Motionless

"Is there anything else you would like to tell me?" asked Dr. Mary.

"Our office is on the platform facing the tracks. We shifted to this one a few months back. There is a glass window between our desk and the platform. Its a one-way see-through tinted glass; so, we can see the passers-by on the station but nobody can see us. Most travellers used the glass pane as a mirror to see themselves. When John had joined the office, he used to get startled by the sight of the onlookers but with time, like all of us, he got used to it. And recently, he even started gazing back at them. I just remembered this because when I saw his picture in the newspaper, the staring eyes reminded me of how he used to stare at the travellers. He was a gentle, reticent and good man."

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"How is Rita, Dr. Mary?"
"She is doing well. I have succeeded, after a long time, in making her write. She has kept a diary and every now and then she writes about her past."

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He never spoke much. He had a rigid routine and his needs almost never changed. After so many years of living together, it had become completely unnecessary for us to talk. I knew what he wanted at any given second of the day. He seemed content with his life. He never made any attempts to improve it and never complained. He had no friends.

The stares began a few months back. I woke up one day to see him sitting beside me and staring intensely at me. I was completely shaken. It was an icy cold lifeless stare. I shrunk away from him and got out of bed. His eyes didn't move, he didn't budge. I slowly walked to him and shook him. He looked at me, smiled like nothing unusual had happened. I asked him what the matter was and he just said "I was lost in thought."

Then slowly it felt as though he became completely oblivious to his surroundings. He began staring at people as though they didn't exist. When my friends visited us, he would not notice them entering or hugging me and even after they sat down around us, he would be mute and staring at the wall or at the door. He had to be shaken out of his morbid reverie.

So many times, I spoke to him for five or ten minutes thinking he was there talking to me, but he was not. Only after he was shaken and explicitly told that I was talking to him, would he listen and participate.

He looked stoned (he wasn't). He only drank a little and perhaps it was only then that he was merrier than usual. When I asked him about it, he said he didn't feel any change in himself. It was as though people around him had stopped existing for him and he had to be consciously made aware of the fact. Movement, sounds, smells - nothing could reach him any more.

I couldn't stand the eerie transformation. He was a dead body, a zombie. He was inert, motionless. And his eyes, that vacant stare was the gaze of death. It had an unchallengeable, callous stillness that chilled my bones every time I saw him.

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Rita Anthony, a 45 year old woman was found sobbing in a pool of blood in her house at 34, Lessing Gardens, this morning. Beside her was the hacked body of her husband, John Anthony, an officer at the local Railway Station. Her neighbours had heard her screams early in the morning and informed the police. The police forced the door open to enter the house. Rita surrendered herself willingly and when questioned, said "Yes, I cut him into five pieces with that", pointing at the axe that was found beside the dead body. When asked for the reason, she said "I couldn't stand him any more." She refused to speak further and has been silent and morose. Sergeant Edward King and Dr. Mary Thomas have been assigned to the case and Mrs. Anthony is in solitary confinement at the Sherwood Psychiatric Centre.

The Speaking Tree

My restless, jittery mind has picked up several distractions in the last few hours in vain.
I have tried and discarded most of man's toys available to me.
What remains is pain, listlessness, a stark desolation.

The covers of several books stare at me from my table.
One shows a tree, its long ramified branches shorn of all leaves.
It stands in dark desperation braving the onslaught of a powdery wind.
The wind wears a blanket of snow and marauds the land.
It shows a shadowy glimpse of other trees far away,
'Are we rooted so deep that we can never come together?,' I hear the tree speak in my hallucination.
The land ahead is white but not white enough to conceal the withering decay of its soul.

The inertia of my moribund existence is terrible.
I look and I do not want to see.
I hear and I do not want to listen.
I think and I do not want to live.
My memories and my dreams meet, clash and destroy each other.
There is nothing behind and nothing beyond.
The weary, frightening path that joins the past to the future wants to fall apart but goes on and on.
'O spring, O sun, where are you?'

from White Fang by Jack London

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

Many fall

With a strident yell, I fell off the edge of a cliff and felt my heart thumping out of control as the air pushed me, with increasing anger, miles downward into a thick darkness.

My eyes were closed and limbs were outstretched on what felt like curved surfaces. My head, turned to a side, was flattened against a sphere. My eyelids shivered and opened a little and shut again. Consciousness was around me, not inside and was about to leave but it felt like I woke up too soon, caught it by its trailing strings and was swallowing it back into myself. I became aware of my body in parts. My arms and legs appeared slowly. I could see that I could see again. It was white all around, everything was still.

