Voyage: An Introduction

He had made a small hut beside the sea. On days of the tide, the sea would stretch to the place his home was. He had made two doors on the opposite sides of the wall – one from which the sea came in; the other, it went out. On these days he had plenty of sea creatures passing through his home. Some of these he really loved to watch whilst he sat on his bed – like the gray crabs, jellyfishes, fishermen and a few ships from the distant land. He had learnt quite a few languages from the foreigners on the different ships; found a few friends in the sailors who would pass in through his hut every now and then with their ships.

One day it started to rain and it didn’t stop. After a few days or perhaps, months, he found a huge ship coming in through his door.

“Which land are you coming from?” he asked them in different languages.

“Land?” they replied, surprised,  “There’s no land. The rain’s taken it all. We live in different ships. Each a country.”

So, the world started coming in through one of his door and going out of the other.

After he died, people claimed he was the greatest voyager of all times.

Love: An Introduction

Her skin was aglow when she was excited. One evening, in her excitement she slit her skin somehow. Light particles poured all over the street. They gushed towards a direction the slope went.

People who slept in their bedrooms became conscious of this light. It was as if a million light bulbs rolled through the streets. They stepped out of their houses and danced in that light. Bathed in it. And they all gushed along with the light.

There was a blind man in the town, however, who unperturbed by the light went in the opposite direction, against the slope. He discovered the girl.

And as he waltzed with her in silence, he exclaimed – “I’ve seen many darknesses, none as colorful as yours.”

The Week Spent Inside A Palm

“I’m back”, he said. And yet, none answered.

The darkness knocked on her cheekbones. But the door was locked. She slept stagnant on her mute heart. She recognized none anymore.

He pressed his ears on her heart for the last time and whispered, “I’m back”.

Peace

Slowly, his life became denser than the graveyards. Not ’til the recent times did the townsfolk notice that the gravestones growing out of the grasses were more in number than the flowers in the grave. They had went to the mayor asking for a brand new grave, but he declined saying – “few people die in the town, nowadays. The young people, who are most frequently dead, are buried in the largest grave of them all: Agony.”

People stopped complaining after that. Not because of what the mayor had told but because they found one fine day, that the lovely undertaker whom all of them admired was living a life much, much denser than the death of their children.

The Balloon that Rose up from Sleep

One morning, as I woke up, I found my palms were empty. The lines had detached themselves from my palms. They were floating around in the different corners of the mid-air in my bedroom. Like strings lighter than the air. Like destiny trapped in a hydrogen filled balloon, covering the distance between the heaven and the hand.

That evening I told my father –

“Dad, you know what happened when I woke up this morning?”

My father smiled.

“Son, you’re insomniac. You haven’t woken up for centuries.”

A Short Essay on Perception

All his echoes were endless and moist. The morning dew accumulated on his echoes. And when the lights filled up the dew, his voice would shine throughout the realm. Bright. Much too bright. The Ultra-Violet rays of repetetive sounds.

People wore sunglasses to save their ears.

Reverse

She always reminded him of dust. Her memories left drying in the sunrays. Like a host of butterfly wings. A reverse metamorphosis. The second cocoon. Caterpillars crawling on the edge of his dreams. Roaches in the corners. Accumulating dust. The leaves springing back to the tree. The ghosts retaining form. She lingering in her life.

It didn’t matter. Whichever way the time flowed, in the end she’d disappear from his life.

The Business Man

Lately, the sea in my head had become noisy. The waves broke breaking a few of my nerves. Anaesthesia flowed all through my body. Yet the doctors said that the sound was sound. It was a natural sound, they said. Meanwhile, the sea seeped into my blood. And a few fishes too, broke in. On silent nights I’d be woken up by the sound of their lovemaking.

I donated my blood a few days back and a fisherman’s life was saved.

Lately, he’s making lots of money.

Alter

Right from his early childhood, he has been appreciated for his capabalities to lie. All his lies were so intense that even when you’d know he’s lying, you’d persuade yourself that the entire world has been a lie. Nobody really cared for the truth anymore. “Truth is relative,” they’d say “but the liar is universal.”

He became a professional liar when he grew up. He lied with such mastery of the art that all his lies seemed interconnected. Juxtaposed. Existing as a parallel realm with the reality. Elusive than the real. The liberation.

The heavens found real competition in him: ‘The Great Lie’ wasn’t meant to have an alternative.

