Waiting

He waited. He had waited for days now, for weeks. He waited again and again and again in the false hope that he would call. He didn't call: not in seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks. Of course his waiting hadn't been passive. He tried, more than once, to call him, but without effect.

What was he waiting for? What was he expecting would happen? That there could be any point was something only a madman would believe. Of course, for some time now he'd been doubting his own sanity. So what then? "It's beyond all reason," he would say aloud to himself when there was no one around to hear; he said the same thing in his mind when there were others to hear so that they wouldn't hear.

Waiting made him a victim: he loved that — he hated that. Maybe he wasn't a victim. Maybe he was just a ****ing a*****e.

Terror

He knew that he was wasting his time, surfing the internet, and looking at the Facebook pages and photographs of people he had never met, nor would ever meet. He had many more important things to do, like his graduate school applications, or reading for pleasure and intellectual development. But he liked doing this more; he felt as though he were learning a lot more by getting glimpses of humanity at its boring everyday, at birthdays, games, get-togethers, where people felt the need to record the memory of a fleeting moment for all time yet to come.

He was learning what it was like to be a human being. This was a lesson he felt he really needed to learn, since he'd lost touch with his own humanness along the way. It is puzzling that losing one's own humanity is possible. After all, in the Sanskrit verse, "humanness is what comes of being human, as cowness comes of being a cow." So how could he have ever lost it, his "ownmostness"? But such was the mystery that had crept into his mind of late. He didn't feel as though he were himself; he didn't feel as though he were anyone. He had become empty, an empty coffee cup at the diner, waiting to be filled by the pretty waitress who was really an actress.

What filled that cup more than anything was terror and fear. He had only seen this kind of terror in another person; he was much older, and by any measure someone who'd failed to make use of the opportunities given to him. But now he had begun to experience it himself. Terror because he didn't know where he was going; terror because there was nothing before his mind. This must be the feeling of convicts at the gallows or the chair, right before the trap door opened and the neck broke painfully, or right before the switch was flipped and one was fried in an oilless pan. It must also be the feeling of those set afloat on canoes in exile as they had nothing but a hostile crowd behind them and terrifying infinity and emptiness before them.

Terror. This is what defined his life now, a formless force.

Existence Refined

His hand shook with a slight tremor as he took a long and hungry drag of the cigarette. He breathed the smoke deep into his lungs with the cold winter air, forgetting but for a moment the piercing wind and enjoying the feeling of an eternal craving quenched. For a moment he felt satisfied, as his mind suddenly seemed to open up; the clarity of drinking ten cups of coffee in a breath invigorated his soul. "This is life," a voice told him from within the deep recesses of the unconscious.

Then, the bitter taste of the cheaply made cigarette, the tobacco and the leaf in which it was wrapped, struck him as a hammer on his tongue. For a moment he was disgusted, absolutely repulsed by the aftertaste, but like with every other bitterness that comes with the short-lived pleasures of life, he became used to it. Indeed, he received a perverse enjoyment from it.

"Wow, I could really get used to this," he said aloud to his friends, who responded with laughter and chiding humour. "Well, you probably shouldn't smoke anymore then," they said; "You don't want to get addicted." More laughter.

But he knew even as he laughed in retort that they were joking, that the simple pleasure of a slow, "classy way of committing suicide" as Vonnegut had once described it would not be denied him and indeed that it could not be denied him. This was his expression of freedom, to do it for the sake of doing it.

Thinking thus, and taking a few last drags of the quickly extinguishing cigarette, he stepped out the last sparks and lit another and took another drag, reliving that first moment all over again.

Knife in the Heart

Outside, the car siren blared at intervals. What set it off or what kept it going he could not tell. His mind found one more parallel metaphor between the world outside and that within. The siren was just like his father, a man he had barely ever known: what set off the emptiness and bitterness of his father's soul, or what sustained it, he could not tell. And somehow, this bitterness, the smoldering anger and self-hate seemed directed toward him, though he knew it was not.

He knew for sure that his father was not the cruel, cold-hearted man he seemed to his mother. He felt it with all his heart, that this poor devil — ruined by circumstances as much as by alternating periods of passivity, over-confidence, and even a penury of spirit, — was, at heart, kind, caring, and even a person full of compassion. He knew it, or he thought he knew it, or wanted to know.

A terrible sorrow filled up his eyes and choked his throat as he saw him get back into his car and drive back to work. He knew somehow that his father (and he could never bring himself to call him 'dad') did not want to go back, but even if he had stayed, what would it have achieved? There would have been naught but more stupid bickering over money and the bills between his parents (as if there were not enough already).

The trouble was that his mother was an unforgiving woman, though indeed well-meaning. All she needed to do was to be more tactful, but she would not, she could not — it was neither in her nature nor was she willing to be more tactful.

For a moment, he was about to cry, to burst into tears. He wanted to cry for his father, for his mother, and perhaps most of all for himself; then, the telephone rang.

