The Lookout

I always believed we were different.

Being in a graduate course or going through the motions of learning the English language, deep diving into the nuances of words clubbed together, wading through fantastic works of poetry, finding hidden meanings and interpreting texts were somethings that almost every student who undertook a similar course went through. Those who did not or could not, would hang around in canteens, be somewhere else other than the classroom they were supposed to be in or simply refuse to exist within a square mile of the college campus. They never found out what they had missed. Perhaps they did, but the loss did not matter to them. As with most of us, they had found a new distraction, one which was less taxing and more entertaining.

My college was not a prominent one. It never made its way into the fancy little boxes that adorn newspapers and educational magazines advertising the best places to study in the capital. The beautiful faces featured in these tabloids, sporting great haircuts and perfect teeth, who spoke of great learning experiences, were not from the college I would end up in. They belonged to colleges whose cut off I had failed to meet.

My highschool grades were average. This marksheet, like the single guy who sparked off the First World War, would set in motion a chain of events that would dictate my entire life. Later, when I would sit in a classroom which had an asbestos sheet for a roof, I would seek solace in the fact that the department of English was the best course the college had on offer. Someone had told me that but I cannot remember who for the life of me.

Somewhere between Home and the World and Jane Eyre, I became friends with Kartik; a well-built South Indian bloke with springy hair and a strong accent like filter coffee. I have a feeling that he probably was a malayalee but I cannot be sure. He towered well over six feet, a fact that would remain etched in my mind after all these years, primarily because we would sit all the way at the back of the class and he would never have trouble looking at the blackboard. And his hands. I thought each of them could hold a dozen eggs.

‘Do you like reading?’ he asked, on one of our first meetings. ‘Of course!’ I said without blinking. Being a Bengali, a caste that has always been stereotyped as being steeped in the arts, I almost took the question as an insult. It was only later that I would realize that most of my classmates actually didn’t. They hadn’t joined the class because they loved to read, or had a fascination for the language or wanted to learn the ropes of writing. It was simply because this was where they got admission in. Which was also the truth in my case, except English as a language was the only subject that I thought I could study. Why I didn’t do it in high school is a story for another day.

‘Great’ Kartik replied, almost with a sigh of relief. His expression told me that he had tried and failed at his attempts before. Stuck in an English class where students were willing to converse in every other language except the one we were there to learn, I could sense where he was coming from. Hell, there was a Kashmiri guy who was supposed to study advanced Hindi as a subsidiary subject and couldn’t even write his name in it. He would eventually leave our class, get into the football team and play for the college, before being sent back due to high blood pressure. All this was still a couple of years away. I wondered at his motives.

‘I am…um…looking to collaborate for this writing activity that I plan to start upon.  It is um…to develop better writing skills and um…it is good if we um, write fiction or you know…um, write. But, no, I was asking you about reading because people who like reading generally like writing’ he went on, bumbling, trying his best to make a pitch that would not make me close the door on his face. ‘I am in. And the name’s Mithun’ I said, smiling and shaking hands with him. That marked the beginning of an activity that I christened ‘The Lookout’; something which would topple the position of that high school marksheet trying to control my fate, and take over to become the driver of my life in a way I had never thought possible.

‘I think the time is upon us to embark on the activity’ he said, as we sat sipping bottles of beer in my hostel room. This wasn’t the actual college hostel room, but a paying guest facility located near the college. Our college hostel, due to its excellent performance in inter-college sports, primarily catered to them. As a result, I hadn’t shown too much of an interest in getting a room there and had chosen the present accommodation over it. My room consisted of a folding bed, a table, a chair, a fan, a tubelight, clothes that I had brought in with me, college books and occasionally, a rat. A spartan, realistic room, it left little to imagination. Embarking on a creative pursuit in such a setup felt ironic in itself.

‘Come, I will show you the balcony. Maybe we could do it there’ I suggested, leading us past the television room, where an old man sat in his shorts and socks watching the headlines for the day. He was the only one above thirty, if you did not count the cook. He would come back in the evenings, carrying a worn out leather case, presumably from work. Dumping it into the single seater that he occupied, he would then proceed to rid himself of his clothes. Clad in shorts and sometimes, a grey pair of socks, springy grey hair covering his chest and the periphery of his old round head, he would sit down and look at the headlines. Why he was not a family man or what he did with the headlines at the end of the day, no one asked. Like the rest of us, he was a boarder; someone to occupy a room and pay the rent.

We stepped out into the balcony, a long passage with a huge stack of printed stationery from the printing press that functioned in the ground and first floor.  The strains of some old Hindi song came from the radio set of the guard who sat at the door of the printing office. A clear and cold wind announcing the beginning of winters strayed over and made me shiver. Kartik, cigarette firmly held in his lips, the bottle of beer cradled solidly in his huge hand looked out over the road, where flats stood quietly like card houses.

‘The rules are simple’ he said, smoke clouding his face before disappearing secretly into the night. ‘We stand here and chug down three beers each. In between, or post that’ he said, squinting, thinking. Then he looked back at me and continued ‘whoever gets struck by inspiration; a single word, a series of words, some particular emotion, tells the other person. Once we have this, we go back to our respective places and have the rest of the night to come up with something smart written on the topic.’

‘Um, that’s vague. And what are we doing exactly, standing here?’ I asked, a little confused.

