The setting sun had always seemed more beautiful to P_ than a rising one. He often thought about this while he sat alongside bustling roads watching the tired sun disappear sadly behind listless buildings. And then he used to rationalize this opinion of his to himself. The beginning, rise or creation of a thing, he thought, was something that is significant only in a retrospective sense. In the moment, it is generally absurd and meaningless if one thinks about it. It is really the end that determines the worth of anything. The all-encompassing end that has in it the meaning of everything that has been, has not been, could have been, or had to be. The end of something, he used to tell himself, is a practical and truthful outcome of the coalescence of all the activity and material things that surround, constitute, impact, or relate to it. What made him perceive it as beautiful was its completeness and impartiality.
In time he became subtly obsessed with this theory of his. He made himself watch dying insects. He bought packs of candles and watched each one of them burn till its end like reading a novel or listening to a story and then waited for it to burn out before summarizing its existence by the patterns of wax it left behind on the floor and the shapes he made out of the slender whiffs of smoke they gave off as their last signs of impactful existence. He, in his moments of seizure, made out that he realized these skewed thoughts and representations were in all probability useless and won’t lead him anywhere but usefulness was a concept he had liked to despise as often as he could. It vindicated his actions and inactions. Though in recent times he was getting weary of these rooms of thought of his in sporadic moments, he treasured them as his precious personal belongings. The beauty he had found in the stories of these candles was something he had given birth to. They were his stories since he had discovered them. And this made him treasure them all the more. Like his work of art. He decorated them with metaphors he would find in the streets watching people and things. And what was inevitable was that so much contemplation about the end of everything would lead his thoughts to that of his own. He reached a point one day where he decided to deliberately fantasize about his own end. How beautiful it would be. Like one thinks of his moments of love or matrimony in retrospect, he wondered about his moments of conclusion in foresight. And the beauty of them. After sometime he realized that it might be unusual for a person to try and fantasize about the beauty (and it was beauty, not magnificence which is commonplace of people to attribute to their end) of his own end. He rejoiced in the idea that something about him had become unusual. He decided to dedicate his life, in bits and pieces, to getting prepared for his own end. He realized that people generally are so overwhelmed by the awareness that their end is near that they are unable to manifest the beauty of it. The emotion,feeling and clairvoyance it accumulates and the meaning it gives to their life. It dawned on him that how meaningless anything would be if it did not have an end. Like the space. He resolved to think of all the possible ways he could die time and again so that when confronted he would be able to breathe it in like a moment to cherish even if only for a second. He imagined that if in that moment of his end he could fathom things in proper light it would give an all new meaning to his having existed. He thus imagined himself drowning and simulated the thoughts that would arise in his mind and how his having considered them would help him overcoming them. He interviewed people with such past experiences. He imagined himself dying in an accident or because of a disease. He sometimes even wrote about these ruminations to save himself from forgetting them. And he read and re-read these.
Apart from these spiralling self-catalogued thoughts and mannerisms his life went on as usual. No different to anybody from what it had been a week or a year earlier. He happened to pass through a time when his workplace remained closed for about a week and one day as he woke up he realized that for about that time he had seen only R_ and C_ around him. He began to find himself a part of their story somehow as the obtrusive glances and eye contacts became more frequent. He had begun getting comfortable with their presence like one does unconsciously with a ring in his finger. And of that unusual effort of his that he had contrived in relation to his own end, let it be said that after some months, though trying hard, there was one aspect he could not get used to. The possibility, though a ridiculously irrelevant one, that he might be murdered.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Chapter 3
One could expect that R_ would have too low self-esteem to hate anyone else, but it was not so. He hated P_. He had no reason that he could cite for hating him but he did tell C_ that he despised P_ because his shoes were always polished. “What kind of a person depends on the shine of his shoes for his self-respect?” he asked. “Well, most of us poor folks do. With our little prides and our big stomachs, we all have to. Because we don’t have your luxury of self-pity”, she replied. A heavy silence followed and then C_ continued in an affectionate tone, “How long will you continue like this? Does it feel good to wake up on the bathroom floors?”
Once upon a time, R_ had been in love with C_. Long before he had become the parasite that he now was. When what she did for him was not that mattered; her just being with him did. But love, he thought, was like a beautiful song. It is ecstasy only the first time you come across it. After that you keep listening to it in hope of getting high on it once again but you don’t. Soon it becomes a tool to keep out the noise. Then, like any other human invention, its worth can be measured in how it helps you and how cheap and convenient it is.
