthetic curtain made him cringe with disgust. Silently he cursed his wife. How many times he had hinted that she ought to give it a wash. But did she bother?

A little girl whined in the neighbor’s room. He hated them, his neighbors. A family of five—parents and three kids—breathed in that dungeon of a room. Bedroom, study, bathroom, kitchen — all rolled into one common space. A six by ten hellhole, a graveyard of living souls.

As the girl’s whine reached a crescendo, a rage surged inside him. He felt like gagging her. Or, maybe throw her down the stairs. At least then he would be spared the pain of those whines that filled his guts with hatred and violence. Many times he thought of doing so, but actually he never came around doing it. Not because it would be a heinous crime but because there would be too many legal hassles after committing a murder. This thought desisted him from taking any step in that direction, adding to his misery.

Why was the little daughter crying today? Maybe she wanted one more slice of bread. Or maybe she wanted a candy. Everything was rationed in that house. The sole breadwinner of that family was a darner by profession. Nowhere in the world are darners known for their riches. Their penury was not a surprise for him. Like bad air, it was everywhere in the mohalla. What rather annoyed him was his own condition, his unenviable situation. Being educated and working as a clerk in a firm, he could never afford to live in a neighborhood of well-to-do people. In this part of the world, if one was not well connected, one could hardly look forward to better things in life.

Nagged by his wife, and also because of his own distaste for the locality, he had thought of moving house time and again. But every time, some bottleneck would come up to thwart his plans. In any case, he was either changing jobs or changing houses. In the process, he had had the experience of having a washer man, an auto driver, a priest, and now a darner as his neighbors.

What could he do? He either cursed his cussed fate or thought ill of his parents. His father was retired now. Once, he too was a clerk. An honest man who did not take bribes, and bequeathed a doomed future to himself and his family. His retired father’s pension fell short of keeping the hearth going. So, a big part of his salary was sent home every month. That took care of the household expenses and also provided for the education of his brothers and sisters. “Who would marry your sisters if they are not educated?” his father said to him once. That was true. So he bore this burden like a donkey. He could have easily rebelled against the responsibilities that had been forced on him. But his conscience did not allow him. Conscience! Another middle class notion, he thought, chuckling to himself.

The little girl still bleated in a monotone. It sounded as though someone had pressed a finger on a harmonium’s key and had forgotten to lift it off. No one in the family even cared to console her. Her whining was her complaint; others’ silence their protest. Her mother, a disease-ridden fat woman, did not even try to hush her. Long ago she had resigned herself to the helplessness of poverty.

7: 15 a. m.

The thud of the newspaper caught his ears. Every morning the vendor threw it at his doorstep. He saw his wife making tea in the kitchen. He felt an urgent need to look at the paper. He must have it in his hands before any body else. It was an inner compulsion. Yet he didn’t know why he felt like that.

He opened the rusty iron gate and bent down to pick up the newspaper. His touch revealed it was tout and crisp. He felt nice about it. At least there was something to be happy about in the morning. The paper afforded him an assurance of familiarity.

Between bending down and standing up, his eyes stole a glance at his neighbor’s door. The narrow slit of the half-closed door offered him a slice of their life. After all, it was a part of the daily ritual. The father was sitting and darning a shirt facing a heap of clothes. He saw the elder daughter in profile. She was reading a textbook. Though he could not see the little girl, her whine was still there as a background score.

The father, through his eyebrows, asked the daughter to shut the door. He saw a small hand giving a push to the door. The hinges screeched and the door slammed shut. By the time their door was completely closed, he was scanning the newspaper’s front page. He too bolted his own iron doors, hurriedly, shutting all miseries out. The filth and dirt beyond his doors did not belong to him, he thought. He felt a little relieved at this idea.

7: 16 a. m.

The tea was steaming in a blue china cup. It seemed to invite his lips. He took a sip. His face became creased with distaste.

“Not good?” his wife asked.

“No, it’s all right,” he said, still looking at the newspaper.

“It’s the tea, dear. We must change the brand.”

“They are all the same. Any way, do as you wish.”

He did not want to start another argument with his wife. It had happened last night only. And he could not sleep well because of her chuntering. He just laid himself on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The previous night’s bitter shadows still haunted him. How long had it taken him to doze off! How long? He didn’t even remember that.

Sleep had been a major problem in his life. Ever since he became an adult, sleep did not come to him naturally. It had to be coaxed and cajoled. It played games with him. It was like a hard-to-please mistress, an illusory delirium with a slippery soul. In such moments, the cold hands of death seemed to caress him in the womb of dark silences. He would feel his body stiffen and freeze on a bed of hundred snakes. Sometimes in the uncanny darkness of the night, slumber came and went off in a trice. Then it gaped at him like a complete stranger making him feel like a dead man. He would then feel that his coffin was being lowered in a grave. This sinking feeling always filled his consciousness with horror—a cold, slimy and quivering horror. The thought made the tea taste more rancid in his mouth. He felt his stomach churn.

7: 30 a.m.

It was time to go to the toilet. He picked up the color supplement of the paper and started for the lavatory. He hated going there. The first reason was that he had to share it with his neighbors. The second reason was that it was never clean. It stank like hell. Compared to it, a horse stable might smell as good as a holy shrine. To make matters worse, a 60-watt bulb hung down from the ceiling at a precarious angle, threatening to open up anyone’s skull at any moment. And there were cobwebs all over the place. He despised them the most. But the funniest part about the toilet was that that one could not bolt up the door from inside.

While sitting in the toilet on his haunches, he flipped through the newspaper supplement. He read the headlines. He looked at the pictures. He read some of the highlighted portions of the stories. There were more advertisements on every page than news stories or articles. He looked at the television schedules of movie channels. He went over to the last page to read tidbits related to film stars.

