The Mirage
I came to know of him as a 75 year old man who lives alone in his small bungalow that was away from the limits of the town's quotidian sounds and clamors and spending most of his time sitting in his veranda and watching the passers-by on the street in front.
He unfolded his day by making himself sink in an easy chair in his veranda with a cup of Malabar coffee and basking under the warmth of early morning sun. As the day gradually progressed and he moved inside the house, the glimpse of the empty chair used to captivate the sight of passers-by - a lot of people stopped for a while and seemed to peruse at it. This phenomenon was revealed and described by him beautifully in one of our conversations -
"It was one of the mundane afternoons when I was preparing for a siesta but was hard to come by so I reached for the window to open in order to let the swift breeze that was blowing outside to come in. As I looked outside, there are colors of furious flaming fire, but the temperature is just a calm and tranquil one - the leaves on the trees appear to be converting into blazing colors of red and intense tones of orange and all the greens look like they are being reborn into yellowish tones. The sunlight had an amber glow almost like a room lit only by candlelight and the soft, fleecy clouds were drifting across the endless clear blue sky by the swift gusts of wind who appeared as a shepherd driving the herds of sheep to their home. Enthralled by the scenery outside, I again became the onlooker and kept gazing at the calm, deserted afternoon street carpeted by the colorful leaves overlooking the veranda. And suddenly I saw a passer-by stopped to take a look at the empty chair and then walked away. His glance lasted only a few seconds but I felt like he sensed a vivid moment of eternity in that glance in which he endured a longing to deliver a sublime soliloquy on solitude and loneliness to the owner of the chair.
"The incident made me to end up, that entire afternoon, repeating my occupation of the morning. Since that day my afternoons have been an inescapable affair of secretly watching, from behind the curtain of that window, people passing by and trying to discern who looks up to that chair.
"There's a beginning to everything and since that afternoon, I began discovering, in the expressions of people of this place, a brewing desire for a relationship with me - a kind that can elicit such unspoken reflections which can be fathomed and consumed only by them and me. And I get a contented feeling today that I was not wrong in my observations and it's understandings that over the course of time people over here got connected with me - they come over my place to talk, to listen to me and often resulting in a warm conversation with a few making my soul satiated at the thought of them when I retire to sleep at night."
He was a theater actor and wished to retire to a quieter life where he could spend his time watching the brightening and fading of natural light after perspiring decades under the high wattage bulbs and endless camera flashes; hence he was here. In his living room, there was a 3+1+1 oak brown colored sofa sitting and glass top small center table of same color, a walnut colored chest of drawer and numerous small and big sized wall shelves and showcase with glass slider of same color that held books of varying thickness. His bedroom had a quaint heavy wood bed and a study table with a lamp placed at one of it's corner that had an amber illumination. The inside of his house encompassed a feeling of Gothic artistry.
There was one room in his house that had always been kept locked. The room housed myriad of memoirs of a love affair he once had, the tale of which had remained concealed from everyone here. It was only he himself who opened that room but only on two occasions which he had always shared candidly with anyone - one when he wanted to escape from the boredom of the loneliness routine and turn into a sentimental moron, other during those nights when he became sleepless for no reason and he would want to shed tears and sob by the touch of the unfulfilled moments of his past that would deplete him making him fall asleep.
The living room had a balcony that opened to a paradisaical sight of countless grassy undulating hills. While his mornings were an enunciation to the place at the break of day and afternoons were a time of keeping his existence secret, he spent his evenings sitting there in his balcony and watching the sunset which he once described as an experience of an unending walk to a macabre ordeal through a glass tunnel that was ablaze with fiery hues with the brilliant red orb slowly sinking beneath the horizon but the threads of it's light still lingering in the tunnel's path, dyeing it's walls first orange to some distance, then red in the next few steps of his walk, then dark blue until all that was left, as far as his eyes could see, was a chalky mauve.
Whenever I was in conversation with him, I always awed at the amount of profundity that the wrinkles of his face and on the back of his palms holds. His wrinkles were like the landscape of this place - where a square mile of level ground is difficult to find, instead the surface is broken by endless undulations which in places swell into considerable and distinct ranges; the entire surface has a lush green carpet that resembles his wisdom accumulated over the ages.
It was not until an evening of late December that I found him soaked in an unusual solemnity with a palpable quietude in the time of his life on that day, as if the sand in the great hourglass of time had turned into ice making the world around him go into a complete motionless state. That morning he stayed away from his veranda and decided to enjoy his Malabar coffee in his balcony to remain untouched by the morning sun. And neither, on that afternoon, did he secretly glanced outside to the passers-by. He said that, for the first time, he witnessed the unfolding of a day in the gradual lapse of time. When I visited his house at around 8:00 PM that evening, he was still sitting in his balcony; beside him was a small bamboo table with a round glass top placed upon which was an unopened whiskey bottle, a dry glass and a bottle of water. The evening had bundled up in a thin blanket of lazily moving fog, toasty aromas wafting from the earthen pots, the glimmering embers and the sight of the quaint, shimmering bungalows situated at the far away lap of hills.
