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The unbearable loneliness of the short story writer

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Siddharth Chowdhury
Siddharth ChowdhurySep 26, 2016 | 15:43

The unbearable loneliness of the short story writer

I have measured out my life in large Patiala pegs, and frankly, my love, it sucks. I sit here day after day with a pen in my hand, a blank virginal page staring right into my eyes, unable to come alive and I think it has all come to a waste. The slide from the land of gup to the land of chup has been swift and definitive.

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There are no stories anymore to tell. I despair — but a tiny voice at the back of my mind pipes up now and then with an "It’s not true, not true at all". There always will be stories as long as there is life but somehow it all comes out stillborn. Dead on arrival.

The last story I did was a couple of months back when we were together. When I would just pick up a pen and point it to the page and a world all tangible and new would appear and we could escape into it and be safe from the encroaching reality. My love, come back to me. I know I have sinned. I am consumed with remorse. Be an angel and grant me absolution.

Each dawn I awake, and for half an hour I lie back on the bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling fan unable to get up — no drowsiness or anything but just the complete lack of will to get up and face what I dread to face.

I do the mandatory 50 pushups and crawl to the table. It is piled up with books, many I haven’t touched in weeks, maybe months. Large tomes of wisdom no doubt but even these do not alleviate the utter sense of desolation that I feel.

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I sit in my chair, pick up the pen that you had given me, a silver Mont Blanc long ago (I remember it like it was yesterday), right here in my little barsati with the dark green walls. You remember that, don’t you? It’s the same pen with which I write today this lament to my soul. The notepads are there, expensive and blank, the finest money can buy; at the corner squats the old Remington.

Above the table on the wall hangs a lithograph of a man who was once to me the embodiment of all that I wanted to be, in his eyes freedom and rebellion blaze like slow fire, the face undeniably angelic with the prettiest lips on any man that I have seen. Prettier than Presley, a tougher Montgomery Clift with the same brooding sadness; and what glorious talent while it lasted.

It is old Jack Kerouac who looks to me from the wall every day but St Jack, kind Jack, free Jack, has no accusation in his eyes. Jack, hey Jack, thou prince of the beat and the beat-up, thou saint of love and loneliness, help thine acolyte mired in misery, wallowing in wine, soaked up with self pity, miserably maudlin to boot. Just show me the open road, mate and I will go.

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The backpack is ready. It is also empty. But he with his beatific smile can’t help me anymore, he has been dead for 30 years, a drink-sodden death, straining at the toilet seat … no sorry, I apologise, that was Elvis. I am getting my stories confused. Jack died watching the tube, washed up and dead for years when he died.

You frighten me Jack but still I love you Jack. I wanted his freedom, his words, his mind, hell I wanted to be a rebel too. I longed to be alienated too. He was poor and I was rich, he hated his father and I loved mine, he had a chip on his shoulder and I wanted one too.

Till one day as the mist cleared, I met you and wanted to conform to everything that you projected. You brought out the bohemian beneath the bourgeois, the snake beneath the skin, the artist behind the thick-lensed dullness in me. Jack with the pack on his back, a smile on his lips and a backward glance and a wink that said, "You are in good hands brother, just hold tight," went up the lonely road; Pather Panchali playing upon his tongue unforked.

I didn’t complain, I had you and I could write. It was heaven. All those years I would always think of writing about you. Construct a veritable home movie of a story about you but never could because for one I had other things to write about. You opened the floodgates of my mind and stories, poems, haikus came rushing out like vomit and there were only so many I could mop up; many spilled about everywhere in alcohol and friends and foolishness but I couldn’t care less about it then. I was sure there would be more to follow.

You were too real to write about. I couldn’t ever distance myself from you. You were on my back like wings and in my side like Eve in Adam’s rib. There was no getting away from you. You were the one thing that I kept just for myself. I couldn’t have shared you with the world but I should have. I know that now. I should have bound you in words, never to let you depart. I should have paid attention to Donne. I should have listened to him and you could still be here beside me watching the bloody sunne rise and go down again in the evening, drinking beer, comparing Larkin’s "Aubade" to Empson’s.

But I can start now and retrieve lost ground. I could write about the time when I first met you. Remember the fair? The stupid fair? The eternal fair? The book fair. Do you remember the two adolescents young with lust who could barely keep their hands off each other and wished to melt away together far away from the madding crowd — and they did. You remember that, don’t you?

