REPETITION (a short story)
"The 'always' of memory differs from the 'always' of reality. It is the more definitive 'always' of the two."
The story was first published online by Out of Print. I have continued to edit it.
(1)
The women who sweep the streets always have their heads covered with chunnis. They use long-handled brooms, working them on the ground in circles and parabolas, raising dust. The dust slowly settles on recently cleaned cars whose wipers all point towards the sky at an angle. The leaves and twigs that the sweepers gather are crisp-dry. They pile heaps of them under the trees along the school boundary wall, where the wind presumably causes less disturbance to the waste. A leaf-collection van removes the heaps periodically per a schedule I’ve not grasped. The houses are all built slightly above the street level. Their sloping thresholds have been washed clean by early-starting house-helps. Dirty water trickles down to the street. In some locations, the water joins street-side puddles; in others, it trickles onto the concrete road and creates a dark, shapeless patch that will dry up in a bit. The stray dogs on these streets are dirty cream or light brown. It’s like they share ancestors. They have no curiosity about me – they don’t approach me to sniff at anything, nor do they bark in salutation. I’m grateful for this neglect.
(2)
The 'always' of memory differs from the 'always' of reality. It is the more definitive 'always' of the two.
(3)
Each morning, I walk to buy cigarettes from a shack some distance away from my house. The shack is some distance away from my house because I live close to a large school, and selling cigarettes close to a school is prohibited (an informed guess). Every morning, I step down the pebbled terrazzo slope of my house and turn left. No, I first cross the street and go close to the school boundary wall, red brick topped by coiled wire, and then turn left. There is a row of houses on what is now the other side; mine is the first one.
After walking some distance, I turn right as the school wall bends right. The correct way to put it might be to say that the street follows the turn of the wall and that I continue on the street. The wall and the street turn left after some distance; I walk along. And then there is a right turn. This turn is the penultimate turn for my journey, and as soon as I take it, I pass, on my right, a large steel gate from where yellow buses enter the school compound (I have never seen them exit from this gate). Now comes the longest straight stretch of my path. On my left are blocks of houses, interrupted twice by streets going in at a perpendicular. The two-storey houses marking these streets can do nothing better than look at each other; there is no school wall and school compound for residents on one side to enjoy the views of.
At the end of this long stretch, I finally part ways with the school boundary wall. I turn left towards the shack as the wall turns right.
The family running the shack knows what I’m there to buy: five Classic Milds. Spotting me from a distance, someone from the family – the man, the wife, or the son, who, depending on the amount of facial hair he carries on a given day, can look to be in his teens or his late twenties – always takes out the cigarettes from the packet before I’ve reached. I pay through my phone and then smoke a cigarette on the raised footpath to the left of the shack’s open front. Right in front of me are three or four autos. There are always some autos parked along the footpath at that spot. I smoke while scrolling on my phone, so there usually isn’t any specific thought in my head. I sometimes smell a whiff of ganja. The auto drivers huddle next to an auto. I’ve never walked into anyone visibly smoking ganja in that space; it is always the sweet trace left behind by a joint already smoked. Between the spot where I smoke my cigarette and the shack, there is an earthen saucer always filled with water; the family that runs the shack keeps it there on the footpath. I’ve seen a dog lapping water from it a few times, and this has always made me think of the family that runs the shack as kind. The stray dogs along this street come in all dog colours. Whenever a dog from another street makes the mistake of coming here, the resident dogs bully it with vicious barking and ensure their domain remains beyond encroachment. I wonder if the dogs’ aggression results from their proximity to a busy main road laid only thirty or so metres to the right of the shack front. The road and its noise must define a sort of boundary in dog country and give rise to a feeling of being at the world’s edge, thus tuning up the territorialism among the dogs who have established a homeland on this street. There have been instances when a calm dog lolling around the shack front has suddenly broken into a foul mood and run past me, growling at a trespassing canine. I’m frightened for a brief moment on such occasions, and the hair on my legs stands up. When the moment passes, I feel ashamed and hope that neither the family nor their other customers nor the auto drivers have noticed the hair on my legs. A swoosh of reason follows this shame, and I quickly conclude that there is no possibility of grown people concentrating on a grown man’s legs and noticing the slight shift in the alignment of the fuzz.
I retrace the path back to my house after I’ve finished my cigarette, feeling my limbs heavier than they were before I had smoked.
