It Must Have Been Thus

She rinsed her mouth with his blood. The salty taste made up for all the bitterness she had kept hidden beneath her tongue all these years. She described his blood as the slumber in a cloudy afternoon. The siesta of a pavement dweller unknown to the conspiring rain.

One day, he had disappeared inside his own body. And blood had replaced his skin. She was the search squad. She walked into his blood. Searching him. She followed a corpuscle with a torchlight. Swam deeper into the red. And still, he was nowhere to be found.

After she had lived those three months thrice, he sprung out of her.

Distance: An Introduction

He found her in one of his own dreams, dreaming about him finding her, in that solitary, circular dream of hers.

Bias: An Introduction

A repetition of dreams. Uncircled thoughts. Unselected. Roamed about on her stage. The drama followed her instincts. A bunch of drowsy audiences. Invited by their fears of unrestrained light. An infection to their eye. Their only eye. Left. The other been washed away in their points of view. Bias.

The play continued, long after their only eye went to rest. The part they didn’t see was compensated for, in their dreams. Dreams that were repetition of each other. And therefore, alike.

Her acting was instincts. Missing. Next morning, from their interpretations. And interpretations said her play had a plot and a logical conclusion.

They never knew that the play went on forever. An infection that spread over to their lives.

Instinct had become their only eye.

The Implausible Stones

Each of his stones was impossibility. None of them had the property of visibility. They reflected no colors. Absorbing all. But you always knew that they were there. Some, because you could touch them. Some exuded the strange fragrance of a stone. While others created the dense, infinite silence that stones have always created – to make you listen.

She brought him a stone, one day, from the land of the free. It was sculptured on nothingness. Had various interpretations. Its only property was mood.

And then, she was gone.

After he had been sitting beside the pebble of moods for a long while, a realization slowly dawned upon him. The pebble of moods is the synthesis of every other stone in his room. A space where other stones are recreated. Because we cannot feel without our minds. Because sensations are also a form of interpretation.

Because impossibility is just another mood.

I Am

The eye is an abyss. Many who fell in it drowned forever. Many times when the eye blinked the world was drenched in darkness for a few fragments of a second. A black earth. It was an eye that held the world in it. Bees, people and civilizations all resided in it.

One day, tears interfered in the life of the eye. And the world residing inside started turning hazy. The people started fading. Civilizations disappeared. The world, like gypsies, moved elsewhere. Void took over. And like we all know now, in every void resides a flock of memories and a legend. And the legend told – the eye is an abyss. Many who fell in it drowned forever.

When the eye went to sleep that night, the mind awakened.

Writer’s Block: An Introduction

“A wonderful way to start would be a dream”

“How ’bout the feeling of being trapped?”

“In a dream?”

“Maybe”

“Sounds more like a writer’s block”

“That’s it, then. We’ll start with a dream in which the protagonist is trapped in a block meant for writers”

“And then, what happens?”

“The tale ends.”

A Clown’s Introduction to Alchemy

The dream stretched out of his forehead and wandered through the labyrinthine corridors of a day in his life. He became a reverie in there.

When he woke up, the next day, he was no more.

The Plague

She had purple eyes. There were certain colors that she couldn’t see and the world was a less congested place for her. She also had the powers of turning an object invisible for her eyes and thereby, eliminating the object. She had eliminated, for instance, pumpkins, crows, three whole men and a caterpillar.

One day, she met a sage who told her – “Growing up is adapting to the things we’d like to eliminate.”

She felt bad and decided she wouldn’t be eliminating things from then on. But suppressing your greatest powers is equivalent to holding within yourself a darkly cursed premonition. Soon she was on the verge of insanity.

At last, one day she murmured – “My powers don’t suit me. I could neither use them nor put them to rest. I’ll never be a simple girl. This world doesn’t suit me.”

After the world was eliminated, she started adjusting to the ensuing grey darkness.

My Experimental Novel

Well, I had been posting this thing in blogsource. My attempts at writing a novel. I really don’t know if it works. Maybe some of you can check it out and let me know.

I’ve just transferred it over here. And yes, I had to create another new blog. I’ve named it after the novel – The Becoming of Dubleu

I might create a separate post page for my other blogs later on and add a short description. Yeah, that’d be fun, but late too.

Listen – 2

Dear girl,

Sounds still creep on the grass where we used to sit. The analogy of dawn seems just as unmindful. I’ve lost a few eyes in these years. The dewdrops seem hazy. But I do listen to the tinkling sound they create as they fall on the grass blades.

You’d be glad to know I’ve found an abode amidst the grass, in an abandoned ant-hill that the ants had evacuated sensing the rains. And guess what, I’ve found all my eyes in there.

