SANJIT SHARMA WAS GOING TO DIE.
Here’s what happened:
On the Monday exactly a month before his thirtieth birthday, he consulted the doctor after suffering a few inexplicable falls. Tuesday, he was subjected to a battery of tests in the hospital. Thursday, he was told he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Translation: you’re fucked.
So how does one deal with this shit? Where does one even start? Sanjit started at the most logical place: a bar. Let’s just call it “the Loser Bar,” as it was full of briefcase-toting middle-aged men drinking rum and cola at low Formica tables, dead souls trapped in dead-end jobs and dead-end marriages. Except in time, Sanjit was going to be deader than them, not just in a manner of speaking, but for real.
He glared at them as he walked in. Brushing off attempts at conversation, he hunched at a table shielded by a lattice screen, downing one glass of vodka after another as the tinny speakers cranked out a string of lugubrious Bollywood songs. He drank and drank. But hours later, he felt nothing except a sick roiling in the depths of his stomach. The smell of Chinese food wafting from the next table added to the nausea. He rushed to the bathroom to throw up, but even that turned out to be a failed project, as nothing came out apart from air and two globules of spittle. It seemed he couldn’t catch a break.
After flushing the toilet, he freshened himself at the basin. The face staring at the mirror was lean and angular, more striking than handsome. Beads of water clung to the ends of his long curls and pointed chin. Eyes, brown and bloodshot, were shaded by wispy lashes. How he wished this weren’t him, that he were in another body. Anybody without the disease. Even one of those losers in the bar.
He raised his fist to punch the mirror, but next second, grimaced and pounded the wall. Ten minutes later, he was out of the bar and on his motorcycle, warm wind howling in his ears. He didn’t know where he was headed. But he knew the one place he wasn’t going. Home.
Besides, what was the rush? The night was young and the road empty. There were more stray dogs on the prowl than vehicles, packs of devil eyes glowing in the dark, snarling from the curbside. He barked back at them as he whizzed past, safe in the knowledge that they’d never catch up, then laughed hysterically at his own false bravery. After a while, he wasn’t sure if he was laughing or crying. Then he realized he was crying.
Why me?
He grimaced, as this was precisely the kind of shit his drama-queen mother had been saying all day. He was sick of listening to her wail like a disconsolate widow, beating her forehead till her glass bangles broke. “Why him? What’s he done to deserve this?”
So had he run away from her only to steal her lament?
First of all, it was his disease. It was destroying his body. Therefore, his lament. He’d taken the first step toward wresting his life from his mother’s suffocating grip, which was claiming back his own self-pity. A legitimate entitlement for a man in his situation. If he were seventy, you could at least argue he’d enjoyed a decent innings. But how did you explain something like this befalling a twenty-nine-year-old?
Was it karma? Couldn’t be, because nothing he’d ever done warranted this dreadful punishment. Then what was it? Would someone please care to explain? He clenched his jaw and looked up at a sky covered in the milky blanket of light pollution. But the sky didn’t answer. It never did.
The motorcycle screamed in the deserted street. A high compound wall to his left gave way to hills of scrap metal, gleaming in the moonlight. On his right, he passed a slum: flimsy shacks of corrugated metal, crisscrossed by overflowing drains. A billboard rising above the plateau of low roofs was crowned by a row of spotlights, shining on a headline:
“DRINKING AND DRIVING IS A CRIME.”
He raised his hand to give it the middle finger. Not only had he been drinking, he also wasn’t wearing a helmet. What was anyone going to do about it? He swapped to the oncoming lane to overtake a doddering autorickshaw.
A car shone bright discs of light in his eyes. He squinted and raised the throttle. The automobile jerked forward. Game on: car vs motorcycle. Two headlights against one. Unfair, just like life.
The car surged closer. The horn grew louder. Each millisecond, a new detail materialized from the darkness: grill, bumper, bonnet, windscreen. Sanjit smiled and kept his hand clamped on the throttle. He was playing this game as if he had nothing to lose. Come to think of it, he didn’t.
Moments later, the car swerved sharply out of his way. Sanjit watched it fly off the road in his rearview mirror, sparks flying from the underside as it scraped the pavement.
He raised his fist in triumph. Under his shirt, his heart tumbled as if inside a washing machine. The shot of adrenaline annulled the drowsiness from the alcohol. He sat erect, eyes wide, as if cold water had been splashed on his face.
For a while, he coasted on the empty road, allowing his heart to settle. Then, clamoring for the rush again, he geared down and turned up the throttle. The bike surged forward, squealing like a tortured animal. The image of Dr. Pandey flashed in his mind.
I’m afraid the prognosis isn’t good …
Fuck you, doctor. Fuck your prognosis.
A red light glowed in the night’s darkness, but he didn’t slow down. Life was too short for traffic signals. Especially when you had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka maladie de Charcot, Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease. Now, how many people could claim to be afflicted by something with four names?
