On the way home, on a kind of bus, 3:15 in the evening.
A man whose hair mixes blond and white came with a young guy. The man—a skeleton graced with living flesh—sat diagonally opposite me. The guy sat in the front.
The car was in bones with no skin to cover the beams. Its roof had no headliner. One of those beams ran from the door next to the man, who had then held it—scared to death from the car’s vibrations. Nightmares reflected off his face with every pothole. I can’t imagine the speedbreakers. His white stained shirt rippled, like a needle playing the road’s vinyl.
It moved the same as he got out when his guy stopped the car, flung open the door, and yanked him out. His arms splayed. The shirt hung on them like a scarecrow’s in the wind. He looked, as a boy of 14 who never looked above his phone remarked, aesthetic.
His iris sparkled with a blithe laugh. I recognized that iris—the blue halo around its brown ring, it’s of a disease I can’t place. I have seen them often enough on men of his kind.
His guy wasn’t that happy and said, “Money” in the bleakest of anger. The man reached into his front pocket, gave his only twenty rupees note and put back the few pieces of yellow paper that were dragged out along the note. The guy kept that note and instead gave a 100 one to the driver.
The man kept looking. When his guy went for their alley, he tripped a little with another laugh that shook his body.
I couldn’t see whatever was left of his laugh. That blithe, unfazed, diseased man who I won’t see again after the car moved on. Might have been a mask or a courage to face the absurd that I can never have.
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