people

A handful of rice. The oblong ivory grains all just lying one on top of the other, in a helpless and accepting manner. A set of coarse brown hands holds them, weather beaten with experience. The hands, with black lines running through it like bold charcoal marks through a chocolate backdrop, look strong and able, like they have tilled the land. The man who owns these hands is a toothless old man, with countless wrinkles running through all his dark skin. He smiles, causing all his wrinkles to come together just under his eyes in a beautiful fashion. Holding out his hands, he offers the rice to the land, Mother Earth, as she stands in front of him.

A gust. The wind plays around with her hair, as she runs onto a small merry go round. The small child that was once in her, the same child with no inhibition or worry or angst or pain or suffering, jumps up onto the merry go round. The tall, beautiful figure is no longer tall or beautiful, but short and childish, and playful, as she holds the bars of the merry go round as it goes around, and shrieks with a long forgotten happiness. The innocence and love of life runs through her, and for a moment, she has managed to reverse time.

The fury of the ocean rages around him. His boat shakes and rocks, in the hands of the storm. The sure footing he has on his tiny vessel, and the love in his eyes as he looks out onto mighty ocean betrays the sailor in his soul. His strong hands grasp the nets as they are pulled in, but not with malice or hate, but gently. The storm wails and screams around him, churning and tossing water; all around him exists chaos and disorder, yet he remains calm. He reflects the storm, acts as the negative, maintains the balance of nature in his soul.

So exist three different people, all bound by society and circumstance, to believe and think, to learn and understand, to find and explore, their own tiny corners in this vast and diverse world. Are they truly that different?

waiting room 2

She was back, except this time, with no book or pen, or anything. She came with herself and her conscience and her will, and hoped that would be enough to hold her together. It had been over a week, and there were many questions she wanted to ask. Many things had troubled her, and she needed clarification. She went to a doctor for some explanation, and he had told her that she was hallucinating, and that he was very sorry to say it, but she couldn’t have heard anything. It just wasn’t humanly possible, he had said. Then how could she so vividly remember it? That feeling of “hearing” not as a separate sense, but as a part of thought itself. Lost in her thought, she didn’t hear the woman come in. But then again, she couldn’t have anyway.

The woman walked up to her, and touched her on her shoulder, and she started, her thoughts dissipating like a wisp of smoke. The woman was looking exactly the same as last time, with her very beautiful features, looking at her emotionlessly. Without a word, she began to walk away, indicating the other to follow her.

They reached the door, and the beautiful woman opened the door and gestured the other to go through. At a questioning look on the other’s part, the beautiful one shook her head; she would not be coming in this time. Closing her eyes, she walked in.

Still a fairly alien sensation, the music closed in on her, causing her to feel momentarily claustrophobic, but then it passed, and it surrounded her like a protective cocoon. When she opened her eyes, she saw him sitting there, looking completely ordinary, sitting with his guitar. He was playing it very softly this time, very gently. For a while, neither said anything, she sat down a little way in front of him, and waited. Then suddenly, the music stopped, and there was a silence that was as thick as a smog that suddenly settled in the room. Now truly feeling claustrophobic, she started, and thoughts began to bubble out of her incomprehensibly.

“Calm down. Everything is alright. Keep your thoughts under control.”

The silence was complete; nothing stirred, or moved, or made any noise. A silence like this complemented the music, both were utterly unearthly. Stilling her breathing, she held her thoughts in check.

“That’s better. Scary, was it?”

“Yes, very much so. Why? Why suddenly this silence?”

In answer, he pointed to the window, and gestured for her to go and look outside. Curious, she walked to the window, and looked out. Nothing out of the ordinary did she see; a squirrel scampering about on a tree, a bird eating a lizard and regurgitating it for her offspring, an ancient oak that was nearing its end. But nothing out of the ordinary. Her eyebrows furrowed, she looked out more questioningly, thinking she had missed something. But she hadn’t, there wasn’t anything she could see as an answer to why he had stopped playing. Maybe he was scared of disturbing –

“Don’t observe. Just look. What do you see?”

“I see a squirrel running, a bird feeding her young, an old tree dying.”

“What do you feel when you see?”

“At peace.”

“Why?”

She thought for a moment, and then pushed, “Everything is in balance.”

“As am I. The balance of Nature is unrivalled. That means not, that we must not maintain it in our souls too.”