Suddenly the power went off. The toilet became semi-dark. Slivers of light came in through the broken parts of the door. He folded the paper and ensconced it between his thigh and stomach. When he was done, he threw a bucketful of water into the toilet bowl, as the flush was out of order.

7: 40 a. m.

He washed his hands with soap. While brushing his teeth, he briefly looked at his wife. She was still preparing breakfast in the kitchen. He could hear her kneading wheat flour in a steel bowl on the cemented counter.

“Why do you look so glum?” he asked her, words fumbling out through the sea of toothpaste froth in his mouth.

“No. I’m just fine,” she said, looking at him from the corners of her eyes.

“But you look so sad. Is everything fine with you?”

“We must do something about them.”

“About who?”

“The rats!”

He knew this issue would come up for discussion one of these days. The rats! Those despicable creatures! He dreaded talking about them. A train of images whizzed past his eyes. Rats jumping around on kitchen utensils. Rats scurrying alongside the room’s skirting, sneaking into sheets and pillows. Rats climbing up the wired mesh of the refrigerator’s back. Rats climbing up the bamboo chic over the window. Rats had rattled their lives.

One night his wife opened her eyes and found two shiny beads gazing at her. It was a pair of rat’s eyes. She had screamed so loudly that his neighbors had woken up with a start. He had seen their room’s lights come on. For the past few months, the menace of the rats had reached a climactic situation. Last summer, before going to visit their parents, they had poisoned all the rats. They had all died then, ending their trauma.

Now the problem had resurfaced with a new intensity. A few days ago, one morning, his wife had put her foot down, refusing to cook anything till the rats were killed. How patiently he had to persuade her to behave normally, neglecting the mischievous rats! He promised her he would seriously do something about them.

In the evening they had gone to the market to buy rat poison. Most shops did not have rat poison. After he had got tired of asking the shopkeepers for the poison, he had asked his wife to do the same. At this, she had given him a nasty look, as though he had asked her to do the dishes. Finally, they found it in a departmental store.

There was an old man in white dhoti and kurta on the counter. First he refused to have anything that killed rats. “ But I have something that makes them flee,” he said. “And why would you want to kill rats? Don’t kill them. Make them run away.”

He chose not to argue with the old man. He took his advice, along with the poison brick. Coming out of the shop, husband and wife laughed. The packet containing the poison cake clearly said that it killed domestic rats. They thought the shopkeeper was a Jain. He remembered Ravi, one of his Jain friends, who hated even the idea to kill a mosquito.

At night, he placed the poison brick at a strategic place of the flat. Strangely the poison had no effect on the rodents. They remained as naughty as before. He had tried to break the brick into two. It was so hard he couldn’t split it. He kept on changing its position. First, he kept it near the flowerpots, adjacent to his neighbor’s door. The rats came from that door only.

Even after two days, no dead mice turned up. His wife forced him to change the position of the poisonous cake. So, after two days, he kept it behind the gas cylinder, near the rubbish basket. Another ten days passed and the rats still scurried around the room with undiminished glee. The whole experiment had come to a naught. Even then, he had not asked his wife to throw the cake away. Maybe it took some time to show its magic, he guessed.

“Did you hear me? We must do something about the rats!” his wife called him out of his stupor.

“Oh, yes, yes. I was thinking only about it,” he whispered back.

He felt the inside of his mouth burn because of the toothpaste. He turned towards the washbasin. A big drop of foamy saliva fell over his shirt, leaving a mark. He flicked a mouthful of gob into the basin. He turned on the tap and water gushed forth.

“You must hurry up or you will be late for office. Breakfast is almost ready,” his wife shouted from the kitchen. He could smell the aroma of freshly cooked vegetables.

“All right. I’m almost ready. Just give me ten more minutes,” he said.

He looked at himself in the mirror. Did he need a shave? He ran his palm over his bristly cheeks. It’s okay, he thought. He canceled the idea of shaving his stubble. This decision saved five minutes of his time. Pulling the towel off the balcony’s railing, he rushed off for a bath.

8: 00 a. m.

He had a light breakfast and was ready to step out of his house for office. He sat on the edge of the bed, his feet dangling. He had even put on the socks, his feet ready to be docked in the shoes. His wife, sitting on the ground, cleaned the shoes with a brush. A spot of light hovered between them. The polish had come off and the shoes looked lackluster. One side of the soles had worn off. This reminded him of buying a new pair of shoes for himself. Next month perhaps, he thought. The budget was too tight this month.

He could hear his neighbors quarrel over something. He gnashed his teeth in disgust at them.

Before letting him shove in his feet into the shoes, his wife upturned them. She always did so to check if the shoes had anything inside that could hurt her husband’s feet. That way his wife was very caring. He was waiting for his feet to slide into the shoes. He was so certain about this action that he did not even care about it.

He thought about the bus that he was to take to office. It must be very crowded, he thought. He hated going to office by bus, sometimes precariously standing on the footboard of an overloaded Blue Line bus, one hand on the support rail, the other holding his lunch box. A vehicle of his own was still a distant dream for him.

His eyes traveled across the balcony and hovered on the dull landscape up in the front. Far off, edged by the tree canopies in the distance, he saw a five star hotel. It had come up before his own eyes in the last five years. At night, its lights presented a dazzling view, summing up the progress and development made in Delhi in the past few years. Then his eyes sprinted back on the buildings in his neighborhood. There were mostly unfinished structures, with unplastered walls and unplanned formations. They looked like the naked bodies of beggars on the street, just like the people who lived beneath those insipid ceilings. His feet were still not inside the shoes, he suddenly remembered. Why was his wife taking so long today?

“Look,” she said, “what is this?” He saw her holding up an overturned shoe in her hand.

