Incredible! India

Just when bleakness' battering ram seems to be getting too stout to handle, you come across something like this.

True testimony that the people at O&M did indeed get it right when they called the nation incredible. As real an example of life's best teacher (libido) doling out a social message chalked on one of it's more visible blackboards(the rear end of a truck).

Basically, don't drink and drive or ur this shot of potency I've just imparted goes waste. Class!

Saboraud's lonely dish

This happened to happen sometime during internship (and SSC's) early days. The setting was Hotel Pamm in Siliguri, Hillcart road.

Just before you cross over into it from Malaysia, the Singapore government has lined up dustbins outside the toll booths. They are dustbins second. Firstly, they serve as the dumping ground for any gum you might be chewing (doing the same chewing across the border is illegal). Siliguri is much the same. A garbage dump en route to Eastern India’s prima dona, Darjeeling. It is a dirty, cramped, brunt uninspiring city, the kind whose ugliness gives rise to a contempt that manages to overpower the pity its step-daughterly treatment generates. And NJP was its groin. But it wasn’t the city that kept Sabouraud on the verge of tears every moment he was awake. It was the fact that he was having to do the one thing that he both hated and was bad at, and would have to go on doing for the next seven years. A lump as hard as a fist made its way up his throat, and punched a tear out his right eye. He wiped it away, sitting alone at lunch and weeping had ‘loser’ written all over it.

Iggy Goes Pop

It seemed just another miserable start to just another day destined to be remain just another number on the calendar. Iggy was woken up as always by an incessant, spirit crushing beeping. Only this wasn’t his alarm clock. The sound came from a machine measuring his pulse. Iggy had woken up in a hospital. Just hours ago, he had tanked up on thirty-eight antidepressant pills washed down with two bottles of cough syrup, and had then slashed his both his wrists just to be sure. Beneath the bandages on his arms lay 28 stitches. To save his life, they had had to pump his stomach, electrocute him in the chest four times, and inject him with enough adrenaline to fill his skull.

Removing the bandages and touching the jagged crests of his stitches made him feel neither guilty nor grateful. Instead, for the first time in months, he caught a whiff of an emotion that had become over time so alien, it was initially difficult for him to comprehend what he was overcome with – he felt hopeful. He wanted to believe that the shitstorm was now over.

The man in the bed next to his had had a bastard of a heart-attack, and lay in deep slumber, with very bleak chances of ever waking up. His relatives milled about outside in the hall, and they’d left the usual hospital visit jetsam –plastic flowers, tacky cards, tackier metallic balloons – on the table next to his bed. Iggy picked up a woman’s purse that lay between a bunch of yellow plastic roses and a Mickey Mouse balloon, and fished out a pen and a notepad.
He began writing a suicide note.

Goodbye (from the world’s worst engineering student) or My Reluctantly RocknRoll Suicide

I used to smile. I used to like being alive. I used to be Jumping Jack Flash.
Then my soul was sold for a life I could never want.

As I begin to write this, I want you to know that I’m dead. All that embodied who I was, aspirations that no-one else would give a home or a hope, dreams only I could keep from drowning, ideas only I could sire, and the one person only I could understand, have been murdered. Butchered by the humiliation that comes with realizing how much cowardice I’d now have to inject in every part of every day, just to get by.

No more drugs disguised as medicines to get over the only medicines that ever stopped the pain. No more pain. No more shocks to the head to wash my thoughts clean of themselves. No more believing my introspection is twisted, and that being spit on by my own reflection is part of a package which will somehow be for my own good.

Don’t tell me I’m judging the past harshly. For why does every choice I didn’t make seem like on that I should have, and ever choice I did seem like the one mistake so wholly responsible for these tears drowning my soul?
I suppose a lot of it has to do with none of these choices being mine.

He tried hard to think of some way to continue and give the note a tangiable middle and a depressing enough end, but wondered if even since he didn’t care about choices made anymore, would anyone else. Leaving the letter half done, he yanked out the plastic tube in his arm, stopped the blood with his thumb, and climbed out the window.

Clambering down the drainpipe, he thought about what he was leaving behind – things he once held dear, a home, his family, some friends, all of which eventually meant less as time went by. Wishing HeartAttack well, he took one last look into the hospital room, and went on his way. Where, to what, how, he neither knew, nor felt awkward leaving unanswered for the time being.

