Pebbles

A sequel to Acid, Bases & Salts 

The pigeon is thirsty.

The pigeon drops a pebble into the beaker.

The sun is sliced up in an unfathomable frenzy of an unfriendly kind. The kind is devoid of any semblance of difference, which in turn have kept them in a state of indifferent harmony. Kindness is godliness, godliness is necessary to form a rhythm of fake hysteria that is bestowed upon the general public who fail to possess the faculties that pebbles are proud of. They mellow down to a molten mass of obscenity served on cones and called ice-creams.

The pigeon drops another pebble into the beaker.

“It is your will”, they shout. He has no will. What will are they talking of? Oh, that sallow skin of the green serpent who slithered in to find an egg, into the pig pen, but pigs do not lay eggs. The serpent's tongue was pulled off and well, red and green. “Will you have the red or the green, Will? Well, it is your will.”

The pigeon drops some more pebbles into the beaker.

The old man cannot keep up with the mice, the mice are faster. The hamster-wheels make music, different kinds. As the old man slows down, he drops rapidly to the floor of the steel-sieve hamster-wheel. He is Sean, the sun of this world. The sun slices through the steel sieve.

The pigeon drops a lot of pebbles into the beaker.

The pigeon drinks the water.

In the beaker.

Fits

A sequel to Visions.

Distorted red and orange ellipses surrounding a perfect brown circle, floated about a feet above the earth. Threads flying around – white, black, maroon.  A red dot stung by black and orange. Some blue, some splattered grey, here and there. An array of superfluous entities – destinies per se, transmogrified into cold clay clad idiosyncrasies resembling mercury droplets. Sean touched a droplet with his fingertip and watched it flatten.

Fairy tales and cocktails. Screwdrivers and safety pins.

The green shroud, deluging cloud – oh so proud; covered all of Sean, but his legs. His legs left bare to the naked air and the whistling moisture; to the infrasonic sounds and the blood thirsty hounds.  Rounds of bullets – long and short, heavy and light. A tight slap, across his face.

The beggar spat at Sean’s freshly slapped face. A crowd was about to gather around the place, when Sean walked away. The beggar tried to run after him, but gave up. Apparently, Sean had stepped on a sleeping beggar, and instead of moving his convicted legs off the beggar, he stood there nonchalantly, listlessly staring at the nearby playground.

About to sit on a mournfully marooned rock in an expanse of grilled greenery, Sean tripped over it. Indifferent to the aberrant actuality, not incurring a perplexing possibility, he froze, ruptured the frozen exoskeleton and exhaled a fit of brazen derision. Lighter’s clicks, mosquitoes’ licks, sick, sick, sick. Sean could not sit on the rock. The rock was stained with human blood – all over, probably donated by martyred mosquitoes.

The beggar came around and spat on Sean’s face again and sat down on the rock. Sean did not wipe his face. The beggar did. Sean did not look at the beggar. With folded legs he sat at the beggar's feet.

The beggar sang –

“Hunger is boiling your intestines,

Crows carry stale meat between their beaks.

The caws and paws, like music,

Harps strung with tongues and lips.

Snails swirling with giant-wheels,

Hogs and masses gargling cosmetics.

A breath of the trees,

A voice to cease.”

The beggar dropped a coin on Sean’s head and walked away.

Sean, in a fit of hysteria, jumped off the podium, tore off a page from his notebook, and chewed it. Then he ran away.

‘What on earth was that?’

‘Who let the lunatic in?’

‘Do you know the name of the poem he was about to recite?’

‘Yes. ‘The beggar who drank my cocktail.’’

Sean shook the beggar’s hand. The beggar spat at Sean’s face.

That was not all. The beggar took out the safety-pin that held the torn, loose pyjama to his waist, and pricked Sean’s fingertip, as if taking a blood sample. A drop of mercury popped up, from within.

Sean looked at the Raven, seated on the window sill, and asked her –

“If I were a beggar, would you be ashamed of me?”

