Lilah's Virtual Graffiti.

"Eh Lilah, eh....eh Lilah" someone on the bar counter said in loud voice, which was near to a scream. Bright lights of yellow, blue and red color were bouncing off and on the surfaces. People were standing on the bar counter Lilah herself couldn't see clearly who was calling out her name. Suddenly a hand from the crowd grabs her wrist tightly and yanked her towards a bald person; he pulled her towards his mouth. Lilah's expression dramatically changed from a smile to disgust, she could smell heavy stench of Country made liquor on him, and the camera was placed in such a way that I could observe each and every movement and expression of Lilah. She tried to free herself from the bald eagle's hold but her bony stature didn't gave her strength to make herself free from the bald man.

Seeing herself helpless she asked the guy "What do ya want?" to which he didn’t replied at once, he waited for few seconds and kept her leaned on the bar counter suddenly he pulled her closer and kissed on her lips, she again gave a defeated effort to free herself and tried to yank his hand away but all seemed to be futile now. In all this commotion, bottle of Country was knocked off from the counter. Every movement between the two of them stopped for a minuscule second and he let her go off the grip. She retracted back to a safe distance and tried to gauge what will happen now? In the meantime the guy picked up a salt cellar from the counter and threw towards, Lilah but his condition didn't allowed him to be precise like an eagle, the bottle flew in the mirrors behind the counter and there was loud tinkering of glass slabs on which once liquor bottles were resting. Everything went silent the music stopped but...the lights continued to bounce off the surfaces but they were now more murkier and obscure on the counter. I was not able to see the guy for few seconds there were many people crowding in front of the counter and all the commotion made me rise up from my chair and i tried to see by getting close to my screen but nothing was clear. I activated a different camera which I had on the roof of counter which gave me the view of the bottle rack which was directly behind the place where Lilah was standing and where all the commotion was happening. I checked my camera what all I could see was bald man, being dragged to the back door and was shouting Lilah, Lilah.....How much do you charge??? Just for once Lilah.....Lilah....don't let them take me away...!! the back door opened and closed with the silent thud and in an instant bouncers were back to their place near the dark corners of the bar and stood with their back against the red walls of the bar.....the music started again and lazily the lights started bouncing again from the pale red and yellow walls of the esoteric darkness mixed with smoke. Again people lazily started to move to the tunes of Bollywood songs on strong and shrill sounds of music. Everything resumed to normal as if nothing has happened Lilah was standing there on the bar counter observing the psychedelic chaos, she usually used to work late night but that night was different there was someone to cover her shift today-Manoj, Manoj was there today to cover up for her. He used to live near the bar in the slums. He was doing double shift today for Lilah and it was not for the first time he had been doing a favor to her.

The camera is focused on the bar counter, where Lilah was getting rid of her dirty apron and greeting Manoj with a smile, directly looking him in his eyes but they were bland of any kind of expressions, but Manoj had a glint of joy in his ones when he saw Lilah greeting her. Upon seeing him she immediately dropped her graze and made herself busy in untying her apron and again looked up again to see Manoj across the counter giving a familiar smile with his crooked lips. She saw him again and thanked him for the favor he was giving her. He budged in between and told her to stop thanking him and made her leave early by waving a goodbye, he started tying his apron and was still staring the door after she had gone out of it as if he's still picturing her somewhere near the door. He started working on the orders and still smiling at the last fresh memories of Lilah. In the meantime he was busy gathering the shards of glass from bar counter in short while he resumed his work and started taking the orders.

Back at chawl Lilah entered her room which is scarcely decorated in a modest fashion, she went in bathroom and splashed water on her face. Her eyes were red and hands were trembling, she tried to rub soap on her face and rubbed the lather vigorously, she tried her best to get rid of any left smear of smudged lipstick and residues of the past night. I picture her in the bed then, she had a single bed in the corner of the room and which was aligned to the wall she had her face towards the wall and staring in the void of darkness. She was curled up in a ball silently with the wall. The camera's focus goes off and the lights dim and darkness is all around. There are just low muffling glutted sounds of the Lilah from corner of the room. she was thinking about the last the similar incidents of firsts of the first times she had a thrashing from her father at the age of 18 for coming home late from school and for the first time she came to "The City of Dreams" and she had to sleep on railway platform when her uncle didn't picked her up from the station, while he was drenched in the salt water lying there on the beach and brain drenched in brownish liquid of eternity, her first day on work when she saw girls being objectified on the dance floors of the bar. Everything was still fresh in her mind as if it have had happened in the recent past it’s been a year now that she was in this city but every day was still anew to her. With every past day, her dilemma grew where, She still didn't knew whether to be intrigued or reject the thought of hers to be present there. She turned in her bed and started staring in to void of darkness. She ruffled her pillow and made her fluffy and tried lay her head on it and gave another futile effort to sleep but soon after these bouts with sleep she gave in tried to put a flank with the Avil pills. She took the pills from the drawer of the dressing table and  pulled out 4 tablets, popped in her mouth and swallowed them through her dry throat but she was unable to that and immediately the gag reflex kicked in and they out there again on her tongue making a sour gooey paste she immediately ran to the kitchen and drank water directly from the tap. She kept her head on the slab and tried to rest a bit, her heart beat normalized and she started to relax. Soon things turned dingy and memories turned into soggy images. At last things ended for that night there and then with those four pills on the kitchen floor of chawl.

Next day camera turns on again detecting some movement in the kitchen, she wakes up with a head ache in the wee hours of noon and tries to think what all happened yester night the memories were hazy and confusing but she came to senses and slowly memories starts receding like released water from a floodgate. The first person came to her mind in these scrambled chain of thoughts was the guy in a blue Larsen and Tubro uniform shirt who was one of the regulars of Lilah's customers. Something was odd, this guy, he was one like regular customers who tried to hit on Lilah once or twice or at least tried to touch her in one way or other but, this guy never really did anything with her. He hardly ever talked to her other than giving order for drinks and a smile to greet her and intermittent thank you's for his orders he was nice to her always and never took any step make her uncomfortable. She used to sit with this guy whenever he requested her to share drinks with her and all those time when he used to sit with her there was silence between them. They used to just sit there and see the colorful lights dancing on the tattered walls of the bar. Except the times when he had bout of fights with his wife when he used to tell Lilah each and everything what happened and why she lashed up on him. Lilah was like a shadow of him to who, he could talk everything without having a fear of getting judged. She also was mesmerized by the words he used to choose to tell her things which were too refined for her and sounded as if someone is reading poetry to her. She sits there silently and listens to him and gave responses at intermittent intervals. There was sorrow in his eyes, unfulfilled desire of acceptability was kindling somewhere in him which made his eyes go wander at people in the bar as if he's trying to find some object of satisfaction. The only times he had smile on his face and sounded soulful was when he talked about his kids who were still young, and studying in school. He used to tell her proudly there latest achievements at school and told her about how they used to play together when they were younger but soon the his thoughts turn gloomy and he stops speaking about kids she used to wonder why?But she never dared to ask him, she thought it was better leave him there on the good thoughts to make him drink less, so she could spend some more minutes with him. She too had a dream someday that she would have some of her own but now in her midlife crisis she was still holding time and her dreams in different hands and they both were evaporating like a spirit and leaving things cold on the surface. With this guy’s narrations she was living an illusory life of her own. It was not that she had fallen for this guy it was just the aspiration of hers to acquire the life which he had. 

For Lilah, it was hard to think of that she will be having any dreams after what had happened to her a year back. The gusts of sand were settling down now each day things were getting clearer, goals were becoming decipherable. In midst of all the turmoil Manoj was lost somewhere in the folds of imaginative corners of gloomy thoughts, he was just an ordinary being existing in her world sustaining on the discretion of “The Bar” away from the transient lights behind the counter.

My Veiled Shack.

Lost in the transitions of life and chaos of the saw dust and concrete powder, sludge, sweat and iron bars I sit here in amidst of all this in the corner of this dingy dark room with hole in its roof which is shared by light and air to come in but I am still not sure after spending one year here in this room whether the things which come in here goes out or not because everything becomes still and numb when I come here.

I am Kristine Sharma, you may be thinking about my name…that’s a question I get usually from people as I come from a Brahman family and this name is an unusual one and as my name is unusual the story behind is as usual as it can be. My mother used to work as a maid for a college professor back when we used to live in Bihar and I was a young kid when he suggested a name for me “Kristen” which was a name of a star in a sitcom popular in those days which he used to like. So out of gratitude to the doctor she kept my name Kristen and I was left with a catchy name for my life. Me and my classmates could not even pronounce my name correctly they used call me “Cirstan”. It was after my fifth birthday when I came to know the correct pronunciation of my name from another employer of my mother who was a person who used to build buildings and he frequently corrected my speech and taught me the phonetics of English words.  I was happy to learn something new but it didn't lasted long soon she left her job to relocate to new city which she was attracted to for a long time- the city was Mumbai. It was my father’s new job which took us there it was a role of a construction worker which took us from Bihar to Mumbai. At the age of 7, I was in this vast city of dreams and chaos; it was entirely a different universe for me where I was just minuscule part of it.

