The Suffering of Being Kafka | Page 2

and
gracious. Like two forces of nature, my grandpa and the concrete post -
older than the fading movie posters - watched the town transformed,
roads asphalted, children turn adults, bringing their off-spring to buy
from him a stick of bitter black chewing gum.

Lone by his cart, he bid the dead farewell and greeted the newborn,
himself aging and bending. Creases sprouted in his face, around his
dimming sights, and in his white and delicate hands.
My grandfather had one love: my grandmother. A ravishing, proud,
raven-haired woman. A framed retouched photo of her hung, imposing,
on one of the walls. In it she stood, defiant, leaning on a carved pillar in
a faraway place. This is how he must have seen her at first: a
mysterious, sad-eyed disparity between dark and fair. Thus he fell in
love and made her his only world.
This woman sat by his side, adjacent to his azure pushcart, day in and
day out. She said nothing and he remained mute. They just stared with
vacuous eyes, perhaps away, perhaps inside, perhaps back, to previous
abodes in bustling cities.
At first, she seemed to like being his sidekick, confidently doling
confectionery to toddlers, whose mothers remained forever infants in
her memory. Intermittently, she laid a shrivelled hand on his venous
knee, leaving it there for a split, fluttering, second, conveying warmth
and withdrawing as unobtrusively. It was enough to restore him to his
full stature. But then, the municipal workers came and pasted funereal
announcements onto his concrete pole and the magic was all but gone.
My grandma withered, dilapidated by this onerous existence.
Eveningtime, she would get up and carry her stool afore, clenched in
two twiggy hands, tediously dragging her reluctant self on the long
march home. My grandfather observed her, his eyes a moist, eroding
guilt. His disintegrating pushcart, the rain-drenched figure of his loved
one, the whizzing torment of the desert winds, the sound of the
crackling paper bags in her arthritic palms - they all conspired to deny
him his erstwhile memory of her.
Each morning, my grandfather woke up to study this ageless image as
he glided over her translucent skin, high-arching cheeks, and
sleep-fluttery eyelashes. He fended off the intrusions of the world as he
smoothed the covers and tucked her figure in. Then, he would get up
and make her breakfast, arranging ceremoniously her medicines in
multicoloured plastic containers on the tray.
But my grandma rejected his sunup pleas. She wouldn't go on living.
One silent morning, she clung to her sheets and wouldn't rise and
accompany him. That day, grey and defeated, my grandpa ploughed the

pavement with his barrow, unfolded a worn deck chair, and sank in,
awaiting my grandmother's reappearance.
When she did not materialise, he left his post much earlier than usual.
He emptied the compartments duteously, packed the unsold goods in
large canvas sacks, tidying them away behind the two bottom doors of
his cart. He then unfurled a polyester sheet above it and sailed home,
shoving and cajoling his screeching and scraping workstation.
My grandma was in bed, as he had left her, ensconced in blankets, a
suicidal tortoise, glaring at the ceiling as it bled in aqueous abstracts.
My grandfather parked his rusting, faded, wagon and climbed home.
His wife awoke with startled whimpers, tears streaming silently down
her creviced face, tearing his heart with the iron grip of festering love.
He hugged her and showered her with panicky little kisses.
She froze and fortified her berth with pillows piled high, staring at him
through narrow cracks of oozing sanity.
One day, my grandpa, returning in the evening, left his cart outside,
uncharacteristically. He entered and, for a few minutes, he and my
grandmother just watched each other wearily. He extended a calloused
hand and she dreamily stood up and escorted him to their porch, which
overlooked the weed-grown garden.
My grandfather draped her shoulders with a knitted woollen shawl. He
tightened it, and then, her shivering hand in his, he sat his love among
some cushions he prepared. She glanced aimlessly at a guava tree that
shot among the trail of gravelled stones. My grandfather contemplated
her awhile and then, with sudden resoluteness, left.
Seconds later he reappeared among the shrubs, saluted her with a
sledgehammer he held tenuously with both hands. She strained her face,
attentive, consuming his image, like a flower would the sun, or the
blind do the sounds.
Gasping and panting, my grandpa heaved the pushcart to the centre of
the plot. With repeated, furious, blows, he dislocated its wheels and
doors. Reduced to splintered wood and twisted metal, he cocooned it in
the nylon throw and left it, devastated by the trees.
Sitting beside, they watched the setting sun diffracted from the
green-hued sculpture