Ridoan is in a trauma, and in a trance, staring in horror-fused fascination at the copper-brown heap in front—the skeletal body of a teenage girl squatting naked in the Indian shitting posture right in the middle of the road, without the slightest sign of shame and totally oblivious, may be defiant, to the posh Gulshan surroundings. The nudity of the girl—whom he thinks as a thing, not a person, without knowing exactly why—is obviously not in imitation of the sky-clad Jainas, but probably because she has nothing to wear or does not give a damn about it, as her mind, her whole existence is in the grip of the almost visible pain radiating from her rectum, exposed, jutting inside out in a large cone-shaped lump, a giant polyp, from the look of it. What mesmerises him the most is her face, an ashen mask frozen in bottomless pain and despair, which is more eloquent in its impassivity than any facial expression could be, which can only be likened to those one sees in the sick, medieval, paintings of sinners frying in Dante’s purgatory. Both her legs from the toes halfway through the knees are swollen, pockmarked with numerous broils oozing a yellowish green viscous liquid.
Even from some 20 feet away, from the entrance to the office building where his wife works, Ridoan can make out the telltale features that mark out a street urchin turned nymphet living on hooking and drugs. But, she clearly had sunk too deep, to the lowest underworld of Rasatal, hit the rock bottom and bounced back to the surface and out, landing on an alien life of a Kafkaesque insect, bewildered, sick, and as lonely as the pre-creation God. Being a poet, though sans the palest halo of acclaim, Ridoan can intuit the wormlike existence she has fallen into. She is human no more. He realises it with a chill running down the spine and spreading deep into the marrow; and he also knows that she knows it too but has surrendered, like a fly caught in a spiderweb, to a pain-induced stupor, awaiting death to come and devour in mercy, wiping out the misery called life or the universe.
So, mute and immobile, the emaciated creature remains crouched in the sultry August noon on the swanky suburban street, unaware of its absurdity. On her left, behind the obscure poet, is a scowling NGO tower and on right a greenhouse-like apartment block. People here rarely walk, unless prescribed by doctors, for they feel it beneath their station to breathe unconditioned air. These devotees of Capital are all for conditioning. From air-conditioned homes they commute in air-conditioned cars to work in air-conditioned offices, shop in air-conditioned stores or dine in air-conditioned restaurants, doing everything in conditioned reflex. So, they pass by the statue of misery, a freak they are not conditioned to deal with.
To Ridoan it seems as if some cruel cynic has conjured her up out of nowhere and planted there to mock democracy, equality, civilisation, human rights, globalisation, CSR, development, gender parity, and such buzzwords uttered, typed, written, printed and read thousand times a day in the buildings around by displaying a personification of the extreme debasement man has accepted for many in exchange of magnificence for a few. Mad and mute, to Ridoan she symbolises the depravity the children of Adam have fallen into to curry favour with their new god, the Capital. But, what disturbs him the most is the symbol being not inanimate but alive.
And then he sees, as if responding to a telepathic message of his angst, her head suddenly turns towards him with a mechanical motion like a searchlight. A pair of dazed, innocent eyes screams for mercy, for an end to it all. The haunted dark wells of her eyes describe more eloquently than any poet could the hell of black, lightless flames she is in, built with pieces of poverty, lust, fear, greed, treachery, slums, beatings, rapes, fatwa, addiction, prostitution, and multitudes of similar wastes of Capital.
A challenge also enters the look, lighting it up with a tiny flicker of intelligence, returning to the insect its human self for a few milliseconds. The challenge is for Ridoan to shake off the instinctive wish to help. Legally, he, the motorists, the residents of the buildings around, or the occasional passers-by, none knows or owes her anything. But, the child in everyone knows her as well as one’s own self, as a co-limb of the same body, and owes her everything to release her from pain and give her ease and peace. Yet, the urgency to keep an appointment with his doctor snuffs out an sudden impulse in a retired colonel to take her to some shelter home, while a rickshaw-puller stops, moves towards her, halts, ponders a while, shrugs, and then turns around and paddles away down the road.
