Lethargy. Complete lethargy. A numbness spreading down the body , from the brain, down the nerves, touching every organ with a loving wand, a caress, enough to turn them off. The back sags down, a crushing weight pressing upon the chest shifting the body down and down in to the cushion. The fighting backbone rests, catches a hurried breath, again takes a shot,- a quick impulse…and then, hey presto! It realizes that the muscles intend to do no further work. It nudges the spinal cord. it lies relaxed…no sharp jab from the CNS. The drummer in the heart seems to be reaching the climax…faster , faster goes the beats..into a frenzied dance…like the intoxicating tarantula venom….
The stomach muscles contract and then abruptly give up. The thighs twist a bit, the knee-caps creak and seems that a light pressure runs through the length of the legs…till it almost absolutely dissolves near the toes .Oh! The hands..well, then lie as they were; uncared and unwanted. The taut face relaxes, the mouth opens a bit, the chin falls and rises up playing to the inaudible sound of the drum-sticks of the drummer lodging in the heart. It’s almost a ripple. Not even that..only a rush of gentle whispering of tree leaves..as they pile up on the autumn lawns. The sound coaxes..It asks the brain to relax. The eye drops lid. Slowly there is a transition in the brain. A world leaves……slowly as smoke trails out of the end of a deserted pipe...and another world enters…like water filling up a fish tank…
AN U-Shaped umbrella of smoke coiling and trailing up into the sky………a blinding flash of light……pin-pricks on the eye-lids that strain to hold their own against a powerful understanding that evinces at the bedlam…..asphyxiated, nostrils clogged instantaneously and momentarily……….One singular impulse pulls the entire body into the position of total command as the protesting mind fights against the possibility of a reworking….
Let me make a well deserved kind request. don’t ask me how I got to the details, if they can be called the details: don’t enquire where I was standing, what was the frame of reference…leave all the wh-words out for a moment, except for why and ask me now an eager then. I have a family to run. now don’t go asking what is that family ok. My perceptions are devoid of your understanding and they do not incorporate your definitions. Please don’t ask me the irritating questions that they did…Ok now I guess comes the inevitable question ”who/what is they?” to know that you will have to bear with a frantic boy and his last …well that will come later. Take it for now that I have got a power to observe a person and I am just narrating that .Simple! So lets get back to it.
Actually I wasn’t supposed to be here right now. It was completely by chance that I came here. The boy wasn’t also supposed to do this .But as you can well see , perceptions and situations change and so changes the destiny. When I got the wind of what was about to happen, I had to rewind actually-to the very day he was born. Now I know this is not a biography, and I have no intentions of reading out the exact duration of his wails in early childhood, because he did cry a lot. But I must explain those inevitable wh-words in the end so I better get a start from now on.
They didn’t have enough money to afford a separate cabin in a posh hospital, and the connections in that nursing-home helped. Precisely after 8 Pm, the wails of the new born startled the maternal grandpa, and he rubbed his eyes and said, "Well! bring the sweets someone”
This boy I am talking about, he got enrolled in the best English-medium school of his city. As if enrolling in an English-medium school ensures that there is going to be a perfect fruitful future. Well that’s not my point of writing this. The point is narrating what I saw. This boy…lets call him E...he had developed a complex nature since childhood. A perfectly natural and normal incident always took a strangely distorted and mangled shape to him. Well put the blame on any one you like..his parents…who he took as hypocrites or his family who really were complete hypocrites. Obviously he had a complicated childhood…going to the school and coming back to a crèche all because his grandma(paternal) wont accept the responsibilities of caring for a grandchild whose arrival and existence(mind you his existence) she had repeatedly boasted to her relatives; and with particular savory to those of them who didn’t have a child or had given birth to a girl. So can this boy really be blamed if he develops a sort of attitude which instilled in him a belief that males were more superior than them who were cursed by God to always get a swollen belly, generally nine months after an intercourse? Well each of you shall have your own opinion ...but mine you will get at the final stages of this narrative.
