We began to fight ruthlessly when the protests outside took the worst of its turn. Our WhatsApp texts fired off with the intensity of the tear-shells outside. In a way, I felt ashamed. Our priorities were misguided. We were selfish to think only of us at a time when everyone’s hands frantically hunted for their family contacts on mobile screens. Scenes of youths in motorcycle helmets, tossing cocktails at panicking busses, graced the TV with disturbing regularity. I wondered if they were original footage or merely recycled ones of older protests. Earlier today, I saw my upstairs neighbor tugging at her sixteen-year old, one hand on a grimy thermos flask, the other holding her son by the collar. A smell of tar crept in through the openings of my room. I only felt annoyed that all this was happening now. Not us arguing, but the protests. Why now? When her nonchalant detachment gave my insides a tightening, why were the students suddenly at their feet? I was all for the toppling of a dictator, mind you, but this timing had to be an inconvenience.
I mention her detachment, but I was no good either, often causing trouble in my own way, needling my way into a confrontation at the first sight of a seeming disconnection. I hated being lied to and to annoy me she lied about the most asinine stuff. Perhaps, this was part and parcel of being together. One had to test the others’ patience to see if they were battle-proof—worthy of life-long cohabitation. But her falsehoods were nonsensical. She talked about seeing the moon when the sun was still out. Once, she relayed a sequence of events that involved her photocopying some travel documents, meeting her father for coffee, and running into old friends on the other end of the city all to return within less than an hour. The absurdity of this did not make me laugh, but rather angrier. How much of an idiot did she think I was? Why was she even doing this? Of course, I too lied. But mine were conventional, typical: the hiding of occasional, meaningless flings with other women.
We are done for good.
If this were any other time, I would have bussed down to her place, made good use of my exceptional talents at making a scene. Seeing me bawling and cursing outside her building would initiate a hasty closure on her part. I would be invited in and we would hush out an end to the argument before her landlord finds something to fault her with. Now, this was impossible. Students barricaded intersections; where they weren’t present, jeeps of policemen lazily halted any passers-by from venturing anywhere too far. Seeing her text, I frantically kept calling her number until I realized she had blocked me. I had been blocked everywhere else already on social media, so maniacally, I kept dialing her unreachable number again and again—I was too anxious not to fess up to the hopelessness of this activity. I felt my heart would instantly shatter like a glass mug flung at the floor if I accepted my situation. Luckily, she too must have sensed this in me and unblocked to write:
Stay home, don’t think of going out right now.
To say some bits of words injected life into me would be dramatic, but straightaway I had purpose. A continuation, from where I could investigate the tone behind this new stretch of line. Was this concern? Concern for someone you love or just being considerate to someone you have been close with for some time? Or was it merely nervousness, that I would end up dead in the commotion and it would be her fault and how would she ever deal with that guilt? The directness could be both a sign of dispelling any further romantic interest or a demand that one could claim only through the sheer strength of love. Which was this?
My mother had called in the meantime, worried dead over my younger brother. He was still in college and their friends had decided they had to participate, if anything to avoid the shame of being called a “coward”. They would holler out the listed demands and if ruling party goons made any effort to block their peaceful protest, they would burn down their club-rooms.
“How do I stop him?” she asked me.
Why did she need to, I wanted to ask. Smoke rose from a distance followed by a snap of a tear-shell. I drew the curtains. “Keep the door locked,” I told her, trying to shorten the conversation, assuring her I would not venture out either. The situation seemed dreadful, but life had not yet come to a standstill. A curfew was not on the table, yet. The banks, as far as I was aware, were still open. I had to go to work too, and I hadn’t already because of the fight. I texted back that she should stay home, too, that I would text (even as that worsens everything) later in the evening when she has calmed a bit.
Leave me alone. Please?
Back at square one. I wrote back a few more lines, mostly begging, but I did not know if she read them or not. It was her tendency to turn off the read-receipt option on WhatsApp so she could be aware of what I was saying without my knowing that she had seen my texts. Unnerving, and if you ask me, needlessly cruel. There were calls from my office, co-workers excited about potential days off. “Why don’t you join?” I asked them, but they were already daydreaming of their much-needed leisure. “Sure, sure,” they say, “If the husband keeps nagging too much, I’ll be out with the sticks and flags right away.”
My cowardly instincts, I would term them as the ailments of a “disinterested aesthete,” naturally made me averse to protests and rallies. In my university days, I had strayed clear of such displays of fervor, even going further to deride the enthusiasm of young revolutionaries as naivety. I fashioned my laziness as style and now I wished I had the maturity of those kids. I wish I had under my belt a few protests so I could feel established, perhaps I could take part in the current one and not feel like I was making up for lost verve.
