Old Man

He was a very old man. He was so old that everyone had forgotten his age, his past and even his name. He himself had no recollection of anything that he had known in his life.  All he remembered were the basic things like eating, peeing, shitting and occasionally talking. He lived in a house that was as old as him, but that was only everyone's guess because no one really remembered anymore which one was older. The dead, who could have told, were least interested in life of old man, whatever was left of it. The living shared this disinterest and were so busy that they had no time, even for pity. A very few, who could have cared to collect the pieces of his memory and put them together to get  a sort of vague picture, grew disinterested by the fact that all pieces were so scattered that it seemed the old man himself was never really interested in his life.

The old man was so thin and wasted, emaciated to his bones, that whatever skin was left hanged freely from his skeleton. It seemed that only a little and indifferent adhesive held his body together. They would have betted on time when his body would break down or melt away or simply disappear, had they been not so busy. His face had many wrinkles and it was impossible to iron them out even in one’s imagination. He would stay in bed, for long periods of time, sometimes as if in trance, sometimes as if dead, due to which he had developed bed-sores all across right portion of his body. But he was also quick to surprise the onlookers, who thought he had stopped breathing, by jumping out of the bed with such energy that no melancholy old soul, they thought, could possess. Somehow he had a lot of hair on his body and head, which in contrast to his to rest of his being, looked relatively younger and seemed to possess a promise to outlive the old man himself. The very old room in which he usually stayed was decorated, by very few who cared, with his old belongings so that he could remember, and perhaps tell them, his own forgotten name. However to the old man his possessions were new toys every day, every minute and every second. The people who dared to enter the room, even when they willed otherwise, generally found a pungent smell that they could not relate to anything and even after they had cleaned every inch of the house the smell remained. Thus they came to associate this smell with old man himself.

Yet, if the rumours are to be believed, the old man once had a childhood. He never saw his mother, it is said, and lived with his father in a forgotten country. He even played with the wooden toys and carried a slate tugged under his arm to the school. He played with girls during dusk and would retire to his home only after it was so dark that it was   impossible to play juvenile games like hide and seek. He would sleep by his father's lap who would narrate to him stories of some forgotten Gods and would wake up at dawn by music of an old gramophone. He probably wasn’t very good at studies and was devoid of any passion to excel at anything. It is also said, that soon after entering into his adolescent years he had wife. Though not much is known, they think that she is the one responsible for preserving him over all these years and her absence is the reason that he is a decaying fossil today. She loved him but they are not sure how much old man loved her because it has been so long that he has not shown himself being capable of any emotion, let alone of love. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to relate any of charismatic characteristics to him throughout his years, instead it is easy to realise that he has always been like this – melancholy, lonely, garrulous at times and above all old. Maybe this is not the true image of his childhood, his adolescence and his life in general, but so it is rumoured, by those who did not care and did not remember.

A very few who did care, but did not remember, didn’t ever look into past because they knew that it was forgotten. For them he was a new person every year, every month and every day. From November to February, when skin of the old man would turn pale white, they would find him lying on bed in shape of Z. The old man would look and feel and smell like a block of ice and even weigh like that – for they found him quite heavy while changing his clothes and cleaning him. After February and by onset of spring he would be full of spite. He would pee while they changed his clothes, would spit the medicines they offered him and curse everyone who happened to cross him. After May and with onset of summer he would cry. He would wail like an injured and abandoned animal in middle of a desert. Even though they closed their doors and windows the vapours of his pain would sweep through and that is how, those who cared, a very few of them, became insomniacs. July, which marked the start of monsoon and a season of happiness, would be for the old man a season of unexpected injuries and illness. They wondered whether the old man actually inflicted these upon himself and they never really witnessed him fight any illness, yet they knew he would linger on.  For whatever was left of the year the old man would laugh. He would sometimes laugh at them and sometimes into the open air - nothingness and vast emptiness. Sometimes they would laugh with him, sometimes at him and sometimes they would cry and while crying they would often forget whether they were crying at his misfortune or theirs. At times he would even try to recall some forgotten poem but almost always lost the meter and then the words midway; the only thing that would leave his toothless mouth was hot air with a smell of decaying stomach and fermented skin.

Why do we care? - they sometimes questioned themselves. Is it because of love or disgust? Is it because of pity or fear? Whenever they questioned they either got no answer or many conflicting ones. In the end submitted them to hope that this state of affair was just transient.

They all wondered whether such a life was worth living. They had always though that old man never did anything significant in his life but still they wondered how a man, as old as he, could live on without memory of even the most insignificant pleasures he had ever felt. Maybe he never felt any pleasure, they reasoned, maybe it was always spite. They even wondered how fearless the old man would be as he had no notion of death even when he was so close to it. They all believed that he was an exception, an anomaly of nature. They had all forgotten that they were all cursed, right when they were coming out of the womb, until they all became him.