Frustration

 FRUSTRATION 

/* Wake from your sleep

The drying of your tears

Today, we escape, we escape

Breathe, keep breathing .... */

   This was the song playing inside my mind with its harrowing tone the entire time I was in auto-rickshaw and even when the driver of auto-rickshaw was asking me for money and I was walking away as if I was a deaf. Deaf not only to him but to the world.

    It was 2nd of May, the time something around one past thirty and the sun was shining so bright over Dehradun that it hurts even to look far off in the sky. These are the first things I recall whenever I asked about my short trip to Dehradun. But I haven't told the most important detail yet : I had failed in SSB Interview for the 7th time straight. Well, let me tell the whole truth - I was screened out.

   The auto-rickshaw I was sitting in was filled with a somber silence. There were seven of us excluding driver, all screened out candidates, our bodies twisted as we were crammed along with our big bags in the small space of auto-rickshaw. The whole time I was in the auto-rickshaw I was looking outside, but I saw nothing, my head was swinging like a pendulum between two states - at one end there were immense number of thoughts and at other there was nothing, a blank.

   When auto-rickshaw stopped in front of ISBT, that song wasn't the only thing in my mind, there were thoughts in such a sheer number that to say my mind was exploding with the immense quantity of thoughts would not be a hyperbole. I was daydreaming, I was walking in trance. So, when the driver of auto-rickshaw asked for fare, and I gave him thirty rupees instead of fifty which he originally asked, it wasn't because I thought the fare was more than it should be, but the reason was simple coincidence - when I opened my purse to pay there were three ten rupee notes besides two five hundred notes in my purse.

   Three ten rupee notes were the ones I handed and before the driver could realize the shortcoming I had already crossed the road and was disappearing into the yelling crowd of people and lined buses. I had a flash of memory the next day of the auto-rikshaw driver calling me and saying something like, "Sir, less than fifty will not do.", but I suspect it being a false memory for I don't recall even now what I had said on my part.

   A bus to Saharanpur was about to leave, so I got inside it. While I was inside the gate I whished for once for auto-rickshaw driver to come grabbing me by the collar and smack in the face, of course nothing like that happened.

   All the window mirrors of the bus were smoky black and it was a pleasing relief to my eyes coming from the blazing sunlight of outside into the dark shades of insides. The bus was full with passengers - not a seat to sit on. I remember trying to fit my airport sized trolley bag into the section above the seats but failing, and then sitting beside the driver on the bonnet. When the bus started at last my left hand was locked to the iron bar standing just beside the bonnet, an old man was sitting on the right of me, and I was facing straight at the long pale faces of nearly a dozen of passengers who seem to me sleepwalking/daydreaming like me.

   A man shook me awake a while later and pointing to a black hideous object he said something like, "Is it yours?". That black hideous thing - which was because of a sharp meandering turn had slammed to the closed door - was my bag. My bag, the only thing which is the witness of and companion in all my failures. Quiety I stood up, had fallen over that same passenger because of imbalance, then lift the bag and placed it in the corner. As an afterthought I kicked the bag two hard kicks, so hard and loud for everyone to notice, and it was then I realized the inside of me was brimming with a vengeance kind of stuff. It was after that the madman stuff started to happen inside my mind.

   The old man had drifted half over to my sitting place, and only when I gave him a hard what-the-hell kind of look he did budge. With only one or two hours of sleep in the night and that overpowering wind coming through windows it was hard for me to hold onto my body and not fall asleep, but with frequent meandering turn my body thrown into this direction and that, and the gear stick hitting my bulging back each time driver shifted gears, sleep was the last thing I could have. Even still time and again I couldn't help but shut my eyes for a short while. And in the state between wake and sleep I was transporting frequently to different places. At one moment I was at SSB center hunched over the OIR question paper, then in another instant I was back at home in the same state as I was then - formal white and black, and bag hanging across my chest - and everyone was staring at me, then it was college and Ajay was sitting beside me doing practical trying hard to be serious, then come the face of this girl which keep on zooming until only the eyes remained to be seen, then there was this sensation of falling down and down.

  At some point of time I was again back at home, the sun was as bright as on that day, even inside the room it was very bright. I throw the bag at one corner, it landed with a loud thud, but that sound wasn't as loud as the kicks I then started to deliver. I kicked and kicked harder and harder, at one point the bag disappeared but I keep on kicking. And kicking. I don't know when did I come out of that trance and when did I started on imagining something different and that more violent.

   All I remember I was suddenly back in the bus but there was a screwdriver in my hand which I was smashing into the eyeballs of the bus conductor, the blood oozing out of his empty eyeballs like a fountain, the blood was falling all over me and over everywhere. And I was laughing a hysterical laugh. I had turned me into a madman. Next target was the frail man sitting beside the conductor, I tore him down into two pieces from head down to the feet with only the sheer power of my hands.

   I didn’t stop there though. I hit, botched, slithered and killed almost every passenger in the bus one after another. But some dead man keep on coming alive, first was the bus conductor who hold me down grabbing me from behind and then this stud guy whose head I had sent flying with the axe. They hit me, and I hit them, it was all going to be very puzzling. But it was a pleasure for me, for my heart which burning with anger; it was pleasure to hit, pleasure even greater to get hit back. The dream took a surrealist turn and it was just me hitting the copy of myself. I was wrestling with the copy of myself.

"Biharigarh! Biharigarhwale come to the front." the shout of conductor broke my trance. I long sigh followed to mark the end.

   Only one hour after failing at SSB I was back to my Mama's house in Biharigarh. Entangled still in thoughts which by now were far beyond my will of stopping. Bag crossed around my chest, and another on my back, I entered heaving not much because of the effort I had been through walking to there but because of the rage within me which wasn't showing any sign to subdue. Mamiji was milking the cow who had given birth the other day, I greeted her Namaste.

   "You are back." she said with a smile and her typical casualness, "Sit down in the room and relax. I am coming in ten minutes with food. Okay."

   I think I said okay but I would have just nodded, I ain't sure. First, I take off the formal white shirt and black pant I was still wearing. Looking at the dress a thought of tearing them up or burning them down crossed my mind more than once. Muddled in these thoughts, I blankly slipped into new set of clothes.

   For the next ten minutes I barely have an idea what I did. I think I drank water, and then went to washroom or maybe I didn't. It all was a trance, I was muddled inside my head with puzzling and confusing thoughts of about many things in random. I remember, for instance, looking at the old TV set and realizing that that it was the same I used to watch movies back during my childhood visits. Then I remember how one particular movie I had watched in it, that memory was kind of sweet. For some time after that I concentrated on the noises of truck and bushes running on the highway in full rush.

   At some time, it could be ten minute or twenty for all I care, Mamiji entered into the room with food. Eat, She said, and turned on the cooler which was sitting in front of me.

   I ate and the more I ate the more something uncontrollable and warm filled my heart, and by the time I finished eating I was barely making it up to held my tears back. However I managed to held them back until Mamiji didn't leave, but as soon as she was out of the room, they broke out uninterrupted like hell from the cloud accompanied with silent sobs --the husky breathing of throat as if chocked of air. This was the fourth time I cried after rejection from Interview. And though it was justifiable in past three times, this time around it was unreasonable given I had come this time after shedding every last bit of hope to get selected. The worst was all I had in my mind. I thought that without expectation I might not get hurt. But you can never know the ray of hope hiding somewhere in your hurt sneaking around without your knowledge.

   In that moment I felt I had wasted my whole life on something on which I hadn't, and that I am the worst person to ever existed on the earth, and one negative thought keep on following after another, and before long I was deep in the sea of despair. At some point of time I had stopped sobbing and fallen asleep.

   The next thing I remember is being shaken awake by Mamiji. I was hanging down by left side of the cot. It was six past something, I had slept for almost three hours. A blank and totally numb sleep, a pitch into emptiness. After a really long time I had a sleep something that empty and silent as that one - devoid of any dream (for a matter of fact I have vivid dreams while sleeping, some of which I remember clearly even after I am awake), or it could be that I had dreamed but the moment I woke up I forgot everything about it, or I was dreaming but halfway into the sleep I had stopped to, there could be any number of possibility, but at least there wasn't this lingering sensation of confusion between dream and reality which I usually have.

    Mamiji said I slept like a baby. And I said no one had thought that before and I don't think it was so. But you really do, she insisted. I remembered cracking into a really big smile and saying, maybe. We went on talking like this for the rest of the time until Mamaji and then my cousin returned hours later.

    The despair never crossed my mind again neither do the frustration. It was as if all that had happened ages ago, as if three hours of sleep had put an immense distance between this and that. This way it was all over as if it was just a nightmare. I was back to normal again.

   On 7th, after being asked almost a dozen times about my experience of this short trip to Dehradun, I felt obliged to write down what I had experienced. I didn't write this part though on that day. I deliberately skipped this whole part. But this part keep on hanging there all the time; when I wrote down this part on 10th at last, it was impossible to avoid writing it anymore.

    By the time I finished I finished writing, I felt as if I had written something of significance to me. Though even now I can't figure out what was this significant thing. But I can feel it is somewhere there.

     The day before yesterday, on a hunch I re-wrote the entire part for the blog; then edited it until a certain flow/continuity was reached – holes and snaps in memory were filled, those parts which cannot be remembered were re-imagined, somewhere a tint of drama was added. The same instant a title was thought out; "Frustration was the first word come to my mind, I however ignored it, but eventually decided came back to it. I don't know this "Frustration" hardly convey the meaning or tone of blog, but this word had this magnetic attraction to it, that other though out titles - A Quiet Kind Of Rebel, and Storming Within - seem pretentious. At last, as a principle I gave a gap of a night before posting it online. This is how the blog came into existence. 

    Talking of my intention behind writing the blog, I don’t think I myself has any clear idea of this part. It is like one instant everything make sense and the next instant nothing; which is to say, can be considered  reason enough to write the blog.