Short Story: Managing the Pieces

Kannan Baskar narrates a powerful story on the pieces of life we are always surrounded with and are trying to put together for survival.

Editor’s Pick

This piece is available for free reading this week

The Voice

However pointless it might seem, this tangled pursuit of mine through a maze of intersecting walkways happens to be sanctified. It will culminate at the funerary temple’s central shrine, as promised. Some will eventually realize there is more to me than this maze and compulsive journey. A mythical object, they call me, a distribution between the corporeal and the ethereal; therefore, overlaps shall be the rule in my retelling that is to follow, while perspectives—like experimenting lovers in springtime—will behave as functions dependent on n possible personal states.

Projected onto the shapely unevenness of a bas-relief sculpture and my eternal locomotion paused, I find myself, now, in a battle scene from the Bhagavata Purana—a thousand-armed king and his Asura army are no match to a flute-wielding Krishna. The sculpture is not just stone and posture; from my entrapped self’s viewpoint, smoke suffuses the wafer-thick atmosphere. In the haze, amid Iron-age mustiness, I hear a voice:

“In these chiseled confines of volcanic reality, you’ll discover the finite set of patterns that’ll enliven all lies.” Then, it continues with another twisted prophecy, “in between the notes of Raga Desh and its ornamentations, you’ll sense her.”

“I don’t see her; who is she?” I yell back.

“She’ll present herself in the fragments of a sensory collage,” the voice postulates, “assemble them; she’s realized in that chore! But I swear by the Sudarshan Chakra and its 108 serrated edges; she has to be with you, even now, even when imperceptible.” The voice does not cajole me into thinking about this “She” person; instead, the countertenor range incites a migrainous vertigo. In the grip of a dizzy spell, admixed with the worst headache ever, I couldn’t help shouting, “Shut up.”

“I sense a skeptic,” the voice roars, “don’t believe me; she is not a story fit for the fretful. But you’ll be shocked to know she is ubiquitous.”

I explore ways to disable my hearing apparatus. A pair of Micro Cup Shaped Alligator forceps would come in handy; theoretically, a self-extraction of my ossicles is possible, but it would be too blind an approach, more messy than surgical. I try performing a massive Valsalva maneuver to rupture my drum. But my efforts to increase middle ear pressure fail, and I end up contorting my face into an octagonal prism and coughing out all that sweet pressure. A Cochlectomy would be an impeccable choice, but the waitlist at my Otologist’s office is so long that if we line up all the hopefuls along the equator, the human chain will traverse the Earth 2.75 times. Before I could think of another procedure, the voice began to rumble again: “Fictive thoughts are meant to be patterned, not categorized. But I’ll classify it for you, and remember, this is a dilution to make the process seem humanly accessible. The stories have been broadly speciated into two kinds: there’ll be the chronicles of your exploits in a foreign land of foggy mirrors and pasty smiles, and these offerings will be interrupted by episodes that narrate your accomplishments in other parallel lives.

Don’t worry; you won’t get lonely in the narratives; she’ll ooze in to entangle all plot threads and knot and clump them up with your dreams, dreads, and desires. But when she sets them all in motion to the tune of the flute, amongst the meditative whirls of a relentlessly latticing plot, you’ll spot her in her figural form; it’ll be a moment of specular stillness, clarity will tear through the blur, do look into her pupils then, you’ll get to see those restless waves smudging your unthought known.”

“Idiot,” I shout again; civility must sometimes be breached, “mere sound and fury don’t make narratives! Who is this omniscient ‘She’? Why would I have to assemble her collage? Why should I care about these stories?”

Finally, the voice quit.

But what would I do with these stories if they were indeed faithful? Should I float around with them, with the least bit of resistance? I could likely find myself marooned one day in an obscure narrative postcode. Even if this new land were to promise me lotus-eating narcosis, crystal-clear waters, or shingle beaches, won’t these bloody stories remain the fluff they inherently are? What is the point? Do I have a say?

12″ x 12″ x 12″ Boxes

Mr. Olson was at the door, not the movers, who were scheduled to arrive at 3 PM. He had bothered to trudge up the curved staircase on his prosthetic knees to wish me luck. A careful observer would’ve gleaned a wince concealed in his twitching forehead furrows; I wasn’t one.

“We’ll miss you, sir; the missus still remembers the Biryani you cooked for us.” Mrs. Olson had passed away the year before. His ponderous mannerisms and the ever-arched eyebrows made one think that he was about to pop a question; on the contrary, he was a man of answers. He handed over a Blu-ray disc that I’d lent him last fall, Ray’s Charulata, and turned his attention to the 12″ x 12″ x 12″ boxes piled on one another, whose longitudinal edges lay translated as obtuse umbral exaggerations. With a divisive intent, they’d consumed and carpeted my space, darkening areas that needed light and ignoring the ruminating corners, which seemed deprived without furniture. “I’m yet to watch The Music Room,” he said.

