Chin Chin and Muck Muck pt2

dil mein sanam ki surat

Chin Chin and Muck Muck started sharing razors, accidentally. The house was small, everything was cluttered. In the morning, you couldn’t tell whose jeans were whose, just like whose limb was whose. Everything was wrapped around each other, everybody was constantly falling over things, onto the double mattress that lay on the floor, an invitation that lasted the whole day. The razor thing started out of Muck Muck’s laziness. Once you were in the bathroom, it felt like a chore to step out dripping soapy water all over, arms to your side like a scarecrow, looking for a razor in the mess. Once she slipped on the wet floor, from the only plastic stool in the house, and Chin Chin caught her by her ankle. It reminded her of a painting, of a memory. Years ago she had slipped off a mossy rock in the river, and had to hold onto her mother to steady herself. Her mother, the frail woman who was as skinny as Chin Chin, held her teenage daughter’s weight and brought her back to her centre of gravity. That was a day, and then this was the only day after it ever. They sat on the damp floor, the phenyl clinging to their skin and noses, and laughed. It was so easy to open the door of Childhood with each other. The unattainable Childhood – a fantasy place that did not exist when it was time, and now only arrived in moments so fleeting that you would burst your head open trying to chase it all across mossy rocks.

Chin Chin and Muck Muck had learnt how to make do, with luxuries punctuating their boredom. The weight of these luxuries were a burden they had decided to carry, for it was so easy to feel the illumination and glitter on their skin and on their tongues and inside their heads and then in each other’s eyes. They never deprived themselves of anything, for the World was already doing more than its share in that department. They had tried submitting the paperwork to reroute some of the deprivation to the Later Years, or at least space it out. Well, it was a trick you see. Chin Chin and Muck Muck knew they would be long gone before the Later Years caught up to them, so this was a loophole they were trying to jump through. But, you know how all the departments in the world work, so incompetent. They misread the form, even though both of them had such beautiful penmanship, and they never ran out of pens, or paper, or colours. They misread the “spacing out the deprivation” as “space between this invention.” This invention, of love, that had stuck to all of them, like greybackgolden bits of cat hair. The application got forwarded, and a stamp was put, in inky blue, just like their tongues in the middle of the night, when they would eat one of those horrid, salty candies to not smoke the last cigarette up.

So here they were. Chin and Muck and Muck and Chin. A bag was packed, jeans were untangled, and washed. No ticket was booked, so the journey felt like an open-ended punishment that looped back into a reward. The promise of return was unsaid; it clung to them, like all of the aforementioned things. Other things were said. Replace the blade after two shaves. You can keep the aftershave. You can take my perfume. Keep this shirt. Read this book. Come back, don’t go, stay, why, why not, how so. Chin Chin went ahead, still unable to tie his shoelaces. Muck Muck stayed back, still unable to make anything remotely edible after coming back from the Big Fight against The Agenda. The threads of their lives had gotten tangled into a ball, and it kept on unfurling as the train carried Chin Chin away, once more, but not for long. At each station, a tug was felt, with each sleepy turn on the mattress, the tug wrapped itself around them, a blanket, akin to the same sky they shared, no matter where they were. Each night, a reminder, the World was still working overtime, there was more of this depravity to come, but not for long.

ikumi nakada

सौ साल तक सनम की आँखों में डूब जाऊं

सौ साल और हो तो उसको गले लगाऊं

सौ साल फिर मिलन की

दुनिया नयी नयी दे

मेरे खुदा मुझे तू इक और ज़िन्दगी दे

For a hundred years, let me drown in my lover’s eyes

Then, if I am lucky, I get a hundred more for an embrace

Then ten decades of meeting

In worlds anew to us

The one I pray to, give me one more life of this all

- Dil Mein Sanam Ki Surat, from Phir Teri Kahani Yaad Aayi