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(Meanwhile in a time some months afore)

Iggy walked into the store selling used tires and was immediately taken aback by the pristine hideousness of its insides. It looked as though the ugliest shop in the world had been burnt down, and then rebuilt using the remains, and the choicest morsels of trash from the rather sizable pile outside. As Pintoo began brokering a deal for the new tube, Iggy went outside to let Bagdogra humour him for a while. Outlandishly fetching Nepali girls walked by in track suits, carved out of tanned cheddar cheese with soul-nibbling smiles. Their being there, giggles and all, reminded Iggy of the conversation he had tried with so many of them, and the final and complete futility of trying. You say tomato. I say potato. It’s always so easy on TV, and ironically, even this dump had cable.

The token jeep ferrying youth workers of a political party screamed by. The boys wanted justice for the displaced poor. They were probably going to get it by holding the whole city hostage tomorrow and christening their day in the sun a strike. Iggy desperately wanted to talk to some of them. Preferably while stoned. He once tried. Dotting the city were several ‘sports clubs’, massive buildings opened under the aegis of one political mob or the other. Colossal things, so big you could play football on the first floor, which, this being Bengal, Iggy expected to find them doing as he walked into the New Tigers Club. Instead it turned out that the only two sports indulged in here were carom and a card game called rummy. The club turned out to be a very bourgeois Bertie Wooster kind of joint, plenty of smoking and the odd glass of whiskey being sipped at, only it was a shade too ramshackle and sadly un-woody.

By now Pintoo’d sealed the tube transaction. He’d done well, for save the cost of the tube, all they’d have to fish out as installation charges was five rupees. Watching him inspect the inflated tire by kicking it, Iggy noticed that Pintoo wasn’t looking too well. His dad was worried about him. Apparently he’d been hitting the bottle a bit more that was deemed good for him, and had started showing up late for work, and at times not at all. And then he was loosing weight, and this was Bengal. He wanted not to thing about such things for a moment. In the shade of a condom hoarding, they paid the money and left.

Noodle v/s Murdoc – Round 1 Winner Murdoc

“Odd thing that I, who used to clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours’ notice, with less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment – I won’t say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that for a second or two, I felt as though (instead of going to the centre of a continent), I were about to set off for the centre of the earth.” – Charlie Marlow, Heart of Darkness

It’s like those cruelest of hands dealt at Scrabble. The letters in the name ‘Tenga’, no matter how you arrange them, always very nearly mean something, but never do – Ant eg(g), Negat(e) and so on. In much the same way, an existence here could very nearly mean a life, but ends up as little more than just not being dead. It is the armpit of the world. And at 5am on a Tuesday morning, I’m on a bus headed to it.

“I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else.” – William Burroughs, Junky

We pull out from Tezpur, the most visually ill city I’ve ever seen. Whatever ails the place is very contagious for you are almost immediately infected with misery and loneliness. The bus has 50 seats, all taken, but conversation is impossible. Each passenger sits constructing his own private hell from the voids of places and people he left behind and would rather be with. The gloom leeches out of your skull, and paints everything the colour sad. Trees lean hungrily over the road, at places intruding with their vine-like tentacles, as if to juice out any remnants of life left in anyone forced to or foolish enough to venture into this circus of dark green bleakness. Often the sun is blocked out, and swamps are born where the soil can drink in no more rainwater, and is forced to vomit. Insects, nature’s shiny unalive jewels of neglect, parade about fearlessly and show themselves off. For every mosquito you kill, five shall take its place.

The ride turns into a sequence of five or six still lifes, repeating themselves randomly. One features sickly, half naked un-childlike children sitting outside a wooden shack, surrounded by malaria and the forest. In another they wave at you, unsmiling. A third shows an ugly shop or some ugly houses surrounded by ugly coconut trees shading an ugly stray dog or two. Like rot dissolving the dead hippo of Charlie Marlow’s cannibal crew, the next picture is of a dead bus or truck being either nursed back to illness or torn to scrap by frenzied, starved mechanic-like beings. Yet another shows the forest being defiled, stripped bare of its trees and undergrowth, to reveal a bare, brown and almost burnt landscape no less putting-off. One, both tragic and pathetically funny starred a sign saying ‘Beware of Elephants’ – a meaningless shibboleth from days when tuskers used to barge into the handful of huts as they pleased, stole rice wine, got drunk and went on killing sprees. The numbers, and the roles of hunter and hunted traded places, hence the sign’s redundancy. Some scenes are nothing but riotous explosions of wild cannabis. But the one image that hit the hardest spoke my state of mind’s language the clearest. In a visage dominated by the swamp, the only gushing of colour that broke the verdant, depressed sameness came from a dying banana tree. The swamp had crept up to its roots, drowning it from the feet up, and inciting a seemingly violent celebration of death in yellow. Deliverance, however it would be, would one day be happiness.

