A Hundred and Twenty Six

Amelie is amused by Nino’s growing bald spot. She rubs this spot every night when she is done creaming her feet and stuffing them into socks, and likens it to peach fuzz. She is older, the skin around her mouth has softened a little. She finds herself appraising her shoes more and more, wondering, is this a little cloddish? There is a young colleague who is trying to get her to appreciate bold colours of lipstick, but Amelie is mostly captivated by how expertly the young colleague applies a steady line of red on her lower lip in just one stroke, and how when she purses her lips together, a perfectly symmetrical other half blooms on the upper lip like a red Rorschach butterfly.

The manufacturer of her favourite eau de cologne has shut shop. She has discovered a weakness for clove cigarettes. In the world outside, a few kings and princes have been overthrown by artful coups that she is lesser inclined to follow. These days, Nino mostly goes down on his knees at birthday and bachelorette parties where photobooths have become a big hit. Amelie has fashioned patches for his trouser knees, and is starting to insist that Nino doesn’t ruin his good pairs of pants. She thinks he works in the DVD business, but he’s actually growing into a millionaire. Neither of them knows this yet.

Across from where they live, an American chain of donuts has appeared. When it is summer, Amelie indulges herself a donut with a syrupy core of orange peel. She reads the English on the paper bag in careful pauses, and realizes she has never been to America. This may not have bothered her before, but now, she’s not so sure.

Ever since her father passed, Amelie has wondered off and on about Mathematics. She read somewhere that long ago in China, the government forced couples to have just one child, so after parents passed, they had effectively halved the population. She thinks, they may now be at 1/64th their strength, and yet, they remain the world’s most populous country. She tries hard to wrap her head around how large the world is, and how random and scattered her own acts of goodwill must seem. She hopes it will pass, because she hasn’t even admitted it to Nino yet, but she’s not sure she believes in solitary moments of gold and god-light anymore.

She dusts cocoa powder on a batch of freshly baked muffins. The cat tinkles the bead curtains and slinks away in apology, but nothing tears Amelie away from watching the cloud of cocoa settle. She is awed by how each and every individual speck of this chocolate has come from somewhere in Ghana, that she, here, remembers her mother recommending. She feels a familiar flutter. She has understood with great clarity her undertaking for humanity. These are not acts of randomness. These are choices that she has known in her every pore; knowledge that has only now made it to her brain. She knows she is not cruel to be unmoved by drunkards crumpled by dawn. But it definitely rules out being Florence Nightingale. She stirs her tea and analyses all the things that break her heart – a car with a teddy bear being towed by a helpline truck, a dead pigeon by the road, dirty snow, a blind man trying to key a hole – and finds that these are things that nobody in this world can exercise the illusion of control over. She cannot remedy these, but she can, using that same Brownian system of the universe, cause kindness and wonder, and maybe, just maybe, gold.

But she pauses. Does the dust of cocoa matter on a hot muffin?

She reminds Nino to brush his teeth. She peels the duvet and slides in. It takes her a while to fluff the pillow into comfortable submission. She sits in bed worrying the band-aid on her finger. Nino is scrapping together what seems to be a hairy –

“What do you think this is?”

She leans over and tilts her head and runs through all the words that Nino has taught her these past few years. They were appalling words, words far more potent than “shit”, “nincompoop”, “retard”, or “Idiot”. She locates the right one and smiles remembering how they had giggled conspiratorially and had said the word over and over and over till it lost all elasticity and became a strange lump of sound, not knowing which the bigger offence was – the word itself or the undignified stripping of its definition. It had been a moment when the universe’s hollowness had been exposed, but they had taken to it like the brave new world under a tablecloth.

Amelie looks at Nino, and smiles.

They can’t stop laughing.

—

Inspired by a conversation with the extremely talented Philip John.