Alone in a Crowd
By Bragadeesh Prasanna
Three disparate characters come together like words strung across time and space, each one grappling with different ghosts of the past
Kaveri
The rain came out of nowhere, like a school friend suddenly messaging on Whatsapp for a loan. Kaveri took refuge in a tea shop with just two tables. Surprisingly, there were no customers. She ordered a black tea and sat scrolling on her mobile phone, scavenging her Twitter feed for any new leads she could pitch to her editor. She had just finished a rather uninteresting interview of a local big shot who had donated a handsome sum to the government school. But the setting for the interview…that had brought with it her childhood memories. It was a huge house in Chennai that had become a city of small flats. A washed courtyard welcomed her when she opened the huge ornamental gate. She almost felt guilty walking in with her slippers. The maid who was ready with kolam powder in her hand showed her to a lounge swing in the courtyard. Kaveri knew that she wouldn’t look professional sitting on it, but there seemed to be no other option. The maid went in to announce her arrival as Kaveri approached the swing with hesitant steps. The swing swallowed her into its cushiony comfort. She could hear and smell vegetables being sautéed in the kitchen. When did I feel such comfort recently? It terrified her that she couldn’t remember.
The cling cling sound of the cycle bell from the road brought her back to the tea shop. The breeze was a bit colder than it usually was. Her tea had arrived and she went back to her phone. Tired of Twitter, she switched to Instagram. A watercolor painting on her feed made her stop scrolling. Though the things in the painting were things she came across daily, the image of a scroll, an ink bottle, and a quill spoke to her. When she was a kid, she was obsessed with becoming a teacher simply because they got to use two different coloured pens. ‘If you become a headmaster, you can use pens of three different colours,’ one of her friends had told her. As she grew up life had other plans but her fascination for pens didn’t fade. As a beat reporter, she thought she would be using her pen a lot. But she was left with her digital devices — voice recorder, note-taking apps, and emails. She noticed that her husband too had liked the picture. She was surprised that he hadn’t blocked her on social media. Did he think of me, when he saw this? The tea was still hot. All he had to say was that he was sorry. She wished he would apologize through a letter. That way, he couldn’t be sure if the message was delivered and read. There are no blue ticks in real life. Then she would buy nice stationery, an ink pen and carefully draft her reply. Let his wait be agonizing. Till then she would sit in a tea shop and sip tea.
Sadagopan
Numbers had become his life. Everything had to tally. The meals he ate, the luxuries he could or couldn’t afford, everything had an invisible number attached to it. And yet, he couldn’t figure out what he was longing for. The numbers just didn’t tally when it came to his personal life. There was nothing but a dull hum of the air conditioner accompanying him in the large conference room. Sadagopan was not used to this kind of quiet. Sounds were an integral part of his day. He always woke up to his mother complaining about milk delivery, the gas situation at home, or about him. He would get ready for work with the TV blaring the daily horoscope on different channels in the background. Then he would leave home and take the train to work. Almost everything was available on a train journey — fruits, cut vegetables, cake rolls, butter biscuits… the MLM kids who got in at Villivakkam even sold international holidays. Today, when he got off at his stop, it had started drizzling. He took hurried steps towards his office, walked to the reception and surrendered his mobile phone and got a token for it.
There was a TV in the conference room and a painting hung directly opposite him. The watercolour painting showed a typewriter, a half-finished bourbon glass, and some mail pinned to the wall. Strangely, he had thought about the typewriter just that morning. How many sunrises had he missed because of the damned typewriting classes? He had passed the exams with distinction. But the skill itself had quickly become useless. However, he knew everything about the different types of typewriters, ribbons and ink. When he was younger, when his father was still with them, he had dreamt of renting out a mountain cabin, type away stories with a tobacco pipe in his mouth and a glass of bourbon in his hand. But now, as a junior accountant, all he was left with was this cup of black coffee. An office assistant dropped a bunch of invoices in front of him and left discreetly.
