Iron eaters

Last night, as I was listening to raag Bihaag, trying to bleed some beauty into an otherwise excruciatingly drab day, I recalled an earlier conversation with my brother about an Austrian film he had seen called ' The Seventh Continent'.


It follows a seemingly happy family from their picture perfect suburban life up to their chilling mass  suicide. Why? I suppose they had hit a wall and there was nothing but day after day of excruciating drabness. Based on a true story.


This takes me back to one morning fifteen years ago, which was totally unremarkable except that our neighbors two houses away, who had bravely attempted to color their modest days with a flush of borrowed money, had found that they couldn't afford it. They acceded defeat by toasting and downing a cocktail of toxic fluids. At least they had a real problem; debt is a real problem. The epilogue to this story is less spectacular; the head of the family passed on to the nether world, while his wife, two daughters and young son survived their ill fate. Happily, they now live a succession of precious, drab days, like most of us.


He was saying, my brother, that as opposed to pulling the plug, there is so much you can do to ease yourself out of the intolerable. Watch a movie, take a walk, plan a party, visit the zoo, call your mother, make a movie, have an affair, join a book club. I read somewhere that life is the greatest monstrosity imaginable; it feeds on itself.


 This town, with reflections of reflections on the faces of buildings, has a way of inducing an easy, pleasant kind of schizophrenia; there are mid mornings when the iron eating rain forest inches its way to the edge of the expressways and I slip into dreams of a day when this place lies overrun with flowers.