The Alternative – A short story

                                                    

I usually skip the ‘Entertainment’ section when I read my daily newspaper, but this morning, one of the articles accompanying a photo of a rather muscular man wearing only jeans grabbed my eye. As I scanned through the article, I was reminded of an old friend I had completely forgotten about.   

This was back when I was still in college, some ten years back. He was my flatmate for seven months only, but I knew everything there was to know about him in the span of those seven months, the reason being that whenever we communicated, it was always him talking and me listening. The day he moved in, he rang my doorbell, and when I opened the door, he had a look of utter disappointment on his face as he looked at me. But he shook my hand, and we introduced ourselves, and the flat, at least, didn’t seem to disappoint him too much.

We share the same first name – Prakash, but he went by the name of Pyro and insisted on calling me ‘Cash’. Every time he called me by this name, I would giggle and say, ‘My name is not Cash,’ but he always ignored my protests. He was very Americanized, though he told me he had never been anywhere abroad. He used words like ‘legit’ and ‘dough’ and ‘rehab’.

Speaking of rehab, that was one of the first things I learnt about him, that he had been there twice (in a rehabilitation centre, I mean). He said the first time was in 2007, when he had been diagnosed as an alcoholic. He said rehab was the best place he had ever been since high school.

‘I didn’t realize until after school was over how shitty life really was,’ he said. ‘And do you know why school was so great? Because we had to go there year after year and meet pretty much the same people. You made friends because you always saw one another. The minute you’re out, it’s every man to his own destination. No one bothers to keep in touch anymore. That’s why rehab was fucking awesome. I made friends because we were all together, we didn’t have a choice but to be. That’s why I went back.’

Pyro said that he relapsed deliberately in 2009. He was depressed and lonely at the time, and he took to drinking again because he wanted to be sent back to rehab.

‘It wasn’t that I liked those people so much. I just liked feeling as though I belonged somewhere, and feeling like I had made friends that actually wanted to see me, even if that wasn’t really the case. Now, they’re all in my phone. There isn’t a single fucking person among my so-called friends who makes the slightest effort to even hear my voice, let alone see me. The typed word is all we have to offer one another’.

I thought of explaining to him that it takes two to make a friendship work, but it seemed to me he had already made up his mind about the nature of people.

Pyro was an aspiring model, which wasn’t surprising by the looks of him. He towered over my puny 5 foot self and flaunted the proverbial six pack abs. He wore t-shirts and jeans that I only know how to describe as ‘tight’. He worked out at the gym every evening and then skipped dinner. He was a non-vegetarian, unlike me, and he ate a dozen eggs everyday, which was the only food he actually cooked at home. Everything else he ate, such as chapatis, raita, and meat dishes, he brought from the nearby restaurant. He also drank copious amounts of milk, which suited me fine because I no longer had to buy milk for my cat, Kali (whom he called Kylie).

Apparently, he had come to Pune to take a course on modelling to prepare him for an upcoming male pageant. He said he used to have a proper 9 to 5 desk job but he had to quit because of his alcoholism, and also because he hated being among ‘idiots’.

‘You may think that’s ironic, considering I entered the modelling world, but you’d be surprised. At least models aren’t trying to impress anyone with their educational degrees and their knowledge of the stock market and what not. They own the fact that they are stupid,’ he would say. I didn’t really understand what he meant by it.

He probably had a family but he never spoke about them. He once mentioned his grandmother but only to express his bizarre fear of photos of deceased people.

‘I see something in their eyes,’ he explained with a shudder, ‘If I see a picture of someone I know who is dead, it will haunt me for weeks. I once saw a picture of my grandmother who had passed away recently, and I kept thinking of where her soul could be because it has to be somewhere, doesn’t it? We can’t just disappear altogether. It freaked me out to think a person can go from living to non-living just like that. I know I’m scum but I would not like to be dead.’

The course he attended lasted three months, after which he re-applied and took the same course again. I didn’t exactly wonder what kinds of things he was being taught in ‘modelling school’, and it didn’t look as though he planned on telling me. He often practised his walking and posing in front of the floor length mirror in the hall. He also did some of his exercises in front of the mirror. I thought he was rather narcissistic at first, but there were times he seemed to be quite the opposite.

He seemed to have the notion that he had an ‘over-large misshapen’ head. No matter how big his muscles got, he thought he could never attain the amount of bulk he needed to disguise the fact that his head was too big for his body. Now, I may wear thick glasses but I could see very clearly that there was nothing wrong with his head, or the size thereof. In fact, he was certainly better looking than any one I had ever seen in person, females included. But he would spend hours looking at his head, placing his palms to either side as though he could squeeze it to the size he wanted it to be. Sometimes, he would experiment with different styles on his hair, and after what seemed like an eternity, say ‘Fuck’ under his breath and throw the comb down in frustration.

