seed #360
1. Addict and the Lover
The hands have frozen at the right angle since dawn. The passage of time is untraceable, but the motion of moments is impervious to the whim of a clock. The day had inched through a sunny corridor and tumbled into an evening of catastrophe. Only Noah can save our asses here. Despite this big rain and storm, the heat wouldn’t go down. This room is a snake that has swallowed and entangled me in the entrails of its emptiness. Boredom is superbly underrated; it is the DNA of all miseries. I am so bored at this moment that I am losing my mind, not that I have done much good with it anyway, but it’s not a great feeling to be going crazy on an evening like this. I see Buddha bleeding all over the wall poster, cobwebs scar the grimy walls, an ugly spider labors under my nose, the ceiling fan circles like a stoned cat, the damp floor eats into the spine. I toss and turn, there! Buddha blows smoke, cardamom scents the air. Coughing like a madman, I light a cigarette, Staring out of the window with a blank disheveled gaze. The rain gleams surreally in sodium lights, beating down on the window panes like devil’s wrath. The rain gets louder, and the pangs are worse. My heart races, my abdomen knots up, and I sweat like a pig. I try and focus on my crippled concentration.
Where to get it? How to get it? Somewhere, somehow.
I retch, wipe the vomit with an old t-shirt I could get my hands on, then something strikes me hard as I wash my mouth in the frosty tap water. Nothing concrete, just a faint glimmer of hope, but it feels enough at this point. I slip into sweat pants and a T-shirt, take my leaky umbrella and get out of my home.
You know you are an addict when you make a move like that or maybe a lover if you like it that way. I feel neither, but I must be both; they might just overlap and become one, but that may happen later; for now, I am out in this crazy cloudburst. This feels like the last evening of mankind. I am standing knee-deep in dirty water, and with me is this story. We hope to move together…
When I met Suvro six months back, he was planning to move out. I hoped he was still there at his place while I waded through the liquid lanes, devoid of life and drama as the rain brooked through my perforated umbrella. By the time I found myself seated on his couch I was all drenched and sneezing, but it was a relief to have found him at his place.
“It feels great to see you, man, what’s up?? You vanished without a word… never picked calls… you don’t answer emails. What shit? Here, dry yourself.” He flung a towel at me. I replied with a smile and began searching for a cue to ask him about the song.
I had witnessed the death of hope after my computer crashed the day I lost my iPod. It happened on an overcrowded local train while I was returning home staggering on vodka and pills with no sense of time and self. It was one of those rare moments when you can feel your complete self-ripping at the seams, erupting into atoms and impossible to be put together again. I have had two serious issues all my life; one was this Song and the other my memory. They unite and part like neurotic lovers. Now, they had fused again and cracked me up.
2. Crazy in Love
It leapt onto me from a tape recorder like a flying snake and stung me all over. It was my 10th birthday party. It was a jolly good party, and nobody noticed as every tiny part of me became the synergy of an inexplicable feeling; it made my stomach churn, invaded my ears, took the hostage of my soul. That was the most appalling tune you would ever hear. The words assaulted the senses. The tune gnawed at me like mountain rats. I prayed for it to stop, feeling violated and feeble. The song didn’t stop; endurance has its limits, and I passed out.
When I woke up, I was a different person. I felt in my senses as if the old one had been washed away forever. And this new person was nothing but a memory; this person was smitten.
At that age, you usually fall prey to what impacts you, and in my case, that wasn’t so, but there was someone in me who couldn’t make a human from a gibberish song awakened by the severity of its ugliness. In the throes of this untimed emotional chaos, I felt the tingling sensations of first love, the kind that kills the child in you. Tidal surges began within me, and each time a thought like that happened, I felt I was being mauled at places where my shame rested.
The insanity creeped out my parents as they failed to understand its nature. They combed through the big and small music stores of the city. The search was frenzied, like- “Our 10-year old son is losing his shit on this thing he heard, we need that thing.” Just that they had no idea what they were looking for- neither the name of the song nor the singer. Besides, they also didn’t have the foggiest idea of what rattled their son to an extent where he refused to speak to anybody. The store people would give me those looks of relishing disbelief as I made a crazy show in front of them. Rich mad kids were always a comic relief amid the tedium of ill paying jobs.
