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, 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

view from the approaching policemen; when he first experienced a mixture of fear, excitement, and the limitless possibilities of the new mental state that he had entered.

And then, in no particular instance, everything drowned into the mundane as in quicksand. His car was now merely something Ayush used for moving back and forth between house and work, work and house. His friends, the rare ones that hung about, occupied a fungible and insipid space in his life. His wife of fifteen years was just his wife of fifteen years. Not only did Ayush feel unhappy, he was unhappy that he was unhappy, as though his feelings were disproportionate and unwarranted. This reaction was conditioned into him. When as a child, he once whined about being hungry, his mother told him to think about the starving children on the streets. When tired, she reminded him of the people who toiled away at farms without rest, their poverty like a sack of lead that reverberated with each cling of their sickle on the ground. When depressed, of the hopeless, waifs, strays, and orphans, and the mental anguish they faced. “Think about all those people who are less fortunate than you,” Ayush’s mother said. As though his unhappiness was a product of his privilege and not a fixture of the human condition.

Despite this, there was not a single thing in his life which he could point to and say, ‘this, absent this, or having this one thing in abundance, my life would feel more fulsome.’ He had no cancerous

tumours to remove, no balmy place he wished to move to, no higher position in his job to aspire to, no persistent dream to actualize. Instead, unhappiness was something that pervaded every instant of his life, like a thorny bed that caressed his face every waking moment. Ayush thus believed that his drinking was more a justified reaction to a malaise he endured than a disease in itself; a corollary of a life which demanded nothing invigorating. A life that he could not conclusively determine to be too short or too long since time is never readily intelligible nor favourable to those like him intellectually and spiritually under-stimulated, prey to the gaping mouth of ennui which swallows its victims with the utmost

precise care in never rearing its head even at that final bend before it pounces. And with this belief Ayush could never progress, as the belief itself became a barrier against all attempts at resolving the treacherous and self-implosive conditions of his life and character.

Ayush felt as though something inside him was regressing, not emotionally or psychologically, but in a way that corroded that implicit inscrutable buttress immanent in all creatures capable of excruciating self-reflection –– that set of defence mechanisms, emotional exit protocols, and unadopted belief templates at any moment held in reserve should irrevocable fissures be discovered in one’s

extant creed –– upon which he from a zit-popping inchoate-wisdom-toothed-age stood fortified to brace against everything that life washed upon his shore.

His drinking thus remained the only thing that granted him enough lucidity –– while admittedly exacerbating his health –– to provide some perspective into his life and its inevitable end, which no one but he, and perhaps Nakul, could see.