Quarantine of the Senses

He sat by the sea, his eyes shut. To him, the company of the sea doesn’t mean turquoise waves, sunrise ochers bleeding across a restless water body. He sought the music of the waves, countless breathless sighs, crashing on the shore, surrendering their sadness to sand and shells, before retreating with a soughing sound, humbled, subdued.
He was aware: his consciousness clung only to the sense of hearing. In the city where he now lived, morning light–seeping in through the half-drawn blinds–would dapple his face with bands of gray and chrome-white, and he would stir under the blanket, knowing it was too early to wake-up, yearning for sleep.
And then, he would hear a pigeon’s wings flap and fall silent as the bird settled on the window sill. It’s deep throaty murmur would reinstall a sweet drowsiness in his eyelids, turning them heavy, driving him back into the cocoon of slumber, safe, content with his hibernation.
The vegetable-peddler would wake him up about an hour later, first the wheels of his pushcart, crushing the gravel on the street, then his voice, calling out the prices of okra and eggplant. Closing his mouth on the toothbrush, his eyes lowered, uneasy about his reflection in the cabinet mirror, he sometimes thinks his mother’s presence is divided between the voices of the pigeon and the hawker, one cajoling him back to sleep: rest, my child, let sleep heal your body, the other stirring him to the world he must walk into, the responsibilities he must own up to: get up, child, there is much to learn, you have to be an important man some day. He works hard, at such times, to bring back the face of his mother. He’s aware that his mother has a heart-shaped face, her skin color like the base of caramel custard, her eyes brown as those of does. But this awareness doesn’t translate to a visual stimulus, his mind doesn’t offer him an image of her. There is only the voice, washing over him, at time like the music of windchimes, at times, like cobwebs in those ruins that childhood curiosities lead us into.
Now, he walks back from the seaside of his hometown to his ancestral bungalow, and in the growing darkness, recalls the evening walks he used to take as a child, in tow with his sister. In the park, they would sit on swings and soar so high, the wind singing in their ears, their mouths still on fire from the puffed rice they ate, coated with chilly-powder and coriander. He thinks of how being a family added a subtle energy to his daily life, an undercurrent that eased the drudgery of homework and those daily chores his mother assigned to him–filling water, taking casseroles and plates from the kitchen and setting them on the dining table.
He tries, sometimes, to access that energy, stretching his hand across all the years that have eclipsed, across the warmth of the many summers, the mild cold of the winters. He has forgotten what it is like to live in a family, yet, he manages to access that energy: in the form of his sister’s laughter, in the stories they made-up together to fill the afternoon.
He gets into his bungalow now, and finds it alive with the pitter-patter of feet, feet running up and down the stairs, through passageways, into rooms, shuffling before the fall silent under a bed, behind a door. No, there are no children at home. No ghosts either. Only memories: of his sister and him, playing hide-and-seek with children from the neighborhood. He smile, holds onto its taste, the way one holds onto the taste of a rare, seasonal fruit. The house is sinking into the darkness of dusk, but he doesn’t turn the lights on, instead, takes the stairs, walks onto the terrace. They are still there: the clotheslines, where his father diligently hung their wash each evening. He remembers now the sense of pleasure his father’s face flickered with, when after putting up the wash for drying, he stepped back, clutching the empty bucket, eyes set on the saris and trousers and school uniforms shivering gently in the evening breeze.
He takes the iron ladder that lead to the water tank. At one time, from here, he could have a clear vision of the sea. But now, the buildings that rise in between, the flats and the offices with tight tiny cubicles, block the sea out. Those new buildings have been built on lands where the houses of his friends once stood, houses that he went knocking to on most evenings, cricket ball clutched in one hand; houses where he played video games with his friends when their parents were away, where he arranged the He Man toys in a battle line, where he plucked lilac dahlias for his sister. Strangely, he doesn’t think of his friends, who would be grown up now, chasing children and monthly pay checks. He thinks, instead, of the furniture belonging to all those razed down houses: what happens to the furniture family’s leave behind, where they once sat sipping on cardamom tea, arguing over an actor’s performance, betting over a cricketer’s score record? What happens to the beds where their children slept, growing bigger each year, until one day the bed, the room, the house became too small to contain their dreams? What happens to the saucers with blue petals, powder boxes with cream puffs, and oh those yellow plastic ducks that floated in the bath water?
The thought of these articles, once so intimately in touch with a family, and now lying forgotten, broken, or recycled to a different form, saddens him. He feels as though an icicle that lay frozen inside him for years has now begun to melt, making his throat soggy, heavy. He gulps fresh, cold air again and again, till the icicle is restored to its frozen state. Satisfied, he steps down the ladder, the stairs.
Down in the hall, he collects a cushion, wraps his arm around it, and reviews once again the contract: yes, he too will be selling this bungalow, this home, so a wealthy constructor can raise an apartment complex, bringing down the spaces where his childhood was cast, delicate as the strokes of a painting done on ancient parchment. He shuffles through the pages of the contract, looking, but not reading. He knows tomorrow morning when the constructor arrives in his usual white safari suit with a betel-stained smile, he will sign and handover these papers, take the money, put it in the bank account, return to his flat in the city, and plan a trip to someplace foreign: Rome, or Egypt.
He lies in his bed that night, knowing this is the last night he will spend in this room, this bed, this house. He tries recollecting the sad moments of his life, feeling it were an obligation, his responsibility to feel heartbroken about the impending trade, old house for contemporary dream. But there is no tumult within him; he abruptly realizes that his home is no longer his “home.” We sometimes feel homesick for a home that doesn’t even exist, he muses; we miss a place that doesn’t occupy a place in the physical world, that exists but in our imagination.
He gets up, nonetheless, and walks about his old house, through the rooms, the bathrooms with their now-dulled fittings and bathtubs. He thinks of how he discarded the senses one after the other, even with no apparent tragedy striking him. Yes, he was a victim of abuse as a child, but that happened long back into the tunnels of time, when he was seven; even after that, he had tasted happiness, the senses in all their richness, day after day.
What happened later in his life was what happened to most people: his sisters got married and settled into the rhythm of their married lives, his childhood playmates grew up and left to pursue education in different cities, he grew bored of his old board games and playthings, his parents found a calling in the spiritual preaching of a guru (he remembers how they would come back from their weekly prayer meets, full of chants and conversations about God; this was before they shifted to the ashram, where they now live). But where other people seemed equipped to accept this change as a necessity to live their dreams, the transience of it all exhausted him: if what is important now is forgotten five years hence, why must he struggle to achieve something five years from now, when a decade from now it will bear little consequence? Only milestones and no destination to wrap his imagination around. And so he let the senses go, feeling the futility of using them to acquire something ephemeral. But the sense of hearing, he held onto, for he needed at least one channel open, so that life may flow through it and fill him, give him energy, just enough to go from one day to the next, just enough to restrain him from giving up on life.
He now sits in the balcony as another day begins with the same splash of earl-gray light. He looks up at the iron grills, beyond which lay the garden area. He remembers how his mother had placed windchimes here. When watching the cats–the eight stray cats that made his home their home–lap at a plate of milk, he’d listen to the windchimes fill the air with soft tinkles, and wonder how six strands of cut-glass can contain so much music.
The cats are now dead and gone, leading different lifetimes, the chimes packed away in some wooden box, no longer singing, no longer dancing in the wind. But the sounds are there: the pink tongue of the cats lapping at milk, the chimes with their sweet tinkles. His eyes shut, he thinks: for now this much is enough.
Yes, for now, to live through this world quarantined from the senses, this music is more than enough.