Raisins. As his alcohol addled brain tried and failed again to make any sense of the weird song playing in the bar, all Alok could think of were those tiny dry nibbles that were offered to the gods every morning but found their way invariably to his stomach. When he thought about it, he realised that in the history of mankind, those were one of the very rare instances when religion resulted in something good. He hazily remembered biting the top off the raisin, remembered the feel of its thin skin on his tongue and spitting it out and how he then squeezed the sweet gel-like dry stuff inside his mouth, savouring the taste as he threw away the rest of the skin left in his hand.
At that moment the taste of the raisins seemed to have lingered through all the years, but even with nostalgic hallucinations and a fuzzy brain, Alok could no longer ignore his surroundings and how much it was annoying him. He hated the bar, hated the psychedelic lighting and music, the darkness and the smoke which vodka multiplied exponentially and especially hated the horny idiots on the dance-floor. He suppressed an impulse to go over and slap a few of the people in one really obnoxious group who seemed to be dancing as if they were high after snorting their own sweat. Smiled at how hard drunkenness was actually making it for him now to suppress crazy impulses.
He was also getting irritated by the banality of his friends, their sob stories about their boring love-lives and their unbreakable conviction that people’s lives depended on details about how much they spend on their girlfriends, how their girlfriends suspect their every move and how they check their message inbox and call logs on the sly, how they suspect some guy of having his eyes on their girlfriends, how they almost killed that guy when they talked to her. One of them was contemplating suicide because he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. Alok started listing out ways for him to successfully carry it out and concluded that jumping from the top of the six story shopping mall they were in now was perhaps the most foolproof way to do it. Sobriety would perhaps have given way to a measure of sympathy, but Alok was not in a mental condition that allowed him to tolerate bullshit.
As the pretty girl he was eyeing since he first came into the bar started puking all over herself and the floor, he realised that he had to get out, he realised that the events of the evening had crossed the line in the sand that separated tolerable levels of asininity and nauseating levels. He had to get out. He snatched the motorcycle keys from one of his friends and walked out. Right then he didn’t care how they were going to go home. He sped off on the bike as fast as it could go. He was furious at nothing and he knew better than to suppress irrational drunken rages. He also knew that speeding away on empty roads with the wind playing its strange toneless harmonies against his ear was a good way to vent and calm himself.
He didn’t exactly know where he was going, just that it was almost impossible to get truly lost in this city with its extensive number of road signs which seem to point everywhere. He went past rickshaws and autos, with their riders lying inside and over them sleeping in impossible positions, beneath bridges and with plastic sheets and tarpaulin draped because it looked like it was going to rain soon. He was calm now, and he needed to find a good lonely place beside the river where he could breathe in the putrid fumes it emitted after a long day of washing away the filth and sins of the city.
The relatively puny river cutting right through the city reminded him of home and the immense river that flowed just a few miles from his house. It reminded him of how inconsequential he always felt when he sat on the bank of the other river back home, how the opposite bank was always lost to the horizon. The one river reminded him of the other, however different one was from the other, and assuaged vague feelings of homesickness that surfaced from time to time.
He found the spot he was looking for, a narrow footpath type ledge on a deserted bridge with protective railings. He could sit on the broad railings or just lean over and look at the polluted disease-filled waters. Alok parked his bike, went and leaned over and immediately felt light-headed and nauseous. He still dragged himself up and sat on the railings and realised that the alcohol, the crazy bike ride and the smell from the river taken together was a bit too much to hold inside. Burning vomit gushed out of his mouth and nose, at the same time as he was aware of a girl sitting on the same railing about twenty feet away from him to the right. While in the process of literally spilling his guts into the river, Alok was thinking of how drunk he actually was not to have noticed the girl when she was positioned right there in plain sight and hoped she wasn’t too disgusted by the sudden malfunctioning human fountain she was witness to. He sniggered at the irony of leaving the bar at the sight of vomit just to travel many kilometres to do the same but even more spectacularly.
