The whole of my second day of the year was spent in a small train compartment among cold struck old men, young men intensely watching arbitrary dramatic movies on their phones, teenagers playing cheesy party songs on Bluetooth speakers, and two very touchy men sharing a side berth, who also happened to be small scale thieves. The teen was too careless with his phone though.
I had a good amount of food packed for lunch and dinner, courtesy of my lovely hosts at Kanpur. Hence, I was well set to spend my whole journey confined to an area not more than 20 square feet. (Le physics nerd, don't calculate the strip of land I covered due to the motion of the train.) Then, one thing struck me. Boredom. Reading up on Renaissance Art didn't help. So I did what every exciting young college kid does, I opened a novella.
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis is a short read packed with the absurdity that gave the world the word "kafkaesque." There is no thriller climax expectation or an impending cliffhanger, but he does place the bomb under the table with the very first page. It's a pageturner. The plot essentially starts with the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, morphing into an insect, but I understood the true metamorphosis to be that of his family afterward.
The protagonist turning into an insect is absurd, exactly what Kafka is known for. His mind is still human, but incomprehensible for the rest. After the initial scare, they start seeing him as a part of the family and try to take care of him yet not having the stomach to see his body, but soon he is just seen to be a burden. The transformation in Gregor's sister is particularly remarkable. She goes from crying for her brother's wellbeing, feeding him, and cleaning up on him to blaming him for the misfortunes befalling her family and thinking his death as the sole solution. I'd call her transformation the metamorphosis.
Kafka hit me on another level though. How long does it really take for a person to morph into a pest? How long will someone take care of me with no explicit gratitude? How long with no expectations? Suspicion creeps up soon. Regret follows. Eventually, pest control.
If only I could run off to obscurity and find answers for myself.