Good Fences

I am getting worse with every post/essay.

This is so lackluster. I need to recharge in a big way.

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Good Fences

There is no struggle more lonely than the fight for respite, the battle against a myriad forces for the opium of sleep, for a descent into quiet so smooth that nothing is remarkable the next morning, and for an awaking so complete and abrupt that an entire night passes in the blink of an eye. That is luxury, that is heaven. The body feels it in the reserves of energy bulging in the limbs and an uncanny acuity of the mind. Daylight makes everything brighter and more saturated in its color than ever before. The air tastes better; the mouth rids itself of its dirty sock of rotten breath and bitter plaque. There is no kink in the neck, no arm twisted into pinpricks, no sheet dislodged and wrung around the body laboring through a long night. A man in this manner renewed instinctively practices empathy, the golden rule, social graces: he smiles, he picks children to make them laugh, he feels noble and acts on that feeling. He becomes a good neighbor.

Until reality knocks his teeth out, that is. Monsoon, so blithely disrespectful of women pulling ploughs and villagers marrying toads, skirts the rims of the valley on its way elsewhere, always vagrantly elsewhere. Concrete roofs heat up, wait silently for the thick of night to radiate. A friend needs attention thousands of kilometers away. The head rings from the frantic back-and-forth of emotions. Ugly mullet is already sticking to neck-sweat. The air is still, without any sign of mercy. A white owl flies to perch on the the window, shrieking, being answered from four houses down. From the sewers somewhere come the terrified squeals of a rat. Mosquitoes put up a concerted raid, swarming along the net, circling endlessly at an uncomfortable near-distance, like fate coiling in to claim the last russet glow of life.

Across the street, the neighbors are evicting their tenants, a bunch of boys who have everyday of the past six months grumbled about the lack of water. It is just past midnight, but they have managed to procure a small truck, which comes barrelling down the narrow street, loudly honking at the too-frequent intersections. An argument breaks out about what the last month's rent ought to amount to: the boys say they need a thousand for the truck, and therefore five is all they have. But the rent is six, and there is no way in hell they can just pick up their beds and toss them into a truck, the neighbor shouts. The boys try to hoist a second bed over the corrugated-iron gate, kicking the gate open, kicking it shut, banging into it, banging out of its prison. Long after the argument about money has been forgotten, one of the boys starts about the water, the lack of it, the expenses that caused, how the new house has water three hours everyday instead of never. The neighbor needs to answer, but she has nothing to
say, because this truth hurts her more than anything else the boys said all evening long, because there are three other families living in that house, surviving on no water whatsoever. She tries to say something, but something catches in her voice. She starts and stalls, caught in an odd recital where emotion rushes before reason, where reality oppresses with its full weight to clamp her voice to kill it before it can register a protest.

Barely a minute passes between the truck's disappearance and the arrival of a rival nuisance: idiots in the neighborhood have takes a motorbike and modified its muffler on the exhaust. It screeches into the neighborhood, comes to a halt, revs its engine. There has never been a louder noise in the neighborhood, not even during a wedding around the corner, from where a brass band played terrible rendition of tasteless Bollywood songs all night long. The blacktop in the neighborhood is unspoiled, without surprises, and for most part, straight. It is an exciting course with gentle curves, wide, stable surface, well lit enough that there is no danger of being surprised by a stray dog or a drunk on his way home on a motorbike. The idiots run their motorbike all night long, attracting unfortunate admirers, other young men, mindless idiots who are satisfied even just to twist the accelerator while the bike stands stationary.

It is impossible to sleep. Fantasies begin to rise: what if a bottle of flaming kerosene Molotoved their shining youth as they raced past the window? What about a line, tied to gates, blackened with grease, set at the level of their necks? Let them roar then, let then yell with excitement. What about a long pole that suddenly shoots from the dark to lance through the spokes of the motorbike and sends the delinquents in flight, brief, coarse, not quite murderous, so that the job can be finished with bricks, sacks of gravel? A noose that catches the one in the back, the one with the loud mouth, yanks him right out, and by the time his friend turns around, dangles him from a pole? A kitchen knife could then cut out the rider's liver, even as he tries to make more noise, rev the engine one last time in an act of punk, rebellion.

Sleep, with its dark trickle of villains, spills from hair-roots and the involuntary shuddering of the eyelids and sits on the chest. Knowing that this is sleeping and this isn't makes it harder still. There is light outside, the darkness becomes an unsightly gray before turning a luminous, crisp blue. But bad sleep sits on the chest, reaching into the brain, clawing through the mind for the small and beautiful moments of rest and illumination, and slobbers as it feasts, shifting on its heels occasionally to remind that this is no nightmare, neither a reverie, not a wisp, not abstract, not ether. This is real, this beast of discomfort, slowly eating all goodness away, pushing its own kernels of the abominable and vile into the roughed-up bed of the conscious.

Morning means more neighbors awoken to a new day with the imprints of thousands of old ones: the rattle of a bicycle returning from Ranibari with drinking water; middle-aged men grunting after the shuttle-cock at the community badminton net; Amala on her roof, complaining about water, a hand-pump getting scratchier and angrier as nothing comes, nothing but stale air poisoned with the stench of watery rust. Suddenly, the hated motorbike starts again. A boy with a broken arm is revving the engine while his friend holds the bike. I scream from the roof, but they don't hear me. Another neighbor marches down the street swinging a large iron rod. “All night long,” he says, and twenty heads come out of their windows: “all night long! Not a minute of sleep!” The boys who thought the loudness of their motorbike gave them immunity from community policing, seem taken aback. The big iron rod rests lightly atop the motorbike headlight as the boys are advised against repeating last night's racket.

Twenty windows close. So it is morning. So what? Must sleep. Now.