Sadagopan looked at the invoices without interest. Some were small pink slips with their carbon prints slowly fading. Some were e-invoices, neatly printed out in an A4 sheet. He was advised to always use a pencil to tally the invoices. It never worked for him. The nib of his ink pen scratching against paper gave him a sense of seriousness. He pulled out a fresh A4 sheet from the printer tray. After giving brief salutations to various Gods, he started to list down the invoice amounts. He was envious of the amount the company had spent on team outings. Just the day before he had spotted a missing invoice. The manager brought the person responsible to ask about it. It was very awkward. As he found the invoice from an event management company for 34,987 rupees, his hand stopped moving. For this amount and thirteen rupees extra they were thrown out of their home one evening. It was seven months’ rent for him, spent over one night. His pen left an inkblot on the paper. He decided to step out for coffee. He needed natural light and sounds.
Deepan
Deepan’s dreams were getting weird. The previous night in his dream he was in an art exhibition. The only painting he could relate to was the oil painting of a table lamp and an open book. There was nothing special about it, except they had a table lamp just like that in their home when he was very young. The neck of the lamp was flexible so the head could be turned in any direction. The lamp was his father’s. In the bedroom, his mother would make his bed on the floor and lay beside him with her hands folded behind her head as a cushion, her saree still wet with the washing and the smell of Vim soap in her fingers. His father would sit at the table with the table lamp on and write things every night. Once, when his father wasn’t there, he climbed up the table and touched the bulb, burning his finger. That was the last he saw of the table lamp or his father at the table.
He rubbed his palms against each other and pressed them to his eyes. The sunlight from the window took him by surprise. The MET department had sent a text alert that there was rain in the forecast. He walked out of his room to the street. The street was under a canopy of trees. The corporation had done a neat job in sweeping the fallen leaves as a heap to the side of the road. The stray dog had found a patch of ground where the sunlight fell and made itself comfortable. A sudden gust of wind lifted a bike cover and carried it up, leaving a blue hue over the dog. The dog took off fearing the sudden change in the scenario. He stopped smiling a bit and reflected on the journalist girl. What was her name? Some Ganga or Yamuna? He, too, not very unlike the dog, got uncomfortable with the smallest change. Maybe she was right? Who cares?
Kaveri
She noticed two girls, probably sisters, walking back from school. The younger one was wearing slippers and was walking on the pedestrian’s platform while the older one wore shoes and was negating the water puddles. The younger one lost patience and jumped in the puddle fully drenching the older one and her. Kaveri looked around to share that moment of innocence. Thankfully, another man was having his coffee. It seemed like he too had witnessed the small spat. He was fair with three lines of holy ash smeared on his forehead. He met Kaveri’s eyes. She didn’t understand the urge for men to have the first line in a conversation and preferably last words too. ‘Silly girls,’ he quipped. ‘Yeah, but they made a memory for a lifetime,’ Kaveri said. The man’s gaze went down from her eyes to below her neck. Kaveri was unsure about what he was looking at, but she decided to get the conversation going. Kaveri turned to the road again and asked no one in particular. ‘Have you ever jumped in a puddle?’ The answer came too quickly. ‘No. My mother would get very angry.’
‘I hope you took permission from your mother before talking to me,’ she said. The man turned away, obviously offended. But little did he know he wasn’t the intended party of her comment. She had never dared to say that to the intended party.
Sadagopan
He felt better as he came out of the office. The drizzle had become rain and there were water puddles. He walked through the narrow parkway to the tea shop at the other end. He passed a graffiti of wolves made in charcoal, reminding him of the conversation he had the day before with the person who misplaced the bill. There was another woman at the tea shop sipping her tea, with her back turned to him. Two girls who were playing in the rain caught his eye. When he turned, his eyes met with the woman. He wanted to sound cool like the person he met yesterday. ‘Silly girls,’ he said, trying his best to sound confident. ‘Yeah, but they made a memory for a lifetime,’ the woman replied. Sadagopan’s eyes went down to look at her choice of beverage. It was black tea. She should be some serious Malayali woman, he thought and turned. ‘Have you ever jumped into a puddle?’ she asked him. ‘No. My mother would get very angry.’ Sadagopan’s reply was involuntary. He thought he heard a faint chuckle. ‘Have you got permission from your mother to talk to me?’ she said and turned to her tea. Little did she know that was the truth.
