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MEENA AFSARI
Indian Nights Sameer’s shoulders sag and his stomach hangs loose over his trouser line when he sits. Puffs of flesh surround his eyes, which are a watery black, filmy and unclear, shot through with snakes of red. As he lights yet another Dunhill Red, his hand shakes slightly. He looks at his watch, an old silver Rolex with a yellowing face. It is five o’clock in the evening. “Time for a drink,” he beams, bounding up from his deck chair. The Bacardi bottles are lined up in a small cupboard under the kitchen sink. Three rows of them. Sameer grabs one eagerly, deftly uncaps it with one hand, pours rum into two glasses and covers it with coke. He pushes my drink towards me and gulps his own down. He pours himself a second. A third. He starts to relax, laugh, slur a word or two, and a pinkish hue highlights his cheek bones. He opens the Bacardi bottle again. And a fifth time. Something has happened to Sameer since I last saw him three years ago. It isn’t just that he drinks without tasting: It’s that he seems to have lost himself somewhere in time and is unaware of its passage. He is telling me about his Rum and Coke days in India and his eyes sparkle. He speaks as though the years have not moved, as if he is still the swinger he was back then. He talks about parties, picnics, gin and tonic Sunday afternoons at the race-course. He tells me of glossy-haired beauties with almond shaped eyes, called Neeta, Aruna, Leela, and how they used to fight for his attentions. “All the women there were after me,” he boasts, “I could have had whichever one I wanted.” He gets up to fix himself another drink, but pauses first to preen in front of a blurred mirror. I am sure he sees himself as he was with all those women, young, handsome, charming – not 20 years later as he is now, bloated with Bacardi in a nondescript Midwestern town. It is almost as though he doesn’t want to remember that he is here, as if he wants to forget his teenage daughters, his ex-wife, his corporate job that offers neither material nor intellectual reward. No, all that has evaporated into drunken oblivion. In his mind, he is still the darling of Indian society, a hot-shot on the rise with the world to conquer. I do not know what to think. One part of me wants to shake him up, tell him to let go of his delusions, to take stock of himself as he is now and to do something about it. I want to yell at him to dust his furniture, load the dishwasher, and do the laundry. To think about his children and how they’re getting along, to find out if they need him. More than anything, I want him to stop living the days out with Bacardi and dreams of times long by. But I hold myself in check – because I am remotely aware of the disillusionment that can come of living a life that doesn’t turn out the way one thought it would. The complete sadness of missing out on other lives in other worlds, of thinking that they could have been better than the present one is still intangible to me, but I know that it could be lurking somewhere in my future, too. So I do not say anything. I just sit there and choke on the emotions of a house cloaked with dust and an aging man I once admired so rotting within its confines, trying to escape into a world that has long since ceased to exist. Night has fallen and one large bottle of rum is already empty. Sameer is poking around in a junk-filled compartment under the television, looking for something. His hands rummage around inside it and he cuts one of them on something sharp. He doesn’t seem to feel any pain, and when he sits up, he hits his head on the TV screen. He laughs. He wants to show me a documentary about India, he says, something he taped off the TV a couple of years ago. It features a street scene during a religious festival, and people are singing and speaking in Hindi. Sameer knows every word they say by heart, as if he has watched them speak on screen night after night. He laughs at their jokes, sings along with an old movie song that is playing in the background. The camera zooms in on the crowd parading through the streets of a city we know well, singing and dancing to the beat of drums and tambourines. We recognize buildings, parks and gardens. And then we see the night sky, velvet-black as only the night sky in India can be, full of stars and fireworks. That’s when I hear his tears, and as I catch them from the corner of my eye, I know that Sameer isn’t only crying for the rum and coke days, the endless parties, the beautiful women. He isn’t even crying for wrong choices made in life or for another life that could have been. He is crying for a country and a culture worlds and worlds away from present day reality, for a kind of belonging that he cannot express in words nor hope to find around him again, but that he needs desperately and searches for every night without ever finding at the bottom of a bottle of Bacardi. People who voluntarily leave their native lands usually do so because they want a better life and they believe that they will get it elsewhere. Few realize, however, that once the years have passed, the glow dies out and the fierce hunger of return that ensues can never be satisfied. The videotape is wound fully to the end and I get up to turn things off. I hear a gentle snore from Sameer, who has gone to sleep in his chair, his chin resting on his torso. The empty glass is still clenched in his hand. The last drop of liquid from it has fallen onto the carpet, making a small, wet spot. Gently, I pry the glass from Sameer’s sleeping hand and place it in the overflowing sink. I put the light out and go upstairs, leaving him where he is. Meena Afsari is a writer with a keen interest in the quest for identity and belonging. |
© 2005 Underground Voices |
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