A Monologue with myself

There are times when what is said is not what is meant. Biding time seems the best escape. Escape I say because time is such a transient quantity. And each second is an ephemeral bearer of moments- a moment that, in turn, possesses a heady concoction of wishes and desires and passions and cravings. Each one of us has a procrastinating process exclusive to ourselves in a bid to abide in that moment of luxury for a time more than the moment can afford. Deferring a thought, an action, a quest or even a living to nestle in that complacent cocoon of self-denial for those few extra inconsequential moments much like those forbidden ten minutes of sleep in the morning, whose futility make it even more irresistible. Mine, over the past half a year has been to light a cigarette and in the reddish grey smolder of it had started to dwell for me a strange pacifying few moments , the ineffectuality of which I was in aware of full measure but never in custody of a will strong enough to acknowledge. Writing this is perhaps an attempt at penance. In fact, it is just a monologue with myself that I owe to myself. I live in a place where there is no spring. An extremely sudden oppressive summer takes over from a harsh winter. Life without gradations, as I’ve come to realize and experience is difficult and mine in this particular occasion has quite unnecessarily decided to replicate the rather unsavoury Jharkhand weather. The writing on the wall had been forever now but that sheath of smugness had made me so comfortably myopic that the possibility of what I had always anticipated but was never in truth ready for seemed unreasonably far- fetched.  Surprises border on shocks so often that I believe they should be treated as synonyms but some people still claim to know better. They’ll learn soon. Well, the place doesn’t quite defy the laws of nature completely. There is a period when the sun does not exactly beat down and the chilly breeze doesn’t take your ears off- it’s short and fleeting though. And now since life has on some strange whim decided to ape the weather, the buds of spring didn’t quite bloom into flowers but I’m not quite complaining. The aftertaste of moderation, mother says, is always better and I trust her. There is so much more I want to ramble but I can already feel the grace starting to wane at a dangerous pace. But honestly I’m disappointed; mightily disappointed. The deal wasn’t quite fair. No, not at all.  The incubation period of the malady was so short; yes, what bothers me is that it was shorter than when I was the lacuna.  The seminal studded drama was worth more than that surely. I am an engineer by training and so numbers come to me as they should to even the worst of our breed. And the story the numbers say makes my blood fucking boil. The anger is misplaced or perhaps it’s just misdirected. Maybe, I need to make more out of it. Rage is a powerful emotion- I fear I’m wasting its potency. My incisor pesters me to be evil. It makes sense too I suppose. Dazed and confused- Plant sings. I agree.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Orchids occulting in orgasmic outbursts

Birds bemoaning bestiality of blasé bystanders.

Of airplanes audaciously airborne in austere affluence

Rains reeking of rational rinsing of wretched reveries

Kafkaesque coliseums of cosmic conspiracies

Ticking time tripwire tied tantalizing taut to tapestry

He’ll hold on to hundred higher hopes in his heart

She’ll sing a song about syzygy and have sex with a sham.

Dance, my love!

Dance my love, dance like a butterfly

Dance when the skies are blue

And the clouds are still away

For I can see the rains in the horizon

Waiting to wash all of our love away

Into the silent river’s tumultuous bosom

In the abyss of which we shall never see other

But just keep hearing faint sounds of the love song

You danced to, danced to like a butterfly.

Breakfast Buffet of Dreams and Realities.

Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast consists of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, toast, coffee and marmalade.

Pranay, though, hasn’t had breakfast for almost a week now -- and, never for that matter, bacon and sausages. He thinks, though, Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast is Floyd’s finest.

Pink Floyd is Pranay Kashyap’s favorite band. Back in his boarding school days in Shillong where everyone worshipped Bruce ‘air raid siren’ Dickinson’s Iron Maiden, Pranay had discovered Floyd through one of his seniors.  Ever since, he has been unwaveringly faithful to Roger Waters and co.

Like most serious Floyd fans -- Pranay, of course, thinks of himself as more than just a fan -- doesn’t consider the post Roger Waters albums as really Pink Floyd’s (People who regard Delicate Sound of Thunder as a Floyd work are only phoney Floyd fans, after all ).

He is listening to Echoes today as he waits at the Barakhamba Road Metro Station for the evening crowd to recede. The evening crowd -- people going home to the suburbs --  has always unnerved Pranay. Back in Shillong, which was  -- is, if yo ask him --  much more of a home to him than Guwahati, where his parents worked and lived, people never hurried. It was not in Shillong’s character to haste. Like the sweet aftertaste of Old Monk and lukewarm water and the clot of jadoh,  Shillong's  eternally overcast skies, the incessant rains, and sweetly morbid atmosphere lingered on forever. 

