Life Sentence #8

A series, born of an attempt to set up a weekly challenge in which I post a single sentence of more than 500 words.

And if all this troweling of memory in long sentences is but a novelist biding his time for a new plot, let it be known that this novelist is aware that there are many kinds of waiting and that all sorts of narrative possibilities emerge from them: a wait during which a contingency slowly gains the dividend of dread, and which in telling may be enlivened by past terrors from similar waiting; a wait such as one in which a child looks out from a mesh window for a sight of his parents returning home and grows scared as dusk begins to turn to darkness, his mind unable to keep at bay that instance from a few months ago when they had returned from a wedding far too late in the night, long after he had cried himself to sleep; a wait which is even more enlivened in granting the child an all-too-alive imagination, perhaps a vision of his parents’ scooter being hit from behind by a monstrous truck, his parents crushed to death and he confined, forever, to the greyness of this twilight;—or a wait in which before the expected arrival something else shows up and intervenes, say a well-known or even unknown person, such that the mental exertions and transports of waiting are replaced by an immediacy of interaction in which fresh hells and heavens will need to be negotiated, for when is another person anything short of hell or heaven for us; a wait such as one in 2003, in which a father looks anxiously to the Delhi-side of the highway for signs of his college-going son’s bus and an acquaintance shows up in a car at the same bypass stop, the acquaintance at once rhapsodising about how “unlikely” it is for him to stop at this spot on his way to Haridwar and meet the father, and, soon enough, upon learning of the father’s waiting-business there, waxing eloquent about the utility of mobile phones, to insist that the father buy himself and his son one each, asserting how these things help constant contact and quash anxiety, before proceeding, in a flourish that the father finds tiresome and not a little embarrassing, to call his wife to loudly tell her of this chance meeting;—or a wait in which the possibility of an alternate life where waiting can be abandoned or bypassed gains immense power; a wait in which for the nth time a woman gapes at her phone for a message from her beloved and for the first time travels—in the sway characteristic of phones, in which each new step erases awareness of the previous one—to the profile of an old flame, then reads old messages that still startle with their innocent frankness, and after dropping a “Hi, long time” and seeing “typing” from the other end quickly builds a whole cathedral from the pillars and beams of an absent romance, a cathedral that persists even when the typing stops and no response comes from the other side (thankfully waiting is never nested, so no wait inside a wait can compound agony);—or an everyday wait whose effects one dissipates by action, action that can be diversionary or part of a surge of meaning-making from or about the coordinates of the waiting (“let’s clean the toilets before they arrive”, “how much time does a bus from Jaipur take to reach Muzaffarnagar?”, “what time is it in the US right now?”, “let me check if the train is delayed”, “natural that there are no birds this year in last year’s nests”, “you have been saying ‘ten minutes’ for an hour now”);—and ultimately a wait that is both endless and intolerable, whose crushing effects one survives by getting on with one’s substandard daily life (“bail is the rule, except for the jailed without trial”), like Kafka’s caged ape who can do nothing but tear with his teeth the few stalks that have been thrown in for him, and who is beginning to sense that his only chance lies in the impossibility of mimicking his captor in totality (in Kafka this ape can succeed and become a monster); a wait such as one in 1996, in which a wife chops okra for the dinner of a husband who should by now have apologised, chops okra and then washes the kadhai and then chops onion and then heats oil and then puts in the ingredients and then begins to beat dough, the rage inside her long compressed like those old ice-sheets in the Arctic, the mix in the pan sizzling softly, the plaintive melody of the song that the man is watching on the TV in the living room spilling over to her.

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The Menaced Assassin by René Magritte. Source: Wikipedia