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A Day in The Life

Chapter 1. Waking Up.

There are two wonders about living in the big, bad city. One, the cock doesn’t enthusiastically crow at five every morning. And two, the utterly and undeniably brilliant invention of modern times: the snooze button. If memory serves me well, this new technological thingamajig was the primary culprit (or at least one of the primary culprits) that forever marked 28 January 2007 as one of the (many) worst days in the life of V. So, at this preliminary juncture of the story, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to the kindly person who invented the snooze button. After all, this tiny little book would never have come to be without it. Thank you, Mister Inventor, and now I’ll leave you to conceive other important creations while I get back to the telling of this story.

Anyone who has survived in Bombay long enough knows that the concept of the rush hour is slowly fading away into a distant memory. It’s a thing of the better days, the golden period of the city, as my father nostalgically puts it. But if you don’t believe me or my father, and would like to get some fact checking done, all you have to do is step out of your home. You’ll come across cars tearing down the streets in such a hurry, they look like they’re trying to get away from the Godzilla equivalent of the motoring world. Trains and buses, bursting with hordes of hapless human beings while other unfortunates wait for reluctant auto-rickshaws. I’d go so far as to say that practically every hour seems like rush hour these days. (And I’d say this with some authority, having found myself stuck in kilometer long traffic jams at 1:30 am on several unhappy occasions.) That aside, anyone who has driven down from Bandra to Nariman Point would - and bloody well should – know how the bumper of a leading car seems to develop a keen and unrelenting attachment to yours. (Not unlike an unpleasant, clingy friend you wish you had long outgrown.) Long story short, if you live that far from work, and drive a 10-year old car, you really shouldn’t rely too much on the snooze button.

But, as is the case with most lessons in life, this too, comes to me in hindsight. Happily, it’s V’s hind that has made me that much wiser. On January 28, 2007, V, the poor sod woke up about 40 minutes later than usual – which is half an hour too late already. The first thing he did in his semi-wakeful state was to find himself stuck to the pillow thanks to some extravagant nocturnal secretions via his mouth. After much distasteful and indescribable struggle, he managed to tear himself away from the pillow and clear his eyes to look at the time. Noticing the position of the clock’s hands, he uttered an unmentionable four-letter word. The word was fuck.

Please note that the author of this piece comes from a respectable family and has an impeccable stock of values and culture backing him. That said, through the course of this book he will be forced to use a fairly large number of expletives. I’m sorry if it hurts some sentiments and sensibilities, but I can’t help it. It’s the story and its characters. They demand swear words.

Now, on a general, ongoing basis, when V uttered the aforementioned cuss word soon after waking up, he also had a realization, namely: he wasn’t going to get his customary cup of masala chai at the downstairs stall that day. This always made him a little less amiable through the remainder of the day. Saying that V liked his chai would be tantamount to engaging in the greatest, nay profoundest, of understatements. He is positively addicted to chai. What I’m trying to say is that the man faces withdrawal symptoms every two hours or so if he isn’t presented with his shot of milky, sugary caffeine. If you don’t believe me, ask the tambaaku chewing person next to you on the train what he feels like if he has to go even one day without his little plastic sachet, and you’ll get the drift. So V knew from that moment that the day wasn’t really going to get much better. Only, and this is where it gets really interesting, he didn’t have the faintest idea just how bad it would turn out in the end.

When you’ve known a person for way too many years for your own good, there are things you identify with them that you often wish you didn’t. Unfortunately, it holds true for V and I. Over the last 5 or so years, I’ve come to realize that he can’t figure out which to disrespect more: time or hygiene. He’s either running late by two days and is scrubbed to a shine, or he’s perfectly on time, but smelling like two day old leftovers.

On January 28, 2007, V decided to try and keep his appointment with fate. He finished showering in about 7 seconds, which is to say, he stood under the faucet just long enough for… actually I’m not sure what for. Frankly, it takes me more time to simply understand which way to turn the handle for the shower and which way for the tap faucet. This always makes my otherwise sweet-as-a-honey-drop wife just a tad grumpy. But I realize even as I say it that this is not a book about the daily domestic victimization of males in the urban setting. So let’s just continue with V’s story. In his unhygienic little frenzy, he completely failed to gauge the slippery nature of the bathroom floor, slipped awkwardly, hit a rusty pipe, and nearly hairlined his ankle. (I wish this were a movie in which I could throw in all sorts of comical Chaplinesque sound effects in the background. It would just make for so much louder a laugh.) And all this simply so he could get out of the house and get to his much loved, disturbingly upbeat Jenny.

