Poles Apart
Photo courtesy: Ayaan Halder
A letter to a friend lost carelessly: ‘With shut eyes, I see you and then myself, rushing around in strange, centripetal circles. Lost souls in fish bowls, swimming around a quiet and darkened running-track’
I spend an hour listening to Pink Floyd, transfixed by an album’s worth of the blue evening, earmarked by an advertisement here or there—as if I am somehow grabbing onto clumps of moist, rotting clouds. And then Gilmour makes the evening wail, and I think of you. Of how your hair curls up like a foamy wave, and light breaks onto your eyeglass, as if only to pixelate itself. I think of the year that I met you, and how you hated me. And then the year that my dog had died, and I had found myself at your doorstep, wanting to cry the week away. You had laughed a kind laughter; but even then, I had heard the deep-seated silence that has now snowballed inside of you like phlegm. Hadn’t his fingers wailed that evening too? Gilmour’s, I mean.
Hadn’t the wretched evening wailed, too?
This may not be a track you’re familiar with—the one that’s playing as I write. Or perhaps I’m being pompous again. But you must understand what I mean when I tell you that his fingers have gathered around my throat, and he is choking me to sleep.
With shut eyes, I see you and then myself, rushing around in strange, centripetal circles. Lost souls in fish bowls, swimming around a quiet and darkened running-track. One in search of the other. One belonging to the other. But then, we’re silhouettes; and even when our fingers brush against each other in the viscous evening—yours against mine, and mine against yours—passing back and forth our spliff-filled cigarettes, as if it were the most ancient motion on earth, we remain silhouettes, unaware of the curls in each other’s hair that foam when washed with sunlight.
The song changes; a worn-out silence gathers between the sounds, as Gilmour oversees their transition. Somewhere in the distance, a woman screams; or perhaps it is a child, or a crow. And then the song returns. I see you now, leaning onto me; slowly falling through the cracks and turning into a fountain that spews my father’s breath. I think of Pythagoras, for some reason, and then of triangles. And then I think of the ever widening breadth between our feet. But we’re still leaning onto each other, you know? Like college kids, or comrades. Perhaps our minds still mostly think alike. And you belong to me, and I to you. And both of us, to your woman.
Your woman, who was my friend, but now seems to have only remained your woman. Your woman, whom I met at a wedding the other day, and who spoke frugally to me, and then didn’t speak at all. As if we weren’t at a wedding, but in the waiting room outside the doctor’s clinic—awaiting a diagnosis at least, if not a sentence for my death. As if it were only a moment of silence that Gilmour was taking between his wailings through the night, and not a clean break in a coalition.
And so, of course, the night wails again, and I breathe in the air, only to shudder a little. The last time that I had seen you, you had almost died, and I had done nothing at all to save you. I was tired, you know? A little more tired than I had ever been.
But brother mine, I wish you knew that I could kiss your mouth now and tell you that I cannot bear your death, or your phlegmy silence.
And that I miss you.
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Ayaan Halder is a poet, author and Doctoral research scholar at the Department of Law, Gauhati University, Assam (India). His works primarily engage with the contestations and coexistences of social indigenous and diasporic identities in postcolonial/post-partition Northeast India, and draws heavily from his own diasporic life spent wholly in both belonging and not belonging to the region. His works have been published in various regional, national and international platforms such as Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature Magazine, The Little Journal of Northeast India, The Wire, Littera Magazine (Bangladesh), Kitaab Magazine, among others. You can find him on Instagram: @_inkslinger__.
