Whenever someone asked him what he would do if it was his
last night on the Earth he said he would sit and chew his tongue. Of course a
reasonable answer would have been to either play loud music or make passionate
love to a woman, but he somehow found it inconsistent with his own intellectual
curiosities, to be trapped in something so real as drinking costly wine for
example. He thought he would spend his time mulling. The prospect of last night
affected him deeply. Unlike for many, it was not the night to fritter away. To
know that tomorrow does not exist, to know that it was the last night did not
rearrange priorities in his mind as it did to his friends and relatives.
The apocalypse was announced and pretty soon the last night
was upon the planet. He tried, as he imagined he would, to sit and mull, to do
nothing more than introspect, to pursue a cosmic dimension of some sort. But he
was not alone. There she was, the sexy receptionist he hired only last week.
They had to scurry underground to take shelter under the hard wooden flooring.
The idea was that it would save them from whatever apocalyptic situation for at
least half a day more than everyone else. Take shelter, yes, that was it, to
take shelter, like rats, burrowing into the ground beneath their feet. He
thought he was different, he thought he would do differently, he was not like
everyone else…
But there he was, cowering with his feet together, in the
company of his young receptionist, under a pile of rubble, only the safety of
recently laid out wood over them. Buildings collapsed, ground shook and air
turned into powdery dust. He imagined all of this. He had no way of knowing
what was going on outside. His office was a two storeyed building and it
obviously collapsed, that much he knew because the roof slanted over and
submerged them in a pool of rank darkness. There was no way of getting out and
he thought what if everyone else survived and no one thinks to check under the
rubble – that would be a crazy way to die. He imagined people in gas masks, in
yellow overalls, lifting up his brittle skeleton three years later, locked
under the broken lintels and rafters. Survivors forming a circle around the
operation-rescue team, some in glee and some feeling sad, to itemize and number
the victims of an apocalypse that failed to wipe out the population, instead
killed the ones who rushed to safety.
He imagined how they would find the second skeleton, a
younger one, of the receptionist, the bones of her legs coiled up around his
own as if in a desperate caress in the end. Someone would shed a tear and yet
someone would gingerly stroke his chin before hauling up the bones into a
truck.
It bothered him that they would evaluate his last minutes,
his death would be reported in the local newspaper, speculating the time he
spent with the sexy receptionist in the last hours of his life, trapped in a
pool of passionate, fleshy desires... And some lazy novelist would pick up the
news report as he sips his morning coffee and an idea would flash in his mind,
to trace the life of a receptionist, a young and formidably sexy woman, trapped
with an obese middle-aged man. And that narrative structure becomes a
commodity, adapted into movies and cartoons and crazy cults. He would go on
living beyond his life, not as an intellectual but as a lucky bastard or an
opportunist who hired the receptionist only two months before the scheduled
apocalypse.
But how was he to know that they would blow the siren up a
week after her recruitment, throwing all his plans into a disarray. He
wanted to be seen indifferent to the pleasures of flesh and he had a plan he
was working towards… But who was he proving it to? After all, it was the last
night for everyone. Perhaps he needed proving to himself… His idea was not a
scheme to trap the receptionist, it was to willfully accommodate her. He even
bought costly wines and stocked them. But no, it was not the wine or the woman
he needed, it was a testable situation where he can test his philosophy of
life. What a shame he had to die the way he was dying now.
Sandhya, as if reading his thoughts, picked up a sharp log
of wood and broke it to splinters on his head. She landed several blows on his
head, one after the other. It was as though she was on auto-pilot mode, landing
blows on his head until it split open. Blood dribbled down his head, his face a
rictus of shame and his skull splayed open like a ripe fig fruit, soft
pus-coloured brain spluttering as if it was a shy squirrel that had been
spotted…
She had been planning to do that to every boss in every
office she worked at. They ogled when she dropped a pen and bent to pick it up,
they gaped when she stretched her hands to flex at the end of the day for it
made her breasts stick out, their eyes furtively followed her when she left to
the loo as if they were clocking the time she spent away and wondered what she
was up to… In the interviews they looked over the top of the spread-eagled
printouts of her resume at her breasts and if she caught them watching they
asked if she was comfortable, did she want some water, why did she leave her
last job?
Sandhya’s bosses always gifted her – sometimes it would be
innocuous gifts such as a dairy milk chocolate but often times her gifts
differed from what everyone else got in the office. Her gifts were personal,
her gifts came with the weight of thinking from the ones who gifted, they were
invitations, they were not gifts… Her last boss went a step further and gifted
her lace underwear.
And she decided – if it was the last day of her life on this
planet, she was going to crack her boss’s skull open
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