Sight and movement felt novel, exciting. For a long time I just moved and observed my fingers and toes and all the joints of my body. I looked around and found gigantic white spheres all around and found myself in the gap between six spheres - two above, two below, one ahead and another behind. There was space between the spheres for me to walk - as though a path had been created. My mind was completely blank. I had no thoughts, no memories, no knowledge. Feelings - strange and new - were emerging.

I began moving in the world of spheres. Each touch felt the same curvature, the same glassiness of the surface and the same bright white rays from every sphere. I was walking on spheres and the path went on endlessly, jumping from sphere to sphere always finding more on every side.

After a while I saw a blurred image in the white light. I strained my eyes to see clearly. Bit by bit, the image grew to completion - large and alive. The creamy white light carved out the image of single female breast. Above the breast was a big, uneven forehead of a woman. A man was making love to the breast and the forehead. I went closer and saw the man from behind. The breast was as big as the man and the man was lying over the breast and kissing the forehead. I went closer and bumped into the surface of a sphere. I realized that the man, the forehead and the breast were inside the sphere.

I moved away and saw that inside each sphere there was an image occupying the entire sphere. The whiteness of the spheres all around were getting replaced by the colors inside. A bright red sphere drew me closer to itself. I saw a small black oval bud that had not yet blossomed. A swarm of bees was hovering around the bud trying to open the flower. The swarm formed a cylindrical shape and started attacking the bud like one single log of wood. Fresh red blood, dripping from every bee, had filled the sphere.

These sights were pure images and I could not identify what I saw with any system of concepts or language. I didn't know what I was seeing - I just knew that I could see. My mind was slowly buzzing into a state of convoluted activity. Images dug up memories and sounds. I started uttering sounds, meaningless sounds. I was still staring at the trickling redness when I uttered "beeeeeee..." and the sound of 'e' revolved around the spheres and kept hitting me as the bees were rhythmically trying to force into the bud. A vague, rusty associative memory between the image and the sound I just uttered was forming.

Every image was different and yet every image was inherently spherical. The world filled with so many different colors and objects seemed to have just one shape when touched: what I felt with my hands was just a spherical glassiness everywhere.

I walked ahead and saw more and more large images within spheres - a tuft of black hair dropping to one side with a few white strands, the legs of a farmer ploughing a barren desert, waves of the sea lapping the striped back of a woman, a glowing yellow sun setting itself behind a razor's edge, nimble fingers caressing a pair of hands, a small dark umbra of darkness and a penumbra filled with skin stretch marks, lips locked into each other kissing and starving and putrefying into a pink gangrene, a window of a bus intermittently flashing lights on an enchanted face, a slimy snail shaped like a human ear in orgasms of joy, foam filled hands scrubbing and laughing, a spine tickled into jerky movements, a mouth being fed pages of a novel, large eyes surrounded by blackness and filled with tears, two shadows walking in circles around the moon, blind eyes absorbing endless expanses of throbbing skin......

Words were rushing into my head and I was yelling them out in a nonsensical stream of babble. I ran between the images and yelled "haaaaaaaaair", "leeeeeegs", "feeeeengers", "peeeeeenk",... stretching out the vowels and reveling in the formation of my mental associations as they emerged from my clouded mind.

Suddenly I saw someone looking at me - was she inside a sphere or outside? The word 'mirage' flashed in my head, I yelled out "meeeerage" and pursued the figure. Catching glimpses of her now and then, I kept running between those images inside the spheres trying to find the image outside the spheres.

Then, with a roaring sound, the spheres started melting. The images inside started acquiring life. The sounds from every sphere filled the air with a deafening noise. At the same time all the spheres also started coalescing. The entire world was melting and fusing around me. I was at the center of a tremendous vortex. The woman I was seeking began to form from the melting and coagulation of everything I had just seen. She had been inside each one of the spheres. And now she was congealing inside me. I was also melting and fusing with every image.

I was not outside anymore. There was no outside anymore. There was no inside either.

Vortex of discontent

Another evening is dying a slow death. The gloomy sky is blending into the gray mountains. The wind reminds me of a naughty child in search of an elusive treasure. The trees are mildly amused at its playfulness. The buildings stand callous and sombre.

I can feel a dull silence emerging from my gut. A void that is wanting to be filled, an unidentifiable restlessness. I feel like an empty earthen pot that yearns to be filled but refuses to fill itself with anything around. Like a dysfunctional digestive tract that vomits what it consumes: it starves seeking nourishment, dies seeking life.

