The expenses of loneliness & loving the darkness

3-Feb-08
The expenses of loneliness. A five kilometre trip to the city to get a newspaper. Nine rupees worth sweets consumed in the course of circling around the liquor shop debating whether to buy that pint bottle of rum or not. Two pirated CDs, one of ghazals of Jagjit Singh and the other of Kill Bill parts 1&2 dubbed in Hindi when what I wanted was a porn flick; even a stupid, coarse and revolting Indian one would do. And that pint bottle of rum. Two hundred and twenty seven rupees.

Found the connection to Rakesh after 26 years last evening. Deepak was found after 14 years and I didn’t want to meet him. I didn’t want to change the impression I had of our university days. Like I hadn’t gone back to Darjeeling since I was thirteen in 1971.

Indulging in loneliness. Accepting this transfer on promotion in the first place. And not going home this Saturday. Not that I didn’t want to. But the boss doesn’t like his going away every Saturday, for we (the boss and I, the company doesn’t count for it doesn’t really exist, except for the those that reap a killing out of it, either in terms of position or the loot or both) lose a full days work, the second half of Saturday and the first of Monday. It cannot be denied that we did have a disconnection in the continuity of work. And then I had just returned from Calcutta after 5 days leave only on Wednesday last.

Just completed one-fourth of the assumed tenure of my banishment and heading towards one-third in another two months time. (Looks like an arithmetic sum and God knows I had hated arithmetic. Never found its logic. I had once failed in Arithmetic and maxed Algebra in class seven.)

25/02/2008
Just back from a heavenly Sunday at Calcutta. For once I was clear about the work at hand and attended to it as it should be attended to and missed his haircut schedule but that is one thing I can now live with, as I can now with many, many omissions.

And once the work was put away, one and a half vodkas in the afternoon, not too rushed, before a heretofore unimaginably late lunch at three in the afternoon, though the chat in the les room with the vodka wasn’t satisfactory at all.

Then the evening of poetry reading at Srijan. Confident with the last poem that I am even now very enamoured of. And that darkness that had a very high possibility of imploding into hell one day. I wonder what it is with him and darkness. Will he ever get out of it? At the back of his mind he knows it is a game. A game he can get in and out of whenever he pleases. Or so he thinks. A remnant of that vital dark one. The one who played with him and when the game got serious chickened out, shall we say? Or did she make a conscious, hard, adult, responsible choice as he had always done with women when they were hooked proper.

And the darkness and the night when she didn’t feel like sex. And the warm torrid sinful darkness so far removed from him in age as to be the next generation. And a night that tossed and turned and she wouldn’t be persuaded. And he fell off to sleep guiltily clinging on to the new darkness and then responsibly, though reluctantly, let go to wrap himself around sleep.

And then the morning; not the morning after and yet so. In my drunkenness with the rum in the evening which I insisted on and was not refused, I had, just before going off to sleep with the lights off and without my specs, wrongly adjusted to 4.10 instead of 4.40 from 4.30 that I had initially set on my phone alarm. Ten minutes of sleep on a Monday lost is irreplaceable.

And so a wrong morning. But such wrongs didn’t matter any more as there was the day to be got through and the week and another one hundred and thirteen weeks before I was eligible to beg,

“Please, please, sir. I beg you on my knees. Grant me the boon of getting back to my family. I shall do whatever you ask. Type. Photocopy. File. Carry it to your house at ten on a Saturday evening should you need to wipe your arse with it in the morning. Year after year after year I shall do the same killingly repetitive menial work and not complain. I shall never ever allow myself to show any intelligence, for only you can be intelligent, experienced, and knowledgeable and have perfect judgement, besides having all the good qualities that a man can have. For you are the Managing Director. Do we know how much you endured to get this far? We do not. We can’t even imagine. When you joined the company you slept on the roadside beneath a tree. And we got to stay in brick and mortar buildings and then had the gumption to complain that those were workers quarters, and the door to the loo had been so eaten away by termites that it had just fallen off and wasn’t worth putting up again and that we were entitled to at least B type quarters.

I am so ashamed of having behaved thus abominably. I promise I shall never ever complain. For anything. Even if my salary is delayed by six months. I can wait a year for my pay. But please, please let me get back to my family now. I know I would be unbelievably, impossibly fortunate if that were to happen. That there are so many who have offered to resign in writing and are waiting for two years now for your decision on whether their resignation is to be accepted. If they leave before their resignation is accepted they loose a lot of money from their retirement benefits.

I shall wait. I shall come again next Saturday and wait the whole day at your ante-chamber and not leave it for an instant for food or water or smoke for no one ever knows when you might have the theme to see me, especially your secretaries and peons. I shall wait.”