I don’t like the summer. The heat gets to me and I need to change my undershirt more often, and if you’re a big guy, you sweat more and it gets flustering with the weight. It’s the second week of June, and the third week at my new job. I’ve been juggling jobs for a while now. Last month I was a supermarket assistant, but I was no good. I always forgot to double pack, and I had to pay for all the bottles of ketchup that tore through and shattered on the floor. I couldn’t afford so much ketchup. Now I work in a light bulb company. You’d think they do most of it electronically, but they can’t afford robots, so they make-do with failed novelists. It isn’t too shabby, five thousand a month for curling tungsten filaments in a dark corner. If all goes well, I might get promoted. What does promotion entail in this field, I do not know, but that’s what they tell me. I quit most my jobs before I can be promoted or patronized. But I’ve decided that I want to be a glass blower. I’m learning the job from the guy who does it here. We work pretty close to one another, well, I work in a corner of the furnace room, like the other filament rollers. There are three of us and one of him – the glass blower is our Cinderella, with all his masterful movements, handling molten glass as if it were the closest to art that man could get. He seems effortless, breezy, and we look at him as if he were a different breed of men. I wanted to make the cut, I wanted to rise from this life of minions to one of the glass blowing Cinderellas. I wanted to claim the factory men scriptures and have the grease-angels embrace me, and so I had him teach me every night after we were done for the day. The other filament rollers call me crazy, they say that I’m shooting for the moon, that it can’t be done, that my flayed fingertips can’t take the borax, but I’m a stubborn man.
It gets hot in here. It makes me sweat like a pig in heat. Last night, when I couldn’t bear it anymore, I took my pants off. And Cinderella chuckled deliciously, his eyes an envious green, “You know, you’re lucky you can do that.”
“You could too.”
“I don’t want to melt my balls off.”
That day we discovered that our Cinderella has balls.
Sometimes I think that this job is getting too tough. It sucks off ten hours of my day, sometimes twelve, but the pay is steady. It’s five thousand a month – enough for five hundred smokes. Good that I don’t smoke much. I have enough for rent. Earlier, I used to live in this cage of a room by the station with a guy who injected stuff into his veins. He called himself Jimmy. How he happened to get an English-sounding name, he wouldn’t tell me. The stuff got him to paradise, he used to claim, but I always saw him stretched out on the floor. Sometimes he would throw up and shit his pants at the same time. Maybe paradise smells like a bedpan. But I didn’t want paradise. I was happy in my sweet drowsiness that the djinns at the bottom of the glass bottles condemned me with.
One fine day Jimmy, in his narcotic daze, came on to me. He undid his pants and stood in all his glory touching himself.
“Make me feel loved”, he said in a breaking voice. He had a longing in his eyes that I could not understand. “Take me in your embrace”, he yelled, “Why wouldn’t you? Oh, why wouldn’t you do it?” And then he tripped over his trousers, and passed out on the floor mumbling.
Back then I was a postman, and I’d often return late in the evenings from the post office to see him struggle with himself. I smoked more often, I drank less, I didn’t write at all. One night, lying in my bed I looked out the lone window at the drab station pillar – grey concrete with the number 72 in a yellow circle painted on it. Jimmy was out in a corner sucking his thumb. And I told myself that I couldn’t live like this anymore. I grabbed my portable and my coat, and left – didn’t care to get my underpants. Maybe Jimmy needed fresh ones to shit in.
I lived in a cardboard shack under a flyover for a while. The days were noisy and the nights were far from quiet, but I was just fine. I was alone enough to let the beast possess me, and I wrote violently. “I’m a writer! I’m a writer! I’m a writer!” I’d tell myself over and over again. With a childlike stubbornness, I clubbed all my failures, and like most petty writers, I waded ankle deep in my pride that came from being unappreciated, from being unseen. Most of the time I wrote dirty stories that did well at the railway station. I had an agent who made money off my words selling them off to a twenty-rupee magazine that was a hit among the degenerates and the wasted.
One day I came across an advertisement for an exam centre, pasted on the back of an auto rickshaw. It promised me a job, and money, and all the nice, wifely women and beautiful children. And so I made a leap for the stars. I gave up my job at the post office and showed up at the coaching institute in the best pair of clothes that I owned, covering my tattered georgette shirt under my corduroy jacket. I went there for three whole months, and for a while, they managed to instill in me an ambition. They tamed the dragon, belted the storm, but it didn’t last long. After the haze lifted, I started to look around, and it all came to me, all that lay behind the shimmering sequins they’d embroidered on to the ugliness and the desperation. Print two words, ‘GOVERNMENT JOB’ onto a paper in bold uppercase, and see all the lowlife swarm to it like unfortunate locusts, in all their hurt and tiredness.
I met Trisha at the centre. She was in the business, and she’d been lured into the centre by the same auto rickshaw advertisement that I’d fallen for when she saw after a hard night’s work. That night, for the first time in years, her sick, yellow eyes shined behind that heavy curtain of kohl that hid their nakedness. She bought a fistful of rice for the kheer, and some palm jaggery to sweeten it with. I looked at her while she took careful notes in the class, stealing her gaze from rabid men around her, who’d drop their pens to get a glimpse of her shapely, pink-legging clad calves.
“I like what you write”, she said one afternoon in her thick broken accent, as we stood sipping hot chai by a cart.
I looked at her with pity, in the same way as you’d see a broken crystal vase lying in a drain, with its shards glimmering under the refuse. Why I saw her that way, I do not know. Maybe I was patronizing her, but all I knew was that this was a woman with hope choking her before all of it would snap. Life was nothing but a long game of hangman.
“I often stop by the station vendor. You’ve helped me a lot.”
“What do you mean?”
“Now I know and understand all the words my clients want me to say. They say I sound delicious in English.”
And all I could do was to look into those sick, yellow eyes, and her thin painted lips to which she brought a blood-stained, blue handkerchief with embroidered little white daffodils. And I looked at her with absolute horror. Something inside me broke that day, even though I’d thought that I’d been through with most fragile things. I didn’t go back inside after that. And all those promises flaked off like bits of damp plaster right before my eyes.
I was jobless once more, scraping off the little I’d saved and kept under my mattress, but that did not bother me. I started eating at a Gurudwara because it was free, living off ten rupees a week. I spent that ten on a cigarette, because that I couldn’t get there, and I’d savour the harsh hit of the nicotine on my tongue like a bitter, forbidden fruit. I smoked on Sundays, calming my nerves for a couple of hours.
Sometimes the sky would break and lash upon my leaking roof, and in the damp air, I’d sit stewing ankle deep in stale water, and I’d sleep on a soaked mattress, but that did not bother me. I wrote stories within stories, more than ever, and I earned enough to afford one pack of cigarettes a week. Sometimes, while on my midnight strolls, I’d see hookers lined up by a railway platform, and I’d think of Trisha, and I’d hope that the dream hadn’t flaked away for her yet, as it had for me. But something told me, in my waking nightmares, that it had, and that she was strung at the end of a telephone, quoting words that I’d written, and it terrified me: to think that I pushed her deeper into the filth. To think the jasmine in her hair would be stained red again, and all the world, with all its love and compassion and champions of humanity, would never see beyond her rouge, and her kohl and her skimpy blouses.
In the spring, I saw Jimmy again after a whole year. He had had his arm cut off – it was either that or certain death. He decided to cut the deal with the devil: losing his arm wasn’t as bad as losing his head.
“Oi! Long time! Looking good!”
“You too, Jimmy.”
“I’m finally off the stuff. I feel great! I feel great!” he convinced himself.
We were outside a grocery store, and he had a bright purple baseball hat on that said ‘Supermart’ in a swanky font.
“Do you work here?”
“Yeah. After this”, he pointed at his arm, “I decided to get my life together man.”
“Are you wearing make-up?”
“I help the women sample stuff here. It started off as a joke, but the neighbourhood women think it’s funny.”
Poor armless bastard. He was worse off than how I’d left him. And it was in that moment that I took him in my arms and almost wept while I cried out loud, “We’ll never be free Jimmy! We’ll never be free!”
Have you ever hugged a one-armed man? It is mighty strange, I tell you. His left shoulder jerked forth to grab me, but that was it.
He helped me get a job at the grocery store. They paid me by the day, ten rupees for a ten hour shift, a rupee for an hour. After ten days, I bought my first quart of brandy in almost six months, and that first swallow of liquor felt as beautiful as a forlorn drop of the gentle autumn rain upon a parched lower lip.
Days went by, and I started earning enough to afford a can of beans every week. Eighty rupees, baked beans in tomato sauce – of all the symbols of poverty, I had to draw mine from the lives of authors that I’d read. And I enjoyed my luxury on Sunday nights after work, sitting in the back alley on a cast iron bench that was put there for no reason at all, and I’d have them straight out of the can under the setting moon. Life was good. And then, I started spending too much on the spilled ketchup.
“I can’t pay up for the sauce anymore, Jimmy.”
“Do you think the eye shadow makes me look pretty?”
“I think I’m going to quit.”
“I think I enjoy putting it on. I feel free.”
“But we can never be free, Jimmy.”
My mattress felt wetter and smellier that night. I think I’d pissed my pants. The royalties kept coming in, and I felt rich, and I thought about dead goldfish in the pond by the park floating flat on their sides.
So I got up, heaving my weight, and put my boots on. I left my pants on the cord to dry, and put on my other pair of knickers, and I walked to the bamboo thicket in the park. It was a warm, breezy June night, and I did not know why I did what I did, but I did it nonetheless. When I plunged into the water, I let out a sharp gasp, and then it dawned upon me, that I didn’t know how to swim. My body struggled to grasp something, anything, but I kept sinking, almost as if strung upon the frames of a movie playing in slow motion. I was blind and senseless. The only thing I could sense was the wetness of the water. When I hit the bottom, I was so lost that I started digging into the earth in desperation. After a while, as my lungs grew heavy, the spiritual took over the physical. In that moment, I felt emancipated, almost in an ungodly way. In that moment, I was a living taboo. And then the next thing I remember was being pulled out by a man with a muffler wrapped around his ears, holding a heavy torch.
“Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!” I don’t know why I said that, but I guess even god needs a flashlight sometimes to cut through the darkness. Only if he knew which one of his beloved souls are best left unsaved. If only he could learn to let go.
And then I ended up here, winding lightbulb filaments, because I wasn’t good at anything. It’s a steady pay, but as I drink all I that couldn’t earlier, and stuff my face with all the food I couldn’t buy earlier, I feel that it’s not enough. I still write, and on most nights I need to get these horrid visions off my mind. This haze of smiling people and deodorant hisses and empty bars and sad women breastfeeding stranded on the curb, and people trapped in the wrong bodies. These horrid visions of dead goldfish and wry platitudes.
I hope she still reads my stories, they’re not all dirty anymore, but I do put in the juicy bits for the sad and the dying and the depraved. Something tells me that she’s not coughing blood anymore, and that she’s rotten away and fed the manure pile. Good for you, Trisha. Good for you.