Once upon a time

If you talk about experiences which made my life livelier – I had many. But when it came to dating, I was pretty a novice. So that night, walking beside K, under the canopy of green, yellow and red leaves; the mild breeze gently messing with her hair; and the sound of waves hitting the shore beyond the walls; all of it cohered to make it a lovely territory to dive in.

We were walking towards the Silver Jubilee campus. If Pondicherry University was Europe, Silver Jubilee was Paris; and Rome. Paris, because it was the abode of intimacy; as in you cannot stand there without having romance gushing through your nerves. And Rome, because it was not built in a day!

This Silver Jubilee, structurally, had two concentric circular highways running at a radius of around fifty and seventy-five metres. The inner one, sufficiently lit, encompassed a huge barren land. Between the inner and the outer were the neatly crafted academic buildings. And the outer circle, which was usually darker, was dedicated to higher levels of romantic manoeuvres.

And when we came to the point where we had to choose between the inner and the outer circle, I was quite tensed. Then K insisted upon taking the outer one. And that made me go insanely happy.

Being a novice all I knew was that my life was changing after this night; but I didn’t know in what way. And quite naturally I began to wonder how to begin that procedure. How to break the ice of the hour. Thankfully it was she who initiated the conversation; in an extremely “romantic” manner!

So tell me, are you afraid of darkness?

Going back to the time when I first came to Pondicherry, I didn’t really want to come out of it. Most of the North Indians who ended up in PU were driven largely by two incentives – the gorgeous beaches, and the cheap alcohol. But I was there because I loved the land – first in the pictures and then in reality. And I was just out of school. We were some two hundred undergraduates drowning in a sea of thousands of postgraduates like K. And settling yourself academically in such a scholarly atmosphere couldn’t be easy at all. But it was. And we realised that only when we encountered the actual problem.

Most of the girls around were at least three years elder to us. And the pain of being universal “brothers” was unparalleled to any other.

But K was truly beautiful. Or precisely she was what guys like me with ugly faces would call way-out-of-my-league. Yet, it was the irony of life, that if you fast forwarded a good number of bus stop encounters, exchanged stares, exchanged phone numbers, double meaning chats, and exciting dreams – you would find me there beside K in the “outer” circle of Silver Jubilee.

I was afraid of darkness. So, I told her that I wasn’t. And I wondered if talking about darkness was a conventional thing to do in a date. Actually, nothing happened which would comply with my popular idea of a date. We just walked through the darkness. And to be honest it was dark enough to calm your hormones to some extent. And as we passed some way through the silent night, I asked her, hazarding all my wishes, if we could walk in towards the inner circle.

Let’s sit here, she said, with an elderly tenor. As if she had infinite knowledge and experience with sitting. And I couldn’t help but comply.

And we sat on the edge of the footpath. And we sat there for some time. I began to make efforts to ignite some conversation. And I asked about anything and everything that crossed my mind – hometown, hobbies, plans, random variables, programming languages, celestial bodies etc. But K was totally stingy with words. She used nothing more than a word or two. And not too late into it, I realised that I didn’t turn out interesting enough!

But there was a lot of night still left.

And I kept my hopes of receiving a fair share of my expectations. I believed that my life was still going to change. I believed so, only until she motioned to cut me mid-sentence. And all she said was a creepily elongated shhhhhhhh.

The first blow of the night and it hurt. It hurt my usually non-existent ego. And it hurt me so much that I was compelled to make a call at whether to stay any further. Whether to embrace any further humiliation. But I eventually did because a part of me still hoped. And then…

Then she put an arm across my shoulder. So, all of a sudden blow-number-one was cancelled. A lot of good things begin by keeping arms around shoulders. And every little nerve ending in my body was a live wire. My heart synced to the rhythm of my favourite songs. The hope – it glimmered brighter than the sun in the opposite hemisphere. The world suddenly became a beautiful place. And my insides started to celebrate; because my life was about to change.

