- The year is 1996. Or maybe it’s 2036. There’s no way to tell because there is no sky. No clouds in the no-sky. No words either. Nor sounds. No trees. No dogs. No cars. No travellers in the buses that aren’t there. No roads. Nowhere to walk on the roads that aren’t there. No air. No lungs to breathe the air that isn’t there. Yet Partha walks. He walks the city with no names and no streets and no people. He is the only one walking. His eyes the sole proprietor of all the tears in the city. His head the retailer of all the thoughts in the city. His heart the warehouse for all the pain in the city. The city of Madras lives in five words: Partha loves. She loves not. Or you could say: She lives. Partha does not.
- She is a poor translation of ‘awa’. ‘Who-she’ would be a poorer translation of ‘yeva-awa’. But for Partha, the key of his being, like the soul of the monster in a Jataka tale, was lost in the folds of the signifier ‘awa’.
- It happened like this. One day Partha had gone to see a play. The play was Antigone. It was at a little theatre on a little lane off College Road. Between WCC and Alliance Française. The entrance was next to a dusty banyan tree whose roots split the sidewalk and tripped people. It was the first time Partha was in the vicinity of a play he himself was not acting in. Antigone was She.
- I know this is where I describe She’s physical appearance, her family background, her beauty, her whateveritis that makes Partha whatever he would never become forever. But we shall skip that part, if you don’t mind. In any case, she is a composite, as is typically the case. And what she was – in herself, for herself – had as little to do with what she was for her lover as it had to do with what she was for her liver. Or for Partha. Which does not mean that the two are not related. If you live in Besant Nagar or Adyar, you know this already.
- After the play, Partha saw her smoking. Not smoking exactly but holding a cigarette. It was the pose, the style, something about the way of being suggested by the relationship between the cigarette and her fingers. Or maybe it was the way the cigarette regarded itself as it smoked. The angle it formed with her wrist, the red tip pointing away from her and, it seemed to him, toward a secret meaning that only he could access.
A Gold Flake it was. The smell transported him to a vision of coconut palms swaying in a tropical island bubble-wrapped in a sepia-tinted time of long ago. On the island’s palm-fringed beach a supple form in a hammock lay, humming a melody from his childhood. Immersed in the voice, bathing in its soporific sweetness, he lay on the sand, watching the waves and chewing a twig.
As She brought the cigarette to her lips, the smoke shifted in a lazy haze, a nebulous mass lumbering toward the thick black curls that bracketed her cheeks like spiral staircases. He saw that She was the only possible frame for the portrait of his life. This was not something he realized but a truth that was conveyed to him. What he did realize, when somebody slapped him on the back, was that he’d been holding his breath.
- She, Partha found out, was an Ethiraj girl. And because this fiction is based on a true story, may I request you, discerning reader, to chip in with the clichés we live by?
- The clichés filled in by you may be summarized as follows: Partha finds that she has a romantically accredited male companion. Male companion holds several advantages of a material nature that our protagonist realizes, or believes, signify joy to She and which significations he shall never be able to either match or surpass.
Rather than dedicate himself to acquiring those advantages so as to make of himself a more worthy option for She, Partha decides, brilliantly, that the best way to hang on to his object of desire is to forfeit it in perpetuity. This happens one Wednesday night at 10.17 when he’s crossing the Barber’s Bridge on the Cooum perched on the third step of the 27J footboard. The stench was of a nature and potency as to induce anyone to embrace the other world. The Central Committee of Insurgent Desire which voted on all the major life decisions for Partha was no exception. It unanimously took the decision for him to trade his material-human love for a love that was spiritual-transcendental, forever beyond the reach of the Cooum of material satisfaction.
In his sleep that night Partha assumed the signifier he would become for the rest of his life for the rest of his friends. Years before he would settle down and start a family and take his last breath – all near the Thousand Lights mosque – he became Thousand Lights Parthasarathi.
- Partha’s body doesn’t remain idle. It continues to digest food and produce waste matter. New cells are born every day, including spermatozoon. The beard now manifest on his bony face is nothing if not new cells, freshly dead. He makes a difference to the barber in Choolaimedu whose predictions about the next Tamil starlet to commit suicide he misses, sometimes.
- The girl who stood behind him in the water lorry queue ate him with her eyes every evening. She worked her silver anklets to make him turn. She glared at the back of his head. One cantankerous night she even spilled water – accidentally, of course – on his feet. But Partha’s hatred of the communal water-collection experience was such that his eyes were pre-emptively shut to the possibility of a soul mate lurking nearby, behind an orange bucket.
- His laughter too wet to combust, Partha carries it in his mouth. It protrudes through his lips like Sherlock’s pipe. Somewhere in his right elbow, ten-millionth of a kilometre under the skin, at precisely ten ’o clock every morning, a thousand atoms of Sodium fuck a thousand atoms of Chlorine.
- One afternoon, on his walk from the American Center to the British Council, Partha stops at a roadside palmist on Anna Salai. The palmist has the head of Thiruvalluvar, the body of Mahatma Gandhi and the tail of an armadillo. Partha squats, extends his hands. The palmist strokes his white, nest-like beard and peers at Partha’s right hand for so long he makes the life line uncomfortable. It wriggles and shudders and merges with the heart line which shivers and trembles and twines itself with the head line which squirms and staggers and trips the elaborate treillage holding his future together. In the resulting short-circuit, the whole of Madras burns down. Partha is the sole survivor.
- Is this likely? Does it violate the principle of verisimilitude, that a seventeen-year-old boy could cause an entire city to go down in flames?