“I’m only moving to Papillion, Mr. Olson; we can watch it on the big screen this summer at Film Streams.” I lied.

“Bye, doctor, say hi to your nieces for me.” He had never met them but spoke as if he had known them for years. Midwest courtesy can seem pointless, at times even creepy, to the cosmopolitan ego, but these overtures assume relevance when an early October snowstorm blankets the streets, immerses the yet-to-be-harvested corn, and turns the dreams of a population of 475,000 to the night screams of a cataractous Red Fox.

It was six in the afternoon, and an hour-old text from an unknown number said, “We’re running late, got held up in another job at Council Bluffs.” The movers had a name that seemed to suggest their inferior resources and was even a subtle nod to a Jerome K. Jerome book, but to me, it implied frugality, a quality I was forced to acquire that year. A deep yellow permeated the semicircular room, and my Torchère lit up the space like it had never done before in the company of its fellow foot soldiers.

I realized that fidgeting or pacing about wouldn’t conjure up the movers, took a deep breath, acknowledged the smell of bad choice, and slouched onto my dust-laden sofa. After three years of hard labor, the leather three-seater had acquired a skin degeneration: splotches of all hues assembled themselves along networks of wrinkles and fine creases, which spread even into those depressions engineered by my backside, but its arms had retained their gloss and were interacting with the lamp’s light, which was now fanning out of the shade’s open top, like arms extended, edging on to lit hollows of a distant Diwali’s clay lamp to elicit faceless smiles that wandered, only to be quenched in bright accidents, like those found in her Bindi, powdery and large. She wore one such smudge of crimson in my dreams between her eyebrows, and it replaced her entirely when the dark became insufferable.

The movers arrived exactly 23 hours and 42 minutes late the next day. The lamp and the leather sofa were the only pieces of furniture I retained in that move. I let the rest take on their independent narratives like sons bidding adieu to the immersed ashes of their fathers in a polluted Ganges. Some tears were obviously shed for the Tempur-Pedic and that oak dresser, which badly needed a mirror.

Rock Formation and Object Permanency

I’d deleted most of the photos on my computer. Pictures that outlasted were a faceless bunch: some were sunsets, and others were random snaps of things. My favorite shot from those years was one of a grayish rock formation that jutted out as a mass of coarse-grained stone to point at the sky, revealing an undersurface of mineral deposits and a generous splatter of greenish-yellow lichens. I had cropped off her gloved hand in the left lower third to fill the entire frame with the stone.

The picture was from our trip to Lake Tahoe. We had gone snowmobiling. It was early summer, but the resorts were still open; the snow cover excited the inexperienced eye. When we reached the trail’s highest point, the instructor halted the tour; we were supposed to marvel at the view of the Sierra Nevada, but my thoughts were with the steep gorge; it was a “V” shaped drop of dramatic jaggedness, each pointed piece of stone seemed angrily effective like the diminished seventh chords buried within a late Beethoven Sonata; they promised pain—the dismembering kind. My rumblings seemed a private affair, though; the rest of the group appeared okay; she was, in fact, ecstatic, busy clicking selfies. I closed my eyes to calm things down and tried to take deep breaths in the way pregnant women do on TV before “pushing.” I pulled my mirrorless camera out to hold on to something solid and kept clicking randomly; I wasn’t even sure if the gadget was switched on or the lens cap was off.

“What the hell are you up to; are you alright.” I heard her yell. “Look at this rock…take a shot of this.” It was all a blur; I just clicked, pointing the lens towards her voice.

She was thrilled that day, talking to strangers and even planning a ski holiday for the coming winter. The outdoors rendered her buoyant; those open spaces with their depths and heights should’ve promised her something I never quite got.

Anxiety—Intellect’s Oblique Asymptote

Dusty winds precede the monsoons in May when clumps of low-pressure areas keep cropping up in the Bay only to fizzle out before they furnish their promised theatrics. For Calcutta’s Pediatrician population, it is the time for Greenstick fractures, pink eyes, and those rare Corneal scars when they must call their Ophthalmology colleagues begrudgingly. But Mrinalini’s problem was not wind related.

