A homeless man lives
on a pavement opposite a bar. He notices two men walk out of the bar. They seem
to be talking loudly and animatedly, but not a word is issuing out of their
mouths. They turn into an isolated alley next to the bar. He knows the alley. There’s
no other exit. People who walk inside it never walk out. He’s been here for
ages and yet never seen a soul walk out of the alley. Yet he sees the same
people in the outside world. Time and again they walk into the alley and
disappear. When he sees them in the outside world, he sees them in various
emotional states. Sometimes he sees them happy. Sad, depressed, ecstatic, lost,
way faring, he’s seen the entire roller-coaster of their lives sitting on this
pavement.
He sees people go in
everyday and never walk out. His curiosity finally gets the better of him and
he goes behind these two guys. He only enters the alley to find it deserted,
but hears the snap of a door closing. Baffled he looks around, and sees that
there is a cupboard stationed at the end of the alley. It is a small closet,
barely large enough to hide one person, forget two! But there’s no other
possibility, there’s no escape. With mild confusion, he walks towards the
cupboard and as he moves a jittery hand to open the cupboard, a man barks from
behind, warning him not to do it. He warns him that it is a dangerous cupboard,
that it is the work of Satan, that anybody who opens gets sucked inside,
anybody who ever opened never came back out of it. He said that only weird
people opened it. And though they never came out of it from this door, they
could be seen frolicking around in the world and getting weirder! And others,
whom he called normal people, others, he had heard, who opened it, were pulled
inside by gnawing and clawing hands and were never seen it. This last part
scared him, but those two who went ahead of him seemed perfectly normal, he
thought. Were they sucked inside as the man with the barking voice mentioned?
In that case, shouldn’t he help them? That man had already disappeared after
issuing his warning.
With a steely resolve,
he moved towards the closet once again. There is a dead silence in the alley,
as if he’s walked too far from civilization. Cars can be seen passing through
the road where he just came from, but no sound reaches here. As if there’s an
invisible membrane. His hands shake as he opens the door of the closet. The
door has an air of antiquity; it looks rickety yet as good as new. It doesn’t
open with a creaking noise as he had expected, but with a dignified silence,
but as it slowly opens, there rises in his ear a hum, which gradually
increases. He’s scared, but the hum doesn’t seem to go past that invisible
membrane. Only he can hear it. As the sound settles in his ear, he realizes
that it is the sound of an infinite people talking, chatting, singing, dancing
and going about their daily business. But it is pitch dark inside. He finds
courage to enter the closet, and the moment he does, he can see. Maybe a light
has switched on, he thought, but soon he realizes that only his eyes have
slowly got accustomed. Inside it is the same world that is outside. The same
people. The same cars, the same roads. He is standing in the same alley. It has
the same things, and now that the initial air of familiarity has subsided, he notices
that the clouds in the sky are different. They are darker, gloomier. There’s an
air of melancholy, as if an elegy is being played. He spots the two people he
had come chasing. They still seem deep in an animated conversation. But this
time, he can hear them. He again sees the man who warned him and goes to tell
him that his warning was unnecessary. But the other man sees through him and
turns a deaf ear to his words.
The two men notice him
finally. They see him making an effort to talk to a man who is ignoring him.
They come and tell him that he would not see him nor listen to him. It’s his
choice. He has chosen to do so. He tells him that he has entered a closet
inhabited by those who are different from the others. They tell him that they
are homosexuals. But they are not the only people who are different. Everyone
who has entered this closet is different from those on the other side of the
door. They tell him that you could see yourself as normal, but by choosing to
enter this space, you have differentiated yourself from them as they don’t
recognize us. They choose to ignore us, our rights, our very existence. And
it’s worse when they do recognize us. Then they pelt us with stones. We see
them but they don’t see us. It is them who have a limited field of view. It is
them who have to come out of the closet. The homeless man looks back at the
closet. It opened the other way.
By Shikhar Singh
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