Sumita – Sumita Chakrabarty

The Mustache

It arrived one morning, unannounced and not surprisingly, unheralded, on J’s upper lip. Something about it was distinctly disturbing. How can someone live through forty odd years with an upper lip as smooth as a baby’s bottom and then suddenly, this happens. It was perhaps then that the dreams started, J thought. Actually, they were more dream experiences, than dreams. He could tell a dream by the fact that it had soft edges and diffused lighting. Full time dream expert and part time professor Arnie Fell told him once. So, J started looking out for the soft edges and it was there. What a remarkable man, the professor was, he told himself. But then he started having dream experiences. In one of them he picked up his garbage and his jealousy of Morton and threw them into the bin. He didn’t feel like himself for a few days after that. Maybe the jealousy kept him going, but then for how long, so he did what he did.

In his next dream experience he saw and felt himself climbing the Eiffel Tower, except that it was called Pom Pom and there was a dollar store at the top where they sold kites and other such interesting stuff. J began enjoying his dream experiences so much that sometimes he took an extra day off just to have one of them. What was the point of going to work as a ticket checker on the train if you could be the train and roar through twisted tunnels carved out black rock. He could feel the wind whistle through him sounding a little like his uncle Puck when he fell asleep while knitting.

But that’s not how the mustache happened. It was the result of one of his dream experiences, because J clearly remembered the mustache coming to him for help. He had been waiting at a town square talking to a young policeman who told him that a revolution was on in the next street, so he better wait here and that was when the mustache appeared and asked for help. It was looking for a way to escape and J figured that the best way would be for him to wear it. There was a sense of swagger to wearing a mustache that had nowhere to go. Made him feel like a man. A hero.

And so it stayed with him. Every time he felt bored of its sameness he remember what the policeman had told him, ‘there’s a revolution in the next lane so don’t do anything foolish.’

Such profound words from one so young. Surely that should count for something.

The story of Stella’s shadow

I woke up sweating, last night. It was the same dream again. I was standing in front of the mirror, brushing the knots out of my hair and suddenly she was there, standing behind me.

Stella.

And she was trying to tell me something.

Everyone who knew Stella said that she was quiet, a little eccentric perhaps and definitely, butt ugly. Not surprisingly she was single and seemed to revel in it. About Mary, the opinion was ….who’s she? Oh, that grey person who kinduv hung around Stella? The one who would throw stones at the neighbourhood children if they laughed at her? The one who sometimes forgot to wear shoes?

I encountered Stella in the lift where she took it upon herself to tell me that the people who lived in the building were all ‘pigs’ with no ‘class’ or any sense of ‘decency’ to a poor woman who lived by herself. I gently pointed out the presence of Mary in her life.

‘Who?’ she barked back.

‘Your sister, Mary?’ I don’t know why I framed it as a question since it was a stated fact. Maybe because I felt a little nervous seeing the look on her face. It was an ugly shade of grey.

‘Oh…Mary…she’s not….yeah…yeah.’

She muttered and went her way and that was that. Her name came up every time I bumped into any of the neighbours.

‘Have you heard what Stella’s done?’

That’s how the conversations started. She had tried to stab someone because she felt that he was a ‘very bad man’. She once threw a cup of hot tea at a child who had thrown a cricket ball at her window. She had constant run-ins with the building staff.

Honestly….she was a real pain and no one had the faintest idea how to get rid of her.

The days following our short conversation were busy and rainy. Mould had entered our lives and claimed every unclaimed spot in the building. And with mould came a strange smell which managed to pervade every corner. It was a strangely unsettling time, so no one really noticed that Stella had not been seen in a while. There were no wild displays of temper when the children made a noise while they played in the central courtyard.

Did I say that Stella was a quiet person? Yes, she was but in a strange, wild way. Her personality was loud, compensating for her lack of words. She unsettled me because of a really weird incident that happened about three months after I had moved in. I was returning back from the grocery and had just stepped into the elevator. The doors were just about to close when an unkempt woman elbowed her way in.

