BREAKING FORTH....

(The elements' story- really trashy, 'tear jerker' is a bloated understatement for this!)



‘This collapsible canvas tent stretched above my head is a colossal web of deceit’
The thought troubled Bablu, as he lay on his threadbare ‘charpoi ‘, with the milk-white palms of his hand resting on his chest.
The collapsible canvas tent, with infinite perforations on its vast surface through which peeked countless blazing eyes, appeared a sham.
‘The eyes are not eyes at all!’
Not the flashing eyes of restless little children playing peek-a-boo from behind the punctured tent, but rather, a giant octopus with a beaming torch-light gripped in each of its several tentacles, gyrating obscenely to the nocturnal music of the universe from behind the canvas mask.
The eyes are not eyes at all…
“You know what they say about your mother’s eyes?”
“No Chachi…what do they say?”
“Two shallow cups of cheap country liquor!”
“Chachi! Please…don’t!”
Bablu felt his ears burn.
The woman went on.
“And know what they say about her lips?”
“Ma’s lips? Why? Ma’s lips are like…like a pair of orphans, blinded with red-hot pokers, abandoned on the busy highway.”
Bablu’s words came out in hurried spurts.
The woman sneered.
“Really? Blind orphans? Even with the layers of garish red rubbed on to them? And did you ever notice the way they appear swollen after she….”
“Stop chachi! Stop! I beg you! Please leave!”
Bablu felt a familiar searing pain in his chest. He fixed his eyes firmly on the ground as the woman started moving away from him. She smelt of the soil, the soil flecked with dust and grime, suffocated with non-recyclable polythene packets and thick glass bottles frothing generous amounts of green fungus at the mouth. Her brown skin appeared well-oiled, it was gleaming, like polished wood. The big vermillion dot on her forehead was the very celestial disk stamped on to the sky, poised to drop beyond the horizon with a mighty plonk!
She turned back once, as Bablu had sensed she would.
“Come with me darling. You know I would keep you happy…”

Bablu closed his eyes and pictured the torch-welding octopus shadow-dancing in the night-sky. But this time, the familiar jingle of fake gold bangles took over the rest of his senses. The wrists of the octopus glared a lurid shade of crimson and red…and its eyes…
The eyes were two chalices, cheap aluminium chalices overflowing with equally cheap country liquor, and men with blood-shot eyes were cupping their soiled palms greedily to get throatfuls of the elixir.
And the octopus?
The octopus was beaming, its garish red lips, stretched in a wide inviting smile…..

In another one of those seedy hotels in Suder Street, on a ridiculously familiar crumpled velvet sheet, under the lazily-rotating fan pasted haphazardly on a screaming pink ceiling, Bonhi went about her duty silently.
No more helpless shrieks.
The Padma river with its slippery banks, the Padma river with its teeming fish, the Padma river with the helpless muzzle tied to its face like a massive fishing-net….and the Padma river that had watched, as a twelve-year old Bonhi had been held roughly by the soft nape of her neck and thrown on the stiff wooden cot….that Padma river of her memory had long dried up. Now it was, a blazing desert.
Now Bonhi would simply shut her eyes and feel Bablu’s curious little fingers scavenging the contours of her body even as she lay on the velvety bed of a client. Now she felt no shame. Just occasionally, a sigh of sympathy would erupt within her, for those men who screeched their cars to a halt before her voluptuous frame and gave an enquiring nod. In that nod, Bonhi glimpsed vestiges of a dying man choking on mouthfuls of sawdust, kicking his dead camel in petrified disbelief as he sinks deeper and deeper into the sands of the desert….
Now she smiled, as she felt Bablu reach out two chubby little fingers towards her in the dark.

“Neeraj bhai! You need a haircut, you know?”
Shomir was grinning from ear to ear, and Neeraj, as always, felt the hostile gale of phony optimism blowing from the direction of the young man’s voice, from the direction of his rotten flute.
A haircut?
As if he cared!
He would not spare a ‘paisa’ for foolhardy Life that came immaculately groomed in stiff white collars, polishing its boots vigorously with polish of the blackest shade, only to be shoved, stamped and kicked in a cramped public bus!
Neeraj gave a snort of disgust as he felt the young man gazing lovingly at his own reflection on the still surface of the pond and trying to convince himself that it belonged to someone else.
“Come on now Neeraj bhai! Just because you are a cripple doesn’t mean that this is the end of your life!”
Neeraj stared down at the two stumps that had once extended into two perfectly agile limbs.
But of course! What would you know about this filthy immobile existence? look at me! I am a stagnant pond with nowhere to flow! Once I had the flow of a fish, in my sturdy little brown boat, I would infuse the rippling Dal lake of my adolescence with the very spirit of my being, screaming-
“Cabbages to sell! Fresh juicy cabbages to sell!”
“Neeraj bhai! What happened? What are you screaming about? What cabbages?”
Neeraj felt ashamed at the sudden lapse of self-control, and turned his face away.
“Now look here bhai. You shouldn’t lose heart. Right? Look at me! You can make a blockbuster movie on my goddamn life! See how the script would roll- a hard-hearted father who seems to have assisted his docile wife in the act of procreation only to beget himself a manager at his shop to do his accounts day and night without pay or rest; a son who grows up to detest those very astronomical units creeping and crawling on the walls of his father’s room which now threatens to trespass into his hallowed territory; the son therefore constructs his own little parallel world in the blissful holes of his flute, only to have his world crushed under the wrathful heels of his father’s boots. So what does the son do? Does he cry and mope around? Does he give in to his father? No! Absolutely not! This hero’s world might have been crushed to splinters, but his heart soared to the tune of the unheard- it shivered in delight to hear the soft bursting of clouds, the rhythmic ruminations of a cow chewing cud, the flirtatious touch of faded silk against stiff iron grills. So the hero cried out to the pigeons- ‘did you call me to join in your flight?’, and in their incomprehensible nods, he found the meaning of life….!”
Neeraj trembled with anger.
Do not give me your lie-infected life! Do not give me that! Do not!
“You think I didn’t try to make a career of my music? Of course I did! I rubbed my heels off on rough rude pavements, sliced opened my forearm while trying to board a running bus, won for myself shameful freckles and zits upon constant exposure to the merciless sun, and still, appeared in my best of forms when I glided into the sparkling music companies! I was flushed in the face….flushed with the intoxicating feeling of euphoria. Victory seemed but a few baby steps away… But you know what? They all turned out to be the same! The filthy little… And the worst part is that, they all speak my father’s language! The despicable language of profit and loss! They don’t feel music, they hammer it into parts and particles and sell them by the kilos! So I said- ‘No thank you sir!’ and left. Everyone knows why I came to live here in this slum. I came to live life on my own terms! Yes sir! Only that!”
Lies! Lies! Lies!
Neeraj felt his head burst.
Argh! Pride! The pride-in-a-vacuum! The dirt of the slums would never brush his heels, for he would forever glide over it…glide over it with leisurely flapping of his wings.
And Neeraj? Where had his pride taken him?
‘You are the pride of this revolution! You are the fiery youth of our Valley!’
The pride….the youth…all culminating in the grand finale…..
The army men, the weeks of torturous interrogation and finally, being rendered a cripple for life….
Now I am a stagnant pool! Come to me all you weeds, I would make a blanket of you and shroud myself!

Shomir appeared annoyed when he left Neeraj’s shack.
He had been there with a set purpose. He had expected the cripple to help him. After all, Neeraj was the only man in the slum to whom Bonhi would fly in her so-called moments of distress.
‘Hah! As if we don’t know what sort of consolation she seeks from the cripple! A cripple! A cripple alone has the power to satisfy a whore? Is that it? I will show her….’
Bonhi.
Desire.
Drug-induced desire that he would puncture into his veins….
She had rebuked him once- “You want to sleep with me? Ha! First get money to feed yourself! You think you are too good, don’t you? Let me tell you how good you are…you are as good as that street dog’s backside!”
And her gurgling laughter had hacked down his chiffon wings. He had felt the grains of earth touch his feet. He had recoiled in disgust.

“So? The flute-player had come to you again?”
Neeraj didn’t need to look up. He could tell what stood before him.
A thick black cascade of hair with the bottle-green plastic comb stuck on to it, dark caterpillar eyebrows that would huddle up in moments of deep distress, the unmistakable stench of soil…soil specked with dust and grime.
“Dhoritri. Don’t do this to the….”
“Don’t do this to whom? To that worn-out-whore of Birati? To that vulgar woman who sells her flesh by the kilos at street corners? From where does these sudden spurts of sympathy come, huh?”
Neeraj sighed. This happened every night. With tiring precision.
“I have absolutely no sympathy for her! Why should I care for a whore? Don’t I have enough troubles of my own? Who is she? Huh? Who….who is she?”
In a sudden burst of anger, Neeraj had flung an earthen pitcher towards the door. It crashed at the threshold…There was no water in it.
He now pushed open the tiny window beside his cot with the end of his crutch, and started screaming-
“Wretched whore! Does this slum look like a hell-hole for you cheap women? Get out of our lives! Get out!”
Dhoritri stood smiling by the shattered remains of the pitcher.
The oil on her skin gleamed as she said softly-
“So, if you hate her so much, why don’t you help the flute-player?”
“Me? But why…”
“Of course you! Everybody in this slum knows what the whore has in her dog-eared heart for you! She would eat the dust for you! Walk on a carpet of needles and shards of glass for you! “
Neeraj clasped his burning head in his palms and kept shaking them in fatigue.
Dhoritri continued-
“I know of course what pleasures you must have bestowed on her….after the first act, anything else could be expected of you!”
“Dhoritri! Please go away! Why do you keep coming back? Why can’t you leave me alone? And what first act are you talking about? Had I not done that, what would have become of our….”
“Stop! Not a word about my son! He is my son, and I will take him with me! You will see.”
Neeraj felt his hands shaking violently. Dhoritri was not done yet. She looked back for a last time and muttered under her breath audibly-
“All that I need to do is make Shomir sprout his wings….and fair too. The man has his grain of wrath. The whore had humiliated him once, snubbed his advances. But ah! Revenge! Only I could spur him to that! He was too flighty for a deep and profound thing like revenge! So now, he would have his revenge, scar her painted face perhaps? I don’t know. I don’t care. He will have his Bonhi….and I will have…”
So saying, she left.
Ah! Dhoritri….she was gone now.
Leaving a trail of dust and crumbled mud.
“Lean on me!” she had whispered into Neeraj’s ear the night he had been robbed and left on the floor, clawing at thin air for support. Then, pressing his ear on her bosom, he had heard the steady roll of the drumbeats of the earth, the vibrating throbs within the heart of her being.
The daughter of a sweeper, Dhoritri had never been alone. Her seven siblings had dived in with her in the painfully joyous scramble for space in their one-room shack. And here, Dhoritri had been the great rock of strength….
That strength Neeraj saw in her now…the malevolent strength of a woman who never forgot a hurt, who never forgave a wrong.
That strength…..the strength that made her return to this slum and haunt its lanes and by-lanes even after six years of her death….

