Sense

He lay in a cloud of something that melted into his being, swirled him around, drew a veil over his thoughts and made as simple an action as moving his hand impossible. Thunder crashed outside his cloud, and rain poured everywhere. Rain fell to the earth in great sorrow-filled drops, collectively soaking their sorrow in tellurian salt. He didn’t notice, and didn’t care to. He lay in his cloud like he was floating on a giant waterbed, weightless and immobile. His body was light and free, his soul shackled by chains of iron to the unnamed. His eyes were closed because the reality his world inside offered was more compelling than any pittance of reality the outside world could offer.

He spun in a greenish ethereal mist, high above the earth, diving in abandon to the depths of the ugly city, rising up unscathed to court the angels watching above, danced through the clouds playing peek-a-boo with the sun and finally stood swathed in the silver light of the moon, letting his shadow fall long and strange on the world below. It had lied to, loved, hurt and bewitched him.

Her smiling photo lay cracked and shattered on the floor.

She emerged from the photo, in a million real colours, and smiled at him. Her fingers brushed past his, tempting, tantalizing. She was in black and white now, and earth and green then, blue and silver next, her eyes sparked like clear water and her hair danced light on her shoulders when she moved. She reached out to him, and oh, so tantalizingly close but he could not reach out to her… he was free, and bound, but wait… now, she was an animation, she was a queen in a tiara and an azure silk gown and she danced, oh, how she danced, it lifted his shattered heart to see her dance so fast, faster and faster but oh the real her would never again dance like this, it broke his heart, spinning so fast she was a blur….

The blur spiraled into a ghost town that he could see from his green mist above. In pitiful age worn poverty struck colour he saw the houses and the roads, the people and the shops. His mother and his father, colours mismatched and hues faded. A cotton sari folded neatly on an armchair. There was sound now, painful, painful sound searing through his soul, voices that were never meant to be raised, words never to be uttered, all resounding inside his head, secrets never meant to be revealed, all in agonizing clarity and absolutely distinct, unmistakable.

There were sobs, then vision was blurred, everything was distorted, he could taste the salt, even now, the salt, not in the dal, not in the fresh rotis, he could taste the wheat, now he could taste the alcohol, he could taste it now, acidic, warming, burning. He could see again the courtroom, forbidding and decisive, endless time in the courtroom, an eternity, and disappointment crashing down like thunder, thunder, and rain washing away the tears but leaving a void, emptiness and a hollow racking dry sob that wrings everything out of you….

Left with nothing but the custody of her two children. Nowhere to send them, nothing to feed them. Yet, they had survived, grown, and she had died happy. Back then there was nothing, but they had the future that held everything to live for… but now, now was the future, and the future now held nothing…

He smelt her perfume on his skin, on his lips, on his neck, he felt her hair… he felt it, yes, so soft, smooth, and baby skin, fresh roti, the wheat in their fields, the earth, the salt of the earth…. Freshly mown grass. Green, green freshly cut grass. Gunshots, twenty one of them- each piercing the still air- Mother, can you hear them, they’re sending their son to you, he’s joining you now, leaving me alone now, all alone, weary, lost, Mother, I am numb, hear me, hear me, what am I going to do now… they give me the flag, I feel it, it is heavy, Brother, I don’t want it, but the flames are high now, they burn hot, and they dance, she dances too, she dances in fiery red and orange, in my arms, she dances alone, she spins, she dances in white, she will marry tomorrow, he’s a rich man, good family, but will she dance like your fire, brother, there is now rain, rain, it fuels your pyre. How, I don’t know. I’m all alone now, always have been. The white of my clothes is drenched, soaked in rain, but your fire does not go out, you will not come back to life… I can’t feel too much now, the rain is stripping me of tears and leaving me hollow with an ache… oh this agonizing ache, this pain… mother, you sing, and my brother, he talks… oh, she laughs, so sweetly she laughs… I can hear nothing else… The visions are faster now. I smell grass… a flower… discontent, betrayal, and I taste… her lips, dal, salt…bitter, bitter blue pills, mother… blood…

The cloud slowly begins to dissolve, the fog fades as the green mist spins faster and faster. He himself spins faster and faster, the links on his soul breaking, shattering, flying into nothingness. The shadow is long, but getting shorter now. His senses shut down.

The last to go, a million, myriad colours of light in my head, in my eyes, visceral, blinding, revealing, realizing…this is where… heaven or hell, life or death, love or hate… body or soul… this, this light... nothing else, only light everywhere… no sensation, only light…. Then… only dark.

Apocrypha, Part I

NOTE::

The characters or the theme bear absolutely no resemblance to my friends/family/acquaintances. The following story is entirely a part of my imagination. Please excuse the profanity.
Thanks.


The changing colors of the television screen reflected off the polished metal-and-glass display case and caught her eye more often than the television screen itself. Her eyes defocused often behind her glasses as she drifted in and out of the reality in her apartment on the 9th floor. The glazed look the defocusing lent her face often made her friends and family suspect she was on drugs and they often secretly discussed how to get her off them. She was slightly surprised when her brother hinted strongly about the inadvisability of drugs at such a vulnerable age, and assumed he was soliloquizing. She suggested a good rehab center and advised him not to tell their parents he was on drugs. He’d stared at her blankly. Too far gone to be helped, she’d shrugged, and had walked away leaving him confused and scratching his head.


