Snow...

The year is at its end and I am told it is a time to be merry. I try to find reasons, and I find them too, without much difficulty. I try and stretch my neck, and look beyond this wall of present into the neighboring future. But, my eyes seem blind to such prodigal wanderings of a languishing mind and looks away, past-wards.

Past, though, is like a book one has already read, and which one has come to love; a book that one goes back to, ever so often; a book whose pages contains lines that describe memories in present tense. So powerful are the words in it, so vivid are the memories that you are sucked into that vortex of words, the only way to stay afloat in which, lest one succumb to its power, is to hold onto the sole thing that exists in its world: the past.

Slowly, you feel addicted to past; you feel that if you are to live, you need to breathe in your past. You are so hooked onto the past that you find the present, constricting, and the future, insipid…. And like that abject soul addicted to his snow white powder, let me once again go back to that book and describe to you one memory of mine. I do not understand why it comes to me at this point in time and why this one in particular; perhaps, it is because this mysteriousness that I find it necessary I must share this with you…

Snow; white snow: I saw it first, last year. It was on one of those peaks which formed the chain of foothills that was a part of the lesser Himalayas. Apart from the fact that it was the first time I rode on a mule, and also, going on the reasonable (albeit naïve, and foolish) assumption that all mountains are basically the same, I had this feeling that I was almost trekking Everest; well, apart from these absurd feelings, my memory of the journey to the top of the peak is blurry and I shall not speak of it more. But, let me describe to you the sight that was offered to me on that peak…it was, the singular most overwhelming sight I had ever seen.

Nature, it seemed to me, was lying on her back, sunbathing, naked; her snow covered breasts proudly pointed towards heavens, teased the gods; and those dark valleys covered with pine trees, tempted us men to lose ourselves in between her legs. The nipping wind gave me Goosebumps; the sheer breadth of the land beneath me caught me off guard….And showing off its prized possessions, cool as ever, there she was…laughing at me…and all I could manage to mumble was “Why?” and how does she answer?—with silence.

What I saw before me petrified me. What I saw before me was old, it existed even before I began my own existence, and it will be here even after I bit the dust and become a part of it. But…but…that is not sufficient is it? One wishes to do more; one wishes, to be immortal; one wishes to also lie naked without fear and tease the gods and (wo)men alike; one also wishes to be the cause of envy…But, sun was setting, and as it did, it did what all alchemists of history put together could not do with their centuries of obsessed perseverance: it transformed all that powdery whiteness called snow into gold in those few moments of twilight…but, by the time I could take my eyes off it to grab some, sun had already set, twilight was over, and night had fallen.

The fool's chance...

One day, atop a cliff, a stone
Underneath the summer sun, shone
Like a ruby on the crown of the late King Bone.

Red like a ruby, were the blood had spurt
Of the idiot king, who did blurt
Before his end: "All but me are dirt!"

A stone, not this one,
That weighed less than a tonne,
Whistled past...a job--in short--well done.

King Bone's head, was broke,
And with not one to tend, he was dead, the poor bloke!
(Note: The intended pun, was not just a lucky stroke.)

Aye! For the wretched kingdom,
Its head deep in debt's bum,
Was as penni-less as a deflated condom.

The people spoke in anagrams; the king, nonsense.
Starvation had their brains put in an e-class Benz,
And pushed off a cliff in the name of God 'Hoo-fils-sens'

The gods, overwhelmed by pity, cursing the destitution,
Sat together,and tried re-forming fortune's constitution,
And found the one way, which didn't end in universal destruction.

Thus it said: "A whistling stone, must break a bone."
And as the history books claim ( 'cause it can't be for sure known)
This caused no war, but the birth of the now obsolete phrase "Break a bone"

But, the meaning was grabbed by its nuts, by the town fool,
Whose brains had been knocked straight, thanks to the rule:
"To all, what happens to one", which upended any other into a nutty-drool.

He watched, silently, patiently--a stone in his hands:
The speech of the king and his prideful prance,
And then, at its end, he threw, and usurped his fool's stance.

Here the story ends,
Only to be spoken about now, in past tense,
That the one who threw the stone,
and killed King Bone,
Brought the kingdom back from foolishness,
but, alas! for perverted rules, lost himself in its absurdness.

“You are beautiful.”

If lie can be called a lie, and that lie, another lie,

Then lie shall never remain a lie, and nor that lie, a lie.

So, if a lie it is that I tell that I lie about your beauty,

Then there is beauty in that lie, and that lie shall never be a lie.

