The Technicolor Man : Chapter 3

—Love is a tender emotion that gently holds the eyes and the skin above it, and turns it towards delight, that every emotion that succeeds comes as a mild surprise. Violence is not love, it is an obsession. So to speak that when spoken that one can die for love translates the foolishness of the mind: a certain sense of the fishy heroic: a mockery of the feeling itself. We seem to have forgotten to live for anything. At everything we start dying. Murder, arson and hell! Grow up!  

 

Thud. Geeta sprang from the well, she was washing the utensils. She sees him. Gentle lonely tears fill her eyes. Misty, hurting.

 

—Education hurts.

 

Ma. Please give me some food. I am hungry. Chintu does not want much attention. He has been bestowed an eternity of attention.

 

Slowly she gets up. All the love that a mother feels, all of it can not be peeled. The earth is whispering something to her feet. A remark of love. Be calm.

 

Yes. Come and sit here. Suppressing her desire to hold him in her arms. Pour me your love, and make small bites of them. Children of birds that fly in our tender mouths. Signs of love. Sug’ga—maina.

 

Chintu slowly came and sat by her mother. Lightly touching her sari. She pours her love on a plate. His pain is lessened.

 

—Hurting faces can not chew,

“So plee-ee-ee-ee-ease,

Love me do.”

 

He devours the food, gulps it all down.

 

—The Chinese believe that one should chew their food properly. It prolongs one’s life. Ancient beliefs. Is there any food for our thoughts? There are guns now. Steel chambers of cold freedom.

 

—The darkness behind eternal light,

Just one shot,

Then a smile,

And let’s pass on the wine.

 

Take some more my love. She whispers. She does not want to wake his pain. Let them sleep.

 

No ma, I am done for now. I want to sleep. He says with some difficulty. A cotton sponge forms in his throat.

 

—How many feelings must a child feel in a day? Even a man! Negligence, hatred, fear, hurt, and then eventually love—the cure. Does love cure anything? A crying heart? Maybe a weeping heart. I have seen love cure. It cures life, once it’s gone, because then there is no death, just the absence of life. Pure and simple swarming particles of darkness.

 

He picks himself up and walks toward the well. The trees are shocked. There is no breeze. Dancers halt in surprise. Shock.

 

—The noiseless well holds in its bosom

All the tears and fears it has welcome

Over the ages of raking silence.

 

Chintu understands the nature of things. In his innocence he is far wiser then we are with our morbid hypocrisies. He understands that there is a cry in the wind, in the wilderness, in his heart of hearts. There is a deep anchor that holds him to life—immovable be thy destiny, only pain and agony. Reasons why melancholic poetry is far more popular then poetry that is alive. We are living lumps of pain. He does not feel any form of hatred for his Master Ji, only a sense of dumb fear with no roots, no leaves. Just a trunk of fear hanging onto the nothingness of empty spaces.

 

—This is where I understand why childhood and old age are the most innocent years of mans life. My book of my revelations. It so happens that when we are children we don’t know anything and hence everything is pure in its form, devoid of acid. The mind is immaculate and does not care about trivial vanities like war and glory. We are yet to learn the meaning of vile and hatred, though Freud says that we do have the Oedipus complex even at this age, but that is a sexual tendency of the animal called mankind.

 

And given old age, we have already understood all that corrupts the world and being. We have all the knowledge on a whole and nothing seems worth it. It’s all all-right either this way or that. We have already realized that there is nothing that can make a productive difference. We weren’t born to be productive; by nature we are destructive animals (exceptions please be left alone). There is one cause and in turn one affect—life unto death. And this is that makes us children again, because we become ignorant of all that is considered our rights and freedom: all the excuses of power.

 

In his beaten tired attire of the soul he wishes to sleep off the pain. He wishes to be in his room again. It hurts. His wish shall be answered with due respect.

 

Baba, if you are tired you can go and take a short nap. Papa might get late. Her voice echoes from the kitchen. She can not bear the burden of his swollen sight. It is painful. Neither can I. So I am making him sleep that he might feel comfortable.

 

—That wonderful mother of a child,

That love she conceived from her womb

How possibly can people live through death?

Without love and affection, in a tomb?

 

Chintu takes slow gradual steps toward his room. Fear grabs him in the throat, what if he would not wake up on time? Some more swelling—he convinces himself. He does not care.

 

—The Greeks were children. Wise men.

 

The room is lit brightly by the sun, and there is an abundant amount of stuffiness and heat. Soon he would sweat. Wet his shirt. The neat broken shelf on the wall and the broken Matka by the side of the room speak loud about the organization of the house. About Geeta. She would not get a job in a multinational. Do you know why? Not because she is unorganized. That could never be a reason. Because she does not have enough money to lie. To fake. The gems that are made by history are fake. Look behind the glitterati. Simplicity is despised, we crave for complications. We complicate things in our consciousness to evade the sense of truth. Truth defies death and horrifies life.

 

The wind sweeps in through the window and flaps them: imitations of a fan. Mr. Wind must have witnessed a fan when he was visiting town. To no avail. Chintu puts a thin torn sheet on the floor and lies on it. The sheet covers a little of his head, but the rest of the piece is torn in such a way that it wouldn’t make any difference at all even if he would not have put it. No difference. Where are the curtains?

 

The sweet dusty smell of the walls enters his nose. Casually singing a lullaby. The lullaby of nature. He is amazed. There is a surprise.

 

—Look when nature keeps its finger on a head

Everything by miracle turns into a comfortable bed.

 

A sweet dark cloud comes in at the right time, large enough to cool off the weather, small enough to not harm the crops. It moistens the floor of the house, making the bed softer. Nature is such a powerful entity that we can never predict it. It does not need to be predicted. It moves with its heart. It listens to nothing but its heart. And we strange species have not yet learnt the ways of the heart; we were too busy mastering the cunning of the mind. The irony is we faltered there as well. Flying shamans of survival: water wiser then the soul: nature, nature, nature: swoon in its name: we can swim to other horizons: love in its bosom and winter in its eyes.

 

—Silver petals and seven unicorns

Gliding against the sky

To greet and uphold the promise of love

Sway gaily, fly bye.

 

Chintu swims toward a sweet painless void. Dense and dark. Geeta comes to the door to watch his sleep. Not daring to come inside. She would have to open the door, and that could raise her son and his pain. She can not even touch him right then, a slight touch on the forehead. Promise of eternal love. A kiss on the forehead. Promise of eternal protection. She goes back to the well, to look into that dark abyss and wait for the whisper.

 

—Old wise whisperer

Please do tell

What is the cure?

I am so unsure

How do I react?

Teach me some tact.

 

But this time nature does not whisper.

 

—You can’t force those of the free will, they rebel. The entities of the heart speak of their own accord, of their own wish. Nothing can be beaten out of them. In times of desperation they become spectacular listeners: mute but not ignorant. Not torture—patient. The answer shall arrive, when time shall arrive. Nature has witnessed enough misinterpretations of untimely whispers: all the derelicts and their pages filled of unearthly vengeance, unleashed upon the innocence of the poor, dying and the dead. I despise the religion that man created. Shallow, short chains of disillusional freedom. I despise all those who preach the higher being, slaves and worshipers of torture and boredom. Capturers and turners of the pure. They should be hanged so that this world shall redefine power, redefine existence, redefine itself. So that we become men again. Not martyrs sucking the divine cock to get an easy entry into the kingdoms of lies. There is no heaven and no hell, no swarg! What is so damn tough to understand this simple fact? Why did Buddha die? Why did all the real men die?

 

He turns to his left. Agony. There is a small red spot: somewhere. It is disturbing him, running from one place to another. Faster. Faster. It grows to become a red spot on a black surface. Something starts to protrude from the spot, something with a thin end. The red spot becomes a stick. Red rotten teeth all over it. Marks of bites. The stick has jaws that open up and run toward him. He runs for his life. There are walls on his sides. They narrow the road ahead. The distance is flooded. He hurts his left hand. Red glue flows from his side; hot as lava. He is burning. The jaws close in on him. He ducks and falls into a pit the size of a dream. He swims. His left hand is about to tear from his body. He can’t breathe. Scream! He tries but fails. There is no voice. He has lost his voice. His cheeks swell and cover his eyes, he can’t see anymore.

 

The mud wall. Looking at him. Eyes open: his.

 

Chintu had slept until dinner. His father was waiting outside with surprise in his eyes.

 

Chintu, I was thinking if you would come with me to town next month? He asks in his gentle voice, full of the unknown. Trying to ignore the swellings on his body that now appears from the room.  

 

Chintu looks into his eyes. No reply. Nothing. Just a smile floods his face. All the pain reassembles at the ends of the labyrinth—they have to wait until the next beating. They will have to hide from his elation. Elation kills pain.

 

—What a lovely end

That begins with a smile

Perishes all the pain

Nothing is more worthwhile.

Random (KNK)

What if;

Colors were flowers

And flowers were men

And men could swim to the sun?

 

Would it

Then be

Any different, would we

Still have,

Bombs and guns?

 

What if;

We were

The winds and waters

That cover this illuminant earth?

 

Would it

Then be

That we

Would fall

To berths that haven’t taken birth?

 

What if;

Tears

Had meanings and wisdom

And lips that spoke the truth absolute?

 

Would it

Then happen

That wars

And darkness

We spread for glory, we would mute?

 

What if;

The stars were hungry

And extraterrestrials

Our friends, and met us one day?

 

Would it

Then matter

What race

Or creed,

Or random colors our shadows went astray?

The Night Whisperer

She whispers through the stormy night,

Whispers with her swollen eyes,

The dark emmissaries of fateless seas,

Within lynin wrapped in million crease,

She whispers soft rage, cruelty pure,

Rubber sparks and rubies flow

She cries at the dawn to slow

Her hate and wrath

She whispers soft

The nights path

As it winds.

Chocolate Doctors and Elephant Paws

This is from the time that was about to come. I wish that this was just another memory that casually slips out of our membrane, but grotesque is the wish of fate. There are things that in my senility I wish to remember, but only their silhouettes linger, mingled with ashes of time. And there are things that I seek to eradicate from the labyrinth of my mind but they have stuck like wax in a slice in a table that in the act of being removed only make the cut wider and more prominent. I wish my memory to be erased. I wish to be erased—but without it.

 

***

Back in those days of the future. When things were far more bitter then the past and crueler then the present. Back in the lap of that moment which was yet to come, I can recall all the incidents quite clearly. We were four of us, May, June, July, and myself, August, sitting on the porch of June’s house. We were waiting through the solitude of time. Waiting for something. I have forgotten what it was. But I clearly remember it had something to do with the future. We were waiting for the past to come back. The fat legged creature with wings of war: Blood spilling shredders that caused earthquakes with jerks.

 

Young, attractive, and full of energy, we sat there staring with vivid blank thoughts at the hazy yellow streets that pushed itself in directions, our right and left. In front of our porch was a starry eyed princess of her individualistic dreams. She was pretty but there was something that was very unattractive about her. I don’t recall what. It was probably her soul that she wore on her face. Through the years that we had known her she had strongly believed that she was quite a princess. Back in school we used to call her the princess of parched dreams. But that was just children being children, and we had grown up to tolerate the vanity of her soul, the poverty of her thought, and the incapacity of her mind to tolerate anything that could be useful to the growth of knowledge in the womb of our minds. It was as if she had plucked out all of knowledge from her mind, like a Gardner plucks weeds.

 

Behind her was a house made of chocolate. Pure brown chocolate. Seductive, attractive and romantic. It was the house of our dreams. It was built in the old style that in the north-eastern part of India is called the Assam style. Typical sloping roof, a door, a window. It looked like a child’s imagination that had taken shape out of the sheer curiosity of the imagination to see itself in reality. Princess’ mother was a witch doctor who spent most of her life inside the house engrossed in experiments in something she called science. Now I can recall that my parents were very angry when she had moved in, they said that a man had previously been hanged by the messenger of god for his experiments that proved that the earth was not the centre of the universe. This made me ask if it was true, but surprisingly he smiled at me and in turn asked me how I could be so ignorant as to not know such an obvious thing as that. Of course the sun was the centre of the universe. Which at that time confused me a bit but I was always taught not ask questions. HE was such a beautiful being, and had created so many things that it was obvious that people like us would get confused if we tried to understand as complicated things as what stood at the centre of the universe.

 

My parents’ annoyance at the witch doctor, who cured pain with a silver slimy paste, and made bone fracture lesser painful and made it heal faster, and cured fever with small white buttons, and did all such sorts of magic, I think was well justified. She was though a nice woman, or at least we children thought so. Always wearing a smile, she used to gift us chocolates for no reason. But the wisest man of our town, who was crowned the mare of the city, once at a dinner at our house, which I think was my birthday, told us that it might be a way that she had devised to kidnap the children of our town and torture us or undertake experiments on us. And I quite clearly remember that the fact had scared us a lot at that time.

 

On our right was the miniature post office with its red building the size of my fathers palm although it used to be several times larger then me back in those days. Every day an old seagull would come and drop a green bag in the fire chimney and pick another that it had left the day before from the front, and just leave. I remember this one instance when the seagull, Uncle Sam we used to call him, was concentrating for the drop and just when it turned it bombed into my father’s chest. Thought he was a very nice man, my father, and so did not say anything, I could see that Uncle Sam’s beak had hurt him. He just smiled and went inside the house. Uncle Sam ashamed of his fault did not bring anymore letters to our town; instead a replacement started bringing them but he was never very welcome.

 

On our left was the police office. It used to be functional back in the days when my father was my size, but long before he had grown up it had been shut. There was no need for police in the town. The cemetery and the temple were good enough. The saints knew the best anyways since they were the messengers of God. So all in all it was left unto their shoulders to judge and condemn, since damnation was the only possible way that a man could be cured, and I think so will the custom even in the days that this story will be read. The wisest man, our mare, took care of the road, and cleanliness of the city and its minds. He also helped my father eradicate rumors that used to reach our town every now and then. There were also many other people that lived out of town, but were not all so important. And I only vaguely remember them.

 

Also, our house was made of wood and was elevated to three steps from the ground. It was here that we were sitting when the accident happened. Luckily there was no roof on top of our heads that we survived.

 

For some minutes the plank we had been sitting on had been vibrating. Then after sometime it started dancing. This was all alright, but then a lot of dust came from nowhere and we started sneezing quite profusely. And then it happened.

 

Like a thud all the city fell to pieces. A paw of the baliphants (elephants with wings of bats) had fallen somewhere near our town and caused all the tremors. The whole town was sleeping at that time, and had swum to another denser sleep from which they would not awaken again.