My descent into hell

I went home that day thinking about things, my mind whirling through the possibilities that might be and that once existed. A susurrant insistence that everything is not as it seems and could even be completely different. I kept walking along the road barely aware of my surroundings. I looked up just in time to see Markeish waiting to talk to me. The expression on his face was enough to tell me that things weren't all right. "What now?" I thought, "Why can't he stop whining for god's sake!"

Markeish was my neighbor. He'd waltzed in one day when life wanted me to appreciate water more. I'd come home sweaty and dirty only to find that there wasn't any water in the taps and my landlady had gone to somebody's wedding. To top it all off the temperature was touching the forties ( in degrees celcius i might add) and there was exactly half a bottle of water in the refrigerator. Period.
In a heat enduced moment of insanity I ambled over to Markeish's house hoping against hope that maybe the landlady had left her spare key with them so that I'd be able to get in and turn on the water pump.

The short version is that although the creepy landlady did not possess a heart of gold, Markeish did. Markeish inspite of having a ton of faults was eminently lovable, with his puppy dog eyes and floppy brown hair that girls wanted to ruffle the moment they saw it. He was a nice guy. For about half an hour.

He managed to produce a spare water pump and some rubber tubing and put together a makeshift arrangement that solved my problems for the moment. Because no sooner had I managed to cool down that Markeish borrowed a couple of hundred off me. That was the beginning of a long and painful association that usually involved a bunch of white lies coupled with my extreme exhaustion and the desire to envelop myself in a cocoon of warmth that would eventually lead to my shelling out a "small loan" that would go straight on to the bad debts column. If I could wipe him off the list of people that I've ever known I'd do so post haste. But I can't.

The day I came back after listening to Loyana for the first time was also the day I refused to loan Markeish anything. Because I was at the end of my rope.

I'd just completed two years of being a teacher, mentor, guide and all round good guy and had nothing to show for it. Somewhere along the way, the satisfaction of teaching stopped making up for the lousy pay. I was twenty four years old with very little to say for myself. I'd achieved what I set out to achieve - being a good person but the truth was that my self respect and empathy were being misused. I'd been lied to, used, made out to be a moron - by just about every one you can name. I'd begun to feel unloved and unwanted.

My best friends from my college days were all married and here I was. No girl , no life, no sense of direction. A year into the job when the pay became truly lousy and the drudgery too much I decided to hand in my halo and wings and get myself a masters. The options covered many spectra but I finally settled on a masters in business administration.

I put in a year of preparations coupled with being a full time angel and after a lot of heartache and disappointments I finally landed in an okay kind of an institution that like everything else in the Indian hinterland boasts of a great past but a lousy present. Which one doesn't matter. Look around and you'll find them sprouting under every patch of shade. The best thing was that I could afford the cost of tuition for the first year.

Since my stepmother ( so I didn't mention her either, sue me!) wasn't very happy about parting with the greenbacks I had to get a job. By some horrible twist of fate I landed up in the same coaching centre that I'd gone to in my days as an MBA aspirant. To cut a long story short I was forced to reprise my role as angel in human clothing. The problem was that once you hand in your halo and the headaches stop you can't put it back on again. I was trying very hard and failing . Failing miserably. I wasn't fitting in anywhere. The halo was much too tight and the wings just didn't reattach. I'd forget to take off the halo when I'd get to class and leave it at home when I was supposed to be on angel duty. Teacher, student, teacher, student - the perpetual role reversals were getting on my nerves. I had double vision from being able to see the issue from both sides. I was sinking. And the fact that my pay was at its lowest ebb was not helping matters. I wanted out. i wanted somebody to talk to, to share my confusion, little did I know that I'd asked for too much....
They say that you should be very careful about what you wish for because you never know, it just might come true. I'd been wishing hard for some form of reprieve. The pressures were mounting. I was being forced to excel and I thought I'd die from the pressure. The constant whirl of life as it passed me by made me feel as if I was standing on a platform that was in the middle of nowhere and none of the trains would ever stop. Being caught in a sandstorm on a hot summer day held more appeal than being out in that miasma.
Then she walked and it felt like the soft patter of raindrops that tickles your skin. A rush of sensation and your blood sings in your veins. The light falls in to broken pools of gold on a winters day. That's what her presence brought but only in the beginning.
Later the raindrops turned to a hail of glass and the golden sun to hellfires. Like sailors of yore i had been led to believe in the beauty of the siren's call and when my life's ship crashed on the rocks of treachery I couldn't blame anyone.
I managed to juggle my varied roles for a while and then one day without warning, my life decided to come to a standstill.