I moved back, letting her claim more than her share of space. I just couldn’t stand the musty smell emanating from her. She turned around and looked at me intently. I could feel myself sweating between my thighs as I grew uncomfortable.

The elevator came to a stop at the eighth floor. Her floor. But she didn’t get off. The door opened ever so slowly.

‘I think your floor is this one, right?’ I couldn’t help asking. Her strangeness was driving me crazy.

‘You’re the woman in eleven.’ It was a statement. I nodded my head vigorously and for good measure looked pointedly at my watch.

‘Be careful….stay away from her….otherwise, she’ll get you.’ And with that she left.

I never mentioned that incident to anyone. Not even Ajit. I didn’t want him to worry unnecessarily. Besides, who cares about what she says, I told myself. She’s mad. But the sense of disquiet stayed.

It was just seven months after this that the mould appeared and Stella disappeared.

While there was a general sense of relief among the neighbours, there was still that question of, where’s Stella?

The mould sample was sent to a local lab and they responded back asking for some time to run more tests. But everyone was of the opinion that it needed to be tackled immediately.

Fumigation. Bleaching. Scrubbing. The neighbours were in a frenzy of cleaning. Some complained that their children were getting sneezing fits and watery eyes.

Two weeks of feverish cleaning ensured that the mould had almost gone, though one did suddenly come upon the occasional patch.

And that was that till Toffee the nosy dog from the apartment below, dug up a battered purse which someone remembered was Stella’s. Not surprisingly, all hell broke loose. The police had to be called and they started digging up the place.

To the relief of all, nothing else was found. Just the purse.

Two months after Stella’s no-show it was decided by the building management committee that we should force open her apartment to check if the answer of her mysterious disappearance was somewhere in there. I was part of the group of five who entered and this is what I saw –

Two rooms filled with piles of unwashed laundry.

The kitchen had stuff scattered all around. The fridge had nothing edible in it, just a bottle of jam and some stale bread.

The bathroom sink had brown stains and lots of cracks in it.

In one corner of the apartment there was some mould growing. It was a peculiar shade of brown and orange.

There was no sign of Stella.

‘Shouldn’t we also consider that Mary is missing?’ It was a valid question to which no one had an answer.

‘Mary, who? No one has really seen her.’ Was there a person like that? I had wondered sometimes.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the brown and orange mould on the wall. It formed a strange pattern. Trying to make sense of it I looked at it from all angles and then I saw it…the shape of someone’s hand. Actually, just the palm.

Suddenly, I felt dizzy. But I just couldn’t look away. I swear that the fingers seemed to be writing something. I looked around. Clearly, no one had seen what I was seeing.

And then I saw the words… Stella was here. And so was, Mary!

In the midst of leftover emotions

When my mother died she was a shell of the fiery, domineering, feisty woman that she used to be with all semblance of human-ness plucked out. What was left was an empty carcass that behaved somewhat like a human being. Every time I saw her, a steaming pile of emotions hit me in the face and the only way I could deal with it was not to dwell on them for too long. And like nimble footed elves they scurried away to hide in the recesses and corners of my sub-conscious. Oh, they were quick to hide and stay hidden, but every once in a while one would pop up to let me know that they were not going anywhere, anytime soon.

Leftover emotions, like leftover food have a staleness about them and the odour tends to cling on like sticky cobwebs that leave behind strands. Wading through them can be exhausting. The coiled clusters of emotions that I carried around with me left me defeated and exhausted over the years. They were of no use but I couldn’t get rid of them with a clean, swift stroke like a warrior severing off a gangrenous limb.

Humour is an amazing tool. I’ve used it well occasionally. My mother’s could be biting and sarcastic without intending to evoke laughter. But sometimes it did and I think it surprised her. That’s why her sudden bursts of strange laughter when she was gradually losing herself, unsettled me. Was she really laughing? Did some part of her understand the point of it or was she just echoing the laughter of the others. It was like she was going after an illusion, except that the illusion was what she used to be.

