Unfinished story

By Leya Mathew

I am the Writer. I would have been called Wanderer, Explorer, Revealer but by a colossal case of misfortune and misrepresentation, I am called Weary. Between what I would have been and what I should be, lies ‘I’ the Character. Since the Writer has been misnamed, I the Character remain unnamed. Therefore, instead of some meaningful, dark, brooding name, or a witty, satirical, half auto-biographical one or even a non-referential pretty poetic name you shall know me as ‘I’. How unimaginative, you might say; how ill-fated, I say and plead my case. The Writer is stubborn. To squash all further rebellion I am further made genderless. The Writer insists that I am that which is common to Man and Woman and that Gender is totally irrelevant to the Story. But, no Sex? How will the Reader identify himself or herself? Dissociate himself or herself from me? I hang my face in shame. The Writer claps in anticipation and proceeds eagerly.

I have been wandering the realms of reality and illusion in search of my destiny that has so far successfully eluded me. In tandem with my spiritual confusions, I have wandered the villages and the cities without paying much attention to the Ancient Glorious Past constantly being reinvented or the Global Super Power Status that is imminent. I passed by the unapologetic pre-occupation with Money and Power. It was on one such nomadic excursion, that I found myself in the neighborhood of my parents’ house. On a sudden whim, I decided to pay them a visit.

My mother was pleasantly surprised. This was the first time I was visiting the re-constructed house and she was anxious to show off. The house I had grown up in was unrecognizable. The walls I had eagerly marked in pencil to keep record of my growing elevation had made way for a larger drawing room. The pale yellow room whose paint I had irreversibly damaged by pasting over with Van Gogh and Monet prints cut from calendars and Readers Digest back covers had become a modern bathroom complete with gilded taps I couldn’t work. I settled myself in the farthest room in the back corner of the house on the first floor. The windows on one side opened out onto a mango tree in full bloom and on the other side to a wasteland that will soon be crowded with apartment flats and multiplexes. I kept myself away from the business of the house and was allowed to let myself be. I had earned my solitude.

I am the black sheep of the family, brilliant as a child; I had excelled in everything there was to do. It was commonly expected that I would join the Administrative Services or at the least become an eminent surgeon. Instead, I had studied the Arts, found formal education bankrupt and drifted through various jobs depending on fleeting inclinations and the lightness of my wallet. My siblings had worked harder at their destiny and had landed well paying foreign jobs. I was a calculation gone wrong that my parents had many a time attempted to set right, but could never find the precise detail that had floundered. I had become an embarrassment in family discussions that hovered around unintelligent investment patterns and had slowly distanced myself from family and school reunions. I was caught up in some unexplainable quest that sought a greater meaning and purpose than mere success. I wanted to learn the secrets of the incessant world within and the endless world without, its harmonies, its energies and its languages. I had been over ambitious. I set myself tasks I did not know how to solve. In the middle of this continual struggle with the soul, I attempted occasionally to write – to find some sense to my concentric journeys.

Now that I found myself in my new house, I let my agonizing narcissism rest and concentrated on eating well and sleeping long. My mother is an excellent cook as most mothers are and she enjoyed feeding her children. She conveniently forgot that we were no longer lanky teenagers growing at an alarming rate and the food we appreciated and partook of in such astounding quantities would only settle into fat and cholesterol.

It was at night after a particularly satisfying dinner that I noticed a small colorless bubble on my left wrist. It was pristine and perfectly round – almost like a dew drop. I was fascinated. I am obviously a very sensitive person and my skin takes after me. I am used to unexplained bouts of rashes in varying colors. But in the morning I woke up with a raging fever and multiplying dew-drops. They were everywhere, even on my scalp, hiding in all corners and appearing at the most inconvenient places. I called in reinforcement. My mother took one look at me and declared ‘Chicken Pox’. I looked at her with mounting distaste. She had the uncanny habit of being right in such unpleasant situations. I was immediately shepherded to the neighborhood clinic where the doctor confirmed my mothers diagnosis and hurriedly sent my off into forced isolation. I racked my brains trying to figure out where I could have picked up the infection from, but no lightning streak of inspiration struck. And the furthermost corner room became my universe.