How easy it was for him to say that, she thought. He’s stayed in this room all his life, and felt nothing of the bitterness of life. He’d felt nothing of broken love. Nothing of the struggle of life, of the unfairness of it all. How could he say something like –

“So much anger. So much pain. Do you really believe that I haven’t felt anything that you say you have felt? Do you believe that all you see in front of you is a product of isolation?”

She couldn’t respond. She had nothing to say.

“Sight is the most deceiving of all the senses, and thoughts based on sight can mislead with ease. Don’t let your sight blind all your other senses.”

She said nothing still. And neither did he; he just began to play again, softly. The music seemed to flow like a thick floating river through the room, coursing through the air with grandeur, leaving a tingling sensation in its wake. And it stayed at that intensity, soft and mellow, but with a solid backbone. His fingers seemed to caress the guitar and coax the sounds out of it, rather than actually play it, and the guitar was putty in his hands. Noticing her jaw had dropped slightly, she closed her mouth. His eyes were closed fast, and the music came fast.

All the questions that she had had all planned out and ready to ask, began to dissolve. She came in with the notion that she would figure out just what was going on, and just how everything was happening. Now, when she sat in front of him, and the music enveloped her, she couldn’t care less how it worked, or why it worked the way it did. She understood, on a very primal level, that she was doing something extraordinary, but there was no sense of pride in it, no sense of supreme accomplishment or superiority. There was just a simple, humble sense of peace.

waiting room 1

The waiting room was tiny. A small cubicle of no beauty or love, it sat there, just in front of the door, and created an impression in any visitor that they should not be here. No paintings or nice photos lined the wall, no memories displayed here. It was a desolate place, barren and dry as an arid desert and dead as a graveyard.

The woman sat resolutely in one of the only two chairs in the room. She sat with nothing in her hand, but a small notebook and a pen. She sat determinedly staring at the opposite wall, waiting for something to happen. There was nothing special about her, she was medium in build, medium in height, medium in looks, medium in voice, medium in beauty, but for some reason, she hadn’t been given the same average measure of thought. She had a tremendous amount of thought in her head, an ecosystem of ideas was her mind. And for some even odder reason, she had a love for children, having none of her own. She found them to be the centre of all life. The child’s mind, according to her, was the most beautiful thing on this planet. Where an adult’s judgement would be fettered and clouded by the shackles and fog of prejudice and bias, the child’s mind was like a breath of fresh air.

And so she had come here, to see a child. A child who had been locked away from society. A child who possessed such godly skills, that he could not be named as human. But as the rest of us are human, and the fact that we have jealousy and envy aplenty was the cause for this child to go into hiding. She needed to know what he had. She needed to understand to a full extent what the – actually, any – child was capable of. The mystery of this child had long ago been given up as being just a hoax and nothing real. But something inside her told her otherwise. And so she had come.

A woman entered the room. She had a small face, with a small, sharp nose, and a small mouth, and had longish hair tied back into a ponytail. Very thin, she carried herself very gracefully, and when the woman in the chair looked up, she was taken aback. The woman’s eyes penetrated her own, laying bare all her hidden thoughts and fears and insecurities right there on the ground of that arid waiting room. Those eyes were large and brown and could penetrate lead.

“Come” the woman made a gesture, and left the room.

The other woman got up and followed her.

They walked out of the deadly waiting room, and moved into a much nicer house. There were paintings here, small watercolours of animals and women, and a sense of perfumed moistness in the air, which made everything pleasant.

Then they reached the door to a room. The door looked exactly like everything else in the house, mildly pleasant, with no ostentation about it.

The woman signalled to not be surprised, and opened the door and walked through. As soon as the door opened, the most remarkable change came over the other woman. Her eyes widened, and her mouth widened, and there was a sense of disbelief in her eyes. On the verge of tears, she ran into the open door, and gasped. The other woman was just standing to one side, watching. The woman dropped her pen and book, and just watched in total and utter disbelief what was in front of her. Right in front of her sat a boy, not older than ten, on a small chair. In his arms was cradled a guitar. And with an effortlessness that is impossible to have been achieved by someone his age, he was coaxing it to produce the most beautiful of sounds. Not complicated or complex, but just divine. The woman now had tears flowing down her cheeks, but she smiled, and then began to laugh. The boy was too deep into his music to pay any heed. She picked up her book and her pen, and furiously scribbled something into it, and showed it to the woman, who just stood watching from the side, completely passive.

“How? How is this possible?”

The woman just shrugged and shook her head. And then she gestured towards the boy, suggesting that she should ask him.

Before the woman could turn to the boy with the book, a small voice suddenly entered her head.

