Alex George

The Heart is a Fridge Magnet

 

 

“He tried to recount to himself certain things that had happened when he was young.

But none of these things he tried to remember seemed real.”

– Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

 

We find our protagonist standing in the centre of a bright, empty room. His tense arms leave no gap for light to pass through, not even where the joint, which holds together his elbow, slightly curves away from the body. He is looking into the distance with a calmness that behoves his unmarked face. We can see that he is feeling cold; the upraised gooseflesh give his skin a reptilian texture.

 

Now, let’s expand our field of vision to fit the entire room: a cube, with each side measuring sixteen feet. The walls are all white. The floor isn’t tiled though, like how you’d expect it to be. Look closer! Yes, it is a concrete floor, plastered and painted like the other five sides.

 

The windows are open (three pairs of narrow casements which occupy three-fourths of the east wall), and had there been curtains hanging in front of them- I’m imagining one of those thin, whitish, translucent curtains that hang with an air of effortlessness- we would’ve noticed the light breeze of Bombay’s weak winter morning.

 

Come now, let us see what’s happening outside...

 

We are in the top reaches of a very tall building with stained and blistered walls. What do you see down on the streets? I cannot describe it myself; I’m not wearing my spectacles. You’ll have to help me out. What is that black-blue-yellow-white blur in the centre of our field of vision? Is it the early morning rush of traffic? And that black spot moving from the western end of the frame to the southern edge along strip of grey blur? Surely it is a man walking on what I assume is the footpath. But you never know. It could be the roof of a bus or of a shed, on which the man is walking. Or maybe it isn’t a man, but a dog, whose sleep has been cut short by the commotion we hear outside. Despite my blurred vision, I can make out some of the motionless features in the image we behold: the dark grey is the road, the greens are the trees, the colourful structures towering upwards, the buildings, the blackness of the railings around the buildings and the distant pylons that zigzag across the frame, breaking the blueness of the sky into geometric chunks.

 

The protagonist hasn’t moved an inch ever since we’ve been here, by the way. Let’s explore the outside of the room till something happens. Let’s go into the living room.

 

Wait! What’s that? Somebody is knocking on the door. Yes, somebody’s definitely knocking! Ah! Do you hear that? He’s trying to ring the doorbell, but looks like it is broken. That’s why the protagonist can’t hear the knock. His room’s door is shut!

 

I think that we must intervene. Else the story won’t move forward! Let’s open the door. It opens with a ghostly creak.

 

Needless to say, the person outside can’t see us. He is a dark, skinny man in his late twenties, his tightly combed hair reeks of fruity oil. He is wearing a pair of dusty, black skinny jeans and stained flip-flops. His bright green full sleeved t-shirt has a graffiti-like design scrawled across it. He peers into the house still standing outside in the dark passage. Nobody seems to be around. Who opened the door then? Tentatively, he steps inside.

 

Although the living room is bare like the other room, it is bigger and the windows are on the north face. The man scans the room for a moment. It is exorbitantly bright, but nothing seems to illume it. Although the windows are large and unshepharded, there seems to be almost no natural light in the room, an inhuman whiteness.

 

Our man proceeds towards the window and looks downward. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one up. As he puffs at it with a calculated slowness, his hand slowly moves towards the ledge of the window and a cool, cowboy-like demeanour descends on him. It is evident from his manner that he wishes he had a pair of sunglasses. After the cigarette has been tapped out on the marble window sill, he proceeds towards the passageway leading into the house and opens the door to the room where the naked man stands. Naturally, he is taken aback. Observe how he takes a step back...

 

“Sahib!” he calls out repeatedly, but the man doesn’t budge.

 

The naked man stands with his back to the door and, by the transitive property of logic, to our friend, the green t-shirted man, who is overcome by an embarrassing need to look at the man frontally. Fighting an immediate feeling of mortification, assuring himself that he should look at the man’s face to see if he is all right, he moves forward, with the same calculated slowness with which he was smoking the cheap cigarette, albeit for different reasons, and peers cautiously at the Nude man’s face.

 

No emotion.

 

Mr Green Tee waves at him to extract some kind of a reaction, but his eyelids do not budge. “Did you open the front door?” he asks him, trying to sound unfazed by the peculiarity of the whole affair. But the naked man doesn’t seem to be able to hear him. Finally, his feeling of discomfort at the prospect of touching a naked man gives way to his frustration at the situation, and he gives him a slight nudge.

