Fiction

As I watched her in the dimly-lit room, I felt awe mixed with envy rise in my heart. While I spend my quotidian life as a mediocre nondescript one in the midst of people I don’t care about, doing things that I don’t find remotely soul-stirring, here was a woman in front of me who did the best things in the world, every weekend and not for a living! I was in a club- or in a room that had a faint ambience or appearance of a club-and a few yards away from me, there stood a woman singing. She had a mellifluous voice, entrancing. She was presently crooning ‘Golden Brown’; nay, she did not have the British accent but still she sang well and played the guitar with as much feeling as flair. Dressed in a flowing maroon skirt and a black blouse with a brown bandana tied around her sleek, short hair, she looked how I would want to look myself. She smiled faintly to herself as she, in her sonorous voice, began to sing ‘O Pardesi’ from the movie Dev D. I ruefully recalled how I have to smile everyday too, at people I do not wish even scowl at. Perfunctory smiles, fake laughter, polite small talks-these have become such a major part of life when I wanted to be like the guitar-strumming, bandana-wearing stranger in front me who could smile to herself! She now began to play ‘Sweet Dream’ as she gazed at I believe no one in particular, dreamily. Could it be possible that she has been bewitched by her own voice? Nay, it was the phantasm-like ambience that had moved her as it enchanted me. She was singing the penultimate line ‘For announcing the end of my sweet-dream…’and swaying rhythmically when suddenly a loud, screeching, harsh noise intruded us.
It was the calling bell! Shucks! I quickly took off the goggles and the bandana. I put aside the guitar and hastily took off the ridiculously long skirt to put on the first pair of pajamas I could lay my hands on in the cupboard and ran to open the door. Gosh! Who could come at 9 on a Sunday evening? I opened the door to find a uniformed guard standing. “There will be no water supply tomorrow after 12 noon. The water tanks will be cleaned”, he said tersely and rang the bell of the neighbouring flat while I said a vague ‘thank you for informing’ and shut the door. I went back to my room;the stuff-sun glasses, the bandana, the skirt-that I had hurriedly abandoned, were scattered on the bed and the guitar was on the stool next to the mirror. I looked at them once and decided to cook for tomorrow, tonight itself as there would be no water to boil vegetables in the next day, or to wash dishes!

The List

That my mind is a misty farrago, I never doubted
But neither did I know that there could be order in it
Until I made the list titled-
‘Have no expectations but only aspirations’!

To wake up at dawn to perform Kapotasana
By the end of this month.
To wake up in the depths of Critical Theory
By the end of this year

To travel to Dharmasala alone
Before the end of this summer
To travel to dreams of rationality
Before the end of this life-time

That I had humble aspirations I never doubted
But neither did I know that they could be so arduous.

Ill-effects of dehydration

It has become very common of late: to get bored easily. There is nothing worthwhile about watching the endless cavalcade of automobiles that honk and whiz past the streets outside; there is nothing worthwhile either about reading the countless lines in the tomes that lay on my bed. Habermas made sense because I began with him early in the morning but as the hours passed, my grasp over the text became increasingly tenuous; I could still vaguely comprehend Foucault’s authorship function and epistemes but Derrida’s Deconstruction made no sense at all. It was 2 in the afternoon and I was ashamed of my blunted power of comprehension but actually, I was too exhausted to be so. I wondered if I had failed to make sense of Derrida because the singeing heat outside has rendered my brain a mass of melting wax-utterly useless and a sordid sight.(It is a small mercy that no one can fortunately see it!) Or was I actually too much of a nincompoop to be able to understand Deconstruction? The fan overhead spun clumsily, and I felt a benumbing pain at the back of my head. Maybe, I did not sweat sufficiently because of which I was feeling so uncomfortable. I picked up Bolano’s Nazi Literature of the Americas presently but after reading in it for half an hour about plagiarizing poetasters, hooligan wits and psychopathic science fiction writers, I shut the book and put it away, in horror. Do people write for mere fame or worse, to satiate their tendencies of self aggranisement? Was I likely to become like these writers of Bolano’s imagination ever? Maybe I would if I tried writing, without first trying to understand Derrida or Levi Strauss.
I felt nervous and decided to eat, though I was not feeling hungry remotely. I began eating a paratha but with every bite of it, I felt nauseous. Was there nothing to allay my discomfiture, this engulfing sense of wastefulness? I wished I could sleep but it was too hot to fall asleep. I began watching Charulata and the scene of a rising storm early in movie when Charu first meets Amal, acutely made me conscious of the dry, hot afternoon hour. It was 4 o’ clock and the sun still scorched the surroundings mercilessly. I suddenly wished I could cry myself to sleep and dream of rains at home! But I knew I could not and therefore, continued to watch the classic. Mabhabi-the actress who played Charu in the film-reminded me of Audrey Hepburn while the actor who played her husband-I donot know his name-with his calm deportment, his impeccable English accent and his fervour for reforms, reminded me of my chotomesho. I again found myself yearning to be at home, something that could not be fulfilled and hence, I attempted to focus on the architecture of the house in which Charu lived and its furniture. How beautiful, I thought, were the four-poster beds, the bureaus, the grandfather clocks and the high ceilings and the broad pillars that were to be found in the houses of this land in the 19th century. I now simultaneously wished that I was born in that era and that I could live in a house like that in 2011, even if it was derelict state…Towards the end of the movie, Charu and her husband visit some sea-shore and the sight of the waves suddenly made me realize that I had drank very little water this afternoon. I drank an entire bottle of water in a few gulps and sensed a moist coolness spreading down my throat towards the abdomen. I felt less nauseous and even yawned once! Maybe, I could try sleeping now and who knows, maybe I will dream of myself sitting at my desk by the window in my room back at home and watching a torrential downpour…Ah!