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Liquid Sleep, by Harsh Grewal

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This was originally written for Harsh Grewal's collection of short stories, Elephant, but ultimately he didn't feel it came up to the quality of the rest, and decided to omit here. With that in mind, it provides an interesting reflection on and counterpoint to those stories, as well as giving a preliminary taste of that collection's flavour.

At noon Raju Gill left a hospital eagerly. He had been speaking to his psychoanalyst. He walked, as always, quickly. A warm sun sloped against the back of his neck. The sky was a smooth, bright blue and smoky clouds plunged toward the tops of rain-dripped buildings.

Raju had been ill. And everyone expected him to get better. He was certainly growing stronger, physically. For it didn’t take him very long to reach a bus stop.

Raju loathed buses. But he couldn’t drive, nor had any intention of mastering the ineluctable art. He always felt seasick zooming forward and reverse in a car manipulated solely by himself.

Raju lived in a town called Handsworth. Green-blue mould populated buildings spilt into two. But only their loftiest storeys were green-blue, dark masses of desolate stonework. For their foundations were new converted shops; their fronts pouring with plastic items to purchase. Near them were banks, building societies and a library too. The pavements were noisy. So were the roads, lorries and delivery vans scattered upon them.

Around three o’clock Raju heard several loud knocks. He had been expecting a visitor. When he had successfully undone two locks attached to his door, he gazed at Harjinder Singh. He was twenty and dressed in black.

Harjinder was the eldest son of a man whom owned a newsagency. This man was his stepfather. Harjinder was too young to recall his father. But his relatives spoke of a kind man inclined towards ill health. His father had a hobby. He liked to visit a doctor; literally twice a week. However, one day, while on a holiday in Julunder, and while recovering from a mythical illness, he was allegedly poisoned by people keenly interested in the huge amount of land that he owned. Harjinder was very close to his mother. She was a bubbly woman with a broken heart and an extraordinary amount of surplus affection to offer.

“It’s perfectly phrased: wow, a waste of breath!” Harjinder said, finishing a cup of tea and nodding his head in appreciation.

Both blokes thought that it was W B Yeats against T S Eliot. They didn’t like Eliot.

“Yeats openly dreamed. Sure, it led him to believe in spooks. But still, he didn’t require the help of Mr Pound to pen a masterpiece,” Raju remarked, still staring at a completely cold and full cup of tea.

“Wrong. Yeats speaks of an Irishman with intimacy, an intimacy for a foreigner which isn’t detached enough for the more conservative Eliot. Yet, he isn’t like Plath. Plath is too excessive and self-interested.”

Raju, however, didn’t want to get into that argument again.

“How’s college?” he asked.

“How long are you off work?” said Harjinder in a quiet and nearly respectful voice.

“Just two weeks.”

“I haven’t been to college for a week.”

“You’re not going to pass if you don’t.”

“I know.”

“So?”

Harjinder sighed. He then raised himself up from an armchair that had made him feel drowsy. He walked toward one of Raju’s bookshelves and crouched, pulling forward a slim volume before returning it to its original position.

“A billion years from now all the text that is so lovingly preserved here will have gone, vanished. Our sun would have burnt out. Planet Earth too. Nothing will remain. So why try? Why all this suffering and striving? Why even bother being nice to someone? Morals require a conception of the past.”

“Love is time, memory. It is only true when it can’t be forgotten. But everything will be. Nothing matters in the end.”

Raju gazed at his cup of tea. The cold brown liquid twirled violently round and round as the bottom of his cup struck a coaster poised on a black coffee table.

“Where did you steal that from?” Raju asked.

Harjinder left Raju’s home at half-past four. Raju waited ten minutes and then slipped on a coat and embarked on a short and hurried journey toward an off-licence. At half past five Raju’s brother returned from work and discovered a slightly tipsy human being reading James Joyce’s Dubliners.

“Joyce’s prose is clean. But I still prefer Lawrence,” Raju said, listening to his brother shuffling a bag of frozen chips. “Harjinder called today. He’s a cheerful guy… Tell us when you’ve finished with the oven,” he continued, noticing that his words were beginning to spin round like his head.

The next morning a miserable Harjinder walked through a college entrance and said to himself: There’s no turning back now. Soon he was seated in a Cafeteria. He skimmed through a gaunt selection of notes. One page caught his eye, but before he had the opportunity to read the text, slowly and spellbound, Surinder called out his name.

It was dark when Surinder’s last lecture finished. She felt her cheeks glowing. Other people asked her if she was okay. She lied. She said yes. Sailing planks of light and streams of cool wind passed her by. Her footsteps were hurried and determined. The weather was cruel. But as she lifted her head and the met the wind, she saw her home dawning before her like a warm and good vision.

Inside her home, she came across her father. He was seated in a spacious armchair and reading a newspaper embossed with spooled black Hindu print.

“Hello, hello, hello!” he uttered in a playful tone.

“Hi, dad!” answered Surinder. Her voice was exceptionally high.

“One day, you’ll be a famous University Professor.”

“O dad!”

“Yes, it’s true. I know!”

Surinder took off a college bag, crammed with books and files. Then she unzipped her coat. She could hear her mother cooking inside the kitchen and, simultaneously, her feet vibrated upon the loud music being played by her older sister lounging bitterly by herself in her bedroom.

