The fly has been roaming all around my tiny room since early in the morning. It goes round and round, all over, settles on a surface for a brief stint and then flies off again -- resilient, persistent, relentless. From whence does it get so much verve? A bottomless tank of evil energy. It’s such a tiny creature after all, defying logic.
Like an unmanned military drone, it circles my small breakfast table, as if contemplating a bombing mission.
My breakfast plate has a paratha and some bhaji, very simple, not the alleged “terrorists” of a frontier town.
But it moves perniciously about that plate, checking for elements contrary, in case, to what its master may approve of.
Sorties continue, it inspects greedily the contents of the plate, wants to put venom in the mix, the venom of the “overlord.” I need an old newspaper.
As I look for an old newspaper, my mind drifts to thinking about the fly. In which dump was this malevolent creature born? There is plenty of garbage strewn all around the place where I live; the whole city is a gigantic garbage dump.
People don’t think twice before disposing their garbage.
They throw their kitchen waste, dirty dish-water frothy with soap and grime, right from the verandah adjoining the kitchen -- scant respect about where the missiles are headed or on whose head the cucumber peel would land or whose clean office-going attire would the dirty water sully. Not their problem, apparently!
This is already a city of bricks, sand, stone, and concrete; greens are mostly only in its people’s memories. Construction of more concrete blocks go on everyday -- burgeoning population, people getting wealthier, the middle class wants its own “trees” in the jungle.
And walking along these construction sites, one would see piles after piles of various construction material just by the roadside.
Sidewalks made for pedestrians have been appropriated, they are storage spaces now. Even the rubbish from such sites are piled in mile-high heaps.
And on these garbage heaps are dumped banana peels, the stinky skin of a jackfruit, empty cans of soft drinks, broken bottles, and the edges of the glass bottles staring menacingly at the passers-by. Plastic wrappers of various colours adorn the mountains of trash, thrown at the whim of the users. And the mountains grow every day.
Nobody wants to clean up, no one bothers to take the trash away, not with any haste at least.
Drains overflow onto the streets, a grimy yellow-green-black liquid spreads on the streets, remnants of that toxic liquid people take home stuck to their trouser legs or the falling lengths of the saris.
A hellish atmosphere of putrefaction. Was the fly born in such rotting refuse of the city?
In today’s world of online media, it is often difficult to find an old newspaper. Oh, there is one! I fold it and make it like a policeman’s baton, ready to pounce. But where has that blasted fly gone?
I go around the room, checking the nooks and crannies, looking for the fly, and my mind ventures into speculations. Maybe it has flown away from my room and is now resting on the wall of a government office. A fly on the wall -- the irony is not lost on me. Maybe it is looking at the clerk and checking out the thickness of the envelope going into his secret drawer.
A few hours later, when the clerk, after finishing his ablutions and subsequent mid-day prayers, sits with his tiffin carrier and arranges his lunch of rice-daal-bhaji-meat or fish on the table and gets ready for a sumptuous meal, maybe the fly will come down from the wall and settle on his food.
Give it a further dose of its toxicity! And that added venom will give him toxic dreams full of colours, blackish red, like congealed blood.
Maybe the fly will then go on venturing into new places, maybe the den of criminals where they think of looting, pillaging, snatching, raping, and having a drink before wreaking havoc.
The fly circles the rim of their glasses with colourful liquids, making sure they are in tune with the hell that they would create.
It is easier to snatch away the last plot of land from the weak than paying for it! This seems to be the zeitgeist of our times.
In my mind’s eye, I see the fly trying to enter the nostrils of a streetwalker as she tries to sleep in the daylight hours, circling around the ears of an addict in half sleep, a morose demeanour, buzzing into him the news of his impending death, disturbing the sleep of a snatcher trying to snooze, stopping his conscience from talking any sense into him.
I see the fly resting on the table where a man who had stolen a mountain of money from the bank settles for a lavish meal, goading him on for bigger loots.
I come back from my daydreams and find the creature circling the rim of my plate … crash! I bring down my baton and I miss the fly but not the plate.
The plate, now more than one piece of ceramic, lies on the floor; the glass after trying to settle on the table, wobbles a bit before crashing into the bhaji mixed with broken pieces of the plate, creating a dirty concoction of “vegetable soup.” I see the fly swimming in that soup.
I sit down on a chair, resigned. The rest of the day doesn’t bode well, the rest of life, well, nobody knows.