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SOLO
Rana Dasgupta
for my darling Monica
CONTENTS
1
THE MAN HAS WOKEN SUDDENLY, in the dead zone of the night. It is unnaturally hot for the time of year; his throat is raw and there is sweat in all his creases.
He stumbles to the sink for water. Then he sits in his armchair, and snorts a few times to clear his nose.
The bus station outside his window is being modernised, and he can hear the drills screaming even at this hour.
In the interests of reducing crime, two blinding floodlights have been installed in the station forecourt. They seem to have deceived the local birds, which now begin their dawn chorus in the middle of the night, just as the man succeeds in dozing off. At this very moment, they are squawking as if possessed.
Breathing heavily in his chair, the man is scorched by a halogen glow from outside, though there is darkness in the room.
Unmindful of the time, the travellers in the bus station bring great ingenuity to the making of noise, shouting and clanging and revving their moribund cars, as if no one were trying to sleep.
The man is nearing the end of his life’s tenth decade, and his apartment is on the fourth floor.
The main room measures four by three and a half metres. There is a bathroom to the side, and, at the end, an area for cooking. The window looks out on the stalls in front of the bus station, where people sell goods from China: alarm clocks, watch straps, plastic plants, batteries, T-shirts, souvenirs, and so on. There are also currency sellers who sit waiting to trade with those who arrive on buses from other countries.
There is a leak in one corner of the man’s ceiling, which lets in water when it rains. This water has leached slowly into the plaster in a shape that resembles a map of Australia, causing paint to fall and a smell of cisterns to hang continually in the room.
The window faces west; so the apartment is brightest in the evening.
The government still sees fit to pay the man a pension every month in order to sustain him in his penury. When he retired, many years ago, this money was quite adequate: he lived alone and had few requirements. But with everything that has happened in the economy, his pension has become worthless, and his savings have disappeared. If it were not for the generosity of his neighbours, who buy food and other supplies for him every month, he would now find himself in an alarming situation. They are good people: they pay for the man’s television subscription, and the wife even cooks his meals, since he can no longer manage it himself.
But he does not like bothering them every time he needs more coffee or toilet paper. He has put in many years on this earth, and he feels he has a right to expect that such things will come to him unbidden.
Events have turned the man blind. But his hearing is quite intact, and his primary entertainment is still his television. He looks in vain for programmes about jazz, for these they do not show; instead he sits in front of beauty contests, infomercials, German pornography, travel shows, and other similar kinds of modern wisdom.
Sometimes, late at night, when his television is turned off, he hears the interminable ring of a telephone somewhere below, and he lies awake wondering where in the world this yearning might be housed, and what it might seek so insistently in this building.
In the afternoons, the breeze brings with it a slight scent of old urine from the wall below his window. All the men who pass through the bus station duck behind that wall to relieve themselves against it. There are public toilets in the station, but they do not seem to be able to compete with the wall, which holds an uncanny attraction for any man with a full bladder. Even men who have never been there before, and do not realise it is already filled with the reeking sludge of twenty years, give not a second glance to the broken cubicles at the edge of the square. At any moment, two or three of them can be seen standing in the shelter of this wall, shaking out their last drops.
Women
