The Train-ride (A story)

As he sat there on that train, he kept telling himself, “This couldn’t be happening! Hell – I’m not even 25 yet.” His grandfather always said, when troubles start raining on ya, they really pour. The irony here was that Grampa himself had been one such raindrop. He hadn’t really been a very good person ever since he could remember, and therefore, he wasn’t very sorry he was dead. The exact opposite of Grandma – ‘Grand Mama’, he often called her owing to her massive bulk. She was the sweetest human being he knew. Thank God she was still alive.

Looking out the carriage through the window, he could see the world outside bathed in an aura of gold, the precise light that brings the full force of reminiscences upon you and makes the living dead stir in their graves. Snatches of his childhood, his teenage, and finally the very recent past flashed before his eyes. He was born to parents who had married very young (his mother was 18 and his father 19 when they’d married), before their blood had cooled or their minds had had the time to accept the reality of their adulthood. So, only a few days after his third birthday, the couple, while returning from a party severely inebriated had crashed their car into a tree beside the highway and died on the spot. With no one else to take care of, the orphan was taken into the household of his grandparents (maternal) where he stayed till he finally moved out at age seventeen.

But a lot happened before he turned seventeen. He had moved in with his grandparents when he was far too little to develop any serious affection for his parents (he had a faint recollection of the perfume his mother wore and her lovely, even teeth; but of his father, he had no remembrance whatever save for an ever-present scent of tobacco) and therefore for the next 12 years of his life, his grandmother was the sole object of his adoration. His grandfather was a mean old man with a perpetual scowl on his countenance. They were farmers with a medium-sized piece of land to their name on which their entire livelihood depended. In that one plot, they grew corn, kept chickens, and even had a minuscule apple orchard growing in a tiny corner beside the house. This apple orchard was indeed the apple of his grandfather’s eye. Although his grandfather did love him in his own peculiar way, he always suspected, and probably rightly so that he loved his apple orchard more. More than half of his day passed in keeping the neighbourhood brats out of his apple trees. He would sit on the porch all day reading a newspaper or swatting flies, and whenever he caught a glimpse of any kid eyeing his apple, he’d promptly rush out with a cane in his hand and a mouth shooting profanities like a machine gun, and occasionally with the especially pigheaded ones he wouldn’t even refrain from throwing stones. He wouldn’t consent to sell them apples, either. No wonder he had few friends his own age within the village and they almost always had apple pie for dessert. When he finally moved out, it was all he could do to keep himself from barfing at the mere sight of another apple.

Looking out that carriage window at a tiny building over the hill, he thought about how any unpleasantness really impressed itself far more strongly on the mind than all the good memories put together. What right had he to nurse a single bitter grudge when there was his grandmother, too? All grey, and yet without a shade of black, that’s what she was. Hadn’t she far greater reasons to complain? He knew all the time that he wouldn’t be staying there forever, but where could she go? And to top it all, she loved his Grampa to pieces. He realized that in all the twenty four plus years that he’d lived, not counting all his past lives, he did not understand shit about women. She was old, weary, slightly lame, and with cataracts, and yet she was there at his beck and call every instant, till about a fortnight back he had to bring his grandfather up to the city to this hospital because of the stroke he’d had. And now he was sitting on this train this lovely summer day - on his way to break the news of his demise to her. She had tried her best to come with him, but he wouldn’t let her for she had broken her hip from the fall she’d suffered in the bathroom about a month ago. He’d engaged a nurse for her – the best that he could afford. Yet, even the best of nurses wouldn’t heal a broken heart.

Looking at his Grandmother, he could tell his mother must have been a real pretty woman, if she’d not inherited her looks from her father, that is. Every morning she’d get up very early to make tea for his Grampa and butter his toast, which she’d place daintily on a tray and bring it right up to his bed. His Grampa would then get up, take a leak in the bathroom, come back to bed, complain about his tea being cold and his toast burnt, eat it real slow (very bad teeth) - dribbling from the corner of his mouth all the while which her grandmother would keep mopping up every minute for him using a white napkin, and then at last light a cigarette and move downstairs, scowling at one and all. Then, she’d proceed to warm his bathwater (they did not have electric heating back then in the country) and finally, she’d help him undress and wash himself. He was her baby, and she cared for him like no other, while he, knowing it all only too well, would have every filthy trick up his sleeve to emotionally blackmail her. He’d complain the water was too hot, then only two minutes later too cold, his gouts would resurface, he’d feel a pneumonia coming on, and so forth, and at last he’d move away not being able to hold it in any longer. But she - nothing he did could obliterate that angelic smile from her face. She in fact had an aura - pretty much like that fine summer day outside the window.

