Let’s talk of things supposedly inanimate
More than ten years ago I heard an anecdote about office equipment,
especially photocopy machines, computers and printers. Apparently, the
story went, if a machine was not responding as expected, you should be
patient. You are not supposed to hurry machines, press buttons
repeatedly or kick them out of frustration because they rebel, get on to
‘go slow’ mode and end up exasperating you further. There was a
footnote: ‘Don’t even think of switching to another machine; they are
all unionized!’
I haven’t really thought about the ‘animatedness’ of things
inanimate, but this morning something caught my eye that made me
consider the possibility and reminded me of the above anecdote. I was
buying a chew of betel from a roadside kiosk. Well, not exactly ‘road
side’ because the said ‘outlet’ was located a few feet into a by-way in
Thimbirigasyaya, Thunmulla to be exact, the kind which led to one of the
500 plus shanty-communities in the City of Colombo.
Little boy
A truck had arrived to pick up garbage and people started coming out
with their trash. Among them was a little boy. He had a bag. He came up
to a container which was already half full. He emptied the bag and out
fell a small shoe. A tennis shoe that might fit a seven year old child.
A single shoe. I wondered immediately what happened to the other shoe. I
wondered also what kind of places the shoes had carried its ex-wearer
and what kind of feet he or she had, what kind of attachment to shoes
and things, what paths he or she wanted to walk but did not or could
not.
Diaspora
The old man at the kiosk gave me the bulath vita. All of a sudden I
thought of something that was not inanimate but was nevertheless absent.
A leg. Suppiah Vijayan lost a leg, courtesy the LTTE (pro-Eelam
Diaspora, please take note) on March 2,1991, less than 50m away from his
bulath-vita shop, which by the way is also his residence. That was when
Ranjan Wijeratne was assassinated in a bomb blast. He spends all day on
his perch (which is also his bed), behind the ‘counter’ of his super
market. He doesn’t dream any more about places he wants to visit and
doesn’t think of places he’s been, the job he did. He sells betal and
says he needs around Rs 20,000 a month, which he says he earns somehow.
Where do lost legs go? What kind of dreams do they dream? Do shoeless
soles experience tar and grass in different ways than those that are
shoed? Do road-stories and grass-stories silently communicated, get read
the way they are related or is the level of distortion enhance by the
roadblock of shoe-sole? The shoe that was trashed (and I have no doubt
that its usefulness had expired) does not fit Vije and even if it did,
he does not need it to go to the toilet (which is the place he visits
most frequently when he does venture out of his home-shop). This is
however not about legs or shoes, bomb blasts and decapitation, loss of
livelihood and lifestyle, tragedy and coping. That shoe, like that leg,
must have experienced something. Or, if one were to be boringly
scientific about it, must have not. It is good to believe, even if just
for mental exercise, that shoes have hearts, amputated or
shot-to-nothing legs have minds; if not for anything, but so that we
respect things and all the labour that is congealed therein.
Vije is very particular about things he owns. His shop. The little
drawer where he keeps his coins and notes. I don’t know if he has
inscribed ‘life’ into things inanimate, but he certainly treats his
belongings with a great deal of respect.
Enhance respect
In the very least, such respect can add time to an object’s life. We
were not born to a culture that believed in throwaway, but we are
quickly mimicking the West in this. Take a look around. You won’t see
eyes and ears in a bookcase. You won’t hear heartbeat as you turn a
page. You will not detect wistfulness in the blade of a knife or longing
drip from the rim of a glass. You will not believe me if I said that
there’s a love-hate relationship between foot and football. It is good
to imagine that all these things are true, though, not for the purpose
of feeding delusion, but as a harmless trick to enhance respect.
The artisan brings his hands together to worship his tools. That’s
not conferring divinity to chisel and paintbrush. It is acknowledgment
of value. It is the clay that makes me, I heard a potter repeat in
Sinhala what Khayyam said in verse. I saw an Indian creative director
working in a local advertising agency worship his computer the moment
has began his work day at his desk. I’ve seen drivers run their hands
several times around the steering wheel and then bringing them together
solemnly before getting on the road.
I don’t know steering-wheel language nor the preferred music of a
paintbrush. I don’t know how newspapers read me, or what kind of
mischief the words I strew on a word file on my laptop are up to. I saw
a shoe and a leg. That’s all. I realized there are a hundred stories
that can be written about each; the one that’s now in a garbage dump and
the other whose trajectories will never be traced again. Unionized or
not, I think it is good to treat all things with respect, those that
breathe and those that are deemed by consensus to be inanimate. I am
open to correction. [email protected]
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