For sake of that love that once existed and out of gratitude for everything she had done for him, ever since, he agreed to work at the bookshop where she had got him a job. But he was making sacrifice a bit too big and he began to realize that soon. He was absolutely incapable of work and he felt a kind of pride in this shortcoming of his. He had only one real interest. Day-dreaming. To sit alone somewhere and think. He never felt that these thoughts had any obligation to be of any use to the body they arise out of. These thoughts did not need to derive meaning out of being applicable in worldly affairs. They didn’t even need to be attempted to be expressed or to be replicated in one’s actions. He had always been disgusted by everything a human body did. Sweating, shitting and secreting fluids were all too gross to be done without a strong reason. And building roads could ease these processes but not justify them. Only the thoughts that one thinks justify everything else one goes through.
He always occupied himself with issues far beyond his reach or concern. But whenever he was working, he lost his train of thoughts. He had never been lonely before but now he was lost. To add to it, he could not bear the smugness with which people detested him: as if being a more organized slave made them somehow superior to him. “At least you don’t spend your nights contemplating suicide now.”, C_ tried to convince him. She thought that to be able to sleep tight at night was a virtue. R_ never understood how this life was better. He could never be a slave and still be free.
But sleep he did. Till one day when he could sleep no more and he, somehow, held P_ responsible for everything. It is fortunate for impotent and bored people to have gods and devils to revolt against. Everyone needs to revolt against someone and for R_ it was P_. His nights were now revolving around the plans to kill P_. He planned and re-planned his murder. How would he kill him was important and what would he say to him while killing him was important too. Everything had to be thought of, everything had to be planned.
Once upon a time, R_ had been in love with C_. Long before he had become the parasite that he now was. When what she did for him was not that mattered; her just being with him did. But love, he thought, was like a beautiful song. It is ecstasy only the first time you come across it. After that you keep listening to it in hope of getting high on it once again but you don’t. Soon it becomes a tool to keep out the noise. Then, like any other human invention, its worth can be measured in how it helps you and how cheap and convenient it is.
For sake of that love that once existed and out of gratitude for everything she had done for him, ever since, he agreed to work at the bookshop where she had got him a job. But he was making sacrifice a bit too big and he began to realize that soon. He was absolutely incapable of work and he felt a kind of pride in this shortcoming of his. He had only one real interest. Day-dreaming. To sit alone somewhere and think. He never felt that these thoughts had any obligation to be of any use to the body they arise out of. These thoughts did not need to derive meaning out of being applicable in worldly affairs. They didn’t even need to be attempted to be expressed or to be replicated in one’s actions. He had always been disgusted by everything a human body did. Sweating, shitting and secreting fluids were all too gross to be done without a strong reason. And building roads could ease these processes but not justify them. Only the thoughts that one thinks justify everything else one goes through.
He always occupied himself with issues far beyond his reach or concern. But whenever he was working, he lost his train of thoughts. He had never been lonely before but now he was lost. To add to it, he could not bear the smugness with which people detested him: as if being a more organized slave made them somehow superior to him. “At least you don’t spend your nights contemplating suicide now.”, C_ tried to convince him. She thought that to be able to sleep tight at night was a virtue. R_ never understood how this life was better. He could never be a slave and still be free.
But sleep he did. Till one day when he could sleep no more and he, somehow, held P_ responsible for everything. It is fortunate for impotent and bored people to have gods and devils to revolt against. Everyone needs to revolt against someone and for R_ it was P_. His nights were now revolving around the plans to kill P_. He planned and re-planned his murder. How would he kill him was important and what would he say to him while killing him was important too. Everything had to be thought of, everything had to be planned.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Chapter 2
What surprised P_ was the ease with which R_ managed all this. He had been observing the guy next door for some days now. With a girlfriend as beautiful (and more) and all day to himself, what more can one wish for, he thought. It was a kind of life he imagined for himself sometimes, when he found himself alone, tired from work. He had used to masturbate off her fantasies until recently when she too, like every other female before her, had worn him out.
He was seen as a “decent” sort of boy. Everybody called him that and was good to him, though in a formal way. They also called him sincere at work though he knew he wasn’t, if ever there was someone. He often used to curse things around him noiselessly and stare at people with contempt like everybody else. His work required him at nights and that had somehow made him hate sleeping while it was dark. He now almost never used to sleep while it was still dark even when not at work. He sometimes used to sit and think about this propensity of his. It was probably because he preferred to remain actually awake rather than a moronic mechanical wakefulness that people forged during the day, he used to explain to himself. Night was like a wall that separated him from the rest of the world and his existence on that side. And he was in process of growing more and more fond of it. His moments of delusions and reveries. He hardly knew that he shared those nocturnal hours of wakefulness with his neighbour, which would, in days close ahead bring his life to a standstill.
