The Useless Life

Born in the Indian Subcontinent

He did not get up from the couch which was already becoming uncomfortable to his back as he lit a cigarette. He always felt guilty while lighting a cigarette. He always felt guilty about a lot of things. About procrastinating, about not doing what he should be ideally doing and about most of his activities.

His existence depended on a lot of deliberation about what was the ideal life choices he should be making coupled with a total helplessness and a sort of paralysing fear which engulfed him  when he calculated the infinite results which his decisions could bring about. So he just whiled his days away by bringing his life to a standstill. Doing absolutely nothing and dreaming about the various artistic ways in which he could kill himself and bring an end to his sordid existence.

He took the last drag before flicking the smouldering cigarette butt to the centre of the room, a lazy attempt at arsony as he saw the smoulder go off. He sighed and dragged himself up. He threw a glance at the outside unkempt world, with the poverty, diseases and misery flowing through the veins of the city like the toxins that slowly wither off a man which was made all the worse by the ensuing monsoon rainfall which turned everything to slime. He couldn't remember the time when he had even an ounce less of the contempt that he always carried around him now. He could hear the mosquitoes start to buzz as it started to darken outside. Darkness was desired by both, the miscreants who operated in the underbelly of the city and the blood sucking disease vectors. And as is the case  with the more bolder criminals who operate in the daylight there are some mosquitoes too, willing to suck off your blood in broad daylight. Most of these bites are fatal to the poor because of lack of resources, they are often unable to get themsleves properly treated as the pathogens delivered by the mosquito bite divide continuously in the host's body, so much for capitalism and privatisation in the health sector in India.

Though he was not sure who had been the vector in his life who introduced this damning contempt for his own life that was eating him away at the core. Sometimes he wondered that being an agnostic was bringing the collective wrath of the multitudes of gods that existed in the different religions around the world upon his sorry soul; or maybe the unknown alien that programmed this world which was the one entity that he directed his pleas or his curses at from time to time when he fell on hard times.

He walked towards his bed where his clothes lay in a disarray and glanced at those outer layers of skins that adorned him, holding the power to change a bit of people's perception about him  now lying uselessly on the bed, awaiting synergy with his false emotions that would make him complete in the eyes of the outside world.

He looked himself in the mirror. The person that he was in his mind and the person that looked back at him were two different beings. He leaned a bit closer to look into his eyes, the eyes of a person who shouldn't have existed at all but there he was, staring back at himself, through the eyes of the other person. A healhy twenty year old male, smiling a broad smile, white teeth glistening like pearls. He felt something roll down his cheek, he put his finger to it; it was a tear. He looked back at the mirror, the person was still smiling.

He let out a guffaw. He laughed till his lungs hurt.

He still had a grin on his unconscious face when he was rescued from the burning room by the firefighters.