The raven dipped her beak into the glass of Screwdriver Sean was holding, and made a hole in the ice.

Ashes

"The rendition of intuition, intuition being an abstract personification of sublime simultaneous symphonies playing incoherently and incessantly in our neurons, can be catastrophic; especially because of its vivid and varied inconsistencies, mis-interpretations. But, I can bravely embody it or them, before you. When I write to you, I don't need to be politically correct, I just need to be grammatically correct. When I do something, I don't need to be politically correct, I just need to be conscientiously correct. I don't have to, or I won't say, you complete me. You don't, because I am a nonentity. How can you complete something that doesn't exist? But, my physical absence is the testament for my esoteric and intangible presence in you." - wrote Sean to Penny.

   You are the rock,

Resolute, intrepid;

Yes, maybe.

I am the water,

Irresolute, trepid;

Yes, maybe

You can shield yourself from me; contest, will you,

You can withstand me, you think?

I’ll not flow over you, but I’ll get inside you;

Not your body I’ll devour but your soul I will drink.

You must be wondering, why this thirst.

Oh, for me...No, I am thirst.

You envisage, what’s the body and the soul, severed

They are mute, dysfunctional debris, when not allied.

Ah, I am hysterical, euphoric, ecstatic, enraptured-

After I am done with your soul, I’ll break you from the inside.

You are no god, then why deicide?

I am the one, I decide.

Had you mistaken me for a friend?

Know me better, I am a fiend.

That old house I long for,

Not house, that was home.

The garden, the greenhouse and the orchids.

This new house I do not abhor,

This house too, is home.

No garden, no greenhouse and no orchid.

And the dark blue walls that surround me, seem a tad turbid.

Or maybe they are not, maybe I am beseeching a mirage,

My mind is dis-painting the walls, to make a new collage.

Penny sauntered in the garden, with an air of nonchalance and uninhibited carelessness; cloaked in pleasant perspiration, which was being unhurriedly unveiled and consumed by the calm, cool and erotic breeze. Her face, so beautiful, so immaculately white – some of the veins around her forehead were partly visible; the veins carried a colour of dull green – portraying congruence with the green but contrast with the bright green that was all around. She walked towards the greenhouse, where the orchids resided.

The grass blades danced a little;

To the air?

The earth was the drumhead,

And her feet were the drumsticks.

And it seemed that the grass moved,

With the vibration-

When she played the drum,

Paradisaically.

Penny struggled with the pile of obtrusive materials she was carrying all at once, with an obvious intention of incarcerating them, or better incinerating them. Those were reprehensible, jejune and gratuitous entities emulsified in vitriolic flavours of obscure reminiscence that served as tools for strident infliction of affliction. They better be obliterated than ominously perpetuated. Penny dragged her feet on the cold floor. She reached the barren backyard of her house, where she dumped the junk in the waste bin.

Penny went back into the house, and walked towards the kitchen. Maybe she had forgotten something.

“You know, Penny, we could probably travel in time if we could travel at the speed of light. It’s hypothetical though, but the thought itself amuses me. I envy the quantum particles; they can travel at speeds comparable to the speed of light. Maybe, they can time travel”, conjectured Sean.

The officinal stench of the place hit Penny’s nostrils. After, a brief shake of neurotic nausea, followed by a rapid recuperation triggered by a defense mechanism of adroitly evading any manifestation of or any proclivity for an autocratic impotence of the perceptive or cognitive faculties, she entered the blood donation camp. People, on beds, squeezing sponge balls; needles stuck to their arms, drawing blood from the median cubital veins; the blood bags getting filled gradually – her sight revealed. She was just accompanying her friends, she could not donate blood; she was anaemic.

Sean : “Time when reversed spells Emit. Nice coincidence, right? If you can reverse time you can probably emit quantum particles. Hah! How lame is that?”

