അറിയോ?

Stories from a Juke Joint

Part I

I attended a wedding last month. Lately, it has been one wedding after another. I’ve been thinking of late, that I am too old to have an Aftersun-like vacation with my future child, should’ve married earlier for it to work out like that. Out of all the family dramas, I do not know why I keep going back to Aftersun now and then. Perhaps, the fact that I’ve never been on vacation, wanting a baby daughter, memory of a karaoke night, my forever dream to save up for a camcorder and the absence of a wife onscreen may all compound to the reason for me wishing for a fairytale like it. Anyways, my dreams are limited to streaks of memory that tire me momentarily on a random day. This is not about all that. This is about a real family.

I do not know, for certain, when I started recording life. There are flashes. Me playing in the sand. Chasing little white butterflies. Pink clouds rolled into balls of candy. I do not remember much from my time at my ancestral home where I was born, but photographs refresh my memory. I’m wearing that Batman t-shirt I was so fond of, in a photograph with Amma and my little sister. I’d tore out the Bat logo years later, which remains safe in a rusted Camlin instrument box, amongst other childhood paraphernalia. A drum that my uncle bought me, which is kept still somewhere inside the spare bedroom upstairs now. On the album, I am naked and with the drum strategically poised so that my blushes are saved. However, not everything from these photographs lasted, and a fair lot remain alien to me. And there is very little that I’ve managed to keep in my mind. I do remember the first time we entered the apartment where we would spend the next fourteen years of our lives. My dad’s coworker and his wife, who also happened to be our neighbours visited us, a welcome of sorts. Since my dad never really took us out anywhere since we were kids, I cannot recollect myself having any friends. It was me, my baby sister, Mum and Grandma, all of us inside that old house with no neighbours around us. Now I’m introduced to these two brothers, who were now our guests and next-door neighbours.

Life had started by then, I believe.

Fast forward all those years and we are at the terrace of their new home. They’d moved here once their father had retired, and like us too, they had left the old government apartment. We sit drinking Russian vodka and smoked ham while discussing 9/11 and the recent Venezuelan antics. Spoke of how 2018 flooded us, and though it was unusual for it be raining on a February night, we welcomed it. It was natural for us to rave about where cinema was headed, and how the regional cinema signified an end of ‘entertainment’, in all the right ways. The dreams of a world of arts and culture had taken off to a different tangent whose future we couldn’t anticipate, and weirdly for the first time in our lives, we weren’t observers. This was our futures too. At some point I swapped the vodka for whisky and I chewed on grilled chicken but it all tasted the same. I posted a photo of the plate to which a person replied ‘yum’.

Whilst we floated around discussing the grave dilemmas that our world circled with, we also talked about everyone who’d once been part of our shared lives. Talked about a dear friend whose whereabouts were narrowed down to some bar in Bengaluru from murmurs around us, but we were still unsure where to find him. That one guy in the neighbourhood who’d been drinking ever since we remember, a ritual he would say, observed to rid himself from this world. And he did eventually, and now we talk about the cricket tournament named in his honour, he was a good batsman. How the school building had remained unchanged all these years and how there’s a mountain of construction debris that takes up half the football field now. Nobody played on that court anymore, I sighed. When I was in school, and since I was smaller than most boys, it was only natural that I played on the wing so that I don’t get bullied in the middle. The pitch felt like it ran forever, as my legs paced from one half to another. I assumed this would be just the beginning, and I’d play at grander venues during university. How wrong was I.

Around two am, the elder brother who was getting married tomorrow would bid us goodnight, and make his way downstairs. Tomorrow is a Wednesday. We drank more and more, conversations much clearer, the rain much heavier. A mutual friend, of whom I’ve heard so much would join us, dripping wet as he came running in from the downpour. With him, he brought stories from another time and place, along with his stash he protected from the rains. We rolled one and started off with round two.

It was a quiet neighbourhood. Except for us three, there was the neighbour’s little dog who occasionally yapped whenever we hovered over it from above.

In the morning I woke up late, with the groom pacing the room. He gave me the big brother pep talk of finding love and getting married, but I was still recovering from yesterday’s fade. It was a busy morning. Soon, I was given the job of getting flowers for the bride, jasmine buds for they would blossom by evening. I’ve never been to many weddings of my own kin, people rarely got married in the family. Either they died before their lives had taken off, or they eloped and moved in with their partners. And as for the rest of the ones I attended, none of them had a linear narrative. At twelve pm I’m at a juice shop with a gift hamper bigger than me and a whist plastic kit full of jasmine, all to be delivered as I smoked a cigarette, sweating as I sipped a poorly made lemon soda, half of which I had to pour aside on the tracks beside.

Part II

There is a phrase in my mother tongue with which you greet someone, especially when you meet them after a long time. Actually, it is a single word, not a phrase per se. However, it roughly translates into, “Do you know me?”, or as we say it,

“അറിയോ?”

“Ariyo?”

I remember arriving at the riverside venue along with the giant cake on the backseat. The car was driven by our groom’s uncle, whom I just met this morning. His kid was making sure the cake was in place as he was crammed into that backseat, trying to hold onto dear life, and the cake. I, on the other hand, found things comfortable as I sat navigating a relatively straight path to the venue on google maps. Despite travelling all the way there this morning while delivering the flowers. Maps and roads were never really my thing. My friend would go around running everywhere since he had the duties of the sibling to see this out, whilst I stood by the banks watching birds settle down in their nests, inside the forest across the river. I wondered when was the last time, I’ve been to a wedding at sundown in these southern parts and I realized it was never. The wedding wasn’t to be tied to any religion and it was a to bring together people from two different states. Hence it lacked the any real theme or the oh so familiar rituals of gods, everything about this felt new. I reckoned it was like that, for every other wedding too. I started noticing all this, because one of my closest friends were getting married now and my thoughts are naturally over him.

I remember the daily blackouts we had, while living in our old apartment. As a child, I thought this was how things were, that this, was normal. Every day around seven pm, we would lose all the lights. Everyone would move into the balconies, away from their dead television sets to observe the night sky. I’d listen to the muffled conversations that slipped out of the nearby balconies, yet there was an eerie silence that hugged them. Occasionally, someone would yell out playfully to their friend who lived on the opposite block. It was unknown to many of in these hours of stillness, the peanut vendor would appear from nowhere. He always seemed to visit all of us when the lampposts dimmed. Serenading with a clanging with his steel ladle on his wok full of burning peanuts. A rusty petromax lamp was hung on his cart as it slowly came crawling, with small groups coming over to him from each block. I remember, we lived on the farther end, aside the abandoned paddy fields, from which a not so pleasant winds would blow. I sat there resting my head on the railing sideways, waiting patiently for the cart to arrive. By nine, the cart would disappear into the darkness and the power would be up again. Nine o’ clock meant it was time for another exciting episode of Dragon Ball Z.

Faces known to me for so many years, some with more grey hair, some with puffy cheeks. I’d tell my mother how all of them almost looked the same. My mother would dismiss it as my naive nature to romanticize everything. Standing there amidst all of my past neighbours, who have seen different versions of me, and as I mirror back to them, I realized all of this was getting old. And perhaps without myself being aware of it all, after chasing life elsewhere, I see now that life has already happened to me. All the cool teenagers I looked up to, who’d graduated from high school then, now had their kids running around. The angry men who’d chase us away for hitting their bikes with our Stumper balls, seemed much more relaxed seeing us. The small groups of aunties who used to wait for their kids by the main gate where still seen together chatting away like before. However, this was no longer an exercise of the routine, and all these conversations would end with a slow goodbye before next.

In the afternoons, after I arrived back home from school, they’d play Powerpuff girls at three pm on Cartoon Network. I remember throwing myself out of the rickshaw before it stopped so that I could reach sooner. I remember how my mother came rushing in whilst I lay near the ditch, bleeding. I wanted to be a Powerpuff girl, but years later I realized how nearly impossible it was, humans cannot fly sadly. A friend who sat next to me had more practical goals, he said he wanted to be lorry driver. Which got me thinking serious about my career when I was eight. Sitting at the same sofa years later, I think about how we survived in a square of six metres wide. How living so close to each other would never be put to my conscience until a friend from class visited me for borrowing notes from yesterday’s class. In my twenties, I would go around castaway apartments in the suburbs of a metropolis, taking notes and making sketches. My professor would lecture me on how designing tight spaces would be much tougher than luxury apartments. For the first time in my life I felt I knew a great deal more than what my professor was talking about. In suburbs, I’d meet another university professor who took lectures at two different universities and who also ran a travel agency to afford his one room kitchen in the chawl. He would ask me whether am I here to build them new homes. I am just a student; I am no hero. Memories collide as I sleep off on the same sofa, my legs are slightly longer, enough for them to be hanging out of the sofa’s handrest when I stretch my back. It’s the same old sofa, same old me, but in a bigger room.

Part III

I am reminded of how the people dear to me never really called me by my first name. Only something that was reduced to an ID card and at times at work, if I was rarely summoned. Even my dear lover from a different time would only whisper it as a caution in my ear when I crossed a line with her body in bed. Rest of the time, it was always a ‘hey’ or ‘you’. I remember even my closest of friends would call out my given name, only in gravest situations. I went by synonyms, and eventually got used to it. My friend would come over with a ‘hey’, between the lengthy photo sessions and chit chats with the never-ending inflow of guests, and ask me whether we should go for a smoke. I told him how I felt unusually shy to smoke in front of all these people who’d known me since I was a child. He nods and agrees and tells me to slowly slip towards the parking lot and he’ll be there in five minutes.

“How did they all recognize you?”

My mother would enquire. I said they didn’t. I spoke of the many instances where I had to put my parents’ name to introduce myself and omitting my own. She would further ask what does a twenty-eight-year-old man would have common with her colleagues who were pushing sixties. My mother, in fact has never seen how I fit into these social settings, or she refuses to believe the reality where I am no longer a child. She calls me names that are very random which roughly translates to ‘my eyes’, ‘gold’, ‘sugar’ and many more in rotation. Sometimes I fear as much as affirming this love is, would I be able to reciprocate all of this back to her. For now, she overpowers me. Perhaps forever maybe.

I hold the tiny arms of a new friend. He clings onto my friend, his mother, with whom I spent my time at university with. She briefly talks to us of the new pangs of motherhood she is going through and all three of us stood there, yet sinking as if some remainders of the vodka from yesterday had started to kick in belatedly. My friend urged me to get a move on for a smoke, as we slowly slipped past the reality that unfurling right before us. We walked, rather skipped. For some reason, I knew this time it wasn’t the nicotine that we were running towards. We were running away.

The bus stop where my house is at, is named Moscow. There are portraits of Babasaheb and Pandit Karuppan hung on the walls of the living room. Three fat volumes of the Das Capital are safely kept on the new bookshelf we made last summer. Old songs of theatre that my grandma used to sing, now ring in my ears now and then. So many buddhist texts around the house. I do not know what to make of all this, it is hard to give into familial morals as such. I wasn’t thrilled when I learnt I was born into a caste which everyone else looked down on. And I didn’t find being born into the realm of socialism as some birthright to grasp hold of either. I’m not even bringing up religion, and I’m no John Lennon either. Somethings in life, I have to earn maybe, before I wear them as a medal from birth. Reasons why I do a peopley job where I’m building homes for the ordinary. Define ordinary, define middle class. What about the ones below? We spoke of how this life found us on that rainy night before, how we’d know a company won’t come offering us fancy packages nor did we search for them. How we’d find solace in paint and ink, and how we knew how all of that would make this life difficult. Irks me that I now read caste oppression written by someone else other than who went through it. And now that Bollywood makes money from the guilt of its viewership, I realize even sympathy is converted into capital. I wonder where are the rest of us. I wonder when we will become the protagonists of our own lives. Be a hero? You know?

It is quite a sight, getting married under the hues of orange and purple. Orange, because the sun was dying. Purple thrown in, from the impending raging thunderclouds. I smile as the groom kisses the bride and I’m in awe that we finally live in a land where small acts of love is no more taboo. I meet the couple afterwards and they playfully ask me when am I inviting them to one of these. I smile back as I drift away with my drink. I slowly move towards the parking lot again, this time alone. Watching a crowd that once was a family, I pity that I am no longer a recurring character in this sitcom. Sitting on the jungly parking lot that was slowly growing out of bounds, I blended in with my dark green shirt. This shirt has seen five weddings already; I should be getting a new one soon. Since I shied away from photographs, I was rescued of the allegations that would’ve potentially arose if they saw me in all those photo albums in the future. Do people still keep photo albums? I’m not sure. It was a full moon night and there was a small cottage surrounded by coconut trees that stood out in the horizon. I was reminded about vampires and Sinners. While watching the post credits scenes, I do not know why it leaves me unsettled all the time. When Stack talks about that day, I didn’t know why I place my arm on my forehead every time and bend my head over and slouch in vain.

I think now, I know why.

‘Sinners’ written by Ryan Coogler