He sensed the girl stiffen when she heard his strange laugh. He was very obviously wasted and she had already crossed the threshold of the incredibly stupid by being out in the streets alone so late. But she didn’t move, which made Alok think she was perhaps even more stupid than he previously thought. As he started to look at her closer – she had on a blue kurti over jeans, short hair dropping over her spectacled eyes, hunched forward and looking down at the almost coagulated water flowing beneath her – he felt her crying. She wasn’t wailing or sniffling, she wasn’t even moving or showing any outward signs that would make it seem like she was crying. But Alok knew she was, like you always know when someone near you has been crying, almost like sadness gives off an odour that you can’t smell but that still reeks.
He shifted and started looking around. Girls crying made him extremely uncomfortable, like he imagined it did every man (well, maybe not Enrique Iglesias). It made him feel like he was obligated to do something to make her stop, amuse her, entertain her. He smiled idiotically at her and waved, alcohol made that seem like a pretty good idea. She stiffened even more and he could start to see a little fear in her eyes. That embarrassed him. Alok was a lot of things but he was proud of the fact that he was not a lecher. He stopped waving, raised up his hand and started shifting away from her, which he thought would allay her suspicions about his intent. He felt her loosen up and his actions have the desired effect. And then he started ignoring her.
They both sat there for about a half hour, looking intently at the water, careful to avoid each other’s eyes. He wanted her to go away, and he felt that she wanted him to do the same and was getting irritated with him. But he had parked his bike near her and he would have had to get up and stumble towards her drunkenly. He would not do that, no matter how long he would have had to sit there. She had once mistaken him for a drunken letch or rapist, and he was not going to let her think that of him again. So he adamantly remained sitting where he was, with minimal movement and careful that even his breath did not make any noise that would alarm the girl.
Another half hour went by like that, and it was almost 4am in the morning as he looked at his watch, when suddenly there was a loud exasperated scream from the girl which scared him out of his wits. He jumped in his seat and when he recovered himself he could see the girl had stood up on the railing and was tensing and loosening in a semi-crouched position. She was going to jump, she was there to commit suicide, she wanted him gone not because she was afraid of him but because she did not want a witness – each of these things hit his head slowly and painfully, as she started rocking back and forth unable to summon that last ounce of resolve that would fling her over the edge. He had no way of knowing how long he had before she did. So he stumbled up on the railing, almost losing his grip and falling over the edge himself, jumping down on the road, running towards her hoping people would hear him and gather to do something because he had no idea how to stop her except panic and scream.
“KISHMISH! KISHMISH!” he screamed the first thing that came to his mind, “Raisins goddamit!” That seemed to surprise the girl even more than it did Alok. She looked back at him and he could now see that she was crying, tears gushing out, dropping one after the other on her dress and on the railing below. She screamed back in a trembling voice, “What?!”
Alok was asking himself the same thing. What?! Why raisins? Panic, beer, vodka, whisky and nauseous fumes had all spouted these words from his mouth, but how was he supposed to keep her from jumping with goddamn raisins? He could hear his 5 ton heavy brain creaking with the effort of making the most of the words he had already spilled out.
“Don’t you want to eat raisins again?” he screamed back, hoping his stupidity wouldn’t be the last straw that would demolish her faith in mankind and send her over the edge. He looked around desperately for someone, anyone. He was convinced it would not be possible for anyone to do a worse job than him. There was no one, not even a stray dog. He looked back at her face and the incredulous expression there. He was hardly surprised at that. When anticipating possible arguments against suicide, a discussion on dry fruits would probably not be on her list, he thought.
“Why the fuck are you talking about fucking raisins?” She screamed. He winced as he heard her, not because she was a woman, he had heard worse abuses from them, sometimes directed at him, and let’s face it, the situation earned her a few expletives. He winced like he would have if he had heard a child use those expletives, inexperienced at it and stuttering. He found himself hoping that screaming out expletives was on her “to do before I die” list and wanted to slap such drink induced inane thoughts out of himself. But he had more pressing concerns, like the answer to her question.
