Fiction: The Party is Over

Anand Bahadur

Anand Bahadur

The party is over, the guests have departed, each leaving behind an echo and a shadow. Shadows and echoes that fill the space and surround us, the two people left behind.

 She’s on the Divan, her legs folded up, me on the sofa, tapping the floor, trying out patterns and rhythms with shoe-toes. Usually, it’s the other way round. Today, the furniture has played a trick. Parties we ‘ve had many but I never ever noticed the trick.

 Here we are, two people sitting since eons: sittingsittingsitting. Face to face ever since Big-Bang. One on divan, the other on sofa, trying to fix the pivot of our existence: A defining act, like an earthquake spreading out from its epicentre.

 She’s Neera or Neeru, and I er— Akaash. I’m all the glorious blues of the sky from whence she drops upon the earth in hues. Akaash the sky and Neera the nectar; Akaash with a double-a, and Neera with a double-e, two well fed, pampered and contented things with names.

Names… how many were there in the party? Each with their own perceptions of meanings and mimicries, pantomimes of desires. Then came the departure, one by one. Names following each other, names tumbling after names till only these two remained— the Nectar and the Sky: Akaash and Neera, sitting face to face, defining or rather, defined by chance, simple pure sublime coincidence. Why else should they be preferred for staying back anyway, to sit face to face in curse or bliss? Hadn’t it been like this, had the Sky-name departed instead, the Nectar-name would now be sitting with some Pawan-name or Rakesh-name or Whosoever-name that stayed back. Would they still sit on the sofa and the divan? Or some other place, bringing in alterations of their own, like this otherone choosing to go inside to brush leaving that otherone to do some other this or that!

Right now, the Sky name and the Nectar name are sitting face to face defining time and space with innumerable nothings. Neera has glanced up a few times but not really getting to the core of it answered by a look from me that looks like a question to a question. That not half an hour ago we spent so much time in this very room meeting so many names talking complaining gossiping picking dropping laughing hating envying purring prattling having tea having drink having music having lunch! Nothing of that remains, not even a trace of it save perhaps this chilly weight-on-back-shoulders-ears-brows. Bothofus sitting in silence carrying a dozen chilly iron-boxes. She’s quiet and still but actually it’s just a sham. Actually, she’s bearing her iron-box with quite some effort, wanting a bit of an empty space to unload but there’s no space hereabout. There are innumerable tiny chilly metal boxes scattered everywhere filling up the entire space.

These boxes… weights of your own abstractions of defeat and heroism that you carry wherever you go. Knowing of the interminability of your curse, wanting to be witness to its beginning and the why of its end. Knowing not your own load, neither the beginning nor middle nor end, yet carrying it wherever you go. Dragging it along, tied to your ankles, knees, toes and brows. Trying to lessen your agony for some time by exchanging your box with someone else’s. That’s what happened a little while back. In the party. Manoeuvrings and manipulations, trying to shift our load on Someothername. Innumerable givingsto-and-takingsback. Yet they invariably come back! Swaying in space twisting and turning passing this way or that! Colliding with each other and getting scratched all the while, letting off colourful sparks. Pretending all the while that some real difference has been made! In the end each getting their own box back only a lot scratched, battered, bruised, and looking rather untidy.

In the adjacent room some strange creatures are asleep, reminding us of ourselves but actually aliens coming from a nowhere planet: our own children! Like foliage growing on walls, stairs, pillars, and roof-tops pretending to own the house. Sprouting endlessly here and there, occupying infinity. Stars twinkling afar and apart rotating to their axes in their own orbits.

A minute past Neera made a firm decisive move. Bending down to lift the newspaper from the centre-table and putting it right back. Straightening, she adjusted her sari-pallu the Neera-way. In this act of bowing down and straightening up accompanied by this slight movement of hand from point a to point z and back, there were a dozen or more different someoneses or different somethings. How many Neeras were there in that one act? Were they phases of a single person like the phases of moon or were there simply many more other women? Womannessnesses of some unknown Radhas, Sunitases, Dollys, and Meenas mingled with that of a Neera lifting newspaper and putting it back. Reminding me again of the party, of all those eyebrows, backs, thighs, curls, nails, boobs, necks and chins. Names that came and departed like a newspaper being picked and put back. Those poses and jesters and postures and gaits and styles and airs and manners. Those smiles and giggles and rotations and gyrations and frownings and smoochings and moochings and pattings and twitchings. Those expressionist declarations of identities. Names owned by hints and allusions. Preceded and succeeded by nothings.

