by Pawan Mishra
Before Coinman could answer, she spoke again. “And what’s that in your pocket, causing every cell in my body to flutter? I must unburden you from the mire of the metal!”
Before Coinman could respond, she slipped her hand into his pocket and got all the coins! She then dashed outside the house and reappeared a few minutes later without them.
That began Coinman’s real trials. A life without coins was no fun!
He spent the night thinking about strategies to win the coins back. In the morning he craved coins as soon as he reached the office. His feet darted outside into the market—all by themselves. He scooted to the first shop that he could set his eyes on and, without delaying a second, reached to the shopkeeper and thrust a ten-rupee bill in his left hand. He then quickly scanned the shop for the lowest-priced item, and decided on a pen that cost just one rupee. Then he demanded nine rupees back in coins.
The shopkeeper patiently counted all the change and handed it over to Coinman. The change went into his left pocket in less than a second. Having found the lost privilege suddenly, his mind spread itself across the entire cosmos, leaving a very sparse presence at any given locus. In such absent-mindedness, he left the shop without the pen.
The shopkeeper ran after him.
“Buddy, you left your pen,” he called.
“Please keep it,” Coinman requested. “I can’t express enough gratitude in accommodating my bizarre request for half a pound of change.”
The shopkeeper smiled, nodded his head, and returned without a word. He was probably too busy to spend any more time on this oddity.
Coinman continued his stroll around the market, pondering ways to alleviate his situation. His mind seemed completely empty—or full of some sort of sticky paste, making it hard for any ideas to enter it without getting caught at its surface. He deferred deep consideration for a future day, when the sticky stuff would be gone. In the meantime he figured as long as he could find a permanent hiding place for his coins, he at least wouldn’t have the burden of getting new change every day. Moreover, Daulat had taught him since childhood that money loves only those who wisely spend it—that was another reason he didn’t want to dispose of the coins after each use.
So he walked into the only public restroom in the area and went straight into one of the stalls, which had an overhead tank and a pull-chain flush system. Climbing up on the toilet bowl, he lifted his hand above his head toward the overhead tank and ran it over the top surface to ensure it was clear of any objects. He then took the coins out of his pocket and placed them at the top.
No one will ever find these, he thought. The municipality’s inattention to sanitation has some benefit after all!
A smile finally found his lips.
When he came back to the office, however, it was only a few minutes before he had a desperate craving again. It was as if someone had stripped him of the most useful part of his being. His now-underprivileged left hand constantly slipped into the pocket out of habit, but encountered only dull fabric instead of coins. The same fabric that had once enhanced the joy of playing with the coins had now become bitter to his hand—just like wandering alone at the venue of past trysts after your lover has deserted you.
His hands could directly feel the void created in his life.
On that day he also noticed that Jay passed by him two times. This was very unusual—it hadn’t happened in the past several years of his work history. He had never seen Jay on the first floor two times in a day; this made him suspect that Jay was personally keeping an eye on him. So, despite his terrible craving, he changed his mind about rushing outside to the public toilet.
The next morning Coinman went directly to pick up his hidden coins, then walked and walked the streets. He just couldn’t make up his mind to go to the office. So he ended up spending his entire day outside: on the footpaths, in parks, at shops, on local buses, and in the movie theaters. He preferred noisier places so he could continuously play with his coins.
He consumed all his vacation time for the year wandering this way. His supervisor had a letter sent to his house asking him to report to the office immediately.
When Coinman came back to work, he was asked to see Jay in his office for a brief discussion.
“I only have a minute before another meeting,” Jay said, “but needed to tell you that I was speaking with your boss yesterday and became aware that you couldn’t use coins at home. I take the blame for getting you into this painful situation and apologize for not being thorough.”
“It’s not your fault, sir.”
“Coinman, I will see to it personally that this issue is fixed in no time. Your anguish is going to be very short-lived.” With that, Jay smiled and left his office for the meeting.
22. The Manager’s Illusion
In troubled times one wishes for a sound sleep more than usual, but, realizing its amplified importance, sleep smugly impedes all attempts to woo it.
Jay had trouble sleeping that night. He turned and tossed in bed. Being an early riser, he knew that sleeping late would spoil his day. So he tried even harder, inadvertently thwarting sleep even more.
Finally he got up to search the Internet for suggestions on securing a sound sleep. He tried three recommendations that figured frequently in the articles: he made his room colder, blocked out the traffic noise fully by shutting all the windows, and got a warm glass of milk.
None worked.
By midnight his head had started pounding as if a bunch of rhinos were trapped inside his mind and were desperately trying to escape. He started to feel weightlessness and attempted to overcome the strange experience by taking a hot bath. That did not help, either. When his disquiet rose to a level he could no longer handle, he climbed the stairs to the roof of his single-story house, where he was the sole resident. The moon was bigger than usual and looked excessively bright to his eyes. He noticed that a large, circular dark cloud surrounded the moon, as if vainly trying to trap it; the moon effortlessly moved out of the loose noose.