His mother had made him promise he would never to talk to any girls in college and he should concentrate only on his studies. The natural question then was why put him in a co-education college with such conditions? The answer was that that was the college they could afford. When he started working, he got permission from his mother to talk to women if the situation demanded it. His father had run away with a woman in his office and put the family into poverty. Sadagopan’s mother wasn’t going to let that happen again to her. Probably that was the reason she wasn’t interested in any marriage alliance that came for him. When he looked back at his life, there was no one for him other than his mother. She didn’t let him mingle with the guys because they had bad habits and Sadagopan couldn’t afford it. She didn’t let him mingle with his cousins because their parents were opportunists. She didn’t let him be friendly with their neighbours because they were always trying to sell some scheme or the other. She didn’t encourage office friendships because then they would walk all over Sadagopan. She constantly sowed the seeds of doubt in his mind about any other human being except herself. Mother is the only person who was selfless and pure while everybody else was scheming behind the duo’s back.
The lady gathered her things while he was still sipping his tea. She paid for her tea and then asked to see the cheap pens hanging in an iron string behind the tea shop owner. She tried some of them to test the flow of ink on a pad — she was writing furiously — and then she pulled the paper from the pad, crumpled it and threw it to the ground, bought a few of the pens and walked to the bus stop without a glance in his direction.
Sadagopan paid his bill and before anyone could look, took the crumpled paper and pocketed it.
Deepan
The 56 inch LED TV sat in the middle of the living room. Right opposite to that was a sofa with cushions matching the upholstery. Deepan walked into the living room from his kitchen. He had his whisky glass, a bottle of Red Label Premium Whisky bottle. He placed it on the coffee table and went into the kitchen, came back with cut onions and ice cubes. He switched on the TV and logged into Netflix. It suggested the show ‘The Sacred Games’ . He sat in the middle of the couch with the glass in his hand. He paused a moment looking at the TV as the light from outside fell directly on the TV. He got up and pulled the drapes of the balcony door. He put two ice cubes in the glass. He switched on the series and let it play. The music filled the room from his Dolby sound bar. As he poured the whiskey and took the first sip, he pointed the remote to the TV and skipped the show’s intro sequence.
Kaveri
She reached her friend’s room and typed out the interview and sent it to her editor for comments. She then opened the book she was reading in the living room. The place she stayed wasn’t too bad. Her friend had let her stay rent-free, a grand gesture since they knew each other only through Twitter. She had brought a few dresses with her and moved in. She could see that her friend was lighting some scented candles in her room. Probably she was expecting her boyfriend to visit. But it was just three in the afternoon. Eventually her boyfriend dropped in and Kaveri locked herself in her room, resolving not to hear, see or smell anything for the rest of the day.
As she dropped into her futon, Kaveri remembered four months back on a day like this, when she sank to the floor with the strips of papers in her hand. The matte tiles which she insisted on placing were not so friendly to her fall. She didn’t expect to find something like this in her husband’s pockets. She plonked down in an awkward position with one leg folded in front of her body and the other one behind her back making it look like some kind of Swastika.
As a reporter, she always waited for the bigger picture to emerge. But when it came to her life, she couldn’t wait. The letters ran like small black ants scrolling before her but she couldn’t make any sense out of it. ‘The kitchen was all clean before mom’ read one of the strips of paper. The paper was not from a stationery shop or a regular A4 sheet. Somebody had written it in a nice notebook and the tore the page. The pen was a general gel pen. Her leg behind her back started calling her out. It was going numb. ‘In few days will forget’ read another strip. Forget what? The kitchen?
‘Maavu kolam in front of it’. She must be talking about the stove. It had to be a she. Kaveri thought she was the only one to write notes and letters. ‘Check on me if I need lunch, snack’. Ah! There comes the sympathy card. ‘My duty to wash it’. Her whole lower body went numb and her eyes filled with tears. The cold floor offered her no solace and her calves were cramping. ‘Just above the stove is where we store tea and sugar.’ That bitch! She hit him in his weak point.
The discovery of the paper strips were not the last straw in her moving out. Her husband’s refusal to talk about it was the last straw. Her parents, the residential community, even her friends said things can be smoothed out if they talk and be open with each other. But her husband does neither.
She sunk deeper into the futon, and put one leg over the other. As she continued reading she started to pull her toe nails bit by bit. The passage was so familiar that it could be her in the book. The character in the book read a book to shut the noises out. Isn’t that the reason why anybody reads? She tried hard not to judge the character in the book. But however open a person could be a quick judgement falls in like a seed on the damp ground.
