Glitch
Avishek Parui — When a 45-year old man with a beautiful wife and two teenaged kids still needs to watch gruesome violent videos all by himself every damn night to sleep well, you know there’s a glitch growing somewhere! Two cigarette smoke-curls were blending lazily over the bench where the men sat. The traffic across the street was getting busier with the falling hours. The car-horns were getting shriller, scooping spaces that were thinning fast. The December dusk of Kolkata waited for the streetlights to glow. The Friday evening was beginning to spread with the hopes of happier weekends. It was the time between two light-zones at Park Street Crossing where waves ran into what did not move. — Glitch! You sound as if I’m some camera shutter conked out. It’s not a snag you see, it’s a pattern, and one I stick to as it’s become a ritual over the months. Just like brushing your teeth after a meal. It’s not that I’m not embarrassed about it as I don’t really enjoy it. No more than you enjoy brushing your teeth every night! Both men were 45, both balding at the obvious places in their heads, both weary with the weight of the over-wrought; colleagues at the sales section of Panacea, a massive medicine company that manufactured painkillers that claimed to kill pain in less than 10 minutes. All kinds of pain. Panacea: the giant killer of pain. It sought to spread its branches across Kolkata, a city where the high-rises had to be rudely removed from the sounds that sank. — Pattern or ritual, the fact stands that you cannot sleep till you watch people torturing each other every night. You lock yourself in the bedroom on Sunday afternoons watching throats being slit when the rest of your family watches sitcom in TV. You’re 45. It’s sick and almost funny! — It certainly is! And that’s the real part you know. I mean we’ll both be really sick going by the way we’re headed now. Ten hours’ work a day, golden fried prawns at dinner parties where our wives wear dresses we can’t afford. Logically we ought to get our first stroke in three years and be dead in a decade. When I watch gory violence it’s not because I want to get a horny high or because I’m depressed . . . you know . . . It’s about something else. It’s about the ritual of seeing rituals break. It’s about seeing strangers scream in meaningless violence. It’s my own private hell. It’s someway real . . . you see . . . A real hell. And I need it to manage meanings in all the fake heavens around me. The voice paused after having hurled the words out in one breath. Too many cigarettes had lessened him already. All things around were lessening together in different degrees of decadence. The brief silence between the two men was slapped by the swishes and shouts as the evening began to eat the big buildings. The Friday dusk at Park Street carried a colour thickened by the smell of fries from various fast food joints that sell fast. The big restaurants with dark windows began to get dolled up for the Friday footfalls. At the appointed hour the billboards glowed up, as did the street lamps and neon signs. A small man with big balloons walked before the big music store that played John Lennon’s Imagine inside the cold glasses. One of the two men in the bench stared at the balloons. Different colors tied together in strings that looked the same: blue, yellow, red, green. The balloons floated gently, with the waves of air and sound around. Everything was mixing painlessly. Along the slanting lights. Through the camera lens. — That’s phony and lame . . . I mean it’s normal for a man of your condition to be bored, to go for drinks and see several women, we know many who bang around other people’s wives and still more who weekend with whores. That’s normal enough you see. But being compulsively dependent on violence for sleep is downright pathetic! You may as well watch porn! Get yourself a woman if you’re bored with your family. I can help you with that! The small balloon man still stood before the music store. He looked smaller with the growing crowd of people who crossed him like waves of car horns. He wasn’t selling anything. The blue, red and yellow balloons kept floating gently, swirling to the sound waves around. Not very far away a group of teenaged kids was heading for a pub, pushing against the crowd of people headed the other way, towards the Park Street metro station. Their words flicked the sweaty shirts of the tired workers hurrying for home. — When my dad tried to act tough on me last night, I smiled at him knowingly. I mean it’s so damn obvious he’s sleeping out with someone, that filthy bastard. Guess mom knows it too but she doesn’t care. And why should she? She’s got her own life to live and enjoy. This morning as I was leaving dad called me and handed me a couple of grand in a tender voice. No lecturing, no big speeches. Nothing. A neat two grand. Guess he’s paying me to shut up. Not to make an emotional fuss about it. As if I cared! — It’s good to have guilty parents. We all know that! My mom’s a whore. She’s been cheating on dad for over three years now. She starts seeing her friends whenever dad’s away on office tours. Where’s the goddam lighter gone? — What do you care? All you need is their signs across your application to a US university after the bloody GRE scores appear! And don’t worry they’ll be guilty enough to keep sending you money while you’re boozing away in the States! The evening lights were spreading out fast, with the breaths