Normal Weather

Harikrishna ran into his dingy apartment on the ground floor and hit the flimsy door with the side of his body hurting himself a little due to the door's inertia, like the hot April wind blowing outside. Something, a speck of dust or a strand of cloth, or a moth had blown into this eyes and he fumbled red-and-teary-eyed in the kitchen to collect a bowl of water to dip his eyes on. The water bespoke of the coolness of the rooms. Harikrishna wiped his face with a shabby towel and scrutinized himself in the vertical mirror. Beside it, his wife's saree lay sprawled on the sofa. He gathered it up in a little heap and tossed it on their bed. The room smelt of strawberry perfume and the air was a bit enclosed inside. Pramita was out at work in a manpower outsourcing consultancy that was nearby. Her job as a receptionist paid little, yet she preferred some work to no work and some money to no money. It was still three hours till she would be back. Harikrishna decided to preprare a kind of sweetmeat that Pramita loved to while away the time but he again decided he couldn't do it, that it would not be in keeping with his apparent condition and sat before the TV. 

He was watching a crocodile in a African swamp tearing away at the thighs on an ill-fortuned wildebeest when the door creaked. The scent of strawberry came faded but firmly into its bastion inside. For a while Harikrishna felt the room looked tamer, and himself a bit tired. She showed moderately surprised demeanor at his early arrival, looked concerned that he might be feeling ill, felt his temperature touching his temple with her palm bangles jingling in the tender slimness of her wrists and decided it were the dust and the changing weather and the wind sapping him. Harikrishna nodded in assent and grunted as softly and as suavely and as demurely and gruffly as it would be proper and said it would be wiped out all over with a good sleep.

The aroma of frying capsicum wafted through the door. Harikrishna went to the kitchen stealthily as a cat and wrapped his arms around the slender waist of Pramita. Pramita smiled continuing to stir the sizzling pieces of the dark-green vegetable on the karai. Her breasts were soft in his hands and they were enthusiastically conversant to his caresses. His tumescence matched her bristling readiness. He turned down the bluish fire in the stove and lifted her up in a light swoop carrying her across the passage that partitioned their two-room establishment from their neighbors' to their bed in the next room, all the way kissing all over her face that expressed diffident remonstrance upon his brazenness, that they might be seen. They shed off their clothes with faithful ardency and he kissed her again as he divulged to her in a half-whisper: 'The doctor thinks I'm okay.' She kissed him in return, first on the cheek that was close, smiled, then deep in his mouth, softly, soothingly.

***

The morning was cool. Harikrishna's left eye was smarting and irritating painfully. He looked in the mirror and saw it was red all over. Pramita said with alarm, 'We can't wait any longer. It's the eye. Let's go to the hospital.' Harikrishna simply said, 'It's 7 o'clock. Hospitals won't open until 9.' He filled a glass of water from the tap and dipped his injured eye into it. Pramita had anxiety written over her face when he tapped dry his face and went to the kitchen.

'Why are you glum again? I'll see a doctor in no time. And it's not that serious anyway,' he said, embracing her from behind, insinuated by the memory of last evening. But now they both knew, it was neither time nor context proper. They both hung up in a suspended embrace and disassembled.

In the passageway through the anteroom to the ocular section the dim and elongated shadows of people surfed flippantly over the dogged shine of the floor. A thick hum of an active but sedated crowd milling about, subdued by circumscription to the sobriety of the building. Unceasing sound of muffled footsteps. Harikrishna took out a slip of paper from his pocket and read silently, 'Twelve'. He could see a young girl in school dress, her hair shiny and knot under the ribbon, just like they showed in shampoo ads, bespectacled, which he wished she had rather not been, hesitantly get into the room. 'Ten', he thought, her age and her number. Which of the two mattered more for him then, the former of the latter? The man sitting ahead of him moved a seat closer to the door. He was 'eleven' but 'five times it' in age. Funny to size and rank people up in numbers. Years, age, placement   …   …

Pramita called from her office and voiced out her little quandary, 'How are you feeling? Seen the doctor?' She is sweet most of the times, now more so. Harikrishna finds himself a bit distracted to channelize himself sufficiently to her so immediately. He says gruffly,' Just about my turn now. It isn't that bad though.' Somebody seems to have come up and she disconnects.

'Harikrishna Bi-Bindari!'

