Portrait of a non-artist as an old man

Hi all. don't have time for the cheery introductions. This is a short story I wrote for a contest by the British Council. In an hour's time I'll be in Anna Salai, listening to a reading of the same, and I hope I win, although it isn't very spectacular, so far as literary merit goes. Anyway, here it is

Into each life…

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, U__ S______ decided, as he ponderously rearranged the window curtains. He closed his eyes, turned around, then opened them again. “You are a foolish old man”, he muttered to himself reprovingly.

He looked at the cushions in disarray on the sofa. He looked at the children’s trinkets obscuring his Air Force awards on the walnut mantelpiece. He looked at the life-sized stuffed toy orangutan, who returned his stare with enamel-polished eyes.

He was an old man, older for being surrounded by youth. “You are old,” Ishaan’s Spiderman remarked from the settee. “You are old,” Medha’s colorful little sandals caroled from under the sofa.

“What nonsense”, he shook his head, “ Grandchildren are a gift from God. I am not unhappy. I am perfectly alright.” He made his way to the bedroom. His son’s Pink Floyd CDs nodded gravely from their racks, “We understand and sympathize.”

“Would that the fates were to be kind enough to allow me a cup of tea”, he said as he entered the room. The old woman looked up from her book. Her voice was always gentle, reproachful.

“Darling, must you be so sarcastic all the time?”

“Oh! Very well, you need not bother.”

“No, no. It is just that the way you say it, it…”

Oh! Of course, it is always my fault.”

The old woman was already out of the room, moving in her assured, helpless manner. The conversation hindered the movements of neither. “It is a ritual almost”, thought the old man as he carefully placed various portions of his anatomy on the bed in order.

“Why does Grandfather act so grumpy with Grandmother?” the grandchildren would often wonder. “He is so cheerful with everybody else.” The old man looked at Ishaan’s dinosaur book lying, dog-eared on the play-bucket. “Are two Loch Ness monsters better than one?” he thought.

“I smile at my son’s guests till my jaws ache. And I laugh at the children’s antics when nobody else bothers. And every smile is a thread for my shroud; every laugh is a spar in my pyre. I am happy because nobody cares if I am unhappy.” He turned his face into the pillow.

“Let me be angry a little, Lata,” he whispered, “Because it proves I am still alive.”

“You are talking to yourself again” broke in the old woman, “ Here is your tea.”

“And about time.” said the old man gruffly.

A weak thing, he thought as he sipped, for a throat inured to cantonment whisky for so long. “But then, everything about me is weak, now.”

“I am getting worried about Guddu and Smita. They will be on the way home now. And it is raining like anything”, she said.

“Who asked them to go to Fatehpur anyway?”

What asininity, what irresponsibility, he thought. To go off on a vacation just like that. With all the bills to be paid… And the children, poor dears, missing a week of school. And heaven knows how healthy the food is in that little slum. And to go and leave us here, alone, on the Diwali weekend… “No, not that of course. The bills, the bills…”

N____ could never understand what the ‘bills’ were. As an adolescent, he could only perceive them to possess all the undesirable characteristics of Hanuman’s tail. You could never be rid of them. At least, Grandfather never could. He would either be fretting about a bill, or worrying about an installment due; or calculating income tax deductions on his pension.

“Callow youngster”, the old man would say. “Where would youth be were it not to depend on age to sustain the inglorious process of Life? Ah! How frivolous is youth.”

And so he thought still, the indomitable old man, sitting in his bedroom, in a three-bedroom flat in an E___ D____ settlement, sitting in the murky light cast by the copper-colored sky of a chilly, rainy, November morning.

“Suniye, I think we should call Baby today. The poor dear! With all that work in their nursing home, she probably can’t get time to call.”

The old man thought of turning his face to answer, then decided against it. His right shoulder ached. Rheumatism is but a euphemism, he grimaced.

“If she is too busy to call, won’t she be too busy to talk? Do you want to waste her time?”

The old woman sighed and returned to her reading.

At least, she still has her reading and her religion, he thought. Slowly, he had begun picking up her habits. “What a stupid suggestion…” he reprimanded himself, “…the silly old woman.”

There had been a time when he would call her by name, defining the limits of their relationship and her influence on his identity. Now, “I am getting soft in the head”, he was content to emulate her, hearing himself address her, “Sunti hain…” with but a slight jar of the ego.