Of course there was school – not something he had much to talk about, though. He was a congenital loner, and the fact that he was really good at studies meant that it was the perfect social suicide for him. He rarely got invited to hang out at parties or birthdays, and therefore he had hardly a friend to call his own all the time that he lived there. But there was this picture of a girl in an elaborately frilled frock beside her Grandmother’s bed that used to pique his curiosity so much. He'd asked his Grandma a million times who she was and was told that she was the granddaughter of some friend she’d had in high school. When he turned fifteen, this girl all of a sudden materialized in flesh – looking a lot better, actually. In place of that frock, there was a white t-shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and jeans. Also, she was almost 2 years older than him and much better read, living in the city where they had a much bigger library. He would have felt a little ashamed before her if she’d only let him. She was the most natural, impulsive human being he ever met. And also the most talkative. She’d only come for the weekend, and following the weekend she did leave, but not before giving him a pocket full of dreams, and incidentally, her phone number.

So the moment he arrived at the city (he’d finished high school back then and also earned a scholarship to study law at the university), he called her up. She’d picked up at the eleventh ring and agreed to meet him for lunch that very evening. At seven-thirty sharp (he was really a bit disappointed not to have been kept waiting) she’d arrived at this greasy, fake Italian restaurant with her hair in double ponytails, one above each ear. They’d ordered chocolate milk for starters (they were young, you see), and when he looked at the way the it left a faint lining of a moustache above her lip, in her double ponytails and all, he decided that he could look at her for the rest of his life.

He’d worked his ass off at college. Not that law school wasn’t tough of itself; he also had to earn his keep working at fast food joints, supermarkets, and even do his time at the garage on weekends. He knew she was working and had in his own mind had classified her somewhere between a secretary and an aspiring actress, but it came as a bit of a surprise to him to discover that she was a merely a waiter in a pub, reading on the sly crouched behind the counter. That meant that they had no money to call their own until he got a real job, which didn’t happen until four years later when this bigshot firm of corporate lawyers interviewed him and hired him on the spot. The very next day, he’d rushed to her and they’d agreed to take each other for better or for worse presided over by the rightful authority whose deathlike solemnity for once had failed to instill any temporary feeling of piety in an about-to-be-married couple.

That happened when he was twenty-one. Three solid years ago that had been the happiest days of his life. Now, he was twenty-four. He’d been kept up at his Grandfather’s bedside for about a week now and was going through some periodical while the old man slept, when she all of a sudden marched into the room chewing gum and arm-in-arm with a guy who looked like something the Beatles had forgot to flush, and told him then and there, right in front of the nurses and all that she’d finally found her ‘soul mate’, and that she must leave him for the one she'd lugged along all the way to show him. This happened exactly five days ago. He wouldn’t have minded so much but for the looks of the guy. All the time she was with him, she used to run this crusade against stubbles and untidy hair. He remembered the ordeal of having to shave everyday and wash his hair every alternate day while he was in college. Once he'd got out, it seemed the whole world had conspired against him to side with her, and his was a job that demanded he keep up appearances as best as possible for the sake of the clientele. But here was this guy with the filthiest of beards and hair so unkempt that he seemed to have suffered some kind of high voltage electric shock. It made him feel positively soulless. This one, he knew would take some time to heal. But his Grampa had created a diversion for the moment by falling ill and dying at precisely the right time, and he’d locked it all in and hadn’t told anybody.

About two hours from when he started, the train finally pulled up at his destination. He hauled his rucksack up his shoulders and made his way out the station. As he geared up for the fifteen minutes or thereabouts walk to his former home, he thought about how his grandfather had finally died. It had been a reasonably quiet affair, and while he was dozing on a plastic chair in the corridor, this nurse had come and woken him up to give him that bit of news. Not something that surprised him overmuch, though, for he’d been in a coma for the past three days. That telling him bit was the easy part since he never loved him, but how could he possibly break the news to his Grandma? Maybe she too would succumb from the shock of it all. She was already over eighty and fairly weak, and that fracture had been the last straw. He hated to think that with his Grandpa dead and his wife gone, there was an even greater surprise in store for him. All of a sudden he wished he had a brother or some, who could do his dirty work for him. But no, him it must be!

Climbing the all too-familiar staircase, he twice thought of chickening out. She didn’t have many days to live herself, so what was the point in telling her? He could just call her up once in a while from the city telling her Grampa was still at the hospital, very much on the improve. She was probably so batty by now, she wouldn’t be able to see spot the lie - which meant that at least she’d be happy as long as she lived. But as he climbed that staircase, his legs seemed to have developed a will of their own and taking him to places he least wanted to go. He found her lying awake in her bed, gazing out the window and the nurse asleep in the adjacent room (talk about constant vigilance!). “The sky looks so much bluer when you see it against a really tall tree”, she said before turning round to smile at him. God, he felt like an executioner.

Then, something magical happened. “I’m sorry, Grandma, Grampa’s gone”, he said. And as he bent down to embrace her to cushion the blow, his glance fell on the picture of his wife as a child, exactly as he’d left it. And then something inside him seemed to snap and the floodgates opened. All the hurt he’d bottled up these past five days seemed to unleash upon him with tremendous force. He realized for the first time what it was to go on living without his wife. He buried his head upon his Grandmother’s shoulder and began sobbing hysterically.

When she heard the news, she sat up and did not move a muscle for about fifteen seconds or so. She’d felt like crying too, but here was her dear little grandchild crying a river, and she realized she must be the stronger man. “Now, now,’ she said. “You poor dear, I know you loved your Grampa very much. But we’re all old, you see, and our time is past. What’s the use of crying over what cannot be undone? So you be strong now…”

Yours sincerely

Jude

Old Sir Rider Haggard (A story)

Of all the attractions that the house contained, the garage was the best place to hang out in. The only place in the house that had an ambience! It wasn’t overly clean like the rest of the house under the able vigilance of his paranoid aunt, nor was it odourless and synthetic, which was perhaps the most undesirable side effect of excessive neatness – the kind that was the arch-nemesis of any personalization (it was his private opinion that his yellow tennis ball, his red baseball cap, and his favourite Asterix edition (Asterix and the great crossing) should always be strewn across the bed or the floor with anybody picking any one of them up only when they really needed it and then tossing it aimlessly with eyes closed when they’re done with it). Plus, it was bursting its corsets with treasure - the kind of treasure that requires no hiding as it is automatically hid from you once you cross a threshold age barrier. There were cobwebs of the most sinister forms, cartons containing all these really old stuff each of which you could go through for about an hour or so, getting catapulted back into an era so long gone that even your mother wouldn’t remember. There was this one scrap of some newspaper (a favorite of his) from the fifties wrapped around this antique pair of galoshes that belonged to nobody he knew that had one large advertisement of a guy in a hat with the creepiest of smiles eating a piece of toast with some margarine on it of a brand that was no longer to be seen. Perhaps the man was no longer to be seen either, so that meant that even though the advertisement focused on all sorts of health benefits from the margarine (vitamins, et al), it wasn’t probably all that effective either. The moral of the story, he inferred, was you gotta buy a product solely based on what it tasted like, and not by reading the nutritional information on the side.