Penny : “Sean, I’ve been thinking, maybe, I had a twin. She doesn’t exist physically, maybe; but metaphysically, within me; like I am two people, two things at once, I am the water and she is the rock and vice versa. Sometimes it brings me to an atrocious edge of impending turmoil. We switch our places so quickly that it’s really hard to distinguish, who’s who.”

Sean : “Oh Penny, do you mean to say you have an evil twin and that she’s no one else but you? Have you been watching those darned movies which endorse those stupid ideas? Our discussion about time travel was a lot more interesting.”

Penny : “Shut up! Will you? I don’t buy that evil twin theory. Oh, about your obsessive travelling- in-time thing, I had time travelled to the future and I saw that we were not together. I showed you the finger, for being a segregated superficial shmuck.”

Sean : “Okay, I shut up!”

Penny : “Do you know about vanishing twins? It’s not very uncommon. One of the twins die very early in the mother’s womb. The dead foetus is absorbed by the mother or the other twin. It becomes nonexistent. Maybe I absorbed my twin sister, maybe she is within me.”

Sean : “Okay! Even if I believe that you had absorbed your twin sister; the time when this happened, your sister or the dead foetus had not developed a brain. So, even if she is present in you, theoretically; she can’t do anything on her own, or she can’t make you do anything.”

Penny : “You’re not getting it Sean. How do I make you understand what I am trying to say…”

Penny returned from the kitchen, holding a porcelain mug and a match box. It was the same mug from which she had coffee everyday. It was given to her by Sean.

Maybe she had time travelled into the future. Sean and her were not together, for reasons - aplenty.

Penny dropped the mug on the concrete. It was shattered into pieces.

Probably, the mug would not have broken had it been her old house, the old garden with a cushion of grass.

She lit a matchstick and dropped it in the trash bin.

Apparently, old paper catches fire easily.

She sat down.

Penny took up a piece of the broken porcelain mug and pressed it against her wrist. Slitting her writs? Oh! That was not her. But, she had always wanted to donate blood…

Sean’s last letter, in a sealed envelope burned in the trash bin –

“I know, we’re not together anymore and I know that you might not be interested in reading anything I write; but hoping that you’ve read till here, I shall continue my jabber hence and hope against hope that you shall bear with me. Do you remember our discussion about the vanishing twins? I do. Well, I don’t know which of you were prevailing then, when we broke apart (and not broke up), but I think I have an alternate theory for that. I was reading about the Tachyon the other day, a hypothetical sub-atomic particle which could travel faster than light. Maybe, you were something like that. I couldn’t see you; understand you when you were approaching me (read with me), but when you passed me (read left me), I could actually see you, understand you, both of you. You were clearly divided into two images, moving in opposite directions, one red and one blue, personified and transmogrified into the rock and the water. But, I can’t travel at the speed of light, let alone faster than that, so I could not catch you, neither of you.”

Penny longed for the orchids, the white ones, the blue ones, especially the red ones… There is a myth that Blood Orchids can resurrect people. She could use them, now.

It was (is) the sixth of February.

“Happy Birthday Penny”, Sean’s voice crackled over the telephone.

Maybe it was past, maybe it is future; or maybe in some other dimension, Penny was in her old home, and it was midnight.

Penny got engulfed in the smoke…

All that remained in the trash bin were ashes, but there were a couple of invisible remnants which could not even escape with the smoke – the vanishing twins and the tachyon.

Black pastel on 6"x4" white paper.

p.s. - The sketch was made upon a whim. I am not an artist.