I should have written about that. About your hair auburn and straight, uncombed and loose, symbol of disorder, "chaos", my literary friends perhaps would call it, and which I would shampoo and comb back from your high forehead but never braid. Even when you would come with your hair tightly bound in a bun I would close the door and take out the pins. Or your toe ring shining with silver sweat or the toe itself. The small left one. If not a short story, perhaps a haiku

Your bloody toe/in my mouth/taste of salt and sour metal/

See, now I do it and it comes out all wrong. Remember the time I came piss drunk to the hostel? I had published my first story and was delirious with joy. We had just met the other week and here I was on my knees, laughing and crying, all at the same time, and your friends were horrified but you had laughed when any other girl would have died of social apoplexy.

Later on that night in the hostel, your roommate envious and scandalised, asked you, "So he writes. That’s all very well but what does he plan to do exactly or is he as vella as you are?" and you replied, "Well you saw, didn’t you?" and laughed some more.

Rifat, come back, I still love you. Do you still keep the copy of my story on your desk, like you did when we were together or have you flushed it down the toilet with the photograph and other memories?

I should have written about that, about finding in that laughter an affirmation of our oneness. We understood each other totally. We communicated silently, our fingers intertwined bashfully, walking together in the November chill, coffee in styrofoam cups from the hostel, the moon dirty and weary coming out behind us at five o’clock in the evening.

Your friends suspicious and protective and mine frankly bewildered — but we didn’t care, did we? We talked about art and commitment and all that jazz but more often than not we talked just about literature: Agyeya and Muktibodh, Barthelme and Carver, Rushdie and Marquez. We spent endless evenings discussing magic realism, dirty realism, neo-realism, oblivious to the world. Sometimes comparing Hughes’s crow to Laxman’s series on crows and sometimes the dichotomy of Garfield’s sloth and Macavity’s feline stealth.

One of those early courtship days I brought you a copy of Gone with the Wind because you mentioned that all your friends had read it umpteen times and you wanted to see what the fuss was all about; but you could never finish it though you kept trying intermittently over the years. I never realised how much you hated the book until the "incident" a couple of months back.

You would always wear those frayed black jeans of yours, the ones I totally detested, and a grey college sweatshirt with the hood pulled over your head which made you look mysterious like Orco. It would be very hard to kiss you—I had to pull the hood down every time. Did you use your hood as a ghunghat, silly girl? Come seven o’clock and you would say goodbye and I would protest, "We have half an hour more at least," and you would always say, "But I have a tutorial tomorrow."

Or of the time we both met Arundhati Roy at the Delhi School of Economics cafeteria when she had come to lecture on Bandit Queen and how it was such an exploitative movie. She wasn’t the goddess of all things then but just as lovely as ever and how I had made a fool of myself by disagreeing with her, making her angry in return, and I had not even seen the movie then; well, nobody had. It hadn’t been released yet but in retrospect I was right. You laughed all the way back to the hostel but you see I had to impress her. She was so enchanting, so fit, though I agree she didn’t take my words too well.

Once you won 500 rupees in a poetry contest and we went to see Death and the Maiden with Bhaskar Ghosh in it. We bought the most expensive tickets available and later on had dinner at a Mexican restaurant and didn’t have any money left for the auto fare.

It was ten o’clock in the night and we caught the 901 to the university. I had a fight with a couple of inebriated louts when they tried to act fresh with you. The prudent thing to do would have been to get down and catch another bus but something made me fight. I wasn’t scared then but I was afterwards.

When at home that night you said to me, "I was so scared, man," and buried your face in my chest, I burst out crying myself. I was embarrassed later and said to you, "I am just not the macho type," and you said, "I would hate you if you were." The next morning we had a good laugh over it with our morning chai and then you left because you had a tutorial.

We could laugh at anything then, love, happiness, sadness, humbug. We used laughter like a machete to level anything and everything. You had the bright idea to write a short story about it in collaboration with me, and as we spun it yard for yard it became in a short while a fit treatment for a movie by Mrinal Sen on a bad wicket. Remember Calcutta 71?

My eyes lost focus for days after watching that. It is good that I didn’t write anything about it seriously because it never would have come out the way it happened. It would never have been a story but at best only an anecdote like it is now.

Once after reading Ulysses in two days flat I went blind the next morning and panicked as I also had a high temperature and my only thought was to have you by my side and my old landlady, that sweet old lady, called you and you came running though you had a tutorial that day.

You cooked for me, looked after me, took me to the doctor, brought the medicines and generally with cool efficiency took over and made me as good as new in only a couple of days’ time. Can I put that in a story and still tell you how blessed, how loved I felt? It is good I never wrote about that because, perhaps, then I would have destroyed it but I remember everything. Since you have gone I have suddenly got the curse of total recall.

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Ritwik & Hriday; Pan Macmillan India; Rs 499.

