Set against the suffocating August heat of 1995 Hyderabad, 4 Minutes 57 Seconds follows Sanwal—an unemployed, heart-broken graduate grappling with intense loneliness. After a fleeting, transactional encounter in the city’s red-light district leaves him feeling even more alienated, an unexpected reunion with an old school friend at a dusty bus stop offers him a crucial, human spark of hope.
By: Raphic Burdo
In August 1995, Hyderabad held the heat even after the sun had begun its slow descent. By early afternoon it had settled into everything, the walls, the buses, the dust, the iron shutters of shops. There was a dampness in the air that came and went with the monsoon, making the heat feel heavier rather than cooler.
Sanwal had been awake since morning without having done anything. He was twenty-four. A gold medal hung somewhere in his past, along with double majors in English Literature and Mass Communication. At present, none of these facts seemed to have much use. He had no job. He had no house of his own. He had no career plan. He was not married. The girl he had thought he would marry had left him. She had wanted marriage. A home. A settled life. Sanwal had none of these things to offer. His future was a question mark. So she had gone.
His friends had dispersed almost at once. During university, he had always been occupied; classes, examinations, books, arguments, cigarettes, jokes, plans. Now there were long stretches of day in which nobody needed him and he had nobody.
He lived with his elder brother in a shabby quarter. His brother worked on a modest salary. The house was crowded. There was no proper room for studying, and Sanwal had spent much of his school and college life finding places outside it where he could read. Now there was nothing to read. Nothing to prepare for. Nothing to wait for.
Sanwal looked at himself in the small dim mirror. He was tall, about six feet, and heavier than he thought he looked. His moustache had grown thick. He had not shaved for several days. His hair was unkempt, his eyebrows almost joined above his nose, and his shalwar kameez had acquired the permanent appearance of having been slept in. He did not care. He had stopped caring about appearances because he had stopped knowing what appearance was supposed to lead to.
That afternoon, almost without deciding to, Sanwal went downtown. He took a bus. At one stop he got off, stood for a while in the heat, then took another bus heading toward the part of Hyderabad he had heard about but had never entered. The red-light quarter.
He had never been there. Until that day, the knowledge had remained abstract, something belonging to other men, other lives, other streets. Now it seemed to him like a possible answer. He wanted relief.
He wanted someone to receive him without questions. He wanted to forget his uncertainty for a few hours. He wanted warmth, perhaps even conversation. He had read about Japanese geishas and, in the strange logic of a lonely young man, imagined that perhaps the woman he met would know how to welcome a troubled man, entertain him, make him feel wanted.
The bus dropped him close enough. He walked the remaining distance. The entrance to the quarter did not announce itself. There was no sign, no gate, no dividing line between one Hyderabad and another. There were simply narrower streets, older buildings, doors opening directly onto them, and men moving with the particular caution of people pretending they had no reason to be there. Policemen stood at a few corners. They seemed almost invisible. They watched without appearing to watch.
Sanwal slowed down. He looked at the doors. Women sat or stood in the shade. Some wore clean, brightly coloured clothes. Their faces were carefully made up. A few leaned against doorways. Others sat on steps or just inside rooms, speaking to one another. Some smiled at men passing by. Some beckoned. A few doors were closed. Sanwal did not need to ask what that meant. The air had a smell unlike anything he had encountered elsewhere. Perfume. Talcum powder. Cigarette smoke. Dust. Sweat. The open drains. Something bodily beneath everything else, unmistakable but difficult to name. It was not a happy smell. It was not a sad smell. It was simply the smell of a place where private acts had become public business.
Sanwal passed two doors. Then three. At the fourth, a woman looked directly at him. She was perhaps thirty. Her smile seemed warmer than the others. She beckoned him without impatience. When he hesitated, she said something brief that sounded almost welcoming. Sanwal entered. The room was small. There was a mattress, a wall, a handbag lying beside it, and a clock. The clock caught his attention immediately. He had always noticed clocks. Perhaps because he was a student. Perhaps because he was a man who had spent too much of his life waiting for things to happen.
