The Child (A story)

The child was dying - yes, there was no question about it! She could see it written as clearly on his face as the boldface letters on the antipyretic syrup bottle at his bedside. The bed itself was large, the bedspread blue with tiny white flowers arranged neatly in rows. There were two kinds of flowers - one, an odd, three petaled rose, and the other, some kind of tulip with berries hanging underneath. The rose also had symmetrical tendrils on its foreshortened stem. She often wondered why the artist had not the sense to add a few grape-leaves as well.
She wondered a lot - ever since she could remember. Patterns - that's what she always looked for - and symmetry. It felt so nice when things all of a sudden and without the least warning would fall in accordance with some notion she'd always had. And the child, her child - he'd caught it, too. She could see him - so young, standing at the door with a faraway look on his face. And when she'd go and ask him what was on his mind, he'd just shrug it off with a 'oh, nothing!' and resume that silly little game of his which involved hopping from one tile to the next but one, which could keep him enthralled for hours on end. And she - she'd all of a sudden feel so small, so weary, as if she'd failed him - as if it were her fault that she could not understand, could not be a part of him. And now it would soon be a thing of the past.
She looked at the bedspread - the divine blue! How wonderfully well could a thing so meagre as a bedspread elevate the mood of the entire room! Her obsession with the colour blue had often made her the butt of jokes amid the entire family in the past, but she'd made them eat their words with the way she'd decorated her little home. Yes, her tiny abode of love! This was the one thing she allowed herself to be proud of, and this was one ground on which the mother and the son were truly as one. The walls, the floor - everything was blue. Except for the ceiling, which was white - reflects light better, the masons had said.
She looked at the moon through the clear glass window. A pink moon! The child used to say so, and she'd laughed saying the moon was silver, or red at best. But now she could see it clearly, too - see what he'd meant. She rose a little, and turned off the light. Then she got up and opened all the windows one by one. Ah, the cool night breeze! The room had that musty smell that she knew so well - the smell of fever. She always formed in her mind one-one correspondences between certain odours and situations - the smell of squeaky clean plastics for birthdays, and the smell of rubber balloons for the baby. Funny, the last one, but she often would take his little hand between hers when he was sleeping and sniff at it, and the first thing that sprang to her mind was a bright, red, new balloon!
The child was sleeping - comatose, in fact. The hospital he'd been at had discharged him two days ago - said there was nothing more they could do about it. She wondered why she wasn't very, very sad - why she, who loved her baby more than any mother on earth, staunchly refused to shed tears when she knew that he'd be gone forever, that nothing she could do would bring him back. One lesson that life had taught her was that love, in her superlative form, rarely made you very sad. She remembered how, as a child her cruel brother had wrung the neck of her favourite doll and how she'd flooded her bolster with tears. But it was frivolous, superficial love, that. This was different.
She touched his hair - gently at first, as if afraid that the slightest touch could spoil the beauty of the moment and alter the picture of him that she'd formed in her mind forever. His hair - she could wonder on that for hours! It wasn't straight and it wasn't curly - it was simply funny hair. And yes, black - black as a raven. Slowly, she buried her entire face in that hair. But suddenly, as if bitten by a snake, she withdrew. What if he'd wake up? The he'd open those marvelous eyes of his! What would she not give to erase the memory of those eyes - those unbelievable coal black pinpoints of light that could see the walls behind her when they'd look at her. Often did it happen that he'd look at her, at something she'd said, and she'd felt her legs give away from beneath her. Please, whatever you do, do not open your eyes - she heard herself saying over and over again. When she'd talked to him, she'd rarely look straight at him, always trying to keep him in the profile and him looking in the distance. He rarely looked at things quite the way others did. Others' line of sight would be aimed directly at the thing in front of them and end there; his would pass right through all the way to infinity! She found that she was beginning to capitalise the 'h-s' in the 'hes' and crossed herself to overcome the feeling. She then closed her eyes.
When she opened them again a good five minutes later, she thought she could view the room from a slightly different angle, and all the more clearly - like a bird's eye view. The child was no longer the centre, other creatures had sprung up. The life support equipment, with all its twisted, serpentine coils and indicators - she wondered how she'd missed it all the while. It seemed to engulf her, close in on her from all sides. And she, a prisoner - alone, with the half-dead child. And she felt something else - joy - a gentle titillating of the skin at first that gave her the goose pimples, and then a full blown tidal wave of happiness that swept her off her chair and carried her over to the window. At that instant, she knew- knew why she was here, and why she could not lose this battle - that nothing they'd do could take the child away from her. It was because without her, the child never did have an existence. There really was no child. It was all a dream, the whole thing! She was the child and the mother, all at the same time. The sweet scent of the night - she wondered how long it would last. She gazed unto the heavens - the high heavens and looked at the moon once again. It looked bigger somehow, huge, in fact, and seemed to take up half the sky! She allowed a smile to form on her lips that quickly turned into a giggle, and very soon metamorphosed into a screaming, high pitched laughter that shook the earth. Now she was no longer the mother, but the child alone. It was as if it was not the child but the mother who'd died. She knew that instant that if she were to remain within those four walls another minute, something, somewhere would surely snap. She swung open the door and bounded down the stairs - two steps at a time, religiously placing her foot on the next but one. And she was out of the house in a flash, on the green dew-wet grass. And there she danced - danced without a care, all alone in her young body with the full moon shining bright above.

