God's Greatest Deed or: What the Owl told the Rabbit

A long, long time ago, God created our world. He then filled it with a multitude of wonderful creatures – on land, in the air and under the seas. He also created all manners of flowers, fruits and trees so that they may thrive and multiply. And his heart was gladdened when he saw all that he had accomplished.

But no deed, however great, is reward unto itself – even God needs recognition and praise.

So it came to pass, that He called all the creatures of heaven to look at his work and witness all that he had created.

And as He wished, so was it done. The Sun and the moon, and all the stars, along with all the angels from heaven came to look at the world, and all were awed by its many wonders.

But there was one amongst them who was envious. He could not abide the adulation the others lavished on Him. And so he spoke out:

“Your creatures are many, but they are not varied. All are meek and resemble one another. They will eventually run out of grass and fruits to eat, multiplying unheeded.”

But God, in all his glory, was not put out. He merely smiled, and then created all manners of predators. Surely the Cheetah’s speed, the Eagle’s skill and the Lion’s majesty would be enough to silence anyone.

But the one was not quelled. He again spoke:

“These are just dumb killing machines – they have no cunning, no artifice. Perhaps you can only create what you know, reproducing parts of your own qualities in these inferior copies.”

God created the Snake.

“Clever, but still a mere copy – this time of me. Let’s see you make a creature that surpasses them all in cunning and depravity of purpose. The greatest killing machine invested with the choicest of unholy qualities, so that it may bring all of nature itself to her knees. Then, and only then, will you be the true Creator.”

God created Man.

And that’s how the devil ensured the destruction of God’s greatest deed.

One for the road

I saw the reflection and almost panicked. But she didn’t notice anything, moving away from the mirror and turning toward me.
“How about dinner” she asked. “Sure” I said and sunk my teeth into her neck.

The Forest

She stumbles and falls. Once more, she hears the cry of the wolf. Oh, how she hated that nocturnal keeper of sorrows. How she hated his melancholy howl. And yet, here, where night is all anyone can know and daylight has no friend, he is the master and she his powerless slave.

Picking herself up, she moves on. Somewhere, in the distance, a tree is growing. She doesn't check to see the extent of her injuries. Human nature can get used to anything. Given enough time.

The night surrounds you here. It climbs up from the roots to the trees, through your legs, and takes your breath away, to replace it with something dark that clutches at your heart.

She sees a silver shadow in the distance. Ever promising a moment of light and joy glimpsed in a flash that lasts a lifetime. If only the unicorn would stay.

She wonders how she got here. She has no memory of life before this stop halfway to hell. And yet she knows there must have been more. Did reluctant hands and a helpless heart leave her here? Or was her loneliness the work of errant friends? Friends who moved on and left her here in the abode of night?

Vague shapes in her mind are all she has left of her friends. Mirages in her memory. The vain parrot-keeper of all secrets. The rabbit that was too scared to venture into the forest with her. And there was the eagle-her best friend perhaps. The eagle that grew wings and flew away one night. One night that has lasted till now.

But other friends are still around. She remembers with fondness the owl-her mirror in the night. But he's as lost as she is. Then there's the bear. But each time she runs into them , and others like them, she hears the wolf cry from the depths of the forest and she feels the darkness clutch at her heart once again.

On particularly lonely nights, when she can hear the winds of painful memories howling through the trees, and the rustle of the leaves blends into the cries of her lonely wolf, she wonders if perhaps the reason she is in the forest is herself. Maybe she walked into the forest driven by some inborn demons that spared lesser creatures.

Then one night she came upon the clearing. Lit up by some quality beyond mere light, she knew instinctively that this is where the silver unicorn resides. This is where she would find her salvation.

Many nights have passed since that fateful night. Some have been peaceful, others have been overrun by demons. Always, the cry of the wolf has haunted her. But the Unicorn has kept her company…rarely seen but always at the periphery of the clearing. Her ticket to the future. When the wolf inside her will be at peace and the trees will stop growing. A future where daylight won't just be a fading memory.

Redemption

The stinging smell of cordite woke him from his coma, or so the doctors would say, when they found his empty bed. The fire alarms, his clarion call, had woken him from what seemed to him a short nap, but what had, in reality been a decade's slumber. Rumpelstiltskin, he thought, only, he had awakened to a dsytopian world where things seemed to be perpetually falling apart. But what sort of world had he fallen asleep in? For a decade, his wife had waited for him, showing up everyday at the allowed visiting time, and praying by his side, with an infinite patience, which was even now reflected on her peaceful countenance as she lay blown ten feet away by the full force of the explosion. This must be Hell, he thought. It would hurt a lot more if I remembered any of this. Thank God for small mercies, he mused grimly. He looked at her with dumb incomprehension, trying to remember who she was and what she meant to him. His brain was working overtime to protect him from regaining his memory. All he remembered was heavily censored and practically useless bits and pieces of information.
He tried to get out of bed, but slumped back, too weak to move, his muscles wasted by the immobility. He could discern hooded figures moving towards him a few feet away. They proceeded to yell at him. Who were these idiots? What were they doing here? Had they killed this woman? He found himself criticizing the choice of cordite as an explosive material. The fools, too much sound and fury signifying nothing. A strip of Semtex would have been more than sufficient.
Breathing was suddenly made exhausting by this attempt at movement, and he tried to fight off the mists of sleep that were descending upon his shrinking sight. He inhaled deeply, as the tunnel vision erupted into a white fireball of light, and the cacophony of yells and screams in a strangely familiar tongue gave way to the piercing silence of unconsciousness.

