A hilarious and moving account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a soldier, who comes unstuck in time. The book follows Pilgrim in his leaps through events strung together with threads of familiarity, yet separated by time, and is the most accurate depiction of a man walking through the memory lane. The deliberate destruction of chronology makes the narrative complex, and sometimes difficult to follow. But this book packs so much that it leaves you with wonder at the mastery of Vonnegut.
There is a reason Billy Pilgrim has been made so empty. The focus is not on his person but on what he sees. So we are not listening to the man but seeing what he saw and feeling what he felt. The events are deliberately disjointed to fit into the tralfamadorian framework of time. As for the narration itself, the apathy seems to mimic the numbness caused by the war. Yet, Vonnegut doesn’t shy away from portraying the cruelty humanity imposes on itself, whether be it the treatment of POWs or the bombing of Dresden. He doesn’t allow an escape in the form of a tralfamadorian utopia, for the higher beings are as prone to destruction and war as us- what makes them different from us is how they look back on themselves, accept their flaws and choose to focus on good memories.
Vonnegut’s writing is clever and sharp. His ability to parade the macabre on the carriage of wit is exceptional.
Slaughterhouse Five is an interesting take on life and war, the fragments and flaws of the same, and the absurdity and pointless of all.
UPSC prep has altered most of my fundamentals; one of them being the doctrine that the human body is malleable, at least in an abstract sense.
What I earlier identified as the pinnacle of a liberating lifestyle, a sojourn into the elegant tranquil uncharted ebonite melancholy- I have now come to understand- has been taxonomized as insomnia: the poetry is now dead and shrouded with medical prose.
Today, or tonight, insomnia is a prelude to what I would call a disease carnival, where everything from acne to cancer can be traced back to obesity, which is conjoined umbilically with insomnia. Insomnia is the life force that sustains and nourishes obesity, and obesity is the death force that saps and kills life. Insomnia, google warns, makes you sexually dysfunctional, mentally depressed, and physically globular. Then, just when you become a giant orb of disappointment and start getting stuck in doors and gateways, it gives you a heart attack. When you are dead, people are sad, but they also secretly calculate how many people it would take to lift your corpse, and if such numericals could be taught to the kids.
All of this discovery was so shocking and sad that I couldn’t sleep for two days straight, after which I became delusional and dropped like a lumbered log in the middle of a sizzling Sunidhi Chauhan song blazing in my eardrums.
When I woke up, I decided to change my life forever. This I did by swearing on my mother that I’d sleep on time- 10 o’clock sharp. So I watched reels till 9:59:59 and clicked the phone shut before it hit 10, tossed it on the table and closed my eyes.
Then, I started thinking about the reels I just saw. As the night descended, I descended deeper into metaphysical enquiries such as whether the reel culture was a digital pandemic or a biological pandemic, and if the time had come to place it beside CBN weapons in the WMD list and pass some kind of Washington consensus. Then I drifted off to an alternate universe where I became a billionaire by making astonishingly cringy reels, and I was summoned to US Congress, which had Prof Vijender Chauhan as one of the esteemed legislators, and he grilled me till I got old and started growing grey hair out of my earlobes.
I quickly snapped out of this dystopian semi-dream and began digging up for happy memories. I couldn’t remember the last time I was happy- truly happy. I wondered if growing up was all about disciplining happiness into a qualified and ephemeral state of mind. I surely remembered being happy for a few seconds here, a few there- mostly watching reels- but I could not remember being happy for a longer stretch, like, a minute. As I rolled back in time, the haze turn into fog and the harder I tried to recall, the more opaque and bleak and dead my memories became.
So I took another thought train to another universe- the fairyland where no love story ever failed. Here I was with my crush, three of them- not polygamously but in parallel sub-universes- and I imagined filmy scenarios like us sitting near the coconut trees by the pool in a resort under a full moon, she watching the shimmering silver surface, and I her shy yearning eyes, and the zephyr made her hair flutter like a kite string, and she turned to me, her slow soft strawberry breaths seeping into mine, her smile making me smile, as if our joys were quantumly entagled, and I stopped still and the moment froze into an eternity; but then I quickly snapped out of it, because I had to sleep and these snapshots had the power and legitimacy to keep me awake and animate even if a river of tranquilizer was emptied down my atrium.
I rolled to other side and tried a few sleeping positions: the fetus, the corpse, and the spiderman. Then I tried to feign death, and imagined the atoms of my soul beginning to move from my toes towards my head, collecting their cousins from all my organs. I relaxed my breathing and let it go.
Twenty minutes later, I was staring into my phone, googling how to sleep. There was a particular breathing technique they suggested, where you had to breathe in for a few seconds, hold your breathe for longer and exhale in the slowest possible manner with the tongue stuck to the back of your teeth. I often mixed up the recommended duration of various stages, and this resulted in complete chaos.
I also listened to sleep inducing music for a while, only to later find myself reading the comments with unparalleled amusement, noting which of those would make to the 100 greatest oneliners of all time.
Then I tried imagining a peaceful scenery, the ones where saints depart after they are done destroying the cognitive capabilities of communities and generations. I saw a bridge which disappeared into an endless white, but then I figured it was too barren to be enticing, so I changed the palette to black and added a few stars. And then I started walking alone on the bridge at night. Soon a woman appeared on the bridge in a white saree. And so I left the bridge.
But the white saree woman invaded all my thoughts from that point. She stood behind me and my lover by the pool, and she came up on my reels. So I felt I should take a pee. A clear bladder is as good as a clear mind.
But after I was empty, I felt my mouth had somehow dried up, and if I didn’t drink enough water, I’d not make it till tomorrow. So I gulped down a gallon or so. Fifteen minutes later, I went to the washroom again, and felt the same urge after I was done. This cycle went on a loop for a long time, and when I checked my phone again, it was 2 am.
2 am is when you start working out the math: six hours is the medically defined threshold, so if I sleep within ten minutes, I will be only slightly doomed, the damage comparable to merely patting the surface of HCl. People have touched worse things. Ten minutes later, you give yourself another half an hour, and say, alright, maybe I will lose my left hand, but we have two hands. And as the clock goes farther, the sacrifices become unbearable. Then, philosophy kicks in. What’s death? Everybody dies, it’s inevitable. And it’s the most blissful sleep- some dead poet said it while he was alive and awake.
Anyways, soon, it’s the coconut trees again, without the white saree hag of course; and it’s her, and it’s me, and the space that separates us is suffused with a shimmering silence. Our feelings float through, like two leaves in a breeze, and meet midway. I know it’s too dreamy to be real.
After some time, in some other place, I see her walking away, with her people, and me, with my people. It’s as if we had never met. As if the thousand years of pining was only a fleeting moment of familiarity. As if our inseparable embrace was just a brush of shoulders. As if love was merely a thought.
I know it’s too real to be dreamy. And that’s when I am awake, still trying to frame the moment of our parting. In that frame, we are on the margins, looking away, as if at different worlds; and the beautiful silence is gone, the feelings obliterated, and the space between us is deluged with barren white emptiness.
Then I look at my belly, and it is nearly a plateau now, and I am jolted back to the real world. Exhausted and squinting through my bloodshot eyes, I look for the phone. My head hurts and I note the time. 3 hours of sleep. That’d be no legs and the left hand. Shit.
Khushwant Singh’s book tells the story of Mano Majra, a border village, in the days of partition. The story traces multiple moral journeys of various characters- Iqbal, Jugga and the village itself- and how the spate of communalism puts a dent in one’s foundational values and turns people into monsters. To stand against your own to save the innocent is the bravest act, but who will do it? The keepers of the religion? The communist preacher? Or the dacoit?
Singh also draws our attention to the notions of good and evil, and how these categories, often invented by law and recast by the one who enforces these, are far from immutable. In the end, it’s your conscience and your actions that determine your place in the spectrum of goodness.
Train to Pakistan shows the subaltern experience of partition- of how a village removed from the node of power and the elite understanding of freedom witnesses and reacts to the violent rending of the social fabric. It highlights the contestation between village loyalty and communal loyalty, and how the latter tries to dominate the former.
Khushwant dedicated this book to his daughter. The concluding scene in the story, which is centered around the safety of a woman and her folks, made me wonder if it was a reimagination of the past to undo the horrors perpetrated on women. It may be a fictional reinvention of the evil men into the saviour man. Not that such men did not exist in reality, but partition, in my view, also was the violation of women by men en masse.
While we are sensitive to the human cost of Holocaust, our memory of partition and the horror it unleashed on women and children gets eclipsed by the Jinnah-Congress debate, or is shrewdly distorted by employing it as the retributive rationale to perpetrate communalism.
There’s a need to visualize and relive the trauma of partition. This will make us more sensitive to the Manipur horror and save us from the shameless whataboutery.
One can begin with Urvashi Butalia’s ‘The Other Side of Silence‘ and Suvir Kaul’s ‘The Partitions of Memory‘ in this regard.
Did not like the book. It’s a draaaaaaggg. The author bombards you with a plethora of descriptions, often unnecessary and in the most mundane manner possible. A cop recording a crime scene makes more poetic observations than this. The stories are hollow and monotonous- they run flat like the line on a heart monitor attached to a corpse. What’s most agonising is that the patience doesn’t pay off as there is no climax. You can hunt for one with a ghost detector radar, but it doesn’t exist.
A few stories, like ‘Sexy’ and ‘Mrs Sen’s’, are exceptionally bad. Like really wonderfully bad. The main story- ‘Interpreter of Maladies’- has such a poor flowering that you wish it was nipped in the bud.
Maybe it’s because I have not read many short stories. I have read a few by Roald Dahl and I liked them. I have tried Tolstoy- not my cup of tea. Lahiri has confessed she likes Tolstoy. So my dislike makes sense to me.
Another reason could be that I cannot relate to the diaspora literature- the experience of a Bengali immigrant in America, and there’s nothing to make it engrossing either.
Maybe other non-Pulitzer books by her are better. Maybe my views will change a decade later.
For now, this one can’t make it to Mumbai (IYKWIM).
It’s a deep dive into the thoughts of India’s greatest revolutionary, and it’s starkly different from the icon he has been refashioned into in the present political discourse.
Everybody knows Bhagat Singh was a revolutionary, but what he was trying to achieve remains eclipsed and distorted by the tendency to shade the independence struggle with a coat of nationalist monochrome. As a result, Bhagat Singh is divested of his ideas, vision and message, and remains one of the token faces in the freedom fighters collage of a political party’s poster.
Thus, it becomes essential to know the man to undo the myth. Here’s what Bhagat Singh’s ideology was, clearly stated in his own words:
“complete overthrow of the existing order and the replacement with the socialist order. “
And this he intended to do through the capture of power against the state, which was a weapon of the elite to safeguard its interest. He read Lenin and followed and appreciated the Soviet system of governance closely.
Unfortunately, his ideas have been shunned while the portrait has been glamorized, and the poster boy of atheism has been reduced to a mere object of divinity.
What’s needed is a critical engagement with his thoughts, and one may agree or disagree, but the point is to first understand his vision, rather than subscribe to politically motivated renderings that do injustice to his stature.
What to say about this book! I am engulfed, speechless and spellbound. The story, the characters and the craft of telling it- Renu sets a gold standard for every aspect of the art.
Maila Aanchal, the greatest AanchalikUpanyaas, is a trailblazer and a touchstone in myriad ways. It’s the story of a village called Meriganj, and its people, at the cusp of independence. The backdrop itself is a journey from the colonial past to the promise of Suraj, a promise which is eventually shattered and soiled by greed.
The work depicts a nuanced understanding of the themes it touches. Meriganj is wilting from the malaise of caste conflict, the tension with the tribals, the spate of superstition, the corruption of the religious offices, the clash of ideologies, and the clear hierarchy of gender. But on its horizon is a rainbow of hope and unity- the wait for the Suraj that is to come. Suraj means different things for different people, but what’s important is that it means something for everyone.
Renu masterfully mingles multiple lives into one melody and sings it in the Maithili-Hindi tune. The references and the vocabulary are regional. The narrative is interspersed with beautiful folk songs. It keeps you engrossed thoroughout, and there’s never an underwhelming sentence in the entire book.
Maila Aanchal will remain an epochal niche in the edifice of literature for centuries to come.
Note: While Gandhiji focused on village as an ideal society, Renu explores the relationship between the subaltern and the imagined Gandhi and the ritualised Gandhism (a theme in subaltern historiography, explored by Shahid Amin), and how the village remains short of its own utopian rendering.
This novel is divided into chapters, each talking about a person in the Miguel street, world war II forming the context. It reminded me of Catch 22.
It teaches a lot about how to observe and sketch people, and knit them into a narrative. It’s not a story bound by chains of cause and effect, there’s no journey this tale charts, and yet all the lives in Miguel street are woven so perfectly that one starts missing them with the narrator when he leaves it at last.
One particular thing I loved from this was that contrary to the classic novelists who take two pages to describe a broken vase, Naipaul, in a sentence or two can paint a picture. Here’s an example: “Only when we had left Port of Spain and the suburbs I looked outside. It was a clear, hot day. Men and Women were working in rice-fields. Some children were bathing under a stand-pipe at the side of the road. “
Miguel Street talks about the Port of Spain, while Paris, London and America linger only at the periphery. In my view, this locational shift marks an important inversion, conveying the story of a colony in the backdrop of a total war fought for the imperialist causes. He explores many important themes while keeping the fun of the narrative intact. The characters are all poor, struggling to find employment. The men beat their wives, sometimes they beat each other up. There’s problem of drinking, discordance, and yet, somehow, Miguel street holds itself together. Initially, I thought this togetherness was there because it was conjured up by the narrator, until I came across this line:
“I was disappointed…. because although I had been away, destined to be gone for good, everything was going on just as before, with nothing to indicate my absence. “
Miguel Street took me to an autumn evening in my village in 2008, when birds flocked back as the sun melted away into a russet smear, and people strolled back from their golden fields while the women burnt the cow dung cakes. You could hear the bicycle bells mix with the cow’s moo and it was a peculiar music only the good old village could make. Maybe this is what’s called Saudade- a home you can never return to.
A lot happened between that and the time we said goodbye to Jade and watched him whittle away. But I want remember the parting in this way. 💕
Jade finally decided to say goodbye to Delhi because the Godpapa-state back home, which whatsApp uncles proudly proclaim has birthed a governance model which the west should emulate, withheld his parents’ salary since the last year, despite the repeated court verdict to release the money, like, before sunset. Since surviving in Delhi without a tree that grows gold is tough, Jade decided to sever his ties from the capital, and continue his prep from home, with his desi boys.
“There’s a library. ” He was hopeful, “and it is on the land purchased from my friend’s chachaji’s, who is a strongman. So it’ll be free of cost. I will be walking to the place, and that’s how I will integrate weight loss plan with studies. “
Jade had applied for jobs, but there was nothing at hand. He had a Btech degree, but it was of no use because, apparently, everybody needs coders these days. He did find one, but it required shifting to Bengalore and a life of slavery. So he declined.
In addition to that, with parents growing old, he thought it would be best to stay home and take care of parents along with managing study. The middle class nuclear family experiment in our society is a failure if you ask me. Each of us have old, diabetic, lonely parents, being constantly drugged by WhatsApp news peddlers, and we the degree holder prodigies, have no jobs good enough to take care of them. Which partly explains why so many IAS aspirants.
Anyways, to give Jade a good farewell, we packed for him his favorite besan laddoos, and some novels and left for his flat a day before.
He had already packed most of the stuff, and although his room had looked like an antiquarian’s den all the time, he had managed to stuff everything in 3 sacks and 3 trolley bags. It’s amazing how once out of bags, even solid objects tend to expand and occupy space!
Jade has always been a different man because he wasn’t a single man. A committed man and a single man look alike, and share 99% of the DNA, but they differ from us like Sapiens differed from Neanderthals. Jade had always been organised and clean, with all the civic sense intact- something I secretly admired- while we lived like fungi that revel in spreading without a pattern. He had an entire meena baazaar in his room- from lighters to sandwich maker- but it was all arranged well. Nothing seemed out of place. And now this abode was so full of emptiness, it seemed like Jade’s ghost will haunt this place till someone makes it a home again.
He welcomed us and we talked for a while, mostly about cricket. Cyan and Jade squabbled over whether selectors should shun Surya or Sanju, while I wondered if the laung lata shop was open. Having visited this place a few times, I had mapped my own memory spots, and the laung lata shop was the brightest of them.
After they were done with their prime time debate over the best team for World Cup 2023, we walked to the park, and were feasted on by mosquitoes. After Cyan googled the latest dengue case count, we chose to keep moving, and since Jade had started to miss this place, we decided to take a long and slow stroll.
When you depart from a place that was your home once, no matter how long you have suffered, you always want to take every piece of it with you. I could feel what Jade was feeling.
The last stroll.
I remember leaving Ranchi. I didn’t have the time to properly say my farewells to the beloved city. It was hectic. My father arrived in the morning and we had a ticket for the evening. The day went in packing. We hailed a cab and just left.
I miss everything about the place. The ghost of Ranchi keeps me awake on many nights. Let’s not go there.
We walked and talked. Nothing sad. It was mostly about Don Number One.
And then we reached the store that offered a V S Naipaul book at the cost of an egg roll. So we bought half a dozen books- from Naipaul to Khushwant to Hobsbawm to Verne to Shelley- each costing ₹50. This was another bright spot in my memory. Jade’s canvas would be studded with hundreds of them, because he had spent his time with his girlfriend here.
After getting the food packed, we trudged back. A soulless room welcomed us. Jade showed us some photos from his trip to the mountains a few years ago. Memories always look happy, which is why they look so alien. But memories are our shelters from the horror of our present; the bias we exercise in building them is forgivable.
Cyan and Jade carried on with their conversation late into night. They were talking emotional stuff, like why men don’t cry, and Cyan asked if Jade knew a trick that could make him cry at will, but I preferred loneliness to vulnerability at that point, so I plugged my earbuds in and dozed off listening to Faasle. That song could definitely make men cry.
In the morning, we stuck to the routine of chai-poha, and then sat on a park bench amid a soothing breeze, educating Cyan about relationships.
Delhi’s go to breakfastEverybody’s favorite chai
“What do you mean I can’t tell her she looks bad? I want to give her an honest opinion. “
“If you have to give honest opinions, go write editorials. Don’t get into a relationship. ” Jade said, by now pissed off with Cyan’s idealism. Cyan was not ready to take this.
“Well, I can’t tell lies. And I appreciate a woman who respects truth. “
“Sorry, Gandhi Baba. ” Jade said.
The thing with Cyan is he’s grown up in an all boys school. So he’s as single as one gets. And these days, he is sick of his singlehood. So he has bought all kinds of multivitamins, dry fruits and peanut butter, and is trying to do pushups and everything. He says what’s stopped him from getting into a relationship is his lanky frame. I don’t think that’s the case, but he is so confident of the diagnosis that he doesn’t entertain any criticism.
The thing about truth, in my view, is that there are two kinds of truth- bad truth and good truth. Good truth should never be stifled while bad truth should not be spoken unless it has a nobler end. Saying that a person looks ugly is a pointless and hurtful perspective. It’s not even a truth.
Anyways, every morning, Cyan does exactly one push up, and he gets exhausted from all that effort, which is why he refuses to lift the grocery bag after purchasing two kilos of potato.
In the evening, we shifted some items from Jade’s house to the couple’s flat. We were eager to use the 5G wifi and download all the movies we had added to the cart. However, to our dismay, the wifi needed a recharge, and all of us were broke. Moreover, the room was bathed in a perfume that gave migraine to Cyan. When we insisted that a girl’s perfume was not to be criticised, he was visibly shocked and dragged us out of the room at once.
On our way back, we had Laung lata and samosa chaat. The Landlord had come to inspect the room before paying back the security. He checked the room with a magnifying glass and grumbled about some stain on the slab. Jade stared at him for some time like a ghost, which was enough to frighten him into giving the money back.
“He was a real parasite. ” Jade explained later, “would increase the room rent randomly and regularly, and threaten to toss me out every once in a while. At first, I tried to tolerate that, but he only got bolder. Then, one day while he came to conduct a surprise check of his flat, I pretended to call a fellow from my village and asked him to send a few thugs from our warrior caste. I said I needed to take care of this guy who troubled me in the park. Since then, the oldie pretends to be strict, but when I show him my displeasure, he settles like a good kid. “
In Delhi, landlords exist in extremes: they are either parasites (like Jade’s) or angels (like mine). More on this later.
We got an SUV on OLA and loaded all the luggage. On the way, the driver told us a lot of things: about the surgery of his spine, and that he couldn’t see well, but he was so experienced that he could drive with an overdose of desi daaru. He had once gotten into a fight with a passenger who had a relative in the police.
“I gave him an extra round of beating, because the owner of this SUV is a lawyer. “
And then he talked about ghosts, one he had encountered while crossing the Yamuna.
“It was a wailing lady. Could have been Yamuna itself. With so much pollution, you can’t tell whose ghost it is. “
To save ourselves from his macabre gossip, we switched on the radio, and the mood inside the cab suddenly turned into an exuberant one.
The song that came up was Musaafir Hoon Yaaron, and the driver, unable to keep his mouth shut, began to sing. But he could sing well, so Cyan jumped in. And then it was Jade. At last, I too found myself humming along. The cab with its throbs joined a cheerful chorus of four as it zoomed along under the starry roof of a sparkling city.
The starry night
A lot happened between that and the time we said goodbye to Jade and watched him whittle away. But I want to remember the parting in this way. Four people singing in a cab on a bright night about the transience of being in a city that celebrated being.
On our way back, Delhi was quieter without Jade. Somehow, the lights had dimmed, and nobody sang.
I wondered if it was finally the time to clean the house. Or maybe I should wait for the neighborhood lizard.
Discovered a cricket, a moth and four spiders crawling through the crevices in the Indian Express castle we have built over two years. An unending string of ants seeped behind the palace of tea cups, collected through phases of despair and exuberance, and disappeared. Cobwebs hung on the ceiling and along the wall, as if to mark the territory as conquered. The corners and the edges were lined with grime. And the ninja mouse- who doesn’t take the pain to search the gaps beneath the doors anymore but simply climbs up the window bars to scurry out- was back to make quick inspection of my bowls and pans.
I wondered if it was finally the time to clean the house. Or maybe I should wait for the neighborhood lizard.
The neighborhood lizard is a well fed monster, who usually crawls out of my neighbor’s bathroom, lies still on the wall to bask in the sun for a while, grows out its wings and flies to my wall. There it moves about for a while, chasing microbes and other invisible prey, and sometimes, when it feels bored, it gets in. I vividly remember it left a child once, and the child travelled as far as to my study table. It jumped out of my pen holder and gave me a heart attack. I had a hard time showing it out. When Cyan was back that day, I discussed this with him. That was when we had sworn on our respective mothers that we’ll keep the room cleaner than a deluxe ICU. We discovered later we were not to be trusted with our vows.
On the Diwali of 2022, we visited this couple’s house in a UPSC hub. The couple had left for their respective homes and left the keys with a common friend, who was Jade. Since it was the tallest building in the area and they had the access to terrace, there could be no better view of a Diwali night in the entire suburb. But more than Diwali, what mesmerized us was the surreal glow the cleanliness, organisation and aesthetics of the interior combined to emit.
“Bro, we need women in our lives. ” Cyan remarked, combing whatever was left of his hair in front of a large mirror that could comfortably reflect two faces standing side by side. In our mirror, we have to first shave the left half of our moustache and then move to the right. For getting a fuller view after we finish shaving, we flip through NCERT physics to determine the exact spot standing where would produce a larger image.
I grabbed the money plant to check if it was a fake. It was as real as the rainforest. Not only was the couple house impeccable, an epitome of Swachh Bharat, but it was kept nourished and clothed, as if it had a personality. It looked like a designer house- a house that conveys the thoughts and the vision of the residents.
Black polybags that you see a couple fighting over in Hollywood movies, usually when they are about to get divorced. Thick pillows with cute cartoon cat covers. The bed pressed like they ran a road roller over the sheet after waking up. Not a speck of dust on the wall or the floor- so clean you could spoil it with just thoughts. The posters struck a contrast with the white walls, but the tension was not disturbing. It was a conflict that rhymed. The room freshener filled the room with the aroma of Jasmine. You could sleep in this house for centuries, and in comfort. There were naphthalene balls in the wash basins to kill even the one per cent left by Dettol. The calendar. Who even kept a calender on the table these days! And it was a piece of art, as if hand made.
Cyan’s eyes were bulging out of his spectacles.
“Why are we living like refugees? ” He wondered aloud.
We returned home with a resolve woven in carbon fibre. That was the second time we swore on our respective mothers that we shall keep the room cleaner than God’s own guts.
But soon, our purses went dry and we couldn’t afford even the polybags. Moreover, nobody except the cook visited us, and she wasn’t particularly impressed by our work. Thus, gradually, the jungle grew. Then came the prelims bout, and we joined libraries; so the house became more of a shelter where we slept for a while, just before the endless day of repetitive drudgery began again. Then, the dreaded prelims came and destroyed us to the core. So we let everything grow- the despair, the beards and the jungle.
But now, with the biodiversity burgeoning in our abode beyond the carrying capacity, and some species even evolving- the ants had learnt how to walk in water after Cyan had drowned a few generations of them, and the mouse had recived ninja training from some Master Splinter in some city drain- I thought it would be better to clean than let them evolve enough to enslave us.
Or maybe I could adopt a ferocious cat. It would kill them all and wouldn’t mind the dirt. I hunted for a good hunter cat, but couldn’t find any on the streets. There were like a million dogs, breeding like there was no condom in this world, but no cats. When I checked online, I found out that all cats had migrated to the promised land, somewhere in Turkey. Shit.
The lizard could do the job, but it cannot be trusted. It may start a coup after it’s done with the little rebels. I weighed in the cost of status quo. There were no scorpions or snakes yet. So I was not going to die. It’s true that Cyan got typhoid, but it was before the pre and there was no correlation. That was because he ate the contaminated dosa. Which I ate as well. But his immunity is only slightly better than an AIDS veteran, so that should close the case.
There was a monkey out there, who used to climb up the walls every morning. But the monkey hunts big game. It would not be interested in spiders and rats.
On one rainy day, I had seen a cat on my neighbors balcony, but it was not the hunter type. It was more of a lazy scavenger, its head immersed in the dustbin, and its tail still as a stunted branch. A lazy cat is the worst pet. A lazy dog is still cute and harmless. But a lazy cat is just a fat ungrateful bitch.
If I had money, I would have gotten myself a vaccum cleaner robot. They have been selling some cleaning gadgets on amazon. It costs a fortune though. Whoever can afford it can keep four human servants.
I spotted the cat again. Same position. Maybe there’s ganja in the dustbin, the cat becomes still as corpse in there. I was picturing the cat with the ganja when I noticed a house spider running up my legs, about to enter my boxers. I jumped like they launched me on PSLV.
ENOUGH! I screamed. Now it was the cat that jumped like it was launched on PSLV. So it wasn’t a corpse after all.
I finally found the broom after a lengthy search operation. It needed a bit of cleaning itself. I let it slant and swept like a samurai massacring mini zombies. I bulldozed the castle and relocated the tower. There I found the cricket, singing its own rap song of protest. I got it on the chinese mosquito racket, but it wouldn’t turn on. It may have been discharged, or dead, because the cricket was walking comfortably on the wires. In fact it got curious and tried to lurk in. It would have been dead in a flash had the machine not been dead. I simply carried it out and shook the racket. The cat was back in the bin- tail up, head down.
Then, I went to the kitchen to get the dustbags out. The ninja mouse leapt out. I retreated two steps back. It did a little yoyo test on the kitchen slab and then climbed up the rod and disappeared behind the exhaust. I switched it on to create a temporary barrier. Till it learns how to jump through the rotating blades.
I took the sponge, the floor cleaner and the scrubber and cleaned like Monica Geller. The tiles now glinted like they were made of diamonds.
When Cyan came back after his library hunt, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“You have got a girlfriend coming over or what!? ” He asked.
“No. ” I replied.
“Do you want to make love? ” He offered.
“Fuck off, Cyan. “I was in no mood to joke as my bones were by now trying to rip out of my body.
He went to the balcony, and said,
” You forgot to clean the umbrella. “
Oh. The umbrella.
“We haven’t cleaned it since we left JNU in 2021. “I recalled.
“Oh. Yeah. If you clean this, I would marry you. “
Cyan has been acting desperate these days. He has been single so long he doesn’t mind doing it with a man. Maybe it’s because of the porn. He had said he was exploring new categories, but I didn’t know he was going to the other side.
Anyways, me touching the umbrella was out of question. So I told him to let it be there.
When I moved to the bathroom to clean myself, I made sure I locked my room first, and then the bathroom. With single men, you cannot take risks.
I cleaned the bathroom first, and after scrubbing the skin out of the washbasin, I had become so skilled I could write a best-selling self-help guide on cleaning. I cleaned the taps and they twinkled like they do in the Jaguar ads. And I cleaned the toilet so good, you wouldn’t want to take a dump there for a day or two. I was a God at this now.
By the time I started bathing, my hands were already soaked and swollen, and I had no energy to lift the mug. It was then I noticed the lizard crawling through the vent. Like the Bollywood police, after everything is done. It made a little survey and then it left. Most likely it didn’t find the location friendly.
Whatever. Overall, it was a good experience because I slept at 10 that night, and dreamt of my crush. And that’s a rare thing. In the dream, I was cleaning her house while she went out with her boyfriend, who had the face of a lizard.
roastedmoongfalis 