The Mercedes-Benz of diseases.
The traffic light passed above his eyeline, still red. He cocked his wrist and blasted through the intersection, entering a honking beam of headlights and exiting it before he could be crushed by whatever was at the end of it.
HE STOPPED BECAUSE he ran out of road. Beyond the jagged rocks exposed by the low tide, the sea and the moonless sky merged seamlessly into a wall of black, dotted by the blinking red and green lights of fishing boats anchored in the shallow waters. Behind him stood soaring million-dollar apartment blocks. To his left, slums. Both just a collection of lights. Darkness, a great leveler. Like death.
Sanjit parked his bike next to a closed kiosk. In the evenings, this seaside promenade was frequented by walkers, joggers and snuggling lovers. The presence of acrobats and vendors selling roasted corn or peanuts added a carnival atmosphere. Of course, there was none of that right then. The pavement, soaked in orange light, was filled with sleeping bodies, scattered haphazardly like corpses in a battlefield.
A man sat on a bench, knees drawn to his chest, palms grinding something. Tobacco? Ganja? He paused when he saw Sanjit approach, but resumed a second later when Sanjit sat down harmlessly. The man resembled someone who lived on the street: torn vest, striped undershorts, scent of a hard day’s work oozing from skin basted with sweat and grit. His long, skeletal fingers filled the cigarette paper with whatever he was rolling. When he finished, he ran the glued strip across his tongue.
“I envy these people,” Sanjit said, breaking the block of silence separating them.
The man laughed. “How can you envy someone who sleeps like a stray dog?”
“Because they sleep peacefully. I can’t remember the last time I did.”
The man lit the cigarette’s rocket tip, ribs billowing as he drew a deep drag. He held it in his lungs for a few seconds before exhaling a thick rope of smoke. The smell prickled Sanjit’s nose. Ganja.
“You know the trick to sleeping well? Don’t dream,” the man said, coughing. “Each one of these people came to Mumbai with a dream. It wasn’t sleeping on the streets and shitting by the train tracks. But they learned quickly that this city makes mincemeat of your dreams. So tell me, what broken dreams are you nursing? Being a movie star? Like the people in the apartments behind us?”
“I’ve had many dreams, but that was never one of them,” Sanjit confessed. As a boy, he’d dreamed of playing cricket for India: a leg-spinner who’d bamboozle batsmen with his mix of leggies, googlies and flippers. After graduation, he hankered to join his relatives in America, the land of dreams. And when the Indian economy opened up, and the American dream was imported along with a whole raft of consumer goods, he was forging one of his own. If he couldn’t be a champion cricketer like Tendulkar, then he’d be a billionaire like the Ambanis.
The man had a point. None of these dreams had brought any happiness, only the emptiness of a broken promise. In some instances he’d come close. He’d made it as far as the selection stage for the state cricket team. Who knew what might’ve happened if he hadn’t broken his wrist in an accident one day before the trials? A few years later, he was all set to get on that Air India flight to Dallas, but had to change plans when his father died and his mother tore his plane ticket to shreds. As far as the last dream was concerned, it was largely academic, because the body was withering. And along with it, the dreams would wither too. They’d be cremated and transformed into fumes that would rise in the air and linger like ghosts. Life might have robbed the sleeping pavement-dwellers of their dreams, but death was robbing him of his.
“Are you crying?” The man was looking at him closely.
Motherfucker.
Sanjit drew himself erect. But it was too late. There was no stopping the burst hydrant in his eyes. It was another thing Dr. Pandey had warned him about: sudden, uncontrollable bouts of crying. But this was just the beginning. Soon, everything would be out of his control. Limbs would disconnect themselves from the brain’s machinery. Starved of nourishing electric current from the mother ship, the muscles would waste away. Fingers would curl up like old paper; flesh would disappear in small, regular instalments, leaving his body cratered with dents. Every now and then, his legs would fail to respond to his commands, like they had the day before, when he fell in the bathroom. Ditto for his arms. Soon this would become a permanent state of affairs. He wouldn’t be able to walk. By corollary, he wouldn’t have the ability to dance at the disco, ride his bike, play cricket or wipe his own ass. He’d lie like a vegetable, collecting bedsores, except vegetables didn’t have a functioning consciousness. But he would. He’d be aware of every needle, every spike, every stab of pain in this nether zone between life and death, with the power to do nothing but pray for the latter.
Why me? What have I done to deserve this?
He veiled his face with his hands, sobbing loudly into the darkness of his palms.
The tears ceased after a while. They had to, because unlike sorrow, they didn’t come from a bottomless well. He uncovered his face and wiped his nose with his fist. The man was still there, sitting at the other end of the bench, lighting his second joint. Sanjit averted his gaze, ashamed that he’d just cried like a girl in front of a complete stranger, even though he knew shame was a luxury he could ill afford.
Luckily, the man didn’t make things worse by offering hollow words of comfort. Instead, he passed Sanjit the joint.