Daryaganj

I was ambling aimlessly through nameless streets or rather streets, the names of which I was certain then I wouldn’t recollect. Around me- stretched and pulled- the evermore reality of a state, in a constant promise of transition, rumbled and tumbled down onto the narrow streets that crashed into each other chaotically; leaving behind a dusty haze in which senile colonies slumbered relentlessly, their skin thick, reinforced in stolid concrete- plastered without regret, over and over again. Big signboards, some glowing faintly, needlessly under the spiteful sun, remnants and perhaps even reminders of attempts in vicious human enterprise, hung and yawned aimlessly over the ignorant eddy of petty endeavours that bounced off their soiled banks- the many rough corners, incidental porches and ruined pockets of deceased grey and red buildings. In blasé harmony, both worlds orbited around their common sun.

Ambling...but there I was, battered and churned by rusting public transport, brothered and then mothered by churlish autowallahs, hurled under the sun and pushed further by a faceless desire- the momentum of a thousand years and ten thousand bodies pressing hard ,lost in their own fantastic pasts, instantly overwhelming the last vestiges of my own impolite and supposedly much educated inertia- until finally, I was only struggling to consider myself as ambling when the truth in fact rested outside my body like a hardboiled egg, forcing my head toward the dangerously flaying scaffoldings along the numerous floors above me, making my legs fall under an anaesthetised, well operated rhythm- the unquestionable parade of a million dull existentialist mysteries.

Books, a hundred for each of those ill-educated people, lay wasting along what must’ve once been a footpath. Most were in English, so that when I found the opportunity to look down I would find myself unconsciously avoiding trampling over Isaac Asimov and Umberto Eco, even when many a cheap Rexene shoe landed on them soundlessly; either way, the wardens of this scattered knowledge rarely frowned. Books were all along this narrow river of strange, disconnected and warped desires, stacked along those grey and red buildings, as lifeless and worthless as them till some strangely foreign face picked up one with stranger, suppressed excitement; the age old prudence of a hairline bargain dawning upon his person suddenly. Until then, to me, and even beyond perhaps, to the swaying bevy, they were mere embankments, disallowing many unabsorbed folks to draw for themselves a more convenient path to wherever it was they were intending to get. By the looks of it, they all seemed strangely misplaced, and yet at ease with it. Perhaps bestowed by the inheritance of ignorant comfort, so common to the peoples of a land forever in transition, moving towards an imitative understanding, I say.

Families, many dressed in uncomfortably large dresses, both in terms of their sheer size and also how vividly they shone under the piercing sun so that they seemed like glass people, stood, sat and hunched in groups and according to height so that they could share the joy of feasting on simmering jalebis and then cloud under a foamy lassi. This and then right beside it, naked ragdolls and bellowing urchins screamed in illiterate harmony, sounding their hunger and plight as it failed to echo off the lifeless parade and everything surrounding it. Their eyes roving like soft, indulgent secrets in the mind of a messenger unaware of the land beneath his feet. What was their pursuit? And what was even the point of such questioning? Surely, they didn’t, they couldn’t concern themselves with it. Surely, to their minds they were not children of the emerging country, as perhaps they were to me- prospective heirs of a societal reverie, the inheritors of its belief at least; misplaced and confounded by that very culture’s faceless deception. Surely, beyond their soiled vests and soot laden torso, they’d never seek to steal much educated emotion- of chronic frustration, of polity, of unencumbered desire, of revelation, of mistrust, of feisty patriotism, of broken resolve and of rights. Surely then, they were fixations of the inopportune; animals existing in their own psychic parody- untouched by the human hand, unseen by the enlightened eye and unfelt by the objective. And as hundreds of them yelped, most lost behind the mosaic silks of hefty women and intricate tapestries of the reasonable middle class, no one even threw them a bone, perhaps ashamed; perhaps hungry.

