Escape through the Boulevard

The dull sound of thunder far away suddenly rang out, disturbing yet again the uneasy quiet. The dingy seraglio in the basement suddenly lit up in frightening brilliance. Cobwebbed corners of walls; an ancient fan whirring noisily, emanating dust more than air; wooden boxes piled up one on top of another, untidily. A rat scurries on top of a box, nibbling rat-like at a tiny hole his forefathers had chewed into the tough wood and left behind for him to carry on widening. Layers of dust coat what had once been a floor of concrete, now just a beach of dust. A spider spins his yarn thicker and thicker onto the cracked yet solid walls. And then the flash of lightning. The skies conspire to reveal to the boxes hole rat spider dust cobweb walls: guests. A woman sitting cross-legged in a corner; corner newly devoid of dust, spider yarn. And cooped up, evidently asleep in her arms, a lump: Her child.

Fleshless, ragged, starving: the woman; plump, frightened, asleep: her child. The spider, slowly working his magician’s tentacles across the room, rests on the woman’s hair. Hair, once fine and cared for, now disheveled, dirty and greying. And the sorcerer spins on, spinning yarns of seclusion and lost promise on the unprotesting hair until hair and magic yarn become one and indistinguishable.

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Antigraviti. I’m walking on the moon. The ground below me isn’t on Earth anymore. A strong force is pulling upward in my thighs, arms, wrist, the sides of my forehead, at each place, gentle hands are pulling my body upward. Skyward. Up. What is such a word? Gravity. But that’s down below. So its obverse, antigraviti then. And now, my bones have abdicated the soul. The crackle at each wall, corner, door and I swivel my way through. now my pen can’t go up the page. Ok. I can’t hold my hand down. The hands are firmer now. Only on muscles. No bones.

I reach for my phone. Now the force is to the left. I’m being held back in a comfortable prison of comfort. Whatever I do, a force shifts thatward.

Bang! Bang! Bang! I wake up. The century-old door to my hostel room is buckling under the pressure of some spirited banging. It’s Singh. I have a call. If you’re wondering what I’m doing in 2010 without a phone of my own, then the facts that I’m a heavy sleeper (or used to be) and that half a dozen missed calls don’t go far towards waking me up should suffice as an explanation. Back to the call. It’s Panickon. There’s a problem. I need to be in college in half an hour. I grunt back an affirmative.

Cut to an hour and a half later. I’m finally in college. Yet another breakfast skipped. The Principal’s room is dignifiedly serene. I rush across the room and enter the back-room we had made our office. ‘Dignity’ just disappears from the face of the earth, the word ripped out of every dictionary ever printed! Brace yourself: Gullu Eyes is sprawled on the floor, laughing maniacally at a joke he had himself evidently cracked. Panickon and Twilight are beside themselves in laughter. Veggie was standing in a corner, giggling and wondering what she was doing there. Napoleon had a bewildered look on his face; his blush meant he had been the butt of the joke. The latest budget sheet had weird elephants drawn all over them. There was a smiley at the end of an official looking letter. Elsewhere, the computer screen showed a distorted graphic of what was supposed to be the design for the newspaper ad, now edited beyond repair. Distant memory told me there was a problem? Yeah! But that’s another story! Welcome to DMD World.

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In the shadow of the elephant-faced god, he would conduct his trade. Handing out shiny pencils and impressive ink bottles to the sons and daughters who came to him holding their fathers’ hands. He would have a kind word to dole out with each pen, and with each book, a story. And he’d hand over each bar of chocolate like he’d do to his own child, watching the smile spread on the tiny face across the counter. And he would work hard. Hard enough not to be able to travel all the miles to see his children’s faces. But he would remember them. Remember them in his dreams and in his prayers. And see them smile up at him in the smiles of all the children who came to him through the day. And every now and then, he would close shutters, call out to the neighbouring Chacha that he was going home to his children, and take the bus to me. And I would relate to him my stories, and tell him about my friends, and fill him in about my complaints and make a hundred wishes. And I’d bury my head in his black leather jacket, and play with his round spectacles and peer into his bright eyes. Then Ma would come with sewai and jalebi and we would sit round the table, he and she and I, and she that never did, and he’d sign my school diary for me to show my friends tomorrow, that This be Him.

The sun having taken leave for the day, its shadow reflects on the windowpane. The leaves arise from their heavy stupor and in the intervening instant, all before me is suspended in patient, contented inertia. Only birds will break the comfortable, moist monotony. Crows swooping low and revolving round and round the math, coming to rest on the blackness of the roof, the cool breeze making each flutter of wings all the more animated. A pigeon drops by to visit, and busily does a swallow. And floating menacingly, majestically in the distance over the college is an eagle. All bathed clean and shiny in the rain. And as I write, a grasshopper rests on my hand to read along. Drops of water form a puddle on the sloped roof, making a rainbow of red and green; and overflowing, it falls. Falls on the forbidden bottle lying forlorn on the edge, creating a melody of tinkling noises. Until one drop too many upsets its repose, and as it rolls to its end, twilight descends on me with the sound of cracking glass breaking the rainy inertia at last.

