Arshi SS: Chiron CHAPTER 3 | UPDATED May 9| pg 25 - Page 17

He means to say he's not likable???

Yeah finally, gosh it really took long. Phew.

The difference between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

- Albert Einstein

3. Coffins in Time-I

Time is like a vast mortuary, days, events, people, moments awaiting burial, but how very clinical of memories to keep turning up there unannounced, for endless sessions of autopsy; pulling them out, those shut in their coffins.

I do not believe in past, and by stating that, I do not mean to get into the Physicists' arcana of infinite timelines or quantum multiverses and universal wave function or even theory of relativity and the presented illusion of time and space therein. If I were to launch into a disquisition about that, you'd rather lock this mad man up in a cabin in the middle of the Amazon forest and throw away the key into some anaconda infested water body. But hear me out, what part of past is "past" and no longer existent?

When it defines your present as a result of it and when your present delineates itself as a consequence? Consider this, your eyes moving from one word to the next, as it appears and becomes a part of the past; the words in the next paragraph that haven't yet come across you are the future, but what you are reading right now makes sense because what you have already read did. Now consider the page in its entirety, you see past, present and future all three existing, real and at the same time that is, now. None of them could be a myth.

Now that the past happens to be a second skin to the present, for me to narrate my story, it feels imperative to take you back to where it started- my "now" that I began writing years ago.

You must also realize that I am putting myself in line of high risk by doing so, you'd judge me if you already haven't and I am afraid I wouldn't be found likable. But then, considering the eventuality of my story ending some day and you learning all about my deeds, the question of likability over a few leaves of history seems rhetoric.

I had an avoidable, unnecessarily anxious childhood. I was born upon a broken mirror, its shards acutely pricking, caused me moronic angst throughout my growing years. My family (I have one) wasn't dysfunctional, it was a highly functional family. A highly functional, f**ked up family. I had all the goings, you see, for becoming a perfect broody asshole (including batman being the favorite superhero) - the angry young man that women love and want to fix, only that I did not. I could not for I was busy chasing normalcy, wanting to be like other kids of my age, wanting to fit in.

So I smiled, a little too wide, charmed a little too much, tried, a little too hard. As a child, I wondered everyday in my bathroom if I could wash away a gunk of memories, come out of it and find the world to be that perfect mould in which I'd happily fit.

Till I grew up and found ways to caste my own mould.

In my early years of teenage, I had often wanted to run away from home, even tried once or twice, packed my chattel in my school bag slung over a droopy shoulder, his image firm in my mind, I had run across the streets. But on sides of the dirt roads would be found scattered, those homes of the homeless- tents of tattered blue tarp with hungry young bellies inside. Now call me a coward if you will, but the sight would make me forget my little sorrows and love my house for whatever it was worth and make my way back into its confines by late evening.

I waited for years and a more pragmatic opportunity to break away. It came in form of graduation, a degree in computer engineering from a college with a certain cachet, away from my home town. (Yeah, I wasn't born with Jyotishacharya stamped over my forehead.) Amid people who didn't know shit about me, I got the freedom I had been thirsting for, I could be the person I had wanted to be. It actually felt nice to even visit home during holidays, once in a while with the monotony of having to live with the same set of people for years whittled away. I won't be PC about it, the family used to bore me!

I fell in love for the first time in January 2000, not that I maintain a diary where I have squiggled all dates and times of the events of falling in love and other sappy details but January 2000 is sort of hard to forget due to the girl. "Arnie when you proposed me in January 2000"; "Arnie when we began dating in January 2000"; "Arnie, when I fell in love with you and Hritik Roshan simultaneously in January 2000"; "Arnie when you wore a green sweater in January 2000"; "When we missed lectures in January 2000"; "When I spilled coffee on your notes in January 2000" (you did that a day before the semester exams bitch); "When my little cousin farted in January 2000"; "When January had 31 days in January 2000" and "When more inconsequential things that you can imagine happening, happened in January 2000."