- As a four-year-old, Partha used to walk 800 metres to his school every day. His school was called Little Flower School. For little flowers like himself. Located near the Ashok Pillar in a place called Ashok Nagar. The Ashok in question had died thousands of years ago. He was an emperor and a Buddhist who became a peace activist after killing thousands of people. Or so Partha learnt in school as he grew older and wasn’t a little flower anymore.
- Partha was born in a government hospital in Triplicane where his mother had eggplant curry for lunch every single day of her hospitalization until he was born. That is the reason, Partha realized, he hated eggplant for no fault of its.
- At the age of eight, Partha rammed his bicycle into a stationary 37G as it stood waiting for passengers to board on Meenakshiamman Koil Street. He learnt balance soon after. All other buses henceforth would be measured against 37G. Including glamorous ones such as 3M.
- When he was fourteen, bunking a school excursion to the Connemara Library, Partha made the first of his several visits to Blue Diamond, which, unlike Hotel California, you could enter anytime and check out anytime for the price of one movie ticket. Ever since this fateful visit as a school boy, the entire area around Blue Diamond – stretching as far as Stella Maris in one direction and Devi Paradise in the other – became one big erogenous zone for Partha. A mild erotic tremor pulsed through his synapses every time he crossed Gemini Circle on his way to somewhere else.
- Partha preferred the Anglo-American and continental parts of the city to the indigenous ones. He liked signboards that promised to take you to Paris, Broadway or Foreshore Estate. He avoided buses that spoke of Otiambakkam and Pallikaranai. One day he went to Bell Nagar. From there he set off for Liberty. Got down at Gemini. Walked to Thousand Lights. Found himself at Woodlands.
- It was at Woodlands that Partha one day met She. This was many years later. At a party. She was then a PhD student at Wisconsin. Back for the summer. He worked for a newspaper in Anna Salai. What do you do, she’d asked him, to be polite, he thought, still unaware of being the landmark that She was in the landscape of his city. ‘I sell space.’ She smiled. He noticed that it wasn’t a smile that smiled at him.
‘You are into real estate?’
‘I guess you could say that,’ he shrugged, half-nodding, elevating his eyebrows. ‘Only difference being the space I sell is occupied not by people but by words.’ She laughed. ‘What’s the difference?’ Ash spilled as she weaved a gesture with her hand. ‘Are there people you know who are not words?’
- Their second encounter, if one may call it that, was at the British Council. They had come – each following a unique and independent trajectory of volition, to watch the same film at the same time on the same day: The Handmaid’s Tale. Or maybe it was The Comfort of Strangers. He’d recognized the silhouette of her head in the flickering light of the movie-lit auditorium. Two rows ahead, three seats to his left, it was She. The film was both erased and redeemed by her manifestation – as unexpected as it was anticipated.
After the screening he followed her out. They walked side by side till they reached Mount Road – it was no longer Anna Salai. He was distracted by how tightly she clutched the folder to her chest. Did not suit a doctorate student, he thought.
- ‘How come? Aren’t you supposed to be selling space?’ Her hair fragrant even in the afternoon sun. Or maybe it wasn’t. Could have been the heat. Or his imagination.
‘I quit’. She gave him a look that was optically impossible. She was seven inches shorter. Yet her gaze seemed to alight on his face from above, like a seagull. Or a blimp. ‘Oh,’ she said. She didn’t ask him why.
- The psychiatrist’s office was in Thiruvanmiyoor. Not far from the Marundeeshwarar temple where his mother once took him to introduce him to God. And show him in front of everyone how to speak to God by joining palms. As they were leaving the temple in a taxi, he put his index finger in the doorjamb of the driver-side door. That was his first definition of pain: finger in doorjamb. He wasn’t impressed with either God or Thiruvanmiyoor after that. Though he paid him 9k in total, he told the psychiatrist nothing.
- Partha’s son and daughter enjoyed equal and opposite failed marriages. The son was an alcoholic and philanderer. The daughter married an alcoholic and philanderer. Equally separated, the three of them lived together in Thousand Lights.
- Partha’s gall bladder surgery, when he was fifty-eight, took place at Anna Nursing Home in West Mambalam. Right next door was a well-known jewellery store. Partha’s stone was lodged in the neck of his gall bladder, blocking rush-hour biliary traffic. It had to be shoved into the large intestine to be evacuated via faeces. Why doesn’t anyone make gallstone jewellery, he asked the nurse who came to catheterize him. The look she gave him, Partha’s pulse jumped a red light. From his pillow, she could’ve passed as a Manipuri remix of She.
- Are people with diabetes, arthritis, osteopenia, hypertension, slip disc, high cholesterol, haemorrhoids, constipation and valgus deformity medically disqualified from feeling anything higher, or existentially nobler, than pharmacological distress, he wondered.
- Partha did tag along for the wedding reception. Her wedding reception. A resort on the East Coast road. He wandered the lawns behind the reception area, drinking non-stop, keeping a low profile. At some point, close to midnight, he spotted two slugs mating on the grass. Each sliding on top of the other, perpetrating a mutual body-massage with their highly viscous mucus. The pace of the congress was glacial, with each thrust lasting as long as a lunar evening. The only visible sign of erotic frenzy, Partha noted, was their feelers, which twitched and throbbed in the salty breeze.
- Partha did not know it yet, but his mortal remains would make their final journey to a new electric crematorium opened in Old Washermanpet by the nephew of a DMK MLA from the area whom he did not like.
- Partha’s son and daughter now live in what used to be their grandfather’s house in Thousand Lights. The son is an assistant manager in a firm that sells security. The daughter is an anti-domestic violence activist. The son takes his TVS-Suzuki to his office in Saidapet. The daughter works out of a lawyer’s office in Guindy. Neither of them have been to, or will visit, the IIT in Taramani where She lectures sometimes – lectures Partha always attends – and lives now, in the Staff Quarters, never out of Partha’s sight, ever.