Ever wondered how an adolescent develops a physical understanding? Well for the ones who don’t know because they missed out on the chance to realize it, and the ones who would like not to recall the first-time when they had a craving for their next door neighbor , let me remind(and inform ) you that this feeling develops all of a sudden, just by chance, at any age, and its mainly got to do with hormones and genes. There fore it won’t be a bad thing after all to own up: this boy’s developed very early…and his first crush was the first girl he encountered closely with. Would you all be shocked and ready to abuse him if I told you that the girl was his cousin??
Well to tell you the truth I really don’t care. This boy was imaginative(at least till he didn’t start growing a beard!), and he dreamt of fairies(not too literally dreamt!).he thought that one day he would be meeting a fairy ,like the sugar coated princes in fairy-tales ;and so he kept looking for them.Actually can you really blame that boy? Say that since his tender age his parents taught him-“Beta! Live up to your age, not above it.You are still too young …”
And just when he was happily fantasizing those fairies, quite oblivious to the changes that took place around him, he woke up to find that the very pedestals of safety that he thought supported him were rusted by the winds of change. And then, came the cry of despair..not from him..he was after all too young to worry at all ; the cry came from his mother, half-muted by the fact that her son was scarcely living up to the level demanded from a student of his school. And the father? Well he found in his son an unlikely person to pass his mantle of “the best student of the school”. So he kept mum without actually keeping quiet-he avoided responsibilities at the earliest. The boy came to be educated in the hands of his mother. And what could the poor lady do but to vent her despair at the lad..he was compared to the best students, his confidence was trifled with and surprise! surprise! That didn’t wreak him. He tried and finally got himself satisfied and actually got his mother to smile. That I guess is taking the shape of a tedious case history. The preamble calls for so much explanation, where the main text is only worth two hours. I mean seriously, a final effect is overshadowed by the sixteen years of lead that accumulated in the burden that an Indian adolescent hailing from an upper/lower middle class has to bear . And what’s more strange is that this is the load that is usually taken up by a person, who is ahead of his time when he finds no takers of his beliefs. All because there is his society which finds him incompetent for a public display of his ideas :just because he has not got the tag from the Government of India that calls him an adult!
Now they say love is blind. Nay love is not blind my dear reader, love is sadly blinded by situation. Consider a case when you have the girl you love beside you all the day…you won’t exactly dream of telling her that you love her(well, unless you feel that the final manifestation of your existence is say out those three words over and over again). But when there is a situation of alarm; probably a rival or probably she isn’t there by you so frequently…what happens then ? You go all the way to convince her that you are insanely in love with her. Well that is a blindness of love induced by the situation. And this is exactly what happened with this boy. Fell in love with a best friend. Well, he was still in dreams over the fairies who never came...she, I am sorry to say preserved her love for another guy. And that’s where the present tense takes it over from the past.
I could clearly see the lines on his face when he entered the room today. The trimmed moustache , and the mowed down beard. He took the customary glance at the mirror, to search obsessively, for any flaws on his countenance that would make him any less desirable. Then with a heavy sigh that is very normal, (given his nature), he departed to his study table, littered with backlogs and sums never touched.
That was all so normal. And that alarmed me. The sheer fact that all is so tranquil and fits so smartly into the jigsaw puzzle-that really rings the alarm bell. Factually his normalcy is desired but actually the non-chaotic representation of his life that I am so unused to, is a nerve-rattling experience. Aah! don’t you see that boy is a hot –headed person of sixteen, and he has radically different views on every matter ranging from Globalization to Ganja- and all you see him doing is sit silently there at his desk and think. Oh! Yah! His thinking is something so very dangerous. Can you imagine a person who can have all the complexities-Inferior and Superior, who has high ego and a conscience that forbids him to be anything but humble? Well if you can’t then I guess you have a completely natural perception of human reality. Because this boy is a creature-yes, a creature possessing or, well, thinks that he possesses that concoction of every idea.
His later antics were nothing of a describable one. But I shall describe them nevertheless: because to me they are very valuable as a testimony of how the mind works for a different person in a trying situation. He got up. I could sense.. no, feel the reactions in him. His thoughts were blaring like loudspeakers on my ears. He had an altercation with himself that day. He wanted to be sure that he had found out the point of existence of his life. And every time he took up the question there came a blank reply. He was frustrated from within. That frustration took the form of mechanical energy, when he punched the table top with his fist, and threw himself down on the bed. Then came the similar reaction that I had so painfully interpreted from his psychological bearings, at the beginning of this writing.
