A Surreal Tale

I was there. I was there a long time ago. And I was waiting. I didn’t remember what I was waiting for. There was a sense of desperation and a bit of urgency in it but I was patient. I looked around and discovered that I was in a square. The walls of square were painted in colour of barren landscapes devoid of any vegetation and they extended, as if, from inside of me. It was then that I realised I was in a corner. I believe a lot of time had passed since I settled in there. I say this because I could see the cobwebs of time around me.

I could see edges of the square from where I was sitting. All of them were covered in a shade of dark. It seems the only source of illumination in the square was a hole and that served as my window to the outside world, though there is very little that I could see and I must confess my sight is a bit impaired. From this hole I could see the rays of sun entering into this melancholy square and creating wonderful patterns in the air out of mere particles of dust. I found this amusing and wanted to smile but then realised that I should be sad, I didn’t understand why.

I had this sinking feeling that I was unable to comprehend. I was not sure if it was originating in my stomach or in my head. The endless solitude of the square was only aggravating it. Probably I should have gotten up and walked around a little, and found someone to talk, but something told me, it was against my nature. I therefore remained silent and kept on waiting.

Someone walked in. Or did I conjure it? I saw someone walk out of darkness. I could not see the face, it was blurred. However, I established from the smell that it was a girl. She did not notice me at first and kept on circling the square, reciting a poem that I could not hear. I looked intently at her. She seemed lonely but I was not sure. I wanted to draw attention towards myself, but then realised that it has been so long that I have not spoken; I wasn’t confident that I was capable of it anymore.

After a long time she noticed me. I wasn’t aware till that moment how I look. When I witnessed her body twitch on seeing me, I realised that I was ugly.  Somehow she controlled herself. She then sat down very close me and brought her face near to me. I could still not see her face properly but I could make out her lips and her nose. Her smell was now overwhelming. She looked at me with curiosity and I felt like I was under scientific examination. I was confused and did not know what to do. I spit at her. This angered her and she raised her hand. She looked so furious that I thought she would squash me. I was frightened. Then suddenly she lost interest. She again started circling the square but now I realised that she was crying. I wanted to console her but did not know how to. She then sat down at the corner opposite to mine. The darkness slowly consumed her and she disappeared.

It must have been getting dark outside as the light coming through the hole had dimmed. It was then that it entered through that very hole. It flew around looking for someone to tell the tales of the outside world but probably found it very dark in here. It finally landed besides me and I quickly realised what I have been waiting for. I devoured it, my prey - the lovely moth, into pieces and felt the satisfaction that I so desperately needed.

Well, you see, if you hear intently then even someone like me, an eight legged solitary hunter, at corner of your room, has a tale to tell.

Old Man

He was a very old man. He was so old that everyone had forgotten his age, his past and even his name. He himself had no recollection of anything that he had known in his life.  All he remembered were the basic things like eating, peeing, shitting and occasionally talking. He lived in a house that was as old as him, but that was only everyone's guess because no one really remembered anymore which one was older. The dead, who could have told, were least interested in life of old man, whatever was left of it. The living shared this disinterest and were so busy that they had no time, even for pity. A very few, who could have cared to collect the pieces of his memory and put them together to get  a sort of vague picture, grew disinterested by the fact that all pieces were so scattered that it seemed the old man himself was never really interested in his life.

The old man was so thin and wasted, emaciated to his bones, that whatever skin was left hanged freely from his skeleton. It seemed that only a little and indifferent adhesive held his body together. They would have betted on time when his body would break down or melt away or simply disappear, had they been not so busy. His face had many wrinkles and it was impossible to iron them out even in one’s imagination. He would stay in bed, for long periods of time, sometimes as if in trance, sometimes as if dead, due to which he had developed bed-sores all across right portion of his body. But he was also quick to surprise the onlookers, who thought he had stopped breathing, by jumping out of the bed with such energy that no melancholy old soul, they thought, could possess. Somehow he had a lot of hair on his body and head, which in contrast to his to rest of his being, looked relatively younger and seemed to possess a promise to outlive the old man himself. The very old room in which he usually stayed was decorated, by very few who cared, with his old belongings so that he could remember, and perhaps tell them, his own forgotten name. However to the old man his possessions were new toys every day, every minute and every second. The people who dared to enter the room, even when they willed otherwise, generally found a pungent smell that they could not relate to anything and even after they had cleaned every inch of the house the smell remained. Thus they came to associate this smell with old man himself.