Yours sincerely
Jude

Tree

[This was one of the first poems that I'd ever written - way back in '99 when I was only thirteen. The Wordswworthian influence is rather obvious, but I have a feeling that I had, back then much more spirit in me than I do now at 22. Well, what more can I say - you check it out for yourself!]

As I walked through the garden
In that state of indecision,
Something put a stop to that
Ever-flowing stream of human emotion.

In the middle of the garden
Stood the grand old tree.
Ruling over all other plants,
I knew it ruled over me.

The sight so common,
The feeling even rarer.
The birds' orchestra added to
That sole moment of pleasure.

Slowly, as I left the place,
My mind was a complete mess.
The world has troubles more than me....
Self-sacrificing as a tree.

yours sincerely
Jude

Kafka's Metamorphosis - a review

[I do not know if I do justice to this page by posting this one- I mean its a review and all, not a very well written one, nor all that profound in the ideas that it expresses. This was intended for a girl who's currently doing her masters in the field of Mass Communication, and hence a brief and unsuccessful attempt to try and put up a scholarly face. However it would be perhaps a lack of honesty on my part were I to put up only stuff that are dear to me, and not stuff that do not show me in my comfort zone. For it is easy to like a man for his virtues, but a man with virtues alone is not really a man. The book was one of my favourites, and i do not dare to think that anything i write could ever compliment it, so what the heck, what have I to lose, anyway?]

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka comes up as one of the most horrifying and brilliant works of the twentieth century. Published in the year 1915, its rather awkward size places it somewhere in between a novel and a short story, and is therefore often categorized in the bastardized genus of a novella. However, the ideas expressed and the immense influence that it has had on the literature that followed places it no lower than an epic. It is often the case that a novelist of the abstract is placed under the indiscriminate title of 'existentialism'. But such a narrowing down of the ideas would hardly do justice to a man of the stature of Kafka.