Sequel - Fumes

Rapture-Love-Rupture

Like a detached variegated feather of a possibly mythical, mystical bird that floats, dances in the air- a little exploited, a little caressed by nature, not stagnant, not firm, maybe fickle, almost always in turbulence yet in absolute peace; and then it comes to complete rest when it gets caught, entrapped by someone or something, depleted of alacrity, replete with insensitive senses, a sense of kinship, belonging, acceptance, of being overpowered, held, caged; Neil’s sight, the sight of a coherent, dull, fastidious, gullible, transparent, convoluted, sane, lunatic romantic walked, sprinted, peregrinated from one place to another, not waiting, not stopping, with unflagging spirit adulterated with mirthless vigour; and then it got stupefied, it froze, subtly, suitably, enchanted by some oblivious spell executed through a seductive, exquisite tool by a sorceress.  Neil’s sight remained bound, albeit loosely, like a ribbon tied carelessly to a little girl’s hair by herself, in a desperate effort to prove her mettle and failing miserably; but that outrageous freedom urged his sight to cling, hang on to the hypnotization. The freedom coaxed him, teased him, mocked him; it was as if a challenge, a casual one, thrown at him, telling him that he would not lose if he quit, he would not be humiliated, humbled if he refused, and just by saying that it also said that it would be his greatest defeat if he did surrender. His sight remained fixed.

She was an embodiment of the sun.

It hurt his eyes to keep looking at her.

What she had, she held, what she had begun-

He was helpless before that, he had to defer.

In one of her hands she held a small paper packet, the usual ones made out of sold off or discarded old newspapers. It contained a delectable mixture of puffed rice, spices, pieces of vegetables and snacks. Neil’s eyes chased the movement of her hand holding the paper packet. She raised her hand, tilted her head a little backwards, then poured some of the food in her mouth. He could separate, see, each element of the food that got lost in her mouth. A sole soul, a diminutive speck of puffed rice, a stranded, estranged entity, nonentity got marooned, prisoned in the island of her moist red lower lip; but she was generous enough to liberate it with a swift movement of her tongue.  Neil closed his eyes.  He was defeated. No. Not yet. He resumed looking at her, after that sudden pause of stare. Her mouth shut, her jaws moved, she crushed the food with her teeth, and then the sublime paste slipped down to her stomach, grazing her throat, leaving marks inside her with incoherent ecstasy. Neil’s eyelids batted in a synchronized fashion with the movement of her mouth, lips. He listened to the gentle sound of bliss, the unchained pleasure.

How he wished he was the…

The bus started moving. Neil had forgotten that he was sitting in a bus which was about to leave the bus-stand in a few minutes. He was startled, but he was relieved. He was on the verge of defeat; he was succumbing to the colossal coercion, the fatal force. Escape, could he? Did he?

Neil knew that he had fallen prey-

to that primitive propensity,

the delicate desire,

the daunting, haunting urge,

that he could not successfully purge,

the feeling, the reeling, the peeling of the soul,

the object, yes object,

which he had ruthlessly ruptured,

mercilessly murdered,

then carried it’s carcass himself,

in his arms,

and unceremoniously cremated it,

the thing called ‘love’.

Apparently, it had come back to life. Suddenly he felt an emptiness, a void in his stomach.

The ticket collector of the bus asked for the fare. Neil handed the few coins that he fished out of his pocket to the ticket collector and declared the name of the bus stop he was to get down at. The ticket collector asked for 50p. The bus fare was Rs. 8.50. Neil had only Rs. 8 with him. He produced his college ID and got a student-concession of Rs. 2, which reduced the fare to Rs. 6.50. The ticket collector sighed, frowned, returned the balance and left. So Neil had Rs. 1.50 left with him now. He didn’t know what was he going to do, from whom was he going to lend money; he was drowning in debts already. He rejected those naïve notions and closed his eyes. Of course he had better things to muse.

Neil went back to his own world, again. He wondered about ‘love’. It had been a conscious choice of his, semi-completely consequential to his circumstances, to sacrifice love. Then why did he feel love again? Why?

But he just couldn’t deny his love. He loved FOOD. He loved to eat, but he was broke, he couldn’t afford food, let alone good food. He could starve for days and weeks and months, now.

How he wished he was the one holding that paper packet and having the food.

