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.