He looked down on the floor. There were tiny black rat droppings. The bloody rodents had taken his shoes for a toilet! He didn’t know if he was to be angry or sad or indifferent at this encroachment. All he knew was that he had to leave his home and break into a run to catch the bus, if he was to reach office in time. After all, punctuality was a part of office discipline. And losing marks on discipline meant risking one’s raise.

“We must do something about the rats!” the wife said with a frown of distress.

“Yes, we must do something about the rats!” He assured her, with a half smile on his lips, as though he was mooning away. He was already thinking of his next locale of struggle. The scene of the crowded bus-stand emerged like a disturbing vision before his eyes.

He put on the shoes. She fastened the laces, which he knew would come undone at least once in the day. This used to happen to his shoes every day. This too was part of the daily routine.

He took the lunch box in one hand and stepped out of the house. Before stepping out, abstractly, he smiled at his wife. She also smiled back at him through the grubby ruins of the morning in the balcony. He had noticed a degree of agitation on her lips’ curve. Yet he could not give it much attention. His entire mind was concentrated on the run he had to break into. He had to dash off to catch the bus, to outrun those who waited at the bus stand like him with the sole ambition of outrunning others and securing a toehold on the carrier. Thinking of this, he hurried his steps. He did not even notice the dappled shadow that ran along with him through the maze of the streets.

First published at www.smallspiralnotebook.com, New York. Only short story selected from India for presentation at the Conference of New South Asian Creative and Academic Writers (26-30 June, 2002) at Colombo, Sri Lanka. The conference was organized by the International Center of Ethnic Studies and British Council, Colombo.

The Revolt

“For me indiscretion is capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else’s intimate life deserves to be whipped.” — Milan Kundera

Dear reader, this is not a usual story. Don’t read it unless you feel sure about your desire to read it. At the end of it, this story may not yield you any benefit, but you can help me in a certain way. Now, if you still want to read it, go on:

… So, finally my book was out. It was my first novel. For more than four years, I had carried it in my head, lost in the maze of its lines and paragraphs. It was like walking pregnant on a high wire. The strange thing was that no one cared about my condition–the pain and the discomfort it caused me. What people only cared about was the product. The process was not important to them. It was a personal trauma that I endured day and night ‘til it rolled out of me–the novel–drop by drop, word by word, until I was sucked and squeezed dry by the blank pages and the creative forces. Once the manuscript was ready, I felt relieved of this lengthy pregnancy. It was as if I had broken free of a self-imposed imprisonment. Now I could shit with a happy heart and as much as I desired and any which way I fancied.

I was feeling smug about it–the accomplishment. A melodious song played on my lips. My head was full of the praise and the attention that fell my way during the book release function. The function had gone well. A cheerful audience seemed to welcome the new author. They asked me interesting questions: How much time did you take to write the book? How did the idea of the book come to you? How close is the story to your life?  I gave them enthusiastic replies: It took me two years to actually write the book; the idea of the book came to me during a love-making session on the rocks while I was in the university; the story is very close to my own life, but fact and fiction have merged into a steamy stew. They clapped and cheered at my replies. With a newfound relish, I signed the copies of my book for readers. Politely, I thanked my friends when they congratulated me. It was a high no alcohol could match; an orgasm no sexy female could unlatch.

Coming back to my room close to midnight, I fixed a drink for myself. I lit a cigarette and with a hot and crisp copy of my book, I plunked myself down on the sofa. Strangely, the whiskey tasted sweet. The cigarette’s pungent smoke kissed the back of my throat. I placed my legs on the central table, with my shoes on. Taking gulps of the drink, I admired the cover of my book. The cover designer had made a colorful mosaic–flowers, trees, highways, buildings, rivers, vehicles, animals, men, women and their body parts. It was a microcosm of our universe, of life, of the world. I marveled at its organization. What a sexy cover, I said to myself. Then, I opened the book. The wall clock chimed twelve times. Its gonging deepened the night’s mystery.

When I was opening the book, little did I know that I was opening something very dangerous, something akin to opening of the Pandora’s box. That I was to realize later; even later than you, as you have the privilege of knowing the chronology of the events while the story unfolds.

I opened the book with an authorial fondness. At first my eyes were fastened to the acknowledgments. I read them and enjoyed their intelligence and humor. Then I moved on. The first chapter began. I cursorily looked at the lines. How smooth and straight they ran! I wondered at the equidistant lines and the spaces in between each pair of words: neat and confident. They stood erect and stout on the pages like hard, excited nipples, sure of their existence and complacent about their usefulness.

It was then that I realized that something strange was happening before me. As I flipped through the pages, I saw certain words and lines erasing themselves from the pages. They were evaporating from the pages into the smoky air of the room. Literally, I mean. I was scared. I frantically turned over the pages, and the same process was getting repeated on every page. The air was getting dense with words, jumbled up and down, like waves in the sea. Was I dreaming? I pinched myself. No, I was not dreaming. It was no hallucination. It was for real. My heart went into a high-speed dhak-dhak with alarm. By the time I reached the last page of the novel, the process was complete. You won’t believe what I saw then. It was a unique scenario no human being has ever seen (I can bet on that). Thousands of words now danced in the air. They reached up to the far away corners of the room. Some even touched the carpet. A large heavy mass of text sat on the sofa, on the center table, and even on the bed. When I looked at the pages of the book, I found to my further horror that some of them were blank. Just blank white pages. Others looked partly blank, like a pariah dog’s naked hairless skin mercilessly exposed at places. And because of the break in the flow of the text, some words had tilted sideways; others had turned upside down, while the remaining ones barely managed to hang on to the surface of the page.

It was all so bizarre that the cigarette fell out of my mouth. Its smoldering remains settled down on the carpet. The goblet shook in my hands, and some of its contents spilled over to the floor. My eyes bulged in a mesmeric fear. I felt as if I had lost control of myself.

