Things Run Out

Yamuna has run out of milk, she has run out of milk. It is 7:57 in the morning. Her bus rounds the corner in four minutes and she has run out of milk. Her coffee will be black today and so will her mood because things run out, things run out. That is the nature of things — they run out and Yamuna has never learned to accept this. She resents running out and seldom runs because she resents running out of breath – resents being reduced to a stitch in her side and a shortness straining after something as essential as air which has no business running out no business running out, but things run out and just the other day when the delivery man came to her door with a package (two extra copies of her favorite book: ) and asked her to sign on a delicate dotted line his ball point pen, that slender plastic wand sputtered a bleak blue stroke and slid into stubborn silence on the doorstep of the second syllable. Ya read her signature – a jeering incompleteness that rendered her speechless and raging inside. How dare things runout! Deep inside she knows. That it is the nature of pens to run out. Pens that give every last drop of their blood to writing grocery lists, notes in history class, bad sonnets, and special instructions to Mrs. Pinto’s domestic help, reminding her to please remember to water the orchid in the living room. Because it may have run out. Yes. Things run out when you least expect them to. Patience, options, the toothpaste in the tube. Time. She remembers running out of time with five questions left unanswered on her physics exam (her arch nemesis Pratap got a perfect score). She remembers running out of words in common with a rickshaw driver on a frenzied Mumbai morning, and running out of sugar for her guests used to five heaping teaspoons in each cup of tea. She reflects briefly on the curiosity of running out of love — like the couple on the third floor who ran out of love for each other in the middle of last week, the same day that seven-year-old Parvathi ran out of money spending the last of her birthday fortune on three sticks of green ice for herself and her two best friends Janu and Gopi. So many things are finite in this world, so many things are not enough to go all the way around, so many things stop without warning and perhaps pick up some other where like lives that enter death like a door into a different body – if you believe in that sort of thing. Cars run out of petrol in the middle of the road, as blatantly indifferent as buffalos, to train departures and interview times. A rice cooker runs out of water because a girl dreaded the word domestic and never learnt that the ratio of uncooked rice to water is 1:2 and so the aluminum bottom of the pot is black from her stubborn ignorance. She will hide it at the back of the shelf when her mother comes to visit and refuse to let her cook at home saying she wants her to try the new Chinese restaurant down the street. There are people who run out of reasons for why they are doing what they are doing. So they quit their jobs and find happiness making fine teas or running orphanages in faraway towns with unpronounceable names. There was a writer who once ran out of ideas for her story. Her heroine lived in a cottage by the beach and stared out a vine-covered window at the crashing waves for days that stretched into months and then a year without anything – not the least thing—happening to her. No flies landed on her nose, no telegrams arrived at her door, no passersby approached her to ask about the delicate scar that ran the length of her left cheek. She did not stub her toe on the edge of the bed, or grow delirious or cynical or nostalgic. Her writer had run clear out of ideas on what could possibly happen next. So nothing did. Why? rages Yamuna as she steps furiously into her slippers and fast walks to the bus stop. Why must things run out? Why couldn’t the world be infinite, bottomless, reliable, obliging? A cornucopia, an Akshayapatra, an Amudhasurabhi of matter, experiences and emotions. Why did the legends always run short of reality? Yamuna reaches the bus stop a split second before her bus arrives. She floats up its stairs on the fierce wings of her questioning and sinks into a rare empty seat behind the driver. A throb of joy takes her. She smiles defiantly, triumphantly out the window at a vanishing, exhaustible world. Life flows like a river and also like sand through an hourglass. Moments heaped one atop the other. And some of them glow in our pockets like lucky stones, like secret charms, like constellation prizes. So yes. Things run out. What of it? On this auspicious morning Yamuna has a seat all to herself on the bus. For now that is enough.