‘We are waiting, waiting to get lucky. Waiting for inspiration to strike’ he said successfully sending up three smoke rings as a message to nobody in particular. ‘Several writers have been found to be extremely creative in various stages of inebriation. Perhaps we could also get creative that way’ he said, chugging down the bottle till there was nothing in it. ‘I will be back’ he said, and disappeared to get another bottle from the fridge.

Almost anyone with love for a particular language has the inclination to write in it. Since school, I had always wanted to pen great stories and had hoped to churn out heavy duty novels on some future date. However, I had never known any particular way to get those thinking cells activated or had any fixed source from inspiration. While somewhere in the back of my head, I knew Kartik’s suggestion was pure bunkum, a part of me ached to try it. Language enthusiasts aching to become writers will know what I am talking about. Inspiration is often a bitch that disappears exactly when you want her the most.

‘So, do we start today?’ I asked, as Kartik resumed his position, his empty bottle now replaced with a new, chilled can. He squinted at the distance, trying to make up his mind.

‘Naw. We start tomorrow. Let’s get to your room and finish these babies up!’ he grinned and we went back, away from the wind which continued on its way, looking for newer people to spend time with.

As planned, we got on our creative mission the very next day. ‘Prompts’ as I would find out later, were both easy and hard to come by. Easy because you could almost pick anything up and decide to write upon it. But coming up with something smart and ‘deep’, as they put it, required more thinking.

And beer.

The first bolt of inspiration, quite expectedly, struck Kartik. We were two beers down and standing at the balcony. As I was about to volunteer to get the third beer, he grabbed my shoulder. Instinctively, I stood rooted to the spot, not moving. I didn’t need telling that the moment of revelation had arrived.

‘Black ink of the night sky’ he said, holding out the forefinger and thumb of each hand and creating a frame of the skies like a film director.

‘Hmmmmmmm’ I drawled, not knowing what other reaction would work.

‘That’s our first phrase. Now, we write’ he said and left with the last can of beer. I went back to my room and tried clearing the buzz out of my head. The black ink of the night sky spilled over across my vision and threatened to drown everything in its sticky darkness. I sat with a pen for half an hour, did not write anything and passed right out.

***

Eventually, though, I caught on. The exercise matured into something solid, something tangible. We would stand on the balcony, gazing at the stars, an occasional car playing out loud music, with its bass spilling out carelessly all over, would pass by, drawing our attention. Other times, it would be dull, sobering, static filled drawl of the radio that the guard did not fail to turn on every night. We would decide upon a word or a phrase, go right back and write. Oh, how we wrote! Sheets after sheets of double-ruled paper crawled with our drunken words. Eventually, the challenge would peter out and meet its natural death like most other events from college. The thirst for writing would remain and push me forward, like a knowing boatman, guiding me down the turbid waters of career and destiny and other such life-influencing poesy. On one such night, I would christen the event with the name which now strongly seems irrelevant.

‘Why the balcony?’ I asked him one day, as we stood in our shorts and rubber chappals, holding on to our respective cans. It was the point when the first subtle hints of a beer belly were starting to show on me. Kartik, however, stood gaunt, without a hint of any extra flab on his exterior.

‘You see that in the distance?’ he said, nudging with his chin towards the distance. I looked at the rather limited periphery of our vision, towards flats on the other side of the road, their interiors dark, standing tall in the borrowed glow of the streetlights. ‘Something or someone out there is holding that spark of inspiration for us. That entity won’t want to part with it so easily. We have to be watchful for the moment, the moment it gets its defenses down. It is then that we will push forward our imaginary hands and grab it and not let go. After that, it is ours. This is our vigil for that moment.’

‘Like…like a lookout’ I said solemnly, trying not to garble my words and make them sound as impressive as his.

‘Yes. That’s what this is. The lookout.’

Years later, I would be still looking out for inspiration, trying to put words on paper and coming up with writing that would pass muster in the eyes of my readers. It would cease to be lines put together for assignments and creative exercises, and move on to become something to be done to sustain my livelihood.

And now, there would be no beer to go along.

It was seven years later that I met Kartik. He had done his doctorate in English and was now a professor of English at a foreign university. He looked the same though; tall, with big hands. We were sharing a beer at a recently opened pub in Saket.

‘Oh man! Those days were fun’ he said laughing.

‘And productive! Remember, the lookout!’ I said joining in with my own laughter. It sounded a little like a cackle, so I simmered it down to a more sober mix of a smile and a sputtering cough.

‘The lookout, yes! How can I forget that! Hey, you think those girls are still living there?’ he said, taking a huge gulp out of his glass. I stopped, my glass poised in mid-air.

‘What girls?’ I asked him.

‘Those girls who lived across the street on the fourth floor? Don’t tell me you never saw them!’ he said, the remaining beer happily jiggling in the glass, matching step to his laugh.

‘No, I didn’t’, I said a little stunned.

‘But how could you not!’ he said, a little incredulous. ‘I mean…we spent a long time there! Oh…the glasses’ he said and trailed off. Someone’s ringtone started playing and went on and on. The whole place felt like a giant cellphone.

‘Is that why…’ I ventured.

‘Dude, why would you want to stand on the balcony in the middle of the night?’ he cut in. ‘Damn shame you missed them. They were quite something’ he said polishing off the mug with a final move. The cellphone died.

‘Oh. Ok’ I said, and called for the cheque.

Outside, a world without inspiration lay in wait for me.