But although K continued to exist, her actions made me doubt my axioms; because, there was no action at all! As if she was my emotional inverse. While I was having a hard time holding my heart in its place, she sat there like a beautiful stone crafted with brilliant curves and weird glasses. And somewhere down the line the net sum of world enthusiasm remained constant.

It was getting terribly awkward. Every passing second killed a butterfly that tried to fly within my stomach. And I grew very impatient. Suddenly the weight of her arm began to bother me. Something felt wrong.

But I still hoped.

Let’s move, I intently blurted out patting her back. What followed was unbelievable. K turned her head like dolls do in horror movies. And through my eyes, which by then had adjusted to the darkness, I could clearly make out her stern cold eyes staring at me; further enlarged by the powered glass. Something terrible was surely on its way.

Don’t you dare touch me. She said, and calmly turned away. And yes, she said that with her arm around my shoulder!

But she meant it; because her voice was low and her tone ominous.

This was the second blow of the night. And now I no longer hoped. I accepted the fact that the night was doomed; that my life was going to remain the same. The night, so far, had been a strange one. There was so much I had expected out of this date. Every step we took inside the outer circle had led to the discovery of new realms of fantasies. But all that was returned was humiliation. Cold, bare humiliation.

Life was sad.

I immediately got up and began pace away. I tried to keep calm. I didn’t want to snap back at her and leave. But she was also my date. And as I slowly walked away through the darkness, the canopy of leaves, the breeze, and the sound of waves, I felt bad. And I paused; and then turned.

She was still there at the edge of the footpath. I chose to forget all the shame she had hurled at me. And then I hoped, for one last time.

I turned on the flash of my phone. I was about to ask if she wanted to come along. Seconds later, I was running as if my life depended on it. My knees ached for rest, my throat pleaded for water, and my lungs gasped for air. But I never stopped; not until I reached my room and sealed the door, and the windows, and the ventilators.

Later I came to know that K had hearing difficulties, along with several other instances of going berserk; some of them as serious as chasing a floor-mate with a paring knife. And stories such as these scared me to death.

K and I, we would still come across each other at bus stops, library, and reading halls. But I never dared to meet her eye. But that moment still remains fresh in my memory. And no matter how much I try to convince myself; that it was nothing more than an ideally executed prank; or the strangest example of absent mindedness; my throat still goes dry with the very thought of it.

My life was indeed changed. Never in my life was I going to date in darkness, if not not date at all.

Because on that night when I saw K through the cell-phone flash, she was still seated at the edge of the footpath; in the exact same manner as when I was there beside her; her right arm hanging mid air; resting against the shoulders of an invisible person.