The Accordion People

When he played the accordion, people could fly. Everyone loved him and the women cooked for him. After he’d fininshed his food, he would start tapping his left foot and picking his accordion would start rolling his fingers. The women would fly back to their home.

When he died, everyone in the town was infuriated. How could he do this to them? Just because he had special powers didn’t mean that he had the liberty to succumb the pleasures and pressures of dying whenever he felt like doing so.

So, they hired a man to play the accordian. But they couldn’t fly. So, they hired wings for themselves. And they hired everything else. They worked hard and made all the arrangements. At last when they could fly they were too tired to do so.

That night, they set the accordion on fire and each jumped into it. The accordian played by itself. Never was a better composition heard by the fellow passangers of the plane I was flying on

Animals – 2: Rat

I was disturbed, yesterday, by a swarm of rats. They kept eating off my fingers. I didn’t like it because I had cut my nails a few days back. And she said she fell in love with my fingers whenever I’d cut my nails. In fact, those were the only days she would talk to me. She wouldn’t recognize me without those hands.

I didn’t like it when I found the rats eating my fingers. But they ate it off, anyways.

When I went to her home this morning, frightened of what I thought her reaction would be, I found her sitting on her bed – playing with a swarm of rats.

Push

She was stuck inside her fall. So, I decided to give her a push. But the constituents that made up her body had changed. She belonged to the anti-gravity now. When I pushed her she fell back higher and higher. And the top has no bottom.

I brought down a dictionary from my book-shelves and started browsing through it. S, t, u, v. Ve. Vel, ven, ver. Vertigo.

Mass

I wrote my screams on a piece of paper. Distributed evenly on either sides. One of the sides would weigh more than the other.

Animals – 1: Rabbit

Evenings have turned to their strands. Leaving my hands wet of the manifold orgasms. I kept kicking the pebble and went where it went. Inside you. The clumsy face of our dead children. Careless kids. They’d always keep coming to us. Breaking into sobs as they spoke –

“Dad, Alice just killed me.”

“Johnny, you should be more careful. It’s a tough time we’re living through and we don’t have enough money for a brand new coffin.”

“But she told nothing’d happen. In the end you never fall.”

“What fall are you talking about?”, we would ask, concerned that he might have hurt himself. “Where have you been?”

“I jumped with her into the rabbit hole.”

Meta-

I’ve been singing into the depths of the night. Seeing them banging their heads into the blue. Until drops of blood would splash onto the bluish blue – making it turn purple. Purple. Perplexing. Unsimilar selves walking in and out of themselves. Trying to catch hold of the tears flowing from their bosoms. An investigation called past clinging onto the back of their tongue. Resisting their flow into the lungs and kidneys of being. The eternal darkness of metabolisms and metamorphosis.

I’ve been singing the songs of light into the depths of the knight.

The Intermittent Life of Pratti

The growing up years of Pratti was different from rest of the girls. She had developed a hobby of collecting the corpses of her earlier lives. She even made a transparent glass cupboard to keep them in. She had thrown away her dolls and spent the entire day tending the corpses. She would give them meals, brush their teeth, comb their hair and dress them up. Gradually her corpses grew up with her to become just a beautiful as her.

Pratti lost many of her friends in these growing up years. They abandoned her because they were jealous of the attention she paid to her corpses. So, her corpses were the only friend that Pratti was left with. In the evenings, she would run out of her house with her corpses following her through. They would arrive to a field nearby beside the brook where they would play different games. At the end of the evening, they would go for a swim in the brook. Pratti did it for fun, but her corpses needed the swim to get rid of the stench that the day had left back with them.

Pratti found her love in one of these dusks. The man was a metallic luster of the sun that had surely shone on him all day long. His feet were weary and he walked slowly as if dragging his body above the earth. Fighting against gravity. “He is the martyr of slowness”, Pratti thought “and he belongs to a world of a single pace. Of monotony. A world devoid of accidents and anomalies. And yet with an absolute absence of boredom: because boredom belongs to the world of speed. Boredom is the fastest spreading infection in the minds of serenity.”

“Take me to your kingdom of slowness”, Pratti wanted to say to the man but was too shy for the words. After all, she was only an adolescent girl who hadn’t encountered too many lovers in her life. Also, she felt she was not enough matured, beautiful and slow for the man.

For your sake, readers, let me assure you that Pratti was as beautiful as any of the heroines of a fairy tale are. When she walked down the road with her colorful corpses following her through, she seemed like a princess passing with her playmates. As for her maturity, she had the integration of all her earlier lives. She hadn’t got much experience of slowness as yet in this life of hers but was renowned for her slowness in her earlier lives. She could breathe in the rhythms of slowness, dance to it, make love in it.