The woman held out her hand. “Two hundred.” Sanwal took out the two red notes from his pocket. She took them carefully, folded them once, and placed them inside the handbag.
Something changed. It happened so quickly that Sanwal wondered whether he had imagined the warmth before. The smile disappeared. The woman looked at him as though he had ceased to be a person she had just met and had become a task that needed completing.
“Quickly,” she said.
Sanwal began to undress.
“Quickly.”
He looked once at the clock. The hands moved. He remembered thinking that two hundred rupees had seemed like a considerable amount when he left home.
The woman watched the clock too. He noticed that. She was also counting. She had been counting long before he arrived. She would be counting long after he left. The clock was not his alone.
Sanwal remembered his former girlfriend. Not her face at first. Her voice. The way she had once asked him, when he was anxious about an examination, “What are you worrying about now?” Nothing about her had been purchased. Nothing had been timed. She had simply been there.
The room seemed suddenly smaller. The clock continued moving. The woman said very little. When it was over, Sanwal remained for a moment without knowing what he was supposed to feel. The woman beckoned him to move away from her. She wore her trouser, opened the door of her room with the same agility she had bolted it with him inside.
He stood up and started dressing slowly.
“Be quick.” She commanded.
He hurried and started to step out. The wall clock told him the exact length of time he had been there. Four minutes and fifty-seven seconds. He could not understand why that number should matter. But it did.
The street was already waiting. Sanwal stepped outside. He did not look back. He kept his eyes on the ground and walked. The faces, the women, the policemen, the doors, the smells, all of them seemed to pass around him without reaching him.
He had gone there believing he might find some small refuge from his loneliness. Some relief from his anxiety. Instead, he felt more alone, more anxious, more stressed.
Sanwal was ashamed, but shame was not the whole of it. There was disappointment. Confusion. A peculiar sense of defeat. He had paid for something and received exactly what he had paid for. That was perhaps what troubled him most. There had been no deception. No promise had been broken. And yet something in him felt cheated.
He walked without knowing where he was going. At the bus stop, he noticed a sugarcane juice stall. He had passed it earlier. He had not seen it. Now he saw everything. A machine stood beneath a patched canvas awning. Sugarcane stalks were stacked beside it. The vendor fed them through the rollers, caught the pale juice in a metal container, and poured it over ice. Lemon. Black salt. Around him the bus stop was alive with ordinary afternoon disorder. Conductors shouted destinations. Bus horns answered one another. Rickshaws squeezed through gaps that did not seem large enough. Four-seaters rattled past. Hawkers called out pakoras and samosas. People argued about fares. Someone laughed. Someone cursed. A bus to another part of the city pulled away in a cloud of dust.
Sanwal stood watching the sugarcane disappear into the machine.
“Juice?”
He nodded. The vendor poured him a glass. It was cold. Sweet. Sharp with lemon and black salt.
Sanwal drank. For the first time that afternoon, something in his body loosened.
He ordered another. The vendor looked at the line of customers. “Finish it. Give me the glass.”
Sanwal smiled faintly. He drank more slowly. He tried to catch the vendor’s eye, to say something, to make some small human contact. The vendor was already looking past him, already reaching for the next customer’s glass, already somewhere else. There was no conversation. No one expected one. Sanwal finished the juice. He handed the glass back. The vendor immediately turned to the next customer.
The sugarcane juice had cooled his body. It had not cooled his mind. He had paid for it, received it, consumed it. Another transaction. Another exchange with no residue. He looked at the clock hanging nearby. The juice had taken him a little over four minutes and fifty seconds. Four minutes. Fifty-three seconds. He did not know why he had been looking at the clock. Perhaps the day had made him notice time. Perhaps he had become unable not to.
