SENESCENCE

INDIFFERENCE

8:00 AM to 12 NOON

Ihad been preoccupied the previous night when I walked from the bus stop to the house where I was a lodger, otherwise I would have noted his arrival earlier. Whether that would have prevented the precipitation of the crisis which occurred in my personal life, or merely saved it for another day, I cannot tell. At the time I was convinced of the former possibility, but I am far from sure now.

Returning from a walk with my girlfriend, I had indeed a lot to be preoccupied about.

Both of us hailed from a sleepy market town, eight hours from the metropolis by a combined journey of slow train, ramshackle bus and van-rickshaw, this last being a contraption for transporting vegetables and humans, consisting of a platform on wheels pushed by bicycle pedals.

We did not know each other, however, before we met at the college for undergraduates where, unwittingly, both of us had enrolled ourselves. It was natural for us to drift together, two pieces of flotsam on the metropolitan waters. Also, we were studying the same subject, English literature. Our town, as it happened, had two excellent, though segregated, schools for boys and girls, set up by old landlords and endowed by their émigré descendants, one of whom took pains to attend managing committee meetings, where he insisted on and was able to enforce and cajole the maintenance of a high standard in the teaching of English.

She was pretty. It cannot be that she was unaware of it, but, perhaps, small town admiration was not valued by her sufficiently to give her enough self-confidence to carry herself with the usual aplomb of pretty girls. This, coupled with small town shyness, made her less noticed than might have been expected. In fact, as I learnt later, the girls of her class considered her arrogant. Now, my aura of rusticity was unmistakable and faded very slowly, and she had me placed quite accurately. That she noticed me at all was the doing of George Bernard Shaw. A Shaw play was taught by the only impressive teacher in the department, a Shaw enthusiast like my old English master at school, who had practically made a potion of GBS to be forcibly fed to unfortunates like me in whom he had seen ‘a glimmer, though no more, of interest’. Smelling a compatriot, however unenthused, the teacher at the college started bouncing ideas off me in class, which led to a certain notoriety.

She approached me in the quadrangle one afternoon for help with Shaw. A little conversation confirmed her suspicions regarding my origin, though she was a little less surprised than me to learn just how much we had in common. Hugely reassured, both of us started talking like long lost friends.

I saw him when I was going to buy razor blades from the corner shop. It was a bright morning and the shadows were sharply defined. He was lying on the sidewalk outside a pathological laboratory. His beard and hair were unkempt and matted, and dirt caked his hands and feet. He wore a shirt, blackened with grime and in tatters, and a loincloth through which came out and rested on the stones of the walk a huge, oval growth, his scrotum, distended till red veins stood ready to burst on its surface, glistening evilly in the morning light. His eyes were open. It was a Sunday and there was a small crowd of market-goers near his head. A small man, the owner of the local hair-dressing shop, two chairs and mirrors in a sliver of space between two mansions, was holding forth on the iniquity of the municipal corporation which allowed such sights to linger in a public place as they ‘outraged the modesty of women’. Crows sat hopefully in groups on overhead telephone cables and electricity poles, and pi dogs came sniffing only to be shooed away by the people joining and leaving the fluid little confabulation around the man. Most of the men had early morning bleariness around the eyes with a day’s stubble on the face and plastic bags in their hands from which erupted vegetable stems and a smell of stale fish.

She lived in a girls’ hostel, which strictly limited male access to an anteroom presided over by a formidable chaperone, perennially huddled over the telephone, which she relinquished only reluctantly to her wards, reserving the right to follow the conversation from this end. Apart from the door there was only a skylight high up and the gloom and squalor were compounded by the weak light from a lone electric bulb, naked without shade or cover. You had only to sit beside an inmate for the matron to start a string of warnings and threats. She was convinced that all male visitors, whatever the relationship declared in the visitors’ register, had designs on the virtue of her girls. She invariably knew when someone had filched time for herself between the end of classes and her return to the hostel, and was resentful of Sundays when everyone was free to receive calls and visit the home of the accredited local guardian, no questions asked. My own boarding house was scarcely more conducive to the germination of romance, peopled as it was by my bawdy contemporaries and flaunting the same concern for the protection of our virtue via a notice in chaste vernacular: No ladies beyond this point.

So, when I picked up the courage to ask for her company without a Shavian excuse, it had to be a Sunday at some place away from our dwelling houses. According to freshman folklore, the walled parks and gardens, bordering the green expanse in the heart of the metropolis, were safe from the intervention of neighbourhood toughs and policemen. On our third outing, I remember, we were crossing the green when the wind rose, dust swirled and swept past us and, finally, the rain came, fat drops hitting us on the face and drenching our clothes in no time. Laughing, we ran to the shelter of the nearest tree, and there I held her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, her hand curled around mine. It was the closest we came to a declaration of love. The earth moved for me. I learnt later, during a sharp exchange of words, in fact, that though the earth did not move for her, she too had been deeply affected. For both of us, it was the first serious contact with the opposite sex, quite different from the chance meeting of eyes at marriage parties.

There followed a very happy interlude. We roamed about the metropolis, walking the broad avenues, bordering the green, as well as narrow streets going deep into densely packed tenement houses with people overflowing onto the sidewalks and beyond, until the ebb and flow of the pulse of the city and its patterns of sleep and siesta became second nature to us. We talked of our childhoods and schooldays, our parents and families. Did we talk of aspirations? We weren’t ambitious, all we wanted at that time was to make good in the indifferent and unhelpful world of the metropolis. Our greatest fear was to return to our birthplace as failures.

I came out again to take delivery of laundered clothes from the ‘steam laundry’ as it called itself on the signboard above a door set at the top of a flight of steps. My everyday clothes went to the washerman, who came twice a week to collect all our soiled linen in a huge bundle which he balanced on the back of a donkey and took away to be washed in one of the several ponds of the locality. Actually I was indulging in a luxury, because we were to go to a film show that afternoon. It was an adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion, and called itself by the same name. This dates my narrative to a period before the sweeping success of the musical super hit My Fair Lady, based on the same play. No theatre ever showed Pygmalion after My Fair Lady hit the world, though the immortals must have weathered successive bursts of Shavian invective once the picture of Higgins folding Eliza in fond embrace reached the eternal abode.

Somebody had thrown a sack over the lower portion of the man’s body and this had drastically reduced his visual appeal to the voyeur. The flies, however, knew what was underneath the sacking. But now only the occasional passer-by would stand for some time and hover hesitantly over him. His eyes were open and he was staring at the sky, which was reflected with disconcerting clarity in each eye, the dazzling whiteness of cloud formations standing out against the darkness of the pupils. For minutes on end he wouldn’t blink and then, all of a sudden, the shutters would come down. Just when you would start to think that perhaps he had dropped off, the eyes would again open. But the only place he looked at was the sky. Not a word passed his lips. I had seen people bending over him and asking him his name and whereabouts without the slightest response from him. His gaze remained unwavering, skywards.

I suddenly felt a twinge of responsibility. The boy at the sweetmeat shop gave me a paper cup which I filled with water from a roadside tap and brought to his mouth. Imagining, perhaps, a parting of the lips, carefully I decanted a little water onto his mouth. The water just dropped off. Only a few tiny drops remained lodged in the cracks of his parched lips, where they glistened like minute jewels. Guiltily, I remembered a kettle on the boil and hastened away, pinning my hopes on the pathological laboratory which would