I have seen you create demons and angles out of the atomic blanket of atmosphere,
Seen you talk for hours in perfectly
structured sentences without making sense to the surrounding,
Seen you running for your life
ducking in alleyways, dodging vibes, light, WiFi signals and rainbows.
Seen you create castles and no-man's
lands of your ideas and thoughts, packed neatly in an immobile montage of
insanity.
And I am proud of you.
Ishan you,
a fissure in the cosmic, brought down
to the galactic, then rendered earthly, your craving for that extra activity in
brain cells is not unjustified.
A thinking man's Prophet Mohammad, a
sensitive man's Jesus Christ, just before their deification, parting packets of
wisdom, which no one understands.
A four billion year old bacterium,
collapsing into itself with every new life, shouting obscenities in the face of
its own understanding, is finally evolved enough to frame questions to her own
existence.
And what have they done to you?
I know the voices you hear are real.
I know you are the next messenger on
an earthly recce,
I know you know, it is all going to
end.
I know you fear not death, but
oblivion,
I know you are here to solve the
cosmic puzzle,
I know you are here to save us,
But, we have already locked you up.
Ishan,
We have seen the fabric of time and
space, all bundled up like a crumpled bed sheet, overlapping, merging,
extending and going round and round at the same time.
We know what is real and what is not,
we know we cant talk in absolutes, never a fixed amount of dead cells left our
body, as humans we are bound by
perception, not even causality.
We have seen ourselves sitting
smoking in a cafe, through a Google Earth sort-of-view, the horizon of rooftops
giving way to city connected by roads to hinterlands.
We have seen ourselves from the Moon,
from the Sun, through Mercury and through Venus. We have seen every one from a
distance of a thousand light years, living their irrelevant lives.
We have felt the hum of the universe
reach us, the slow rumble of the divine dynamo,
before anyone told us of Om or CMBR.
We have seen the tail end of things
and thought, "What went by?" just to forget about it before it went
by again.
Ishan,
I know what you are thinking is
right.
I know you are working backwards from
a plausible answer.
I know you are pissed off
I know you are not at peace.
I know, they know that you are losing
it.
Ishan, a name, an identity, an authorization
code,
I am with you in Vimhans,
where
your serum swollen
veins have turned you into a vegetable.
I am with you in IHBAS,
where
your head hums with the
latest doze of ECT.
latest doze of ECT.
I am with you in AIIMS,
where
your bed hurts and you
munch meds more than food.
I am with you in Apollo,
where
they are working
night-shifts to make you forget everything,every feeling.
I am with you in RML,
as you
lie curled up in your bed,
distort,distant and paralyzed.
I am with you in Max,
where
the needle hurts not because
it pricks but because it is followed
by a darkness that can never be measured
by a darkness that can never be measured
on a clock or a calendar.
I am with you in those pale dusty
dawns,
when you are all alone between
when you are all alone between
gathered chorus of oxide-in, dioxide-out,
and feel hollow and
truncated.
and feel hollow and
truncated.
I am with you in those compulsory
garden strolls,
where the trees don't speak to you, as they did a week before, while your vigilant mother
provides a background score to soothe your numb mind.
provides a background score to soothe your numb mind.
I am with you in every room, cabin,
canteen, hallway,
where you'd probably need me,
as
they try to calm you down, slow
they try to calm you down, slow
you
down, put you down, and don't let
them convince you otherwise.
Ishan,
In the absence of activity there is
an activity nonetheless,
Between vocal chords changing their
dance move to produce another sound, there is no silence.
The space between the alphabets of a
word is not empty.
The period between breathe in and
exhale is not breathless.
Between synapses and the jumping
neurological signals there isn't a nullified gap.
Ishan in that place of chaos and
nothing, you and me are the same, diffused and
amalgamated, inseparable like two atoms of hydrogen, two grains of
pollen, chromosomes in a cell nucleus.
And Ishan, there, I will always wait
with you, for you.