Then a bus stopped. It was an old, battered bus with dust around its wheels and a window whose glass was broken at one corner.
Sanwal heard his name.
“Sanwal!” He turned.
“Sanwal!”
A face leaned out through the broken window. For a moment he did not recognize it. Then he did.
“Altaf?”
Altaf grinned. “Get on the bus! Where are you going?”
“Nowhere.” Sanwal uttered the word even before he thought about it. Altaf looked at him. “I’m not going anywhere. You come down. Sit for five minutes. The bus has a brief stop here.” Altaf jumped down from the bus. Sanwal looked at him. Altaf was older now, broader around the face, dressed in the clothes of a gentleman officer. There was something familiar in the way he stood, though.
Sanwal’s first thought was not happiness. It was apprehension. Had Altaf seen him? Had he seen where he had come from? Had he been watching? Sanwal suddenly became aware of his own face, his clothes, his unshaven cheeks, his silence.
“Are you alright?” Altaf asked.
“Who? Me? Of course.” Sanwal said without making eye contact.
The same boy who had once shared a school bench with him. The same boy who had lived in the hostel because his home was too far from school. The same boy for whom Sanwal had sometimes carried dinner across the street. Sanwal had used that hostel too. His own home had been too crowded to study properly. The hostel had given him a corner, a table, a little silence.
Together they had learned how to manage the hostel warden, a rude and overbearing man who seemed to believe that shouting was a form of administration. They had managed him. Aptly. At least that was how they remembered it.
Altaf bought two glasses of sugarcane juice. He did most of the talking. He told stories about school. Teachers. Friends. The hostel. The warden. The cricket matches they had played badly.
Sanwal listened. Sometimes he answered. Sometimes he smiled. Sometimes his mind drifted back to the small room, the handbag, the wall clock. But each time it returned, Altaf was talking. And somehow that was enough.
“How long has it been?” Altaf asked.
“Since school.”
“Since 1987.”
Sanwal smiled. Altaf laughed and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for my results.”
“What results?”
“University.”
“Still waiting?”
Sanwal nodded slowly, hiding his anxieties.
Altaf shook his head.
“Lousy people.”
Sanwal laughed.
It was the first real laugh he had produced that day.
They did not discuss the red-light quarter. They did not discuss Sanwal’s former girlfriend. Sanwal did not tell him what had happened that afternoon. He did not tell him what he had been stressing out. Some things could wait. Perhaps some things needed time before they could be said.
As Altaf talked, Sanwal found himself thinking that there was now someone in the city he could call. Someone who knew him from before. Someone with whom he could share a memory without explaining where it had come from. Someone with whom, perhaps, he could someday share a worry.
Altaf told him he was now an Inspector in the Excise Department.
“If you drink,” he said, “I’ll get you Murree Gin.”
Sanwal laughed.
The bus conductor shouted that the bus was leaving.
Altaf stood and climbed onto the bus. He turned at the door.
“Keep in touch.”
Sanwal nodded. The bus moved. Altaf leaned out through the broken window and waved. Sanwal waved back. The bus disappeared into the afternoon traffic.
For a few seconds Sanwal remained where he was. Then he turned toward home. He could have taken another bus. He did not. He walked.
The same streets were still hot. The same buses still honked. The same rickshaws still forced their way through the traffic. Nothing had changed.
He walked without knowing where he was going. He had no job. He had no house of his own. He had no results to wait for. He had no girlfriend. He had no plan. Tomorrow would be the same.
But he had Altaf’s phone number now. Written on a piece of paper in his pocket. He touched it once, through the fabric, to make sure it was still there.
He did not know if he would call. He did not know if Altaf would remember him by the time he did. He did not know if anything had changed at all.
He walked. The clock on the sugarcane stall ticked behind him. He did not look back.
Read: Feet in Water – Short Story
_______________
Raphic Burdo is a student of Literature, Psychology, Public Policy and Entrepreneurship. He writes on the subjects where all four intersect.