---x---

Food is a necessity, a biological need. So is love, may be, or may not be. Some ascetics conquer hunger and also desires. If love is a desire, they conquer that too. Neil was not an ascetic. But he thought that he had conquered love, perhaps; hunger, of course not.

He still had food,
when he could afford to,

but he didn’t feel,

the same zeal;

love, was not there,

it didn’t matter though;
he didn’t care,

and then comes love again,

to heal,

or perhaps, to kill.

Neil was not hungry. Neil was in love, with food.

Lives

A sequel to Fumes.

From the heaven descended bulky drops of rain, they struck Sean’s face like arrows hurled from the slings of a group of deft archers. He had been waiting in the rain for more than ten minutes now, and he wasn’t carrying an umbrella, abiding by his inveterate trait of acute carelessness. Andy is supposed to pick him up. Andy had called five minutes ago to let him know that he was caught up in a traffic jam and would be there any minute. Sean had replied ‘Okay!’, not complaining the slightest, in his usual strain of uncompromised indifference and utter expressionless-ness. He was indifferent to the rain, to the vehicles that went past him splashing mud-water at him from the roads. He stood there shaking, feeling and observing- the unobserved, the unkempt, the unfulfilled, the unnerving facades of the vivid, poignant and beautifully destructive dystopic  colours of unnatural nature, which mercilessly yet mellifluously debased life, his life. He was painting, capturing, narrating and listening, all with his eyes.

Time flowed,

So did water.

Clouds bellowed-

Hoarse thunder.

Sean could feel a silhouette approaching him, but he chose to be indifferent and be engrossed in his job of discovering the dystopian spectrum, the obscure light which was making unflagging and unmitigated efforts to keep dusk, night at bay.

A man appeared out of nowhere and asked Sean “What time is it now?”

Sean replied “It’s quarter past six by my watch.”

Sean realized then, that five minutes had long passed.

It was no theatre,

So did he ponder.

Why did people gather-

In a crowd yonder?

Sean asked a person who was walking hastily towards the crowd, “What’s the matter?”

The person, without even glancing at Sean replied hurriedly, “There’s been an accident.”

Suddenly everything seemed still, the rain, the noises, the people around; everything. Sean’s senses seemed to have undergone temporary selective impairment. He walked towards the crowd, often bumping into people; not apologizing, he moved on.

He dreaded these accidents, these sights made him sick.

Sean recognized the car at once. He saw the body lying on the road, soon to be put on a stretcher and carried off in an ambulance, a few people surrounding it. The man was still alive, Andy was still alive. Sean observed Andy and the car, he couldn’t figure out which was more wretched, Andy’s body or Andy’s car.

The blood made him sick.

Sean’s senses did not get better. Silence prevailed.

Without inquiring anything about the accident, he found his way out through the crowd, swiftly.

No tear escaped his eye, no shriek escaped his throat.

Sean reached home. He was soaked to the skin.

The warmth of his home was hauntingly tranquilizing. He did not turn on the lights. He didn’t change, nor did he get himself dry; he sat on his bed, inert, motionless.

His mind drifted-

One year ago,

“He was in love. They have been together for more than two years now and the spark was still there.”

Sean was on his way to meet Penny. Penny didn’t turn up that day, instead she texted him, ‘We’re through!’ They had their fair deal of occasional tussles, but that was a bolt from the blue.

Dejected and crushingly mesmerized by the aura of atrocious affliction, he had switched off his cellphone and wandered apathetically on solitary streets.

When he reached his hostel, he was informed that a friend of his father’s had been trying to get to him all day. Sean called him back immediately. Sean was instructed to get home as soon as possible, availing the quickest and best mode of transport he can manage to get.

Sean stayed in a different city. He was studying engineering.

All the while he was on his way home; his mind was digging up the same cadaver of his deceased relationship with Penny. He had even shouted out once in his mind, “Thank you God; what can be worse?” He didn’t even try to know or comprehend why he was rushing home.

