Youth & Disillusionment — “I'm not ready”

“Architects of grandeur are often the master builders of disillusionment.”

Dedicated in memory of a friend who deserved much better.

It was hot, you could feel the moisture licking your face slowly as the wind whipped her freshly washed hair all over her face, strands dancing around like a modern day medusa. Across the horizon the sun was slowly dipping down to merge with the sea, it reminded her of a blob of butter melting its way across a piece of toast. A piece of toast she wouldn’t be allowed to eat without feeling guilty. Almost subconsciously she pulled at her long sleeved shirt and grimaced at how snugly it had started fitting her. She continued trudging forward across the sand her feet sinking in and out of the porous grains, so safe and unnerving at the same time.It was like life in many ways…you sink in and just when you think you are safe and got a footing you’ll find yourself wedged in, or worse find a beedi stain on your new Steve Madden loafers. “ And then I said to him, no dude you’re the loser! ” The monolog cut into her thoughts. “Shit!” she realized he had been talking to her the entire time! Dammit! “I need to stop zoning out on people.” she thought. “It’s not your fault you’re here with a pretentious jerk.” said a harder, more cynical version of her conscious. “Yeah, why the hell was she here with this loser? she couldn’t bear his company for a minute, he spoke incessantly about himself and he double cuffed his pants.” “Don’t think, try and be a normal teenager for once.” she reprimanded herself. She forced herself to bring here glazed eyes and mind back to the foreground and tried to focus on what the douche was saying now. “And don’t call him a douche!, you’ve got to be more accepting of people, that’s why you’ve got no friends…” she said to herself. “ LOL right?! Has that ever happened to you?” damn! he was asking her a question. “Don’t panic!” just say “uh huh” and give a cutesy laugh,” she thought to herself muttering in agreement as best she could. A goofy grin sped across his face or rather his goatee with a face attached to it. He launched back into another monolog about his epic retort, that she was pretty sure he rehearsed on his way or maybe even saved as a memo on his phone.At this point, their lazy trudge had led them to the end of the main stretch of the beach and the path broke off to a smaller dirt road that led to “broken bridge”- a definite no-no for anyone who didn’t have a death wish. It always reminded her of one of those tiny roads that led to a haunted castle, like the ones you saw on scooby doo, the kind with thunder, lighting, a creaky gate… the works.Until now she had always come up to this point and turned back.As she was about to whirl around he stopped her. “Wait, let’s go I hear the sunsets amazing at broken bridge,” he said. “Is this the point where I’m supposed to go — wow ! you like sunsets too?!” and skip along she wondered, cynicism overriding her system by default, the way it’s always been. He didn’t wait for her answer but walked on, almost if to “you wo-man, me man, me walk you follow”. Somewhere in her brain a tiny stick figure holding up the sign “panic” was running around but she figured she listened to him too much and besides she was here to be spontaneous. And why the hell not.

The track was dotted with a few people farther ahead. She guessed it was about a mile ahead and they were losing daylight fast. Up ahead the stench of open gutters and garbage pierced the air. “Ah, here’s the tricky bit,” she thought. They had to cross a slum notorious for robbing people especially the dumb rich, like the kind with his iphone sticking out of his jeans walking ahead of her. If India had a ghetto this would be it. Instead of rappers, baggy pants, reeboks and boomboxes you had bleary-eyed, dirty veshti, hardcore men. “Would he chicken out or would he walk by them?” she wondered. He didn’t look he was slowing down, she was actually impressed for a min or two until she saw the khaki-clad policemen up ahead keeping a check on things.

Goofy in his casual “ish style” blue jeans and a black t-shirt may have fit in with the other cretins of their age, but here, he stood out like a sore thumb.You could almost see a neon billboard flashing above him “rich, vulnerable, cranial range of a glue stick’. At this point, they were not on the fringes of the settlement but right in the middle of it. He turned his head instinctively to look at the sea, they way we’ve been conditioned to do so for these “situations”. Like a handless beggar tapping our window panes at a traffic signal. The famous “if you don’t see them, they don’t exist” defense mechanism that’s kept a whole generation of middle and upper-class Indians relatively guilt free. She, on the other hand, couldn’t look away, she looked everywhere and at everything. She didn’t censor out the politically incorrect bits, the bad bits, the sad bits, she just drank it all in. She looked at the hollowness in their eyes, the weariness, the hatred in some of the younger fisher folk. There were two sides to this world. She and double cuffed blue jeans were on this side, born with everything — loving parents, class, status, every whim satisfied at the snap of fingertips.

