One day I found a book; someone’s diary. It was in the attic behind the wrecked pieces of a carom board. I proceeded to dust the book; a rexin binding had kept it fairly intact through the ages. With the spine of the book rested on the writing desk; I flipped it open, right in the middle, to reveal two thick yellow pages. To the right, a bump ran through the pages; it welled and swelled with every turn of the page until the shores of rexin put a pause to it. Now, I flipped the pages from back to front; the bump subsided as my finger released one zigzag mouthed paper after another. Half way through the flipping, the bump wore the appearance of a furrow and on the shore of the rexin, I noticed a sharp indentation. It was as though someone had dug his elbow into the book’s cover; by the look of it, I declared the book a mysterious one.
It was the story of a small village; a bizarre virus had infected the people of the village. The virus infected their brains and turned them nostalgic. The first reported case was that of a butcher who mused so often that people complained. As days wore on him, his condition worsened to the point that, seated before the bucket of guts or with his hand dug inside the peeled sheepskin, he would ponder at length. With his mouth agape and eyes glued to a distant object in his view, he mused throughout the day and at night. Men gathered around him, some thwacked him and some slapped him, but the reverie was only disturbed for that moment. He would say something to the effect of ‘help me’, and regress back into the oblivion.
The butcher was a short limbed and heavily built man. His thighs were sturdy like oxen and he always wore a red chequered dhoti; word had it that he pressed the knifed sheep skull between his palms like a chimpanzee. His spent the evenings sharpening his knifes and the mornings, slipping them into the tender red meat. A hairy chested man, with a leonine head and stolid eyes, he was considered best left alone. His wife, an elegant woman, was the subject of a major portion of the evening discourses among the village men. It stirred their guts; they wondered, how the hairy beast, wedded the most attractive woman of the village. Presently, he paused in his gulp of the food and gagged helplessly as the wife whined pitifully; she poured water into his throat from such a height as would necessitate the food to trundle down his empty pit. In his last days, the butcher’s condition worsened as he paused in his pee and wetted his trousers; paused inhaling and had to be reminded by poking with a sharp needle into his ribcage.
The wife grew weary and vexatious; no one doubted her actions until a sixteen year old teenage boy, who was to acquire the disease himself, noticed unusual behaviour in the lady. The teenager laboured every morning to drop a stealing peep at the glinting angel’s nakedness. On the particular morning, as the teenager parted the strips of straw around the slanted walls of the thatched bathroom, he found the glinting angel paused in her travails of bathing. For hours, she sat with her head sunk into her knees; at first the teenager brushed the thought of virus, for it seemed to him that the hapless woman was bereaving her husband’s condition. But the sun climbed overhead, the glinting drops of water on her back were all but dried now; and the angel’s skin gradually developed a brownish tinge.
Four hours passed. The teenager’s angel was transforming into an earthly woman to reveal a spiky spine that ran from nape to the haunches like a desert plant’s thorny branch. The burden of a long life painted the summits and cascades of the spine brown, and the unwelcoming sun’s fiery stare painted it red. But the lady won’t twitch her toenail; thawing in the sun, her condition melted away the teenager’s trepidation, as he at last, extended his hand to thrust his angel’s back with a sharp stick. One jab, two, three and on the fifteenth jab, she started; looked about her, grabbed the sari around her brick red back and scampered into the house as if nothing had happened.
The teenager’s story ringed through the village; apparently, he left out the details of his peeping habits. That night, men assembled at the butcher’s home. His condition had worsened, the descent into the limbo required not one pin prick, not two, but about a dozen. His wife madly drew pins into his chest; in a minute, she drew about four dozen pricks with two needle heads welded into both her fists. The teenager present at the time thought that if not for the agitated guilt of the act of pin pricks playing on her mind; if not for the agony wrenching her heart into a vortex; if not for this, she, the infected, would have descended into the well of oblivion herself. Two hours later, the butcher breathed his last sigh. He had grown weaker; his wife attended to him patiently, but the man was helpless.
Slowly, the men of the village were infected. One by one, they fell victims to this bizarre virus; it was infallible. It was not until someone pointed out that the blind beggar of the village stood unharmed by the virus, did eyes roll in contemplation.
