FICTION
EDWIN
All That Falls, Bound to Break BY RAHUL EDWIN Ayush returned home every day with a broad smile and an open offer for a welcoming embrace. His bloodshot eyes, gravy-stained hands, and shirt reeking of sweat and alcohol meant that no one took up this offer. Ayush would stumble home, alarming the neighbours with a clang as he entered, collapsing over the foot rack. His wife, upon hearing this, would swear under her breath, which she made sure that he heard. On one particularly irritable day, she called him a second-rate husband, a second-rate father, and a second-rate alcoholic. And to this, Ayush replied, that there are no second-rate alcoholics, only beer alcoholics, wine alcoholics, toddy alcoholics, and whisky alcoholics. Ayush failed to specify which kind he was, and neither his wife, nor his son, Nakul, were equipped to find out. This nuanced branching of alcoholics, which Nakul had previously overlooked, felt to him as a sort of spiritual revelation his father had bestowed upon him, since it made Nakul question whether there were other dimensions of the human nature he had left unexplored. For instance, Katherine Driscol, a character from John Williams’ Stoner, describes herself as being “desperately unhappy” in a rare moment of vulnerability. What other modes of unhappiness are there? Can one experience lonely unhappiness, torpid unhappiness, polite unhappiness, or even, daresay, happy unhappiness? Nakul didn’t know what kind of an alcoholic his father was but found little difficulty classifying his father’s unhappiness: Ayush was quietly unhappy. Unlike other drunkards, who were pugnacious,
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irritable, and exuberantly loud, Ayush would try to hide his emotions, quite unsuccessfully so, as Nakul thought, since Ayush’s unhappiness was apparent to Nakul as daylight. Yet, no one else acknowledged it, almost making Nakul question whether what he saw was real. When alone, Ayush would fall into bouts of muffled weeping, almost at will, as though he concentrated all the lugubriousness he could muster during the day and then released it in his solitude. This world of Ayush’s inarticulable sadness, quite apart from the realities of Nakul’s world of school and crushes and raucous street playgrounds, was one that only he seemed privileged to every time he peeked into his father’s study. When other kids escaped into the fantasy worlds of Panchatantra and video games, Nakul was dragged into the harsh realities of adulthood.
⁂ There is much to be said about Ayush’s childhood too. When Ayush was younger, he’d found happiness in everything: climbing moss-infested walls; plucking cherries, guavas, and tamarinds with his sister; holding dragonflies up by their wings to make them lift tiny stones; exploring the “haunted mansion” near his house; bathing in the rain on his terrace with a plastic grocery bag over his head, his eyes peering through two crude circle cutouts. As Ayush grew older, his happiness gradually receded to include only new experiences. His first car, first kiss, the first time he got drunk — that fateful evening by the beach when he and his friends dragged themselves, tipsy and blurry eyed, out of
