The Lonely Road

I ran my fingers over the welt, still red. A triumphant smile interrupted the tears of defeat. For days that bruise on my upper arm would keep me company. It was close enough for me to reach with my lips. I could face the mirror and tell myself that I was not alone.

We often traverse through the terrain of togetherness, formalize life into an impregnable fort, while feelings fall like a pack of cards. We feel desired, even destroyed. Sometimes, nothing happens. Like that day. Before I could wilt in the suffocation of despair, I bent over and felt the welt with a dewdrop from my tongue. It would cling to me, a blushing bud blooming into blue.

This happened once. It may happen again. For I have been unable to get rid of loneliness. I give it other names: recluse, misfit, alone but not lonely, but these are just words enshrined on a crumbling edifice. I shy away from admitting it due to the fear that I will have to accept an indictment I have brought upon myself, and that my emotional demons have scarred me with. I deny it with vehemence and yet…

That is the reason I don’t let go. I swallow the constricting feeling in my throat, call it commitment, courage or whatever, and stay on. Why? Because I am afraid of losing even the shroud that covers me. Loneliness hovers like an undertaker. I know I am not the only one, but even if we were to form a sorority of lonesome souls, you and I will still not be together in it. Your moments may find echoes in mine, but can you hear my voice?

I screamed. It was a bright day. Sunlight streamed in through the bay windows, the distant ocean a muffled sound. The untiled floor was uneven, the walls scraped and plastered. It was a house waiting to become a home. Mine. For the first time I would feel like I had something concrete – some concrete – to call my own. Bought by me. I had packed things that would embellish my fantasies rather than the place: statuettes, paintings, knick-knacks, and I had nowhere to put them. And now I was told that I would not be moving in. Plans had changed. Just like that. But I resisted reality. I started cutting out bits and pieces from magazines and pasted them on cardboard sheets; a collage had formed. I was hoping that having made a pattern, things would fall into place. Do they ever? The verdict was clear. My house would remain bare. And as I fought those unsaid words, the thoughtless thoughts, I had thrown open the windows, let in the breeze and screamed. No one could listen. I was the dog howling at the moon. However loud I was, it would remain a moan. I knew that even if people rallied around me, I was doomed to be alone. No one would fully comprehend what I had lost, for no one had understood what I stood to gain.

Since that day, I have never wanted to belong anywhere. I do not feel out of place in new surroundings because I am designed for alienation. I know that I am a stranger amongst the known, for there is nothing to overwhelm me and claim me.

Last New Year’s Eve was another such day. I sat curled up on a sofa watching television. Friends had plans. I had none. My excuse for not going along was I felt so happy that I wanted to be by myself. The truth is that I did not want my solitude interrupted for a few brief hours. How would it feel after the hangover to return to my one-man army and fire rounds in the air and find that, in the twisted loneliness, I had failed to see that the barrel of the gun was facing me?

Some people think I am brave and self-sufficient. “You don’t need anyone, which is wonderful.” If only they knew I can fill a stranger’s vacuum into mine through hours compressed into moments. Even in blissful slumber, I am threatened by the nightmare of emptiness. I start missing people before they have left. I assume they will leave. And so, instead of letting experiences grow, I wallow in episodes. I see in every zebra crossing a milestone. The contradiction within a lonely heart is that it attracts people; it becomes the terrain on which they can pitch their tents. The nomads depart in time and I have the rubble of memories to showcase as life.

This constitutes my inheritance – the stuff I have held close to my bosom and things that I have had to discard in the garbage heap. I go scavenging often to look for traces of myself and, among other people’s leftovers, I find that I have left nothing at all. How can I differentiate the bones I had chewed on from a stray’s?

I have formed an unspoken relationship with a beggar. He salaams me with his solitary arm and, being mute, he can only smile. In the years I have known him, I haven’t given him a single paisa, yet he sprints across from wherever he is to meet me. He even knows my moods, or so I think. The other day, after I was returning disheartened after a meeting that did not take place, I saw him pass me by. How could he! He too was giving me the boot. Behind my shades, I let the tears well in my eyes. Once again I was alone. Just when the traffic lights were changing, he came, having retraced his steps. He gesticulated wildly, and I fathomed he was indicating that he had not spotted me and was sorry. Yes, I had made it. I was not alone. He was there. You will have to believe me when I tell you that I forgot all the disappointments of the day and went home in a happy frame of mind. Till I realised that even if the chrysalis had become a butterfly, all it could do was flutter about, suck the juice of a flower, and then what?

Are lonely people born that way? What lessons do we learn in the womb? I remember as a child in a joint family I had plenty of company. But the fear would not leave me that one day they would all go away. I’d wake up at night and go checking to see if everyone was breathing and then return to the bed satisfied that their lives would give me reason to live. Next morning I would feel crowded by them. And lonely.

This is something difficult to write about. It is like being trapped in a blank sheet of paper, thoughts running faster than wheels on an empty street. I am too afraid to chase them, capture them and then sentence them to a page. But I cannot stop being fascinated by how the pen holds itself back -- a few dots expanding into bubbles that might burst any minute. Sometimes, like now, in spite of myself, words form. I try slashing them, hoping to see them bleed. Instead, like the royal blue of their ink, they regally shun my attempts and brush me away as another speck of dust.

Is that why I like the feel of mud? I have told them that I would like to be buried next to Nanima. Grandma died years ago and six feet below the ground there will be no trace of her left. Yet, it is comforting -- the thought that I will not be alone. In the graveyard I familiarise myself with the scent of rotting flowers and the sight of worms. Are dead people lonely as well?