He rose from his seat, recognized. Used to hearing his second name mispronounced, he felt like sardonically giving the woman a pat on the shoulder  that she finally made up to it. Even in this inner sanctum he was waiting for his turn. There were two patients before him, leaning against the neat walls with pink pads in their hands. He showed his token to the woman who regulated the patients one by one over to the doctor's cabin. This woman he felt he had seen before. Suddenly he remembered one singular occasion when there had been a heavy torrent in the evening on his way from work almost two years ago. He had forgotten his umbrella in the office and the bus was nowhere in sight. People were milling about in the bus stop that was an unroofed side of the open pavement. For fear of not finding room in the bus that would eventually come, nobody was taking shelter in the awnings of the nearby buildings. He feared he'd catch a cold as it was already past 7 am. His place was a half hour walk away. He could wait for buses one after another and yet fail to find a room in it for himself. He could just wait for the rain to let up and that looked nowhere closer to happening afterward than now. Finally he began to pace on towards his abode when he found this lady with an umbrella whose face he couldn't discern very well in the feeble light who offered to share her mobile canopy. They had talked all the way to New Baneshwor and the way and from there they had parted ways. He remembered her out of gratitude. She didn't seem to remember him, just a company that he had been. 'Medical people,' he thought,' they do it every day.' He had almost begun when he restrained himself from broaching the memory over with her. Now himself in line he looked at the woman who was shuffling the pads and respective token number slips pinned in a vertical pile upon her table. Was she married? Had she been married two years ago when he met her so fatefully? Then he had been a bachelor and he had fantasized about her at great lengths during his restive nights. He hadn't relented on that delusive sport until much later, until he hadn't been shown Pramita and he hadn't been able to ask her out for the first time. A very short span of physical company had accounted for such a long sequence of imaginings that the woman seemed to have a sizable history of herself cultivated inside him. 'So incredible!' he thought, his older self inadvertently re-enlivened to him. 'How much do those occurrences belong to her, those colorful and futile play-acts of my mind centering on her? Does she have some kind of ownership over them? In what sort of dispensation? May be just to know about them? But how could I even begin to describe that even if she were to show interest? . . . '

'Please step in, sir. It's your turn.' She spoke at last.

Hoping he hadn't been staring too long at her to notice, he took the seat opposite the doctor, the observing apparatus between them. He made his complaint and after a brief observation, the oculist confirmed a foreign object was embedded slightly. 'You might have rubbed and the speck or whatever it was was driven deeper into the inner flesh. I'll administer topical anesthesia with a few eye drops, then pluck it out,' said the doctor. Then he said matter-of-factly,' I want you to focus right upwards. To a point and nowhere else. You will feel no pain but you've to oblige by not moving them.' In a moment a nurse brought over the tray of necessary instruments which he couldn't see properly with now dulling eyes. An eye-brake was installed and the spherical organ, now subjected to what they called topical anesthesia, was submissive to the procedure that would un-sully it.

To focus was to choose. A vain act; an act of unreason. A host of ideas float over one's mind. These are wings to lift attention up and suspend it stationary at a point in space. And time, it shall do its eternal job of slipping by. These wings have minds of their own, hard to regiment them to a pattern. But they allow levitating any burden of desire to the maximum imaginable zenith of virtual realization. You can expect to shoot them up like an arrow, a shaft of sheer beam, pure, absolutely even, like the trajectory of an involuntary reflex flashing down the spine.

He felt a slight prick and the thudding weight of pain abated exerting abruptly. Then the eye-brake was taken off. 'I've taken out the speck. But you'll find difficulty seeing in the brightness outside for about an hour until the effect of anesthesia wears off,' said the doctor. Don't wash your eyes until then. And avoid rubbing and straining too.'

Coming outside into the lobby, he sat on the temperamental seat. He thought he could doze off for a while and go home by himself instead of troubling Pramita to manage time off her job. Still he couldn't help thinking about the hospital woman. And what had followed after the evening they had shared by accident. And the bulk of small events and mood of times he'd been facing then. His job had begun to pay off well and the struggles of the rear end of his student-life had slowly begun to become lighter. Back from the village, his folks often called him and asked when he was getting married. Finances improved and now there was relationship to be handled. A man should have a wife— he faced the axiom. Topical anesthesia wasn't possible if life literally. To take apart a phase and treat it as an organ in the long segmented temporal body of life. But he must agree, he had been treated thus. And there weren't many things to complain about. A village friend, himself in Kathmandu too, on his behest found for him Pramita. Oddly though, it was very fortunate, he soon realized. Pramita was lovable at the very first sight. The parents were happy. His mother, coming to arrange the wedding in The City, clamored out her disbelief,' These days children steal away parents' mantle and make out their own marriages a show for them! City air! What black magic it plays!' In a year's time, insinuations for having kids began to trickle in. 'Why are you so miserly when you earn so much?' Humiliating self-doubts ate him for a while with gusto but that hole in the smooth patch of his life too was sealed over well. What now? What if they had a child? What if they had twins or even quintuplets? What would he say then? Did he want kids? Did he not want kids? What do resolutions on these tell about him? But, who would know his thoughts anyway?

***

In the evening, Harikrishna's eye felt quite good. When he was watching the news bulletin at 6 am there were voices coming in from the courtyard. Pramita entered in with her younger sister Mandira who stayed at a girls' hostel at Putalisadak. Although her parents' home was in the Valley, for some reason he had never been able and eager enough to fathom, she lived in a hostel in the bustling centre of the city. She often came to live with them some nights during holidays or when exams were over at the college. Although she didn't talk much, she was what he thought intelligent and even slightly demure by metropolitan standards.

'Namaste Vinaju!'

'Namaste. How are you doing? Welcome visitor!' he tried to sound jovial and found he hadn't failed as she also smiled.

'Yes, you're quite right to chastise her so! Being one of a family, and living so close, she rarely comes to us.' Pramita seemed to have been picking on her all the way in this usual tone regarding her little sister who was now nearly as tall and, he thought despite himself, as voluptuous as her. How many boys should have been attempting to make moves towards her? But he quickly cocked himself up against frothing out verbally in such a vein. Merely smiling, and just in time, for Pramita saw in it a solidarity to her sisterly sensibilities.

'How is your eye? How do you feel now?' Pramita came and sat beside him on the bed.

'A small speck was stuck inside and they pulled it off. It doesn't hurt now. Here I've eye-drops to use for a week.'

Looking at the cover of the little eye-drops container, she said,' It says five to six times a day. When did you last use it?'

She had caught him. 'At eleven-thirty', he said smiling, ashamed.

'You're already past the second administration by two hours!' she exclaimed. With a stern countenance she undid the lid and motioned him to tilt his head backward, facing the ceiling. A tiny fish, its scales raised like a porcupine, slithered about his eyeball as his temple twitched and he couldn't suppress the surfacing irritation. In a reflex his one hand pulled Pramita by her soldier, making an effort at calming himself by raising his head and torso up. She fell, facing upwards on her back. After a few seconds, between blinks he could discern Mandira looking quizzically at her sister, who now shuffled humouredly beside him.

'Impulsive like a child!' She said in mock anger.

Harikrishna felt fully subdued that moment. After an instant of silence, he said,' I'll take a walk around.' But as he got out into the courtyard he found that it was already dark and became unenthusiastic. Besides, he said to himself, he never cared for strolls.

Inside the kitchen, the sisters were bantering away on a horde of topics. The doors of the two other rooms of their co-flatters were locked. A couple lived there but they often left for weeks to live in the village. Harikrishna went closer to the kitchen door and stood just a step short of the opening and heard Mandira saying,' . . . and we girls decided to try this fellow for a date turn by turn. Don't you think it is odd that he was willing? These US green card holders are so brazen. They feel they are on a holiday and try about anything between their flights in and out of here . . .'

Rather than collecting information so effortlessly by eavesdropping that he thought was of no apparent use, Harikrishna left for the bedroom and switched on the TV. The crocodile documentary was on in Discovery channel. This time the presenter was conducting an experiment in which they were trying to measure the force a croc's jerk exerted as it jawed away at the flesh of its prey. Theatrically, the saw-like rows of the croc's jaws snapped hard at the rubber make-believe of a turkey that was strung with a cord to a digital force-recorder. 'You fool! Don't you have a tongue to taste the bloody rubber trash?' he said with relish.

After a quarter hour, the two women came in and they watched the 8 pm bulletin on Nepal Television. No sooner had the first ad come than Pramita took the remote controller and zapped on to a Hindi TV drama. And no sooner had she done this than Harikrishna asked if supper was ready.

Pramita pouted and said, sardonically,' Why don't you take the the lead of the long march?'

Harikrishna ignored the jibe and began to move toward the door. At other days, when they were by themselves, Pramita would wait until Harikrishna had laid down the dishes but today there was Mandira too and she turned off the TV. "Move on lady. Aren't you hungry?', she jokingly jostled Mandira.

When they had supped, the one-hour bulletin was almost over and the weather forecast was on. 'The weather in the Kathmandu valley for tomorrow is expected to remain normal, without significant precipitation', it said. 'And with fair mind and dazzling sun', Harikrishna added in his mind. And he yawned once, twice, thrice, stretched over the bed sheet, yawned again, and became indifferent to it.

When Pramita woke him up and showed him over to his bed over the carpeted floor, it was almost eleven pm. The TV was still on showing a singing reality show. Pramita made his dogged eye to open up and be drenched in, as he felt, a medical drop of thorny rain. Hugging his light blanket, he waited for the TV to be muted. The sisters would sleep on the bed for the room had only one. 'Oh! How un-romantic!' he thought, now stirred up from sleep by the fidgeting in the sore eye. How un-romantic!', he said to himself again. By the sixth time, it was no more than a faint echo inside the sneezing caverns of his fading consciousness.

The two women watched the show until midnight, commenting over and even softly clapping at the brilliant performances of their favorite silver screen idols, their eyes blinking in relaxed rapidity like a well-kept dog lapping away at is routine bowl of delicacy in an affluent urban courtyard.