Nearby, combs, dresses, knives, frying pans, screws, wall hangings, bulb nets and every domestic invention there ever was, that is, up till a certain contemporary epoch that passed by a few decades ago, was being advertised and sold randomly. Soot covered waifs grabbed at them periodically and attempted to make a desperate escape, the unfortunate yet certain eventuality of beatings never overwhelming the vacuum inside. Beside one such urchin caught midway, with bottled water and despairing thirst, being beaten and reasoned upon simultaneously; shafts of water, yes, real water, traipsed and settled unsuspectingly here and there, around the pool of interested vendors. And as it came running down the mossy walls, falling from nowhere into the copious flow of sweat laden vigour, replete with cries, laughter, silence, survival, resilience, ignorance, trickery and chastity, someone lamented that the urchin drink from the plentiful collecting in rusting canisters nearby. But not always was it collected in these canisters; there was a short supply of those too. Sometimes a pool would form along the slight drains and indents between the road and the doubtable footpath so that books, those which were most shunned amongst the shunned, floated briefly before sinking for the day, unnoticed. I say so because many times when I revisited these footfall vendors I would find these books again, their lifeless, drowned soul rescued by the keen urchins who the owner paid meagrely for reconnaissance.

Poverty and illiteracy had perhaps circumcised the democratic ambitions of this class of proletariat. All along this tapering causeway, at the end of which there was little objective light, someone had erected a fortress. Someone had tamed this passel long ago, perhaps their ancestors, so that they were this way. Not that it irritated me that this fortification, here erected upon pages of knowledge- walls of multicoloured paperback editions gleaming stupidly toward an uninterested frenzy, allowed its peoples to dwell happily in their relative ignorance. But so inopportune it had rendered an otherwise obvious lot of opportunistic people that even though they’d got their math and economics for the month figured, even though they knew their diets and their indulgences, even though they believed their Gods and roamed their streets, they accepted so innately the dominance of the corrupt, depraved and licentious. So easily they accepted that injustice reigned with an iron whip; injustice, a moral judgment that they created defined by themselves.

So much so, that almost everyone had carved out their own island of omission, some forever building upon their inheritance, the rest lost in an interminable boat ride to the next sanctuary. Behind the heartening languorous faces, the forever smiling and enduring country folk who had accepted their political fate as being one part a divine order and the other an equally incontestable inheritance, there brooded bloodied survivalists who had been taught over generations to think little of one another and think only of a distant, never realising preservation of what was to be their legacy. To reconsider their neighbours, their religion, their doctrines, their wealth, their envy and their power was the established thumb rule of political thought. Political will and power itself dissolved in the sheer quantity of either the mal-educated or the illiterate- the well guised handicap of the world’s largest democracy. So that all that remained after each election was this narrow human flow, beyond which one couldn’t see or perceive once the plunge was taken. And which never ceased to flood and drown her people and her animals. For all this, knowledge stood again, firm on the edges, rendered farfetched, foreign and useless to both- the patient-like, disinterested, consummate consumer of social medicine and the smiling urchin who continues to this day to pick up its tattered substance, unknowingly reinforcing his estranged past somewhere on streets I am certain now I can’t quite recollect the names of.

A Surface Over Nothing

I had been walking for an hour; my feet had turned sore, almost numbed, as they landed with dull practice on the undulating sand beneath them. I hadn’t really turned around to look for a while. There wasn’t much point. There would be little sense in doing that and then end up wincing at the thought of having to walk back again meaninglessly. There wasn’t much point in fact in looking in any direction, any direction except down with your chin sticking into your throat, eyes aimlessly following indiscernible grey dunes as they whizzed by under our giant, aimless feet. The wind followed us with impiety, conjuring sharp gusts from no certain direction, slicing the neck with unseen shrapnel, over and over again. I didn’t dare risk looking up now because the sun hadn’t come up. And till the sun tore through some part of this grey sheath around me I didn’t want to look at the unending nothingness around me. It wasn’t meaningless though, as a sluggish friend to my right, I think, said. Just that it lacked direction, ascertainable and exhaustive. They grey sky above seemed to be pressing down upon the bleak flatness upon which we mooched. Unashamed, the hardened sterility beneath us slithered everywhere and no matter where we went, how many steps we took, the unending grey scales seemed to coil further under our feet, the whole expanse throbbing silently. No direction.