(4)
Sometimes, between the second and third turn of my walk, I hear the soft, stringy thwack of racket on ball. I remember the first occurrence of this event clearly. I remember finding the intervals between two thwacks – units of an unseen, unravelling rally – comforting. I remember thinking of David Foster Wallace and Vladimir Nabokov, two writers whose descriptions of games of tennis, or players of the game, I have loved. It is the kids playing tennis behind the school wall, of course. That this sound is audible only on some occasions makes me wonder if the tennis court is open on particular days, or during a specific time every day, or during a specific time on particular days. Since I undertake the walk at different times on different days and have no reason to keep a record, there is no easy way for me to estimate the tennis schedule. But I always wish to hear the music of those thwacks every time I walk out of my house. I start hearing it—if it is there—only after the second turn. It becomes fainter and fainter as I near the third turn. I’ve concluded that there is only one court and that there is, at any time, only one rally in progress. The thwacks’ music, when it is there, confirms that much.
Why has it never occurred to me to stop and listen to the tennis for longer? Why do I always walk on? I can’t be sure of the reason. Perhaps there is in me a subconscious desire to maintain the transitory nature of a pleasant occurrence. The pleasure of listening to that music is so particular and so unclassifiable that neither instinct nor reason knows how to react to it, and the body thus continues the actions it is committed to.
The steel gates from where buses enter the school compound come after the fourth turn. Diagonally opposite the gate, across the three-way juncture (I’ve never walked on one offshoot of it), there is a three-storey house and a vacant plot. The side of the house abutting the plot is visible from my walk just before I take the penultimate right turn. Along that side, a vine rises a vertical, grill-like installation. When it’s not green, the vine looks like a bunch of twigs pasted to a metal ladder. But when it is green, the house looks more beautiful because of it. As I write this now, I realise that the foliage on this vine is the only indicator of seasonality that I’ve noted along this walk. It proves that I’ve been taking the walk for a long time now. All else, including the changes in my own attire as I undertake the same walk in different seasons, has been out of the ambit of my observations. But if I press memory, remembrances begin to trickle in. I vaguely remember hearing a koel call on some occasions. That’s a summer thing, right? The absurd fear of having my leg hair noticed when a dog runs past me is also a summer thing—I’m in shorts whenever that happens. And isn’t the earthen saucer that the shack-running family keeps filled with water also a summer thing? And the leaves the sweepers gather—which season would explain their dryness best?
We are experiencing whether we choose to or not. Sometimes, we observe consciously, intending to recollect later. But the processes are imperfect, and though the degrees may vary, memory is always an adulteration of what we truly experienced or observed. All is dubious—all we saw, heard, or smelled not now but before. It happened; it did not happen. It was there, it wasn’t there. I was there, I wasn’t there. The more I think of it, the more I believe that a state of comfort with ambiguities of experience and recollection is the largest constituent of what they call the joy of solitude.
That makes solitude an act of repetition. That makes repetition a condition of joy.
As I write this now, conscious of seasons and seasonality, one more memory of summer tumbles forth. One day, at the spot where the sound of the tennis rally is usually the loudest, I noticed two sweeper women with arms akimbo, looking upward and talking excitedly to a man holding a long stick. Three children carrying polythene bags stood next to the women. They were all eyeing the branches of a jamun tree, which I made out—for the first time(!)—from the purple and black splatter on road and roadside. The group—was it a single family?—was collecting jamuns. Jamuns are a summer fruit, my logical mind tells me now, although I had not thought of the season then. At that time, I had just walked past the family, slightly amused by their excitement and impressed by their success (as proven by the nearly bursting polythene bags that the children were carrying). I don’t think, or at least I don’t remember if, I heard tennis that day.
The very next day (of this, I’m sure), I saw two men holding long sticks looking up at the same jamun tree. A middle-aged woman from the opposite house (the nameplate mentioned only a male lawyer’s name) instructed them not to shake the branches too vigorously and to avoid jamun splatter on the cars parked under the tree. She started repeating the instruction even before she’d finished it. One of the men acknowledged it, only to shut her up, it seemed, then looked up at the jamun tree again. I kept walking at my pace, wondering whether it was witnessing the profitable fruit collection of the previous day that had invoked the proprietorial instincts of the woman. It’s natural, perhaps, to consider that some of the produce on a tree that is not on our property but close to our house belongs to us, especially if it’s a fruit-giving tree. But still, the fact that the woman had hired two men for the job (both had scowls on their faces and were in it only for the pittance it would earn them), the same job that on the previous day had been done with chirpy glee—men, women, children, all involved—saddened me. I did not hear tennis that day either.
I didn’t find the two men at work on my return walk. Perhaps they were taking a smoke break themselves, or the tree had been so thoroughly cleaned of fruit the previous day that there hadn’t been much to collect today. I preferred the second possibility, and the irritation it would inevitably cause the woman, though I did not look up and check whether there were still any jamuns on the tree.
(5)
The ‘sometimes’ of memory is concentric with the ‘sometimes’ of reality, even if the areas they cover, as metaphorical circles, are different. It is impossible to say which is the more ‘sometimes’ of the two. Sometimes it is one; sometimes it is the other.
