specks of bunkum but somehow watery

The Petrol Pump

Life was now as it had always been for Manoj. Today, as everyday, he felt perplexed by the absurdity of it all and this second, as every second, he felt, dreadfully close to his face, the big black question of "what now? what next?". From a very young age, he had been very confident and firm in his idea that god, as aloof and indifferent of a god as he was, had, although vague and veiled, an enormous goal in store for him, a legacy waiting to be made, the very existence of which separated now from death, as in, he could not possibly die without doing something extraordinary, imploding like a firework in a big blaze of light and glory before fizzling out into ash and dust. How enviable, how celebrated he would be! As a result of this perpetual anticipation of a blast, Manoj had never quite known peace. He trudged through life expecting to be baffled, to close his eyes one instant and open them the next to find himself in the lap of a sudden opportunity to shine blindingly at the world, to prove to them that the only reason he was such a dull, sulky and walled coworker that stunk of solitude and garlic was that he was saving all his movement, all his words, all his personality for that one awfully awesome blast, that blip in the hum of monotony. And now, as he stood hunched over a motorbike with a godforsaken engine that would not shut the fuck up, filling petrol in the tank of it, entirely swallowed by the dull monotony of the every day, listening attentively to his stomach gurgling, his coworkers all up in yells slandering, on duty, anyone and everyone they could think of, including themselves and each other, the cow pissing on the world loudly at a distance, the whining of a child who wanted to sit on the tank as his father filled it with petrol, the father's resigned sigh, the whirring of engines of the vehicles, ever on the come and go, the angrier of his customers' frequent "jaldi kar madarchod", now increasing in frequency, and again his stomach gurgling. He reluctantly tried to shy away from the truth that he was getting kind of old for all that but he could not. He wanted to shove the petrol-puking dumb old nozzle he was holding needlessly deep into the tank, and then his hands too, his head, his entire body. Fuck it, he was 50. Whoever said sanity comes with age!
His body was like an empty kettle beginning to boil over. None of it made sense. He frowned harder and harder, his eyebrows began to furrow more and more intensely and the dimples on either side of his chin pulled the ends of his lips further and further down. Implode he had to, he could do it now or later, during the day or during the night, as a firework or as a kettle, provoking celebration or disgust but it could not be held in anymore. He suddenly felt sixty years old, then seventy and now eighty. His knees would give out just two bikes and four buses later. But what if the fourth bus never came? What if his knees had to carry the weight of an empty kettle forever? He grew more and more agitated. He never made any sound at work but now he grumbled, no coherent words, just a low buzzing humming grrr. If anyone noticed his face, puckered tight into a knot and if intrigued, they bent down to his face, they would hear the low buzz, like a pressure cooker about to whistle, and the fourth bus would come, the kettle would boil over and his knees would finally give out, but now he stood with bow legs, hot to the touch, like a matchstick man a vain friendless boy had made, waiting for the wind to topple him over.
In reality, he was still quite intact. He did not know this because he would not open his eyes, his ears, his legs, unclutch his hands, breathe. He looked across at the booth opposite to his with the emptiest of gazes. He allowed the sun to toast his cheek, allowed the heat to evaporate his perplexity. He stared mechanically at the argument beginning to unravel in front of him and he blended unnoticeably into its growing audience. There was a man on a Rolls Royce who wanted his petrol replenished. His entire body was patterned erratically with vitiligo macules. His large spectacles with circular golden rims looks absurd and caricaturesque on his shrunken and emaciated body. There was something Gandhian and pure about his appearance that made you either absolutely hate him or be entirely overcome with a fan like fascination for him. Today, he seemed adamant on embodying the bossier side of Gandhiji and with every fibre of his lacking body, he yelled at the man behind the fuel dispenser. He claimed the employee was trying to cheat him of what he had paid for. As a regular here, Manoj knew, he always got ₹200 worth of petrol and so it had been for years countless. In the past few months, the workers there had developed a certain familiarity with this Gandhi 2.0 (which is what they called him). Eventually, they stopped him asking him how much petrol he wanted and began to fill Gandhi 2.0's fancy Rolls Royce, imported straight from Great Britain, with his permanent share of two litres. Today, as I have mentioned, was like any other day, so Prithviraj, or Prithvirai if you preferred to go by the little gold nametag on his striped blue uniform, began lazily and mechanically to fill up Gandhi 2.0's tank. Gandhiji, feeling personally attacked, got down from his bike with a dramatic sort of anger, and in a fit of rage, began to stomp around. In a speech without a single break or blip, he uttered every single gaali he had in his vocabulary that he had created and built over his tiringly long life responsibly and diligently to put to use in situations like these. Now he was a case of vitiligo, a Rolls-Royce and this fat dictionary away from Gandhi and fuck Gandhi and