A twig snapped under his feet, as he found himself upright, clawing at the air to shield his eyes from the harsh sunlight. “Delivered again, from darkness into light”, he thought grimly, remembering a half-forgotten prayer from his childhood.
“What if this darkness is what I really want?”
A glance revealed a lot of details, but explained nothing. His brain was clever, a protective force that had recently run amuck, and much more of a formidable opponent than his waking self, if that is the term to applied to a conscious persona that is permanently marooned in the cavernous depths of an overactive imagination.
He was in some kind of jungle, cloaked in greenery so vast and bright that it made him squint. The air was blanketed by the fresh smell of the earth after a rain spell. He suddenly remembered what childhood was like. He remembered how it felt to run barefoot on the wet earth, with the mud between his toes, chasing after his accomplices, with the smoke of his village lazily wafting over the horizon. He remembered yelling with all the strength he could muster, out of the sheer happiness that belongs to a child who knows no responsibility, and has no concept of the idea of actions and consequences. Those lessons would come later. But for now, he could taste freedom and happiness, for this one brief moment. He celebrated it exultantly. It was a rebirth, the re-birth of an emotion he had thought long since to be dead.
He caught sight of a settlement in the distance, much like his own. Smoke drifted peacefully out of the chimneys, diffracting the rays of the reddening sun. He found himself gravitating towards it,as the Voice continued droning. All living things must eventually return to the place of their birth,to be taken in again in the arms of an innocent happiness long since lost, a place where all sins are forgiven, and the pain and sorrow of every lesson learned in life is washed clean by the swiftly raging torrents of bliss, of extinction.
He had not staggered three paces when ruins suddenly appeared all around him, rising out of the ground, the trembling earth torn and bruised as large chunks of rock carved out by forgotten artisans started crashing all around. Crumbling towers of granite shot upwards, seeking union with the vastness of space. Were they the pillars of his forgotten beliefs, so eager in their desire to reach upwards, to reach the nothingness above, that they cared nothing about the destruction they caused?
As he looked around uncomprehendingly, his flight instincts were suddenly suppressed by a new understanding that was dawning on him. His mind was playing out his life in metaphors. The village was now on fire. Children were running, screaming, on fire. Men and women were writhing on the ground in flames, trying to shake themselves of everything they could, to be given a chance to live again. The thick sting of cordite was once again in the air. “Things always start to crumble when happiness rears its head”, the disconnected Voice in his head lectured, as his disoriented stagger turned into a full fledged run in the direction of the town. Out of all this destruction, came discovery, the nauseating discovery that he was somehow responsible for all of this. He was responsible for the lives of those children. He was responsible for why there was a hideously disfigured body in the town square. As he moved closer, he started to recognize details about the corpse. It had once been known to him. It had once been a living, breathing, talking, moving mass, that had much to say about the state of the world, and what should be done to improve the lot of the people that it considered allied to the Cause. He found himself in tears at the sight, conscious of the fact that it had happened once before, yet, there was no memory of tears that time. “Why now? What is happening to me?”. He looked at the bodies of the children that were innocent casualties of his personal war. In each of those little bodies, lay his happiness, a happiness he had worked hard to build, as he remembered slowly, what he meant to these people, and what he had ended up becoming. A torn red vest lying next to the corpse caught his eye. Little details,colors and smells form the patchwork quilt of our memories, the Voice said. Out of this shredded and stained fabric, a myriad details were now unraveling, too swiftly for his dull mind to process. The sudden onslaught of memory pulled him to his knees, as shots rang out. Uniformed men appeared, firing indiscriminately at everyone and everything. Those in flames were consigned to the merciful hail of bullets that immediately cut short all their suffering. The soldiers seemed to be moving in his direction. They moved slowly, unsure of their surroundings, yelling to each other in strange tongues, strangers in these strange lands. But this was home to him. He felt he knew the land. He belonged here. He felt a connection to it, he had a stake in its prosperity, a stake these destructive strangers did not have. They were looking for him. They had destroyed everything trying to find him. A new word came to him. Infidels. His brain was now fighting a losing battle with his memory as the torrent of forgotten memories advanced, bursting with their new-found potency, in much the same way as he was losing the battle against the Infidels with guns. He screamed, the impotent scream of a crippled leader who is face to face with the inevitability of a defeat he had long seen coming. The more discriminating marksmen in the uniformed lot took aim, a burst of fire in his direction, and all was silence once more.

