Vicarious

Suddenly this afternoon I remembered an old game which I and mother used to play during younger times, at night. Younger times they were, when we both would be up oppressed by a windless summer night, waiting for father to come home from endlessly long voyages. Mother, then in her thirties, would hardly be able to indulge in some meaningful conversation with a girl so young that even dolls made little sense to her. As silence would only thicken the moist languor smeared over our faces on such nights we discovered this game. One was supposed to write on another one’s hand as the latter closed her eyes and tried to guess the thing being written. Needless to say I always won. I had the edge of motherly love which let me win even if I mumbled out ridiculously nonsensical words that I would have been unable to repeat the very next moment. Nevertheless, that’s what mothers do. They never let you lose even when you do not win. Before this little story digresses any further from its rather strange name I would trace my way back. Many years later when I grew up and came across this word it took me back to those nights when I remember to have laughed the loudest.

Vicarious. Something experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.

Many of you might not agree with me but the very idea the word suggested seemed like that thrilling juvenile adventure (yes, let me be little dramatic) I had in those sleepless hours with mother. Trying to imagine what she was thinking, trying to see the same before my eyes as her fingers ran over my back, a vicarious pleasure filled my inside.

Since I had that faint idea of being vicarious I have applied it often in my life. 

On too many early mornings when I had to be at school studying mind-numbing algebra, I imagined undisturbed slumber. Vicarious slumber!

Every time I was dragged forcefully to learn Tagore songs I did not understand, I would imagine hearing Paul, Peter, Mary or Dylan in my mind. Vicarious music!

Soon after that, as I was forced to study poets or authors in Bengali I never liked, I would read Tagore in my mind. Shishu, Binodini, choto nodi, Shesher Kobita….. Vicarious literature!

Of the few meaningless trysts I had with even fewer men and their conversations over coffee I thought of the right one, of the endless conversations we would once have while having a less insipid meal. Of Dylan, of Cohen on days of rain without a raincoat. Vicarious romance!

Without Dylan I will not be half the person I am today. I owe that to him as I wish further to be his blue-eyed son. Even now after winning a few battles, I tend to be vicarious from time to time. To escape from a stolid present where nothing amuses one too deeply, I keep drifting between a lost childhood and a coveted tomorrow, oh so vicariously! Part of me longs for the evening spent at didar bari fighting with brother, part of me thinks of a house on Scottish lands sipping tea with kids whose names I do not know. But none of me wishes to stay here as I am now, like an exhausting continuum. The oceans lying ahead of it are dead and the wind brings redolence of only the last day of autumn, no spring to follow only perpetual fall.

With great loss comes great power? I wonder how else I developed the skill to swing over vicarious existences in such beautiful synchronization. As the grim dusk expands on the evening sky my vicarious twins return to their imagined abodes leaving behind my humourless phlegmatic presence. Every day they take me to newer places of past and future, either forgotten or unimagined. I wonder what Camus meant when he called for one’s very existence being a rebellion. Am I imposing such behaviour towards myself by such deliberate avoidance of living the reality? The words fail to appear at this juncture thereby proclaiming a silent tirade.

Of all my vicarious experiences only one fails to appear before me, the ones that would give a hint of those nights that have gone a decade ago. Me and mother gave grown older. Even though we have not grown apart something prevents me to sleep beside her. Of course the many sheaths that have deposited themselves on me require space, some privacy I believe, reducing the idea of setting for a vicarious journey with her to be unwarranted, ridiculous!

My handicaps have become so unavoidable that the sky lowered to touch my back in consolation like my mother once did.