I lost the sense of size and magnanimity of inanimate feelings as the things happening around me were pretty big and magnanimous. The change was too radical for a person coming from a small town of Bihar. Everything in this city was in excess; cars, motors, people and buildings everything. I had instantaneously fallen in love with the tall buildings of Mumbai I could see them for hours and hours together and smile at them admiring the gigantic builds. And moreover the building on which my father was working on was one of those big and high rise buildings. My evenings after school used to spent on the unfinished floors of the buildings playing around and sometimes swinging my legs in air from the 25^th floor. I loved the air in my hairs and on my face it used to take me in an alternate reality away from my dingy room and gloomy thoughts in it. 

I used to sit there for hours together and try practicing the phonetic lessons of builder guy. I couldn't practice it down in my room as I was already famous and teased for my foreign name an over the top if I would pronounce words like a foreigner , people around me would have laughed at me. I already had stopped going for playing as children of my age used to tease me by twisting my name around and making fun of me. I used to stay back at dungy room and help mother out to prepare porridge and keep home-based liquor drinking place up and running. Yes I forgot to tell you we had a small side-business of ours own which my father and mother used to run which was a small drinking place inside our shack, in the morning it used to serve as a kitchen with a removable stove and utensils and at night it used to serve as a sitting area for fellow laborers, bright colored curtains would go up and decorate the aluminum walls and television used to tuned at Chitrahar (an Indian music program). I could listen clearly from the thin curtains as I was not allowed to cross the curtain in the evening time, I would listen people talking about their sex lives and talking about their accomplishments of fucking whores from different states across India the person having highest number of count would be the one talking the most for that group, sometimes I used to listen some of the men speaking some of the poems and songs which were the ones they heard in some movie or they heard while travelling in buses. Sometimes I would listen loud quarrels which were very common, people used to beat each other up on petty issues but next day again they would bond with each other as if nothing would have had happened the previous night.  Usually when these quarrels would happen , my father used to escort me and my pregnant mom outside the shack and stop inside to stop the fight, sometimes he used to succeed sometimes he used to get thrashing for getting in the middle of a fight. And for those times our drinking place remained shut down and it would open again after a week or so, again things would start functioning smoothly. We were under constant threat of police raids of unauthorized drinking place but we used to have an arrangement with the people living in the outer lane near the boundary wall to raise an alarm if any cops tried to approach our shack which was unlikely to happen till last month,until one of our neighbors reported our side business. And as a result father had to be in lock up for two days and we had to pay three grands to the cops to get him out. Things proceeded on and after a brief stay and on persistent requests of fellow laborers father opened the shack for people  to come in and have last drink of the day which was roughly after about a month when all that happened.

I used to miss all the chaos in the shack for a month when our shack was closed to people, I used to miss Rathore uncle’s poetry, Prasad uncle’s travel stories, and nonetheless Pratham uncle’s adventure stories which all knew were incidents from Hindi movies where he used to replace actors with himself, but then also people used to love his stories and so did I. Once again our shack got lightened up with jovial tranquil moods of fellowmen I again started to enjoy the conversations and moods of all the ones there behind the curtain. I used to imagine myself time and again on the other side of curtain where I could have shared the stories of my life, but the question of matter was that I didn't had any of those stories of my own neither like Pratham uncle I used to watch movies. I just used to sit there beside the curtain staring at the wall and listening intently to what everyone was talking about and responding to them with laughter or raising eyebrows to respond to the fascination. Still people couldn't speak my name correctly but I had got accustomed to be called “Cirstan”, I have stopped correcting people but I have kept my self-training on, and these days I am also learning how to write in English I do miss my village back in Bihar but memories of the dusty lanes are fading away in the smoke of my shack, they have taken refuge in a corner of the shack somewhere behind the curtain where I can only feel them for momentary periods but can’t experience them.

 I don’t know whether losing me in the shack is a right thing or not but the shack, the 25^th floor’s breeze and this magnanimous city is giving me enough space to grow. I will keep on staring on the bright curtains for a long time and try to build some stories of my own with what all I have in my life.