#3. The Resurrection, Part 1: Born-Again.
In my 20s, I wrote a short story called Lost In Translation, before Sofia Coppola made a film by the same name. Upset, I threw it under a rock. But it was a rolling stone, and here it is, Born-Again.
PART 1.
I know I’ve fallen, but I don't think it's from Grace. I might have been picked. Either IN like a ripe tomato or OUT like a rotten one. I don’t know. I’m just a documenter trying to provide a narrative representative of our times. I mean, I see how it’s all really terrible and not right and how it should all be different, and I could talk to you the way they talk to us, but now with so little time, what’s the point of the pack of lies? Can’t de-crumple a crumpled post-it, if you know what I mean. Documenting is a great reason to hang around. Wallowing in the details is good – makes time fly. I like wallowing in the details.
Malini’s funeral prayers are done. We don’t feel like watching the cremation or going through all the chitchat of goodbye, so Sara and I slip out through one of the back doors. We wait in the parking lot for the sun to set, hidden from view, smoking, talking, and looking at everyone leave. Malini’s mother looks like she shrunk overnight. Tiny, faded, old. From somewhere in the ruins will resurface the tubby, meddlesome, crafty, mercenary, god-fearing, matchmaker that we know and love, no doubt.
The sky is pitch now. We get back in my car and zip down Marine Drive. Salt spray thickens on my windscreen. I flick my wipers on and off to clear it away, which only makes it worse. Lights twinkle in a dramatic arc all across the bay and the smog floats like a fat grey swan over the Arabian Sea. Sara pops in a tape: Where do bad folks go when they die? They don't go to Heaven where the angels fly, They go to the lake of fire and fry, See 'em again 'til the fourth of Joo-lai!
Offices are closed and there is relief in the air - a big unified cosmic fart - the sigh of people headed homeward. The sweaty men with their sweaty brown pants, pinstripe polyester shirts, and tired, lecherous eyes are safe in bed. Their wives exhale. Their oily-haired sons, tongues trapped between front teeth, sit head to a desk in white tube light, eyes a-pop, doing their sums, smudging the workbook with dinner-soiled hands.
But the dogs are out, and so are we. The streets belong to us again.
I just love this city at night.
Sara’s smoking a cigarette, holding it out of a gap at the top of the window where she’s rolled the glass down just an inch. Every now and again she takes a drag and blows smoke out through the gap. She thinks this stops it from circulating inside the car when the air-conditioning is on, but it doesn’t really. At the red light near Super Juice Centre, a beggar boy comes to the window. I don’t look directly at beggars anymore, but even from the corner of my vision, I can sense something odd about this one. Something not quite human. And I have to look.
He is so small that all I can see is a pair of grubby hands, tiny palms pressed flat against the cool of my window, and the matted top of a filthy head. He must be six or seven. He catches my eye. His breath condenses on the glass. I have to sit up straight, lean to the right, and peer all the way down to see his face. Or what’s left of it. There’s no upper or lower lip and the flesh is almost gone from the chin, making his teeth flash skull-like. It looks as if someone held a blowtorch under his jaw, and stopped just before his nose began to melt. It is an incredible face. A face with the suspended motion of a half-burned candle. As he points to the coins on my dashboard, I begin to feel slightly nauseous, but the light’s turned green and someone is honking madly. Sorry, kid, bad timing.
In twenty minutes, we’re at Sara’s place, pulling Meena, the maid, away from the TV and into the kitchen. Launching her task with loud abuse in an obscure dialect from an obscure village, she serves us dinner, makes fresh rotis, hovers while we eat, clears the plates, and finally, brings us glasses of chilled water and slivers of apple. It’s been a forty-five-minute procedure, her show is over, and she’s pissed as shit. She’ll have to watch the re-run tomorrow afternoon, during her nap time. Sara’s father, widower, sadsack, has no money. Meena’s probably provided him with a little more than hot lunch all these years if you know what I mean.
Sara and I never discuss it. For all her indifference to the world at large, Sara can be quite touchy about Slave Queen Meena. Mother replacement, tier of shoelaces, maker of ponytails, ironer of school uniforms, waiter at bus stop, applier of coconut oil, nursemaid through several bouts of malaria, grudging accomplice to all her teenage crimes, sneaking cigarettes in and boyfriends out, and even at one point, regular agent for the securing from the Nepali watchman, little bags of quality Manali weed.
I never had a Meena, or parents worthy of description. The apartment where I grew up was foreign, the room in which I spent my childhood, unfamiliar. When my half-brother Jeet died, he gave me his life. He’d made some money, bought a small apartment, a little car, a truck full of books, and a commendable (though tiny) collection of art, all of which he left to me. My parents told everyone that Jeet’s death was an accident, but it wasn’t. He’d quit his job, left his girlfriend, and worked out his will just weeks before floating out of his terrace on the wings of a hallucinogen. He was 32. I was twelve and inconsolable. Mainly because losing Jeet had broken my grandmother’s heart. She died a few weeks later, of ‘natural causes’, and for months after, I was too scared to go out into the balcony, convinced that they were sitting there, Jeet and Nani, on the top branch of the four-storey high gulmohar tree, arms outstretched, waiting for me.
PART 2.
Jeet’s flat is my body. I wander through its space a sheltered soul. The kitchen, the bar, and the living room are my guts, the white-washed walls my rib cage, the terrace my eyes, ears, tongue, and the bedroom, the beating of my heart. If you look up into the apartment from the street you can actually see, stacked from floor to ceiling, several tattered towers - the dubious legacy from a dead brother. His books fill my space with the world. I look for him on their pages, and sometimes it makes me brood. For example, a few days ago I found a large illustrated volume on Volcanoes. The spine groaned and crackled as I opened it, and right there, on the first page, was a big ring-shaped stain from a cup of coffee. Under it, the words: For J, for love, Love, M. I’m really not the wistful type, but I found myself spending most of that day conjuring up M and J lying around on the wooden floor of my apartment, barefoot, listening to Simon and Garfunkle LPs, drinking coffee, kissing.
Read Part 2 of The Resurrection HERE.
[TO BE CONTINUED… perhaps. If you are curious about how the story ends, please leave a comment below to help me decide if l should serialise it… or not! ] *
© Tara Sahgal
* This post is an excerpt from a short story I wrote in my 20s which I submitted (in part) with an application for a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. It was the early 2000s, I had recently finished a MA in Fiction and didn’t much care for what life in the so-called ‘real world’ had to offer. Luckily, I didn’t get in at the University I had my heart set on (East Anglia, rather ambitiously!), nor could I work up the nerve to ask my parents to pay for the less impressive second choice that had accepted my application while also enabling my now possibly pathological avoidance behaviour. What I did know even then is that getting words on the page was the best Way of Escape available to a person such as myself. I proceeded to publish a surfeit of features, travel stories, editorials, and book reviews in glossy magazines, newspapers, and websites, which helped hone the skills I badly needed to write better. Happily, the fictional Hellscapes I created in my spare time were so awful, that returning from them to my rather comfortable and ordinary life felt like Heaven. A win-win situation.
“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic, and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
Aaaaarrrrrrgh .... where's the rest of it!
Gosh ... so vivid, T ..
I still don't look at beggars directly :-p
Yeh dil maange more!
Serialise it!