Spirit Residue

Solitude, Memory and Intoxication

1

I do not remember when I picked this habit up- as I’ve aged, I go more often than not to the movies alone. I believe it must’ve started when my tastes differed with the people who surrounded me at the time. As much as I love my solo adventures, there is no denying the frustration in bottling up all those emotions that seep into me from the giant screen before. Later it would be the time to reminisce the very few times we’ve gone to the theatre together. Driving back, we would discuss the futility, and rarely the brilliance of the film we witnessed. We often picked the bad ones. Looking back, I realize in life, all good things are celebrated in silence, and whatever is vile is serenaded with a marching band. We’d talk over the buzz of the traffic; ranting as we zoomed through. Back then I would live through it as a normal day. Years later, as I sit at the center of the room with all with lights out, and all by myself in front of my laptop, I come to terms with what I’ve lost over the years. People don’t just leave; they brush off the little patterns of life they drew along with you. Sitting there in the darkness gazing at this singular source of light, would soon become a ritual for the very many years to come.

The only interference in my life, would come from the coucal who has somehow chosen to nest above my room. Sometimes I could hear it walking above the panels above, slowly pacing as if it were hunting me down from above. The slow tapping it made with each step, felt like straight from a horror movie. I never liked horror movies. I see the creature rarely during the day, once in a while you could catch a glimpse of its rusted feathers while it was hunting in the gardens for snails. It would walk timidly, just as it did on the roof, and would flee at the sight of me. I spent my siestas watching this solitary coucal go on its rounds, from the rocking chair that belonged to my uncle. He never used to let anyone else sit on it. The household joke was that he kept rocking the chair even after he’d died on it.

2

These days, I no longer have time for movies. Yet, I wake up to horror. My dusty old laptop with a broken hinge, sits stationary at my desk these days. My cellphone is the new organ that I’ve stitched onto myself, but it was the kind of bondage that was the only anti-dote to my perils of adulthood. There is a war, which I view on the palm of my hand. I cannot imagine a seventeen-year-old me would envision myself watching buildings being blown up in some part of the world in ten years’ time. And I am still supposed to finish my breakfast and hurry onto work nonetheless. I have swapped tranquility with terror, as I look down a kaleidoscope of fears.

Smoke fills up this house as I start to pick up pace during these early hours. I throw in coconut shells into the amber to get the fire going. My excuse to use the old fireplace at the outhouse is so that I can save up some gas, but honestly, I just like the art of burning things up. The fire hugs the big steel pot which is now covered in soot that matches the rest of the interior. I find myself, perhaps in very similar settings like this, from time to time. Fixing the firewood, I feel the warm caress of the flames on my cheeks, I close my eyes to feel my skull tightening. While I remain immobilized, the smoke is funneled into the house, and the sappy smell of an ageing plaster gives way to the clouds that reeked of dying embers. The sun would rip across the hallway, so that I can navigate back into this living structure. While the reality in which this house would be shelled down has not materialized in the present day and despite the fact that I’ve clogged it up with smoke, it is still alive. But the angst that has been building in these walls are from a different nature, something that I’ve had a hard time explaining. I feel both the suffocation and warmth of the air that clogs this small hallway.

Portraits of my ancestors lined upon the living room. There is barely any room to plant my heel some days, with all the noise and cheer from everyone as they would engross in their discussions. I see these dark bodies looming behind the smoke. Suddenly I feel the warmth that once I tried so much to fill the house with, being cancelled out. Cold droplets drip from my temples as the ghosts of my ancestors walk about the hallway. Working my way through the crowd I take my refuge at my little corner upstairs. The past year or so, after returning from all those years in academia spent on unfamiliar grounds, I’d taken my stead in this house built by my forefathers. Remarkable that it is still breathing. Not a soul has visited the household in the past year, yet the echoes of the dead would fill up these walls. Maybe, that is what it holds it all together.

3

Like a blur, the day would pass. I take a sip as I listen to my co-worker talk about the building him and his father are constructing at the moment. I rarely talk to people, but since alcohol has eased me, I had stepped out into balcony to socialize. Sometimes I feel my body arch backwards, almost like a crescent moon to break into two. Picturing this makes me draw out the remaining air inside of me, my mouth now dried up, I take another gulp. Big gulps of Gin, and sometimes the ice too. Sometimes I double down on drinking when crowd is boring. The number of projects in your father’s construction company is directly proportional to the number of shots I’ll be drinking. My body is failing but I am still together and in one-piece. The co-worker continues on his rampage, and I try not to give away any of the disappointment I have for this human being, since my muscles are very much relaxed now. Instead of throwing a punch, I give a wide grin. Crescent moon, again. Violence never interested me, in life nor in celluloid. Heroes beating up Villains and vice versa just reminded me of bullies. Worst case scenario is that I would set you on fire, and in that balcony, I did think of that idea, only momentarily, since something else grabbed my attention. It occurred to me that there was a monkey sitting alone at the roof, I doubted myself first.

“That’s not a monkey, is it?” I said. I cut him off by pointing to the roof of the opposite building.

In no way I was too intoxicated to mistake a tarpaulin sheet or a metal canister for a monkey. Only less believable part was that the monkey just sat there. In the middle of that dead cold moonlight. As if a sadness had consumed it. Or maybe he wanted a drink. Soon people crowd up to guess whether it was a monkey or just an apparition, and I’ve officially lost my sanctuary. I told them I was feeling unwell and got on a rickshaw. I wonder what the monkey must’ve felt since it too had its moment taken away.

