My grandfather has three children, and six grandchildren.

For quite some time, I was my grandfather's pet grandchild. Don't get me wrong, he loves all his grandchildren equally, but I was his first grandchild, and… Ok, I can't quite explain or qualify this. But I was.

And then, my cousin, Su, was born. This was when I was about 12, and firmly accustomed to being the cock of the walk. And I realized that my grandfather was talking about him all the time. And, of course, not quite realizing at the time that superannuation is in the nature of
things, I didn't like it at all. I liked Su, but I didn't like the fact that he existed, if that makes any sense.

I dealt with it, but it took me a long while.

Now Su has a brother, Vi. And when I went over to my grandparents' yesterday, everybody was clustered around Vi in the drawing room, and Su, I saw was sitting alone in the bedroom. No one noticed he wasn't around.

I could have told him it was going to happen eventually.

The worst thing about it is that I see his parents completely ignoring him. And it doesn't help that Vi is one of the cutest children I have ever seen. Everyone is in raptures over him.
I am no expert on family dynamics, but I realize that I am very lucky that after my sister was born, I still got a lot of time, from my Mom, my Dad, my grandparents, everyone. I was never made to feel completely overlooked.

And even though a few years ago, I quite desperately wanted the focus to shift away from Su, I would never have wished this on him.

Prologue: The City of Gold

The city was cold and dark. It was a thousand miles below the surface, where there was desert, and rock, and pitiless sun; and nothing else. Or so tradition said.

Far below the city in a chamber gouged out of the living rock sat a woman. She was clad in a shroud, and on her finger was the ring of the dead, the ring that was put on a person’s finger after death, just before the burial.

Though she was insulated from the city by an unspeakable weight of rock, she could see all that happened in every part of it. She was the spirit of the city.

The chamber she was in had no obvious source of light, and yet was diffusely illumined. She was on a slab of rock, the only thing the bare chamber contained. Above that slab was the opening of a long shaft, her one corporeal link with her city and its people. Along one side of the chamber was a sluggishly flowing stream- the blood of the city, it was called. The water was bitter, and dark- and always blood-warm. It was said that the stream would flow for as long as the spirit of the city remained within her chamber. And this water was the lifeblood of the city, and in its dark stream was what made the city prosperous, and her people rich: innumerable granules of gold that the stream brought from somewhere along its course in the rock.

The woman looked young, and her hair was long, and as black as a raven. As black, indeed, as the rock that surrounded her. But her hands were calloused and hard from constant contact with the rock.

There had been a spirit, for as long as the city had existed, imprisoned in that little bubble in the rock- and the city had existed for thousands of years. No one knew who had built the first tunnels, or indeed the last, since none of the tools the people of the city had now could make even a dent in that black rock. No one even knew if the ancestors of the people of the city had themselves hewed it out of the rock, or had found it empty and settled in it.

The city existed as a single tunnel, in a series of five rectangular spirals, one below the other, each turn of the great spiral tunnel connected to the ones above and the one below by shafts, which had rudimentary steps carved into them at intervals. And set along the walls of the tunnel were doors, which led to the chambers in which the people lived.

The end of the tunnel, at the termination of the last and lowest spiral was the Hall of the Dominus, the lord of the city, the master of much of the wealth the city contained. No one was allowed in that last chamber, without express permission, on pain of death. Because that is where the shaft connecting the spirit to the city opened, at the foot of the throne on which the Dominus sat. The walls of the hall were veined with gold, and there were torches all around, and guards who, it was said, never slept.

And so she waited, in her chamber alone, and tired. She watched the people of the city: their crowded marketplaces, the areas where they harvested the gold, the stifling, dangerous tunnels that connected them to other cities, much higher up, closer to the dangerous surface.
And sometimes she sang:
“In the city of gold, will be born the one,
Who will lead the child of man into the sun.”

It was an old couplet, part of the tradition of the city. Men said that it was an old wives tale. But the spirit knew what it meant, and she waited for the Golden One as time grew gnarled in the city of gold.

The ballad of the perfect Romance.

He was looking for another cause, something else that could be saved.
He was sitting under the twisted tree that grew beside the lake.
The twisted tree was company, and he told it what he craved.
And the sky was full of tangerines that hung upside down.

He was sitting there when she found him, she sang her siren song.
She told him he could be brave, now that she was there to be strong.
He told her to paint him on a canvas, so he’d remember just what he was.
He asked her to preserve this reality in her jar of cobweb silk.

Then the sun was in their eyes, and then it drifted away to the right,
They held each other as the day died, and as time was reborn as night.
The stars came out as hard little points, and hunkered down against the light.
And fires burnt on the horizon, where the others waited.

She was crying one day when he came to her, and he would not ask her why.
She cried into his shoulder, she sobbed for hours, and then she let her tears dry.
He knew he should have asked her why she had been crying.
She smiled at him, and she said, Thank you, for knowing not to ask.

He was writing symphonies in the street, and they saw, and ran to get her.
He is mad, they said, he is lying in the road, go to him, make him better.
She smiled, he won’t listen, she said, he is free, he doesn’t understand fetters.
She wouldn’t go, he has the soul of a poet, she told them all.

She never tried to reform him, she would never try to own his mind.
And he never tried to shield her, from truth, from life, or from the blind.
They were together until they were parted, and that was when they died.
And turtle doves bled feathers over their pyres.

The smoke rose high.

I want time to stop.

I want order. And quiet.

And long, cool draughts of rest, to fill my soul.

And long, quiet conversations where I do not need to be charming.

And days where I do not have to be intelligent.

And evenings with my feet up, reading.

I do not want to pace this bridge anymore.

I want everything to stop. Now.

I want to live here.

And I want this moment to be everywhen.

I see a thousand shades rise up out of the dark. They tell me that no single thing abides, and that all things must flow. Who was it that said that? Lucretius? I forget.

Everything flows away.

Away into the dark that houses the past, where the smell of sacred incense blends with the stench of dead intentions, with the sustaining odor of past triumphs, with the tang of happy promises and every so often, with an elusive whiff of forlorn regret.

Before I became a not very pompous young man, I used to be an extremely pompous boy. I wrote horribly. Verbosely. Pompously.

I wrote this poem in the space of fifteen minutes as part of a creative writing competition for a fest that I went to.

This is one of the very few love poems I have written, and it is one amongst those of my own poems I least like. However it did win me the first prize, and I like the way I arranged the poem in three line stanzas.

I am putting this up to show one person who agonizes about her own writing, one of the follies that litter the landscape of my own creative efforts.

Before you read it, remember to not judge me too harshly. I was young. And foolish. And had a crush on a girl I thought I’d never see again.

Ah. Youth.

The topic they gave us was, “Love Among the Ruins.”
Yes, I know. Browning turns in his grave.
And yes, I have noticed my creative use of adverbs. It is called poetic license.

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

The velvet night was dark.
Yet it all stood out so stark,
Against the confusion that was your hair.

We stood in front of the walls,
That stood surrounding the dark halls.
Our love, we vowed, would never end.

The wind from the sea was salt, and sweet,
I saw you turn to me, watched our eyes meet.
But I never finished what I meant to say.

When I met you that night,
Your face was framed with ethereal light.
I was falling into the dark pools of your eyes.

The walls echoed softly, with whispers and sighs,
Of long dead lovers, their half-truths, and lies,
The ruined halls calm, and indifferent to our love.

We turned from each other, tears in our eyes,
I was a fool, and so we said our goodbyes.
But our love was enduring, as timeless as the ruins.

I meet you today, after eons, it seems,
And these ruins are the same, moonlight gleams
Off them tonight, as they have done for years.

Tap tap.
Hullo?
Tap tap.
Is this thing on?
Hullo?
Um.

Oh, right ho, then.
Um.

Ladeez and gemmen.
I thank the sensational one for my very first tag. 10 simple pleasures.
Ok. And here I go:
1. Shaving: Yes, I know. Weird. But it’s oddly therapeutic.
2. Writing: I love it. Enough said.
3. Reading poetry aloud: I do it, even if I’m alone. But its better if there is someone else in the room.
4. Having a snuffly wet nose nudge the back of your knee when you aren’t expecting it.
5. Listening to a song for the first time, and knowing that it is going to be one of your favorites forever.
6. Having warm feet. Like in the morning. Or at night, just before you fall asleep.
7. Sunlight in the winter. And peering at bright things through narrowed eyes, and watching the patterns you can squeeze the light into.
8. Watching someone read a really great book you told them about. And then talking about it with them.
9. Sitting, stuffed, around a table, with very old friends.
10. Aimless conversations that last till 3 AM in the morning.

In turn, I tag: shunshine, xiamaze, aarshi, mercuryshadow, agarwaen, and magnus.
Im sorry, It really is too much effort to link all of them, but they're all on my blogroll, anyway.

People who come to our hospital, come there because they are too poor to go anywhere else. They come from far-off villages, from hamlets you couldn’t locate on a map, and from slums in which you couldn’t believe people lived.