Everyone, it appears, is too busy to help the girl, to help one’s own bloody self, Ridoan swears in silence. He becomes angry — with the girl, with everyone, everything, the entire lousy world, but most vehemently at himself. The one thing he has always boasted of is of being a maverick, a born rebel, a through-and-through outsider. That claim now faces a challenge. The thing on the road by its mere existence challenges him to either justify or relinquish that pride of being different, an individual, not one of the near-identical corporate products differentiated by names alone.
He re-enters the building, takes the elevator to the floor where his wife Amrina is.
‘Give me some clothes for the girl, quick,’ he bursts into the room and whispers in an urgent falsetto to Amrina, who whispers back, but adding a hiss, ‘What girl is that?’
He takes hold of her arm and almost drags her to the window, ‘That one, you see, on the road, that lousy miserable girl.’
Ridoan looks for some indication of Amrina’s mind in her face. Finding none, he goes on, pausing after every sentence, ‘She needs a doctor… She must go to a hospital… But, I have to cover her with some clothes first… Don’t you have any old clothe, a sari, bed sheets, anything in this office?’
‘Of all men, why must it be you, the most worthless of them all, to help her? He who can’t even help himself wants to become a saviour! Ha!’ Amrina has a way of making words so caustic and abrasive that it really hurts, when she wants to.
Ridoan winces as the words jab him at his core. But he continues to stand beside the window, glaring at his wife in defiance. Ambrina on her own looks through the Venetian blinds down at the girl and then moves back to her desk. She rings a calling bell and an elderly orderly appears. ‘Bashir chacha, go, bring a saree, from those for zakat, you know, from the storeroom. Tell Amin, I will fill up the requisition slip later. It is urgent. Go bring it in five minutes. Okay?’
‘Thanks,’ says Ridoan, which he rarely does, and approaches her as if to hug, but halts in the midway in astonishment He sees her blush, after how many years he doesn’t know. He stares at her face in amazement and realises, also after a long time, how comely she really is, a little weary from work, stress, dissatisfaction and boredom but her body language is still as dignified as her virgin days. And all of a sudden, memories of their brief courtship during a film appreciation course rush back to his mind.
The sari arrives. Taking it from Bashir, Amrina says, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Are you going, too? I never thought you would,’ astonished, Ridoan actually stammers.
She smiles in mock derision, ‘How do you expect me to trust you alone with such a task? It’s enough that you at least could decide to do something good, at last. But, do you believe you can mange taking so sick and crazy a girl to a hospital all by yourself? And arrange for her treatment?’ Those are not questions, but statements. But they don’t hurt him anymore.
‘Now, don’t stand there like a fool. Let’s move,’ her hand feels soft and caressing on his arm, leading him towards the elevator.
The elevator descends, while the two souls mate again in silence and fly again in pair in a more sublime joy than they used to do years ago.
Even from some 20 feet away, from the entrance to the office building where his wife works, Ridoan can make out the telltale features that mark out a street urchin turned nymphet living on hooking and drugs. But, she clearly had sunk too deep, to the lowest underworld of Rasatal, hit the rock bottom and bounced back to the surface and out, landing on an alien life of a Kafkaesque insect, bewildered, sick, and as lonely as the pre-creation God. Being a poet, though sans the palest halo of acclaim, Ridoan can intuit the wormlike existence she has fallen into. She is human no more. He realises it with a chill running down the spine and spreading deep into the marrow; and he also knows that she knows it too but has surrendered, like a fly caught in a spiderweb, to a pain-induced stupor, awaiting death to come and devour in mercy, wiping out the misery called life or the universe.
So, mute and immobile, the emaciated creature remains crouched in the sultry August noon on the swanky suburban street, unaware of its absurdity. On her left, behind the obscure poet, is a scowling NGO tower and on right a greenhouse-like apartment block. People here rarely walk, unless prescribed by doctors, for they feel it beneath their station to breathe unconditioned air. These devotees of Capital are all for conditioning. From air-conditioned homes they commute in air-conditioned cars to work in air-conditioned offices, shop in air-conditioned stores or dine in air-conditioned restaurants, doing everything in conditioned reflex. So, they pass by the statue of misery, a freak they are not conditioned to deal with.
