Existential Inquiries*

I was feeling rather vague and utterly meaningless while Vishnu stood smoking, bringing out rings of smoke through his mouth. My solemn cigarette consumed smoke and gave out the same. I abstained from listening to the ugly din of the traffic behind, and the monotonous hum of the hospital in front beyond the fence, separating the parking lot from the hospital portico. 
                                 Vishnu started saying something about the ' glare of the moon' last night, which made him tip and fall and kinda dislocate his shoulder of sorts and then he turned his gaze towards the hospital and i knew he was eyeing the girl visible through the hospital windows, dancing, laughing, singing, going crazy. 
                              Abortion. Leukaemia. Meningitis. Psychosis. Mania. Cancer. Tumour. I wasn`t feeling a lot well. 
                            - "We`ve to nail one of `em yo" said he with a glint in his eyes. I stood numb. The traffic creating a roar behind me and the girls peeping through the hospital windows were not even visible properly and I was amazed that they could live so happily there. Singing, laughing, dancing, pretending happiness in a void which they occupied. 
                            - "Damn man...one with that hollow-open-mouthed laugh looks kinda amazing, no?"
His 'no' caught my attention and I looked at him. He was holding the burnt-out-butt in one hand and his dislocated shoulder was cradled in a cotton sling. 
                            - "I don`t know,V, they all look quiet retarded to me, or why else would they be chirping the night there?"
Vishnu looked at me with a surprise in his eyes and said with a serious face, 
                           - "Whats wrong witchu nigga?! A pussy is a pussy yo! No matter how chirpy or retarded. Now tell me, you game?"

                           - " You mean, play ball?"

                            - "Haha, yeah exactly!"
Suddenly I turned back to the sound of screeching tyres and saw a huge but sleek Jaguar come to a halt just behind us. The door opened and from the drying seat, out stepped Shiva. 
                   Shiva, man of the moment, pure intention juxtaposed with harsh aptness, dressed in motley colours and heavy boots, looked nothing less than a horse-riding-gun-wielding cowboy. Although I couldn't see it, I was sure, he had a gun tucked somewhere in his person. He didn't like taking chances with retards and people in general. 
                                 - " How is it going Brahma? Vishnu? waiting to score? huh?"

                                 - "No man, we are here, Maya has gone to the gynecologist inside there." I said pointing to the left wing of the hospital.

                                  - "YOU GOT HER HERE!!!! After all that talk about the inefficacy of Government Hospitals, the absense of hygine..."

                                    - "Listen Yo..."

                                    - "...you know the torture..."
                                     
                                    - "...yo..yo..."

                                    - "...and the doctors?!"

                                    -" We went in along with her Shiva. Chill now."

                                    -"One of these days, I`m gonna nab all these fuckers in the butt!" Shiva said stressing on 'butt' and two invisible horns seemed to emerge from his bald head. Vishnu threw the butt away and looked uneasily at Shiva. 

                                   -" The gynecologist was a...."     

                                                                 A loud sustained honk of a huge LAYLAND Carrier and then a train pulling in into the station a few hundred meters away from the VAMINAS GOVERNMENTLY OWNED PRIVATE CLINIC, Hospital, made my voice inaudible. 

                                   -"...again."   I finished as the raucous died down and I saw Maya coming out of the hospital.

                                  -"I think we are good to go, yo!"

                                  -" But where, you partially functional system?"
                                     
Maya came down the steps, her dark hair flowing back towards the hospital like connecting wires, like umbilical cords. The half moons under her eyes were prominently visible and the mascara was conspicuous by its absence. She looked beautiful. She descended. She hadn`t seen us. She was caring a hospital-white package.  
                                     Vishnu was trying to move his dislocated shoulder and gave out silent screams of pain, which Shiva and I saw but did not hear. Shiva juggled the car keys in his pocket. 

                                -" FUCK YOU MAN! I ain`t partially functional! I say you are totally useless, even defunct! I was lying on the beach, glared out by the moon, I was screaming with pain and you, you just kept jogging! You miserable act of fuck! WHY did you not lift me up? give a helping hand? WHY the fuck Shiv, are you so distant"?
                           She had dumped the package in a dustbin at the foot of the steps and was waiting for us in front of the hospital. I looked at them both and again felt vague, meaningless and even tired as I moved towards the absurdly parked Jaguar. 

