Droplets

Sometimes, in my flashes of forgetting, I couldn't remember the first time I had slit her skin.

She told me there was no first time. No first of its kind. No beginnings. She introduced me to her realm of deja vu -- where all beginnings kept repeating from time immemorial.

Blood was her expression of deja vu. Recurrence.

Her blood was strangely cohesive. They sprang from the association of her being, defied the gravity and froze somewhere in the air. They captured a block of air in my room and made a home. When the sunrays touched them the red droplets kept glowing for a few hours until they turned brown. Drying. The patches kept lingering in intangible spaces of my room. They smelled of the sea.

Her blood was also volatile. I could remove the strains of the brown blood from my undiluted air by simply holding the burning end of my cigarette beneath it. And see them fade like my memories. But I'd never be able to take a puff of those used cigarettes, ever again. Their taste would change. And they smelled of the sea.

She had come out of the sea one moonlit night. Naked and bleeding.

She had slit herself beneath her neck and above her breasts. Droplets of the sea played all over her body. Running down. Crashing. Jostling. Mingling. Magnifying. Making its way through them was a stream of blood.

"Taste it", she said.

Unable to understand what I should taste, I tasted the seawater and her blood. They tasted the same. The same that it had everytime. Deja vu.

I knew people would call this a game of sadism. Still I would slit different parts of her body many times on her request -

"Clown, you know I can't cry. Can never let you taste my tears, but I desire tears like any girl does. Help me. Please, let my body weep the blues."

The Swing: Epilogue

A swing is a staircase of unending. It has no bottom, no crux.

The Swing: Fourth

There were splashing lights all over when the evening broke. But none noticed 'cause it had made no sound. My silent girl was infused in that evening. Forever.

It became the only evening she had spoke, among all the distinct evenings. Unfragmented.

"Who are you?", I had asked.

The silent girl kept staring at me, expressionless for a long time. And a time that seemed longer than the long time. Only after watching her unchanging expression with a long, painful sustenance did I realize the answer she was about to give -

"That is the smallest possible query to the longest answer."

I had no idea as to what was expected of me to be said in return. So I decided to stay quiet. The silent lady continued -

"I haven't been able to reach to the conclusion of that answer myself. But I've always had the beginning. As a child I used to believe that this beginning itself would lead me to the end. But beginnings never lead to an end. They only give birth to newer beginnings. Gradually as I grew up I learnt to surrender to the beginning itself. There was no escaping from it. Unlike my girlish thoughts of the beginning as a bridge to the other side of the river; to the end, I soon came to realize that the beginning was a dark room that I had to create around, above and over myself to trap myself in, eternally. It was something that though never said was always wanted of me. The day that realisation was complete I moved on to the greater realization --- that I was no longer a girl but had become a woman."

Woman. The inexpressive hands on the trapeze. The silence in my sleep. First words in her broken evening. Last words unto its end. Beginning. Bridge. Swing. Dusk. Eternity. Dark room. Frenzy. Unreal. Storm. Silent girl. Shadows. River. Leaving memories. Too much. My lone two brains. Jumbling thoughts. Gobbling words. Jesus. Forgetting. Bacteria. Fungus. Me. Woman.

And words kept lingering, irrespective of who spoke --

"I know that all of us are immortals. And life and death is as beauty is, in the eye of the beholder. Relative. We don't live forever. Niether do we die. The line that divides life and death is actually very, very thin. Delicate. So that we must overstep it again and again. We keep living our death. And we keep dying into our lives. Swing."

I've forgotten my last swing on the trapeze, but I'll relate it through my instincts.

Her tiny hands were cold most of the times, except for that evening. In that broken evening her inexpressive hands became warm. Burning. And all her eyes caught fire too.

"Bring back freedom to this realm.", she said before I left her hand and let freefall take her in his unending arms. And swing.

The Swing:Third

The trapeze is a moment of trespass. An extreme form of the swing.

I had came into the life of a silent girl. I had to take her hand and swing. Her tiny hands were cold most of the times. Her hands were just as inexpresive as her eyes. And her lips. Silent. When I held her hand swinging on the perpetual trapeze, it seemed they were detached from her body. Disconcerted. Indifferent. Disconsolate. She didn't stay in her body. she was never there inside. A perfect disappearing act. Irreversible.

The name of the process was decay. Fungus. Bacteria. me.