One day in the orthopedics wards, we were given a child to examine. She was 6 years old, and she had come with her mother. Wide-eyed and quiet, she let her mother answer all our questions.
Her mother said that she had fallen down and broken her arm at school one day. They lived in a village that didn’t have a qualified doctor, so they took her to a quack who dressed her arm with leaves to reduce the inflammation, and then put a plaster cast on it.
When they took the cast off, a month later, her hand was curled up, and it wouldn’t straighten.
It was a fairly straightforward case. She had Volkmann’s Ischemic Necrosis. Blood supply had been partially occluded to her forearm, by the cast, as well as possibly a tear in the artery.
They took her to the local health center. They were referred to the block hospital; I don’t remember the name of the place. From there they referred her to our hospital. They had come, the entire family, to Calcutta. The father waited nervously outside.

I don’t know what happened to her, we never saw her after that first day. As a matter of fact, she will never get back full use of her hand.
Poverty and ignorance- that is what this little girl lost her hand to. As will many other little girls, and boys.
But this post is not about that. That is neither good, nor bad; it is what it is.

What struck me was their hope. It didn’t matter that the doctors at all the other hospitals had told them that it could not be cured. They had come to Calcutta. All their problems would be solved here.
Hope glittered in their eyes, and quickened their speech.
Even the apathetic little girl, whose arm lay limply and uncomplainingly in the grasp of whomever cared to examine it, even she was touched with hope.

They had come to the city of miracles.

Hope is like that. I see it everywhere, in so many people.
They cure cancers in Vellore. They save people with heart surgery in Bombay. They will heal blindness in Chennai, and they will transplant livers in Boston, and forcing a live fish down your throat will cure asthma.

Blind, unrestrained hope.
A fresh start, a new existence, and my ulcers shall be healed, my limbs shall be made whole, and the scales shall fall from my eyes.



I wish I could find this place of wonder.
Somewhere I could be healed.

Apocalypse isn’t something that is handed to you on a platter. You have to achieve it.
Also, de-worming is good for you.

There are so many things that I didn’t know before I wrote my book and came to the big city.
Like the fact that Lennon isn’t dead. He just went undercover. He lives in the big city in an underground room. Or a turret, I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me. He is ashamed of where he lives.
Or the fact that Hitler wasn’t just killing Jews. He was trying to exterminate everyone except the worm people.
Or that the Incas only sacrificed worm people to appease their hungry gods.

Or the fact that worm people are everywhere. To recognize them, Lennon says, you must look at their eyes. They are blank. Vacant.

Now I see them all. They are at all these book parties that I am invited to, all these talks I must give, all the plays I am invited to see. Vacant people, with nothing to say, though they talk all the time. They never listen to what you say; I think they have an inner monologue going all the time.
In a conversation, instead of the appropriate response, if you say something quite different, they still make their appropriate response. It doesn’t matter to them, a conversation is a dance and they are fixated on their own moves, only their own moves.
They are beautiful to watch. I feel like a rock slab in a forest of rich, golden willowy reeds, I stay in one place and scuff my feet, and I watch them furtively, jealously, I watch their rich smiles and the darkness they hide inside their halos of sunshine.

It is terrifying. Sometimes I feel like we are the only persons left alive, Lennon and I, and I am drowning in a sea of billowing clouds and sophistry.
I become claustrophobic, I gasp for breath while the worm people do their polite dances, and sip their wine.
And it is such wonderful wine. Tart, and subtle, like ancient poetry.

And they don’t know that I know about them.

Like the girl whose name I have forgotten. Olive skin, with eyes shaped like olives. Only there is a hungry nothingness in those eyes. There were shadows on the walls, and she had no heartbeat, and a voice like low chimes that said nothing at all, and her perfume that was soft and cloying, like exotic spices touched with the faint tang of madness.
They are such graceful dancers, even when the dance means nothing at all.

That was the night I first met Lennon.
There were a lot of firsts that night.

Lennon told me that thing about the apocalypse. He always comes up with things like that. Blood is sterile, he said, when I hurt my thumb and I put it in my mouth. I asked him what he meant, why he said it. ‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘No reason. Because it is true.’

That is why we are on my motorbike now. I’m in front and Lennon is behind me. We’re speeding, but there is no one on the streets, its one of their holidays, they are all at their worm-people parties. Every so often, Lennon stoops and places something heavy on the road, and we speed up, and from behind us streams a conflagration, a wall of sound and fire that hits us and yet flows through us. And we scream with delight, and raise our arms and speed through the empty streets, the wind making our eyes water.

De worming, Lennon shouts.

My computer is still not fixed.

I have been spending way too much time at cyber-cafes.

I have loads of studies to do. Loads.

If there had not been one thing I am happy about, I would have cracked.

Chaos.

And Darkness.

And a plague on everything.

And a cancer for the cure.

Except for that one other thing, that is.

It is October again.
This is my favorite time of year.
For me the year ends, and begins here.


It’s the light.
It attaches to every surface, rich, and brown and thick like honey.


Everything smells different.
It is the death in the air, imminent, urgent, flapping its wings like a hovering bird.


This is how the year should die, after the rain in September and before the cold in November.
In stately October, where there is no petulant rain, nor singing heat, nor is the year hoary with cold.


I hope I die like this.
Strong, at the height of my powers, my mind keen, and my blood singing through my veins.
I want to be full of life, I want to feel it bleeding away as I die.
I will not die stupid with age, or wasted with disease, sickened by life.
I have seen too many deaths like that.


It is not in my hands, of course.
My death will not be suicide, and euthanasia is an abomination.
But I hope for this.
Perhaps I even pray for it.
To what? I do not know.


So I celebrate the death of the year.
Not the beginning.


Every birth is much the same.
Every death is unique.

I’ve been doing the Pujo thing.
Meeting old friends. Pandals. Lunch. Walking.
I have plans, everyday.

I’ve never done this before.
The festival would find me comfortably ensconced in my room, listening to music, and reading. And maybe lunch, one afternoon, with friends. That was it.

But this time, I’ve been meeting lots of friends. Some I haven’t met for a long time.
It has been a mad whirl of places to go, and people to meet. I’ve liked it. I’ve even had to decline invitations to two places I would have liked to go to, because I had prior plans.

Fervent pleas to the most inveterate amongst my pandal-hopping friends went unheard, and I have consequently rediscovered my loathing of theism, pandals, loudspeakers, crowds, crying children, people who ask other people called babui to take pictures in loud voices, mud, and the general public.

But I’ve loved being with friends. Regressing. Reminiscing.
It is a fascinating pilgrimage, this revisiting of past selves.
Wearing all these old masks is almost surreal, its like perpetual déjà vu.

As soon as this is over, I am going to go back to being very unsocial.

I’m going to bark at people whom I think are going to try to talk at me. Yes.

I was on my way home when I saw them.

They stood in the middle of the road like combatants, facing each other, their hands clasped in each others hands.

I was in a rickshaw; I had been watching them from some way off, wondering what it was they were doing. The rickshaw puller shouted at them to move, but it was like they couldn’t hear him. An old woman, and a very old man. Their hands were locked, and I saw the man’s legs were slightly bent. It was evening; the place was entirely deserted, except for the crows.

The rickshaw stopped, and I got off. They were both silent, like statues, they didn’t move.

Except for the old man’s knees, they were bent, and they were trembling. His muscles were like taut strings holding his marionette frame together. It was as if he was laboring under a great weight. His eyes were staring, his lips were parted in a grimace, and as I came toward them, I saw a single driblet of spittle fall in a weak string from his lips onto her chest.

I asked the old woman what the matter was, but she wouldn’t say anything either. It was as if it was all she could to hold on. I put my arm around the old man, and the old woman let out her breath in a long exhale. She came around to the other side, and put her shoulder under his. The old man was surprisingly frail, almost insubstantial. I asked him to move his legs, but he wouldn’t. He stood there, with his legs fixed to the ground. He was not trembling anymore, but he was holding himself rigid.

I asked him to move, again. He wouldn’t move. He was still drooling.

I was about to pick him up, and carry him inside.

The old woman peered into his face.

“Ashun,” she said.

She lifted her saree, and wiped his face.

“Ashun,” she said, again, softer.

She had to repeat it several times, before he started shuffling forward. They went toward this little house on the road. It was of bricks, but the roof was tiled. I was still supporting the old man. As we came to the house, a boy came out from it. He was younger than me, and he silently took my place.

I looked into the single room, the floor was mud, and there was a large bed in the center. There was one tube-light, and the fan pushed air in lazy circles around the ceiling. The bed was raised on bricks, and there was a hole in the bedcover at the place where it was tucked under the mattress.

They still hadn’t said a single word to me.

They didn’t even look at me. I couldn’t wait there any more, in that place that stank of dankness. I turned and walked out.

The man had had a stroke, I think. I don’t know.

I got on the rickshaw again, and went home. The rickshaw puller wanted one buck extra for having waited.

I didn’t argue.

I don’t judge.

The very naive and the very wise play with ideas of fairness; they don’t exist in the real world.

Quiet streets. The young people have emigrated, and the old people never come out any more, after dark.

There are whole neighborhoods like this, ex-sanguinated.

The Magus lives in such a neighborhood. It suits him fine. There are no neighbors to greet him, no busybodies to wonder at his comings and goings.

He is on a ground floor apartment at the back of a building that has seen better days.
He never goes out. He buys groceries, a month’s worth at a time, so the shop assistant will deliver it. He has a friend who brings him art supplies, and clothes.
And he paints, all night, and sometimes, even for some of the day.
But he does not see scenery, or flowers, or people who stir him to art.

