There's space. And then there's more space. And so much space that you don't know how to handle it. You have given away. Much. You have given up. Even more. You have given so much of your being in such minute fractions periodically and perennially that you have practically polished your inner self clean. Not a fragment remains. Of thought or feeling. Not a little particle of anger or despair. You have transformed all memories into fiction. So much so, that the minutest residues of joy and sorrow have perished. Who you were is a story. Your yesterdays accumulate into an amorphous interrogation. No, you don't reason it out. There's no reason why you would! You have snapped off ties with all that could have been memories. Fiction begins and ends. You don't allow it to linger on. You are an empty space. And there's so much space that nothing else remains. Light washes over your being and you assimilate darkness. You are a receptacle. Renewed each day. You are full each moment and empty again. For you see, you don't retain. You give it all away. And then there's space. And so much space that you don't know how to handle it. 

Her eyes are closed mostly. She’s here. And not here. Speech is difficult. And also forbidden for most of the day. They’ve said she mustn’t speak during the eight nebulizers in the day. Certainly not while eating. And of course not while on life support through the afternoon and night. Twenty minutes per nebulizer and half an hour per meal…how much is gone..? Two hours through the afternoon and four at night…how much is left..? These are occasions when I feel thankful for my ill-developed arithmetic skills. She’s on the bed completely through the last one year. The little that she could move and save her dignity with – walking down to the bathroom with the help of her orthopedic walker, was taken away last year. Not by an accident, but through meticulous medical treatment. White robed demigods. They compromised on that last bit of her movement by keeping her in the ICU to restore her depleting breath. When she asked for help to relieve herself, they gave her a catheter. When we said she’s disoriented, they yelled back at our ignorance. And the next day called up to inform us that she had had two consecutive rounds of intense brain seizures. She has been confined to the bed since they handed over her discharge certificate. Sometimes, in the hours that are still left for her to speak, she murmurs names. Names of places. Names of things. Names which have nothing to do with each other. Disconnected names. Margaret Noble. Seema. Michael Madhusudan Dutta. Yudhishthira. Brajanath Dutta Lane. Parthasarathi. Broken chants. A blend of histories, personal impersonal. Boundaries of space dissolve. Silently. There’s nothing called time anymore. Memories fade. The light is white. Eternity, is it...? Dazzling. Relentless. But her eyes are closed mostly. As she’s still here. And not here.

She does not understand. As she sits with a blank face in front of one of the government hospitals for the last four days, she does not understand. With a round little hand where veins have succumbed to the prolonged insertion of an intravenous cannula, she does not understand. Perhaps, because the sun asserts its might in a tropical summer and flies hover relentlessly looking for continuous moisture on her body, she does not understand. I walk past her. I do not try to explain. I do not know how to explain. Or what to explain. I stand at a distant corner stealing one more glance at her. How do I tell her that people who were supposed to let her hand free of that pain are protesting inside? How do I explain to her that she has been insensible to land up here on the footpath when hundreds or even more suffering, anguish-stricken souls inside are voicing their fear of being brutally assaulted by people who come for treatment to these places? It does not matter if she did not cause the harm; it does not matter if these are the same people who could give her mother no bed when she was brought here for childbirth; it does not matter if they did not raise a protest then because patients were suffering, not their fraternity. All of it matters now. At this hour. Because their rights have been violated. She must suffer for belonging to the faceless chunk of population sans affordability who come here, because a section of them have done terrible things to the educated elites – those who have been chosen by God to grant a fresh lease of life to the dying; those illustrious young people who will become famous for their talents and skills at handling two hundred and six bones inside the human body and other related organs; those who will add to life expectancy in human population by virtue of their research and merit to populate the world with a species that does not understand each other’s suffering. Sometimes she peeps inside the premises. I have this silent unbearable streak of shame hitting me as her eyes catch a glimpse of young educated elites shouting slogans and clapping to register their protest against tyranny. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, they say. A protest bordering on a revenge against the powerless is difficult to understand.  There is this private hospital at a little distance. There they are doing everything she needs to have done to herself. But the elders who seat her on their lap as they wait beneath a tree on the footpath seem apathetic. They do not want to know that there are other places they can take her to. It seems they do not have what it needs. Lackings are difficult to handle. Her elders lack affordability. She lacks wisdom. I lack the language to justify her condition. Just as people there inside lack good sense to register limits of human tolerance. 

