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Picture-Perfect |
| Written by Arjun Sengupta | |
| Tuesday, 15 January 2008 | |
It was a glorious morning. Better still, it was a glorious Sunday morning. The day stretched before me meandering through the depths of my imagination. What should I do? Pub it? Catch a movie? Ring up random people from the telephone directory just for kicks? All of the above? In hindsight I should have. What I chose to do instead was rummage through a pile of old albums looking for nothing in particular. I do that sometimes – the nostalgia stirs me up in a way a double espresso could never hope to match. So anyway, there I was, with a handful of hours to kill, and too many ways to kill it with. And I chose pictures. And a bottle of whiskey. You see, pictures have a way of transforming things. I didn’t know that then. Most people would think pictures are a sort of a memory capsule – capturing a moment in time so that the future can remember exactly how the past was. But that is rarely, if ever, the case. I was hunting for my dose of déjà vu, and I happened to stumble on a picture I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was a photograph that had languished at the bottom of the box for years. I probably should never have looked at it, or, if I did, should not have continued to look at it. It was a picture of me in the prime of youth, or, as many people would confirm later, what passed off as the prime of youth. I was wearing a blue jacket and holding a large object – something like a framed certificate over my head like some sort of trophy. Age and termites had eaten into the quality of the photograph, and poor cinematography had not helped. I peered closer at the thing I was holding in the picture, and suddenly it dawned on me. It was my graduation certificate. It was a perfect picture. It was the picture of a man who wanted to make a difference to this world. I was 10 years younger, with promise in my eyes, and the strength of youth in my arms. I had the world in front of me and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I couldn’t have done. I could have been anything. Movie star, doctor, lawyer… a number of lucrative and promiscuity-enabling professions came to mind. Who knows? I could have done just about anything. And here I was, on a Sunday morning, looking at pictures of broken dreams. Even as I looked at it, I could feel a sense of resentment welling up inside of me. I thought about this miserable thing I called my life and it bothered me. I should have been somebody. I could have been somebody. Instead I was a bum, doing a 9 to 5 job where the most exciting thing that happened was a spilt coffee mug. I turned my attention to the whiskey. That infernal thing. That was it! That had caused me my ruin. Even as I thought about it, it all seemed to fit in. I had held eight non-descript jobs in ten years and my major concern during those years had been getting off work as soon as I could and heading to the nearest bar. I looked at the bottle peevishly. I was annoyed. I had, by that time, had three glasses and it was starting to take its effect. No more! I said to myself. I was going to change. I was going to quit drinking and get a life. I steeled my resolve with another glass. I was going to turn back time - become 10 years younger, have the same hopes and dreams again. I stubbed my cigarette and breathed heavily. I felt reborn, fresh out of the womb. At that moment I could take on anybody and anything. That was when the bell rang and he walked in. I should have guessed. My constant companion in misery. We had been to college together and by a strange twist of fate, he worked in the cubicle next to me. “Hey,” he said, and followed it with a ‘Wassup?’. I scowled as heavily as I could to show him that he was not welcome. I might as well have tried to lift an elephant by its tail and hurl it like in Tarzan movies. “What are you looking at?” he asked and bent over my shoulder peering at the photograph. For a moment I thought he was as mesmerized by the ‘eyes full of promise’ as I was, because he was silent for a while. “Hey you remember that day?” he asked. “Not really,” I had to confess. It was a long time ago. “Do you?” I returned hopefully. “Of course. Just like it was yesterday. You were so drunk that evening. Don’t you remember? Oh, of course you don’t. You passed out,” he said as a little balloon in my chest starting deflating rapidly. “What?” I said. “We were at Bimmys Bar, back in those days when they used to cover their liquor menu with wooden frames. Look – you are even holding it over your head – you must have been sloshed beyond belief,” he said. Everything within me seemed to sink. I felt sick - whether out of shock or whiskey I will never know. “Be a friend,” I said, my voice quivering. “There’s a bottle of premium whiskey made by hard working Scotsmen beside you. Pour me a drink.” Copyright 2008 Arjun Sengupta |
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