Bablu was thinking again….
I could have been born anything…a flower, cow-dung, the curl in mother’s hair….
But would it have bothered me still?
The acrid words of Dhoritri chachi sped back to his mind as though they were waiting in ambush for the opportunity-
“You know Shomir? But of course you do! The young boy, the flute-player! The one who is hardly eight years elder to you? Now eight years is hardly a time gap, don’t you think Bablu? Such a guy could easily be your brother….so….he is your brother’s age, don’t you think?....And would you like it if your mother were to creep in to his cot in the dead of the night when you are asleep and in your dreams, smiling perhaps….so, would you like it if the whore were to creep into the bed of your brother and to caress him and love him…love him more she loves you? Would you like it if in that moment, she whispered in his ears- ‘Shomir! I love you so much!’, just as she whispers into yours?….”
“No! stop! Stop! Stop! Please chachi! Don’t say such horrible things about my mother…please! You are a liar! A liar!”
“We shall see….”
And Dhoritri chachi had vanished, leaving ten-year old Bablu to his living fears.
Bonhi had often warned Bablu against talking to Shomir. She had called him a boy of ‘bad intentions’. But now, doubt started snaking its way into the perplexed mind of the boy. Life at the slums was hard. It opened up windows and razed down walls to expose things that one did not want to see. Here, a boy of ten was expected to become a man of sordid experiences. But Bablu was still swimming effortlessly against that tide…
Bablu knew what his mother did for a living. But she had always come back to her little Bablu, taken him in her arms and shut out the din of the world. And now, she would divide her love?…give it to…to Shomir! The boy who would play his flute and incite the other slum boys to chant ‘son-of-a-whore!’ whenever Bablu would pass by him.
Never!
His mother could never do this to him!
In his little man’s mind, Bablu had declared a permanent war with Shomir.
“I would snap his wings in two and bring him down one day…”

Flute music reached her ears as she made her way home.
The flute that would elicit airy fetters…
Fetters that would fly to Bonhi, clasp her wrists and feet, and drag her to him.
Ah! The conquest would be done!
Shomir smiled.

“No chachi! I don’t want to go anywhere with you! Please leave me alone!”
Dhoritri appeared desperate.
“Come with me Bablu. All your false beliefs…all your faith in that whore will be wiped clean.”
“Stop calling my mother a whore! Stop calling my mother…”
“She is NOT your mother!”

Bonhi had felt the familiar fangs of force upon her. That old galling taste of coercion- of aged men forcing themselves into a helpless girl as her shrieks sprang off the pulsating floors of the Padma and diffused in the night air….
No more, she thought.
Shomir felt a jolt of shock as Bonhi pushed him hard against the wall and with a flourish of her bejeweled wrists, broke the lighted lantern over his head….

The hut was on fire.
It was steadily gaining momentum.
Bonhi had to escape.
But wait!
Through the smoke….who was that?
Bablu was standing a few steps away from the burning hut…from Bonhi.
“see…see her….she loves him so much that she has dived right into the fire to try and save his life!” Dhoritiri was hissing into Bablu’s ears.
“Bablu! Don’t worry! Don’t be scared. Go get some help…fast! I need a blanket to cover myself…go…fast….Bablu?”
The boy was standing transfixed on the ground. He barely moved an inch. A single tear was sliding down his cheek.
This is even better, thought Dhoritri gleefully. The whore would see the betrayal of the one person that she thought loved her! And now that bablu knew the history of his birth…..ah! What a death it will be for the whore! Now it was all coming to a head. Neeraj’s betrayal too! It had torn Dhoriti’s heart when after her death, her crippled good-for-nothing husband had given away their son, Bablu to that whore to keep.
Why? She had asked him again and again. She couldn’t depart because of that one act of betrayal.
Why?
Neeraj could have tried suffocating the musty pages from his dairy under the weeds of his immobile existence…but some things would forever defy death….
Like Dhoritri…
Or, like the memory of the eighteen year old Neeraj from Kashmir accompanying his uncle to Calcutta on his carpet-selling trips. Carpets they had sold under the scrutinizing gaze of the sun, and when the sun had been substituted by blinking street-lights, the boy had knocked nervously at the door…the door that he had pictured in his infinite obscene little dreams. No particular door really…but the door that would be opened at a half-knock by a buxom woman in garish paint, who would pull him in and concretize his lonely dreams with lightening dexterity….
But what stood shivering before him, was a stick-thin frame of about seventeen….Bonhi they had named her. He had been her first client. The ‘client’ for her was then, akin to some divine court of law at whose altar she had broken down, crying bitterly of her state, of the ‘men by the Padma’. The young Neeraj had been shocked, muted, the only expression of his extreme discomfort.
‘Why is she is doing this to me? Is this a ploy to extract more money?’
He had pictured his friends back at home, jeering him when he would recount his first ‘failed’ attempt….
No! Neeraj could not bear that. And here was this girl still weeping, asking him to help her…to give her ‘a better life.’
A better life?
“Hah! So, by donating our child to that whore, you feel that you have put to right whatever she expected you to mend that night? Ridiculous!” Dhoritri’s eyes had transmuted to a menacing shade of red.
“Maybe not quite. But yes, in my crippled capacity….yes! When, after so many years, I met her again here in the slums, I observed her closely. It was the same girl, now a woman. But there is another reason too….That night, when the young helpless girl had broken down so completely and recounted her horrific experiences to her uninterested audience, what the audience did not fail to notice in her tone, was the unflinching pride of a woman. This woman, I knew, would consume herself, but never let her loved ones burn…she would not ….”

“The Birati slums are on fire! Help! Someone call the Fire Brigade!”
People thronged the bridge that ran over the slums. Thick black smoke ascended the sky with increasing urgency. Down in the slums, tress, shacks, brick and mortar, all sizzled and melted…..and in that, in that flame, a little boy was found clasping the frame of a woman.
“You are my mother! You are my mother! I am so sorry, I doubted you….”
“But why Bablu?”
Bablu didn’t say a word….
He simply clasped on to Bonhi’s body and continued weeping in wisps and burps.
Neeraj the cripple stood at a distance by his shack. “Wretched whore”, he muttered.
And smiled.

Character Building: Naiwrit Ray

Name:
Naiwrit Ray

Age:
About 35 in human years, but Naiwrit Ray has not always been human and grows (old) faster than humans do. So in another year he will be close to 40 in human years.

Residence:

Currently Calcutta, where he rents a decrepit rooftop room in an old building in a Selimpore slum. It’s extremely cheap, for which it is infested with insects, lacks one window pane, and the asbestos roof is nearly crumbling, but these things don’t bother Naiwrit. He never remembers to buy a replacement for the light bulb which has stopped working weeks ago, because he doesn’t miss that either. He switches on the fan sometimes, just because a normal city human requires something to show on the electricity bill (and conveniently often forgets to switch the fan off when he goes out); but he actually sleeps on the lichen-grown terrace just outside his room.

Occupation:
Currently working as a bouncer at a small, shady bar-cum-eatery in Kidderpore, near the port, a job he has joined a little more than a month ago. It is a night-time job, beginning at 6 in the evening and ending around 2 am.

Species:
What Naiwrit Ray isn’t, by definition, is a “mutant”, but he was nevertheless born a tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) and is currently a human (Homo sapiens sapiens). He is not more of one than the other; and his mind and body are a mix of both. But since he started out as a tiger, his human social skills aren’t the sharpest.

Appearance:
- About 6’2’’ tall, wheatish complexion. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. Waist is narrow in shape but has acquired a bit of girth. Large hands and feet. Thick fingers, much like paws.

- Has a thick, dishevelled mane of wavy, dark brown hair down to his shoulders, which glows golden when sunlight passes through it. Has a profusion of hair on his body, but since the shade of hair is not strikingly different from the shade of skin, the hairiness is not grossly visible.

- Broad face. Prominent jaw. Large, blunt nose. Has an unkempt stubble but not really a beard, for he neither cares to shave nor keep a proper beard (He trims the facial hair occasionally, and erratically, when it gets too uncomfortable). Thick eyebrows. Small, deep-set dark grey eyes – if one looks carefully they will notice that it’s not the irises that are dark grey but the entire eye (i.e. the “white” of the eye), and the black pupils contract and dilate in adjustment with light. No one, thankfully, has required to look carefully yet.

- His front teeth have grown flat like humans, but from the incisors inwards he has an excellent feline set. No one, once again, has yet required to investigate this.

- Wears full-sleeves and full-length trousers, even in summer, but not of a tight cut or a heavy material (He likes cotton). Naiwrit Ray hasn’t got a sense of style in even the most basic way, so his dressing is often odd – not because it stands out, but because it doesn’t offer the unconscious indication of any particular socio-cultural background. He isn’t aware of this, of course, and consciously prefers to dress in a way that does not attract attention. His instinct is to wear dark camouflage colours – grey, brown, dark blue or green, more or less all dusty, faded shades. (But not black. Black is not a camouflage colour.)

Movements:
The easiest way to perceive Naiwrit Ray’s movement is to remember that he is yet to come to terms with small, intricate human movements. He cannot sew or use cutlery, coins slip through his fingers and he doesn’t notice if he is not paying particular attention. His voice is guttural; he won’t be able to say a tongue-twister.

Therefore, Naiwrit Ray walks with large, slow steps. He also limps a little, dragging his left leg. However, while he does not possess the elegance of a dancer, there is a pervasive grace about this large, shabby man which is the grace of an impoverished king. Despite his gait and his limp, he holds himself up majestically. He can turn like lightning, run and swim faster than any man, has an exceptionally sharp sense of sight and smell, and can break another man’s arm by simply grasping it too tight. He also walks without a footfall. These talents, however, are not immediately visible to a person who casually runs into Naiwrit in the street.

Intelligence, Emotions, Social Skills:
Naiwrit Ray is, in fact, extremely intelligent and perceptive – what passes off as stupidity or clumsiness is the absence of the basic social training that a normal human being receives from childhood. Naiwrit has not been a human for long, never had a human to train him, but has acquired enough human skill by himself to pass off as a vaguely “weird” man.

He speaks Bengali in a mixed Medinipori dialect that he has picked up from all over his way from the Sundarbans to Calcutta (Its strangeness does not stand out as much in Calcutta as it did in the pockets of Medinipore; Calcuttans don’t know each regional variation of the Medinipori dialect). He even speaks a few words of Hindi and English that are used in day-to-day talk. He understands the alphabet and letters well enough to be able to use money or the transport, though he probably won’t be able (and is not interested) to read a book.

Naiwrit does not understand philosophy or politics. He merely imitates human behaviour from the outside. In human terms his nature is strictly fair, but that’s because he follows a strict, straightforward animal logic. He does not understand treachery, hypocrisy or violence without immediate cause, because the usual motivations for them – power, prestige or love – hold no meaning for him. (He does understand the usage of money, but to him it is only the human replacement of hunting as a means of sustenance. He has not met many rich people or got acquainted with the various prospects of money, some of which might be tempting to him if he knew.)

The pervasive emotions in Naiwrit’s mind are caution and apprehension. He is aware his difference other humans and the need to conceal it. For the rest, he is quite indifferent to human emotions, merely because he hasn’t been acquainted with them. Tigers don’t make friends, and in his human existence Naiwrit hasn’t yet encountered a situation where a human has turned to him for intimacy. He doesn’t know how to make conversation.