Sean’s family comprised his father, mother and younger brother. They had been out to the market on an evening, shopping. While they were returning, their car had met with an accident on the highway. It was a ghastly accident.

There was no corpse on which Sean could rest his head and weep. Just a heap of flesh, undistinguishable; what was his father’s flesh, or mother’s or brother’s.

Sean hardly remembered when was the last time he had hugged his father, had a hearty chat with his mother or fought with his brother. He was away, in his own kingdom of inherent insane inanity.

Water dripped from his hair and from his clothes on the floor. The bed was already wet.

“Andy: ….Don’t be this dead man, this zombie. C’mon, don’t be Frankenstein...”

Sean: …Victor Frankenstein is the name of the scientist who created the monster and not the monster itself. ‘Don’t be Frankenstein?’ I’d love to be him….”

Sean bent down and with his index finger as a pen and water as ink he started writing on the floor-

Why do you follow me so assiduously, o’ Death?

I won’t give up, although it hurts with my every breath.

Why do you bruise me with your abhorrent tentacles of depression?

My life is annihilated and exiled are my expressions.

Why do you stab me again and again, to inflict agony with your blunt knives?

With my head still on my neck, I won’t be afraid of you, for those taken LIVES.

Finished with his eccentric scribbles, Sean sat up again.

It was still raining outside.

He kept sitting on his bed, inert, motionless!

-------

Life is futile-

And short-lived.

A bullet fired,

Hits the target-

In no time.

Tracing the path of-

An obnoxious projectile.

Sequel - Visions

Jour de naissance

In a pensive stance,

I sit beside a window,

with my head tilted sideways,

my eyes affixed,

on the blades of grass,

that dance to the tune,

of mellifluous drizzle.

I have switched off the fan,

I didn’t like the sound of it;

it is obstructing, distracting, subtracting;

the convergence of my cognitions.

I light a cigarette,

I smoke effortlessly.

The smoke,

sometimes slaps back at my face,

and sometimes it is extracted,

deep from my mouth;

in a twisted cyclonic fashion,

goes out of the window,

and dissolves into the moist air.

How, the direction of the wind changes without any notice.

I try to recollect my last birthday. Abhishek wishing me at midnight; lunch with Sumit and Anish; the movie Love Aaj kal after that, at Inox. Yes, Ma had made Ilish Biriyani for me. That’s all. I don’t remember anymore of that day.

The last year of my life had not been very eventful, as I’d supposed it would be. I had spent most of the time coping with my illness.

A few good people were added to my life,

a few good ones subtracted.

Sporadically, at times of depression,

I feel, maybe,

I’d held the grains of sand,

Too tightly.

They slipped through my fingers,

Through my clasp.

Well,

I could have gathered,

the grains of sand,

could have taken a piece of paper,

made a few strokes,

with a brush and glue on it,

and then let them slip away,

all of it, again.

It would have remained.

A piece of art.

Birthday kiddo.

You’re a year older.

Injury

I got injured while playing a football match.

My ankle got twisted, and it got twisted so bad,

that I wasn't being able to stand up;

so I was carried out of the field.

The injury was bad.

I informed a friend about my injury. 

She was laughing.

I replied : 

Please, don't laugh. 

It's terrible. 

When the pressure is intense,

and I ought to run to the toilet, 

my condition becomes pathetic. 

I limp and crawl to the toilet,

restricting a volcanic eruption of bowels,

which by the time has built up so bad,

that I don't even get the time to lock the door,

lest it floods my pants with all yellowness.

I feel like a soldier,
 a leg of whose has been blown off by a bomb;

 who is dragging his ass up to an already deceased medic,

 who lay,

 on the earth covered with his own blood and used up and unused bullets;

 with the faint hope that he might get something which could make him live,

 while blood oozes out from his torn out leg.
His agony rocketing sky high,
with every inch he moves.