Like all good meetings, I did not meet p; first I heard of him, his presence pronounced in his absence by people he has had and continues having ambiguous relationships with. You could not really tell what he thought of and felt for the people he so defended himself from, I sometimes picture him as a fair-faced, straight-haired Arien Don Quixote charging and swinging his sword at the windmills. My own relationship with him ambiguous as it can get is marked by bouts of dislike, confusion, followed by moments where I understood him completely, leading often to unbridled admiration for him.
His unabashed inclination to Talk shocked me at first; unaware of things such as: imaginary boundaries that people other than him can draw around themselves like a circle of white salt to ward off people’s evil and considerate thought for the other, he goes on spilling himself, loud and sharp, with a toothy grin. He is the sun, sometimes too harsh and hot and burning, other times radiant and full of light.
Somedays he is all the salvation I need from a day dreadfully spent. On certain afternoons, after having shared our tiffined rice, alu, dal, and after a smoke or two, we head upwards the gravelly inclined path to sit on the benches and talk. Well, he talks and I listen. His winding thoughts thought out loud and clear hit me with revelatory sparks; there is no beginning, middle, or end to what he says and what he means, its circularity brings him back to the same point again and again: “I want to leave this place” but he remains staying.
In the beginning, I was a blank page for him, a big ear, a void, a vessel that would unsoughtly take in his entirety: his unsolicited thoughts on different types of sweat his body excretes, there is the oily musty type for instance, which according to him is unsatisfactorily unwantedly eliminated during cold weather conditions leaving him feeling unclean and heavy, then there is the water-y dilute form of sweat eliminated during hot weather conditions leaving him feeling cleansed. He prefers the latter for he has irrational thoughts regarding the state of his own body, he claims to know his body well, he also claims that the latter takes away illnesses lodged in the crevices of his anatomy.
Frequent monitory calls from his girlfriend interject his impassioned views on people and the world. He calls his girlfriend baba, and he tells me all about her. I enjoy listening to his carefully developed judgements and observations. At times, I am overwhelmed by it, and I get up to look at the giant hills around us, I look up at the seated statue of Guru Padma Sambhava, I pray to it, I quietly pray that I get to leave this campus, this town, my room, and cross the river to the other side. The hills on the other side with its terraced farms, and faintly visible blossomed trees, thin stringy roads carrying vehicles that look so tiny and toyish, I take pictures of the landscape.
p runs on strong negatively defensive thoughts, as if the world and its people around him are out to get him, he is the harbinger of bad self-luck, of cruelly intentioned men and women. I think people are not really bothered by him so much as to mean him harm, I think that people, one of them being Me, are blinded by his audacity.
I did not realise that I got attached to him and his stories, I thought I was only a bottomless container for him, but I fear he has himself stuck to the sides of my bottomless container body.
I tell him a story, made up by me, of a giant green hill, brimming with trees of all kinds. Once upon a time the hill was all that there was, but then came People with their shovels and spades and pick-up trucks and cement and bricks. The People cut the hill, and built a town there. I show him the hill that was cut up, it is far away but visible.