The man looked at Pratti eagerly, hoping, perhaps, that Pratti would say something. When she didn’t he came towards her slowly, took her hand and walked away. All her corpses kept standing in a daze – they too, had fallen in love with him.

The next few days were even better than Pratti had imagined they could be. She had never known that souls can be exchanged in the union of two bodies. But that’s exactly what she found to be to be the most calming effect. The man had infused his slowness into her. She felt herself transforming into a courtesan of slowness. A world devoid of accidents and anomalies.

Gradually, as days passed she found out that she was not the only one the man made love to. The man slept variously with all her corpses. And even though she loved all her own corpses like her own sisters, this somehow infuriated her. One day she broke into a room smelling of fresh green chilies and found the man making love to one of her corpses, both of them screaming and tumbling on pepper dusts that was spread all over the floor. She went and picked his pepper covered body and slapped him on his face.

“You don’t love me”, she said.

But as she slapped him a few particles of the pepper flew and landed right inside her eyes. She couldn’t open her eyes. And they began to burn. The man picked her in his arms and led her to the fountain. There he washed her eyes with his hands.

“You’re different.” He said.

“From whom? From all my different corpses?” she shouted

“No. There’s something inside you that really interests me.”

“What is it?”

“Your life.”

“Why don’t you accept it, then?”

“Can you give it to me if I ask?”

“It’s all yours.”

And so he picked her up in his arms once again and led her to another room. It was the room of daggers. He pressed her body onto the wall where the daggers were, and made love to her. She groaned in pain and ecstacy as she found herself transforming to a corpse amongst her many orgasms. And slowly, as she found herself dying in his arms she realized that someone must come to claim her corpse as well. Someone from her future lives. Because it was a cycle of unending.

“You cannot keep me and my corpses forever”, she told him “Someone would come to claim us.”

“Someone already has, who is your subsequent life.”

She kept looking at him with an eyeful of unanswered questions. And waited until she died.

He picked her corpse in his arms and walked with all the corpses trailing behind; corpses that had belonged till now to Pratti’s earlier lives but now in the same cycle were his.

He walked towards the kingdom of slowness.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

The World

I realized I was going blind for the first time when I started seeing things in the dark…. Things that couldn’t have existed….. Like a figurine of love, a dead eagle on my window-sill and myself in the mirror. It was a matter of time until I lost my sight.

When light came back on earth I went searching for a blind man. I found a woman, instead.

“Teach me blindness”, I told her. And thus, in a grey, cloudy afternoon our lessons began.

“Blindness is nothing but an alternative to the world you live in”, she told me. “You believe your eyesight is the best gift you have….. But you see, you never know what infinite options you have. Your eyesight is a limitation to your pursuit of these options.”

“What do you mean?”

“Eyes attach properties to objects. Blindness removes them. There are no particularities in blindness. As a blind person, you can see anything in as many ways as you wish. Tell me about your experience when you felt for the first time that you were going blind.”

I told her about the figurine of love, the dead eagle and myself in the mirror.

“Do you remember seeing them before your attacks of blindness? See, that’s what blindness gives you: Freedom of sight.”

When I returned home that night her words kept returning back. I remembered the number of times she used the word “see” in her words. It sounded pretty awkward in the words of a blind woman. But I couldn’t understand her purpose of using the word: Was it a mockery or enlightenment? I couldn’t understand the meanings of the things I saw in the attacks of my blindness….. Or if they had any meaning at all. Only my complete blindness could help me find answers to those questions.

The next few days, I kept waiting eagerly for blindness.

But the woman came back to me before blindness did. I told her that I was confused.

“Well, all of us are, sometimes”, she said taking my hand in hers.

I found she was looking into my eyes, constantly, without her eyes blinking even for a second. It took me some time to realize that she was blind. But aren’t blind people meant to see better than people gifted with eyesight? Wasn’t she seeing into me much more clearly than any normal person would do?

“Are you in love with me?” I decided to ask her.

She left my hand as I asked her the question. And moved a little farther away from me.

“What makes you think so?” she asked, a little concerned.

“You were looking into my eyes in such a strange way.”

Even though she was standing turning her back towards me, I could see her leaving a deep breath.

“Maybe, you should stop imagining things.” She said, as she tried to leave in a hurry.

“Why are you going away?”

“Because….” She shouted; then, fell silent. At last, in a much calmer tone she said, “because it’s fearful how you….” She fell silent, once again.

I waited for her to finish. But she never did.

“….Is it how I see into you? Is that what you were trying to say?” I asked.

“Not me, but everyone….. everything.” She continued, “Let me tell you a secret – We can see ourselves in mirrors. You don’t exactly need to go blind for that. It’s true that blindness assures freedom. It’s true that blindness is much, much more powerful than eyesight. Blindness in never dark, as the popular belief goes, but is capable of colors unimaginable by a common man. Only blindness gives you access to spaces intangible….. But you see it’s very, very difficult to come in terms with the fact that you are blind.”

“But I don’t think it would be difficult for me to come to terms with the fact when I do go blind. You’ve already taught me so much.” I said, hoping that I was able to understand what she tried to say.

“No. It’s you who taught me all these.”

Unable to understand I kept looking into her eyes, vaguely.

“The doctors did indeed, find you blind from the very day that you were born”, she completed.

And she reminded me what the world always would, that I cannot go blind ever again.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

Snow

One evening when we sat by the distances, she told me of her wish to burn her body to see her souls catch fire, too. She said she loved the perfume of burnt-out souls. I realized that it was going to be difficult but decided to give her this gift on her nearest birthday, anyways. I asked her which of her souls she would like to burn.

“The wet one”, she replied.

It had snowed last night. It had started when we were playing with each other’s bodies. Fondling. Jostling. Mingling. In our silent apartment. I was drenched in her presence. I always was. Despite her perfumed hair, her ethereal nudity, the sentiments of her fragrant touch; her body was only an effigy. A mirage. Because she were innumerable women at the same time. In our silent apartment, her converging souls passed in and out of her body all the time. And in every parting moment, she fragmented herself more into the nooks and corners of my room. With every passing instance, my partner in the bed would change. I made love to all of them. It felt like a game of betrayal in which you’d stopped counting. And you had no idea any longer who it was that you were betraying. You betrayed each for all. And none for the other. Living inside a deadly turn-on.

I didn’t notice the beginning of the snow until she pushed my body aside and ran outside. Into the snow. Trailing one of her souls with her. I put on some clothes and followed her outside. Snowflakes landed on her naked skin. I found slowly, that her color was changing. She was becoming a deep, deep blue. I asked her to come inside but she refused. I was worried both for her and the soul that she had brought for herself. Gradually, I found that her body had begun to glow so that the space around her seemed to be lighted up in a divine light. The light kept spreading until it went in through the windows of the people who slept. All of them woke up to find their eyes being washed in a light so deeply blue as can only be found in dreams. Thinking of the light as a divine purgation all of them started to pray.

She stood unmoving, in the snow until she fell senseless on the accumulated snow. I went near her and asked if she would like to come inside. But she wouldn’t answer. So, I carried her in my arms and took her inside. I put a blanket around her. But before that, I took off her wet soul and put it next to the fire to dry.

It remained wet.

As days passed, we made plans for the burning. Even when we made love we spoke about her burning body and soul. It would turn us on. We started collecting matchsticks of different sizes and shapes. Ignite each of them to examine its flame. Our days passed like dreams.

At last her birthday came. She was apprehensive from the morning about the evening ’cause that’s when, we had decided, we would set her on fire. She seemed excited from the morning. I had never seen her so exuberated ever before. By the time evening came, she had tired herself out of excitation. She quickly put on her wet soul. I, on the other hand, lighted a matchstick and set her on fire.

As flames started playing all over her body she started dancing in jubilation. First she set a few of my important papers on fire, then my beautiful Arabian carpet and slowly, my entire apartment was on fire. But we little cared for any of it because nothing was important beyond this moment.

“Come take me in your arms”, she said at last, stopping “and see if I’ve started exuding the fragrance of burnt-out souls.”

I went and took her in my arms, but couldn’t find the fragrance of her burnt-out souls. I told her this. She seemed surprised. It was not some thing that we had planned for. I looked more closely at her. The flames coming out of her body seemed calm and composed. They were blue….. exactly the color of her snow drenched self.

Snows were nothing but frozen blocks of fires.

I realized that the fragrance that she was looking for would only be possible if she would burn in the snow, like the last time round. I realized, also, that I was on fire. Perhaps, I had caught it when I went and took her in my arms. When we stared outside, we found that the snowfall had started.

I took her hand and ran outside.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical