The story you want to say

is more important

than the thought you have

when you want to say

your story.

On November the 1st

The serious conviction.

Bubble-wrapped discoveries.

Time-warping.

Dilation.

Audience, the dearth of them.

Shared happiness.

Wise-cracks.

Self-indulgence.

The long dark tea time of the ghoul

It has been night for a long time now. I've no idea when tonight started but its not over yet. The fan creaks and eeks, rearranging molecules in space. It is manipulating air, creating a vortex directly beneath it, sucking me upward.

Are we there yet ?

Zombies under the Sun

To You,

These are people stuck at a point, unable to go further. They need to see that; the piercing agony of being reduced to redundant puppets, played by some unimaginable ringmaster far away. But these little playthings are so full of themselves and their aspirations that it is woefully tragic to see them manipulate big chunks of the jigsaw puzzle. 

Zombies under the Sun.

The bug bites everybody. But I want you to come out of it a fitter person and champion this generation of assholes.  

Love,
Me

The Chapel

He doesn't speak to that many people these days. When the presence of stupid scum of planet Earth gets to his nerves, he packs his bag and goes to see the Monk, to seek solace at his abode. He is on his way there now.

The Monk lives in a big city, where dogs sleep atop benches, in the smelting heat of the afternoon, and men lie beneath them, in their shadows. Here, dirt has replaced air as the principal requisite for respiration. Countless flocks of men are herded off to different points in the city by a sluggishly strong metro-train service. He has to traverse through the sweat and phlegm of these co-passengers, who won't smile or acknowledge their discomfort at causing him inconvenience, to get to his destination. 

The journey ends at a small apartment on the second floor of a five-storey building, hidden from the immediate vicinity of a road. But the noise can’t be escaped from, here in this city, no matter where you go.

The Monk reaches home at midnight, after toiling hard at a multinational corporation, earning millions for his employers. In return, he is provided with enough dough to accommodate for his rent, his cable TV subscription fee and his electricity bill, contributed to, largely, by a refrigerator that houses bottles of Bacardi Limon and Beer any given day. He buys more of them tonight since he has a companion. Beer-cans of a bygone era and bottled remains of other sacred liquids lie neatly arranged on the floor of his kitchen.

The Monk calls out to The Organ Donor, which is what he calls the principal character of this work. He will be referred to as TOD henceforth. TOD gets up from his semi-sleep and goes and sits on the Nilkamal chair. Limon oozes out, white drops on a dark night, and flows into glass tumblers. TOD is young and naive, his idea of brashness is to consume alcohol at one go.

The Monk talks about his work and the power at his disposal, one that could wreak havoc on the reputations of big financial institutions, if he decides to break bad. He talks about women, the details of which the writer desists from letting out, out of deference to the great man’s privacy. He talks about the paycheck, three quarters of which he gives away to people he doesn't care for. And finally there is the motorcycle, his beloved companion, older than himself, which serves as the elixir of his everyday life.

At two in the morning, The Monk rolls up a joint and lights it up.

‘This one is from the Dude’s stash’ he says.

‘Hey. The Dooood...'

The Dude was a former resident of the apartment. He was something of a guy’s guy. A greek God in appearance and jovial by nature, this guy was a center of activity. On a previous occasion, arriving at the apartment after a tiresome journey, TOD learnt that the two of them had gone on a cycling expedition to a beach 92 kilometres away, at a time of the year when a drop of Sun’s ray on your head burnt like Hydrogen Sulphate.  

'Where is he now?’ TOD asks him, happily recounting the past.

The herb’s powers are extraordinary and the pace of conversation becomes slower. There is much happiness around. They start singing.

In the morning, TOD wakes up to see an empty apartment. The man has gone to slog it out for another day. He leaves the apartment's key behind. TOD spends the morning wandering through the aisles of the nearest Landmark outlet, picking up books after thoroughly inspecting its contents. He observes the proceedings; customers walking in, inquiring about a book, the disappointment on their faces and their subsequent muted inspection of the shelves. Housewives and college students form the larger group of visitors. A dad walks in, picks up a children’s book, pays off in a hurry and leaves the premises.

After lunch, he returns to the apartment and checks out the mini library there. He adds the book he bought to its inventory and goes to sleep reading a 1980s Reader’s Digest. 

He dreams of the Siberian peninsula and peacocks strutting atop melting ice-glaciers. The white desert has a cricket stadium on it, empty and deserted. As it begins to grow dark outside, he wakes up. The bed is soft and mushy, and the air-conditioner produces a low mechanical hum, insulating him from the harshness of the outside. 

Land of Nod

In the dream-world, I can take the form of anything and anybody; rocket the size of a city, a small boy, jaws agape, in awe of everything he sets his eyes on, a gargoyle, green and short, with a queer sense of humour, a frozen pair of eyes, immobile, carefully observing the passage of time.