I fill the void with words whose impotence mocks my pen. Every form that this ink assumes deforms its intention. This is an exercise in futility. The arrow that misses its mark conveys an intent that is frivolous.

A desire, a quest fulfilled only by a conquest. A future, a dream that invades the present. A word, a form that colors a dormant darkness.

Existence is a mould for disharmony. Its violations are defects in its design. The aberrations isolate themselves with an immutable hope. A hope that is abstract - formless, since it defies existence. Is it a self-absorption that is so vain that it fails to see its solipsism?

the metamorphosis

A sparkle of sunlight, a sudden flash
A warmth within, a feeling in sight
A flicker of a flame kindled by blood
A thought-enveloped mutiny of desires

It grew, it spread, mutated by breath
Burning and raging and embracing death
How was it born? When did it transform?
Why did it sear the flesh it fed on?

The first letter in a string

“I can’t think. There are too many images tossing about in my mind. I can’t see clearly. The afternoon sunlight is blinding. There’s a desolate road on the right. There are no people. Dead faces - faces that have no meaning in my life any more. This road is my life now. Oh, my bloody itchy legs. Damn my leprous skin. I am surrounded by them – strangers - and I want none, I can see none. Aah! The acid is surging into my neck now. This house looks like mine. Looks like the house that I once had. What’s this tinkling sound? Three rupees. Why did I lose today’s game? The brandy was good – worth my last note. Why am I so restless? Its all so disgusting, so ridiculous. Look at this leaf that falls from this monstrous tree on my bruised shoulder. I want to look at my eyes, strained, burning, teary eyes.”

A dog was lying in the shade. It was a puppy that was on the threshold of becoming an adult. A man with ragged clothes was walking on the road. He had a dreamy look and would occasionally stop and look at the surroundings with vacant eyes. He looked completely absorbed in himself. His demeanor bespoke a terrible loss, a pensive, pathetic sorrow. Absent-mindedly he stepped on the dog’s tail. The sudden disturbance irritated the dog. It yelped and angrily sunk its teeth into the man’s leg – just above the ankle. What followed was an episode of shocking brutality.

The man bent on his knees and caught the neck of the dog with his large, swarthy hand. He rammed the head of the dog into the bark of the tree. The dog was yelping loudly and desperately attacking with its paws. The nails dug into his feet and legs and they were bleeding profusely. His red, livid face was shrieking with anger but his eyes were still vacant. They were not participating in this gruesome duel.

“How many more things do I have to face? This bloody creature…what right does it have to live? Why should it suffer this existence? Why can’t they just leave me alone? Bloody bastards, I’ll kill them all. Sickening morons – all of them. The villains, the plunderers – oh, this stupid dog, its stinking flesh. Ah, see the mashed flesh, the fresh blood. Society, evolution – what utter nonsense. Bloody scoundrel of a dog – why did you bite me?”

His left hand found a large stone. His right hand was still clutching the neck of the suffocating dog and muffling its cries. The stone pounded on the dog’s head till it was thoroughly smashed. The ears bled, the eyes bled, the teeth cracked, the skull cracked. Pools of blood surrounded lumps of scattered pulp of the dog’s flesh. The fidgety limbs came to a halt. The man released the dog’s neck and stood up. He jumped on the body of the dog kicking it with vicious force. With every kick his angry yells became louder and more terrifying. The unconscious dog’s abdominal skin tore apart. The man was not looking at the dog. His face was tensed and stretched to the point of exploding. Tears were flowing from his bloody eyes that stared with melancholy at the clear sky.

Completely exhausted, he fell on the ground that stank of blood and flesh. A mangled body lay beside a battered mind.

On the way...

He could see a blur of whiteness on his side. There were shapes forming one large mass and then fragmenting into two or three or four blobs of white and then again uniting into one continuous shape. Only when the shapes came very near and bent over him, did he realize that they were nurses meticulously and anxiously exercising their skills. He had to concentrate hard to make sense of all his sensory perceptions. He slipped back to a daze with a welcome effortlessness. The rattling of the ambulance van became a rhythmic motion cradling his imaginations and moribund thoughts.

Lying down, he could see the balconies and terraces speeding past and the clouds scraping the electric poles. He could see the clouds funneling and trickling onto the roofs. He could see figures dancing on the electric lines – figures from the deepest recesses of his minds, faces he had long forgotten. Every figure balanced and danced perilously on the lines and on the balconies – some abruptly falling down and vanishing and others joining newer figures and forming an ever expanding procession that was following his thoughts, trying hard to keep pace.