Nothings… for what is Neera but a particular gait and gesture? Just the name of the style that possesses that name! If that particular style had belonged to some other name, Neera wouldn’t be sitting here with me right now. Why if the colour of her blouse were to change from blue to pink or green or red, she would be someone else forever and ever! That’s how colours and shapes save us! If one of my shoulders were to droop just that imperceptible bit more or less I would take a voyage from being Akaash to some Harish or Girish. Not even a complete Harish or Girish at that, but some hybrid of Akaash and Harish or Girish, stopping mid-way in the buffer zone between some Dipak or Asif or Martin.

That’s what happened a while ago when Neera was picking the paper up. She kind of metamorphosed into Poonam but starting with the adjusting of her pallu came right back into herself though only via some Sheetal and Champa and Monika and Neelam. Then there was this matter of the chappal (which I recognize) into which she put her feet. Thanks God that I recognize the chappal! Thanks God that one of the ladies of the party didn’t choose to depart in those sandals, initiating the possibility of a new act by a new protagonist effecting entire past present and future. Which brings in the Overwhelming Question: Did she notice some Akhil or Pravin or Ramesh coming into and going out too just as I was tapping the floor with my toe? Apprehending some other name and getting irritated, only to find the right name back before she had time to be fully irritated. Was it my shoe again, by which she got hold of me finally? Or was it something else?

This keeps happening everywhere: at home, on the pavement, in the market. We keep changing into someone or something else. Departing and returning and getting irritated in the process, so that slowly and steadily one gets transformed into a fixed irritation. Neera and Akaash: are we nothing but two irritations that collided in course of our flight through eternity? Colliding, getting trapped into each other’s gravitational field, and thence orbiting some star together like twin satellites, going round and round and round. Getting irritated and irritated and irritated. Wearing each other out.

Or could it be that one of us was real, the Real One. The other an illusion. I am perfect I with all my subtleties and crudities could be a mere dream dreamed by an irritation called Neera. O how sweet this is! This thought of being a dream dreamed by an irritation! At once it sets you free, liberates you. Ah, here there is no place for complexities or idiosyncrasies or expectation! It’s sublime, this feeling, like tasting the very dew of heaven! This may be the Moksha!

Our house, which embalms us from outside and a bigger house embalming this house around. The house of the house. This house of ours is actually a puny individual dwelling within a larger house of its own, living like us with postures and gestures, caprices and idiosyncrasies. Often getting irritated and calming down like us. Going somewhere and coming back. A voyaging house! Just before the party it was a different house altogether. Then it changed and is now slowly coming back into its own self. Just a moment ago the plasters of the walls crawled back and now the windows are re-entering. Very soon it will be the turn of the floor, then the roof, the varnish and the whitewash will come. The curtains will return perhaps a bit clumsily, and then the drip-drop-drip of the tap and finally it will be the turn of the gas-stove to regain its clumsy shine. The question is: will everything come back to make it the same house again, or a few things just choose to stay away refusing to come back? Adamantly resisting, allowing some other selves to take their place? What would happen, say, if one of the bed-sheets wandered away too far to lose its way and a different sheet arrived in its place! There must be lots and lots of lost bed-sheets wandering about trying to get to some place or other, so as soon as a sheet wandered away there’d always be one ready to jump in!

These goings-away and comings-back! Sometimes accomplished in a moment’s glare like a reflex act leaving you speechless and awe-struck. Without giving any chance to protest, like a voyage taken in a time-shuttle. Slowly and painfully at others, drawing tardily like blood oozing from a wound. There are again moments when it happens haphazardly, like the wanderings of a truant schoolboy, who bunks the class and goes to the park for a fag and comes back after a while. But not always. I’ve seen houses returning clumsy, ragged and worn-out after ageless journeys. This suggests there may be a few that didn’t come back at all!