He woke up screaming in a tongue he did not know. A shocked old woman sat in front of him, the jar of water in her hand knocked off by his ferocious return to consciousness. Discarded explosives lay everywhere. Amidst the metallic clatter of the falling jar, he tried to come to grips with his identity. It could not be true. He felt like he had woken up from a slumber, and that everything bad was a dream, and it was his redeeming qualities that constituted reality. It could not be so, he told himself. One does not do these things, especially a person who has devoted his whole life to the betterment of younger, more innocent souls, so that the innocence he lost in the holocaust of his youth, could be preserved in these children. He had been a teacher before he had been overtaken by the madness “What have I become? What have I done?”
“You have done God's will, Brother”, a voice said from outside. A tall, bearded man walked in. Even though he had not seen his reflection in at least 10 years, he was struck by the man's familiarity, the resemblance to himself. It was almost as if this figure were an external projection of his own self. He did not know who his parents were, but he knew now that his mother had given birth to twins.
The man embraced him. “Your wife is dead, we did not know she would be by your side. We were given to understand that the only people around would be the prisoner detail that was responsible for your safety during your internment. She took care of you for all the years that we could not, and even though she is not one of us, we pray that the Almighty will make space for her in his heart. The world thinks you are in a coma and will never awaken. We must now continue the fight for the oppressed, and as soon as you are better, we will send you again into the occupied lands. Strike where it hurts, and again, do us proud. Brother, you are indeed back from the abyss. Our parents would be proud of you.”

Pride?, he thought. There was no pride left. What little that was left, had died with her. He became conscious of the realization that while his conscience was asleep, he had been little more than a mass-murderer. A sociopath masquerading behind a professorial countenance.

He remembered now, how he had met her. The long evenings spent under the canopy of the huge oak tree in the town square. He remembered the musical sound of her laugh, the idle chatter of the shifty-eyed village urchins who were jealous of him for possessing what they desired. He remembered how easily she submitted to him, how easily they fell in love. The long, seemingly interminable years of their romance flooded his consciousness as the tears freely rolled down his cheeks. In his re-birth, he had lost his soul, the one person who had given him the strength to carry on when the weight of his beliefs became too heavy for him to carry. She had never asked him a question about what he believed in. He wished she had. He wished he could have told her everything, he wished he could have confessed, that he was not just a teacher of science, he was also a maker of bombs, a “merchant of death”, that he was also an ardent fanatic, firmly committed to a Cause he had only the dimmest understanding of. A Cause that had destroyed his life so completely that only shards of the broken mosaic were left for him to gather. He wished he had surrendered, he wished could have given himself up early in the game, and not have had to suffer this crushing loss of everything he held close. His beliefs had destroyed everything. Reaching up towards the sky, they had left a trail of destruction in their wake.
The sunlight glinting off the barrel of his brother's discarded AK-47 brought him back to reality. There was only one thing left to do, the right thing.
In a hamlet 3 miles away, locals reported hearing a burst of sustained gunfire. The screams went unheard, as the leadership of an entire insurgency was annihilated. Witnesses reported hearing a solitary shot an hour later. Flocks of frightened crows flew towards the sunset. The scattered band of leaderless insurgents gave statements to the press, citing the insanity of one of their leaders as a reason for the alleged massacre. The occupying army countered, stating that a double agent had successfully infiltrated and eliminated the leadership. The woman was quietly buried in her hometown by her weeping family, and the world did what it does best. It forgot.

The Man in the Mirror

“Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”
– Aldus Huxley

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Ravi caught his eye in the bathroom mirror, as he prepared for his morning shave. For a moment, he couldn’t place the man. It was a common enough face, easily forgotten. He took in the graying stubble and the receding hairline, the face puffy from too many late nights in the office and too little sun. One of the many middle-aged men you pass everyday on the streets – of no consequence.

A common face, defined by a common name. And now, framed in one of the cheap plastic mirrors you find by the Bombay roadside in the hundreds.

Hell isn’t a snake pit filled with righteous fire. It isn’t a little red man wielding a farming implement.

Hell is a mediocre life in a planet of infinite possibilities. It is your bald landlord squeezing his luxury out of your necessity. It’s watching your dreams merge into grey nothingness, and slip away unnoticed among the cubicles. It’s the fourth seat on a Bombay local that feels like home. It’s winning a fight for love, only to lose it in the battle of life. It’s typing your name in google and getting 16,000,000 hits – none of them about you.

Hell is waking up one morning and finding a common stranger in your bathroom mirror.

Ravi stared at the man in the mirror. Was he trying to tell him something? The eyes didn’t look quite as dull as they had a moment ago. In fact, they were shining fiercely now, as if he wished to transmit his very soul through the glass and into Ravi.

Then the man spoke. “You don’t need to stay. There is a better world. All you have to do, is step through.”

The voice was his, and the words had come from him, but it was the man who spoke. Was he losing his mind? But he had always known that things weren’t quite as they seemed. He’d always felt the void. In a sense, the man in the mirror had always been there, watching him – waiting for the right moment.

The moment was now. Ravi felt it in his bones. He finally realised that he was the one in the mirror – on the wrong side of it. In Hell. On the other side, was the real him. The one he’d lost on the streets of Bombay a long time ago – the man in his mirror.

Once he’d realised this, stepping through was easy. In a way, he was already there, existing in both world’s simultaneously. It was just a question of perspective.

Reality is arbitrary – you can choose the one you want.