Beams of light reflected from regions he would never see again sparkled in front of his eyes – each ray gained an indescribable strength, became an invigorating attempt, but in vain. The rays pushed the houses, uprooting them from their foundations. The houses merged with each other and the clouds pulled them from above. The houses formed images that were a jumble of his memories.

A ruined fort in a desolate desert became a temple with a mellifluous garden, an enchanting dew drop turned into a towering inferno. He heard whispers echoing from the sweetness of togetherness and shrieks from wild carousals. The gables turned to turrets, the soft sounds of flowing rivers melted into the smell of rain. It was a cumulating of sensations – sights, sounds, smells – that slowly faded into a blissful darkness.

BOO

The young boy was sitting with his elder sister on a wayside restaurant. It was a dry, dusty day. They were in the outskirts of the village and arid lands were all around. The vegetation consisted chiefly of dry, thorny shrubs. Once in a while, a vehicle passed them on the road - a state highway - moving towards the city. Every time a vehicle passed them, the dust on the road swirled up and appeared to dance with the tune of the engine, settling down slowly only after the vehicle was out of sight. The midday sun shone with blinding resplendence – not a speck of cloud was visible in the azure sky.

There was no one in the restaurant. After serving them, the waiter, who was also the cook and the owner, had gone to his house as his buffaloes could be heard bellowing for a long time. The boy was looking at her sister as she was scraping the last morsels of food in her plate. There was a playful wistfulness in his demeanor. The girl was chewing the food and the mingled dust without feeling either - apparently. Between two consecutive sessions of mastication, the girl was chattering incessantly in a drawling voice and the boy, without paying any heed was looking at her and day dreaming. He saw a thin red line appearing on her neck. The line was lengthening and encircling her neck. The girl went on chattering without the slightest hint of discomfort or pain.

The thin red line had become a full circle and a liquid – red in color – started oozing out from the line. Flies from the surrounding filth started buzzing around her neck – many of them sitting on that circle and devouring the liquid. The liquid was now flowing like a stream and her neck, below the cut, was completely red. It was like a grand necklace with flies carved into the design. She had been talking without a pause. Then, she let out a sigh, brought her hands near her ears, clasped her head with both her hands and with a soft groan, pulled her head off her body and placed it on the empty plate. A fountain of blood gushed out through her neck and her body fell backwards along with the chair. Blood streamed all over the place and mixed with the filth all around.

The head kept on chattering. The boy was delighted. He let out a yelp of joy, picked up the head of his sister, holding it with the short hair above and went out of the restaurant. He threw the head up lightly. The head went up in the air till his shoulder height and then started falling down. The boy gave a light kick and the head rolled forward into the field, scraping the shrubs as it moved. The boy steadily moved in the fields, kicking the head along. The head chattered incessantly.

Loneliness

The silence was intense and heavy. He stared at the dull, grey clouds, sitting by the window. He was alone in the house. The clouds were dark and gloomy. The stillness in the air was ominous and unnerving. There was stillness, numbness in his mind too. As though involuntarily, his hand hit a pen-stand on the table and the sound cut through the silence. It lasted for a few moments – the silence made every detail of the sound audible, visible. The sound rang in his mind again and again, echoing, trying to enter the innermost recesses of his mind, unflinching in its persistence. He could see the sound, colorfully entering every cusp of his soft, jelly like brain, the sound wringing his nerves from the ear to the brain and squeezing out a painful, poisonous fluid that he could see enter his system. The pain was excruciating and he held the pen-stand firmly in order to stop the incessant and incisive sound.

The pen stand was clasped firmly in his hands and slowly the sound stopped. With utmost caution and minimum sound, he got up from the chair and started walking. He was scared. He looked around and saw every item in his house with dread. He saw the fan rotating slowly above his head. He concentrated his attention on the rotation. The fan looked tired and yet it went on and on. The tender buzz of the motor fell on his ears. As he fixed his attention on the fan, the buzz became louder and louder and the agony in his ears started again. He saw the fan slowly descending – an inch with every turn. From the centre of the fan, a wet, sticky fluid started dripping – the drop could not reach him. Before the drop could touch him, it would become a bee that would buzz away out of the window. The fan started rotating faster and the drops of honey were falling faster. More and more bees were moving out of his window. The fan was also descending faster. He stood transfixed in fear and was dreading the moment when the drop would touch his face and sting him. The next drop became a bee only one inch away from his face. He had turned to ice. The next drop emerged from the fan and started falling – he could see its trajectory with utmost clarity. The drop shaped like an almond, the cohesive forces keeping the molecules together, the air around it applying pressure on the drop, the breeze of the fan swaying it, the dust particles that were being displaced, the force of gravity between the drop and every other mass on earth, the passage of light through the drop and the golden color – he could perceive everything. The drop was moving straight towards his face and then just before touching his forehead, it moved along the contour of his face and went into his right ear. “No,” he gave out a blood-curdling yell, “Grandma had asked me to put oil and not honey.” He lunged to the switch board to switch off the fan and he could feel his entire house, every entity in his house vibrating with the sound of his yell. The fan was switched off and he could see the fan – silent and benign – hanging from the ceiling.