He said he never had regular dreams, only nightmares. I never saw him sleep because I went to bed before he did and he woke up before I did. We didn’t eat our meals together either because he thought his non-vegetarian food would offend me. I told him I didn’t mind at all, that I had even tasted a fish finger once (although that was because I was told that it was a potato patty), but he was rather insistent on it. Even though we didn’t actually do anything together, we did spend a lot of time talking. I suppose now that I think of it, I was his only real friend when he was here in Pune, at least for a while. If you went by appearances only, he seemed like the kind of person who flitted from one social circle to the next with his impressive physique and his trendy branded clothes. But he was a very lonely person. His harsh criticisms of everybody he knew belied his desire to have ‘bona fide comfortable friendships’ as he put it.  

After his course was over for the second time, he spent most of his time at home preparing for the competition. He read magazines and online articles, and practised walking and flexing in front of the mirror. I told him he ought to feel very confident since he had worked so hard. He replied, ‘I would, so long as the judges can look past this oversized head of mine.’

‘I don’t really give a crap about this pageant,’ he told me. ‘It’s just kind of a stepping stone to what I really want to do. You get a modelling contract, among other things, if you’re one of the winners. Once people start noticing you on ramps and fashion magazines, it’s just a matter of time until a film producer approaches you for a role. First you get the small ones because they don’t know how well you act. But then once they see that you’ve got some real talent, they sign you up for the big movies. I’ll be an actual Bollywood star, and then my vengeance will be complete.’

‘Vengeance?’ I asked timidly.

‘Well, in a manner of speaking. My whole life, I’ve been a fish out of water. There is no place I can go where I can feel I truly belong. And you might say it’s a shortcoming on my part, but I’m 25 years old now, and I have consistently received the same differential treatment everywhere. I’m going to have the last laugh over everyone who has ever been shit to me.’

The night before he left, he ordered pizza. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t like the taste of pizza since he took the trouble to order a vegetarian pizza especially for me. I had been neck deep in college assignments, and I was quite tired but I stayed up with him since it was his last night. Kali had long since retired to her corner in my bedroom.

‘You know, Cash, you’ve probably been the best roomie I’ve ever had. I’ll miss you,’ he said.

‘Same here,’ I replied, taking a tiny bite of pizza and washing it down with Pepsi.

He had already finished his packing since he was planning on taking an early cab to Mumbai the next day.

‘You pray for me ok,’ he said absently, flipping through one of his magazines. ‘You’re pretty religious right? So pray that I win this thing.’

‘I will. But you should pray too,’ I said smiling.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I mean, I believe in God, but I doubt He’ll give a shit about my prayers.’

He was such a strange person. On one hand, he seemed to think so highly of himself that people often fell short of what he expected from them. He was certainly self-centred enough to rate relationships based on how much they listened to him or how they treated him, the focus never being on his treatment of them. I knew that was why he liked my company.

On the other hand, it was as though he was aware of this very nature of his, which was why he had such a low opinion of himself. It didn’t seem to me that attaining fame and success would do him any good. I wished that I could help him but I didn’t know how.

Before I went to bed, we shook hands and I wished him the best of luck, and promised that I would watch the show. He laughed and said, ‘Don’t watch it. It’s just a dumb pageant.’

He was gone the next morning before I was up. It was only after he left that I realized we never exchanged phone numbers.

The article I saw in the newspaper this morning was about the same pageant that Pyro had participated in; they were announcing the audition dates for the year’s competition. I only realized then that I hadn’t bothered to check whether Pyro had succeeded in winning it the year he participated. I did a quick Google search on my phone but didn’t find his name in the list of winners. I then did a search of his name but nothing came up other than Facebook and LinkedIn pages of people who shared the same name. I was sure you could find anyone on the internet if you searched hard enough. Yet, Pyro was nowhere to be found.

It almost made me sad, but then I recalled a conversation we had one Sunday morning as I ate my breakfast and he was responding to some emails with Kali snuggled into a ball on his lap.

‘You know what I’d like, Pyro,’ he told me as he looked up from his computer. ‘I’d like either to become completely famous, or completely anonymous. This state of in-between that all of us are in, and I do mean all of us, this isn’t acceptable to me.’

