"Ok, don't listen," she said and turned away from me.
I was looking down. The floor was paved with mosaic tiles. My sister once explained to me how these mosaic tiles are made. First, they pour the white cement on the ground. When the cement is only half dry, pieces of broken stone are strewn onto the cement. It dries slowly and forms the mosaic-like surface. Sometimes they polish it to make it look like marble.
I kept staring at the floor for a few moments. She turned back and looked at me. I tossed a sheet of crumpled paper at her. She didn't respond.
She was telling me that on the street she heard someone saying that a plastic knife heated for ten seconds could kill anyone. I thought, Sure. So what? I wasn't paying much attention. But she was charged up.
"Is it so easy?" she kept asking. "Is it so easy to kill some one?"
*
All that was at 8 am today. I was barely awake. I was thinking of all the stuff I would do in the day. I’d go to the Carter Road promenade and examine the winter sea. I’d go to the station and try to figure out how many people slip on the third stair every minute.
Now it is what, eleven? The house is empty. Neelima has left. She has gone to meet her friend who lives a few streets away.
Everyone in Khar eats brown bread. Everyone can afford hair-cuts worth fifteen hundred rupees.
I am trying to find superheroes.
I was sitting in my room one afternoon and I wondered if there actually might be someone like Spiderman, Superman, Shaktiman living somewhere in our midst. Wearing plain clothes, pretending to be ordinary, capable of fantastic, superhuman feats.
*
"If a plastic knife is heated over a flame, won’t it melt? How could it possibly kill anyone?" Neelima asks. It is 9:30 at night. I am tired. I want to fall flat on my bed, cover myself with a pink bed-sheet and go to sleep as soon as I can. I have been superhero-hunting for hours. Did I find any superheroes?
Nothing ever happens in one day. Everything takes at least a week, a fortnight, a month, two months, half a year to happen.
Neelima gets up from the chair and paces around the room. "See, if I hold a plastic knife against someone’s skin, the skin will get burnt. But will the burns be so severe that they'd cause death?" she threw a pillow at me.
Ours is an arranged marriage. On our honeymoon, she said that she liked the feel of the wind blowing on her naked back. She said she liked standing naked on the balcony. It gave her a good feeling. I was watching her nervously, sitting on the bed. She asked me to join her. "I'll catch a cold," I said.
*
When we started seeing each other, engaged but yet to be married, I remember that there was a coffee shop at Bandstand which we used to favour. We had our own favourite table, mid-way across the room. Both of us could look at the sea.
The sea came rushing obsessively towards the rocks lining the shore. White foam, dirty brown sea-water.
I liked to look at her dark hair. She combed it so neatly. I could not see a single awkward, vagrant strand; everything was in place. The necklines of her dresses were sometimes lined with fine embroidery.
I said that I like her taste. She laughed and started talking of something else. Was she shy? She said that she couldn't handle praise.
"Why are you studying law?" I asked.
"Nice boys." She smiled and pointed to an apartment building which was towering above all the others. Blue, with white protrusions. "I stay in that flat on the top floor right across from the law school. From the flat I have a good view of the basket-ball court. I liked a boy; I wanted to be with him." Her eyes were lowered now. She was stirring the sugar in her coffee. "But I don't know. Maybe at eighteen it meant romance to me, maybe it meant that sweaty boy. But at twenty-three, it means nothing. I won't practise."
"No?" Some sugar had spilled on the table; I took a napkin and wiped it off. So I will have to keep my job, I thought and started accounting for the expenses.
*
What does being a superhero mean? Superheroes can look at a problem clearly and understand its root cause. They can reflect on instant solutions which don't affect imbalances. Heroes are just hyped-up good guys. They are just pale poops who can play to the gallery and not feel cheap about it. Heroes you can find at a rupee a dozen. Superheroes grow on special trees. With radiant blue branches, and fiery red leaves. They have a quaint tune running in their heads.
How does one make out a superhero in camouflage mode from a non-superhero? There are ways. Maybe, when you do a lot of things right, you unknowingly also do a lot of things wrong.
These things, the ones that you do wrong, are ordinary, common, everyday things. Things which don't even seem important to remember. Like climbing stairs, and slipping EACH AND EVERY TIME on the third stair.
Like standing in the middle of a busy street, staring at the window of a costume shop. Time for a change?
Neelima is pretty. She is healthy. She doesn't look frail or mean or sleek. In a way, she is sure of who she is.
I like that.
"Maybe the melting plastic knife exudes poisonous fumes," I say. Neelima's dark black eyes twitch with interest, she turns her head around. She is wearing a pale blue shirt, faded flowers printed on it. The first few buttons of the shirt are undone. There is a good view of her breasts. Her breasts look like oily balloons. Hmm... Actually, no. I just mean they are huge.
*
Neelima and I often went to this old single-screen cinema near our house in the afternoons.
Friday, 24th June, 2003. We bought tickets from the balding ticket-seller who sat at the counter. His eyes smiled at us. Our seats were right at the back of the movie hall.
I plopped down in my seat, and put the popcorn in the small notch in the armrest. Neelima’s seat was creaky, everyone could hear all her movements; she was quite fidgety that day. After the advertisements had played out, the lights dimmed.
I looked at Neelima. She was smiling at me but maybe thinking of something else. I took her hand in mine. A few days before, she had gone and gotten her hair curled. I don't know what had got into her. In the darkness of the theatre, some strands of her hair caught the light and were visible while others were dark and indistinct. I wrote some words on her palm with my finger. She couldn't make them out; she got very excited and asked me to write again. And again. And again. And then, she wanted to write on my palm, and I was ticklish, and she wouldn't stop. We were playing there like kids and somebody said, "Please be quiet," and I sank back in my seat. She kissed my right ear softly. I put my arm around her. She allowed my hand to graze lightly across her neck. It was a long movie.
Everything melted slowly. Everything got disfigured and faint and blurred and pale and soft. The patchy luminance of the screen lit up our faces and it felt like we were wearing masks.
*
All superheroes share a firm belief that they can save the world.
But this is too abstract. On a given street, just by looking at people, their faces, clothes, you can't figure out who believes they can change the world and who does not. I need more physical, more concrete signs.
Take a pack of playing cards. Start building a house with it. Maybe, like me, you built a structure like this:
/\/\/\/\
/\/\/\/\/\
/\/\/\/\/\/\
You have lots of "double triangle" shapes. A superhero can pass through any of these double triangles without upsetting the entire structure.
All the flying, creeping, swimming, swinging superheroes you see in comic books are just exhibiting the stunts they are good at. They save people from accidents, save people from fires, kill evil villains. But, behind the scenes they deal with our actual, fundamental problems.
Problems like suddenly waking up to a world where there is intrinsically nothing left to be happy about, to be joyful about. Everyone needs distractions, everyone needs toys, everyone needs obsessions. Living by one self and feeling strong is something nobody is capable of anymore. Maybe the superheroes of today are busy trying to raise our spirits.
Staging slapstick pranks, bizarre and novel happenings for the media to report every morning. Ensuring that national and international sports events remain unpredictable and funny. How could the fielder miss that catch, it was so simple!
Undercover superheroes role-playing like jesters? Sounds improbable?
Or, maybe, they try to improve the patchy conversations we hold with loved ones, carrying thoughts across minds. Is that what intuition is supposed to be?
*
So many destined catastrophes get averted. So many people seem to get saved miraculously. Who do you think is doing all this?
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