Remember me Pankaj, or is it too late, Ten years is long indeed to forget an old mate. You have left Benares behind, maybe the past is no more, Yet one sudden morning, this shows up at your door! But worry not my friend; I don't seek wealth, or a home safe to go, But, this story I have to tell; and I just want you to know, About how the world hurt me, and how I hurt it back, About how I yearned to love, when love was all I lacked, Because, at the end of this battle, After all the blood you shed, and every tear you wipe, You do long for a way to make sense of this life. So it had begun with my birth, a “middle class” I was born, You know the problem about being one is as if to remain one you have sworn! You crave to reach the door out, in it an entire life you spend, But it's the void in between where you keep dwelling till the end! But birth was just the beginning; soon my father would be dead, Dear uncles would grab his money, me and my mother betrayed, With not a bread to eat, not a shed to live, The world would get harsher, but we would still try to cope, Because the middle class we are, we are not allowed to lose hope! And so this kid would wake at dawn, for his age a bit too grown, And sweat his life out at the factory, to make money of his own. Carrying carpets heavier than his weight, and after spending hours in the dark, At last he would stop to watch his friends, while coming back from his work, Some playing marbles across the road, and some fishing along the pool, He can't wait to watch these kids; he can't be late for his school. He would write with the same fingers which had bled during the day. Earning would become his entertainment, and getting to eat, his play. You know, this kid never complained, nor wondered if life was fair, Pankaj this kid, this was me, my childhood was never there. But Pankaj, I made it in the end; the struggle didn't go in vain, As I stood before the college entrance, I knew I would never look back again. I thought I would change the world someday; my eyes had this spark, And in this world full of strangers, I was sure I'll leave my mark. But the world it's a large place, how little did I know, For a layman stuck in Benares how good could it go! We aspired of education and values – all obsolete at this hour; Because the only path to thrive went through the people with power. Soon a shady bungalow found me shaking hands with one of them He thought his fake smile wouldn't tell me that I was just a pawn in their game “The deal is pretty simple”, then his chair he would pull, He said, “You do me a favour, and I make your pockets full”. And I kept doing these favours; I was soon blinded by my greed, I'd loot the debtors, knock the rebels, I'd make innocents bleed. Soon threats changed to theft, the kidnap changed to kill, If my morals tried to take me out, I was reminded of the deal. Later, I would walk with my head sunk; meeting people had become tough, Because I couldn't tell if I have killed someone they used to love. But a part of me had known, that no matter where this path leads, Where I'll stop would be the edge, one day I'll have to pay for my deeds, I've come long from being that kid, who had once left his home to learn, He had killed a lot of people, and now it was going to be his turn. And soon it was the beginning of my end; the world started to want me dead, My demise was the product of the choices I had made. And I thought about the old days, where has my old world crept? It had no one but my mother, with the little time she had left. Now when the fight was over, and I had the longest scar, Having roamed around the world, I craved return back to her Even she kept her share of horrors, but she had kept her world pure, If she sees what I have become, would she still be able to endure? She is breathing what she can, although her eyes hardly have light, But I can't return and risk this life, at least this I have to do right. Pankaj, I had no soul to call my own, no place call home, And now I began to run, And ever since I've been running, I was sure I'll never be done! Pankaj, ten years; ten years it has been, What I ate I couldn't tell, where I slept I didn't know, Was running my role in life; was there nowhere I could go? Now, I often sit back and contemplate, as those days I recall, What did I want from life? Where was I running to after all? And then one day it flashed before my eyes, the realization, at last, I wasn't running to anything, Pankaj, I was running away from my class. The compliance to the violence, and every struggle I ever bore Were all because I didn't want to stay a middle class anymore! You know, we shouldn't even try escaping; rather embrace it with pride, Because this entire place is the middle, there's nothing on either side. It's this maze we are in, and we are told to find the doors, While in real there are none, it's just the walls, ceilings, and floors! You are walking through this flawed road; it doesn't matter where it bends, It just takes you to another one, and this cycle never ends. Pankaj, I've stopped running now, I know I belong to this maze, And it's here with that spark I'll spend my remaining days. It can't tell you where I am, the enemies follow my trails, I am sure before you reach me I will be found by someone else. But Pankaj, I never thought I'll make a friend, but I did, and I'm glad. It's just this once I'll write to you, and we'll never meet, and it's sad Because I will be waiting by this window, and one day the light would grow dull, Those bullets would start coming back; they would be drilling through my skull. It's this simple at the end, you live and you die, And there's just this little story in the middle. My dear friend, goodbye!

It was very unlikely that we were both sitting on the high edge of the terrace. Actually, we didn’t fit anywhere else on that morning. We were both outcasts to our own worlds. We were always among people stuck in inappropriate surroundings.

You could clearly tell that this person was by far the most awkwardly dressed individual around. The scorching heat didn’t stop him from dressing in black. And the brim of his hat grazed right above his nose; concealing the pair of his mysterious eyes. I had no clue about where he came from.

So, it was him breaking the silence; because, it never is me.

“Why are you here?”

I was there because I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Wherever you be you would either have to talk, or listen. I never talked a lot. And I was tired of listening.

“Allow me to help you”, he said again.

It is usually hard to get me to speak. But he did. He sensed the weakness. And he was using it against me. And I had to remember things which I wanted to leave far behind.

“I don’t know. I broke up last week. My father’s health is worsening too. Nothing is working out”.

My shoulders collapsed in despair. For a moment I thought it was better to keep things to myself. But I also needed to reach out to someone; without being judged or misunderstood. And maybe a stranger was my best chance at it.