In no time, they took me to a shrink. He couldn’t get the head or tail of my problem and prescribed my parents more attention towards me. That amounted to too much attention, suffocating and bereft of any point. They began buying me stuff which I didn’t need, took me on trips I didn’t want to go on, spoilt me with snickers and video games with no help at all. I kept losing interest in all these things at an incomparable rate. I lost appetite and weight, looking like a malnourished walnut. I would sit at the corner of my room, contemplating the song, reliving the irritation dripping out of its chaotic notes like a tiny blood clot. My grades and attendance in school sank, too; everything else too declined at an astounding rate except my madness.
Things were turning pretty messed up when my father got promoted in his job, and we shifted base to Delhi. This helped. In the course of time, things became normal. Time heaped on time. I finished school and went on to major in journalism. In my second year, I topped the university and got picked by a leading daily to write for their sports column. I even got this nice apartment on rent; I began seeing this cute French girl staying up in Saket near my office. We use to get drunk on the weekends and have sex with Kenny G in my apartment.
We used to hang out quite often. One day we were at this new bistro in South Delhi. The ambience was warm and fuzzy- nice biscuit scent mixed in the air, fancy murals, well-dressed people, a John Denver instrumental playing in the hall, a nice saxophone looping smoothly through the air, smiles peeling here and there, iced tea and sandwiches. Suddenly, from catastrophe’s toe, it strikes. It tears out of the music and erodes me fifteen years back to that party where it had waylaid me.
Time is malleable; if you could feel the sameness as I did, you wouldn’t disagree. It was as if an invisible wave through a fibre optic glass had culminated into this moment that has joined these two episodes positioned two decades apart. The same notes tumbling on to each other in the same way, no sense of rhythm or pitch, the same off voice screaming like a toad. It darkens inside. Then there’s a strong gust, a splash of rain, enamel bright lights assault my pupils. Everything freezes, like the silence which looms when acceptance kills hope methodically inside a hospital ward. This was a union with lost love for a few fleeting moments. The tremor of an emotion indistinguishable from happiness and horror rose in me before disappearing in a blink. A black tunnel engulfed me and everything.
3. The Bar Whore
Yes, Love is a tunnel. Long, dark and winding with the certainty of no light at the end. In fact, there is no end at all. The permanence of pain brings the permanence of hope, which is why people love to suffer. Dreaming of things getting better is better than actually, things getting better. It’s a crazy habit, being in hope and love, making plans of getting out of it but never quite getting out- that gap fuels everything in life. Things are like dreams here, at times like nightmares, and most of the time, they fuse into one another. I wake up with cold sweat; I sleep throughout the following two days.
My girlfriend broke up with me over an email stating that she was leaving the city for work. She hates it, but nothing can be done. “It’s better we took a break. Fake mare of the year health.” The last sentence took me a while to understand, and I was in splits after I got it. Errors and stupidity usually enrage me, but together I find them funny. So, that’s the best she could think of after my eerie fit creeped her out. That was also very funny when I thought of it, but I don’t blame her; that’s not how a woman likes her guy, digging a cheeseburger this moment and with a bleeding nose the other, getting shakes like a heroin addict. I wanted to feel bad about it, and I wanted my pain to shift to the break-up. Perhaps it would have if I managed to recollect her face properly, but when an old romance relapses like that, your memory refuses to maintain any discipline.
Pain and longing dwell in a locked room somewhere inside the head. Now, they have broken the door, spilled on my consciousness like molten tar, and I can feel the heat. There was no room left for anything else, and it was too greasy for anything more. Memory has an inexplicable way of flushing out all its contents except for the one it wishes to retain. And, usually, the one it does is a beast that runs rampant in its mind always.