Most of the evenings I was afraid. I felt the audience would fail to notice her on the trapeze. Lately the glittering lights would pass through her body. She was becoming transparent. Like an empty swing on a stormy dusk.

Most of the evenings I was afraid. I felt the audience would fail to notice her on the trapeze holding my hand. they would find me clinging onto a piece of nothingness. A peace of void. And they would start laughing. I was afraid of finding them laughing for reasons other than my colorful mask.

And most of the evenings I was afraid. I discovered her independent feet, her inexpressive hands, her unmoving lips -- all staring at me. She had eyes all over her body. A constant glance on a swinging trapeze. Between this movement and stasis I found a phenomenon unknown to me. Sleep. A sound sleep. A silent girl holding my hand.

Her tiny hands were cold most of the times... except for one broken evening.

The Swing: Interlude

I came musing into a senile night. And in the night's womb I found a tent, sleeping.

The tent was huge. It seemed to encompass the entire night. Clinging on to it. The night was old. It had waited in the same space for many centuries. Looking closely one would find that in some places its color had come off. Its darkness had faded. It stood naked. Colorless.

I had stepped into its white darkness. And dreamt of colors.

I had stepped inside the tent, that evening, for the same reason. A tent that promised blinding lights and deafening music. Thus, I created my mask. Its background was white. Imposed on them were more gleeful colors.

Red, yellow, green, blue.

That mask became my ticket to centre-stage. I put it on and flourished in the dazzling lights and glorifying music. I put it off and became unrecognized. I could choose between fame and anonymity. I had the freedom to accept both roles and swing between them.

Gradually, I started realizing that the mask was becoming my face. And I could not switch faces. My real face was gone. I was faceless. I had become the dream of all colors. Invisibility. The Clown.

I wished to stay anonymous but, anonymity is an identity, too. And I found, unknowingly I had been living in many hearts, simultaneously.

"The clown may heal all hearts but shall not own one. He mustn't keep one for himself.... not even his own. A clown is a saint who enlivens all but worships none." - A clown as old as the night had told me once.

I needed to swing from life to life. I found the trapeze.

The Swing: Second

I felt oftentimes, that a dusk has many beginnings. As if fragmented into different spaces, in different times it lingers in its own dillemma of the dull, the bright and the dark. However, when I needed most to feel that I'm alive I waited for the dusk. Probably it was the only certain dillemma that needed no solution. This was one of those dusks. I remember being insane when I stepped inside the dusk and I remember my forgetting the remembrances of my insanity when I stepped out. I attained perfection in insanity.... Perhaps, I'm making things a bit too much complicated. Just give me one more chance and I'll start from the beginning.

I felt oftentimes, that a dusk has many beginnings. My life had only one.

The swing in the storm. No one sat on it. The frenziac winds played with it. The swing - a libertine. It swimmed in the storm's lap. And invented all possible directions in which it had never been. And those directions that didn't exist started calling me. I ran to the swing. I ran through the storm.

The winds increased as I climbed onto the swing. I looked at the direction in which I used to stand. I stared. And I found myself standing over there, looking at me on the swing. Looking past me on the transparent swing. I had become weightless; bodyless; mindless. The storm passed through me. I had ceased existing. And thus my life began.

I became the master of the swing since then. I could convince the swing to move in any direction I wished. Make it follow untraceable paths. Negotiate it to move to a space from where it need not return to its point of origin. I started telling children -

"A swing is a staircase of unending. It has no bottom, no crux."

They listened mesmerized. They tried to find those spaces. But found the swing to be unfairly similar to the cradle of their lesser childhood. It moved back and forth, and went nowhere.

The swing took me alone farther and farther ahead as I climbed the stairs and reached to a colorful tent. I little knew then how those colors would never leave my face ever again....

The Swing: First

A storm had broken in somehow, into one of my childhood days.

It wasn't meant to be there. It should have been a clear evening in the park, like all evenings in the park are meant to be. There ought to have been children playing like every evening ... with the swing. And I was meant to be standing in one corner watching them, with the last rays of the sun glimmering on their eyebrows. I would have watched each of them taking someone else's turn to climb onto the swing.

Complaining, shouting, fighting, embracing, smiling.

I would be left alone, wondering why I should not join them. ..... wondering, perhaps, too long unto the evening's end. Recurrent evenings. But this was a different evening.