“They are delicious. Don’t you remember their taste? You will never again get to eat them if you jump now.” He groaned inside. What was he saying, what was he doing? He should have talked about her family, maybe her mother, maybe her lover, someone, maybe even her pet. Who talks about bloody raisins? He had seen films where they negotiated and calmed people about to commit suicide, none of them had the rescuer talk about raisins, or any kind of food for that matter. Why raisins? He cursed himself and wanted to jump on the river himself. But he had to keep her from turning away towards the river, he had to keep talking to keep her attention on him.
“Come on, think hard about it. You will never get to taste raisins again, or anything else. Never. Raisins in cakes, in puddings, custards, biryanis. You’ll never feel that sour-sweet taste in your mouth. If you die, you will never feel anything again. You will never see anything or hear anything again. You will never be able to listen to songs again, watch a movie. You’ll never get to watch Sachin bat again! Do you have a car? I know I want to buy an Audi before I die atleast. You’ll never get to do that if you jump now. You will never watch the rain again as you eat raisins. You have to eat raisins for one last time before you even think about dying, anything else is absurd!”
She was distracted by his incoherent jabbering. He could see that. She had visibly stopped tensing, and inexplicably seemed to be considering his, literally, fruity appeal. Alok knew she was going to decide one way or the other in the next few minutes, and no amount of drunken bullshit was going to change her mind then. He inched closer to her, maybe he could pull her down if he got close enough. His motor functions were at a really bad shape though, and a betting man wouldn’t bet against him flapping his arms in thin air when reaching out to pull her down. He knew that.
“I don’t know why you want to kill yourself. I just know that you will not be able to eat raisins again or do anything again if you do. I just know dying cannot be more important than tasting raisins again. You know what I mean. You will never get another chance if you jump off now.”
Alok looked at her eyes. He saw that she desperately wanted a reason against jumping off the river, a reason to continue living. He also saw that his drunken ramblings had given her that reason, but he had no illusions. He saw that she desperately wanted to live. Raisins surprised her and gave her that reason.
He knew then, that it was over. She wouldn’t jump. Slowly, but surely waves of relief started washing powerfully over him as he saw her straightening and weakening. He saw her swoon, get down from the railing and collapse on the road. His feet started shaking too, and he went down on his knees. He hadn’t realised how scared he was, and how weak the last few minutes had made him. He started taking deep breaths. And then she started crying.
He sat back on the road, waiting for her to stop. Awkwardness and Relief kept taking turns at bludgeoning his brain, as he slowly felt his heartbeats slowing down to a human frequency. She cried for a long time and he kept his distance. He wasn’t taking chances. Who was to say body odour or his ugly face would not give her a reason to stand up, run to the railing and jump off? Even raisins had their limitations when put against factors like those. She stopped crying and kept sitting there motionless, as he got up went over to his bike, sat and told her he would leave her home, or wherever she wanted to go. She said nothing, but got up and sat behind him.
They went through the streets as she kept giving him directions, finally stopping in front of some residential society. He left her there and heard her say something to him as she was getting down which he couldn’t understand and sped off once he saw her enter the gates. Alok did not remember much after that except that he somehow made it back to his rooms.
He woke up late in the evening to concerned faces. His friends told him that he had left the bike just lying on the road, stumbled through the gates and then puked on the door. He then fell down unconscious on the floor and started shaking with high fever and mumbling non-sense. A doctor had come to see him, and had given him medications and strict instructions to lay off alcohol. He had been out for more than one and a half days.
But once he sat up, Alok realised that he felt fine. There was no after-effect, he didn’t even feel weak. He hurriedly got up, ignoring his friends and telling them he was fine. He started remembering what had happened, like a hazy surreal dream. He needed to meet her. Well, maybe he needed to eat first because he was famished. But he would meet her after he had eaten something. He realised he did not have any recollection of where he had dropped her, but he knew he had to go back to that bridge. He knew she would be waiting there, curious as he was. He knew they both had to talk.
But maybe not about raisins this time.