Lavanya Kashyap, the first real girl I imagined screwing while lying in my hostel cot (I don't remember exactly whom and what I imagined screwing before her), my first girlfriend, had this cloying affinity for January 2000. True, it was time when we had newly embarked into adulthood, got the rights to vote and found it vital to have scathing political opinions, but my declaration of love for her wasn't accompanied by a series of unrelated, unforgettable events happening in that fateful month of that fateful year as Lavanya loved to recount.

It could perhaps have happened during a dragging Digital Logic lecture while evaluating a Karnaugh map or while lollygagging in the mild January sun in one of the campus' gardens, and happened in the most undramatic way, the in-a-flash comprehension that I was most likely in love. Without waiting for any propitious timing, I had told her just outside our campus gate. She had laughed at first and then quite unexpectedly had thrown her arms around me, "I love you too." was her chortled declaration which had for a moment made me suspicious about her seriousness, "and I am serious Arnie, are you?" Her pretty nostrils had fluttered like they always did when she laughed, cried or was excited about something- a unique tic.

"As serious as Prof. Sharma is about the DSA quiz tomorrow." I had told her. I remember this because Prof. Sharma had forgotten about his quiz the following day.

Lavanya had of course, sung Tune dil mera toda sanam bewafa post the quiz-less Data Structures lecture being concluded which I remember because it's hard to forget an already appalling ditty being turned into a blitheringly terrible one. You don't forget bad things anyway.

Lavanya and I, two young adults desperate to fall in love lasted three years, which was the entire time we spent in our common alma mater following January 2000. Given how unlikely we both inferred the event of us ending up together to be, our relationship was strangely steady. As a (nasty) corollary of being with Lavanya Kashyap for three years, I recall we parted in Feb, 2003 upon acknowledging that though we had genuinely loved, we loved our respective careers more than each other. She had cracked the MBA entrance and was going to study Business in some varsity down South, I had gotten a job in the States. Not to forget, "Arnie when I realized that my Dad would anyway marry me off to his business associate's son Atul Something in February 2003".

I had asked her, why had she continued to be my girlfriend then, to which she, rather disturbingly sang in response, Milti hai zindagi mein mohobbat kabhi kabhi.

I had felt sorry for Atul Something to have to hear that voice, probably for his life, and had kissed her farewell, our last.

***

Fly, fly, fly away,

We didn't get to say goodbye, goodbye.

A dreamer wrapped his fardel of dreams, with certain swag in his step after taking a phone call from that rickety instrument inside a ricketier yellow booth, bold, black letters I.S.D painted over it.

The contents of this coffin are clear as the day, I had been humming the song as I returned to my room, my job confirmation in hand. The call had been made from New York, nay, Nu York to confirm whether I had received my joining letter while I was catching up with Catch me if you can.

When I left India, I had no plans of coming back save the Christmas holidays which meant leaving my poor, pitiable siblings entirely at the mercy of our grumpy grandmother and our nearly non-existent, miserable mother.

My snooty, unhappy brother had come to see me off at the airport, even he had smiled that day, "Go bro, shag those blondies by a dozen" (a dozen? Eww!) I had been meaning to remind him about my girlfriend till I got reminded myself about my newly reinstated single status! "You are heartbroken, girls love heartbroken guys."

Was I? I guess I never got the opportunity to contemplate on my break up given the job in Videsh frenzy.

***

For starters, you'd never know why is Noo York The Big Apple (though "The City" is certainly not) and what species of metazoan on Earth is this flying rat, till a bunch flies past your ear and head, dropping what they drop precariously close to your body. And when that has happened, you'd be forced to ponder on at which evolutionary stage did the dumb pigeon resemble a grubby rat for weeks till you arrive at the conclusion- don't give a rat's ass. (A standard solution that makes life incredibly easy, nah mean?)

They say hire them young and young I was, barely 22, an eager, terrified boy from India in a place that didn't smell any better than New Delhi (not the same though, garbage in NYC is different from the garbage in Nayi Dilli.) seized by the fear of not being able to fit in.

I had purchased a copy of New York City for Beginners, a travel guide and another magazine on hip hop culture from a book stand on the Brooklyn Subway station in hopes of getting apprised of my new home, risking myself the dreaded stamp of a tourist. Though in due time one realizes if one relies on those guides, one would never cease to be a tourist in NYC. They serve you some archaic 70's shit, that's all.