Don’t get me wrong. I love solitude, nay I thrive on it. It is not unknown for creatures of my disposition to shut ourselves up in dingy rooms to introspect and absorb ourselves in vanity. But forced isolation? No, no… I considered it my duty to rebel. My rebellions had always been stupidly ill timed and this one was no exception. I morosely sat in my large single bed and stared through the mosquito mesh on the steady earth that was supposedly rotating and revolving continuously. The sun came up. It grew warmer. The horizon of dusty thorn bushes fluttered through the day. The sun went down. Night fell. The thorns continued their intermittent flutter. I was fed on weak gruel as the unchanging world stared back at me throwing in my face the proposition that the only constant is Change.

The universe didn’t have to expend much energies of Fate to cover me in boils. Crown to sole (and soul) was soon covered in tiny multiple dew-drops. If I were a flower in a misty valley I would have looked mesmerizing. Instead I was wrought with an intense desire to scratch and tear out every one of those bastards. They smiled back innocently. I tried counting them. I started from the top, but before I could finish with the head, I could feel a new one germinating in some forgotten corner and that fuddled my numbers. I washed myself in cold water, in hot water, creamed myself, covered myself in oil, flitted neem leaves on my naked skin; nothing worked. Finally I restricted my mad energies to my customary evening bath in lukewarm water. Dettol soap and Vaseline Creame became trusted accomplices. And I waited. I waited and watched the thorny bushes from morning to night. If I could, I would have shrunk into myself, lowered my heart-beat and metabolism and slept like the polar bear through my winter of discontent. We humans are not that lucky.

There were books all around – an interesting variety. Readers Digest, Mad Comics, Shakespeare, Paulo Cohelo, Dostyovesky, Dickens, The Guiness Book of World Records. They peered down on my from their high shelves, some condescending, others peering intelligently into far space. I cold shouldered them and continued my obsession with the barbed shrubbery. I started familiarsing myself with my boils and indulgently watched them grow and bloom. The pioneer on the left wrist had shriveled up in old age and I mourned the demise of close associations.

That is when the Tree appeared. Bang in the middle of the thorn fields. I had not seen it grow. Did somebody plant a full grown tree in the middle of the night? I had watched over my thorn fields night after day, over the course of the lifetime of many boils and had never seen this Tree. Was it a hallucination? Or had my eyes skipped over it and never seen it? Whatever be the story of the genesis of the Tree, it was there. It was tall; or maybe that was just a relative term, because all around it were stout bushes that did nothing to question its monopoly of height; and bare. It was still early February, so I could not blame old age for its nakedness. It was an ordinary, non-descript tree- neither old and knotted with stories of generations or young and eager and thirsting for life. Its ordinariness captivated me. It did not question its purpose in the grand scale of events prescribed of the Universe; or the lack of it. It stood tall, at once proud and humble in the middle of an unremarkable field of thorns, content in its nakedness. How was there such harmony in Nature? Why were we; though so much a part of Nature, yet so divorced from its fundamental essence of balance and concord?

As I watched, the Tree transformed itself into an unfinished apartment building. The main beams had been finished and the blocks of empty holes, the same concrete ash colour as the Tree, were placed row after row, column after column like some fantastic card trick. A pigeon flying around mistook the construction for my poor old tree and flew about looking for a suitable nesting corner. It found one easily enough, on the left flank, a sturdy corner well protected from the winds. The pigeon went about building its nest while the workers filled up some holes with bricks and the others with large glass window panes. The twigs were in place and the straw was going in when the painting was finished. The workers liked the pigeon, so they were careful with her. She grew to trust them. They dabbed a little yellow paint on the corner of her nest as a souvenir to remember them by, when they packed up and moved on to build taller and larger houses.