Jay stood there for a long time, looking at the sky, as though making up for not having looked at it well enough for numerous years. He remembered how, during his childhood, he and his siblings used to look at the mystifying sky together for hours from their roof to spot the shapes of the clouds.
Peaceful as they were, however, his thoughts were broken by a chain of bites from a swarm of unfeeling mosquitoes.
Back in his room, with sleep still away, he lay back down in his bed and tried to read a short story, massaging his head at the same time. Soon he realized that despite having attempted three times, he couldn’t make sense of the opening paragraph in the first chapter. He tried the same paragraph again, and again, and again…but to no avail. He wasn’t able to focus—so he put the book away and tried to go back in time, to his childhood, remembering as many people he could from his elementary school days.
Strangely, that worked instantly, launching him into dreamland.
After several bizarre dreams, he dreamed that his boss visited him at his house to discuss the Coinman issue. They talked at length, until a gust of heavy wind appeared from nowhere to blow away almost everything around them. His boss stood up from his chair with a jerk and stretched both hands in Jay’s direction, palms facing down. The boss then chanted mantras loudly, making black cobras emerge from his sleeves to float in Jay’s direction.
Jay couldn’t run. To his horror he was completely frozen and couldn’t move a limb. He screamed for help, but words did not come out. He was in a soundless world! He could feel his pulse through his entire body. The snakes had formed an aerial queue to bite him on the face, turn by turn, until Jay fell into an infinite pit, completely weightless.
Jay woke up screaming at this point, and was much relieved to realize that it had been only a dream.
His heart was still beating fast, and he noticed that his hands were resting over his chest. He remembered his mother’s warning to him during his childhood. “Never sleep with hands over y
our chest,” she would say. “It turns you into a mute and gets you into ghastly nightmares without being able to call for help.”
He looked at the clock, pleased to see it was only four o’clock in the morning; he could still sleep for two more hours. He slipped back into bed and was back to dreamland within a minute.
Unfortunately, the nightmares weren’t through with him yet. This time Jay was mysteriously trapped in his office. As he was coming out of his office door, he noticed another door, and then another…and soon he was passing through door after door, endlessly, until he completely lost his sense of direction to the exit. The office was glaring with white neon lights. He did not recall ever having allowed those to be installed. There were no people; he found himself thinking that others might have left well ahead of time, being aware of the spooky metamorphosis of the office after hours.
Every door he passed through was situated in such a way that he could see only one room at a time. He couldn’t see the next room without leaving the previous one, at which point the door would close automatically behind him. Every time he passed through a door, he landed in an identical room. It seemed he was stuck in the labyrinth of infinite identical rooms. Each room had four doors and the same objects in exactly the same states. No matter which door he tried, the situation remained the same. Once he jumped back into the previous room—trying to dodge the maze. But to his surprise, it was a new room. He’d figured this out by dropping his watch in the previous room; the watch was gone when he had jumped back through the same door.
“This means,” he told himself, “it isn’t possible to enter the same room again after exiting.”
Intrigued, he continued dropping his stuff to study more. Maybe there are just ten of these identical rooms with four doors, he thought, all somehow connected. His thought, however, proved false once he’d dropped more than ten objects, each all by itself, and still did not see any of them anywhere in other rooms. When he was out of watch, pens, coins, shirt, shoes, and socks, he hopelessly started taking off the rest of his clothes to help map his location in the maze. He stopped throwing his possessions when he had only boxer briefs on—and had the horrible thought, What if I meet someone from the office in one of these rooms?
He completed a full circle of thinking and re-postulated to himself that there was only one room, which he was entering and exiting at the same time through one of the four doors—but that somehow, by the design of this maze, the objects he dropped disappeared during a transitional point so infinitesimal that it was not observable with the naked eye.
In frustration he broke the chair in the current room and exited through one of the doors. The next room, too, had a broken chair. Next he scratched some paint from the current room and entered the next one. The next room had scratched paint as well.
“Wow,” he murmured to himself, “there is only one room here.”
He took the curtains down from the four doors and meticulously tore them into thin, long strips to make a rope. He then tied one end of the rope to the broken chair and entered the next room with the other end, carefully getting the rope through the space between the door and the floor. The broken chair in the next room had the same rope tied to it—exactly the same way he had left it in the other room. The other end was going out from another door.
“It could be this end that I am holding?” he asked himself. “God! Where am I?”
He went through the door and in the next room saw that there was a rope coming from the chair going into the door he had just left.
Confused and lost, he now followed the end he was holding and went through the door from which he had entered. There was a chair in a similar condition, with the other end of the rope disappearing through another door.
“So this doesn’t work, either,” he murmured, and then screamed, “Anyone here?”
Surprisingly, even though he was in an enclosed room, the sound echoed multiple times, as though it went through each room he had been to so far and somehow channeled back into the room he was in currently. Completely exhausted from hopelessness, he gave up and sat down on the floor.
He thanked the sun when its morning rays fell directly on his face, waking him up from his nightmare. The fitted sheet was completely crumpled to one side, exposing most of the mattress, indicating how violently he’d moved during sleep.
In the bath, a good solution to his dilemmas suddenly flashed into his mind. Next thing he knew, he was talking to Coinman in his office.
“Mr. Coinman,” Jay said, making his tone as friendly as possible. “How have you been?”
“I have been living.” Coinman’s tone, on the contrary, was devoid of any cheer.
“Well, I wanted to provide you with a quick update. I am still working on the right solution, yet I may have found a way to bring some temporary relief to you.”
“I am eager to find out,” Coinman said, although he didn’t seem very excited.
“As a temporary solution, I propose to get rubber coins made for you.”
“I am sure that wouldn’t work.”
“Have you tried them in the past?”
“No, I have not.”
“Let’s at least try. What do you say? I will make sure the rubber coins feel the same as the metal coins do. Your hands won’t even realize that they have been dodged. Besides, I have completed a good study on this—and found that there is a way to make rubber that has a similar density and feel as metal.”
“How about the sound?”
“What do you mean? Isn’t that what we are avoiding here?”
Coinman nodded. A drowning man counts heavily on the smallest speck of hope, and Coinman was no different. Even as he very much doubted the solution would work, he wanted to try it.
“We will sail through this together,” Jay assured him. “Consider me your comrade in the trouble you’re going through. We’ll find the best places to make the rubber coins to our specifications, so that your hands get the same experience they once had.”
The highly customized rubber coins were ordered and delivered to Jay the following week.
Before handing them over to Coinman, Jay put them into his right pocket and, to compare, put some metal coins in the left one. He slipped the coins through the fingers in both pockets, trying to see if they felt the same. Then he swapped pockets and repeated the exercise. He then closed his eyes, to focus even more on what his hands were experiencing. He was gratified to realize both types of coins felt the same to him.
Jay got the coins gift-wrapped and personally handed them to Coinman at his desk.
Coinman tore open the envelope impatiently and emptied the coins into his left pocket. But his left hand’s instant disappointment traveled to Coinman’s mind in less than a second.
The rubber coins were completely bogus.
I should still try to get adjusted to the new coins, Coinman thought. Who knows if after a few weeks these coins may be helpful?
So he gave them a chance, and a few weeks passed, but the rubber coins did not solve anything—they were instead a sort of burden on him and had even started to irritate him. One day he threw them in the trash, then went to Jay’s office and knocked at his door.
“Come in, Coinman. Please have a seat.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“May I help you with something? How are we doing with the rubber coins?”
“First, my apologies for barging in uninvited like this,” Coinman said.
“No, you are good.”
“I appreciate what you’re doing, sir,” Coinman continued. “I know how important your time is. So I would talk straight without much huddle-muddle. The rubber coins suck! I also want to tell you that, going forward, I don’t want you to share my burden.”
Coinman had said this in one breath. He paused to let Jay have time to digest it.
“Keep talking. I’m listening,” Jay said.
“If for a few minutes I take myself out of this situation, to look objectively at it as an outsider, I can�
��t help but think that no one else but me needs to deal with it. If I cannot come to grips with my own sufferings, and find a resolution, I do not deserve to be a man.”
Coinman acknowledged to himself that the sudden rush in his blood wasn’t going to be very useful. So he paused to take a few breaths.
“It’s my pain and I must fix it,” he said again, with such determination that Jay did not want to offer any views.
“So be it,” Jay said. “I respect your confidence and determination to solve this on your own. I want to tell you that I am always here to help, should you need it. Good luck, Coinman! Keep me posted on how it goes.”
Jay saw a ray of hope in Coinman, a spark that hadn’t been evident in the past, a determination to possess his future by assuming captainship of his present. That, in his opinion, was all to the good.
23. The Fundamental Cornerstone
The loss of a reliance on others often helpfully forces a more sophisticated rumination that enables the opening of previously unknown avenues.
Taking the responsibility into his own hands, Coinman scrutinized the issue at an unprecedented level. He was able to get down to a list of potential workable solutions: leaving home forever to live alone, and changing his job; or, alternatively, asking Jay for a separate office, putting a wireless sound capture and transmitter system in his left pocket to transmit the jingling sound to his ears without releasing it to the surroundings, asking permission to work from home, or even doing a presentation to the entire office on the joys of coin jingling. Then he drilled each one of these solutions down to the minutest details and listed the pros and cons of each. He thought he was drawing very close to determining the best solution and wondered if a second opinion would still be worth it, given the importance of the matter.
He thought of running his list past Jay first, but then, considering his last discussion with Jay, he thought it best if he could get someone else to weigh in—someone who had enough intellectual capital to not only understand the complexity of the situation, but also discern the precise nature of the interest each party had in the matter. He knew only two such people, other than Jay: Ratiram, and his childhood friend Funda. The robbery had exposed Ratiram’s real face to him. So Funda was the only option.
