The one who is out of the rat race

 

The fog with adulterous traces to turn noxious smog. A chilly mid-November morning. Whom do we call the dimwits? The ones whom we couldn’t fraternize for forgery and cheatings required to outsmart others on a routine basis in daily life; who unquestionably can’t be turned shrewd like the smart majority; who have a void somewhere wherein the inherent innocence tranquilly stays in a safe chamber. Bo is more or less the same as I remember him during his boyhood. He has grown in body but the child inside is ageless, beyond societal spoliation. He must be carrying some nerves that despoil the spoiling agents’—the agents that ensure the transformation of innocence into shrewdness—best efforts.

Bo is a big man in his early forties. He can smoke as many beedis as you can manage to offer him. This is a foggy, smoggy, chilly morning. I see him working on his brain, performing a kind of exercise. He has spread his palms against a wall and hitting his forehead, gently with nice rhythm, against the plaster. He then shifts gears and hits the side of his head, then the other one, followed by the back of the head. Maybe he is shaking his nerves from the spell of irresolution, probably born of hangover caused by country liquor.

Normally he breezes past you with triumphal air without even looking at you even if you greet him with a wide grin and huge bouquet. Sometimes he startles you with ‘kya haal hai’ when you are least expecting it. But today after these soft penitent plummets at his head, he seems to have discovered some socializing fibers in his nerves. ‘How are you?’ he says. He doesn’t seem to ask because ‘how I feel’ hardly means anything to him in this off-course, uniquely poised state of being. Well all of us have our own peculiarities and eccentricities. He has his own. But I take it as a good omen when he speaks. I’m eager to reply to his statement but he has already moved on before I can send him my first word.