The bus pulls into an eating joint, and all are warned that the stop shall last only 15 minutes. Deciding to believe in my bladder and abstain from the mad-dash to the loo, I head off to the counter and buy myself a Coke and half a chow mien. The noodles are disappointingly good and I hate them. I want everything about this place to be the absolute pits, I want to have justification to be miserable, to not allow myself to be labeled just plain cranky. I am rescued by the flatness of the Coke, and with a contented smile I gulp down what tastes like machine oil, sugared ad nauseum. Cannabis, in glorious bloom surrounds the small eatery too. I pluck a flowering stalk and offer it to a 4 year old girl staring longingly at me and my Coke, and making me feel naked. She ignores it, and stubbornly refuses to let me swallow in solitude. So after finishing it, I hand her the empty bottle. It’s about as much a disappointment as she’s in a mood to take. She runs off to her parents, and I throw the stalk away. Just as the vacuum of the moment starts making me wonder how I’m going to keep from taking up smoking, not become an alcoholic or stay away from the dope, the bus starts honking and threatening to leave without us.

More of the same. Then the ride slowly changes - as we climb higher, pigs join the dogs on the roadsides, and the kids start smiling when they wave. We’re getting closer to Tenga. .

Barbarian at the Gate

April 2007, pre-shitstorm.

By not charging forth and physically assaulting the eye from any arbitrary vantage point in the capital, India Gate successfully hides how huge it is. When I do come to it, I am disturbed by the lack of sentiment it churns up. The reaction to a Forty-two meter stone brute built in 1921 in memory of Indians who died, alone, cold, sick and hungry in lands that were not their own, fighting for people who’s causes they didn’t truly understand or believe in, should have been more visceral, more overcoming. But it wasn’t.

Now more than ever, and hopefully in just me and no one else, the Gate’s edge, like everything else’s, could no longer rasp or make me bleed. It was now just the immobile stone embodiment of every rude physical retort India wanted so badly to give, but didn’t, when some heckler cried soft-state. Even schoolboys on Republic Day aren’t made to debate that anymore.

Unlike the Gateway of India in Bombay – a warm gray monument of welcome, India Gate on Rajpath seems to have been built to be kept closed. A sort of firm, snarling ‘Fuck Off’ to all those who didn’t want to come inside and play nice. It was stripped of that role somewhere along the road, and is today, just a carnival attraction in the giant circus the Dream has become for all those willing to buy tickets, see and not believe.

As I stood its imposing yet whimpering shadow, and tried find something to feel, my luck served up a far better show than I thought likely. Three boys, hormone-galvanized foot soldiers at the vanguard of the neo-Hun invasion, use the All India War Memorial for the only purpose it seems fit to serve in the now and here: for self-actualization through defilement. They first make a mockery of the rhinoceros in the insignia of an Assamese Regt on the Do Not Enter placard, coming to the conclusion that perhaps the fattest of their threesome would be allowed to. Then they proceed to repeatedly touch pillars that weren’t to be touched and step over (and almost immediately back over) chains that aren’t to be stepped over. Low waist denim clad soul-faggots, engaged in hermaphrodite daredevil games – nausea at its most complete. A curt Fuck Off sends them on their way, but the loneliness in this bitterness they leave behind is eerie.

A chemical nature litmus test of the decoct of 60 years worth of vomit from our most wasted, bilious core. That is the Gate today.

Here alone.
But to not decay is now to achieve.

Junk Babble

Junk transcends demand and supply, the pusher, the pimp and the product. It becomes the wide white line between unsure and cringing-at-death’s-door-dead sure. Junk decocts virile craving from limp desire and impotent curiosity. It needn’t know any rules – of biology, of hunger, or sex or conscience – for it is designed to never loose.

The only entity truly comparable to junk (the perfect product) is virus (the perfect parasite) - both pernicious, beguiling shape shifters. When alone and homeless, they exist as cold, inanimate crystals. It is if allowed to poison, that they become poison.
It makes little difference whether you call him a host or a user, for following inoculation, he ceases to matter. He is now just a medium. He becomes the virus, or the drug, and follows orders.