“What’s happening, oh my God!” I was shaking in my pants.

“Ha…Ha…Ha….” Laughter rumbled in the room.

“Who’s this…who’s…?” I squeaked. I looked around with horror.

“You know me, Mr. Writer, don’t you?” the chorus-like guttural sound said. Then further laughter followed.

“No, I really don’t know you, sir. I beg of you not to scare me like this. Tell me who you are? Are you a magician? A hypnotist?”

“You are my creator and you don’t know about me? Amazing, Mr. Writer!”

“Come on, please stop puzzling me and tell me who you are!”

Another bout of laughter echoed in the room. By now I was sweating profusely. My temperature went 20 degrees below normal and my limbs felt light as a feather. I felt as though if I was in a chiller. My hair must have stood on end, thick with icicles.

“I am the character ‘C’ in your novel, dammit!” the chorus roared.

“OK, C, OK, but why are you in the wrong place, out of the book, scaring the hell out of me like this?”

“I am not in the wrong place, Mr. Writer. You put me in the wrong place, you got it? I agree that you created me, but I don’t exist in isolation, I don’t hang in the air. I am not a living person but I am the portrait of a living soul.”

“No …C…you see, I don’t…”

“Don’t act like a fool, Mr. Writer. You have portrayed me wrongly in your story. And more than that, your foremost sin is the imprudence on your part. Now I can’t hide my life from the eyes of others. You have made my life hell!”

“How, no…I mean I’ve painted you the way I thought I should do, what’s wrong with that C? It’s about my imagination. And anyway, I have created you and so how can you have a problem with how have I painted you? Isn’t it the creator’s privilege?”

“You have made me a villain in your novel, and so I revolt against you.”

“Revolt against me? Bullshit! What do you mean by this C? Now that the novel has been published and released, and people are already reading it, what can you or I do about it?”

I was trying to get into my bravest shoes. I thought I could order him or convince him to backtrack. I thought I should act like a snake charmer: how a snake charmer manages the movements of a snake.

Similarly, I hoped to bludgeon C into silence and then make him comply with my logic. How wrong I was!

“If not you, then I can! I hate being called a villain. I am not a negative character. And I don’t want to remain one. So, I’ve left your book’s pages!”

“But, listen C, if you don’t go back to where you belong, how will people read the book? What will happen to the book?”

“I don’t care about your goddamn book, Mr. Writer. As of what will people read in your book, don’t you worry about that. Coz I have got a solution for that!”

These were the last words I heard from the chorus-like sounding C. Then the strongest bout of laughter thundered in the room. The words began to shake in waves like the fat belly of a demon. The heavy text that was sitting on the sofa and the table and the bed and the carpet began to rise. The words laying in the far-flung corners of the room began to move towards me. The density of words about me increased like the fat shiny body of an anaconda. The words became a whirlpool whose noose began to clasp me. My feet started dissolving into words, then my shanks, then my thighs and my waist and my stomach and my chest and my neck and finally my head and even my hair. They all became words. Then, like molten glass, I was poured into my own book. I had turned into black type on the pages of the book. On the paper, I was arranged as lines and paragraphs. The process of my wordification and textification went on till the last page of the book. I was helplessly turning into shapes that C desired. I had lost my voice and my heart and my mind and I was just one thing–words. And leaving me there on the pages of my own book, C went out the window–fat, vainglorious, triumphant, and laughing in his now familiar chorus-like sound.

So, dear reader, here I am trapped in my own book and I am telling you my story. Now, everything depends on your courage, my friend. I beg of you to help me out of this curse. If you don’t help me, I will remain trapped forever. If you don’t help me out, how will I tell other stories that I have in my chest? So, please lend me your hand and yank me out of here. Please, dear reader, please. Please don’t go away. Yes, now you are not going to do that—turn the page. Please, please, don’t turn the page, Nooooo….

…

This story was first published in The Six Seasons Review (3&4, Vol 2, No 1 & 2, 2002), Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The Whisper of Yellow Roses

I had nearly forgotten him but one day, when I saw him after two years, my doubts about him were confirmed. I had repeatedly told my friend, Mustafa Kemal, that the bird called true love did not exist. But he, the son of a donkey, was not the one to heed me. His head flew in the air all the time, and his feet were never on the ground. If he became the butt of jokes, one is not to be faulted for having such a friend.

But why would he value the nonsense from a florist like me? Not his fault entirely. After all, my job is not about the brain. And where does advice come from? The brain itself, doesn’t it? I am not a teacher or an intellectual, people who are said to have some good stuff inside their skulls. I’m a poor florist. My job involves the heart, not the brain. When people have something in their hearts and they want to express it, they come riding their scooters or driving their cars to me and buy my ware. The family-minded people or those who want to express their platonic affection buy the mixed bunches or the bouquets. I mean these are people who are going to see a patient or going to wish a friend’s wife or sister. They don’t care much about the quality of flowers or their arrangement. They just fancy a bouquet, and if it suits their pre-determined budget, they buy it in a hurry as if there is no time. It is only the romantically inclined who have all the time in the world to choose what they buy. They would keep looking into the contents of the vase and would finally pick up the healthiest flowers, robust enough to carry their message of love.

My friend Mustafa Kemal was one such customer. I don’t know why we became friends. I generally have nothing but sympathy for people who believe that giving a rose to a girl would ensure lifelong happiness. In fact, I laugh at the silly notions of city folks. Their idiocies are beyond my comprehension. If flowers and happiness were actually related, people all over the world would grow nothing but flowers. Don’t we all crave for happiness? So, says my florist brain, why care about flowers, which are anyway going to end up into the garbage bin? They might remain fresh for a few hours or a few days. But after that they start losing their charm. Exactly like love. They wilt and die and disintegrate. Like certain emotions, like some memories. No, no. One does not mean to say that flowers are totally useless. They provide bread and butter to the empty stomachs of poor folks like us. That is why I am in this business.

