Nameless in a Faceless City by Prakash Kona

Table of Contents Part 2 appeared in issue 149.

part 3 of 6

The heterosexual narrator is in search of an orgasm. On one side is the sea. On another side are seas of humanity isolated from each other as the sea. How do I become objective with a name and an address in an apartment complex? What does objectivity indicate in a city of objects? Will the narration be objective if I am not my own narrator? Is the third person more reliable than the first person that claims to know himself? Is God the third person that knows the first person? Is the first person made in the image of God? Is the first person an incarnation of the gods? Who made the first? If he comes first why the third?

I paid to be masturbated by hands other than my own. It was a loss. I could not come to senses. My objectivity failed me. I died the natural death of an orgasm. The narration continued. In pain I learnt about pain. In joy I knew pain for a fact. In ecstasy joy and pain were forgotten.

I could never leave Bombay. It would be as painful as a character leaving a story. The character would suffer as much as the author. My heterosexuality compelled me to memorize the contours of a woman’s body. That was the surface of the story. I had no idea what lay underneath. Maybe I never lived in this city. Age wore me out with this horrible possibility. Contours of a female body. That’ s what Bombay in essence meant to my shady imagination. It had to be taken for me to be who I am.

I was married to the essence of unimagination. My wife was from a satellite town close to Bombay. She cried on the night she lost her virginity. Was Catherine of Braganza a virgin when she married Charles II in 1661? Bombay was part of the dowry the English received from the Portuguese in the marriage of Catherine to Charles II. The marriage legitimized the heterosexual credentials of the city. The cinema industry thrives on these credentials. Did the memory of Bombay a city that she perhaps never visited have the same orgasmical effect on Catherine that it has on me?

Charles II was a man of affairs. In his last days he was a Catholic thanks to the efforts of his wife. What kind of confession did he make to the priest? Did the priest kiss Charles on his lips as a sign of absolution? My wife was a virgin as much as Catherine of Braganza. Both cried on the night they lost their virginity. When they cried they thought of their bodies and not of Bombay. I was hurt. I became a passive lover.

The British had to display their heterosexuality to the world. I sympathized with Charles II. I would probably dip my mouth in the lips of the priest. I had to be absolved of nothingness. Colonialism meant carrying the memory of woman. The man had to leave the body after he came in bed. The smell of his semen was unbearable. The woman stood for everything that was unbearable in him.

In my approach to women I am passive. I became a man when I left the bed of the woman. In her bed I had to be like her. She refused to come. I took her soul. The body was there. I never understood if soul came before body or vice-versa. When she came she was a child. I was afraid of losing her to other men. If she died it did not really matter to me. I had the city. I could venture into nameless ways with the thought in mind that they were mine.

Once I come I loathe the touch of a woman. I long to kneel and worship the mother. My mother is a poem that consumes meanings. I am the philosopher that looks beyond words. I could break at any point. I must be handled with care. The wife in whom I looked for care never forgave me for having taken her virginity. The marriage was a revenge for her. I was in it for her body. She was in it to destroy my manhood and turn me into her. I hated my father even more for not murdering my mother after I was born. In my wife I was eager to worship the mother.

I wanted to be a child. My unimagining wife could never see me as one. What else could a man be ? He does not bear a child. He is condemned to be alone. The children never associate him with struggles of birth. A man’s suffering is incomprehensible because it cannot be seen. The birth of a child seems naturally painful. The obvious struggle of woman to bring forth the child is taken for what it obviously is. I don’t want to know that I have a body. I wish to escape like the colonizer. I want to leave the bed and go into unknown lands. I want to conquer and enslave. I cannot be bothered to appease. I want my body to be appeased for its own sake. The city is a holiday for me. Did Charles II and Catherine ever dream of coming to Bombay on a holiday? When they came in their royal beds was Bombay in their minds?