Kisses.
Him

Animals – 3: Protozoan

He had learnt it from the spiders. A web drawn out of feathers. There’s no windows in the feather apartments. A dream trapped on its edge. Melting. Falling on some rainbow feather. Accumulating. A heavy heart.

Her steps were measured on the feather-web. Each one a thousand escapes. Escapades. From all edges of her body she walked inside herself. Concentrated into a point. In the end, she found holes large enough to be called doors on the moist walls of the feathers.

She would have been miles away from him had it not been for his pet Protozoan who gobbled her.

Unforgetting

Animals – 1: Rabbit
Animals – 2: Rat

The House of Many Doors

There was a house of many doors, in which each of the doors led to some other rooms.

He lived in that house. He was born there and had been there ever since. Alone.

There was no door to outside. There were no windows.

After 25 years of his life inside the house, he met her.

“How did you come inside?” he asked.

“I live here”, she answered.

“I live here too, but I don’t remember seeing you here before.”

“That’s because we have never been in the same room at the same time.”

“Is that possible?”

“Yes. In my childhood I remember meeting another man who claimed he was my father.”

“You mean to say there is another man in this house.”

“There are innumerable people in this house.”

“Then, how come we never meet each other?”

“Because the number of rooms is also innumerable and their combination is infinite.”

“Does that mean we’d never meet again?” he asked.

He felt he had fallen in love.

He felt she was the most beautiful woman in this world, even though she was the only one he had met.

“There’s very little chance of that to occur.” She answered

“But couldn’t we do something about it?”

“Let me think.”

She thought.

“There’s one thing we can do”, she said at last.

“We can number each of the rooms in ascending order as we go, so that we might trace our way back in descending order.”

So they went by, numbering each of the rooms in which they went.

When they felt like meeting they traced their way back.

One day, he realized that other people in the house were also using the same ploy.

When he was walking ahead in new rooms, that day, he reached a room in which he found the number1261 written. His number for the room was 2116.

First, he thought of writing his own number on another wall.

Then, he realized the confusion that it might create.

Then, he thought what his options were.

Then, he wondered if he should consider not writing his own number.

Because a single room should have only one number.

Then, he realized it would mean sacrificing his love forever.

Then, he questioned himself if it was worth sacrificing his own love for a person he had never met.

Lastly, he decided to erase the already present number and write his own in its place.

That’s what he did.

She never came back to meet him ever again.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

The Prism: Final

Massacre

On the day that the soldiers were to leave the carnival town, a few gunshots made its way through the parting air and made a home exactly where their love resided – in their hearts. And thus, the solemn silence of a few love struck, warrior hearts that stopped beating proclaimed the beginnings of a war.

A few numb eyes of girls who had been crying nightlong after their final lovemaking last night, watched their lovers’ bodies being carried away and left to the rivers. They had came following the river and let them pass away so. The news of the soldiers’ passing away didn’t wound their beloveds’ heart any more than did the news of their going away. A soldier’s leave-taking, after all, was synonymous to his death. There never is a promise of return.

The soldiers, who survived, however, went away with an added hope – They might get to use their guns after all. The soldier, who was our hero, was among this group. He took his farewell roses from the girl and left.

On the very next day that the soldiers left camouflaging themselves with the river, a bunch of well-prepared bombs, verified by the authorities, were dropped into the town busy in cleaning the leftovers of ‘The Carnival of Fading Lights’. Houses came tumbling down like the tea cup on the table. And there originated from the center of the town a stale air of mutilating flesh. It became a breeze and passed onto other towns. People who had to breathe in that air cried out –

“It’s the stench of the massacre. Doom’s day has begun.”

The carnival town became the dwelling of spirits and new-born orphans.

The troop of soldier fought with a newfound vigor. They used their guns. And contested with each other on the number of targets each of them had hit. But that phase passed away as fast as it had began. Then, came a disillusionment of war. And they found themselves being the target of a new vigorous enemy troop. They started dying and laughing at the foolishness of the new enemy troop. War, after all, was meant to be carried through and not to be lived. “They’ll realize this in time”, they thought.

Our hero, the soldier saw his comrades dying one by one. He gave to each of them one rose from the bunch that the girl had gifted him on his leave-taking day. Then, slowly his bunch of roses started getting thinner. And one day, he realized that he had no more roses left with him. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him – what flowers would he have after he dies? It suddenly occurred to him that there was exactly the number of roses as were the days he had spent in the carnival town with the girl. And one by one he had given it all away. He had given the girl away to the dead.

That’s when he decided to surrender.

The enemies found him much too dead to have been killed. So, they decided to punish him by letting him live. They had found a weapon much severe than the gun: Life.