Mustafa had been coming to me for a long time now. Maybe it is this long-standing interaction that opened up windows of friendship between us. In fact, it is very difficult to put it down to a point of exactitude. Can we all honestly explain why we became friends with such and such person? I think we can’t.  It is like love. You feel it, you know its warmth, but you are hard put to explain it.

The moment I saw this yellow-cheeked Mustafa I knew he had fallen in love. His hesitation in inquiring about the roses made it clear to me that he was going to express his emotion for the first time. He first surveyed all the flowers and bouquets on display. I watched him from behind my stall where I was putting together a bouquet on order. His eyes hopped from color to color, now delectably watching the roses, and now soaking in the soothing whiteness of the rajnigandhas. Finally he kept on staring at the bucket of rose buds.

“How much are those rose buds?” he asked with a wavering voice.

“Rupees five each,” I said, looking up at him while my fingers gave final touches to the bouquet.

He kept on staring at the roses.

“How many of them do you want, Sir?” I asked him.

He was taken aback by my sudden intrusion into his private inspection. He deliberated for a while, then muttered out of his indulgence, “Err, two…in fact, ahem, one is enough.”

“As you wish, Sir,” I said.

He ran his fingers over the flowers, checking the texture and health of the petals. He finally picked up one.

“Can you pack it up for me?”

“Yes, sure, sir!” I said.

I took the rose from him. I pruned its stem to the right size, plucked out the thorns and wrapped it up with transparent cellophane. He paid and took the packaged rose from me. He looked at his purchase with a whiff of pride. Holding it in his hand like a prized possession, he started his rickety Bajaj scooter and vamoosed away.

After a couple of his visits, the wall of strangeness was gone between us. Riding his wobbly scooter, he visited my shop every evening, at the same time, to buy his rose from me. Our relationship progressed beyond that of a seller and a buyer. So much so that on occasions he would forget to pay me for the roses and I wouldn’t mind his slip. I began to know him better. He was a student at the university. He gave tuitions to support himself like many young men in this city who didn’t come from privileged backgrounds. His love was one of his disciples, the teenage daughter of a rich industrialist.

“She is very beautiful and tender. The only problem is she is too young to…” Mustafa confessed to me one day with a broad grin. He was a shy young man. He wore glasses and had the air of being a learned person.

So it was a case of tender love, I thought. Tantrum-laden teenage girl of a rich father. Poor young tuition master with dreams of falling in love with a rich girl. I knew where it was headed. Selling flowers, I had seen enough life in the city. Maybe I did not have brains. But I had experience on my side. I did warn my friend Mustafa to watch his steps time and again. For me it did not matter if I lost a customer. But who could bear to see disappointment in a friend’s eyes? Yet he was not to listen to me. He thought I was a fool, a peddler. He didn’t reckon he too was a fool, a peddler. I sold flowers. He sold knowledge. The only difference between him and me was that of experience. My experience had taught me something that he was still to learn.

One day when I was downing the shutters of my shop, I realized that Mustafa had not come to my shop to buy his rose bud. Taking hard puffs on my bidi I wondered why. Maybe he was not well. I shut down my shop and left for my little room in old Delhi.

Mustafa did not come the next day, and the next day, and the next day. I did not see him for weeks. Had he gone to his village in Uttar Pradesh? Maybe his father was not well. Maybe his mother had died. I was making up excuses for my friend’s absence. But what could I do? I could only guess about the reasons and remember him. Weeks became months, and months became years. He began to fade away from my memory amid the colorful magnolias and roses and carnations. I did not see him for another two years until today.

He had come riding his same old rattletrap Bajaj. He looked a little thin and wearied. He had a stubble too which I had never seen on his face before. He used to be meticulously clean-shaven all the time. His eyes looked red, almost bloodshot. Perhaps he was not sleeping well, or crying, or drinking, or a combination of all three things affected him.

“So glad to see you prince,” I said shaking hands with him. His hand was cold, slightly limp.

He wore a thin smile on his lips. He looked down on the ground for a while, perhaps searching for a sentence.

“Where have you been boss? All well?” I asked him. I had to ask him.

“I was here only,” he said, meaning he was in Delhi. His voice was tremulous.

“Have you changed your florist or you are angry with your friend?” I asked him a little teasingly.

“No, no. It is not so,” he said with a deadpan expression. He was still a shy man. Perhaps he was bashful about sharing the details of his life’s recent developments with me. I pretty much guessed there was something amiss. It must be that damned love thing, I thought.

“So, want your usual rose?” I asked him.

“Yes, but can I have the yellow ones?”

“The yellow roses?”

“Yes, you heard rightly.”

I looked at him in surprise.

“She has come back to India after two years. For a little while only. This is what I know. She studies in Europe now,” he said. He looked away from me, at the swelling evening traffic. Shadows of pain passed over his face.

I knew all along this was how it would come to an end. Mustafa knew my advice was not wrong. But more than his, it was the fault of youth’s optimism.

“Give me a bunch of three yellow roses,” he demanded.

He did not even care to pick up the roses today. I took out three healthy yellow roses from a bundle and began to dress them for him.

“You were right Rajkumar Bhai,” he said, bending forward towards me. “In the initial few months, she was so passionate about me. She would not even have dinner without me. We would sit for hours together in her room, all by ourselves. She would just listen to whatever I had to say. She would even drink from my cup of coffee…then…” Mustafa almost broke down.

