So it’s food now, sighed Mira. She should have gotten used to the metaphor laden laments Kashi leveled at life almost on a daily basis, but his choice of connotations and the vigor with which he propounded his newer claims took her by surprise even now and then.

She wanted to smile now, and she even allowed the tiny twinkle that had been dancing on her eyelashes to stray down her face a bit, in the general direction of her lips. Just then, Kashi looked straight at her, and she froze. The half smile faltered, petrified, and hung itself by her nose, like an icicle, and tickled her till she could no longer keep it in, and she let out a massive “Aachhoo!!”, spraying a mist straight into Kashi’s startled face.

“Bah! Ptooii!! Phlegm! Onions! Bah!”

“I’m so sorry, grasshopper. Aww, gee, it’s all over your face. Sorry, Kash! Here, lemme wipe it off for you.” Mira offered, apologetically.

“Nyehh! F’gettit! It’s awready too bad you weren’t listening, you don’t have to rub it in my face now!” retorted Kashi, but he couldn’t suppress a smile even as he said that.

Mira grinned. Kashi broke out into loud laughter.

These were young days still. People with windblown ungelled hair and unfashionable long coats would huddle together in canteens, sip cold and very sweet chai, and talk excitedly in hushes and shushes, taking great care not to call Red Red and generally being politically correct. Young and defiant men and women wanted to go around distributing scandalous ill printed pamphlets, though they had little to say. Artists, especially those that didn’t produce, were springing up by the score, in mossy urine wet alleys and abandoned cinema halls with paan spittled staircases. Benzene was everywhere, and everyone wanted to get on it. Bright young men were having sex with crippled beggarwomen and beautiful smooth skinned women with kohl lined eyes straddled naked ash smeared sadhus with matted hair on sacred river banks, and they all kept dog eared journals that described their escapades in autopsied detail, page after page of bad grammar and burning passion.

Kashi Ahmed was a nebulous paradox of a being, or so many believed. Apart from his fashionably blasphemous name, he had a colorful resume to his credit: he had arrived at the University gates as a Literature major, flunked every third course he took, and dropped out twice (He got back in the first time around because University rules allowed only on-roll students to access the press house and the prescription free drug store. The press house was razed to the ground that subsequent September, and by then Kashi had met HariOm, a med dropout, so that he no longer needed the University. The University had always harbored similar sentiments towards him and obliged quickly, kicking him out a second time.) He had once publicly accused the Dean’s daughter of trying to rape him, and on more than one occasion had been seen attempting to perform vasectomies on litter dogs. He called himself an artist, and was rumored to be one, but he avoided expression in any form, lest he be debunked as another of those ‘junky tourist types with paintbrushes up their anuses’, an expression he himself had coined and popularized into circulation. He passionately abhorred that kind, those that got ‘high on horseshit’ and believed they had it, and who then spent sweaty hours furiously scribbling ‘infantile poop on brown envelopes’, collaging together ‘pop culture vomit’, painting ‘Kali-doing-Keith-Richards’ murals on dirty bathroom tiles. He subscribed to a ‘higher lineage’, as he called it, and claimed he had ‘intellectual ancestors’ in supermen like Newton, Nietzsche, Faulkner and Joyce. But his inherent contradictions would suddenly overwhelm him, and right after he had delivered an eloquent lecture on ‘the grandeur of the ego, the pride in existence, and the trash that was leftover culture’, he would pick up cans of paint and a couple of hard brushes, and then cloister himself in his room for the next forty hours,( The University hadn’t kicked him out of his room yet, there was some paperwork still remaining) painting a wall with a zoomed-in version of the ‘Somdomite’ note that famously ruined Oscar Wilde.

On Friday evenings, he held forth at the ‘yard’, a derelict circular bathing tank with stone steps leading down to it. The tank remained devoid of water for the most part, and resembled a Greek parliament house, or an amphitheatre. Kashi would take stage in the middle of it, and the company would be seated on the first couple of steps, with adequate supply of alcohol and other substances. Kashi, though gifted with a way with the written word, wasn’t much of a public speaker, and he tended to warble and meander, but he would intersperse his monologue with a generous helping of theatrics and noises, groaning and moaning, and swaying and sashaying along, and the audience wasn’t the complaining type either, so it went. Kashi would describe how he tried burning amphetamine with his own piss and ingesting the residue, and the audience would go “Noooo! You awesome bastard!”, and he’d wait in suspended animation, and then burst into laughter with, “Youse are so easy, illiterate peoples!”, but he’d have a worried, melancholy look on his face by the time the “I knew he wouldn’t!”s amongst his listeners died down. By twilight, no one would be in a state to either talk or listen, garbled grunts and morning cigarette smoke rose to the brightening sky, and in a matter of minutes, the remnants of the night would slink away, and sunlight would swathe the round arena like a utensil, clearing out darkness and people, and everyone would be dazed and irritated, and they would shuffle out mumbling things, and head towards the buildings or the nearest wooded areas. Afterwards, they would gobble down omelettes and gulp down hot chai back in the canteen, and then disappear completely, to reappear later in the cool evening, their slept in, bathed and shaved bodies brimming and saturated back to everything they had traded over for the ‘night in the yard’.

Mira was one of the ‘company’ now, but Kashi initially had a hard time fitting her in, mentally. When he’d first met her, he had let his testosterone take care of the perception part, which had been more or less the general predicament in Mira’s life. She was often outright stunning to look at, and wasn’t adept at contorting her face in a manner that would overshadow her dark luminous eyes, her luscious lips and her delectable complexion, so that it was pretty difficult for men to listen to her attentively, and respond appropriately. Also, unlike Kashi, she wasn’t in the habit of letting those around her know, by the sheer force of silence or through detachment, that she was thinking. She laughed naturally, at almost everything, and talked like she had no intentions of changing the world. In those crazed, label-happy times, when the regular gods had fallen by the wayside, and everyone was desperately looking for new ones, and more than ready to confer godhood on mortals at the slightest sign, when all anyone had to do to be worshipped was remain silent for a couple of hours and then burst into vociferous profanities, Mira stood firm on the taxiway, laughing, talking, bustling about, and generally evading taking off into a fickle sky dotted with hallucinating stars. No one quite knew what to think of her, she didn’t paint her eyes with truckloads of kohl, or drip hair oil, or wear brown lipstick, or shave her head, or flash everyone around instinctively. She wasn’t even very right or wrong enough all the time. Reluctantly it was that people classified her as more of a ‘band-aid’ than a rock star.

But Mira did think a lot. And she could get inside a person more than the person ever had before. She had a finality about her likes and dislikes, and she rarely mixed them together. She developed a quick derisive loathing of Kashi in the first few days after she met him. He was a man to begin with, and she somehow had little love lost for the species. And he appeared to be the vilest of them, the flaunting, presumptuous, trying-to-get-into-panties kind. He had seemed vain and, as she told him later in a moment of acid haze, ‘snakelike’. She thought he was thinking out his life like a soap opera, replete with advertisements and endorsements, more than he was living it. Through all this, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. He became something of a natural barometer for her contemplations, he provided her head with a lot of material to chomp on, and as she continued with her mental experiments on him, she’d be time and again reminded of how different they were. She couldn’t deny that he had a quick mind, that he was witty, and somewhat learned too, with all his wild wacky wisdom. About a year and a half of toying with her subject toned down her caustic take on him, she even came to like some of his characteristics, his terrible passion for things that were close to his heart, of which there weren’t many, his childish treatment of traditionally grown up matters like death and parents and religion, the way he was putty in the hands of people he liked. They would even talk now, off and on, and they were both good at certain kinds of conversations, so on it went. She used to believe he was a slick womanizer, a view she had formed of him when he’d hit on her right from the moment she set foot on the region of earth he supposedly popularly commanded, and from what she’d heard of him, but this perspective was on eroding grounds, since, during a rather long winded tete-a-tete, he had quite forcefully posited the idea that he was one of those people who didn’t mingle because they wanted something out of it, but because they liked it, they were interested in humanity in general, and this was something she didn’t find incredible, since she was one of that kind too. Kashi, on his part, found this revelation endearing, and dropped the contemptuous demeanor he wore for her for good. She was soon inducted into the Yard of Fame, and this marked the beginning of the Kashi-Mira period.