Our hero, the soldier, wandered through many lands and then arrived to a town that recalled no visitors. There he built a house for himself. Strangely, it became the house of three corners. It took the shape of the prism.

Then, as years passed and he became madder, he wondered why in all these years he hadn’t heard the voice of the girl in her head, as was promised by the game of the prism.

One day, when he could no longer take the void that had been created above his head; he went out searching for a mirror. That day, a breeze named agony, took him in and landed him on one side of a table on the other side of which he found the girl and on the center of which a tea cup had tumbled down.

He didn’t realize that the desert was the exact place where the carnival town had been once….. that time had taken away its belongings…… that time would once again, recreate itself. He didn’t realize that time had returned. The process had began. That time itself had become a maddened soul searching for answers.

He didn’t recognize the table in which he had poisoned the man who had initiated the magic that was lost forever.

But he recognized the girl. He did.

She didn’t.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

The Prism: Third

A Loner’s Tale

My death had come like slumber – vanquishing between imagination and reality until none of it was left, anymore. I slipped into the realm of a mindful of voices…. Trying to adjust their tones. And their hearts.

They would make excellent characters for my story. Unlike all my other stories, this one shall have no ending. With quite a few beginnings. Like my vagabond life.

Life. Perhaps, lives. I had left behind in places I didn’t know.

I had started my journey on a day when I had realized that I’ve quite a few words but not a carnival of faces to assign them to. So, I traveled into unregistered towns. And found a herd of people, everywhere, clinging to each other, frightened of their impending doom. Living their lives into a prophecy of massacre. I lived with them. Taught them dancing steps in which you could raise yourself above the ground and dance into the floating air …. Thinking that they might discover a relief in their new-found lightness….. Thinking that I might be able to reconstruct a civilization – abandoning itself. But I was too small a unit for this. There were no societies anymore. The heart had been abandoned. When I had turned back for the last time, before living a town, trying to wave a goodbye to them, found them staring at me like awestruck children who could understand nothing no more. They had forgotten to greet visitors or wish them luck for their journeys. They believed they had none left with themselves. Even after I left, I felt I could see them dancing their lives into a sundry prophecy of massacre.

Even then, there were places where the disillusionment couldn’t spread their blinding white sheet. Like in the land of the prostitutes. Yes, it was a dark valley. And most of the times it rained all over again on the drying streets, drying leave, drying apartments. And whenever I would pass a somber woman, she would spread out her hand towards me and cry out –

“Look, I’m drowning. Won’t you save me?”

“I think I’ve lost that power in all these years.”

“Then come, drown with me”, she would say laughing out at me.

I would go and hit her on the face, again and again. And again.

“Do not laugh, ever again. It doesn’t look natural on your face.”

“Face? What face are you talking about, monsieur? We don’t wear a same face twice.”

“You have a way with your words, you little thing.”

“What else do you think we sell? Do you think people need to come to a whore for a body? They could find it anywhere and they won’t have to pay for it.”

“But aren’t people too afraid these days to be visiting these streets?”

“Oh! Those poor trembling souls. I can’t help feeling pity for them. If only my words would have caused not a single stir in their heart, they wouldn’t have returned to these dark, dark alleys.”

“Ain’t you afraid yourself?”

“I’m immortal. I’ve already drowned so many times in these rains…… Look, I’m drowning. Won’t you save me?”

In the land of the prostitutes, I learnt to make love to life. And write stories.

I fell in love for the first time in the last town I had visited while I was alive. It was the only place where I found people celebrating. It was ‘The Carnival of Fading Lights’. A carnival in tribute to the passing soldiers. Love was sprinkled all ’round. In the mornings, a beautiful girl passing by the streets would turn to look at me. And there was something written all over her face, that I couldn’t forget.

But then, gradually, I came to realize that she forgot my face everyday. And took my face for someone else’s that she was in love with. Naturally, due to her amnesia she couldn’t remember his face as well. He was a soldier and every morning I became the same.

For her it was an illusion. For me, a chance I couldn’t let go. I posed for her beloved every morning and tried to live in her lovely eyes.

Then, came the night to play ‘The Prism of Extinction’. The soldier took her hand and came forward to play the game, looking for a third fellow to complete the magic. That’s when a miracle took me in. She chose me as the unknown man to be taking part in the game. I agreed on a condition that they would give me food and shelter for the night.

After the game was over, I came to the girl’s home along with her and the soldier. I was told to sit by the dining table till they would bring me food. So, they went away in some other room. Then, slowly the magic of the prism began to work. I could hear in my head voices of both the girl and the soldier.

“I have a plan for him”, said the soldier.

“Yes. I know what you have been thinking. But don’t you think it’s a bit harsh on the poor fellow.”

“But it’s our life and it’s our duty to secure it. We can’t let him in all the time.”

“But that is not the way to deal with someone”

“Look, my dear girl, we’re soldiers and that’s how we are told to treat our enemies. It’s our profession. It’s no big deal.”

I wasn’t mentioned for a single time in that conversation and yet, since I could hear all of it, I knew it was me that they were talking about.

And then, they came in with the tea-cup. The storm in a tea-cup. Somehow, the perfume of death seemed to be attracting me. So, knowing all of it I drank the tea.

My death as, I told earlier, came like slumber. And I kept hearing their voices inside my head –

“At last…”

“I hope you’ll forgive me’

“We’ll be free now”

“I didn’t want to do this but…”

“Happy dying, fiend.”

“You see, there was no other way.”

Slowly, it felt as if their words were all jumbling up. And I couldn’t figure out what they were telling. But this lasted only till I died. Then, once again their voices were all clear inside my head. I had decided right then, that I’d write their story.

“The tea cup tumbled on the table for the first time, that night.”

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

The Prism: Second

Carnival

Once again she’d have to spend an eternity in a stranger’s eyes. She’d take a chair and sit in there. Pick up a novel and read it. Waiting but unable to find its end. But she would know that it is a destiny she couldn’t resist.

But before any of these would happen she wondered, as she looked into his eyes, if this was her sacred death.

And even before that, when no one had ever thought about this story and when she had been independent of a writer’s selfish interest; had seldom been someone’s muse – she used to be a child.

When people would ask her name she used to say that she was an orphan and had no particular name. Even though no one had ever told her what an orphan meant, she liked using that word in describing herself. She had seen orphans. They were children who were set free from all boundaries; had to obey no rules. They could do anything. And she had deduced that when orphans grow up they become spirits. In their growing years they develop wings on their shoulders and learn to fly….. becoming invisible as they do so. That’s exactly why there were no grown up orphans.

She had a name, though. And all of those who had ever heard it said that it was the most melodious name they had ever heard. It was like the strange softness of a silent winter night. However, she couldn’t recall her name most of the times. As a matter of fact she always found it quite difficult in remembering names – of others and her own.

“You must always remember your name.” her grandma would tell her “As you grow up that’s all that would be left of you which would differentiate you from anyone else.”

After this she found out that along with names she had also started forgetting faces. That’s exactly when the news came and big, bright posters were put up on bricked walls announcing ‘The Carnival of Fading Lights’ celebrating the arrival of a troop of passing soldiers of a faraway land.

It was told that they were to bring a gift for the townsfolk – a strange game.

He had come there with them following the river. Into ‘The Carnival of Fading Lights’. And found the girl.

The girl was young. Much younger than him. A child.

But ever since he saw her there’s nothing else he wanted to remember. He had seen her passing by the street. Alone. Indifferent to people who existed. He was sure that she was a woman who wore the skin of a child. She was a fallacy of nature. She would die soon, someday. Because nature doesn’t forgive fallacies.

As much as he wished, he knew that a soldier is forbidden to fight against the forces of nature. He had been a soldier for a long time now. He had come to realize in time that there is a soldier, not because there is an enemy, but because there is a gun. A government needs soldiers because it is concerned about the guns that it produces. It needs to make sure that the gun doesn’t land into the lap of a wrong person. Therefore, it needs soldiers to take responsibility of that gun.

A soldier can’t fight against nature because guns can’t wound the forces of nature. And there’s no point in fighting an enemy you can’t hurt. Like shooting a corpse.

For the next few days he watched her secretly as she passed. And followed her sometimes. But she seemed ignorant of his existence ….. even, her own – drenched in her own thoughts. At last when he could take it no longer, he decided to speak to her.

“What’s your name?” he asked

“I’m an orphan; I have no name.” she answered smiling at him. And went away.

He wished he could forget that smile.

She had to come out every morning, because each night she realized that she had forgotten his face. But how would he recognize him in the morning for she didn’t remember him anymore. So, she decided to pass through a common road everyday so that the man could expect her. She walked until she was been followed. Then, slowly while taking a turn she would take a quick look (so as not to be caught) and drink the grace of that reincarnation of a face.

When she recognized him all over again her heart yearned to speak to him. But mostly she was afraid that she would fail to recognize him the next morning. Thinking how embarrassing that situation might be, she decided never to be completely acquainted with the man. She even went away time and again when he approached her. He seemed hurt, but would somehow come out with doubled vigor the next day.