                                 -" You know V, you are no good, at anything. Your acting and juggling and pranking has had a toll on me and the only reason I didn't stop to help you was that I thought you were making love to the beach sand, and you KNOW you CAN do that."

                                  -" You. fuck. You."

The engine started and the car came to life. Ticking of the Amygdala came through its surround sound speaker system. Vishnu sat in the front seat and both of them kept cursing and high five-ing  each other and we stopped in front of Maya. 
                 She looked on the verge of something, a possible explosion, a release, but she held back her tears and there wasn't any other release left for her. 

                                    -" Your morning creation is in that trash can over there, V, you can collect it anytime you want and its free of copyright." she said in a voice quivering with hearted and malice. 
                                                       She lay her head on my shoulder and soon drifted off to sleep. Amygdala  kept ticking in the car. Shiva and Vishnu did not say anything and I felt my shoulder get soggy. 

                                    -"Poor Maya. Poor, poor Maya."

I thought. 


*All characters in this story are taken from the mythology of India

Fyodor Dostoyevsky like roving madman in town.

               

I am lost. Hopelessly lost. I have broken off and gotten detached. No more cohesion or uniformity. The sense of absurd is growing more than ever, and every day I can feel myself falling into the bosom of unfamiliarity, of incoherence and of randomness. Wasn`t it just yesterday, that I had felt so particularly lost when she'd asked me if I loved her? I could produce no certain answer, my conscience twisted and turned, trying to muscle out an answer, just a simple yes or no would have been fine, actually perfect, but then simple yes-no answers are the most difficult ones I guess, and I could only mumble something incomprehensible in a very low bass voice, turning scarlet with embarrassment.

                         But now, as I sit here, I think I know the reason for my indecision then, it was this lost state I am in, so perfectly lost that I have no inkling of what`s happening around. Every passing minute seems to me like a half awake dream, a dream as unsettling as it is uncertain. Though I wasn`t like this for ever. I used to be a fine man, a man of aim, focus and hard work, a man who wore his responsibilities around him like a prized piece of jewelry, I knew what I had to do and how to do it, most of all I was sure of myself and believed in myself, but then something happened, rather I should say I fell in bad company.

                           I met him every day, sometimes even twice or thrice, in my bathroom. He always remained in the same position, not moving, just its antennae wiggling solemnly. He was a fully grown male cockroach and he had my acquaintance, a proof of which was that he wasn`t scared of my presence, but rather greeted me with moving his antennae more vigorously. Even I liked him. He was a piece of beauty, his oily brown wings hiding the pink knotty body, a white ring separating the head from the abdomen, but what I liked most about him was his unpretentious beauty, which wasn't like a photoshopped picture or an ad, but was simple and plain.

                      He, that fat fully grown male roach, is the reason I am so lost that I can't separate one from two, can't get a grip, he and he alone is the reason for my misery, my pain, my suffering, for he was the one who planted those ideas in my head, which have troubled me since, giving me sleepless nights. He enticed me with his beauty and then left me upside down.

                            I used to stand near the shitter and admire him for hours, and sometimes when he was in the mood, we'd talk. He was quite a wise follow for his species. He told me that he has been around for the past billion years or so, a thing which I did not believe initially, but when he told me stories about the first humans, the Australopithecus taking a dump next to him in stone age, about Lucy giving birth to a strange Homo Sapien child, about the fall of Mesopotamian bronze age and the rise of the Greek iron age civilization, I was quite taken aback. Although I could not believe that a simple cockroach could know so much, in the face of his stories, I had to concede.

                          I remember clearly, ah! how excited I used to be about the whole thing then, I used to run to the university library, to cross check his stories, and it is incredulous but he was always right, down to the minutest fact. It was all etched on his amazing memory, and an amazing memory he did have, remembering things from the depths of history, no, rather depths of consciousness. We talked about the slow evolution of various species, there division into different branches and how cultures developed and I was so flabbergasted, so astonished, when the insect told me he had helped Darwin in his research and helped him give shape to his ideas, that I was ready to kiss his feet, or whatever closest counterpart of them he had, but he told me to not stand on ceremony.

                      For many days the roach was my best friend. He told me stories and I gave him bread crumbs to feed on. I spent hours in the bathroom with my friend and didn't bother to get out. But how happy I was before that troublesome creature came to my life and how easily he destroyed everything, how easily he took my calm, my peace of mind and left me a roving madman,  completely oblivious of his surroundings.