Thankfully this house of ours hasn’t fallen prey to such a whim, not yet. Only these fragmentary wanderings. Going somewhere and returning, like just now: a house retreating to its old self after a party. I hope by morning or noon at least everything will be fine. Hope it comes back fully and doesn’t stop half-way so we find ourselves strangers in a half-remembered house. But that is for tomorrow and I hope no one knocks in the morning seeking some Srikant and Rekha instead of Akaash and Neera!

Just a while ago the clock on the front wall shook ever so imperceptibly. I’ve seen clocks doing this many times without ever having to shed their stillness. It is as if time from some another cosmos, forgetting its way, collided with our time. Or could it be that our own universe, feeling lonely and bored and apathetic wandered off momentarily to amuse itself? Or does it doze off during a boring existentialist class imposed by some omnipotent power only to wake-up with an irritation? It’s an infant still, this universe of ours, accustomed to its infant wanderings. Certainly, there must be maturer universes capable of going on longer wanderings. There may even be universes that may have gone off for ever!

Neera has already departed; leaving me thinking of a name that interests me because it exists in my thinking. Or is it because this very thought is my creation? Perhaps this is the way you get involved. Perhaps the universe too is just a thought: God’s thought. Or could it be the other way round? Is it a God thinking a universe or a universe thinking a God? God-Universe-Neera-Universe-Akaash-God-Neera-Akaash-universe. Sitting face to face. One of these days one of the parties involved will depart just as Neera has done, leaving an empty space staring at an occupied one then?

An empty sofa staring at you! This is a game we often play, the four of us: Neera-Akaash-Sofa-Divan. We sit and stare till one of us departs. As soon as that happens the game starts. But I’ve never known what happens when both have departed, I reckon the sofa and the diwan come back into their own very real selves and start playing the real game they always wanted to. The emptiness that pervades when we are sitting starts filling up. A feeling of fulfilment begins to seep into the inner chambers like rainwater seeping into a dry well.

Load shedding!

Suddenly there’s no light. Suddenly everything has dissolved. Suddenly there’s neither universe nor nothingness, even my thoughts have evaporated like someone halting abruptly in midst of a brisk walk. A little twinkle, like a glow-worm, is peeping from the bedroom. A torch or a candle, perhaps? Neera or somebody? This somebody: some dark female coming out else dwelling in the hidden caverns! The Neera of the light and the some-one-else of the dark! The overwhelming question is: are there two Akaashes as well? Initially I used to feel that way. But she killed the other one quickly. Men carry their mirages far, often being tortured or injured or even getting killed by them. Women are perfect at this butchery, their necessity counselling them to kill.

Electricity!

A New World! A brand-new new world! Full of infinite possibilities, a dazzling newborn babe! But aging prematurely, getting worn-out in a flash and becoming primitive. Rapidly losing colour and lustre. One moment this shiny rainbowish thing, the other this greyish, sad being. This is yet another game we play, don’t we? Glistening and glowing-new one moment and getting worn out the very next. This hide-and-seek, this getting into some tunnel at one end and ripping out of the other as if in a deluge.

Neeru’s been calling from the bedroom for quite a while, beckoning with threads of silence woven into colours. Colours! How quickly they germinate and sprout and dry up before our own eyes! Healthy and raw and glowing one moment, grey and soiled up and dead pan the other. I remember the shiny colour-bits that were scattered on the stairs of the general-store where we met the first time. As if only a moment ago. And now in the blink of an eye this stony ash-colour hanging over the horizon, thinning out.

Sounds from within! Let me switch off the light.   

This has instantly erased the chaos scattered around. This is even more soothing. Chill and quietude seeping in.

Chill and quietude.

***

Foot Notes

---Divan- A bed like thing with space for keeping things inside, usually placed in a drawing-room.

---Chappal- Footwear                                                                          

---Sari-Pallu- The end of a Sari dangling at the back of the wearer

---Moksha- State of bliss after death when the soul transcends the cycle of life and death

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Setu, October 2025