Nameless in a Faceless City Life and Times of an Objective Narrator by Prakash Kona	Table of Contents

part 1 of 6

The gap between wish and fulfillment is not the same as fantasy and reality. The unfulfillment of the wish is recognition of the otherness to being the maker of a wish. If all fantasies could be translated to reality, then reality would aspire to remain fantasy. The wish would seek never to flower lest it die at the peak of its bloom without the tremulous knowledge of its passing beauty, which exists in the unknowing of fulfillment. The conception of the flower would never want to be reality of the flower and nights would not desert the dark for fear of returning into the same night. Everything would remain in an innate state where reality fails to negotiate with chance and turns into an autocrat embodying all wishes with the true without giving the wish a chance to suffer the tragedy of becoming. Life would preserve itself as non-life.

If becoming is a fantasy of being, a fantasy that can happen in reality without any obstacle, then becoming is pointless, because its outcome is predetermined through the real. Reality maintains a modest distance from multifarious processes of becoming by leaving the wish to encounter the real as a matter of chance. Chance is not the real, just as the storm is no more real than the calm that prevailed before it. In encountering chance, the wish encounters one version of the real that seems the most potent of all forms of reality.

Wishes are for old men as wasps are for wayfarers. The wish was there as a house and reality was there as wind ready to blow the house. Waspishness is in the character of the old man who travels as he wishes with no intention of looking for the real. Young, I hardly wished for the real, because nothing seemed more real than youth. Spaces waited without conspiring to destroy my soul. Lights that saw me through morning mist unmade me. Spaces that unmake you disturb the contents of soul and bring out forms that are not always alien to who you are.

I fell in love without realizing that falling in love was the invention of nostalgic old men. I could never write a story without introducing myself as narrator of the story. Supposedly I was the author as well. I was a wasp of an old man. I stung the wayfarer in me until he bled to death. That was the end of my traveling life. I was a statue after that. In the brothel that I visited, I was fairly well known among prostitutes as the old man who resembled a statue. Dogged by a life full of aspirations I realized that life could not be more real than a brothel.

I suffer from no weakness but life. The most imaginative of men married the most imaginary of women. That was in a year I don’ t care to remember. Once upon a time I was an idealist. Now I see the world through green lenses of ideas. I see no other color.

“Your hands are silk. Why don’t you work in fields and harden them before night melts them away?” The woman who asked me this question recognized that I was passive. I told her so. The truth was I did not love her. I did not want to come to her arms. I remained passive as a ball in the hands of a sleeping child. She offered to leave me home. I insisted on going back alone.

On the street I was ready to puke. I reached home. It was toward the early hours. I barely slept. My bed, which knew my body as well as my mother’s womb, failed to calm my nerves. Before morning arrived I went into a brief state of coma. I came out restless with clouded thoughts. Was I there at a certain point in time? I felt I had never slept at all.

I am an author that came out of the lips of narrator. I just lie without stopping. My lies come back to me as truths of my life. When a man rejects his own home he ends up seeing all places with the same eye. He may claim to be an exile but he is more at home than others. For the practical purposes of being a narrator I come from Bombay. As an author I am an exile. I am at home everywhere except the so-called home of the narrator. I laugh at the narrator. He has a feminine pitch in his voice. I pinch and bite him. He is a brothel-visiting old man that resembles a statue.

Those inner depths of hills I desired to explore with waters of youth rising in my breast. I saw nothing except a green world and a girl in a green sari. I stood at the gates of paradise and wondered if this is what I really wanted from life. The search for a brothel is my life. An old man’s illusions are stranger than the old man himself.

If all exterior spaces are projected interiors the emptiness of the cup emerges from within the cup and moves outside into the world. Why does emptiness need the open since the open is an externally projected interior of emptiness! In Bombay paradoxes are interiors and ironies are interiors projected outside. The profile of a stranger is a no-profile and this was a city of strangers. I walked without a profile for days and slept without one at nights. The vulnerable prey on the vulnerable. It is the nature of the vulnerable to suffer the smell of spring breezes that thrive on the imagination.

Tender melancholy was everywhere. Only an objective narrator can depict the plight of a city alienated from trees and birds. Where men prevailed, it was easy to identify a world that waited for the wind to pass. I suffered from a disease called premature graying of the mind. The pleasures of senility preceded my birth. I was born senile, following which I aspired to be an objective narrator of stories that seemed to belong to me but are not mine.

Illusions have a way of graying a man before his time. Senility had to be turned into a virtue in order for success to be possible. From my mother I cultivated a clear obsession for death. I lived in a world where things passed and I sang songs of passing things. Strangers in a strange world we are. Death and the orgasm: the life and times of an objective narrator.

When shadows on curtains fall, the aspect of the room has undergone a metamorphosis of light. The shadows are dark, but there is light in the room that comes from the air outside. Light is in my nostrils. Air fills the room. In this darkened atmosphere, the drama of shadows has begun. In this city of shadows, men exist as if tomorrow is fundamentally at variance with yesterday. The variance seemed inevitable in all material advances of the social order. The past is driven out of the closet of the past by a force that the past could never comprehend with ease.

The horrendous rush to work that began each morning at railway stations and bus stops never came to a stop until late hours of night brought the city to a polite halt. The shadow of a clothesline gave the wall an unexplored depth. Walls melt in my eyes as sweet tears. Insomniacs share the plight of shadows that permeate walls of night. Distant as a desert and private as a pearl. Routine is a bad thing for a cosmic adventurer like me. I invented this city, therefore. Shadows persisted in their loneliness. Curtains fell when the city fell quiet for one moment. Shadows disappeared with curtains because they had nowhere to fall upon. The question of walls was secondary to shadows on curtains. Walls were transparent but shadows were opaque and walls could not contain opaqueness of shadows. Curtains could bear the vibrant energy of shadows. But they had no choice other than to fall.