Some weeks would have manic torrent in them. They’d spring out of a dreaded Monday and wash away every other day. I wasn’t complaining like all, rather the only thing that kept me tied to sanity at this point was work. I did my writing, covered hockey matches, cut down my coffee, smoked very little, and crashed real early. Tired myself real bad to feel nothing. I guess I riled people around me real bad; from the milkman to my colleagues, everybody thought I was behaving some kind of a loony oddball, being uncooperative and all that. Not much that I could do about that, I wasn’t speaking much, that’s all. I wanted to share this thing with someone, but all I could do was tell it to myself. I was never really fond of my colleagues, but they were fond of me. But when you wake up in the middle of the night, have crazy-ass dreams of a song reaching a satanic pitch and destroying your sanity, you can’t be congenial.
I would go insane on some nights; I can’t tell how. Many nights went like that, sleep wrecked, dehydrated, coughing in a strange world of blankness and loops. Sleeping pills failed, and so did meditation music. Insomnia stricken eyes see a different reality. The problem with losing it this way is that a part of you, an active, rational part of you keeps alerting that you are getting crazy, and that’s where the battle begins. Russian roulette with a dark unknown adversary within, turning you into a battlefield of some sort. Very few reach sweet madness unhindered by that other voice. The fix here was strange- it wasn’t purchasable, it wasn’t known, it was devoid of identity. You realize the worth or the worthlessness of money on such occasions.
“Hey, wassup, care for a beer?” My phone beeped. That was Vikram; we used to play billiards; in the last few days, I hadn’t taken his calls. It was Saturday, and people were leaving the office early. I had plans to stay back and finish an article. I hadn’t slept in days. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal. I stank. I kept googling up like a loony fuck for the worst songs ever but never came across it. This was draining, this ever inflating hollowness. Get a grip! Get a grip! So I thought I should go out with Vikram and unwind.
“Seriously, this sounds insane.”
After my parents, Vikram became the first person I told of my strange affliction. It took me four beers to explain to him the entire thing. Vikram had this thing for weirdness; I thought he could find some identity for this habit, and most importantly, sharing felt good. I think he found it crazy.
“I guess you aren’t getting your dick sucked enough, take a break from work, find yourself some pussy.”
I hated him at that moment. I decided that I would surely not meet this moneyed bastard again in my mind. I deleted his number, and then I realized he had my wristwatch, which he was supposed to give me back. We got out of the bar. A whore approached me; I took her home. Usually, I am not too hot for whores, but as I told you, I was drunk, and it had been quite a while.
We fucked. She was gone by the time I woke up. Later, I figured out that she had taken money out of my wallet. I was fixing myself some breakfast when I noticed a CD on the bed. She must have left it behind. I played it, and there were almost 20 folders of music named after the singer. One of them was named “anonymous”, and I found it there.
4. Pointlessness of Pointlessness
It felt like feeling complete, like having found it felt like finding a missing part of the body. Like a violent storm had subsided, and a beautiful season bloomed. It was enough for me not to question how it happened. I saved the song on my computer and on my new iPod, a gift from my mother. I marked the CD as “the best music collection” with a few of the artists’ names on the cover. In spite of this feeling of being complete, I searched for the whore everywhere I could. I cannot conclude concretely why, but I guess it was just a part of me trying to find another human who could understand the importance of this gibberish song. But, sad luck, it’s not possible to find one particular whore in a big rotting city like this.
Suvro played the guitar very well, especially the Dave Matthews palm mute percussion style. He landed up at my place on a sunny day with a few friends, and we jammed. After the jam, he noticed the CD and wanted to take it along with him. I didn’t want him to, but I didn’t know how to say no. That was another big problem with me, saying no was always such a tough one.
This story is wayward. It moves on its own, it simpers and runs in strange directions, but it has joined me back on Suvro’s couch.
“Fuck off, Miles!” He screams at his dog, licking my legs, a golden retriever named after Miles Davis. That’s strange right? I don’t know what kind of a fan boy tribute is that naming your pet after your hero. I wouldn’t have particularly appreciated that if I were Miles Davis.
“Here, have coffee. You are here on a good day, my folks are out and I have some mad stuff on me.” He took out a reefer and dangled it.
“We will smoke this after you go and wash your feet.”
I almost rushed to the washroom as if I couldn’t wait to take a hit. In reality, though, I had no interest in getting stoned and talking crap with him. But I had to do that. I wanted to normalize the vibe as much as I could, otherwise, I wasn’t too crazy for dope. The thing with stoners is that they think everybody climaxes over a joint. Damn. I don’t get their thing; I don’t get my thing either. Quite literally so.