Long live revolution!

Just as the traffic signal blinks red at one of the busiest crossings in the city, children come to your law-abiding civilized cars - balloons in their hands. Shape, colour and size of the balloons are governed by the calendar. Around independence day, they'll sell orange, white and green balloons, while around Valentine's Day, they'll all sell hearts. Series of red hearts balanced upon a stick, floating past the busy lives standing at the halt. Hearts priced according to your willingness to grab one. Show interest and the price goes up; turn away and it's yours before you've paid. I had always felt that these balloons are machine-blown - multiple and big. But a careful glance and you notice at an obscure corner of the signal, a woman seated in a tricycle for the disabled, quietly blowing up the balloons - her tricycle handle full of multicoloured sticks waiting to be attached to the balloons and children crowding around to get their share as she resignedly blows in breath into these little flexible bags.

How much perseverance in each of those air-filled bags...all to be submitted to the whims of a consumerist world. The equation between cost and production has always been too twisted to be academically determined; for cost is not worth and worth is, often, way beyond affordability.

And so then, they come to visit you. Sometimes. Old selves. One timid, another vibrant, yet another shy, while another is bold. They merge, they split. Like kaleidoscopic visions. And in them, merge times and spaces. Flighty feathery fictional selves. Dancing to the tunes of abrupt memories. None speaks. Language is redundant. You've lived a time in a different space with each one of them. They who are fictional today were you, once upon a time. They emerge like spirits having risen in the dim light of recollections. Or old tenants, perhaps, who have nothing more to do with the old space called you. There are no unsettled dues. No matters that need sorting. Just a tableau of figures your present self witnesses resignedly...like unnecessary concentric ripples formed suddenly in still waters. You have nothing to worry about, technically, for you have been at peace with each one of them and quite happy with each other so long as they were you. And yet the discomfort of sudden emergences...the embarrassment at an unannounced crowd of visitors.

Droplets of dew silently settle on the hyphen punctuating your span of life so far. 

There's a storm. And then some rain. Sometimes a deluge.

Lashes let go of the delicate connect with the moist edges.

An abyss awaits. Silently.

It's that time of the year when you realize that the mortality rate is the highest for dreams.

This city is home to a lot of events. Amongst them, literary meets. Amusing things.You reach there and understand how knowledgeable fellow human beings are. Everybody knows everything. The cosmos overflowing with knowledge. Anybody can speak about anything under the sun. And more surprisingly, everyone understands everything. A microcosm of heavy intellect. Heavy to the point of claustrophobia. There's no air around. It's all intellect, dripping away in each particle you happen to inhale. Words of wisdom, critical insights and high philosophy soaks every inch of your being. Everyone is high on aesthetics, academics, art. An unthinkable jostling of bodies as starving souls seek enlightenment. Invites pour in from all ends. People tell you they are 'doing' poetry or literature with devotion and sincerity. 'Do' is the new in-thing. You are expected to be there. To see it all being done. To appreciate, applaud. Steaming coffee, stimulated brains, sincere nods and sweet smiles. Claps that permeate the universe as novel ideas are articulated amidst the holy blessedness of human breath.

Amma sits outside. With her stupid gaze. Comprehending nothing. Her prescription and bowl of expectations in front of her.

As the gathering dissolves, important, enlightened two legged beings emerge. A few coins to Amma. Perhaps.

Social service, self-importance and knowledgeability. Ask the ragpicker, yeah, God's world couldn't have 'done' it better.