Naiwrit also hasn’t felt any sexual attraction for humans yet, and this is both the effect and at least one of the causes of his lack of intimacy with humans. As a tiger he had mated (one may suspect even with his own mother) and had cubs, but also as a male tiger he feels no adherence to any of his blood relatives, or has any knowledge of them. He is generally indifferent to mankind, but that is not because he doesn’t have human emotions, but essentially because most of them haven’t yet been called into activity.

However, he is also keen to integrate into human life, proven by the fact that he has struggled to learn its ways ever since his transformation, rather than attempting to return to the forest at the first chance he got. As a tiger he was an alpha male, and once (if ever) he gets that essential social training, there’s a chance Naiwrit will turn into a quite socially successful human being.


Food habit:
Likes his meat best raw and still brings some home and eats it that way, but Naiwrit is making a conscious effort to curb that, because it isn’t a very human thing to do. To that effect he usually eats his meals in public, where his favourite things are kebabs and steaks, followed by dishes with eggs and/or milk. He has also developed a reluctant appetite for cereals, and can stand rice or bread. But green vegetables he shall not eat, unless he requires to throw up.

He has never felt any attraction for alcohol or smokables.

Contrary to public opinion (or what it would be if the public knew what he was), Naiwrit does not crave human meat. He has never tasted human meat in his life, he isn’t going to try it especially now that he is one of them, and he finds goat, chicken, cow and other available meats quite enjoyable. (There’s no repression or compromise involved at this point.)


Racial Back-story:
An entity like Naiwrit Ray emerges not from factors that can be explained by science but from the edges of reality where it can be hardly distinguished from myths/belief. There are ghosts in the darkness because they must be there. A tiger can turn into a human because, deep down, anyone who has ever lived in a forest knows that they can.

Gods, demons and folk characters often arise from the same well of belief, gradually consolidating into steady characteristics if they don’t cease to exist. A god that survives in human belief gradually accumulates more and more faith, and everyone knows faith can move (quite physical) mountains. But what happens to a god that steadily loses popularity? It eventually disappears, but does it disappear till even one person remembers and maybe believes in it, since all gods are but formations of belief?

There are people in the Sundarbans who still speak of Dakshin Ray, though few remember who he originally used to be, and many children, being educated in the “modern” way, have not heard his name. But Dakshin Ray had once been the spirit of that entire forest: part-god, part-demon, with the body of a tiger but the voice and mind of a man. Modern renditions of the myth depict Dakshin Ray rather simplistically as pure evil – the adversary of the benevolent figure of Bon Bibi, who was the representative of the human dwellers of the forest, protector of the honey-gatherers and hunters and fishermen, who regularly forayed into the forest to earn a living. But the forest never belonged to the humans first, and Dakshin Ray had been the voice of the real forest, the forest of the beasts, its mystery and its terror.

The cult of Bon Bibi has withered long ago, and even earlier than that the ritual sacrifice that was compulsory to be offered to Dakshin Ray before any man dared to venture into the forest. With the dwindling of faith Dakshin Ray’s descendants have been reduced to nearly mere tigers: mortal, devoid of human-like speech or intelligence. But while the faith and terror has died, the cultural memory of Dakshin Ray lives on in highly distorted jatrapalas and bedtime stories for children; so the transformation to mundane has not been complete yet. Although no human can tell it, the descendants of Dakshin Ray still distinguish themselves from other mere tigers. Physically no different from other tigers, they pass down their ancestral legacy to their children through expressions humans will never interpret. Other tigers do not have names, but the descendants of Dakshin Ray do; and like their mythical ancestor, they are always named after a direction. (Not the major directions, for the name must be appropriate to the power of the individual tiger. But tigers can perceive so many more minor directions than humans do that finding a name is never quite so difficult.) To humans they may look like just a line of highly intelligent tigers, but the descendants of Dakshin Ray still retain the bare vestiges of what they used to be.

Personal Back-story:
Naiwrit Ray, as his name suggests, had from his birth been one of the most exceptional members of his line. (He is not named after one of the primary directions, for to attain that honour is to be as great as the Dakshin Ray himself; but he is named after one of the secondary directions – Naiwrit is the south-west – and that itself is a distinction rare enough to achieve.) In his tiger existence he had outfought all the other males in the forest and was the unchallenged lord of his domain. For generations that had been the highest distinction any tiger could achieve, and Naiwrit knew no better.

However, an unprecedented accident in his tenth year – much into adulthood for a tiger’s lifespan – turned Naiwrit’s life round forever. That monsoon, despite his exceptional intelligence in avoiding human traps, he was outsmarted by a group of highly skilled poachers. Wounded by a bullet at his left hind leg, exhausted till his lungs nearly burst, Naiwrit skulked one fateful night in the torrential rain in the flooding rice fields next to a village, entirely sure that death awaited moments away. He had lost too much blood; the poachers hunted him from the direction of the forest; and to move towards the village would only add the ignominy of battered bones and a charred corpse to the certainty of death. With his last gasps of breath Naiwrit struggled against the oblivion seeping into him… suddenly to find himself in a body and with a consciousness he had never known before.

Naiwrit’s first reaction at that instant was to drag his newly acquired human form to the village with the desperate urge for survival. He used his grievous injuries to conceal his first utter confusion at human society, but later, as he pondered, he could never understand how exactly his transformation had occurred, or if there was any way to turn back. None of the intelligence that had been passed down to him from his mother contained any precedent of such occurrence. As a highly intelligent being, however, Naiwrit soon got wise to the advantages of a human existence over a tiger existence, and decided that he did not want to return.

It did not take long for Naiwrit to learn – as he made his way into the human world – that large, cosmopolitan communities were the safest to conceal his dubious origin. (People in a village soon found out that he did not come from a nearby village, that he had practically dropped out of nowhere.) Naiwrit kept his head low, speaking little, observing intently, learning fast. He picked up small, paperless employment: working as farmhand, construction worker, porter or assistant to sweepers and truck drivers. There were jobs aplenty for big, strong men, and insults or poor payment did not affect Naiwrit, as long as no one asked questions. He moved quickly from place to place, always making his way to bigger, more amalgamated places.

Naiwrit arrived in Calcutta two month from now, nearly eighteen months after his transformation into human. The last truck driver he had worked for had dropped him into the city. After some initial, aimless roaming, he landed his current job. The owners of the bar-cum-eatery would also have employed him as a small-time goon, but on inspection Naiwrit was found too simple to understand even the basic premise of crime. His employers therefore kept him at his straightforward job and regularly swindle him of small parts of his payment, but Naiwrit Ray does not care enough to take offence. The life suits him fine. Soon he’ll go somewhere else.

---

Character Building: Tonmoy Sen

NAME: Tonmoy Sen

AGE: 21; (06.09)

SEX: Male

ETHNICITY: Indian; Bengali; Ghoti.

APPEARANCE: 5ft 8inches; thin (his mother’s perpetually trying to fatten him up); passably-fair; deep-set eyes; aquiline nose; limp, straight, black hair, cut quite short; no moustache or trace of stubble; wears pressed trousers and pin-striped/checked half-sleeved shirts and sandals; wears a black-leather-band, black-dialled Titan watch on left wrist.

LOCATION: 45 B, S.P. Mukherjee Road, a three-bedroom, single-floored house near Ashutosh College.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS: Middle-class-conservative.

EDUCATION: Schooling in Padmapukur Institution; graduated (English, Hons.) from Ashutosh College.

PROFESSION: Has joined as junior sub-editor at India Book House.

PARENTS: Father (Jitendriya Sen) works as a clerk in the Passport office and is nearing retirement; mother (Madhumita Sen nee Bagchi) teaches at Padmapukur Institution.

EXTENDED FAMILY: Has two uncles and an aunt on his father’s, and one aunt on his mother’s side, resulting in a total of five cousins, two of whom are older and three younger than him. Of the older two, the girl (Sharmishttha) is married to an NRI living in Colorado, the man (Hironmoy) is working on his post-doc thesis in physics, of the younger three, one (Deeptesh) is in his second year of medical school, one (Maitreyi) is a commerce student in Class XII, and the youngest (Niladri) is in Class VIII.

ROMANTIC ENTANGLEMENTS: None; he was in a boys’ school, his mother monitored his tuitions; in college, he was one of very few boys in a department full of girls, but was still invariably dismissed as far too geeky and/or not intelligent enough. This, he feels honour-bound to state, does not mean that he is abnormal, by which he means interested in men.

FRIENDS: Shatadru Mallick. Shatadru was as interested in marks as he, but rather more interested in science, a fact which meant Shatadru almost always scored more than he did. Their friendship lasted three years, at which point it dissolved under mutual maternal displeasure. Other, comparatively more mischievous people avoided him because of his mother; his mother made him avoid those she thought would only want his notes or the names of his tutors. In college he was quite as unlucky—his closest compatriot would never have considered being a friend; they were, after all, both vying for top position.

FAVOURITE:
Colour: Light green, like the new peepul leaves.
Books: Gora; Roots.
Films: Paromitar Ekdin; Shatranj ke Khiladi; Fiddler on the Roof.
Song/Poem: Amar Mukti Aloye Aloye; Ode to a Nightingale.
Sport: none, though he does watch a fair bit of cricket.
Actors: Soumitra Chatterjee; Sharmila Tagore.
Food: Chilli Chicken; Chicken Momos (fried).

THOUGHTS ON:
Feminism/Gender Roles: He respects women, of course—ask his mother, or his aunt (mashi), or his other aunt (pishi), or even Sharmishttha-di (cousin married to NRI). And of course women are capable, and intelligent. But that doesn’t mean they need to act like men, no, just because western women do? What’s wrong with salwar-kameez, if sarees are ‘constricting’? And it’s a fact that smoking and drinking are worse for women than men—gives off a bad impression.
Democracy/Party Politics: It’s an interesting theory—democracy, that is. But his Political Science tutor in Class XI said that Aristotle said that democracy was mobocracy, and well, Aristotle was right. All political leaders are corrupt.
Globalisation/Affects thereof in the socio-cultural realm: Globalisation nothing. It just means western products in the market and western thoughts in the head. While the former are useful at times, the latter are utterly unnecessary. There’s a reason juvenile crime rates have gone up, and the number of old-age homes have multiplied.
Sex/Sexuality/Marriage: Tonmoy’s a virgin, and not really ashamed of this fact; he’s a bit apathetic about sex, in general, and all his experiences are with his left hand and the recent access to online pornography that’s arrived with the computer he was gifted just after graduation. Alternate sexuality is a concept he’s very vaguely aware of—he stumbled across a gay porn site once—and rather scandalised by. Marriage is for men and women, and it’s terrible that divorce is so prevalent—two of his classmates have divorced parents, his current boss is divorced—there’s a reason for the saat janmo ka bandhan spiel, really, people hardly try enough these days, what with ‘feminism’ and lack of tolerance.
Capital Punishment: No murderer should be left alive; how can you judge the severity of a murder? A person died, no? How is fourteen years enough for some deaths and only death enough for others?