Though initially, he may be thrown scraps of life like euphoria or illness, as his breakdown blossoms, he eventually experiences nothing. Only a need to be filled. Like a vessel. He cannot defeat the drug or the virus. It shall leave him only if it wants. If it chooses not to, he is destined to die. In either case, it will be the same cold, lonely, emaciated death.

Yet when the medium is dead, they are not. They have already spawned and moved on. The body that was once home has been used and now outlived its purpose. And hence, like the virus, junk is immortal.

“Every dead body that is not exterminated gets up and kills. The people it kills get up and kill.” – The Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood

Junk is not some machine executing an algorithm of decay. It truly enjoys breaking you down. Somewhere, in someone, Junk is always working, and for it, everyday at the office is a good day. Each body bagged is a victory, every sickly surrender a cause for celebration. But like a smug, invincible sportsman, it extracts the most entertainment from the resistance of those who try not to be broken. Junk is moody, but the swings are predictable. It initially offers its respect and glory to someone who wants to go down with a fight. But its patronage is fleeting, and the subsequent retribution for wasting its time is humiliating.

William Burroughs was turned into both a legend and a pathetic example by Junk. Junky serves as his and his drug’s Bildungsroman. Intention is not the only reason it is a detached and factual account. It is also a fractured piece of writing because it precariously tries to weld together the exploits of its two characters – the user, and the chemicals that own him. At places Burroughs narrates, at others, he is forced to take dictation.

In return for his persecution, he is rewarded with a cruel yet honest education. Junk’s dropper-and-syringe tutelage enriches the mind and conscience of a man whom years of the best possible schooling had left wayward and confused. (“Junk is a cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity”)

For example, he is taught how at times, renunciation of effort is not just the best, but the only option “I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving”.

How the most important and the worst job is often the same “The job of peddler was a sort of public service that rotated from one member of the group to another…….All agreed that it was a thankless job……As George the Greek said ‘You end up broke and in jail. Everybody calls you cheap if you don’t give them credit; if you do they take advantage’”.

And how the consequences of a man’s actions stalk and hunt him down “You don’t wake up one morning and decide to become a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all” “One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict”

It is scarily magnificent, for all the right reasons.

I saw my first junky in my second year of college. He must’ve been about forty, had no legs, and only a right hand. He sat on a wooden cart in front of Bombay’s Churchgate station using an empty milk tin as a begging bowl. It’d clearly been weeks since he’d bathed and probably days since he’d eaten. He swore at everything that did or didn’t pass him by – at the people who spared loose change, at the people who didn’t, at the lice trampoulining in his hair, at the strays smelling him and barking at him, at God, at fate, at me. Even without what was to come, he was one of life’s more pathetic sights.

His stubborn outpouring of venom persuaded most to walk away. A lady ferrying her kids home from school decided to move on to the next stop and catch the bus from there. But I couldn’t go. It felt like one of those DiscoveryChannel moments, where the gnu walks up to the water’s edge to drink, and you just know a crocodile is going to lunge out of the Nile, clamp down on his neck and drown him – something was going to happen.

And it did. His peddler came. It was no Jesus-comes-to-the-lepers encounter. It was a cold mechanical transaction. There in full view of anyone bothering or daring to look, the pusher took a vial of Ketamine out of his front pocket and snapped it open. He loaded it into a hungry syringe the legless one had waiting. The needle was then plunged into the beggar’s one remaining limb, and emptied. The beggar melted – slowly, warmly turning into a bag of skin filled with liquid joy, just barely holding on to the human form. His peddler, meanwhile, emptied the milk tin of its change and walked off. All of this in less than 90 seconds.

It was magnificently scary, for all the wrong reasons.

Given a choice, I would have stayed and watched him as he lay prostate on his cart, smiling at the sky, now unmindful of the stray licking his leaking vein. But I had a train to catch.

I tried searching for him on subsequent trips to Bombay, but he was never there again. In all honesty, he’s almost definitely dead, and it’s not like he’s taken some shade of the great watercolour with him to the grave. You can rest assured, his place in the chemical chain has already been taken. Three-stump lives on though. He features in one of the more believable recurring nightmares in my head, wedged between some stuff from The Ring and the one time I saw a horse drown.