“Two great banyan trees have been downed in Shibpur,” claimed a voice emanating from a Murphy radio in a narrow lane off Chitpore Road, where fishmongers usually sell Hilsa and wherein a Pediatrician with a sickle-shaped scar on his forehead found himself at the threshold of a palatial compound whose arched gateway was flanked by marble griffins with their tail-ends pointing towards the Hooghly River and the Eden Gardens, respectively. He had never done a house visit before but had to do this one.

The doctor’s mentor, Prof. Basu, had convinced him for the house call. “You have to go; do it for the girl; my wife tells me she could bring our next Fields Medal.” Like fresh Atlantic Salmon served in a Calcutta restaurant, the justification smelt of bourgeois manipulation. But Prof. Basu was not one to be irked, for he was more famous for his intricate vindictiveness than his Pyloromyotomies.

The Colonial mansion was the Roy family’s, built during the troubled times of Lord Curzon by Mr. Shoumik Roy, whose father and grandfather had helped the East India Company with the Opium trade (the business tycoon had even maintained a menagerie of exotic animals then, but his treasured possession was a diamond-studded longcase clock, which was cremated along with his earthly remains, as per his wishes). It was well known that one hundred and twenty-three members of the Roy household were within the property, and twenty-three were immigrants from Bangladesh.

Mr. Sourav Roy, the great-grandson of Shoumik, had converted the old courtyard and the rose garden into stables; this reorganization meant the loss of all the ten-tiered fountains designed by the French landscape architect Varda. Shoumik was especially fond of them for their phallic finials, whose apical orifices spouted out granite Greek gods. The stables were organized like an Equestrian facility with Vets, Farriers, and Trainers; they housed Arabian horses, Przewalski’s horses (gifted by the Kyrgyz businessman Babanov), and some of the best feral horses in India, which competed in the Delhi Spring Polo season.

Sourav’s daughter, Mrinalini Roy, a sixteen-year-old bespectacled girl who wore her hair in a double ponytail, was the brightest adolescent in Calcutta (the family believed so—vehemently). They never failed to mention that she could recite the Meghadūta in reverse. Since Mrinalini had started working on her thesis, she had developed bouts of vomiting and even had an episode of seizure.

The doctor could only examine his patient in the presence of the parents in one of the house’s hanging verandahs, and nurses were not allowed. He was offered biscuits and puffed rice snacks, which he declined with a mild reprimand.

“Doctor Babu, my daughter has the fits. Is it Durga ma that has descended into her?” was the mother’s polite inquiry, who wore a sleeveless blouse, and a dull blue silk sari made from the larvae of moths.

A Bihari maid whispered in Bhojpuri, “Babu, Memsab is in love with a Muslim boy.”

Mrinalini’s lips were parched, and her eyes had dried up like a temple pond on an auspicious day. She also wore a dark navy Baseball cap, faded on the edges, and the letters “N” and “Y” were superimposed over one another. Just beneath the cap’s brim were visible sores on the forehead at various stages of healing, and around these were fingernail markings distributed like whorls of petals around a central structure of importance. “She’s been wearing this damned cap since she started working on her thesis.” This was her dad, Sourav.

“I need some water,” Mrinalini mumbled with the quavering vigor of an overworked cow, but she couldn’t keep the water down.

“Mrinalini, can you take the cap off?” the doctor asked, rolling his eyes as if he was trying to hypnotize her.

She said, “Fuck off.”

Not many around there knew the semantic significance of the swear, yet the physician was unperturbed; he had come prepared and engaged her in a discussion of Fermat’s last theorem. The wind was creaking the rafters, and through the window, he spotted the mares being herded into the stable, and in the background was a small swirling sandstorm.

“Sir, you’ve been here for almost an hour. Have you made a diagnosis? Mr. Lahiri said you were the best. I should say I’m having my doubts.” Sourav crossed his arms, pursed and puckered his lips. His assistant, Mr. Ghosh, who had so far felt that his employer resembled an Orangutan, was convinced he looked more like a hippopotamus.

“I will tell you the diagnosis if we can take her to the stables,” replied the doctor.

Before Sourav could ask or say anything, the doctor asserted, “We need to move her in a wheelchair into the open right now; if not, I’m leaving.” He heard a dog barking from the far end of the verandah. The metal roofing was clanging in unison with the creaking rafters. It was loud, but he liked loud. The girl needed inpatient care and fluid resuscitation, but he needed a diagnosis to convince the Roys, all one hundred and twenty-three of them. With his arms crossed behind him, he walked towards the window and seemed to meditate on the view. The space outside the stables was a literal dust bowl, which was talking to the wind in patterns of angry whirls; somehow, he felt that the horses responded to those patterns, the sounds, and the meaninglessness in the gusts.