With time, Mira found out that there was a whole bunch of traits she shared with Kashi. Besides being the quintessential dreamers, they both had an almost profane appetite for life. It bordered on the disgusting, to watch two young beautiful people take to life like that, pliers and scissors and hammers and axes, ripping apart the wrapping and pawing the insides, instead of wishing on and hoping for and tiptoeing around things. Soap bubbles never really became them. They never set out for the chefs. It was always – always – the blacksmith.

Once, after one of the Yard Nights, they were lounging in the shack, midmorning, busily forking bread crumbs, shaded from the buzzing sun by the shanty top. Kashi was making glurging sounds as he swallowed the oil soaked bread. Mira took a long drag from the damaged Statesboro (It had been in the back pocket of her jeans all night) dangling in her long white fingers.

“Why do people paint their homes, or doors, or anything else? ” she mumbled, mostly to herself, holding out the cigarette in his direction without looking at him.

Kashi wiped his oily fingers in his lush black hair, took the smoke, held it at a certain respectful distance mostly accorded to a delicate artifact, and looked at it.

“Whadidja do to this?! Fucked it kya?” said Kashi. Then pufff. And fwhooo. A traumatized smoke ring hobbled out from between his lips. Kashi watched it climb up the air and disintegrate prematrely, irritated.

“I mean, what, like you’re gonna be happier or make more money or have less stupid kids if your door’s aqua blue?” she furthered, now looking at Kashi.

“Mira, jaan, my dearest, why do you always have to ask me questions I happen to have answers to?” said Kashi, a languorous smile easing up his face now. He had forgotten the rings, and now had his mouth ajar, face up, and a thick grey wad of smoke rose swirling up from the bottom of his throat.

“I got lots you don’t have a clue about, but I try to make you feel happy about yourself, that’s all” Mira retorted, grinning.

“I’ll pretend I never heard that, and go on believing you don’t know as much as you seem to”

“Whatever. Answer my question, though, if you feel like”

“OK. Fear”

“Fear?”

“Yeah”

“And how so?”

The tree puts on wheels
and starts to skate downhill
and Grace from the Airplanes
hands you a red pill.

You hear a guitar in the distance
screaming at its strings
they’re all still Minor but lately
they’ve been acting like BB King.

The tree has burnt its rubber
and caught fire at the roots
he asks you to get off politely
and walks off to buy new boots.

The river, meanwhile, chugs on
carrying sandmen to the west
they’re mining for gold there, you hear
and they’re dressed in their best.

You run into half a rainbow
he’s weeping as he turns a bend
“Eastman’s stolen our treasure!” he says
“have to talk to my other end!”

You then step into a bush
and out pops a doorknob
he’s worried out here, you see
he’s looking for a job.

They’re partying down at the electric store
the Toaster and the Oven
Kettle and Stove chime in with glee
“Ben Franklin’s in town!

You think it’s pretty early for a party
but you can’t really recall
cos a man named Dali took your watch
melted and hung it on a wall

You start to get worried now
since you can’t figure out the time
and lo! walks up Einstein
with his friend from Desolation Row, the Mime.

“It doesn’t really matter” says the mime
and his friends promptly points to his head
“my friend here sorted it out, you see
or else he’d still be dead.”

You decide to be happy for a while
so you gulp down some ecstacy
Mary Jane comes to you popping wisdom
“Fettooshee! Fettooshee!”

I never saw a war. Any war. Least one that was mine. I was once in a school skirmish and another time saw someone being shot at. The school altercation didn’t amount to much, a couple of bruises at the best, and after the first few potshots were traded, both parties quickly forgot who’s turn it was next. The shooting was equally indecisive. The bullet missed Someone by quite a distance and flattened itself out on a wall in the background.

I grew up in a pretty tedious fashion, and fairly unremarkably at that too. I was never too short, or too tall, or even too dull, for my age, and safely stayed within the prescribed boundaries of regular conforming anonymity. My father beat me up in reasonable amounts. I was never molested by an uncle, and never tried to kill myself. I didn’t squash cockroaches for fun and rarely laughed out of turn. Honestly, no one quite saw me grow up, let alone resent me for it. I grew up like the grass.