“It is possible because that is what it must be. God doesn’t decide what is impossible and what isn’t. You do.”

The music was still playing, and she took little time to figure out who it was. The boy showed no sign of having said anything, and his eyes were closed now, entrapped in the silken cocoon of his music.

She just shook her head, and closed her eyes too, the music running through her a very odd sensation, but at the same time it was remarkably comforting and beautiful. She just let herself go, trusting completely in the music and the sensation it created in her. Then she thought something, and was just going to reach out to her book and pen, when suddenly the voice entered her head again.

“Do it. It’s not so hard. Project your thought outward. Believe that impossible doesn’t exist.”

A little shaken for a second, she gasped. But then she realised that there was much she didn’t know and she had to try –

“Try not. There is no try.”

Now her jaw truly dropped. Where did such a child get such wisdom? The music was still passing through her, like a symbiotic organism. Then she suddenly realised something. The music wasn’t the same throughout. She hadn’t had any experience with music before this, but her primal instincts told her it was changing not with the boy’s mood, but her own. But shaking her head and throwing out these thoughts from her head, as all they did was bring more questions, she thought about an apple, and pushed it. She had no idea what pushing a thought meant, but she was relying on the music and her instincts, and then suddenly, her thought existed inside her, but she was aware of it also floating around her. And then equally suddenly, it was gone.

“It isn’t so hard is it?”

“No” she replied, at length.

She smiled and let all these new feelings envelop her. Usually she would have felt a deep sense of dread, but somehow, even though everything was alien, the music calmed and soothed her. Closing her eyes, she just trusted in it, and waited.

The other woman heard and felt nothing during the whole course of the intercourse between the boy and the other woman, but that didn’t bother her. Passively, she left the room. Only when she had closed the door behind her did she smile.

integrity

He looked out onto the street. The crossing was crowded, full of cars edging dangerously into each other. The air was a thick soup of noxious fumes, mixed with the urban cacophony of a thousand cars. He sat in the small tea shop, holding his little cup of steaming tea, and watching passively, as the cars barely managed to obey the rules of traffic. The tinny radio was blaring in the small, brightly lit, barely furnished tea room. The night was false outside; there was too much artificial light, a sea of pin pricks, marking the source of so many beams. He sipped his tea and thought of what would happen if he just sat there, and let the traffic take its own course. As the scalding brew washed down his throat, he already knew the answer. The cars would go wild, everyone would be selfish, everyone would want their own way. There would be chaos. He knew all of this, yet he let his mind wander on the different possibilities. Maybe, maybe just once, there might be a handful out there with integrity. Maybe there would be those who could stand against the crowd. With true souls. With the courage to see their own thing. And so every night, he came into this tea hut, pretending to leave the traffic to its own devices, just for a little while, hoping. But never had it happened. The same thing always happened. Chaos reigned. But he still came away every night.

And so tonight he watched, secretly, the tea going cold in his hands. The traffic waited, confused; like a blind dog who’s leash has been removed for the first time – an unrecognised freedom. Like every night. He still waited, waiting for the realisation to hit. Waiting for the first guys on the line to feel the raw unadulterated power that one feels when traffic laws no longer apply to them. And even from here, he could feel the tension build. But he did nothing. He just waited. And then everything happened too fast.

The tension reached a climax, and things suddenly went completely chaotic, like a sudden flash of lightning right in your face. But just before it happened, in a space of a thousandth of a heartbeat, a child ran across the road, a small little girl of no more than five. She had been waiting on the other side, aware of the tension, but oblivious to the magnitude, and so she ran, just a tiny instant before everything blew up. And from the small little tea hut on the side of the junction, he saw it all, but it rushed into his head like a number of sledgehammer hits, from a machine gun. Pinned him to his seat, and he watched chaos burst and then the small girl’s eyes wide open as she was simultaneously hit by three cars, tossed one way, and jarring into a car coming the other way, her body sickeningly stopped but her head kept going, and she was wrenched in half at her torso. He saw all this, and he was totally helpless. He was pinned in his seat, in the small little tea room, watching outside. He had seen a girl die. He had seen the wide eyes of the girl as she was wrenched in half. He had watched as chaos had burst. He had done nothing. And here he was, sitting in a small tea room, voyeuristically watching for someone with integrity, when he had none. The realisation hit him just then. He had let a girl die. He had killed someone. He could’ve saved her.

No, he thought bitterly, tears streaming softly down his cheeks and his heart suddenly going all black, I couldn’t have saved her. A man of integrity might have, I could not have.