Since the carnival began every dusk when the night would be taking over the day, it was called ‘The Carnival of Fading Lights’. People from different places came to attend the carnival. As the darkness would become dense, the colors of the carnival would become sharper. People would believe, however, that the colors of all things present in the carnival had a strange property: change.

Then, came the night to play the strange game that the soldiers had brought. They brought out from one of their bags a triangular prism. They said it was a gift they had got in the land of the magnolias. It was called ‘The Prism of Extinction’. And none of them had any idea why it was called thus. But they knew that it had strange powers.

“The prism gives you access to your loved one’s heart. You would get to know all that’s going inside your lover’s mind for you, forever ….. As long as you live or that person does. Wherever you live, however far and at whatever time, whenever that person would be thinking about you, you’d know. I’d like to make it clear over here that this prism does not give you access to your lover’s thoughts which are independent of you. Also you could play this game only once in your lifetime. The process is pretty easy though. You and your lover must come in front and put their right hand on two separate faces of the prism. However, since the prism is triangular, in order to initiate the magic there must also be a third hand of another person on the prism. This person could be anyone you wish. Both of you would have access to his thoughts about you and he would have access to your thoughts concerning him, but not to your thought concerning your lover. So, I would say that it is pretty safe. Now, whoever would like to take part in the game is requested to come with his or her partner and a selected person who would complete the magic.”

As happens with any new game, there were many people who were afraid in taking part. They were afraid perhaps, because it was called ‘The Prism of Extinction’.

There were also many who took part. Among them were the girl and the soldier.

They decided to take any unknown man as the third person so that they might not have to think of him ever again. The man they chose seemed disconcerted about taking part in the game with them but agreed on one condition that he be given food and shelter for the night.

The game began. They put their hands on the prism. And suddenly the entire place seemed illumined by a deep, dense orange light. It only lasted for seconds until everything was back to normal. None of them found much difference inside their head. And the more concentration they would like to apply to delve deeper into their thoughts, the more they found nothing.

The unknown man who seemed the least concerned about any of it accompanied them as they walked together, for the first time, into the night. The soldier concerned that he would have to leave the town soon along with his troops; the girl concerned ’bout the same. The silence was becoming unbearable. So, the unknown man decided to break it –

“I hope you’d agree with me that it’s quite cold tonight. I’m really looking forward to finding a nice, cozy sleeping place in your home. And one more thing, before I have my food I’d like to have a cup of tea…..”

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

The Prism: First

Three Corners

The tea cup tumbled on the table. And an emptiness that had filled it up to the brim, spilled over the orange tablecloth. Straining it. Alas! There was no one to praise the beauty of the spreading strain.

* * * * *

She woke up on the wall. Her eyes still unable to recover from her dream of the orange tree. She climbed down onto the right side of the wall. She remembered that on the other day she had been on the left. There were trees on this side; so were there on the other. There were houses on this side; so were there on the other. There were people on this side; so were there on the other. Both sides were essentially the same….. Except that the left became right and the right was left.

She had deduced a few days back that the wall was actually a mirror glass. None of its sides were real. But whether any of them were imaginary, she could not tell. She just had to live in both of them.

* * * * *

In the years of the massacre, there used to be a town that recalled no visitors. And deep inside this town was the house of three corners. No one knew why it had such a strange shape. No one knew, as well, who lived in that house. Some said, though, that they had watched a man standing naked by the window. He had his body painted with a compilation of unknown colors. Indescribable. And that he would look at them as if they were clowns. And laugh.

* * * * *

This morning when the girl started walking, her head was still filled with the words and imagery of the last night’s dream…… the color of the tree was orange. And like all people who couldn’t forget their dreams, she was trying to analyze it ….. trying to decipher its meaning, when she reached the windmill. She found that the wind was blowing from exactly the opposite direction than it had been the other day when she had been on the left side of the wall. And the windmill went exactly the other way round. But then she left a deep breath – A change in direction doesn’t change the world after all.

* * * * *

Sitting in one corner of his three cornered room this morning the man realized that the void that he had been feeling so long is actually just above his head. A region of wordlessness. Yet not silence. A cluster of meaningless noise. A crowd of disturbing formlessness.

He had tried to look up… to the space above his head. But God had created him with a strange form. He cannot look above his head. His head recedes in the same pace in which his glance follows it through.

The solution, however, was simple. A mirror.

The difficult part was – He didn’t have one in his home.

* * * * *

The day was ageing, slowly. The sand in the desert was burning. Alas! There was no one to praise the beauty of the invisible fire. Alone stood a table in the middle of the desert…. For no certain reason. No one knew how it had come to be there. Or who had ever taken tea in the cup that had been left on the table-top. No one knew, as well, why the tea cup tumbled on the table. No one was there to know.

A warm, warm breeze started in the desert. Its name was agony.

* * * * *

For the first time in his life the man decided to come out of his house. For the first time he stepped out on the road. The road was empty. They were the years of the massacre, and this morning there was a premonition of chaos. So the townsfolk decided to stay behind their closed doors. Security was their only aspiration.

The road was empty. But it didn’t matter to him at all. In fact, if there would have been people on the road it would be difficult for him to control his laughter looking at them. For just because there was no mirror in the town none of them knew that they looked exactly like each other. But right now he needed a mirror for himself …. To watch the space just above his head.

“I might have to walk miles for that”, he thought.

That’s exactly when agony arrived. A warm, warm breeze carrying grains of sand bathed him so that when he opened his eyes he remembered not being able to see anything.

But whatever it was that he was trying to see he could not remember.

* * * * *

“What is it that changes our world forever?” she was trying to figure out. At the same time, she was also trying to figure out the cause of her meaningless meanderings upon things so insignificant. Perhaps, this search for a cause too, was a part of her meaningless meanderings. And this almost gave her Goosebumps for it meant that all her thoughts were meaningless.

Then, it suddenly occurred to her that the breeze that was blowing from the opposite direction was a lot warmer than the one that had been blowing the other day when she had been on the left side of the wall. A change in temperature was not a property of the mirror.

“Does that mean” she thought once again, “that a change in direction does change the world after all? Or perhaps, I was wrong from the very beginning. Perhaps, the wall is not a mirror at all.”

That’s exactly when agony arrived. A warm, warm breeze carrying grains of sand took her in so that when she found her senses back she remembered not being able to understand anything.

But whatever it was that she was trying to understand she could not remember ever again.

* * * * *

Both of them found themselves sitting on opposite sides of a table, on the center of which a tea cup had tumbled down.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

The Prism: Prologue

Orange

Orange was the color of the tree. We went and sat underneath.

Her: Can you breathe the color?

Me: Orange.

Her: Yes. But the smell…

Me: Maybe, I have a bad cold.

Her: I know you do. Try smelling it with your eyes.

Me: I find nothing.

Her: You have to. Touch the shadow scattered all over the ground around you.

[I put my palms down onto the grass. My eyes closed upon me.]

Me: Ah! The smell of wet mud.

Her: Exactly! The smell of dusts drenched in rain… the smell of softness… of
beginnings….. and virginity. The original smell of the color orange.

Me: Perhaps, you are correct. It feels like the fragrance of the day we had met in the
grey lanes.

Her: In the land of the Prostitutes.

Me: Yes. But you never told me what you were doing over there.

Her: I was trying to live the life of a whore… To sleep with different men so that I might
not have to remember any of them. Maybe, I was looking for the man whose blood
was pure orange. Rather, I’d been looking for a suicidal man… hoping that he
might permit me to taste his death.

Me: You wanted to die with him?

Her: No. I wanted to live his death. [silence] Did you ever make love to a person who is
dying… Felt yourself touching a departing soul… In a body that’s drowning into
itself? I wanted that. To tempt freedom into the maze of no returns. The labyrinth.

Me: So, you wanted a slave?

Her: I only wanted myself back.

Me: No. You only wished to have a scattered life. To lose meanings. To cherish all
leave-takings. To die after each of your deaths. Didn’t you always wish to be in a
carnival of fading lights?

Her: I always was in the carnival. I only wished to take you there.

[I saw some teardrops roll down her cheek]

Me: Why are you crying? Don’t you know it’s forbidden?

Her: Don’t you?

Me: Why? Am I crying?

Her: Yes, you are.

Me: Are you sure? I never realized I was!

Her: Yes, I can see tears down your cheek. They are orange.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

Glass

In the beginning there was a rain in the valley. A perpetual rain. It didn’t stop for many years. People told that it was one of the driest rains that had ever been. It hadn’t quenched the thirst of a single lonesome leaf. It was the glass-rains. A shower of glass-dusts. Zillions of glass-dust particles had poured over their houses, trees, fields and dreams.

They had a small space in one of the corners of the valley. This they called their sphere of dreams. All of them used to preserve their own dreams in this space. A library of dreams. All people living in the valley had access to these dreams of many people. They had their reveries, their trance and nightmares all heaped up in this space. The glass-rains poured on them. All dreams, henceforth, in the valley were infected with glasses.

I had came into the valley when the glass-rains fell. Thus, I was christened as the glass-boy. I was described variously by different people – the boy with glassy-eyes; a boy whose touch was like the cold glasses; transparent as he is, like the glasses. There was a girl who used to describe me as a boy with a heart of glass – it did not beat and was much too fragile.