“Nothing ever does. That’s how it works.”

“Who are you?” I realized that this should have been the first thing to ask and know.

“I am an agent, you see? A salesman to be precise”, he explained.

“So, why are you here?”

“To sell. Quite obvious, isn’t it?”

And amidst everything I was going through in that moment, the last thing I needed was a salesman shaking me up.

“In case you’re wondering, I sell death”, he continued revealing his unshaped teeth.

I wasn’t shocked, but irritated? Certainly. I responded, seemingly annoyed. “I don’t have time for jokes right now. So please leave.”

“No dear, it’s business. And death can sure be sold. And it works like every other product. I convince people to buy it.” He paused. “I convince people to die.”

“And why would you do that?”

“Because sometimes it’s the only way out, the true solution.”

“Bullshit”. I didn’t know what this man was after. And for a moment it appeared as if he was present there to amuse me. So I continued pretending to be curious.

“So, free service?”

“Not exactly”, and there were the teeth again. With teeth came surprises. “Job satisfaction, you understand?”

“Yes, it’s highly satisfying to convince people to die”, I mocked, “How good are you by the way? How many have you convinced so far?”

“Well, I’m well off, I suppose. There hardly is any competition. I’ve convinced people around here as well.”

And then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me — that today wasn’t the first time I was seeing him. Quick flashes ran through my head; the backseat behind Farhan anna, the night when he crashed into a running train; the benches before the library, with Ferman, the day before he hung himself. He was there. With people I knew. And they were all dead.

Now I was immensely shocked. And though silence of that morning had somehow subsumed me, my insides couldn’t stay calm anymore. My blood boiled with every drop of sweat that formed on my forehead. It felt like my heart was pounding next to my ear. I was more infuriated than scared. And I didn’t know how to deal with this. I couldn’t bring myself to settle with just words. So I cried in disbelief.

“You killed them!”

“No. I am not a murderer. I just convince people to die. There is a difference, you see.”

“They had family”. I was in tears.

“So do you. So does everyone.” He placed an arm around my shoulder. I shrugged to remove it. “Calm down. Look around. What do you see?”

Few yards across the watchtower the gardens ran along the university highway. And the gardeners wandered under the sun, cropping the branches with their oversized scissors. Not a leaf was going to be left jutting out oddly from the row. They were all etching for perfection.

“Why do you think they’re doing this?”

“So that they can earn; so that they can feed their wives, parents and children; to afford education, to pay for their needs.” I yelled. “You see, not everyone is as cruel as you are.”

“Food, education, needs! What are needs for?”

I was never a violent person, but then I seriously considered pushing this man off the roof. “Needs are for life. Your cold heart is not going to comply. People to live, not die.”

“Living?” The man laughed out. “That’s the biggest joke out there. People are too dumb to get it.” He paused. “No one lives. People just buy themselves time. Everyone you see here is trying to escape; trying their best to escape immediate death; either for themselves, or for someone else.

“Fancy anyone. Doctors. Bankers. Labourers. Priests. Everyone.

“What is point in planting stones, watering them, and then expecting them to flower one day. Life is fake.

“Because death”, he adjusted his hat and clenched his knuckles, “is inevitable! No matter what you have or what you earn or what you know, you can’t buy forever.”

It did and didn’t make sense at the same time. I had nothing to say in response. I was just hoping that this man leaves, and never comes back. And meanwhile my heart thumped at an abnormal pace. And I felt void forming in my stomach.

“Look, dear”, he again put an arm, and this time I let it stay. And as he pointed towards the ground he spoke with a fatherly tenor. ‘There, my child, there is the truth. How can you not see it! You don’t have to be stiff. You can stop shaking your legs. This is easy and peaceful. Just let go.

“Look down there, it’s beautiful.”

Warm tears rolled down my cheek. My vision blurred. And I leaned to embrace him. “I can’t do this to my parents. I can’t hurt them.”

“They are already hurt. Everybody is. Why do you live. Eventually, there would not be a thing. Not a stone, nor a memory. You leave now or later, how does it matter?”