The fortress is finally asleep. Four hours past midnight, all lies calm and serene, the corridors in a lazy slumber of patterned darkness, a pitch black night beating the floodlights to cast mysterious shadows on the math; the dogs eerily silent and the overhead lamps creating a ghostly halo over the Vagabond. Every step is greeted by groans from the wooden staircase, lit dark by the night filtering in through the overlooking window. Six score years have taken their toll and at this unearthly hour, even the wooden planks cry out begging quiescence. Every corner, every corridor, every court threatens to reek of history, of telling an unnerving tale of individuals past, told out at every turn like so many invisible tale-grannies. And unearthly hours are indeed when such tales come to life, when the thin line between reality and the past dissolves in the myriad shadows that engulf the complex. Then, a trembling climb down unlighted 19th century staircases, a burning matchstick all that adds to the truant play of light and shadow, brings on the inevitable feelings of being watched, of having trespassed into that which belongs to you not, of walking not just down a staircase but down to the stony cold dungeons of the past. And till you creak open the gate and rush out to the morning mist, the walls watch you like so many eyes on an inquest.

The street is unnaturally silent. The darkest hour is also the quietest, the lull that precedes the bustling activity of light and life. The dogs have abandoned station, the asphalt shimmering in the street lamp’s orange melancholy, the buildings all around in dignified slumber. Against the deep and dark sky, the university haunts the streets with its gaping windows, and you get the general feeling of living your worst nightmare. College Street looks a ghost of its cousin from the daytime, tired bodies lined up on its pavements where books would otherwise be strewn. An early couple has got around preparing their morning meal. At the far end of the street, overlooking Presidency, a sea of coconuts has descended, to be dispatched to all parts of the city. The tram lines wait in patient languor, stretching in perfection till as far as the eyes can travel and then bending away with the road into oblivion. The cold breeze cuts into the skin, and clothes are held much closer to oneself against the spring chill. Someone remarks on how callously he has replaced the river bank with the tram lines; to me, each seems a peaceful enough proposition right now.

The chulha burns. Grey unimpressive coal come to life in a celebration of warmth and destruction. Hungry stomachs are appeased, thirsts quenched and sleep induced as rings of smoke conspire to change the complexion of the night. The tram lines vibrate to life as the first tram of the day rushes through, unimpeded and intent. I watch till the yellow metallic heritage of the city disappears round the bend. The spell of darkness breaks its stranglehold and the first lights of the day break in all around us. The day has begun, and so also it’s time for my slumber to get the better of me as I watch the dark building from my window gradually paint itself in vivid colours of the sun.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Ever since monetarist Milton Friedman named as such, one of his several writings of complicated mathematical jargon, the term has been considered as the core fundamental of economic theory. Three decades hence, I have spent two years of an increasingly meaningless existence trying to come to terms with the idea. That we can get nothing that we like without sacrificing something other that we value just as much. It pretty much made a lot of sense, pearls of wisdom for sure! After all, the two years themselves have entailed the opportunity cost of living alone. Then again, there have been the experiences of a practical application of the same, every literal lunch that I have “enjoyed” over the period. The philosophy, if I may demean the word, has run thus: You have this, you can’t have that; if you eat that, this isn’t coming on your plate. Perfect economic logic. Not a fault to be found in it in decades of neoclassical theory.

So I went down for lunch like every other day (well not every) and chose doi over fish. Not a heart-breaking sacrifice that, by any means. Yet a hearty meal later, I was still hungry (blame that on the food, or on my appetite, I can’t say). And the perfection of the logic somehow lost its charm on me. Dramatic bullcrap it would be if I’d say I had one of those moments of reckoning from all the movies that have them. It’s been some time in the coming, and a week of what seems like self-imposed exile has certainly been the last straw that broke the camel’s back. It suddenly doesn’t feel wrong to want a free lunch, nor to make someone else pay for it. And by the time I got back to learn that the ratio of marginal utilities of having doi and having fish should be equal for me and some other hostelite called ‘B’, for the hostel mess to be maximising ‘social welfare’, I certainly had had enough.

If I were to write the rest of my thoughts honestly, it would be considered too inappropriate for a public blog. The gist of the matter remains that I can’t wait to get away from this empty theorising and ‘studying’ a subject that truly has miles to go in order to realise why it exists in the first place.