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.