Uglines

(A short writerup by Sidharth Vardhan

First published on March 4, 2019)

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1.

His clothes were as black as the background. The place was marked by a complete lack of landmarks – trees, walls, etc. Nothing but the darkness and, in it, that ugly man visible. but the darkness in the place wasn’t just a lack of light it seemed to have a material presence, it surrounded the place like a black fog and you could look in all directions without seeing far because of it. This fog-like effect was produced by a circle of dim light that circumscribed the visible area as is the case in fog; except, in this case, it was a black fog. This man whom he saw only in profile seemed so ugly to Manoj that he thought it won’t be an exaggeration to deny him the quality of humanity and call him a monster. The ‘monster’ was very heavy about his stomach and had a crooked nose and an almost albino skin shade with ugly black wrinkles spouting in the face. He smiled showing deformed, yellowish teeth. His eyes were of that undefined color which Manoj quickly read as the color of greed.
ambiguous sense of guilt and an absurdly strong feeling of fear and it was this shiver that woke him up from the nightmare. Unlike in movies, the nightmare didn’t make him sit up, he lay there in bed, though the shiver had made his body make a violent turn in bed.

The very sight of this man made a shiver run down Manoj’s neck whose disgust was combined with an

He tried to get the nightmare out of his mind. It took him a few moments to stop thinking about the strange monster. As he lay there trying to clear his head, he realized he had a really dry throat and a strong need to piss. While satisfying these needs he began wondering how completely we abandon our body when we sleep, completely unaware of any of its needs during the time. The vulnerability to which we subject ourselves when we sleep struck him as odd. Instinctively, he thanked God for making his bladder strong enough to hold piss so that he won’t humiliate himself (especially in front of his wife) by peeing in bed. A moment later, he realized what an absurd thing this was to thank God for.

He went back and laid there in bed trying to go back to sleep but was unable to. The sleep seemed all gone at the moment and then the image of that ugly monster kept popping up in his mind, the image had gone blurry now and he was no longer able to make out the features as clearly as before. What he remembered far more clearly was the strange feeling he got on seeing the monster. It didn’t scare him anymore now that he was awake but it was hardly the sort of thing one wants to have at the back of one’s mind. And so he woke his wife, Diksha, and quietly made moves for sex. Diksha was upset upon being woken up like this in the middle of the night but tried hiding it. She didn’t manage to do a very good job and Manoj could see her unwillingness but was not bothered by it. After all, what other need he had for this woman in the house?

2.

Being used to his eight hours of sleep, Manoj was grumpy the next day. He observed several faults in his breakfast meal and, after taking a break from fault-finding, to kiss his dear daughter goodbye before leaving for the factory, he was soon finding faults with the drivers of the vehicles on the road who were all slow enough or fast enough to make him declare that they were fucking their mothers and sisters. These observations about incestual relations were even more frequently made by him about workers working under him at the factory.

The factory, which for fear of being sued by its owners I can’t identify by name, created a tool that weighed 80 kilograms that we shall call ABC. This ABC tool was created by workers in a machine where they would load iron sheets and from the other end would come out of the final product. This ABC product was then placed in a trolley. There were two such trolleys for every one of 15 machines in the factory – one of them was always getting loaded and the other was getting unloaded in the space that was marked as the store.

The store had several exits that opened out to places where trucks were filled with them so that they could be taken out to the customers. This is where Manoj came in. His duty was at these exits as a supervisor who made sure that the workers who were employed there for the sole purpose of loading these tools into trucks would do so in minimum time. He had got this job solely because the owner of the factory, Rajesh (name changed) was his college friend who had offered him this job after the sudden death of his father (his mother was dead in his infancy).

Seven years later, he was one of the most trusted hands and there were, in fact, talks of promoting him to the position of production manager as Mr. Sharma who presently held the job was retiring.

He was only 29 years old and there were many senior managers in the factory. The reason why he was being considered so seriously was his radical idea which had done so much to reduce production costs.