‘I’m sure you’ll become famous someday’, I replied, not getting his point. ‘You’re already very popular now, I can see that.’

‘No, what I mean is, if I can achieve real fame, not like the kind of self-manufactured fame that’s made possible nowadays, if I can obtain world-wide eminence, I’ll know that I have made it. The other option is that I disappear off the face of the earth, so to speak. No one knows where I am or what I’m doing and they have no way of finding out. That would be a great success too. The only way to fail for me is to carry on being like this.’

‘Like what?’ I asked stupidly.

‘Just another colourless individual trying to stand out,’ he said, typing away on his keyboard absently.

It occurs to me now that Pyro might have actually achieved one of his two major dreams. Maybe he was somewhere far from home, some obscure country where every person he met was equally out of place, where no one knew who he was, where he came from, or what he had done. Completely anonymous.

I may be wrong but perhaps he had been leaning towards the alternative all along.

Willow – A short story

So it isn’t entirely true what they say about your whole life flashing in front of you when you’re on the verge of death. In any case, how would anyone know? If they lived to tell what the experience was like, their accounts wouldn’t have been valid. It’s ironic how I feel right now. It’s ironic because here, in this moment as I’m plunging to my death, is the first time I don’t feel fear.
The first thing coming to mind is this town, and how much I wanted to escape the first time I came here. I looked the same as everyone else, I spoke the same language, so why did I feel like an alien from some other galaxy. In the office, I would want to go home. At home, especially on weekends, I’d wish it was a work day again. At night, the geckos on the walls would disturb me with their incessant fighting. I’d throw a pillow at them but they’d flee in the same direction and continue their noisy fight in some other section of the wall. It was just me alone in bed always.
I tried to be like the others. I was a fish among arboreals attempting to climb the tree as well as they did. Here’s another irony. I’m beginning to realize only now that far from them judging me for my inability, they never cared one way or the other. But still, I was still the only one with useless gills.
A memory of the kid who hung himself. Even though there were a million words uttered that day, the only sentence I remember is the one spoken by his next door neighbour ‘Kids these days. They get into relationships and think it’s all they have to live for.’ The listener nodded their head in agreement, and so did I.
Another memory. Chris phoning me at what I thought was 2am but it was only 11pm and I had been asleep for hours. He didn’t need to say all that he did when the underlying question was always the same one. Why? I never knew how to answer him though I do now. It was because after my discontent wrung him clean of all he had, after he gave up everything he was just to make me happy, I was still empty. I shouldn’t have picked up the phone, but I always did eventually. I wanted to hear his voice, it was me being selfish again.
I also think of Frida from the office, who always reeked of perfume, I say reeked because the smell made me nauseous, but she was nice enough. We might have been friends. She looked at me with something like concern one afternoon and said ‘are you depressed?’ I replied that no one had ever asked me that question before. I wonder what gave me away. She kept looking at me as though waiting for a response. I said of course not, and to my disappointment, she smiled and accepted my answer. For one second there, I had felt hope. That I could talk to someone and they would listen. Why didn’t I just tell her the truth. It was the same old thing. Fear.
I wish to be ordinary, even now, though I am seconds away from being a dead body. I used to watch movies and find myself wanting to be those extras in the background of some scene, no characteristics, no back story, nothing worth noticing. What makes me think I’m not ordinary. I don’t know. I know an ordinary person might stand on the most precarious, highest ledge of an eight storey building, they might look down and think about how fragile life is that one misguided step could end it all, they might even sit and dangle their feet and thrust their torso forward to get a taste of danger. But an ordinary person wouldn’t jump off the ledge in the manner I just did.
I’ll be glad to be rid of the panic attacks. It was fine when they came in the night time even though they terrified me, because at least I was alone. But when it happened in public, like that one time I was buying vegetables at the market, I had to act like everything was fine while feeling as though I was face to face with the devil himself. Isn’t it the most unfortunate thing, to not believe in God but to have no doubt about the existence of the Evil One. I know the devil exists because he haunts me every day. But it’s ok because he isn’t going to be where I’m going.
Where I’m going is into oblivion. It’s safe there. I see Chris’ face again. I remember the day I fell in love with him. I remember the exact moment. I remember daydreaming about the rest of our lives together. That was a time when hope played a part in my life. We would have been married a number of years by now, had children, bought a house.
Now I’m face to face with that which gave me sleepless nights. I used to look out from my office window and wait for the breeze. When it blew, I’d watch the leaves dance. It was almost like I was willing them to move. Those were the only moments I did not think about death. Every other moment, regardless of what I did, or who I was with, was like another step towards this very moment. They say the best way to conquer your fears is to face them, so this is what I’m doing.
The very thought of dying used to render me unable to breathe properly, clenching my fists and punching the pillow, inflicting some sort of pain on myself so that the pain would distract me, running down the stairs and into the streets, frantically searching left and right, crying and screaming mutely, watching it all turn black.
Now, I’m no longer affected. I see what it must be like to wake up in the morning and feel glad that you haven’t run out of coffee, to feel your body getting stronger as you run your fifth mile, to relax after completing a long drawn work assignment, to buy groceries while planning what to make for dinner, to go to sleep knowing that the bed will support your weight, give you rest, until the next morning which precedes much of the same though no day is ever exactly as the other. This is the last time I will ever have thoughts again.
Three, in my falling form, is there some semblance of a person, a person worth loving and living for? Two, I come to the futile realization that human beings are all alike after all. One, I’ve made a terrible mistake.

