Some would call it a life of depravity, some would call it a life under an evil sun but he just lived and gave in to ‘pleasures’ of the bottle and philosophy in response to the pain he felt, a life unto death, the candle burning at both ends, at least the last twenty years of it.
He had a happy childhood and a good enough start to adulthood but pressure did not drive him to fight back but he felt like a bullied kid when he should have acted like an adult. Instead of measured steps to counter adversities he threw a tantrum, a response contrary to the norms followed by most others. He finished his studies, rather abruptly, and dived into a life that required the expertise to deal with the usual ways of earning a livelihood, he failed miserably, if not totally. He got married, became a father but loved no one but the bottle. Smoking three packs a day he hit the bars at every opportunity and sometimes created opportunities at the expense of a ‘normal’ life.
He went to his workplace and had to deal with people, people of various types, people who almost never spoke his ‘language’ and people who knew what went where after one opened the construction set of a ‘plaything’ called life. He drank and drank and sometimes daylight told him it was time to go to work. With bloodshot eyes, reeking of booze, he could barely stand up straight. If he managed to get dressed and go to work, he would nurse a hangover all day, thinking about a chilled beer that would stop the throbbing head from exploding, or feeling the need for a shuteye in the middle of the day for stopping the bulging eyes from popping out. With a raging hangover came actual rage and people who fell on the crosshairs of his diatribe marked him instead in theirs for life. Amiable at times of sobriety he let go of volleys of radical judgments and oaths at people when suffering still, if not from a hangover but the counter-culture philosophy that had based firmly in him over the years. His wife loved him though, through thick and thin, even when he was drunk and blinded enough to run into a glass door or woke up at the end of a bender in the middle of the night and demanded food.
He became a father and only saw the little boy one day standing and then a young boy of changing heights and when he was forced to leave the bottle because of a freak event, he found him a boy of fourteen, an alien but made of his own flesh and blood; an estranged son who had only two feelings for his father – fear and hate. He also found his life in total shambles and whatever he had had once, gone like pee leaves the bladder after a hearty drinking session. His wife still loved him though.
He stayed sober and tried a new approach to life. He found people more unbearable than the drunken days, his rants in public started coming back. People didn’t fight back after a radical lecture from him, too aware of the hypocrisy that dictated their own lives. He started again and this time he drank till his last breath or penny, he ran out of breath first. At the point of departure, he felt rapture, a relief at last, from a world he had come to loathe with the passion of the righteous. He was leaving it without wealth, without a loving progeny or a host of grieving friends but he didn’t care. But on his dying seconds, he looked at his wife and saw sparkling beads of love in her watery eyes and realized that he was loved till the very end, loved still by the person that mattered most. He desperately wanted to cling to life. He died, a man in debt.
Dhaka
28th January 2015
© S M Shahrukh and Traces of Orange, 2015
traces of orange 