CHAPTER 1
I used to be a sea once. I loved my grandeur and the misery of tiny clueless rivers falling into me against their will. Their offerings made me meaner and hungrier . I sank ships and flattened fishing villages when they irritated me and created huge waves to teach a lesson to the audacious surfers and holidaying families who tested my shores with the intention of taking me back as souvenir. I was never really at peace with myself but nor is a real sea. What used to amuse me though, is the fact that in spite of all my fury and fatalism, they loved me, even worshipped me at times and always returned with fresh ships, villages and surfboards as offerings. After all, people need a god even when he does satanic things to them. I must admit this warmth elated me because even a god needs to be loved sometimes.
Now I am reduced to a tiny bubble. The sea in it’s entire opulence have abandoned me very slowly and secretly, maybe while I was sleeping. I was both clueless and shocked because I considered it mine. I really believed that it will live in me till my death and only when my body will disintegrate to ashes and it will have no place to live in , it will leave me heavily. But it left much before that and without it I am so tiny that I am allowed to exist unbothered.
Oh No no…! It’s not like what it seems. I am not making up a melodramatic plea to get my sea back. I will never do that simply because my years with the sea have taught me one thing – begging will never get you what you want , on the contrary indifference can. Anyways if my sea can live without me , I can also live without it. Every man is a story, with or without sea and so am I.
My story began much before I was born because it’s a story of a parasite that I always was whether I had a sea to feed on or not. My mother was the first one of my victims, sheltering my cowered genome in her womb and feeding it with her life and blood through an umbilical chord. When I left the womb, I found the entire world with everyone who was shot, crucified , honored or forgotten carrying a million different umbilical chords to feed me with their tales. I drank blood of Jews in concentration camps and wine of dictators in beer halls. I smoked weed with rock and roll hippies and discussed parables with prophets. I shed tears for the hungry continent of Africa and dreamed for extravagant orgies of Las Vegas. After so much drinking , dreaming and feeding on the world I now imitate it so much that I am unable to differentiate myself from it. After so many mutations I am not me any longer but an encyclopedia of history, a relic of human civilization.
“Is he alive ? ”
Yes I am so far ….miraculously. But death is just a few minutes away.
“Quick ! call someone . ”
Leave me alone and I would be fine. I need to talk to my insanity. I need to ask it some questions , the same ones you promised to answer but never actually did. Maybe absurdity fairs better than logic in giving answers. Absurdity , yes the same thing sane people like you are so much scared of but it’s the only occupation I have nowadays unlike many of my kind who occupy themselves by scratching their skin, counting sparrows for hours or mumbling nursery rhymes they learnt in school. I can make out their tricks also. Behind their childish pretenses they all are constantly thinking. Thinking about unanswerable questions like will I know that I have died after my death, is it a sin to fantasize about your own sister and yes of course, who the hell is god ? Trust me, mad people think much more than you guys do and that’s precisely the reason why they are mad.
“Let’s get this bugger upstairs”
So you won’t let me die in peace. And why are you moving my body without my consent. Wait! I can’t face you this way as I am naked. First let me wear some lucidity and then maybe we can sit down and talk.
“quick ! Someone call Dr. Swaminathan. The patient is coming to senses .”
More voices , more panic
“how the hell he got here ? ”
“what was he thinking ?”
Why did he do it ?”
“why Miss Rangan ! don’t you know that he is nuts ”
“somebody check his pulse !”
Slow down , slow down please as I am also slowing down with every passing moment. You are talking too fast to be audible and all I can hear is an audio cassette playing at double it’s speed. But I know it’s all my fault. I am in no hurry to decipher the noises, to open my eyes or even to breathe. Is this how death feels like to everyone ? Maybe we never actually die but rather become deaf, dumb, blind and numb simultaneously , too oblivious to breathe and too tired to move. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to die and this was not a suicide attempt but the closeness of death with all it’s promises of answers is tempting me into thinking that maybe death is not such a bad idea after all. I am already dreaming the infinite fields where I can lay down in simple perfection of absolute silence.
Somebody has opened my eyes forcibly with his fingers and I can see it is Dr. Swaminathan , the almanac of eccentricities arising out of mental illnesses. He has witnessed too many cracked skulls in his life that now he finds us perfectly normal beings , our bizarre actions justified as response to our desires to hide the cracks.
“ hello M ”
Did he really said hello ? or is it his smile that conveyed the word for me ? No one says hello to a dying man but then no one smiles to a dying man either. Maybe I am paranoid because now when I have closed my eyes again I can see the entire world lining up in front of me , all smiling. I can easily make out my father. He seems to be smiling his first serene smile ever as he knows that the melancholy which started with his birth will soon be over with my death. In his pensive mood once, while he was taking me to zoo , he told me –“ son, always remember. Never show your weakness to anyone , even to me. it will destroy you ” . I must have paid more attention to the old man because the moment I was revealed in entirety with all my fears, anxieties, desires and perversions to the world, I was sent to the asylum. I should have hid my madness.
I can’t figure out why my mother is smiling as she never smiles on good-byes. Maybe it’s a smile from the past when I used to be a good boy attached to her with an imaginary umbilical chord so that I don’t stray very far from her kitchen. I don’t have many smiles of her in my mind as she was always sad. She never told me the cause of her melancholy, maybe there wasn’t any and this enraged me more than anything in this world. I can never forgive her for her despair and she can never forgive me for what I have done to her in return.
There were many more people smiling whom I don’t recognize but there smiles suggest they all know me very well. Mostly friends and enemies, I guess. Overwhelmed by the warmth of this farewell gathering I myself opened my eyes smiling and saw puzzled faces all around me.
“Now what the hell is he smiling about ? ”
It’s comic how people react when they see a dying man. I caught a glimpse of Miss Rangan , the head nurse of the ward, who is running around frantically to get a machine started and connect it’s wires to me. Dr Swaminathan is violently waving his hand , asking for strange looking metallic objects that would have made perfect toys if they were made of plastic instead. One guy pierced a needle in my arm while another put a mask on my face . They all seemed like a bunch of lunatics to me.
Why I am not making any sense ? What has dragged me to the edge ? why have I died before my death ? Is it the longing for the sea or is it the smiling multitude that came to feast and raise toast to me on my big day ? or could it be her ? I don’t see her today. Maybe she is there but she isn’t smiling.
But I still remember the day she smiled at me. She was reading a book while I was busy with my whisky wondering what kind of girl comes alone and reads a book in a bar. She was drunk but not by the filled glass that lay abandoned on her table but by some mystical intoxication that cannot be served in a glass. She raised her head to look at me as if sensing my dilemma and smiled. I have seen many kinds of smiles in my life , inviting smiles, challenging smiles, ridiculing smiles , sensuous smiles, fake smiles , pretty smiles , ugly smiles but it wasn’t any of them. After all these years together she never told me what that smile was about. As I lay now cherishing my last moments of consciousness , I think I know the meaning of that uncanny smile that ruined both our lives.
No I am not talking about some girl I was in love with .I never wanted her to love me as love would have been too unnecessary and burdensome for both of us and I am grateful to her that she never actually did. What I wanted was acceptance. The kind of acceptance that strangers who have never seen or heard about each other have for each other. I wanted to be accepted without being analyzed. Yes . That smile was a smile of acceptance and I must admit that I would have missed her today if I wasn’t so close to death.
I have satiated all the desires of my life and in return they have led me to one final desire – the desire to die. These doctors are trying to allure me back to life, back to where I came from. But how can I go back now when I am so close to fulfilling my final desire. I can’t abandon death as it is my victory over my pain and my taunt on my pleasures. Death is our mockery of life.