I have no intention of being narrated upon by a third person. This is a city of first persons. I am a unit of death. My orgasms are real. Catherine is not my wife. Charles II is not my lover. Neither of them is substantial to narration. Catherine had miscarriages and Charles II was left with no legitimate heir. Was it a marriage of two states England and Portugal or was there some body chemistry between Charles II and Catherine of Braganza so that at least they could have some honest lovemaking once in a way? Was Catherine psychologically stressed with Charles’ affairs? Was she able to have her orgasms? Was religion a weapon in her hands?

This conversion to Catholicism. Did it make a difference to her ultimate self that she could convince Charles II to submit to the priest and receive final unction? If Charles II confessed to a priest at the end of his life there is no doubt that he submitted to preparations for what was to come after life. The kiss made an impact. The kiss from the lips of a dying priest on the lips of a dying man. The kiss that brought out the passive lover hiding in the soul of Charles II.

The priest is the third person narrator. There is a priest in me but I am the first person narrator. I did not pray. I made wishes. I wished for a bone that I could throw in a well. The bone is imperative to my character. My body is a flamingo but my soul is a bone. In Bombay you live by the law of the bone. The fantasy of bones occupies the collective fantasies of people. The Arabian waters that touch the shores of Bombay carry the color of death in them. The scent of disappearing sea stays with me. I surrendered sadness to ecstasy. Each experience was a moment in life. Each moment of that experience was life. My past lives flickered before me. They were bones of my soul.

My soul could never comprehend the logistics of narration. It just died at various points in time. With each death I return to the emptiness of orgasm. My lives in this city are fragments of one big orgasm. If the bed is a wish how can the bodies on the bed be real! They are real because fantasies are linguistic realities. Words make the world. The word is dead. The world is not alive. It is a self-seeking fantasy. What is the proof of the world outside words?

Bombay is a city without past. You can experience Bombay as fantasy. It is a wish come true. City of wishes. No one understood this profound truth more than moviemakers. They create cities of fantasies and they call it Bombay. That is the Bombay I refer to. If there were a movie depicting the history of Bombay then a fictionalized account of the marriage of Catherine of Braganza with Charles II would be essential. This is more than showing the Western connection of the city. The connection with fantasy or a wish is emphasized. The romance of the city does not include humidity and slums. That’ s too commonplace. The romance transcends people. People enjoy romance as an idea. The romance is the mood of narration. It is sublimated form of the orgasm.

The life of the narrator is a romance. His times are romantic. These are formulaic times. History repeats itself in fantasy. History is a wish that comes straight out of a well. My narration is a script for a movie. The camera guides the viewer’ s eye. The eyes are without prohibition. The camera is the fate of narration. The narration bows down to the phallic eye of the camera. The feminization of the camera can be a means to alter fate. I was born with the eyes of a camera. I could undress a woman from miles away. I did not have to see her. I once heard a song: do not wait for time to pass. Once it has passed all you have is regrets.

Bombay is a city with a hidden camera. The camera is individualistic and refuses to be feminized. All points of view are exclusive. The movie industry is an outcome of the situation of the hidden camera. It reinforces the viewpoint of the camera as well. It is a city of regrets. Time has passed for those who wanted it to pass. History is in movies. There is no other history.

Evil is destroyed because it is logical. This order is I. It laughs when I laugh. It weeps when I weep. This order is an expectant mother and needs to be protected. I suffer from boredom of a man who has no reason to be unhappy. Unhappiness is connected to gravity and atmosphere. The order is essential. The camera stands for a sense of order. In this city hooked to a camera I’m a romantic old man with few regrets. In a shell on the shore I hear echoes of my past. They have forgotten me. I simply don’t allow them to go. What is a man without memory? He is the unborn. I am not affected by detachment of those that are not born. Born I want to live as if memories of the world were real.

The narration cannot exist without the order. This is not a sad acknowledgement of fresh coffee and fuming vapors of age. Nothing is harder in life than not to age with bitterness. My tongue was afflicted with bitterness before the other parts of the body. This tongue that kindled waxen lips of women and devised ways of unlocking mysteries in hollows of the mouth. I clung to the naïveté of youth. A Bedouin among Bedouins the narrator blends into narration as mangoes of summer blend with heat.

