Chair in the Balcony

By Sangeetha G

He sat in the chair firmly with his hands on the armrest. He then leaned back and crossed his legs and smiled to himself. With red velvet cushions on the seat, the backrest and armrest, the chair looked like a throne, placed at the centre of the balcony. From the balcony which opened from his bedroom on the first floor of the house, he got a wide view of his land. The groundnut plants in the field were in the flowering stage.

 

They looked healthy and happy and were enjoying the evening breeze. He could see occasional walkers taking the mud road by the side of the field to reach the village square. When they saw him, they waved hands and greeted him with a smile. When they did so, he felt like a king - master of all that he beheld. He watched his grandchildren shouting and playing in the courtyard happily. He enjoyed watching them and laughed loudly at their pranks.

His wife woke up from sleep, startled by his laugh. “He and his dreams. Won’t let others sleep,” she muttered a few cuss words and went back to sleep. The whole family of Arumugham - wife, daughter, grand daughter and son slept in the same room. The dingy room had all their belongings. They occupied every inch of the room. Things were stuffed into bags and hung from the wall. Every corner of the room was occupied by the boxes. A plastic rope tied from one corner to another was sagging in the middle due to the weight of the clothes hung on it.

Each bit of space on the wall, the roof and floor were fully utilised and fresh air struggled to squeeze in through the single window. Even if it managed to come in, it got stuck among the household items. Till the door was opened, the air was caught up in the room and got filled up with the musty smell of semi-dried and unwashed clothes.

Adjacent to the single room was a small covered area used for cooking and that too was crammed with old vessels over and under a concrete slab, plastic containers, a rusty stove and a few vegetables in the corner of the slab. The family had to climb three floors to use the bathroom on the terrace of the four-storeyed building. He had lived in that room at the rear end of the parking space in the ground floor of an old residential building for 20 years. But, Arumugham would never call it his house.

He had come to the city with his wife and children 20 years back from his tiny village near Thirukkovillur. That year drought had eaten away all his crops like the previous year and the money lender had taken possession of his house. The family packed up their clothes, a few vessels and other essentials to leave for Chennai like many other farmers who left that year and the previous years.

Before leaving, he walked up to his land to bid goodbye. Teary-eyed, he held a handful of soil closer to his chest and smeared a pinch of it on his forehead. “Don’t worry Arumugham, you have taken the right decision”. Arumugham turned around to see his neighbour Selvam. “Despite all the hard work he puts in for months, uncertainty never leaves a farmer. If the price of produce goes up, his crop would have failed and when he has a good crop, prices would have touched rock bottom. Scarcity or abundance, a farmer would always remain penniless. In the city, at least you can get a job and will have a steady income,” Selvam consoled. Arumugham nodded his head.

It was a four-hour journey by bus to Chennai. But that four-hour journey took him a century ahead. He felt as if teleported to a certain time in the future. Large roads, overbridges and countless shops on both sides of the road, people in their varied and colourful attire, tall buildings and different brands of expensive cars co-existed with squalor, slums, stinking water channels and garbage. Old and dingy tea shops with stained sieves and dirty cups jostled with swanky car showrooms and hotels to serve tea and oil-dripping snacks to the well-dressed and not so well-dressed.

 

He walked through the busy city streets unseen and unheard. Nobody looked at him. They all were in a hurry. There were a lot of people, but no familiar faces. He knew that even if he walked through the same streets for ten years, he would never bump into a familiar person and no one would call him out from behind, smile at him and ask about his well-being. The city will always be full of strangers.

They came out of buildings, which looked like match boxes arranged one on top of another. From the top of the buildings, their cars looked like tiny ants marching in lines on black roads. They kept moving day and night incessantly and tirelessly.

At night, the shops dressed themselves up in glittering lights like the women in the red-light area in their cheap and flashy clothes. They beckoned the customers in. The shops never asked his caste nor cared about his colour. For them, he was just a human form carrying a wallet. If the wallet had money, he was king and if not, a pauper, fit to be thrown out to the streets.

Without money in his pocket, he found the large city cold and unwelcoming. After roaming around hungry for days in search of work, through an acquaintance, he got into the team of a small-time building contractor, who took up some reconstruction assignments within the city. He accompanied the contractor wherever he worked, slowly learning a bit of plumbing and electrical repair. But his skill was in making himself available for every given job - strenuous and risky. He started earning the daily bread, but he began losing a bit of himself everyday.

 

He hated the servility expected from a labourer – of taking orders, of doing whatever he was asked to, of being yelled at, of silently receiving all the abuses and leaving home with a paltry amount, tiring body and a bruised ego. As a farmer, no one asked him to sow, to harvest or work in the fields. He has his own master. At night, he dreamt of the fields, the smell of the damp soil after the first rain, the evening breeze that caressed the blossoming crop, the festive mood during harvest and the harvested crop heaped up in the courtyard. The chair in the balcony was always there and he sat on it every night like a king.

A few years later, he was a man fully drained of purpose. He thought about the land, his village and the crops less often. Gradually he stopped thinking about anything and dreams too stopped visiting him in his sleep. He woke up at the same time, ate the same food, took the same route to work, did the same work, heard the same abuses and returned to the same dingy room to repeat the routine the next day. Like the smelly air in the room, his life also had stagnated. That's when he had a new companion. It came in glass bottles and took charge of his body and mind.

The air in the dingy room acquired new odours. It stank of liquor and all that he threw up along with it. The tipsy air lost its way out and forgot to escape even when the door was opened. Arumugham also forgot many things- the fight that he picked up with a fellow tippler, the place he fell off after his daily doze, the stray dog that licked his bottle for the remaining drops, food that he gulped down some time during the day, the dirty clothes he wore improperly, anxious faces of his daughter and grand-daughter, the abuses he hurled at his wife and the household things he threw at her. In his mind only one thought lingered - a colourful liquid packed in glass bottles and ways to secure it.

When meeting daily expenses became a challenge, Arumugham’s wife cleaned dirty vessels in the neighbourhood, mopped their floors and scrubbed their toilets, cooked for them and collected and disposed of their garbage. She married off their daughter with her meagre savings only to find her back with a baby in the same house a few years later. In the dingy room now there was one more member and one more mouth to feed. His son gave up the idea of marriage for want of space in the room.

Age started catching up faster with Arumugham and so did the demands of his family. He escaped from all those bickering and took refuge in the daily dosage of booze. The family had given up on him. But when his heart too did so, he collapsed one day. However, life gave him another chance. A failable heart was an eyeopener. Lying in the hospital bed, he realised that he had very little time left to return to his village and live his dream. Once again there was a purpose and urgency in life. Once again he held the reins of life in his hand.

Arumugham picked up all the jobs that came his way, including that of a security guard of an apartment complex. While on guard duty, he would climb up the walls of tall buildings with a weak heart to fix the leaking pipe, meddle with live electric wires, run errands, clean water tanks and cars. He charged for every little service. His acquaintances said he had turned greedy after the heart attack. But he was in a tearing hurry. He collected and saved every single rupee as his dream was taking shape. He started building his dream house in his village. He wanted his tiny house to be double-storied with a balcony opening out of his bedroom to the fields. Each brick took him closer to his dream and finally the day arrived.

The family removed the clothesline, squeezed the clothes into the bags hung on the walls of the dingy room and filled up sacks with utensils and kitchen items. They were excited to leave the city and were running around and packing up things the whole day. After the truck loaded the household things and took them away to his new house in the village, Arumugham for one last time lay down on the floor of the room for a nap. His body was aching with the day’s work. He looked at the discoloured roof and stained walls of the room where he stayed for more than 20 years.

 

He realised how the room too has been ageing with him. But that thought did not bother him much. He had waited 20 years for this moment to bid the walls and the roof goodbye and they too bid him goodbye happily. After several years, he experienced a sense of contentment and achievement. He smiled to himself and slowly slipped into a slumber. In the dream, he saw himself seated in the chair placed in the balcony of his new house in the village, waving hands at the passersby.

A few hours later, they made him sit upright on the chair. The chair had red velvet cushions fixed on the seat and backrest. It truly looked like a throne. The throne stood at the centre of an open vehicle, which had golden paper pasted all over and was decorated with garlands to look like a chariot of yore. He wore fresh white clothes. He was garlanded and flower bouquets were placed all around him. He was taken out in a procession from his new house through the village road. Crackers burst as the chariot moved forward.

 

Flower petals were strewn on the path and a group of youngsters kept beating drums and dancing to the beat, while moving in front of the chariot. The people in the village came out of their houses, waited to see him on both sides of the road and paid their respects. But he did not look at them, nor did he smile and wave at them. His eyes were closed and body still; a white cotton ribbon held his chin and the head tight and cotton balls were inserted into nostrils.

 

Sangeetha G is a journalist in India. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Sky Island Journal, Down in the Dirt, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kitaab International, Indian Review, Nether Quarterly, Muse India, Storizen, and Borderless Journal. Her stories have won Himalayan Writing Retreat Flash Fiction contest and Strands International Flash Fiction contest. Her debut novel 'Drop of the Last Cloud' was published in May 2023.