In fact, Pranay doesn’t like traveling by the metro at all. The metro, he thinks, is too fast and impersonal. The metro stations, too, have too much metal for his liking. Delhi’s obsession for sleekness in their constructions, which implies using metal in great abundance, had always depressed him -- the pinewood back in Shillong was so much warmer and welcoming.

Echoes is a long song even by Floyd standards. At almost twenty three minutes, it is characterised by David Gilmour’s languid guitar riff. It is just perfect for Pranay today. The  evening rush is at its peak and Gilmour’s guitar is just what he needs to  happily drift to his other world -- the world of Shillong, and frosted dewdrops on pine trees, where he still harboured hopes of retiring to someday. Delhi is where he would run the rat race but never rest.  Home, it will never be.

Just as Pranay starts to go adrift in the aroma of crackling firewood and Gold Flakes in a cozy pine wood room, the metro’s clamour drowns Gilmour’s riff, rudely transporting Pranay from a cozy red roofed house, perched on one of those meandering steep roads of Shillong, to the harshness of Barakhamba Road’s metallic  metro station.

The melee of the evening crowd is almost over now; Pranay gets into the train. There’s no place to sit. He is used to it.  In front of him is a middle-aged woman in  a pair of black capris pants and a mauve shirt, sitting cross legged. She looks Punjabi with her fair full body and a kada on her right wrist. He thinks she is pretty. Ever since he has come to Delhi, he has developed a reluctant fondness for the big breasted, fair and creamy (like malai, a friend from Amritsar had offered) Punjabi women. He wonders when she last made love.  Was she married? Did she have a lover? Was he loyal to her? Without really contemplating an answer,  he smiles at his boyish perverseness.

The metro stops too often, he can’t concentrate on the music, so he puts on some light MLTR instead.

It’s a cold October evening in Shillong and there’s rain in the air. Pranay is wearing a rip-off Chelsea windcheater bought from Glory's Plaza with a pair of blue Wranglers his mother picked up from a recent visit to Delhi with his father. One could feel a sense of  happy excitement and anticipation in the chill of the evening Shillong air. He lights a Gold Flake and puffs at it intensely. He’s a little drunk on Royal Stag whiskey. MLTR, the Scandinavian pop band, will perform at the Polo Grounds  in Shillong today. The town’s abuzz with people from nearby places like Dimapur and Guwahati. Many of his friends from Guwahati would come too. The pre-show sound check welcomes him as he enters the Netaji Stadium Polo Grounds. It’s drizzling now but nobody seems to mind the rain.

“Hey man! I knew you’d be here”, a tall dark man slaps him almost too hard on his back.

 "Anahita, this is Pranay. We were at Edmund’s together," he continues,  gesturing to the petite girl with him, without waiting for anyone to reply.

“Hello man! Long time, eh!”

It’s his classmate Rajkamal from school. He politely says hello to the girl, consciously to not slur. he likes her name. He has always had a thing for names.  Anahita is Raj’s sister, two years younger, in the 2^nd year of her degree course in history from Guwahati University. They stay in the plains of Tezpur, a small historical town on the north bank of the mighty river.

The metro relentlessly rattles over the Yamuna, as it prepares to leave the peripatetic boundaries of Delhi for Noida. The lights across the river remind Pranay of the panoramic view of the city of Guwahati from his grandfather’s home on the Nabagraha hills. The last time he had been there, Anahita was with him. It was barely a week after their wedding. Back then he had marveled at the  lights and had decided, almost impulsively,  hat big cities are where the lights  -- and life  -- are. But today, the luminescent yellow dots on the black horizon are hurting his eyes. The contrast is too stark -- the bright lights against the dark callous horizon of a city he was increasingly wary of. 

“…. Doors open on the left. Please mind the gap”. Pranay doesn’t have to make much of an effort to de-board. He is pushed out of the train with the wave of people getting down at the same station. He adjusts his glasses and climbs down the stairs of the metro station. As he exits the air-conditioned  metro station, the mugginess of the evening gets to him.

Like everything in the city, the clouds, too,  had flattered to deceive. The rains would not come. It would be another sticky night. He lights a Gold Flake, as the tempo wallas try to convince him into one of their overcrowded tempos.

He would just walk today. The tempos are  too full of people returning home from work.  Inside them would be an air of tired humdrumness that Pranay doesn’t want to breathe today. He starts walking back in his slow, languid way   -- an outline of drooping shoulders with MLTR’s Breaking My Heart for company.

