Bricklayer’s Arms/ New Kent Road
I write about myself because I’m not sure anyone else ever will; I write about myself because if there’s something I know best, it’s me. I remember a lot; in a way, I bury my past, and revere it; a past not buried isn’t worthy of worship; a past unworthy of worship is not a past, it’s a ghoul. Hence, I’m haunted by ghouls and blessed by the lives I live.
I don’t think I’m a person, perhaps I’m a people. I have been at least, on different roads that are etched on this town and my heart. I remember the one that lay adjacent to the Ganga, a highway, with green boards displaying names of places and miles hanging over it. I remember summer nights looming over the road, with a dense air almost burying me and my father as we drove cutting through the humid landscape.
My father drives the scooter and I sit behind him. We’ve been doing this forever; I don’t remember when it started. We do this because when I’m taken around the town on the scooter, I live different lives in my head and play them repeatedly till I’m bored. When I pass the Jain temple, I remember a friend who was an impatient kid; either getting into fights or in trouble, after talking back to the teacher. I weave a story thinking of whatever I remember of him; the last time I met him was years ago, and I don’t think we will talk ever again. So, I think of the kid I once knew and imagine running into him while passing by the temple someday; he surely visits the temple occasionally, I hope.
When I pass the house, I once used to visit for math classes, I think of another boy who I don’t remember being much fond of, nor did he think of me any better. I remember it to be him, a person I didn’t like at all, who was obsessed with Harry Potter films. When I turned twelve and my father gifted me the first book in the series, I was borderline offended that he thought I’d like the same thing as my archnemesis. For the longest time, I was too proud to accept I had been loving reading those books. I don’t see this archnemesis anymore, nor do I hear from him. I wish I’d told him I was reading the books and loving them, the day the teacher and the other students were late, and the air was growing thick with our secret bitterness. I wish I’d told him that I was patient enough to read the books unlike him, to offend him a little. We could’ve been friends. Perhaps.
When I pass by a dear friend’s home, a boy I tried loving till the end, a boy who would rather kill himself than admit he wanted me to be his friend just as much as I tried being his, I’m angry. I’m so angry I feel like going back to the same classroom where our English teacher had taught us The Merchant of Venice. Keeping in mind our romantic realities (he was taken, I was not), I’d said to him he was my Bassanio, and I was his Antonio. And I remember him taking offence at this; he thought I wanted to portray him as a poor loser who borrows money from his best friend and never returns it. I feel like going back to that classroom to scream and say, “You were my Bassanio because I could never tell you in any other way the extent of my love. If anyone, the poor loser was Antonio who was a coward; brave people profess love, it is only losers who shell out money.” He never knew me, and sometimes I’m not sure if I’m angry or just too much in love with a past I wanted to live in but could not. When I pass by his house, I wish I never met him; we can be friends with people who don’t know us, not people who refuse to know us.
I pass by my cousin’s apartment very often. We grew up together, there’s nothing we haven’t told each other already. I remember her birthdays, a day I’d wait for all year long. I never had many friends, but she did. Her friends would come over on her birthdays and I’d meet them. They’d sound like fantastical beings to me, so different from everything I stood for. Unlike my little world, only occupied by family and extending from my home to my school, their lives were constantly resounding from the echoes of love and its predicaments. That their identity was made of diverse threads and certainly messier than mine was particularly astounding to me. I had simply a friend or two and no romantic episode by then. It was during one of those glamorous evenings, that one of her friends bent over me as I kept on moving till I lay horizontally on the bed, eyes locked. Nothing remarkable happened after that, nor did my heart race fast when it was happening. However, that was the first time I felt in charge. That was for the first time I was being looked at as myself and myself only; existing social relationships not filling the air in between with context. It was then, for the first time, I felt like a person and not a genetic extension. When I pass by her apartment, I laugh a little and I look up and thank fate.
When I pass by a lane that leads up to a home I used to visit annually, I think of the friend who lives there. He was not really a friend; our mothers were friends, and we saw each other around in school sometimes. It’s funny how much I hated going to his posh birthday party. I’d visit his home, and try fitting in with his friend group, all gaming nerds too comfortable with killing people who lived inside the computer. I’d become uncomfortable soon enough, asking them to do something else, maybe even gossip for a bit, but they’d be too busy glaring at the screen. Having nothing to do I’d sit in a corner, and his mother would then force them into including me in whatever they were doing, again I’d want them to stop gaming and then a fight would break out. The same script was followed every year till we grew up and stopped celebrating birthdays entirely. I met him for the last time during the final months of school; I wish our kids happily celebrate each other’s birthday together someday since we couldn’t. It’s not nice to fight on birthdays.
I’m in college now; I don’t perform in my town’s auditorium anymore. Though I still visit it, now and then. I visit it to look for a secret alley behind the stage known only to performers. When in the alley I breathe some of its air, my insides bleed a bit and I think of the wintry December night, the end of a waning year. I remember him who had hugged me, shaky still, from the effect of the tunes I had just caressed moments back on the stage. I had peeped into the earnestness of his eyes, and the pull of the body. That year I had put most of my friends in care of the fold of time; I had lost them. This glowing apparition in front of me was really a torch I could trust with bestowing light on my eyes. After ages, I felt the touch of a friend, a piercing act of revelation. When in that alley behind the stage, I uproot myself from my reality.
At times I pay a visit to my nonna’s place, the house has a small garden. When there I think of the seventh year of my life, the time when I was starting to feel a connection with soil. Since then, I’ve been sculpting, and the feel of mud in my hands is a key to elsewhere. I think of the ants of the garden and their stinging bite on an itchy arm, the texture of the skin made rough by the dry layer of soil on it. The mud smelled of rain, and the house was old and temperate, just like nonna. Thus, it wasn’t July when monsoon arrived, it was whenever I walked into that house. I think my childhood is damp, for the most part, and temperate seldom. I prefer to keep it that way.
Walking or not, I loiter a little too much in this town. Sometimes I loiter to ease my pain. Sometimes I loiter because I want these streets to haunt me. Sometimes I loiter because I feel my childhood slipping away too fast. Sometimes I loiter because I’m not a poet, the closest I’ll ever come to poetry is by becoming a poem myself; when I let my past intrude into my present, moving on the same streets, feeling the same things as I did before.
When I was in London for the summer, I walked on Webber Street, alone and late at night, under a massive arch lit in blue light from the inside, I thought about the last day as a freshman. I thought about when I was sitting on the floor of my room, my friend beside me, the air weighing down on us, heavy from the dim yellow glow that fairly lights emitted. We had talked about music and had eaten snacks so spicy that we began to wonder whether it was the day, the music or the food that was making us tear up. That day, a storm had been harsh on the campus, and it didn’t feel like summer, and yet it was a summer we knitted with our words as we sat under the lights pretending as if they were stars and we were bigger than our circumstances. That day when I walked on Webber Street and then passed the Trinity church, hidden behind layers of trees, I felt like a song: victorious, lonely and burning. I realise now that I have been the boy with the golden scarf to London. The scarf always waved in the summer air, making me look like a pole a silk flag was tied to. Have I been a ship then? My consciousness the metal, my body the flagstaff?
I remember the stranger from Falmouth Street, him looking out to the road from his home, the sight of his eyes momentous, the window framing life as if it were cinema, a yellow light drenching his dusty shelf crowded with mellow books. To him I think, I have been a peculiar limping ship; I recall feeling a sharp pain in my legs that day. How different is a British city from my town? The sky is the same, I cling to solitude like a resentful lover, and I refuse to stay still. It is all the same.