I did the washing pretty fast and came out. Meanwhile, Suvro had fixed coffee and placed it on the table. Porcupine tree wafted from the speakers as he lit the joint in the dimmed hues of the room. The entire room was filled with a pungent scent of grass. I puffed twice, and then Suvro reduced the volume.
“So? How are things, man? Long time since we smoked up.” He took another long deep drag.
“Yeah, man, really missed it.”
“Fuck you, man. Don’t lie. You are so inaccessible all the time.” “You know work and all.”
“How’s work? You don’t look so good. You haven’t touched the razor in a long time, have you?”
“I quit my job.”
“Why? That was a thick paying job, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but didn’t like it much.” I was looking down; it was real hard to carry out a conversation so unwillingly looking straight into his eyes.
“You can join me for good, you know, we can create some real good things. I am working as an independent cartoonist for an advertising firm. Communication in the new media is all about creative graphics.”
“I will definitely consider this, but I will chill for some time now.”
“Oh! No issues, man, here.”
I just affirmed with a smile, but that wasn’t enough, he expected more. I was blowing smoke through the suspended silence. It was getting awry, plus the weed was really messing up with my thoughts. John Mayer hummed in falsetto, Suvro increased the audio. The music poured on to the silence ornate with all those beautiful riffs and licks, and in that instance, the voices in my head got so loud that I couldn’t hear anything.
“You alright?” Suvro asked. I was perhaps breathing a bit heavy.
“Do you have that CD, with songs and all you took from me?” I asked him in a voice which concealed so much that I kind of recoiled within myself.
“I don’t remember. I have taken many CDs from many people.” He was visibly irked by the question.
“No you took one when you came to my home some four months back. We jammed together that day.”
“We have done that many times at your place. What’s the point? My computer is formatted, and I lost my CDs while travelling.”
“Can you get me my CD? Like now, I really need it.” “I can’t figure out which CD, give me a few days.” “Did you hear all the songs?”
“I don’t get what you are talking about.”
“Did you hear the song in a folder called anonymous? A bad kind of song?”
“I don’t remember, and there are many bad songs I hear. In fact, there are more bad songs than good.”
“No man, like really bad, all off-key and a bad voice and gibberish lyrics…”
“I might have, but why are you so keen on a bad song? I will give you a kickass blues album.”
I found nothing good coming out of the conversation. Somewhere I thought Suvro was lying, he was purposely denying me my CD. He wanted to keep it a secret not to be shared, but I was sure he wouldn’t be able to like I couldn’t. This song becomes a private hell wherever it goes. It’s beautiful ugliness is undeniably alive.
“I’ll get going.”
5. Recluse and the Romantic
I am hopeless again. Me and the story are down in the rain, but it is about to desert me here in hopelessness and regress in time. I can’t exactly recollect, it was around October, I met this girl at Suvro’s place over a beer gathering. He was actually quite hot with women. He introduced me to this girl, a petite chick studying philosophy. We kind of got along well. She was well informed on current matters and books, and we started doing it at my place. A kind of hormonal carnival it used to be, she seemed to have seen things and been places. The sex was good, but I think I couldn’t handle the conversations for long. She would express all her fondness for ribbed men and Romcom TV. Naturally, what she spoke of made no sense to me.
Meanwhile, my consumption of the song had become very high. All my points of pleasure had concurred on it. Nothing else would do. I would go to the office, take frequent loo breaks, and would listen to the song. Mr. Banerjee from the editorial section was a curious man; he kind of sniffed this odd behavior and followed me to the loo. I was having a quick shot when he knocked on the door and asked me, “You listen to songs when you pee, that speaks great things about you.” I broke into a sweat as if I had been caught killing
“Care for a smoke?” he added.
“No,” I replied, “Quit smoking.” I tried to leave.
“But I saw you smoking this morning. Is there something bothering you?” I nodded a no and walked out of the washroom.
He followed me out of the washroom, stopped me, l snatched my headphones, and put it in his ears. In no time, he was laughing.
