What was rough became smooth. What was sharp became blunt. What was whole became tattered. Rubbing fish skins and turtle fat on things, as I did, greasing them a little, made no difference. The salt went on eating everything with its million hungry mouths.
As for the sun, it roasted everything. It kept Richard Parker in partial subjugation. It picked skeletons clean and fired them to a gleaming white. It burned off my clothes and would have burned off my skin, dark though it was, had I not protected it beneath blankets and propped-up turtle shells. When the heat was unbearable I took a bucket and poured sea water on myself; sometimes the water was so warm it felt like syrup. The sun also took care of all smells. I don't remember any smells. Or only the smell of the spent hand-flare shells. They smelled like cumin, did I mention that? I don't even remember what Richard Parker smelled like.
We perished away. It happened slowly, so that I didn't notice it all the time. But I noticed it regularly. We were two emaciated mammals, parched and starving. Richard Parker's fur lost its lustre, and some of it even fell away from his shoulders and haunches. He lost a lot of weight, became a skeleton in an oversized bag of faded fur. I, too, withered away, the moistness sucked out of me, my bones showing plainly through my thin flesh.
I began to imitate Richard Parker in sleeping an incredible number of hours. It wasn't proper sleep, but a state of semi-consciousness in which daydreams and reality were nearly indistinguishable. I made much use of my dream rag.
These are the last pages of my diary:
Today saw a shark bigger than any I've seen till now. A primeval monster twenty feet long. Striped. A tiger shark—very dangerous. Circled us. Feared it would attack. Have survived one tiger; thought I would die at the hands of another. Did not attack. Floated away. Cloudy weather, but nothing.
No rain. Only morning greyness. Dolphins. Tried to gaff one. Found I could not stand.
R.P. weak and ill-tempered. Am so weak, if he attacks I won't be able to defend myself.
Simply do not have the energy to blow whistle.
Calm and burning hot day. Sun beating without mercy. Feel my brains are boiling inside my head. Feel horrid.
Prostrate body and soul. Will die soon. R.P. breathing but not moving. Will die too. Will not kill me.
Salvation. An hour of heavy, delicious, beautifal rain. Filled mouth, filled bags and cans, filled body till it could not take another drop. Let myself be soaked to rinse off salt.
Crawled over to see R.P. Not reacting. Body curled, tail flat. Coat clumpy with wetness.
Smaller when wet. Bony. Touched him for first time ever. To see if dead. Not. Body still warm. Amazing to touch him. Even in this condition, firm, muscular, alive. Touched him and fur shuddered as if I were a gnat. At length, head half in water stirred. Better to drink than to drown. Better sign still: tail jumped. Threw piece of turtle meat in front of nose.
Nothing. At last half rose—to drink. Drank and drank. Ate. Did not rise fully. Spent a good hour licking himself all over. Slept.
It's no use. Today I die.
I will die today.
I die.
This was my last entry. I went on from there, endured, but without noting it. Do you see these invisible spirals on the imargins of the page? I thought I would run out of paper. It was the pens that ran out.
CHAPTER 90
I said, "Richard Parker, is something wrong? Have you gone blind?" as I waved my hand in his face.
For a day or two he had been rubbing his eyes and meowing disconsolately, but I thought nothing of it. Aches and pains were the only part of our diet that was abundant. I caught a dorado. We hadn't eaten anything in three days. A turtle had come up to the lifeboat the day before, but I had been too weak to pull it aboard. I cut the fish in two halves. Richard Parker was looking my way. I threw him his share. I expected him to catch it in his mouth smartly. It crashed into his blank face. He bent down. After sniffing left and right, he found the fish and began eating it. We were slow eaters now.
I peered into his eyes. They looked no different from any other day. Perhaps there was a little more discharge in the inner corners, but it was nothing dramatic, certainly not as dramatic as his overall appearance. The ordeal had reduced us to skin and bones.
I realized that I had my answer in the very act of looking. I was stairing into his eyes as if I were an eye doctor, while he was looking back vacantly. Only a blind wild cat would fail to react to such a stare.
I felt pity for Richard Parker. Our end was approaching.
The next day I started feeling a stinging in my eyes. I rubbed and rubbed, but the itch wouldn't go away. The very opposite: it got worse, and unlike Richard Parker, my eyes started to ooze pus. Then darkness came, blink as I might. At first it was right in front of me, a black spot at the centre of everything. It spread into a blotch that reached to the edges of my vision. All I saw of the sun the next morning was a crack of light at the top of my left eye, like a small window too high up. By noon, everything was pitch-black.
I clung to life. I was weakly frantic. The heat was infernal. I had so little strength I could no longer stand. My lips were hard and cracked. My mouth was dry and pasty, coated with a glutinous saliva as foul to taste as it was to smell. My skin was burnt. My shrivelled muscles ached. My limbs, especially my feet, were swollen and a constant source of pain. I was hungry and once again there was no food. As for water, Richard Parker was taking so much that I was down to five spoonfuls a day. But this physical suffering was nothing compared to the moral torture I was about to endure. I would rate the day I went blind as the day my extreme suffering began. I could not tell you when exactly in the journey it happened. Time, as I said before, became irrelevant. It must have
been sometime between the hundredth and the two-hundredth day. I was certain I would not last another one.
By the next morning I had lost all fear of death, and I resolved to die.
I came to the sad conclusion that I could no longer take care of Richard Parker. I had failed as a zookeeper. I was more affected by his imminent demise than I was by my own.
But truly, broken down and wasted away as I was, I could do no more for him.
Nature was sinking fast. I could feel a fatal weakness creeping up on me. I would be dead by the afternoon. To make my going more comfortable I decided to put off a little the intolerable thirst I had been living with for so long. I gulped down as much water as I could take. If only I could have had a last bite to eat. But it seemed that was not to be. I set myself against the rolled-up edge of the tarpaulin in the middle of the boat. I closed my eyes and waited for my breath to leave my body. I muttered, "Goodbye, Richard Parker. I'm sorry for having failed you. I did my best. Farewell. Dear Father, dear Mother, dear Ravi, greetings. Your loving son and brother is coming to meet you. Not an hour has gone by that I haven't thought of you. The moment I see you will be the happiest of my life. And now I leave matters in the hands of God, who is love and whom I love."
I heard the words, "Is someone there?"
It's astonishing what you hear when you're alone in the blackness of your dying mind. A sound without shape or colour sounds strange. To be blind is to hear otherwise.
The words came again, "Is someone there?"
I concluded that I had gone mad. Sad but true. Misery loves company, and madness calls it forth.
"Is someone there?" came the voice again, insistent.
The clarity of my insanity was astonishing. The voice had its very own timbre, with a heavy, weary rasp. I decided to play along.
"Of course someone's there," I replied. "There's always some one there. Who would be asking the question otherwise?"
"I was hoping there would be someone else."
"What do you mean, someone else? Do you realize where you are? If you're not happy with this figment of your fancy, pick another one. There are plenty of fancies to pick from."
Hmmm. Figment. Figment. Wouldn't a fig be good?
"So there's no one, is there?"