Ib's Endless Search for Satisfaction Read online

  ROSHAN ALI

  Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  PART 1

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  PART 2

  FOUR

  FIVE

  PART 3

  SIX

  SEVEN

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  Advance Praise for the Book

  ‘Roshan Ali’s prose is an exhilarating dream ride through a city of memory and desire, mixing Emily Dickinson with tapori English, while remaining true to a central truth: we only know what we know when we know how we know it’—Jerry Pinto, author of Em and the Big Hoom and Murder in Mahim.

  To my parents, who let me be, And to Arpi, who didn’t.

  PART 1

  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

  —song

  ONE

  I am an empty man in an empty city, and every time I begin to fill up, the city sucks it all out again. An empty city is the subject––the subject of everything––and I am the object. What is it about cities that empties me like this? Maybe it’s the density, the fullness, stuffed with people of such lofty stuffing that the natural technique of nature to empty the filled and to fill the empty is reversed by this overdose of man and his mischief; and thus a thin man like me gets the stuffing sucked out of him, till he is hollow and restless. So it is necessary for any objects that move about a city to have these lofty notions of man and society, to contribute, to fit in and thus avoid the mad dissatisfaction of being hollow. A samosa, as someone once said, is better stuffed than empty, whatever the stuffing, if only to give you some satisfaction that you’re getting what you’re paying for, leave the side effects aside.

  Some things are certain. Like, death is certain. I know death because it is certain and all around, though sneaky, invisible, oddly so for something this black and big and this is another thing about cities: how they hide death. But I have never experienced death, never seen death. Yet I know death is painful. Death is dark and deep and does not stop because it has so much to do. Death––that thing with feathers––comes out from the unknown, leaps on to the road, sticks and stones ready, and leaves you bloody and a broken nose. It is only afterwards that you know: Death was there all along, crouching by the side of the road, and became known only when it jumped out into your headlights.

  History is certain too––maybe it is a lie, told by the ones who know how to lie, or a nightmare––but it is certain. These things that are certain––death, history––don’t really need to be told because they are well known. My history is well known to me––the only one who needs to know—and I go about things (but wait, that’s been told), but must be repeated. I am like lighter fluid––easily flammable––yet I require that spark, the right temperature and conditions. And in many ways isn’t that better? Where would you store such a lighter fluid that combusts itself in regular weather and pleasant rooms? Thus I begin: I am Indian, city-born––cities, those empty cities––and go about things . . . but that’s enough. And not really true.

  Where should I begin? The signs of my birth were absent. I came, plonk! and the nurse was surprised. It is possible that her mind was briefly distracted into attention by this entity shaped like a peanut. At once she must have thought about weakness. Something so magical for the parents; so dull to her that her mind was almost at once back to some boy or the other, and nail polish, or the evening. Also, nobody cares about things that have no signs (except signs themselves which seldom have signs, and if they do, to propose that these signs had signs too would be stretching any reasonable rights to speculate. A sign of a sign is utter confusion: Imagine a road with an infinite regression of signs. Where will they end? Or rather, where will they begin? These are questions worth asking.). And speaking of this, there must be some connection with our lives, some hints, some clues of uniqueness, or blessing. Maybe, in the old, black, round-bum Fiat, many weeks before my slimy, unmiraculous birth, Amma said, tapping Appoos’s shoulder and pointing towards the sky, ‘Look, Kamran, that cloud looks like a boy!’ And father replied: ‘All the clouds or just that one?’ And mother said, ‘Shtap, no. You always make fun of me. But see, it can be a sign.’ These things are fun: The stars wait quietly in their silent formation; nothingness heaves a deep sigh; and time is released like a river of red confetti into the darkness of space, like a trumpet of victory for every unique, human peanut occasion; and thus forming the universe itself. And like this every day, universe after universe is born and then dies. These are the stuffings of excitement, and I’ve been told––there are many who make it their business to do so––that I rip the stuffings out of excitement wherever I go. This is my fate: To not only be a blanket soaked in some universal ether of grimness, but to rip the stuffing out of whatever kind of exciting mattress is being used in that particular venue. I have been called many things––fun isn’t one of them. In fact, here is another lie––I have never been called anything but my one name. Perhaps, this is a sign of a miserable life: I am the one-headed, one-brained, monkey-eared, one-named, one. And in the event that you are still hoping for magic and mystery: No there were no signs of my birth, and allied to tedium and every expectation, I wasn’t born any time even close to midnight.

