01. A Regular Glass of Water

trails into the old-world, micro-lives, an insurmountable gap...

A wetness hangs upon the air. Even though it is winter, everything about the evening carries the smell and distinct morbidity of long twilight hours drenched in rain. And so one wakes up from a nap, a few minutes before the sun slips into the depths, and finds the atmosphere to be in a ferment. It smells of moisture, but the cold tartness of winter is breaking the skin into hexagonal deserts.

Soon, all of time appears to have slipped through the tenuous bulges of space into a whole different world. This is the world where golden, perfectly pleasant afternoons resplendent with a tropical indolence, evolve into vacuous evenings - evenings where suddenly the singular wistfulness of nature upon which the sun shines, mutates quite mournfully into separate, individual, disconnected precipitates of cultivated human patterns.

A group of men sits upon stout, three-legged stools, painting wooden boards for what looks like a family that has newly moved in. These men, laughing and humming popular tunes in a way that is extremely non-self-conscious, seem like the kind of people who do not think that the world might change - or has changed in the past, or that the world fucking changes, as it is at the moment changing. Standing in my balcony, I can see their forms, edges lit by the warm glow of the very last stains of the sun. They seem like a part of the evening. They are as natural, their demeanor and presence as extraordinarily ubiquitous as nightfall. To me, that is enviable. I covet something that they have, and yet I do not dare covet their lives. They are talking and moving their arms and heads like people whom the worry of things happening outside - in inaccessible pockets of this world both physical and virtual - does not eat away. They still belong to that old world, which is still very much alive in certain folds and continuities of this new world - the old world where the contingencies of the future evokes perhaps an angst in many of us, but is far from the gloom and despair of ennui. I realised that I covet the simplicity of that scene comprised of the men, their actions, and the evening. That I was not even remotely a part of that world was evident from the fact that as soon as I associated the word ‘simplicity’ to it, something rather stifling, yet with potential for positive reinforcement - call it conscience, political correctness, education - gnawed at my face till I qualified my intuition thus - my envy for this simplicity is with full knowledge that the simplicity is both in their suffering as well as their joy, the contours of which I could (should) not dare to presume. I could never have simplicity; nothing can ever be simple anymore for me. Academic training, god bless universities, had given me a new world where I could choose my own adventure, but with a head full of fear.

In an apartment a few blocks away, a woman is pushing buttons on her washing machine. I can see her through the grills of her balcony, the scene lit under a fluorescent bulb. She turns her head to the door, as if calling out to someone. A boy appears promptly - probably no more than 10 - they speak, he disappears into the house and returns with a pair of pants. The woman in the meantime is pulling out lengths of clothes all knotted end-to-end from the machine and dumping them in a plastic basket. The boy holds the waistline of the pants under his chin, its legs go down to the floor where they collect in a puddle - his father’s pants. He inserts his hand in one of the pockets and I can see his small fingers rummaging inside as his tongue hugs his lips in clumsy effort - nothing. He tries the other pocket and this time a bit of paper emerges, probably a list of some sort. What could it be? - groceries, school supplies, birthday essentials - the boy opens the paper, hands it to the woman and disappears into the house just as simply as he had appeared a few minutes ago.

The western sky has descended into a haze of ash. Smoke emanating from the little huts in the slum curls its fingers around the horizon. Canopies which attracted singing birds during the day take on an amorphous quality, shrouded by shadows and the occasional trail of traffic light. The woman holds the piece of paper with both her hands resting atop the machine. From where I am standing I cannot see her face, but something of a weight has attached itself to her neck - she stares at the paper for so long that it seems as if she is reading its contents. But something tells me she already knows the contents; this paper is familiar to her. Almost immediately, she begins to fold the paper and keeps it on the cemented parapet of the balcony, pressed under a box of clothespins. She then proceeds to lift the clothes one by one from the heap in the basket, turning each one this way and that and dumping them back. She finally picks one pair of pants up, puts her hand in each of its pockets in quick succession and finally puts it on top of the machine. She then takes the piece of paper from under the box of clothespins, turns back towards the door - there is no one there - and puts the paper in one of the front pockets of the pants she has chosen. She then lifts the pair up from the waist and pins it up on the line. One by one she lines up all the clothes she has washed to the left and right of the chosen pair. She picks up the empty plastic basket, looks at the chosen pair, pulls slightly at its hem, dusts something imaginary off its body and turns the fluorescent bulb off. The balcony recedes into the abyss. In a corner a rectangle lights up half covered from my line of sight by the wall of the balcony that juts out of the building. I turn to get a better view. The woman sits at a table, a large orange box of glucose opened in front of her. In a tall glass she stirs a spoon, eagerly peering at the liquid inside. She keeps the spoon on the table and begins gulping down the solution, her Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and her back straightening little by little with the sheer volume of the liquid she is taking in. She does not stop till all of it is over - then she places the glass on the table, wipes her lips with the back of her hand and burps.

The men on the other terrace have left. Potted plants stand swaying slightly in the wind. What time is it, I think to myself. It is a memorised cue. As soon as I remember that question, the scene is shattered. Something sharp and heavy begins to collect at the base of my throat till all the stories - of the men and wood, the woman and her machine, the boy and his absence - disappear in shame.