It really is

Silvery white waves of foam on pristine blue. Rising in a glorious ark and then stooping down, its peak glistening in the afternoon sun. This is where it all happens. The sun is only drooping down on us, bathing us. But the sea has secrets in it. It ancient and roaring and sad. I stand there for a while, scooping up sand and throwing it into the waters, but the sea's decided long ago - it won't take anything from us. We may bathe ourselves all we want. We may dance on its waves, feel its tremor over our skin, rinse ourselves of all the loss of purity, but we can never be a part of it.

This is where we die a happy death. People sitting on the sand, couples making love, people making love with their own selves, with the waters. I stare around in complete awe, for this is a fiesta, a great giant orgy of human flesh and water, a mingling of existences, a chance to go beyond the conformity of your shoes and clothes.

There is always the chance that you may run past the sea. You will feel a breeze gently kissing your shoulders, the receding waters lapping your feet. You will have to stop and look around and it hits you again.

You may not believe me. You can't, not till you've come here and seen it all for yourself. It really is the sea.

They merge into themselves, as if dissolving into the sky, and then they scatter aside, beautifully parting sideways, opening up a narrow office through which i can see clear blue. The evening air is only damp, only, only.

Smoke curling up in various haunting shapes, wriggling with its own pieces before fading away, and with that my hopes also plunge down, i give into the possibility of what i saw earlier, that this is a dream and I only wanna wake up.

You think its gonna swallow you, rather, you think you'll take pride in the image of your self, in your reflection, but I have to go back once again to a thing i heard recently, but that was said long long ago.

Imagine a room. No windows, no doors. Grey, drab and sad. And there's music somewhere. Are you free? Am I free?

Sweet smell of incense suddenly takes my breath away, i am shamed, i leap a mile away from those rank earlier smells of the day. How infantile is my imagination, how frail my perception of myself, only that harrowed creature that stares back at me from the surface of clear glass, nothing else, not even a mystery.

An old song rings hollow through my ears now, it is night time, the doors and windows are all shut, the earth is bereft of all noise but the hollow dull ringing of loneliness.

Tragedy is Gregor Samsa being given the boot my the charwoman who worked at their house. Oh, Gregor, oh.

Yeah, i just read Metamorphosis. it's quite extraordinary.

Days are spent with the wheezy cough and a wait for that funny jolt I get before i start panting for a lack of breath.It isn't much worth living. Only the engaging company of a very engaging paperback named Kafka on the shore keeps me alive. For the time being. Or else. Who knows?

Fuck, man.

Desperately in need of a blank page. One i can write on. Write anything other than crooked line integrals and draw figures as far removed from the roundness of say, an equipotential surface. I think i might be driven soon to insanity, I keep dreaming of being swallowed by a wormhole. Or falling through a vacuum. This is all so surreal, I might just be a very depressed, a very hungry electron for all I know.

A grey realization

And well, tonight, its raining sultry in Kolkata, i feel like logging into youtube and checking out the weather in Buenos Aires, find out if the sky over the country, so far removed from our own, the one for which I seem to be burning in dismay, is anywhere as sad as the sky over this city this night.

I will admit unabashedly that the dream was shameless. It is only after its over that you realize that. For even now, there is no shame, only a strange realization, as grey as the sky.

As Lionel Messi glides past a row of Nigerian defenders, with the entire stadium around him holding their breath in weighted anticipation, you get the feeling that even the wind dies down and awaits the moment when he's gonna finally do the thing. The thing you know, that which he threatened many a time yesterday, but couldn't quite grab. What thing is it? You'll know when you see it. For now, we await.

Tonight.

The sun won't be up for several hours now, but i'm dying to look at it. That's not the best note to start a birthday, to want to die for something. But such is the strange paradox of dreaming at night with your eyes open.

Tonight will never be the same again, for once in this streak of living, the past and the future are blown away by the sheer intensity of the present.

The sun, for all its handsomeness of feature, for the brazen glory with which it shines will still not make my day.

The night will. The night will make my day.

Of escapes and pearls.

These are dull days, no sun to look up at, no rain to ponder on, no chill so that you might allow yourself to be hugged by yourslef tightly, let that strange feeling of warmth calm you down. There's a lot to what i'm studying, there's a lot if you think of it that way. But then again, there really is nothing in it. I can loose myself in the dynamics of the natural phenomena that i'm studying, they call it a science, but it really is just another escape. It's a fantasy, the whole of it, a beautiful make believe world which people have carefully built up over the years. We all live in that fantasy.

