Mr. Bright

A Story by Sharan Suresh

Not everything necessarily makes sense. But to some it always does, and they find it no matter how absurd things seem. A police officer plays my muse in this short story.

"Someone once wrote that the first sentence in a piece doesn't really matter; people pay most attention to the second one. Now that I have your attention (and hurrah! we proved someone wrong) please sit your mind through the next three sentences..."

"He wrote this in his suicide note?", Officer Philips inquired, his face illuminated with disbelief.

Every dead person deserved a voice. And Mr. Bright was as dead as good government. Moreover, he was a writer. Ergo, my voice, today was for him.

"Well, yes, but he does go on to say that nobody is responsible for his death and how nothing really made any sense, like an unending saga of HIMYM. He even wrote 'no offence' to the fans. All in those three sentences like he promised."

Officer Philips, the 54 year old result of the vestigial British ancestry in modern India, wasn't impressed, "alright! jumped to death. willful suicide with evidence for premeditation. you know the drill. Get on it.", he yelled hollered. I thought it unfair of Officer Philips to be unimpressed with a little dead man like Mr. Bright.

In the next half an hour I was put in charge of three tasks, all of priority, flagged red and to be immediately discharged; the most interesting of which is not remotely intriguing enough to be put down here. But the fourth one, in fact, was about Mr. Bright. So, let's get back to him. He wasn't like most people. He had answers, attempted ones anyway. Bright was the kind of man, Mr. George, the nihilist, noted in the eulogy, who lived most of his life like a blinking cursor in the wasted space between a question and an answer; befuddled if the question was right, petrified if the answer was wrong. Then one day it decided not to blink anymore. It was "a mutiny against the incarceration of self", George (the nihilist) had confirmed. I felt it was really deep, and if Mr. Bright was around he would have felt himself as deep as the Mariana trench.

The locality however had a not so elegant story to tell. They remembered him as the strange little fellow who never really ventured out much. They would see him time to time, always a morning or an evening, wearing a tee and pants, and mostly always as if he had just rose up from bed. Every time the watch changed, the security would stop Mr. Bright on his way out or in, his attire barely ever becoming of an apartment owner. The supervisor at the society even reckoned that if someone else had died in one of the apartments, "Mr Bright would have jutted out as bright as any suspect", given his peculiar idiosyncrasies.

They missed him now, I could tell.

Mr. Bright was found in 'a pile of human matter', thirty meters below his tenth floor parapet. The low rise guard was so set to "enchant the Godha family with the bewitching panorama of the Arabian coast.", it said in the brochure.

It was macabre.

Family never came forward to claim him, and he was incinerated at the state's expense.

Mr. Bright had friends though, none of whom agreed on what he was, none of whom had visited him on the tragic day. "The only visitor is Death, and she drops by when she pleases. We converse sometimes, sometimes she even shares my bed, tired as she becomes so often, haggling over the price of my young life." He had written in one of the many paper sheets found at the scene. I remember finding the suicide note half-fed into the Remington. Quirky as it was, it made sense to me (perhaps he was looking for more sense than that, I am confessedly easily satisfied). It must have been the sound, the relentless clatter of hapless letters under the wordsmith's hammer. I wonder what price they put on his young life - an extended vision of the end light, perhaps. I could not help but think he was a little like me. I had just decided to stay on and keep blinking.

It was two weeks later, on an autumn morning, lifeless as a fossil, that the slanderous piece of information came to light. Mrs. Bigelow, the maid who worked at Mr. Bright's, walked into limelight holding a piece of paper in the clutch of her fingers. The purported new evidence was accidentally carried off by her along with a bunch of old newspapers. I was the first to examine it. The letter-head read "Jackfruit Leaf Publications". One statement from among the contents read thus,

remington

"JFL Publications are delighted to offer you a two year contract for the three part series titled, 'Tales of the Forlorn'".

Sure enough, aspersions were cast. Later that evening Officer Philips told me in private,

"Mr. Bright could have very well fallen off the balcony", officer Philips abused the latitude. "That suicide letter of his might very well have been the beginning of a pulp soup! He might just have fallen off, pacing around in his room, spinning dreams of being published. What an enormous waste!"

I felt it unfair of officer Philips to reduce Mr. Bright's death, his struggle for self between the empires of Questions and Answers, to a mere accident. He was a writer, a thinker. All that would mean nothing, after all.

"What was this guy, dude?", officer Philips asked, exasperated, even disappointed.

Every dead man deserved a voice.

"A blinking cursor.", I lent him mine.