Friday, September 6, 2013

To walk down the street in the next morning was not easy. Engaged in an absolute chanting with cigarettes in the freezing air, I was yet to whelm the hangover of the nightly affair. I was awaiting a suave sunshine, but the guardian of the planet seemed not willing to allow any respite, even though the worst had been over with the dark hours gone away. I don't remember when I had fallen asleep or woke up with a dream of raindrops.

Harrowing with the anguish of being alone in a dark hole, a dungeon-like cylinder in which I was caged, I was trying to climb. There was absolute darkness and only a hissing sound to give me company.... I thought I was caged in a well, thrown by an enemy I couldn't remember any more. Thirsty, sweating, I felt like a prisoner awaiting the death sentence in a movie I could faintly recollect, in which a convict befriends a mouse to pass the eternal wait for an electric chair to clutch him finally. The green alley shown in the movie I was missing badly...I was trying to imagine the green floor, cold enough to quieten the agony of a prisoner. But without avail, because the hissing sound was becoming louder with every passing second. At one point, it scored over my imagination, conscious, subconscious—everything, and I shouted, started screaming with the extremity of any loudness that my thirsty throats could bear. "Save," was the word I screamed out, which filled and beat the hissing sound that had overpowered me. With my self-created sound of sanctity, I could feel a light piercing the darkness into pieces, zooming in on my face with a blaze. I felt ultimately, that I was inside the stomach of a snake...a huge one. And then, a drop of water, heavy like a sigh, fell in my open mouth. Then one more, after another, followed the first drop of water in the ever-thirsty mouth. A gusto of rain or water flow, I don't know, came after that.... I was dancing inside, swimming all of a sudden in a flood of water. I was certain that I was released and it was my own sound, or one might call, scream, which saved me from the huge snake, the demon that made that torturous hissing sound.

I still don't know if it was venomous, but one thing is certain, that it was trying to eat me alive, gobbled the whole of me without even letting know how had it all happened?

Now that it was over, I could breath a sigh of relief...and woke up. I woke up only to find that after years, I had sunk myself in my own puddle...I had wet myself.

Now it was time to wash, drain the guilt of the night.  

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

The Rime of a Somnambulist

OOOO Hours

There was no electricity. It went around one hour ago. Our neighbors say it goes off often in the Muslim side of the town. The room was dark, yet dimly lit like a burka-clad woman, calm with sequestered emotions inside, walking alone on a cold Delhi street. It was cold outside; the winter was creeping in slowly like a mouse entering a house in the darkness. But ironically there was enough heat inside. Amma was standing at one of the narrowest corners of the room. I was standing at another part of the room, fully under the deepest dungeons of darkness, with eyes burning with anger. Sounding like an ungulate animal hoofing on a rock, I called her, “Randi! You are a prostitute.” The words left a rapping echo within the room. She was crying. I could hear the sobbing sounds coming out of her mouth, probably right from the womb where I was born. That didn’t affect me when I was uttering those words. I still don’t know why, I felt as if a hurricane of rage was coming out of my subconscious, gushing forth to release the all inner strength of anger. I uttered the words again, “You can sleep with any one, Randi.”