I: The Son
He has killed my mother.
They say I cannot concentrate. I do not know why they think so. I see things that others do not. And still they make me go to see that talk-talk doctor guy. He is stupid. Always telling me to talk and talk and talk; and all the while I never want to talk. I hate talking, I think they all want to know what I am thinking, always- the doctor, He, even my mother sometimes; they never leave me alone with my thoughts. I think the talk-talk doctor guy and He- they do not really dig the way I think- how I see what others don’t see, how I am perceptive to vibes of other people. They make me take pills- a green one and a blue one, and the green one used to make me lazy, always making me want to sleep.
There is a bottle of whiskey in front of me- His whiskey, stolen from His minibar; they wouldn’t even let me drink whiskey- and the level of whiskey in the bottle is as low as the depression I feel. I don’t know why I am sad, I think I should be happy- I generally do when break I rules-His rules and the talk-talk doctor’s rules. But it makes me rather sad when mother finds me breaking the rules. Mother likes me- she is not like Him and that talk-talk doctor and the bitch-girl math teacher I had when I was in high school or that dumbfuckersonofabitch history professor I had in college or the-what’s the use of counting- mother loves me and I love her too. And that’s all there is to it. She will always be there to take care of me. She is not like them. Not like Him.
The ice in the icebucket looks very interesting when seen from directly up top. It reflects the cigarette’s scarlet tip and forms interesting patterns of red spots in white ice and it is nice to see them even though the smoke burns my eyes. Cigarettes are also not allowed me- but I sometimes smoke, even though it makes me feel really bad when mother comes to know I have been smoking. He knows, of course- He knows I smoke and it makes me happy, and so He tries to make me stop smoking. So I have to smoke in secret. In my room, at night, when they have gone to sleep, I walk up to the balcony and quietly have a drag- even though sometimes I fear they are not asleep when they are sleeping, that they are just lying down quietly pretending to sleep so they can catch me smoking. Mother once did catch me like that- but she did not scold me, she only took the cigarette and stubbed it out and went out of the room into the kitchen after telling me to sleep and later I heard her crying, sobbing when she thought I was asleep only I was still awake and I heard her and I felt bad and did not smoke a single cigarette for a whole week because I also love her and do not want to see her cry again- and after that I have been real careful while smoking so she never catches me again or she will cry again. But she never screams at me- she is wonderful like that in many ways- she understands how I feel and she loves me and if she were to see- Mother is dead! He killed her!
II: The Father
On the surface, I lead an enviable life- I am a self-made millionaire, and a successful consultant, my wife a very pretty artist and poet, and a son who will soon be ready for life. In reality, I am the head of a dysfunctional family, my wife cheats on me and my son a basket case, nervous wreck who, his psychiatrist says, is a paranoid schizophrenic, and business has never really recovered from the recession. Quite a state of things, and don’t even see the irony in it, anymore. These are just facts of life which I have no choice but to accept.
Even now, my son is sitting in his room, drinking my whiskey and thinking god only knows whatever crazy thoughts that wrack his brain. He is not allowed to smoke or drink. But sometimes, perhaps it does him good. Or bad, I don’t know. The psychiatrist tells me not to interfere much with his life and half the time I am torn between slapping his brains out for him or hugging him hard and crying- God, I am as much a basket case as my son is.
There is only so much emotion that you can spend in a lifetime on any single subject without becoming inured to it. You begin to accept things as a part of life. You stop fretting about wrong decisions and right ones, about the stuff that you could have done right and the stuff that went wrong when it had no right to. You just begin to take things as they come. Like my son. Or my wife. Or my life. It was not always like this, as all bad stories go; things change and happy times turn into sad or confusing ones, and you do not know what to make of things. You just carry on with life. Tired. And alone.