  My mother had a nice face, a nice ear; the other ear not so nice and quite normal. She was nice––a deceptively small word that is exactly as simple as it sounds––and never yelled at any servant, and even refused to call them that. Sometimes she had two baths a day. Father, father deluded, was mad as a flag in a storm, was rocking crazy and fun in his own crazy way. He went nuts shortly after my birth, and nobody seemed to know why. But is there a why to these things? And I sometimes wonder if I am going to go mad too sometime in the dim future (the future is always dim). Thus I had no father, or no fatherly father, thus no father, and fatherless I found my own patrons. There was Nooby, the wise, old, sexually excited ant; Frauntfraunty, a cancer-stricken housemouseelf (‘Metastasized master, metastasized,’ he used to say); BringOverMarty, the once popular sitcom star from one of those United States who now managed a dhobi ghat and spoke in riddles (‘I wring-a-wring-a rose dress, bring-a-bring-a coal-grey dress. Is this yours? Is this yours? Is this yours?’) which weren’t really riddles but possessed a manner of rhythm and tune; and finally, Shaktidas Murali Broom, a retired besom with an unusually straight back who understood the deep, complex problems of life but alas, could never articulate himself (‘God make naise too much, he not ther. Man make noise too much, he ther, but aalvays he try disafeer. Naat nice.’).

  Amma, with her nice, oval face and tiny height, survived. Sometimes, and even Darwin said, survival is a matter of fitness, yet mother was never fit—though her hair was remarkably black and neat. She was Hindu by birth (or so she was told), nothing by choice, then Buddhist by choice and songbird by next birth—this is what she believed. Amma, shortly after father went mad, went quietly sane, saner than she had ever been, and forgot her dreams of being reborn as a songbird. She was a quiet, sane woman after that, never looking at clouds. Sometimes I recall her nice face, through the steamed lens of childhood by my bedside, as Shaktidas Murali Broom sat, straight-backed, listening (he never interrupted––this is a sign of a good friend). She spoke for hours softly. I don’t remember much––the past is dim––yet I remember her hands contained in her lap and her mouth moving slowly; her sad, neat mouth and her very white, clean teeth. One evening as she left my room, Shaktidas said in my ear, ‘Human bean many sadness. Heavy, heavy harat.’ And Nooby, who was hiding in the closet, stuck his head out and added, ‘Dude, you have a very beautiful mother; if I h
ad little more strength . . . and in this old age . . . difficult to move. But I would really give it to her right in the . . .’ And BringOverMarty appearing suddenly beside my thin legs cut him short. ‘Quiet ant, stupid ant, lingers over things. Quiet boy, bright boy, what’s your heart think?’ he sang. And I said to myself, ‘One day I will make my mother a machine that will listen to her stories and give her high fives.’ Nobody laughed and everything was quiet. Quietness occupied a large part of my childhood.

  Amma was, above all things, one who avoided conflict and everything, like herself and her room, was clean and she believed in not talking about things. Conflict––that pins-and-needles feeling that comes with every position a man takes for too long––was quite efficiently swept under rugs and other warm things like caramel pudding. And everyone knows spiky things must never be swept under rugs: Often, when it was least expected, these things pierced through and slowly tearing apart, exploded into the quiet living room space. Appoos was mad after all, and one couldn’t sustain a fight too long, as it collapsed over the weakness of one party to maintain a point over the course of even one sentence; so the shouting faded only to be replaced with a strained and tight peace in the air, a volatile mixture that was set-off at the least signs of trouble. It followed that there was not much talking in our home lest this strange peace was disturbed and I spent my days in this or that world. Amma also often did things to make herself feel better regardless of the final product, which was counter-productive because it was the final product, usually, that affected her.

  Her husband, Appoos––called Kamran by everyone other than his son; once a stout and upright guy with an impressively maintained moustache and hard, thick arms, but now a shrivelled and fluttery fellow who rarely stood up––was harmlessly schizophrenic, and was good company when there was nothing serious to discuss. But when critical topics were brought up, there was only that laugh; that merciless, non-discriminatory laugh; and this tore up Amma, who was trying to take life seriously. There was no place for humour in Amma’s life: Her wounds were too grave for laughter to be any kind of medicine. In those days, when she was patient, and when Appoos and her ate together (later he ate alone, and watched something through the window), she would quietly tell him to pay attention, to quiet down, to be normal, as if his madness was just another state of his annoying mind that could be reasoned with, to be told off and controlled by words. He was terrified—of what we didn’t know—and I felt scared too. The table at meals was always cold with an unspoken tension. Sometimes, when Appoos had an episode, it was like our quotidian family dinner was interrupted by a rakshasa in work clothing, all ready to kill, but disguised as an office man (and if you looked carefully, the blood glinted red in the white of the light under his perfect length blazer-sleeve), and mother’s jaw would clench and something inside her would begin to swell and make her hands shake. Then, like she normally did, when things began to explode, she would leave. I wondered if everything would be better if my mother did just hit him. That poor woman––maybe she needed the violence, the licence for violence. Maybe violence can save lives. And is there anything worse than people happy for no reason? I mostly hated mental Appoos but pretended not to––that’s the truth; I swear on my father.

  Appoos had good days and bad, but this was what he said and we all knew most days were bad though this wasn’t really his fault and came down usually to the net amount of seriousness in the universe. I, little coward, was never around; usually in my room trying to get rid of seriousness, and bad things, by swatting at them like one would do against flies and other motley creatures with wings; distractedly dodging and swiping at these bad things that I somehow sensed in the world but could never explain, or articulate.

  I don’t really remember much of a small, conveniently close school, perhaps because my mind had driven out the stuff that made it untidy, a nervous mess, but I remember a cane and a sharp pain, but nothing more and nobody’s face to put it to. Often it is just a kind of sharp, painful fog, somewhere in the space of my mind, the rest of which tries its best to forget those smoggy days.

  I was told much later that one day, there was a mark on my arm. Amma saw it while changing my shirt and she screamed and cried and I screamed and cried and the next morning there was no school, and I was overjoyed, running up and down the stairs.

  What I remember is, I came back every evening from that school, before mother made a fuss and took me out, and there was a tune. It went like this. Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na. Shaktidas liked it, even though he said he didn’t, but I knew it moved him, like it moved me. It moved something deep inside me, physically and solidly. I felt something shift inside, in the unknowable spaces between thoughts and ideas, feelings and actions. The tune came from a piano in a corner, from lonely hands somewhere in the neighbourhood. But then one day it was gone (I have found that things usually do). And then I relied on Shaktidas; I would say to him, ‘Hey, Broom (this annoyed him). Sing that song, na.’ And he would sing, na na na na na na, but it was over much too fast, much too swiftly. These are the things that really annoy me: the good things that get over too soon and perhaps the bad ones that linger.

  The oddly scented, dimly lit mist of the past has obscured much, and I can barely remember some things, and yet others remain clear, perhaps a little too clear. Like that house we lived in: Completely white on the outside, and completely dull, with a flat roof, flat walls, flat everything. The door, which I can feel even now, was rough and heavy and made of some reddish wood and smelt of polish. Bars criss-crossed every entrance, every potential entrance; black, hard, shining, and obscured every opening into the world with a jail-like texture. Inside. The furniture was dull, faded cloth on unpolished wood, and smelt of old things left alone for too long. A long, narrow corridor led from the door to the dim insides of this animal that I was raised in. A kitchen clanked further on, and to the left a neglected guest bedroom, unused for years. To the right, a narrow staircase that took you past cobwebs. Upstairs. A large bedroom with the lightness of my mother’s scent, arranged and neat, and attached, through a corridor, past the bathroom that nobody used, a tiny room, mine, with a view of empty plots, and far away, a road, and far away, buildings, and far away, the city.

