"All Cracked Up" - Authored by Ayush Prasad - 13 August 2013 A host of cracks lace the roof of the room I live in. They run like rivulets, stretching in all directions, revealing a darkness that does well to hide in the crevices of the concrete. When evening comes, the darkness crawls out of them and spreads out like cobwebs, becoming the night. Bathed in the yellow glow of tall halogen lamps, it wets us with assumptions of the city’s nightlife. And we oblige, sometimes returning home for dinner and TV with family, sometimes blowing our sweat in the blast of air-conditioning in some pub, cafe or mall. Occasionally, we also read under a bed-light and mull on the fictional, melodramatic nature of our realities in this story and sensation craving city. But we hardly ever pay attention to where these cracks lead. There were cracks in my flat in Malad too. Those ran along the wall from top to bottom and were shaped slightly like the Amazon. Looking at them, I felt transported into the lost world of school-life, geography and punishment for unfinished tasks. Maybe, that’s why I moved from there. Fingers whacked with the edges of a thick, Tiger No. 1 ruler, knuckles hit with canes, being shouted at, being made to stand outside classrooms for purposes of shaming, a finger split into two because the teacher miscalculated the intensity of the blow, Mr. Kim, the history teacher, neatly splitting the taut skin on the palm of a teenage boy with one tight blow of the cane and making rivulets runs and borders appear. And all because the boy was paying attention to the girls rather than standing in line for assembly. Girls fainting at the sight of this sludge of imposed morality and servitude and being made fun of by moustache-wearing male teachers who thought too much or too little of themselves. And all in the name of some sucker called Don Bosco, a metaphor called Jesus, a value called discipline and an idea called usefulness. Cracks, cracks, cracks and cracks all over the place. While walking in Dharavi the day before yesterday, I saw even more cracks. They were there in hundreds and thousands in the tin roofs and thin walls of the shacks that manufactured plastic pellets, aluminium peel, aluminium bricks and leather. The sacks which contained rubble from the world over had them too. They were there also in the eyes, hands, skin and soles of the labourers who worked there. It seemed that the blast from furnaces, the blinding sparks of welding, the uncontrollable noise of plastic-grinding machines and the serpent fumes of the nether world had cracked their very soul. Did the nauseating smell I got come from them? Did the American woman who was with us fall sick because she saw the cracks that had come to sit like a web over the blood vessels of these workers? Did she retch because she could feel the cracks of disorganised, working-class Indian life spin their sticky cocoon around her bare arms and feet and not let go? Did the shed manager who laughed at me and smirked as I shielded my eyes from the white blasts of welding and puckered my face do so because he saw me waging a farcical, losing battle against these cracks creeping up on me yet again? Outside Mahim railway station runs a wall with faded paintings by the city’s not-at-all-famous artists. On the other side of the road sit homeless members of a Dalit, artisan community, the Jogis. They make beautiful baskets, chairs, stools and other decorative objects out of bamboo shavings. Behind them looms a tall, dark building. It looks worn out with many deep cracks across its face. When I spoke to them more than two years back, one of them told me that that was where they hid during the 93 riots as the rioters cut his grandfather into half on the road. This man is a driver now. Drunk with hatred against the community whose members neatly carved the belly of his grandfather, he now votes for dark, political forces and a Nazi mouthpiece which keep that other community continually on their toes. That’s the way to go, he says, that’s the way to crack the whip, to break their confidence, else they will cut throats again. He doesn’t bother about the cracks that have surfaced in his humanity because of such a decision, because of such an unthinking, assumption-laced, generalising position. Those bastards, he adds, those bastards. It must be done, he sighs. It must be done. But what if that Nazi firebrand is actually using him for his own ends, I ask. He shirks the question with a shrug of his shoulders. He doesn’t think that could ever be the case, he says, and without any further thought bites into the delicious chicken of the beautiful turmeric-stained biryani that people of that very community have cooked in one of the many restaurants run by them in Mahim. Yesterday, a man boarded the train and started doing gymnastics. He wanted people to look at him, to empathize with him, to love him. And he wanted to give it back to them, to hit them, to lacerate them. His glowering eyes said it all. His antics were a challenge to the stability of the society in that first class carriage. He was the upsetting element, the cracked mirror much to the humour of the other passengers. He was hurling back the psychic blows that made him, in popular language, a crackpot. Could we too somehow see ourselves cracking in his state of delusion and grandeur? Maybe. Maybe we could see ourselves cracking, disintegrating, rupturing in many, many more like him. An old man continued speaking to someone that didn’t exist from Church Gate to Borivali the other day. On another evening, an aged woman carried vegetables and spoke to her husband who was not there till she got off at Dadar. A month back, a boy of twenty-five had his hand in a rosary bag. With the other he clutched a laptop bag. As the journey progressed, he chanted words to an ever eluding God, his eyelids flapping open and shut as if he was on hash. Only last Friday, a middle-aged man laughed and smiled and laughed again and continued to do so till he got off at Santacruz station and disappeared over the foot-over-bridge. A month back, a young, smudged, vagrant loitered on Bandra station, asking for food, reminiscing things from his life, shaking his head, clapping, his buttocks showing through his torn pants. Why had these people cracked so? Why had they not been repaired? Wasn’t repairing cracks easy with the FeviQuick of popular culture—fashion, cinema, fine dining—nowadays? On my return to my building, I stood still and gave it a thorough look. A tall, cracked, lump of concrete loomed in front. The building’s disfigured body seemed like a metaphor for a Mumbai afflicted with psoriasis. Its pores and cracks, its damaged goods, ogled at you so much more than its polish. This was a city where you had to give an explanation for why you needed to keep alive, why you needed to eat, why you desired freedom, why you wanted the weight of proof that lay upon you to fade. It was for these reasons that standing in the ruins of the old, imperial vanguard of Bombay, the Watson’s Hotel, I had felt an uncanny sensation raise its head and then come in stealthily, rattling its tail, asking me to take a flight. It was as if the worn Hotel, its dishevelled lobby and its creaking teakwood staircase spoke to me and said that it had crumbled into oblivion and disgrace because it no longer had answers and reasons for why it needed to be there the way it was in the past. The madness of the pressure to simply be (or you can say, exist) had been just too much to bear.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 07:36:15 +0000
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