Prisoner of the Moment
‘unemployment’ (2016) by John Kline
My brother flew into Mumbai at 7:30 pm. My mother, father and I have been here for at least five hours more. Not to say this is significant to our holiday but only that there existed a space in time– a pressure point. In those five extra hours, my parents and I resumed our routine as Mother, Father and Daughter when we found our bearings within the 20-minute radius of our abode in Bandra, a North Western suburb of Mumbai. I passed the mansions of Bollywood’s elite overlooking the weekend beach dip of their devotees, some of whom, I hear often take it upon themselves to guard the gates of their lord’s manor; filming CCTV footage on their phone cameras just in case. We ate at a restaurant called ‘Mini Punjab’ where the term, ‘mini’ was not ornamental like in its rap equivalent, ‘Lil’ but an actual declaration of size. My father and I bickered. I remained on my Mother’s team even if she remained firmly in the role of his wife. We toured the markets nearby and I bought some oxidised jewellery before returning to the hotel for a surprisingly flavourless chai.
Finally, at 6:45 pm we left to receive my brother at the airport.
He spoke softly, smiled brightly and stomped lightly. As the days progressed, I watched him adopt the roughness in their tone, the frown directed my way and the tenacity of each step sorely wearing off the glue at its seams. The aura around him dissipated into something less than Blue; the void filled and then not there all over again. This convergence in being represented a process in time, an interval of something like a suspended thought… It is not that his naturalised state had gone forever. It was there, it had just not arrived yet. A separated entity kept in hesitation.
He, the traveller, is our subject who fidgets through his first three days and I finally see in him what I have always felt but could not observe correctly in my emergence from elsewhere. That there are some of us who easily dissolve into the reflections of others, revealing ourselves in the second person as we assimilate to a speech, a stance, or a way to hold our hair on a sunny day. We become the “easily adaptable to different situations and people” of our resumé’s ‘About Me’ sections. Yet, there is a tension writhing inside, insisting against an otherwise perceived rigid sense of self.
This is the instinctual epigenetic tightness that does not know how to escape from our chest, unable to pinpoint the moment of its geographical breakdown. Leaving us to suffer a momentary lapse in… as we cross time and simultaneously create it as a brain-nullified NPC, mammal to sort of compassionate human/machine hybrid. We’ll eventually emerge by rote while enduring a sense of loss. And it is only at the point of our departure that he, the traveller, will arrive there again. Finding the self as the self transpired, beyond.