Hi, this is your very own fitness and general well-being blogger Kamaputra, reporting live from Delulu University, Bharat, where a fresher, previously known as the Hot Assamese, has found himself in an endearingly small campus with a state-of-the-art gym that helps both ripped and unripped guys lose a few muscles.
Within the first week, Hot Assamese has witnessed an uprising demanding an increase in delulu, followed by resistance from anti-delulus, leading up to potential arrests. After strolling inside the police station in an accidental attempt to produce solidarity, Hot Assamese regrets the state of the country and then immediately considers having biryani for dinner. He wants to contribute to the delulu wars, but knows there’s a time and place for everything, and being 3 days new to the campus doesn’t count for either, so he walks back and sits on a okayly-mowed lawn underneath a starless sky with three of his classmates. In the middle of the night, the four of them talk about confessions gone wrong and reveal embarrassingly persistent crushes, laughing in turns.
He’s nudged to speak, but manages to remain contained. He thinks that he deals with people better now, but also understands the inventive lie that contains it. Mostly, life feels like repetitions with no development, as if the original Karate Kid was about Jackie Chan scamming a young Jaden Smith into companionship, and in reality, taking off your jacket everyday won’t teach you anything about kungfu, as making and losing and making again a few friends doesn’t leave you unassailable for the future.
Underneath the floodlights that are plentifully installed, snails cross their street and hang out with the dogs and dog-type cats until eventually the snails crack and become paste under the shoes of new students droning on about timetable clashes. The ones that survive relish the wet grass.
The rain falls like it always did in Arrupe, and for a moment he imagines the walls around him aren’t very different from his previous life — but it seems so far away now, everything that was once his to disappear from. Architecture constitutes this divination, the ability to remind and redeem, to solidify the past and the future into interactive memory.
His hostel room, for example, offers multilingual graffiti. A list of Korean words, a few of which translate to hope, weekend and housewife. Large Hindi inscriptions that says jhandu and bhosdike. Malayalam poetry that predicts the downfall of the Hot Assamese. Something in Russian. A volleyball team called Ball Busters. The people who lived here before him. The people who will live after him. In a way, it is already decided. Like the window that exists because it has the ability to look out.
During his very first class, the professor says, “Literature is a phenomenon. It is an event. It occurs” and the Hot Assamese fights an intense urge to slap the desk and shout more, more, more. It reminds him of tenth grade when he foolishly and adamantly stood his ground. He would’ve never guessed that it was a phenomenon, or why it interested him. It’s not that he was one of those people who devoured books. His disability came in the way of reading. It’s not that he wasn’t smart enough for engineering or proud enough for administrative services. He chose literature for no other reason than that he was wholly lost. He struggled to empathise. It’s not obvious, and yet the lack of empathy can simply mean that you’re lost. And it’s only in reading and watching that he discovered a part of himself that he enjoys. How could he let that go now? You can’t enjoy people unless you enjoy yourself a little.
This is difficult to explain to others. A life driven exclusively by affect isn’t realistic or admirable, although it occasionally generates praise, for instance, when someone relates to a sentence or feels jealous of it. Even more stupid is the idea of spending your entire life trying to recover what was once lost.
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
Kafka on the Shore
I wrote about losing in my previous blog. But what I completely forgot to undertake then was the idea of losing yourself. People lose themselves for many reasons. At a young age, it happens almost inconspicuously, like the growth of a nail or the shadowing of the moon. Hard to notice even if you know where to look. But later it gets more participative, more democratic, you’re aware of it, and you worry deeper into it. You begin to consist of what’s already lost and what you’re constantly losing.
Have you met someone like that? A person with eyes so immersed in loss that the rest of their body and being stands rigidly in protest of apathy? To empathise is to find yourself.
At Delulu University, the Hot Assamese inhabits a space that has already been ghosted by people, beings, he admires and loves. He cannot sit in the Secret Garden without wondering what the two Matteo enthusiasts, who he’s friends with and had the privilege of being taught by, who are also two of the most empathetic people he knows, talked about when they sat here, and how many lights shone down and around them, whether their illuminated/darkened faces gave away their destinies, of uniting, then separating, of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, META and crazy postcards, of Joe Sacco and Carmen Maria Machado, of Jerry Pinto and the patchwork of literature that connects them, binds them and reinvents them — right here, from a laptop repair shop 5 kms away from campus, a new tale begins, and the old one puts on a jacket and strolls along.
And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?”—as all around him, the apartment filled with light.
A Little Life