And so he paints dreams.
Somnus has a thousand sons, of whom Morpheus is all people, Phobetor is all beasts, and Phantasos is all objects.

The Magus paints the other sons of Somnus.

Let me set the scene for you.
Mid-morning. Three guys are lounging in the library.
Call them A, B and C.
C is a thin young man, in an off-white shirt, the shirt tucked decorously into his pants. B is clean-shaven, and very slightly overweight. He is wearing a collared T-shirt, also tucked into his pants. He clutches a schoolbag to his side. A is neither fat nor thin, he hopes, and has very scruffy hair. His shirt isn’t tucked in and he has spectacles.
We interrupt them in the midst of an altercation concerning something I don’t remember:

A: You, B, are a pusillanimous pussy.
B: And you, my dear A, are a pugnacious pug.
Pause.
A: Ok, that’s a good comeback.
B takes a bow.
C: Will you guys shut up? I’m trying to concentrate.
Just then, J walks shapeli-ly by. (I’m coining a word here).
Bigger pause. J walks over to another table and sits. R comes in after her, and sits with her.
C: You’ll never believe what I heard. Apparently X saw J and R kissing in the elevator. They’d stopped it between floors.
A: (incensed) What? We have to walk up stairs because that idiot R is taking advantage of that sweet young girl in an elevator?
B: (sniggers) sweet young girl!
C: Ha!
A: (dignified) Well, I don’t know what you people are insinuating, but I’ll have you know that she is a very nice girl.
C: And you would know that how? How many times have you spoken to her?
A: Very often. And both times, she was very nice. And she has perfect hips.
C: (in an aside) Both times!
B: Perfect hips?
A: You know, hips. As in the legs are attached to the hips kind of hips.
B turns around.
A: Don’t look at her hips, idiot!
C is laughing his head off.
They all look at J.
A: I’m going to go over there, and ask if the words ‘A simple desultory philippic’ mean anything to her.
C: What’s that?
B: It’s a song by Simon and Garfunkel. What if they do?
A: Then I’ll ask her to marry me.
B: And what if, as is vastly more probable, she has no idea what you’re talking about?
A: Then I’ll ask her to marry you!
C: Um. Hullo? She’s taken. R, remember?
A: Oh pfuit! You don’t think I’m going to let her childhood indiscretions weigh with me, do you?
B: What’s a philippic, anyway?
A: It’s a short, bitter, verbal attack.
B: See, its obscene that you know that.
A: What? I looked it up.
C: Listen. More to the point- she speaks in hindi almost all the time.
A: I had hindi for twelve years. I’ll burnish it up.
C: She reads Sidney Sheldon’s books.
A: (fondly) I’ll give her other stuff to read.
B: Wait. She has a Hum-Tum bag.
A: What!
B: Yes, look over at her table.
J and R are leaving. J has a Hum-Tum bag slung on her shoulder.
Long pause. A looks thoughtfully after J. C and B are smiling.
A: (announces suddenly) Gentlemen. My great love- it burns no more.
B and C are laughing. A is, too.
A: I shall now go and consume some pesticide.
Pause.
B: What, you’re killing yourself?
A: No, of course not. I want some Pepsi. Coming?

The corpse is still there on the verandah.
It’s disgraceful; I fully intend to complain to the authorities. It has been there for months now.

I see it everyday as I leave for work. It lies sprawled in the furthest corner, with its face hidden in the crook of its arm. It’s naked. They should put a sheet on it. Or take it away.

This whole neighborhood has gone to the dogs. When I was young, it was a respectable place.
Now the whole place is full of teenagers. Like in the house next to mine. It is crumbling, but it’s full of teenagers. Thin, with lanky, greasy hair. They never wash. And their dogs. I’m astonished at how many there are. Full of ticks, they growl at me when I go to drop my garbage bags off. I also wonder at the amount of garbage I am lugging to the dump every evening. Maybe someone is throwing their garbage in my bin.

I wonder why the dogs don’t eat the corpse. I’ve been leaving the gate open for a few days hoping they’d drag it off, but they haven’t yet.

I go to work, and I’d talk to the people there if I could recognize them. I can’t. Their faces all look the same to me. Its not something new, I haven’t ever been able to tell faces apart. I compensate by giving them names. Patch-on-neck is the man in the big office. Extra finger is in the cubicle next to mine. I don’t talk to anyone else; I just stare at their eyes and nod along if someone talks to me. Establishing eye contact means the person thinks you know him, and recognize him, and are listening to him.
So no one knows this about me yet, though I’ve been working there for many years.
I write manuals for toys. They give me a sheaf of paper, and I read it, rewrite it, write an index, and write little ‘how-to’ pages to put at the end of the booklet. I also write “Not suitable for children under 5”, or “Small plastic parts: not recommended for children under 2.”

The teenagers always play the same song. “Funky town”. Always they play it. I keep hearing it in my head. But I can’t make out any of the words. Except “Funky Town.”

I bought a gun to shoot rats. I have rats the size of small cats. It’s those teenagers with their leaving food about. I’d talk to them, but I never see them around. But I see their silhouettes against the closed windows and they don’t have curtains, they light candles in the afternoon.

I bought groceries. Food. Sticking plaster. When I returned the corpse was still there. I wonder why it hasn’t rotted.

Someone came and said he was from the corporation, and that they were going to pull down the condemned buildings on either side of my house, and that I had warning to leave my house for a period of seven days, and go live in the accommodation they had provided.
I asked, “What about the teenagers? And when are you removing the corpse?”
The man stared at me. I shut the door in his face.
They think they can fool me. The moment I leave they’ll steal my house. I’ll burn it down before I let them have it.
I wont go to work tomorrow.
I have to guard my house from them.

The thought of that corpse outside is not letting me sleep. My eyes feel like they’re full of grit.

I went outside to check. It is still there, the same as always.

I can’t sleep. Why won’t it rot?
I have no choice.
I’m going to have to burn the house down.

She was beautiful, and not only to look at.
She sang, and danced, for no one in particular.
For anyone who asked her.

She was askew, and he was not. She swam in worlds with jagged windows, oblivious to all around her, and he lived in his room, with his bed and his books, awash in a music he dreamt was coming from long, fair fingers playing strange instruments.

One night he heard her talking to him, she was talking with her red mouth with the sharp, sharp teeth, and he was mesmerized and the scent of her was everywhere and nowhere, and her fingers were like daggers.

She said, as she smiled, and he was lost, as he looked at her, she was glinting in the faint light, like unpolished gold, and he looked at her mouth, and she said:

Take my hand.
Come with me tonight, to my palace of nothingness.
And surrounded by walls of silence,
Forget the emptiness inside you for a few moments.
Lose yourself in my darkness.
Strip away your soul.
I want your soul.
Live.
Emote.
Rend.
Change.

Evolve, baby; evolve.

Age cannot be repaired, nor decay undone.

We are none of us Gods.
It’s no use asking.
I will die; and so will you.

Most of us dissolve into death, free at last to wed the oblivion we have courted all our lives. She is a forgiving wife.

But some of us live longer than our bodies do.

So many platitudes. So many afternoons.
So much striving against the grammar of life.
So much laughter; and so much anger;

So many of us left to grieve.

Here’s to the old man we loved to hate.

He won’t live forever, but he will have had a good crack at it.
It is only what he would have expected.

Ok. So I am going to flout my unwritten rule of never writing anything about my life.
I have a huge exam in Microbiology on Tuesday; a big exam in Pathology on Wednesday; I’m tired; I’m obsessed with Creeper Lagoon’s “Under the Tracks”; and I’m sleeping ten hours a day.

To top it all off, I have just heard from a friend that an extremely neurotic person thinks I’m ‘after’ her. To be told that someone for whom you have harbored no sentiment other than that consistent with the most disinterested friendship, which, quite frankly, is about as tepid as they come, is flabbergasting, to say the least. I am flabbergasted. How conceited someone has to be to place that construction on a single phone call, and two messages over a space of three weeks is something I don’t understand. I wanted a book; I thought she wanted a CD.

I’m embarrassed, though I have no reason to be.

Also, another person I know, whom I meet about once a week sends me a couple of messages every day, and calls every other day. She is very sweet, a really nice person. She asks about my studies, and tells me about her day. And she takes it as a matter of course that I shall spend all my time at this place where I meet her, with her. She wants to have coffee, and stuff. I don’t know about this either. Does she want to be more than friends? Or am I completely misconstruing everything? I cant be anything other than a friend to her.

This is worrying me, almost exactly the same thing happened before with a very good friend who wanted more from me than I was ready to give, and its still very weird with her.

I don’t need this. All I want to do is listen to my music, and read, and study something that interests me. I have all of that, and then this gnarled tangle of complications explodes into my life.

I don’t want relationships with just anyone. I’m not superficial that way. I don’t have flings. I don’t care about how hot people are; of the three women I would actually like to get to know better, two I like because they are radiantly smart and write incredibly well, and the other is just about the nicest person I know.
And with them, I struggle to sustain conversations. Go figure.

What I want is a muse. It would be nice if you could just advertise for one.

“Muse / epic love wanted. Duties are not onerous, and will comprise mainly of desultory conversation about books, music, the mind, and the meaning of life. Applicants must have ability to smile appreciatively upon the production of poetry. Occasional accompaniment to places of revelry is required. The pay is no good, but there is an excellent Medical plan. Please apply at the earliest.”