At this point, there was a bare column of ragged torn ends of the pages. There were no page numbers on the book, but by the look of it, I could tell that it was a hefty bounty that I missed. I flipped the next full page but had to pull myself back; the mystery of the story was hanging limp on this page. The wavering chasm of the story could have buried beneath its torn image, something vital, and it would be immature to proceed further. I had to launch myself into a search for the lost pages.
After two long hours of rummaging through the attic, I gave up. Before me were the suitcases with their gaping mouths upside down, and the contents heaped out of the wide mouths. Some suitcases had their leather tongues stitched to the back of their plastic throats. They hid something in their zipped pouches beneath the elastic belted throats. But at the end of it, my piqued interest could sail no further; the torn pages were nowhere to be found. Although dejected at the loss of the pages, I pulled myself together. Beaming with curiosity, I turned my attention to the book for a second time.
Two men stepped into the lift. The soft hush of the lift as it creased through the busy entrails of the building, granted a moment of solace to the occupants from the dizzying territory outside it. The metallic creature opened its teeth-less polished square lips to regurgitate the two men it had swallowed down below. One of them said to the other “let me grab a cup of tea. You carry on.” The other man, tall and handsome, with cropped hair and trimmed beard, was not paying attention. In the lobby was a brown pigmented sofa set; buried in its cushions was an attractive young lady. The former of the two slipped into the sofa beside her; their eyes met briefly before his turned towards the disposable tea cup and hers dropped on the newspaper. He was ungainly infatuated with her; he was aware of the fact that she was kept informed by many in the floor, that he could barely keep his eyes off her.
Her ankles were draped in sequin stitched flimsy trouser legs. Alternating between the newspapers spread open on the coffee table before him and the attractive lady, he rolled his eyes further up and up. Gazing over the glazing jewelled pendant that suspended truculently from a hair thin gold chain, furtively, hesitantly, his eyes traipsed in the direction of hers. But here, before he could beckon his intuition and blurt something adorable, in his eyes, he caught the sight of the former. He was still standing in the lift; his right hand rolling the sleeve of the left. Ten minutes later, as the metallic creature, in the plastered guts of the building, hurried about with its head wrung to a coil overhead, the former of the two still stood his ground. The last thing he remembered was rolling his sleeves.
Here, I paused again. Through the window, I could hear raised voices of men and women in the streets. I was too short to gain access to the window; well, I could have stepped outside. But this was no time to be bothered by anything unrelated to the story at hands. The virus had obviously mutated. It now took only ten minutes to drag the victim into oblivion. I had a feeling that the torn pages contained the parts about the spreading and mutating of the virus. It spread from the isolated village to the stylised city offices and dwellings; that was clear. And the mysterious writer chased it. But that’s enough. Why contemplate the few missing details when the story resolutely camped on the dogged lot before me? So I turned my attention towards the book for a third time.
The swollen yellow pages were devious and mischievous, for the rest of the book was blank. Blank as butter; the pigmented pages with a crease here and a fold there, chirruped as I stirred them apart from their embalmed state. With every flick of my finger, like Egyptian mummies, they turned their dead resolve against me; some I tore in my anger, others I fiddled with until I thought I saw a stroke of pen. Twenty minutes later, I was slowly coming to terms with the situation at hands. The scheming, manipulative book had turned its back on me. Oh! What was this? An ink blotch on the last paper! With a kitchen knife, I peeled the binding off the book to uncover a piece of paper carefully hidden in the triangular folds of the rexin. It was addressed to the reader. It read
“Dear Reader,
In the course of writing this book, if you are to encounter blank pages, you should know that I am infected too. Should the question of tackling the virus remain open, remember to look away”
The bump! It occurred to me; the unmistakable weight of an elbow rested heavily. Now, leafing through the book, I sympathised with the writer. Frozen in time, the elbow dug a furrow in the front and it ran through the leafs of the diary to transpire into a bump in the back.
Outside, a sudden calm had engulfed the streets. I felt cheated by the book, so it was time to survey my surroundings. The hallway was empty; on the gas stove, steaming rice oozed and fell into puddles through the wide mouthed burner. The windows were thrown agape; the flimsy drapes embroidered in velvet were fluttering rapidly. Wind lifted spoons from the dish stand and threw into the sink beneath it; the tele was turned on, the image of news reader frozen in his reading flickered on and off. I stepped over the egg basket that was vomiting yolks on the door mat; outside, mother had stretched her hands in an animated discussion; father had put on a contemptible but wise look.
I should have looked away. But how could I?
Comments