  I also recollect an uncle with nothing, who visited once a year; an uncle from some cold, snowy country with signs of air travel hanging off huge suitcases. He brought shiny shoes, shell-shaped chocolates, till he lost his money––as it inevitably leaves––and then brought keychains and empty boxes and gave them to me with the same eagerness, with the same words and the same expression, as if, if he pretended, nobody would notice how poor he had become. Foreign Uncle––this wasn’t his name––smoked like a dragon and I am aware that dragons are extinct. Of course this is beside the point. He was outspoken in a careless way, and around him people found themselves fidgeting very often. While Amma was like this and grimaced and shuffled when Foreign Uncle brought up sex––which he very often did because he said I needed to be ‘well versed and knowing’ on these things––Appoos laughed, and he was probably a liberal in the way that he wasn’t against anything really. Some forbidden topics often started a strange argument between them: Appoos couldn’t really argue, but Amma having an easy opponent, continued to force points. And while this one-sided debate occurred, Foreign Uncle, smoking a cigarette, and resting his hairy arm on the chair I sat on, smiled and coughed.

  One day, it was Saturday evening, late March, cornering me in the corridor next to the bathroom that nobody used, he reached into his shirt and brought out a long box of Marlboro cigarettes. I had seen the long boxes before, in the glass windows of shopping malls, a red and white brick, so crisp and foreign, and of course, by that point, I was ‘well versed and knowing’ on this topic of nicotine, but the look on my face betrayed my nervousness, because never before had nicotine and my mother been in such close proximity (she was maybe ten feet away below me, putting out dinner). He handed them over quietly, his eyes darting towards the
door behind me. ‘You better hide them,’ he said quietly. ‘And not before you’re fifteen.’ Then he walked past quickly and I heard his heavy steps going down the stairs and then his muffled voice as he innocently asked Amma a question about dinner.

  I didn’t understand then why Foreign Uncle had given me that box of cigarettes. I was only twelve, and had only just begun to discover the twin pleasures of nicotine and rebellion. And of course I assumed all the adults were part of some worldwide undercover operation to crack down on teenage smoking. But apparently Foreign Uncle wasn’t one of these strict, rule-loving adults, and I immediately liked him more for it. And now it was our little secret to glance at about over dinner or tea. And of course I never told him that I smoked almost immediately after he gave me the cigarettes, on the terrace, braving the sun. But say what you want about Foreign Uncle, he wasn’t a stupid man. He certainly knew I would smoke, and gave them to me despite this. Years later, when I told Major, he said, ‘He obviously wanted you to smoke, Ib. He wanted to set you free from your parents.’ This made sense. After all, he was miserable like all the adults, and maybe he was trying to live through me, his only young relative, and gain some joy by setting me free.

  Foreign Uncle was Amma’s brother. He was younger by a few indistinguishable years. Amma never liked him much. He’s always complaining, she said. And he was—constantly irritated and grumpy about matters that he couldn’t control, depressed about some state of affairs in a country I didn’t know existed, but unwilling to think beyond his anger and frustration.

  In the winter of some year, the last night of his annual trip to the country of his birth and the last time I saw him, he came home late and drunk and smelling of smoke. Amma was upset when she opened the door and went upstairs without saying a word. She was too upset to even put me to bed, so I sat there on the landing and watched his clayey frame standing still in the living room, till he heard Amma’s door shut, then he sat heavily on the sofa and closed his eyes. Then he rose and walked around, stopping occasionally at a picture on the wall, or at the fish tank with its three still-alive fish, and artificial plants. All at once, as the orange light from a street lamp outside fell on his shapeless face, I seemed to see beneath his expression and his form, and suddenly felt a deep sadness that I had never felt before. And suddenly I felt angry at mother for being so upset and insensitive. Couldn’t she see how miserable he was? He was so lonely and sad. He seemed to sense my presence, and called out softly. I went down the stairs on my toes. He sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘Did you see?’ he asked, not looking at me. I nodded and he sighed. ‘Forget it, Ib. You shouldn’t worry about such things. At least not yet.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t you have school tomorrow? Go, go. To bed.’ I scampered up the stairs, and before I reached the landing, I turned and glanced one last time at my sad uncle. He hadn’t moved, still sitting there, looking down at the floor.