Kinaara

Ravikant Kisana has completed his graduation in International Relations from JU and his post-graduation in Communications Management from MICA. He is presently working with Ogilvy & Mather, Kolkata.

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When he woke up it was still raining outside. The sky was cloudy and purple, the trees looked grey, wet and cramped. He looked outside his window. Littered with innumerable potholes holding little pools of brown, muddy water swimming in them, the road looked all worn out and desolate. The narrow shanties that lined it looked restless and edgy like a cornered dog in heat. The drains were open and overflowing. The garbage dump was now an intimidating pile of nasty filth that even the stray dogs stayed clear off. Barely twenty metres away from it was the street market where everybody bought vegetables. Tomatoes, cabbages, ladies’ fingers and brinjals all muddy and slushy, being sold there on the dirty road on nothing more than a bare, blue plastic sheet; right there amidst the unbearable stench and blood and feathers from the chicken shop behind. And people were buying that stuff and feeding it to their children and living as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He closed his eyes for a second in a silent prayer about nothing in particular. He looked away. As a daily practice he avoided eating a heavy dinner so that he did not need to use the lavatory in the morning. It was a public lavatory that everyone on that floor shared: all four flats and their twenty-three residents. He went to the pay-toilet next to the station. To say it was cleaner would mean that he had enough water to flush his shit down when he was done. He generally did not brush his teeth as there was not enough water for it. His living area was a tiny room partitioned away by thick cardboard material. He shared that small flat with four others. The roof was generally leaking and the walls were always damp from the pipes outside. It was impossible to keep anything dry inside the house, and all his shirts carried the faint odour of moist cement. It was a funny kind of odour, but one which you would not mistake for anything else in the world except moist cement. It made him nauseous. He was now addicted to aspirin.

He left while the sun was still beginning to rise. The rain was now a mere drizzle. The clouds had scattered for the time being. The narrow lane to the station was already abuzz with the people frantically hurrying for their trains. It was a daily migration. The local train from the suburbs ferrying millions to the heart of the metropolis’ commercial zones to keep money flowing through its veins, then returning the same people back to their cramped dumps in the same fashion it had brought them – without compassion, without empathy and most of all, without dignity. They went forth packed like galley slaves in those train compartments, bursting out from its seams, shunting along with this tremendous surge of humanity that never asked any question and always had the same forlorn faces. Long and tired and devoid of any life or hope. He was one of them.

Angry and silent and waiting.

‘Any moment now all of this will explode,’ the fiery leader of a saffron Rightist party wrote in his political newspaper. ‘This city cannot let itself be overrun by migrants. They have reduced it to a garbage heap. They have stifled us, the people of this land, and they have taken our jobs and rightful livelihoods. It is they who are to blame for this big mess we have all landed up in.’

He folded away his one-rupee copy of the newspaper as his breakfast arrived. He ate a budget meal at the same cheap hotel everyday. It had filthy tables attended by lost, immigrant bhaiyyas from Bihar dressed modestly in their baniyaans. They were always sweaty and their sinewy black bodies looked hardened and overworked. Their eyes were dead. They dug their nose a lot. It was impossible to hold an intelligent conversation with them, as they barely ever understood what was being asked of them on. He ate quickly and left the place without drinking the hazy water they poured out for him, leaving no tips behind

The walk to his office – if you could call it an office – was through another narrow lane before crossing along the length of one of the metropolis’ main roads. The way would inevitably be choked: man and car stuck together, inching forward together, jostling, pushing, cursing, honking… together. The flyover overhead was jammed with traffic and an inertia of silent rage, crippling frustration, pending chaos and anarchy hung in the stale air. Nothing seemed to make any sense. Not the snaking queues outside the ticket counters at the local train stations, nor those at the joke of a security check at the mall entrances. Armed men were gunning down the rich in luxury hotels and bombs were ripping the local trains every now and then, yet nobody seemed to care. Everything was suddenly a jaded dream, a state of catatonic submission to the most sickening indifference. There was an economic miracle happening today, a recession tomorrow, but life seemed the same on the roads.

On the roads, all around were hoardings with strangely smiling faces, screaming about something or the other. There was a sale on everything, a disconnected visual and aural consciousness being propagated to a blinding mass that seemed to be in a strange suspended animation of apathy. The hoardings, the intersections, the traffic jams, the sales and the smiles: all amalgamated into a strange oneness celebrated in its morbid monotony everywhere across the metropolis; a symphony of the diseased, an opera of the strange… a land with moving people, millions, each without an address.