I had rented a studio at Bronx for the grand Indian saving scheme planned with maximum credit in my thrifty middle class head meant I couldn't live in Manhattan where my office was, for at least the first few months or till the company provided me with an apartment there and I could live among a greater population of Outta town cats.

It had taken all of a week, for me to settle in my new apartment, learn the important Subway routes, know that Yonkers aren't from NYC (the bro up there, in the City gets mad if you don't), know the slanguage, pronounce Long Island as Lawn Guyland and basically, belong. At the end of the first week, I could be found on the humbling thoroughfare of Seventh Avenue, staring up, awed, at what would be the nemesis of many a dream in the coming years, my workplace - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Now is where I reveal to you a different side of this normal, self conscious little man. My childhood anxiety hadn't been unfounded and it had more reason to it than just family. My pursuit of being consistent with my peers had only deferred the knowledge that I had, in fact a gift that could be called somewhat rare.

In fantasy they call it the sixth sense, in reality it's merely an advanced intuition. My mind lied in that nebulous realm between guesswork and concrete knowledge; I knew things without having any direct knowledge about them. The plug in the kitchen that was going to short circuit, the high speed truck that was going to appear suddenly at the turn, my mother's sari that was going to catch fire from the lamp in the mandir, I would know those things, seconds before they took place. The latter I remember transpired when I was six years old. My mother was in our garden worshiping the Tulsi plant, an evening ritual where she would place a diya by the plant, I was in the garden too, watching her go about her work before my gaze got fixated on the lamp. The feeling was inexplicable and nothing I'd ever forget, it's like a seizure lasting for some milliseconds, I have had it so many times but I am still not sure if it ever lasts a whole second, but in that duration something switches on, reflexes alert, and I act.

Act I did back then, my legs took me rapidly towards the faucet and by the time I opened it, I heard my little brother wailing from his chair in the verandah, my mother must have turned abruptly because of his cries and that's when the palla of her sari caught fire, she didn't even realize it till the heat reached her back and I heard her shriek next. I lunged to grab the mouth of the garden hose and opened the water jet at the flames rapidly engulfing the cotton material.

She had sustained only minor burns, it was perhaps the first incident of its kind to have happened with me.

It was perturbing, perplexing even petrifying at times for it was not always intuition, sometimes it could merely be a vivid imagination of a kid convinced something terrible was going to happen, I wasn't old enough to understand the difference. Nor was I always prescient, I confess, holding a book in hand I had even walked head long into walls.

This wasn't the end of my peculiar ability. Its scope extended to academics as well and this was precisely what made me stop fearing it. I was never a nerd, but I could solve complex problems much faster than my classmates. Especially those that required trial and error. Whether it was coordinate geometry or differential equations or even balancing a Redox reaction, I could intuitively have the shortest, quickest solution. I opted for computers given my capacity for problem solving.

I had interned at a bank and in my final year, I got a chance to present my paper on Computer Oriented Risk Analysis in banking at an international conference. Tony Miller, a representative from Lehman Brothers present there had offered me a job shortly after the conference concluded.

And thus I found myself in the borough of Manhattan, on the 745 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, at West 50^th Street when the Big Board at Wall Street was gradually recovering from the slump caused by terrorist attacks on WTC in September 2001 and had been further threatened by an impending recession with the bursting of the Dotcom bubble.

But I was the dreamer, the algorithm trader, calculating when I'd move from Bronx County to the Midtown neighborhood with a job in the fourth largest investment bank about to pay me a Mooga.

We needed to simulate the economy, we needed more capital liquidity, we were to change the way how global economy was perceived, we were also to introduce eventually case studies in economics textbooks regarding what not to do, in the coming years, for we would inflate a new bubble- the housing bubble.

****

Roomal no. 2

Ria Lage Raho 😊

Arnav's peculiar power reminds me of a tamil movie where in the protagonist also had the same ability but he couldn't prevent them from happening.

Do continue soon.

All the best for the end semester exams which most of us are going through. ;-)

Can arnav prevent the events from happening?