Suniye – literally ‘listen’; representative of the ancient tradition of Indian womanhood of not referring to husbands by name, symbolic of the acceptance of a man’s supremacy over her own identity.

“Why do I say that?” thought the old man, lying beside the old woman under her reading light. He thought of the little flutter of the stomach that preceded addressing his children and grandchildren – the fear of the understanding, sympathetic smile, the terror of the supercilious, condescending glance.

And he turned over in bed to face her, whom he would not name, she who would not name him, and listened to the incessant patter of the rain. There they lay, two Rumpelstiltskins, and in the uncertain light, it would not be a feat of imagination to regard their gray, amorphous silhouettes to be one.

He was half-asleep when she had another one of her coughing fits. The old man moved nothing but his eyelids to watch her scrabble, wheezing, in her little blue bag for the inhaler. She found it and the old man rolled over in bed to face the door.

“I am not angry. Why should I be angry?” he thought. “ I am not angry at my entirely loveable son-in-law, whom I greatly admire and respect as an individual and who gives us all these medicines for free with that insolent, virtuous smirk on his face.”

“I am a feeble old man with an oversized ego,” he thought. He rose impatiently and stepped out of the bedroom, rubbing his shoulder gingerly.

“The air feels cold on my bones,” he muttered as he trudged across the dining room. He stopped and scratched his side. Then he went across to the mantelpiece to pick up his reading glasses.

He looked at the denture bowl and the two translucent mandibles suspended in liquid. “If all of me was as easy to replace, who would replace whom? I am no longer here. I don’t know…” he blinked, “I am rambling.”

He made his way across the drawing room to the door of the balcony. “This shall be my cave,” he had announced to all and sundry when the masons and window-workers had finished insulating it from the elements. The old man had moved in, replete with religious books and icons and mementoes from the past.

Now, he entered his cave again. “I am a restless sanyasi, though” he grumbled. The love of life ran strong in him still, carrying him through a career in the Air Force and three heart attacks to the age of 76. He still loved life, though there was nothing left in life that he loved.

Sitting cross-legged, even on an upraised divan was an imposition on his arthritic knees. But the feat was silently accomplished. He picked up a book at random, flipped through the pages, then abandoned this pursuit and looked out of the window.

This rain was a prisoner of war, pouring down resignedly on the concrete walkways of the apartment’s compound, marching to the obscurity of the sewers under guard of the ruthlessly efficient drainage system.

He sat there, the old man, as anachronistic and incongruous in the second floor flat’s window, as the cold November rain that beat down upon it on the other side.

“What is this piece of paper doing in my hand?” the old man mused. He looked at the children’s little play-field beside the car-park that was trying hard not to look like a pond. “I am a silly old sentimental fool,” the old man told himself as he started folding the paper.

“If arthritis is not the herald of rigor mortis, the world does not make sense,” he thought as his fingers protested against the unaccustomed exercise. But then he stopped thinking as he concentrated on the intricate task at hand.

“They go to origami classes enough. Where are all the little children with their paper boats?” he wondered. No matter, his would be the first.

He bent over as he contrived to pull the paper out into a recognizable hull, then subsided into repose as some of the paper came apart in his right hand. The old man sat there, watching the puddle in the play-field rise in tiny plops to meet the rain. He labored up and walked back into the house.

He walked back to the bedroom and painstakingly worked his stiff body into a jersey and shoes. The old woman, stirring from her light doze asked, “What is it, darling? Has the rain stopped?” Then she drew herself up against the bedstead.

The old man walked out of the room and the old woman followed him. He went out of the front door. She locked it behind him and went to the kitchen to set some water on boil. Then she went to the bathroom and switched the geyser on. She laid out the old man’s woolen dressing gown and socks.

The old man stood beside the puddle, rain dripping off his still abundant, snow-white hair. The little paper boat, bobbing slightly askew in the water, struggled to survive the spear thrusts of the rain. There he stood, a sinking old man watching his little boat sink, as the rain beat down on both, steady as the ticking of a clock.

The old woman went to the balcony and looked out of the window. She saw the valiant little paper boat in the throes of its watery demise. She saw the old man stumping stolidly out of sight. The old woman watched both, one after the other, afraid to lose sight of either. Then she fixed her eyes on his form as he trudged slowly out of sight. The old woman waited patiently, eyes fixed in the distance.

(1780 words)

…Some rain must fall