Afterlife On Earth

I feel as if I'm in exile. The world around me looks like a post-apocalypse. Sky is spreading black. My face pale. I am looking for water, searchong for it everywhere. None drop I got to satisfy me. I felt very dry. The desert around me seemed less dry. The bare rocks everywhere, emitted heat energies which made my eyes swollen. I couldn't sit or lie down anywhere.

Suddenly I saw a big tall pole- abandoned. Wires all messed around it especially on top. Dah, I am not the only one wrecked here. Ah, the wind was stroking like a sand-paper. Too rough, too posh. All of a sudden I felt something behind me and turned, "Ah, a comrade!"

He came near me and we embraced each other. So warm. At last God gave me hope to live. But soon his embrace grew tighter and tighter. I felt like I was being strangled. In the blurring heat I can see his whole face, his teeth. He is not a man, not now, but he was before. Now he is just A WALKING DEAD. I opened my mouth and said, "Stop comrade, I'm not a man!"

Engaging Love 5: The Deviated Pole

June 10, 13, Mon

Today I met myself. Myself asked me if only then I got remembered him, when all left me!

No one was there, It was like trying to talk with a decayed corpse. Looking for light in the dark. Seeking children on swings after dusk. Searching old files after formatting. Fearing ghosts during daylight. Longing togetherness after breakup.

Love was not returning. Hope had gone threadbared, ragged and jarred with time. Murky uncharted waters of my life will not get known to anyone but meet its oblivion and get buried here between me and myself. 

                         -The End-

Engaging Love

Mar 10, 13, Sun

Some people have wit and confidence. But what that type of person requires? Can't he get what he wants? Does that man cares of someone other's wants and needs? Or he bends others desires to reach his own.

The gravity was according to its Law. Everything was going by the First Law of Newton. But hormonal disturbance made the physics of life an Uncertainty Principal.

Evolution of thoughts occured. Mutation of thoughts haunted me and my sleep cycle went worse. No one can predict where this relationship will go. My mind was drifting to find a proper refusal to this proposal of marriage which came all of a sudden from no where. Like a cosmic shower from another dimension. Against gravity, causing a change in momentum of my life.
She wanted an answer. I replied, "Later, after having some serious thinking". 

"Will wait for your call." 

Suddenly life became so much serious like a nuclear deal.

An Avant Garde Painting

All were dressed in white (in our culture it is white on this occasion). I was here as soon as I got the obituary. It was the funeral of my freinds foster father. All went over silently. With a heavy heart I reached home. Alone. I still can't get away the memory of the creepy grave silhouetted in the cemetary. The stones,the dust, the dried trees and the diminishing sunlight. I went into the kitchen and put some water to boil while I dined some mashed potatoes and lettuce. I was eating lazily. The light was dim in the room. Scary. I looked at the kettle on the burner, the flame of the burner looked black and spreading and reaching the graveyard. I took the kettle, poured the water and made some coffee. With the cup I went towards the window. It was quite dark outside. The coffee seemed more black. I felt fear. Nervous. I don't know but why I thought to jump out of the window. First I'll fall and then start flying in the sky like a fairy crossing all mundane boundaries, reaching infinity. Random thoughts kept coming my mind. I took a knife, pin and needle and went in the bathroom. I sat in front of the mirror, naked. Starting from the needle and reaching to the pin I started carving a grave on the back of my hand. Blood dripped. But I felt no pain, or I felt! Soon I engraved the whole scary cemetery and my hand became bloody. I tried hard to add detail and etched fear in it. Then with the knife I scibbled, scratched and painted the loathesome memory like a painting.

Translation

Nov, 2002

Rukhsar was a girl next door. She lived in an other backward society with a general forward thinking. Hated her environment. She was 19 years old and I was just 13. A six years age gap but yet we were good freinds. She never acted like a neighbourhood sister. She always treated me as a freind as she had a modern thinking. It felt good.

I was fascinated to her because she loved books. She always wanted to learn english but she was a girl, a muslim and financialy weak. So she has has to satisfy herself with a hindi- urdu medium government college. Enligh medium school creates money problems, co- ed problems, skirt problems, religious problems and family problems. A muslim girl should be in burkha, they say. Who? Her parents, society and religion.

They say a girl should only learn sewing, cooking, home science, arts and religious texts. And yes literature, thank God they permitted literature to girls!

Anyway she had 2,3 Shakespeare books which were one page english- one page hindi texts. And in the same way she read Milton and Byron. She had plenty of story books and novels in Urdu. She was not good in studies at her school but always dreamt of living the lives of the characters in those novels. I borrowed books from her and read the english parts. One day I told her that these english parts are more richer than their hindi translations.

"I know, but how can I help it and I am happy with it. At least I am able to grasp the very soul of Miltons and Voltaires verses. But someday I'll explore their richness of the language. Their style of expressing... " she stopped in the midst and lost in dreams.

"Expressing what?" I asked.

"Oh, you wont understand!"

"And why so?"

"You are too young."

"Oh, shut up I know english well."

"My dear, you may know english well, but yet you can't grasp the concept, the soul of a phrase. Look, ok tell me the meaning of this line:-
'He looked at Raina, and she blushed in shame.'
yes tell."

I thought and replied, "What! a man looks a woman named Raina and just blushed in shame. That's it!"

"And why she blushed with shame?" she asked.

"Maybe she has commited something wrong any crime."

"And my dear what is that 'crime'?" she smiled.

"I don't know, it is not mentioned here, tell me!"

"Oh, you can understand it yourself once you grow mature enough." she pinched on my cheek and lost in books. I returned home.

I wrecked my brain and oh yes I knew! I knew that that crime was 'love'. And she wanted to read Miltons style of expressing 'love' in it's poems. But what's so special in this word, 'love'!