by Niranjan Jha
During the week, as I got a little familiar to the people around, I wanted to find out the truth about what she had told me about her family. Communicating with them was a great problem for me because no one except the priests knew Hindi or English in the locality. After a few days of struggle, I knew the reality that as much she had told me about her family, even half of that did not exist. The family was so poor that they were surviving on the church’s monetary support. There was no good house to stay. Her father was a big drunkard and whorer. The family’s condition was totally in lurch. Seeing all that, I urged to see her educational certificates again, but she gave me all wrong excuses hiding the truth. A big fight took place that day in which I was wounded.
Her violent nature got strong root to make her mad day by day. To my surprise, one day I saw that in the anger of feeling hungry, she blew the snot out of her nose and swallowed that.
‘Oh, shit!’
I could say that much only. Her mom supported her a lot and told me that all her documents were lost in the train while she was in the journey to New Delhi for the first time.
Out of the frying pan into the fire! I thought.
With eyes turned misty, blurred vision, parched lips, I lied on the ground withering in pain while looking at the blank sky. With no focus, my pupils were dilating and trying hard to come to a point where I could see. I could see something physical at least, if not the far askance look which was trying to search my soul for questions unanswered for eons, where the entire life was drifting away. Trying to hang on to my fleeting moments by mere hanging the intangible threads of my shredded life’s cocoon was giving me a scuffling challenge.
I wanted to get my money back but I failed because she had already swallowed up forever. From the second week onwards, the things started getting bitter. Finally, she thought of telling me the all truth assuming I would have mercy on her. But the mistakes she had committed were too big to be forgiven.
She revealed the truth in her own words that she was a ninth-standard failed school drop-out.
‘Oh fuck!’
I thought for a moment.
‘Then why did you lie to me?’ I enquired.
‘I am sorry,’ she could say that much only.
I gave her a big slap, and angrily, I caught her throat to strangle. I kept on asking her why she lied to me and she had no answer. There was no word in her mouth. She just begged pardon for all she had done. My life appeared to be finished at that moment. Hearing that, I felt my face smacked by a stone-handed devil. She was accusing her poverty for everything. Feeling the heart burnt, when I spoke to her mother, she blamed her drunkard and brothel-stuck husband as he never took care of the family. Julia had no cousin staying in the USA and her starving family had no option but to spend my money to survive.
I got my mind cluster-fucked!
With a blob formed in throat, I labored to gasp for filling my lungs to survive. A vast blank horizon stared back at me mocking my very existence, my dignity, my soul itself. I stared back…blank…dead eyes…no feelings…no emotion…absolutely with nothing, into nothingness. I was asking myself whether I was created for the sake of just punishment. Where did I err…or why did God err?
“The laws of the universe cannot be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner.” –Ambrose Bierce
Chapter Nineteen
“The world is not willing to welcome those who find problems only. It needs those who find solutions.”
The living condition of her family was as worst as of the tribal’s of an interior hilly area. The money she took from me was gone forever. If that much was enough, I would have still married her. But the next thing what she did with me was so cruel that I was left flabbergasted. At a strange place, I was left to drag in the streets of Kerala seeking a shelter for months. Such a gruesome cheating!
Till now, she was still trying to patch up, but for me everything was fishy around. She would come to see me in the lodge so viciously as if she was digging my grave behind. I went to the church and informed everything to the priest to seek justice. This time, to save the family from facing insult, she played with words and asked forgiveness from the society. Holding head in hand and standing at the darkened crossroad, I was listening to the priest’s advices. Ultimately, the decision of him went in her favor. The torture killing my morality, and the humiliation upon humiliation embedded into the core of my soul were leaving a blotch of the questions – what did I do to deserve this? Was this the wrath imploded of the mortals or the immortals??
The interface between my mind and senses was lost. I let the priest be the mediator to decide my future. The situation was hyper-tensed but she was pardoned for everything and was told to ask forgiveness from God in total submission. The priest advised her to go to the retreat center, and for that, he told me to accompany her. They apprehended that a week of time spent in retreat would transform her into benignity.
Whether one goes to a retreat center or takes a dip into the river Ganges or visits Makka and Madina, the ultimate purification comes from his soul not from the place or the thing. But I had to agree to their advices and we left for Potta Retreat Center of Kerala. She knew that I was carrying a debit card which she had already taken the password of. That was enough for her.
She took me to Kottayam.
She had me wait at the bus depot.
And she stole the card from my wallet.
Julia withdrew forty thousand rupees from two ATMs leaving just ten thousand rupees in my account.
I waited for her until midnight but she did not come back. I could not trace her out anywhere. Running helter-skelter, using broken words to communicate with people, bearing the tremor of cardiac arrest, I came back her home to find her whereabouts. When I asked her parents, they started sniggering with Double Dutch language in such a way as if they were proving to be the harbingers of their daughter’s crime. Her father’s face was showing what his sperm-drop can create. Their moral numbness seeping through the eyes could barely let me communicate with them. I thought of going to the church to complain.
The potential for understanding and constructive cooperation was nowhere in them. Julia’s destructive struggle for survival was the story they knew since Adam’s age. She had a dark past of submitting herself as an odalisque to the rich rainmakers wherever she saw. With the nymphomaniac malevolent nature, she had played like a jilt in her real life leaving many gullible boys to beg. I could sense a lot of credibility gap and delusion of grandeur in the people I was complaining to.
‘As you both are not married yet, we cannot do anything,’ they said.
The clever-clog priests and the coxcomb society took my words on their deaf ears and didn’t help me trace her out. Finally, I went to the police station, but the police also started blaming me in return for the mishap. I found her nowhere. That day I knew how much down a woman can stoop to rob a man. Feeling frantic and derelict, I was left to wander in the streets of Kerala for months as Billy-no-mates. Having no contact with anyone in the world, repenting on my own deed, I sensed gynophobia crawling into my soul to make me a misogamist forever.
After a few months, little by little, as I got my mind stable, I got a job in a city of Kerala and started teaching English. One day, I thought of calling my family in Delhi. The very first sentence I heard on the phone was that my mother had already died six months ago…..
“There is no light unless you burn yourself.” –Aristotle
Chapter Twenty
“Happiness comes in life by doing good work. And you do good work only when you are happy in life.”
Mira Road, Mumbai
In the year 2004, I got a job in a BPO, which is generally called a call-center, and started doing the most hectic job all in night shift. Working for more than three years in the graveyard hours of night, I saved every single penny I earned, and I purchased a flat in Mira Road. I was trying to develop contacts with the people of film industry, because doing a rigorous job in the call center had gifted me many
physical and mental problem. A computer with internet connection at home was keeping me active, and I started renewing communication with the lost world.
In the call center, we agents were taught to play all the nasty tricks to cheat American customers. Our seniors forced us to tamper with the credit card information of the customers and if we were caught red handed by the clients also, we were left easily. The many agents like us were trained to give financial damage to the callers for the profit of the contractor and the company. We learnt how to extort money from American customers, mislead the buyers, violet the process, set false expectations, and drop the calls of irate customers in HP outsourced call center of Mumbai. Almost ten times I tampered with the customers’ credit card. From the frame of reference, the flip side of the thought is that these call centers are nothing but beltway bandits making their each employee’s day a bad-hair day. The fence market in India is better than these Costa del Crimes which are generating cubicle monkeys with their mental hard-disks at the verge of crash.
I never let any bad habit conquer me because I value life a lot, and never spent money behind girls for sexual gratification. I lived most of my time in loneliness but tried to keep myself happy. Though I would not deny from the fact that the disturbance brought a lot of ill-effects to me and I was about to get attracted to homosexuality. I remember the day when I was teaching a male student, suddenly my mind got so wild that I got disposed to start kissing him. But just then, I got up from the seat and had a glass of cold water. My loneliness was killing me so mercilessly that, when I was in the friendship with a Christian priest, I was getting eager to approach him with disgusting carnal desire. Moreover, many a times my loneliness drove me to gain absurd satisfaction from sadomasochism. But… at every slip, my caliber could hold me up.
Most of the boys and girls working with me in the call center were addicted to drinking, smoking, drugs, whoring and homosexuality. But always avoiding their company, I was trying to keep myself busy making contact with film directors and producers, attending film-parties, writing lyrics and stories, hoping for a foothold in the industry.
But there also I found that the film industry understands only two languages – the language of bed or the language of money. I am not exaggerating or lying. If you don’t believe, come into this hell and see how it is. If the struggler is a girl, she has to sleep with every man she meets until she gets a movie in hand. By that time she becomes a half prostitute. For a boy, no matter how talented he is, even if God comes to give his testimony, they won’t hear. They won’t hear unless he invests his own money. Otherwise he has to become a pimp or homosexual partner of the pederast producers. Many of the film producers have bisexual instinct, and for that, they want beautiful men to both sodomize and to get sodomized. Being gigolo will get a struggler nowhere. Yes, if he has the contact with underworld, then something may happen. Seeing the reality of the movie industry at close quarter, scanning from bedroom to washroom of them, I got convinced to the fact that my way wouldn’t work, so I got my heel back.
Beware of them! All are beasts!!
They supply girls to develop contacts, make their wives sleep with other men for getting finance, and they are addicted to pedophilia. They make movies to show to the world, but in their real lives many movies are made everyday.
Dropping the idea of becoming a writer in the industry, I concentrated more on my call-center job. There was one more field I could have tired – politics. Knowing that the World Trade Center was demolished by the Zionist regime of Americans, the Indians, who are the best copy-cat of the world, had already got into the political footprint of them. And following the same trail, some politicians staged 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai. Mr. Modi and Thackeray are the leading names for that! It is not that I am talking-about-talks but telling you the truth that only these politician play pogrom-politics. If you ask me the proof, do you think every crime of the world leaves a proof behind? And if the proofs are found, don’t you know that they are suppressed by money power? Don’t you know that Indian media is most corrupt in the world?
The politicians have already sold India, now they would sell their mothers. Recently in 2011, the Congress Party of India, facing insult at every corner of the country, gave bribe to a certain organization to start a fiasco revolution to keep the people busy for at least two years. Anna Hazare is that fiasco revolutionary!
Now in this coming election of 2014, the Indians are going to support the fundamentalist regime BJP forgetting that this party’s members killed the president of Pakistan – Zinha and after yeas, said that he was secular and the best leader of the world. This party created its foundation on the basis of building Ram Temple in Ayodhya, but when it came in power, it declined to build. I don’t know what this party can do for the betterment of India.
“The things that made me stronger are the ones that didn’t let me sleep at once.” –Anonymous
Chapter Twenty-one
“The secret of walking on water is knowing where the stones are.” –Proverb
The Internet was entertaining, but sleeping alone in the night was making me feel life abhorrent. The habit of jerking-off every night before sleep was also not giving satisfaction anymore. Somebody told me to keep a paying guest to avoid loneliness and I got a non-paying guest who was struggling for a singing career. He started staying with me. After sometime, a TV serial associate director also started staying with me. I did not take rent from them.
The director, while living together, pushed me into the habit of drinking which I still hate. He took me to the places where I could have accessed to the prostitutes and white slaves, but I did not do. Some of my friends used to go to beer-bar to see bar-dance but I never went. Though I was getting tempted to, yet at every temptation I remembered how hard I struggled to reach there in life.
After completing one and half year in the first call center, I got so much saturated that I left the job. The call centers run by the contractors in India are the worst place for the employees. Money was the only thing I worked for because ‘no money’ means ‘no life’ in Mumbai.
I took rest for three months, and then decided to join another call center, and for that I was talking to my ex colleagues. They often asked me if I could find any girlfriend, and my answer was always no. In a run to make my life secure, I could not get the time to think of a girlfriend. All the girls were looking like mother to me.
As the time was passing, the age was defining the necessity of a life partner more strongly, and my effort to ignoring it was making it more serious. For some obvious reasons, after spending one and half years of time in Mumbai, at the age of twenty-nine; the need of a woman was hovering over my head to drive me insane.
O my God… finding a woman was the most difficult!
Finding a bed-partner is always possible in Mumbai, but life-partner is impossible. But when something is on stake, one has to try his best. It takes both rain and sunshine to create a rainbow. I just thought that I won’t go the way life takes but I will take my life the way I go.
After thinking several times, I uploaded my matrimonial profile on jeevansathi.com and shaadi.com websites, and started calling the numbers of matrimonial advertisements of the Times of India and DNA newspapers. I got some good and bad experiences from that.
Almost fifty percent of the women who post their profile on matrimonial websites are prostitutes, twenty percent are fun-seekers, and only a few use them do it for genuine purpose. These websites should not be exonerated from the blame of creating a mirage-like deception to those who are really in the need of a life-partner.
One day, I got an expression sent through shaadi.com by a girl named Pushpa Lal who lived in Nagpur. Within a day she gave me her email address and we started chatting using yahoo messenger. I felt something embarking to adventure raising me to subtlety. The time she preferred to chat was midnight. I asked her the reason of coming online late, and she answered that in the day time she worked at her mom’s hospital. Night was the only ti
me she got free to talk. My sharp-six rang the alarm of possible deception, but ‘beggars cannot be choosers’. I took it for a valid reason and we started chatting every night. She let me talk to her mother on phone and we shared each other’s photographs also. Within a week, I got the invitation from her so-called mother to come to Nagpur to talk about marriage.
The buried past, blurry present and unborn future, were making my life a question in itself whether it was worth living. But not applying strength meant if the sky falls, I would catch the lark. Revolting against frustration, opposing obscure intuition, I made up my mind to reach out the propensity of twinkling turbulence.