Sigh.

Sometimes I think about how humans are different from all other life.

And when I ask people about this, I get all sorts of answers. ‘We pollute’. ‘We kill when we are not hungry’. ‘We take more than we need’. ‘We do not live in harmony with nature’. And, of course, my personal favorite, ‘We modify our environment to suit us’.

Yes, we do all of these things. But none of these things makes us unique; all of these things are done by many other organisms. (For one thing, the humble dung-beetle makes a burrow, and lines it with dung. That is a modification of its environment.)

But I’ll tell you how we are different.

Every species has its gene pool. This is the sum of all characters in an organism. If mutations arise, characters change, and absolutely unfavorable traits are continuously weeded out, with certain unavoidable exceptions.

How, you ask?

The most important mechanism is disease. That is Nature’s way of eliminating every undesirable attribute. If a feature is incompatible with life, the organism dies. If a feature makes an organism more susceptible to a disorder, or weaker, organisms with that quality become scarcer and scarcer, and then die out. It is all played out in an elaborate dance of relative reproductive rates and mortality rates and natality rates.

But you see, that doesn’t work any more. For the first time in our history, we have effective medical care, and this is only getting better. ‘Undesirables’ abound in our gene pool because we do something that is distinctive to our species, and to our time. We give life to those that Nature destines for death.

And organic evolution, the eternal progressive movement of life toward perfection is, for us, distorted. Evolution exists and it always will, but it is not now dictated perforce by the selection of the strong, and healthy, but by the selection of widely differing attributes.

This is our uniqueness. This is the only new thing we have created in the history of life.

We have managed to begin the fraying of the chains that bind the tapestry of our existence.

This is our original sin.

Observe, and marvel. We have done what nothing has ever managed to do. This is not something as unremarkable as the birth of a species.

We are witnessing the gestation of a whole new stream of evolution, an evolution devoid of conventional selective pressures, evolution in a form we have engineered.

Si quaeris monumentum, circumspice.

I’m watching Mrs. Brown.
She’s wearing a silk frock. I like the feel of silk.

Mrs. Brown never gets older. She looks exactly like a girl I used to know, called Sarika.. Sarika and I were at school together, when I went to regular school. Sarika didn’t have a father. She had never seen him. But she had a mother. She fell down the stairs one day and broke her head. The teacher came and saw her and screamed. The other teachers took her away.
The next day she came and told us that Sarika had gone home to her father. I think she was lying, because I went to her house the week after and no one was there, not even her father. I think she just died.

I am sitting with my crayons. It makes Doctor Mitra happy to see me with crayons. But I have found a way to divide a line into three equal parts with a compass. The math teacher once told me that it couldn’t be done without a scale. It’s called trisection.
I want to write a paper on it and send it to a journal. You first have to draw one of those four-sided things on the paper, with equal sides, at right angles to each other. I have forgotten the word for it, and I can’t write the paper until I remember. Mrs. Brown says it is called a sesquimaux, but I’m not sure I believe her. I think Mrs. Brown wants to kill me.

Today I met Doctor Mitra again. He said he would tell me a story, and then ask me a question. He always asks me silly questions. He once brought many faces drawn on paper and asked me how the faces looked. I knew two, no three, no I think it was two: happy, and sad. I thought four of the others were sad also, but it wasn’t right. They think I can’t tell when I’m wrong, but I can. Their shoulders drop a little, and Mrs. Brown laughs at me.

Today there was another doctor with him. I had seen him once before. I call him the nice doctor.
Doctor Mitra said that there is a funeral of a man. His two daughters are there. The younger daughter looks at a man, and she likes him, and wants to meet him, and maybe later marry him. Three weeks later there is another funeral: the older sister’s, because the younger sister killed her.
Doctor Mitra asked me why the younger sister killed her. I was wondering if the three weeks had any significance. I asked. The nice doctor said that it was just a random time, of no particular importance. It was perfectly obvious, then. The man the younger sister liked came to funerals. So if there was another funeral, then maybe he would come, again. So to cause a funeral she had to kill her sister.

I think that was the wrong answer because Mrs. Brown laughed again. I wonder why Mrs. Brown is called Mrs. Brown, because she is only six years old.
I asked the nice doctor if my answer was all right. He said that there was something in my head which was not like other people’s heads. Other people would have said that maybe the younger sister thought the man liked the older sister, and killed him out of jealousy. But I think that is foolish. In the story they never said that the older sister liked the man, or vice versa.

The nice doctor patted me on the shoulder and said that it didn’t matter, but I think it did. Doctor Mitra told me to go, and I left. The nice doctor has a mole on his chin. I think it has become bigger than when I last saw it. Maybe Mrs. Brown is making it get bigger, and it will get bigger and bigger until it takes over his head. And then Mrs. Brown will make him into a puppet, and use him to kill me. A puppet is a bad thing to be, it is made out of plastic. Or wood.

Mrs. Brown is gardening now. She is digging, and I think she may be cutting off the heads of earthworms. That is a bad thing to do; my mother told me that years ago. If I hide behind the curtain now, Mrs. Brown won’t be able to see me.

Now I’m watching Mrs. Brown.

Are you happy?
Of course you are. We all are.
We have everything.
We deserve it for being born.
Entertainment isn’t a luxury any more, in our beautiful world of glass and plastic.
Everyone is golden.
We are born to be stars, all of us.
We will be famous.
Famous.
Rich? That’s not the half of it. We’ll be swimming in it.
There are no half measures for us, this is how we operate.
We’ll do movies. Or maybe I’ll be a rockstar, or a famous author.
Or, I’ll be a doctor; I’ll save lives, you know?
Lives. Imagine.
And you’ll be a lawyer, and put criminals in jail.
And you? You’ll be an environmentalist, you’ll save the forests.
We’ll all save the fucking world.

Everyone will know us, they’ll all want to be us.
And we won’t let it go to our heads, no, we’re not stupid.
We’ll stay away from drugs, and stay clean; and we’ll never be diseased, hey, get the fuck away from my glass.
What was I saying?
Yeah.
And then, then we will be happy.

And our many loves will all be perfect, perfectly chiseled works of art.
And they'll all last forever, our epic loves, forever until the next.
That’s how it works, haven’t you seen it on TV?
Everything will be perfect, and music will play.
It will be beautiful. So beautiful.

So let’s all jump onto the big pleasure yacht.
(Its white, but you can also have it painted a very fetching hot pink.)
You don’t need to sell your soul; you only need a little money.
And you deserve it.
You deserve to be happy.
You are happy.
And all the other people you’ll see there aren’t people, no.
They’re just props.
They’re all extras in the movie of your life.
Because you are special.

This is the dream.
Your parents will buy you the luxury of indulging in the twin sophistries of self doubt and over analysis.
Because if you aren’t happy, there’s something wrong with you.

So what have we learned today?
We are born into grace, our generation.
Nothing will ever be as good as right now.
(I’ll just turn the music up on my i-pod, the sound of this news report from Somalia made me miss my favorite part of this song. And who the fuck was Nero?)

We are the children of a perfect world.
We’re so thoughtful. We worry about who we are, and finding ourselves.
We’re so clever.

Aren’t you happy yet?
Of course you are. You just don’t know it.
Man.
Oh man.
You’re so happy, you’re fucking delirious.

This doctor isn’t famous.
He isn’t rich.
He works at a large hospital, where thousands of people come to die.

He has no empathy for these people any more.
They are wretched, and frightened. That is how they have always been.
And individuals do not kindle in him even a flicker of the warmth he lost in his youth.
But he is still kind. It is a virtue innate in him.

And so he sits, day after day, in his cubicle where the floor sucks light out of the air, where the windows are absurdly small, and where the plywood partitions glower like empty eye sockets.
And he sees many people, and a parade of miseries.
He is tired, and he feels empty.
And he is still kind.

And cancer patients tell him with tears in their eyes of the money they must save for their daughters’ weddings. And mothers of children with thalassaemia listen with stricken eyes as he tells them their children must die. And of the people they save many slink away, relieved and slightly ashamed.
And still he is kind, because that is all he can be.

And the poverty always wins; and the squalor; and the ignorance.
But nevertheless he sits there, trying to empty an ocean with the spoon they gave him.
And it wears him out; it chafes him threadbare.
But he is still kind.
Because compassion is his way of doing things.

I have a cousin. He is about five years younger than I am, and he is in love, I hear.

First Love.
You are smiling. I am, too.

And perhaps you are thinking about the first time you fell in love. I am.

I remember the wasted evanescence of my tissue-paper love.
I remember the feeling of pure happiness, before I had memories of another love that I never let anyone see.

I remember it still.
I shake it out sometimes and drape it around my shoulders, before I let it collapse, back into its origami folds in a box that no one must ever open.

And, for a few moments, she trips daintily along the corridors of my mind , impossibly graceful, a girl-woman with flyaway hair.

First love.
You are smiling. I am, too.

I wish him luck.

This is my tribute to S, even though he will never read this.

S came to our school in when he was thirteen; which means that we’ve been friends for almost seven years now. He joined in the middle of the term.
I went over and introduced myself that first day; I’m friendly enough when I feel like it.

He told me a couple of months later that he’d come back from boarding school at Dehradun because his mother had cancer.

