A LULLING NOON } The curves are what that sway for the rigid plateaux, the stern importance is what that seeks its opposite, the jelly. Perhaps, a lulling afternoon is good enough, in the silent house to die in the moans, through a vision of deeper longings. It’s not one that you merge with, but many that you had long forgotten, without wishing to forget.
Those intensities are derived from the sweetest knowledge that the world that hides in shirts, pants, frocks, and gowns, experiences the same heat in these universally secret sessions.
Perhaps that’s what makes your heart beat faster, faster, faster…
ON BANGARAM ISLAND } It’s dawn. The green, blue lagoon is still. Cold, calm, inviting. Puffs of clouds drift in the sky. Patches of orange hue on them highlighting their white. In the air hangs and wafts away, a faint smell of wet coconut leaves, wet after the night’s rain. The green of the chundi plants and the tender plantains stand fresh as if they burst out of the white earth. Sometimes, their leaves move a little.
There’s none around. At least all human endeavours, men cooking for travellers, travellers getting ready for a silent day, islanders helping islanders on simple chores, all that are hidden from my sight. Just the white shoreline, the blue sky and all the green shoots remain. A bird or two, tiny and flitting, croon on trees. In the distance, in the waters, in the glimmering light of the tropical dawn, a pale shadow of a fishing boat. The boatmen’s whimpering voices come floating in the breeze in shreds.
The colours are contrasting and the quite, disquieting. Yet not a thing around me is pronounced. Everything seems to merge into everything else…
DESTINY } He had hurt his foot and had been home with books mostly for a year. He was the first in the family who had gone to college. His mom’s family, with whom he and his siblings and his widowed mom had stayed, moved to another town for his learning. But after college, he resisted seeking jobs. He had read Sir Walter Scott and wanted to be a popular writer. From age nine, since he began to read, after that bad foot, he wanted to become a writer. Perhaps this is how a bad foot works on your life.
I never had a bad foot. I had my artist dad always at home, asking me to paint. Mom, considering her angst for our family to somehow get richer through art as she was led by her husband’s fantasies, also wanted me to take up my father’s painting lessons. I wanted to play with my neighbour friends, of my age. I resisted his urge to pull me to the easel till his death. My father had died without having fulfilled his wish to see me as a painter. I had been lost to news job, what he called ‘a shame’ upon the family. My foot was too healthy for pursuing art as a vocation.
The boy, meanwhile, returned from college, as young and robust and wanted by girls as he was, and shut himself in his family room at his mom’s home (his captain dad had died when he was four). For the next twelve years, he led a cloistered life, trying to write a popular novel. Whatever he wrote in these years, he destroyed later. Even his wife didn’t know about his first novel, what he had published in 1827 anonymously. That hardship and toil went on for long twenty-five years. And one night as he finished writing his first successful novel, he read the ending to his wife. ‘It broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headache,’ he wrote to a friend next day. The writer had looked it upon as a triumph, judging from its effect on his wife. He was already forty-six. Late and bleeding, for success.
But The Scarlet Letter, was never a success that brought him wealth. It sold just about 7,800 copies. It brought him some good reviews, of course. The determined boy and the later suffering writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had died never realising his wish to become a great popular success. He isn’t one today either. He isn’t even remembered by the academics or the literati.
I’m not sure what happened to the price he paid by enclosing himself at home. I don’t know how he got it all repaid. And I’m not sure if I did wrong my dad, who wished I had listened to him. At forty, I had quit my job and got into a room to write. We believe we are following our hearts, by attempting to do what we believe in. But indeed, Hawthorne’s is a bleak tale. And we can never be sure that the same fate doesn’t befall on us. Neither to be there nor here. I don’t know what awaits me at the bend.
Yet, sail I have to. And indeed, that’s the indelible mark of man, the sailor, who always believe in what his heart says, who believes in the waters ahead. Despite the bleak histories. Despite the drownings.
MUSINGS } My eighteen-month-old daughter was screaming downstairs. I wanted to go and hold her. Yet, the story I’d rewritten in the last three days, the result of it, had left undesired doubts in me. It was then I got furious with myself and made some calls to friends.
Three of them, unfortunate ones, kind ones, sat through the late hour and read to give me their opinions. I’m a latecomer to fiction. Pacifying was for me the thought that some latecomers had done well. Conrad the late starter, as Naipaul wrote once, held out hopes to ones who never seemed to start at all. Names like that. Also, arriving at the right form, and finding the ’soul of things’ (Flaubert), ensuring that the story worked, it all weren’t easy for me. I’m a student and hopefully, a learner. Hence this pressing night call for a feedback. Also, I couldn’t sleep. With the thought that a few printed pages of what I considered a story was kept on my table, the merit of which I was still unsure, I could not have retired for the day.
