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.
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