The story is rather short. Gregor Samsa, a young traveling salesman is burdened down by financial anxieties ever since his usually meek-mannered father loses his business in its entirety. Since then the onus of winning bread for their family of four (the father, an invalid mother, a pretty and kindly younger sister aged seventeen and Gregor himself) has fallen on Gregor's shoulder and as yet he has stood up to the challenge gracefully, earning enough to allow his family to put up in a respectable station (there are debts yet to be paid though, and he's not quite on firm ground yet, one of the creditors being his own boss). The family is typical nineteenth- early twentieth European middle-class who consider their station in life above all else and have little regard for 'menial' offices (otherwise why would a family of four need hire the services of a maid when the money was so desperately needed elsewhere?). Under the circumstances, we might imagine his consternation when one morning Gregor wakes up to find that not only he's late for the 6:45 train, but he's also been miraculously transformed into an insect or a bug of some sort (The exact species of his metamorphosed form is not explicitly stated, but the cleaning lady has taunted him by calling him a dung beetle. We will take her word for it!). However he's somehow managed to retain his human dimensions, and that has only helped in making him all the more hideous in the eyes of people. Now the metamorphosis has also taken away his power of speech (actually his speech seems to him all the more distinct while others cannot perceive anything beyond a bestial cry. He also complains of indistinct vision. However, the problem is not too severe). His rather taxing job requires him not to spend a day away from work without a valid reason and therefore when he does not open the door to his room (he always sleeps with the door locked, a traveller's precaution) his family is not a little worried. So Gregor, incapacitated to the extent of neither being able to answer their calls nor to get up and open the door himself, feels as if all hell has broken loose when he hears his boss entering their apartments nagging about the former's lack of dedication to his work. The poor parents can try to make it up to him, but all in vain as Gregor himself cannot arrive on the scene. Finally as his sister is about to fetch a doctor, and the maid a locksmith, Gregor, after a huge struggle and no little loss to himself manages to open the door. But even as he expects complete understanding and co-operation from his family on this issue, the total shock and horror on their faces is something that knocks all the hope out of him in an instant. His boss staggers downstairs with his hand to his mouth and his father mercilessly drives him back to his own room. To his own room he is thus confined, living only on the food (leftovers and trash mainly) that his sister condescends to give to him without the least kindly speech or the sympathetic smile (However that does not mean that she's stopped caring for him though, as she routinely gives him his food and also cleans his room). Days pass by, and Gregor little by little learns to ease his pains a bit. He even develops certain amusements for himself, such as crawling all over the walls or hanging from the roof). Indeed its only to allow him to play his little games with greater ease that his mother and sister decide to empty his room of all the furniture and such, that they think might be in his way. However, when they remove the stuff one after the other, the rebellious in him suddenly awakes, as is the case with people devoid of any human sympathy for long, and when it comes to a framed photograph from a magazine clip on his walls, he jumps on it and clings to it as if for dear life, and that scares the wits out of the two women, as it seems to them that he'd done it especially to scare or to insult them, and ever since delegate the responsibility of feeding Gregor or cleaning his room to a cleaning woman.

The fact that Gregor no longer went to work meant that the family finances were on the decline once again and all the three family members had not only to take up jobs but also hire lodgers. These lodgers were a grim set of people with flowing beards. So it happens that one day when they sit to dine, they hear Gregor’s sister playing the violin in the kitchen. She is immediately requested by them to continue the performance from where they could feast their lascivious eyes upon her, to which they all, eager to please, agree. Now Gregor loved his sister and the music, and this was all that he could bear. He could see that none in the room were the least interested in her recitals and therefore he slowly stepped through the open door of his room and tried to tug at her dress, to call her up to his room where she could be fully appreciated and where he could tells her all the rosy plans he’d laid out for her. But the mere perception of his presence was sufficient to bring down the house and that was the last they’d see of the lodgers. Now everyone realized that the time for charity was past since this new Gregor was totally insensitive to their needs, and his isolation was complete. In fact his father bombarded him with apples to scare him away, one of which god embedded in his back and hurt like hell. For company, he’d only have the cleaning woman once a day who used to drive him to great despair by taunting him, as mentioned earlier, and who’d threaten to hurl a chair at his back at the slightest display of anger. So Gregor, now a picture of utter neglect, no longer cares to touch his food or think of his family, and eventually slips into his grave. And now that their ordeal is finally over, the family learns to smile once again and face life with a whole new vigour.