I took photos to pass my time. The beach was a good occasion to wield about with a camera I had thought. But I hadn’t used it since I had packed it in back at the hostel. I realised on the bus, where I had the desire to click away at the blur hurtling past my window, that it would be a while since someone would eventually muster up the desire to use such ungainly equipment. So doubly bent I must’ve been to take that instrument, that I had packed it in the first thing. Over that, two small piles of clothing, a towel, few fresh underwear, a brown hop bag, some weed, a glass bong and a badly wrapped soap. As usual, it wasn’t neatly done so when I had once opened the bag I figured that the soap bar was on the loose somewhere. Thoroughly unimpressed by the circumstances, we had decided to let the matter rest in the cubbyhole till we landed ourselves a bunk. The blur hurtling past soon turned to a parade of concrete enterprise boards as we made our way through districts and I forgot about the beautiful colours sinking softly into each other; there impervious canvases rendered faceless and vague. I forgot about the need I had had to keep that image with me. It would probably come back in a while and even otherwise, it was probably best in its fleeting conjecture. One way or another, my mind forgot about it and moved on, trapped within the inertia of the travelling body. But later at the hotel by the strange beach, I had taken a late night shower and while arranging my bath found the camera cuddled with the soap. What were the chances of that; I had been flustered and even wronged then. Slightly ashamed though that kind of shame is difficult to describe, a sort of futile shame that one knows, by practice, will come and leave, never disturbing the conscious balance of my immediate needs and desires. An animalistic shame, devoid of further moral consequence, I liked it. And sure enough, the shame dissolved with the soap. Later, I imagined it was quite obvious really and rather dull headed, I usually accepted such things at the first instance. In this case, it was an intuitive thought when I was packing the soap which I had naturally paid no heed to. So why bother now? At least not now; I would probably use it tomorrow then, if it works, I reasoned. I ate at the balcony of the hotel room. The beach was just across a line of coconut trees and as it were, I felt that night that the beach slowly pulling away. Sucking a little of this and that from that night that we had. We sat for while, in groups, in the little balcony, smoking, drinking and clicking away at the slow night as it pulled away from us, ready to crash behind the horizon somewhere, just like the receding sea. Later, when our minds surrendered to the vacuum and the alcohol, we passed out for the day.
Taking pictures of a grey beach on the Bengal Coast under the dull prenatal sky was not a great idea. But it did help pass a lot of time. There was no variance in what the viewfinder displayed. The grey tone fell with equal monotony on the lens, the only active distinction in the tone arriving midway where the horizon must’ve been, between the silhouette of the absent sea’s neat bed and the stubbed sky. In some ways it looked like the picture could’ve been taken anywhere. Many days later when I had reviewed the pictures, not remembering where exactly I had taken them, most had seemed like those accidental pictures which could’ve been shot as easily under the sheets on a rainy day in the bedroom. Everything was out of focus, the camera too had lost its sense of direction and with it, that of familiarity. The presumption of familiarity, or rather lack of it, made the both of us rather disinterested in trying to chisel things out clearly here. We were in the company of weary skies, the camera and me. It was too early in the morning and too late into the hangover to be thinking clearly. I amused myself with the digital display once in a while though. But every time my mind came around to settle on something mildly amusing my feet would start regretting ever being there and my stomach would force itself upon my mind- telling me that it wanted nothing and would refuse even the air. What a presuming device! This stomach of mine; when in fact I wanted nothing as much as to forget the tizzy I had left it in, it bothered me continuously, persisting till I finally prodded around my throat.
Finally, after another unreasonable half hour or so, we were exhausted as a collective and finally decided that we should stop and wait right there for the sea to come to us, which would take approximately a few hours. The truth was that the dawn was breaking then and we hadn’t yet found the supposedly inward bound waters, they seemed to appear and disappear at the edge of our vision, waves bouncing off transparent embankments, but we never did get close enough. Finally it was reckoned that maybe the sea had begun to recede earlier than we had expected and that we should all just settle down right there and wait rather expectantly. We sat through dawn and saw the sun finally emerged from somewhere, which we instantly marked as east to our short-lived elation. It was stunning. I admitted. It seemed to tear and burn its way out through the sea, wherever it was between us and the sun, vaporising the red waves as they rose up. The grey tint that engulfed us had been flooded with fiery spirits. As I sat there, the wraithlike reflections drew further up and revolved around me frantically everywhere I looked. The sun climbed out eventually and settled for a sluggish ascent from thereon. Finally we took pictures that were discernible and some of them came out rather well. These couldn’t be taken under sheets. Mostly, when we were completely unaware of how exactly to make the camera do what we wanted it to do; the nuances of photography came out quite brilliantly.