Choking in my own tears, I asked “Can I see Reya once?”

And he smiled. “Kid, she’s gone. There is nothing left for you here”

And as I gasped for breath, I asked for the last time “Can I never be happy again?”

He lifted his hat to look deep into my eyes. “I don’t know. But what after that?” And he wiped my tears with his palm.

He held my hand, “Trust me. The pain is about to end.” And I looked at the pavement, far beneath the watchtower. And it felt like I could almost reach it with my arm. He whispered. “Just let go.”

I looked over my head. The sun was blazing brighter than any ordinary day. And I could sense the blue of the sea from the corner of my eyes. Yet the day was getting dark for me. I was seeing things in blur. I was a whirlpool of emotions, but none of it made sense.

I was about to faint. He saw it. And he gave me a reassuring gesture. A gesture to fall.

And I left falling to luck. And as I finally closed my eyes I didn’t know which side I’d fall to — life or death.

Life, it was.

I woke up to heavy raindrops hitting my face. I didn’t know how long it had been. My lips had split. Blood and dust had painted a side of my face. And as I stood up to face the sky, the rain washed them away.

The terrace was huge. And as stood against the edge again, I saw people underneath. Sayan, Sid, Poulami. And then, I spotted Reya.

All of them drenched wet; shouting my name at the top of their voices, and scrounging at every corner of the campus. Someone pointed a finger towards the terrace; right where I was standing. And they jumped and waved their hands; they cried my name in unison. And even from the top of the tower I could distinctly make out the spark in their eyes. I felt grateful.

Seeing them I remembered every detail of the morning. They rushed to me in the form of guilt; cold, bare guilt. Guilt of almost being at the edge of life. The rain had washed away my weakness. And as I looked through, I saw clearer than ever. I realised the salesman was gone.

He was never there at all.

I was the salesman.

Not everyone falls towards the side of life. Not everyone is as fortunate. Ferman, Farhan, and many more have fallen prey to the salesman. He is a parasite, wandering around, looking for a host, a prey, a customer of death, at the cost of life. But life, if you do not already know, is non-transactional. Life is priceless.

And such moments which make life priceless are the ones which almost took it from you.

That evening I remember walking out of the door at the base of the watchtower. Reya rushed to give me the tightest hug of my life. And the way she clutched the back of my shirt, I was convinced that she wasn’t going to let go very easily. Poulami shouted from behind, in her usual sarcastic tone, ‘The hug is postponed. Calling aunty is prescheduled. There are at least fifty missed calls since morning.’ Reya turned around. “Priorities”, Poulami smiled.

But Reya continued to sob on my chest.

And as we strolled back to our hostels, I felt him for one last time; hiding behind the doors; quietly peeking at his failure. I turned back and saw him disappear.

Sid shook my arm and asked who it was. “The salesman”, I smiled and we left.

At this moment I am not on a flight. Not travelling by a car on an edgy hillway. At this moment I am just lying on my bed. This is peaceful. This is not a chaotic border. Not the middle of the ocean. This is just a peaceful place. This kind of peaceful makes a tomorrow certain. That no matter what happens there’s surely a morning on the other side of a few hours. So, at this moment I lie back with patience. I think about a life eventually falling in place. I see the hazy flashes from the times to come. My parents have come to hugging each other again. That book? Yeah I’ve recently published it. Oh, the new car doesn’t have a hood. And she insists on wearing that little ring I gave her in school. So I build hopes at this moment. This moment that I have taken for granted. As if future is so obvious, and continuity — so inevitable. As if such chances like a one in a million aren’t chances at all. As if every moment ever is just like this moment. Only better ahead, and worse left behind. And then I realize, I have never been so unprepared to die as I am at this moment. That if I am taken by surprise and told of a giant meteor that hits the planet in five minutes, I would wake with a jolt, go restless, and get lost at all that was left to happen, and all that I would miss. I would try, and cry, and crave, and spend my last five minutes as the worst five ones. I am so unprepared that if I know that it ends at this moment, I wouldn’t be able to take a walk, I would run.