The notes I took down from those calls are pointers. Yet, I feel I should keep it away, the story, for now. On some morning, I’ll hear a gentle voice from within, instructing me on what to do. I’m enjoying these harrowing hours, though. At least, the tale can’t get worse than it ever was. It can only turn better. That pacifies me.
A SKETCH OF A STORY } You can’t really count the occasions of ‘sometimes’ in your life. It’s a trick, the thought. Because the truth could be that it was always there and not just sometimes.
Yet, he could count some such occasions. One that he remembers was when he was in bed with his lower half raised, slanted on the wall. The rest of him in bed. He saw his toes and a day rushed into him when he remembered the shock of the whack on his back by his man. He was more struck by the shock of his friends who stood frozen in the playground. He was being whacked by the man who had rushed at him a moment ago. His friends took a while to make out who the man was. He knew the man for so many years. So he had to stand and take the beatings.
But certainly it was a ‘sometime’ for him. At least when the commotion had ended and his friends had come to sit or stand by him, not knowing how to pacify him. He bit his thin lip, bearing his pain, too ashamed to cry before them. Some unable to face him stood looking away to where his father had gone. That night Pauly had this image of the slowly floating body of his father. With his head pressed in the wet pillow, he sank in that imagery. His father was to be floating somewhere. Not anywhere near their house. But somewhere else. He had seen the police and then friends and relations who had come to condole. Of course he was wanted then and his mother would give more share of her attention to him. He had felt the pats on him. Those hands of men and women that gestured on the fate of the melancholic son. He forgot to sob. He forgot the pain. He merely thought of the floating body of his father. It was such a relief.
Many years later, Pauly was trying to walk. His doctors had said he need to walk like a forty year old. He was instead walking most of his life like a seventy year old, an aged chief physician who checked on his spine had said in between short chuckles. There was the difference of thirty years, Pauly later made out. The count gave him the glimpse. Thirty years since his father had died of a heart attack. The man had not floated like Pauly had always wished. He had died in sleep and was buried in the parish cemetery.
‘Hold on to that rail, mister,’ said the nurse. ‘We don’t want you to fall. Not here, not now.’ Pauly writhed in pain. The spine should have been telling him to go to hell. His back had been telling things he never wanted to hear, even at his former office, even while he was with his ex-wife, even in his lonely evenings. There was so much of pain and Pauly could not figure out why it was all given to him.
A week later, they buried him in his parish cemetery. Not near his father’s tomb. It was gone by then. They had found a new space for the son. From the funeral, the few who came, kept walking to their cars. It was a wet evening. One remembered, ‘I heard the doctor saying that the nurse had seen it. He said the man had no reason to let his arms go while on the stairs. It was almost like him floating all the way down.’ After the muffled surprise, the mourners slowly drove away from the cemetery fearing it would rain again.
Like the leaves in the rainy wind, like the lost feather, like a forgotten thought, we do float about sometimes. Though we can’t really count the occasions of ‘sometimes’ in our lives.
ONCE UPON A TIME, RECENTLY } Waking up, in the sea of ruffled memories of the yore, the window shows us the light to the days of beyond, the light coming forth from the uncalled days, of which I don’t want to remember even after those days, in the years to come.
One cherishes, the hazy sight of the toes, even the tiniest, how they behaved with others in the twilight, peeping through the slipped away sheet. And the fingers that came in search of mine, in the glitzy crowd of strangers who were there to buy, whispered that we’d forgotten the future, the known.
We had lived in the unknown, in the room of our own, set away from the light by thick curtains that we had pulled earnestly together before we set our den. One remembers how the curtain rings rushed, their jovial ring in the air, even when we fell into the lullabies of our imaginings on our love to be drawn from us by the other.
Forgetting was bliss, in the dark. Remembrances were from our own dark, endearing cellar of the children in us. We searched for toys in each other. We found more than we had found in our attics. We amazed ourselves. We knew we’d be gone. The amazement, from the look in our eyes, tangible, reachable, touchable, would be soon taken away. Yet we stayed amazed. The arrangement of her eyelids over her surprised eyes, the teeth that smiled more than her lips, the voice that prayed when it giggled, the rock of her love, that I felt in her heart, through my running paths of her risings, through the sliding fall of her curves, I suddenly knew it was my valley of tears, of hidden lives, of unreachable evenings.
We never blared into light. We never pulled the curtains. Yet it dawned.
These days we write short letters about lives beyond forgetting. Her transfer. My growing tonsils. Her baby’s anxieties. My false teeth that never fits. Her dying dog. My pending pension..
Our gifts, were the gifts to the others, through the room that had its curtains drawn, through the room that our lives had gifted us.