As we mentioned the tool produced by the factory weighed 80 kilograms and it was shaped such that it was nearly impossible for most of the men alone (the factory owners didn’t even consider employing women for this job even in old days). Thus two workers were employed at every exit to pick it up and place it in the trucks. Manoj’s simple solution was to make one worker do the job of two. This age-old wisdom of managers who often delude themselves as gods didn’t seem physically possible at first but Manoj backed his solution with two additional suggestions. First that the workers selected for the job be physically strongest and healthiest thus they should be able to barely carry the weight of the tool. The factory already had enough of such workers and some to spare, you just needed to pick and choose them well. Second, that to silence any protests from the workers the wages of those employed for the job should be increased by twenty percent. Some simple mathematics would show a reduction in total wages paid for that particular task by 40 percent. Of course, if one dug deeper, one finds that even a healthier worker who, attracted by the money on offer, might take the job would have an impact on his health in long term because of such heavy weight lifting. But since the workers were not organized, permanent laborers; the management didn’t need to worry about their long-term health.

This twenty percent increase in wages had another advantage in that it was an instrument of control in the hands of Manoj (or whoever might take his place in the future). Manoj was quick to remind any worker requesting leave or wanting some rest or complaining that it was the time for a lunch break that the factory hadn’t been paying him additional wages for procrastinating. Of course, the workers – and most of them were intelligent enough to know it, could not say that for a mere one-fifth rise in wages, their work had been doubled. Hypocrisy is imposed in such conditions on the oppressed because they are too afraid to call the hypocrisy of the oppressor by its true name.

But didn’t Manoj see through the hypocrisy of his ways? Yes, he did but he seemed to have a belief that we are all here as mere actors. Some chose to play the master, others choose to play the victim. And together they conspire to create this ugly game. Manoj had learned not to think too much about it. It was a sort of belief system that people who are not too introspective develop unconsciously. The workers seemed to him a kind of people, a race, in whose best interest it was to get perished.

And it was not that Manoj needed this weapon to make his workers work like slaves. He would swear and curse his workers constantly to make sure they work to the fullest of their capacity during the time they paid for.

On his first day at work, Rajesh advised him to keep his distance from his subordinates if he wishes to do his job properly. Manoj wasn’t the cursing type when he took the job. He even allowed some concessions and some generous leaves during his first couple of months – a practice which earned him a threat of being fired from the job by his boss, Rajesh‘s father. Manoj, whose only possession in the world at that time was the house he inherited from his father, knew he would have no future without this job. And so he learned his lesson – If he didn’t act cruel, he would be one of the victims of cruelty.

After that, he did his best to ensure that no workers approach him with requests for concessions. The very fact that he felt he was exploiting his workers made him feel angry at them, and this anger made him operate with an unconscious assumption that the workers somehow deserved this behavior. How else was one to make these shitheads work?

When looking in the mirror at features of his face which had grown sharper over the years, he realized he was a much more handsome man now – so far better looking than when his father had died and when he was just a goody-two-shoes. It mirrored in his development of philosophy, a view of life, that though he won’t be able to phrase in so many words (he never was good with the words) could be summed up like this: Cruelty is what makes us beautiful. Tigers are far more adored by us than deer ever will be. Of course, he never would put it in so many words, he would never philosophize but it was the pattern along which his mind worked.

And thus he considered workers ugly because they seemed so passive. Their bodies seemed to degenerate before time (he didn’t realize at the same time that it was because of the oppression of people like him) and they seemed to have a sort of stink about them that repelled him. A stink of stupidity.

3.

The same ugly dream as before. The same monstrous man again with his pale skin, crooked nose, and fingers, and potbelly, etc. Only this time, Manoj was a little less shocked and a bit more curious about this monster and so the nightmare persisted a little longer. Manoj observed how the monster had a whip in his left hand with which he was now whipping the two girls who were kneeling near him – both naked, both scared of him. Manoj’s heart went out to these girls.

The girls, he guessed, seemed to be in their early teens given the formation of their bodies. Their breasts were still sprouting but there was no freshness of a young body in them. Instead, they suggested a stink, much similar to that of workers under Manoj, and their bodies were undernourished, that they seemed to wear off even before they were fully formed. The shoulders were weak, the arms were pencil-thin, and there were black scratches and marks all over the body.

The monstrous man whipped them and they cried and shrieked in pain and afterward seemed to offer him food (which showed up out of nowhere). Manoj, who observed them while himself being unobserved by them, already somehow knew that after his meal, the monster would return to whipping them again. He felt sorry for them and wanted to help them. But he was himself scared of this monster, scared of even being seen by him.

As he wondered about it and decided he was too big a coward to interfere, the girls turned toward him and looked at him with a kind of hostility in their eyes as if it was he who had whipped them. But as he recoiled in this terror, yet another horror got him, surely the monster too now …. yes, the mysterious man had followed the gaze of the girls and was to look at him …… the combination of these two horrors was enough to wake him.

4.

The recurrence of the nightmare itself was bothering him but what bothered him still more was the hostility in the eyes of the girls. Being a modern man, he wasn’t of the kind to look for meaning in his dreams. Modern psychology was only for mad people while the religious interpretation of dreams was for the superstitious. He did feel amused though by the realization that there won’t be any Hindu book talking about things contained in his dream.

The question that seemed to bother him most was why the girls hated him. What harm had he done to them? It was this question that won’t let him sleep. He had actually felt sorry for the girls, nothing disgusted him as violence, especially violence against children – he himself had a father who had beaten him a lot (though he remembered how it was the humiliation of having to apologize afterward that had often bothered him more than the actual beating) and, in turn, he won’t punish or let his wife punish his four-year-old daughter in anything other than scoldings. And that was another reason why his dream bothered him so much.

He found himself turning around in his bed and being unable to sleep as he looked for distraction. Again he woke Diksha up, who grumbled a little but not too much, too scared to make her husband angry. She had a strong aversion to arguments and could go to great heights to avoid one.

She had never thought much of sex and except for a couple of times when their arrange marriage was still fresh never enjoyed it much. It seemed to her just another sort of duty one does for one’s husband. She tried her best to hide her reluctance but it showed on her face and that only made Manoj go at it in a much rougher way. If only he knew violence has more meanings than mere physical beatings!

5.

His bad mood went into the day. He sarcastically complimented his wife over her ability to make the food more and more tasteless.

And today he was even cursing their workers when they were doing better than the norm. His mood remains sour even when Rajesh came to his desk to tell him that he is to work as an assistant to the production manager learning his job starting next month so that he could replace him a month later. The news seemed to leave him so unimpressed that his friend suggested that he need some refreshment “if you know what I mean”. Manoj knew exactly what he meant but that would cost a lot. Perhaps some other day.

6.

The same dream only this time the monstrous man was wearing the suit; this time Manoj knew he was going to whip the girls and, as it often happens in dreams, knowing it was to happen was to see it happen. His foreknowledge seemed to increase the pace of dream time so that the monster was already done with whipping in no time and had now turned his head toward him, still chewing on the food given by girls – a morsel showed in his mouth, making Manoj feel like throw up.  But Manoj’s terror takes a new height when the monster looks at him. The expression on the face is of a friend ….. oh no! not a friend, it is ….. absurd! it was flirtatious. The man seemed to be looking at him the way one looked at a lover. With lust and playfulness.

7.

Again Manoj woke up in the middle of the night. Three nights in a row he hadn’t been able to sleep well. He looked toward his wife but was struck by a strong sense of exhaustion. No, he won’t be able to do it again. He stood up and got himself a glass of water but drank it too quickly. As a result, the water burnt on his dry throat, angry, he threw the glass on the floor, and it broke with a sound that woke his wife.

”What happened?” it was a somewhat general question, asking about the reason behind the change in his behavior in the past few days. And, she regretted asking it as soon as it was out.

“Nothing,” Manoj said in a tone that suggested she had asked something which she, an inferior, had no right to ask, and left the room.

Diksha even as she got up from bed to clean the fragments of broken glass was relieved that he had not got his anger out on her and that he had not wanted to have sex. As we mentioned before, except for the first few times, after their arranged marriage, she had never driven any pleasure from it. In fact, her ability to adjust to the dictates of fates was so strong that she had just imagined those pleasures she drove from the first few times. That, there was just no such thing as sexual pleasure for women.

8.

It was Sunday so it was a good day to make up for the sleep lost during the week. He went back to bed after breakfast but even though his eyes were heavy and his body restless, he just couldn’t fall asleep. The images from his nightmare kept popping up in his mind and he couldn’t distract himself in any way.

Remembering the promotion he was getting soon, he decided he should be happy. Seven years ago, when his father died he had next to nothing – just a house and a graduate degree. And now he had made a life for himself, had a wife and a daughter, the latter he loved more than anything in the world. And it was only to secure her future that he would often stay out overnight and work overtime.

No, he deserved to be happy, he should be happy. He had worked so hard, cemented himself, and killed his softer side …. and then he remembered the words of the factory owner. Yes, he needed to reward himself. He needs some really good company. 

He hired a room in a hotel and requested the services of a prostitute from a contact which Rajesh had shared with him years ago. Rajesh had kept offering him an adventure like this from the time they were together in college. But his romantic and moral notions had made him deny them earnestly. Though these same notions had made him get married (arranged marriage) within months of starting the job.

Diksha had not been able to lose the weight gained during pregnancy after the birth of his daughter, this made her unattractive in his eyes. Unable to feel any attraction toward her, he had started sneaking out on weekends and hiring prostitutes. 

At first, he did so every week, feeling that he has found a sort of new treasure. He was careful to ask for only the prettiest ones. Over the next few months, his visits grew less frequent, first because the novelty of a variety of women exhausted itself,  and second, the first shock of the ‘ugliness’ of his wife now being over, she seemed to serve the purpose despite her ugliness. Now the prostitutes were treats he would indulge himself in when his wife bored him.

Over time, it had occurred to him that it wasn’t anymore the idea of possessing anew beauty in itself when he wanted a new girl every time he took services as had been the case at first, but rather it was the simple, mundane conversations – the awkward introductions that preceded the act that gratified him. The few times he had asked for the same girl, it had seemed to him, that the girl was holding something back, that there was some sort of judgment in her. That he had done something, created an image in her mind that could never be changed. And thus he started fresh with a new girl every time these days, already knowing that by the end of the act, he would have acquired some sort of monstrosity in her eyes.

Perhaps it was this very observation that he desired novelty over beauty that he decided to experiment this time by asking for middle-aged women. And these middle-aged women cost less which helped him save more for his daughter. It was this phase of his life when the recurring nightmare made him restless.

He knocked at the door of the address given to him. The woman greeted him with a smile. ‘Not bad’ he mused.

9.

“Mother fucker! Whore!” he cursed the whole wide world and the woman as he put on his underwear back on and moved toward his pants. Fortunately, it wasn’t a girl in her twenties this time who might have been scared but a woman in her forties, who just frowned musingly.

Treating it to mean that she was inwardly laughing at her, he started accusing her of his own failure “It is useless. You can’t do a thing right even though you have done it all your life.”

The woman ignored the accusation and just asked: “Should I consider it over then?”

He laughed bitterly “yes”

“My money?”

“Your money? It didn’t even get hard.”

But this was not his submissive wife who would be scared of loud voices, “Don’t you accuse me of your lack of manhood, mister” she said in a firm voice that also had a threat in it.

This brought Manoj to his senses and, anyway, he wasn’t the sort of man who would be given to passion for too long. He quickly accessed how it could turn into a scene. He took the wallet out of his pocket and paid the woman mumbling his grudges incoherently.

10.

The humiliation of the whole thing sat on his mind as he made his way back home barely holding back his anger. He continued to mentally accuse ‘the whore’ of being so ugly that she couldn’t excite him. On the way back, he took a bottle of alcohol. It served two purposes – one he would get drunk, two, back home, Diksha would know not to bother him. She knew not to disturb him when he was in the mood to get drunk. He would fall asleep in front of the television in the same drunken state.

11.

The same dream, the same man, the same whip, the same girls. While the intensity of the scare things gave him had reduced immensely by loss of the element of shock by now, it wasn’t a relief because now the nightmare seemed to be happening faster too. This time it happened even faster than the speed of his thought. When he saw the monster, he quickly remembered what to expect, but then in what seemed to be the very next moment it seemed to have already happened – the monster had already whipped the girls, and he had apparently been standing there seeing his nightmare repeat itself for a long while. In fact, he realized they, the girls and the monster, were already staring at him for a few moments now as if to let him catch up … the Same hated in their eyes, the same coquetry in his.

On seeing that Manoj had finally noticed they are staring at him, the monster smiled and shoved a girl ahead and, though finding her so young and knowing it to be wrong, he went forward and kissed her, as if compelled by some sort of spell and started to feel her body. She kneeled in front of him and took his sex out. As if a button was clicked, it got hard and, this prompted him, now it was an act of will and not done because he felt compelled, he took her up in arms and kissed her and he was kissing her neck now when suddenly he heard laughter. It was the laughter of the other girl and he felt a shiver as he heard it. Only a moment later, this laughter of the girl was joined by that of many – he looked around and saw several faces appearing on the curtain of darkness that surrounded them and they were all laughing. Even the girl in his arms freed herself and took a couple of steps back laughing  – he himself took a step back in terror wondering why everyone was laughing at him. Only one person seemed embarrassed and that was the monstrous man whose head seemed sunken down. And it was the look on this man’s face that made him look down at his sex to find it ridiculously small. He woke up in the same state of terror on his couch but felt unable to move around. He closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep again only to fail. He would spend the rest of the night watching television.

12.

The next day he was fallen to a new low. He managed to scold Diksha thrice before breakfast, won’t even kiss his daughter goodbye before leaving. He cursed workers even though they were doing their best. And it was perhaps in trying to act too fast that one of them accidentally threw the product of the factory breaking it. Enraged, Manoj half ran to the worker and slapped him. But this very act of slapping him acted like a moment of epiphany for him. It was him. He. He was the ugly monster, the ugliness, and cruelty himself. The worker who was agitated and humiliated by the slap had slapped back, the hand falling on Manoj’s neck. The worker had backed it up with another punch and was soon beating Manoj.

But Manoj was so absentminded, so removed from his own body. that even when they were separated by guards (the workers were too happy to see Manoj receive the beating) he didn’t say anything. He was suddenly conscious of an unending abyss of darkness inside him. And he just couldn’t look away from it. The workers, his wife, the prostitutes – what he had become for all.

There are many among us who seem to live naturally – like animals, adapting to conditions, changing without ever thinking about themselves, without a sense of self-criticism either for good or for bad, going with the tide without ever struggling against it. Manoj who was a highly extroverted being was incapable of introspection lasting more than a few minutes. He was of a sort who would live almost instinctively and all his instincts seem to be suited to get him immediate pleasure in the present moment. It is not to say that he didn’t have a philosophy, a view of life with which he lived but he just wasn’t conscious of it. At this moment, he realized how ugly his soul had grown in his selfish pursuit of happiness. Rajesh, who had arrived at the spot told him to take the day off – a fact that he barely registered but he silently took the suggestion and left the factory, his head sunk in deep introspection, but also of guilt, that kept him from looking into the eyes of workers.

13.

Rajesh didn’t go home directly. Instead, he went to the highway just outside the city limits, there stopping the car on one side, he got out and sat down on a milestone. Everything wrong in his life had become clear to him by now and, yet, a sort of haze had stayed over what he should do next. And no thoughts or ideas suggested themselves to him for the next few hours. It was only in the evening that he made up his mind about how he could try to correct at least some of the wrongs that he had done and he decided to go back home.

When Diksha took his lunch box, he saw that fear in her eyes too. He would have to become better, win her trust back, and make her fear him less. But the change must take its time. For now, he just sunk his head and went to the sofa.

14.

The next day, Manoj talked to Rajesh and tried to convince him to roll back the ‘reform’ which was his own recommendation but Rajesh just laughed this away as if it was just a joke. Manoj persisted and got fired as a result. He would spend the next few months searching for a job, only ending up as a salesman in a gift shop. His relations with his wife improved despite a fall in their financial position. He realized he had forgotten how beautiful she looked when laughed. His face lost sharp features as his health took a fall because of a more taxing job. He was growing ugly. Manoj realized it but the ugliness of the oppressed is better than the ugliness of the oppressor.