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.