Then there was their side, where people were fighting for their very existence, every second of every day. Fighting for what was always handed to us.” She pushed her hands deeper into the sleeves of her sweatshirt and moved on. By now it was completely dark with a few blueish purple streaks running across the sky reminding her of bruises. Up ahead, the dim but definite lights of the broken bridge seemed to have materialized. She breathed a sign of relief, they had made it without incident. He started slowing down and soon their strides were in sync. “ This place has a great view,” he said, ruffling his unnaturally stiff hair and for once she agreed with him, it was quiet magical, the whole city stretched out before them slowly lighting up for the evening. The old with the new, the good with the bad, the real with the fake, an empty canvas of endless possibilities.Why had she been so afraid before? an overwhelming sense of nostalgia washed over her, as she realized these bright lights in front of her, contained all the people she loved, her family, friends, her life, college… she realized at that moment that she had everything and just hand not appreciated it enough. She was looking for what she already had. The things she had been worried about — grades, looks, being popular… seemed so inconsequential at that moment in time and space. She was so excited by this epiphany that she didn’t even mind the douche sliding his clammy humid hand into hers, as a means of romantic overture she felt so generous, that she threw him a bone and leaned on his shoulder, much to his happiness. She could smell the eagerness on him, no doubt he was rehearsing how he would retell this tale to his little boy band and then they would high five and punch him on the shoulder and say what an “ishestud” he was. In turn, her friends would gush and goo and ask what she wore and if he had paid the bill and yadayada… but at that moment she was content. The world was her oyster and everything in it was fair game. She felt empowered with this knowledge. That her life was what she was going to make it.

Suddenly, almost surreally she felt his shoulder disappearing from underneath her. She turned in annoyance to see if he had managed to fall off the bench they were precariously perched on. Instead, she saw a flurry of hands dark and glistening with sweat. Everything seemed to be happening slowly and fast at the same time. Blurry like a black and white film but real, she felt the steely taste of her own blood as one of them clipped his elbow across her face. Her eyes whirled around to assimilate the situation. So the douche was down, being pinned by five guys and pounded by another few. All around her, limbs were pulling, pinching and furiously kicking her. “Wait, this wasn’t supposed to happen.. this can't be happening!” she thought. “This was supposed to be like one of those things on tv!” she would have her epiphany, walk back get a coffee at CCD with the douche, go home and bitch out the whole evening with her best friend over the phone.Then when she was tired she turn out the lights, decide what to wear the next day and skip on over to her comfy warm bed. A strange sense of detachment formed over her, she felt this wasn’t even happening to her anymore, she seemed to be floating above the whole scene. The douche was a mass of blood and pulp, his throat slit with a broken bottle, the face of his black Tag Heuer watch that only hours ago was his pride and joy was glistening in tiny shards all around him. Her face looked like a bloody mass of hair, glass and skin.The same face that had been cleansed, conditioned and done up for this evening, the face whose only concern a few hours ago was if it looked alright in all the pictures it took in a brightly lit café bathroom to put up on facebook. “It didn’t look like this in the movies.” she thought. It wasn’t a kind of gory set up made to scare or win the sympathy of a studio audience so that they got their 300rs worth. It just looked real. The assailants were pretty drunk and she couldn’t negotiate with them. She knew at that point this wasn’t like the movies anymore were she would barter things away for her life, where the gutsy heroin was kidnapped and tortured but always rescued by the hero before any real damage was done. These people didn’t care about the consequences. For now, they wanted, and what they wanted they took, because right now they could. There was nothing even her cynical side could do to make things better. There was no amount of eye-rolling or witty retorts to make this go away. Sometimes it’s just bullshit that doesn’t work out. She thought about her funeral and how she had always joked she wanted idlis and pancakes served, it didn’t seem so funny now. She thought of her body being burned at a crematorium, of it charring and melting away, all her dreams and the connections she had shared with her family and friends melting away with it, till only a charred residue was all that was left to define her in this world. What would she be when she was gone? A memory? A girl? A warning? the evening news till something more tragic came about. She thought about all the things she had wanted to do, but would never end up doing. She thought about all the things she would never feel again — the sun on her face, that kiss on her cheek, the delicious secret that had made her laugh so hard.

Suddenly, she was back in her body and everything hurt. Man! it hurt so much more than she thought she was capable of feeling! Wasn't death supposed to painless? Weren’t you supposed to detach yourself from your physical self or some shit like that? “News flash, things are never the way you think they are,” she thought. She didn’t deserve to die, but she was going too. The last thought she had in her mind, apart from “Oh god! make this end!” as the tears and blood pooled around in her eyes was “I’m not ready.”