Half Life

I should be dead.

Being hit by a bus going at 100 kilometres an hour should do that to you. Okay, may be not a 100, but it was still going fast enough. But I was still alive, at least I thought I was. I couldn’t be dead because I was standing on the footpath looking at the crowd gathering around the bus.

Traffic came to a standstill and people popped out of nowhere to jostle for the best view. I was starting to feel a little better about myself. I might be dead (or something along those lines) but in death, if not in life, I was the centre of attention. Then the phones came out and I realised that I was just Facebook like-bait.

I wanted to join the crowd to find out what had happened to me, but I was also scared of what I would discover. Had I become a ghost destined to roam the world searching for absolution?

“Excuse me.” Someone bumped into me, tossed an apology in my direction, and hurried on to fight for his spot in the viewing gallery.

Wait a minute! If I was a ghost, he couldn’t have bumped into me. All the experts were very clear on that point. Even the kid in Sixth Sense had said, “I see dead people.” Not, “I cannot walk for bumping into dead people.”

Yay! So I was not dead, or at least I was not a ghost. I worked my way into the centre of the circle and took a peek. My stomach clenched and I almost sprayed the crowd with the remains of my breakfast.

The guy under the bus was definitely me. He looked like me, was dressed like me, even had the same taste in laptop bags. I pushed my way back out of the crowd and sat down on the kerb. The world seemed to be spinning faster than normal. Or I was spinning slower than normal. Either way, there was a lot of spinning going on. And to think that the day had started off so well!

2

I had had breakfast for the first time in months. I had put on my best shirt, taken the trouble to match my socks to my belt, and both to my shoes. And I had left early. I had actually been looking forward to office.

I worked in a bank. Or should I say ‘I used to work in a bank?’ Hmmm… okay, till something told me otherwise, I would count myself amongst the living.

So, I worked in a bank. That is to say, I was present in the bank from 8am till 8pm. My job was to sell pre-digested, pre-packaged lies to middle class people hoping to retire rich. It was an easy job and the bank had whittled it down to a 3-step process that it had guaranteed would work.

Mesmerize the privileged customer with professionally photoshopped images of old couples relaxing in paradise:

Confuse them with graphs and excel sheets and percentage points that show how much money they’ll make

And then hurry them into signing away a good part of their income with either one, or some, or all of the irrefutable reasons below:

a) The market is down right now

b) I myself have put 15 lakhs into this fund

c) This is the opportunity of a lifetime

d) Do this one thing and you don’t have to worry about anything for the next 15 years

Only someone as disinterested as I was could have failed at it. I would probably have been kicked out soon enough if fate hadn’t intervened yesterday, in the form of Rose Barett.

There’s that One Woman who lives in every guy’s head. The woman who slips into his mind in the night when he’s alone in bed. An exquisite amalgamation of everything good in every stunning woman he has ever met, seen, spoken to or thought about.

Rose was that woman. Only instead of helping me along while I gave myself a happy-ending, she was there in flesh and blood.

I had to talk to her. Take her out for coffee. Listen to her stories. Sympathise with her pains. Get righteously angry at whatever made her angry. And finally, I had to wake up next to her in bed.

It sounds simple, but nothing’s simple for a hesitant mouse like me. I am forever scared of not being liked by people, of being thought of as stupid or worse. So I held back yesterday, though I did notice the lack of a wedding ring when I shook her hand during introductions. I had big plans for us. And I might have made some progress if I hadn’t gotten in the way of a speeding bus.

3

The thought of her brought me back to reality. What was I moaning about? I was alive. I had to get to office before the rest of my rivals (yes, I was sure there were going to be rivals) arrived and started marking their territory.

I raised my left hand to look at the time, but my watch wasn’t there. For some reason, I was wearing it on my right hand. I didn’t get time to dwell on that because I noticed there was something wrong with the watch: the numbers were not right and the hands were moving backwards.

It was my dad’s watch, a parting gift from him when I left home to work in the city. It had big numbers on its face, and right then, for some reason I couldn’t read them properly. Then it struck me: the numbers were all mirrored! It was as if I was trying to read a mirror reflection of the watch.

I squinted at it. No change.
I shut my eyes, shook my head and then looked at it again. Nope, no change. I looked around to make sure my eyes were okay. And that’s when I noticed the road signs. Everything was mirrored! I got up off the kerb with a start: What was going on?

The details of the world around me settled down and formed a very disturbing picture. The bus was on the wrong side of the road. Most of the people were using their phones with their left hand. Every written word I could see was mirrored.

It was obvious that I had been hit by the bus and had suffered some sort of brain injury. So was I imagining all of this? Was I still under the bus waiting for someone to call for help?

But apart from the mirror thing, everything felt so real. When the guy bumped into me, I could feel him, and obviously he could too, otherwise why would he have said “Sorry”?

I got up and asked a guy in the crowd, “What happened? Accident?”

“Ya. Some poor guy. Died on the spot. Somebody’s called for an ambulance.”

I really couldn’t figure this out. If this was an out-of-body experience, it was a fucking good one. Maybe I would wake up in a hospital looking like a needle cushion, but till then, I figured I would just enjoy the ride.

Most people search for happiness; I had a different plan. I reckoned that if I ran away from whatever made me unhappy or sad, I would find happiness at some point in time. Which is why I left home to find a job; I just couldn’t do what my dad did for a living.

I was down to my last thousand rupees when my roommate said his office was looking for someone. Luckily for me, the banking sector was booming and they couldn’t hire people fast enough. I was given an incentive-based salary, which is corporate speak for you make us shitloads of money and we’ll let you keep a teaspoon of it. By Day Two I was bored but experience had taught me that being bored was much better than being unhappy. So I stuck around for almost a year, scamming just enough suckers to make ends meet.

Then the words recession and retrenchment began to be whispered about in the cul-de-sacs of the office. You could spot those who were thinking or talking about it from their faces. They looked like they had just found out that someone they vaguely knew had caught a fatal, contagious disease. They were sad for that person but glad it wasn’t them, though secretly afraid that they would be next.

If Rose had not wandered into this swamp of gloom and doom I would have waited for my turn at the abattoir like a good sacrificial lamb. But now I had found something that could make me happy and I was not going to let something as silly as death snatch it away from me.

4

I turned my back to the crowd and headed for office. For some reason, it wasn’t easy. People kept getting in the way and the turns were all wrong. Where I would have taken right, I had to take left. As I stumbled along, I looked for clues to piece together what had happened to me.

Everything was right but yet wrong. Did that mean there was something wrong with my brain? Then it struck me: I should just Google it! The search page loaded up with words that I had to struggle to read. I got a headache just looking at it. Anyway, it did not seem like Google knew much about the condition, and if the big G did not know about it, then…

I started to panic a little bit. Maybe I should get hospitalised. I stopped to figure out exactly where the nearest hospital was, then I remembered why I was in a hurry to reach office on time. Apart from the whole Rose thing.

The circular had said: Meeting first thing in the morning . That usually meant 9.30 am. I had a feeling turning up late for that meeting meant being assigned a brown cardboard box and a pink slip. I could either be a patient or someone with a job and maybe a girlfriend. The hospital would have to wait. I looked at my watch; I had about 20 minutes left, I think. The quickest route was to go the wrong way through a series of one-ways, so a cab was out of the question.

As I half-jogged along, I kept trying to read every word I could spot, to see if it was printed or written correctly. That’s how the headline in a pink paper caught my attention:

It was all I could do to not snatch the paper from the person reading it. Economic Boom? Just last week, seven people from my office were asked to pack up and leave. Even worse, that morning’s news feed had talked about some company letting go of 50,000 employees. How could the world have gone from recession to economic boom in the time it had taken me to… cross… the… road?

I sat down. The world was spinning again. What if the world wasn’t the thing that was wrong? Maybe I was the one who was wrong in this world. Perhaps the right ‘me’ for this world was lying dead under a bus.

What were they called? Multiple worlds or parallel universes or something; same in many ways but different in some. Maybe the bus had hit me so hard that it had thrown me into another world. A world where I was supposed to die under a bus.
So if the ‘me’ living in this world was dead, what had happened to the ‘me’ in my world?

Had I just disappeared?

Did I really care?

Who knew, maybe in this world I was a bank manager instead of a brochure-pusher.

It was as good a theory as any, and more importantly it was a theory that meant that I was not injured or dead. All I had to deal with were words and numbers that were written all wrong. I could live with that.

I got up from the pavement and hurried towards the bank. I glanced at my watch… wait… wrong hand. I glanced at my other wrist while I increased my pace. I still had 15 minutes.

I could see the entrance to the bank now and I slowed down a bit. I did not want to arrive all sweaty and bothered. I wanted to be the perfect boyfriend when I spoke to her.

A car, the kind that I had only seen in magazines before, roared past me and came to a halt next to the entrance. The passenger door opened and Rose, my Rose, stepped out of the car. Was it me or did the Rose in this world look even more desirable? I quickened my pace. She had almost reached the top of the stairs when someone from inside the car called out, “Darling you forgot your phone.” I stopped.

She turned back while whoever it was inside got out. He was tall, handsome, undoubtedly rich… and, well, everything I was not. He handed her the phone and they kissed. Not the mechanical kiss of a couple tired of each other’s company, but the kind that spoke of passion and love. The glint of the wedding band on her finger was the only other thing that registered in my mind.

His phone rang and he picked it up as he walked back to the car. And just like that, I knew what I had to do. If a bus could catapult me into this world then… I just hoped that he would be driving fast. I looked at my watch. I could still make it for the meeting.

I observed him carefully as he walked to the door. I knew that time was running out but suppressed the urge to check my watch. I took a deep breath and started counting in reverse under my breath. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…”

He started the car: Six, five…

He gunned the car in my direction while still on the phone: Four, three…

I hoped the crash wouldn’t ruin my shirt. I wanted everything to be perfect when I spoke to her: Two…

One.