He sat up abruptly, and the drums began to play in my heart now,…. action time??
I clearly remember each moment of resolution that I have seen, and this boy’s was very different and is still clearly etched in my memory. Boy! oh boy! He was so much like a volcano raving to go: it was like the eruption, rudely interrupted by a rock clogging the vent; and he clearly struggled to remove the rock, blast it to pieces, his past, his family, his society, his religion, his love, his perceptions and himself…the great bunch of mistakes, lies and elaborately advertised untruths. He couldn’t stand the lies blatantly existing all around him, - he was like a Copernican fellow, forced to preach that the earth made annual trips round the sun. He felt clogged into the drainpipe of high social expectations, and crushed under the overwhelming weights of the previous generation; tortured by the fact that his ideas were correct. He strove to understand where was the grand flaw? In Fate? Fate that made him get born in an economic setup that refused him pleasures . “Who was responsible?”, he asked, “the family that I am a part of?”.
They had not judged him on grounds of actual reality, free from the constraints of weak-spine diplomacy and conservative purdah. He was tired to be the last person to know of the economic strain that his family went through, and yet he was the first person to know that his actions needed to be rectified, just to stall the economic strain. He could not bring up to himself, to agree, to his own habit of praying at the alter, before any major work…when he had so assiduously studied science and found no trace of the divine grace , he bowed in front of.
He simply failed to explain why he had to change his own self before embarking on a new attempt to love, to feel wanted, to find someone who showed that she cared, by showing the affection, not by verbally promising an affection running deeply in the veins. Living alone since the age of four had only made him create a microcosm , where there were only his perceptions and where he had so unhesitantly declared “Forever! Trust who you are…because nothing else matters”. His basic thoughts were making a similar outburst…
I quote it as exactly I heard it…
“Look I am stagnant. I am not working. I am just rolling on the cushion. I am wasting my time. No I am thinking. But what good is it going to do to me. I am just one of the millions others who love to sit, combine heavy words put in smart phrases: a bit out of the ordinary. But guess what we seldom read what the other person is at.. There are so many theories and some of them are so painstakingly similar that it is very boring to even read at the titles: same diamond viewed a thousand times from the same combination of angles and the new angles are even exhausted. then why do we exist at al with our branch of philosophizing that is promised(I don’t know when) to be different from what was there before. Let me attempt ok? There are people who shall refuse to see sense( if any) in our works. They are always there, the target of out angst…we call them the generation-Ex…their philosophers are the crack force of crack-heads employed at the crack of dawn of our life to crack the phial of zeal that nourishes and replenishes the stock of dreaming{well, everyone dreams…but we (especially I) dream of becoming just different}We are here to make these crack-heads understand that the mantle needs to be passed...for good or for bad.
If we the youngsters are laughing for we find it funny :and if we are smiling because we find the conception of passing the mantle, encourage able for our type of people…then I have a last word for that too…..
We are the future and so we must also be the future representatives of the crack-headed people…etc . etc. I am sure if reality is taken into account our self-proposed laws that govern, our thoughts wont be of any logical avail to even us….”
That was so much like a modern Vesuvius. A boy who only wanted to be perfect, craved to escape his theories of life and those of the previous generation. He spotted hypocrisy in places, that were the abodes of just rationality-and he interpreted, that it was getting too tough. Publishing an idea is like being diplomatic and employing hypocrisy…that was just too much………
He walked into the balcony…looked at the still evening sky..the prickle of lights, like flashbulbs that failed to highlight the tornado ravaging his innards. Choking him in the full realization of the enormous complicacy of the mesh that wound itself around each life, in the name of society and world. He felt that the web was only too gratefully ignored by the ones who lacked the stamina to enquire.
Then in a gesture unprecedented he shouted aloud in the night life….
“Are you satisfied? …………is that what it required me to know…..have I got anything more to offer to you?? I have shredded each ounce of my sanity to interpret….I have found my point of existence….then ..then.. Its time in the end….I am the only person who wilfully decided when to cast away my life in contempt …”
And he fell………………..
The wind soared up to him…the heart-beat increased manifold…and he encountered blackness….
I was there to write it down.
