Drip. Drip. Drip. That was how Perina loved the raindrops best, each crystal gobbet discrete, apart, like words that did not form a sequence but felt utterly beautiful nevertheless. God for her lay in the fragments, and so did love, beauty, the whole world. She did not know of any other god, but then so many people passed their lives as non-believers; it was really all right.

            She fell back to revising the manuscript, thinking she knew what to do. She had even baptized herself several times: quack editor, tuppenny proofreader, grammar nanny. Before her the rain continued to caress the windowpane, tracing and erasing oceans of wrinkled light across her face. She did not notice. The magazine editors had mistaken the bleak desolation in her sample writings for art, and accepted her as a something in their office. Soon enough, the drafts began pouring in – the summon to the office, the disapproving bespectacled voice, the ugly brown envelope sated with work for another night or the small hours of dawn.

“The – night – was – enchanting – and – the – music – flowed – along.” She vaguely felt the sentence was nice, tried to imagine the starry skies, with – but no, she mustn’t get carried away. A comma was wanting somewhere; a spelling required correction. Forget the big picture. The editor-in-chief and his readers could bother about that.

Details, concentrate on the details!  

What would they have her do with these drafts, exactly?

Well, exactly – she had to check them for grammar, the finishing touches, you know. Sieve the individual word, the phrase, even the sentence, but never tinker with the whole thing, never bother about the big picture. Don’t bother yourself with the meaning of the piece. That’s our – the Chiefs’ – job. You know what I mean, don’t you, Miss Perina. 

She tried to understand. She was at the very nadir of the ladder; it was but natural that they would assign her a responsibility that was, in fact, no responsibility at all. With the devastating humility of the new recruit she told herself that her position was so superfluous they were yet to invent a name for it; it had probably been invented on the spur of the moment to hastily accommodate an extra recruit too good to turn away; a designation scarcely born, too new for words.

Yes, sir. I begin to understand. Standing in that yawning office space with its tanned furniture and books sallow with age, Perina glimpsed the god that lay in details. He was beautiful in fragments; He did not have to form a big picture. Perhaps there was no big picture after all, only many little fragments craving to form a mosaic, break off and form newer ones.

But first she must make use of the new power He had endowed her with, the gift that she would eventually use to finish Him off, just as it happened in the creation myths. Power, any power, is like a newly acquired limb; it needs to be stretched and flexed and exercised before it is put to use. Fragmentation, that was what she called it. The faculty of fragmentation. From now on she was – blessed? doomed? – to see the world in shards. When she emerged from the office the scene appeared to her in a novel garb, she who was used to taking everything for granted! Mundane objects seemed new, strangely surreal in a way that made her stare at them long and hard before assigning to them names hoarded in her memory. The notes of song appeared dismembered; the clouds, ah, the fleecy clouds did not appear as a whole, but as bits of wool strewn across the sky by a careless hand. The sum of the parts was greater than the whole.

* 

It was on a similar rainy morning two weeks back when the panic came upon Perina, the realization that she had lost the power to feel. 

The blow had fallen from an unlikely source, a fellow student who was perusing the final drafts for that month’s issue. Perhaps that’s the way all blows come to you, Perina reflected on her way to office: bumbling, bespectacled, shabbily dressed and seemingly innocuous. By the end of her read-through the girl was quite confused, hardly knowing what to think. Goodness, Perina, don’t tell me you edited all that? Accusatory finger jabbed at the pile.

Well, I don’t see who else did.

Do you even know what these are?

She shrugged. Short fiction, news capsules, editorials on how to run the country, professional advice on love and menstrual troubles and office politics.

But what about this? she asked, gingerly holding up a draft by its dog-eared margin as if expecting it to scald her hand. It’s the most inflammatory piece I’ve read in ages! 

Ah yes, I had considerable trouble fixing that up, said Perina, not without a flicker of pride. The writer obviously had no sense of grammar – commas littered all over the place, profusion of ands and thes.

But didn’t you feel anything? Pritha asked, curious. Anger? Indignation? Hesitation, at the very least? Surely the explosive content…

For a while Perina was silent, hands clasped in her lap. I don’t know. I’m not sure. Maybe I did frown a little while working on it, or I didn’t – but it’s not my business. It’s up to the chief to decide what goes in and what doesn’t. Hand me the other piece. I haven’t finished with it yet.   

Pritha’s eye settled on her like an inquisitive lens. Could you (her hands rubbed together at the prospect of discovering a new species of the human soul) could you read aloud as you work?

“He – grasped – her – in – his – arms – see, someone obviously forgot to put a comma here – pressed – her– body – to – his –an – an – I must add the d – kissed – her. And – the – world – ceased – to – exist...”

Ooh, how titillating!

Perina sat bolt upright. Titillating? What did the word mean? Was it a coquettish little bird that fluttered in the room, teasing her to catch it but constantly evading her grasp? Was it an exquisite, piquant sauce, that she wanted to roll it on her tongue, taste it, swallow it? She tried, she wished to understand, but the word meant nothing to her. Evidently it did mean something to her friend, made her squirm with schoolgirlish pleasure and turn red as she grabbed the papers and poured over them. Something about those lines suddenly made Perina discontented. She sat back, biting her lip. She did not know what was wrong, did not feel anything but this strange desire to rip the papers and scatter the bits like snow over their wild little hostel garden though the gods knew it never snowed in her part of the planet. For the first time she tried to glean the meaning of the whole, but the vision was blank to one who was accustomed to viewing the world in fragments. The whole might answer her questions and yet she did not want to be free of fragments.

                                                            *

She occupied the window seat of the BEST bus that would take her to Churchgate, that charming quarter, thinking, What was it that Pritha had said last fortnight? Perhaps all provocative work comes to us through the hands of people who have lost the power to feel. But you are crazy, she told herself, of course you can feel. You are alive, aren’t you? Maybe you’ve taken your job too seriously, that’s all.

And she tried to recall any story, any article she had edited, tried to summon to her memory the main themes, the big picture. Nothing came, except fragments – an admired turn of phrase that was separated from perfection by a niggardly comma, or a well-placed word whose spelling wanted attention. Shards and pieces, floating like bits of wreckage to the shore on which she stood. 

It was true, then. She knew no other way. Yet she hadn’t lost the power to feel – she would not put it that way – only that she felt a little differently. Instead of one world, she had many, each a fragment, beautiful and unique. If there happened to be, at that moment, a miracle, if God or the devil swung a giant weight into the world and caused it to smash into a million little pieces, why, she would assure her terrified fellow passengers that fragments are not so bad after all; they are beautiful, they are all we have.

All was well; she was ready to live like that forever.

                                                            *

Ah, Miss Perina, we have been expecting you.

She humbly submitted the drafts. Two grand mustachioed walruses (so she thought) smiled approvingly. Good work. We appreciate good work.

But now the smiles were replaced by identical looks of palpitating expectation, like that of a child about to make a present. You have been one of our best recruits, Miss Perina. We recognized your ability the day we read your entry. Do you know that we had no vacancy in our ranks at that time? But no, we thought, here is a gem too good to throw away. So we came up with a job for you that many would describe as, ah, somewhat irregular.

Perina suddenly felt very tired. The smiles widened. How good it would be, she thought, if both of them were to evanesce gently, leaving only their huge Cheshire grins flashing at her.

 But the dog days are over, Miss P., for we have decided to make you permanent. You’re a full time member of our editorial board. You shall be given articles to edit (by which we mean really edit them). We congratulate you.

The tiredness spread over her like a sort of pleasant death. Pritha had been wrong after all, she thought dully. She could feel something, after all.

I hardly know what to say. Thank you, sir. And thank you, sir. She gently uprooted herself from her chair.

Something was missing, the editors thought: the grand performance, the show of incredulous, histrionic gratitude, the cupped hands flying to the mouth, just as it happened in beauty pageants.

Of course, it goes without saying that your salary stands doubled, they added.

There was no perceptible change; if at all, a tiny sigh that meant – what?

As she left, she felt the urge to ask a final question. Sir, doesn’t God live in the details?

God lives in the big picture from now on, Miss P. That’s your new mantra. Let someone else bother about the details.

Someone else, she thought dully as she traipsed down the stairs. 

~ Pritika Pradhan