My family was moderately religious. They knew precious little about the whole affair of faith and thus justifiably believed in it. No one quite remembered how the parable ended, and this surreptitious collective ignorance ensured that of the reprimands and rebukes parents dealt out to their children, a measly share concerned divine issues. They were meek people in that regard, and wisely kept their mathematics textbooks and their scriptures in separate shelves. Not surprisingly, no one in the house could defend the household gods when needed, even though the hagiography came with a lot of convenient ‘holes’ ( The hallmark of an intelligent religion is a generous sprinkling of such ‘gaps’ in the story, crevices in the mountain of mythological expostulations, buffers of sorts, into where gods and their colorful bickering legions can dive in for cover when under attack, and where from devotees can pull out fantastic birds of magic that might be able to aid and abet a clay-footed god on the run in his flight back to divinity. A well thought out religion always has possibilities open for a reverse deux ex machina!) In course of time, the family faith graciously stepped down from its high pedestal and took its place amongst other similar growing up knick knacks, like bedtimestories and fairytales, devices young parents use to discourage growing children from asking too many uncomfortable questions, or going to bed late, or having sex early. The cardboard box marked ‘Used Toys’ was subsequently shut, cellotaped and dispatched to the nearby orphanage.

Adolescence wasn’t especially hard on me. I took passing fancy to a petite little thing in my high school trigonometry class. The intervening period between when I first saw her, and felt something akin to love, and when I first banged her, the expanse of time that can prove to be happy hunting ground for much of boyhood poetry and many of the sleazier dreams, was cut short considerably by our mutual randiness and love of triangles. We got together under the pretext of study sessions, derived some important first theorems and soon parted ways, amicably. The lack of any ill will, again, proved a dampener to any pyrotechnics of creativity fueled by vengeful hormones. I didn’t get into bed with another woman for a long time after that, mostly because I couldn’t find anyone drunk or horny enough, but also in part due to my chancing upon Gandhi and Nietzsche, under the most unusual of circumstances. The former’s philosophy of preserving ‘body fluids’ to strengthen the intellect and the latter’s sheer disdain for womankind kept me happily justified to myself. The thought of having intercourse with a man never occurred to me.

College was a miasmic pastiche and a deja vu mashed together, a collage of messily pasted cuttings from teeny flicks and comic books I had read before. I tried many things, like many others. Philosophy and tattoos and cool, though I admit I met with obscene failure trying to pull the latter off. I would dabble in the uncool, occasionally and accidentally, and my cool veneer would wear thin under reproachful peer glare. I quit cool soon enough, not because I ‘realized’ I was inherently uncool but because I began to see that the brand of cool everyone else used wasn’t natural. Nobody could be that cool naturally, and it took some effort to billboard it up all the time. And then, it tended to get funnily scary when you were alone. I was a sloth by nature, so I decided to get a style of cool all my own, and with some expedient trammeling, I had cut enough flab off ‘sloth’ to make it passable as ‘languorous’. I became ‘smooth’, ‘easy’ and ‘casual’. I was in no hurry to reach places, I was too polished for that. That was how I saw it back then.

Then she made her move.

A sickly draft of air tugged at the ends of her subdued black flannels just as she reached for the handle on the glass door of the brightly lit superstore. It wheezed out of the thin slit at the bottom, moist and cold, and false, smelling like the insides of a rich man’s coffin, foliaged with refrigerated flowers. And refrigerated peas in cold misty plastic packets. It made her jerk her hand away partly, startled, undecided, like an allegory, barely there. The flat two dimensional gust had, by now, grown warmer, and murkier, and it now lay limp on the sidewalk between her feet. She looked down at it.

She was back in her home, in the sunny south, and had just woken up after that tiring weekend of ghost partying, and now, as she flip flopped down to the front door in her pajamas, a metal mug with hot rancid coffee in one hand, and the other shielding her bleary eyes from the strident golden beams coming in from the window slats to her left, she imagined she was squelching whiskey dregs in every step, accompanied by a quirky ‘choo choo’ sound. Under the front door lay some yellowed letters, probably delivered last Friday, she thought, and just when she bent to pick them up, the realization, the time of the year, struck her playfully on the head like a prank. A wry smile skipped lightly over her face.

She looked up just in time to catch it reflected in the glass, before it disappeared amongst the undulations of her long drawn countenance, lit up like an 80s discotheque display board by the frothy fluorescing lights from the insides of the store. It had been a fleet-footed look of apprehension; of a tidy nervousness. She looked down again, at the space between her feet. There was nothing to be seen, just like there never had been.