 

The man jerks into life. A shocked look mingled with the expression of a person just rescued from drowning- embarrassment, shortness of breath, gratitude- can be seen on his face. After a few minutes his breathing returns to its normal pace. He sits down on the floor.

 

“What happened to you?” Greenie asks, himself looking baffled. No reply. He just sits there, thumbing the dust that has settled on the floor, his face cast downwards. Green Tee lights up another cigarette: this time, in a less dramatic fashion. The smoke rises and reaches the naked man’s nose. Looking up, he asks sternly, “Who are you?”

 

“Santosh...”

 

There! You have Greenie’s name now! You can use it in any way you want. You can write it on a piece of paper and then put it in a randomly selected book from your bookshelf, and then months, or maybe years later, when you take out the book to read it again, maybe because it reminds you of a feeling you no longer feel, or because it reminds you of days gone by that will never come back, or just because you happen to enjoy reading the book, and when you will reach an important juncture in the book, you will find a little note with ‘Santosh’ scribbled on it, and maybe you’ll remember this story, maybe it will somehow, abstractly, subconsciously, enhance your interpretation of the book you are reading, I don’t know. Or maybe you could just keep the name in your head for the duration of the story, like any other boring old person. I don’t want to tell you what to do, it’s your property now (the idea of the name that is).

 

“Stop smoking, Santosh.”

 

He crushes the cigarette.

 

“Why are you sitting here like this?”

 

“What’s it to you?”

 

“I was asked to come here… regarding the renovation…”

 

“Oh! You’re the builder?”

 

“That’s right!”

 

“Aren’t you a bit too young?”

 

“Are you all right? Your eyes are all red.”

 

The naked man gets up. The ground underneath him has a single tile stuck to it. He had been standing on it all along. He pushes it down into the floor which results in its springing outwards like one of those fancy drawers, people have nowadays. But this one is more like a glass case with three shelves, which he pulls up and latches using a lever at the bottom, so that it doesn’t slide back into the hole, from whence it came.

 

Nudie takes out a strip of tablets and pops one in. “So you are the renovation guy? Have you done this before?”

 

“Yes Sahib, I’ve been doing this since I was ten. What kind of work do you want done?”

 

“You see this shelf?” Nudie asks pointing at his tile-contraption. ”I want similar shelves all over the house. Tile the entire house and every tile will be a shelf. That way I won’t need any furniture! Everything can be stored underground.”

 

Nudie puts on his clothes, which he extracts from the underground shelf, losing his identity in the context of this story- as the naked man, Nudie, what have you.

 

“Are you crazy, man? Are you wasting my time?” Santosh says, with that tinge of menace one can expect from a hard-working Bambaiyya.

 

“Listen here, kid. I’m just telling you what I need done. Can you do it or not?”

 

“But isn’t there a house below this one? How will you get them to agree to this? How did you even get them to agree to put that one?” he asks pointing at the underground shelf.

 

“I own the downstairs flat. It’s not a problem.”

 

Santosh considers the proposition for a moment. It looks like he still isn’t convinced about the legitimacy of the operation.

 

“Well, in that case, I will need to take measurements before I can give you an estimate…”

 

Nudie, no, he’s not nude anymore, let’s call him the Owner now- the Owner leads him to the living room and lets him take down the dimensions of the room in his decrepit looking pocket-sized spiral pad. The pad has a picture of the goddess Laxmi on its outer cover.

 

“I’ll be all getting the material for you. Just tell me the cost of labour.”

 

After the living room is done, they go into the other room again and Santosh measures it using his metal tape which stretches out of its square holster.

 

“There’s one more room,” the Owner says as he leads him into the third room. This room is smaller and the walls are black.

There is a tile in the centre of this room too. Next, they go into the kitchen, another empty white room with another tile in the centre.

 

“Bathroom?” Santosh enquires.

 

“Oh, of course! I almost forgot,” the Owner chuckles.

 

The bathroom is also an empty room with no taps, no pot, no shower, nothing! We can see how Santosh is taken aback when the bathroom’s door is opened. He, nevertheless, measures the room and takes down the numbers diligently, probably reminding himself that the whole situation is eerie, so there is no need to be extra flustered by a pot-less toilet, after all, the kitchen doesn’t seem to have any food either.

