Baseless Accusations

Thank God, it’s Monday. The weekend was miserable and I am in no hurry to have another.

It, misery, started on Friday night. I was at the community centre. There are two rooms there, marked ‘Gents’ and ‘Ladies’. I try to avoid the first room – liquor, cards, men and all that which follow the first three. Usually, my quota of community service is in the second room – on Friday, it was the day for salsa. I opted for the role of the helper rather than that of the partner. For some reason, I preferred to replenish bottles of drinking water and to mop sweat on the floor. Two of my acquaintances there – taking a break from the throes of ecstasy, exhaustion and exhilaration – accosted me and said,

“You leave it hanging,” said one.

“Cut it out,” the other added.

It, my writing of course, was the reason for this accusation.

For some time, my few readers accuse me of engaging in ‘high-brow’ writing. They tell me that I (mis)use mythology, history, humour, ambiguous endings, literary allusions, collage of multiple ideas/viewpoints on a single topic and include even touches of absurdist theatre. None accused me of brevity, though.

Like most people on whose head the burden of wisdom is placed, I searched for the same on the Net. I found that I should read the work of the master of ambiguous endings, John Fowles (‘The Magus’ is highly recommended, it seems). I laboured through the many hits about the absurdist ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett. It is good to sound wise about anything and everything. After all, none hear me when I tell them that I never got past page 22 of Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch 22’ or the first chapter of James Joyce’ ‘Ulysses’ – even after it was proclaimed to be the best book of the century.

These accusations trouble me a great deal. I am a sensitive soul in dire straits, financially and emotionally, quite unable to handle such aspersions on my literary skills.

When I tell them that I ‘leave it hanging’ because I have no clue how to continue, they do not listen.

I left the community centre dejected, rejected. I slept early – with no desire to face this unjust world with open eyes.

I woke up at seven and the morning seemed beautiful – blue sky, birds chirping, men spitting, women…

The woman with whom I had spent the night was standing in front of the mirror. In the mirror, I could see her looking at me. I am a big fan of crime thrillers. But when a woman, an intimate partner till dusty death, looks at you with ‘dead eyes’, ‘smile never reaching the eyes’, ‘cold cruel reptilian gaze’, the sky darkens, birds go silent, men swallow.

“What happened?”

I would boldly ask this question to any woman in such a situation. That is, if she is not my wife.

In fiction, a wife will stare for a while and then deep emotion, love, understanding, trust and respect will choke (ignite) her with tears (rage).

In reality, the man will close his eyes and sleep a little longer.

In a dream, my subconscious accused, “Insensitive male.”

That is a harsh description of a man who is known among his peers as ‘Feminist’ (at a recent alumni get-together, the same lot used the same word while we were discussing Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods but then, they must have made a mistake).

I know that I should have enquired but a wife should understand her man.

A deep understanding is required especially if her man has reached that age when infidelity is unthinkable because he has to fear not pot-bellied husbands (probably in the same predicament) but hot-blooded sons with a gang of cold-blooded pals. It’s that age when it is not the fathers who protect their daughters from you but it is the grandfathers who guard their grandchildren against you; that age at which a man cannot think like he used to for two or three score years without being labeled ‘dirty old man’.

I know that some of you might ask me with an accusing voice,

“What happened next?”

You might think that I ‘leave it hanging’ but I wish I knew the answer myself.

The way I deal with such situations is to make myself scarce. Though I got my meals on time and I was allowed World Cup football, the atmosphere at home remained dark, brooding and moody till I read it on Sunday.

It, being her post, made the air heavy with gloom, uncertainty and love.

Do you remember that old ad in which a deep-voiced guy croons into a phone, “Hi Rashmi, it’s me”? I felt that her post said the same thing to me, with the appropriate gender modifications.

Gloom? Well, the ‘her’ involved is not my wife. Uncertainty? I cannot understand her post.

I want to borrow words similar to that in ‘Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo’ and tell her, “When you have to talk, talk, don’t be clever.”

And, love? I wish I could.

I know that you will accuse me of being unfaithful to her. But, let me try to explain why I cannot.

Around the same time on that Sunday, I had an appointment with my physician. I was diagnosed with ‘pilapses synapticitis’, and the good doctor even read from his medical text – the one between the texts by Gray and Cunningham, I noticed with a tired mind – ‘affliction of the synapses causing lapses in the trigger of nerve impulses such as to produce out-of-sync expressions’.

“Nothing serious,” the pedantic doctor consoled, “apart from tragic-comic mix-ups, inability to understand the outcome and/or gravity and/or requisites of a relationship and/or a situation and other related premature bodily functions.”

“That is good news,” I agreed.

It, my disability, might explain all the baseless accusations.