The Girl

She was 17 when she began disappearing. Every afternoon there was a little less of her, and soon people around her started remarking how pale she'd become. The color washed out; the apple green mingled with the banana ochre and collided with the orange orange as they swirled into nothingness, and crept away, leaving her alone.

No one cared too much about it, though. People don't have time for fruity colors, any more than they have time for looking up at the evening sky, or saying hi to their morning sugar. I wouldn't even say 'now they don't have time', because they've never had it. The time, I mean.

But there was no denying it. She was fading away. Curiously enough, it started with her eyebrows. Don't ask me, I don't know why.

She did regain corporeality at times. Sometimes, when she listened in between the notes of her guitar, or when she sat cross legged in the night, looking out of her rain splattered window, reading her poetry, she could almost feel herself whole. Ephemeral balloons of humid happiness used to call her back, sometimes. Not that she cared too much. She'd come to terms with the graduating greyness. In fact, I think she almost welcomed the slow fade. She'd always been lost within herself; in the hookah puffs of the music and the receding colours of her mind. She used to have the scent of smouldering hashish in her hair, and the tang of soft alcohol in her insouciant eyes.

At the age of 20, three and a half years after It happened, she disappeared completely. Funnily, no one noticed she was going until she was gone. They got over her, eventually. Time and sleep heal, perhaps too much.

Me? I often wonder what colour her eyes were before they finally faded away into patterned emptiness. I used to love them when they were brown. They reminded me of chocolate.

Mercy

The boy
Was pathetic.
His eyes were emaciated, dappled
Pools of hungry want.
His hands were outstretched,
Almost out of dirty habit.

His need was too great for me to fulfill.
He needed my burger.

Except that it wasn’t mine.
It was bought of my father’s sweat.
As were my guilty cigarettes.
He needs it more than I do.
As does every other beggar in this jaundiced city.
I’m hungry.
As is he.
The society?
The individual?

I gave him the burger.
I ate the burger.

His face betrayed no startled happiness, no
Glare of gratitude, that is so
Silently precious to practitioners of charity.
He walked away, insipidly; almost
As if his want had exhausted itself long ago.
My heart wasn’t filled with any warm, liquid
Love towards humanity, borne out of doing that
Which is morally green.
This quality of mercy was strain’d.

His half-hearted tugs at my undeserved shirt
Were ignored, until he
Went away, to spoil someone else’s
Appetite.

...

It is twice curs’d.

There Is No Coin

I could just lie here for hours. On this patch of grass. On this lonely oasis of seclusion in an ocean of people and buildings and civilization. I could watch the weather change. I could look at the birds – enraptured by their own freedom – and indulge in envious desire. What I would not give to be like the eagle, and have pleasure as my only occupation, and existence as my only pleasure.

Instead, I glance guiltily at my textbooks, and what they represent. I have chained my contentment to a set of mostly arbitrary and external parameters of academic success.

My brain and I want to soar free like the birds among clouds of violet intelligence. I want to live off the earth, and among the stars of my dreams. Be a child of Nature. Let the sun rain down upon my face, and watch the sunlight sprinkle through the leaves of the mango tree. Write until the day metamorphosises into the crippling night, and until the patterns of thought in my head exhaust themselves. Think, until I’ve defined myself, and wrested my identity (the balance between what I want to be, and what I am) from the shadows of the impressions of others in my head. Until I’ve found the Secret of Life, the Right way to live. Within. Without the without.

But.

But then I remember, that I love the external too. Music. Guitar. The sound of an old acoustic. The power and sting of an electric. People. Humour. That girl I met in college, whose crimson florality of thought and whitish golden-pink couplets of emotion-in-action, who fascinates me. That blossoming of new friendship with another. My mother. My brother. Douglas Adams. Books.
I find joy in the thoughts of others, too. Society, despite all its faults, often provides me my dose of prosaic happiness.

But then what is the Right way to live? What is Right? What is me?

Maybe there is no Right or Wrong. Absolute colours exist only in our heads. Judgement is our response to the cacophony of action and reaction that is Life. We were never Meant to do anything, never ordained by God or Nature or whatever higher power appeals to your intellect to be good or bad or whatever. All of it exists only in our head. We were designed to only exist, like the dog or the tree or the camel or the cow or the eagle. We are born and we die. All that we do in the intervening space of time is attempt to give ourselves happiness. And while that is a worthwhile cause in itself, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it is the higher purpose of Life. Because there is none.

Maybe there doesn’t have to exist an ‘I’, even. Maybe I don’t need to have a set, crystallized identity. I am not a toaster. I am not a box of things or attributes or traits. I change constantly. I am a lot of things at once. I exist in plurality. I exist.

…

The sun is setting. It’s getting colder. I should have brought a jacket. The mood is passing, as is the clarity of thought. I should return to textbooks, and study in pursuit of the fulfillment of some long-forgotten reason. Return to my vanilla life. To my quotidian confusion.

To the dichotomy of my thought-stream, and therefore, existence.

…

There are no two (or more) sides of the coin. There is no coin.


(Dedicated to Mansi K, for being the first one to appreciate what the hell I'm talking about, here. Onwards, to the Forest!)