                          One day she had come to meet me, at my place for I had stopped going out altogether, but I spent the whole time she was there, in the bathroom, with my new friend, chit chatting. It was soon after that, that she left me, screaming at me then, what I know only too well now, ' You are fucking lost!!!Get a grip on yourself or you are gonna shatter!'. Yeah right, I thought to myself then, and I still do, though in a more acknowledging tone.

                    Then I didn't see him for a few days. He disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. The bathroom became empty and I lonely. Instead of the bathroom I started spending time in the study, more or less forgetting the old cockroach, which was no less than a tell tale china man. I had expected him not to leave without saying goodbye and that's what happened. After a few days absence, the roach was back again with the solemn wiggle of his antennae. He told me he had gone to mate and soon he will be a father, if everything went well that is. But he didn't seem happy about it, and when I asked the reason for his sadness, he said he felt tired. ' I have been doing this for so long, old friend, that I am tired of this all' he said and went on, ' and anyway the world has lost its charm, there was a time when I witnessed wars, plagues, epidemics destroying a civilization just to see it rise again as a phoenix, reborn, reincarnated. Change used to be such a big part in the scheme of things, but now, everywhere there is a lull, a stagnation, it's like the human world has reached a plateau, it has achieved whatever it had to achieve and now it has hit still water, maybe the only thing changing is technology, else everything has reached a mark which can't be crossed.

                           I was taken by surprise by this attitude of my pal and tried to console him saying, ' history is always in the making' but he didn't want my sympathy. ' The history we are making today, dear friend, is that of how well we survive our own created horrors, or how well we digest our food or take in the shit that's been thrown at us from our television sets. The world isn't what it used to be.' Not knowing what to say, I went out , but his words kept echoing in my head, for even I had felt the futility of existence and the only reason I tried to argue with the roach was to prevent my own sense of hopelessness from taking over. Gauguin had asked all the right questions and we are still seeking their answers.

                        Although I did feel the impact of the conversation, I wasn't much troubled by it initially, for I believed there was hope, there was still a possibility of revolt, of resistance, of constantly striving to achieve nirvana, utopia, but slowly, even that left me. Think a Trotsky in his exiled home in Mexico. Think a fat uninspiring Castro of his 70s. An ugly dead Che with a bullet hole in his head. That was me, all hope in humanity gone, dead, corpse like, and then as later happened, lost, neatly, impeccably lost, like a tiny minute detail in a framed old photograph.

                          By then the rain had set in, and we were slowly launching into a wet, sticky season of erratic rain, sludge and dinge. One day I came in all drenched and doused in rain. I did not go to meet the roach, the truth was that by then I had already started developing a certain repulsion for him, a certain strong dislike, which prevented me from meeting him. I spent the day in bed, thinking about Paul Gauguin`s painting, Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? and finally when the day turned to night, and I really longed to talk to him, I couldn't help myself going to the roach, for apart from our friendship, I was his patron too, and without me, the old lazy bastard would be going nuts with hunger. So with a few bread crumbs juggling in my pocket, I went into the bathroom. He was at his same spot, wiggling those ugly projections on his head, and in the same senile mood. He told me he was a father of five now and asked if I could spare some bread crumbs? I gave him the bread crumbs and before he could say anything, went out. Though I had left him, he stayed in my head, his frustrating idea of a bleak meaningless world, a charmless world where there is no inspiration, no motivation. And soon things got so bad that I became partly suicidal. What was the purpose of my existence? my life? was it worth living? and the world around? it did not hold any charm for me, for my heroes were all dead or dying, even decaying. Gone were the days when the hippies roamed naked on the streets, or black Negroes played mind-blowing jazz, gone were Dostoevsky and Ginsburg and all we are left is with their memory, which in itself is a burden. I became so engrossed in such introspection that my personal life began to suffer, my grades in university started sinking low. It became my habit to aimlessly haunt the lanes of the city while rain pelted on  me from above.

                    And it was then, while getting soaked in the sticky rain of Delhi, one evening, that I came up with that horrible idea, for which I cannot stop admonishing myself, and to tell the truth, if today I am in this way, lost, miserable, suffering, it's not just because of that roach, there is my involvement in it too, for during the sleepless night which followed, I went into the bathroom and squashed my friend, who died just like any other cockroach, with a crunch, his antennae for the first time wiggling frantically, for a full half a minute after the body being crushed, and I went outside, in the rain, lighting a fag, towards her house.