The Second Campaign

Here comes the second campaign for the imaginary www.anythingandeverything.com
This time the idea takes a twist.And the Art Partner is none other than V.C.Ratheesh, the ruthless perfectionist.

Incoherent random ramblings

Yesterday, I lost sleep some time during ‘brahmamuhoortha’. My watch showed the time as 3.40. Then, after a while again I slipped into slumber, the next time when I opened my eyes it was 7.45. It was raining through out the night and it was one of those mornings when one just wants to tuck under the blanket for ‘some more time’. But this time, I made sure that I didn’t actually sleep. At last, I got out of bed at 8.10. I need a lot of time to finish my chores. In fact, in the morning I may look like a grown up version of Darsheel Safari brushing in ‘Taare Zameen Par’, baldy, bearded. And by the time I left my room, it was 9.15. I was just wondering why I feel so hungry and the bus I got in was surprisingly empty, not that I got a seat, but still comparing with the jam-packed one’s I usually travel, this one offered a lot of space, in bus conductors’ parlance ‘enough space to play football’. (They stopped using any such metaphor ever since people started to tell them that they are the goal keepers. So many goal keepers. Poor N.S.Madhavan who told us about the loneliness of the goal keeper) The real surprise was when I reached the office, almost all my colleagues were there at their seats with their eyes glued to the monitor and fingers frantically searching on the keyboard. No, it was not the ‘just-logged-in’ look but the ‘has-been-here-for-quite-some-time’ look. And the person on my left smiled at me, yup, something was there in it, something was wrong, and I almost smelt the rat. ‘What’s the time’? ‘11.30’, he replied. “Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?” I got this reputation of hitting the bottle when it rains, and well, when it doesn’t. But yesterday I was just sober as a ‘whatsitsname’. But still some of my colleagues exchanged ‘I-know-what-you-did-last-night’ smile with me. Alas! What a day, it was not that I reached the office late, it was the 2 hours I missed…bizarre it was.

Everyone is busy explaining themselves. Isn’t it the problem with the world? No one bothers to care what the other feels, how they think, what they have to say or what it would be like if one stepped in to their shoes. It’s always me, me and ‘my point…’and I’m not different!

Someone says ‘one is responsible for one’s experiences’. I agree with that, though not wholly. That’s a damn truth, just love it. But still, my experiences don’t allow me to agree with that without disagreeing a bit.

…a cursed death

Actually this post was supposed to go with the last one, at least that’s the way I had planned it, since there’s some connection between these two. The only separation I had wanted between them was a thick line; one made up of the asterisk mark which is situated right on top of the head of 8 on the keyboard. But for some reasons I decided to keep this as a separate one.

It happens to me quite often. But once the surprise (or shock/revelation) settles down, it goes down to the kingdom of oblivion just like the numerous things that happen regularly. I’m talking about being shown the other side, sometimes instantly, sometimes not-so-instantly.

Once I jotted down kinda-draft of the last post titled ‘…a blessed death’, I went back to ‘The God of Small Things’, which I was reading after a decade or so. Since it was re-reading, there wasn’t any hurry to ‘know the story’. Naturally there was a lot of time to visualize Comrade K.N.M. Pillai. “Arms were crossed on his chest, and he clasped his own armpits possessively, as though someone had asked to borrow them and he just refused”. Or Estha crushing to his bed saying: “Et tu? Kochu Maria? Then falls Estha”. Or Chacko, ‘the spoiled princeling with the old Zamindar mentality playing comrade, comrade’, thanks Ammu. Then all of a sudden, nopes, not all of a sudden, one could see disaster lurking in the air, but still, chapter 7, ‘Wisdom Exercise Notebooks’, was a blow, perhaps the most heart rending of them all. “A different Ammu” made an appearance. “Swollen with cortisone, moon faced, not the slender mother Rahel knew”. And after she showed her phlegm on a handkerchief Rahel hated her. Yes, she hated her. Ammu died at 31. Not young, not old, but a ‘viable, die-able age’. She died at a lodge in Aleppey where she had gone to attend an interview. A room boy found her dead in her room and ‘he switched off the fan’. The church refused to cremate Ammu in their cemetery. So they went to the electric crematorium; Chacko and Rahel, just Chacko and Rahel. “The door of the furnace clanged shut. There were no tears”. And after a while they received: “The whole of Ammu crammed into a little clay pot, Q 498673.”

…a blessed death

“I long for my mother’s bread
My mother’s coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hours of my death
Worth the tears of my mother”

-Mahmoud Darwish

In the middle of the courtyard of Ramalla’s Cultural Palace, where he had given his last poetry reading, the grave was ready, to give the land’s dearest son a welcome embrace and a whole-hearted acceptance into her heart. On the winding road that led to the cremation ground, there were thousands, on their way to see their beloved poet for one last time. And in the midst of them was she, brought on a wheel chair: Houria, aged 92, the mother of Mahmoud Darwish. A blessed life. A blessed death.