Chasing emotions can be an extreme sport. Looking into memories, feelings, thoughts…oh, it’s nasty! But it needs to be done. However bloodcurdling the results. I felt the full weight of it all while trying to figure out why my mother gradually devolved from being a human with a life into an entity who just existed. There were days when the guilt was bruising and I could almost smell my deep resentment bordering on the hatred, for her. In this gush of negativity I sometimes caught a whiff of sadness for what could have been and the unfairness of it all.

Watching a person standing at the precipice of a mental downfall is one of the most frightening things. The brain and mind are not in coordination and in the process they leave the person floundering. I stood among the remains of my mother’s fading mind watching her drift through the remaining years of her life on the shoulders of household help with whom she had a relationship that was more hate than love. Her love for all things beautiful remained lost somewhere in the dregs of her destroyed brain cells.

Did they make a valiant effort to be heard?

Maybe.

Perhaps in another life they will come alive again. For now they have gone…with her.

The music in my head

There were drums playing in my head on Thu. Usually it is the violin on Thursdays and the harmonica on Saturdays. I was a little surprised, maybe even perturbed, but the feeling didn’t stay for too long. Someone needed to pay heed to the music and since it was in my head, it had to be me.

The building supervisor had once complained about the guy who played the drums loudly on the fourth floor. “Not all of us enjoy drums,” he said to him through the din of the music. “You’ve got to stop.” Everything else that was implied just hung in the air between them and was of course completely ignored by the drummer boy. Since then the drums have gone off in my head.

As a child I was not considered to be very musically inclined, though it was not for lack of trying. I was sent to a teacher, in reality a bored housewife with middling music skills, who played an out of tune instrument. I came back from each lesson, even less musically inclined till one day it was decided that enough was enough. Since then I’ve dabbled in learning magic, trying to walk on stilts and ventriloquism . I just managed to get the hang of it when abruptly the drums and violin started playing in my head. I didn’t think much of it. I really enjoyed it, though to most people watching my head bob from side to side must’ve been disconcerting. I hope I didn’t look like a bobble head doll. I really hate them. They freak me out. They’re always looking at you from the corner of their big eyes and smirking from the corners of their over-bright smiles.

I realized that I was happy with the music in my head. Some days, I could turn the volume up if I wished to. I figured this the day I found M in bed with P. M and I had been engaged for two years and were on the cusp of marriage. A certain familiarity had crept into our relationship and I enjoyed that. It felt comfy…like old socks. But then M had to go and do this. And I had to find out. Why? Why couldn’t they have been more discreet? Then I would not have known and life could have gone on. Wonder why people set so much store on knowing everything.

Last night it was the piano. I woke up to it playing in my head. But when I was up I realized that it was coming from somewhere outside. I noticed the light under the door. It was to the room that I usually kept shut. Was the light dim or bright. And who could be playing the piano there? I walked up to the door and put up my hand to open it. And then it stopped…the piano. My hand dropped away. I turned to leave and it started. Yes, it definitely was not in my head. I would have to open the door to find out who was playing. But I didn’t want to. There was enough music in my head. I didn’t need to seek out new music. What if I came across M and P again in the room, like last time?

Revorr – at the centre of the universes

Divining the courses of the lives in the universes is the Revorr, the prime consciousness. It balances, holds together, manipulates and restores events and lives in the surrounding universes. Such is its power that even the force of the wind is tamed and dictated by it and yet, the Revorr by itself is nothing but a breathing, pulsating blob.

The universes don’t really circle around it. They’re scattered in the periphery of the Revorr and occasionally when the magnetic pull is too great one of the universes may hover close by and at such times life there becomes topsy-turvy. It was said that this happened when the rhythmic beat of the Revorr was disrupted by flashes of electric impulses.

The Revorr is older than creation, those who have charted the course of the galaxies, believe so. It holds within it secrets of the cosmos and the carcasses of dead stars. And above all, it has intellect. It’s random moves are not that random after all, it is believed.

Occasionally….very, very occasionally, following a rhythm that only it can hear, the Revorr scatters stardust on those living in the universes.