This aunt, whose house and whose garage it was, wasn’t really an aunt in the true sense of the word, meaning that she wasn’t a sister of his mother or anything. In fact, she wasn’t probably even related, and consequently a fondness so profound had sprung up between her and his mother as can only be found between women who had never fought each other for bathroom rights or the affection of the same adult. Thus, by not being related, she had become a greater sister to his mother than her real sister and a greater aunt to him than any other aunt he knew of. And it was the unwritten code in the family that the first fortnight of every summer vacation must be spent in the aunt’s house (who, by the way lived eight hours away and it wasn’t possible to visit her daily), a prospect wholly agreeable to him. In fact the only unpleasant bit was Sir Rider Haggard. For disambiguation’s sake, the Sir Rider Haggard referred to here was his batty old aunt’s hideous lhasa apso – a vicious, senile ass of a dog that she loved to distraction. Every time they’d park their car in his aunt’s driveway all ready to get out after the long and tedious journey, Sir Rider Haggard would come running out of nowhere to greet them yapping like a kid with the whooping cough by taking a leak right on the front tire in full public view! And whenever he’d be sitting in any of the rooms all alone or talking to his aunt or anything, it’d be watching out of the corner of one eye like a vulture waiting for the death rattle to sound from his soon-to-be-meal, pretending to be asleep all the while. It was his biggest fantasy to give it a bone with a concealed stick of dynamite on the inside and watch as it blew up, its fragments spewed all the way to Mars. And yet, she not only would have it live with her in her own house, but also love it and care for it as if it were her own baby! It nauseated him to watch as she’d bathe it, cuddle it, lavish it with praise, and refrain from clothing it in diapers perhaps only because she couldn’t figure out what to do with the tail bit. Therefore, to avoid causing injury to her feelings, he had to force himself to be civil to the cretin.

On this particular occasion, as he stepped out of the car, he was so relieved that he was actually a little sad that there was no yapping and no stream of yellow to welcome them. Instead it was merely his aunt smiling one of her milk-and-cookie smiles from the doorway. Oh well, he thought. Perhaps the old rascal was busy eyeing the neighbourhood poodle. What did he care, anyway? After the initial formalities were over, he immediately betook himself to the garage. Somehow, this part of the house was almost never touched by her aunt’s hand. It seemed as if the past year had conveniently passed this place by without altering it a bit. As he was rummaging through the trinkets in a huge carton in the corner, a high pitched yapping startled him. Turning round, he came face to face with the inevitable.

“Oh, it’s you again, huh? There’s no getting away from you, is there, you ugly little mongrel?” Two yaps, followed by some panting and vigorous wagging of the tail was all the response little Sir Rider could muster. “Oh well, I guess I will have to put up with a flea bitten donkey like you, after all. It’s not as if I could get rid of you if I wanted to.” Saying this, he turned once more to carton, with Sir Rider at his heels, sniffing, scratching, and for no apparent reason, very much contented.

Now, in another corner of the garage was this huge bureau that he had never seen before. Perhaps it had been shifted from one of the upstairs rooms since his last visit. It, like the house was prehistoric. It had escaped his view from being kept in a corner in the dark just beside the door, and he saw it quite accidentally turning around to brush off a tiny spider crawling on his back. As he approached it, he saw that it was really unstable with one of its wooden legs broken, as if it were a signal for him to back off. But it looked very promising, and such a trifle wasn’t going to deter him from exploring it. He gave the handle on the middle drawer a tug, but it didn’t budge. Looking more closely, he saw that the wood around the edge had become swollen from the damp and long disuse thereby jamming it. So he gripped the handle and pulled with all his might, egged on by a highly excited Sir Rider, close at his heels, making short growls of impatience. A thunderous crash and a high pitched bestial squeal was all he could hear as he scampered out of the way of the falling bureau with tremendous agility.

As he got up brushing the dirt off his knees, through the cloud of dust he could see the bureau lying face down on the ground, slightly raised at one point with a now motionless Sir Rider below it. In a few second the pool of scarlet that oozed out confirmed his worst fears. For a minute or so he stood there paralyzed, his jaw hanging and his throat making weird gurgling noises. His aunt – his favourite aunt, living all alone shunned by one and all in her old age save for that queer, old dog upon which she had conferred a mother’s love. But merely by its presence, it had repaid all the favour and the couple had lead a fulfilling life. And in one single blow he had ended all that. How could she ever forgive him for this? As soon as the initial shock wore off, he ran out of the garage.