Fighting myself in my inner monologue, the chimes on my phone pull me back to the real-time crisis that is of reaching home. Last time I exited a party and I blanked, only to find the society’s angry dog on my lap. For the life of me, I couldn’t get a recap on what happened in between. Now, holding by the bars of the auto I check my phone - my friend has sent me a video of me and her dancing during Navratri from a year ago. As I play the video, I see us drunk dancing, trying to learn the steps at our maiden Garba but we’re spinning like two Beyblades battling it out. That day too, we had a full moon night. I am drinking with the wrong people I thought to myself. It was the last office party I went to.

4

There are far too many instances when I’m drunk and something magnificent decides to randomly drop onto my life. And I on my part, would be at the most frozen stance that I could possibly take up, and it’s all left to my eyes to believe what I see. I would put with the occasional sad monkey, but at times I have more trouble explaining the other beings. We are a sum total of what we live through, and I too, lived by these axioms that germinated a long time ago in my brain, but it was all limited. I felt all those self-help books hard the same hard full-stop that never took you anywhere. Just a picturesque train journey across a nice county that you’ll never live but you hoped to eventually get down at some point, but it just went on and on.

Only colours made sense- Green, Red and Yellow. They seemed to boil inside my mind, in rows and columns. Words, that were primitive which lacked any real meaning. And symbols that rained across them, motifs that God etched on his own for me. Whenever my mind underwent a reset, I was brought down to these visions. This was a puzzle for me to solve. I build myself from this before I dared to preach again. Never could understand which was more intense, slipping into slumber or waking up from a dream. I yearned to exist in between.

“So, what you saw, might be a Djinn”, a friend of mine proclaims.

I try not to lose my cool. A silly proposition, but I was at the mercy of following someone else’s rationale to devise a logical explanation to the being who had been following me. At first, I would not take things seriously because alcohol can make you feel funny things. But it was long after the buzz of the homemade cocktails had settled, I had still felt, the sensation of being followed. My ancestors would visit me, this was certain. But not while I was blanking out in the cold, in a city far away. Not beyond the walls of my house.

“You see, you feel these beings when you attain a different level of consciousness”, my friend continued.

The only ‘next-level’ consciousness I wanted to achieve was to somehow get the ghost of Freddie Mercury into me so that I can go nuts and look cool while I’m at it.

I take out the bottles from my bag, and neatly laid out everything I would pour together. I am particular of the alcohol I drink, and was more particular how I drank it, thereafter I would naturally ask my beloveds to imbibe this regimen into their lives too. In a dry-state, if wanted to drink, you had to go through a sophisticated drill. You make a number of phone calls, and after a two-step verification that’s more secure than your bank account, the dealer arrives on his bike and asks you to hop in. This is when you make meaningless conversation and transfer the bottle from his bag to yours, all while he drives across a quiet neighbourhood. Being tipsy already, I tell him a fantasy tale about my father’s booming construction business and how I want to sell it off because it doesn’t interest me, I wanted to write poetry. I neither liked construction nor poetry. I introduce myself as Arjun, my made-up name. Whoever he maybe, to me he is Krishna, my driver. And together we are going to war. The sun was setting on us whilst we went around the concrete mazes and occasionally, we’d hear a peacock call us out. Soon the giant creature would fly across me, as I gape watching it from below, as it takes flight from one compound to another. This was my hot summer fever-dream, except that I’m wide awake.

5

Hanging out with my friends at the film society made my Fridays. My friend, who also happened to be my professor, breaks down this movie after the screening has finished. She speaks of how the film is the interjection between a dream and reality. She may or may not have coined a term for it, for the life of me, I am not able to remember. I remember the beasts onscreen more real than ever with all the Gin I drank. By this point, I should either do an advert or join the alcoholics anonymous, I thought to myself loudly. As I leave the screening, I ask her what was the deal with the film having the same character with different personas. She told me she’s no longer my professor and will have to come up with my own interpretation. We’re having a double feature today, and I focus om the screen from afar. The yellow beam reflects of the white wall and I stay frozen under the full moon for a while. Movies seemed to be coming back to my life, and I was no longer watching them alone.

I walked along the empty road; my apartment is a fifteen-minute walk away. I’ve developed a limp after subsequent injuries on the pitch, now even a midnight stroll was putting me off. It was 2 AM and not all the street lights were working. Being afraid of the dark I walked faster so that I reached the next visible checkpoint which was a peepal tree, under which there was a light. By the time I reach there, a group of stray dogs had noticed me and had started growling. At times like these, you really aren’t sure whether the growls are real or is it the mind playing games. I felt the trees were hovering over me, blinding me from the skies. I felt like I was in a tunnel, with the peepal tree at the end. For some reason, I did not turn back. I was in no physical shape to deal with an attack. It was then I noticed a woman under the peepal tree.

She wore a football shirt, pretty much like mine, and chunky sneakers. She was unusually pale and was blonde. I wanted to colour my hair blonde too, naturally this piqued my interest. She was me, and an extension of what I wanted to be, I thought for a split second. I do not know why she sat there at the dead of the night, watching me fend off these strays. It was then I felt a wet nose of a dog by my knees, I had panicked beyond reason. I’d started swinging my arms and I was, at that moment going in circles, on a dance of my own. A wind circled me as I tried to stay on my feet. By the time it was over, the dogs had retreated and I was down on my knees, my legs had given up. I turn back to see what the spectator’s reaction was, but the woman by now had vanished. It was barely two minutes. Of course, to me it felt like a lifetime, still it felt eerily strange that the woman would vaporize like that.

I woke up the next day on my balcony, my face laid flat on the cold tiles. I do not remember reaching there, but I was in no mood to replay the events of yesterday. I woke up to warmth of the morning sun, a hot day was arriving. I arise brushing aside the dying mists of the night and look around the roses, laden in pearls of dew. Faint smell of the roses reminded me of the breeze from yesterday. I wasn’t being followed anymore.