Meanwhile, there was one thing about P_ that stood out. He had absolutely no doubt about the fact that he was ordinary. He was one of those extremely few people of this world who was rid of the illusion, hope, euphoria, whatever one might like to call it, that there was something different or extraordinary about him. He was at peace with the fact that he was here to tread the period of time between his birth and expiry like every other insect. A period of time no more meaningful than any other. He did not overemphasize his time or existence like the hyperbolic society. There was a time when he had come to hate it for all the unbridled chaos but eventually he grew over it and accepted that too as an indifferent occurrence on the other side of the wall. He had grown into peace with this fact and thus used to remain unruffled by most of the things happening around him. Also, he avoided women.
For reasons unclear to himself. He had never in his life been close to one since his mother in his premature childhood who had been dead long since. He had hardly talked to one in past few years and the more he stayed away, the more he tried to rationalize that it wasn’t necessary or of much consequence. He worked hard to believe it. After all the seeking and thinking he had done, all he desired was to die not thinking that there were things left undone but that their being done would have made no difference whatsoever and that the inconsequentiality of this world was the ultimate fact that superseded everything else.
That night just as he was about to leave for work, and had been outside to dispose of the trash he happened to cross C_ while she was returning like every other day. She was tired and his glimpse of her went unnoticed by either of them. Until some days later he recollected it.
He was seen as a “decent” sort of boy. Everybody called him that and was good to him, though in a formal way. They also called him sincere at work though he knew he wasn’t, if ever there was someone. He often used to curse things around him noiselessly and stare at people with contempt like everybody else. His work required him at nights and that had somehow made him hate sleeping while it was dark. He now almost never used to sleep while it was still dark even when not at work. He sometimes used to sit and think about this propensity of his. It was probably because he preferred to remain actually awake rather than a moronic mechanical wakefulness that people forged during the day, he used to explain to himself. Night was like a wall that separated him from the rest of the world and his existence on that side. And he was in process of growing more and more fond of it. His moments of delusions and reveries. He hardly knew that he shared those nocturnal hours of wakefulness with his neighbour, which would, in days close ahead bring his life to a standstill.
Meanwhile, there was one thing about P_ that stood out. He had absolutely no doubt about the fact that he was ordinary. He was one of those extremely few people of this world who was rid of the illusion, hope, euphoria, whatever one might like to call it, that there was something different or extraordinary about him. He was at peace with the fact that he was here to tread the period of time between his birth and expiry like every other insect. A period of time no more meaningful than any other. He did not overemphasize his time or existence like the hyperbolic society. There was a time when he had come to hate it for all the unbridled chaos but eventually he grew over it and accepted that too as an indifferent occurrence on the other side of the wall. He had grown into peace with this fact and thus used to remain unruffled by most of the things happening around him. Also, he avoided women.
For reasons unclear to himself. He had never in his life been close to one since his mother in his premature childhood who had been dead long since. He had hardly talked to one in past few years and the more he stayed away, the more he tried to rationalize that it wasn’t necessary or of much consequence. He worked hard to believe it. After all the seeking and thinking he had done, all he desired was to die not thinking that there were things left undone but that their being done would have made no difference whatsoever and that the inconsequentiality of this world was the ultimate fact that superseded everything else.
That night just as he was about to leave for work, and had been outside to dispose of the trash he happened to cross C_ while she was returning like every other day. She was tired and his glimpse of her went unnoticed by either of them. Until some days later he recollected it.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Chapter 1
R_ was living the proverbial “heaven on earth”. He had no money, no friends, no work and no ambition to find any of these. He lived in his girl friend’s house and fucked her to make a living. Other than that he watched TV, drank and smoked with whatever frequency he could afford to. Every day he would wake up to feel a kind of burden on himself. A burden to live through the day, waiting for it to end. When he fell asleep at night he felt a kind of nervousness because he knew he would have to wake up the next day. Often, he would lie awake in his bed, C_ sleeping next to him, with the tick-tock of the wall clock in background, thinking of his life and what was he doing with it. He would think a thought once and then repeat it over and over again altering a part or two in it till it sounded perfect to him. He would promise himself that he would find a work and a life from the next day. He would make plans of working hard and giving C_ the life she deserved. He would spend hours thinking of how he got into this mess. He would catch hold of something that someone had said sometime and start building theories around it. He would end up either furious or crying. He would still not go to sleep.