Who am I? I am , rather was, his destiny, that he wished to control…his final words certify that.
I wrote it all down, the true feelings of a boy who died self-willed, for he had nothing more to discover out of the stagnant, smelly magician called life, that pulled out the same ruffled rabbit from the hat…and mesmerized the audience with a dazzling smile….
I am destiny…about to write a new story…
The stomach muscles contract and then abruptly give up. The thighs twist a bit, the knee-caps creak and seems that a light pressure runs through the length of the legs…till it almost absolutely dissolves near the toes .Oh! The hands..well, then lie as they were; uncared and unwanted. The taut face relaxes, the mouth opens a bit, the chin falls and rises up playing to the inaudible sound of the drum-sticks of the drummer lodging in the heart. It’s almost a ripple. Not even that..only a rush of gentle whispering of tree leaves..as they pile up on the autumn lawns. The sound coaxes..It asks the brain to relax. The eye drops lid. Slowly there is a transition in the brain. A world leaves……slowly as smoke trails out of the end of a deserted pipe...and another world enters…like water filling up a fish tank…
AN U-Shaped umbrella of smoke coiling and trailing up into the sky………a blinding flash of light……pin-pricks on the eye-lids that strain to hold their own against a powerful understanding that evinces at the bedlam…..asphyxiated, nostrils clogged instantaneously and momentarily……….One singular impulse pulls the entire body into the position of total command as the protesting mind fights against the possibility of a reworking….
Let me make a well deserved kind request. don’t ask me how I got to the details, if they can be called the details: don’t enquire where I was standing, what was the frame of reference…leave all the wh-words out for a moment, except for why and ask me now an eager then. I have a family to run. now don’t go asking what is that family ok. My perceptions are devoid of your understanding and they do not incorporate your definitions. Please don’t ask me the irritating questions that they did…Ok now I guess comes the inevitable question ”who/what is they?” to know that you will have to bear with a frantic boy and his last …well that will come later. Take it for now that I have got a power to observe a person and I am just narrating that .Simple! So lets get back to it.
Actually I wasn’t supposed to be here right now. It was completely by chance that I came here. The boy wasn’t also supposed to do this .But as you can well see , perceptions and situations change and so changes the destiny. When I got the wind of what was about to happen, I had to rewind actually-to the very day he was born. Now I know this is not a biography, and I have no intentions of reading out the exact duration of his wails in early childhood, because he did cry a lot. But I must explain those inevitable wh-words in the end so I better get a start from now on.
They didn’t have enough money to afford a separate cabin in a posh hospital, and the connections in that nursing-home helped. Precisely after 8 Pm, the wails of the new born startled the maternal grandpa, and he rubbed his eyes and said, "Well! bring the sweets someone”
This boy I am talking about, he got enrolled in the best English-medium school of his city. As if enrolling in an English-medium school ensures that there is going to be a perfect fruitful future. Well that’s not my point of writing this. The point is narrating what I saw. This boy…lets call him E...he had developed a complex nature since childhood. A perfectly natural and normal incident always took a strangely distorted and mangled shape to him. Well put the blame on any one you like..his parents…who he took as hypocrites or his family who really were complete hypocrites. Obviously he had a complicated childhood…going to the school and coming back to a crèche all because his grandma(paternal) wont accept the responsibilities of caring for a grandchild whose arrival and existence(mind you his existence) she had repeatedly boasted to her relatives; and with particular savory to those of them who didn’t have a child or had given birth to a girl. So can this boy really be blamed if he develops a sort of attitude which instilled in him a belief that males were more superior than them who were cursed by God to always get a swollen belly, generally nine months after an intercourse? Well each of you shall have your own opinion ...but mine you will get at the final stages of this narrative.
Ever wondered how an adolescent develops a physical understanding? Well for the ones who don’t know because they missed out on the chance to realize it, and the ones who would like not to recall the first-time when they had a craving for their next door neighbor , let me remind(and inform ) you that this feeling develops all of a sudden, just by chance, at any age, and its mainly got to do with hormones and genes. There fore it won’t be a bad thing after all to own up: this boy’s developed very early…and his first crush was the first girl he encountered closely with. Would you all be shocked and ready to abuse him if I told you that the girl was his cousin??