It all really is an escape for me. I like escaping, that's the cold truth. And i like escaping from that cold truth.

About thirty six-hours ago, i watched 'Double Indemnity'. I took pleasure in watching it, an immensely crooked guilty pleasure. People have done the same over the years. I was chilled by Barbara Stanwyck's first appearance, she was loosely covered in a bath-robe, looking down at the man downstairs the same way a teacher looks at a student when they pose an unexpected question. Something would shine in her eyes throughout the movie, and yet we shall forever be perplexed by what those eyes really held in them.

That was another glorious escape for me.

I've been hearing stories lately. There was one about a guy who walked into a resturant by the Maine and treated himself to a sumptous feast. It turns out that he didn't have a penny on him at all. The resturant manager was swelling in fury, threatning court, when the man blurted out those silly words which won the day. He had been having oysters for lunch. Now, the thing is, by the side of the Maine, they simply grab the oysters alive in their fishing nets. Back home, we've all seen the dynamics of animal slaughter. By the side of the Maine, they're techniques for such murder are infinitely cooler. They just spike the oysters with fresh lemon, and all life is sucked out in an instant, a second and a few drops of lemon juice and you're gone.

But i'm digressing. This man, he had these oysters for lunch. And when the manager asks him for an explanation, he retorts with a smile and says, 'I had so many oysters, i'd simply hoped that i'd find a pearl in one of them. I'd hoped to have payed my bills with that one pearl.'

We shall all search for that pearl. I'm sure we will.

1

It was early morning, the sky was a dull grey, the air was thick in smog and the birds weary in their early morning chores. Trendhill's Gate, where all the dead come in to be stoned, was witness to a small gathering in those early hours. It's decade-old undertaker, Mr Gatr, was in his early morning stupor, his hands feebly clinging on to a bottle of old California Wine, an E & J Gallo. He was seated next to his young accomplish, the sprightly teenager Miral who was often blasted by the undertaker for being a touch too curious about life when his work dealt mostly with death... And just as these two were out on the yard, feeling about the earth with their feet(soft and warm from last night's sleep), they were stalled in their tracks by the earliest group of mourners. Mr Gatr groaned. He hadn't been out to feed his dog yet, he hadn't yet lifted his eyes up at the sun, and there they were, those bloody beings who've got nothing better to do but mourn for what's gone and never coming back. Over the years, Gatr had compelled himself, internally, to not flinch at the sight of the dead bodies. While the mourners allways irritated him, their noise was annulled by the silence of the dead in front of him. Early on in his career, what had haunted him most was that some people would die with their eyes open. Which meant that even in death, they seemed to be eerily staring back at him, that cold lifeless stare a dreadful sight that filled him up with inexplicable guilt.



And yet, he had moulded himself, almost carved himself into that role that he had chosen, and after all these years, Nixem Gatr was Trendhill's sole burier of souls, he was the one who had the last glimpse of the rotten corpses before they were burried beneath.



Thankfully for him though, the crowd assembled this morning was a small one. A dozen people, about a couple sobbing shamelessly into their handkerchiefs, and there were six people who held the body, now covered in white apron, they had it hoisted up above the rest. In a sickening thud, it all came down, and Gatr was suddenly consigned to it again, for there he was, a pale young youth in a bed, a serene white deathbed. Up above him, a giant eagle circled the sky, but Gatr went on unflinched, his eyes fixed on the unmoving earth as he sealed the death in front of him with a reading from John's Bible, that which had been for a thousand years.



In the midst of life, we are in death. Of whom may we seek succor but of thee, o lord, who for our sins are justly displeased.



The deceased was Paul Gregory, Gatr knew him by sight, he was a handsome young youth after all. He had however, been fairly ill-reputed around Trendhill, for he would often wind up in brawls, or take to the road with a town belle. His eyes would shine in a queer tempestuos lust, (Gatr read it as his natural lust for life), and now in front of him, the eyes were gone.



And suddenly, it wasn't a dull morning anymore. As old Gatr turned around him, the morning was dreadfully sad. The eagle up above him was gone, the people were gone, Miral was gone, Paul was gone.

I stared on, a second running into an eternity. All that there is to love, in that one frame, one vision, my mind a paradise, blisfully blank until it was gone, gone, gone in one painful stroke of time. I can stretch my hand all I want, all i'll grasp is the dreary sadness of the air around me.