Middle Distance

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.”