Well to tell you the truth I really don’t care. This boy was imaginative(at least till he didn’t start growing a beard!), and he dreamt of fairies(not too literally dreamt!).he thought that one day he would be meeting a fairy ,like the sugar coated princes in fairy-tales ;and so he kept looking for them.Actually can you really blame that boy? Say that since his tender age his parents taught him-“Beta! Live up to your age, not above it.You are still too young …”
And just when he was happily fantasizing those fairies, quite oblivious to the changes that took place around him, he woke up to find that the very pedestals of safety that he thought supported him were rusted by the winds of change. And then, came the cry of despair..not from him..he was after all too young to worry at all ; the cry came from his mother, half-muted by the fact that her son was scarcely living up to the level demanded from a student of his school. And the father? Well he found in his son an unlikely person to pass his mantle of “the best student of the school”. So he kept mum without actually keeping quiet-he avoided responsibilities at the earliest. The boy came to be educated in the hands of his mother. And what could the poor lady do but to vent her despair at the lad..he was compared to the best students, his confidence was trifled with and surprise! surprise! That didn’t wreak him. He tried and finally got himself satisfied and actually got his mother to smile. That I guess is taking the shape of a tedious case history. The preamble calls for so much explanation, where the main text is only worth two hours. I mean seriously, a final effect is overshadowed by the sixteen years of lead that accumulated in the burden that an Indian adolescent hailing from an upper/lower middle class has to bear . And what’s more strange is that this is the load that is usually taken up by a person, who is ahead of his time when he finds no takers of his beliefs. All because there is his society which finds him incompetent for a public display of his ideas :just because he has not got the tag from the Government of India that calls him an adult!
Now they say love is blind. Nay love is not blind my dear reader, love is sadly blinded by situation. Consider a case when you have the girl you love beside you all the day…you won’t exactly dream of telling her that you love her(well, unless you feel that the final manifestation of your existence is say out those three words over and over again). But when there is a situation of alarm; probably a rival or probably she isn’t there by you so frequently…what happens then ? You go all the way to convince her that you are insanely in love with her. Well that is a blindness of love induced by the situation. And this is exactly what happened with this boy. Fell in love with a best friend. Well, he was still in dreams over the fairies who never came...she, I am sorry to say preserved her love for another guy. And that’s where the present tense takes it over from the past.
I could clearly see the lines on his face when he entered the room today. The trimmed moustache , and the mowed down beard. He took the customary glance at the mirror, to search obsessively, for any flaws on his countenance that would make him any less desirable. Then with a heavy sigh that is very normal, (given his nature), he departed to his study table, littered with backlogs and sums never touched.
That was all so normal. And that alarmed me. The sheer fact that all is so tranquil and fits so smartly into the jigsaw puzzle-that really rings the alarm bell. Factually his normalcy is desired but actually the non-chaotic representation of his life that I am so unused to, is a nerve-rattling experience. Aah! don’t you see that boy is a hot –headed person of sixteen, and he has radically different views on every matter ranging from Globalization to Ganja- and all you see him doing is sit silently there at his desk and think. Oh! Yah! His thinking is something so very dangerous. Can you imagine a person who can have all the complexities-Inferior and Superior, who has high ego and a conscience that forbids him to be anything but humble? Well if you can’t then I guess you have a completely natural perception of human reality. Because this boy is a creature-yes, a creature possessing or, well, thinks that he possesses that concoction of every idea.
His later antics were nothing of a describable one. But I shall describe them nevertheless: because to me they are very valuable as a testimony of how the mind works for a different person in a trying situation. He got up. I could sense.. no, feel the reactions in him. His thoughts were blaring like loudspeakers on my ears. He had an altercation with himself that day. He wanted to be sure that he had found out the point of existence of his life. And every time he took up the question there came a blank reply. He was frustrated from within. That frustration took the form of mechanical energy, when he punched the table top with his fist, and threw himself down on the bed. Then came the similar reaction that I had so painfully interpreted from his psychological bearings, at the beginning of this writing.
He sat up abruptly, and the drums began to play in my heart now,…. action time??