Moonch – A short story

“You see that man over there selling pani-puri? He’s been sitting there for hours and he hasn’t had a single customer.”

Seven year old Rohini sat next to her dog, Bittu on the steps of the verandah as she watched the man across the road sitting idly on the pavement next to his pani-puri stand.  She ran a brush over Bittu’s long coat, and said to him “Maybe his pani-puris aren’t so tasty.”

Bittu yawned and rested his head on Rohini’s lap. He didn’t care much for pani-puris.

A little later, Rohini was getting ready to go cycling to the  park. She opened the gate, pushing the cycle along by its handles. Bittu followed excitedly. The pani-puri vendor hadn’t moved an inch. His stall held a wooden box, three pots covered with lids, and a large bowl stacked with puris which he had covered with a transparent plastic sheet. She felt sorry for him, and reached into her pocket for the ten rupees she had been saving to buy ice-cream for herself and Bittu later.

“Five rupees worth, please” she said to the man. He stood up, and she saw that his shirt had a number of holes in it, and that his shoes looked as though they would fall apart any moment.

The man smiled without saying a word, and began to prepare the first pani-puri. He crushed a puri with his left thumb and almost at the same time, put the filling of potatoes, sprouts and onions that he had prepared beforehand. He then added a spoonful of tamarind chutney in the puri, immersing it in a small bowl filled with flavoured spicy water and handed it to Rohini. As soon as he did this, he started preparing a second one with equal speed.

Rohini took the puri and broke a bit of it to taste it.

“No, no” said the man, looking at her and shaking his head. “Not like that. You eat it whole. Go on.”

Rohini did as he said. It was the most delicious pani-puri she had ever tasted.

The man prepared four more pani-puris, which Rohini devoured. She handed him the ten rupees; he smiled and opened the lid of the wooden box on his stand, placed the ten rupee note in the box, and took out a shiny five rupee coin, which he handed to Rohini.

“Thank you” said Rohini.

“You’re welcome. Have a nice day” replied the man. He sat down again on the pavement, wiping his forehead with a red rag that he had hung on the side of his stall.

Rohini said “Let’s go, Bittu” and as she turned around, she saw a strange, dark man across the street, standing next to their gate. She stared at him because he had the longest and blackest moustache that she had ever seen. It looked almost as though the moustache didn’t really belong on his face.

A second later, she heard a loud bang, and the man fell to the ground. She turned around and saw the pani-puri vendor aiming a revolver in the direction where the man had stood.  He deposited the weapon somewhere in his dhoti and ran across the street towards where the man lay on the ground.

Just as he bent down to examine the man, a white van stopped in front of the gate, blocking Rohini’s view of the two men, and a few seconds later, the van sped away. The fallen man was no longer on the ground.

The pani-puri vendor walked to where Rohini stood, frozen, Bittu by her side. He knelt down and said to her “Rohini, what were you about to do this evening as you came out the gate?”

“I was going for a walk with Bittu till the park.” She didn’t ask him how he knew her name.

“And what did you do?”

“I bought five rupees worth of pani-puris from you.”

“And what else?”

“And..”

The pani-puri vendor smiled at her kindly. He had big brown eyes that reminded her a bit of her own father, who was presently at his office, and would come home at 6pm as always, asking Rohini’s mother for a nice, hot cup of tea.

“And then I went to the park” she said. “Come on, Bittu.”

She walked along with Bittu and looked back only once to see the pani-puri vendor pack up his things. She wondered where he hid the revolver now, and then realized that must have been what the wooden box was really for.

Rohini had a feeling she would never see the pani-puri vendor ever again.