8 Random Facts

1) Though I do not remember the time I was born, I am told it was the first time I cried. Though I do not remember what I liked or disliked then, I have been reminded on more than one occasion that I liked the smell of kerosene, so much so that I once drank a lot of it. Even though you may tend to disagree, I must say, it did not harm me gravely. Though I guess, it did screw up my olfactory senses and has made the smell of kerosene repugnant enough for me to have puked each time I smelt it during those long rides on dilapidated buses we took when we had to travel to the city. Perhaps – I again surmise – it was this relation of sickness to buses and buses to travel, that made me hate buses, travelling and anything else related to travelling. And it is for this latter reason I think, that I liked staying put at home, and perhaps due to this that I started getting bored of home, and therefore took up books to exorcise boredom in order to stay put.

2) 2) I am told that even when I didn’t have enough sense of consciousness to realize that I was in fact trying to read, I used to attempt reading the newspaper upside down. My maternal grandfather always kept me beside him whenever he was working, he gave me a pen and a rough notebook and I – the ever obedient grandson that I was – used to scribble on the book either until when there was no other page left to scribble on, or when my grandfather or anyone else stopped me from scribbling anymore. I always liked sitting at one place, even before I started travelling. So, I think I am contradicting my first statement.

3) 3) I was named Unnikrishnan Neithilath when I was about 6 months old. Unni in Malayalam means ‘child’. Krishnan of course means Krishnan, and not someone who is so dark that it is hard to capture his image on a photograph. Neithilath is the surname of my mother, which she got from her mother, and so on (This is a custom in the Nair community that the surname of the mother’s is passed on instead of the father’s.) Then I got named bugs bunny, for some insane, inane reason….then got nicked Dr. Flea…then I got nicked panni (I don’t know why)…then I got nicked prandan unni (Unni the psycho, “why?” is quite evident I think)…then vulgar-unni (for my sense of humor)…then director Unni (for a flopped play)…then editor unni (for the newsletter)…I am planning to name myself Unnamed Unni…doesn’t have the touch though…am still thinking…ideas for names are welcome.

4) 4) I learnt balling; I liked it and I balled so much that I never got to bat. I didn’t give a damn. During one period, I made it a ritual to eat five-star before I went out to play a game.

5) 5) I once made humus out of a lot of waste and decided I would become a biologist. Then my friend and myself, took the wood shavings from a sharpener, added explosive powder from the “atom bomb”, some water, mixed it with something else, then I think we heated it (If we did, we were lucky not have blown up the kitchen), and at last put whatever it was, in the freezer. After a week we found a silver colored precipitate, which my friend’s mother threw out in a fit of frenzy as soon as she saw it in our hands. I made up theory for things falling on the ground, and told it to friends, none of whom understood a damn thing (this was in seventh). I at the same time, also started writing stories inspired by hardy boys, of whose collection I had read only half a book. I wrote two stories, the themes of which I do not remember. I then saw the film “Border” and decided I would join the army. I was also inspired by the famous cartoon GI Joe. I played a lot with a lot of toys, day dreaming war sequences. Abhinandan and myself would sit together, and painstakingly set up the whole thing in about two hrs, hiding the villains, imagining beds as cliffs, and the floor as the battleground; and then in one stroke we would finish off the villains, because we knew where they were hiding exactly.

6) 6) I always thought specs were cool. I thought they made me look intellectual. The first specs I bought were round, like that of Harry Potter’s. After reading Harry Potter I always dreamt about my pen suddenly becoming my wand, and being able to blast my teachers into oblivion. I had a humongous crush on Hermione.

7) 7) Whenever I eat apples at home, with all civility in me, I throw whatever is left into the bushy park in front of my home, thinking that after a long time those seeds grow into apple trees and that park change into an apple orchard.

8) 8) Once as I rode my two-wheeler (spirit aka “kukka pilla” for the noise it makes) I had an intense, irritating wish to scratch my right knee. I didn’t want to slow down the vehicle, and for some reason wanted to scratch my right knee with my right hand. After some amount of careful deliberation I came to the conclusion that I could hold the accelerator with my left and the scratch my right knee with my right hand. I tried that ingenious plan: the scooter lost balance, skidded about ten feet, was about to land in a gutter but was saved by a tree. All this luckily happened in front of the hospital. I am alive, and that is about the best random fact I can give you about myself.

A walk in the rain

As I walked, these were the thoughts, visions, memories that passed through my mind:

1) I was watching an English film, and with it I had to watch all that “the package” delivered: bomb blasts, shoot outs, dramatic chase sequences, cheesy dialogues; the maid who was watching all this agape, sighed and told me in a grave voice, “They say the world is going to come to an end. They say it’ll happen this year.”

2) The world is round, and so is perhaps the moon...but, asteroids are not (are they?) and if one were to walk/hop in a straight line on one, would one fall off it at some point in time? Or, could one then walk/hop upside down?

3) A story: There is a coup in a sultan’s kingdom, led by the women of his harem and their lovers. The sultan though, is forewarned by the eunuch (kancukin, as they were called in India) who guards the harem. The sultan had enough time to escape but, he disguises himself as a eunuch and goes to the harem to find the one woman he loved so much. It is because he gave her most of his time, he reasoned as he tried to get into her room, that the other women felt unsatisfied and started having illicit love affairs…. He climbs into her room through the window, only to find her head severed off the torso by the rest of the women in the harem. They were expecting him…they whistled, all at once, and their lovers came through the doors, and like black ants filled the room…they surrounded the sultan and mutilated him. (There is a story in the Thousand and one nights, about a sultan who watches his entire harem cuckold him with their black slaves. I have not read it, but I have read about it. This story is my own, though inspired unbeknownst to me by the review of the story in Thousand and one nights I read in The Black Book well before I formed this story in my mind...it is weird what one remembers, and the way one remembers it.)

4) Everything around me was grey. There was no light, and yet there were a few surviving rays that sort of gave everything around me a greyish hue. As I walked in the puddle of water that the ground had become, I found that I wasn’t walking but rather the ground beneath me was moving giving me the feeling I was walking. I walked faster, but the ground beneath me seemed to be the one moving and not me. Relativity, and the sense of it, had confounded me; it seemed I was drunk in the benighted night that had enveloped everything.

5) What is the meaning of Vagueness?

6) Day dreams and their importance…futility of everything real.

7) The poem Kubla Khan, was written by Coleridge in a sort of trance that he thought was brought upon by opium. He couldn’t finish the poem, because as he was writing it, a guest knocked upon his door, and Coleridge couldn’t finish the poem because he forgot the lines to his poem. He always found his poems to come to him as visions or as dreams, rather than be of a more deliberate nature…I have to tell this to Nirmal.

8) There was a seal found during the Harrappan excavation, that of a big-nosed gentleman wearing a horned head-dress who sits in the lotus position with an erect penis, an air of abstraction and an audience of animals. What would they be using that seal for? Why has it gone obsolete?…I would find it quite funny, as I write my exams to find a seal of the above kind, instead of an insipid college seal….it would be only amusing, of course, only amusing...no other sort of...you know...it would be merely funny...that is all.

9) Another story forms: Mr. Lingam was very insecure about his cock’s future. It was quite improbable, he told himself, that after his death anyone would even look twice at it, let alone make sure it had a new pair of underwear everyday, so, he wrote a will. After his death, all his wealth passed onto his cock, and the caretaker of the cock, would be given unrestricted access to it(the money, I mean). The fact that Mr. Lingam had gone cuckoo during his final days, actually a few months before he rewrote his will, and locked himself in his room while clucking like a chicken, added disquiet to the already mysterious proceedings. After his will was declared, there was a fight amongst his ex-wives (who were too many), his sons, his daughters, his friends, who were only too eager to get rid of this sickening responsibility of “my cock” (as it was alluded to in the will). Surely, they told themselves, Mr. Lingam had surely gone insane. They in the end imposed this responsibility upon the geriatric butler who had been with Mr. Lingam, until the former fell in the bathroom, injuring his hip bone to be wheel-chair-ridden for the rest of his life. The aged butler, standing by his allegiance to his master, who was kind and loving to him before insanity overpowered him, took the responsibility of his master’s cock, but not without his doubts. As everyone else left the mansion and after the decision was finalised, the butler was asked to go to the room where the body lay unmoved, to do whatever was necessary. The butler is carried by his sons to the room on the first floor, and still unsure of his decision he opens the door to find the cock; its legs sticking out of its underwear, clucking and eating the grains off the floor.

10) Dostoevsky and his greatness. How I resemble Ivan Karamazov. What Pamuk says about Dostoevsky, “My first reading of Dostoevsky has always seemed to mark the moment when I lost my innocence.”—how true…how true…. What Borges says about Dostoevsky, “Discovering Dostoevsky is like discovering love for the first time, or the sea, – it marks an important moment in life’s journey.” – how true…how true…

11) How profound is this:

"Aye!" (quoth the delighted reader) "This is sense, this is genius! This I understand and admire! I have thought the very same a hundred times myself!" In other words, this man has reminded me of my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him. – Coleridge.

12) Why should one write? What should one write about? What is the necessity of art?

About how, Robin Williams says in Dead Poet’s Society, “Art is what makes one want to live” or something on those lines…How Woody Allen remarks to himself that of the things worth living for is the second movement of the Jupiter symphony by Mozart… the paedophile case against Allen….everything ceases to make sense…life is vague, so must be art…art exists to show the inherent futility in trying to prove that everything is connected, and why it is so….an artist must be there to help others give examples to confirm their belief about life. Without art, they would fall short of analogies, and once that happens they would never be able to speculate on life as excitedly…the one thing that makes living worth its hardships…the ambiguity of it…the scope of speculation.

Digressions in the Diary of a Dionysiac

I must start smoking or something. Not that I want to die with my lungs filled with tar or anything, that would be a terrifying prospect of course, but just that the picture of myself writing with a fag between my fingers would be a very ‘picturable’ thing. Balanced between the index and the F-finger of my left hand with the ash piling up at the other end, while my right hand holds a fountain pen- not those slim, aerodynamic ones which sometimes make me wonder whether they were made to write for they seldom did, or were they made to help you throw it more accurately at someone you didn’t like, not those- you know those really old ones, fat and which leaks ink from every joint it has; resting my left hand so that the piled up ash falls onto an ash tray on the writing table on which are strewn papers, some rolled up and crushed, some lying underneath an egg shaped paper weight, some being blown away by the table top fan that sits on a high pedestal; an open ink bottle solemnly remains stationary beside these papers, on the table; sitting before a glass window through which the penetrating afternoon rays crash upon all that is in the room, illuminating them; this would be a very picturable picture, even if I were not having the cigarette in between my fingers- I am not saying that, all I am saying is it would add to the whole ambience of it. It would look even more appealing, if the pic were to have a vintage look to it, like you know black & white and all. Somehow, writing with a pen on paper seems to be what those old fashioned, weirdo, pedantic guys would do, maybe they do it just because they feel they are a part of this picturable picture, yes, that would be quite probable, I would’ve done it too, of course, if I were like so darn pedantic and all, but I am not. They are the most ostentatious, hypocrites of geeks I have seen, and I have seen many geeks, being one of them myself, but I am no pedantic. They always spoil the jokes; they come in with these correct pronunciations when we were only joking for F’s sake, man they really kill them jokes. I usually write whatever it is that I write on my laptop, MS Word helps me with my inane mistakes in English grammar, so if you find any punctuation errors or some spelling mistakes or mistakes in sentence structures, blame Microsoft for it, because I have used auto correct options everywhere in this piece and if still there are mistakes, it is because MS Word is not as efficient as they say it is, or so you could conclude. But then again picturable is something I made up. I am quite a wordsmith myself, and not only that I am quite a punner too, only my puns just seem to bounce over people’s heads, they just don’t understand. Like for example, I use euphemisms almost always, but only that I use the harsher terms when I could have used a softer one, I once had to say this vote of thanks for the teacher’s day celebration in my school and I went and said, “Thank you for wasting your time here.” Well, my English madam came to me after the vote of thanks finished (which by the way was only that line.) and swore at me so badly that I learnt a few new swear words myself from her that day. Anyways, what I wanted to say was, if I put in a laptop in that picture, it would just as much as ruin the darn thing as a cigarette would enhance it. So, now, I am in this dilemma of sorts. If I wish to be in one such picturable pic, I would have to lose my laptop, and that would like kill my writing spirit. But, for the sake of the beauty of the picture, if anyone were to take a pic with me in it exactly like that, for beauty’s sake I think I must do that, I must start writing with paper and ink so that I would have time to get habituated to writing with a pen, just so that when the time comes I don’t look as if I was posing for a picture, that would look so bloody “phony”. Now, that is something else- ‘for beauty’s sake’. How much would one do for beauty’s sake? Would one even tell what one doesn’t believe in, just because he knew his thoughts are a nasty piece of work? Well, I would. I just did.

I could even start drinking now, coming to think of it. Why stop with smoking I say? Like, I only have like a year or so to graduate from this god forsaken place of knowledge, “An institution that seeks to produce India’s finest engineers” (like hell it does), and I have still not managed to inculcate a decent bad habit. It is not that I haven’t tried, as god is my witness, I have. But, every time I smoked a puff, I would burst out into these coughing bouts, man they were embarrassing as hell, so I stopped trying to smoke. I mean, who would want smoke to come out of themselves. But in their defence I must say these guys do look quite cool when they slowly exhale a dense cloud of smoke from their mouths, and only then and at no time else. It is like something spiritual or something. You know, as the cloud of smoke seductively hovers near your mouth and then diffuses, it’s like watching the person’s being leave him or something, to gain higher places. Now, how many of you people realised that was a pun? Did you? Of course you did. Now, I wouldn’t want to be a narcissistic fool thinking I am bloody obscure, that would make me pedantic wouldn’t it? Well, those souls who are too narcissistic, to the degree they are addicted to it, drink like drunkards. It is as if, they need to lose consciousness of themselves to become more narcissistic. There was this night; it was raining suddenly, as if heavens had decided to take a leak suddenly then and there, I was waiting for this bus to take me to this place I had to go to, and I was surrounded by drunkards. Most of them were so bloody drunk, they couldn’t sit on their asses for more than a second; ok, that was a slight poetic, artistic, exaggeration, about 50 seconds let’s say. See, now, exaggeration is something we can also find in them drunkards. They blow up the tiniest of their woes by fretting on them, by adjectivising them, that they would make the ones who hadn’t had a drink even once in their lifetime, puke on themselves because of the incessant nauseating narcissistic cribbing. Somehow drunkards are able to understand drunkards better, almost similar like as women understand women better. I am not yet a drunkard, I drank only once, honey-bee brandy, one peg, dry- it tasted like sweetened vomit, though I have not had that, I guess it would have tasted like that. My friends were laughing their guts out, most puked their guts out later, but, I had a manly reason to give them when I refrained from drinking another shot, and I wasn’t making it up either, I meant it. I told them, I would like to have my sense about me when I am still alive, it is supposedly the only time when we know we exist, and I meant it. Sleep is another such thing where one seems to lose consciousness; though I sleep as if I were dead. Not that I really want to be an insomniac or anything, though I did fantasise I was turning into one, I even acted out being an insomniac- to myself of course, in front of a mirror- after watching the film “Insomnia”, the one with the Italian guy in it. Insomniacs are lucky that way. Anyways, I am no insomniac. Though I reckon it is best if we are as conscious about the fact that we are alive as along as we are “up and about” (once dead we would no longer know we were once alive would we?); sleeping would not do that would it, so I sleep when it is absolutely necessary for me to sleep, I sleep quite late, about 2 in the morning or so, but I am so tired that I never manage to get up fast, and so I end up sleeping more than others too. I must remember to sleep early, perhaps, that would put me one step closer to becoming an insomniac.

I just finished this book called “The catcher in the rye” today. Well, what do I say about it? I won’t say anything, as a matter of fact. I hate book reviews, actually. I hate reviews. How can one say whether this is good or that is bad? And even if one had all justifications, and the right, and the power, to say whether this is good and that is bad, and if he would say it, I would still hate it. I would hate it even more if I hadn’t read the book before hearing the review, or seen the film for that matter, film reviews are more ubiquitous (a pedantic term, wouldn’t you say?). But, then of course a simple, good or bad review would look like god when compared to those other reviews which gives out bits and pieces of the film. I hate trailers too; they are almost like these other type of reviews. Like, if someone says to me so-and-so film had such-and-such actors Frenching right there on the screen, then when I did go to the sleazy movie, I would be so excited to watch them make out that when at last the scene did come it would become such a banal thing that I would feel miserable for those bucks I lost to watch this unsurprising act of frenching, the point is the whole surprise would’ve been ruined. Just now, when I referred to the movie as a sleazy movie, you must have thought I was being a “phony” prude or something; but, I ain’t one. Its just that, sometimes after all those blue films have satiated my appetite of the flesh, and if I wanted to watch a covered woman for a change, I would take a Hindi picture thinking that at least there are still decent films to watch after all that “perverty”; but just as the film moves into its quarter time, I find wet t-shirt contest like rain dances; orgy like marriages, where every one is trying to make out with someone else; or plain, straightforward nudity. It’s all so “phony” that I wish I were still watching an unphony freaking porn film for F’s sake. This phonyness is something else all together. “Inspiration”, is what a few from bollywood call it; yeah, my foot it is. It all starts with formation of stereotypes, such phonyness that is. Actually, originality itself is a phony word. If something were original it would be classified, and then because it is thought to profess somekind of whatever notion, it would cease to be original. People like stereotypedness, and stereotypedness is what makes them classify everything and in that originality loses its unique identity. And once that happens, originality itself becomes a phony word. It is stereotypedness that makes one say, “Hey isn’t this piece of shit like this other piece of crap that is based on another piece of unmitigated triteness?” it shows you how one piece seems similar or dissimilar to another, and hence magnifying the banality of it. Actually, if I were as narcissistic as those drunkards, I would’ve realised that I am as good a liar as those phony laptop writers ready to do anything for beauty’s sake who are as phony as those old fashioned writers of the Pen (Pun intended). Actually, if I were as phony as those reviewers, I would’ve realised that this piece of whatever it is, is like something else which I hope to hell was an original. But, I am no phony, and so shall end it here.

THE BAG, THE UMBRELLA, AND THE GIRL

Those, who wish to get inside this college, can avail themselves of a myriad different street:
For those who always come through the front door, two head entrances gapingly greet;
For those, who wish a stealthier path- come through the back, to walk into those futile Math slots;
But, beware sloth and temptation lurks behind K-bar’s calls, for an hour of rummy, or two rum shots;
For those abject brethren majoring the engineering approach on how to watch birds rare;
For those unseen angels seeking vengeance- money is your answer, pass through the ATM’s lair;
And for those who seek none of these, but to come on the sly from the side door,
Can cut through the cemented valley that swills with water in seasons, when rains pour.

Through one of these roads, came to this college a jolly good fellow,
Who, always smiled and showed off his teeth yellow;
His heavy black bag, that he carried with him everyday,
Was given special attention on his favourite Friday;
When everything from his stinking underwear to the unwashe sweater,
It would carry all the dirty secrets that would be laundered at his home later.

On other days, with his black bag balancing his skewed shoulder,
He walked round the gallery, to the canteen, making people roll with laughter;
When one day, he saw this beautiful girl, in a pretty white dress,
And lost his self, as she waltzed past him before he regained consciousness;
As he lay on his cot, in his hostel room, he knew he had lost his slumber,
For her round face kept coming back to him- ‘Am I in love?’ he asked in wonder.

He poked around, and got to know that she, it seems, was in the college’s centre dock,
When he was, two jumps from the end, in what was called the production block;
He then saw her once, in an ice cream parlour inside the city centre ring,
And then again, by chance or fate, in a Chinese restaurant named “The Ming”;
Once more, as he saw her passing through, when he least expected her,
The shock caused this, chest congestion, and a week’s time of delirious fever.

The curly hair which crashed softly on her shoulders, was dark as the picture of outer space;
In her eyes, whose gaze his had never met, he mused, lay the dark labyrinth of love’s maze;
As he searched its convoluted paths, his mind and heart, conspired his next pretense to meet;
In the empty college corridors, he dreamt of how she would smile, and how he would greet;
He found an open door as he composed a poem, of atrocious rhyme, meter, and length;
Which he wrote sipping tea in Wimbis, finishing it before the hour reached night’s tenth.

It was when he woke up beneath the Mech-tree, his limbs fumbled for a decent step,
And as he reached the civil facility he had lost his entire faculty that slacked his pep;
He wondered, why he wrote this unmitigated piece of crap, that spewed an ersatz flame,
How, if silence were golden, and words only silver, is this going to woo the opulent dame?
But, aren’t words, he consoled himself, more beautiful than the ostentatious golden glitter;
And thus saying passed through the eternally closed library, to the gallery- perennially in litter.

‘Twas not long before, that she came out to glorify the world around him, or so he felt,
But, she swept past him, he thought later, before he had a chance to spell “Spelt.”;
He followed her, to the ends of the college, through the decrepit Chemical flank,
Manoeuvring with grace between vehicles parked, ducking beneath the moribund water tank;
To stop before the puddle of water, before the sneering façade of the production bank;
To see her profess, undying love to the guy holding a lanky blue umbrella, fit for the villain’s role;
When, our poet, slumped down and declared, “Who cares, when my heart is like a black hole!”

For beauty’s sake

The candle wax dripped silently, to its stoned state;
The drink wasted, stayed untouched in its old crate;
The stars scattered, as pearls from a broken necklace
Shone on the blood stained corridors, revealing every trace;
Of where lay the murdered hunchback, still hunched in his death;
It hinted that the oozing red was what he smelled in his last breath.

***

On a castle, atop a crooked hill,
When it was dark, and weather chill;
With demented bats serenading us with a topsy-turvy tune;
Where the food was sumptuous, and no one to prune;
We sat waiting for the hunched butler to leave us be,
So, we could start that which we whispered as our “Loving spree”।

Wolfs howled from the surrounding forest den;
Owls hooted the ominous sighs of the dreary glen;
But, in our lofty abode, oblivious of these obvious omen;
We made passionate love, amidst the billows of white linen;
Pressed against each others bosom, we heard a thud and a faint bleat;
And we felt each others fear, as concertedly our hearts skipped beat.

***

Memory, stay with me! What was it that happened next?
Did I leave you? I think I did, but, under what pretext?
I remember the wooden stairs, and a dusty handle of a creaking door,
I remember a soft breath, and then a shooting pain with a vision gore;
Blood, dazzlingly red, gushed out of my knife-corked wound;
As I crashed in that infinitesimal moment of death, I awoke and was doomed।

There I lay in pain as I realized I had a hump on me;
I found my sneering butler and you, my love, in a negligee;
It was neither you, nor me; I am my own servant, but only in a dream;
It was you, my love, who plunged that knife, I know from your eyes’ gleam;
Oh! Grant me the honour of truth as the hour ends, for pity’s sake do your duty!
Why did you kill me? - And she answered truthfully, “I did it for the sake of Beauty.”

