1.
The women who sweep the streets always have their heads covered with chunnis. They use long-handled brooms which they work on the ground in circles and parabolas, raising dust. Part of the dust slowly settles on recently cleaned cars whose wipers all point towards the sky at an angle. The leaves and twigs that the sweepers gather are crisp-dry. They pile heaps of them under the trees along the school boundary wall, where the wind presumably causes less disturbance to the waste. The heaps vanish – picked up by a leaf-collection van of some sort, I imagine – per a schedule that I have not been able to take note of. The houses on the street are all built slightly above the street level. The sloping thresholds of some of these houses have been washed clean by early-starting house helps. Dirty water trickles down to the street. In some locations, the water joins street-side puddles; in others it trickles on to the concrete road and creates a dark shapeless patch that will dry up in a bit. The stray dogs on these streets are dirty cream or light brown in colour. Perhaps they all share ancestors. They have no curiosity about me – they don’t approach me to sniff at anything, nor do they bark in salutation. I’m grateful for this neglect.
2.
The 'always' of memory is different from the 'always' of reality. It is the more definitive 'always' of the two.
3.
Every morning, I take a walk to buy cigarettes from a shack that is some distance away from my house. The shack is some distance away from my house because I live close to a large school, and selling cigarettes close to a school is prohibited (an informed guess). Every morning, I step down the pebbled terrazzo slope of my house and turn left. No, I actually cross the street first, so that I’m next to the school boundary wall, red brick topped by coiled wire, and then turn left. There is a row of houses on what is now the other side; mine is the first one.
After walking some distance I turn right, and the school wall also turns right with me. Perhaps the correct way to put it would be to say that I follow the turn of the wall, or to say that the street follows the turn of the wall and I just follow the turn of the street. The wall and the street turn left after some distance, and again I move with them. And then there is a right turn. This turn is the penultimate turn for my journey, and as soon as I take it, I pass, on my right, a large steel gate from where yellow buses enter the school compound (I have never seen them exit from this gate). After the gate lies the longest straight stretch of my path. On my left, again, are blocks of houses, interrupted twice by streets going in at a perpendicular. The two-storey houses marking these streets can do nothing better than look at each other; there is no school wall and school compound for residents on one side to enjoy the views of.
At the end of this long stretch of my walk, I finally part ways with the school boundary wall. I turn left towards the shack whereas the wall turns right.
The family that runs the shack knows what I’m there to buy: five Classic Milds. Spotting me from a distance, someone from the family – the man, the wife, or the son, who, depending on the amount of facial hair he carries on a given day, can look to be in his teens or in his late twenties – always takes out the cigarettes from the packet before I’ve reached. I pay through my phone, and then proceed to smoke a cigarette on the raised footpath to the left of the shack’s open front. There are three-four autos always parked along the footpath, right in front of me. I smoke while scrolling on my phone, so there usually isn’t any specific thought in my head at that time. I sometimes sense a whiff of ganja smoke, which I assume to result from the enjoyment one or more of the auto drivers in front of me, whom I’ve always seen huddled together next to any one auto. I’ve never walked into anyone visibly smoking ganja in that space; it is always the sweet trace left behind by a joint already smoked. Between the spot where I smoke my cigarette and the shack, there is an earthen saucer always filled with water; the family that runs the shack keeps it there on the footpath. Twice or thrice I’ve seen a dog lapping water from it, and this has always made me think of the family that runs the shack as kind. The stray dogs along this street come in all dog colours. Whenever a dog from a perpendicular street, including the one that I walk on before turning left towards the shack, dares to walk on to this road, the dogs on this street bully it with their vicious barking and ensure that their domain isn’t encroached. I wonder if the aggression of the dogs on this street is a result of being close to a busy main road, which is laid only thirty or so metres to the right of the shack front. The road and its noise must define a sort of boundary in dog country, giving rise to a feeling of being at the edge of the world, and thus tuning up the territorialism among the dogs who have established a homeland on this street. There have been instances when a calm dog lolling around the shack front has suddenly broken into a foul mood and run past me, growling at a trespassing canine. I’m frightened for a brief moment on such occasions, and the hair on my legs stands up. When the moment passes, I feel a tinge of shame, and I hope that neither the family nor their other customers nor the auto drivers have noticed the hair on my legs. This shame is immediately followed by a swoosh of reason, in which I conclude that there is no possibility of grown people concentrating on a grown man’s legs and noticing the slight shift in the alignment of the fuzz there.
I retrace the path back to my house after I’ve finished my cigarette, feeling my limbs heavier than they were before I had smoked.
4.
Sometimes, between the second and third turns of my walk, I hear the soft, stringy thwack of racket on ball. It is perhaps the only repeated event on this walk whose first occurrence has specifically stuck in my memory. I remember finding the sound pleasant, and finding the intervals between two thwacks – units of an unseen, unravelling rally – comforting. I remember thinking of David Foster Wallace and Vladimir Nabokov, two writers whose descriptions of games of tennis, or players of the game, I have loved. It is the kids playing tennis behind the school wall, of course. That this sound is audible only on some occasions makes me wonder if the tennis court is open on particular days, or during a particular time every day, or during a particular time on particular days. Since I undertake the walk at different times on different days, and have no reason to keep a record, there is no easy way for me to estimate the tennis schedule. But now when I walk out of my house for the walk, I always wish to hear the music of those thwacks. I learn it is there only after the second turn, and if it is there, I get to enjoy it till the third turn, after which it becomes fainter and fainter until it vanishes. What I’ve concluded, however, is that there is only one court, and there is, at any time, only one rally in progress. The music of the thwacks, when it is there, confirms that much.
Why has it never occurred to me to stop and listen to the tennis for longer? Why do I always walk on? I can’t be sure of the reason. Perhaps there is in me a subconscious desire to maintain the transitory nature of a pleasant occurrence. Perhaps the pleasure of listening to that music is so particular and so unclassifiable that neither instinct nor reason know how to react to it, and the body thus continues the actions it is committed to.
After the fourth turn comes the steel gate from where buses enter the school compound. Diagonally opposite the gate, across the three-way juncture (one offshoot of which I’ve never walked on), there is a three-storey house with a vacant plot to its side. That side of the house is thus fully visible from my walk just before I take the penultimate right turn. Along it, a vine of some sort clings to a vertical grill-like installation. When there is no green on it, the vine looks like a bunch of twigs pasted to a metal ladder. But when there is green, the house looks more beautiful because of it. As I write this now, I realise that the foliage on this vine is the only indicator of seasonality that I’ve noted along this walk, proof that I’ve been taking the walk for a long time now. Everything else, including the difference in my own clothes as I undertake the same walk in different seasons, has been out of the ambit of my observations. But if I press memory, then from a corner of it, remembrances begin to emerge in trickles. I vaguely remember hearing a koel call on some occasions. That’s a summer thing, right? The absurd fear of having my leg hair noticed when a dog runs past me is also a summer thing, for clearly I’m wearing shorts whenever that happens. And isn’t the earthen saucer that the shack-running family keeps filled with water also a summer thing? And the leaves that the sweepers gather – which season would explain their dryness best?
We are always experiencing things, whether we choose to or not. Sometimes we observe things consciously, with an intention to recollect them later. But the processes are imperfect, and though the degrees may vary, memory is always an adulteration of what we truly experienced or observed. All that is not in this instant seen, heard, smelled – all of that is dubious. It happened, it did not happen. It was there, it wasn’t there. I was there, I wasn’t there. The more I think of it, the more I believe that a state of comfort with ambiguities of experience and recollection is the biggest constituent of what they call the joy of solitude.
That makes solitude an act of repetition. That makes repetition a condition of joy.
One more remembrance of summer tumbles forth as I now write this while conscious of the season. One day, at the spot where the sound of the tennis is usually the loudest, I noticed two sweeper women with arms akimbo, talking excitedly to a man holding a long stick. Three children carrying polythene bags stood next to the women. They were all looking up at a jamun tree, as I made out for the first time (!) from the purple and black splatter on road and roadside. The group – was it a single family? – was collecting jamuns. Jamuns are a summer fruit, my logical mind now tells me, although at that time I had not thought of the season. At that time I had just walked past the family, slightly amused by their excitement and impressed by their success (as proven by the nearly bursting polythene bags that the children were carrying). I don’t think, or at least I don’t remember if, I heard tennis that day.
On the very next day (of this I’m certain), I saw two men holding long sticks looking up at the same jamun tree. A middle-aged woman from the house opposite (the nameplate mentioned only a male lawyer’s name) gave them instructions about not shaking the branches too vigorously, as there were other people’s cars parked all around and nobody likes jamun splatter on their car roof. She started repeating the instruction even before she’d finished it. One of the men acknowledged it, only to shut her up, it seemed, then looked up at the jamun tree again. I kept walking at my pace, wondering whether it was witnessing the fruit collection of the previous day that had invoked the proprietorial instincts of the woman. It’s natural, perhaps, to consider that some of the produce on a tree that is not on our property but close to our house belongs to us, especially if it’s a fruit-giving tree. But still, the fact that the woman had hired two men for the job (both had scowls on their faces and were in it only for the pittance it would earn them), the same job that on the previous day had been done with chirpy glee – men, women, children, all involved – saddened me. I did not hear tennis that day either.
Strangely, I didn’t find the two men at work on my return walk. Perhaps they were taking a smoke break themselves, or perhaps the tree had been so thoroughly cleaned of fruit the previous day that there hadn’t been much to collect today. I preferred the second possibility, and the irritation it would inevitably cause the woman, though I did not look up and check whether there were still any jamuns on the tree.
5.
The ‘sometimes’ of memory is concentric with the ‘sometimes’ of reality, even if the areas they cover, as metaphorical circles, is different. It is impossible to say which one is the more ‘sometimes’ of the two. Sometimes it is one, sometimes it is the other.
6.