A bruised soul sits ashore
As relentless waves
Play upon the remnants of wounds Enshrouded
In prenatal indifference



Numbness is an art
Sometimes called poetry

Just as the little busy bee realizes that she can stand on her feet and manage herself, her limbs and everything she understands as belonging to her (except for the essential supplies) quite peacefully, they begin singing rhymes to her. Nursery rhymes. Beautiful rhythmic chantings, which need not necessarily generate a meaning at that stage. Say for instance, twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. The little one repeats and repeats and further repeats, not really gathering the meaning or trying to gather the meaning, but simply because it's fun - the rhyme, apart from the compulsion of tests and grades. 

And then gradually the world of meaning comes crashing in. She is taught what twinkle means, what's a star, what is wonder, what is world, and of course, the sky - very vague meanings, but meanings nonetheless! As she grows up, imagination steps in. It blends her rhyme with her perceptions. She imagines the star and the stories of stars she might have heard - how loved ones might have become stars, how there are other worlds in those stars far above etc. She looks up at the sky - the same place where aeroplanes go by, where birds fly, where the sun rises and sets, where kites dance to the tunes of the breeze, as the abode of the star. She internalizes the conceptual vastness of the sky without quite technically comprehending it. And per chance she develops a fondnesss for the rhyme, she repeats it to herself even when there is no one around to appreciate her babblings. 

But knowledge is a fundamental catastrophe. The Sapien world will ensure you know it All. Period. So gradually as she grows up and happens to find herself in a school, they begin telling her how the stars are not little but huge. How they look little because they are far far off. They define a star and she must accept it, at the expense of her imagined stories, loved ones and little worlds. They tell her the twinkle technically results from the luminosity of the star - the star which has a life, a duration and so much more to it which can be precisely calculated. Lo! The element of wonder is finished. The star becomes an astronomical object at the expense of those five edged scribblings one had always believed to be representing the star. She struggles to return to the realms of simplification. But once you've entered the realms of meaning, there's no escape. So they tell her, how 'like a diamond' is a simile and how the entire thing called the rhyme has a specific prosodic structure. The fun of the chanting is now lost as one of the earliest childhood favourites now stands almost entirely explained. And if that were not enough, she might further land up into zones of fine linguistic classification where they tell her how the 't' in star is an aspirated phone of the /t/ phoneme.

Tired, she plugs in her earphones and plays a random song in a language she does not understand. There's no compulsion to figure out a meaning. As the brain ceases to function, the heart is at peace.

Sometimes, it's so much fun to return to meaninglessness. 

Meaning has a meaning when it means a potential, else it's a prison in the mind. Let's have some ventilators.

Meaningless is meaningful when meaning becomes meaningless.   

In ancient times, sometimes known as childhood, there used to be these hours of dismal darkness which elders would call 'load-shedding'. It was an age when one understood neither load nor shedding. But one, of course, most diligently parroted what was said. So during load-shedding, since the world had still not experienced the light of inverters or the smartness of smart-mess (better known as mobile phones), one used to have the concept of light confined to the glow of a candle.  A candle, then, used to be a simple white cylindrical object. If you wanted to be a part of the scantily lit room, you ensured you found a space somewhere in the vicinity of a candle. As minutes matured into hours with no sight of electricity anywhere and you did not quite know what you were to do, you began fidgeting with your fingers. And as soon as you looked up at the wall beside you, Voila! there was a new something taking shape out there - black amidst the soft reflection of the candle light! You stared at it, quite spellbound, trying to figure out what was going on and as you changed the position of your fingers, you found that the shape changed. You realized that you were the source of that little something black on the wall moulding and re-moulding itself into new entities as you changed your finger positions. It was fun. It was refuge from a lot of everything else without having the slightest idea of the bard having written - life is a walking shadow. Knowledge is beneficial perhaps, but certainly not essential. Ignorance is existential and, sometimes, yes, bliss. The line of demarcation between ignorance and innocence is surprisingly thin. Ignorant thus of dialogue-worthy worldly wisdom and baffling philosophical implications, you simply brought up the other hand and experimented further, until you had replicated known shapes and put them onto your momentary load-shedding canvas. You made dogs, human faces, rabbits, human figures, fish, snails, ducks, bears, flowers and what-not! They moved, they spoke and there you were - creating stories beyond the grasp of language in the darkest hours of the long day!