Sadagopan
The crumpled paper in his pocket weighed heavy, almost like it was going to pull his pants down. He had never done something like this. Who writes for an pages to test a pen? He pressed his back to a wall like it would hide what he was about to do. The note started with a Malayalam song and went on to describe a morning scene in her apartment.
The note was about a girl trying to climb up the balcony railing and a boy trying to stop her without breaking his morning prayers. It was like somebody saw him during his morning ritual, doing his morning Sandhyavandanam. But nothing could possibly distract him. Just three days ago, when he was doing his Sandhyavandanam, he saw the younger brother in the next house stopping and smelling the night dress of his sister-in-law. Why didn’t cute things happen to him?
He ironed out the letter by pressing it against his chest and tried to read the whole text. It abruptly ended with the kid wishing her good morning. Did it really happen to her? Or was it something she wished for? A cold wind brushed his nape giving him goosebumps. Or did she want him to find the paper?
He walked into the cafeteria. Much like the conference room, the cafeteria was devoid of any colours, except for the colourful chairs. Sadagopan paused a minute to think about the lucky colour the TV astrologer mentioned in his daily horoscope this morning. He found a purple chair to sit in and opened his lunch box. Sometimes it was very difficult to understand his mother. She buys a Tupperware bag but she uses the containers at home and packs his lunch in the same steal Tiffin box. As he opened his lunch box he knew the purple chair didn’t help. It was the same vathakolambu and kovakkai. He had brought veggies yesterday and specifically asked her to make beans. But for his mother, English vegetables were an extravagance. They would be cooked only on Sundays, so that they could enjoy it at a leisurely pace. Even during school, it was the same. But back then that was what they could afford. He remembered his friends teasing him. Sadagopan started to swallow the food without chewing it, like he did in school. He waited a minute between two handfuls so it would be over in twenty minutes.
That evening, like every evening, he would get into the MRTS train, sit in the middle seat in the last row, fully aware that no new or beautiful thing could happen to him, and will start swallowing the minutes of his life.
Deepan
It was his time at night, alone at home, with just a lamp above his head and a worn-out paper in his hands. It was a page out of his father’s diary. He made himself comfortable in the reclining cushion and put up his feet on the ottoman. There were always objects for specific use in his place. He wouldn’t put his feet on a coffee table or work at his dining table. It was his space and he used it perfectly.
Though he had read it many times, his hands still shivered as he picked up the paper. It was one of the last entries from his father’s journal. The little water droplets had smudged the ink on paper. He wasn’t sure if it was his tears while reading it or his father’s tears while he wrote it. His father had described his visit to the psychiatrist, mental doctor to his mom. He wondered how he was aware of mental health at that time and age. He had described everything so well, not even leaving a small detail. How Deepan wished his father was with him. The words were evenly spaced out but the letters were tightly wound together, like they were too close and too far at the same time, just like his relationship with his father. He had described a cushion that felt heavy because of the weight of thoughts it carried of the people who had sat on it. His father would have no idea how heavy that single piece of paper now weighed in his hands. If only years and yearning could be measured using that metric. Deepan sighed.
The only thing he took from his home when he moved to his own place were the cartons of boxes with his dad’s journal entries. He couldn’t live in a home where his mom had another companion. He was good man. There was no doubt about it. He had a steady 9–5 job. He took care of his studies. He tried to be present in Deepan’s life in any which way he could. But he was simply not his father. When he looked at the situation as an outsider, it felt right. His mother was just 32 when his dad got committed to an asylum. There was no improvement in his condition. She remarried at 35. She had a life and she had to live it. She made sure Deepan was well-cared for.
Some people will classify his actions too as some kind of mental disorder if he let them. Society has words for everything. If he doesn’t want to get married, he is commitment-phobic. If he wants his things to be in order and keeps an eye out for it, he is OCD. He didn’t want anyone to come close to him in the fear that they might put him in an asylum and move on with their lives.
Like he said in the party to the girl, he shall remain as he is now — a man alone in the crowd.
Bragadeesh Prasanna is an independent writer based in Chennai. Read his work here: http://bragadeeshprasanna.com/
