Reasonable Limits
Tanuj
Solanki
I had that
chronic neck pain that you get from working too much on the computer, but all
else was fine, in the sense that I was doing okay financially and had a stable
job and was fairly settled location-wise and all, yet all these things as a
composite felt like a lumpy contradiction, feeding a kind of unwellness that
was close to boredom while being defined in its difference from boredom, so it
wasn’t a great time for me and I felt life wasn’t really giving me what I
wanted from it, so yes it was probably a bad time, yes, and I had some
nomad-type friends who used to come to my house to spend a night or two, you
know the smart You-Only-Live-Once people who do not hold a job for too long and
who do not worry about a house and an insurance and other such things, such
friends, and those friends of mine would urge me, over drinks that were bought
exclusively with my money, to do things like they did things, to let go and
basically discover my physicality or whatever, be Rimbaud or whatever, to see
the world as much as I could: But please don’t do it from the balconies of good
hotels, okay? : et cetera et cetera, and after hearing my friends I would feel
compelled to outline the advantages of my position, the merits of obeying the
order despite criticising it, I would defend my place in the world, the unique
coordinates of my independence, my committed cultivation of a life of the mind,
and in my excitement I would sometimes posit that a life of the mind could only
be cultivated around creature comforts, at which my friends would start their
giggling; they would giggle because my AC would be running and my refrigerator
would be humming and my mutual funds would be ticking, yet I would be the one
with the dead eyes in those nights, I would be the soul in stasis, I would be
the weakest bulb on the tree, so to say, the gist of the system, if you may,
and so I guess it is not much to reveal that whatever I said to those fuckers
only made me little in their eyes, and instead of giving me the solaces of what
was, only led me back to the bleakness of what really was, which is not to say
that I saw the bleakness as bleakness, as cent per cent bleakness, for that
couldn’t be possible, I mean I had a routine, I had work, I had to go to office
five days in a week, I worked in a life insurance company, I wasn’t doing badly
there either, and the company was doing well, in fact, so the bleakness was not
really as absolute as I make it sound, but some things had led to dark
sentiments, for example there was that gnawing story, always, that horrible
story I had heard at work, the story of blood on paper, the story that I’d been
told by the guy from Operations, about the frequent blood stains on the
document scans received by Ops, the story that this guy had told me one day
just in passing, which he started by informing me how any life insurance
application needs to be appended with a slew of customer documents which are
all collected and stapled together by the salesman, which are all excessively
stapled in multiple places by the salesman because that man doesn’t want
anything to be lost in transit and then have to ask the customer for it again,
which seems only logical, and so the documents come excessively stapled and
then have to be digitised because it would just be unwieldy and unwise to rely
on paper throughout the processing of any life insurance proposal, so the
documents have to be sent to an outlet that can scan them all, a scanning
vendor, an enterprise that hires people to de-staple the excessively stapled
documents, an enterprise that gets paid depending on the number of sheets it
scans per month, an enterprise that therefore incentivises its own people on
the number of sheets they can scan per hour, an enterprise whose employees soon
figure out that using any tool other than their own fingers to de-staple a
thick sheaf of documents is a loss of time and money, the employees who
therefore start using their own fingers for de-stapling as standard operating
procedure, whose hurried fingers thus bleed as standard operating procedure,
whose blood stains the sheets to be scanned as standard operating procedure,
and so on it goes day after day after day after day after day after day after
day after day and then again, and at this point of the story’s telling the Ops
guy got a gleam in his eyes and a shine on his balding pate, he was happy that
he had scandalised me, and that was not a mistake, for I was scandalised, I was
in fact hurt and scandalised, and he surely saw something in my eyes for he
then tried to calm me by reminding me of the good work that I was doing,
reminding me that my project – of giving each salesperson a mobile application
to capture customer documents as images – would mean that there would be no
scanning required, that if my project succeeded there would be no blood on
paper because there would be no paper necessary, and I was surprised because I
hadn’t thought that that was the real importance of my work, and for a few
seconds I allowed myself to be happy, till I understood that with my success,
not only would there be no paper, there would be no scanning vendors, which was
the real logical reason why the company wanted me to succeed, to not have to
pay those vendors, because stapling was anyway easy to avoid, the sales guys
just had to be instructed to use easily removable clips for each file that they
made, but when I succeeded there would be no scanning vendors and there would
be no employees whose job it would be to de-staple paper, and all those people
with their horrible fingers, who had done nothing in the big city but pushed