The apartments were all ready and the landscaping was in full earnest. The golf course was in place lined by gulmohars. The large ‘Tropical Paradise’ was filled in with desert palms, delicate foreigners and exotic natives. The pigeon looked on approvingly. The view had definitely improved. The thorny bushes were lost to view and like an oasis in the desert, Tropical Paradise bloomed. Prospective buyers started dropping by. The animal rights activist was the first one. The broker showed him around. He wrinkled his nose at the pigeon, sent the broker away for some details from the Building office on the ground floor and hurriedly relieved his bladder that had been troubling him awhile. Many more bikes and cars parked at the basement parking lot in the days and weeks to come but nobody came to disturb the pigeon. Then suddenly work started. The tiles went in, soft and creamy white, the doors and handles and other fittings were installed. The house was ready. The pigeon gurgled satisfactorily and promptly laid her eggs. The couple came in the evening. They were young, and terribly excited. The boy could hardly contain his pride. The girl was wide eyed in wonder. She loved every bit of it, but most of all the large French windows with the cozy window seat that opened out into the tiniest of balconies grilled in for safety. Spring had creeped in unnoticed and the world was in bloom. Lilies and magnolias mingled with button roses and gardenias. The jasmine bushes bowed under their white burden and even the pigeon was overcome with the terrible beauty of the moment. She sighed. The girl started in surprise. They stared at each other, the owner and the tenant. The girl’s face broke out into a grin, “Darling, look, there’s a pigeon here, and she’s even laid her eggs. Isn’t that wonderful?” the boy was more practical. “Oh, what a nuisance.” The girl wrinkled her nose at his total lack of romanticism. The soft evening light fell gracefully on her face and the boy forgot all about the pigeon. They held each other close in their eyes and drew nearer as if hypnotized. “Here?” she asked. “Is there any better way to make this home?” asked the boy as he quickly bolted the door. The girl giggled like a nervous teenager. They disappeared into the cool whiteness of the creamy tiles. Our camera moved tactfully away to two large velvety daisies nestling at each other’s cheeks.

There my Elysian vision vanished. I was left with a sea of thorny scrub, a dreary tree and an abundance of boils. I stared hard into the void willing the vision to continue. What happened next? What snake came to tempt my Eve in the Tropical Paradise? Did passion slowly trudge into domesticity? Or did the model-turned-actor neighbor prove too distracting? And what of the pigeon’s babies? Did they hatch and grow up to play with the rose buds and the jasmines or did they hang treacherously from a discarded nylon net? I variously questioned my boils, from the wise old wrinkled ones to the baby still flushed at birth. They were too busy multiplying and dying to answer me.

Night fell. A new day dawned. The sun rose. I pecked at my festering memory. I hated my prickle bush and the darling Tree. I drew the patterned curtains over them and searched the landscapes within. Finally, exhausted and empty handed, I let it slip into a long collection of unfinished sketches. I fondly go over them one by one. There is the ‘City of Dreams’. The richness of detail still overwhelms me. It is a large canvas, almost finished. I had created the city to destroy it, but as I filled out the tiny back alleys and the crowded market places with hope and love and pain and despair, I could no longer agree with its destiny of destruction. True, the city was seeped in sin, but there was also so much honesty and dignity among those bewildered strugglers. The final act of heavenly retribution will not be written. I move on. Large and small, sketches, outlines, watercolors, charcoals, oils, they have come back to haunt me with their incompleteness. There in a corner is the ‘Salvation of the Devil’. This one I had been loathe to abandon but eventually I left my little devil stranded at the gates of Salvation. Because my God couldn’t answer his one question – ‘if God is Love, then why is Love not enough? Why should there be pain and death?’ My heart wrings when I see the expectant hopeful little D, so ready and joyous, eternally waiting.

I go back to my boils and find company with Job. We sit together among the ashes scratching and agonizing. My skin has begun to clear. I will soon go away into the world to continue my meanderings. I have been oft pregnant but I pray that Life will grant me the kindness of giving birth.