I never looked for anything different other than myself. What I found over and over is my own self. It was there to receive me. The essence of narration is my self. Things happen. There are roads and complexes. Slums. Mafia. Police. Metropolitan city with 9,926,000 according to 1995 census. Economic capital of Indian subcontinent. Momentum. Obsession. Delirium. Sea. The cult of the orgasm takes shape in this city. The cult of ruggedness shapes the city. The heroes are men who can act at the spur of the moment. Sulfur in their eyes. I am identical with the sky. I tailor the city to suit the narration. The helplessness of boredom chews the suit of narration. Once orgasm was equated with the cult of masculinity women were essential for the perfect orgasm. City of the perfect orgasm. Narration came out of the blue. The blue dipped into the bed sheets of the narrator at the point of orgasm. Blue orgasms tore the body of narrator into pieces.

This is a blue city before dawn. I was a rajah in a white palace. The blue princess came from the west. Together we rode horses. Wet with the blue she came in a blue bed in the bluest hour of morning. A fantasy passed through the slender space between skin and flesh. The woman was overpowered in the arms of fantasy. She turned into a seed in seeds of my flesh. It was a dream that the cold light of day gently dispelled.

I am an apparition of the same. I live in this city. I never live here too. At any space, at any time it may be true that I am an apparition. In Bombay I cannot remember being anything other than an apparition. The apparition strays into the city. No one takes slightest notice of the apparition. The apparition does his job. He goes back home. I delighted in being an apparition in a city of apparitions. I lived in a house of apparitions that was an extension of the city. The apparition has an orgasm. That is the one moment when he can be seen.

The narration is about life and times of an apparition who apparently looked for an orgasm at all possible occasions. The orgasm is the bread of fantasies. Without an orgasm the city cannot be conceived. The objective narrator comes out of the navel of the city. The navel is a cluster of intersections that connects bloodlines of the city. The cluster has a character of its own. It does not recognize shifts of the sun at various points in the day.

The sun taught me never to bleed easily. My wounds dry fast. Drops of the early blood of my youth I spent to nourish the foliage. Leaves of narration compose the foliage of the city. My words are pointless. That has something to do with the fact that I hardly spilt any blood. I remained in the corners. The navel is at the center of narration. My narration is independent of light. I stray away from the navel of the city. Somewhere it exists. I picture it as foliage. I saved my blood to write. What I wrote was not worth the blood that I saved. A city with a floating navel. Freak city. I freaked when touched by thought of an orgasm. My foliage is a freak image of the orgasm. It occurs when electricity of the finger is injected into magnetism of the navel. I die with shock of the electrifying magnetism emanating from the foliage. I erase curtains of dust with shadows of my hands.

A man’s ancestors are in his shadows. My ancestors were men with a mastery over language. Narration is in the green blood of foliage. The narrator is a necrophiliac vampire. He succumbs to nothing. This city is teeming with bodies. The narrator remains one with himself. He leaves his body in the shade of a guava tree and walks into bodies of cats peeping into ventilators. Sometimes he is a hyperactive stray dog who is most alert in quiet moments when rest of the city is asleep. I was a blue shadow in the room of a five-star hotel. I hate what I do not love. I love the hate to death. It gives me orgasms.

I am a sworn enemy of clouds. They wander while I refuse to leave the city. I am chained to a room that enters my subconscious. Endless flow of traffic forms the background to my existence. I outmatched the world in the steps I took from the bedroom to the bathroom. The world was growing old and senile. I preserved myself at all costs. My father believed that as long as there was a house to go to at the end of the day everything was okay. My suffering stomach was the greatest preoccupation as well as impediment of my life. The scars of my life were physical. My stomach convinced me that I was alive.

To be continued...

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Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona