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.