One time we went to the Alliance Française to see Jules et Jim but of course we didn’t have the passes, still we knew we would get in and we did. We begged, we cajoled, we pleaded and flashed our college identity cards, did our "but-sir-we’re-students act" and got in at last but since the chairs were all taken, we sat on the steps. Rich matrons in pearls cast us curious stares but we didn’t mind. Later on I made you jealous by going on and on about how fascinating Jeanne Moreau really was and I only stopped when you cried. I never thought I would miss you so.

The only comfort these days are those memories. They are with me everywhere, when I go to the library in the morning, when I am working on the stupid dissertation, at the dhaba nearby where I have my lunch every day, and back home in my room from where it seems you have never left.

At the corner of my table, beside the typwriter, the manuscript of your book of poems is kept. How well you write; I get jealous sometimes. Your poems are a great comfort, they speak to me in your voice and remind me of your wit and charm and dear comrade the last seminar we attended together. It was spring and Al MacGuffin was giving a lecture at St Stephens on "postmodernism".

The mic was perhaps a bit faulty and MacGuffin, the klutz incarnate, tried to position it right and in the process demolished it totally. A new one had to be brought and horror of horrors, in that snooty, august gathering, your high-pitched laughter, proletarian, suddenly rang out.

I couldn’t control the giggles myself. We were both thrown out. Later on you said, solemnly, as we sat in the coffee house, that it was the single most defining act of "deconstruction" that you had ever seen. Ah if only I had thought of it first, but as usual you beat me to the gun. We had the big fight a couple of days after that.

The only time my memory fails is when I think about that fateful day, about that stupid fight we had and everything comes through a wall of perforated mist; words, phrases and some actions are missing at times and my memory unspools through many jumpcuts. All I remember is that I played Othello to your Desdemona with my mind at its scene-stealing best as Iago. All I know is that I am sorry.

I was a fool to suspect you of infidelity but you did praise Ritwik’s story much more than mine at the café and he kept giving you those adoring looks of his while I burned up inside. His stories are better I agree now, but I was consumed by envy then. And you shouldn’t have shouted and thrown Gone with the Wind at me, smashed my glasses and I shouldn’t have punched you and split open your lips and then for an encore given you a black eye, to say nothing of your hair, a tuft of which somehow came into my hands in the end.

I sincerely hope it hasn’t made you bald in the back. My fingers have atrophied since then, withered and scaly-white like chanticleer claws, though I can still hold a pen and write, like I do now, the blood has dried up and believe me, even as I hit you, I realised that perhaps this time I had gone too far.

But I didn’t hit you out of spite or anger or to teach you a lesson but only out of artistic curiosity.

Now I believe at the back of my mind the burning question was whether I could ever hit you or not. And how would it feel to hit? And to watch your face and gauge your emotions after the act closely so I could write about it later on. It was just an experiment, darling. My anger had died out the moment before I had hit you. Just an experiment for my art, you see; I had never hit a woman before.

I really never thought you would take it so badly and disappear totally from my life. I realise the enormity of my act and am now penitent. I am down on my knees and begging baby please, but I didn’t do it for pleasure. I did it for art and as an artist you too can understand the importance of investigation and experiment when it comes to method writing. Perhaps by now you too have written a long poem about it.

You are my Beatrice, my Banalata Sen, my Layla. You are my own little private goddess of all things. Come back, little Mira, come back to daddy, come back back back or let me do my Jimmy Dean in all my petulant surly mouth sorrow: "You’re tearing me apart, you’re tearing me apart!" That was always good for a laugh, wasn’t it, darling? Back in the good old days but now it has become excruciatingly real and cuts right to the bone.

Mira at 24

I am 24 years old today. A beautiful, wild, cheerful 24. The breasts are still firm. Upturned and perky. The tummy tucked and poster-smooth. Hips delicate, made of glass. I am proud of my body. It is all class. The legs long, supple and strong. The heart a tired leonine. Why tired? Ritwik. That is why. I wish he would do something soon.

Anything. Earn some money. Settle down. So I can marry the slippery little bugger finally. For a certified intellectual he is incredibly stupid. No sense of reality at all. I want to mate now. The time is ripe.

Moreover, I am bored. It would be a change, don’t you think? There would be responsibilities no doubt but I am old enough, am I not? I can take care of anything. I have got a couple of baby cacti on my desk and they haven’t died in weeks. Also a nine-month-old dachshund who is living yet. It is early morning. Still dark with a hint of rain. Here in paradise.

(Reprinted with permission from the publisher.)

Last updated: September 27, 2016 | 11:36
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