QUIRKS/SECRETS:
1. Loves Sharatchandra novels, but doesn’t confess this; he’s been told that they are vaguely girly.
2. Believes devoutly in astrology, but not really in horoscopes.
3. Is secretly glad he didn’t have higher marks in the Higher Secondary exams, because he would have had to continue studying science otherwise.
4. Smokes (away from home) because he thinks it’s ‘cool’, but cannot inhale properly.
5. Saw the daughter of the owner of India Book House once and very badly wants to do so again.

TRAUMATIC/SIGNIFICANT EVENTS:
1. Hironmoy-da (the cousin studying physics) was the only one who bothered to talk to him on his tenth birthday, once their parents left ‘the kids’ in the same room and left.
2. Nocturnal emissions.
3. Getting back the science answer-scripts for his Class X Tests.
4. Being allowed to study English.
5. Being harassed, first day in college.

BACK-STORY: Tonmoy has two lives—the one his mother thinks (and tells everyone) he lives, and the one he tells nobody, not even himself, when he can help it.
It is easier to describe Tonmoy by what he is not. (All the things he isn’t, are interesting things.)
He is not frivolous, loud, vulgar, incompetent. (He is overly-serious, painfully-quiet, pompous, and a workaholic.)
Tonmoy has always been well above mediocrity, academically. (Hours of slogging, till his head ached and he mumbled formulae in his sleep, bagged him a bare 80% in Class X, and a 65% in the H.S. exams.)
He got along very well with everyone in school. (He would have been bullied openly were it not for his mother, as it is, he was harassed in later classes by boys who made it a point of honour for him to not tattle to her, but ‘take it like a man’.)
He made friends easily in college. (After the initial ragging—which was one of the most traumatic experiences in his life—he was severely ignored by seniors, batch-mates and juniors alike.)
Everybody loves Tonmoy. (His father, another underachiever, truly does; likes him, too. His mother can’t see the real person beyond the construct she’s kept building as he’s kept failing her tests for success. His aunts and uncles feel sorry for his parents, and the only reason they don’t openly pity him is that they’re all scared of his mother. His cousins, save the one getting a physics doctorate, all ignore and/or pity him.)
He is going to flourish at his job. (It hasn’t been long enough to tell, but personal tradition avers otherwise.)
Tonmoy is a good kid from a decent family—bhodro barir bhalo chhele—and has no vices. He’s a lot better than most of the boys in his school; he never talks back, never raises his voice, and never disobeys his parents. (He smokes furtively; eyes women on the street and wishes he had the courage to cop a feel on crowded buses; used to fantasise yelling at his mother and wake up feeling guilty; sabotaged his chemistry practicals in Class XII; feels stifled and can’t say it; is in awe of every science-studying family member, though he knows he would never have managed; feels guilty for no reason because he isn’t what his mother thinks he is, but cannot pinpoint where he has gone wrong.)

Possibility of Consolidated WIPlash

As per suggestions made in class, I'm going to look into the possibility of publishing a four-year consolidated edition of WIPLash with a reputed publisher. Accordingly, I'd like everyone from the previous years who hasn't submitted their story (or submitted it and took it back) to send it to me. I have the stories submitted by the 2007 batch but not 2008. Please mail me your story as soon as you can, preferably the final one but could also be classwork if you think it's good. You all have my email address since I sent you all email invites to this blog.

The Desert Soul or The poet.

my word was Zanit. i wrote this in the dead of the night in a wild fit of passion, do not expect Thrill and NEVER expect excellence.
___________________________________________________________________

Ishmael ibn Ziauddin Haq was a poet. Like the poets you see in the riverbanks watching sunset, like the poet you find in the intoxicated Mehfil of a Sufi singer. The poet you find in the eyes of a late-night visitor of a Kotha, he was the poet that you yourself want to be when the first monsoon catches you in the streets of a scorched city.

Ishmael was a poet who did not exist for the rest of the town. There was a statue of a poet in front of the town hall, a statue made of stone which has turned moss-green due to its age, it was worshipped by the rest of the town and all the poets followed his style to earn popularity. Ishmael was the only one who thought, discussed and talked about his own poems. Very soon Ishmael was ridiculed and taunted by the townsmen because he dared to call himself a poet without knowing Zanit. It was referred now and then in his poems, his lectures, manuscripts, paintings and other works. One such poem says-
“The wounds that I get do not heal,
The fires in my heart never die—
The desert is drunk and calls for Love!
I dance with my naked feet and whisper in thirst—
oh! drench me in sorrow and pain! My zanit!”


Nobody knew about this poet’s life or where he came from, he also had a weird habit of not signing his name in the poems. Learned men always quarreled to prove their opinions, several people had several ideas—some said Zanit was thirst, some said melancholy, some said death and some of them said that it was celebration of life though each breath that one takes in. Ishmael said nothing, one morning he came home from his walks, took a sack of his belongings and set off for the desert. Poets sometimes take other poets very seriously and literally. Ishmael was one of them.

On his 3rd day of traveling, Ishmael realized that The Thar was not as easy as he had previously thought. Very soon he regretted his decision. The desert did not provide him Zanit. It provided him the adequate amount of devastation, melancholy and thirst. Ishmael lamented over his crazy idea of seeking Zanit in the desert, the desert where wolves sharpen their fangs at the end of the day and bones from long forgotten skeletons whistle in the wind. Ishmael was about to give up and head homewards when he saw a silhouette in the horizon. There was a man coming towards him from the wilderness.

Night fell, they met, the man from wilderness gave him water and dry dates. Ishmael narrated his story, his story of the quest for Zanit. Now, the problem with men from wilderness is that they have all the answers but somehow the wilderness does not allow him to give away something without checking the intensity and the passion of the seeker. The wilderness purges out their emotions, sympathies and pity, in the end, the man himself becomes the image of the wilderness. It seldom matters whether if the other person took a poet seriously, it hardly matters if they are the only two people sitting by the fire in the midst of the desert and it never matters that both of them are easy preys for the giant hunger of the night-time desert. The man from wilderness promised him that he would reveal Zanit to him if he does what he orders. Ishmael was ready for anything. Thus, he was ordered to write his name in the sand; two hands of width and three hands deep. The man also warned him about two things—firstly, he would write and move with the flow of the Urdu alphabets without ever looking back, secondly, he would not straighten up his head at any cost and break his concentration. Ishmael agreed to both of the clauses. Ishmael started writing, the sand felt cold and soft. The work became more and more stressful because of the giant area he had to cover. By the time he finished the work, the Sun was young on the horizon. Ishmael went up to a dune to observe his work. To his horror he saw the last alphabet fading out with the falling sand from its edges and sides, the rest was gone. There was no sign of the man from wilderness, not the date’s remains, the water casket, the ashes—nothing was there to prove the uncanny encounter of the previous night. The shock and the horror left a ghastly expression on his face. Suddenly his face contorted, eyes glazed and he broke into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Tears rolled out his eyes. Ishmael found it, he found Zanit. Ishmael had found out that Zanit is when you write a line so powerful, that the crudest desert is bound to remember it, by branding it with the sheer thrust of magnitude of creation. So that the desert remembers a name; even when Time erases it from the world.

This happened a long time ago but if you visit the town today, then you will find two statues in front of the town-hall. The two dead poets had a common habit, they never signed their names under their poems. One is Ishmael, the other, is the poet from the wilderness.

Ekti shundor kobita

Bitchy people everywhere
Bitches on the trees
Bitches, all, I just don't care
Bitch on all you please!

:D Ting!

Apocalypse

Four elements theme exercise.

I resent how predictable this turns, and how long too, because it's so condensed I could hardly work on minor points, which I love. Anyway, for whatever it's worth.

---

A fights down the urge to turn up his collar as he steps into the darkly lit bar. Instinctively his eyes take in the alignment of lights inside the space and his body moves seamlessly to become a part of the surroundings. A knows he is good, because he is the only white man at the bar, and even in this city of starers people have barely noticed.

A low jazz saxophone wails from invisible speakers, seeping into the room an air of sophisticated forlorn. A’s practised eyes seek out the four-person table forty-five degrees to him, and feel a twinge of regret at how easily they find it. The young, dark-skinned woman who sits alone at the table is wearing simple, demure clothes, he notices, but she has a long way to go before she learns to merge into the background.

‘Good evening.’

‘Mr. A,’ the girl looks up from her drink. Large, expressive eyes, long curls pulled back from her temples. The lips hold the smile a few seconds too long for it to be a mere gesture. Too much warmth, too much heart. How old is she: eighteen? twenty-five? She still has a long way to go.

‘Just A, no appellative.’ With a fleeting grin he pulls himself a chair, ‘And you must be W.’

She nods amiably, and follows his questioning gaze to offer, ‘The master will join us shortly. He has left briefly to attend to others he must meet.’ No recognisable accent, A thinks. Good. E was always an exacting trainer. Just as well, since when has E been “the master”?

He takes a long time over the drinks menu to evade the awkwardness of no small talk to make. He knows a little bit of the history of the girl. Picked up by E from one of the tsunami-hit coasts of the Indian Ocean, right after the disaster struck. All the people she loved are dead, her old life completely destroyed; must be, for her to be here. Perhaps if he asks she will still tell him their names, and the name she used to go by. But A must not ask, neither tell her anything of himself. Names and personal histories are required to become non-existent, peel off their beings like dead skin, till they are nothing but the uniform, pervasive grief that binds them to their resolve. That is the cardinal rule.

A is relieved of his discomfort by the light touch on his shoulder that announces the arrival of E. They greet each other as E settles into one of the chairs. He is glad to see E again, to be in E’s benevolent, soft-spoken presence that radiates a Buddha-like calm. No man who hadn’t encountered E would ever know what lethalness was concealed behind that saint-like exterior, and no man would ever encounter E. E may once have been Japanese, and the mildly greying hair provide an indication of age, but beyond that A has never guessed much about him. E’s unspoken seniority among them may be of age or of being around the longest. E’s other life may have been taken from him in one of the many earthquakes in Japan, but A does not know which one. Which did not matter. The exact details varied and were irrelevant. The why was always the same.

‘F is on her way. Caught in the traffic, I understand,’ declares E as he orders a round of snacks. He relaxes in his chair and starts whistling casually to the music in the background. How cheerfully murdering the John Coltrane tune, A privately muses while he pretends to pay attention to the cricket match displaying on the screen on the opposite wall. At the edge of his eyesight he is aware of W shifting and shifting. So young! Is there nothing else in the world she would rather be doing?

Despite himself, A’s mind is drifted to the time he too had been young, in another country, more than a decade ago. He had a name, a house, parents, one younger brother, the childhood dog he loved. There was a university in another town, friends, a girlfriend whose name still rings in his mind like sad music his ears must never hear again. He had brought her home on a break; the brush of her skin so soft against his, the faces of his parents so proud to watch their son take his first steps into adult life. And then the storm had struck, more violent than anything he had imagined in his life, and his two-storey wooden house had crumbled like a sandcastle. Even in this age of technology, in the richest and safest country in the world, all it had taken was a few hours’ storm to deprive his life of each of the people who had given it any meaning.

