everyman

It seemed like he'd been stuck in a sort of temporal equilibrium for several hours now. On the desk in front of him, lay a page with an arguably shakey line riding down its length, splitting it into awkward halves. The halves were labelled 'White' and 'Black'. That was all that was in ink.

His hands fiddled around with the pen as he stared dreamily into the abyss of the sheet.

“How did I get here”, he wondered, “when did this begin?”. “Should I have known sooner?” “How could I have known?”

He took the nib to the right half of the page, in an attempt to condense his thoughts into a single word,

Decadence, he scribbled with little dexterity.

Insecurity, under it.

Inaction, below that.

As he struggled to distill his thoughts, his grip on the pen loosened and it slipped out of his hand and rolled towards the head of the sheet. It now masked the labels of the columns. A single drop of tear escaped the cusp of his eye lids and stained a small spot of the black ink that demarcated the two halves of the page. All it took was a reflexive blink to betray his emotions.

Perhaps, it was never anger. He felt weak. He sensed the thoroughly comforting blanket of self-pity wrap around him. It is biological self-defense, he rationalized to himself,

“It'll soon start feeling heavy. I only need it until it's no longer cold outside.”

He stretched his left arm out and reached for the glass, his eyes traced the three words he had just written. He brought it closer to his lips and realised that the glass was empty. He placed it by the page and debated internally for a bit before he chose to pour some brandy into it. It wasn't something he usually drank, but brandy was cheap and he suspected the smell of esters had some sort of uplifting biochemical effect on his mood. He pressed the back of his right hand to the steel body of the kettle to check if the water was still warm. It was. He took a small pinch of what looked like black pepper resting in a teaspoon on the table, and sprinkled it into the brandy, before topping the glass off with warm water. The warm glass felt nice in his hands.

He sipped on it slowly while trying to think of other things that made him feel nice. Cats? Sure, he did often personify them to a point where they could have simply started talking to him and it would not have surprised him. He appreciated the honesty in his interactions with cats. They came to him for food and occasionally some company but they were clear about their intentions and there was no scope for misunderstanding in that situation. If only more people were like cats.

He placed the glass back on the table and reached for his pen.

Kindness

He wrote under 'White'. “What evolutionary benefit did kindness provide?” “Perhaps, it was natural selection that resulted in reciprocal altruism being a natural trait in humans. In that case, how did a kind world end up as fucked up as it is today?” He looked over at the column on the right as if to find a reason. Whatever he saw seemed to moderately satisfy him. He abhorred dualities. Nothing and no one is all black or all white. Yet, here he was, attempting to categorise all of humanity's traits into two poles.

He deliberated for a bit before pressing the nib onto the paper. The ink flowed and left a scribble that read

Honesty

This one went against his inherent survival instinct. After having spent much of his youth in pursuit of absolute rationality, he had eventually inferred that cognitive dissonance was most definitely a socially-beneficial evolutionary feature.

“Honesty is accepting your limits. Its only concern is the truth. And, truth does not play well with biology. Reason is not natural, although, it is reason that has helped humans survive this long. And reason does not care about feelings, only about the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes one.”

He chose to believe he was an honest man. There must have been some dissonance at play in this explanation, however he preferred to remain ignorant. It mattered more to him if the people in his life were honest. He thought of those that were, as courageous and often wished to ask them for advice. He had never done so. He looked over to the other column and figured it was his narcissism—his need to appear perfect to mask any insecurites—that ensured he never made any such foolish attempts.

He felt liberated as these chinks escaped his body, and simultaneously safe, that they were still trapped within the blanket, hidden from the world.

He wasn't sure which column, if any, this next one should fall under. Against reason, he chose to follow his gut. He had only recently learned that the gut was a quasi-secondary brain and had therafter spent considerable time pondering over this fact. This had more or less convinced him that human bodies were merely vessels for bacteria.

“If so, this is a purely biochemical process that ensures, undoubtedly, the number one evolutionary goal—survival. Not of humans, but of the microcosm of bacteria in their guts” His rationality sometimes repulsed him. He knew what loneliness felt like. Heck, he had even managed to escape it at various moments in his past. He wasn't sure how he felt about it, though. He believed most people didn't really know either. The experience was quite like sailing in a flimsy canoe in the turbulent ocean. He much rather preferred it to have been like one of those ferries that could carry twenty cars with remarkable stability across the currents of a raging river. It did not seem unrealistic for some to be riding on that ferry. This thought brought him solace. He pressed the pen to the paper and traced

Love

He felt the blanket weigh down on his shoulders. It was time to put it away.

He tucked his tummy in, as his left hand reached for the handle of the drawer that just moments ago lay pressed against his stomach. He pulled on the drawer and slid his right hand in and fetched a pistol. He stuck the barrel in his mouth, with his index finger perfectly still on the trigger, his eyes scanning to check if the safety was off.

“I have never been more certain in my life”, he thought as he pulled the trigger, blowing up his skull into forty six pieces.

I sat up straight on my stool to look at them, wondering if they were lost. The man in the group held a crumpled paper cup in his right hand while he dug the other into his pocket. The women climbed out of the rickshaw and surveyed the neighbourhood. The stares of a few ten strangers made them feel like perhaps they were out of place here. The rickshaw driver handed over what looked like two ten rupee notes to the man who then folded them hurriedly and stuffed them into his wallet. He looked a bit lost as his eyes scanned the area. His hand held on to the cup anxiously. It was empty but I could say with certainty it was probably filled with rabri from Shankarji's shop just until about a minute ago.

I've been to Shankarji's. It's not my favourite rabri falooda but he prepares them to order unlike the other storekeepers here who just store them in the refrigerator until a customer comes along and asks for it. The ice Shankariji uses is questionable though. Was it Pankaj who told me that? No, it was Ramesh. He swore he'd never drink anything from Shankarji's again ever since he saw that kid from Prakash's shop drop off the ice that morning sometime around Holi. Ramesh lived next door to Prakash and he knew where Prakash sourced the ice from. Prakash didn't own any freezers. He paid some four hundred rupees every night to use the meat freezer at Ahmed's. He didn't own any containers either. Ahmed rented out his poultry crates for two hundred something extra. So, Prakash would fill up some three drums of water and load them onto a rickshaw and ride it to Ahmed's where he would then transfer them into the crates and leave them to freeze for six hours. Are six hours enough for ice to form?

Ramesh seemed confident when he revealed that Prakash did not wash the containers before he filled them with water. He thought it wouldn't be long before someone fell ill after having the falooda. Does Prakash not wash the containers to save time? Does water really need a minimum of six hours to freeze?

I don't know how long Prakash has been supplying the ice to Shankarji's and it has been over a month since I last had anything from there. Maybe it was the same ice and my stomach handled it. This man doesn't seem like his stomach will be able to handle it. I looked at his hands as he passed the cup on to his left hand. I called out, “Bhaiya!”, and stretched my left arm out and pointed towards the other side of the road. He looked at where I was pointing and then at me, smiled, and silently mouthed what seemed like a thank you before walking over all the trash on the road towards where my fingers had just pointed. He raised his left hand and let go off the cup into the green receptacle which had a sticker that said, 'Dry Waste Only'.

He was looking for a dustbin. They were clearly out of place here.