But soon it became very hot as the sky continued to press down upon us in the company of the impressive sun. I thought I would doze off waiting for the sea to claw back to us. I thought the sea wouldn’t make it; there was that possibility in this kind of heat. Everything could naturally give up here, it would be of Darwinian consequence- further pushing the wheel of survival and churning out the remains. I thought of the empty bottles of water lying around us, left behind by strayed tourists, perhaps just like us, only with the sense to carry water; and then of all the water around us; innocent, inviting my parched throat and even a grumpy stomach, guising the invisible salt. I thought of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and I might’ve thought then that I would pass out instead of dozing away, which would be worse. I don’t remember the next five hours. Neither do the others. Some of them don’t remember the entire day. We must’ve all crashed right there, in that spot in the middle of nowhere- that we had chosen rather reasonably but without any apparent reason to build upon the entire day; it made perfect sense even though none of us remember it now and feel confounded in retrospect, as always. A string of completely real choices under very real circumstances had led us to a place which we couldn’t place ever if we had walked five minutes away from it. I had thought so when I woke up and it made my head feel dizzy with completely unnecessary wondering. After staring briefly into the painfully bright turquoise screen that hung over our flaying forehead I looked away and shut my eyes. I remember the Albatross and the wooden ship moving effortlessly, for some wicked reason I’m sure, toward me, ploughing efficiently through the grey sand. I remember the pirates who gave us rum instead of the water which we gulped rather easily. I remember the misplaced euphoria of lies and intoxication. I remember this and an hour later, when I finally woke up, breathing in water through my parched mouth and nostrils, I remember drowning rather foolishly in my own sleep, in four inches of water.
The salty taste on my tongue came to mind and I rushed to my waking rescue. As I found my feet I realised I had turned over sometime and slept on my face and that the slithering water must’ve rushed up my nose. The sea was coming, finally and how unexpectedly? I had a stupid feeling of being unceasingly undermined by nature that day, for quite a while at least. I woke the others up and we smoked a few cigarettes until someone rolled a joint. We smoked, following the water as it slithered past the tiny dunes. The water ran past our toes, crashing between them. Felt oddly placated; but not quite as ticklish as a few years back on another beach; the feeling perhaps compounded by the first pleasures of childhood back then. The sea felt cool nonetheless, Way cooler than the stiff morning breeze and the solar conclave that engaged us incessantly ever since dawn. Slowly greater volumes, from the sea, cascaded across the landscape effortlessly, pushed on by an invisible force that grew steadily in strength. It was slightly frightening but mostly I was awed. The fact that with such casual detail the earth was able to wash over our plans, avert them and at least render them miserable humbled me. With such grace the water displayed its conquests every day here, in the middle of nowhere where nobody really noticed; conquests over every enterprise and thought that one could conjure up. What a shame, I thought, how was one expected to take note of such display and the days ahead? In law school, or in the streets or in offices or schools or apartments or supermarkets or cars or roads or street lights or parishes, how? Someday, I thought, we would all wake up to the taste of salty water, as surprised as I had been, even in expectation. And maybe then, with nothing around us except a large, flat and seemingly monotonous canvas, we would perceive the falsity of our unequal hopes and forgotten needs, whatever they would be.

Later that day, as the evening set in and our wallowing throats gave way to dry silence as we slowly ran out of things to talk about, we decided to head back. It was a strange combination, the inner desiccation and the salty moisture on our skin, wrapped around us. My teeth were chattering dry. We had watched the water rise up and noticed that it did so rather rapidly. About fifteen minutes into a light, cannabis propelled, trip we decided to make a hasty retreat. Most of us lost our footwear to the waves and the bag that we were carrying was dripping wet. We had waded about for a bit, slightly euphoric, urging each other on and wrestling waves and all that came along with them. The moon seemed to be waiting to surprise us as we turned to head back. It bounced off the still waters in the distance, nearer to the coast and lit up tiny shards of water sleeping between the dunes, undisturbed until our gaze fell upon them. I had managed to salvage the camera and tried to capture the sight, but to no avail. I wondered if I would remember seeing this. I lamented that the human eye had incorrectly been of greater potential than my camera, which at that moment, I did not need. I’d imagined forgetting in a few weeks. It reflected more than anything else, on my poor memory I reasoned. My mind seemed to take these moments rather impressively upon itself but it had somehow inculcated an attitude towards my memory that was similar to my attitude towards laundry. In a way, I was thankful. Otherwise I could’ve badgered myself with vivid nostalgia, something I have regretted mostly, especially since I can remember myself as an emotional adolescent in the days when my splendid memory played truant. This state was ideal as long as it didn’t take away from what I felt right then, the anticipation of being inebriated by a sight that I might find myself surprisingly interested in. It had the makings of a perfectly real yet unmistakeably uncertain and therefore not mind-numbing possibility, each time.
As we walked past the many quiet moons beneath us we realised that the sun had disappeared without notice. We had missed the sunset, even after being warned that it happens quite regularly to tourists here, who lose themselves in the rapture of timelessness. Such had been intimated to us by the resort manager, or representative, as he liked to present himself, in dark green overalls. And when I remembered this, along with my own dismissive thoughts back then, yet another wave of shame washed over me, even as many crashed relentlessly- eager to wet me, wet us, pull us back perhaps. The shore came to us rather quickly. I don’t remember feeling tired or even expectant as we arrived rather soon compared to the morning ordeal which might’ve gone on for days if time had mattered. Dim bulbs lit up the shore here and there, the light offering nothing under them, except yellow sand around which it wrapped itself. The resort was unnaturally empty; we were the only ones staying, perhaps in the entire region. This extended a helping hand to the silently roaring surrealism that we had our backs to, for now, as it receded only to pull whatever remained of reality along with it. And as our caretaker handed us another bottle of ‘whisky-scotch’ with a tired smile, the cold vacuum was already building up, readying itself for another night of smashed perception.

The Journalist

As she walked out the first one to spot her, to his great disappointment, was the little man in the green shirt, swathed in his sweat, the stench of a week‘s worth of moist tobacco clinging on stubbornly. Too many nights spent burning oil and burning holes in corduroys. He’d been waiting and watching. Hoping to quietly slink away, unnoticed, in her direction and get a word- in and out. How he hoped that she had hung about inside for a bit, tentatively peering out to give herself away, only to him. So much easier. How he would’ve thanked all those around him who were unfortunately just about like him, if they hadn’t sooner or later spotted her too. How easy it would’ve been if all these cars and these cameras parked around them, as they swarmed insignificantly until that moment, had never been invented or discovered or whatever. How nice it would feel in fact if the sun hadn’t bellowed down upon them day after day, chasing them in and out of one political parish, chasing them down. Relief and luck, he thought, too often graced hypocrisy and ignorance; of which he had seen and accepted much, for far too long, as long as he could remember now. He longed for his youth. Whatever it meant. He would’ve loved to be ignorant in that way. The youthful and pure ignorance of ignorance itself. The first freshly laid layer, preordained or whatever, present since time allowed him to breathe and till he allowed nothing to breed within it, attempt to define it or be revealed to it. That kind of ignorance was alright perhaps. Anyway, it was alright probably because it really did expire and wasn‘t viciously cyclic. Somewhere in his youth, he thought, he perhaps had been on the other side of this life. Distanced and comforted by the forethought of nascent education and huddled in warm sleep between the copious flow of unrestrained opportunity and self-creationism, he had perhaps, only the slightest idea of one day facing the possibility of being trapped within this conjugation of measured opinion and after thought. Both of which had left him with little to be relieved about. Luck was absent altogether. He didn’t understand luck, more importantly he wished not to, unlike his young days. However incomprehensible though it might’ve been to him, he was sure of the symmetry between all such things, not necessarily evil or wrong- he wasn‘t sure if these existed either, but based on qualified ignorance. Luck was for the ignorant and for those who never expected it to chance upon them. In many ways it was the ironical extension of ignorance, created by the ignorant who wanted perhaps to search no more or didn’t feel the need to do so. And those whose objective was defined and to which they committed in such a way that it drove them or compelled them to ignorance of which they might have later reaped, luckily of course. All this cyclic contemplation was too much. How he would love to be confused and effused again with his own preconceptions that followed his youthful thought. But knowing so snatched that away from him.