And then, as he sat at the rescue camp bitterly speculating why he had been spared, two unknown men had approached him with an offer. He would eventually know them as E and W, when he had agreed to take up the role of A. A still remembers the previous W, a sagacious man with a flowing grey beard and a voice like the gurgle of a forest stream. He had died a year ago and A never came to know where or how, just as he was never told the details of the death of the one who had been A before him. The group does not dwell on of information that was not essential, even within itself. The current four are always the only four.

---

A’s thoughts are interrupted by tumultuous entrance of F through the front door of the bar. Yet again he is struck with fascination by F’s particular brand of inconspicuousness. In her mid-forties, F’s brown-haired, green-eyed, coffee-skinned appearance blends in anywhere between Asia and the Americas. And F is always visible, walking in the middle of crowds, singing aloud at karaoke bars, but she does it all with such an easygoing mediocrity that people forget her as soon as she’s left the scene.

After F is seated and gets her drink, E opens their discussion. ‘The reintroduction of W completes us again,’ E’s gravelly voice sweeps over their table, ‘and I shall reiterate the reason why we exist. As we know, there are four elements that sustain and destroy this world. Each religion in this world agrees to their existence, though some may confer upon them the title of god, while others merely acknowledge them as forces. But these entities exist, and while time has moulded into them several human-like characteristics, the essential strife and reward of human existence escape them. To them we matter not…’

He has heard the introduction repeated till they’ve become part of his brain’s fabric, and A’s mind wanders again. Meeting after years at a randomly selected bar in a landlocked city far away from where each of them was born, and no one except the four of them knew who they were or why they were here – at times all this strikes A as entirely unreal, but that is only a proof of their efficiency. The four of them are the oldest and most secret society in the world, existing since the dawn of time, so secret that they don’t even have a name. Names attract identities, and the world tends to notice that kind of a thing. They have no documents, no records, they leave no memoirs. Ever since paper identification had been invented, each of them has possessed multiple names, passports, personal histories, and sometimes these pass on smoothly as death replaces one person with another. They train at different places under different pretexts, picking up each skill from a different part of the world, and the final assimilation is always done on their own. As far as the world is concerned, the four of them do not exist.

This was essential, since unlike other secret societies which existed for the sake of political power, ideological stances or the worship of particular gods, they were a group of humans who had declared war against entities nearly god-like themselves. What right do the elements have to sweep thousands of human lives away like playthings, lives whose intricate beauty they cannot fathom, all the intense love and hope and effort that go into building each of those? This little society has existed for millennia, silently working, each small step by step, towards its final, nearly unachievable mission. Its members had once been prophets and adventurers and scientists and kings and builders of enormous civilisations. They had only one thing in common: all that their lives had been worth had been reduced to nothing in one unforeseen stroke of natural disaster, leaving them with nothing but an alphabet to identify the element they must redress their inexorable grief against.

They met scarcely and trained in secret; long, painstaking years of preparation. Training was even more important than strategy. The elementals did not change their habits from day to day. But centuries have been spent in preparation – in the study of religious, philosophical, scientific and every other text that led them to a weak link they could break through; in rigorous exercises of the body and the mind to raise them beyond the flaws of the mortal coil. Each new member has to internalise centuries of accumulated skill before they could add something new to the repertoire. Ten years have only enabled A to speak thirty languages and debate with clerics with all the Semitic and Aryan religions. He walks without casting a shadow, his bones are nearly unbreakable, he can outsmart the most skilled spy on the planet, and yet there is so much left to learn. To become barely competent.

---

After the meeting breaks F takes a hasty leave and E slips away to the back of the bar to reunite with the others he was meeting. Finding himself alone outside the bar with young W, A asks her if she would like for a walk along the uncrowded night streets. She blushes and agrees. Blush, he notices. The girl’s spirit is overwhelmingly feminine, a serious flaw, and how had E overlooked it?

‘I cannot help wondering why you refer to E as “the master”,’ he finally mentions, when they have walked far enough from the bar. ‘None of us do that, you must have noticed.’

‘But he is the master, is he not?’ she looks at his face in surprise.

The feeling of something being not quite right strikes A again. All through the evening, every time a remark was addressed to her, he had noticed W turn her eyes imploringly at E. E had surrounded her, mouthed her words, like a protective guardian answering for a child. That was not how A has known their society to function, for the four were never meant to have a leader. If six months of training had not instilled that self-sufficiency in the new W, clearly something had been amiss in either her selection and training, and how could E have committed either?

A remembers that his own training had been overseen by both E and the previous W, occasionally joined by F. The new W had been selected and trained by E alone, and what E had been doing? Was it mistake, negligence or deliberation, and was there a way he could find out?

‘E is certainly the eldest and most skilful of us; without his training you or I would be nothing,’ A carefully says. ‘But the purpose of our training is to renounce all the identities that define us, is it not? I’m not Mr. A because A is not my name; I have no name. There is no hierarchy within us, because hierarchy must come from identity, which we do not have. Is that not what you have been taught?’

‘Essentially, yes,’ says W, her figure shifting uncertainly. Then her voice turns stiff, ‘I am sorry, should I answer your questions? Is it not forbidden to inquire or divulge of information beyond the strictly essential?’

She is brave, loyal and has learnt her lessons right, A thinks with a hint of irony. Each of the four is alone, independent and dies with their own small secrets. Yet how easy it was to twist those rules, and A suddenly realises how much he has never been taught about the group. Has there ever been a traitor in the history of the four, and how were they intercepted? Would he be a traitor tonight if he spoke of his doubts to W, or would he be a traitor to hold his tongue?

‘You are right,’ he tells the girl, frowning to contain his thoughts. ‘I only implore you to remember that those rules apply equally to each of us. If you have been taught otherwise… you have been taught wrong.’

‘Water and earth are sympathetic elements,’ W starts speaking in a distant voice, staring ahead, apparently unconcerned with his presence. ‘Water nurtures earth, and together they give forth vitality and life. It is a relationship water shares with neither air nor fire.’ The girl’s voice trembles, as if with the great effort to hold back tears, ‘It has not been easy. Sometimes death has seemed easier. But I have given myself to this mission. I will not disappoint.’

Her hand casually brushes against her belly, and suddenly all of A’s doubts are dispelled. In his other life he had been a forensic student – why has it taken him so long to notice? And the weight of the realisation shakes him to the core. What has E done, the man under whose tutelage he has trained, the man he had aspired to become all these ten years? That preposterous theory held all the answers he needed. The four of them were not the elements themselves, they were mere human crusaders, and who would know the distinction better than E? And if E had fallen from the ideal, what was their society worth any more?

A tremor goes through the earth and throws both of them on the ground. Panicking madly, A looks up to see the silhouettes of the buildings on both sides of the street shaking violently against the night sky, their lights flickering, and the cars in the street screeching as they hit one another. ‘An earthquake! Run!’ he yells at W, a second before a surge of terrified people comes rushing down the street in the direction they were walking. He pulls W up by the hand and they both get carried down by the crowd, further and further away from the bar where E is, and which seems to be the centre of the earthquake.

The ground shakes again, the walls of buildings collapse, and W, holding on desperately to his hand, sobs out aloud as she runs, ‘But the master! He is still there!’

‘There is nothing we can do for him!’ he yells at her over the screams of the people. ‘Nothing more than he can do for himself. Earth is his own element, and he is more powerful than even the two of us combined!’ But as he runs a strange premonition fills A’s mind. He has never been in an earthquake before but he has studied them enough, and who had ever heard of an earthquake that rises so violently from its centre and yet quiets down within so short a distance? Where they had started the buildings are already razed to the ground, but less than a kilometre away the crowd is fanning out. Everything is normal in this part of the city. Even the windows of cars have hardly shattered.

They spend the night in A’s dingy hotel room in Paharganj. He does not prevent W when she turns over from her side of the bed and curls up against his chest. She sleeps uneasily, shivering in her dreams. But A lies wide awake as he runs his fingers impatiently through the depths of her hair. He had always wondered how others of the group found out when one of them was dead, and now he knows. But how exactly did it happen? E could not have triggered that earthquake himself, he had not yet mastered those powers. Or had he, striving alone to push the boundaries of his immense knowledge, the oldest and wisest of the four? Was that what he had tried to convince W? But when did E break away from the rest of them, and how, and why? Will A ever find out, or will the next E simply not be told because the other three did not know? But again, who will recruit the next E? What if they do not inform F? What if no one is recruited? What now, what now?

---

A year later a postman climbs up an Alpine hillock to the cottage which young Mr. and Mrs. Silverstein, a strangely reclusive inter-racial couple, had made their home with their equally mixed-race infant. Mr. Silverstein, cradling his dark, slanting-eyed baby in the garden, receives the envelope and sees the postman off with a smile and a few coins. Putting the baby down on its cot he opens the letter and reads the blue handwriting:

Beloved children,

I write to you to say that perhaps all that has happened has happened for the good of everyone, and none of us must blame ourselves for it. A dream has been expelled, a dream dreamt by hundreds of people over millennia which had perhaps grown just too large for four mortals to carry it further. How far can mortal fabric be stretched before it rips quietly at several significant points? How far can we humans renounce the flesh, blood and soul we are made of?

I have built my house on the earth that had once been husband, children, parents, an entire hometown to me. An entire life flamed down to nothing but dust, can you imagine? But of course you can, the two of you have been through the same. But you are young, you can rebuild your lives. I am glad you have chosen to do so. My house stands alone on this barren ground, as do I, for I have forgotten how to make friends. But oh! what a relief it is to pronounce those dead people’s names again, to remember them without guilt, to freely grieve those who I loved more than my own life! I can spend the rest of my life in this meditation, and there will be no greater reward.

Who was it that said that we are never truly dead until we are forgotten? All the people who had been the four had erased their existence from the world, receded to nothingness, the reason why the current four used to always be the only four. I implore you, children, to never let your memories die. Remember the pasts that have abandoned you, the people you have lost. Remember the man who had led you on an impossible track and perished in his own ambition. Remember with fondness, pain or hatred, with your imperfect memories, write their names down everywhere you can. The elements forget, we do not. That is our greatest victory over them.

Yours truly,

Emily Ojibwa, erstwhile F.

There is no address anywhere on the letter, no request for a meeting. Meetings are a thing of the past none of them want to return to. Mr. Silverstein folds the letter, puts it in his pocket, picks up his wailing baby from the cot, and goes inside to inspect what his wife has been cooking. The air is unnaturally still. Soon there may be thunderstorm.

---

Natural Calamities

This was written for the elements prompt, please excuse the lame title. It also needs a fair amount of refining, but this is as it was on the day we were supposed to finish it, so. [/lame justification]

*** ***
A girl walks into a forest, feet dragging and walks steadily—unsteadily—away from the fringes, away from the huts of hunters and woodcutters that cling to them like mud to the hem of her skirts, and deep into the heart of it, where even the birds are quiet. Her feet track blood on the fallen leaves and her slender body shivers with the coming cold—it is winter, and the trees are bare. And though she fears to sleep, yet sleep overwhelms her, and when she wakes, the sun has sunk and risen again, and the east sky seen through the latticed branches is a dark gold, shot with red.

And the woman standing before her, back to the bole of a tree, one slim arm twined about a low branch, watching her through narrowed eyes, is dark, near the colour of the earth and the wood—dark skin, black hair in coils, brilliant black eyes, and long black lashes. “Who are you?” she asks, not without trepidation—though the woman is slender and seems unarmed, she has seen too much of the malevolence of women.

“I am your mother,” she says, “and you, child, what is your name?”

“Vasudha,” she says, “but you are not my mother, lady, though you smile as she did, for she walked as though her feet were shackled and her back was bent and her shoulders stooped, and you carry yourself like a queen.”

“A queen? What know you of queens, child?” And yes, what can she know, mud-stained shabby clothes and small, dark body and simple braid and all? But she does.

“I served a queen, lady, till a week before.”

“A good queen?”

“Nay, lady.”

“A wise one?”

“Nay.”

“A beauty, then?”

“Yes, lady.” She stops, lips pressed tight, and the woman looks at her with kind eyes that remind her of the mother she lost so long ago. “But not kind.

“Neither a good queen, nor a wise one, nor kind.” The woman seats herself by Vasudha, puts a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You did well to leave her service.”

“I left it not, my lady,” she admits, “She sent me away.”

“Why sent she you away, my Vasudha?”

“She received in tribute a new vase,” she starts, stutters, stops, wonders why she speaks so freely to this woman she has never seen, and brings out the rest of her words in an agonised rush, “and I broke it.” The memory of the queen’s anger colours her cheeks a dark rich red, and she looks away, down at the barren ground, and the cracking carpet of leaves on it.

“For so little a crime?” the woman muses, voice full of restrained anger. “Have you a home to go to, child?”

“Nay, lady.” No home, she thinks, but the glittering Palace she has had to quit, that she has stayed in since she was a child sold in the slave-markets, plucked from kin and home in war.

The woman sighs and the leaves lift and fall with her exhale, and stands, one hand briefly on her head in benediction. “Then come to my house, child, and meet my kin.”

There is no guile in those eyes when she meets them, nothing but kindness, and she rises, and takes her hand. “You are too kind to me, lady.”

“My name is Vasundhara, child, and I bid you call me mother,” says the woman and smiles her dead mother’s gentle smile. “For as a mother I will be to you, for a little while, while you dwell in my home.”

“I cannot,” she says, and oh, it is hard to speak the words. “I have been forbidden shelter and food within the limits of Suryapur. It is death, mother, to disobey.”

“I live not in Suryapur, child, and I fear not the lady in Surajgarh. Come to my home, child, and live therein.”

***

It is no mean distance to Surajgarh—a full day’s ride, or a week’s walk, along Vasudha’s meandering route—and the trees ’round Vasundhara’s home have put out new leaves and new flowers, while those in the Palace gardens remain still bare, when a stranger enters first city limits, and then walks slowly up to the Palace gates. He comes wrapped in the scent of incense, and all he passes feel the balmy breath of spring wrap them ’round.

Into the Palace he walks alone, and into the audience-chamber, where Rani Indumati rules on her son’s behalf, and there stands, some unfelt wind ruffling his uttariya, and tangling in his hair, and making soft music of his strings of rudraksha and tulsi wood.

“Hail to thee, Queen of Suryapur,” he says, and his voice is the susurration of wind through trees laden down with the bounties of spring.

“Hail to thee, Brahman,” she answers, “who are ye, from whence come ye, and for what purpose?”

“My name, lady, is Anilesh, but that” he smiles, “is of no moment. I come from Raja Banhishwar, and I come, lady, with a message.”

“What message is this that you bear, from this King who I know not?”

“Raja Banhishwar rides to war against you, Rani Indumati, and that is the message I bear.”

“To war against me?” There is curiosity in her voice, and no fear. “But what harm have I or Suryapur done him?”

“You have greatly harmed his kin,” says Anilesh, and seems unaware that he should be afraid of Rani Indumati, that his hands should shake and his voice falter.

“How,” asks Indumati, and in her voice is anger, “can I harm the kin of a King I know not?”

“All men are kin to Raja Banhishwar,” says the Brahmin, and his voice carries the heat of the wind crossing desert sands, “and greatly have you harmed them.”

“How dare this King of no name and no realm thus criticise me?” The anger in her voice is evident now, and guards creep closer to the Brahmin.

“I have told you his name, lady, and all realms are his realm.”

“But not mine,” Indumati snarls, and gestures at the guards.

“Even yours, Rani Indumati, I promise you this,” answers Anilesh, nothing repentant, and raises his eyebrows as the guards put heavy hands on his shoulders. “I am a messenger and inviolate.”

“You have stood in my halls and insulted my rule. Neither caste nor age nor being a messenger can keep you inviolate, Brahmin.” Indumati smiles as Anilesh’s wrists are shackled. “Nor will your master be able to free you.”

Anilesh looks at his chained hands and then at the Queen, eyes cold. “I serve no master, lady. I came bearing a message,” he says, and his voice is an insidious icy wind, “and I have told you it.”

“And now you will regret telling me it, in my dungeons, without food and water.”

Anilesh smiles. “I am glad I came, lady, for I have now seen that in truth you are not a good queen, nor a wise one, nor even kind.”

“You dare?”

“I dare, lady. And now farewell.” The shackles fall clanking to the floor as white mist swirls around the Brahmin’s form, and his form dissipates, and the mist turns air.

***

At the height of summer, when all Suryapur’s farmers are praying daily for rain, for thunderstorm, for massing monsoon clouds, a barge sails up the river and docks at the Surajgarh jetty and a man walks to the city gates and hires a palanquin that takes him to the Palace. At the gates the guards move to stop him, and fail, and later think he flowed ’round them like a river breaking its banks, and shake their heads, bemused.

Into the Palace the man walks, and into the audience-chamber, where Rani Indumati doles out what she calls justice, and there quietly stands—the light from the many windows lighting his black curls blue, and shifting over his garments in illusory waves.

“Hail to thee, Rani Indumati,” he says, and his voice is waves lapping the shore.

“Hail to thee, stranger,” she answers, “who are ye and whence come ye?”

“I am Ambupati the merchant, lady, and I come from Rani Vasundhara with a message for thee.”

“What message do you bear?” she asks, and though her voice is steady, yet a shiver goes through her.

“I bear news of war, lady.” The Queen and all her court tense, for the sound of a tide rolling inexorably in is in their ears.

“Why bring you this message to me, when I never have seen your mistress?” The anger in her voice is tinted with fear—even Suryapur, prosperous and powerful cannot wage war against not one realm but two.

The merchant laughs like a jaltarang being played. “Oh, lady, she is no mistress of mine. And she wages war against you for you have grievously injured her kin.”

“I have injured no kin of hers,” Indumati says, fighting fear down in favour of rage.

“All women are kin to Vasundhara,” says Ambupati, and in his voice is the rumbling of a thousand thunder-storms. “And grievously have you injured them.”

“I let no man, nor woman, stand in my halls and instruct me in king-craft,” Indumati answers, voice deceptively gentle, eyes hard. “Even rulers I know not, even envoys they send.”

Ambupati inclines his curly head. “I have given you the message I bore, lady, and I will say naught else.”

“You will tell me, merchant, all I wish to know,” says the Lady of Surajgarh, as her guards chain the merchant’s hands behind him. “In the dank dungeons, you will tell me all.”

“I am a messenger, lady, and inviolate.”

“You are in my realm,” smiles Indumati, “and in my power.”

The merchant smiles, sunshine on water. “Aye lady.”

He lets them take him to the dungeons, and push him, still shackled, inside. But all night the guards hear the gurgling as of a spring rising from between the dungeon stones, and in the morning the merchant is absent from his cell, and the barge from the jetty. And the river slows to a trickle as it crosses Suryapur on its way to the sea, and all the streams become mud and all the pools dry.

***

It is monsoon by the seasons, but only by the seasons is it monsoon. No rain has fallen on Suryapur’s soil, and no trees have burst into leaf and flower and fruit. The royal granaries have begun to dole out grain, and even the seed-corn in the granaries has gone to fill the hungry bellies of the farmers. And then the cracked soil turns the brown of wet earth, and the trees unfurl new leaves and petals, and the mingled fragrances bring Rani Indumati into her gardens, away from the starving men she has had thrown into the dungeons for stealing food.

And in the garden, beside a flowering jutika plant, gathering up the fallen petals—so soon flowered an so soon fallen—she finds a dark, shabby, woman, easily dismissed as a gardener, save her bearing—when she unfolds, she stands as though no servant, as though a queen meeting another.

“Hail to thee, Rani Indumati, lady of Surajgarh, queen of Suryapur.” And though the voice is hoarse, the cadences are crisp, and so too are the words.

“Hail to thee, woman.” And she turns her face away, to look at the flowers and revel in their redolence. Surely the gods are pleased with them, to send thus this bounty, and without rain make the trees burst into leaf and flower and fruit, and turn the ashen bark the rich colour of the woman’s hands. The woman’s hands that are close to hers, now. And Indumati turns, all mellow pleasure gone—and rage coursing her veins. This woman, so shabby, earth-shaded skin and threadbare clothes—this servant, this shudra, how dare she? “I was not aware,” she bites out, longing for the guards she has dismissed, “that my gardeners employed woman to sweep away the leaves.”

“Do they so?” The woman’s eyes are like dead coals. “I know not, Rani Indumati, I number myself not amongst them.”

“Where number you yourself, then? Amongst the cleaners of slop buckets, or the eaters of carrion?”

The woman smiles, reaches to pluck a flower. “Neither, lady, though they are my kin, as all women are. I am Vasundhara.”

Indumati moves, finds a root catching at her feet, stumbles and steadies herself against a tree-trunk, flattens her back against it. “And you go needlessly to war against me.”

The woman plucks another flower, and another, and another, and begins twisting them all in a chain. “Not needlessly, Rani Indumati,” she admonishes, reaches out to pluck more flowers till the bough is bare, “for you have grievously injured my kin.”

“And you would avenge them?” She fights back the fear in her voice—this woman cannot fight, let alone defeat her. And yet she looks so calmly certain.

“I would,” answers Vasundhara, still calm, and raises her flowers to wrap them ’round her neck, and finds the chain fall short. “But that is not all the reason, lady, not the real reason.” She reaches her hand out towards the bare bough, and plucks a flower from its new burden. “You are not a good queen, nor a wise one, nor kind.” She twists the last flower into the chain and the chain round her neck. “And that, Rani Indumati, is why I go to war against you.”

And she smiles again, soft and gentle, and moves deeper into the trees, while Indumati stands in her garden, bark rough against her back, and the trees in her garden shed fruit and flower and leaf.

***

“Have we displeased the gods?” The raj-guru shakes his head, mute. “Then magic is being worked against us.”

“No, lady. These things that are happening—they owe naught to gods or magic. They are natural.”

Indumati grips the carved arms of her throne. “Natural? There has been no rain this year, no grain can be brought in because the river has dried, the land breaks the plough, and you call this natural, priest?”

It is autumn, and the granaries are bare, and the people, hungry all summer, have begun to starve, when a man on a bay horse comes riding through Surajgarh, up to the Palace gates. There guards try to stop him, this stranger dressed for war, but neither their flesh nor the iron-barred door can bar his way.

The murmuring audience-chamber falls silent as he enters, and the chastened raj-guru rushes gratefully away from Indumati. And Indumati rises from her throne to greet the stranger who stands before her throne, sunlight throwing living flame aross his copper ornaments.

“Hail to thee,” he says, “Rani Indumati of Surajgarh.”

“Hail to thee, northerner,” she answers. “Who are ye, and whence come ye, and for what purpose?”

“I am Raja Banhishwar,” says the man with flame in his hair, “and I come with news of your defeat, lady.”

“My defeat?” she asks, then again, forcing her voice steady, “My defeat, when you have not fought me?”

“Need I fight you, lady, when your granaries are empty, and your people starving? Your soldiers could not lift sword or spear against me.” He smiles with the warmth of a new-lit fire on a cold night. “Come, lady, step down from your throne.”

“You are one man,” she says, eyes wide and curious, “no matter how well-fed; and I have in this Palace at least a hundred warriors. And yet you speak of my defeat?”

“I am one man,” Banhishwar echoes, and draws from his scabbard a sword along the blade of which flames play. “But I am, lady, also the devourer and the scourge of all things. Step down, lady, for you are defeated.”

But Indumati does not step down. She stands before her throne and watches her guards let their weapons fall clattering to the ground, watches her son shrink behind his tutor, watches the raj-guru stare and stare and stare at Raja Banhishwar, as though his aged eyes see what no-one else can. And she pulls a sword from the nearest guard, hefts its weight in both hands, and moves towards the man with fire in his eyes, her own eyes clouded with crimson rage.

And Banhishwar laughs like the crackling of a forest fire and pulls her into his arms, and stifles her cries against his shoulder, and holds her as she burns to cinder, to ashes floating down to rest in a pile at his feet. “Not a good queen,” he says, as flakes of ash fall from his hands, “nor a wise one, nor kind. But brave.”

At the open doors of the audience-chamber the raj-guru stops him. “Will you rule us, Lord?” he asks, eyes wide and hands shaking.

“Nay, priest, not I,” he smiles, and takes the old man’s trembling hands between his. “We will bring you a queen in place of the one you have lost.”

***

It is winter, and the trees are bare. Yet, though it has not rained all year, nor has soil been ploughed, nor crops sown, yet in Suryapur there are bellies and granaries are filled and the river in danger of overflowing its banks.

A girl walks out of a forest, over a crackling carpet of leaves, under the dawn sky red against the latticed branches. She walks steadily away from the heart of it, where even the birds are silent, and at the eaves of the forest, where the huts of hunters and woodcutters cling like zari work to the hem of her skirts, she mounts a dappled horse and takes its reins from a white-garbed Brahmin.

And then she rides alone towards Surajgarh to take its throne.

BOKAROO! BOKAROO AT LAST!

Nonsense word exercise.
By- Shayeari Dutta


Yet again, life stirred in the land of Wambo.
And yet again, life pierced its way into existence.
But the inhabitants were elated…gigantic thought-bubbles captured the coveted desire of their hearts…the desire to skate around the pulsating slimy orb of their suffocatingly tiny land and shout out to all who may hear- “bokaroo! Bokaroo at last!”
And youthful eddies of wind swooped down upon the echoes of their cry and carried them afar. The news must spread…and with that, a sudden burst of blinding light.
“that light, again!” the inhabitants exclaimed. This was the very thing they had been scavenging for all this while! “bokaroo at last!”
This light was indeed a strange creature. It had tentacles that were wax-tipped and always had a glaring tongue of fire burning at that tip. At first, it was an object of extreme paranoia. But with time, the inhabitants learnt to harness their fears and learn more about this strange creature….and so they learnt about the hypnotic powers of this flash of light…the power to distill and dispel clouds of one of the greatest things these inhabitants lacked in their lives- bokaroo! Clouds and clouds of intoxicating, rejuvenating bokaroo! Bokaroo of the sort that flushed their hearts with a cozy warmth. Bokaroo of the sort that made some of them tie their skates on to their heads and spin around till giddiness restrained their acts!
How they cherished this sudden feeling of bokaroo! Tears welled up in their eyes when sharp and stinging memory broke through the walls of their mind and reminded them of the infinite acts of desperation which they had adopted to grasp even a single wisp of this bokaroo…they had robbed chemical labs, begged at street corners, dealt with bootleggers for alluring packets screaming promises of ‘an eternal state of communion with bokaroo!’ only to be snubbed later by bitter grains of salt!
And now! Now bokaroo was in the very air!
With this they anticipated the entry of their god. The god, who would come riding the tumultuous winds with a charm that would melt the hearts of all. The god- he who is the harbinger of the elusive bokaroo that seems to take great delight in playing peek-a-boo with the inhabitants of Wambo. Now the king would come! He would come with his infant projects of urban and rural development. The government of Wambo would unthinkingly relinquish every acre of land that he has. The walls of his ridiculously tiny country would expand, every single brick would would be re-laid, far far away, and in the very heart of the country, the god’s secret laboratory would be established. Hush! The inhabitants would say, pointing bony fingers at the spherical building throbbing and vibrating with strange sounds from within… “hush! For the god is working in his great chambers for us!”
It did not seem to bother them that the god was from an alien world, that he had forced his way through, ripped through the gates of their land. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. The air of bokaroo was spread like an oxygen mask on a giant face turned pallid by dearth of oxygen. The air of bokaroo was a savior. And nothing mattered anymore….
But the oldest inhabitant remembered. He remembered the feel of a cloud of bokaroo in his palm. He was not supposed to touch it. So had the foreign god warned in his benign tone. But the cloud had rested there in the old inhabitants palm, almost as though it had a purpose to do so. At first, it just lay there, couched in his palm, purring like a contented cat, eliciting burps of bokaroo that almost tickled the inhabitant to death. But then, he slowly started feeling a pain. A distant pain, almost an out-of-body experience. But the pain escalated, it surged forth and he dropped the cloud with a loud cry. His palm was scalded, the acrid smell of roasted flesh snaked its way to his nostrils and fear gripped him tight, in a suffocating embrace.
‘I don’t want bokaroo!’ he had screamed, skating madly through the streets.
and the god directed him to be sent to an asylum.
But the truth would be told one day….some day…when the world of Wambo would care to listen to this madman.
Then, he would have horrific tales to re-count.
Tales of the chamber of the god expanding to gigantic proportions, of the great flood that the god had summoned to keep his precious chamber afloat, where millions had perished. And yet, the victorious shouts of ‘bokaroo is here! bokaroo is here!’ penetrating the eardrums. The heavens had screamed in agony, in extreme pain of what the madman did not know, and all the while that she shrieked and roared, the god had smartly pushed out his massive chamber in periodic heaves. And the chamber! The chamber was no more of the bulbous shape, now it was a creature with arms and legs! The government had cried out to the god- ‘please do not move out your project from our land! We would extend all the support that we can!’ yet, he had moved out. And with his exit, the world of Wambo had collapsed, like castles in the air built with a pack of cards…..
The land had met its own demise….
Bokaroo does not exit. Or maybe it does. But wait, of course it does!
They sell it in inconspicuous bottles without labels on them. The inhabitants of Wambo pierce their veins with syringes spurting bokaroo. Sometimes they purchase it in dark alleyways, packets of powdery bokaroo which they snort. And how it fills them with limitless bokaroo!
Ah! Bokaroo! The very source of all life!


{Wambo is a Proto-Germanic word, (hypothetical prehistoric ancestor of all Germanic languages, including English.) meaning, the womb.}

Thursday Morning

Nonsense word exercise.

Word picked: zanit.

---

In Thursday morning’s class the insanely beaming teacher asks us to speak on why each of us is special. Every child must have secret specialty hidden somewhere about them, or primary schools would cease to function. Freckle-faced Simran is special because of her purple pencil-box with Mickey Mouse on it. Joydeep, clumsily fixing the spectacles on his nose, is special because his class-works never fail to return an A+. Anurag, stodgy and heavy-breathing, is special because his mum bakes the best chocolate cakes in the world.

I try to lower myself into my desk till the teacher’s eyes inevitably spot me. ‘You, Chintan! Tell your friends why you are special, won’t you?’

‘Um. I’m not,’ I give her a stupid, confused stare as I drag myself up to stand. ‘Really,’ I add by the way of emphasis, taking care to sound just the right amount of pathetic.

My classmates duly dissolve into peals of laughter. Someone snickers behind my back. The teacher quips, ‘Oh, my poor boy,’ and proceeds to silence the uproarious class. With a sigh of satisfied resignation, I sink back into my seat and return my attention outside the window, where a guava tree sways gently in the summer breeze just outside the school wall.

That guava tree is my regular refuge. Its highest branches – so thin that even a cat can’t balance on them – are a dreamy nook of intertwining light and shadow. The leaves dance lightly in the breeze, tickling your skin continuously, making you flicker and ripple at the edges. You can see for miles from up there. You can occasionally let the air current dislodge you off your branch and gently float about in circles above the city, shimmering transparently in the sunlight and not upsetting any cosmic balance anywhere in the world. You can even take a peaceful nap, save for the trouble of the rare collision with a bewildered bird in mid-flight. While the rest of my class learns the mysteries of multiplication, I spend my afternoons on the top of the guava tree dangling my legs.

It’s a good thing that the teachers have given up on me. No one bothers me any more if I spend the entire day dozing on my desk, or staring glassily out of the window. Some children are born… a little slow, as it is politely said. It’s not anyone’s fault, especially if those particular anyones are being paid good money by the parents of the said child to keep him at their school.

---

‘What’s up, eh, Chintu Master?’

I turn my head to look into the wild, grinning face of Anita inches away from mine. It amazes me how Anita always manages to look scruffy – even her shimmer has a grainy quality to it. Anita is twelve and agile like a monkey. When she wants, she can slip through cracks in windows and holes in fences as if her body did not possess any mass at all.

Back in school Anita studies two classes above me and scores even worse. Anita is a certified retard. Her parents spend thousands of rupees running from child psychiatrist to counsellor and back again. Anita doesn’t care. She dislikes that other life far worse than me. She despises every bit of it.

This particular afternoon Anita is puffing on a small, oblong item that looks to me suspiciously like a beedi. ‘You’re smoking,’ I tell her reproachfully.

‘Ah, yes,’ Anita gives me a toothy grin. ‘Wanna try?’

‘No, thank you,’ I grimace, angrily adding, ‘This your newest hobby, is it? What would your parents think if they found out?’

‘Who cares? My parents think I’m a drooling, babbling retard,’ Anita shrugs. She sways her legs furiously. ‘A stain on their blood.’

‘That’s because you’ve never spoken to them, Anita. You’ve never even uttered a word! You’re so smart, maybe you could even pass off as a normal kid if you tried. Why don’t you make the effort?’

‘Well, who wants to be a normal kid? My sister was a normal kid and she will be married off as soon as her college is over and be someone’s miserable housewife all the rest of her life. I say a zanit’s life for me!’ Anita grins widely and stretches.

I don’t answer, so Anita drags at her beedi happily and rattles away, ‘Say, did you hear of that massive power failure in Bombay yesterday? That was Manish Iyer, you remember him? Tall dark guy with a severe case of acne, used to go to DAV Public? It’s unbelievable the things he does with technology! And that doctor in Vellore whose pants spontaneously caught fire last week? Such a roar! That was a girl called Preeti Mohanty from Cuttack. Just a little older than me. Her folks had taken her for treatment out there.’

She laughs aloud by herself, swaying her head like a transparent dusty doll. Then she suddenly notices my silence and pokes me in the ribs. ‘Don’t you think they’re the coolest, Chintu? When I grow up I’ll be cool like them! Hey, what’s up, kid? Want me to punch that long face out of you?’

‘Those people sound just as horrible as you,’ I return her glare.

Anita smirks at me and aims the remaining beedi at a sparrow perched a few branches away from us. She misses, and the beedi lands in our school courtyard. ‘Then what do you want to do, sit on a guava tree like a sad little ghost all your life?’

‘I don’t know, Anita,’ I tell her. ‘Don’t you think we zanits could do better things than playing nasty pranks on normal people? We can do so many good things, useful things... we can help people, can’t we?’

‘And what good will that be to us? They’ll never find out who did those things.’

‘They would, if we told them,’ I tell her. ‘We could all tell them. There are so many of us.’

‘Hahahaha, you think they would? Is that really what you think?’ Anita laughs out at my face with sudden viciousness, and then her voice turns dark, ‘Listen, kiddo, how old are you? Ten next month, eh? There’s a lot about the world you need to learn. You’ll tell them, and they’ll believe you, a bunch of slow-brained, drooling, stuttering children who can’t tell mama from papa? They’ll lock you up in asylums for life, and you’ll be thankful if they do that, because at least in asylums they leave you alone. Or else they’ll send you to laboratories and cut you up, try to find out what’s special in your genes and how they can replicate them. They’ll keep you under watch, stick things into you, make laws and invent devices to ban you from going where you want and doing what you like… You’ll never, never be able to fly about by yourself!’

She pauses to catch her breath, and then dangles a finger in front of my nose, ‘If even one of us gives away, all of us are destroyed. Never forget that! A zanit keeps his lips zipped.’

I stare at her in horror, the callous, cheeky Anita I knew peeling away into this new, ferocious person who sounded so much like as adult. ‘Where – where did you find out these things?’

She reaches out and pats my cheek with her small, rough hand. The unprecedented gesture of affection takes me by surprise. ‘We all find out, Chintu Master,’ she sighs, ‘You’re still too young to worry about these things. Enjoy your stupid guava tree! I’m here for you, no?’

The school bell rings below us and Anita’s face lights up with another grin. ‘Well, here they come! See you around, Chintu Master… Ta!’ She puckers her lips and throws me a flying kiss – knowing perfectly well that it embarrasses me – does a couple of somersaults in the air above the guava tree and glides off smoothly towards the school building. I will follow her after a few minutes: the older classes are released before the younger ones so it will still be a while before a teacher gently nudges me to leave my seat and start walking towards the gates.

---

For now I dangle my legs at the guava tree and wonder, How difficult is it to be special? All you need is a mum who bakes the best chocolate cakes in the world. How difficult is it to not be special? I did not choose to be a retard, I did not choose to be a zanit. I cannot tell if I would’ve taken this, given a choice. I know Anita will say she would, but would she either, honestly?

But a zanit keeps his lips zipped, even to his own kind. So be it, then. So be it.




Monidipa Mondal

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Nonsense word exercise: grumelisk


At the crossing of Andromeda Avenue and Lakshmi Lane there stands a very grimy statue of Confucius, his features obscured almost beyond recognition by the incorrigible smog of the lower levels of Paradise.

If your vision of heaven is filled with graceful arches and naked cherubs and voluptuous apsaras, then let me tell you, you’d have to be the bloody Prince of Eden himself to get them. For the rest, especially here in the lower levels, Heaven is just another shanty-town. Everything is caked in sooty squalor because of the filth percolating down from the upper levels. Shabby and derelict apartment buildings lean on each other’s shoulders, spilling onto the narrow, dimly lit, cobbled streets. Welcome to the divine tragedy.

But I digress. I doffed my halo to the grimy sage before me and ambled down Lakshmi Lane until I came upon the Café Manichaean. It lives up to its name by seeming to be in eternal struggle with itself to bring some kind of uniformity to the décor. Mismatched chairs stand huddled around dirt-encrusted antediluvian tables. Each wall of the tiny cafe had several layers of peeling wallpaper on them, each a different design. I swear, even the waitors wore mismatched uniforms.

I perused the menu, holding it with my fingernails for fear of infection and thought it safe to order an apple cider. I had hardly handed back the menu when I saw Terziel enter the shop. “A small coffee,” he said to waiter without prelude. Noting down the order, the genie disapparated into the kitchen below, perhaps in a hurry to get away from Terziel’s singularly ugly face, which no amount of ambrosia can cure.

“Do you have the grumelisk I wanted?” he asked once he was sure no one was eavesdropping.

“Certainly. But explain to me exactly how you intend to kill GOD,” I replied.

“How I intend to kill GOD?” he repeated. “It’s really very simple. But first, do you know what grumelisk is?”

“Of course,” said I. Fuck you, I thought. How dare he insult me like this! As if there was a single apparition in heaven that did not know. It is, in a word, the quintessence of one’s soul. In effect, it is used as a raw material to power the divine city’s generators. Every new soul that manages to reach heaven has to pay a ‘grumelisk levy’ of one-fifth of one’s soul in exchange for a visa into Paradise. This collected soul is decomposed in special vats into grumelisk before entering the city’s power grid. The tax has been rising steeply for the past few centuries from a mere two percent in my time, more than five hundred years ago.

The waiter deposited our orders on the table and floated away again. Terziel wrinkled up his nose at the smell of alcohol in my cider. Fuck you, I thought again. Paradise was a better place without the likes of you!

Ah, heaven had been a very different city in the day. It was only seven levels high when I first arrived here. But the great spurt in human population following the Industrial revolution has led the city into a state of gargantuan overpopulation. The city has grown into a massive eighty-two levels high, with each new level that is added filthier, and more crowded, and more dangerous than the one above.

And correspondingly GOD’s powers have grown. Gaian Operations Division, as it was once called, controls grumelisk production, which means GOD controls energy, which means GOD controls the city. GOD’s energy monopoly has allowed its insidious growth into a Byzantine monstrosity that uses new souls pretty much as walking-talking grumelisk production units. GOD has introduced twenty new forms, to be filled in by immigrants seeking to enter heaven, in the last century alone, charging 1% soul for each. By the time new immigrants arrive at the Pearly Gates for the grumelisk levy of 20%, they may not 20% to give. I have heard of many souls who have simply disintegrate onto the floor just then and there. GOD doesn’t care.

Gaian Operations Division is our only interface with the mortal realm. Once a benign and innocuous agency, it has grown into a draconian and dictatorial bureaucracy which controls every aspect of our lives. Even Archangel Michael, the duly elected President of Heaven, does not dare to oppose GOD publicly. They maintain a vicious shadow government which monitor’s people’s lives without their knowledge. If a prominent angel disappears mysteriously, we all know he’s been fed to the city generators by an agent of GOD for publicly denouncing them.

Terziel took a sip of his coffee and said, “Well I shall use the grumelisk against GOD. Ironic, don’t you think? I have recently perfected a device that runs on grumelisk … an explosive device which can destroy every soul in the radius of one kilometer. The device is strapped onto my chest. I need only push a button, and…boom! Penetrating the facility will be cherub’s play with the gate-pass you have provided me. You have very influential backers.”

“You can be damn sure I do,” I said, keeping my voice barely above a whisper. I did not intend to meet my end as raw material for powering heaven’s anti-gravity engines. Not when I’ve come this far.

Terziel was exactly the thing I had hoped for: hysteric, malicious and stubborn. You could say he was fulfilling his destiny. You see, Terziel had been a terrorist in his before-life. A suicide bomber, to be precise. In fact, he was one of the last terrorists to get into paradise before the 723rd Mount Kailash Conference back in `82, which banned people with a history of violence from entering heaven.

Terziel never had a chance. Public opinion being the way it is, the stigma of terrorism hung over him like an ominous cloud. Nobody wanted to hire him. His last steady job had been as a garbage collector in Valhalla New Town. That had been seven months ago. He had lived his entire afterlife as a dreg in the lower levels, and he could take no more. He focused his anger against GOD. GOD had stopped others like him from entering. GOD bled him dry of grumelisk every chance they got. GOD had never explained to him that the phrase “seventy-two virgins” isn’t gender-specific.

“But won’t you perish in the blast as well?” I asked, feigning concern as I had a sip of my cider.

“A small price to pay,” he replied. “Trust me, I’ve done this before.”

“Excellent,” I said, as I indicated to the suitcase sitting at my feet. “The grumelisk as per your specifications, in concentrated vials.”

“Your master must be a powerful man, to acquire this much grumelisk in such a short time,” he answered.

I thought to myself, You have no idea.

At last, GOD shall fall! Years of planning are finally to bear fruit! Luckily, their facilities stand well on the outskirts of the divine city. The annihilation of a few thousand new immigrants as collateral damage was well-justified.

“It happens tomorrow,” Terziel said, as he got up to leave.

“Godspeed,” I said without thinking. With a withering look, Terziel was gone, his coffee unfinished. If all went according to plan, I would not be meeting him again.

I gave a sigh and reflected upon my inner demons, for you see I have many. In fact I always keep one tucked inside my left nostril in case I need to send a message across quickly.

“Take a message,” I commanded, as it hovered obediently at nose level.


My Lord President Michael,

Our plans are going perfectly. GOD shall fall tomorrow, and you shall soon be undisputed master of Heaven and Earth. I can only pray that we do not meet the same fate as befell your brother Lucifer.

Your most obedient servant,
Joanne de Arc.

P.S. Can’t wait to see you tonight.


------------------------------------------------


Rimidi was good enought to point out that Terziel has in him shades of Achmed the dead terrorist. However, the biggest influence was Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion", which taught me to verbalize my deep suspicion of God(s).--- Sharad

Colour Exercise: Green

You sit in front of the astrologer, eyes anxious, as his eyes pore over the spider-web of your palm. “Emeralds,” he says, drawing out a selection that winks up at you like the eyes of so many snakes—too many Harry Potter references chasing themselves in your skull. “Emeralds assist in intelligence,” he insists, and you frown over the cost and pick the smallest—the cheapest—and it gleams against your skin like rain-washed leaves.

“Emeralds for intelligence,” you mutter, and pay him with figuratively green money for your green stone that has nothing to do with wealth at all.

Derision

Letters I could not deliver, I could not write.
A dog that starts barking whenever I begin,
The ball-boy who has not received a single ball today
Pierces into the microphone.
Letters I could not write, I could not deliver.
An unexamined touch of an unknown hand in the dark,
That endeared back-road where ants take on strumpets
Falls like moonlight on my copulating words.
There could still be tears in the dark---
De-populated, Like
Letters I never wrote, never delivered.