If there’s one place where the melting glaciers of The Himalayas made their pain felt, it has to be Guwahati, one of the most unloved capital cities of the country. This town in the plains of Assam has tragically transformed from being a moderately-weathered pleasant small town into an extremely hot, humid cramped city in less than a decade. The Brahmaputra still flows through the old town in its unparalleled might and the Kopou still blossoms, but Guwahati has ceased to wear its original colours. The swanky coffee bars, the international restaurant chains and high-rise flats of a metropolis in making have, rather heartlessly, taken over the old city’s gossipy teashops, dreamy eateries and spacious Assam type houses.  And the sadness that is; is the most penitent for the romantic like Pranay. The rains have refused to come and the heart objects to sleeping dry. And, like all things loved but not enough for life to be spared, a new haven is searched upon and for Pranay, the order of events weren’t different too. With college, Shillong had come to an unwilling, but necessary end.  Guwahati seemed greener for some time but bigger meadows beckoned and Guwahati with its confused state of in-between big and small, sensitive and superficial could not suffice for long too. Delhi is the biggest meadow in the vicinity and here was where Pranay, like countless other young men of the country ended, or, began the great Indian game of struggle for the proverbial roti, kapda aur makaan.

The clammy evening is enveloping into the dark mystique of a starless night. Pranay observes the   appearance of the kinds that roam the street as the day begins to get darker. He is reminded of the overpriced Comesum food stall outside the Nizamuddin Railway Station. When with parents, he used to observe the mundane families and students on their way to homes and holidays. Later, with friends at night, the odd stoned firang and party sick youngsters -- he was fascinated by the how the place changed with time. He contemplates buying a quarter of Royal Stag whisky but gives up the idea as soon as power cut of the last night comes to his mind.

There’s some beef in the fridge. Maybe, he couldmake a simple curry. He wonders how his mother,  increasingly religious with age, would react if she were ever to know that her son ate and enjoyed cow’s meat. He had first eaten beef as a curious 14 year old at Keith’s home and had really liked it.

The house smells of a faint sandalwood room freshener and of a woman having lived there not too long back. His mother would always say one could easily tell a house with a woman from a one without one. It’s not just the tidiness, but also something about the character of the house.

Come to think of it, it’s probably that essential enigmatic something that made a home out of a house. The pencil-sketch-like photo of him and Anahita on the wall stares  at him uncomfortably blankly. The Sikkimese masks, Anahita had bought from Paharganj, on the pale yellow wall seem to look at him with  deep-rooted disgust. He never liked them anyway; it reminded him of a horror movie he had seen as a kid.

He washes himself in the pigeonhole of a bathroom. Anahita had always complained about the  bathroom' size . Now he suspects it was  just not the bathroom.  Anahita  was perhaps complaining about the smallness of all things associated with  him – a petty job in a non-descript academic publication house,  a small house with an even smaller bathroom. The realization dawns upon him like the evening fog in Shillong, which suddenly engulfs the most cheerful of things and thoughts in a hazy blanket of murk and melancholy.  The Royal Stag (the brand of whiskey he’s been drinking for years now) full bottle in the kitchen cupboard, which exhorts its drinkers to make it large,  makes him almost smile at the irony of the situation.

He doesn’t make beef curry, rather boils some rice and a potato together for an early dinner and reads some Poe while waiting for the rice and the potato to boil. He is reading Al Araaf- a poem he knows by heart - for the umpteenth time and wonders if he will be ever able to write something of such caliber ever. The job at the publishing house is not his cup of tea. He cannot check for sloppy grammatical errors by people. He is a poet. 

It is a rainy Sunday afternoon in Guwahati. It’s been raining for over a day now but the mood is far from gloomy in the Hazarika household. Their only son has come home for his summer holidays from boarding school in Shillong and his first poem has been published in the Sunday Magazine of the most popular local English daily.

“Babu, the poem’s good; even Bhonti Jethai likes it a lot but to improve, you must constantly keep writing," Mr. Hazarika says to Pranay in a preachy fatherly tone.

Pranay tries to appear nonchalant but heart in heart the praise does matter to him. The poem is about colours. He had written it after reading Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in his English textbook. Though Frost paints a very dreary image of a white sleepy landscape full of saturnine snow, the poem had, in Pranay, conjured a flurry of surreal colours. And he knew, he had to write a poem; though why he chose colours, he doesn’t remember too.

The whistle of the pressure cooker blows and Pranay puts on some Oasis as he eats his dinner. The potato is slightly undercooked and the rice too watery.  But he is hungry and eats well. He had planned to keep some rice for the next morning but ends up eating everything. Champagne Supernova plays in the background as Pranay does the dishes. The song talks about special people in life changing. Many special people around him have changed; none more than Anahita. Or was it him who couldn’t, as Anahita claimed, adjust to change? The fragile bubble of romanticism that he has been precariously holding on to for all these years was beginning to burst slowly. 