“You are such a weirdo man. You look as if you haven’t seen your bed for months. You don’t talk much. You take all these frequent breaks, look sheepishly around to check if people are looking at you, then sit and lock yourself in the loo. I have been following this for a long while man, I thought you were on something, then I noticed you crouch inside the lavatory and plug yourself with the headphone, and now this is what it is, you are weird.. hahaha…” and he started laughing really loud.
Very involuntarily, I punched him in the face, kicked him in his groin, followed by a kick in his balls. He started bleeding. That was a big show; I walked out of the office. I lost my shit after I came out and smoked eight cigarettes in succession to get a grip, things in my head were sinfully fast, and the scene outside was equally slow. It seemed to me I would go off my axis and fall apart into pieces. My phone rang at that instance, and I thrust it on the ground with the force of all the madness strumming inside me. It shattered to smithereens. I took a cab and returned home.
I shut myself up for the next seventeen days, lived on puffed rice and water, locked in my room, and kept myself ear plugged. I kept listening to it. It was like emancipation every time I listened to it, like unhurried lovemaking in the solitude of my room. I had built up a wall between the world and me. The voices inside my head, the countless me’s in me, had all become faint, moments melted in that privacy. Neither of us was like the way we were supposed to be. She wasn’t like most songs were; I wasn’t like most men were.
Identity was a matter of number; the mean measure of everything. Our love flourished like never before for seventeen days, completely cut from the world. Perhaps, even cut from the dark passenger inside me- no clamor of inner voices, as if an erected wall stopped the diabolic communication. A series of buzzers made incursions of my little haven of peace on the morning of the eighteenth day. Fucking tore me out of my sleep; it was that philosophy girl I was doing. She was shocked at my appearance; I looked like a blinking corpse.
5. Love Lost
“You are full of shit. Go fuck yourself.” She told me after we fucked. I told her that I can’t take this forward; I got issues. Before leaving, she threw the books I had given her to me. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of a nutcrack would bring books with the idea of breaking up but end up fucking before doing it, ultimately leaving it to the other person to take the call of the break. Probably, it was just her way of insulting; I couldn’t help but laugh at her juvenile thought.
On the first page of the book, I found a number written with a name which I reckoned was familiar. I called the number and realized it was my friend from school. We hadn’t met in a long while. We met later that day over a beer. He was a musician. I made him listen to the song and asked him about it. He laughed and told me I must be crazy to have such a song on my playlist. I hate it when they do that.
I left the bar pretty drunk, new JBL headphones stuck to my ears, the song played in a loop. I was quite drunk over four beers, and I missed the 10:20 train. The next train that arrived was insanely packed. When it arrived, I thought of letting it go and taking a cab back. Yet, driven by tipple, I boarded it. That was the worst decision I ever took. After I got down, budging the crazy crowd, I realized I had lost my iPod. The moment I remember was the blow of a hammer on the head, then the pain became sharp, that was my only friend, the medium of my love, the witness of my life, and it was gone.
I sat there by the station till I met a man who also seemed to have lost most things in life, that is how his eyes were, red with memory and his breath stank of something sharp and outlandish. We didn’t exchange a single word; we looked at each other. His tattered clothes and sweat had the effect of ointment on me. The sore of loss got a warm touch. We got up and started walking after he gestured with his hands. We bought vodka from a woman in an unknown dingy lane. It was 1 ’o ’clock and the roads were empty. We had it neat in halves. Some stray dogs barked the shit out of their tonsils. The man looked at them, and they scattered away. After he was done, he gave me a few white and blue pills, “These will help.” With that, he showed me the direction of the highway.
I was sloshed. I reached the highway and luckily got a cab. The driver charged me a hundred bucks more than the fare. I agreed. Sitting in the back seat, I popped those pills. It distorted time beyond my wristwatch; I staggered my way into the bedroom and switched on the computer. I had my headphones intact. In fact the iPod wasn’t that relevant other than being a gift from my mother because I haven’t been consuming other forms of music. That would be like cheating on my partner, which I didn’t want to. I had the song on the computer, and that was what had given me the relief, but it crashed. It did, like a cruel joke.
