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.