It was generally believed that I was the harbinger of the glass-rains. The messenger.

The glass-rains kept perpetuating when all of these names were assigned to me. So that, gradually, living into the glass-rains I started believing that I was the God of glass-rains.

When the families of the valley-dwellers had their dreams infested with glass-rains, they were brought to me and I was able to heal them. In most of the cases I took away their infected dreams and kept them in one dark corner of my room – so that they may not spread ever again.

Most of the afternoons, I lied on my bed beside the window and kept watching the glass-rains. It piled on the roads on which people tried to walk. Their feet bled, but they were used to that after so many days. They toiled about, indifferent to the glass-dusts in which their footprints were imposed for ever. I looked more closely to the blood-soaked glasses.

They had become part of my existence. My children. Often lost in my thoughts I would lose myself to sleep.

One evening, I was woken up by a chaos that seemed to be originating somewhere outside the door of my house. I got up and opened the door. I found a group of people howling, trying to say me something, but since all of them spoke at once, each drenched in their own choice of words; what they tried to say was indecipherable. All of them had forgotten their umbrellas and they were drenched too, in the glass-dusts and their own blood.

Since I’d been healing people for a long time, I knew that when people arrive in front of my doorstep in the glass-rains forgetting their umbrellas, it invariably means some thing serious. That evening I was taken to a dusty, shabby looking house. Inside I found the girl who used to call me the boy with a heart of glass, sleeping peacefully.

Her peaceful sleep was a curse of the glass-rains. She had transmogrified into a dream herself. This was the worst form of the disease, in which the infected person slipped onto a surreal world of her own made up of glass imageries. A sphere of infinite mirrors. The realm of fragility. Of extreme loneliness. And multiplied selves.

Her father was looking at me with much hope. I took my eyes away from his and said –

“I can do nothing for her.”
“Is she….” Her father gasped, unable to complete his sentence.
“No, she isn’t dead. But she has been taken away by the dreams of the glass-rains.”
“What happens after this?”
“Nothing in the reality. Anything in her dreams.”
“But you can do anything. Can’t you bring her back?”
“No. it’s beyond my powers.”
“But you are the emperor of the glass-rains.” Her father was almost shouting right now, “And you don’t know how to bring her back?”
“You can bring her back only if you could visit her dreams and drag her out of it.” I almost screamed back at him, as I stepped out of the door. I heard her father still shouting behind me –
“How cruel can you be? My daughter is dying over here; at least, you could have given us some hope.”
“Well, she is not dying, but I’d rather like it if she would have.” I screamed back.

Walking on the way back to my home, through the glass-rains, with an umbrella over my head, I tried to recall what it was that I was trying to say. Why did I suddenly become so cruel? I had never been thus in the past. I looked up to the glass-rains. Some drops of glass poured in my eyes making them bleed. Suddenly I could see nothing in front of me. I could only hear some distant voices coming from afar.

That’s when I woke up from the dream.

I was woken up by a chaos that seemed to be originating somewhere outside the door of my house. I got up and opened the door. I found a group of people howling, trying to say me something, but since all of them spoke at once, each drenched in their own choice of words; what they tried to say was indecipherable. All of them had forgotten their umbrellas and they were drenched too, in the glass-dusts and their own blood.

This time I knew all of them by their faces. I recognized the father of the girl who used to call me the boy with a heart of glass. But much more importantly I recognized myself. I recognized the dream that I had been. I recognized my voice saying –

“You can bring her back only if you could visit her dreams….”

Isn’t that what I did? Isn’t that what the dreams of the glass-rains had made me do? The infected dreams that I had taken away from people and stored in one dark corner of my room. I heard her father was requesting me to come to their house. I looked at the fountains in the corner of his eyes. Wet. Like the simple rains in the world from where I had came from. Left too far behind. Much too far behind. Here in this valley of glass-rains I had saved the life of a girl who called me the boy with a heart of glass, but could I ever quench her thirst? Could I quench the thirst of any of these people who come to knock my door? How can I ever do so in this valley of glass-rains where there is no concept of water?

But I had brought her back to life. I looked beyond the eyes of his father. And beyond the eyes of all the fathers who surrounded her father….. And I saw that the glass-rain had stopped. A nice, bright sunray came and touched my skin.

I did find the valley of glass-rains, myself. I was its founder after all. I realized this.

Exactly at that moment, I started evaporating.

For the first time I realized that I was made of mirrors. An assemblage of glasses. Fitted to perfection of angles so as to create an illusion of skin, flesh, bone and blood. An entrapment of light in the zillion of glass-dusts. My body. A frame of delicacy. Fragile.

