Elbow Room

The wretched agression which fuels his ego could win him the world if he were to redirect it. I think of him as an anti-Mahatma of sorts every now and then. Thin and bony, sometimes like a baby who can barely keep his chin up, he walks with me, happy for the moment, on the red soil paths. The green trees, the wind blowing our sweat dry, people excersing and doing Yoga, an old couple with a labrador, and a stick in hand to keep the monkeys at bay, the healthiness of the surroundings pulsating in jogging feet--he is such a misfit here. Everything inside him desperately soaks the wellness in the air like a thirsty dog laps water, like a band-aid on a wound.

His forced exile has given him what others may call...the gift of time. But its nothing short of Pandora's box. For most of us Time is a gushing river we can not bathe in twice; his Time however is a quiet lake that looks exactly the same at all hours, even the waves the winds paint on its wet surface are not random.

Everytime i enter his room, its as if time has ceased to be till i step out and the clock starts ticking again with a gasp. Strange it is then that the angry clock on his wall runs ten mintues ahead, as if forcing him to take cognizance. But he lies there on the same spot, in the same way, facing the same wall the paint on which seems to have stopped dead in its track trickling down, once liquid and colourful, now solid and caking.

The claustrophobia of his existence chokes me. Someone has bound my hands with heavy manacles to this side of the bed, i cant seem to break free. I am desperate to help him for his sake and my own. But i am afraid to approach him at times, like you would telling a war veteran that he must stop trying to gulp down in his drink the hideousness of the world he sacrificed his leg to save. You'd be afraid he might just throw his drink in your face and holler at you for daring to ask him to smile and let people think of him a mad fool.

I feel his pain. Its spread to us and become ours too. And that gives me authority to enter the room which has imprisoned time. And as i do, the birds outside stop chirping in mid-song, the people on the road freeze in their activities, the rain holds its breathe and the hands of the clock in the kitchen stop waving the minutes away...

"Its not the food thats stale, dad. its the drink."

He looks at me with bloodshot eyes that if you stare in them for too long you can see someone trapped crying out for help.

"Its not mom, its you."

He asks me to stop preaching to him. I try to tell him subtly this is not him. That this is what Freud called the Ego, what so many spiritual traditions call the 'False Self', that it is often a pathological term. He waves sheets of paper in my face, that say his blood tests and his urine tests, everything is normal. But how do i convey to him that the medical reports cant reveal the sickness he seems to be suffering with. That what he feels to be connivace of the rest of the world is a misplaced pride.

I sense I have a few seconds left to stop talking before he makes me his enemy too. I change the topic. And as a post-thought, i quit trying to avoid the fate this road he has taken must take us meet, i quit trying to find a solution. I realise there is no solution; the kind that i have frantically been looking for. The kind that the five years of english literature in my veins pumps into my idealist heart. There is no solution.

I keep up at nights, staring at the fan, feeling utter lack of any emotion as blank watery tears stream down my cheeks gently. I feel nothing. There is no solution. There is no solution. There is no solution. So i quit trying to understand the anatomy of his meloncholy in order to cure it.

'We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.'

There is just this. A readiness to face this meloncholy, and a tolerance, whose limits are not infinite. And as always, there is distraction. Rebellion sometimes is a kind of denial of reality.

So we walk in the green and red scenery, and i let him talk of his time, his time when it was a speeding train, and how quickly it did pass him by. I put some songs in the car i know he likes, and let him hum along. And discover a melodious voice i didnt know he had. I let him take pride in what he has created, and he looks across at me with wonder at his own genius, and for now, i dont break his illusion.