Welling Up in Laughs

I'm not going. No. I'm not--

Stop pushing me!

{Thud, echo thud thud thud...thud}

Uh....Its dark...

{light comes on overhead. Can see microphone. Phooooo. Coffee-breath bounces off black empty space. Cannot see anyone. Sooooo, talking to the dark, am I? Tap, tap mic}

Muffled groans, a moan, a singular voice in deep contralto above the rest.

Sorry?

{bending out of the circle of light}

What am I feeling?

The audience nodded.

{I felt a tremor of air, doofus}

It's a little difficult to explain--

A hushed groan.

Uhh, spotlight is a tough thing. Esp after you've just watched a movie about a man dreaming
to live alone in Alaska, getting there and dying a very painful death.

They're all quiet now.

Well, I ate too much. Y'know, while watching the movie. Aaand,in other news, but you're not
interested in other news are you?

Hmmm, from the crowd. They're beginning to get bored. I can smell it.

Its like having your nose stuck in the shittiest of sewer canals in the dirtiest of cities. Pardon my french. Say cities like New York or Bombay. People smell boredom a mile away in big cities, like stench from the vast network of underground sewers. Coz' the boredom is right there -- right under the carpet on which people walk in their clean luxury homes. Like the shit swimming beneath our feet, under, oh please don't faint, this very auditorium.

Aaaas we speak, there must be so many contributing to it with filing their tax returns, watching age-old double whammy porn, planning to kill an old couple, or spending newspaper reading time in the loo.

Boredom lurks beneath the job, the train travel, soaps on tv, and even in poetry.

Only; in poetry; hmm lemme say this right...there's... there's a mint or rose room freshener sprayed over the filtered words someone threw up over the page.

Usually, the penciled, bearded, skeptical, many-colored-pens holding editor, or the harried-by-monthly-bills poet's in-love-with-the poet best friend contributes the lush-green petrichor fragrance to the boredom of his poems. And if the friend supplies the wild, thick, intense fragrance, the editor takes up his latest iron sieve, puts all the words into it and shakes it real hard - like a person in divine fits, drawing on God's and internet's knowledge no less. Odd words, phrases, punctuations and sentences come out.

Sometimes, they're like strings of different colored wool, sometimes, they're palm leaves choked with ivy. Then they package this subtle form of boredom, allow for readings in shushed bookstores or tired, desiccating libraries for people too deaf, too senile or too rich to be really bothered or moved.

Whatever the poet's inspiration was got caught up as trash in the sieve. And the starving poet was only too happy to get the landlord off his back during the killing monsoons.

Nowadays, people are becoming hip with their boredoms.

They take their boredoms to steaming, warm-smelling coffee shops and spend sun-filled, static hours propping up for heart attacks at thirty when they guzzle down galleons of cream rich caffeine throughout their jumpy-teens and hyper-tweens coz its the 'in' thing. Need I mention feeding the boredom with chickens? or other, more interesting fauna like ducks or eels?

Sushi is the new rage in town. Its to get away from the boredom of daals, vada-pavs, burgers, french fries, chapattis, idlis, dosas, chinese, thai, grilled steaks and boiled potatoes, falafel, humus, all kinds of flavoured milks and curds, butter and ghee, bread and pizza. People shall get bored of soft, tender, raw, odorless fish too. Trust me.

In a life that is so full - where there's not time to think, no time to wait, no time to spend alone - with your own thoughts or books - where there's time to stay at coffee shops, spend hours at the newest gym because of a hot guy, try out newer and newer foods and spicier, heavier concoctions or cream, milk and sugar, shopping for weeks for a vacation, and spending thousands for an evening at a club dense with smoke and acrid breath of alcohol that'll end up giving half the people laryngitis in their forties - boredom swims ever closer to the slippery alcoholic sheen beneath your feet.

The autos that drive you from one place to another, the taxiwallahs who switch on their neon lights in the night so you can catch a few words of Plath from your newly borrowed book, the queen's necklace where you sit with a walkman, an ipod, a cellphone, a book, a handbag, and an umbrella - alone and yet not alone - all places you hurry to and fro from, all the people you glance at or exchange money with, all the ones you smile at - everyone's just as bored as you - and sometimes more.

Can't you see it in their eyes?

Just when they turn their gaze away from your sweaty face in the train.

You know that guy was looking at you for sometime. You knew when the hair at the nape of your neck stood erect. You felt it when goosebumps became visible on your arms. And your suspicion was confirmed the moment he avoided your gaze when you threw it in his direction. You know there's a subtle connection there. Subtle enough for words not to do justice - like the scent of grass. Its overwhelmingly subtle. And suddenly the scent of grass fills your mind. Fills it like a hot-air balloon filling up with laugh-gas helium and making your head spin.

Just for that split second-of-a-second - that boy and you can glimpse into each other - like narcissus into the pond - but you're afraid to take a leap - afraid to jump in the water. And neither are you as brave as narcissus was - to keep looking - and looking at your reflection in the water.

You pass by so many moments like these in the day, don't you?

Bordeom, like the flavour of a well-chewed paan - lingers in your mouth when you put the key in the lock and open the door to your silent apartment. All the other girlfriends have gone out. Or they're at work. Boyfriend's on a trip to the US - working his ass off for a white man's company that's getting bored with the whole depression and not-being-able-to-outsource stuff anymore thingy. They're findin' out newer ways of something out there grabbing their attention. They may just break into a civil war if someone kills Obama. That would be a bad thing though. His being killed I mean.

At least one wouldn't be bored. Unless the news channels crusade US with their reporting zeal and show everything - killing, tying up, beating, raping, mutilation, fear, blood, spewed out rotting intestines of bodies who cannot fathom the concept of "dignity" now - unless they show all this 24*7.

Reporters are the new age fascists in the name of the democratic prowess of mass communication media.

For the first few days people will be glued to their sets, I guarantee you. I also guarantee that after a week of such 24*7 coverage, people will be more amiable to switching to other channels and war, blood, fear and loss will be reduced to the value of/made equivalent to a silly Ekta Kapoor soap.

That my friend, is not apathy or some such larger emotion. It is boredom. Plain and simple boredom.

Have you ever wondered why fascists enjoy being fascists?

Its because they can get passionate about their cause to militancy and death. Its because passion like that - single minded-focused passion of a million is squeezed into a kilometer wide concrete canal and made to flow ravenously along the earth - eating into its bounty like a parasite that has no concept of fulfillment or content. Such passion is like an animal with a thousand mouths and ten thousand stomachs that never feels anything else but razor sharp, precise, spitefully angry stabs of hunger. Such hunger eats up the boredom. Become even a little sated - the boredom will creep right back beneath your feet.

{Silence}

Spewing all this is the fault of the shitty cold coffee I drank backstage at the last minute.

{I shuffle my feet, hearing the wooden boards go creeaaak for the first time.}

{Silence}

{creeeaaak}

{Laughter
(loud, ringing, hollow laughter)
and a few roses at my feet}