Sometimes, I decide to smoke not standing next to the shack but while walking back to my house. On those occasions, I invariably finish my cigarette on the last or second-last stretch of street before my house, not very far from the jamun tree. When I’m done, I throw the cigarette on the ground and squash it with my left foot (I feel certain that it is always the left foot). Dry, combustible leaves and twigs, errors and misses of the sweeping process, are never too far from where I throw my cigarette butts. On a couple of occasions, the cigarette butt and the last lit part of the cigarette have come apart upon hitting the ground, the latter popping and rolling under a dry leaf or extinguishing itself. I’m always in a mini panic when I’m not able to conclusively squash the lit part of the cigarette, and on the three or four occasions when that has happened, I have entered my house with wild visions of conflagrations behind me, the whole neighbourhood on fire, cars exploding and flying several feet into the air, people running around frantically, and so on. Our imaginary culpabilities are sometimes tied to cinematic visions of mayhem.
On multiple occasions I have had to stop before the school gate and wait till a yellow bus has completely moved inside the school compound. The two doors of the steel gate are both six feet wide by my guess, but the street is narrow and manoeuvring the length and breadth of the bus inside is a tough task. Sometimes there are four or five buses lined up one after the other. A guard opens the doors for the buses always the same way – one inwards, one outwards. I've never understood why the doors cannot both be opened in one direction, but I believe that there must be some logic to it. A man with red shoes (I have only ever noticed the shoes) directs the whole operation along with the guard. He never speaks, just moves his hands. As the buses move, dust and diesel fumes fill the air. Sometimes, in my instinctive hurry—one never chooses to hurry—I have to bisect the distance between two buses at a slight trot, making the bus facing me hiss in disapproval.
There are never any kids on these buses.
On days when I, by chance, avoid this procession of buses, I see the guard seated on a rickety chair just beside the gate, the chair’s cane-mesh seat torn and strands hanging below the bulge of the guard’s ass. Not more than half a decade older than me, the guard is always peering into his phone, watching a video. I’ve never tried hard to listen and make out what it is that the guard is watching. I’ve never actually made eye contact with the guard. I wonder if my walking past him twice every day, first this way, and then that way, has become a part of his repeated reality, wherein he’s noted my presence and stored it in a corner of his mind, as a thing that happens every day is often stored by us, categorised as something that just happens and warrants no special attention, as the humdrum way of the universe. I wonder if the first day that he saw me smoking while walking past him was the day he finally deduced what I undertake my walk for, what my reason for the daily walk is, and whether that removed a small question mark in that corner of his mind. The idea that he’s never paid me any more attention, that my daily occurrence hasn’t been deliberated by him, is not a pleasant idea. I’m sure that if I think about it long enough, I will end up approaching the guard one day and saying Hello, or asking him what it is that he’s watching.
7.
The desire – and it is a desire – to not be blank event, to have some intimation that one is perceived uniquely, with the possibility of being enigmatic thrown in, and if this is not a certainty, then the desire to intrude upon another’s perception, to register as cordial or corrosive, whatever, but to exist in a unique way in the other’s mind even if one is for the other only a ghost that recurs, an item of zero practical importance, is a desire that stems from the instinct that tells us that story-making is perpetual and is, in fact, the true matter of existence, and that we are nothing if we are not in the stories others make of the world.
In the story that the guard makes of his day, either I figure or I don’t. I would prefer the former. More so because he’s there in this written story about a part of my day.
8.
The monsoon has arrived in north India. Incessant rain has blocked my walk for the past two days, and it is in the past two days that this story has been written. From my balcony I see the school grounds waterlogged, the street I walk on after stepping out of my house waterlogged, the sky waterlogged. The wipers of parked cars have accepted that they were wrong to challenge the sky, and have stopped pointing upwards at a slant; most have wet leaves and other debris stuck over and under them. I can see no sweeper women. The work of house helps can add nothing to the wetness all around now. I wonder where the guard sits when it rains. I wonder how the cigarette-shack family has dealt with the water. I wonder where the autos are parked, and whether the autowallahs have smoked ganja together. I wonder where all the dogs of that main-road-hugging street are, and if the rain has calmed them. I wonder how long it will be till the games of tennis begin, till my walk begins, till this part of my day begins. A constant sense of dread – in intensity something like the onset of anxiety – permeates my being. Nicotine withdrawal, and the sudden snapping of a routine, are both responsible for it, although there is no way to know which one is more responsible.
What if the weight of the rain makes the vine installation along the side of that house fall down on the empty plot of land? To me, this possibility is like the possibility of a crash of seasons, a collapse of all routine, a crumbling of repetition and solitude. I hold a tall cup filled with sugarless tea and hope, for the life of me, that this is not the final rain of the world.
*
Tanuj Solanki's last novel, The Machine is Learning, was longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature 2020. In 2019, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for his short-story collection, Diwali in Muzaffarnagar. His next, a crime novel titled Manjhi's Mayhem, is due from Penguin India in November 2022.
Tanuj Solanki’s work has appeared in Out of Print.