Heading out. I wrote.
I did not know where I was exactly heading out to, perhaps toward my old high school, which was right around the corner. A walk of ten or fifteen minutes. I hadn’t seen its moss-ridden walls and depressing, gridded corridors for years, but now I figured there had to be some gathering there. I could call up the two school friends I was still in sporadic contact with, before remembering how embarrassing it would seem, to want to congregate back here. I would seem without focus, and more so, out of character. This wasn’t the person I was known to them. On the streets, I decided to turn off my mobile data, so whatever message she writes me, if she does, comes through as “sent” and not “delivered”. A little diabolical? But if I wasn’t offline, I would be obsessively checking back, pestering her again, worsening it, as I always did. And how could I have my eyes glued to the screen while on burning streets! An effort for my peace of mind and the attempt to infuriate her was now one and the same.
Suddenly, the world’s worries overwhelmed my senses. The empty streets, devoid of the muscle of corrugated local busses, was fresh and welcoming. I walked on for signs of revolt, but there were only snatches of irregularity. A sugarcane van left abandoned, the ice topped over its machine smeared in red—blood or merely a smattering of the coloring added to the sugarcane juice? A bearded old man, selling hot patisseries in a steel box, complained to me, “I should have gone to the roundabout-intersection in the morning. All the hungry students were there today, I would’ve sold out in minutes!”
I asked if the protesters were still present there. “I don’t think so, the police had battered the rally, I heard.” They had dispersed, and either way, the intersection was a different route and I had no intention of randomly joining a procession. My high school seemed a safer choice of entry.
Where are you??? Get home immediately.
She had sent me an SMS from her phone. It was an odd sight, a personal text amidst a sea of mobile-carrier offers on internet packs and call-rates. My temporary pleasure in seeing her distressed reminded me that she, too, had pulled this tactic some days ago, albeit in a tamer fashion. Her friends in the group-chat were abuzz with talks of resistance. I did not care much for them, and I suspected it was only to show on Instagram that one was attuned to politics, that they were there when the fall almost arrived. But she used this to proclaim she would go too.
I am going there tomorrow. Don’t call now.
But how could I not? Being the mess I was, I could not pretend to be okay with it and while I saw through her ploy to have me beg, to plead at her feet to stay inside and not get herself killed, I did it anyway. She had given me yet another opportunity to show that I cared for her and I wasn’t going to let that go. Neither of us were going anywhere near the fighting proper and we both knew it. We were cowards, both of us. We were meant for each other.
But I was outside now and even the regular ruckus of the city added new dimension to my eyes. I saw half-torn sandals and thought of poor children fleeing rubber-bullets, yet the sandals were perhaps just the usual rubbish so ubiquitous in this city. Once a police bike sped past, as if it were chasing a robber, and the few of us on the roadside scrambled to a corner—more pathetic than exhilarating. The chances of being stopped and questioned was greater on the main road, so I shifted inside to a narrower road. I knew my way around the area, having lived much of my life here. The shops and tea-stalls were shuttered down and an eerie dampness permeated the roads. Occasionally, I would see men in their wife-beaters and lungis sprawled over a van, playing Ludo. They would murmur about the bad state of business, about how the government had seen it coming and deserved it, how it was the common people like them, who were suffering. They stressed on the suffering part quite merrily as they heaped the dice over the cardboard and celebrated a good turn.
Exasperated by now, she had started calling me, but no sooner could I answer her, I walked out into the wrong road and a police barricade lay right in front of me guzzling on fire. How could metal burn? Perhaps there was a mechanism, some sort of flammables thrown on it. In that moment, the air of kerosene felt romantic. I was instantly part of the movement. Through some circuitous justification in my head, I was more than just a pitiable man longing for his girlfriend’s return now. In vain, a rickshaw-wallah whipped at this grand display with a flour-sack, hoping to douse its fire. The burning showed no sign to disappear and a few of us stranded here before it stayed in awe of it. A siren wailed nearby and a crowd began to amass. My phone was ringing constantly now. All this attention got me in a rather good mood and I relented, answering: “I’m going home, I’m alright, don’t worry.” She promptly cut the call, but I did not let that affect me. I was still in high spirits when I reached my apartment, the sight of the fire had stayed, had glazed my face with indescribable hope. I took my shoes off and turned on the TV. The situation had indeed turned worse now. A curfew was being announced. I called her number a few times to say that I was back, but found it unreachable. Later that night, the electricity went out and the government cut the phone lines. The glass mug had finally shattered to the ground.
♢
March 21, 2025
