A Story

So, you are ready to read? Are you comfortable reading stories? I ask especially, since some stories could be really demanding. To read a story, you need to volunteer and, to an extent, even strain. Sometimes, even then, it feels like you haven’t really put your finger on it. Writing is only trying to measure up to what one has read.
I quite understand that we are getting nowhere with such meandering prefatory dialogues. I better tell you the story that I thought I should tell and shut up, lest you ‘click over’ and leave as arbitrarily as you have come here. Please don’t. Let’s come to it – the story.
Note that we are going to read a quintessentially romantic story and that I give you unrestricted access to the main characters: you can fix names to hold them in, plan a genealogy to place them in, or even design and build a house to put them in. in that sense, we are going to construct this story together because I feel I should consider your claim for autonomy (you don’t want anyone to dictate terms, let alone whole stories, to you!), hard-earned knowledge (you always took pride in the fact that the story-teller must depend on you for identifying his story’s manifold ‘socio-cultural implications’ and mapping the story’s ‘complex layers of meanings’) and fine-tuned sensibility (remember how your chest grew heavy with admiration and awe at the sight of an author in the book stall; how your fingers lingered lovingly over a certain hardbound; or how you dug your way to glory and –finally – found a ‘worthy’ book from the heap of ‘trash’ in that second-books stall near by the New Stadium). In fact, I’m almost disappointed that you are more knowledgeable than me; I feel extremely insecure in having to think about you who push those specs a little up your nose, shift your weight in the chair and bend inquisitively over this page. So, out of sheer respect (add ‘a latent inferiority-complex’ too, if you will), I offer you the choice of names, neighborhoods, castes, creeds and appearances of these characters. As a matter of fact, I make sure that you decide on all the important attributes of the story (including its climax), while I merely present a scene or two that might go into it, and anticipate a final stroke of genius from your key-tapping fingers to make it a perfect story.
It is all about this anonymous man who woke up one morning and found that he is fatally wounded in the soul and has to die. It is a very still morning. Not even a faint breeze outside. All leaves stand still. He decides to confront his end rather languorously, and dresses himself in dark trousers, a silk shirt and a moustache that he finds abandoned near the washbasin. The man proceeds to wash himself carefully. He frowns in the shower at the thought of strangers sloshing buckets of water over his soon-dead, cold, stony, pale body. He decides to put on a frowning face at the moment of death so that he could claim some sense of self-respect with those corpse-washers. He grins. He proceeds to inspect his body closely, fondly: the uneven coloration of the skin, betraying the arrangement of flesh beneath it; its pores, now wet, through which hairs sprout; the molding and texturing of skin at the corner of nails. Then he prepares to look in the mirror, to see in it the most tragic and hopeless of all creatures. As he moves to the mirror, he remembers the opening sentence of a novel he has read last week: “Man is the only animal that dies before it is fully grown.”
The story proceeds in time. It is twilight. He decides to die in the arms of a woman, comfortably. And we see him smoking his favorite brand of cigarette, lying lost in the kind arms of a tall beautiful anonymous woman.
“……,” she posts an unasked question into the air. This unasked question drifts forward and upsets the sets of smoke-rings he was carefully crafting into the cold air.
“Yes?”
“Who are you? Really?”
“Who are you?” he returned.
“I’m not sure, but I can cook and fix your clothes and sleep with you” said she, “and when you’re tired of me you can say good-bye and I’ll be gone. How do you like that?”.
He didn’t say anything.
“See, there’s some soup boiling in the kitchen right now. Can you smell that?,” she asked with a gleaming eye. He waved off the cigarette- smoke that floated below his nose and breathed in. She’s right. There’s something spicy boiling in the kitchen. He liked the smell.
It was getting very hot in the room so she lifted his head slightly from her lap to take off her shawl. “You really need me, you know,” she said.
“What I was thinking about was that I want to ask you some questions that will help me fit some things together.” He said.
“What kind of questions?”
“I don’t know yet”, he said, “About what you like and don’t like mainly.”
“Well, sure, we can do that now”
He said, “I thought maybe I could ask questions about what your attitudes are about certain things. What your values are and how you got them. Things like that. I’d just like to ask questions and then later may try to put something together.”
“Sure,” she said, “What kind of questions?” She noticed that his cigarette had accumulated a small ash-stick at the burning end, since he has been thinking for a while.
She aimed at it and let out a playful sigh so that the ash-stick broke.
“What really matters as far as a question is concerned is its ability to understand the other person’s pattern of likes and dislikes,” he said. “What constitutes a society at large is its pattern of likes and dislikes, you see. And when the world sees that it better have a history, it tries to extract it from a given set of likes and dislikes.” He said. “However, I see that you are a completely different person and your preferences would never match mine. So, whatever question I might put to you, and whatever fancy I take on to convince myself of your preferences, in the end there is going to be a grave incompatibility. A silence. So…” he stopped noticing that he was not making any sense.
She was running her fingers through his hair, and it seemed it didn’t matter to her that she didn’t know what he was talking about. She breathed keenly at the smell of boiling spices from the kitchen.
“Give me a second. Let me just see what’s up with our soup.”
She goes to the kitchen. The soup is done. She uses a stainless steel handle to lift the pot off the stove. And, pours the liquid into two small bowls with a splutter of bubbles and a cloud of steam.
He leans on the wall, takes a final drag on the cigarette, and since there are no ash trays in the room, tosses it through the open window, into the withered garden. She brings in the soup bowls and they both smile at each other and drink the liquid down.
The sun sinks lower in the hills. After talking for long, feeling thoroughly exhausted, the man sinks deeper into the arms of the woman with a final question. “Why am I all alone like this on this end of the world?” he asked, his voice muffled. She whispers back: “You’re not; I’m with you.” She smelt like monsoon winds. At that moment, he realizes he need fear no wound, however fatal. The moon whimsically decided to give the night an extra-doze of moonlight. Without her noticing it, he scratched his nose expecting to find his moustache there. But no, it has fallen off somewhere.
You, the reader, catch him exactly at this moment. Pull him out of his peaceful night. Drag him into your day. Like an experienced psychoanalyst – well, you have always been very precise in recognizing what went on in others’ psyche – you lay him on the couch and ask him questions. Find out whatever you can, about his wound. Be sure to locate the way he is connected to me and you. And once you have made your diagnoses, show him the door. I know he will be a little puzzled as he steps out into the high noon outside. He will feel drained out, now that you have extracted his meanings completely. And he will also feel that his wound has grown into some sort of sickness. I hope that she can comfort him, and that she explains everything to him once again, when he finally drags his tired and hot feet into his living room.