It is half a year since Anahita has come to Delhi. Initially overwhelmed by the ruthlessness of the city, she has coped well and has even managed to get a job in a primary school nearby. But Anahita was starting to get taken over by the mad melee of a city in perpetual motion. Her colleagues had husbands who were in the city’s ‘export-import’ business and so were better off than they were. They were mothers who discussed donation-engineering colleges in Noida and Bangalore and how the donations seemed to be getting higher every year. They were women who discussed sales in sari showrooms at the Lajpat Nagar Central Market. They were neighbours who gossiped about Sharmaji’s daughter being spotted at India Gate biting into Mother Diary lollies with a ‘bazaaru launda’. They were Dilliwalas who had big dils but even bigger bank balances. Anahita, in their sangeet and sagai ceremonies had a sneak peek into their gold and Benarasi Sari lives and now she wanted more. More than Pranay could ever give or perhaps, even aspire to give.

She has just come back from her cousin’s place in Lajpat Nagar and is in a bad mood which further worsens when she sees Pranay typing on his laptop in the drawing room and sipping whiskey in between.

“You could always write anyway, Pranay. See Rajiv is doing so well, he had started on the floor and in just two years, he is an executive today”, Anahita says, trying very hard not to lose it.

“I’m not meant for a call centre job where I can’t even keep my own name just because some cunt of a retarded American thinks it’s too difficult for him to pronounce”, Pranay gives the same answer that he has been giving for more than a month”

“See your Tagore and Poe will not feed us. Besides I’m not asking you to stop writing. You could always write during the day”

Pranay lies down on the bed, switches on the TV, and watches a movie about a charismatic American Senator played by Tom Hanks. He has seen the movie before and is not so attentive. During the commercial breaks, while browsing through the channels, he comes across Sourav Ganguly playing a valiant innings for Kolkata Knight Riders in what appeared to be a losing cause.  Ganguly is someone Pranay really looked upto and he sees a tragic hero in him- a man who has not had it easy but finally made it. Watching him bat well makes him happy until sleep finally takes over him.

It’s past midnight and Pranay is drunk. He’s had almost a half of whiskey and a few beers too. He carefully unlocks the door, earnestly hoping Anahita is asleep but that is not to be the case. Fully awake, half out of concern and the half out of anger, Pranay’s sloppy steps and slur as he tries to convince her that he hasn’t drunk so much annoys her.

“This is all you can ever do in life. Come back home drunk and wasted.  This is not bloody Shillong and you’re not Edgar Allan Poe or whoever! I’ve been waiting all this all while to have dinner and look at the state you’ve come back home in now”, Anahita bursts out , genuinely wounded .

As Pranay tries to explain, he throws up on the sofa . The stench of the retch and the fermented tension in the air combine to give the air an ominous stink- a stalemate of frustration and disillusionment, which no room freshener in the air can ever purify.

“I’m going Pranay, forever. I am filing for divorce. I can’t  live in this suffocating smug world of yours anymore”, Anahita stamps off and Pranay is reminded of that rainy evening in Shillong when he had first met her and amidst MLTR’s love ballads had fallen in love with her forever.

He wakes up early next morning, makes himself a strong cup of extra sweet cup of tea, and browses through the Indian Express. The front page contains a small snippet of Tarun Gogoi being reelected for a record third time in Assam. The cover story is about Mamata Banerjee overthrowing the 34 years old Left rule in Bengal in a landslide victory with a full scape photo of her making the victory symbol with her fingers. And all of a sudden, Pranay picks up the papers lying on the centre table for quite some time now and signs on them as fast as he can. It’s done- Pranay and Anahita are finally legally over too. Just as he puts the paper back, his phone beeps for an incoming message, which reads:

“Mr. Hazarika, This text is from Life Publishing House; we have decided to compile your poems into an anthology. We should be able to pay you an advance of around 2 lacs and we shall discuss other details if you could come to our office at around 11 today”.

Pranay lights a Gold Flake , pours himself a stiff peg from the Royal Stag bottle that was lying in the kitchen cabinet and puts on Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast.

So, Shall we play?

The game’s exciting, Russian Roulette is fun too but you see, you son of a bitch, I don’t have a gun

It is just rum, not acid, you tripped your turquoise whims to the beat of a bitch and I have to wake up to a timed breakfast

The cosmic conspiracy works on days the moon looks likes the sun, a fireball without balls

But then balls were never what you played with and I”ll grant you that; I’m stronger after all

The purple smoke I saw you stitching the day you kissed her bottom

Yes, after she had rinsed it, but does that give you as much as an iota of chance

For the darkness of a cold night hides so much,

More than even those dark shades that you had brought from the mall

In the broken bathroom of which I had shat once

After watching a movie that ends with the hero dying of cancer.