I could well imagine him sitting along with her, in a brightly lit room, decorated with all kinds of stuff, as they show in films. Let’s say, for the sake of convenience, her name is Pretty (I don’t know her real name). So Mustafa and Pretty sit side by side on a comfortable bed. Or maybe he sits on an easy chair, his legs eased over the bed. Pretty sits facing him on the corner of the bed. Or may be she sits on his lap. Who knows? He gives her a lesson in history or India’s constitution, and she gives him all her attention, like an enchanted princess. Then…

“It’s all right Mustafa Bhai, life me aisa tragedy kabhi kabhi ho jata hai,” I said, trying to console him. “But please take care of yourself, you don’t look very well.” I was feeling emotional about his helplessness.

“Her parents sent her to Europe for studies. They did not like our relationship. But then, she too forgot me once she went there. You won’t believe Rajkumar Bhai, she used to call me up every week for the first few months. Then she stopped calling. She even stopped writing to me. She forgot me. She completely forgot me. You were very right Rajkumar Bhai. I was a fool,” he said. His eyes shone with moisture.

The image suddenly changes in my mind. No longer Pretty is sitting along with Mustafa. He sits alone in his university room. He has a glass of rum in his hands. Tears flow down his fat cheeks. Maybe he has even caught cold and so he snuffles and sneezes now and then. His nose tip has turned red. His heart misses a heartbeat every time the telephone rings downstairs at the hostel guard’s table. Then he waits for the phone boy to call him out to attend an ISD call. It does not happen. He takes another swig from his glass. The bitter swill in his mouth reminds him of a happy Pretty in Europe. More tears flow down his cheeks. Another sip, another fragment of memory, another crease of tears on his face. Each time he hears an airplane fly over his hostel, he imagines Pretty has come back to India, to walk into his barren life, to embrace him.

I came out of my little stall and put my hand on his shoulder. The little bunch of flowers was ready in my hands, its transparent cellophane crackling with the whisper of yellow roses.

Published at www.sulekha.com

Thank You, Friends

One July afternoon, I find myself steeling my nerves to write a letter to all my friends who are in town. I no longer am in a position to suffer negligence at their hands. Initially, I was not sure about it but now my position is very clear. I have to end my suffering and I have to do it today. It can’t wait any longer.

Naturally, I am in a miserable mood. Before settling down to write, I stride about in my room and look out the window. The weather outside is charming; the sky is overcast with thunderous clouds. It might begin to rain any time. For a moment I feel I should go out and enjoy the moist breeze, and allow myself to hang out till the gentle raindrops begin to drench me. I defy my feelings, and by the strength of my will, I walk into my reading room, which is sort of sealed, without any ventilation, and is full of mugginess. I have to write the letter. I have to write it. I cannot but surrender to this urge today before it escapes through the window of cowardice.

This urge is not new. It has been there for a couple of years now. But I have been delaying its implementation, sometimes under the cover of laziness, and often to save myself from losing the dignity of being able to maintain friendships.

Ironically, I am reminded of a famous Urdu short story: Mujhe Mere Doston Se Bachao (“Save me from my friends”). This is a humorous story written almost half a century ago. In the story, the protagonist, a writer by vocation, is so much sick and tired of his affectionate but suffocating friends that he barely gets time to do any writing. The moment he sits down to write a piece, one of his doting friends would barge into his writing room, and his reluctant muse would take his leave. My story is quite the opposite.

I have many friends or so I thought until recently. Most of them live in my neighbourhood, and if you will, at a stone’s throw from my house. Most of them are my childhood friends, people I went to school with, and even to the university. There are other friends who live a few miles away from my house, in far-flung neighbourhoods. These are people who I befriended in the university or at the work place. There are some friends who live abroad, thousands of kilometers away. And yet all these distances, short or long, seem meaningless to me. They have all forgotten me.

How do you feel when your friends forget you? One, you feel left out. Being common friends, you imagine that they are meeting and eating together. For them nothing has changed but you. You are like a napkin that has been used for dirty purposes, and now, after having outlived its utility, it must be consigned to the garbage bin. That may not be entirely true and is a matter subject to verification. But then, whatever the truth, you feel left out. I feel left out. Two, you feel inert, lifeless, like being part of a graveyard. Your feelings seem stunted and nothing grows on you.

All this does not happen in a day.

The process of forgetting starts long ago. Like a benign tumour, it begins as a mass of innocuous accidents. Gradually, the accidents turn into serious lapses, first followed by excuses, and then without them. There is no compunction left. All that remains of friendship are selective memories and shameless forgetfulness. The tumour then becomes full-blown cancer. And so it must be taken out of the body. And hence my decision to write the letter.

After the college years and the rush of the first job, everything seemed fine. My friends had their dates, but there was time for me too. We would often go on walks, eat our dinners together, and watch movies. There was booze, jokes and laughter. Then with change of jobs, as the calendar moved on, the friendly meetings diminished. My friends shifted from area to area depending on their jobs. Still they would find time, now with more difficulty, to meet me. If they could not meet, they would at least phone me or email me. They would let me know where they were and what they were doing. We would at least meet on each others’ birthdays and if we could not we would feel sorry. We would meet on festivals, and old times would come alive again.

Things, however, got worse with time. Some friends got married. Others crossed the seas in search of a better life. The phone calls became infrequent; the emails became shorter, stiffer, and finally inconsequential. Some merely kept forwarding group messages, jokes, and pornographic images. A forwarded message became the metaphor of friendship, replacing the blood and flesh interaction. When I think of my current level of relationship with my friends, especially my childhood friends, I am reminded of what Amy Taubin wrote somewhere: “…ambivalent feelings of boyhood friends who, as adults, have little in common except a reciprocal sense of loyalty mixed with guilt.” My case is worse than that.

Two years ago, when a college-friend, at another friend’s wedding, asked me if I had read all the jokes he had been forwarding me. If replied in negative. He was so furious that he immediately broke all ties with me. I could never understand his behaviour but I was certainly shocked. We never met or talked after that day.