Yet, if the rumours are to be believed, the old man once had a childhood. He never saw his mother, it is said, and lived with his father in a forgotten country. He even played with the wooden toys and carried a slate tugged under his arm to the school. He played with girls during dusk and would retire to his home only after it was so dark that it was   impossible to play juvenile games like hide and seek. He would sleep by his father's lap who would narrate to him stories of some forgotten Gods and would wake up at dawn by music of an old gramophone. He probably wasn’t very good at studies and was devoid of any passion to excel at anything. It is also said, that soon after entering into his adolescent years he had wife. Though not much is known, they think that she is the one responsible for preserving him over all these years and her absence is the reason that he is a decaying fossil today. She loved him but they are not sure how much old man loved her because it has been so long that he has not shown himself being capable of any emotion, let alone of love. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to relate any of charismatic characteristics to him throughout his years, instead it is easy to realise that he has always been like this – melancholy, lonely, garrulous at times and above all old. Maybe this is not the true image of his childhood, his adolescence and his life in general, but so it is rumoured, by those who did not care and did not remember.

A very few who did care, but did not remember, didn’t ever look into past because they knew that it was forgotten. For them he was a new person every year, every month and every day. From November to February, when skin of the old man would turn pale white, they would find him lying on bed in shape of Z. The old man would look and feel and smell like a block of ice and even weigh like that – for they found him quite heavy while changing his clothes and cleaning him. After February and by onset of spring he would be full of spite. He would pee while they changed his clothes, would spit the medicines they offered him and curse everyone who happened to cross him. After May and with onset of summer he would cry. He would wail like an injured and abandoned animal in middle of a desert. Even though they closed their doors and windows the vapours of his pain would sweep through and that is how, those who cared, a very few of them, became insomniacs. July, which marked the start of monsoon and a season of happiness, would be for the old man a season of unexpected injuries and illness. They wondered whether the old man actually inflicted these upon himself and they never really witnessed him fight any illness, yet they knew he would linger on.  For whatever was left of the year the old man would laugh. He would sometimes laugh at them and sometimes into the open air - nothingness and vast emptiness. Sometimes they would laugh with him, sometimes at him and sometimes they would cry and while crying they would often forget whether they were crying at his misfortune or theirs. At times he would even try to recall some forgotten poem but almost always lost the meter and then the words midway; the only thing that would leave his toothless mouth was hot air with a smell of decaying stomach and fermented skin.

Why do we care? - they sometimes questioned themselves. Is it because of love or disgust? Is it because of pity or fear? Whenever they questioned they either got no answer or many conflicting ones. In the end submitted them to hope that this state of affair was just transient.

They all wondered whether such a life was worth living. They had always though that old man never did anything significant in his life but still they wondered how a man, as old as he, could live on without memory of even the most insignificant pleasures he had ever felt. Maybe he never felt any pleasure, they reasoned, maybe it was always spite. They even wondered how fearless the old man would be as he had no notion of death even when he was so close to it. They all believed that he was an exception, an anomaly of nature. They had all forgotten that they were all cursed, right when they were coming out of the womb, until they all became him.

Their Irony...

Envy other's life but in chains are we,
wonders my wife and hazel eyed she.

As the night ends...

Never thought would have, such a paucity of friends,
Alone would stare through wine-glass, as breezy night ends.