Thinker Me

I think it is in my father's family normally to think too much when one has free time (or time when nothing can be done) to think. Think too much, to brood, that is. I've seen my grandfather, who's now in his middle 80's, sitting on the porch in his wood-and-cloth easy chair in the afternoons, on rainy days especially, seemingly looking through thick glasses (I am told the thickest possible prescription) into nothing at all with his eyes glazed over with the reminiscence of times past. The man has ironically gone through much in his rather uneventful life, through much embarrassment, much suffering, and certainly much disappointment. The only reason I think he has lived this long and is as healthy as he is,— and his being alive today is a great surprise to me— must be his deep faith.

But I think like my grandfather my father is one who thinks too much, and at my age, young though I still am, I am starting to detect this quality that I once used to think came with age and experience. I think it is my very being to think about things, to regret, to hope, to simply brood on life. Now that I think about it, even as I child, my favourite (though I admit that it was not a conscious choice) pastime was brooding. I would spend endless hours in my room, especially after the death of my maternal grandfather, thinking about the future, thinking about the past and thinking about nothing in particular. Of course, with age, this habit (or should I call it instinct?) has only become worse. Now, it is not merely a passive occasion, especially as the time that I have to myself (in commuting, where one cannot do anything else) has increased in amount.

Indeed with age, the content of my thoughts has changed a lot as well. Once, I used to think of my joining my father, far removed from me by circumstance. I used to think of my grandfather, who loved me and spoiled me with gifts. Now, I think about friends, about all those wrong turns I've made with them, about all those missed opportunities to have asked a girl on a date. I feel rather like every teenager, and then some. Indeed, most teenagers don't have the added curse of thinking about ethics, which I do. I think on dating — I mean that I actually dissect the merits and demerits and the implications for myself. I worry about my parents, I worry about what it would mean to them I were to date, though their point that it could potentially ruin my studies through distraction is a valid point. I think about this, I think about this and a thousand other things. 'Cogito, ergo sum.' — 'I think, therefore I am.'

Long Night's Tale

I remember that time when I went to the opera. I was tempted by the offer of free tickets to balcony seats (and they were really good seats too) It was some stupid thing in French, and though the orchestra was amazing, the plot was disgusting — like that bad coffee you get from some cheap bodega, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Outside, it had been cold even before I went in, as I had not thought that November in New York could be this cold. I had worn my dad’s blue wool pea-coat, that blue one he had gotten a few years ago from Gap or some similar store for one of his three birthdays (don’t ask, it’s a long story, maybe one I will treat later in another couple of pages). It was cold and windy, I felt stupid not having worn that raincoat in addition to this seemingly threadbare pea-coat. The condition was made worse by the fact that rain had been predicted by some television weatherman and so I was forced to carry my full-length umbrella, leaving one hand exposed to the cold. I was really quite glad when others from my school had come and we went inside to see the opera.

Anyway, after having borne through the two-and-a-half hours of operatic singing and the incredible knee pain, I was glad to leave the opera. My parents had come to pick me up after seeing some movie of their own, as they were unwilling to let me brave the long subway ride with the ten-thousand transfers. It was a blessing on my part too because if I had taken subway, I would have had to wait for another forty-five minutes for that bus. But the killer was none of this — not the burning hunger, not the knee stiffness and pain, and not the torrential flooding rain that was falling outside, which reminded me not of the typical New York rain-shower, but the monsoon rains that I had for years borne in tropical South India. For each first day of school, June the first there, the new uniforms, the new shoes, and the neatly combed hair and powdered faces of all the students for their first day would be ruined in the rain that broke umbrellas like an elephant does long stalks of sugarcanes and heavy cocoanuts. But it wasn’t even this rain that was bad.

The fact of the matter was, that though my leather shoes were getting wet inside and out as I was making a run across the flooding, bowl-shaped courtyard of the opera house, the worst part of the night was a sight from the next block. It was that homeless man, very likely insane, sitting in that rain, screaming ‘Won’t somebody help me? Please!’ The man was just sitting there crying, a cup in hand, filled with either that rainwater or his tears, but who could tell in that rain? Everyone was just rushing by, trying not to get wet, the cars and yellow cabs trying not to ram into each other. Everyone was just trying to get hell out of that rain as soon as possible, and this man, unknown, unnamed was crying for help. As it were, with the other half of the world rushing to get somewhere, I too ran across the street, annoyed by his cries, and sought the cozy, warm comforts of my parents car.

As we drove away, I tried not to think of him or that disgusting opera. ‘Think happy thoughts,’ I said to myself inside. ‘Think warm, cool, happy thoughts.’ The rain outside roared on as ever, falling in torrents. I still wonder sometimes when I am in subway, stuck between two heavy sleepers and my arms pinned down, what happened to that man. Whatever happened to thee o’ nameless one...?