 

“You want to get the house painted as well?”

 

“Yes!”

 

Santosh scribbles away into his notepad. “You will be providing the entire material no?”

 

“Yes, except for the cement.”

 

“Two and a half lakhs”

 

“Way too much! Come on, give me some discount!”

 

“Sahib… It’s standard rate only. You’ll need a carpenter also to make all the shelves. I’ve added his charges as well.”

 

“Come on! How about Two Twenty?”

 

“That’s too less, sahib. There is a lot of work!”

 

“Arre yaar I’m providing the material, no?”

 

“Two Thirty-Five! Final!”

 

“Okay deal!”

 

“Deal!”

 

“You’ll have tea?”

 

“Sure!”

 

The Owner goes into the kitchen, Santosh follows. He normally wouldn’t have done that, but it looks like he is really curious about how the tea that has been promised is going to be prepared. The centre tile is pushed. It contains a kettle. The Owner turns it on.

 

They sit on the floor waiting for the whistle to go off.

 

“You don’t have any furniture, sahib?”

 

The Owner considers him for a long moment, and then says, “Ever heard of the Orion-1 mission?”

 

“Of course! The space mission, no? It was all over the news a couple of years ago!”

 

“Yes… I was one of them… One of the astronauts, I mean…”

 

Santosh’s eyes widen in wonderment, a pale reflection of the actual wonderment he feels inside.

 

“Once you have experienced what I have experienced,” the Owner continues, “you start to look at things from a different perspective. Things that were commonplace seem to not make sense anymore.”

 

They stare at the kettle. You can see that Santosh really wants to ask something but is hesitant.

 

“How did you manage to fight them off? How did you escape? It was never mentioned in the papers!” he blurts out, not able to contain himself anymore.

 

The kettle begins to whistle. Santosh is surprised to find the Owner smiling in a friendly manner. He expected a dramatic moment, even if it was going to be a refusal to divulge the story.

 

“See… that’s what I’m trying to say…” he pours tea into two cups and gets up to walk away. “All those details don’t matter. It doesn’t matter, man!” he says, still smiling.

 

They go into the second room, the black one. The Owner pushes the centre tile. A mini-refrigerator emerges. Among the thousands of photographs that are stored inside the fridge, stands a one litre carton of milk, alone, but not lonely.

 

The Owner pours milk into the two cups. He suddenly gets up and turns to leave, nodding at Santosh indicating that he’d be back in a moment. Santosh takes out a bunch of photographs from the refrigerator and flicks through them. Photographs of a happy group in the savannahs, of a woman sitting in a cosy sofa, looking away, another one of her, again, looking as if she was talking to the photographer while the picture was being taken, wait a minute, she was there in the group picture as well.

There’s another one of her in a uniform. As he makes his way through the pictures, Santosh realises that the woman is in every single one; bunch after bunch, not one photograph without her. In some of the pictures, it feels like she doesn’t know that she’s being photographed. Digging through the refrigerator, Santosh comes across a bunch wedged vertically in between two stacks right in the back. He starts spending more time on each picture as he goes through this bunch. He is no longer playing the game of spotting her in each picture anymore. Something seems off, as if they aren’t photographs anymore. In this new bunch, the woman’s face looks altered, with more defined angles and an otherworldly glow, pictures in which she floats, a picture in which her limbs are like strokes in a painting, pictures in which her index finger points with the grace of one of those Virgin Mary statues in Mahim Church, almost escaping out of the picture’s surface. She looks foreign. She looks like an image from a dream. Jerking out of the sway of the hypnotic images, Santosh hastily tries to replace the photographs and in the process drops another bunch down. They are pictures of her at the Great Wall. She looks happy, normal.

 

He sips at the tea. Ten minutes pass. There is no sign of the Owner. Santosh wonders if he should go look for him. For some reason he chooses to look in the room where he had initially found him, probably because he intuitively knew that that’s where the Owner was going to be.

 

He is standing on the centre tile, naked, again. Santosh slowly backs away, attempting to close the door as noiselessly as possible.

 

“Leave your number on the floor. I’ll call you about the construction,” the Owner calls out.

 

 

 

Alex George is a editorial assistant at an outdoors and active lifestyle magazine based in Bombay. He graduated with a degree in Media studies from St. Xavier's College in 2013 and has been writing short stories and poems ever since.