I clearly remember each moment of resolution that I have seen, and this boy’s was very different and is still clearly etched in my memory. Boy! oh boy! He was so much like a volcano raving to go: it was like the eruption, rudely interrupted by a rock clogging the vent; and he clearly struggled to remove the rock, blast it to pieces, his past, his family, his society, his religion, his love, his perceptions and himself…the great bunch of mistakes, lies and elaborately advertised untruths. He couldn’t stand the lies blatantly existing all around him, - he was like a Copernican fellow, forced to preach that the earth made annual trips round the sun. He felt clogged into the drainpipe of high social expectations, and crushed under the overwhelming weights of the previous generation; tortured by the fact that his ideas were correct. He strove to understand where was the grand flaw? In Fate? Fate that made him get born in an economic setup that refused him pleasures . “Who was responsible?”, he asked, “the family that I am a part of?”.
They had not judged him on grounds of actual reality, free from the constraints of weak-spine diplomacy and conservative purdah. He was tired to be the last person to know of the economic strain that his family went through, and yet he was the first person to know that his actions needed to be rectified, just to stall the economic strain. He could not bring up to himself, to agree, to his own habit of praying at the alter, before any major work…when he had so assiduously studied science and found no trace of the divine grace , he bowed in front of.
He simply failed to explain why he had to change his own self before embarking on a new attempt to love, to feel wanted, to find someone who showed that she cared, by showing the affection, not by verbally promising an affection running deeply in the veins. Living alone since the age of four had only made him create a microcosm , where there were only his perceptions and where he had so unhesitantly declared “Forever! Trust who you are…because nothing else matters”. His basic thoughts were making a similar outburst…
I quote it as exactly I heard it…
“Look I am stagnant. I am not working. I am just rolling on the cushion. I am wasting my time. No I am thinking. But what good is it going to do to me. I am just one of the millions others who love to sit, combine heavy words put in smart phrases: a bit out of the ordinary. But guess what we seldom read what the other person is at.. There are so many theories and some of them are so painstakingly similar that it is very boring to even read at the titles: same diamond viewed a thousand times from the same combination of angles and the new angles are even exhausted. then why do we exist at al with our branch of philosophizing that is promised(I don’t know when) to be different from what was there before. Let me attempt ok? There are people who shall refuse to see sense( if any) in our works. They are always there, the target of out angst…we call them the generation-Ex…their philosophers are the crack force of crack-heads employed at the crack of dawn of our life to crack the phial of zeal that nourishes and replenishes the stock of dreaming{well, everyone dreams…but we (especially I) dream of becoming just different}We are here to make these crack-heads understand that the mantle needs to be passed...for good or for bad.
If we the youngsters are laughing for we find it funny :and if we are smiling because we find the conception of passing the mantle, encourage able for our type of people…then I have a last word for that too…..
We are the future and so we must also be the future representatives of the crack-headed people…etc . etc. I am sure if reality is taken into account our self-proposed laws that govern, our thoughts wont be of any logical avail to even us….”
That was so much like a modern Vesuvius. A boy who only wanted to be perfect, craved to escape his theories of life and those of the previous generation. He spotted hypocrisy in places, that were the abodes of just rationality-and he interpreted, that it was getting too tough. Publishing an idea is like being diplomatic and employing hypocrisy…that was just too much………
He walked into the balcony…looked at the still evening sky..the prickle of lights, like flashbulbs that failed to highlight the tornado ravaging his innards. Choking him in the full realization of the enormous complicacy of the mesh that wound itself around each life, in the name of society and world. He felt that the web was only too gratefully ignored by the ones who lacked the stamina to enquire.
Then in a gesture unprecedented he shouted aloud in the night life….
“Are you satisfied? …………is that what it required me to know…..have I got anything more to offer to you?? I have shredded each ounce of my sanity to interpret….I have found my point of existence….then ..then.. Its time in the end….I am the only person who wilfully decided when to cast away my life in contempt …”
And he fell………………..
The wind soared up to him…the heart-beat increased manifold…and he encountered blackness….
I was there to write it down.
Who am I? I am , rather was, his destiny, that he wished to control…his final words certify that.
I wrote it all down, the true feelings of a boy who died self-willed, for he had nothing more to discover out of the stagnant, smelly magician called life, that pulled out the same ruffled rabbit from the hat…and mesmerized the audience with a dazzling smile….
I am destiny…about to write a new story…
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