There was a time when I waited for Sunday. After a week of work, and I worked hard, a day of rest was very welcome. I loved to sleep. I am not an atheist, and I go to church maybe once a year for midnight mass on Christmas eve. So I'm not a churchgoer basically. Therefore Sundays did not mean that I was seated in the pews in church listening to the pastor's sermon. The pastor, in fact, would not recognise me until my sister, who goes more often to church, introduced me as her brother after Christmas Eve mass. I also had a problem sleeping and would lie awake at nights trying desperately trying to fall asleep. I tried counting sheep and it never worked. I also tried those sleeping videos on YouTube. I listened \ and felt bored. They were not music I was familiar with and they kept my eyelids firmly apart. Even a safe tranquillizer that my doctor prescribed did not have any effect. The on...
Middle Distance
Staring into the middle distance is a great pastime for me in my
idle hours. I am idle for hours on end or even weeks. In 35 years of earning
bread I had little time to stare at the middle distance. I'm making up for lost
time now.
First let me speak about school. Penal servitude is a mild word for it. My school was
surrounded by very high brick walls painted a toxic red. From the outside it
looked like what it was; a detention centre where a fixed tenure of 11 years
was the norm.
During such hard times there was no pastime as such. Books and
more books were heaped on my shoulders making it seem like the proverbial last
straw for the long-suffering camel.
My spinal cord almost dislocated from lugging a heavy bag on a
daily basis. In school, it was something akin to jail inmates glumly breaking
large stones into little stones, with the prospect of indefinite tomorrows
requiring more large stones to be broken.
The brass bell eventually clanged for return to the barracks.
Staring into the middle distance in school was a cause for
reprimand. Inmates like me and the others bunged into school by their
thoughtless parents were under the eyes of a monitor when the teacher skipped
for some time perhaps to stare into the middle distance himself.
The monitors were like the guards at Auschwitz , minus the death's
head, jackboots and black uniform. And, while not speaking in German, the
monitors voiced disapproval with dark
threats of ‘telling sir’.
I wonder what the sentence was for staring into the middle
distance. It must have been something horrendous.
But then there were some who were privileged. It was the teachers
that lolled in their chairs as we laboriously scratched ink over paper during
examinations. Gazing into the middle distance served as a satisfactory
interlude for them when their piercing eyes were not suspiciously sweeping over
the bowed heads of their tortured charges.
When it was time to earn a living, I found some people doing a lot
of staring at the middle distance.
These were the bosses. Having told their minions that they had a
salary to earn and should get cracking, they themselves seemed to pass into a
trance after a while. They had a huge desk behind which they sat importantly.
Their secretaries spoke in hushed tones with other employees.
These secretaries and their bosses had a secret understanding. The
secretary guarded the door and raised querulous eyebrows at anyone who dared to
seek an audience. With the door firmly shut and secure in the knowledge that
Cerberus was keeping vigil, the boss had a great time staring into the middle
distance. This was his most important task on a daily basis.
This brings me to a boss who may have passed into the hereafter by
now. He was a diminutive man with an ample wardrobe of suits and ties. After
the staff members in different departments were introduced to him, he retreated
to the lair assigned to him.
We saw little of him thereafter. There was a small glass pane in
his office door. But this was so strategically placed that the boss and his
desk remained out of sight when he was perhaps staring into the middle
distance.
Only a faithful peon had immediate access to him. Our boss did not
have a secretary then.
This boss had a small imported car. When he drove up, the peon was
there to receive him. The boss always brought a flask with him which the peon
carried into the premises like the Holy Grail.
The boss’s den was at one end of the office, down a corridor.
There was no reason for employees to go there. There was also a red bulb over
his door. It was never lit in the past. But we found that it was now lit from
the early afternoon till 4.00 pm, when the boss called it a day.
There was a sense of mystery behind the red light glowing for
hours each day. The employees commented on it in furtive tones.
One day I plucked up courage and decided to ask the peon. The peon
looked imperiously at me for a while as if I was asking him to give away a
state secret. He then whispered conspiratorially, “He sleeps.”
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