When he was eight, we knew that our son would grow up to be a poet. He always went after his mother, following her, clutching her saree’s hem like it was his only lifeline in a stormy world. She painted- so he took crayons and created thousands of colorful, if nonsensical, sketches on the walls of our home. And even though I was never a connoisseur of art, those scribbles were more precious to me than any M F Hussain mural. She wrote. So when he grew old enough to be able to start stringing together words to for coherent, if somewhat disjointed, sentences; he wrote too. She dressed in bright colours- the brilliant yellow of a sunflower, the blinding orange of a tangerine, the bloody scarlet of a ruby- and they were the colours he chose for himself whenever we went shopping. He never had any of my shades of gray in his life. And I guess that was the time when the trouble started.
III. The Son
When I was a child, he seemed always to be a very distant person- he still is- less of somebody who lives physically in your home, than someone who comes to your home everyday on the third page of a bling newspaper. I do not mean He is glitzy- just that he was never real. He would go to work before I woke up and come back home after I had gone to sleep. I sometimes never saw him for months, even though we lived in the same house. There never was any shortage of presents, but there was always a shortage of a parent. And He never really loved Mother or took care of her. The best He did to her was that he neglected her. Totally.
He always was a slimeball- having affairs behind my mother’s back, coochy-cooing with that bitch mathematics teacher, flirting with that EA of His client who regularly called Him ostentatiously to update Him on projects He was working on, with His own secretary, and even with the whore who sent me roses. It was all just a sham. Why else, after all, would she send me another bouquet of roses when I had already thrown her first bouquet into the dustbin and torn her card?
And, all this while, Mother suffered silently. I am sure there were always fires raging in her heart which would be violent enough to snuff us all out in a couple of heartbeats, but she never let them go. Which is why she, to me is the colours of life- the violet of a cloudy sunset, the purple of a bloody sunrise, the crimson of spilt blood, the gold of a languorous mid-moon night. She is life in death.
I have not taken the green pill for three days now. I realize now that the green pill was poison- it made me sleepy; now I can think much more clearly now that I have not taken the pill in three days.
The girl who I loved in college- she ran away from home with someone who had a big car. I was not allowed to drive a car by that talk-talk doctor guy and Him.
When I was six years old, we went to a picnic. I don’t remember, it might have been when I was seven. Or eight or nine. Doesn’t matter. The details are a little vague. We had gone to this park which shared a boundary with a zoo, and there was this old tree under which we sat. I do not remember many details, but I remember wondering why there was not a pond where the tree’s shadow ended. We might have had sandwiches that afternoon for lunch. I do not remember. It was a rare afternoon for even He was there with us. And we had a big striped plastic ball at least one of whose colours was purple, and I remember thinking how much fun it would have been had there a pond or lake or pool in which I could have thrown the ball and waded after it as it bobbed in the same place buffeted by the very mild breeze. It was much fun even so.
It was many years later that I found out that the whole park was fake, that the tree under which we had spent that glorious afternoon was actually a lamp post which had been covered with plastic bark and branches and leaves for a week as part of some show that the park was organizing in the nights, and that the grass that had grown there, where my pool should have been, was later grazed barren by a herd of goats who couldn’t care less, and had never regrown because the park management never had enough money to plant seeds and water them. Today the park is still a park but more in use as a drive-through by car-or-bike-owners who hate to drive that extra kilometer around its boundaries and just drive in from one of the numerous huge gashes in the park’s wall. I, when I was six; or seven or eight; never knew.
The girl who I loved in college- the one who ran away from home with someone who had a big car- her body was found, battered and mutilated, in a town three thousand kilometers from home. She had fought. And lost.
IV. The Father
Do the lullabies you sing to your children when they are small remain with them? Do their playful, unconscious minds retain the words you speak to them and do not speak to them but speak to others when you are pretending to speak to them and the words which you speak to them in your mind while you are actually speaking to them something which is quite something else? Do their tiny, enormous minds grasp these words and their meanings and subtexts and undercurrents of love, lust, hate, anger, desire, frustration, exasperation, grief, and gloom? Do at some point in growing they play the recordings of these words again and again in their minds and try to find out the meanings of these strange goings on to which they were party or witness or cause? Do they grasp the complexity of the emotions behind the words and are they able to cope up with them? I suspect my child could not.
