The Boxes

Summer rain was beautiful. Kevin stood still in his tracks, and let the umbrella fall from his hand. The umbrella flew away, snatched by the wind and propelled by the torrent of rain. It landed ten feet away, but Kevin didn’t notice. He worked all week with the efficiency of a mule and the loyalty of a dog. It was Friday, and it was time for him to go home for the weekend.

He sat on the grass. He was having a splitting headache from all the thinking he had had to do all month. Although, he was very diligent at his work, he was like a working ant making one section of one tunnel over and over again because every time he finished it, the rain would come and destroy it again. It was a perpetual cycle of creation and destruction which made him question the basic foundations of life. In this state of mind, the cold grey clouds were like a kind nurse, and the raindrops were like cotton pads dabbing his bleeding wounds and cleaning off the grime from the joints of his body.

But Kevin didn’t always complain about life and think out absurd similes and metaphors to visualize his situation. Usually he was a happy guy, with normal quantities of delusions of grandeur for someone of his age. This particular month was very strenuous for him, because he also had to move. He had to go home all right, but right now, he didn’t have a home to go to. He was being kicked out of his flat because he had finished the agreed tenancy period and he wasn’t getting an extension, and he was too busy to search for another place to stay. He had just one more day to think of something, and his job as a working ant wasn’t taking him anywhere.

For all these reasons, he sat quietly on the grass, letting the rain sweep him off his feet. But soon the rain stopped, and so did his reverie, just like the grandfathers had said – all things that have a beginning have an end; though in this case Kevin wanted this good thing with the rain to last a little bit longer. Good things never lasted half as long as bad things in life. Just take for example the week. The good part of the weekend finished within the Saturday and Sunday, while the bad part of the working days always had to extend to the five days, and if the creator wasn’t satisfied with that, He would make sure of extending the bad times into the wee hours of the weekend as well!

He needed boxes, to move. He needed plenty of them. He called up his landlady, hoping that she would be kind to him. He always had the best of intentions whenever he did that. Just that, each time the conversation started well, but inevitably progressed into a slushy slide of malodorous degradation of the English language.

It was post tea time for Mrs Bahn. She was a formidable German, who looked and felt the part. Kevin knew that she would be in an easy mood, the easiest mood in the whole day, and at this time of the day, she would be the most lenient when asked for a favour. He was often granted extension on his rent just because, according to Mrs. Bahn, he caught her in her wrong foot.

“What do you need boxes for?” asked Mrs. Bahn.

“I need them to shift.” Replied Kevin, as calmly as possible.

“But, where are you going to shift to?”

“You’ll be the first person to see my new place.”

With this, Kevin slammed his phone down; or rather he wished he had. Instead, he just pressed the button which said, end call.

Where could he get boxes? Kevin thought. The individualistic spirit of his society was eating him away. Nobody was ready to cooperate. Everything he ever needed was supposed to be written somewhere in some instruction manual. Whoever he contacted seemed to laugh derisively and say (in their heads), go find your own manual, I am not tech support. He was tired of people afraid to help. They probably were stuck in their silly little lives because they were too afraid to ask for help themselves. This probably created a notion in their heads that nobody had the right to ask for help. He had often wished people would cooperate more. But that was not what people were taught at school, so who was he to object.

Then the unthinkable happened. His mind became blank. He could no longer think. He felt like the intestines when they are constipated. The food kept coming in, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere, just accumulating between the junction of the stomach and the small intestine like he had seen it accumulate in a blocked drain.

He walked quickly to the train station and boarded the next train. He was going to behead the big pumpkin head of his landlady Mrs. Bahn.

Kevin’s physical attributes were nothing to write home about. He was of medium stature, but compared to Mrs. Bahn, he looked like a dwarf. Today he was going to exact revenge on the terrible widow. He was going to make her pay for his own miserable state, and for the misery her husband had to probably face when he was alive.

Kevin had a great friend in Sam, but he never wanted to ask favours from him, especially when it came to intruding into his personal space. But the granddads said – when the going gets tough, the tough get going; and Kevin thought maybe in these tough times, Sam was tough enough to see him through. Kevin called Sam and asked him to meet at his flat in an hour.

Sam was waiting when Kevin arrived. Kevin told his plan to Sam, and the two went in quietly using Kevin’s key. Mrs. Bahn was in her bedroom, as expected. She had an old record player in her sitting room, and Kevin helped himself with it, playing Beethoven’s fifth symphony, the first movement: allegro con brio. He had heard it mentioned somewhere that it was like death knocking on the door. He turned up the volume, and knocked on Mrs Bahn’s bedroom door. There was no response. He shrugged his shoulders in an ‘I told you so’ motion, and proceeded with Sam to the storage in the basement.

There were two wooden boxes in the storage, right in the middle of the empty floor. He had often heard Mrs. Bahn go into the storage, and creak open the boxes. But the next thing he heard was sound of cutlery, so he imagined she went there to eat in peace. What he didn’t understand was that she lived alone, and couldn’t quite figure out why she wasn’t peaceful in her own living room or bedroom.

He plied open the weak locks and lifted the heavy lids, one at a time. To his surprise, he found not one plate and bowl, but whole sets of cutlery, beautifully white and brilliant, with some regal symbol etched in one corner of each. He thought, wouldn’t be surprised if she happened to be Hitler’s little sister.

But he had not come here to exact revenge for the atrocities that the Germans had committed on the Jews. He was too naive to enter into any revolutionary frame of mind. But here, it was his own honour that was at stake, and though, the plates were immaculate and very clean and beautiful to look at, he took one after another and started throwing them at the wall like Frisbees. Sam joined in, and the excitement reached an orgasmic level when the two finished up with a pile of smouldering broken German cutlery at the South-Eastern wall of the little storage room.

The music kept playing while the two friends lifted the two antiquated boxes to Kevin’s room. They cleaned out the closets and packed up all his possessions. Next, Sam called a cab, and before long the two were off, on the road! The whole process happened very efficiently, so that by the time Mrs. Bahn woke up from her day dream, and found a lump in her throat at the broken pile of her most precious possessions, the two were miles away and heading fast towards where Sam lived. Kevin had decided he was going to put up there till he found a place to rent.

This was a new Kevin, and like the bursting of the wineskins to release the weight of the water it was holding, his mind was now free of the slushy slide of malodorous degradation which he was starting to get accustomed to, so that now his thoughts would be like a garden of wildflowers, a land irrigated by sympathetic clouds.

Dwaipayan Adhya.