their nails against sharp metal, would be out on the street with nothing to do
and nothing to learn, nothing to do other than showing their fingers to the sun
and peeling the scabs off them, and it was thinking of those people whose
fingers knew only piercing and bleeding that I would be disturbed at my
workplace, and this disturbance added to the bleakness that I’ve talked of, a
bleakness that was also being contributed to, in part, by the fact that the
story was after all a clichéd story – the well-worn, age-old story of how an
advancement in technology must mean that some people fall into irrelevance – a
story whose persistence was a bigger problem than the contents of any single
version of it, and I did not feel guilty of my own participation in it as much
I felt frustrated in the face of the hard truth that even if I were to
extricate myself from this particular narrative, the elsewhere I would go to
would in turn bind me in a new way, impose on me another damning mode of
participation, where essentially the same story would tap me on my shoulder and
hand me my specific role in it, and on nights with YOLO friends it was this
inextricability that I wished to impress upon everyone, my buttoned down
inextricability and their happy-go-lucky inextricability, for there was never a
doubt in me that they too were participating, their versions of youth also had
a price, they too consumed and produced, they too had no escape from eating the
things and wearing the things and drinking the things that someone somewhere
was scraping their nails to get made, just as mine was making the things that
would put that nail scraper out of his job, which meant that all in all there
was no cosmically correct way to be on this earth and all you could do was be
aware of what you were really doing, acknowledge its painful by-products, and
keep at it, and keeping at it was what I would be doing, for I wasn’t a revolutionary
either, I knew that living in the Yellow Pages was better than living in the
crispy pages of History tomes, so I kept at it and looked at possible
absolutions, I looked for inspiration online and I started reading Wikipedia
articles at work, only to realise that the denudation of my soul played its
role here too, veering me away from what may be called general inspirational
stuff and leading me to historical articles, articles detailing the cruelties
of the past century, articles that described the magnitude of pain humanity had
delivered and endured, and needless to say the Holocaust cast the biggest
shadow among twentieth century catastrophes, which is to say that I read a lot
about it, pondering grand theories about State-sanctioned torture and death,
and I thought about small silly things as well, such as whether Holocaust
studies today could cover a peculiar tenwty-first century phenomena which may
be titled ‘How extensive reading about the Holocaust impacts one’s evaluation
of the Contemporary Arts’, which means that one can’t really watch a well-made
movie about the complications of romantic love after reading this sentence: The
Nazis took in a batch of Jews, had them stripped, had them stand in adjacent
rows, shot down the front ones from such proximity that a single machine gun
bullet killed the entire row, then pushed the bodies in the ravine, covered
them up with mud, stepped down to shoot at anyone still squirming, and then
called the next batch in : so such miseries hounded me, to the extent that the
faculties that help us differentiate between one thing and the other began to
be filed away in my case, things began to lump into each other, such that the
workers with the leprous fingers seemed to me no different from the murdered
Jews, one suffering dissolved into another suffering, contemporary became
historical and vice versa, and I starting having weird dreams, such as the one
in which I found myself in a huge field of corn or wheat, in a desolate field
of corn or wheat, where a silent UFO cleaved the sky, a restful UFO, well-lit
phallus of the extraordinary, and ki-ki-ki went my heart; I still kept my chin
up though, I drank with friends, found critical paths of critical projects at
work, played my own powerlessness day in day out, while there remained pockets
of my life that I liked, even enjoyed, but the heaviness would always return, I
would always think of those bleeding fingers, or would end up reading a
sentence like: The disposal of corpses was hard work and required managerial
acumen : and there were no lasting distractions for me even in any dull love
that I tried fostering with a couple of ladies, and I followed the war in
Syria, I paid attention to all reports of sexual crimes in India, I watched
Youtube videos of American mass shootings, I read the bigotry of reader
comments on Op-Ed pieces, I ate a lot of pizza, and I shrank and shrank on some
incomprehensible dimension, realizing that the world was an inferno with only a
few cool mirages, that there was only pure danger in ‘getting out there’, that
my friends were wrong, that my friends’ favorite writer Kerouac was wrong too,
that great Roman candles that burn magnificently actually just burn away, and
we all need to find a bed, and for as much as possible we all need to follow the
injunction of waking up tomorrow in our own bed, in our cocoons of peace and
laziness; we can and should continue our hiding, if it is that.
Tanuj Solanki lives and works in Mumbai. His stories have been published
in The Caravan, Out of Print, One Throne Magazine, and numerous others. His
first novel will be published in 2016 by Harper Collins India.
No comments:
Post a Comment