He has always been very childlike.
He is from one of those old Marwari families, very conservative; He is a devout hanuman-bhakt. He quotes from Gandhiji’s ‘My Experiments with Truth.’ He is very uncomfortable talking to girls, I don’t think he has the phone number of a single girl apart from his sisters, and he says things like we should all remain celibate, and give our lives to the betterment of the nation, if any real progress is to be made. If you ask him what the connection between the two things is, he’s rather hazy on the actual details.

In school, whenever he came up with one of those sententious sayings, we used to pat him on the back, two short taps from each of us, and shake his hand, saying solemnly “you are a good boy, S, a bhery good boy.”

We’ve always babied him around.
Mo helped him with Math in class XII.
I told him about the birds and the bees.
And when he told us, one day, that he liked Juhi Chawla, I think we laughed for months.

His mother died the week before our XIIth standard board exams. It wasn’t cancer that killed her, she died of malaria.

I met him some time ago. Mo was there, too.
He still reads the Hanuman chalisa everyday.
But he works in the evenings after college in his father’s office. He gets home around 9, every night, even Sundays. It is obvious that he is a great prop to his father, and when his father goes out of town, he manages everything.
And he talked about saving for his sisters’ marriages.

I had the distinct feeling that he had changed very much. Not at the superficial level: he looks almost the same; his corny sayings; the goofy haircut; he still doesn’t shave. He used to stammer, and a hint of that still remains.
Both Mo and I, in contrast, have changed a lot since school. Mo has long hair tied back in a ponytail, and it is dyed brown. I have spectacles, longer hair, a five o’clock shadow, and I’m taller.
But at some deep place inside, he is completely different. At the place where I am still the same, a detached observer on the fringes of things, the part of me that will never change, he has changed. He works, and he is responsible for things.

I remember at the end of the evening he said that he would never marry, and that he would build a hospital and a temple, and work for the poor. Mo and I dutifully laughed, and we went through the whole ‘good boy’ ritual, for old times’ sake.

But he has grown, while we have not.

While I was shaking his hand, I wanted to tell him that he is a good man.
But old habits die hard.

He comes in a chauffeur driven car. Nothing ostentatious, a black car, it goes into the hospital, and drops him off just in front of the hospital building.

He gets off, with a briefcase in his right hand. For a split second you can see the newspaper he has been reading folded neatly on the seat he has vacated, before he pushes the door shut, a fluid movement, as he exits, and he walks up the shallow steps, one at a time. He is dressed conservatively, quietly elegant, and he wears a tie. No one else in the hospital wears a tie every day except him.
He goes past the security guard, with a nod, and walks toward the six elevators that stand, faintly humming. The security guard watches him walk away, his clothes are crisp, he looks fresh, and one knows instinctively that his hands will always be slightly cold.

In front of the elevators there is a huddled group of students who wait respectfully for him to enter the elevator first. He nods pleasantly as one of them manages a diffident ‘Good Morning’ and goes in.

The elevator stops at the proper floor, the operator knows which, and the gate is opened for him. He exits and walks off down the corridor.

He has done this almost everyday for the past twenty years.

He is very famous.
He has a large practice.
A very good clinical teacher, an excellent diagnostician, the students say to one another, and his infrequent classes are very well attended.

All the while he is walking to his floor, he never talks to anyone; it is one of his well known idiosyncrasies. He never returns a greeting at this time, only that faint impersonal smile, and a nod.

He is probably thinking about his cases, someone says. Or perhaps the paper he has been invited to present in London; he is a fellow of the Royal College, did you know?

But they are wrong. What he thinks about, everyday, as he walks into the hospital wards is not any of these things.

He is thinking that he cannot believe that he has managed to take them all in again. He cannot believe that no one can see that he doesn’t really know anything more about being a doctor than he did on his first day of medical school, apart from a lot of information. He cannot believe that in twenty years, no one has exposed him as a fraud, and that no one understands that he still doesn’t know what it is to feel like a doctor.

It is funny what things you overhear on buses. I was in a bus today, sitting right at the back on the left.
There were two guys in the seat for handicapped people just in front of mine, and I wasn’t really listening to what they were saying, but I couldn’t help overhearing.
This guy (tall, no spectacles), was telling his friend, (taller, spectacles, oiled hair) about what he’d done with his girlfriend the evening before. Apparently, she had been wearing a black salwar, which looked byapok, man, and no one had been home and they had danced to music, which was romantic, man.

And what had they been dancing to?
“Quit playing games with my heart”, by the Backstreet Boys.

What a waste of a perfect moment.

But I was thinking about this: I have a soundtrack to my life.
I mean, like you see in the movies, where they play music in the background, to suit the moment, whatever. Something is almost always playing in the background, when I am not paying attention; it’s like my own personal audio screensaver.

For example, if I were that guy, I know what song I’d have had playing, I wouldn’t even have had to think: David Gray’s “This Year’s Love”, or Third Eye Blind’s “Deep Inside of You.”. Or if I were feeling especially soppy, Teitur’s “One and Only”.

At college today, Fountains of Wayne’s “Mexican Wine” was playing, and later, when I was leaving, “Too Cool for School.”

But, for most of today, I’ve been playing “Creep”, by Radiohead. I love that song.
I always have that playing when I feel everything around me is reduced to incoherent fragments of images that I can see beyond a pane of glass beaded with raindrops.

Have you ever played raindrop races?

Have you ever been delayed just before the light changes at a busy intersection? While incredibly pompous looking bald men driving cars of a most unpleasant shade of gangrene green make U-turns?

Have you ever been stuck behind an automobile that a discerning slug would scorn to own (if slugs could own automobiles)?

Has your car ever been clipped and its rear lights destroyed by moronic taxi drivers?
Have said taxi drivers chortled apologetically while you are dealing with a fit of apoplectic rage?

All of these things have happened to me.

It does not help that G, who drives us, is the meekest soul alive. The most fiendish of drivers draw, at most, a chuckle from him. This is while the seat belt is beginning to feel too tight to me, blood vessels are cording up at my temple, I am making various inarticulate noises, and words that I shall not sully any maidenly eyes that might be reading this with are rising unbidden to my lips.

I don’t think I can drive in this city. The stress would kill me.

The police are no help. Inexplicably, their sole desire seems to be the re-establishment of smooth traffic flow, and they simply refuse to let angry young men with disordered hair harangue catatonically stupid taxi drivers for any reasonable length of time.
I simply cannot understand this. I am put back in the car, kicking and gesticulating wildly, by the united efforts of tubby traffic constable and G.

I need a weapon. A thing of awesome power, something that would do the talking for me and would make even the most obtuse traffic cop look the other way as I flayed the skin off of offending drivers.

Excuse me while I experiment with attaching this meat cleaver to the end of this hockey stick.

The smell assailed us as we entered the morgue. All the while we had been outside it had come to us in vague wisps. Now that we were inside, we could tell the smell was different from what we were used to. The smell at the anatomy building had been the smell of rancid flesh, coated with the civilizing veneer of formalin. But this was the smell of putrefaction, pure and undisguised.
I borrowed T's bottle of cheap perfume, and doused my handkerchief. It didn't really help, but I clutched it like a talisman.

The post mortem room, into which we entered from a short passage, was a rectangular room, with four concrete slabs perched on iron legs. At one end, a gallery rose, in tiers, for students to view post mortems, and an adjacent side had a shallow drain and a brace of sinks. The other end had a rack filled with bottles of congealed specimens taken from bodies. There were four corpses on each of the slabs, and another five on the floor between the tables. The bare-chested dom who ushered us inside flitted casually from corpse to corpse, talking volubly. This was a hanging, and that was probably a poisoning case. This one, he said, indicating a body with part of the skull caved in, was that of a youth who'd hit it on a pillar while swinging from a train-door. He trod carelessly on the forearm of a corpse as he walked across the room. It made a tiny rubbery sound.
His associates spilt some perfumed phenol on the floor. The smell receded a little.

The gentleman, who conducted the post mortem, an assistant professor of Forensic Medicine, was a dapper little man who spoke in staccato bursts. Magnus, Shaky, and I went up on the second tier of the gallery. We looked around while the little man told us about the documents it was necessary to have before a medico-legal autopsy could be performed.
The dom who was about to perform the post mortem (I don't know his name and will call him X) was a young man wearing a dirty yellow vest, and a pair of shorts. He had a scalpel, and something that looked like a chisel. He had a glove on one hand. A pair of ankle-boots completed his ensemble. He continually sharpened his instruments against one another as he waited for the professor's signal to begin. I saw Shaky's throat working, and Magnus had his handkerchief pressed to his face, his expression was exactly how I felt.

First up was a young woman, twenty three years old. She had hung herself, the report said. There was froth around her nostrils, and a rope pattern (the ligature mark) around her neck. She had long black hair, and she was dressed in a bright red salwar-kameez; the kameez had flowers embroidered in dirty gold down her front. X took a wooden ruler and measured her 'length'. Then he untied the knot at her waist and pulled the salwar off. Then he walked over to the other end of the table, and pulled her kameez off. She was left splayed on the table wearing an incongruously pink pair of panties. X hooked his fingers around the waistband and pulled them off.
This was the only time in the entire proceeding that I felt a rather surprising twinge, of something I can't quite describe. A sense of violation, perhaps.
I leaned forward to catch what the professor was saying.
"...and we must check for the presence of a sanitary pad or tampon, premenstrual syndrome is something that may be advanced as a cause of temporary instability..."