I howled for the whole night. A pale moon hung in the sky like a grim portrait. Like a mirage, I had lost her, I tried to fix the hard disk, but it turned out to be impossible. Something in me told me that everything would go bad from there onward. I mourned for days to come. Then my mother came to visit me and told me my father was unwell. I told her that I had some assignments, and will get over and all. She tried to talk marriage, but I managed to avoid it somehow,
“Are you sure you are fine?” Her parting maternal concern expressed in precision. I had nothing much to say. I could never understand what it is
actually to be fine or was it just a collective yearning we had, something to chase- to be fine. Being fine was a comic set piece like misery itself.
6. Calling Noah
In the last six months of my life, I have aged at a faster rate than time could offer. I feel old, and now in this rain with this crumbling story which adheres neither to chronology nor friendship, I feel older than ever. I was lost in my cruel head, drenched in the rain; my umbrella had disintegrated into metal without the top. I saw the interplay of halogen and calamity represented like fine art—the streaks of thunder and the hiss of snakes past my toes. I saw a group of people chasing someone in the silhouette at the crossroad. There were four men, splashing water, running like blood crazy. The person being followed took a right and crossed me from the opposite direction. Right then, in the brief moment as the person crossed me, I heard a ringtone. I rotated and followed instantly.
I became the fifth guy to chase the running lot. I knew nothing else. Struck by the lightning which nearly missed me all evening, I followed her as she got up and vanished. There were a few under construction buildings; their skeletons looked morbid in the rain. Dust whiffed in the air, and I heard the strains coming from the building. I climbed up through that pitch blackness. I climbed up through the blue light, which guided me. I kept climbing, one step at a time, almost tripped over.
…the song again… my song…how did it reach here…
I heard a rush of voices and footsteps behind me. I climbed up onto the roof with the rain beating down like stones. I looked all around, couldn’t find a soul, and then I felt a sharp deathly stab on the back. I yelled in pain, then a blow on the head, “Take this motherfucker.” More stabs followed.
I felt death penetrating deeper, replacing life, a slow sweet process. The pain was like purifying fire, like the melody. I realized in that fit of frenzy that the voice was a woman’s. She played, as we both tripped over something and went over the ledge falling. The song played again from her cell phone, and it played till we fell. Before we did hit the ground, I thought I saw her face; it was the prostitute from the bar.
We shared a secret well-kept in the recesses of our hearts, and probably so did those men chasing her. The song left them all except her, and she preserved it—none of us who knew this met in conventions or met in privacy and discussed retreats. But, if we would have, I am sure we would have talked of falling in love and getting stung by it at an odd place and odd time.
Where to get it? How to get it? Somewhere, somehow.
I retch, wipe the vomit with an old t-shirt I could get my hands on, then something strikes me hard as I wash my mouth in the frosty tap water. Nothing concrete, just a faint glimmer of hope, but it feels enough at this point. I slip into sweat pants and a T-shirt, take my leaky umbrella and get out of my home.
You know you are an addict when you make a move like that or maybe a lover if you like it that way. I feel neither, but I must be both; they might just overlap and become one, but that may happen later; for now, I am out in this crazy cloudburst. This feels like the last evening of mankind. I am standing knee-deep in dirty water, and with me is this story. We hope to move together…
When I met Suvro six months back, he was planning to move out. I hoped he was still there at his place while I waded through the liquid lanes, devoid of life and drama as the rain brooked through my perforated umbrella. By the time I found myself seated on his couch I was all drenched and sneezing, but it was a relief to have found him at his place.
“It feels great to see you, man, what’s up?? You vanished without a word… never picked calls… you don’t answer emails. What shit? Here, dry yourself.” He flung a towel at me. I replied with a smile and began searching for a cue to ask him about the song.
I had witnessed the death of hope after my computer crashed the day I lost my iPod. It happened on an overcrowded local train while I was returning home staggering on vodka and pills with no sense of time and self. It was one of those rare moments when you can feel your complete self-ripping at the seams, erupting into atoms and impossible to be put together again. I have had two serious issues all my life; one was this Song and the other my memory. They unite and part like neurotic lovers. Now, they had fused again and cracked me up.
Magaj INC 