(6)
Sometimes, I don’t smoke standing next to the shack but do it walking back to my house. On those occasions, I invariably finish my cigarette on the last or second-last stretch of street before my house, near the jamun tree. When done, I throw the cigarette on the ground and squash it with my left foot (I am sure it is always the left foot). Dry, combustible leaves and twigs, errors and misses of the sweeping process, are never too far from where I throw my cigarette butts. On a couple of occasions, the cigarette butt and the last lit part of the cigarette have come apart upon hitting the ground, the latter popping and rolling under a dry leaf or extinguishing itself. I’m always in a mini panic when I’m not able to conclusively squash the lit part of the cigarette. On the three or four occasions when that has happened, I have entered my house with wild visions of conflagrations behind me, the whole neighbourhood on fire, cars exploding and flying several feet into the air, people running around frantically, and so on. Sometimes, our imaginary culpabilities tie up with cinematic visions of mayhem.
On multiple occasions, I have had to stop before the school gate and wait for a yellow bus to drive into the school compound. The steel gate is several feet wide, but the street is narrow and manoeuvring the length and breadth of the bus inside the gate is tough. Sometimes, four or five buses line up one after the other. A guard opens the entrance always the same way – one gate inwards, one outwards. I've never understood why the guard won’t open the gates in one direction, but I believe there is some logic to it. A man with red shoes (I have only ever noticed the shoes) directs the whole operation along with the guard. He never says a word, just moves his hands. As the buses move, dust and diesel fumes fill the air. Sometimes, in my instinctive hurry—one never chooses to hurry—I have to bisect the distance between two buses at a slight trot, making the bus facing me hiss in disapproval.
There are never any kids on these buses.
On days when I, by chance, avoid this procession of buses, I see the guard seated on a rickety chair just beside the gate, the chair’s cane-mesh seat torn and strands hanging below the bulge of the guard’s ass. The guard is five or six years older than me. The guard is always peering into his phone, watching a video. I’ve never tried hard to listen and make out what it is that the guard is watching. I’ve never actually made eye contact with the guard. I wonder if my walk past him—first one way, then the other—has become a part of his repeated reality, wherein he’s noted my presence and stored it in a corner of his mind, as a thing that happens every day is often stored by us, categorised as something that just happens and warrants no special attention, as the humdrum way of the universe. I wonder if the first day that he saw me smoking while walking past him was the day he finally deduced what I undertake my walk for, what my reason for the daily walk is, and whether that removed a small question mark in that corner of his mind. That he’s never paid me any more attention than that, that my daily occurrence in his life hasn’t caused greater deliberation, is not a pleasant idea. If I think about it long enough, I’m sure I’ll one day approach the guard and say ‘Hello’. Or ask him what it is that he’s watching.
(7)
The desire—and it is a desire—to not be blank event, to have some intimation that one is perceived uniquely, with the possibility of being enigmatic thrown in, and, if this were not to be a surity, then the desire to intrude upon another’s perception, to register as cordial or corrosive, whatever, but to exist uniquely in the other’s mind even if one is for the other only a ghost that recurs, an item of zero practical importance, is a desire that stems from the instinct that tells us that story-making is perpetual and is, in fact, the true matter of existence, and that we are nothing if we are not in the stories others make of the world.
In the story that the guard makes of his day, either I figure or I don’t. I would prefer the former, even more so now that he’s in this written story about a part of my day.
(8)
The monsoon has arrived in north India. Incessant rain has blocked my walk for the past two days. It is in the past two days that I’ve written this story. From my balcony, I see the school grounds waterlogged, the street I walk on after stepping out of my house waterlogged, the sky waterlogged. The wipers of parked cars have accepted that they were wrong to challenge the sky. They have stopped pointing upwards at a slant; most have wet leaves and other debris stuck over and under them. I can see no sweeper women. The work of house-helps can add nothing now to the wetness all around. I wonder where the guard sits when it rains. I wonder how the cigarette-shack family deals with the water. I wonder where the autos stand and whether the autowallahs have smoked ganja together. I wonder where all the dogs of that main-road-hugging street are and if the rain has calmed them. I wonder how long it will be till before the tennis resumes, till my walk resumes, till this part of my day resumes. A constant sense of dread—in intensity like the onset of anxiety—permeates my being. Nicotine withdrawal and the sudden snapping of a routine are both responsible for it, although there is no way to know which one is more responsible.
What if the weight of the rain makes the vine installation along the side of that house fall on the empty plot of land? This possibility is like the possibility of a crash of seasons, a collapse of all routine, a crumbling of repetition and solitude. I hold a tall cup filled with sugarless tea and hope, for the life of me, that this is not the final rain of the world.