The Revorr makes it possible for universes to function and holds them together by means of massive magnetic force, the origins of which is not known to anyone. As for the secrets it holds, no one has delved into them, because that would mean delving into the Revorr itself….a task that is absolutely impossible.

The nation’s misery

The king had decided to reveal to all that he was naked. Never before had the citizens encountered something so strange. The guy who sold brinjal and okra beside the cycle repair shop exclaimed about it. His vegetables seemed exhausted and defeated by the time the sun had climbed to its 12 PM position in the sky. Clearly, the number of customers would now dwindle so this was his time to discuss world affairs in a tone of perennial amazement. I often wondered if cynicism had passed him by completely. He always seemed astonished by the duplicity of the king and his courtiers.

The king’s revelation had paralyzed the will of the people. How could the country function if its king was naked? Wasn’t that a violation of natural laws? Was it even legal for the country to function like that? The lady who sold lipsticks in the mall, wondered aloud to her colleague, an anorexic girl in her late twenties. The lady wore her profession proudly on her lips every day underscoring it repeatedly till they look obscenely scarlet. Today, the scarlet had worn thin but she let that slide as she looked askance at the girl, waiting for a response. The girl just continued to arrange the racks of nail enamel mutely, as if the king’s matter was something too uninspiring to be discussed. Over across in the gentlemen’s underwear aisle, a stocky man threw lingering glances her way. The anorexic girl was aware of them, but she chose to ignore. His salary was a pittance. No point acknowledging the glances of someone who was at her pay scale.

Soon the hushed whispers of the cabinet gave way to mutiny. Mild at first and then increasingly vehement. The king needed to be replaced. The world was laughing at the nation with the king who was naked. History would judge them harshly. HISTORY!! It stopped everyone short. Of course, he needed to go. Nobody messes with history and gets away with it. The owner of the cycle shop didn’t care about history, he told the okra seller while sipping his fourth cup of tea. His children could deal with it. What good was history to him when he was dead. But yes, a naked king. That was definitely an inconvenience. Okay, okay…an embarrassment he said hastily, before the okra guy’s amazement magnified a hundred fold.

The next day, an elaborate announcement was made. The king was considering stepping down to make way for younger talent. Somebody who could bring the nation together. As the prime minister walked into the king’s chambers to get it signed by the king, he stopped short in surprise. The queen stood before him, her feline looks cast him a malevolent glance. The king is not naked, she said chewing on every word before spitting it his way. He’s wearing his top hat and fig leaf. Why would you want to tell the world a lie. He glanced over her demurely clad shoulder at the king who stood there wearing his usual idiot grin. The king nodded at him in glee and while the prime minister fumbled for words, the queen went up to him and hissed venomously, tell the world the king will stay until I say so.

As he turned around to leave he heard the queen say aloud, every legacy needs to be built carefully and we’ve just started building ours.

21 grams of indifference

Milos was precisely made up of three emotions…21 grams of indifference that was weighted down by 19 grams of nonchalance and 5 grams of self love. The rest of him, like the red planet, is mostly unknown territory and no amount of trawling would yield any results, was the general consensus.

When I say precisely, I mean that the quantity of each emotion was very carefully dispensed, perhaps when he was pulled out of his mother’s womb kicking and screaming. And to his credit, Milos lived his entire life within the boundaries of these emotions. His indifference was more fine grained than lumpy and it had the tendency of seeping through other people’s emotions and caused them to choke on it while Milos, having doled it out generously went back to being himself.

The nonchalance, it was said, was of a thicker consistency. He sometimes tripped over it and one classmate from high school chemistry class swore that a piece of it caught fire when Milos was in the process of throwing it out to the teacher’s assistant. She said that the others stared in awe as it crackled and spluttered and then finally ended up as a dark spot on the table. The teacher never found out the truth about the spot.

When he turned 25, Milos decided to abandon his family and make a life for himself in another city. When asked how he would support himself, he said, he wasn’t planning on supporting himself. Instead, he would give someone else that opportunity. His response meant that he would be back home very soon. But clearly nobody had anticipated that five grams of self love could see him through life. Unchallenged.