Betrayal of the Fittest - II

Written 2 years ago when I was less wise :-)

She was the melancholy that was there in his heart. He wanted to possess that little child, uncorrupted yet seductive child, to whom the world had been cruel so far. He wanted to be that prince who had rescued a trapped princess from an unknown dungeon. ‘They lived happily ever after’ was how he would have loved the story of life to end; the nostalgia had never really left him. But if he was ever to receive a tight wake-up-call-slap from destiny, then the time could not have been better than this. It was morning of ninth April. Outside it was still dark.

He had a simple choice to make. Either to go ahead with the commitment which he had made in past, or to walk out of it and return to the known jungle of uncertain future. If he decides to stay, he would have to live with a lie, in a make belief world, that he has love of his life. Yes, it would be a lifelong pain, but in a way he will be proclaimed a hero – by his own self and by others (if he dared to tell anyone). He would be doing a selfless deed; preserving sanctity of a commitment. But what if he decides to walk out of it? What a cowardly act it would be! Messiahs of love, all the Romeos and the Juliets, would walk out of their graves and punch him on face. Yet his pain would be relived. He would be guilty, true, but he would not be lying to anyone, least of all to himself. Ironically, his honesty would also heal his ego by returning him his hero status once more.Those were tough days, very tough days indeed. He remembered how he would sometimes feel that maybe a belief in God would have prevented such fate. Then atleast he would have feared a final trial, the afterlife. The set norms of God would have made his decision much simpler. Only if the God would have seen that mischievous smirk!

In the end, he chose to be selfish. Ironically, it was nostalgia – of his old life as singleton – that shaped up his choice. But the shadow of devil did not leave him. His thoughts did not end, they continued to haunt him:

Time is the culprit. I should have said this long back, at the beginning, it was in my heart.I was inexperienced, lame. She provoked me. I resisted, but failed. I was hungry. I wanted sex. I wanted more than sex, I wanted love. It was first time a girl had accepted me. I was overwhelmed.I committed.

His every attempt to rationalise his act, his existence, would end in guilt and yet he felt no remorse. As the days passed by, he realised that it was becoming more and more important to put an end to this guilt. So he did opposite of what he would do when he was in love. In love, to make himself feel that the girl he loves is the best he could have ever desired, he would concentrate on one very unique and desirable feature of her’s. It could be anything, her smile, her eyes or even more subtle features. Then, in the window of his mind this girl would personify it, and he would worship it with religious intensity; no other person in world possessed such a beautiful thing that she had.It wasn’t easy at first but when he tried it wasn’t difficult either.

"She, his fairly land princess, wasn’t looking for love, he tried to establish, just marriage. She wanted security, an illusion anyway."

“That’s why she was not interested in real me. Over and above all, she tried to invent guilt in me.”

He remembered how she would often mention trifle details and say “Look how much I am doing for you”. He was used to such methods, for even his parents have used it many times. He admitted that such factually correct statements do create a lot of guilt. This is their sole purpose. All his pain for her ended with one statement:

“It was not worth!”

Drunken Thoughts

Just 2 Kingfisher Strong

What if you find someone in absolutely same predicament as you. What if the person is undergoing a similar agony. This is what I felt:

1. I felt love - no before you become apprehensive, let me allay your fears. This is not the usual love, that is much talked about, and yet ironically it is the most the most common love. It is the love one has for oneself, the narcissism in its purest form. I felt as if I had allocated a portion of this love to this person. After all did she not represent me in her feelings, in her predicament!

2. I felt an urge to destroy her - I have always believed that out of new lows, out new predicaments arrives a new success. There can be only one winner, or very few at least. If this person has a similar predicament then she may share my throne. Destroy her now, that was the urge.

Writer - He and I

W. Somerset Maugham, Preface to Collected stories Volume 2 -

There is a point I want to make about these stories. The reader will notice that many stories are written in the first person singular. That is a literary convention which is as old as hills... Its object is of course to achieve credibility, for when someone tells you what he states has happened to himself you are more likely to believe that he is telling the truth than when he tells you what happened to somebody else. It has besides a merit from storyteller’s point of view that he need only tell you what he knows for a fact and can leave to your imagination what he doesn’t know or couldn’t know. ........But the I who writes is just as much a character in story as the other persons with whom it is concerned. He may be the hero or he may be an onlooker or a confidant. But he is a character. The writer who uses this device is writing fiction and if he makes the I of his story a little quicker on the uptake, a little more level headed, a little wittier, a little wiser than he, the writer, really is, the reader must show indulgence. He must remember that author is not drawing a faithful portrait of himself, but creating a character for the particular purpose of his story.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the underground -

The author of these Notes, and Notes themselves, are both, of course, imaginary. All the same, if we take into consideration the conditions that have shaped our society, people like the writer not only may, but must, exist in society. I have tried to present to the public in a more striking form than is usual a character belonging to the very recent past, a representative figure from a generation still surviving.

Franz Kafka on being a writer, "Letter to Max Brod." (Qtd. in Corngold 73) –

But what is to be a writer? Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward but its price? During the night the answer was transparently clear to me. It is a reward for the service to devil. This descent to the dark powers, the unbinding of spirits by nature bound, dubious embraces and whatever else may go on below, of which one no longer knows anything above ground, when in the sunlight one writes stories. Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I know only this one; in the night, when anxiety does not let me sleep, I know only this.

Air Pressure!!

There are two types of silence in this world. One, in which you hear nothing. stillness. The other is in which you hear every one's voice, whispering, all around you. It is quite similar to passive smoking. You inhale everyone's suggestions, ideas, advices, quarrels, love troubles. All types of stories mix up with your own as you try to turn page of that stupid '100 ways to do something great' book that you picked at the airport because your boss wanted you to read it, most probably because that was the only book he had read after becoming your boss.

I was seated somewhere in middle of that airplane. The blinding glare of right wing had already compelled me to half close the shutter of that small window. There was not much to see outside of that window anyway. I have always observed that clouds are more interesting from ground than they are from 30000ft. While I am looking up at them they fuse and diffuse into all kinds of shape but while looking down I just find white sea, shapeless.

There was nothing much interesting inside the plane too. To my left was an ugly mulatto girl who was feigning sleep just to crawl over me every now and then. This was also the reason I had kept the window shutter half open, so that I can direct my attention outward whenever the need arises.

The air hostesses were also a disappointing lot. They were the reason I had picked up this airplane for travel, even though fare was a bit over reimbursable limit according to my company policy. Their brochure flaunted many blondes in red dress. Hope, of a madman, to spot at least one desirable woman among this crowd had clouded my decision. In reality, most of these hostess girls were in their early twenties. They wore white shirts, red skirt and some of them had red jackets on. All of them had small firm breasts, their skin tanned and hair pulled back. Maybe as a teenager I would have found them attractive but somehow today I did not.

So as this relatively boring flight, attained relatively boring height a not so unusual fear grew inside me. What if we were to hit a bird (or superman) and explode in sky? If I were to imagine such a situation while lying on my bed, as I presently am, I would have definitely thought like this - "How will I be remembered if I died? How will people whom I love feel? will they be able to live without me? Oh my God, I don't want to die". However, at 30000ft none of this occurred to me. Somehow, this fear elevated my desperation to find a "desirable" woman, whom I could hold tightly as the plane explodes.

My brilliant thought process was suddenly interrupted by an explosion of another kind. It seems that the lunch served by the undesirable hostess wasn't well accepted by my stomach. As this monstrous metallic bird dived in and out of the clouds, the frequent explosions inside resulted in frothing outside. Now, before any of my ugly co travellers could acknowledge this by sound or smell, I had to run to the toilet. Yes! The seatbelt sign was on. If I go down with pale face, the hostess would not trouble me with questions but the source of unpleasant scent would be well established in the plane. So I walked up to the toilet door, with my little finger scratching inside of my ear - as if air pressure has numbed by hearing senses. The hostess was also too lazy (undesirable) to shout more than once. I slowly turned the little handle and I was inside. Heaven!