After we had checked the external surface of the body for marks, or any injuries, or evidence of sexual assault (there were none), X used his scalpel to cut her open. He gutted her, slashing unceremoniously from her throat to her pubis. Her intestines rose outward as she gaped open. He sawed through the soft connections of her ribs to her sternum with a grating sound. He flicked her sternum away, and it landed between her obscenely spread thighs, leaving a glistening smear against her genitals. X cut her flesh from her ribs, and her breasts sagged against the sides of her body, like flaccid bags.
They took her stomach out. It had also been cut open, and it spilled the remnants of her last meal. They put in a plastic bottle, for analysis. X cupped his bare hand and scooped some blood from the thoracic cavity into the bottle, before he shut it.
They also cut her uterus out and opened it.

She had had children.
After they had looked through the rest of her abdominal viscera, and placed them in a little pile between her thighs, X cut across her scalp down to the bone. He then proceeded to pull her face down, everting the skin, stripping it from the bone like a mask so the forehead touched the chin. He sluiced her skull with water, as the professor pointed out a bruise on her scalp.
They next took off the top of her skull, with a hammer and a chisel, and took out the brain. Chips of bone had flown everywhere. After we had examined it, he threw it casually inside her belly. It came to rest, nestled amongst her intestines.
This was where it hit me: these bodies come in as remains of human beings. They leave as desecrated sacs of viscera.
Behind her, at the other tables the post mortems proceeded at greater speed. Four had already been done as ours continued.
Outside, there was a flash of lightning, followed by a burst of loud thunder. I remember remarking to Magnus that the atmosphere was positively Frankenstein-ish.

Another woman had died of acid poisoning. They took her stomach out and showed us the corroded lining inside.

***

Shaky and I both wanted to leave, and Magnus followed us out.
We had to wait in the ante room before we could finally leave because it was raining so hard.

I met Ri on a bus the other day. It was a mini-bus, and I was on my way home.
I sat next to the guy for a whole year in school. He doesn’t live in Calcutta now, and we hadn’t spoken for months.
In general, I find it rather difficult to describe people without exaggerating something about them, but for Ri, there is really no need. He is pretty much the most handsome guy I know. He is about one-and-a-half inches shorter than I am, which would put him at a bit over five-six, but he has a profile that would not look out of place on a Grecian urn. And he is great company. He knows all the gossip, and will have you in splits within about a minute. Needless to say, girls love him.
In spite of us being so very different, we were pretty good friends. I remember he once said to me that I don’t have his looks, and he doesn’t have my brains. Funny guy, and oddly forthright.
So we were talking, and as the bus stopped outside Lady Brabourne’s, two girls got on. The bus was fairly crowded, and they were standing behind us.
One of the girls was absolutely beautiful: Slender, flawless skin, the works. The other one was a little plump, and had frizzy hair.
Just then, the gentleman in the seat near the window in front of Ri got up and left. So Ri turned to the pretty girl, and asked her to take his seat. She said ‘thank you,’ and sat down.
Pretty soon, the other guy in the seat got up. The other girl was standing right behind Ri. But Ri didn’t ask her to sit. He took the seat himself, and sat next to the pretty girl. Ri being who he is, they were soon talking, of course. He really is very smooth, you’ve got to give him credit for that.

The reason I started writing this whole piece is because this girl had an expression on her face that is all too familiar.
It was like she was saying to herself, “Well, what were you expecting?”
So when the guy in the seat in front of me left, I asked her if she would like to sit. She sat down, and I got another seat after a while.
If this was the movies, then I could probably have told you that we got to talking and I found that she was a lovely person, and that she volunteered for the SPCA, and liked talking about crazy conspiracy theories, and thought that Artemis Fowl was much better than Harry Potter. But this wasn’t, and we didn’t speak to one another, and then Ri and I got off the bus.

I gave that girl my seat because I recognized that look. I know what that feels like.

Now, I’m not going to say that I am blindingly ugly, or that I have no female friends. I am not, I am average looking, I suppose, and I do. It is just that if they do like me, and value my friendship, it is because I’m smart, and usually nice to talk to, and many other such nondescript reasons. No one ever thinks I’m hot and that’s alright with me. My self esteem doesn't hinge on my looks.
But, once, just once, I would like to have some absolutely superficial, yet very attractive girl look at me and think, “I wish I knew that guy.”

You probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But that’s alright, too.

A quiet restaurant. The subdued murmur of conversation, and the clinking sounds of cutlery handled by hungry hands.
Suddenly there is a commotion. A rather fat gentleman at one end of the dining area, stands up and staggers back, and his chair falls. He clutches at his throat, and tears stream from his bulging eyes. It is obvious to everyone that he’s choking.
His daughter screams, and his wife pats him on the back. Nothing makes it better.
At this moment, someone screams, “Is anyone here a doctor?”
I rise from my table, and walk over to the diners in distress, elbowing a gawping tall gent out of the way.
Tossing my spectacles carelessly to one side, I say, calmly, “I am a doctor. Please move away.”
At my announcement people scatter, leaving a clear space for me to work with.
I go behind the fat gentleman, put my arms around his midriff, and attempt to perform the Heimlich Maneuver.
It doesn’t seem to work. The fat gentleman goes limp, and a glazed film appears over his eyes.
His daughter clasps her hands, and says, theatrically, to me, “Oh, please, please save him.”
I realize that there is only one thing to be done. I shall have to perform a tracheostomy.
“Hand me that,” I say, pointing to a table knife.
“No, the knife,” I say, as someone hands me a dinner fork.
Armed with the knife, I sterilize it in a cigarette lighter flame that someone holds for me.
I take a moment to visualize the thyroid gland, and the laryngeal nerves and vessels, and the thyroid vessels, and I make an incision into his neck.
***
The paramedics have come, and are taking the fat gentleman away, as he signs his broken thanks to me. (he can’t talk, obviously, he just had a tracheostomy.) I nonchalantly wave aside his daughter’s thanks, and walk away as she mouths “My Hero” to my retreating back.
As I leave the building I am cornered by a horde of waiting newsmen.
“It was nothing,” I say, modestly, “all in a days work.”
“No comment” I say, when someone asks me something (because that’s what all famous people say), and fade into the night.

***

Dammit. Why can’t this happen for real?

If anyone of you is thinking ‘Walter Mitty’ I’m coming after you with a table knife and a dinner fork.

I am no quantum physicist, and even less of a philosopher. But I have a question.

Is it impossible to define reality in terms other than relative, that is, without relating to perception?
What is reality?
Are pictures real? Sculptures? What about stuff on TV screens?

Physics calls reality a state in which events occur, an event being something that has a position in the universe defined by four co-ordinates: three for space, and one for time.

Pictures exist. But their subjects are in two dimensions, and so are not real.
Sculptures have three dimensions. So they exist, and they are real. But what they represent is not.
They are not real because they do not have a temporal association with the universe. A sculpture of a man does not move, or age, or change with time. A sculpture may age, but not its subject.
Depictions of real things are reality immured in a facsimile, which in turn, is real.

Things on TV screens are two dimensional, they’re disqualified.
What about a sort of ‘three dimensional’ image? If I could project a holographic image, with sources of subliminal light placed all around, seen only when they intersect, and thus produce, say, a disc, which would technically be three dimensional, would it be real?
Ok, temporal association. Let me extend this, and postulate a sort of holographic TV. Would that be real? They would have three dimensions, and temporal association, of a kind.
(Incidentally, plays are real.)
No, they wouldn’t, because a projection of a tree is not like other trees.

So, real things are those that must not only have an independent three dimensional existence and have a progressive association with time, but must also conform to all the characteristics of others of their kind.

You see? You can’t tell if something is real, unless there is an original thing of its own kind for it to be compared with.
Reality is just an accident of perception.
If that is so, reality can only be a statistical concept.
‘This’ is reality because the frequency of people who call ‘this’ real is maximal.

I once read this case study of a man with schizophrenia who said that that he could hear the voices of ghosts. He had dialogues with his great-grandfather (who was dead, and whom in fact he had never seen), with Napoleon, and with his dead son.
He is what is called an ‘incorrigible’. He has been in a psychiatric ward for years, because he has remained obdurate in adhering to his own version of reality.

Who knows? Maybe he had it right all along, and we just couldn’t tell.

Every one has a breaking point.
I don’t mean the conventional ‘stress’ breaking point. Something quite different, actually.
It is the one thing that is central to that person’s sense of self esteem. And it is quite easy to find, if you think about it.
I can find it fairly readily, in most people.
Everyone has one.
I do too.

I know yours. And yours. And yours. And yours sticks out a mile.

You, for instance, like to think you’re so cultured.
But I used to know you before you went to college and acquired that thin veneer of sophistication. Back when your idea of good literature was Robin Cook, and Erich Segal. Back when you couldn’t tell a Gauguin from a Goya.
I think you still can’t, unless it’s pointed out to you.

Or you. You like to think that you were loved once. That you were part of something timeless. Or so you were told.
But then, you have always been very gullible.

Or you. You think you’re so cool. You have long hair with those ridiculous streaks of color, you play in a band, and you’re a hit with the ladies. I’ve seen you practicing playing the guitar with your teeth.
Good for you. Enjoy it while you can. This is the summit of your life. Ten years from now, you’ll be teaching the piano to little girls.

And you. You’re smarter than everybody else. Intelligent.
Who told you that? Your high school teacher? Your friends? The adoring bimbo you have on your arm?
Please. You are the most contemptible of them all. They delude themselves, but you are desperate for every person to share in the general consensus of opinion about you. And you’re always afraid that someone is going to see through it, and expose you for the picayune you are.

So go away before I say something I will regret. All of you. You see, I’m not a nice person.

Tomorrow I’ll be the big man again. I’ll look past your stupidity, and tiptoe around your insecurities. And you can mistake my forbearance for acquiescence once again. That’ll make it better.

Leave me alone. I need some time to lick my wounds, and feel them harden into scabs, and burn into scars.
Go away.

I am reconciled to the fact that I can never do as well in exams as it is possible, in absolute terms, for me to do.
It is just that I can never actually study before exams. And though I have already read most things I need, I do not remember every single thing that I have studied throughout the term.
For some reason I am unable to sit still; to read something consistently.

I wander from room to room, my brain pickled in ennui, lost in a fog of repetitious meaninglessness.

I hate examinations.

(This is part of a phone conversation, and yes, I have a photographic audio memory, except for lectures at college)

‘So how is college?’
‘You know. The usual. How are things in the medical line?’
‘I’ll tell you how things are after I find out if I’ve passed.’
‘Sudhra nahin. Why must you always be so irritatingly modest?’
‘Hey! I’m not modest. I get antsy around exams.’
‘Thought of a career yet? What, Gynaecology? Paediatrics?’
‘Oh, no. No, no. Not gyno.’
‘Why?’
‘Because people who work in coffee shops hate coffee.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Think about it.’
‘And why not paediatrics? I thought you liked kids.’
‘I do. And that is why I won’t do paediatrics. Apart from the fact you have to be clairvoyant to be either a paediatrician or a vet.’
‘So, what?’
‘I don’t know. I won’t be an ophthalmologist. Or do ENT. Or biochemistry, or pathology. I have figured out what I do not want, but not what I actually do want. Story of my life. Maybe medicine, or surgery. Most probably omphalology.’
‘What on earth is that?’
‘“Omphalos” is Greek for “the umbilicus”. An omphalologist is a specialist in diseases of the navel.’
‘I didn’t know you had diseases of the navel.’
‘You don’t. That’s the point.’
‘Ha! Do surgery. There’s a lot of money in it.’
‘Mon cher!’ (In heavy fake French accent) ‘I find you fort amusant. Ze money, she does not mean anyzing to me!’
‘Oh, Please. You’d be selling your soul to rake in the moolah, once your trophy wife starts asking you to buy her stuff!’
‘Good God! You think a trophy wife would divert me from my lifelong dream of being absolutely idle? Almost you persuade me not to seek a trophy wife!’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Well, I did say almost!’

It was a Saturday, almost a year ago.
It was our first class in the ‘hot wards’, the emergency, as compared to our usual travails amongst the chronics at the ‘cold wards’.
We were all a little awed, I think. The cold wards were almost a relaxing place to be compared to the frenetic activity that was taking place around us. Here was imminent death, a fog of palpably immediate pain.
Our class was taken by a post graduate trainee.
Ruzy, we called her, a diminutive of her unpronounceably long name. She is from somewhere in the North-east; young, very pretty in a Michelle Branch sort of way. The thing about her is that she has the tiniest hands, red and white, with which she gestures as she speaks. Captivating hands. Quite a few of us fancied her at the time.
At the end of the class she said that we were going to learn how to examine the lympho-reticular system.
She brought us out into the corridor.
The corridor is where the overflow is housed, on trolleys. Many people never make it to beds.
This one hadn’t. An old man, with some kind of lymphoma, I don’t remember exactly. But he was quite dead.
Ruzy knew, of course. She told us that he had died that morning, but his lymph nodes were very enlarged, and it was a good specimen.
And so we had the rest of our class. We learned to palpate the horizontal chain of cervical lymph nodes. And it was extremely instructive, I have never seen pre-auricular lymph nodes that big.

It was the first time I had touched something freshly dead. He was not cold; he felt clammy.

K said that his head was very heavy, and that it would have been easier if he'd been alive.
Ruzy agreed.
I remember thinking that that was not a very good eulogy. I almost laughed. I wanted to leave, to go wash my hands, to be anywhere else.

I know you’re probably thinking that this is a violation of a man’s dignity in death.
But you don’t understand.

You see, there is no such thing.

I can’t do the melon thing.
You know, pick up a melon and shake it, and percuss it to see if it is good. I don’t know how. And I can’t tell if fruits are going to be sweet, or if the cauliflowers have insects in them.
I’m more of the ‘go to the supermarket and ask the guy who’s got a “May I Assist You” badge on him in which aisle I can find produce’ kind.
I prefer buying cartons of juice to actual fruit, and those readymade soups to actual vegetables. In fact, for a period of about a month when I lived absolutely by myself, I ate maggi every night, out of the saucepan in which I cooked it.

I hate maggi now.

In fact, unlike most young men my age I have never actually gone to the market to buy stuff. I hate haggling.
But there is one area in which I have the theoretical knowledge necessary to buy things: Fish.

First you look at the gills to see if it is well vascularised, and if it is wet. Then you look at the eyes, because apparently, hypoxia makes the nictitating membrane go opaque. And there are a thousand other things that tell you if the fish is fresh.

Now you must bear in mind that I have actually never gone to a fish market, and quite frankly never intend to. This is just stuff I have imbibed over the years.

Maybe this is some sort of mystical knowledge that is passed down through the generations from Bengali father to son: the genetic ability to tell if fish is fresh; a sort of bio-cultural adaptation, necessary to the people of a riverine civilisation.

I am sure if I ever have a son, and if there is a nuclear explosion that selectively destroys supermarkets, then, in this post-apocalyptic, supermarket-less world, my son would be able to tell if the fish is really fresh.

Ok.
So I am a science fiction and fantasy buff.
Yes, I actually know what wormholes are.
And yes, I can name a fantasy author other than Tolkien who writes for readers older than 15.
I know what a Hugo is.
And incidentally, I have watched all the Star Wars movies, and every episode of Star Trek: the next generation.
In spite of this last, I am a science fiction fan.
I think it is exasperating, the way people bring up the star wars franchise or the star trek show in any discussion of science fiction.
I mean, I enjoyed them very much. I remember what Jabba the Hutt looks like. And I can also name every member of every crew of the Starship Enterprise.
But that is not all of science fiction. Or even very good examples of it.
And most importantly, that is science fiction without soul.
Give me a Frederic Pohl, or an Alastair Reynolds, or a William Gibson or a Robert Silverberg or a hundred others, who actually write science fiction.
Good science fiction sticks with you. You carry it around, and it influences the way you think, a little. For one thing, I still remember the day I first read ‘Ubermensch’ by Kim Newman. It blew my mind. And I still fantasize about having my own dragon, like in the Anne McAffrey books.
Science fiction is so much more than spaceships and lasers and aliens. Science fiction is a fiction of ideas, of ‘what-if’ scenarios explored to their logical conclusion. Science fiction as it is intended to be makes you look up from the book you are reading with a beatific smile and shining eyes.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a good read.

I am reading “Les Fleurs du Mal”.
Beautiful poetry. I am surprised to find that Baudelaire and I have a lot in common.
Case in point:
He writes, in a ‘Sad Madrigal’,
‘What do I care if you are wise?
Be beautiful, and sad.’

Wow.

I have a theory.
As a people, we enjoy destruction. We like to watch it. To share vicariously in the grandeur of decay, and of loss.
The destruction of something beautiful is inherently beautiful.
That is why so many people visit waterfalls.

A waterfall is just that. Water falling.
But its allure is not in that.
It is that something is falling. We are mesmerized by the simple fact that the water is symbolically dying, flying off a cliff and crashing to the ground below.
That is it.
It dies, but what a magnificent death it is, with what magnificent disregard for life, for prudence. Clad in its funereal splendor of trapped rainbows, it goes blithely to its dissolution.
That is what we enjoy.
It brings home to us the wildness that we will never give in to, the urge we sometimes have to leap into an abyss, for no reason at all.

There is great self love in that, of a different kind.

The reason I am writing all this is a phone conversation with a smitten friend. He tells me that he has found the girl of his dreams.
He has always been inclined to melodrama.
He tells me all about her, all of her (many) virtues. She seems very nice.
She seems perfect, actually.

Now this may sound masochistic, but I would hate that.
Because I would like to love someone just a little bit self destructive
Because I would rather love a waterfall than own a stream.

Did you know, there were eagles at St. Lawrence when I was young.
Or hawks, or whatever. Ornithology is not my forté.
But they always fascinated me.

Eagles, who fell from their nests in those high trees into the sky. And they were always silent. I never heard them make a sound. Maybe I was too far away.
Silent silent grace. It was like they never moved. Like they were carved in place.
I think about them often. They are a part of my childhood I will always carry around with me.
I remember lying on the grass one day watching them fly, silhouetted against an impossibly blue sky, the kind of sky you get just before the end of summer, with cirrus clouds that look like feathers.
I could smell dry dusty soil, and dying grass.
If I squinted just a little, I could block out the buildings and the lamp-posts, and the water tank just outside school on the other side of the road, and even the trees. And then I could pretend that I was an eagle too.
And that I could fly.
And that I would live forever.
And that I would never fall from grace.

