College was over, i was broke and an opportunity of getting a
job came by. And thus i found myself in Lucknow. The station was crowded and dirty
and it was a damn hot place. I’d got a tiny shack for myself off Faizabad Road.
It wasn’t quite a place but surely it was a quiet place. The good part was the cheap
Beer Joint right outside my window, the bad part was that electricity was a luxury
and spending ten straight hours in the beat summer-scorch was a part of the
whole deal.
Office-work was okay. All I had to do was teach law to a
bunch of nice little brats who reminded me of myself. But let’s not get into
that. I’m not here to tell about how i moved my sore ass around in office and
you are not here to hear about the same.
Like all bums and all the members of that great lost tribe
who keep on rambling without caring about destination, heat couldn’t deter me
from roaming around. I like busy sidewalks and crowded marketplaces of unknown
cities where one can safely hide and can observe the maddening tumult of folks strutting
and tumbling around to procure food and a place to stay and to keep themselves
clothed, with sheer awe that comes with the objectivity of being invisible. I
felt like being this phantom haunting the streets and slums of a big city just
for kicks.
And then of course, there were these country liquor joints
throughout the city. I would sit there for an hour or two and drink in silence,
with bits and pieces of stray conversations of the fellow worshippers of Dionysus-in-His-desi-avatar
bashing against my eardrums and falling flat. And when all these bored me, I would
trudge back to my room. By the time I would reach my 15-by-15 room with pink
walls which had faded with years of indifference and lassitude like all pink
and red and green and blue and yellow and white and black walls do, i would
inevitably be:
a)
Drunk
b)
Hungry
c)
Horny
d) All of the above
Taking care of Option (c) wasn’t possible. I hadn’t got my
paycheque yet, the city had no brothels and the tawaifs and courtesans of the
Lucknow we get to know from books and movies are lost in the quagmire of
apathetic time because of its attempts at globalisation and because of the
junkload of morality that is being heaped upon the heart of the city by politicians
of every colour since independence. There were no kothas, no tawaifs, no shayars
and even the music there has been butchered to death by Bollywood and its
lackeys.
Inside my room, i was pretty much cut off from the world.
Telephone and internet bored me and i stayed away from those. It was nice in a
way. I’m not a sucker for solitude and neither do i hate it. To me it’s just one
of those inevitabilities of life. It’s there like other stuff. I remember those
sultry summer nights which were so lonely that even the dogs refused to howl. I
would lie on my back, and listen to the crickets for hours till i passed out.
There’s a blasted poetry in life and you get to feel it when there’s no one you
can reach out for living or dying within a physical radius of around a thousand
kilometres and a virtual distance worth the effort of a pressing a few buttons.
Sadly, the allure of reaching out gets to us eventually. And I’m not sorry for
digressing.
Mornings were painful. I would wake up, often in a pool of
vomit and reeling under a giant hangover, rush to the washroom to clean the
bedsheets and my body. Luckily, i believe in nudism for convenience and in a
power-cut prone place where the average day temperature hovers around the mid
forties and the night temperature hovers around late thirties and given that i
was staying all alone and all by myself, i had acquired a proclivity for my
flabby hairy birthday suite dotted with juicy red boils. Hence, i didn’t need
to wash my clothes – washing my puke-stained body would suffice. Nevertheless,
bathing was a sordid affair. There was no shower and bending down to scoop out
water from the green plastic bucket with a red plastic mug and pouring the
same over me was an enterprising endeavour for which i was too lazy and way too
much in pain. Even the water was hot. After pouring a mugful of water or two, i
would stand there and itch and press the boils and feel droplets of puss oozing
out, and i would stand there and observe ants moving in nice straight columns
across the washroom walls before pouring water on them and scrutinising the
frenzy as they drowned like the inhabitants of Sodom and feeling godly in a way
because i was relieving them of their misery. The world’s surely a bust place
when it’s this hot and when you can feel real blood smashing the walls of those
arteries around your forehead and temple in brutal rage, seeking to burst out and
devour what that’s left of you like a pack of hungry wolves. It was on those enlightening minutes and
seconds that i learned what being deadbeat is all about.
Sunday mornings were different. There was no compulsion to
get up early. I would lie in bed for hours until the power-cuts, the heat and
the screeching and honking of automobiles got to me and then i would get up, and
indulge in the following activities:
1)
mutter curses aimed at the world at large and at
the god of electricity in particular
2)
light up a crispy bidi,
3)
sit at the loo and spray rum-shit and whiskey
shit all over the shitpot,
4)
feel good about that
5)
wash my ass and flush the shit down
6)
clothe myself in whatever cloth appeared closest
to my reach
7)
lock the doors and get the hell out to face the
first blow of searing gust
I would naturally be more hungover on Sundays than on
weekdays and that used to perk me up to fight my relentless duel with the blaze.
I was constantly walking and riding up and down the city, constantly swearing
at the heat, challenging it to throw me off the burning avenues and bleating
alleys, to get the better of me. My eyes would burn and i could feel gallons of
blood mixed with gallons of alcohol rushing up to my head, but i was tough
enough not to buckle. It was thus that i got to know the city.
Folks are similar everywhere, pissing on their own lives,
making a mockery of living and dying, existing for someone else, enduring through
all sorts of pointless dump. They are all the same, just like mannequins.
Then again, each city has its own smell and Lucknow smelled
of harshness, fuel, kebabs and gutters.
It had its own say in history: there were bullet holes from
the Mutiny on the walls of Residency, and the imambaras and mosques and
clock-towers were there too, all stone and concrete, and there was this sturdy dark
passage where morons and tourists get lost and pay the guides to show them the
way out. The idea of the lost ones paying someone to find a way out amused me. And
it still does. Suits all morons and tourists I guess.
The city has eaten all its history up, digested most of it
and has crapped, farted and belched away the rest. Now all that remains are the
towering structures which might well have been at some other place without making
much of a difference. It has become like a canful of stale flat beer, beyond all
grief and compunction. The gardens were nice.
Despite everything, when a city affords you good cheap food,
it’s hard not to grow fond of it. I never care for the big and famous eateries
because they don’t offer that real deal which lies in those small shacks that
sell food for the street-folks. And having those kebabs sold for 20 bucks a
plate from near the Railway Station was one of two the things i used to look
forward to after weary days spent slogging it out so that my employers could
get richer, the other thing being returning to my room and drinking myself to
sleep.
I’m back in my hometown now. I haven’t quit my job or been
fired yet. I’ve been transferred. I hate attaching the load of worth to things
or to experiences and all i’ll say about my one month out there fighting with life,
hangovers, the heat, and with the inevitable necessity of jumping into the
bandwagon despite being fully aware of the pointlessness of everything is that
i was there, i was alive and that’s about it.
3 comments:
BEPOK...!!
BEPOK..!!! Nothing more to say..!!
For me,the Bombay one was better,obviously! You call these 'travelogues'? Ahem ahem. I love them for their sheer directness and blunt words,so unlike your poetry! Why didn't you participate in IBL's poetry genre also? I saw they have it too(on their Facebook page). Anyway,see ya tomorrow. And am I allowed to expect that you might actually have my pen drive with you tomorrow,by any chance? :PryYou
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