He was known to display flashes of it every time he smelt a challenge in the air. It could be as simple as someone stealing his seat in the bus. Milos would gently sidle over and hover around in the person’s line of vision and proceed to gently move his bag from one shoulder to the other as if his shoulders were made of delicate porcelain that were not meant to shoulder the weight of anything heavier than a puff of frivolity. Most often, Milos managed to reach into the recesses of the person’s guilt and pull at a stray strand. It always worked.

When it came to paying for anything, he would look at the person with tears trembling at the precipice of his luminous eyes and say, ‘you’re a truly divine human being and I hate doing this to you, but I have some medical bills to take care of this month.’ By the time next month came around he had found someone who could be unraveled strand by strand.

For Milos, it was always, all about him. And just like that five grams went a long way.

What’s your super power?

Mine is, not caving in to rejection. It started out as a muscle which was strengthened by rejections over the years till it finally developed powers of its own. Mainly deflection powers.

There, I see a rejection coming…flick..foom…and it’s gone. Didn’t let it get to me and batter my sense of self-worth.

Rejections come thick and fast in the business world. I’m sure it does in other worlds too but I’ve not my dipped my toes in their pools so I’ll speak for myself.

Capabilities, integrity, ability to go on, persist, integrity, innovate, experience, take on additional responsibilities, integrity…..rarely matter. What matters is …. oh well, you know what I’m saying. So, I figured that I’d take my bag of tricks and move on instead of trying to convince a reluctant management riddled with politics.

Along the way I realized that there’s a lexicon that is used but never in the way it is meant to be used. For instance, capability, actually means, ‘you can get her to take on a lot more as long as you keep telling her how much of a difference she’s making.’

Yeah, sucker, you say. I agree.

Here’s another one, commitment. Loosely translated it means you are true to your role and do the best to ensure that the track it runs on is well-oiled and efficient. But actually, it means, ‘does your boss think that you’re making a difference? Because if that’s not the case then you may as well not be there.’

And why should the boss not think that way? Simple, because you’re not ‘in line with the vision of the company’. Flick…foom…rejection brushed off. I’m ‘in line’ with my vision for myself and that’s important!

Batman and Superman may be saving the world one burning building at a time, but my intention is to keep my sense of self-worth alive and kicking. Because that’s my burning building and if it’s not saved then nothing else is worth saving.

Drowning in a vat full of memories

The dream sometimes sneaks up on me when I’m least expecting it. It’s usually the one where I’ve lost my wallet and have no recourse to getting out of the situation that I’m in, but today I had chanced upon a sliver of a memory that was sticking out from under the wardrobe. I tugged at it and found myself falling into what I first thought was a rabbit hole, but turned out to be a vat. It was filled to the brim with memories and I sank like a stone in it.

At first they were like gentle bubbles floating around me. Soothing. Gentle. Happy. I spotted the tall, gorgeous, dark skinned Ambika, who had worked at our place. Her statuesque figure was at odds with her wild giggles. I was buoyed by them for some time as I kept drowning. Much to my amazement, I found that I could turn my neck a full 180 degrees. In the far corner of my peripheral vision I spotted Mrs P. She was so petite and delicate, I remember. She seemed to be doing something strange. I watched as she poured a can of diesel on herself and was scrambling around looking for a match. I screamed out to her but she couldn’t hear me. My voice was drowning in my thought bubbles. No…wait….she was crying. She was not her usual coy and demure self. Why?? What was that sound?

But I had floated on and down. It felt so calming. And quiet. Peaceful. Why were people afraid of old memories? They could be so therapeutic. And then I heard a voice. It was telling me, no, not possible, not by you. I recognized that voice. It had merged with my consciousness. Somewhere deep down I had always responded to it. But now I didn’t want to listen to it saying no, over and over again. It was time to break the hypnotic cadence of that ‘no’. Surely, there was a ‘yes’ hidden somewhere in that ‘no’.

In the midst of the ebb and flow I caught sight of Troy. His cackling laughter and eyes for me only had coloured my early twenties till I was ready to believe that I mattered a lot. In the space time continuum this belief would have been self sustaining if life had not come in the way. Maybe all this was not drowning, but just a steady progress into a parallel universe where the same things happened but the effect that was created did not really matter.

An untragic romance

At the centre of every great romance lies something tragic. Otherwise, there is no point in calling it a romance. It could instead very well be an affair, or an indiscretion or a dalliance…you get my point. So in the spring of a certain year, I stumbled upon what I then thought was a romance.

Kamal had a thick mop of hair, each curly strand was fiercely coiled, ready to spring forth at a moment’s notice. That still remains my most enduring memory of him. That and the fact that he thought I was worth staring at long and hard, every time I crossed his line of vision. In small town India, by the time a boy hits 20 he is a fully formed raging Romeo with eyes that express hunger either for food or for girls. Nothing subtle. Just plain hunger, openly expressed.

I relished the long glances. The way they slid over the surroundings without taking in anything and then slid back to me. I deliberately hung around waiting for his entire attention to snap back and then lock on to me. It was ego massaging at 800+ megahertz. Only I could feel it and almost hear it. The rising crescendo of his desperate desire to seek me out. Everywhere.

But like all good things, this one too had a wrinkle in it. And it was I. The object of this adoration. All that intensity and being the cynosure of his pent up passion (which my youthful arrogance assumed it was), had left me a wee bit bored. Like a ripe fruit that was borderline decayed, he had fallen into my lap. There could not be anything interesting, after that.

All summer I was pursued, ardently. My every glance, smile, gesture, movement, mood….was studied by those brooding eyes beneath the thick mop of hair. I preened and pirouetted to those glances much to his delight. His gangly looks and the fact that he wore his trousers shorter than his sideburns never really mattered. I was high on life. At eighteen, nothing can be more of an aphrodisiac.

The summer days started getting shorter. The heavy warm air was turning cooler. The hibiscus didn’t seem that radiant and colourful. The season was gradually turning and so were my feelings. The rush was beginning to fade and my sights were set on a horizon that was not too distant, but definitely hard to reach. The boy next door whose presence in the balcony, cigarette casually dangling from between his fingers evoked tingles in the subterranean corners of my mind and body. An entirely new climate of feelings was rising on the horizon.

I’m not apologizing, I would like to state that clearly. Apologies are given by those who doubt their profanities and their badass-ness. I don’t. And I didn’t. Passive, loving looks had become so last season. I was now moving forward towards a different adventure with frictionless ease.

But this one, fell through. The ‘cigarette dangling from his fingers’ guy turned out to be a damp squib. He carried too much baggage…too much arrogance which sat heavily on his slight shoulders. No one should carry so much weight on such a slight frame.

And then suddenly there appeared a twist in the tale and she had a name. Just when I thought that cruising through potential romances was going to be my thing, there appeared the hint of a shadow on the Kamal horizon. I had not really abandoned his adoration completely. It remained in the background, almost like white noise, giving my ego a leg up ever so often.

Her name was ….wait… I forget! Years later when I look back on this sliver of a moment in my life I just remember her face with its vacant look of incomprehension and a smile that revealed a gap in her teeth and very little intelligence. Maybe I was jealous that the focus had shifted from me. Or maybe I felt insulted that I had been replaced by a less worthy person. Whatever it was, the pair of eyes now turned their focus on her and I was history.

I felt deflated, angry, irritated, smug, superior and some other minor emotions that I’m not sure have names, in turns. But youth is extraordinarily selfish and resilient. I leaned hard against my feelings of disappointment till they gave way. And then I stood up, straight. Resolved. Focussed. Stronger. Because the self-pity had been beaten out of me. I figured that I was destined for bigger victories and no gap toothed, vacant faced woman was going to take that away from me.

It has been decades since that moment of awakening. I continue to saunter through the alleyways of life nonchalantly. And occasionally I look back in the hope that I may encounter a pair of piercing eyes under a shock of tight curls. A gentle massage to the ego never really hurt anyone.