His grandmother had died 3 years ago; his grandfather, a year later. He scarcely remembered their faces. But he used to have sudden flashes of memory when he would recall their most insignificant words.
He looked around the house again with the same alertness of body and numbness of mind. He moved out of his room and saw the Tiffin box lying on the table in the drawing room. He had never given a thought to his food. Everyday, three meals used to reach his house without fail and he used eat them perfunctorily. He didn’t know who would bring them, how or why. It never occurred to him that he should think about it. (Perhaps, his mother had arranged for it when she was in the hospital before her death. His father, of course, wouldn’t have had the opportunity since his life had ended abruptly in an accident 10 years back.) He had always liked his solitude and the feeblest sound had always disturbed him, agitating him beyond his patience. He had removed all sources of sound in his house – the telephone, the radio, the television, the sound of the external world. He kept his windows closed at all times except in the sepulchral silence of the nights and he had not seen a human being since the death of his mother.

He had none for his company but for the sounds in his life. He was aware of every sound in his daily life – the sound of his urine on the toilet pan, the sound of the water trickling from the tap, the sound of the curtains brushing the wall, the sound of the switches, the sound of the breeze moving through various objects in the house, the sound of the clock ticking, the sound of papers flapping, the sound of beetles in the dead of the night, the sound of a distant automobile horn, the sound of the creaking doors, the sound of his breathing, the sound of his teeth chattering in the cold, the sound of his swallowing and even the sound of his feet on the floor. He lived with them, and yet despised them. Because he keenly observed nothing but these sounds, they were larger than life and louder than they usually are to others. In fact, he could also hear what others couldn’t. He knew every sound intimately. In his world, a sound had life, it had a shape that he could see, he could touch and feel the texture of every sound and what he heard would always be nothing but a miserable and maddening agony to his mind. They constantly disturbed his mental peace by intruding in his life. And alas, he could never get rid of them.

The box lay on the table, motionless. Its unobtrusiveness pleased him. He went to the kitchen to get a plate and some water. Moving slowly and feeling everything in his house, he reached the kitchen. Suddenly, he saw the figure of his mother standing by the stove, placing the whistle on the pressure cooker. He was stunned to see the whistle there for he knew that the shrill noise will rapaciously claw his ears apart in a few minutes. In his fear, he looked helplessly at the chimera of his mother. His mother was about to utter a word when he jumped forward to cup her mouth. His mother vanished with the pressure cooker from his world and he saw the empty stove with some knives hanging above. The past, the present and the impossible were inextricably woven in his mind.

Tranquility was restored and he gazed at the knives vacantly. He saw them growing into swords and piercing into the stove. He saw it expanding and contracting and with each expansion it was cutting the gas pipe that connected the cylinder to the stove. The cylinder was empty and there was no smell of gas. He saw the shreds of the pipe on the floor. They were cozily embedded in the heavy layer of dust on the floor. He saw the knife in his hand, with a changed shape. The knife was smiling at him since the blade of the knife had curved a little too much. He returned the smile. The cold breeze of winter wafted slowly into the kitchen and the knife was shivering. He saw all the containers in the kitchen shivering, chattering in the cold. He walked back to his room and brought a blanket to cover all the containers. He then kissed a few of the containers good night – they were his favorite since his childhood. (They were his favorite because of their content but he could not recall that.)

He finished his dinner and went back to his bedroom. He wanted to sleep but didn’t see his blanket. Without that, he could not sleep. He tip-toed back to the kitchen and was pleased to see the blanket. He climbed into the shelf and slept with his favorite containers. He closed the door of the shelf lest the containers would fall and hurt themselves. The damp, suffocating air of the shelf was noiseless and he slept peacefully.

In his sleep, his face was tranquil, completely devoid of fear and agitation.