Behind the confounding streets of Delhi must lie the drunken unfettered imagination, irreverent poetry and unscrupulous enterprise of these men and their progeny.

Sweat dripped down his forehead and onto the tip of his nose. There it perched precariously as his head bobbed to an unpresent rhythmic music in a way that clueless boys hope passes off at a discotheque for dancing. There it perched and then it dropped, into the batter for pooris he was rolling. On the left of his uncle’s eatery was a flower shop and on its right was a butcher’s. Sweetmeats, flowers, meat, sewage and sweat to go – you could tell that the air around was confused. How was it supposed to smell anyway?

 Out of the corner of his left eye, Aseemullah could see a barber’s shop that offered Bollywood hairstyles. The wall in front of him partially blocked his view of the dome of the 16^th century Moth ki Masjid. To his far right lay the imposing back walls of posh south Delhi houses. And behind the circus-like row of shops lay a cramped residential area where illegal first floors fused into illegal second floors. Also, illegal and shaky-looking balconies jutted out above narrow streets. You could poke your head out of your first floor bathroom window and catch yourself facing your neighbor, watching in mutual bemusement as he stood there in his balcony.

  An expensive car playing loud music stopped at the corner of the street. Two teenage girls stepped out, blew flying kisses to the boys inside and walked off slyly towards the posh houses. Fourteen-year old Aseemullah eyed the girls dreamily. He knew he wanted them but he had no idea what he would do with them if he got them. Perhaps he could walk out of the barber’s shop at the corner into a cool Delhi evening, dressed like a Bollywood hero. The two girls could be waiting for him in his yellow, open-roof car. The girls could intersperse swooning over him with orange bar ice creams. And they could be shouting jubilantly too! They were after all with Assemullah- the hottest prize in the whole of Delhi!

The car could be decorated with Diwali lighting even. Fataak. His dream met a violent intervention. As he nursed his cheek after the slap, his uncle informed him that the poori batter wouldn’t batter itself and that the customers wouldn’t feed themselves. Since his father passed away a couple of years ago, Aseemullah had helped out at his uncle’s shop in the afternoons, after school every day.

That evening he sat on the roof of his house, the roof surrounded by a tangled web of criss-crossing electricity and telephone cables. He sometimes wondered how the cables would look from above. He wondered if there might actually be a pattern to them, if the chaos might somehow transform into order if only you looked from far enough. From where he sat, he could see the setting sun fuse with the dome of the Moth ki Masjid. He sat there outlining shapes in the mosque’s architecture; he knew all of them were the way they were for a reason. And one day, he would find out. He wanted to be an architect. Of course his uncle and his teachers thought he had little talent for anything. And sure enough, his dream was distant and things look orderly and manageable if you look from far enough. The seeming impossibility and tangle of things hit you only when you are right near them. But he was prepared for ‘Aseemullah Against the World. “Aseemullah!”, called his mother from below and he walked off towards the stairs with a smile.

Illustration by Priyadarshini Sivakumar

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Spring was far from his mind. Outside, the merry-go-rounds brimmed over with kids and kites fluttered warmly above rooftops. But inside, the only sound remotely resembling a flutter was the mild letup of loose newspaper ends stirred up by the occasional draught. The walls that blocked the inside of his mind from the spring outside were lined up with damp newspapers. He sat hunched up against one of these walls, recalling the events that had pushed him into depression. He could see no doors or windows in the room – anything that might be a passage to the world outside his mind. There, outside, his friends and family tried desperately to find an inlet. They knocked on the walls of his mind hoping for a trap door so they could reach him and defend the silver linings of his life.

A jumble of recent events floated around in his mind and he was finding it difficult to make much sense of them. Around him, only the dull front pages of newspapers lined the walls. Like a prisoner who carves letters and drawings on the walls of his cell while drifting through time, he had circled every ‘NO’ that occurred anywhere in the newspaper text. Recent times had seemed like a hurtling train of NOs that seemed intent on steamrolling him. It was almost like the world was collectively saying ‘no’ to him, saying, ‘No, you are no good’ and ‘No, you are not welcome.’

The room did have some other ‘decorations’ besides all the newspapers. A table sat in the middle of the room and atop it was a single, flickering candle. It seemed to be in a hurry to embrace the tabletop, with its melted wax spread thin and its stem nearing end. Alongside it lay a box of size just enough to contain a football. Beside him on the floor, a few pieces of broken glass lay strewn around. He had broken the mirror – introspection was painful and feeling angry was much easier.

He sat with his head in his hands, shirt sleeves unrolled. That was an oddity for him since he always liked to have his sleeves rolled up. It seemed that he was too high on despair to care. I say ‘high’ for a reason- ‘highs’ are addictive. On one hand, he was clearly miserable but on the other, it seemed that he himself was the only thing keeping him that way, inside the rotten confines of his mind’s room. This irony made him angry. He felt angry with himself. At times like these, he liked thinking about suicide – it was consoling. Despair and anger formed a labyrinth, which seemed too difficult to escape from. But thinking about suicide told him that there was an escape from all this, from life itself and most of all, from himself.

He became sure that the answer to the big, hanging question that his misery posed for him was inside the box on the table. He became sure that it must be poison. He tried getting up but stumbled. His legs were numb from giving up. But he desperately wanted to put an end to all this, to escape. So he moved toward the box. He moved falteringly, but he moved. The air inside the room was already heavy from being damp and now it carried the added weight of grave anticipation. With trembling hands and a nervous click, he opened the box.

Ting.

Dhishoom.

Straight to his nose. It was a big Jack-in-the-Box. After hitting him in the nose, it went straight over him for the wall behind and made a big hole in it. Sunshine streamed in, dust from the hole dancing in its path. He stood there, shaken up and positively bewildered. Part of his mind had been trying to reach him for quite some time and finally, there had been a breakthrough. “You can climb out now, stupid!” it said to him.

On the glove of the Jack-in-the-Box was written in big, bold letters, ‘LET’S KILL OUR APPETITE FOR TRAGEDY!’

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