I sleep with my mouth open. It was a running joke in my
family. My father would tell my mother in the morning, as he left to work in
our Yajamana’s farms: ‘don’t feed the
little one— he had two ants and a fly during his mid-night snack!’
As a child, I slept soundly. Outside, the clouds would rage—lightning
streaking across starlit skies— and it would pour. I, however, would sleep
through it all. Rain and gunfire, death and celebrations— nothing ever
disturbed my sleep. After dinner, I would swagger like a drunk towards my
mother and, before she could raise a word of protest, plonk my head on her lap
and shut my eyes. She had vessels to wash, a house to wind-up and a husband to
tend to. And yet, uncomplainingly, she would stroke my head, until sleep drifted
in from wherever it is that sleep does.
Ironically, here, in the city, a thousand miles from where I
was born and three lifetimes away from the life I had lived as a child, I work
as a night-watchman. I still sleep, but sleep lightly. Even the footsteps of a
cat, suffused with the quietness of their species and the magic of the night,
would make me take notice.
However, curious flies are still unconsciously consumed—
perhaps the only link to a childhood from another world.
*
My wife and children
are still in the village, though I am trying to get my eldest to come to the
city. I have just about enough money to send him to a private school here. If I
had spent less on frivolous things when I first came to the city thirteen years
ago, perhaps I could have brought them all here. But, when you are young and
new, everything is light, lovely and joyous; everything is about the today and
the now.
Once, I went to the same film six times straight, not
because the hero was a superstar or the heroine, an import from the north,
ravishing; nor was it for the predictably comforting underdog tale. I went
because (as I came to discover on my third viewing) one of the characters—an
old headmaster of a dying school—reminded me of my father.
I gambled, but never drank. Some while ago, a friend of mine
calculated and discovered, much to our alarm, that had I saved up all the money
I had spent on beedis, I’d be thrice
as rich.
*
This friend was special: she is not like me at all.
‘But we are like each
other’, I can hear her insist in my head.
Okay, here are the facts and I’ll let you decide: she is
half-English (or American or Australian), I can barely speak English
(half-English?); she is tall, with long, sexy legs which she lets the moonlight
lovingly caress, I am short and fat— my hairy legs are barely contained by my
bulging khakis; she is white as milk, glowing in mere starlight, sometimes I am
invisible at twilight; she rents an apartment and lives by herself, I sleep
under the skies.
You are an intellectual,
she would always say, cupping her coffee-mug, her head resting on her
knees. Had you been born in my world, you would have been wearing big, round
glasses, smoked a pipe and spoken about the Big Things: God, Life, Religion,
Cultures.
But, what is your world? I would wonder out aloud, What is
this world to which we have no keys?
See?, she would say, that is precisely the kind of thing an intellectual would say.
*
She came nearly every night. She was remarkably
unselfconscious, but the night was also kind: no surreptitious eyes ogled at
her lovely legs, no jealous women made comments on the sly. She brought a mug
of black coffee: dark, steaming, mysterious. She would talk and watch me make
my tea, a necessary indulgence to wade through the night.
We often traded histories. After all, most conversations flow
through memories’ windows.
I came to the city because I grew tired of singing at
weddings. We were descendants of the Nagas.
Like the snakes, I would tell her, we
virtually lived underground, in darkness, in a hamlet away from the rest of the
village. And just like the snakes, we
briefly emerged from the darkness every now and then, to be faux-revered, but
quickly banished. We were invited for all religious ceremonies—weddings,
festivals— because music was in our blood, our voices could scale notes that
none else could imagine.
My father rebelled against his mother by choosing to work in
the Yajamaana’s fields—at least, he argued, we don’t have to wait for people to get
married to fill our stomachs. I rebelled against my father by leaving the
village altogether.
It was remarkable how differently she and I viewed the city:
for me, it symbolized progress and freedom. For her, it was regressive and
constraining; but, equally remarkably, for both of us, it was a land of
opportunities.
In my line of work, she would say, this is a gold-mine.
There is so much to do, so much to develop!
What if these people don’t need your development?, I would argue.
Why wouldn’t anyone want more schools, better schools?
My father never went
to school. I think, on the whole, he was happier than I was. But that is beside
the point. What I really want to say is this: why can’t schools teach what we
want to learn? Why should my son learn what someone in the capital—thousands of
kilometres away—deems fit? I have so much I could teach children: my music, our
way of life. Why should everything be so complicated?
I know you have a point there, she would counter, but what
you are saying is impractical.
I could sense the mild exasperation in her tone. I would
stay quiet, watching my tea-leaves swirl in the yellow light of my lantern; the
glorious violet fire below evoked the feathers of a peacock. The gas connection
was a gift from her; the cart was the dhobi’s who had died last year, leaving
behind all his savings for his only son. He gave me the cart because we had
been old friends and he wanted someone to ‘treat it with the love it deserved’.
We’ve become so complicated, I would soldier on, an eye
still on the tea. We can’t even tell people what we do without resorting to an explanation. You work with—what do you
call it—policy advocacy? How does
that tell anyone you work for
children? Tomorrow, we’ll have fifteen words for walking, twenty words for the
kind of hunger we feel. Actually, maybe that’s not true: only you rich people
have such lush vocabularies and hunger is not something you feel as intensely
as we do. Come to think of it, you don’t even walk as much!
What do you want us to do?, she would ask, turning her head
towards me, become milkmen and night-watchmen?
It was a rhetorical question, meant only as a counter-barb. I
poured my freshly made tea into my chipped tea-cup, one I got twenty-five years
ago as part of my dowry. I sat across her, my head against the compound wall of
her apartment and asked, quietly:
How was your day?
*
She never brought anyone. On the days she had friends over
for the night— posh girls, good-looking men—she’d usually not turn up;
sometimes she would come, later than usual, with a sheepish grin and explain:
he’s asleep; clearly I am not good company!
She once asked me about sex. It was a windy night—the kind
when you could taste the dust on your upper-lip; the world was hazy,
beautifully so, especially in the bright headlights of the odd truck that
cantered by. The tea had been made, my head rested against her apartment wall
and her thick, dark hair swayed sensually with the wind. I was telling her
about my last visit to my village, when she interjected:
You haven’t seen your wife in ages! Don’t you feel like
sleeping with someone?
It was a question like any other: gently curious, but casual
and easy.
I stiffened. It is odd—I talk sex to myself constantly;
during the day, the topic is a favourite amongst my best friends, the
sex-starved Manja, who runs a liquor shop and the promiscuous, boastful Kalla,
who owns a gudangadi down the road. And yet, those conversations are
mechanical, illusory: the tone is light, the banter good-natured, the humour
detached. I—we—talk of sex like we talk of cinema stars, like it is somebody
else’s problem.
I stood up abruptly and walked to my cart. I picked up the
lantern by its side and placed it between us: her bright eyes shone in the
soft, orange light; her nose-ring—a speck on the bridge of her sharp,
impeccable nose—glistened softly; the wind made her tee-shirt cling to her
breasts, accentuating her curves; and the shadows of her slender legs were
thrown across my own.
I stared at her, my
mind stunned into calm silence. She looked back, her delightful eyes questioning
me playfully. I could sense my imagination leaping out of my self, scampering
wildly along the dusty, dirty lanes of the city. She was toying with me, fully
conscious of the impact she was having on my senses and revelling in it.
In minutes, she finished her tea, her eyes never quite
leaving me. She stood up and left quietly,
her windswept hair bouncing gracefully.
Our conversation wound up in the absence of words; the
electric silence, however, was anything but empty.
I had not felt more alive in a very long while.
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