He is falling. A moment ago he had climbed a peak. But now, he is falling. Take deep breaths, as that yoga teacher had said. He attended a few yoga classes last summer. It was to help with breathing. You must take deep breaths every few hours to improve your life. Did she say life? He doesn’t remember. It can’t be life. It’s been over a year since he left that yoga class. But he has been taking deep breaths every few hours ever since. Take deep breaths, he tells himself, while falling. The yoga teacher had blocked him on WhatsApp. You ask a lot of questions, she had said. But, how will I take deep breaths if I am feeling breathless? You can, she said. But how? You haven’t paid me my fees. Take deep breaths and forget about it. Blocked. She was a good teacher, though. But for a yoga teacher, she was very impatient. It felt like she was meant to become an investment banker or something but ended up becoming a yoga teacher. Sometimes, the lives people choose for themselves, are actually the lives of people they admire. And their whole life they keep trying to fit themselves in that glove. The glove loosens, eventually, but it was never their glove. And the lucky ones realize it early. They throw away the glove and try a new one. And again and again. They keep doing that till they find their match. The unlucky ones, well, they take deep breaths. Until they fall. And he is falling.
A memory keeps coming back. It’s nothing special. Quite ordinary. Nothing to do with the falling. Nothing to do with anything, in fact. It’s not a life lesson. It’s not an experience. It’s just a memory. A glitch. Something that the brain has forgotten to delete. Floating around in his brain, like hundreds of stars in our small galaxy. Nobody uses the phrase hundreds of stars. It’s always billions. The number has to look scary to make us feel scared. Overthinking again. Back to the memory. He is watching TV. In five minutes, it will be 1 PM. He soaks in as much TV as possible in those five minutes. As the clock hits one, he gets up from his bed, switches off the TV, picks up the lunch box, and starts walking. He is 14 and that’s his Sunday routine: to deliver the lunch to his dad. He has been doing this every Sunday, for the last few years. Feels like forever, though. The distance between the house and the shop is about three kilometers. He walks at a steady pace. He covers the distance in about thirty to thirty-five minutes. There are no phones, no iPods, no gadgets. It’s him and the lunchbox and a twenty rupee note in his shirt’s pocket. If someone kidnaps him, that twenty rupees should be enough. But nobody would kidnap him. It’s a familiar neighborhood. Thousands of other kids are walking with him too. With lunchboxes in their hands. Striding forward. A parade of meals. He reaches the shop. He looks around. It hasn’t changed a bit from last week. The stapler is where it should be, and the tape and the bill book and the pen and that calendar and everything. All the things are where they should be. Like how they have always been. For many many years. The monotony of it is disgusting. He keeps the lunchbox at the exact same spot where he has always kept it and walks back. Three kilometers again. Not an experience worth remembering. Yet he remembers it very distinctly. Like it was yesterday. No life lesson here. Just life.
He keeps falling. It’s liberating, the fall. The last time he felt this liberating was when he removed the screen guard and threw the back cover of his new iPhone. I will live on the edge, he told his friends. Of course, that’s as far we can go when it comes to living on the edge. More often than not, we find ways to connect with ourselves via objects. Having that thing would change my life for the better, losing that thing will make me let go of feelings, keeping this thing close to me will make me grounded, etc. When in fact, nothing changes and we keep living the same as before with or without those objects. A few days later, his phone’s screen broke. He gave it for replacement and meanwhile switched to a dumb phone. Before the phone got repaired, he left America and flew to Europe. Now that was liberating. Or so he thought. He flew with the intention of never returning. A whole itinerary was planned. There was this village in Greece, where they make fake passports for you and if you live there long enough, you might become a citizen. He planned to live there until he was seventy. He had good enough savings, so what could be the problem? Right. That was dumb. After multiple hikes, he returned. He couldn’t even last 10 days. The first thing he did? Collected the phone. Getting the phone back was liberating too. But not as liberating as the fall. And he is falling.
He lived in the mountains for a few years. You can work from home, they had said. But what is home? There is no home. So he went to the mountains. A small house, with all the facilities. On top of a hill. Cheap. That’s home. It took him a few days to adjust to the altitude. But he managed. It was normal. It used to take him a few days to adjust anywhere. And this is just high altitude. At least, it’s better than the high rent in a high-rise building. Take deep breaths. He makes his own breakfast. Sometimes it’s milk and bread, and other times it’s just milk. Lunch and dinner are delivered by a restaurant a km away from his house. It’s not a “restaurant”- restaurant per se, but they cook edible food. The owner’s kid comes every day at a fixed time to deliver him his food. Sometimes, he delivers it on his bicycle, but mostly, he walks. A scene straight out of that memory. One-man meal parade. Maybe the kid shares that memory with him, along with thousands of other kids. Will that memory ever die? He wonders. Or will it float into space, like the voyager? Forever and ever until everyone forgets about it.
It’s raining now. He is still falling. The twenty rupee notes that he had saved in his childhood are in his pocket. He lets go of them. One by one. All his childhood Sundays are gone now. The brain feels lighter than ever. It’s raining heavily now. He is about to touch the ground. It feels like he is. Liberating. But there is no ground. There is no peak. There never was. He has been falling for years. And years. And years. And he can’t do anything about it. He sees the gloves he has rejected and the back covers he has thrown and the screen guards he has worn. All of them are falling with him, the truths, the lies, the lunchboxes, the abandonments and the escapism and the monotony and the bill books and the yoga mats and none of it makes sense. None of this makes sense. But then again, has it ever? He falls. And takes a deep breath. It’s a peak again.
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He Is Falling
This is too good man but unlike THE FALL it ends. I have read almost everything he has written on internet. Be it on ARRE or MEDIUM. And now I am addicted. I need more. So can someone suggest a writer whose writing style is close to Vishal.
You are incredible