But the shambles fall back on as the westward sun climbs over the mountain and peers mercilessly through the open windows.

Our forefathers used to follow a ritual every night, before going to sleep. They would gather the skeletal remains of animals and humans, and lay them out, in concentric circles, with the head of a being at its center. They would then sit around, forming the outermost circle, and sing hymns in praise of the Night-lord, imploring him to delay the Sun God’s rise. We, the Cheshnakis, love to sleep. 

Tread end

I remember seeing her for the first time, a timid expression on her face, hesitant and anxious, entering the class, hands gripping the straps of her school bag. Never did I ever imagine then that she will, one day, become a source of great misery to me. Memories of her, manufactured and real, have become a thorn in the flesh.

The tarmac is a soothing presence, with its long-winding turns and killer dividers. These dwarf dividers are assassins in the middle of the night, in the middle of the road, on a national highway. An indefinite stretch of empty roads lead to the next turnpike and, after that, more turnpikes. 

                                                                    
                                                                     - Hishiko Kohima (Balloon at the end of the tunnel)

Blue-moon kingdom

The lagoon we are on gleams blue at night, even after all the beautiful creatures here go to sleep. The moon is a feminine hue, set against dark forces of space. In the distance, we can hear her waves lash against invisible rocks. 

‘This diminutive dimension is home to sorceries we are yet to understand’, the man tells us, letting out a cloud of smoke from his lungs.

I trace the path his fumes take; journeying up until it becomes one with the starless sky.

‘I’m going to tell you a story you will never forget’

Those of us whose membranes are meandering, ready to shut down for the day, give a last push to stay awake to this man’s narrative.    

‘The story takes place in a land far, far away, interlocked between a mountain and a river. The mornings here were full of sunshine. The vegetation, tropical, was in abundance. Dense forests, thick foliage, bovines grazing lazily in the open grasslands. It had everything’

‘The people inhabiting the land had a fun time, nowhere to go, and nothing to do. They mated amongst themselves like bunnies, days and nights, season after season, year after year. Till the day came’

‘What day?’

‘One day they were all smoking home-grown marijuana, like us, on the banks of their great river Sharu. A giant yellow creature, blisters marring its face, made its appearance in front of them and declared - 

‘This River will become a sea one day, then an ocean. The banks you are sitting on will vanish tomorrow and be replaced by crystal blue waters, a lagoon it shall be made. You are to be stripped of all your memories. When you wake up, you will all be newborns again. You will be separated from each other, you will wander across remote stretches of the world, lay your seeds and see them grow into big civilisations and then, back unto dust again. But a time will come when all of you will return to this very same place with this exotic herb of yours, and inhale its juices. Then, I shall set you free again’

I look around our lot and see a racially vibrant group of people. We are embracing sleep, hands on sand and across shoulders. The man smiles at me. I nod my head and we, too, go back to sleep. 

Powers of deduction.

I could think of two people who were fit for the job. Neither of them were around. So I slipped my hand under her skirt, made sure no one was looking, and rested my fingers on her panties. I looked her in the eyes which showed no discernible deviation in emotion. I imagined them (panties) to be white but I had no way to validate the deduction. Three of my fingers started to rub them, the way you would rub a cute little squirrel. She went on talking to me about her daily chores, as if nothing was happening beneath. She knew I wanted her to. Greed overtook me then, I simply had to know the colour of her undergarment, and I kept pulling it down. She paused midway her hyperbole and stood up to facilitate the mischief. Voila! Black it was. 

The childish euphoria he felt on seeing a woman, older than him, standing in front of him, with her panties rolled and crumpled down to her knees, gave way to a sadistic desire in torturing her, giving her enough pleasure so as to render her incapable of resisting his grade-A assholishness. 

Pelvic musing

Dick. A very important name in the day to day existence of humankind. If you are christened with this name, you are forgiven. Otherwise, you should try to not be a Dick. It’s a hard task because take any random person from a crowd and there is .93 possibility that he is, in fact, a Dick. 

Advise: Do not get your dick intertwined with the reasoning in your head. This is the most important bit. Do not, I repeat, make decisions with your dick. If you do, you certainly become a Dick and you can live the rest of your life happily married to your right hand.  

Pussy. Another important name in the day to day existence of our folk. Nobody gets christened with this name unless you are a cat. If you are one, this conversation doesn’t apply to you.

Funny how the colloquial lingoes for both male and female genital organs have connotations that portray attributes that aren't exactly desirable in a person. I know people who are both a dick and a pussy at the same time. But none who have a dick and a pussy on them at the same time. Or at a different time.