We had many arguments when he was small, over many things large and small, and we tried to resolve it. There was a love which had not died yet, at least not been reduced to the mummified, shriveled ghost of an existence it has, now, and you know that old story goes, young boy trying to make his name, you girl trying to make her fame, a child enters the equation, and suddenly there is no time and the stress of growing professional lives begins to collide violently against the foundations of what should be life, itself, and eventually something gives over time, and things become just so. You have seen this movie several times over. We coped, very badly, an adulterous, flawed couple who were always two, constituting a family which was always less than the sum of its parts. And somewhere along the way, the child fell off the caravan.
V. The Son
Did I mention that my attention wavers? I cannot focus- the mind roves from topic to topic to yet another topic, like everything in this world were a series of dots waiting to be connected like those little diagrams everyone does in drawing school only this time no certain comes out. But still, once can visualize shapes, vague patterns of things that are, under the surface, waiting to come out, almost violent.
He has left the house. I sneaked into his room, sometime ago, to get some more of this whiskey. I checked the garage, his car is not there. Where has he gone, now? All my life, he has kept sneaking out on me. When I was 13, there was the circus come in town, and he took us. It was a wonderful evening. The clowns and the animals and the gymnasts and the music and the slightly enraging, but still interesting crowds. The clowns were the best. They did a lot of funny stuff, and one guy did a magic tricks and pulled roses from his sleeves while doing palmsprings and got himself locked and escaped chains and pulled funny little paper planes out of his hat and those planes flew from his hands like little birds and changed colours thrice and disappeared. One of the birds which at least once changed to an angry mauve colour flew towards me as if it was planning to peck me with its paper beak and I knew that it could not harm me that its paper beak could not cause me any injury and that it was anyway flying slow enough that I could catch it, I nevertheless screamed and ducked and attempted to hold His harm and tuck my head in there and as I turned and grasped at his arm he was suddenly not there, no longer there, gone. And all of a sudden, in that one moment of desperate irrational fear and paternal desertion I understood how those magic tricks worked and the circus was never the same again.
On his bed there was his gun. I will sit in front of the front door, I will wait for him to turn his key in the latch. This one time in my life, I will concentrate. He killed my mother, and I will take from him something far more precious.
VI. The Father
I often ponder the question of loneliness. I find it fascinating that three people living under the same roof, bonded so closely to each other, can be so far away from each other, all of them alone at the same time. I am waiting for her in her room; I know she will be back tonight. It has been two days since se left me after our angry argument, in which vases were flung but were not as accurately directed or hurtful as words, another episode in a series of mutual misery. She left me, and took my car, and this is not the first time she has done so and this will not be the last. She will go check into some hotel, buy sex, drink herself dumb and then comeback after two days. When it is my turn, I also go check myself into some hotel, gamble recklessly in shady casinos, drink myself dumb and get back after two or three days. Or weeks. Her anger is predictable. Mine I have no control over.
There is a strange comfort in sitting in her room here, wallowing in the warm mud of self-pity. I am not drunk, and have no intention of getting drunk. I just sit on her bed and look at the pictures, touch her drawers (while not opening them), run my fingers through her clothes as I realize they have grown cold, and miss her body’s warmth in them. How many years since I last kissed her?
I am aware of a slowly growing void inside me, something which makes me want to cry. Of course, I will not. But this room is her absence looming large over my soul, screaming imprecations at me for having let ourselves drift so far, for having let our life crumble and disintegrate into the incompleteness of her life and mine, and for letting the life of our child get torn in this. I need her, somehow I must have her back tonight, or I will lose her forever. No, I have already lost her. I need her back. This is a realization that I still love her. And that she will be back tonight, and she will probably never be back.
This is her, driving my car into the garage, I hear her slam the car door. She is having a little difficulty with the garage door. She is probably drunk. I can see a mental picture of her standing hands on hips in front of the garage door, giving it a disgusted look before deciding to give up for the night her battle with car-shelter portals, I imagine her lock the car, and walk to the frontdoor of the house, I imagine her taking out her keys, fumbling a bit with the lock, I imagine- Was that a gunshot?