Identity crisis: the story of a sci-fi plot

Like them banal novels inspired by those ludicrous Hollywood sci-fi movies, starting out with someone killing someone, so that the hero/ heroine can chase someone he/she wants to, only to forget as they become more and more entangled, in this “web of mystery” they never wanted to be in, that they have “loved ones” who can be killed before the climax by someone else who similarly in the end, in self absorbed narcissism having the hero/ heroine cowed down, after a prelude of thunderous laughter, starts performing an overzealous soliloquy justifying his wrong doings, vaguely resembling those Shakespearean villains, oblivious, of the hero/ heroine plotting some fantastical escape attempt, which involves frog jumping overhead muscular bodyguards and choreographed action sequences in which everyone is able to kick if not simply graze, everyone else’s ass, with consummate grace at least once, all these only to end it by a prosaic killing of a whimpering villain; let us start our story by killing someone. Only because one can do that in his story, even if one were anemic, nerdy, clumsy, five-feet something, with the only power he has being the insanely high powered spectacles for his short sight. So then, someone, in ragged clothes, having a scarred face, climbs up pipes running down decrepit buildings, into some cluttered apartment in a dingy corner of a moribund city; maneuvering himself through the convoluted mess, that could be called any thief's perfect nightmare, with such precision that he could not have been a thief; that to another, watching him through the dark blanket of night, this act of trespassing would only be natural, for no one else could have moved through that clumsily filled apartment with such ease but the one who owned it. So, after a few other lines of verbose description, we find the man in the green jacket stabbing someone still in his pajamas with stupefaction on his unscarred face, and as the murderer bows down to drag the body we find him thinking, how once in his past, he was the man he had killed.

So, now that we have satiated the appetite to play god and kill someone, we move on to the plot. Headlines of newspapers read; "Are we at War?" or "These disturbing times!" and some other, ingenious, enigmatic, puns of a title for an emergency that is because of what follows. It seems that if we take out history text books of any one of the few school going kids at the time when this story takes place, or seems to be taking place, we shall find a high quality color photo of a young woman, quite insane by the looks of it, standing beside some gigantic tin container that she calls the time machine. We would find in the same text book, articles written instead of text book chapters, giving accounts of how the reason for their combined, miserable fortune, so virulent that all the future generations including their present one will be afflicted by it, and shall never recuperate from it; is their foolish continuum counterparts in the past, whose globalised foolishness is the cause, as is alleged, of this catastrophe called the present. The condition that is reported in these articles is something like this:

Sometime before, unable to reconcile his present fate, that is not only deplorable but something that he had never expected; unable to comprehend how all of us human beings in the world were able to manage to get into this state of extreme dereliction, depravity, and even with all that money with people, the destitution, which due to its ubiquity cannot even be pitied; confounded at how our combined fates had tumbled down to such a depressing point; started brooding upon his own life. Thus, he started first by, severing his own life from the lives of others, his own fate from that of the others, which for him, and other millions like him, was the only solace to the misfortune that had crashed upon them simultaneously and overwhelmingly so. In this search for his own individual past, he revisited his lost memories which showed a youth filled with grand ideas and a contagious hope for a better future; his decisions in life; the opportunities that went past him; the people who mattered to him the most; the books he had read; the movies he had seen; the journeys he had taken; the songs he had heard; disasters that were caused by human nature and nature itself; all of these resounded in his mind's hollow corridors. Thus, shuffling between memories of his youth, childhood, and his present and that of the common memory of mankind-our history; he found dots which he could join and which on joining, to his consternation, he found a meaningful constellation. He found his own freedom restricted by the freedom of others, and that his say in his own life, even though he rebelled against his family's wishes, the government, and against everyone if only to prove his point, was also decided by the circumstances in which he lived. His own individuality in the past and in the present was so entwined with past and present of his contemporaries, he found his own life too constricting. He found himself unable to extricate himself from this ghastly predicament of being enjoined in the combined fate, and the mediocrity of it, infuriated him. He wanted to be free from his fate which, he declared to himself in a soliloquy, was his destiny. What if, he thought as he tried to plan his own destiny, if he could enlighten his past?

And thus, this war that we are in with our own pasts, started with one man named "The hero" for the sake of anonymity, seeking to enlighten his past and hence, change his present. To this end, he found that, the insane scientist woman had created for him his tool, the time machine, and so, after discussing with this scientist on the side-effects of using this machine, he took it, let's say, for a ride. He had gathered enough to understand that the woman was a raving lunatic, and that if one could go by what she murmured during her bouts of sanity (it was when she usually stuttered, as she used to do in her past), that this machine was based on the theory another inmate of the scientific asylum had propounded a decade or so back, which stated that "We are but our identities"; that even the non-living things exist as a part of our identity as a human; that the variety of what we see around us, is but the materialization of the cognition of our different identities, and we, our mass, is but the cognition of our own selves. This would, he construed, apart from explaining why one became almost delirious when affected with high fever, explain how we all fell into such a mess. We gave up on our individual identities, we classified and declassified our identities so much that we stereotyped everything that was around us, even being unique became commonplace; men who did try to become different from different, found their identities still being similar to those others who were fighting side by side with them against mediocrity and thus, resulting in an inward revolution, and so on. All these tedious metaphysical revolutions were given up at the end, and all of us, giving up our struggle to find our singular identities, joined the combined fate, and consoled each other by showing how similar each was to the other. He also learns that, though he can not change his past without causing damage to his present identity; that each, the identity in the past, and the identity that has traveled to the past, are different and are independent of each other and that the past is connected only to the future. When we once step out of time, we are no more, either a part of the future or a part of the past. Thus, to exist, he who has stepped out of time to travel in it, must continuously be traveling, or then kill either of his identities, in the past or the future and then as a result of the first law of identities, "An identity can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed from one into another."; establish his own identity instead of it. This would mean that our past and future are therefore linked as a whole, and when we step out of it, are only taking with us some from the whole; and if we don't restore back this division of the whole into two and only two, we, our past, our future, and we who have stepped out, shall remain scarred for the rest of our lives, like the insane scientist who was the first to step into that fermata called time.

Our hero, wearing his lucky green jacket, steps into time, thereby scarring his own face from the sudden redistribution of identities and does what was described in the first paragraph, to his own self. This would, as the story moves, bring back this shift of identities to harmonious division into two of the whole, completing each others past and the present. Our hero, as he leads a life as his own past tries to achieve what he must to give himself a better future, his ex-contemporaries from the future learn of this path to salvation from their state, start trying to kill their past identities to form a better one for their own future. This would go on for long, until, the super power of the then past, by their covert intelligence, learn of this rapidly emerging new underground movement, that helped, to widespread disbelief, kill themselves. When all of this becomes news in the story's present, or our hero's past, people find their hopeful selves losing hope, looking at their own despicable future. And to dispel this sick relationship, which once used to be pure hope, between their present and their future, secured the time machines which this underground movement has until now kept secretly hidden from the government, after a bloody battle. This would be necessary, so as to send their own selves (by stepping into time) as assassins to kill their future selves. Their future selves also simultaneously stepping into time and so many of them doing it concurrently, causes major redistribution of the ethereal identity, which is overlooked for the greater good of mankind on the whole; which in the end would be seen as the datum with respect to which stupidity would be graded.

Every story must end. It must end, for if it doesn't, its meaning remains incomplete; like a sentence that never ends; like a word that is never uttered; like a life that is not yet at its end. The story without an end remains obscure, obfuscated by its inherent incompleteness. So, it is also our duty to draw up an ending to the plot, before we base our story on it. An ending where all the characters learn of their meaning in the story, where they reconcile with the parts they have been given, where their combined fate is decided. A story is unlike life in the fact that these paroxysms of fate, that causes one to be a hero and another to be a side kick; one to die and another to live; is decided by one, and that one, is still unsure of what will be his decision until he himself reaches the end, concertedly with the characters he has created. The symbolisms are quite conspicuous one feels, in his story, and yet, even an avid reader misses the point. It happens, because mainly it seems, the reader is comparing the identities of each character to his own; even perhaps, as he compares the identity of the writer to his own; and thereby losing, in ones effort to find similarities, those quirky aberrations which are perhaps why the story was written in the first place. In ones quest to be different, one disappointingly finds, that he is not as different or unique as he thought he is; this would lead one to ask himself, whether he must isolate himself from the world, retreat back into solitude to hear his own voice, and be with it. But, this would only be until his memory of the world from which he has come hauntingly points to him his mediocrity, in being the same. Would it suffice, to remain as an identity with which we are at peace within? What about discontentment? How many of us are happy being discontented? Discontented with what?-life, relationships, knowledge, love. What about a story that has an ending? What about a story, that doesn't have an end? What would it be showing us, but, the continuity of life; that the meaning is in the story and not in the end.

So now, we reach that part, where we are at the crossroads, contradicting ourselves. Should we end this story, but, if such a war were to happen, would it not go on, with the future continuously trying to perfect itself; or would it end with the annihilation of the identity of a man as an individual and as a group; or worse would it end by the identity losing itself in itself. So, now that the question remains with us story writers, it is we who must decide upon the future of the identity. Or, should we, showing solidarity with our fictional counterparts, be discontented with a complete story, giving ourselves the unlimited hope of having what is better than what we have, and thereby relieving ourselves of the great joy of being the one who controls the fate of all these characters combined, or those of each single character, and passing on to each reader's imagination this responsibility? Where then, would be the horizon which identifies the reader and the writer, memory and the present, truth and the make believe?