The letter was blank. A loud blank rectangle of paper, with no more a purpose than hide what it did, when she held it in her hand. Abdominal parts of the old burgundy upholstered couch. Half of the chinaclay tumescent Buddha on the mantlepiece above the couch. Some knick-knacks. To be honest, the blankness staring at her from the paper wasn’t surprising; the surprise it evoked therefore was.

She gave up trying to find anything there. She knew she was actually trying to stall the inevitable. She knew she had to go in. She knew she had no say in the matter. She couldn’t possibly be altering alternate reality. She rushed in. She did.

Once inside, she became fidgety and shaky again, staring at her shoes, and her fingers fooled around with the edges of her deep grey blouse. She sensed gazes on her. They felt hot on her skin, like in the nude-in-high-school dream sequence. Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes and cast a tentative look around. It was bright, far too bright, and her hand went instinctively to her eyes. She now began making out shapes. Aisle after aisle sat like expectant students, their faces turned towards her, each face telling a different story. “Aisle 3B: Sanitations”, said the narrow green one in the front. A broad and low brown one at the back claimed, “Aisle 5A: Paint”. A small prim pink one near the left end coyly admitted, “Aisle 1A: Luxury”. Others similarly attired chimed in, and her eyes burned with the noise. For the next moment or so, she contemplated turning back and running out the way she came in. But before she could make up her mind, a honeyed voice cooed from somewhere amongst the plastic flora.

“Rrrrring !! Rrrrring !!”

She dropped the withered pale letter into a vase on the mantle, and lifted the phone off the hook. “Heyy, sweetie, G’morning. He left a letter for you before he left. It had been in the mailbox for sometime. I had the gardener drop it off at your door. Did you get it ?”

She looked at the vase. It was a crusty clay thing shaped like a mermaid.

“Yeah.”

“That’s gweat, Miss! How menny uf these shall I pack fer you ?!”

“Huh ?!”

“How menny, Miss ?”

A petite blonde with a jarring lip gloss and a blue and white toothpasty apron stood in front of her, holding oddly shaped objects of different colors in her arms, cradling them like babies. She thought they looked more like toys, in some parallel universe she didn’t understand, and the woman looked like a disgruntled kid, looking for someone to play with her.

“I don’t wanna play, ummm, I mean, buy those. Do you mind if I look around some more?”

“Suwwwiee.”

She shuffled on, her foot steps the only noise in the whole store. She walked through rows of aisles filled with plastic uselessness, foam filled inanities. They didn’t make any sense. She held her temples, and tried to figure out uses these objects could be put to. The aisle seemed a mile long and, as far as she could see, was filled with these insanely colorful oddities. She switched aisles, but it felt no different a neighborhood, with an orgy of colors and an overwhelming stupidity of shapes from one end to the other, without respite. Her eyes started to hurt again, her brain refused focus, and she felt herself corroding under the cheerfully virulent gaze from the aisles. Her pulse quickened, and she began to panic. The lip gloss woman called out to her again.

“Scream ! Scream your cunt out, you lousy bitch!”

She opened her mouth to scream. Someone else beat her to it.

“Fuck her, Danny! Fuck her kidneys to pieces!”

“Fuck her!”

“Fuck her!”

“Fuck her!”

She heard someone laugh in the background. Her brow felt hot and cold at the same time. She couldn’t bear the pain in the color, the smell of the polymer, the weight of the refrigerated air. She looked around, for something that would soothe her eyes, something black, something gray. Bright green hit her from the left. Orange from the right. A fountain of shiny red burst from her mouth.

“Fuck her! Fuck her! Fuck her!”

She remembered she wore black and gray. She looked down. She saw bare flesh.

She was in high school. Everyone was looking at her.

She was in a pale blue van. She was being raped.

It began to rain.

As she walked out of the glass door of the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities, she seemed scaringly sure to herself. Her light hair sloped down her forehead in hair colored channels, and water ran down along those in trickles, and, as she fumbled for the keys, she remembered something he had once said.

“Before it falls, it’s a cloud, and afterwards, it’s just muddy water running down street drains. When it’s falling on your face, when you get wet, is when you call it rain.”

She smiled. And drove off. And all that was left of her visit to the greatest superstore in the Twin Cities was a bunch of hundred dollar bills wrapped in a pale yellow blank paper, lying in the mud.

*Footnote: Crap! Crap! Crap

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