Always a keen one for efficient multi-tasking, V threw on a pair of jeans (which he had been repeatedly wearing for the last two weeks) and a relatively fresh tee shirt, hobbled out of the house and reached the staircase. Only after he had gone down three full flights did he remember that he had locked inside the house such fairly important things as his wallet (with his driver’s license and a thick wad of unpaid bills), his cell phone (with all the battery-hungry new applications he had been wanting to delete for three months) and about six hundred rupees in change. (Fiscally speaking, this was actually a fairly opulent month for V. On the 28^th of last month, his slightly embarrassed bank statement read 120 rupees and 40 paise). He uttered the same expletive as he had a few minutes ago, and limped back up, grabbed all the essentials and hobbled out of the house again.

As he was descending down the dingy stairway the second time, Aunty stopped him to ask how he was and inform him of a peculiar stench that she had been noticing since last night. She’d been wondering if he could smell it too. Perhaps it was that dumb bitch Agnes next door, keeping those prawns out of the refrigerator overnight. Ah, but never mind these stupid cows. How had he been? And why had he stopped stopping by. Oh, and surely, he would pay the rent on time, unlike that other couple? Always behind with the rent! If only they could just stop going at it like bloody rabbits and worry about the rent once in a while. Oh and she must tell him about that Gupta fellow who’s been trying to get his cock-eyed son married off for three thousand years. And that other one, what’s his name, what’s his name? Oh, but forget it. He must be getting awfully late for work, no? He must try and wake up on time like a good boy from now on. Can he smell it too, by the way? Must go and give that old hag Agnes an earful. Dumb bitch.

Aunty was the landlady of the building. Although going by her terrific bone structure, she could just as well have passed herself off as the landlord. She owned the building and everyone who lived in it. Everyone aside from my good friend V, that is. He was nice to her, you see. He didn’t evade any of her questions. What’s more, he never asked her questions – such as why she couldn’t get a proper hair cut? He was always polite to her. But most importantly, he was never behind with the rent. So, as usual, he said his polite goodbyes and dashed off, almost squashing under his hurting foot the nine unnaturally immobile kittens in the passageway. They were always there. And they were always unnaturally immobile. Could someone tell him just who the hell fed these creatures? He made a mental note about bringing up this nuisance at the society’s monthly meeting – something he was never invited to.

Now we’ve already seen that V isn’t (or at least wasn’t in those days) a doyen of personal hygiene. But talk to him about his car and he’ll bring up such mind numbing jargon as ‘jet-wash’, ‘wet-scrub’, ‘dry-scrub’, ‘hot-scrub’, ‘cold scrub’, ‘detergent soaked microfibers’, ‘automated soap swipes’, etcetera. After that, he’ll throw in a few more just for some added effect. Then he'll smile, no, smirk at his possession of all this unnecessary knowledge. But not on the 28th of January 2007.

On January 28, 2007, as he approached his car, his face contorted into something that is really, really difficult to explain in words. But please do allow me to make an attempt. Imagine a large, pristine, transparent plastic bowl. Good. Now picture it coming out of a microwave oven after, say, an hour’s nuking. Very good. Add to this a little bit of blue-green gooey stuff. Right. And… perhaps a little mud? Yes, that’s good. A little mud. Now try to look through this at a pug. (For the uninitiated, the pug is a ferociously ugly little breed of dog that is associated with telecom advertisements in the country.)

I think I got pretty close to the real description there. But to continue, this melted-down-plastic-bowl-that-looks-and-feels-like-an-ugly-pug expression was all thanks to a large group of unruly pigeons that were illegal tenants in Aunty’s building. These chaps, it appeared, had decided to relieve themselves on every available inch on the outer structure of V’s white Zen. Forgive me, but I am going to have to repeat that for effect - WHITE Zen. A car V had come to call Jenny.

Only those who have ever named a car – or any other inanimate object – will truly and completely understand just what an unsettling conundrum my friend was now facing. To wash the vehicle and feel delighted at the sparkling sight or to go to work and hear his boss calling him a testicle sack. For reasons that I’ll never even bother to try and understand, V chose the latter.

Bugger it, he thought, knowing full well that he didn’t have much time for all this today. The car could wait until evening – or tomorrow night, depending on when he got back from work. He got in and gave an ‘I’ll-be-back-to-fuck-you-up’ glare to the pigeons. The critters met it with a ‘We’ll-see-about-that-when-you-come-back-from-the-carwash-but-we-don’t-really-give-a-fuck-anyway’ look and continued with a bit of feathery fornication and some more lavish excretion. Burn, he thought and shut the door, turned the ignition on and finally felt infinitesimally better at the familiar sound of Jenny’s finely tuned engine. Before you ask, I don’t know why he calls that Godforsaken old metal box Jenny. As a matter of fact, I don’t know why anyone would name a computer or a mobile phone or a coffee mug. These are mysteries to me and I don’t intend to go into their depths if I can avoid it.

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