Insomniac

Insomniac

 

For one hundred and four hours I’ve lived like an insomniac. And then they became irksome. Insomnia as well as the clichés.

Irksome to the extent that I felt compelled to pick up my laptop while sitting on the hearse van to this crematorium.

You are not the white-robed in persona Christi on the other side of the confessional, and I’m not looking to get my sins absolved or my actions validated by telling you this story. I’m not trying to quench your stream of curiosity as well. I’m just trying to flush out the solidified lump of a yearning settled in the left corner of my brain.

One hundred and four hours ago when I was sitting at the airport lounge in Kolkata, waiting for my flight to this city, Guwahati – my adopted hometown – this yearning wasn’t a lump. It was an acidic fluid running through my veins. It left a burning sensation wherever it passed through, like cheap whiskey leaves when it goes down your throat. All I was doing then was listening to Chester Bennington, sipping cappuccino and staring at statues in front of me. Statues sleeping with their heads on their shoulders or sipping hot coffee, reading books, smiling at each other, fiddling with boarding passes and smartphones, listening to songs, waiting for boarding calls. At three in the morning, what else do airports make of people?

“For God’s sake, CHANGE THE SONG!” my brain yelled at me as I looked around the lounge to talk to someone. For a moment, I felt that Bennington perhaps suffered from chronic pharyngitis. Numb no longer sounded like music. I switched over to my favourite singer from here – Zubeen – he sings mostly in Assamese – my father’s mother tongue. And I prayed, “Get me some sleep Zubeenda. Can’t keep staring at these faces anymore!”

I wished petulance wasn’t an accessory for early morning airport dressing!

 

***

 

Ma was just fine, her usual self – caring, scolding, worrying, anxiously loving – just as she would be any other day, while I’d heard her voice over the phone for the last time two days before I boarded the flight to this city. The pain in her abdomen wasn’t subsiding despite pain killers though. When she started having frequent black-outs, Jahnobi, my sister-in-law, took her to the hospital.

“She’ll be fine,” was Jahnobi’s routine assurance for two days whenever I called her to ask about Ma. She was banking on the assurances of the doctor. I was counting on hers, until she expressed vulnerability: “Any moment can be the last moment. Come over, as soon as possible.”

Jahnobi was holding fort all alone here in Guwahati while I was dodging sporadic pricks of conscience not as much because in the hospital she was doing what I should have done, but because I was going back to Guwahati one more time, without having arrived, without making it big.

This prick of conscience was the other thing that cohabited with the clichés ever since I’d boarded the train from here to Pune eight years ago. I trusted the move to Pune like thousands of others from this city did. Like everyone who moved from Guwahati to other big cities like Bangalore, Pune or Hyderabad with the hope of better opportunities, I also believed that on the other side of Burha Luit, things happen, wrongs set themselves right and wounds get healed. But since that move, whenever I visited this city for short holidays, I had these sporadic pricks. At the top left corner of my brain – my Third Ear. In eight years, all I have managed to do is pile up journals after journals cluttered with memories stretching over eighteen years. The book is yet to happen, I am yet to arrive, wrongs are yet to set themselves right, wounds are yet to be healed.

A lot can happen over coffee– the punch-line in the Café Coffee Day counter in the airport was treachery at its best! Nothing had actually happened! After two cappuccinos, the punch-line surfaced as a smirk – “Go, see, feel and touch your genitals while you pee. Nothing else’s really going to happen! It’s your Waiting for Godot moment. So wait.”

Hope’s a cunning radical. It always slithers its way through -everything. But I wasn’t counting on hope either! Wonders weren’t going to happen. Neither could I do some miracle to see my mother hale and hearty, nor could I transform decade old journals into a story in just four hours by the time my flight landed here in Guwahati. And when you can’t change things, you don’t wish things to change either.

I have anyways stayed on in these journals far too long. In the airport, I just wished my mother to stay on the way she was – alive – until I reached the hospital to be her side.

***

 

I call out Biswa and a few others in the playground at the top of my voice, but it seems that they can’t hear what I’m saying. I’m saying that I don’t want to bat at number three anymore, and I don’t wish to play for the club too. I have made it to the national team, I have got the blue jersey with Number 4 and my first name embossed on it. I’m going to open the batting with Sachin. It’s, kind of, I want to say goodbye to all of my teammates before boarding the bus to the airport in the big city…but all of them vanish in thin air, leaving me with a trace of fear! I wonder if I have just seen ghosts. How can real people vanish?

I read through the dream sequence in one of the journals on my laptop. Two hours for the boarding call, and one hour in the air was good enough to find at least the exposition. Dream sequences in the first chapter of a book are pieces of trash. Every third book starts with a dream sequence! Definite turn-offs for literary agents and editors. No, I am not judging. That’s what the agents and publishing house editors say in their How-to-write-a-great-novel videos. That’s what they warn aspiring authors against – NO DREAM SEQUENCES PLEASE! Not at least in the first chapter! And that’s where my dilemma was! No matter how much my dream sequence was real, how often I got haunted by it, how deftly written my narrative was, I needed to keep it off the first chapter of my book. To have that one, good, sellable story which would set things right, declare my arrival, heal the wounds.

When I looked around there were people sipping coffee, reading books, smiling at each other, fiddling with their boarding passes and smartphones…

They were not statues. They were as alive as the pages in my journals are.

The smoking zone on the distant other end meant a long walk for me, but I needed a smoke. The stench of nicotine and tar, would help me shed the insomniac at least. Perhaps.

Insomnia and not airports make statues. I was just about to become one. A statue made of hackneyed remembrances.