Surinder was the youngest of four sisters. Two were married and lived away from home. She was, however, her father’s favourite child. For she had been the most diminutive of the girls spewed out by her mother. Her ageing father had been born in India and had not been wealthy. He had seen innumerable newborn children as tiny as her die. Her pet name was lucky.

At eleven o’clock the next day, Raju’s head spun violently. Nevertheless, he allowed another mammoth helping of alcohol to run down his throat. Then he sat inside an armchair and watched the wall and the television set fixed before it.

At half-past one Harjinder entered his house.

“It’s Friday and I’ve only got one lecture today. However, it starts at the stupid time of three o’clock!” he said to Raju, after sipping a fresh cup of tea.

“I know, you’ve told me before.” Raju spoke firmly, almost angrily.

“I went to college yesterday too. God, what an ordeal. And some of the people, Raj.”

“Other people!” Raju began, staring at an undrunk cup of tea. “There’s this vile prima donna at work. And… ah, forget it!”

“There are loads of people like that, Raj… Is she single?”

“O a long time ago a form of magic occurred in her life: she found true love.”

“You okay, Raj?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Scien–tifi–cally and metaphysically, hic.”

Harjinder was late for his lecture. It was a crowded room. The teacher was unpopular, but the subject he taught was necessary. It had to be learnt in order to acquire a decent job or a place at University. Harjinder had only carelessly dwelled upon these two options. They seemed remote and uncaptivating goals. He wanted to pursue a more artistic, and a more personal, vocation: poetry.

Surinder glanced across at him and then returned her attention to the teacher’s humdrum monologue.

After the lecture, Harjinder approached her.

“You could save my life, you know,” he said in a tempting voice.

“Really?” asked Surinder, unable to look into Harjinder’s face.

“You’re so clever…”

On Saturday at twelve o’clock, Harjinder knocked at Raju’s door.

“What have you been doing, Raj?” he asked, seated in an armchair and drinking a long and cool glass of orange juice. Raju had purchased three cartons of fresh orange juice in the morning. He had become fixated on homemade screwdrivers.

“Pardon?”

“What have you been up to today?” Harjinder questioned again.

Harjinder walked home. The chilly breeze, which made him hunch his shoulders, seemed poignantly true. The day was darkening and, when he finally entered an old house, he murmured a disinterested hello to his mother before labouring up a brightly lit flight of stairs.

His bedroom was a small and tidy place. But he moaned as he seated himself behind a desk and stared at his forever messy poetry.

On Monday he walked some of the way home with Surinder. He noticed that her cheerfulness seemed to increase every time he asked about her life. It was raining and her umbrella protected his head from the bouncy silver water falling everywhere. It was cold and yet, as he dug his hands deeper into his pockets, he became hot and anxious. He noticed her fluid body. It swam in time to his own. Her dark brown eyes revealed a liquid soul. Her cheeks seemed soft, so clean and glossy. Then, when he had to say goodbye, he gazed at her face. She was smiling and shivering and he felt compelled to whisper it: goodbye. Instead, he grinned and raised his hand.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said and turned away, still picturing her shining face fixed beneath an umbrella dripping with rain.

He walked swiftly. The weekend and his past seemed immense, but, now, also transient, like the overcast sky spilling with rain. He felt that he was leaving behind something dark and motionless. He felt this with joy and a cautious disbelief.

The next day they sat together at their lectures. But he felt an inexorable pressure. Something seized and stretched his heart. Turbulent emotions coursed through his veins. Soon they flooded him and he thought that he had drowned in them and her.

Surinder arrived home. She hoped that she didn’t seem too distracted to her father. She tried to pretend that nothing had happened. Her life was the same, she told herself, believing and fearing the lie. But she couldn’t wait to finish her tea and race upstairs into her bedroom. There, lying upon her bed, she poured herself into the day’s events.  This was her first love. And she longed for it to last. Her sister’s music throbbed into her room. She could hear the wind howling outside her window.

Two days later Raju received a telephone call from Harjinder.

“I’m going to get married, Raj. But it’s all respectable. It’s arranged, sort of. Her father and mother agree.”

“I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend?”

“Yes; recently. And it’s the real, big thing, Raj!”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Raju… My true friend!”

“Okay, then. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye!!!”

Raju gently replaced a plastic telephone receiver and turned to his brother, seated in an armchair that used to be occupied by Harjinder. He said:

“It’s too sudden… If he screws this up, we should kill him!”

One day passed. It was Friday. A dark, icy night had dropped over Raju’s house. He had been drinking with his brother, but now sat alone in a hot living room. He switched off a television set. A strange silence fell over him and his whole life hurried softly and swiftly across his face. He walked into a cool kitchen and washed an empty glass. Later, he undressed in his bedroom. He slipped onto his bed and immediately became a drowsy undergrowth to a large and lush quilt. He recalled the silence that he had experienced. He felt sombre, then isolated and sad. Gradually, sleep began to arrive. It seemed thick and sweet and spread over him like a silent sea. He wondered what he would be thinking when it finally submerged him. He hoped that it was a good and warm thought.