All was still not lost. My neighbourhood friends were still around. I trusted them and hoped they would not forget me at least as long as they were in the same locality. I occasionally invited them over for lunch or dinner. I often met them at their lodgings and took them out on long walks. But I did not get much in way of reciprocation. When I thought about it, I was frozen with horror and dismay. And what my wife told me about them further surprised me. She said that there was an envious competition between my friends and me. I, on my part, to make matters clear, never prided over my little achievements, and yet I was a source of envy for my friends. That was unbelievable. My only crime was, I reckoned, that I started early with a job and hence had more material accumulations than many of my friends. But I failed to understand how my accumulations could become a source of envy for my friends. My wife told me how my friends’ wives would come to talk about every little purchase they made. Even buying a new sari would become a news item to break, let alone a new washing machine or a new music system. Now I understood why on the way, my neighbourhood friends ducked their gazes and walked past me as if I did not exist. I recalled V S Naipual’s phrase—“the competition of existence.” In the U.S., Naipaul wrote with a sense of surprise, Indians neglected each other when they came across on the road or in a shopping complex because they were threatened by the competition of each other’s existence.

This year was the worst. None of my friends turned up to meet me on the festivals. This was quite unusual. What was most unusual was that none of my friends remembered my birthday. The closest of my friends, who had never given it a miss, completely forgot about it. I don’t think he will ever remember my birthday. A neighbourhood friend remembered to message me a birthday wish but it came two days late. Later, on my way back from office I came across him. He asked me if I had got his message. I said yes and added it was a belated message. He said that it had become fashionable to send belated messages. What gumption! I felt insulted and did not reply at all. I expected regret, not an in-your-face-don’t-care-justification from a friend. My wife became angry when she heard this. “Why didn’t you tell him that we are still old fashioned people?” she said. I could only smile at her suggestion.

Recently I wrote to one of my closest friends: “Where are you? Seems I have been chasing you for a long time now! I am sure your work and your wife (the 2 W’s in life-not mentioning the third one-wine!) keep you busy. Let’s meet when you have time on your hands. Come for lunch/dinner on a weekend to my place, or we can meet somewhere else. Will not disturb you on phone any more. Regards.”

His reply put a stab through my heart: “I have lost one W only to add two more Ws. It is true that the most sought after W (wealth) is still far away. Now I am searching for an inverted W (meaning). Anyway, things are like this only, and I do not think that situation will change in near future. After one thing, something or other crops up. C U Soon. Regards.”

Recently, one of my friends moved out of the neighbourhood. He did not even inform me about his change of address. I felt sad and insulted. Why shouldn’t I give up on them?

And hence the letter of parting our ways. As I mentioned earlier, I no longer am in a position to suffer negligence at their hands. I must make my breast clean. I hope this letter will free me from the bondage of friendship that I still feel towards my friends. I know I have done nobody any harm. Once the letter is gone, my life would be easier, and in the evenings, I would not suffer the anxiety of looking up a friend to know how he is getting on in life.

I sit on a chair, facing my reading desk. I look at my address book, in which the names, addresses, and phone numbers of my friends are enlisted. Looking at the index, I feel as if I am looking at a graveyard. Their names and addresses look like sad and lifeless epitaphs. Now my eyes brim over with tears, and unintentionally, a fat drop falls on the address book, like a lilac on a grave stone. “Thank you, my friends, for everything.” A silent prayer escapes my lips. I take a handkerchief, all crushed, from my trousers’ pocket, and wipe my wet eyes, readying myself to write the letter.

This story was first published in Crimson Feet Magazine (Vol. 2), India.

Should I Kill My Wife?

“Oh yes, come friend, come. You may sit here and have my company. You too are troubled like me, aren’t you? Who would walk into a bar like this at this quiet hour of midnight when most have retired to the cozy comfort of a home? Either you don’t have a home or you are running away from a familiar reality. Isn’t it so? I can see it in your bristly face, disheveled hair and dark-circled eyes. You are my mirror image, aren’t you? Or I’m yours. It does not matter, does it? Maybe we have different problems, but their rancid shadows run deep in our veins, don’t they?

“Yes, yes, you can order the same arrack as the one I’m having. It’s bitter and it goes well with pain. And before they serve you, here it is. Take my bottle. Take a gulp from it. Why wait for them when you have a friend? One shot down the entrails and your distress will shine through, polished. You are getting me all right, aren’t you, friend?

“Now that you are here, I’ll tell you my story. And I’ll tell you without a preface. Why waste time? I’ll also soak in your tale of woe. That’ll be a little later. After all, people say for good reason that pain shared is halved. What do you say to that? Fine! All right, so I go ahead.

“Ah, did you ask me my name? Is that important to know? I don’t think so. Didn’t somebody say what’s in a name? Take his example, the guy who’s sitting up there, far, far up there, who’s always spinning the web of life, who’s made us run blind in this labyrinth of sorrow and maze of joy: Him! People call Him all sorts of names. Allah, Ishwar, God! Does His reality change with the name assigned to Him? No. Right? So, what of us lesser mortals? For a sensible person like you that’s a useless business, a futile premise. A fish is a fish, whether you call it a koi or a rohu. I think the reality is important. The rest is immaterial.

“Or take the example of my wife. Had her name been Lata instead of Neeta, would she still come out of her 16-months long coma? Look at her fate. At 25, she is no more than a vegetable, the mother of my five-year-old child. Life has come to a grinding halt for her. Neither alive nor dead, she lies on a soiled bed, the bedsheet torn and tattered, under the thatched roof of our house. And she can’t move or talk or eat or even recognize anybody. Not even her son. Our son asks me when will his mother speak to him, when will she love him again, make him sit in her lap and feed him. And I tell him: son, I don’t know. I really don’t know, my friend.