Everything that falls has a certain character to it. The thing that falls attracts the attention of onlookers. This accounts for human fascination of the spectacular. My shadow is in a fallen state. People look at it with pity as if an old man’s shadow is something spectacular. My shadow is a bone for which a dog would forsake sitting on a throne. Dogs prefer the throne when they look at my shadow. I feel the viciousness of a bee on the hood of a cobra. It won’t let go of me, this demon of viciousness. I take this city with the violence of a dying man. It buckles under my indifference and begs for mercy. I ravage it to the core. An old man’s breast has more fire in it than the entire city. The eyes of night do not close. I’m that night that does not go to sleep. My eyes sting in day for lack of sleep.

Diary of a discontented soul. A bourgeois Indian is naturally incapable of talking about his family. That may involve telling the truth about oneself. Death is that self. The self that tells truth must die endless deaths without being born. I use English as if it were my language. The ‘as if’ connects my using the language with the language itself. Was the language ever without an ‘as if’ connecting it to an exterior user? What are these clothes I wear? What are these words I consume while I pretend to produce?

If death is my real self, the orgasms I experience in another language are real as well. My orgasms are conditioned by spaces. If I am in a slum in Bombay it has some striking similarities to ghettos in New York or poverty in London and Tokyo. Orgasmically speaking I am dead wherever I am.

In any other case I’ve a different language for myself depending on spaces. The language of death with its various dialects. I am not the author of the story. I am the soul of a discontented man in a man’s body. Like a child I follow women I love. As a man I carry the brunt of childhood. On women I love I impose the brunt of motherhood. An orgasm brought me into this world. I was spring the season of death by beauty back in days of the womb. In a watery world land was an illusion. It was a wish of the forsaken.

As for me I was a water baby. In fragrances of fragmented waves I recognized spring. An objective writer is conditioned by objects that induce in him objectifying orgasms. Civilization is fantasy caught in a web of fantasies in its obsession with orgasm. To that extent the writer is civilized.

Of all objects that surround him the objective narrator is committed to the bed. The bed is the objective condition of the narrator. In bed the mimesis of the city takes place in the rub of the eye. The eye releases strange emanations that the finger absorbs and reuses as writing material. The angel of death never comes close to the objective narrator. The narrator of objects is same as writer of images. Both are different from the author.

The author is a pageant of colors. In the mirror of a room I saw her back as she was walking into the night. I did not see her face. I assumed that she was faceless. From her gait she seemed old as the platform of a railway station where I used to board the local train to go to work around 7 a.m. The author is the product of cities. The narrator is the visitor who comes to the author at nights. The author is Kali the mother-goddess. The narrator is the sacrificial goat offered to appease the mother-goddess. The blood of passion is what the author seeks. Love is what the narrator gives the author.

For years I used the same platform to go to work until the time when my eyes began to fail me. I disappeared from the scene of the city. I could not see and the city never saw me in the first place. I abdicate my title as the author of the story. Instead I choose the facelessness of the objective narrator. If change is a combination of perception and material movement the village was a social unit that was as responsive to change as the cities.

The author is marketed in cities unlike storytellers of villages. Patriarchy pushes women into a corner in villages. In cities the discourse of marketing turns everyone into objects. The writer of objects is a presence to be reckoned. Imbroglio. The storytellers of old are further isolated. Television replaces mother. The mother is freer to be pushed into other forms of bondage. I did not believe any of the things I thought or said. They were dispensable figments. I believed that I could write.

The marriage of wish to fantasy is no easy one. The endless wrangles of such a marriage. I hated the women I was attracted to. This masculine sensibility originated in my authoriality. The rest of my life was a disguise. I was a spoke on the wheels of karma. The disguises multiplied with time. My degeneracy into oldness is the disguise I am attracted to the most. I could act without expectations. That’s the perfecting of the actor.

In this city of masks death is the mask of an orgasm. My hands were chopped off but I did not die. I lay bleeding, conscious of disappearance as a discourse of time. What I can offer the world unconditionally is a word. If I call it ‘the city’ or Bombay either way I am blown off my feet by the indifference of a woman’s eyes. The heterosexuality of the city is embedded in notions of purity and pollution. It wipes out distinctions of language, region and caste. In that sense one who lives in Bombay is a Bomabayite. The purity of the city is associated with wealth and status. The pollution is in the rest of the city far from iron gates of privilege. I am a heterosexual male because I subscribe to purity as a way of life. I am pure as a piece of white cloth in sunlight. I stain my purity when I touch a man with desire. The fantasy is abominable. The reality is aesthetics devoid of the purity of intention.

The ugliest of beings was a thing. This thing believed that I hated it. What was it that I should hate it? I called it a being because it moved on two feet. I am certain it was a thing. Things are in a continual demand in Bombay. Bombay is a miniature world for the Bombayite. Quiet places had a strange effect on my being. I live in orgasms of a city in the throes of death. Untold ugliness reaches the aesthetic cells of my brain faster than a packet of light. This thing had that kind of an effect on me. It was a man some times and a woman when it was not a man. It could throw me into the worst fit of madness. It spoke to me with a contempt that made me laugh despite myself. My life had a purpose with this ugliness in view. It was diseased and that raised my hopes to confront life through dying.

The ugliest of things could speak and repeat without end that I did not like it. An ugliness that refuses to compromise disturbs the eyes to the point of bringing out thoughts of murder. Ugliness is immortal unlike beauty that dies. I chose immortality over every other longing. Ugliness was the answer that my soul provided to my miserable body. I wrote my story about an ‘I’ . That was not I. It was a thing in itself. It gave the feeling of once in a way dwelling inside my body. The question is answered with a question. The dying narrator and his orgasms.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona