DEATH WISH
I am a palmist who doesn’t believe in palmistry. Well, in a bazaar you hardly do what you believe in.
These days you don’t need a palmist to tell about your future; it stares at you with eyes like those of dead fish. With a future like that, you feed on nostalgia. To me, nostalgia is masochism.
Our village was a drought stricken cluster of slovenly shanties. Everyone devoured the available traces of life, like maggots teeming a rotting corpse.
Father would be busy all day smoking, spitting phlegm and blood, in his damp corner – “father’s corner”- and did nothing else. One day “father’s corner” was silent. Silence alarmed us; we were right. He was dead. The smell of tobacco, phlegm, and blood lingered for a few days.
Mother worked as maid servant. I was already a agriculture labor, before i was ten.
Then came the factory. It acquired agriculture land. Local leaders were quick to cash on the opportunity at a premium. The peasant became the unskilled labor; his wife washed dirty utensils and soiled clothes in the factory colony.
A modern factory, it was. No smoke, no noise. It worked silently. Like a predator lying in ambush. Predate, it did. The factory ruined the village, and closed down. We lost our livelihood. The rich, now richer, lost nothing.
All youth migrated to the city. The village became home for the aged and the moribund.
I worked as a garbage-truck helper. The garbage was an assortment of tobacco pouches, beer bottles, rotting vegetables, quivering offal, dead rats, used condoms, soiled sanitary napkins, hospital waste (once i inadvertently touched a macerated body of a new born - and came apart a palm: some divine prophecy, i suppose!)..the integrated stench won’t leave me for days. Within weeks, i could smell nothing in the world.
The garbage-truck driver was a learned man. Had done his masters in economics. We called him “professor” The “professor” was also a man of the world. Managed to stay in place for more than a decade. Shortly, he would be promoted as a water-tank driver- a more lucrative job.
I lost my job after the three months. They gave a “break” to everyone, so that nobody claimed employment rights.
Then I sold pesticide. Dealt in death, sort of. I stood near the railway station, with poison-packs in my bag, displaying the rate-board placard. Cockroaches, rats, bugs: each life had different price-tag.
Death dealing was not that bad. Life depended on that. But i left the job not before long. Of late, i noticed a man staring me for hours from across the road. Daily, for a week now. Never said a word. That silent stare irritated me.
‘Well buddy, what do you think you are doing, staring me like that, eh?’, asked i.
Startled, he mumbled, ‘No..no..I mean..you have some..poison? I need it..badly.’
Oh, that’s all what it was!
‘How much?’
‘May be a dozen.. make it twenty packets..rat poison.’
‘Twenty? Well..’
I never saw him after that.
Next day i heard of a family having committed suicide- could it be his family?
Actually, i was nothing more than an incidental instrument in the entire event. The poor man would have managed something or the other- maybe, strangulated his folks, and hung himself. Anything. But the guilt haunts my dreams even today. I stopped selling poison.
Now i sell dreams to the defeated. I don’t know a shit of palmistry. I practise unadulterated sham. Not sure of my dinner tonight, i claim to tame the stars and the planets!
My office is a mean rag-space under an eternally leafless tree, affording neither shade nor shelter. All my property is a caged parrot with moth-eaten feathers; a worn out pack of taros; and a rickety umbrella - all hand-me-downs.
I hate my lifeless tree. Particularly because right before me, stands an evergreen banyan tree with all its majesty; and “they” occupy that coveted space.
A bunch of idiots. Three deformed humanoids with waxy stunted bodies, hairless, not even eye-brows. Slopping shoulders, pendulant breasts, pot-bellies...Small triangular heads with pointed crowns. Slits for eyes, almost no neck. Open mouths, dribbling saliva. Protruding teeth, hyper-pink gums. All exactly alike. Siblings, triplets or, flotsam-jetsam of life-wreck, brought together by blind chance? They come every morning, smile mutely at each other the whole day, and go away at nightfall.
Their very sight gives me nausea. I can’t help staring them, either.
The job bores me. Life is a 50-odd-year-long yawn, and not a moment of peaceful sleep. Hunger gnaws me by the day; guilt, by night.
Boredom makes me introspective. What would mother be doing in that all-forsaken ditch of a village? Add old age to loneliness. Father could never be tender to her (or to me) - his own life was too abrasive for that...I didn’t quite understand him ever.
Mother never liked my coming to the city. The prosperous city is like a sick dog, licking its own prick, and affecting machismo. Each man, lost in his own void, putting up a steel-and-concrete façade of indifference.
The three idiots sit there smiling at each other, under the majestic banyan tree. Resentment overcomes me again. The afternoon sun scorches me, not a shred of shadow over my head, and those skunks smile like that. Father spits blood, and dies; mother withers away waiting for her only child, and the shameless skunks go on smiling. A family lives and dies like rats in holes, and these buggers can’t stop smiling. I, wholesome, am crucified to this rickety thing, and idiots keep smiling indifferently, under the sacred banyan tree. That’s sacrilegious!
Somebody please go, and slap them, kick their ass, thrash them, cudgel them, and stop them smiling, make them cry. Go, stab their bloody paunch!..would they bleed, or just ooze out some milky, nasty smelling sap?
God!..i shuddered at my own imagery, at my stooping down so low. Sorry, guys. . .
Then comes the tempest. An angry, ravaging crowd, spitting venomous abuse.
‘Close down, close down the shutters..!’
‘Kill them, kill those bastards..!’
‘Long live..!’
‘Hell with..!’
Frantic mob fury runs amok. Shops are ransacked, houses set ablaze. People run, and find nowhere to hide. Drop dead from exhaustion, or lie littered on the road, bleeding to death.
The danse macabre is over. Rigor mortis follows: a dead stiff stillness.
I come to my senses, and find myself sitting perched on the thorny tree, shaking with fear. Scratched, bruised all over, but safe. Clinging for life to the selfsame poor tree, i hated all my life.
Below, the parrot has been thrown out of the broken cage. A scraggy, rabid-looking dog pounces at it. Even threat to life affects no more than a feeble flutter in those wings, paralyzed by years of disuse. An inarticulate cry. .a whirl of lifeless feathers. .and then just a bloody trail.
I look around. The banyan tree stands tall in its grand equanimity. Underneath, lie the three poor idiots, reduced to a gory pulp.
Did they ever know what happened? Or, what was happening even to them, when the wise of the world trampled them to pulp? Something within urged me to go near them. .perhaps some life may be beating somewhere faintly. . .
I dare not climb down the tree. The devil of the dog is still stands there, snarling at me. The fiend has already tasted blood.