It is not uncommon that someone like Kafka scribbles a few lines and we spend our whole lives trying to interpret them. The theme of Existentialism was introduced at the start of the discussion, and there is little doubt that this story does have some of the features of the philosophical and literary movement brought on by Sartre and co. Existentialism principally deals with the ‘me-ism’ of ‘myself’, i.e. the way we think of our selves to be unique to us. It is reasoned that the world around us is exactly the way we see it or choose to see, and the importance of science or God is therefore nullified. In fact if tomorrow, we choose to define walking as flying, then that alone makes us qualify as birds! Therefore existentialism stresses the fact that man is the maker of his own destiny. Kafka doesn’t really uphold this particular aspect of Existentialism. In fact, a lone man’s fight against the forces of destiny is also the theme of much of his later work (such as The trial and America) as much as it is of The Metamorphosis, and mostly it is a lost battle.

The Metamorphosis is all about one of those nightmares that you have where everything goes wrong and the only consolation for you is the knowledge that you’re really dreaming. However, what if from one of these dreams you never really wake up? Gregor, as with the dreamers, never really accepted his metamorphosis as a change for eternity. He’d throw it off his mind as a traveling salesmen’s occupational infirmity, nothing more, in fact a condition that will pass from mere rest cure or medical help. But the lack of acceptance of the truth is the reason why Gregor tries to hold out against the adversities for so long. Hence the novel, despite the apparently tragic end is as much about psychology as about hope. Psychology – because it deals with that miraculous mechanism of the human mind, that apparent restraining force that prevents the system from a total breakdown in situations of extreme stress (Gregor slowly acquires greater command over his newly begotten faculties and even tries to amuse himself after a while by hanging from the roof and such). This illustrates Man’s adaptability – the reason why it is sometimes argued that the child of the ghetto fares no worse than the rich kid in the penthouse. And all the while, it can be observed that the metamorphosis brought no greater sorrow to Gregor himself than the rest of the family. And hope – because it concerns the biggest puzzle for philosophers everywhere since the beginning of time – namely, why are we here? The metamorphosis does not choose to answer this question directly but decides to sidestep it. It basically gives out the message that the ‘here’ is really defined in terms of our existence, and the existence part cannot be questioned. However it does shed some light on the question, why it is that we choose to remain here, and the answer is simply because we refuse to acknowledge our own destiny even to our innermost selves. This is the reason we always keep the faith, we marry, multiply and eventually die. It is no secret that our sorrows almost always outnumber our pleasures by a great extent, and yet we choose to keep the farce going! This is what is called hope, and hope is the biggest reason to live.

It is often the case that works of the likes of this are termed allegorical, which in this case seams a rather lame and superficial treatment of the subject matter. Kafka, it is my innermost belief was far too subtle an author to stoop to all that. Gregor’s metamorphosis was real, real as the ground that I walk on! The story also illustrates Kafka’s view of the psychological differences of the human sexes and a certain lack of sympathy in men. The attitude of the father towards Gregor shows the reason why men never stop to ask for directions. They are too wrapped up in their own selves and the pseudo-soundness of their own beliefs to give a damn about others. And it also shows man’s fear of the unknown or things beyond their comprehension. It goes to explain why it is that non-conformists are despised so much, and why in the medieval scientists and heretics were burned at the stake.

All in all, the possibilities it opens up are immense, a reason for its enduring popularity and its immense influence. Indeed, but for Kafka, authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and even J.D. Salinger might never have existed. Kafka died on 3^rd June 1934 at the mere age of 41 leaving behind a legacy so rich that even 41 centuries are far too short to exhaust it.

yours sincerely

jude

The Silence of the Night

[This poem was written only yesterday, to be presented to a girl on her birthday. Although the content does not exactly suit the occasion, it was written on the spur of the moment and add to it the fact that it was entirely typed then and there on her orkut scrapbook, it does, in a certain way serve its purpose. I have decided to post it here, just for the heck of it!]

Behold, for there's so much to see
Rejoice, for the moon shines bright
Listen, till you hear the melody
Of the silence of the night.

Weep not, for there's no more to lose
When your kingdom's cast away
Loneliness is all that's yours
As the Sun lights up the day.

When the fickle world turns upside down
When the last ship leaves the shore
Look within, and you shall find
The key to unlock the door.

Yours sincerely

Jude