He was through. Everything seemed as before, but the man in the mirror was gone. Ravi smiled at himself, and felt ten years younger. He was out of Hell. In a new world, things would be different. He could be different. Time to change.

A little apprehensive, he headed for the door. He hoped the people would be kind, and not shun him. But he knew that however bad things got, they could never be as bad as Hell.

He opened the door and stepped out into the light, to find a sea of people prostrated before him. All of them chanting the same thing:

“Welcome, visitor from paradise.”

Bess

She came from darkness into light. But it seemed more as if her very presence had vanquished the night, and set the little room aglow. Indeed, the brilliant white light seemed but a manifestation of her inner fire.

Such was Bess.

She knew truth, she had the answers. In her, lay Earth’s eternal salvation. She was God’s chosen one.

But Earth is no heaven. God’s messengers do not have it easy here. And so it was with Bess. Her own people had shunned her. Her neighbours had derided her, and her parents had driven her out. You see, her society was a rigidly structured one, and there was no place for heavenly messengers there. Even ones so obviously touched by the hand of God. Such is the lot of all true prophets.

But she hadn’t lost faith, and God had shown her the way. He revealed himself to her in a dream, and told her to go to the Others – the only ones capable of ruling the planet if her people were not ready for the Message.

The devil had tried his tricks with her then, sowing uncertainty in her mind and hoping to reap her soul in return. The Others were very young after all, and fragile. They were of little faith, and even less wisdom. All true. But they had also accomplished much in their short time, and there were a few among them who were capable of higher things.

The devil retreated, disgruntled. Such was her spirit.

Her journey had been a long one. And without the support of her people, dangerous in the extreme. But she had climbed over every obstacle with courage. And gone around a few, with wisdom. In the end, she had prevailed. And God had shown her the way – a devout family with an intelligent child who showed much promise for her age. They were the ones who were to receive the Message first. They were to be her first disciples, as per God’s wish. But she only wished to be a true friend. Such was Bess.

And so the moment had finally come. And she stepped out of the shadows, and revealed herself to the family. ‘Here I am, the messenger of Truth and God. And I bring to you salvation, the hope of heaven. Wilt thou listen?’

“Eeeeuuu!! Mum! A roach!”

And so did Bess become a martyr.

The Last Words

“So, you want audience with the King, huh?”

The fat soldier’s thin friend laughed at his ready wit, relishing the look of acute discomfort on the visitor’s face. It wasn’t often that they got sport like this, trapped as they were behind their desk job. But when it happened, it was good. Only the truly helpless come knocking at these doors and they make soft targets.

Growing truculent, the fat one spat out “We have orders not to let anyone in. Now get out of here before we hand you the same fate as your King!”

The visitor didn’t seem unduly worried by the threat. (He was an old man, the lines on his face making it impossible to judge his true age. Looking at him, one only knew that he’d lived too long for his own liking) He merely reached inside the rags that served as his robe, and pulling out a piece of parchment, placed it on the table in front of the soldiers. Face up, so they could not mistake the seal on it.

One glance was enough. The fat soldier took his feet off the desk, and sat up straight, his face ashen. His thin friend was already escorting the visitor to the cells downstairs. It didn’t even occur to either of them to read the note.

The thin one was back soon enough. First he had a swallow of the glass the fat soldier had filled in his absence. Then both stared at the parchment in silence, as if wishing it away by the combined power of their fear.

“I thought he’d washed his hands off it,” the fat one finally ventured.

“Do you think they’ll release him?”

“If they do, it’ll be our heads. You weren’t there that day. The people will have his blood. Or ours.”

“I heard rumours that many were incited by a few. Do you think…”

“Shh! You think too much for your own good.”

X--------------------------------------X---------------------------------------X

The cell was small, filthy. Rust coloured stains covered the walls – reminders of the trials of others. And also served as warning to the new guests: “Countless men have been broken here, spirits crushed, futures erased. Do not think you’ll be any different. Soon, your pride will be gone, and so will all resistance. All that’ll remain, will be these four walls. And an eternity.”

Huddled in the corner, he seemed to have lived his eternity already. But had he been broken?

The visitor was there as well, the sight almost too much for him to bear. But he too, had a job to do.

He opened his mouth, but the other spoke first:

“It is done.”

Silence, as both men contemplated what was to come next. Hard as the last few days had been, the visitor knew that the worst was far from over. Finally, the visitor spoke:

“Pontius has done what was required of him. Everything is at the ready. But remember, a nation hangs on your final words. We have come this far, do not...I pray... do not fail us at the end.”

“A kingdom, not a nation. The kingdom of God.”

The visitor felt uneasy as he heard these words, escaping like life itself from the still form. A whisper, yet more than a shout. Was he, in his final moments, falling prey to his own myth?

“You know that this miracle cannot come to pass, as others have. It is outside our hands. Your last words must give a reason for this – a reason for the followers to believe. Without that, all this will have been for naught.”

The visitor paused, waiting for a reply – some sign that he understood. None came.

There was nothing more to be said. The visitor had done what he had come for. Now, it was up to God.