his mother, he could not care less. Having exhausted this precious heap of words, he paused to catch a breather and heaved in the entire atmosphere. Everyone around him, mildly suffocated, when eventually had gotten over their surprise, inquired of him the reason for such an aggravated response, for this blast (and a blast it was indeed, even Manoj was jealous). In 2.0's eyes, you could see he was ready for another round but tired and old as he was, inkeeping with his Gandhi-ness, he resigned. He said that this madarchod Prithvirai wanted to steal him of his money. Apparently, 2.0 had recently received a WhatsApp Forward that alerted all Indians about the frauds prevalent in the petrol market. It said something 2.0 did not quite understand but believed completely, something about how the money you should enter into the system should not be a whole number like 200, 500 or 100 but something approximate, deformed and pretentious like 106, 204 or 501. In his (the Forward's) opinion, the machine was rigged to display round, even and healthy numbers but it discharged petrol worth much less. Prithviraj was heavily offended and since this Gandhi was only slightly bald, he dragged him by his scarce hair to the dispenser to see all the floating dancing numbers on the register for himself that confirmed the truth so glaringly against him. Being a devoted citizen of this society of WhatsApp uncles that preach being ignorant yet confident, being delusional in being aware, he stood his ground and at the very top of his lungs, called the machine bullshit. Having gained a slight confidence from using an Angrezi gaali, he added with amplified expression and particular emphasis, "bull...shit!" as justification for his stand and they argued like cats, for twenty minutes straight.
Manoj would have been completely unfazed by such a display any other day, but today, his curiosity was at its peak and that had debilitated his sanity, crumbled up his walls, his body was a beaker with chemicals going mad inside it, bubbling, boiling, freezing, evaporating, the chain reaction of doom and he felt like a fraud chemist who having faked professionalism had landed a job in an esteemed laboratory and now, having burnt it to the ground due to some small or big blunder, stared at the ruins of the farce, baffled and awakend.
Suddenly, he was very interested in their conversation and he listened with wide ears and watched with even wider eyes, as they exchanged insults for better insults interminably. When Prithvirai called 2.0 Gandhi ka dusra avtaar, he could not hold it in anymore. Prithvirai had obviously meant it as an insult but the irony was blatant, egregious. He laughed a most unnatural and obnoxious, deformed sort of laugh and this croak, this blip, this little blast turned everyone's eyes from the argument to him. They looked at his smiling face and heard his giggles, saw the saliva frothing up at the ends of his smile and confounded, they stared at him like one stares at a baby who has just uttered his first word and a congratulatory look of surprise and appreciation overcame their expressions. Manoj could not stop. His body had been bewildered too. It had never realised Manoj could laugh and now, as his wrinkles and the permanent glower on his face struggled and failed to stunt his smile, he felt suddenly enlightened, completely renewed. He questioned nothing and understood even less but for the first time, it did not matter.
The people of this town had a peculiar tendency, a strange belief. Whenever they saw someone laugh in the centre of a crowd, they joined in with louder giggles. They sincerely believed that if you were not laughing with the laughing party, it was laughing at you. So they laughed even louder, simply to prove that they could not be made fun of and it became like a competition. 2.0, feeling encouraged, grew even angrier and his voice now accompanied a strange arrogant confidence, as if his old ears had mistaken the laughter for applause.
Manoj was not trying to laugh louder than anyone or at anyone, because he finally realised that there was not much more to laughter than big sounds and strangling your lungs. It was a simple mechanism, an obvious reflex. A Black Cloud had tunnelled his vision and all he could see was the glaring might of Now. There had been a sudden and enormous plunge in his perception and try as he might, he could not think ahead, he could not see past 2.0, the present was opaque, the reality was two dimensional and he was powerless. The Clouds encircled a small sky and did not allow him to view more than a lone cloud, a single bird and the glaring pleasantness and ignorance of the blue, he could not see the bombs dropping from the sky in twenty different countries, he could not see the smoke in the sky from the numerous fires everywhere, he could not see the pigeon that flew into and resulted in the crash of the airplane, he could not see all the kites that had met their doom today or the factories polluting the skies, the pillars of fresh buildings stabbing the clean blue expanse or any of the sadness that the sky is brimming with, all that, The Cloud ate up. All he could see was a big fat crow, a sound lazy cloud and the overpowering joy of the spring sky and he smiled. There existed nothing but the booth opposite to his. The world stopped where the petrol station ended. The busses, the bikes, the autos, they came from The Cloud and disappeared into it. All he had to do was get through every passing second and that was so easy now that he knew how to laugh. He surrendered, his knees did not give out, the fourth bus never came, there was no release, the build up had never existed and a scooty was next in line, a Honda Activa and it was thirsty for a litre of petrol.