“We have the wheelchair. Where to?” grumbled Sourav, his anger only accentuating his nose’s broccoli-like nodularity.

“Mrinalini, I’ve never quite understood Watson’s Lemma. Can you explain?” the doctor asked. The girl hopped onto the wheelchair, which he pushed through the central doorway into the courtyard. He then moved her northwest from the area of low wind velocity to high.

“The statement of the Lemma needs to prove asymptotic equivalence for all positive Xs…” Mrinalini got lost in her explanations; the doctor had feared that she would test his understanding of the Lemma, but she was too weary to wear her pasty, scary face, so she just got lost in her narrative of her one true love, Mathematical Analysis.

The wind velocity had picked up, and the doctor, in ten minutes, pushed the wheelchair to the clearing near the stables. The smell of horse feces was strong, and when he turned around to look at Sourav, he was shocked to see that all the one hundred and twenty-three Roys were in attendance. A gust of wind from the direction of the sandstorm blew towards them and the stables, causing the horses to neigh and snort. Some of the Mares in season had been brought out into the open by the trainers.

“I hope this madness has a method,” grumbled the father. The doctor ignored him and continued to listen to the young genius. The gust picked up speed, causing some of the frail Roys to take cover, and it ended up blowing Mrinalini’s cap off to expose a “U” shaped bald area on her head, which had some red and yellow sores.

“Mrinalini, thanks for the clarity; I must take pure mathematics seriously.” The doctor cleared his throat and instructed the maid to take Mrinalini back into the house.

“Mr. Roy, why don’t you walk me to the gateway,” the doctor demanded. Once he ensured the girl was out of sight, he said, “Sourav, you need to get her to the hospital right away; she needs surgery.”

“What is it”

“She’s been pulling out her hair and eating it.”

Cell Culture Flasks Do Not Tell Stories

“It is never about the experiments; they are but meanings in tiny increments.”

The lab: a glorified box; sections of it grew essential things like human coronary artery smooth muscle cells in frown-shaped plastic receptacles. At the same time, the rest of the establishment was intent on making stories for and against the phenomenon: the growth. I thought it all started with a question and ended with an answer. But questions only led to more questions and this chain of queries seemed more philosophical than scientific. It often stunned the leadership (who were obviously not philosophers) into withdrawing from the scientific topic altogether, and instead, they decided to grow new stuff. So, the point was growing things and not the answer.

The coffee shop was quite a drive from the health sciences building; our colleagues in the lab thought we were mad to venture out into the cold three times a day, fourteen miles back and forth, for a cup of Mocha with three packets of brown sugar; but, her stories of friends, friends of friends, relatives and the feuding members of a joint family in an art deco mansion in Shyambazar, woven around the eccentricities of the cities of Bangalore, Calcutta and Omaha, necessitated distance and time. The stories kept changing with the season, the availability of cigarettes, and the speed of travel.

But on a February afternoon, when the snow had melted reluctantly, and the tyre marks stayed fossilized in the slush to flank our twenty-minute drive, she narrated stories in pulsations of five-minute anecdotes; she was the central character and she bled into each episode through their conflicts. The stories didn’t flow; they moved like slurry, thick and fast from left to right, to enmesh me—the listener—with their side noise. Driving became difficult; I couldn’t tell red from green, and I had to pull over into a parking lot, near the Walgreens pharmacy at Ninetieth & Blondo intersection. After an hour, she completed the stories; there was silence, yet she didn’t appear fully drained. By the time we got to the Starbucks on One hundred and fourteenth and Dodge, it was 6:00 PM.

We were the only customers; the Barista said, “I’ll serve your order at your table.” I got a Macchiato instead of a Mocha and the cafe had run out of brown sugar. She bought a water bottle but did not drink from it; instead, she watched a tall man in a yellow parka blowing snow in the driveway. This went on for almost twenty minutes; it was not unusual. The most amusing thing was that the snow that chuted off to pile onto the roadside only spilt back into the road, yet his labour seemed vital to her; probably, the attraction was the pointlessness.

After I heard the Barista close out the register and before we got up to leave, she spoke to me, unexpectedly, in chaste Hindi. There might be a story in every sentence, but hers was more like a formula for a zillion other stories and in all of them I ended up being fluff, a mass of cotton stuffing uncoupled from a stuffed toy.

Omaha or Februaries, since then, have always been different, as if smudged, like the shallow waves of a moat encircling a funerary temple.

Author’s Bio

Kannan Baskar is a Pediatrician from India. In 2022, he was admitted into the MFA program in Writing at Columbia University in New York. However, he had to drop out after a year for personal reasons. He has previously published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Medical Genetics and Nature Genetics.