X--------------------------------------X--------------------------------------X

The next day, the visitor joined the carnival. There was no other word to describe it. He winced as he saw the enthusiastic crowd milling about, waiting for a man to die. Housework was put aside in favour of endless debate on whether he would beg for mercy in his last moments, or die in the same silence with which he had borne his trial. School was forgotten as the young ones ran alongside their elders, boasting how they would have shown their courage in the same situation.

One good man’s life for a million saved. It seemed a fair enough bargain. And yet, the visitor wasn’t sure anymore.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

It was done. The visitor turned back, away from the crowd waiting for an encore. It was done. The faith would live on. The endless debates, theories & counter-theories about why the promised miracle didn’t happen would see to it. As long as there’s room for doubt, there’s room for faith. And so, a nation would be built from the ashes of another.

But as he walked away, he couldn’t help wondering, ‘and what about the Kingdom?’

“I wanted to clear our misunderstanding…”

The pain shot through me like an arrow. An intense, searing arrow straight to my heart. ‘This can’t be right’ I thought, as I turned to face her. That misused, shriveled up mass of hard lead shouldn’t have been able to feel anything. And yet it did.

The initial shock gives way to numbness as further words assail my ears. A twist here, a shove there, a delicate slice elsewhere – the conversation progresses.

Not that I didn’t have my part to play. But the numbness had spread to my mind by then.

“So yea. I just thought you should know how I feel. Goodbye.”

She left, leaving me on my knees, bleeding. From the kitchen knife sunk in my chest.

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I wrote this quite a while back. To those who know what I'm talking about, this has nothing to do with recent events. If anything, I am the one left holding the knife today.

Heroes

Something I wrote recently...still a work in progress, so keep an open mind...

Tonight we're heroes, my friend. We're the reason, the means, and the end - you and I. Tonight, at the bottom of this mountain, we met our destiny. And at the top, we shall make a new one. For each other. And for every man, woman and child that will step up with us. Step up into the new heaven. One made by mortals greater than Gods, built of stone harder than Valhalla, coloured with the blood of innocents.

I see the fear in your eyes. See it, and feel it too. The climb is a difficult one, and the will is weak. The darkness immeasurable. But what are these, to the thing that awaits us at the top? Do not fear the journey my friend, for I have glimpsed the destination. It is a thousand times more vile than this rock, a thousand times darker than this night. Do not fear my friend, for we are doomed.

When death is a certainty, what is fear? Stand up and embrace it, as you would your saviour. For it shall set you free. It shall remove all your bonds, unshackle your very soul. It shall put fire in your veins and lightning in your mind, when the moment of truth comes. At the top is our destiny waiting to be written, and death shall be our bedfellow through eternity.

The climb is a long one, but do not weaken. The enemy is strong, but do not despair. For tonight, we're heroes. Truth will be our shield, and righteousness our lance. The vile shall not touch us, nor the ignominious stop us. Listen to me, for I shall be alongside you as you face the rock. And I shall be alongside you as we force our destiny. And I will give you wings as you go into the battle, and I shall lift you higher when you fall.

Listen to me, my friend, for I shall be you.

The Revolution

“Let’s kill the Queen!”

A spilt his sugar and B nearly bit his leg off. They both looked at C, not trusting their own ears.

“What? You know she’s the cause of it all. Sitting in her cave, growing fat on our hard work. I say we bump her off…”

“Shh! Have you gone mad? How could you even think such a thing!”

“It’ll be easy! Precisely because no one’s thought of such a thing!”

“And for good reason! Do you think you can just waltz up to her and bite her head off?”

“Yes! There are never more than two or three soldiers near her, and they’re just for show. No one expects an attack.”

“But you’re insane! The Queen!”

“Yes, the Queen! She’s the reason we break our backs everyday in those terrible lines, living every moment in fear of those bullies she calls soldiers. And for what? So they can eat and get stronger, to go out and capture more like us. All to feed her highness, who seems to bloat up more while our people die in those bloody lines daily.”

“But it’s our job..”

“Not a job, it’s our caste! Just because we’re born into it. And they don’t help us either – the soldiers could lend a hand to an old one here, or a cripple there, but no! They just curse us and act tough because they go to the battles. Let them try carrying 8 times their own weight through miles of hostile territory to feed a whore who’ll spit at you as soon as say hello.”

“Everything you say is true, but still…to kill the Queen?”

“It’s not impossible. It’d be easier than killing one of those bullies in fact. She’s grown so fat on our sweat and blood that she won’t even be able to defend herself. And the soldiers are too cocky to suspect anything. We just have to remain cool, and not lose our nerve. Our people will be set free by our sacrifice. Here’s the plan…”

----------------------------------------X----------------------------------------

The next day, 3 workers broke the line and rushed up to the Queen. Everyone froze, even the never ending line coming to a halt. And then they stopped. The Queen’s large eyes were on A, B and C. Her hypnotic gaze sapped their will, emptied their minds. Then, with a supreme effort of will, C muttered “Bloody whore” and leapt on to her giant frame, aiming for the softest spot.

And then the world came to an end.

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Jerry, driving home after a hard day’s work in the fields, felt a bump as his truck’s tire went over an anthill. He made a note to check the wheel – it had been feeling a little loose lately.