Have you, in a really bad dream, realized that it was just a dream and obtained solace only from the fact that you would wake up. R_'s life was like that. Perpetual boredom. And it just would not end. His only solace was the suicide he kept planning. The occasional optimism and his aversion to complicated undertakings kept him from attempting it.
One day, just after dark, he was sitting alone in his room because C_ was running late. He hadn’t had much to drink or smoke. The train of thoughts, though hard to trace back, had somehow started from imagining C_’s infidelities. Not that he cared much. He loved feeling sorry for himself and this just gave him another reason to. Anyways, lying on the couch with cheap colours and sound from the television filling up the otherwise dark and quiet room R_ was fantasizing all the male colleagues of her trying to seduce C_ and C_ playing games with all of them only to see them fight each other over her. He imagined C_ fucking her boss in his cabin. He grew more and more furious at his thoughts. He cursed C_ for being a slut. He cursed himself for being so impotent as to be unable to prevent this. All this while, C_ was trying hard to meet her deadlines doing her tiresome job. When she reached home, fighting the traffic and eyes of ogling men who kept rubbing against her in the bus, R_ awaited her with his accusations ready (he had practiced them in his mind, over and over again). They quarreled sharply as she undressed. She was too tired to placate him and in no mood to fight. Still she fought back only because she did not want him to feel neglected. In the end he walked out and she cooked, ate and went off to sleep.
When he came back he was hungry and he could not eat till he was on talking terms with her. He had that much self-respect left for himself. So he went and lied down next to her. He put his arms around her, holding her left breast and he kissed her on her neck, below her hair. He rubbed his penis against her thighs, and said softly, “I am sorry”. Once they had had sex and she was asleep, he walked to the kitchen and ate the cold food.
That night R_ kept sitting in his bed, C_ sleeping next to him, the clock doing its tick-tock. He lived a life of impotence which had no meaning. He thought how easy it could be to end all of this then and there. He walked to the bathroom and undid his razor to take out the blade. He sat in one corner of the bathroom holding the blade close to his left wrist. He just could not put it to it. For some reason, after having tried for some time, he gave up and started crying. He muted his crying deliberately as to not wake C_ up. As to why he started crying, he did not know. All the reasons had long ago ceased to exist. They had all dissolved into a kind of discomfort which only remained. That night it had amplified making him cry mutely in that corner of the bathroom.
Have you, in a really bad dream, realized that it was just a dream and obtained solace only from the fact that you would wake up. R_'s life was like that. Perpetual boredom. And it just would not end. His only solace was the suicide he kept planning. The occasional optimism and his aversion to complicated undertakings kept him from attempting it.
One day, just after dark, he was sitting alone in his room because C_ was running late. He hadn’t had much to drink or smoke. The train of thoughts, though hard to trace back, had somehow started from imagining C_’s infidelities. Not that he cared much. He loved feeling sorry for himself and this just gave him another reason to. Anyways, lying on the couch with cheap colours and sound from the television filling up the otherwise dark and quiet room R_ was fantasizing all the male colleagues of her trying to seduce C_ and C_ playing games with all of them only to see them fight each other over her. He imagined C_ fucking her boss in his cabin. He grew more and more furious at his thoughts. He cursed C_ for being a slut. He cursed himself for being so impotent as to be unable to prevent this. All this while, C_ was trying hard to meet her deadlines doing her tiresome job. When she reached home, fighting the traffic and eyes of ogling men who kept rubbing against her in the bus, R_ awaited her with his accusations ready (he had practiced them in his mind, over and over again). They quarreled sharply as she undressed. She was too tired to placate him and in no mood to fight. Still she fought back only because she did not want him to feel neglected. In the end he walked out and she cooked, ate and went off to sleep.
When he came back he was hungry and he could not eat till he was on talking terms with her. He had that much self-respect left for himself. So he went and lied down next to her. He put his arms around her, holding her left breast and he kissed her on her neck, below her hair. He rubbed his penis against her thighs, and said softly, “I am sorry”. Once they had had sex and she was asleep, he walked to the kitchen and ate the cold food.
That night R_ kept sitting in his bed, C_ sleeping next to him, the clock doing its tick-tock. He lived a life of impotence which had no meaning. He thought how easy it could be to end all of this then and there. He walked to the bathroom and undid his razor to take out the blade. He sat in one corner of the bathroom holding the blade close to his left wrist. He just could not put it to it. For some reason, after having tried for some time, he gave up and started crying. He muted his crying deliberately as to not wake C_ up. As to why he started crying, he did not know. All the reasons had long ago ceased to exist. They had all dissolved into a kind of discomfort which only remained. That night it had amplified making him cry mutely in that corner of the bathroom.
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