Nimesh Bastola
He drank eight cups of coffee that day and regretted it later, as always. He regretted it more at night when his eyes wouldn’t shut and nightmares haunted him at dawn. He knew very well how he was deteriorating his health: weight loss, loss of appetite, sleepless nights, and melancholic nostalgia of the past. He tried to inspect his inner and outer surroundings. There were thoughts—fiery thoughts aroused from experience—but he wanted to extinguish them so they would never grasp his head, neck, chest, and entire body.
He was surrounded by papers, some scattered packets of potato chips, a stack of unpublished essays and stories, and, mostly, books of every kind. He noticed The Bhagavad Gita and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion lying stacked one on top of the other, like bread and butter sticking together. That sight gave him some strange, unusual thoughts—suddenly, he felt a strong urge to separate them.
He sat back in front of his laptop and pondered his writing—his usual, average, mechanical practice of hammering the keys in an attempt to escape himself. He wanted to be away from himself. But the human condition is such: the more he tried to get rid of himself, the more he became bound to himself. There was a strange, senseless pain, as though he were on the verge of losing his sanity. Many times, he had felt such.
The day was gloomy, and the rain had stopped only a few hours ago. There is boredom in such weather; even feet feel reluctant to step onto the street. He, too, felt that. He thought of walking out without any real interest, simply because he had nothing left to do—just a desperate desire to get away from the sadness that had been erupting inside his body for a long time.
While walking, he encountered many scenes. He always used to think these encounters might help suppress his boiling thoughts. Sometimes they did help, but many times they only made him suffer more, as the scenes reminded him of unforgettable melancholic memories.
As he walked, he first saw a man selling cheap clothes in the street. He had been seeing him frequently for two years, pedaling his bicycle and selling clothes. The man didn’t seem to be bothered by his poverty or the laborious work—cycling under the scorching sun or through heavy rain. He looked happy; his head and chest upright like a soldier marching on the commander’s orders.
A little further, he met an old school peon. The man had been working at the same school for more than twenty years. He was old but energetic and dedicated to his repetitive work, seven days a week. In the evenings, he drank and played the flute. The dreamer had heard his flute softly resonating many nights and needed no time to understand that this man had been drinking again.
A few meters ahead, he was stunned by the sight of four old women with delightful, wrinkled faces. They were busy in lousy gossip, the corners of their mouths glittering like that of a one-year-old baby.
Just as he was watching those women, his eyes fell on a child—perhaps three years old, maybe slightly more or less—crying because his small four-wheeler bicycle had been taken by a man who was teasing him playfully. The child was crying, and the people around were laughing—laughing like they were in some kind of circus. The dreamer found that scene both funny and meaningful. He smiled to himself, reflecting on the discomfort and complexity of life.
He made up his mind to return to his room. As he headed back, he passed a group of teenage students. They were barely fourteen or fifteen, but their chatter was mature—about love, relationships, breakups, boyfriends, girlfriends, and names he didn’t catch. They were also talking about colorful flags, though he didn’t clearly hear which ones, and he decided not to dwell on teenagers’ colorful dreams about love. But just as he tried to ignore them, his own memories returned. All his melancholic nostalgia suddenly started ruling his head, body, and entire disposition.
The sky looked ready to pour again; small raindrops, like tears, had already started falling, though he hadn’t noticed. The clouds soon increased the intensity of their tears—larger and faster. He stepped as quickly as he could, trying to save himself from the cold, heavy rain. A part of him wanted to get drenched, to mix his unnoticed tears with the immeasurable volume of rain. But he kept walking and walking like a marathon runner until he arrived at the gate of his house.
He went straight to the kitchen, made a cup of coffee, and bolted the door to his room without speaking to anyone. He erased the words he had typed earlier—exactly eight hundred ninety words. He was frustrated. And, as always, he deleted his writing in moments of frustration. He had deleted many saved stories and essays. He had never liked anything he had written. He mumbled, “I can’t write like me.”
There was a novel—The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson—lying on his bed. He had hardly made it to page fifty. But he had already watched the movie adaptation multiple times; he knew every frame by heart. He found the absurd combination of Thompson and Johnny Depp amusing. He thought he wasn’t as brave as Thompson. And then he thought again: to write, one must be brave.
He wanted to write about the hidden world that remains hidden even when widely exposed. He wanted to write about the darkness that appears even in the light. He wanted to write about the suffering behind a happy face—and the happy face behind suffering. He wanted to write about common people who fall down and rise again with charming faces—not because they are strong, but because they know no other way. More personally, writing was an occupation that could give meaning to his meaningless, absurd life. There was nothing else he could do.
He cleared the page again, brought his tenth cup of coffee, and started typing. The rain was pouring heavily outside. He could hear only two sounds: the rainfall and the clacking of his keyboard. Everything else was silent. Even his mind, for a while.
(Who was he? Of course, he had a name like everyone else. But more than his name, his introduction was laid in how he perceived the world. In that, he was like many others—those who want to live as they feel from the inside. Perhaps that was the home of his desolation, and he was just another inhabitant of the kingdom of absurdity. He was one of those who are too weird to live and too rare to die.)