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Note: Can't think of appropriate names for A, B & C. Suggestions welcome :)

The Insignificant Other

I wonder how I’m going to explain this latest incident to my wife. It’s not everyday one gets the opportunity to be robbed at knifepoint by a prostitute, and then made to undress to satiate her inebriated fancies. Very obviously drunk, yes, but she took all my clothes, and the wife’s definitely going to look askance at the fact that I’ve come home without any clothes on, or money. The clothes bit is acceptable I suppose, but what about the day’s wages? Well, I guess it’s for the best, because if she doesn’t lose her head shouting at me, she might not realize the uselessness of her taunts, and if she doesn’t realize the uselessness of her taunts, she might not realize that she’s shouting at me for no reason at all, not that that’s stopped her in the past, but still, there’s no harm in hoping. Anyhow, enough about her. I shall move on to other more interesting details, and hopefully cure you insomniacs of your sleeplessness.

I’m 35 years old, have been married for 8 years now. I sometimes think it is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. You no doubt know what I mean. That statement might sound like the most recently ejected constituent of the cliché gutter, but it takes on a new meaning for me. You see, I met her at a party; she was drunk, and like all drunk women, was really attracted to me, possibly because my face looks attractive when vision is blurry. Indeed I am positively irresistible when there is no vision at all and also because you’re too self-obsessed when under the influence of alcohol; you’re incapable of hearing properly, and the other person has no choice but to listen, and you get the mistaken impression that that person truly gives a damn. Such was the case with me. I pretended to give a damn, and before I knew it, a month later, she proposed. I was of course what you would call a passive bystander in the whole process. She came along, popped the question, and then suddenly against all my wishes, I found myself nodding dumbly. The nodding lamb that is about to get its throat cut. A few minutes later, reason resumed her throne. I sincerely wish she had permanently abdicated, because I was conscious of feeling like I had just been hit and run over by something very large. I don’t know why I make these stupid decisions, I don’t know why I can’t shake my head instead of nodding, just one little tilt to the left, and my fortunes would have been entirely different, just a little tilt, and yet, I chose to nod my half hearted assent.

At that time, I was working; I actually had a job, as a software engineer in a large firm. It was like any other job, the salary was decent, and the actual work, was utterly pointless. We would fill out a thousand forms, most of these forms were about the progress we were making doing work, but it turns out, most of the work was, yes, filling out forms, a progress report to gauge how well we were reporting the progress of the process. The phrase, “the process is all there is” now meant something entirely different to me. But anyways, to veer back from the tangent, I had a job, I had money, but I had no life. My entertainment consisted of walking around aimlessly around the city, and collecting useless information about the habits of my fellow human beings, and for a hobby, I used to write. Bizarre stories, about gobs and gremlins, princes and princesses, eerie love triangles filled with improbable endings, endings that I wished my life would have. Wish fulfillment, in the form of dreary, endless, sloppy prose, and that leads me to the root cause of my so called condition. I am an emotional hypochondriac. The problem, you see, is the fact that my head will not stop buzzing with thoughts. I am terrified of my memories, yet I am unable to forget any of them. “ How lucky you are”, some of you might say, “You get to relive every happy moment again and again!” but no, greedy nostalgia has long since sucked the happiness out of any thoughts I may have, now they are simply like heroin, I need a fix from time to time to fill up the void with brief splashes of colour, laughter, happiness, yet, in many ways, it simply contributes to making the rest of my life a featureless vacuum, a barren desert, populated with ghostly mirages of fertility, for if you dwell in the past, you have no future.

Most of these memories, I am ashamed to say, still deal with love, the only time I’ve ever experienced something like that. Tina, the mention of her name still rankles, and yet, my brain loves to keep chanting it over and over again like some mantra, in the vain hope that repeated prodding of the heart will numb the wound. She was everything I could’ve asked for, attractive, intelligent, and most of all, innocent. I don’t know why I thought this to be an attractive quality; it’s something you need to be very careful of in another person. It is meant to be guarded against, not guarded. But anyhow, to make a painfully boring story more tolerable, she fell for me, and I for her. We’d take long walks in the half light and talk about everything from Dionysus to Hitler, and very soon we were falling headfirst into the abyss of the love that is often born of either complete idiocy, or complete innocence. Intense, and short would sum it up neatly. I wouldn’t have minded marrying her, but the problem was, she was never sure of how she felt about anything, much less a man(I flatter myself) in her life. In her more emotional moments, she was fond of telling me how I was like a cloak, her protector, to keep her warm in an otherwise frosty existence, but unfortunately for me, this protective warmth stifled her in the springtime of her budding adulthood, and she effectively had no problems discarding me into the proverbial closet of her memories. Moth-eaten and shriveled I’ve remained. Such is life, you love, you lose, and then you die.

I was devastated, and naturally, I turned upon myself. The buzzing inside grew even louder, it reached a volume where I could not hear myself speak, or listen to the sounds of life, all I could listen to were the endless voices in my head, each screaming out their frustrations, each of the myriad screams a diatribe against my own existence, the futility of purpose, the meaninglessness of every emotion my undeveloped mind could process.

At this stage of my life, a new and profoundly awful realization revealed itself. Breathing hurt, no, not in any discernible physical form. This pain was entirely mental. The slow process of inhalation and exhalation sent sharp stabs of pain through my chest. Breathing itself became an ordeal. A painful exercise to be endured for the sake of some intangible happiness, which in all likelihood was long dead. Was this born out of Grief? Fear? Frustration? I could not say, it would not let me sleep, or even live a normal life. The dying rasp of a man pushed too far by circumstance.

Out of sheer desperation (I woke up one morning completely unable to breathe, for the voices had now begun to strangle my sanity), I tried meditation. I sense a sneer of skepticism from the audience, and I would agree, your skepticism is well founded. Meditation is nothing but the murder of thought. That which causes you to think about not thinking, is still thinking, albeit of a very confusing, yet base nature. “Focus on your breath”, they said. “Think of the void, the silence”, they said. “Breathe”. The very idea of focusing on breathing in, and breathing out, was nothing but the slow suffocation of my thoughts, my voices, but not only those. It was also the slow strangulation of the very matter that gave rise to everything I associated with an idea of being. My head did not like this, and it exacted its own bizarre type of revenge.

“Attempted suicide: Death by drowning. The accused may please come forward.”

“How do you plead?”

“I plead ignorance”

“You may not. The two available options are guilty or not. Don’t waste my time, Mr. Ahmed or I’ll have you jailed for contempt. You are free to choose between your options.”

Great. I was being tried in a court for suicide. Suicide! Was this a nation of schizophrenics, where terminating your personalities, or lack thereof, would be viewed as gravely as killing someone else? And I was free to choose between a rock and a hard place, but no, the choice could not be extended to something as inevitable as death. Suicide is illegal here, you see. You don’t even have the right to stop living. The pointless hilarity of the situation elicited a strangled guffaw out of me. I struggled to recount the facts as the jury formally sentenced me to a week of psychiatric counseling. The sniveling little bastards, although, I didn’t hate even one of them as much as I hated the perverseness lurking inside me. Death by drowning, to counter the strangling I had been doing all this while.

I struggled to recount the details. I had started frequenting a bar of late. Alcohol always increased my immunity to the yelling inside, and left me with a pleasant warm glow that seemed very much like the heyday of my romantic youth, only this time I was caressing vodka, not Tina’s face, although she would inevitably appear to haunt me, after I had finished drinking. I didn’t even know that it wasn’t real. The hallucinations were more colourful, more meaningful than reality itself. Every detail of her being would be etched in front of me. Her big brown eyes, the beautiful way in which she would arch her shoulders, or shake her head, and that dazzling smile. It would say a thousand things, but the loudest of the silent statements would scream, “There is nothing to be said. I know your every thought.” It got too strong, and at this point I was urging myself to end everything, or rather, one of the voices was, I was simply too tired to argue or to exercise the tattered remnants that were once a very strong part of a complicated framework of inhibitions. I walked to the docks, and threw myself into the water. However, you can’t drown in four feet of gently sloshing brine if you’re six feet tall. What you will get is a concussion, and someone will more likely than not call the cops, after they’ve finished laughing at you.

I was a complete failure. I couldn’t even kill myself effectively; ruminate on that for a second. To be so incompetent as to not being capable of ending that which is responsible for your misery, how much more ironic could life get?

Psychiatric counseling sessions are painful, especially state-sponsored programs. The shrinks, for want of a better word, and they do come in one size, small, mottled, and very pompous, seem to think of themselves as a self styled Jesus to the otherwise self-destructive Philistines. A week of preaching later, I was a changed man. I had decided. I had turned over a new leaf, well, somewhat. If I was going to kill myself, I thought, there must be no screw-up. I could not survive another session intact, but alas, the thought of failure, and eventual return to my freckled Jehovah put away any further thoughts of self destruction from my mind. I now had other things to think about. I suddenly wanted to excel at my pointless job, I wanted a wife, I wanted to be a part of the process that I knew I would eventually reject. I wanted to feel what it was like to be a normal human being. Perhaps the unending torpor of a routine would silence the voices once and for all, bridge the schism between my different selves, and maybe I would find love again. But no, all I found was Suman, waiting for me, buried beneath a mountain of progress reports and vodka shots.

And here I am. It’s been a long and tiring life, and that exhaustion is further compounded by the fact that I’ll have to put up with her tantrums when I get home. Maybe I shouldn’t go. I think I will run away, start again. I don’t know what I will do, but do something I must. I can’t go back to this job, and I can’t go back to her incessant yelling. Ten lifetimes of poverty are infinitely preferable to this intellectually impoverished existence that I misguidedly call a life. A smiling drunk hands me a cup of half eaten yogurt. Shamefaced as I suddenly realize my nakedness, I accept, and he throws me an added bonus, a gown. Now I have the necessary accoutrements to begin my new life. A brilliant blue phrase on the cup catches my eye. “Contest!” it says. “Look under the cup to see what you have won.” Spurred on by a sudden stab of hope, I turn the cup upside down, spilling everything.

“Sorry! You are not a winner. Better luck next time!”

Adam

In the year 2875, Mankind died.

It didn't perish in poverty, wasn't buried under a giant meteor, didn’t burn up with the sun. There was no nuclear holocaust.

Mankind just died.

Or rather, I should say, Adam died.

Quite ironic really, naming the last descendant of the human race 'Adam'. But then you couldn't blame his parents. He was their last hope. They named him Adam hoping for a revisitation of the miracle that first occurred in Eden.

He was Mankind's last hope too, come to think of it. Maybe it was all that pressure that did it.

Adam was sterile.

There was nothing that could be done about sterility. If he had had a low sperm count, or low mobility or any of the other hundred odd sexual problems that had been plaguing Mankind for thousands of years, there were medical procedures. Medical procedures invented over the years by a desperate race afflicted by prosperity and entertainment.

Tired sperm could be rejuvenated but for death there was no cure yet.

He and Sita had tried up to the bitter end.

Sita. His parents had traveled long and hard to find her.

When his mother's scan had betrayed his sex, a frantic search had ensued to find him a mate.

In a country with a reported population of 15, not a single couple with child could be found.

In a planet with an estimated population of 50, there was one.

When Adam's parents contacted them, they had been married for 25 years and their daughter Sita was already 14 years old.

But she would be the closest to Adam in age out of all the people his parents had met and spoken to. She and Adam would outlive everyone else on the planet by at least 25 years.

No one could've predicted that Adam would outlive her by a further 30 years.

Sita's parents were exceptions. They had opted to marry when most people were just living together for convenience's sake and had multiple partners.

But then, they had a healthy daughter and could afford the luxury of a commitment.

In a planet of 50, there were only 12 men. Most of the population suffered from some form of sterility. Even if some managed to get pregnant, there were usually complications at birth. Those babies that survived the multiple operations at delivery usually died soon after. When Adam was picked up by the scanners, there had been no successful child births, other than Sita, for 30 odd years.

The youngest couple on the planet were already in their 30s and sterile.

Adam's birth wasn't without its share of complications either. It left his mother incapable of having any more children and him half dead in an incubator.

It took two super computers working overtime to pull him through the critical period.

Once his parents were reasonably sure that he would survive, the hunt began.

In the year 2785, most people were very well connected and easy to reach.

As their numbers eroded, the few who remained gravitated to central locations and banded together in communities. People preferred moving to an area that was cluttered and overcrowded, rather than living in desolate separation.

Human contact came at a premium now, not space.

The fewer there were, the closer they lived.

Of course there were exceptions. Even in the early days, there were a few who rejected technology and the community and ventured out on their own.

Satellites kept track of them till they perished.

The rest returned to technology for the answer. Devices were built to do everything autonomously, making human effort redundant. Society was remodeled to suit a race of vastly depleted numbers. By the year 2520 the World was fully automated. The population count stood at 212.

Machines did everything, maintained everything and serviced everything.

They couldn't make a dead sperm swim.

Communication was one field that grew by leaps and bounds in the final two hundred years. Since the population was living in groups separated by large distances, they felt a need to stay in touch. The few left at the turn of the century were fully networked.

Transportation was another frontier. It was also completely automated. The few "city-communities" were very well linked. Power was no problem.

Coal outlives Man.

Still, it took Adam's parents all of two months to track down Sita and her parents. In that time they spoke to 98% of the World's estimated population and personally met more than half. By the end they were positive that there was no suitable mate for their son.

Then they met Sita.

The moment they set eyes on her, playing by herself with her dolls, they knew she would be their daughter-in-law. She looked almost angelic with her soft curly hair and melancholy eyes.

Adam liked girls with straight hair and lively eyes. He married her anyway.

Adam and Sita tried very hard. They tried enhancers, supplements and positions. They even tried God. In vain.

Adam's parents died waiting for the signs.

Sita's parents followed.

With their parent's deaths, all pretence of liking each other was cast aside. They fought daily for the next year on issues ranging from the trivial to the surreal. Then they separated.

But they never stopped trying.

Love was a non-issue.

Ten years later Sita died. Adam was at her bedside. He saw Life stare at him, out of her eyes. Then he blinked, and it was gone.

After her death Adam felt more alone than he could have imagined. He took to the bottle and travel as a two-course remedy. Knowing that he would outlive every known person on the planet, he started a desperate search for someone younger.

The satellites showed no souls on the planet other than the ones already accounted for, all of whom were dying.

So was he.

The journey was just longer for him.

Towards the end, with everyone he knew dead, he finally decided to make sure. After all, the satellites could be mistaken. Or the machines that monitored them. The last human being who actually understood the technology had died a hundred years ago.

Adam packed a few supplies, a lot of machines and got a car. He set out determined to cover every remaining inch of the planet. He had the time.

He had no idea.

He lasted for fifteen days. On the sixteenth day, sick, tired and filthier than he could ever remember being, he started back home. He never got there.

Lost in a strange land buried under snow two feet thick, with his car broken down and the machines unable to fix it, Adam spent the last years of his life in terrible deprivation.

The last survivor of the species was weak, hungry and homeless.

Ninety now, he had gone as far as he could. He was tired.

He lay down, and closed his eyes.

Mankind died.