He fished into his wallet and pulled out a one-rupee coin. It slid smoothly down the slot on the pay-phone once he had dialled the number on the slightly greasy and stubborn dial.

‘Hello, I am calling from Dhanraj Chemicals.’ Baba, I want to be a hero when I grow up. ‘Like Swami Vivekananda?’

‘Yes. Collect the consignment from my warehouse.’ ‘No. Like Amitabh Bachchan.’

‘Ok.’ A static on the other end made him realise that the line had been disconnected. A few crows screeched raucously at each other on a wire overhead. The rain had stopped. An obscenely bright sun broke from behind the clouds and in a garish display of its vanity; made the wet, almost-grey almost-brown road glisten. Umbrellas looked stupid. You squinted as the glint from the sunlight on the vehicles hurt your eyes. It was suddenly too bright. Too loud and too obscene… well, almost.

‘One Navy Cut cigarette.’

‘Chhutta nahi hai, saab.’

He put the fifty-rupee note back in his pocket and gruffly walked towards the taxi stand. It took him twenty-seven minutes and thirteen refusals before someone agreed to take him. They just parked their taxis and lazed in them till a long fare arrived. Everybody wanted a long fare. Everybody wanted an extra buck. Everybody wanted to race and wanted to be the first. Too many people running, he thought to himself. He wished he had a gun. He wished he had a lot of things.

Another jam. Another beggar. Another hijra. A painfully young hijra with her curly hair worn long in an untidy braid and the faint beginnings of a stubble on her face. Long, shabby earrings hung from her ears. He couldn’t hear what was being said to him and kept mindlessly blinking as the hijra felt his face all over with her rough, manly hands. A cheap, faded watch on her wrist told him it was one in the afternoon. The lights turned green. Last of the jaywalkers skipped away from the roads and the watch and the untidy braid were left behind.

Another signal, another jam, another beggar: a little girl with a shivering baby in her arms. She invoked Allah. He paused. He did not have change. The taxi driver shooed the kid away. She screeched at him before leaving and called him the son of a whore. The taxi driver swore back at her, but she was gone. He turned back to explain to him that these people were ruining the metropolis. They swarmed to it in droves from their villages seeking to make an easy fortune and soon ended up in the criminal world. They had reduced everything to filth. They had reduced the dignity of a common man’s honest day of hard-work. They… they… they…

‘Just look at the records, saab. The jails are full of them. These Muslims are a cancer, saab. They are always killing people. Wonder how they raise their children?’

‘Why is the road so jammed? At this time isn’t it usually free?’ he asked without offering a comment.

‘There is some accident up ahead I think.’

In about ten minutes’ time, taxi number MH-A-781 crawled past the accident site and he saw it. An old man with his face squashed, reportedly by a bus.

‘The back-tyre went over his head, saab. No chance. Spot-dead,’ offered the taxi-driver before entering a ramble about how he once escaped a life-threatening accident with nothing more than a scratched car and a few bruises. Everyone has one of those stories to tell. The ones that you absolutely don’t want to listen to, because you cannot relate them to the sight you’ve just seen. A man dead: crushed skull, eyes squished out of eye-balls, blood thicker than you’ve ever imagined blood to be. A mangled body still stuck to a mangled scooter. Arms distorted in ways that will give you nightmares for weeks. A crowd of people just standing around in sickening silence and apathy…

Some distance and time away, it is the same taxi in another jam. The road is lined with all sorts of small shops selling umbrellas, wallets, incense sticks, cheap clothes and curios. Hundreds of people walk past them every hour and nobody seems to stop. The shop-keepers all look tired and lost. They seem a part of their crowded displays, like exhibits in a museum, slotted and behind glass-panes. And now presenting our latest exhibit, ladies and gentlemen – The Man of the Metropolis!

Nearby stands a smart-looking church on the road. It is not big or imposing or beautiful so as to say, but was a handy little place to go to. A sign outside announced in bold letters the sermon for the day – ONLY JESUS CAN TRULY FORGIVE THE SINS OF MAN.

He looked at it for a few seconds, then he hissed ‘Fuck you’ under his breath. He didn’t say another word for a long time. He just sat there – angry and silent and waiting.

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