The promise of a storm. Silence. Empty benches. A transparent swing. An undisturbed stasis. Disturbing.

Perhaps, it had never been an evening. I had invaded the realm of an alien moment with no escape. A part of the day that had never been before. I knew it would choke me. It felt frightening.

When fear sprinkles in your heartbeat, it becomes your heartbeat. Suddenly you are not frightened of your fear anymore. You live in it. Strange forces. Strong. I waited for the storm.

"A storm will fulfill me, my half-being."

I little cared for what was to happen. I only thought of an unknown future. And the storm waited for all my gripping realizations. I watched spellbound at the changing colors over the horizon. My unchanging stance. The execution of an end. The storm infused slowly into the calm. But as it touched my skin it seemed, as it seems with all storms, invariably, sudden.

Then, for the first time in my life, I became conscious of an existence that would change my life forever. I felt the sonata. The music of the wind.

The Swing: Prologue

Once, I wrote on a piece of paper. On one of its faces I scribbled the word - 'Reality', on the other - 'Imagination'. Then, I left it to the winds. It went and dropped into a river. One of its faces was washed by the water. Taken in by the river. Its alphabets gone. The other face remained.

I really don't know which face remained. But, all the same, I kept living by that face. Some of the people I met in my separate lives thought imagination was my name. Others believed it was just a mask.

Sometimes, I felt I had left reality completely for imagination. At other times, I felt imagination has left me completely for reality. Actually it was a swing, I kept moving back and forth, going nowhere. And the swing became my life.

Once, a lady I had little known, had been sitting on a swing, looking at the sky, musing. Sometimes, she was no longer awake. At other times, she was no longer asleep. She lived the life of the swing for those few moments. She oscillated between the existent and the non-existent. Later she asked me how long could that moment have been existing for she had fell asleep.

When we sit on a swing what we really cover is time. But we also cover ourselves in that time. And we become beginners. Children.

Fly away, children, fly away.

This lady had opened the gate to her primordial self. And times don't exist when we are children. For time cannot stay where beauty is. This moment is the stream that runs to eternity and cannot be measured in time. And she had really lived a baby's life - waking and sleeping ..... without a pinch of deliberation.

My life in the swing had also begun thus. And I promise to start from the beginning.

The Swing: Introduction

A few days in my life are recurrent. On these days I know all events that are to follow, so that I could, not only, manage my actions accordingly but also those around me. On these days I can catch an old lady by her hand and say -- "Don't cross the road or you'll meet an accident in which you die." And thereby, I not only save her life but also stop the day from recurring.

The rest of the days in my life are not mine. I wake up everyday in someone else's life. Perhaps, I live parallel lives.

Perhaps, I keep living a single day, over and over again. In changing contexts, changing spaces.

Perhaps, in one of my lives I bleed; in another I bandage the bleeding.

Perhaps, only in my dreams I'm awake.

Perhaps, my life has become the swing I had chosen for myself.

Shadows

Do you remember all the dissimilar shadows you had created the last time you had danced?

Probably not. For when we dance we don't usually expect our shadows to be there. Unlike the times when we are walking through a half-lit, lonely alley, in a dance we assume we are shadowless. Like spirits.

But shadows linger. And this is exactly where my tale starts-

I had once been to a party where I found a lady dancing. She was dancing alone slowly and gracefully. Guests were watching her. And I, as you must have guessed, was watching her shadow. How gracefully it moved and changed shape and assumed better beauties. The shadow captured all her postures. The lady was dancing beautifully and she was drenched in its rhythm. But then, a different realm was also calling her in. And this is the realm that I like to call -- Frenzy. She started defying all music and danced to some silent music of her own --- The musik of dementia.

Long after she stopped dancing, I found all shadows of her dissimilar postures, the insane creation of every possible synchronization of limbs, scattered on the floor. People were walking over them. Their own shadows got super-imposed on them and left. They lingered on the floor and in the minds of those who watched her dance. It was amazing to think of all the shadows she had left behind of herself.

What are shadows but little conquests of darkness? All of us were fading into the darkness. Perhaps, we all realised this. Maybe, thats why all of us left early that evening.

When I returned to that hall a few days later I didn't find the shadows anymore. Perhaps, the house-keeper had sweeped them off, like dead leaves by the roadside.

Fade

I have two brains. They are paired to think in two separate terms. They often work simultaneously. But it really starts getting difficult when thoughts start jumbling up. These are times when I must surrender.

In my leaving memories, there used to be a river. It kept flowing. Incessantly. Untiring.

In my other memory that refused to leave, there used to be a girl beside its bank. She kept sitting. Incessantly. Untiring.

I could swear that these two memories were unrelated. But they were inseparable. I remember walking to the girl for the first time and asking her - "why are you always sitting over here?" "Need it have a reason?", she looked back at me. "A question can never be an answer to another question." "I don't believe in answers.", she answered, indifferently.

Since then at the beginning of some uncertain dusks, I went and sat beside her. We never spoke. Just watched the water flowing. Listened to its music.

I don't remember when I stopped visiting her. Perhaps, the day I died. Perhaps, the day she did. Perhaps, the day we all do.

The only thing I remember now is that the river was a part of my leaving memories whereas the girl wasn't. Therefore, the river slowly stared fading out. And when the river was no more I watched the girl sitting in front of a defying blankness. Staring at nothing over the horizons. Without the flowing river time no longer moved for her. She sat trapped in a single unending moment .... within one unending heartbeat resided her life. And the sound of that heartbeat was becoming loud. Shrill. Unbearable.

And there was nothing beyond the unbearable. Only a never-ending stretch of endlessness. No more was to be the music of the river. Years later I learnt the scientific name of my guilt that took the river out of her life.

By then, my schizophrenia had already taken her life.

Disease

"Must a risk always be dangerous?" - I remember one of my childhood friends had asked me once. I had found silence that day, for the first time, as an answer. The same silence had frightened me when I tried to go to sleep that night. I had realised I would be unable to take risks for the rest of my life. The silence had promised that I would never be able to recognize a risk. Because risk was just like death. It had no face.

It was from that day that I contacted a disease. An infection called magic. I could do things that other people won't dream of doing and coming out, not just alive but, unhurt. Children loved me because I could do everything. Their parents were afraid of me because I could do anything. Children were not allowed to play with me. But secretly, they met me and they loved it even more, because it was forbidden. Thus, magic was an infection that spread. And soon, all children in the town could do everything.

We had all forgotten fear. Risk had been terminated from our lives. We had become immortals. Little gods.

Thats when the rain came. And our parents told it had brought a disease. But we loved diseases. We thought magic as a disease. It had changed our lives forever. So, we went out in the rain, defying our parents, and embraced one more disease. We were growing up. We thought of it as moving from one disease to another, lives changing again and again like dates on a calender. When people stop growing up their lives don't move, diseases don't change their lives anymore. And they start growing old.

In that season of rains, however, we learnt that diseases were more powerful than we had known. Not only could it change lives but also take them. Children started dying. We saw corpses of little gods removed from their houses. We saw their parents crying. But we also saw our parents cry. They feared our death. The dead and the living alike brought tears in their eyes. The past and the future seemed equally uncertain. For those of us who survived, we kept living in guilt of some indecipherable mistake.

I rejoiced, however. I had found answer to a question asked to me a few years ago by a childhood friend -

"Must a risk always be dangerous?"

"Not as long as you take it for yourself."

Clay

I remember seeing two people yesterday. One who kept laughing; the other who kept dying.

I've a fond memory of a girl who did both equally beautifully. I wish she was my forgetting.

The two men I'm talking about are mad. I told them so. I told them I'm the clown. I'm mad. But they were too afraid to be recognised thus.

But madness is like love, it comes when it does. I couldn't resist it. Niether could they. So they are two madmen. One who keeps laughing 'coz death has forgotten to take him in; the other who keeps dying "coz he can't laugh.

And then when it started to rain in the afternoon, they started melting.

"Jesus! They're made of clay."

So what makes them different from each other? Laughing or dying? Happy or sad? Sane or insane?..... Jesus or me? Its all the same.

Dear girl trapped in my memory, are you clay?

A Terrible Beauty

Once upon a time, I used to have time. Like a white sheet of paper. And I had to fill it up. I believed it was my obligation towards life. My duty. Time, like money, is not to be preserved, but spent.

But then, one day, time left me. Deserted me. Or if she had been my lover, I would have said -- ditched me. So that I was stranded in one single moment. What I really lost that day was a past and many uncertain futures. And the present was unending. Tiresome.

I had attained death.

Slowly, after I had overcome the initial excitement of my great achievement, I realised that the line that divides life and death is actually very, very thin. Delicate. So that we must overstep it again and again. We keep living our death. And we keep dying into our lives. Your feeling that this piece of writting is somehow connected to your life is the evidence to this.

I know now that all of us are immortals. And life and death is as beauty is, in the eye of the beholder. Relative. We don't live forever. Neither do we die. Don't be misguided. I'm NOT writing about a reincarnation. But about this life of yours.

You'd never be able to live. Nor to die. But will be trapped in a single moment, just as you are right now.

Imagination is your escape. Embrace it.

God

Oftentimes, words leap up from scriptures, from books ..... even from the transparent air to gobble me up. They take each other's hands and form rings...... No! Not rings. Crystals. Disturbing crystals of jumbled words. That's exactly when I start writing nonsense - like I'm doing right now.

A few years ago, when I fell in love for the first time it had taken a strange shape in my heart. And I remember I was trying to sketch that shape on a rough paper.

Have you ever met a person who would suddenly make you realize that you were a part of a common past -- of different times, different lives, different eternities? Could you describe that person to me by words, by paintings, by photographs? By any or by all? No. Because belief is always inversely proportional to expression. We have very few expressions. This society has made expressions only for the common, the drab, and the surealistically veiled drab.

This is the terrifying wordlessness that I live everyday. Thoughts start filing up my head, they overbrim and start covering my face. And I find words everywhere which I'm unable to catch, to decipher, to define.

And then, I think maybe all words have meanings. Maybe, I've forgotten.

Maybe, I'm forgetting myself.

Maybe, I fade within your memory everyday, so that you may start remembering me yet again.

Maybe, all you're reading right now is just your imagination.

Maybe, I don't exist anymore than God does. Imaginations.

Imagine. Frenzy is a realm of infinite possibilities.

Forgetting

In my childhood I was told to write opposites. So, when I saw knowledge, I wrote ignorance. And when I saw remembering, I wrote forgetting. But then things changed so that when I saw knowledge, I wrote forgetting. And when I saw ignorance, I wrote forgetting. And when I saw forgetting, I still wrote forgetting. And I never saw remembering ever again.

In those days I used to live with my granddad. He had amnesia. My parents told he had been so from a time when he had been less older. Although children in this town ( including me and my friends) believed he was 200 years old and had never been any less older. We believed he had been living in this town from a time when there was no town, instead in its place stood a kingdom where wars were fought daily to keep the king busy. We all loved him dearly because forgetting everything he had become a child like us. But then, as they say, things changed. As far as I remember it all happened one afternoon, when while having my lunch I couldn't remember what I had had in my breakfast. I shuddered at the realisation and thought --

"My God, amnesia is contagious"

From that day I was afraid of my grandpa and used to stay away from him.... perhaps I took my imaginations too seriously. It was from that day that I started forgetting my grandfather. Then, one day when I succeeded in forgetting him completely I learnt that he was dead.

I still don't know, till today, what exactly keeps us alive - our heartbeat or our memories?

I write forgetting. And I keep writting.

Come Home, Madness

I woke up and found myself inside a dream. It was my life.

Its been long since we put our imaginations in a colourful box and thrown them into a lake. We watched it sink deeper and deeper till it found no bottom. And then, one day, we forgot ourselves. That was the day we had dissappeared. Since then we've been looking for ourselves. We move from one mirror to another. And yet another. But we find no one. Void. Blankness. Invisibility.

Argentine writer Borges had once wrote: "mirrors and copulation have a strange property: they multiply people." Things have changed since then. Reproduction is extinct. Our minds are realms of sterility in which we take death, like medicine, everyday after our meal.

So, come home to madness. To frenzy. And let us once again reacquire our imaginations. Let's walk into a world of immense possibilities and expect what we didn't even expect we could ever expect expecting. Yes, just like that last sentence. Don't worry over how much you understand. Just let yourself be confused. And free. Fly.

And let this clown lead you to a space called clownscape. Learn theories about your own psychology in ways abstract, unreal and funny (at times). In the end you'll be obsessed about stuffs you won't even be able to describe.... let alone, name.

If you want to take the risk just remember me and read my next piece on "forgetting".