Everyone had noticed though, the woman as she strode out. Why? Why could she not have stayed inside he lamented again. The loathsome passel, that had been buzzing like presumptuous flies over fresh turd, suddenly congealed into one tight swarm, like one big, frenzied erection. Collectively they moved like a mob of termites, eating into each other, toward the woman- mikes held out as far as they would reach, cameras propped on the shoulders of men sitting atop the shoulders of another- the press. He had been wondering whether they would all go back home, not today maybe, but someday. One day, he thought, they were all sure to understand, like him, the futility of their individual concerts around the super bowl of inscrutable politics. Maybe, he tempted himself, that day would arrive when democracy for once would aid those like him. Even a flaying majority would be sufficient to drive home his point, wouldn’t it? If most of us conceded that we were byte grabbers and tired of being so, then maybe journalists like us would have it much easier on our supposed conscience, he amused himself. But the latter bit, about the conscience and his own supposition consumed his rationality. Looking around, he found it hard to believe that many of these men and women, their own consciences locked away and preceded by the practicality of various things, cushioned by the lard that reflected their remuneration and hunger, were even in a position to reconsider their mediatory existence as conveyers of compromised information carefully repackaged to placate and instigate the audiences they were catering to. But then who was he to settle the conscientious matters of the world? Specially since the world he intended to opinionate upon was full with people who thought they did in fact possess a conscience which most in fact, in their eyes, seemed to lack. Rather idiotic, he thought, this conscience business. But how easily we all seem to sway in its tender understanding, always exclusive to each person and eluding his contemporary. Which too we ourselves gauge. Strange.
As the eager throng, in the middle of which he was pressed and sandwiched, tided over the heat emanating from the tar below, closer to the woman, some clever folk tripped and nudged each other; they were all out to grab what the other could not grab. And if the other could grab it, it mostly lost significance in terms of elusiveness. Less thought was given to dissemination at this moment. There were many things that the job required at that moment and the latter was just not as highly prioritized. Their job, just like his, meant many things too. It meant a legitimate opinion at social gatherings, one that everyone would be keen to hear. It meant a well decorated name plate at the head of the front porch of a mildly decadent colony brimming with the unique middle class of a country forever in transition. All this of course, only if they had managed to buy into a hot property deal. It meant remuneration and independence of elderly opinion, so essential. Further, it probably meant reverence. For many it was a mere stepping stone to greater glory, there was so much out there- regional analysts, editors, commentators, authoritative debaters and perhaps even politics. The noble pursuits of journalism long lost in the search of the elusive, which in itself was not a problematic or intrusive quest, except that elusive increasingly became what could be kept out of reach once held onto, however accessible it may have been before that. Amongst the rhetoric of front pages, bolder titles, the impugned editor’s breakfast preference, bracketing requirements, regional recovery programs and other things, the biblical tenets of journalism seemed inane. Maybe they too felt like him- very little like their ideal journalist (which he presumed was better), whoever that was, and much like their neighbor’s envy, in which most had perhaps sought and found satisfaction; of course all this behind the veil of responsible and reconciled adulthood. But then he never managed to find satiation in that. Maybe that was because he didn’t know who his neighbors were or what language they spoke. But nonetheless, he wasn’t daft and understood that he was surrounded by men and women who fit many an Indian’s most befitting description of a practical adult, absolved of the stoned haze that engulfed the rebellious English speaking youth of the country- the redeemed soul of an even handed journalist. And this thinking wasn’t necessarily abrupt or unreasonable, he reasoned. At least whilst he was unfortunately familiar with domestic realities of his people. The people around whom and amongst whom he lived. With whom he bore striking resemblance to the untrained eye, the eye which most would possess. If this was not the case it didn’t matter much. Journalists had been a feared specie amongst the hapless many who whiled away their middle class mornings reading newspapers, quizzing their children playfully or sternly at breakfast and faded away into the vast night of opportunities- falling into punctual slumber as the whiff of onions consumed at dinner filled their knowledgeable heads- the news channel buzzing softly in the lobby, projecting on the unlikely couch.

On really offhand days he would bark at his dog, everything outside their little concrete safe house was an inheritance of compounded ignorance. And everyone and everything could be blamed- capitalists, communists caught in crossfire, the knowledge revolutionaries, the littering housewives, the internet, children with more facial hair than civic sense, the beleaguered student, the woeful farmer, the traffic police, the auto rickshaws, the eve teasing youth, illiterate labor, pension schemes, apparatchik, renovators, planners, anyone. But in the end, the finger always pointed conveniently at that which he best comprehended and lived for and amongst- journalism. Journalists, to him, were barely worthy of being considered as a collective. If anything, it was problematic to do that. To him, they represented and symbolized, as a consequence of their oath, the vast gorges- gaps that lay between the many peoples submitting or inheriting their acquiescence to the national democratic ideal. He often felt that the news media could not, as much as it may have tried, bridge these identities and present them as intertwined and co-dependent. At best, there were those who lived either above or along or below the surface of the vast national polity which affected them accordingly. Each people isolated but not insulated from the other. Journalists, like everyone else in any other observant profession, seemed desperate to live in the denial of the nation’s multiple personality disorder, one it had inherited because of the incestuous ties of the Raj and his daughter kingdoms. One had bred into the nation a familiar bureaucracy at ease under the eternally swiveling sarkari fan, distanced cleverly from the faceless proletariat. And the other had imbibed a plethora of disconnected levels of functioning- thought, reasoning and tradition. After much adultery with the globalized West, each culture, each strata of our collective society had brewed up its own concoction of life and existence, in the process severely distancing itself from each other; all this under the cool, clever eyes of the democratic ideal- the people’s sarkar. So that while a handful sat educated in towns and capitals, content within their golden cages replete with imports that brought them mindfully closer to a reality much farther and unconcerned but definitely more entertaining and intelligibly packaged; many tiny human eddies snaked slowly through the forgotten deserts of time and space where independence had always truly prevailed. This void, the factum of mutual alienation, however inadvertent or justifiable, the journalist displayed best.
Just as well though no one could be blamed except the dumb route of agreeable intelligence and the inevitability of absurd existence. But then he saved that thought for better days, when he would perhaps buy himself an early drink on a weekday or something. These were much less specific thoughts and more shapeless in their abstract objectivity, however futile. Thus they were thoroughly entertaining to him, since answers to such problems were best clearly unanswerable than frustratingly disjointed in their logical conclusions as he perceived them to be.
He could not see her when the mob got there, screaming and shouting questions that ate into each other, muffled and fell to the ground without making much sense. Behind all the camera work, reasonable opinion, measured announcements and steady flow of trustworthy reporting lay this utterly clattered, perpetually flogged and combustible world of the quick, churlish and sly. Any minute now the family of journalists would go nuclear, he sneered. He secretly loathed being short- specifically since his tenure in political parishes involved as much on the spot reporting amongst such throngs as it did trying to get his face out of another’s baked armpit. Pushing and shoving were at their professional best today. He hadn’t quite seen such frantic appeal overwhelm these familiar faces against whom he had found himself pitted for as long as he could remember now. Strangely though, he felt sleepy and tired. He’d had all these ideas which perhaps he too was confused about and which probably directed him away from anything not alternative, for some equally baffling reasons of course; but he had successfully managed to avert the blasé nature of his ever-concluding remarks from seeping into his work. Thus he took it quite seriously even when he found himself around a bunch of social magnets. Not that he had much work, no sir. If there was one inborn talent in the man, one virtue he had built upon with dedication and ease, it had to be his ability to avoid most work. And yet be recognized in some way or another. This he considered a part of his serious outlook. A smart chap, his colleagues would say. “He’ll get the slot someday”, “Very earnest chap!”, “…but rarely have I seen you complain…”. Such opinions were commonplace. They had always been among the people he worked with. Only in the end, an end which he decided, had someone the misfortune of being revealed to his equally abrupt facet. Most thought of him as a rather simple fellow, just like any one of them. Only slightly more talented but lacking in social skills that could propel him toward greater authority. But they were quick to regard the latter as a temporary handicap, soon to be revealed to the all encompassing eventuality of experience and exposure and “duniyadaari” and so on. They thought of him as a man of the world too. But there own world perhaps. A world he would go on discovering with each passing day. Greater monotony befalling the hours as they lapped into each other warily, forgotten and disrespectful. They were pretty confounded though as our man was anything but like them. At least to himself, he would never admit so. So much time and effort, among other ideological proprieties of youth, had been invested into the careful and slow alienation of his opinions. His talent, his punctuality and his ease were all mechanical extensions of how he now thought and perceived. This he had realized or rather compromised upon not long ago, the memory was yet to settle and harden up. Like fresh cement, he thought. The idea of surviving as a Roman in Rome had made sense as life had narrowed and receded, hand in hand with his hairline. He never bothered correcting anyone, neither out of the urge to be brutally honest nor to appease himself. Both were, in a certain way, the same thing now. A man must only be brutally honest if he must consider himself to be better disposed in the company of truth, which must in turn appease him. It weighed lightly on his conscience though, the incumbent hypocrisy in lying to another bunch of likely hypocrites. He wondered that he was growing old and beginning to think just like each of them. Those he passed silent judgment on in the blink of an eye. But the degrees were different and as of now they did matter. There still did exist a difference between a white lie or a white collar lie, indifference or arrogant apathy, irritability or intolerance, ignorance or denial in his world just like there existed a difference between transvestites and homosexuals in the surreal world of a straight non-conformist. Baffling but conveniently distinguishable and imputable in case of urgent need. He didn’t care.
He fought his way through the arm trenches, careful not to breathe unless the sun burnt his temple. The woman was announcing something in what seemed to be a well practiced rhetoric- a theatre like voice over. Journalists who’d hotly disagree, perhaps later on prime time, nodded feverishly in agreement so as to move quickly to the next bit of hopefully dramatic sound byte. Some of them, the older ones, the quieter ones, the newer, shyer ones and the tinier ones like himself, had been relegated to a less strategic position and were now attempting to imitate those invigorated souls that preceded them, trying failingly to float their question successfully across the roving overhead cameras and over the flashing and clicking flash bulbs. When he finally got out he realized that his recording piece had fallen somewhere under the drunk legs of a swaying and thrusting mob. So much for the exclusive piece which he had carefully planned to extract. Life was it its random best. Murphy was watching with utter delight perhaps. He walked away, sighting a roadside tobacconist to his glee. The world was too fixated or too random to be enjoyable. It was not to his taste perhaps. From the outside, the dots forming the big snake seemed to be gyrating and grinding into each other, it was such parody, he smiled exhaling smoke. Amongst so many men and women finding pieces to fit their many meanings into levitates the best possible carrier- the shapeless smoke. But no one would take note or take advantage, what a shame. If only audiences would tune into prime time to watch wisps of smoke cut through the morning sunlight as it filtered and fell through the canopy of leaves above us, he sighed and then laughed. For the longest time he would continue to think of his travel plans when he aged a bit more, always keeping in mind the next prospective expiry date. They were surely like the smoke. Shapeless, unrestrained and vulnerable in the fact of their sudden disappearance. At ease even with compromise. It was another experience waiting to unfurl. One which would at least not, he could be sure, entrap him in the monotony of its predictable structure. Predictability itself, perhaps, was the last bastion of his inner defeat. A feeling he experienced so often, so difficult to describe. All that he knew was that this predictability, cycle and structure, with all these people as its symbolic, powerful constituents had left him consuming, every morning as he woke, a concoction of thoughts congealed with frustrating contradictions and inner turmoil. The devil who resides within the idle, he thought. His monotonous ways were magnets for these things. He would travel. Yes. But in this increasingly uninteresting and servile world, where the consumerist man was at best a survivalist, an animal no better than a plump, leashed dog, his curiosity to feel and see humankind spread everywhere was fast turning into a subversive arrangement. He would have to search beyond that which was already elusive, which so many wanted. Like a sound byte, disgusting. He felt as if the human herd was too much too handle all of a sudden. It’s collective search for elusiveness suffered the debauchery of its inherent commonality at every layer. All pervasive. He would prefer a quick personal derangement if that were the case and if the case was not to his liking indeed. Stubbing his beedie, he turned to look for the last time at the uneasy congregation and its symbolic, mindless, haphazard and inefficient pursuit despite all the attempted civility education, progress and other rhetoric. He looked at the woman, at her smug party workers. After all that they had done politics had absolved them. From all of it… This case was indeed not to his liking. He’d continue to wait and watch then. Hoping he could quietly slink away, get a word in and out. Not today, some other day, perhaps. Smiling, almost cynically, he touched the holster of his 9mm- it felt warm, in anticipation; shook his head warily and walked away- relief and luck, he thought, too often graced hypocrisy and ignorance.