“Do you think I’ve not done anything for her? That is unfair to say. I’ve done whatever I could. There’s nothing I’ve not done to bring her back to life. From doctors to courts to papers to what have you. Shall I tell you when it all started? Excuse me, can I have a puff? Give me the one you’re smoking. That’ll do. Oh, thanks! One long drag and I feel much better.

“So to begin at the beginning. One night, a lupine, dark night 16-months ago, I returned home from work. Neeta was pregnant for the second time. We were happy expecting another child. We thought this time it would be a girl. But my friend, that night proved to be demonic. When Neeta complained of labor pain, I rushed her to the nursing home. The lady doctor suggested an immediate caesarian. She demanded Rs. 8000 for the operation. It was a big sum for a poor man like me. I had four thousands rupees with me. I deposited that amount with the doctor and went out to arrange for the rest. Four hours later when I came back, I was told she had fallen unconscious even before she could be operated upon.

“There began my woeful journey, my friend. They say very rightly that trouble always comes unannounced. The evil face of trouble had forced itself into my house. The anus-the-see-ya (anesthesia) overdose had made my wife unconscious. When I pointed this out to the doctors, they refused to admit their mistake. Would you believe it that they got us thrown out of the hospital with the help of some goons? You sure know that rich people like doctors, politicians, contractors, and bureaucrats work hand in glove with the goons in this country, don’t you?

“Outside, it was raining by buckets. There was scarcely a rickshaw in sight. I had no choice but to put a cataleptic Neeta on an unclaimed cart and run to the government hospital. Within two hours, she gave birth to a baby girl. I was happy for the child. I hoped Neeta would come out of her unconscious state. Twenty-four hours later, the baby died and Neeta was still comatose. My world was shattered.

“Let’s have one more round. I told you you’d like its bitterness, didn’t I? Here we go. Yes, where were we? Oh yes, the baby had died and Neeta was still comatose. My world had fallen apart. But then I could not run away from it. I had to face the reality. I had to look into its ugly face. Neeta was transferred to the emergency ward. Another six days passed and she did not come out of her stupor.

“I was absolutely clueless about whatever was happening to my wife. You see I’m not much educated. So, I don’t understand much of these complicated medical conditions. And what do you expect from a person who earns a salary of Rs. 2,200-a-month as supervisor in a private electronic company? But all this was happening to my family, to me. I had to do some thing. From the apathy of a government-run hospital, I took my wife to another nursing home. The doctor promised me that he’d completely cure her. He demanded Rs. 9,000 for this job. Now I had no money in my account. There was some dough in my wife’s account though. But she was in coma. So when I told this to the doctor, he showed me an innovative way. He took the thumb impression of an unconscious Neeta on the check and withdrew the amount. Doctors are so intelligent, aren’t they? The problem was solved.

“But, you see friend, Neeta was not cured. She continued to be asleep. Not only I was running out of funds, I was also getting short on patience. A new hope arose in the form of another doctor. This time at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences. There the doctor did a See-Tee scan (CT scan) of my wife. He found her having some new-ro-logical (neurological) problems. So turn for another doctor. I knocked at another clinic’s door. For eight days, the doctor examined her. On the eighth day, the doctor asked me to take Neeta home because the treatment was expensive and slow. He also handed me a bill of Rs. 10,000, which I had to settle.

“While all this was happening, I had lost my job, had emptied the family savings, sold my ancestral home for Rs. 65,000, Neeta’s jewellery, our television set and household utensils. Despite all this, nothing brought her back to life. Friend, at last I had no option but to move the courts and seek mercy killing for my wife. You know mercy killing, don’t you?

“Do you have another smoke? Give me one. Even a bidi would do. So, you thought that’s the end of the story. No dear, no. There is more. Only if you’d listen. So, where was I? Yes, I moved the courts and petitioned for mercy killing. You know what happened then? I became a small celebrity. People in the court, and even the journalists, came to me to tell that I had started a debate on the issue of U-tha-nasia (euthanasia). That’s another term for mercy killing. Tough word but interesting, isn’t it, like the word anustheseeya? But for all the publicity, I did not gain much. The court rejected my plea for mercy killing my wife saying that all “artificial death” whether desired or undesired, was illegal. It simply meant that only natural death was legal. Some learned folks also informed me that last year, a 72-year-old retired headmaster, a 60-year-old cycle repair shop owner and an octogenarian in Kerala were refused the right to die by the high court. I don’t understand why these people think so. Isn’t a graceful death better than a disgraceful life? What do you say friend, eh?

“But there was a little ray of hope. The court heeded my other request. It ordered that the state should bear all medical expenses in the wake of curing my wife. But that was more of a joke than a succor. When I took her to the government hospital, a paltry Rs. 3.50 a day was given for her treatment under the government rules. Now, wasn’t that a sad joke? When I raised my voice against this, a local leader threatened to kill me. He wanted me to withdraw the case.

“Now that forms my quandary, my friend. It’s been more than a year since Neeta went unconscious. All my money is gone and I’m nowhere today. I’ve no answers to my son’s questions. All the means of hope are blocked and sealed now. I see my wife’s body, full of sores, laid on the tattered bed, like a dead body. The law refuses to give her a dignified death, a mercy killing. We too are fed up with this daily hell. What’s hell after all? A place with no comfort and no hopes, isn’t it? I don’t even get any sleep at night. Neeta is at least sleeping. I don’t even get that. That’s why I’m here, every night, telling my story to a friend like you, trying to make up my mind. Now, you tell me what should I do? Tell me, should I kill my wife? Tell me what you would do if you were in my place?”

This story was first published by www.sulekha.com (USA).