Chapter 3
Hypnopompic
'Did we just kiss?' Horror and disbelief take me in their landslides and dump me on a sly mattress of fervour. It is her. The same one who made me auction for my own breathing process. Her grace. Her knowledge.
'It is okay.' A tobacco cigarette is lit. 'How do you feel?'
'You look like an angel.' I stammer.
‘You are on a trip. Easy orbit solider.’
Is that a nickname for me?
'What have you done? Why did we kiss?'
'I don't know. I just felt like kissing you.'
I touch my lips. Her lips are still on me. Not in person. In emotion. Her lips are tender as the feather on a baby dove.
'What?'
'I don't know. I had a premonition that something bad was about to happen to me and before that I wanted to do something crazy. I have never kissed another man other than him, you know. I mean, ‘voluntarily’.’ She says ‘voluntarily’ like she is ashamed of saying it. ‘I met him when I was in high school.’
‘So in other fuckin’ words, you just wanted to kiss 'someone' and you caught hold of this railing. Me?'
'Don't say that.'
'What the fuck am I going to tell him?’
'Nothing. You tell nothing.'
Her hair has lost charm. The nausea her perfume caused first and stopped for a while had resurrected. This time more intense. More foul. Even more disgusting.
'Are you fucking kidding me?'
'Are you fucking kidding me!' My own statement is cremated by her higher pitch with the exact same words. Shows she is the boss here. 'I have known him for over a decade. You know him for . . . what? 6 months, now?'
'Less than that.'
'So, screw you. Don't tell him! I have known him all my life, and I, I am not telling him anything, and you, you will fuck nothing for us.’
'Are you telling me you are not going to . . . tell him ever? About the shit that happened?’
‘You fool. Of course. Why will I ever say something about this to him!’ Her half-smoked cigarette she chucks in the empty pool.
‘I will blame you. You pulled me and kissed me.' The cigarette catches on to a couple of stray pieces of random paper. I jump into the dry pool. My boots douse the ardent fire.
'Fuck all that. We kissed. Period. Leave that now. Jesus! Are you such a juvenile!'
Her voice is annoying. If I liked it earlier, I may have been wrong about it.
'How am I going to face him?'
'Just act normal.’
A couch. Shaped in the form of a lotus. A blossomed lotus. It emits light. The couch is here. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Now it has my acknowledgement. His doll sits on it. Sitting on it acquits her from any foul – the perfume that made one nauseously anxious, or the adultery she had just committed and had decided to be 100% covert about it.
Above, stars are brighter. Colourful. One pattern, when connected turned out to be an ‘angel’ with wings.
The dance floor behind us was on an exaggerated thump. People jumping to a techno set, going mental on the dance floor with LED halos, horns and penis-shaped glow sticks. ‘Raunchy’ would be a gentle understated word. That is how I had seen it before his doll and I had stepped out to get 'some air'.
Dog Hag had no problems to leave his doll with me. He trusted me too much. Probably that is why I have the biblical urge to tell him of what happened, while she wants us to be thick thieves. I don't know how I can do what she is convincing me to do.
Without a surprise, just as how sentences in present tense fail to endow the reader, the music on the dance floor is brought to a stop. People are running out. Some come to the area where we are seated. Some are running out of the club. Screams. Cries. Shouts.
His doll is unperturbed by this chaos. The lotus couch holds her in too much quaint for any external opinions or charades to affect her. I see that now. She is too happy with her own self. Not nihilistic. But, just as someone who had an awakening. Nothing feels wrong to them.
Close your eyes.
I close my eyes, just as my monologue suggests. I close. Steadily with static a peculiar white sound gets closer and closer to my ears. The earth, the sky and the sea are one now. The whole shit is on one plain.
God! No horizons!
The earth, the sky and the sea are in a paradigm of parable puzzled union. As much as they are different, they are one. They cannot be separate. Like the mind, heart and blood. It makes sense to me. The sea wants to come to the earth. There is Tsunami. The sky wants to come to the earth, there is tornado and hurricane. The earth is confounded. Splits up. We have nowhere else to go. The sky and the sea are envious of the earth, because WE live on it. But the earth knows better. It has had too much of you and me. It is waiting for a minute minute to cut itself into two halves like that of a tomato. It is then we become refugees of the orbit.
Open your eyes.
I open my eyes, just as my monologue suggests. His doll on the lotus couch is dragged away. There are 6 men who drag her away. The 6 men, all of them wear clothes in saffron colours. Slogans they shout in a dialect that is spoken in the northern parts of the state my city belongs to. Their slogans are self proclaimed prodigies conveying a message that curb our ‘basic’ rights. They are here. The moral police. I understand. But not why they are dragging his doll. I hear her scream once. The next time she is made to shut up. One among the six throws a punch on her face. Blood spatters. The revellers in frenzy had run away from the dance floor earlier. That frenzy had made them leave behind and abandon their glow toys. The glow sticks that lay stray on the ground glorified the blood on her face.
There is dilemma in me. The dilemma is to understand why I am not part of the chaos. Legs, mine have retired. Hands have fallen ill, just as my legs. 'You will suck his cock.' A short man in white colour jubba pyjama. Saffron scarf around his neck. He throws Dog Hag to me like a cloth in the drier. He was powerful for his height. Commands. Thick log in his hand. The barbwire, coarse, snakes around the length of the log. My lips tremble. The barb wire is not the catalyst. The guilt is. The conscience of guilt of having kissed his doll and being unsure if telling him that now would disturb him further than he already is.
Angry words. Dog Hag shouts angry words at the short man, who, calmly maintains his threat under the breath of his weapon - the barbed log.
Dog Hag’s leg is twisted. Saliva drips from his mouth. He cries and shouts and mewls. Coughs blood. His face holds trophies of bruises. Like that of a cat scraping the skin, in an ambush. He is unabashed by its success.
Dog Hag’s helpless eyes see a distant sight. I see what he sees. His doll's dress is being ripped apart. There is no other reveller. They are dispelled by the tornado. The moral police. They are saying the baddest things to her. I cannot get up. My legs are numb. His doll didn't know that I had already tasted a drop from the bottle before she placed the diamond shaped square centimetre of paper on my tongue.
Dog Hag crunches my arm. I don't feel any pain, but I understand it is being crunched too hard. The short man laughs. 'Suck on his cock' the short man commands me for the second time. Collects a deal of spit in his mouth and delivers it on me, to show he does not mean anything for the sake of humour, and his physical stature is to be not taken for granted. Tears form up in my eyes. But they are silly compared to Dog Hag's. His doll is quiet. They remove her panties. They are touching her everywhere, and they are only about less than 10 feet away from our isolation. The short man turns behind, sees what’s happening, gives a content laugh and turns back to us. Takes his log far away behind his shoulders like the pinch hitter in baseball is about to do some serious home run, and then discharges all that adrenaline on Dog Hag’s leg that was twisted already.
Dog Hag crunches my arm further. His nails pierce my skin. I know there is blood coming from my arm now. I cannot see it. My shirt's full sleeve has barred me from giving into that modest leeway. For a m
oment it felt as though Dog Hag was asking me by crunching my arm, 'Why’d you kiss her?', as if he had pierced my skin and downloaded all of my myriad deeds.
The short man best friends with the fierce and pain-giving ends of the barb wire, pulls Dog Hag’s pants down. Dog Hag always wore ill-fitted low rise jeans. It was easy for the short man to peel Dog Hag’s pants off with just one pull from his barbed log.