To Ridoan it seems as if some cruel cynic has conjured her up out of nowhere and planted there to mock democracy, equality, civilisation, human rights, globalisation, CSR, development, gender parity, and such buzzwords uttered, typed, written, printed and read thousand times a day in the buildings around by displaying a personification of the extreme debasement man has accepted for many in exchange of magnificence for a few. Mad and mute, to Ridoan she symbolises the depravity the children of Adam have fallen into to curry favour with their new god, the Capital. But, what disturbs him the most is the symbol being not inanimate but alive.
And then he sees, as if responding to a telepathic message of his angst, her head suddenly turns towards him with a mechanical motion like a searchlight. A pair of dazed, innocent eyes screams for mercy, for an end to it all. The haunted dark wells of her eyes describe more eloquently than any poet could the hell of black, lightless flames she is in, built with pieces of poverty, lust, fear, greed, treachery, slums, beatings, rapes, fatwa, addiction, prostitution, and multitudes of similar wastes of Capital.
A challenge also enters the look, lighting it up with a tiny flicker of intelligence, returning to the insect its human self for a few milliseconds. The challenge is for Ridoan to shake off the instinctive wish to help. Legally, he, the motorists, the residents of the buildings around, or the occasional passers-by, none knows or owes her anything. But, the child in everyone knows her as well as one’s own self, as a co-limb of the same body, and owes her everything to release her from pain and give her ease and peace. Yet, the urgency to keep an appointment with his doctor snuffs out an sudden impulse in a retired colonel to take her to some shelter home, while a rickshaw-puller stops, moves towards her, halts, ponders a while, shrugs, and then turns around and paddles away down the road.
Everyone, it appears, is too busy to help the girl, to help one’s own bloody self, Ridoan swears in silence. He becomes angry — with the girl, with everyone, everything, the entire lousy world, but most vehemently at himself. The one thing he has always boasted of is of being a maverick, a born rebel, a through-and-through outsider. That claim now faces a challenge. The thing on the road by its mere existence challenges him to either justify or relinquish that pride of being different, an individual, not one of the near-identical corporate products differentiated by names alone.
He re-enters the building, takes the elevator to the floor where his wife Amrina is.
‘Give me some clothes for the girl, quick,’ he bursts into the room and whispers in an urgent falsetto to Amrina, who whispers back, but adding a hiss, ‘What girl is that?’
He takes hold of her arm and almost drags her to the window, ‘That one, you see, on the road, that lousy miserable girl.’
Ridoan looks for some indication of Amrina’s mind in her face. Finding none, he goes on, pausing after every sentence, ‘She needs a doctor… She must go to a hospital… But, I have to cover her with some clothes first… Don’t you have any old clothe, a sari, bed sheets, anything in this office?’
‘Of all men, why must it be you, the most worthless of them all, to help her? He who can’t even help himself wants to become a saviour! Ha!’ Amrina has a way of making words so caustic and abrasive that it really hurts, when she wants to.
Ridoan winces as the words jab him at his core. But he continues to stand beside the window, glaring at his wife in defiance. Ambrina on her own looks through the Venetian blinds down at the girl and then moves back to her desk. She rings a calling bell and an elderly orderly appears. ‘Bashir chacha, go, bring a saree, from those for zakat, you know, from the storeroom. Tell Amin, I will fill up the requisition slip later. It is urgent. Go bring it in five minutes. Okay?’
‘Thanks,’ says Ridoan, which he rarely does, and approaches her as if to hug, but halts in the midway in astonishment He sees her blush, after how many years he doesn’t know. He stares at her face in amazement and realises, also after a long time, how comely she really is, a little weary from work, stress, dissatisfaction and boredom but her body language is still as dignified as her virgin days. And all of a sudden, memories of their brief courtship during a film appreciation course rush back to his mind.
The sari arrives. Taking it from Bashir, Amrina says, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Are you going, too? I never thought you would,’ astonished, Ridoan actually stammers.
She smiles in mock derision, ‘How do you expect me to trust you alone with such a task? It’s enough that you at least could decide to do something good, at last. But, do you believe you can mange taking so sick and crazy a girl to a hospital all by yourself? And arrange for her treatment?’ Those are not questions, but statements. But they don’t hurt him anymore.
‘Now, don’t stand there like a fool. Let’s move,’ her hand feels soft and caressing on his arm, leading him towards the elevator.
The elevator descends, while the two souls mate again in silence and fly again in pair in a more sublime joy than they used to do years ago.
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