As for Burroughs, towards the end of Junky he claimed to have defeated junk. He committed the grave mistake of gloating – “The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before”. Burroughs went off in search of a telepathy inducing herb supposedly used by the Russians in slave labour experiments. His wife left him, as did most of his sanity for a large period of time. Junk hunted him down in Tangier and nearly drove him irreparably mad. Rehab happened, and he wrote again, but I’m pretty sure he’d never write like Junky. Much like the three-stump’d beggar, he’d been gifted 158 pages worth of immortality, been used and thrown away.

Beached whale blues

My third step on Marina Beach ended in a semi-concealed pile of two-day old vomit. This was largely symbolic of the way things were going. The current holiday to Chennai (or what used to be Madras) wasn’t turning out to be the exotic, battery charging sojourn I had hoped.

For one thing, half my luggage had refused to disembark the connecting flight, deciding to spend its vacation in Goa instead. Then I learned that Reema, the only person I knew there, lived half a day’s drive away in a city with perhaps the most fine-tuned traffic jams in the country. And now here I was, standing ankle deep in the remains of someone else’s indigestion.

A stroll down Marina beach in the evening has been described by many a travel guide as the highlight of every Chennai trip. Looking around the panorama, I had to ask myself one question: Did they ethically deserve to be in print? Even if you did manage to dodge the vomit booby traps, didn’t have your picnic held hostage by a gang of marauding crows or weren’t hit on the head by a well-aimed ‘stray’ football, whatever you were left with wasn’t much of a beach. The sea, for one, was this unique shade of gray, best described as the only conceivable chromatic counterpart to its smell. There were no coconut palms, and there was no sunset, for the beach faced east. Dusk was no orange fireball’s theatrical demise, just a bland, boring sumo-wrestling exhibition between two gray giants – the ocean and the sky. When they weren’t piddling in it, kids in varying stages of nakedness squealed their Tamil
squeals and ran in and out of the water, competing to fish out the most interesting piece of washed up garbage.

In the usual rosier frame of mind, I would have found all this colic-inducingly hilarious. But not today, when a place just as chaotic, restless and confused existed in my skull. The past few weeks had been amongst the worst in my life. I’d been wrenched by as bitter and unexpected a breakup as I believed possible. I was having grave doubts about my vocation, my place in the family, and at times even my sanity. A healing getaway, I thought, would be in order. But this definitely wasn’t it. The worrying part was I didn’t have a clue what would have been.

I felt like the loneliest, most stupid and rejected person alive. Then just when I was about to cry

“You know, I’ve been ripped to shreds ever since my boyfriend broke up with me. I hate my job so much. And sometimes, at night, I get so scared that I might be going crazy” Meera said, perched next to me in the sand.

And then, as if on cue, Marina Beach switched on its lighthouse, and called home shoals of sardine-shaped fishing boats. Stalls materialized from thin air, selling salvation disguised as coconut water, cold drinks and coffee. Magic and telepathy mingled with the fried fish and Tamil film songs in the air, turning Meera into the one person giving perfect answers to questions I’d framed but would never ask. I looked
at her face, and saw creases of worry bobbing up and down like marker-buoys on a face she tried to keep a smiling sea. The breeze, observing she felt alone too, half-pushed my elbow up against hers and made us hold mental hands.

Things were so different now from before. I saw kids sprinting out of the sea into waiting, warm towels held by mothers eager to dry them off. Crabs scuttled out of holes my gloom had kept me blind to earlier on, probably venturing in search of sustenance and sex. And then, in a final gesture of spirit bandaging, Marina sent forth one of her most loyal subjects: the parrot/guinea pig fortune teller.

Clad in a diaphanous kurta with an Iron Maiden t-shirt clearly visible underneath, for a measly fifty rupees, he offered me a choice between having my tale told by a bird or a rodent. I chose the former, and looked on in awe as the green critter strutted out of its cage, sized me up for a few seconds, picked a card from the stack piled up in front of it, and then obediently walked back in. The teller fished out a seedy looking book and read from it, becoming the bridge between a piece of cardboard and everything I needed to hear. In Tamil. Once again Reema proved she was my savior in the here and now – she translated.

As we got up to leave, a middle-aged couple asked me to take a few pictures of them standing arm in arm in the surf. Paying homage to Marina Beach, I made sure that one of them also featured a skinny little naked boy gleefully leaping into the frame.