A woman in a pink salwar-kameez was shrieking about the current cold wave killing hundreds in North India and she focused on the television screen, giving credence to the fact that the woman may actually know what she was talking about. Most people around her didn’t know what they were talking about, or doing. It seemed to be the latest fad, doing things blindly on impulse, without thinking, leaving the brain in cold storage to be used by generations to come. Maybe they were compensating the children of the future for the gas deficiency by leaving them their unused brains. She really couldn’t account for the fact that most of the people she came in contact with had had lobotomies with magnificently concealed stitches, otherwise. The woman in pink, for example- she looked like a normal person, quite warm, with a pink Cashmere sweater and silk scarf to match- without severe cerebral paralysis or some other such obscure mental disorder, and yet she continued forming words with no meaning while the cameraman zoomed into a shot of a shivering, waist-upwards naked pre-teen boy who had probably been dragged out of the comparative warmth of his hut to stand in the biting cold winds to provide the real-time TV effect for the millions of viewers huddled up in blankets with warm coffee.


Suddenly the woman in pink metamorphosed into an impossibly round, fat-bottomed, tragic little politician who was made fatter if such a thing were possible by the multiple sweaters and shawls that looked expensively warm, who spoke in a high, pathetic little whine about how his hands were tied and how much he was trying to do for the people who were suffering from the cold. She nodded firmly. His hands were tied inexorably to the woolen gloves that held a steaming cup of coffee. The phone rang somewhere in the vicinity and she reached out to pick it up.

“Yes.”
“Hello? We’re stuck in the rain. We’ll be an hour late. I just called to tell you so you wouldn’t get worried.” Her mother said.
“Thank you.”
“What? Oh. Yes, Yes, I suppose. We’ll bring dinner.” her mom said, a little disconcerted.
“Thank you.” She hung up.


‘She gets stranger day by day.’ her mother would be telling her father who had stopped listening to anything his family said about fifteen years ago. Not because nothing they said had any intellectual relevance any more, but because he had more or less lost the ability to comprehend anything beyond his opinion. Her brother was the universally accepted angel in the family, the boy wonder who had a smile and a kind word for everyone… everyone that mattered. He had been born with the unnatural capacity to identify people and things that were of consequence to him and his material future. She, closer to his age and able to see things her parents turned a blind eye to, knew that ‘universally accepted angel’ was a misnomer and ‘unacknowledged ass’ would be a better description.


And herself? The Strange. Always sarcastic, critical, smart-ass, uncaring, selfish. She smiled to herself when she realized how hollow the words sounded in her head. They often had no meaning any more- sentences were rarely much more than words strung together, and words had never been too much more than letters combined to sound good. Of course, there were exceptions. Just as the words fuck off sounded so perfectly rhythmic, in resonance with the emotion that the word generated, poodle was such a silly-sounding word, and she felt, even had a derogatory connotation to the dog in question. Of course, she’d come to lose any feelings generated with describing herself that way. It was just how others described her, and given the amount of intelligence she credited others with, it was probably pointless to take their description. Until a while ago, she rather felt happy about being categorized cynical, critical and uncaring. It rather distinguished her from the other positive, encouraging and altruistic personalities that her immediate social circle seemed to be made up of.
But again, once she realized they had no idea what they were talking about, she realized she probably wasn’t critical or cynical at all. After all, they were just tossing words around probably because substituting ‘effing bitch’ in place of all the adjectives above would be politically incorrect. She didn’t like being called selfish, though. Even though it seemed to others to fit well in with her character, she thought selfishness characteristic of a degenerate organism. Parasitic behavior was inexcusable in a higher evolved body like man, and every action that was selfish was one step closer to unmasking oneself to reveal the unicellular organism within the human exterior. Of course, that was debatable. Man was taking definitive steps towards de-evolving back into an animal.


She reflected with a grin that the docile sheep was the preferred morph. And not all men were becoming simple sheep, but often wolves in sheep’s clothing. Ha. At least the sheep had the guts to be its brainless fluffy self. Was intelligence and being one thought quicker than the next person the most critical thing in the world? Couldn’t simple redneck values or emotions exist that weren’t classified by supercilious neo-Freudians into belonging to the id, ego and superego?


She turned the television off and headed directly to the terrace. It was dark and wet as expected, and was extremely windy. She blew air out steadily and watched the raindrops distort her white, cold breath. The feeling of standing eighteen floors elevated above the road traffic and watching her breath-dissolved drops fall down into eternity below was exhilarating. She leaned back slightly into the open sky and watched the dark rain clouds as the drops hit her face and hair heavily and streamed down her body, drenching her slowly but to the bone. The wind was strong and blew her wet hair away from her face and body, fanning her cold breath out into a mist above. She blew out again and stood submissively against the wind, her arms at her sides, her knees slightly bent, her face tilted back to feel the cold rain sting her, drench her body completely so wet that she could no longer feel her clothes on her skin. Her lips formed the golden words up to the sky above.

Fuck You.