Unhabited

It was time to go. He looked around at the room he loved for one last time. It had been his domain, his kingdom, his home, for the last three years. He thought of all its little imperfections.  The creaking door, the window that didn’t ever close completely, the sagging shelf in the cupboard, the crevices in the floor. He likened it to a song, that space. You know, when one listens to a live version of a song one loves, and one does so over and over again, one begins to like all its nooks and crannies. Like when the audience applauds after a particularly intricate piece. And when one listens to the original version of the song, something seems amiss. The notes are all there, but the familiarity one shared with the song is gone. Its little idiosyncrasies are gone.

So there it stood, the furniture still in place. The table looked bald, with its wig of criss-crossed wires gone. The door stood straight, relieved of its burden of innumerable clothes. The newspapers that covered the shelves of the cupboard looked sheepishly redundant. The nail on the wall where he had hung some vague painting in one of his fits of cleaning looked forlorn. The room reflected his mood.

The door creaked its goodbye. It was time to go.

Politically (in)Correct

“It’ll all come back to you, multiple-fold”, he said with a sneer that had sent a chill through my spine. I didn’t know if I had felt excited or creeped out. Somewhere in a corner of my mind, I knew I had gone too far down the road to come back.

It had all started with this need I felt to do something worthwhile with my life. I was at the age when one felt one had the will and the brains to change the way things were.  What I didn’t realize then was that all I would end up doing was losing my self-worth.  It was a vicious spiral, and I was sucked in before I could realize what was happening.

The Opposition had a new strategy that year. It was the youth that had voted against them the last time, and they weren’t losing those votes again this time. So, they kick-started a youth movement. Involving young blood to show that the party was the one other youth should vote for. Clearly disguised, of course, under the pretense of promoting the youth’s future.  So, I volunteered, completely taken in by the words of the party leader who came to my college.

That was ten years ago. I have come very far since then. I lost quite a lot along the way, and gained a lot too, or so I like to think. I made the party activities my highest priority, and my  grades tanked. I dropped out of college, and got elected Youth President. I hurt and subdued those who were against me, and I rose in political standing. I let my good moral sense rot, and my influence spread wider and wider.

Today, I share my prison cell with the same man whose words I had admired on that fateful day , the party leader, my godfather. After a life of constant action and no looking back, the prison’s relentless monotony of inaction has forced me to introspect, and that’s what I am spending my days doing.

I don’t know if I have really done anything wrong. I made a choice then, and it has directed my life so far. There was a way in which this career gets to you, in that there is no going back. I have no college degree to fall back on and hence, I can’t get myself a “respectable” job. But, this doesn’t mean I have done nothing. I have worked very hard to get to the position I am in. Today, my family lives in the kind of comfort that my father couldn’t dream of providing. I have threatened so many, inflicted pain on many more, and extorted so many I have stopped keeping count.  Sometimes, I don’t even know where all the money my party  spends comes from. But, everytime I embark on this train of thought, it always finds its logical conclusion in a recollection of the same sentence. “You have given so much to this, it is only right that it pays you back.” I had felt the corroding effect of my godfather’s words on my good sense then, and I can feel it now. It made sense then and it makes sense now, except for this blip on that screen of perfection.

It is as though I have sold my morality, and gotten riches in return. It seems a just bargain. And given how much importance people attach to morality, it makes  sense that the riches are in good measure too.  It is funny even, that these intrusive press-fellows see just the surface of this murky world, and create a ruckus. I wonder what they would do if they managed to dive deep one day. They would probably never come back to the surface, then.

It isn’t only the press. Today, I am condemned by the very same people who voted for me. They don’t seem to grasp what is, according to me, the most cardinal rule of human behavior:

There is always a gap between what we should be doing, and what we really do.

So, aren’t my actions just an extension of what these people do in everyday life? Take food, for example. Taste and health do not obviously go together. You make the choice to eat tasty food all the time, and you give up on health. You pay the price, of course, but was the taste worth it? Or, you eat healthy all the time, and end up with numb taste-buds. The sensible ones manage to strike a balance. But there are always going to be those who want taste all the time. I am just one of those people.

So, when the money did come back to me multiple-fold, I embraced it. I lived a king’s life. And I am paying the price. And the surprising thing is, I don’t feel an urge to change myself, or the way things are around me. I know I will live like a king again. So will my family. Haven’t I done something worthwhile with my life? 

Perfection

There she was, across the street. The vehicles rolled smoothly past, at a pace that reflected the sloth of a warm Sunday morning. Amidst the steady traffic, he caught glimpses of her every now and then. It was like a game, like he was being given pieces of a jigsaw and he had to piece them together in his mind. He felt that familiar eagerness of working on a puzzle, trying to make everything fit within a broader framework. Each piece revealed something -big eyes, polka dots, a hair band, a white dress, wavy hair. With every glimpse, he felt like he was getting closer to that image of perfection. Yet, there was this gnawing feeling that something was eluding him. Like that one jigsaw piece that stubbornly refuses to fall in place. Like that one word in a crossword that leaves it incomplete. Maybe it was her craning neck, maybe it was those searching eyes. Maybe it was a bitten lip or a nervous twitch, or maybe it was all in his mind. He began to get impatient. There seemed to be an unseen force driving him to mirror her actions. He craned his neck when she craned hers, he stepped forward when she did, and back when she changed her mind. He did all he could to catch her attention. And then their eyes met. His heart stopped as she ran, right across the street and towards him, that dull searching look transforming into a delightful smile. His outstretched arms picked her up, and her small, soft hands found their place around his neck. “Papa”, she said. And there it was, perfection.

P.S. : I thought of this when I was feeling warm and fuzzy on Fathers' Day, but never got around to writing it till recently. Maybe that explains the excess of sentiment.

KGP: My Version 2.2

Super-final year is all about the superbness and the finality. What is superb about this final step of life at Kharagpur is the time it offers for contemplation about the past, present and future. Not that we use that time for contemplation, given there are so many more interesting things to do- doing nothing, for example. So, in the short while that I managed to spend in thought, I tried to answer that oft-asked question: the one thing that I would take away from KGP. Funnily, it seemed to me that the answer was rather general, and obvious. And if I were to verbalize it, it would be shared emotion.

Let us think of our four or five years here as a GC event: choreography, maybe. We arrive and are greeted by an empty stage. A stage where everything is at stake. Before we go on stage as performers, we are individuals, unbound by any commonality. Freshers to the stage, perhaps? The audience seems stoic, vague, unpredictable. We are unaware of who they are and how they will respond at the end of our ‘performance’. At this point in time, perhaps unknown to each other, we all share emotions of anticipation and anxiety interlaced with happiness and pride.

So, here we are, and we have begun.

The music starts to play. The first few moments are spent in extreme nervousness, but there is also the assurance that arises from all the effort that has gone into preparing for them. Through the haze of the lights, the sound and the abundance of chaos that envelops us, all we seem to have is the support of those on stage with us. The effort we make to move in synchrony ties us together. We seem to bond through a common struggle. Maybe it is a struggle to put on our best show. Maybe it is a struggle to stay together. Maybe it is a struggle to survive and thrive in an environment that seems foreign. The only way we can get through it successfully is by being together, and that is exactly what we do.

As the dance progresses, we begin to tread with confidence. We move through multiple scenes, each of which challenges us differently. Often enough, when we forget how to continue, we imitate the movements of our fellow performers: on stage, in the lab, in class, in exams, in interviews, in life. As long as we have the support of those around us, we don’t falter. And even if we lose that support and fall, the show must go on, and it does. With the passing of each scene, the end seems nearer, easier and more attainable.

We finish with a flourish. It all came together. For some, it all made sense and for others, it didn’t. We hear the applause of the audience and take a bow. But at that moment when we finish, we do not think about how much time we spent preparing, or about all the difficulties that came along the way. Those are reserved for later, when our fellow performers are probably not around us. At that moment, it doesn’t matter how good the performance was. All that matters is that we met, we were in it together and we shared all those emotions: the happiness, the tears and how we managed to survive and conquer. And it is these emotions that we will talk about for days and days to come, and these emotions that are passed on from generation to generation of performers.

To take it one step further, might I venture to say that the stage, the music, the lights: they are all just accomplices, it was the people that really mattered. So, even if you were to take the stage away in the future and turn off the music and the lights, the memory of having those people with you will always stay strong. Perhaps, we will all get together for a dance again in the future. Perhaps, the number of times I have used ‘we’ in this piece is proof enough that we will.

So, here we are, and we have arrived.

We shall move on to become the audience soon.

Judges, please note the empty stage.