As I brought a chair and sat across the table, he, in his signature sedateness and thick voice, uttered-
"On many mornings, I am so allured with the idea of spending that very evening, after the sunset, quaffing the whiskey and sink into an ephemeral psychedelia that I savored my coffee more on those mornings than the other ones. But it couldn't happen - either my evenings got occupied by talking to people, mostly sharing the shades of my experiences as a theater actor, who come over at my place or spent in an anticipation of anyone's visit.
"Today morning when I woke up, I felt an indolence as if it's been ages I am on the stage playing an adrift character of a protracted play who's in a perpetual search of ways to love and ways to loathe. And today he realized his pursuit was a purple haze and the reason for that pursuit remains a mystery to him now.
"When the sleep had left me today morning, I kept lying on my bed for a long time and kept an unwavering gaze on the motionlessness of the ceiling fan only to perceive, after sometime, the rare and prolonged thoughtlessness in my awakened state. And so I decided to consume alcohol to avoid the blankness for the rest of the day but I chose to sit on my balcony to stay away from the passers-by in order to dispel the feeling of being surrounded by the presence of spectators. But my idiosyncrasy to stay pre-occupied with the ways to be prominent in the eyes of people couldn't let me open the bottle all day long."
A silence of calmness and solicitude prevailed. I brought a glass for myself and he then held the bottle with a trembling hand, opened and poured the whiskey and water one by one on both the glasses. In a span of time in which I made only a couple of sips, he gulped the first one down and took charge of the second peg. And in the preparation of second peg, the trembles had disappeared and he appeared at more ease.
We preferred to let the silence flourish and enjoy the tranquility that the effect of alcohol seemed to bring in to our nerves until I finished my first peg. In preparation of my second one and his savoring of third one, I expressed a curiosity about the locked room. He sunk more deeply in his easy chair, looked towards the inkiness of the valley where everyday he watches the sun sink and said -
"There are some things on this earth that remains beyond the human understanding - to be a prisoner of nostalgia is one of them. That room is a nostalgia - one that had over the years enriched the reverie of love by making the pulse of the time faint away and leaving me in a time trap for such thoughts. I had a love that folded admiration in clandestine corners of my heart and concealed applauses at the dip of midnight's ethereality. But today as I reflect back, I find that it was a forbidden and partial love where the emanation and subsidence of fondness was confined to me only; she existed uninhabited by such emotions. Life, for her, was an uncaring walk through a path that alternated between radiant display of emotions and abandonment into stygian darkness.
"And finally my romanticism started to spill over gradually and it happened that people began beholding that affair as an illicit one. The cacophony of illiciteness grew larger and that's the point when it began to cast doubts on the legitimacy of my emotions. And unable to handle the inflection of people's voice, one morning when the world was still asleep, I left the place and her, carrying all my belongings and attachments from the glory of that love affair.
"I housed them in that room and locked them up to be cautious that it doesn't get spill over this time."
He paused and gulped his third peg down. Keeping his glass gently on the table, he resumed in a mildly entangled speech -
"What I told this place of my visits to that locked room is a lie. I begin my mornings there spending time to trying to find out what was illicit in my love affair and end up my night, before sleep, trying to find out if I had done right by abandoning her. I do not know if it was a love or an infatuation but falling in love, in all these years, with the memoirs of whatever it was had finally made me a tired human being today."
For the rest of that evening, we turned speechless and remained confined to ourselves, pouring whiskey in our own glasses and sipping them in the growing coldness of the air and gradual decaying of senses which made us fall asleep wrapped in the warmth of alcohol only to wake up the next morning, at the break of the dawn, to find he was not there beside.
There were false skin wrinkles, a white wig and a key kept on the table but he was nowhere in the house. It didn't take me time to understand that the key is of the locked room. I took the key and attempted to open the lock of that room and found that I was not wrong.
The room was dark and dingy without a window. As I switched on the light, I found that the room was erupting with the numerous news paper cut outs, stapled in it's walls, from the recent past that published acclaims of his acting along with the gravitating pictures of him in the get up of the characters he played. There was a dressing table on which were lying countless lumps of used cotton pads bruised with the scars of make up and a mirror with bulbs fitted at it's border - a one used in green room to illuminate during the make up of an artist.
I spent that entire day subsumed in that room looking at the walls awestruck and trying to connect the dots.
The people of this place had created a delightful tale out of his sudden and enigmatic disappearance that will be rendered and cherished in the years to come but misses him and the sight of the empty easy chair in the veranda of that house in afternoon !