My semester exams start the Monday after next, and therefore, I am procrastinating.
I have made the rounds of every community that I am a member of at orkut. I have checked every blog that I can think of, and have tried, and failed, to think of a song to download. I have studied the chapter on penicillin. And there is absolutely nothing on TV.
I was going to go curl up in a ball on my bed and listen to All American Rejects, but I think I’d rather type this post, instead.

I’m listening to “white trash beautiful” by Everlast. Next up is “strange condition” by Pete Yorn. And then I will play ‘stupify’ by Disturbed, at full volume.

I’m bored, and I feel scruffy inside my head.

Maybe I should have gone to college instead of deciding to stay home and study.

I hate exams. Not oral exams, but long theory exams where you have to write and write and write. And you know its no use because if you were the examiner, you wouldn’t read your handwriting anyway.

Even the dog is asleep.


Fat, lazy dog.

I met M and S yesterday. I hadn’t seen S since high school. He hasn’t changed at all. M has hair in a ponytail now.
We walked around for ages. I got home at 11.

The dog is still asleep.

I’m going to find my scalpel and cut things into little slivers.

There are distinct sorts of beggar-units.
There are the old women who’ve suffered enough for their blessing to be worth something.
And the disabled men.
And the disabled men who are led around by their wives.
And the old men.
And those that sing.
And the children.

The children are of different sorts too.
There are children who beg, and those that make desultory swipes over the windshield of your car with a rag before they beg, and those that carry around a baby and beg.

I almost always give child-beggars some money if I can spare it.
Stupid, I know.
I’ve heard it all before.
I’m feeding the alcohol habit of their fathers, or whoever it is that have charge of them.
I’m feeding their glue-sniffing habit.
They have more money tucked away somewhere under those rags than I do.
I’m encouraging the development of begging, as an industry in central Calcutta.
And they probably rented that baby.
Yes.
Cynicism is such a comfortable state to exist in.

I was walking to the Moulali bus stop when I saw this beggar child. She was about twelve, I’d say, and she was sitting on the pavement. She had a baby on her lap. I had seen her before, with a baby at her hip.
They were looking at each other. Suddenly she raised her finger and started tickling the baby. It was laughing. Then she put her mouth to the baby’s stomach and blew. There was a loud farting sound, and the baby laughed some more. She looked up from the baby and smiled, I don’t know, at nothing in particular.

As I passed them, I gave her a tenner, before I got on my bus.
I had to walk home from the bus stop, and it was hot;
And they sniffed glue, or bought their guardian some alcohol, or even, perhaps, bought some food.
I think it was worth it.

I have officially learnt nothing today.

In the morning I bunked the first lecture, because I had an exam immediately afterwards.The exam went reasonably well, though it was rather disappointing. Even though I had, by some unforeseen miracle, managed to retain how global ischemic encephalopathy causes irreversible damage to the cells in the area of Sommer in the hippocampus, I was only asked the difference between a transudate and an exudate before I was fobbed off with an 80%.
Ah well.

I bunked the wards and after a coke or three, goofed off in the library for two hours, during which our group was admonished by no less than three seniors who were studying for their exams.

After that I went to class and slept peacefully through the lecture on rape, being nudged awake only just before the roll call by a vigilant friend.

And during the pharmacology tutorial classes, I sat at the back with a like-minded friend. Our literary output was tremendous, being no less than fifteen dirty limericks and an epic poem on something quite unmentionable.

I had, in short, a great day, having valiantly resisted all attempts at edification.
And I loved it.
So there.

This is dedicated to a girl I used to know.

Every so often, we call, for duty’s sake,
And we sit through painful conversation, and polite games.
We used to be close, you and I,
Now we are strangers who know each other’s names.

Is affection held in thrall by convenience?
Are all friendships made to die like ours?
Are relationships defined by time and space?
Can closeness be measured in minutes and hours?

We must shed the debris of our cluttered lives.
If we now laugh with others, that is no crime.
Notwithstanding the frail links of parts of a shared past,
We are only strangers who knew each other once upon a time.

I was leaving college today when I saw one of those cycle-vans that carry dead bodies. It was going towards the morgue.

It had a body wrapped in a plastic sheet. One end was tied to the front end of the van, just below the seat for the driver. Or whatever one calls the guy who operates those things.

But the other end was free, and at this end the frequent jolts had caused the sheet to come unwrapped. One could see the head, and part of her forearm, which was folded across her neck. It was, or had been, a young woman. She had those white bangles on her forearm, and a large vermilion streak on her forehead. A little to the right of that, there was a cut, a gash, which went up past her hairline.

The van dodged some beggar-children playing on the street, giving the corpse another jolt, and went past me.

The children stopped their game for a moment and gazed after the van, with incurious eyes.
They are inured to horror.

I envy them sometimes.

There is a beggar near the gate outside the hospital. He takes all his clothes off sometimes, and they say he is mad.

Madness is quiet; insidious; and fundamentally erosive.
One does not go mad in a crescendo of shrill ideas, but in silent swirls of disjointed thoughts.

I must guard against disjointed thoughts.

What is life, O Gentle Reader? What exactly is it? Is it merely a collection of chemical reactions in cells? Or is it, at the other extreme, some mystical force animating everything? I am sorry to speak in such clichés, but needs must.

We know almost all the chemical reactions in cells and have characterized almost all of the complex metabolic pathways. We have sequenced the genome. But why is it that, far from being able to synthesize a highly differentiated human cell, we have consistently failed to make something as simple as a bacterium, starting from scratch. We can modify existing cells and can even turn a hapless bacterium into a factory in microcosm, churning out molecules we need. But why do we not know what life is?

There are so many definitions of life. Life, according to some authorities is any focal region where entropy is reduced at the expense of an increase in entropy elsewhere. (Of course, then, a refrigerator is also alive!). But this much is true, if this entropy business stops, then an organism is dead. Entropy itself is a measure of the randomness or disorder of a system. Way back when, just before the big bang happened, the universe was in perfect order. This is when time did not exist, and (this is what will astound you), at this point there was no space either. And ever since then, we have been sliding for eons into chaos, from highly ordered matter into evanescent energy.

And are we merely machines programmed to sustain ourselves and replicate? Is that the purpose of life, to perpetuate itself? Or is it worse, something entirely without purpose, a cosmic accident?

A team of Russian scientists once tried to make a cell, ab initio. They made little semipermeable lipoprotein packets, and put synthesized enzymes in them. Then they put them all in another semipermeable packet, and adjusted the ionic concentrations and the voltage, put in microtubules, enzymes, and replicated, in short, the cellular environment. But the cell would not function. It lay in its fluid, an obstinate, albeit flaccid little bag. It would not live.

The tiny anthrax bacillus spore, something which is technically alive, can survive in soil, with the miniscule amount of food it has inside it, for 60 years, when the average time for which one bacillus exists as an individual, is about twenty minutes. That is like a human being living for, I don’t know, you do the math. And yet when it finds a collection of things I can only term hope, it burgeons into something beautiful: something alive.

So what is life? I want to know. I need to know.

What is it to be alive?

Arunava has been ill.

But that is not in itself, remarkable.

What is remarkable, is that he has been foolhardy enough to follow my medical advice, and having taken the medicines that I prescribed, is actually on the way to recovery, by some colossal freak of nature.

He is my first patient, and quite frankly, I would have been more comfortable with his therapy if he had had epilepsy. But, vastly to my own surprise, those nasty microbes plague him no more.

And Arunava has not only survived his illness, but also my medical advice.

Arunava, my friend, I salute your courage.

Another nameless relative enters my room. This is late afternoon. I sit up straight in my bed, trying unsuccessfully to look as if I was conscientiously studying, rather than reading the Dick Francis paperback, with its loud red cover.

My father enters the room behind said relative. Aimless chit-chat, my face contorted into the uncomfortable rictus that I fondly assume is a smile.

My father, while out walking Thor one morning, slipped on the wet grass and now has a hairline crack in his sacrum. He walks over to the life-size picture of a skeleton and pointing to it proceeds to show the gentleman where exactly he has a fracture. He points to a place somewhere in between the coccyx and the ischium. (My father, in spite of his voluble learnedness on the subject of the consonant shift, has an endearing lack of medical knowledge.) Aforementioned nameless relative scratches chin, and looks at the skeleton, and wonders aloud, like so many before him, how I sleep at night with that hanging over my head.

My facial muscles begin to ache.

Nameless gent continues in much the same vein, as my father watches with some amusement; he has probably endured nameless gent for as long as he could, before embroiling me.

Nameless gent having exclaimed at the number of books on my table (I never tidy up), the printed out song lyrics decorating the walls (quite avant-garde, isn’t it?), and the guitar lying dustily in its corner, finally got up and walked towards the door.

‘Think about where you want to be in ten years. That’s how one should study, with a goal, pictured in one’s head.’ Having dispensed this piece of splendid advice, which fell on the floor like meaningless aphorisms generally tend to do, he took himself off.

He left me wondering whether, in ten years, I’d have long hair in a ponytail in a desert, or close cropped hair in an air-conditioned office. I still don’t know.