I evaporated and became translucent clouds floating around like glass-slides over the silent valley. At times someone would speak out breaking the silence:

“The glass-rain could come down anytime like the avalanche.”

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

Tale

I had seen the avalanche coming to cover her sacred nudity. Between that potentiality and actualization resided this tale. I had found it over there and tried to save it from being buried forever.

Me and her. We both knew of the tale. We had been told about it….. Had been told that it was too dangerous….. That we should not listen to the tale even if the tale tells us its tale. We knew.

Me and her. We both knew of the avalanche. We had been told about it….. Had been told that it was too fragile….. That it could come down anytime like the glass-rains. We knew.

[I know I never told you of the valley of glass-rains. It’s quite difficult to write of it but I promise to try and capture it in my next piece.]

She loved walking down the way the avalanche would come. She told me that she had had a premonition in which she had found the tale exactly in the center of the potentiality and actualization of the avalanche. She had found the avalanche waiting for a provocation of sounds. And she was voiceless. She told me that she had been a mute child ever since her voice started to disappear.

She was upset when she had discovered this, one fine evening. The winds had been blowing from the north when she found out that everything she had told a few moments earlier could no longer be heard by any of her relatives. Her voice had started to disappear. She had lost her power of speech. Her utterances had ceased being there.

When years passed, she grew. So, did her silence.

Many seasons later, she met me. And I taught her that silence was a form of sound. And just as we have access to different kinds of sound we could find silences unlike each other. It didn’t take me too long to make her realize this. I only took her to the silence of a soldier’s death being mourned and the silence in the shade of an old tree. Then, she learnt the language and spoke to me frequently.

She told me about all her speechless years. And she told me about an evening when her voice started to disappear. The wind was blowing from the north. She had made a tale and was telling it to her relatives. But when her tale ended she found that the words that comprised her tale were not there anymore.

She told me all these tales every evening while we walked down the way the avalanche would come. I had heard them many times, but since she spoke in a language of silence the tales became new every time. They were independent of the limitation of words.

After a few evenings the same independence was infused to her being. She became a libertine; even though, I had very little idea then and even now, about what that word really means. I knew she had become one since she told me so. And then she told me about her tales of love-making to different people in the consecutive nights when she had not returned home. She told me that she had slept, on the way the avalanche would come, in the arms of insignificant men.

I had closed my eyes and in my visions found her trying to cover her skin with her sacred nudity. For reasons unknown to me, that evening, I had started to scream.

My scream. The exact center of the avalanche. Sound. The core of its potentiality and actualization. And in my continuing vision, as was promised by her, I found the tale:

“It was a distant evening. A group of people had found themselves a dark part of the evening in which, as a cluster, they all sat. Everyone in the group was silent… except for a little girl who seemed to be telling them a tale. A wind was blowing from the north and she told them the strangest tale ever been told. A dangerous tale. A tale in which a man and woman keep walking under the promise of an avalanche searching a tale that they are unknown to, even though it belongs to them. A tale that they keep reliving over and over again…”

When I opened my eyes I found the avalanche coming down. And in that glory I evidenced a strange, incomprehensible phenomenon – I found the tale covering the avalanche. And her sacred nudity, too.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

Droplets

Sometimes, in my flashes of forgetting, I couldn’t remember the first time I had slit her skin.

She told me there was no first time. No first of its kind. No beginnings. She introduced me to her realm of deja vu — where all beginnings kept repeating from time immemorial.

Blood was her expression of deja vu. Recurrence.

Her blood was strangely cohesive. They sprang from the association of her being, defied the gravity and froze somewhere in the air. They captured a block of air in my room and made a home. When the sunrays touched them the red droplets kept glowing for a few hours until they turned brown. Drying. The patches kept lingering in intangible spaces of my room. They smelled of the sea.

Her blood was also volatile. I could remove the strains of the brown blood from my undiluted air by simply holding the burning end of my cigarette beneath it. And see them fade like my memories. But I’d never be able to take a puff of those used cigarettes, ever again. Their taste would change. And they smelled of the sea.

She had come out of the sea one moonlit night. Naked and bleeding.

She had slit herself beneath her neck and above her breasts. Droplets of the sea played all over her body. Running down. Crashing. Jostling. Mingling. Magnifying. Making its way through them was a stream of blood.

“Taste it”, she said.

Unable to understand what I should taste, I tasted the seawater and her blood. They tasted the same. The same that it had everytime. Deja vu.

I knew people would call this a game of sadism. Still I would slit different parts of her body many times on her request –

“Clown, you know I can’t cry. Can never let you taste my tears, but I desire tears like any girl does. Help me. Please, let my body weep the blues.”

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical