The Day
Earlier in the year, one author at the Jaipur Literature Festival told the starstruck crowd something that translates roughly to “You cannot write unless and until you are in unfathomable despair, have reached the deepest level of sadness in your heart and realised that everything in the world is nothing but a ball of crap.” The same author tells the crowd to consult an editor who can point out words repeated in our draft and find our blind spots. Yet there lie the monetary restrictions on a person like me who dreams of making it big yet slouches for long hours. So, my dearest author, you are correct in the ways of writing about life yet novice in the practicalities of the same.
I am not lazy, mind you, but the passage of time, the reading of books and the romantic aura of being in the city of yellow taxis certainly made its mark on me. The town with its cheap chicken rolls, poised citizens, beautiful avenues near Park Street and loud tinker tanker city-life, somehow, possessed the ability to mysteriously slow down time.
However, as the new day dawned and the shackles of society forced me to make something of myself, with a dejected mind and a seemingly tired soul, I slouched out of the bed in my rented flat and remembered the biblical words of Tyler Durden from the legendary movie, Night Club. And thus, I began, my search to find meaning in the mundane ways of life, yet again.
I fancied the formal attire in my college days; seldom realising that wearing it regularly asserts a feeling that it is a part of the dead skin on your body with the exception that you need to shed it daily and then wear it again the next morning. Dressed in that dreaded thing, I started my day. My job is pretty simple: I sell things or at least try to. The fun part is that I encounter new adventures, every-single-day. So today, a watchman tried to throw me out of the shop for asking a phone number; there was a voluntary exit from a shop where the pot-bellied elderly owner was kind enough to offer me tea but along with it also offered a substantial dose of fresh breath comprising of the reverse aromas of his lunch.
For my kind readers, this is usual, you don’t need to pity me. Not yet. At around 7 PM, I booked a cab to return to my shack. The app showed that I needed to wait for just 2 minutes. After 20-minutes, drenched in the rain, I stepped in the car, shivering. I asked the driver to turn on the AC; I needed it to cool down the remnants of my warm soul. At the destination, I stepped out. I encountered an unpleasant moist sound and could feel my left foot becoming wet. I looked outside and saw that my left foot was ankle-deep in wet cow dung. I tried to (il)logically think of it as an ironical come-back move from the cow mafia, targeted at my leather shoe. “Not yet”, I repeated. I rammed the door of the cab. An excruciating pain found me, something so directly aimed that I couldn’t even shout. I realised that my thumb was sandwiched when I closed the cab door. I waited there for a moment, intrinsically enlisting the events of the day leading to this. So, when I turned to my diary that night, I wrote, “I am ready to write.”
Image Credits and Source:https://www.skymetweather.com/content/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/kolkata-rain-social.jpg