Venu Decides To Die
Amritha
Dinesh
The wind flowed around his balls and played
with the hair on his butt. A heavy, full moon emerged from the clouds and Venu
decided that if he was to jump, he had to do it right now. A shudder ran from his
tailbone to the crown of his head. This was it. He took a deep breath and
looked down unable to move until the dawn lit up the sands. Only sand. Where
did the water go? He looked down frantically. There were a few silver pools
across the sand like broken mirrors, but the river had disappeared. Would the
hard sand do the job or would it leave him with broken bones or a broken back.
Living at the mercy of his wife until he recovered, or for the rest of his
life. The thought brought on another shudder. He turned to the neatly folded
shirt, ivory dhoti and briefs, next to his Hawaii chappals. Why were they
called Hawaii chappals? Why had he removed all his clothes? He had
seen it in a movie a long time ago. The camera had moved dramatically to a hero
unbuttoning his shirt, standing at the edge of a cliff, tears streaming down
his face, or was it rain? In the next shot an evil policeman laughed as he saw
the neatly folded clothes and shoes at the edge of the cliff and shouted, ‘He
killed himself!’ Of course the hero hadn’t killed himself, he came back and
threw the policeman off the same cliff. Venu was going to miss movies when he
was dead.
There was a rumble in the distance. He looked
up, goosebumps breaking over his skin, reminding him again that he was naked.
At first he was spooked by the pairs of lights, one after the other, hovering
and jumping over the sands before he realised it was a line of trucks. They
passed under him as he crouched low, face to the ground and bum a little higher
to protect his privates from the broken concrete. He scrabbled for his clothes,
dressing while almost horizontal before standing up. The last truck had stopped
below the bridge. A face was looking up and it was a familiar face.
‘Venu chetta. What are you doing here so early
in the morning?’
‘What are you doing here? With all these
trucks?’ he shouted back.
The boy was his neighbour.
‘Sand. For construction.’
‘Sand mining is illegal.’ He recited.
‘Yes, that’s why we are doing it at this
godforsaken hour.’
The boy did not look very happy with the
conversation and so Venu changed the topic. ‘Why is there no water? It rained
pretty well last month.’
‘There are no sand bars to hold the water and
the rains weren’t that good.’
The boy turned away and walked towards the
truck.
Venu’s house stood half built; he would ask
the boy for a favour when he needed sand for the rest of the construction.
He did not need a house. He was going to die.
His legs took him to the village party office.
He was not a member, but you could get free tea and sometimes a cigarette. And
newspapers. He had started reading them to while away time but now he was
hooked. A few weeks back he had read an article about poison in everyday items.
Toothpaste was poisonous, but you needed to eat an entire tube for it to kill
you. He liked the minty taste of Colgate. He should try it out. He
turned to walk home.
The house was silent except for a groaning fan
in the master bedroom where his wife of fifteen years and his twelve-year-old
daughter were sleeping. He had been banished to a smaller room. The toothpaste
was in the common bathroom. He hoped there was a full tube and not a crumpled,
folded-into-itself-end-of-month one. He was in luck. For the first time that
night, smiled. There was a women’s magazine on the dining table. He took the
magazine and the full tube of paste, sat on his bed and started licking it like
an ice cream cone. Fifteen minutes later, there was just one dent in the tube
and his tongue refused to obey him. He squeezed in a mouthful and swallowed.
Venu’s stomach did not want to die. It sent frantic signals to his legs. He
scrambled to the bathroom and vomited toothpaste and bile.
A shrill roar woke him the next morning. He
had forgotten to clean the basin. His wife then discovered the half emptied
toothpaste tube and the roar gained intensity. Venu watched as his daughter
calmly got ready for school without even a glance at her warring parents. He
sat at the dining table with her, hoping to get breakfast or at least a cup of
tea, but she ate without acknowledging him, smirking at some of the more
creative taunts. His wife had progressed to his manhood. ‘You’re a woman.
Jobless, gossiping, spineless woman. That Sheela came and complained that her
husband was torturing her every night. I told her to be thankful she is married
to man.’
His daughter smirked once more into the plate.
Venu realised she understood exactly what her mother was saying. He wished
words could draw blood. Then people would see the harm they were doing. He
wished bruises would form every time his wife hurled abuses at him. His skin
would cut open with every taunt so that she could see what happened every time
she opened her mouth. He wished his chest would tear apart so that his daughter
could see how she had broken his heart.
A year ago he had tried to ‘be a man’. He
found a job as a restaurant manager. The daughter was at her grandparents and
he had tried to please his wife. Rubbing his face between her humungous breasts
like he had seen in a soft core movie. There was a sour smell; he opened his
eyes to see a piece of idli, its edges still coated with rancid coconut chutney
wedged in her cleavage. The pores on her skin looked like large dark holes
trying to swallow him. A stretch mark flamed out on one side, looking to burn
him. He tried, but his body had already decided that it wouldn’t function.
The next day he had lost his job and his place
in the bedroom.
Venu walked out of the house, when it became
clear that he was not going to be served breakfast. Dousing himself with petrol
and putting himself on fire seemed too painful. He was scared of hanging. As a
child, he had discovered a neighbour hanging from a tree in their backyard, eyes
and tongue protruding, bowels loosened. He still had nightmares about it.
Normal poison would do the job. Why had he even tried toothpaste when there
were so many other easy poisons? Because it would require money to buy and he
was broke. No shopkeeper would give him credit. The party office was almost
empty. He walked in and started reading the papers. The old caretaker walked
past him, Venu involuntarily asked, ‘Is there any poison lying around?’
‘Rat poison. It’s in the storeroom at the
back.’ Two days later Venu discovered the answer for one of the burning
questions that haunted the internet. If he had better luck, someone would have
made a viral star out of him. But Venu’s luck was like the only bus that
connected his village. Always late, always at the verge of breaking down and
only just enough to take you from one place to another.
Expired poison isn’t as potent as poison used
within the recommended date. He survived and became the joke of the day at the
village medical centre. His wife and daughter did not come to visit. In the bed
next to him lay an old drunk who was sympathetic. ‘The house next to the broken
down temple, go there and ask for elephant tamer. Drink it and go jump in front
of the train. You will feel nothing. I would do it myself, but I don’t want to
give my wife the pleasure.’
A really fat man was sitting on the porch. ‘Fifty
rupees.’ Venu did not have any money on him and asked for credit. The man did
not respond.
‘Brother-in-law! What are you doing here?
Trying to get a life after trying to die?’ Venu detested his loud and
successful brother-in-law, especially when he was drunk, so he tried to walk
away.
‘Married to my sister, I don’t blame you. As
compensation, please accept these two sachets from me.’
Venu grabbed the plastic packs and walked
towards the railway station, tearing them open with his teeth and pouring the
contents down his throat. This time he willed his stomach into keeping the
contents.
The railway station was deserted. The board
said that the next train was in an hour. He walked between the tracks, away
from the station so that the train would be coming in full speed and not
slowing down as it mowed into him. The thought brought tears to his eyes. The
railway line grew blurred and then tilted from side to side. The elephant tamer
must be taking effect. He sat down. The steel rail was cool to the touch and he
placed his cheek on it. There was a light rumbling, the train must be nearing.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and waited.
At the railway station, junior reporter Sindhu
and the photographer assigned to her were told that the train was two hours
late. When the reclusive author who lived in the middle of nowhere refused to
speak for the third day in a row, Sindhu had decided to leave. The photographer
wanted some pictures of the colonial railway station. They decided to explore
and were walking on the tracks to the bridge that was supposed to be older than
the railway station, built to transport teak from the forests that no longer
existed. There was a man lying down on the track. The photographer took a few
artistic close ups. He had ambitions. ‘Man sleeps on railway line in interior
India.’
A beautiful woman was shaking him awake. Had
the train passed? Was he in heaven? She had her hands around his shoulders. The
side of her breast was pressing against his chest. His eyes had trouble
focussing but with each sliding of the eyeballs, he could see a considerable
portion of her chocolate coloured breasts. Venu’s penis worked perfectly after
an entire year of slumber. He wanted to whoop with joy, but strangely his
tongue wasn’t working. All the blood must have passed to his member, he thought
before transferring his attention back to the girl. She was asking him
something. He wanted to pour out his troubles to her, starting from his
incomplete house to his failure to kill himself.
‘Sand for construction,’ is what came out of
his mouth. The misery of realising how stupid it is to jump without clothes. ‘Stripping
the river.’ His favourite suicide method that didn’t work.
‘Killing the river?’
‘No … No.’ His tongue gave up, so he made the
universal gesture for eating the poison that didn’t kill him.
How this train was going to be his final
salvation and so he pointed in its direction.
‘The man is on a hunger strike combined with a
rail roko against illegal sand mining!’
Sindhu had her scoop. The photographer
silently took photos of Sindhu’s chest and the man’s erection for his private
amusement.
A day later the short video (it was shot on a
DSLR) with Sindhu, her cleavage still partially visible, hand around a drooping
Venu, a stopped train in the background, and with her English tainted
accent declared to the world that there were still people who cared enough about
the environment to put their own lives at stake, went viral.
A few days after that Venu wondered whether he
would die of starvation. It was the worst way he could think of, but now there
was no option left.
Amritha Dinesh is a freelance writer based out of
Chennai. She has dabbled in everything from entrepreneurship to
copywriting, equity research to industrial marketing. She was a finalist in the
Creative writing in English category for Toto Funds the Arts in 2010.
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