That night Sudhin ate his usual, quiet dinner. He had tried to do the pork the way his mother used to, and that brought him memories of his family. He remembered growing up with his brothers in Kalimpong during the late seventies and early eighties. There wasn't much TV to keep you entertained during those days, but he could fondly recollect the eagerness with which they anticipated new issues of Indrajaal comics at the Himalayan stores and Upasak. His favorite was Phantom—Phantom, the health-conscious hooded hero who always started a fight in a bar by ordering milk! Phantom, who in the brusque, dynamic language of the comic was "rough on roughnecks"! He was also a fan of Mandrake. He remembered with a curiosity that had not diminished over the years the chinky guy called Ho Jo—martial arts expert and chief of Interpol who, in his undercover avatar, was a chef cooking chow for Mandrake at Xanadu.
As they grew older, the comics gave way to books. Enid Blyton, the abridged classics of Kenneth Library, Hardy Boys, Louis L'Amour, Alistair MacLean—they had read them all. Tashi's intellectual flowering, of course, happened earlier than most of his contemporaries. He remembered the excitement with which he had discovered Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Each one of his friends saw himself reflected in the adolescent confusion of its protagonist. Of course, books were not the only windows into culture. There was music too. Sudhin was particularly influenced by Robin, who was three or four years his senior at school. It was Robin who introduced Sudhin to Deep Purple, Hendrix, and Pink Floyd. Robin used to own a small Sanyo cassette player, and the two whiled away many musical hours listening to guitar riffs squeezing their way out of its tinny speakers. Later Sudhin would go on to own more serious hi-fi systems, but no cutting-edge acoustic technology by the likes of Bose and Harman Kardon could ever evoke the feelings they used to get when they listened to "Smoke on the Water" or "Born to Be Wild" on that ancient machine.
It was with Robin that Sudhin had come up with the idea of floating a band, an idea that was immediately shot down by Tashi who, as he recollected now, was a cynic even in his adolescence. Tashi had been very matter-of-fact with his discouragement. Doing rock music would not only prove a distraction from performing well at school but would also be a fruitless exercise since neither Sudhin nor Robin had any genuine talent in that field. Being able to appreciate "Purple Haze" and identify with Hendrix was one thing, playing like him quite another. Today Sudhin did not know whether to be thankful for that advice or regret that they had not been strong enough to get past Tashi's early-flowering negativity. With Tashi now gone, it was pointless thinking about it all. But Robin was still around, teaching in a government school in Sikkim, and the two would meet up whenever they could.
Robin had been going through a particularly hard time in recent months. He lived all alone in his tenement in a remote village in North Sikkim where his school was situated. The village, notwithstanding the blitzkrieg of modernization that the state government subjected it to, had not changed much during the five long years that Robin had been employed there as a teacher. For somebody used to the warmth of Kalimpong, the place stung with its cold and its lack of culture. Robin did not consider it snobbery to belittle the shallowness of his adopted village whenever he came to his Kalimpong circle of friends. The ordinary folk of the village were alright; the ones he could not stand, however, were the political and literary classes. He disliked Sikkim as a whole for its lack of dissent, its preoccupation with pecking orders, and its nauseating lack of originality and entrepreneurship. It was, in fact, a wonder that he had lasted so long.
A teacher's position in the village was one of great deference, and Robin often found himself suffocated by the terrible show of formality that governed most of his societal interactions. What was, of course, equally inexplicable to people who knew Robin was that in spite of being an intelligent, kami boy, he had not managed to pass the state civil services or the bank PO exams. For a number of years, examinations had become a sort of annual ritual for Robin, but he could not prove himself lucky with even those lowly clerical-grade selections. So, partially frustrated and to a great degree very lonely, he had hit the bottle. That was a very Sikkim thing to do, and he wasn't alone in it. The only outsiders who managed to stay off the bottle successfully were the Bihari teachers, who had profounder things to worry about than just bouts of late-evening ennui. A typical Bihari worry in Sikkim could be a daughter's impending marriage or the outcome of a generation-hopping court case back in their own country.
Fortunately for Robin, life was less complicated. He had tried writing poetry, but with no one to show it to, he found the exercise fruitless. Robin, after all, had the heart of a performer, and he could not do anything that did not involve an audience. So the only thing left to do was to drink himself silly in the evenings and then entertain his drinking buddies with old sentimental Narayan Gopal numbers that he would sing in his god-gifted kami voice.
Sudhin had of late been a little concerned about where Robin was heading with his life. The last time Robin had been up at his place had really shaken Sudhin. His fingernails were coated heavily with a thick crescent of black dirt, and his breath reeked of Gold Star. There had been occasions when the two would have sat to enjoy a case of Hit beer that Robin brought as a gift from the beer-friendly state, but now he felt rather guilty. Robin seemed to be a shadow of his former self, and Sudhin detected a stranger in him that made him a little uncomfortable. Still, they had talked about the old times and planned an evening with Tashi, which of course never materialized because, as with any alcoholic, plans and resolutions meant very little to Robin. Then, of course, Tashi died—a development he was not quite sure Robin was aware of, given his out-of-the-way field of operation.
Sudhin thought a while about Robin and then wondered which of his friends were really doing well in life. He knew this was a tough question since the parameters with which you measured the successfulness of an individual's life were usually clichés like money, status, and relationships. Even his own life did not seem very purposeful at the moment. Yes, there was the book that he had been planning, but he was not so sure about it. The lizard had turned out to be different than he had expected. He was interesting, no doubt, but was his life weighty enough to merit a book? Yes, it had some appeal, but something told him suddenly that it was a sort of gimmicky appeal. Maybe he could please Sandip Jain, his editor friend at the local magazine, with an article on the lizard, but the book needed thought. And he knew he had to delve further into the cultural and religious background of his subject. The fact that the lizard did not swear and smoke on Tuesdays implied that he was a devout, practicing Hindu. His aversion to blacks was a mystery, but not a very dark one given the light of these recent revelations. Still, he could not defer the idea of writing forever. He had resisted the tide and decided to stay back, and there had to be something to show for his stubbornness.
There was a power cut that evening, and swarms of moths swiveled into the flame of the lamp, putting up a display of desperate, defiant, and ultimately dumb death. He sometimes wondered where these creatures came from. He had seen them nesting on the curtains, their wings resplendent with the almost obscene beauty of their exquisite patterns. Yet they were hairy with big, ugly mouths and repulsive, hideous insect eyes.
Suddenly these moths, millions of them, flew down in a hairy vortex of wings, drowning him with their noisy fluttering and flapping. Sudhin woke up with a start. He had dozed off at the table, and there, right in front of the moth-infested lamp that was now flickering in a losing battle against that unending procession of moth deaths, a small puddle of saliva had dribbled out of his mouth. His mouth tasted of the stale tastelessness of his dried-up saliva. There was the smell of kerosene and burning moths in the air. Sudhin was too sleepy to do anything, so he just blew out the lamp and slumped on the bed to snore deeply in sleep.
Another day gone.