The Buffer
The house had four floors, but only three of them believed in gravity. The fourth, inhabited by a litigious lady whose voice descended like a police report through the stairwell, preferred the law to physics; she brought men down not with ropes or bullets, but with accusations, carefully typed and stamped. My father lived just beneath her, on the third floor, in the thin band of air between her lawsuits and the street, a slender buffer of jasmine incense, old newspapers, and unpaid memberships to the club.
When I returned from the borderlands—he announced, with the grave certainty reserved for stock tips and arranged marriages, that the best investment I could make was no investment at all. Trainers were traps, he explained. Gyms were gossip mills. Clubs were corridors where the fourth‑floor lady could see me, could say my name aloud, could stitch me into the next complaint.
It was, in purely financial terms, a fascinating hedge: to protect his assets by gently discouraging mine. The one thing that might have benefited me—one hour a day of measured exertion, of iron and breath, of a trainer correcting my posture as my mind corrected its own—was vetoed in favor of a strategy of invisibility. “Don’t go,” he would murmur, as though the treadmill itself had subpoena powers. “Stay here. Just be here.”
***
The lady upstairs had once put a case against somebody’s son—harassment or something, the details circulating in the building’s gossip like diluted ink. She had put a case against my father, too, and another gentleman in the building, her complaints rising and falling like monsoon rain. In the official version, she was a victim; in the hallway version, she was a menace. My father, who had spent the better part of his life cultivating an image of worldly competence, was suddenly terrified of this woman two flights above him who could, with a few sheets of paper, drag his name into a courtroom.
Fear does peculiar things to a man whose self‑image rests on control. It shrinks his movements, tightens his voice, abrades his judgment. It turns the gym trainer into an accomplice, the club membership into a risk, the act of leaving the house into a potential exposure. In that atmosphere, every external benefit—exercise, social contact, fresh air—became an internal threat. Why strengthen the body if the law could still knock on the door?
He talked about her as one talks about weather: cautiously, with respect, pretending that this storm, too, would pass. “You don’t know what she’s like,” he would say, peering up the stairwell as though her silhouette might materialize against the landing. “She’ll file something. She always does. Better not to be seen.” I nodded, but quietly noted the gentle pivot: better not to be seen in his vicinity, near his door, in his legal halo. It was as if my physical existence needed to be squeezed into the apartment and kept there, out of public sight, so that if lightning struck again, it would strike only him.
***
Years earlier, in another city, another vertical arrangement of guilt and furniture, he had carefully extracted himself from an affair like a hand removing itself from a glove. Bela Vista: a flat whose name sounded like a mental hospital and behaved like a jewelry box. In the stories, the place shimmered with a certain illicit glamour—a view, a balcony, a taste of other possibilities. The woman there was not my mother. She was, in the official family vocabulary, “the mistake,” a term that functioned not as confession but as grammar: an error that must be conjugated correctly to avoid legal repercussions.
He returned her things, eventually. Clothes, gifts, little tokens of shared fantasy were packed into bags and delivered back to their origin, as though he could reverse not just ownership but time. The mistress was left high and dry, the Bela Vista narrative closed with a door and a receipt. My mother remained in the legitimate house, her suffering filed away in the invisible cabinet labelled “endurance,” while the mistress’s anguish was outsourced to distance and silence.
By the time I arrived in India again, these two women—the lawful wife and the discarded mistress—hovered around him like unresolved chords. One was physically present, the other phantasmic; both were part of the private court in which he was perpetually defendant and judge. The fourth‑floor lady added a third echo: the accuser with official paperwork to make his faults public. It was, by any standard, an overpopulated psychological weather system for one aging man to stand under.
***
In this weather, his narcissism aged like old film stock: the colors faded, but the drama remained. He was still the central figure in his own narrative, still the protagonist whose decisions shaped the family’s fate. The panic, the confusion, the insistence on control were not new; they were intensified versions of old patterns, now sharpened by fear of lawsuits and mortality.
He insisted, for example, that the gym trainer was not only unnecessary but somehow dangerous to me. It was an odd twist: the best investment, in his own words, was to not invest. Not in the body, not in the club, not in any structure that might expose us to public gaze. The trainer became a symbol of independent self‑improvement—precisely the thing that threatened the delicate balance of his control.
***
At this point, my aunt entered the scene with a sort of operatic enthusiasm. She was his sister, and therefore, by some unwritten hereditary law, co‑curator of his later years. She called, wrote, suggested, insisted that I should stay in the house, stay close, stay available. Her arguments were wrapped in the language of care and opportunity: “You’re his son, you should be there”; “There are assets, you should benefit”; “You’re in a unique position.”
Beneath the phrasing lay a simpler formula: they needed a warm body in the house - a presence. A human being whose physical occupancy would soothe their collective dread of empty corridors and unguarded doors. I could almost see the diagram: on the third floor, a father and son; on the fourth, a lady loaded with legal ammunition; on distant Bela Vista balconies, the ghost of a mistress; and somewhere in the wings, an aunt orchestrating attendance.
***
What does this say about me? That was the question that appeared, insistent and unwelcome, as I lay on the narrow bed in that house, listening to the ceiling creak with footsteps from above and the downstairs television mutter cricket scores to an empty room. Was I somehow destined to be the buffer, the absorber, the placeholder? Had I been selected for this role by some flaw or virtue I did not see?
***
There is a temptation, in writing this, to cast myself as either savior or victim. The savior narrative would give me a heroic arc: I returned to the house, I faced the lawsuits and the mistress, I restructured the family’s dealings, I emerged with assets and unbroken conscience. The victim narrative would grant me martyrdom: I sacrificed my health, my art, my autonomy to occupy that third‑floor purgatory for the sake of an ungrateful patriarch and a scheming aunt.
Neither is quite true. In reality, I occupied that role for a time, with a mixture of resignation and curiosity. I listened to my father’s instructions about trainers and clubs, knowing they were irrational but understanding that they were part of his attempt to retain control in a universe that was slipping through his fingers. I let my aunt outline the benefits, the inheritances, the long‑term logic, sometimes nodding, sometimes quietly marking the distance between their needs and mine. I walked the stairs, up and down, sharing the building’s oxygen with lawsuits and ghosts.
And then, as always, I thought about music. About how these same dynamics—fear, control, entitlement, warm bodies in rooms—in part an attempt to re‑author the script: to take these patterns of family gravity and translate them into chords, frames, and prose instead of merely living inside them.
***
I do not know, as I write this, whether the fourth‑floor lady is preparing another case, whether the Bela Vista mistress still looks at that returned wardrobe and thinks of betrayal, whether my father is still pacing the third‑floor apartment and wondering who will be his buffer. The house exists, for me now, as a mental architecture: an arrangement of floors and fears, of people misusing gravity and law.
What I do know is this: the best investment, for me, is no longer the avoidance of trainers, but the deliberate cultivation of perspective. To see the narcissism without being swallowed by it; to understand the legal terror without becoming its hostage; to recognize the aunt’s calculations without despising her; to feel, in my own limbs, the difference between being a warm body and being a whole person.