As he ran out in the open with tears streaming down his cheeks, he realized that there was no one he could tell this to. His father wasn’t at home and may be gone for a couple of days, and his mother – once, in her presence he’d been irritated to the point of insanity by its constant yapping and had proceeded to kick it, but one look from her had frozen his foot in mid air. Malevolent was the only word he could use to describe that look! If she got to know of this, she’d probably think he’d done it on purpose. So, he must bear his plight all alone. He had to run away.

Slowing down, he quietly made his way towards the house. He’d made up his mind. He had to get out of there – go to the station, then catch a train and go to some place far away where he’d have to work in some factory under an assumed name and live in the ghetto, just like they do in the movies. Despite his grief, he felt a little pleasurably excited at the thought of the adventure. To make a success story of it he knew he had to calm down and use his head. So he did calm down, and used about as much of the head that was the fair share of every seven year old as he possibly could. His aunt was out at that moment as she had to get stuff from the supermarket. His mother, after having lunch was probably upstairs with her head buried in some historical novel. So, with any luck, he’d have the entire ground floor to himself. Just the privacy he needed to kick in on the supplies. He made his way up the steps to the front door treading as lightly and noiselessly on his feet as a cat. With extreme caution, he pried it open just an inch, and peeped in to make sure there was no one around. Then, he widened the gap and slipped himself in. Among his bags, he found what he was looking for – a small, suede rucksack. Hauling it up his shoulder, he made his way up to the kitchen and, on reaching there, he cut himself around five peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. These, he neatly packed in a brown paper bag and placed it in his rucksack. In another ten minutes or so, he was all geared up. His supplies consisted of the aforementioned sandwiches, a carton of milk, a bottle of water, a bag of cheetos, a notebook, a black, ball-point pen, and two pairs of clean underwear.

As he made his way through the gate, he couldn’t help but turn and look at the window of the room in which his mother was supposedly reading. This might be the cause of some grief for her, and she might perhaps cry a little. But his father would be there to take care of her, and maybe a year later they’d have another baby. Babies were like that – they sprouted of their own accord where married couples lived. And anyway, he was already feeling a little proud of himself for the sacrifice he’d made.

He knew the way to the station, it being only half a mile away. But as he turned around the corner, the house all of a sudden disappeared from view behind the high wall and he felt a wave of fear creeping over him. What if he’d never make it past the train? What if, once he got off the train, he couldn’t get a job? Would that mean he’d have to starve to death? And he’d heard from his mother the awful things that happened to children who stray too far out from their homes unaccompanied. All of a sudden he felt tired and lonely, and above all, dreadfully afraid.

It happened just as he was crossing the post office. A hand on his shoulder and a female voice inquiring, “Hey, where are you off to, all alone?” The suddenness of it startled him so much that he’d almost performed a somersault right there on the street. He turned round to see his aunt looking down at him kindly, somewhat amused. And then he told all, with the tears falling fast. “Its Sir Rider – it – he died. It wasn’t my fault – the cabinet – I tried to get rid of it but it wouldn’t quit following me around, you see – and it fell -”

His aunt, meanwhile had let go of his shoulder and was staring at him fixedly and open mouthed. “But my dear,” she explained almost pleadingly – “what is this you are saying? Sir Richard died last year. Didn’t our mother tell you? His poor heart the vets said – it just stopped.”

Yours sincerely

Jude

Stars in My Eyes (A story)

It was the last day of high school. There we were - on the stepping stone to manhood, with a tear in each eye, one foot firmly planted in the future contemplating the glories that could be ours and the means to get there, the other steeped knee-deep in reminiscences that - naah! We just grabbed a seat on the nearest car/bike that chanced to pass by and got the hell out of there! The cliffs of __, therein lay our destination. It was to be a party. All day, all night - boys, girls, and an ocean of hormones and beer - it was our tribute to life the only way we knew how.

It took around two hours to get to there. I'd hitch-hiked off the back of a bike ridden by a vicious young shemale who reeked strongly of meat gone bad - who'd hit the brakes at the very last second with the front wheel poised tantalizingly between my legs leaving me with no other option but to hop on. I do not remember much of the journey - was too drunk to - except that we rode very fast and at one point I'd had to hang on to her leather jacket by the teeth to keep myself from falling off.

Once we got there (it was a solitary, small two-storied house that we'd rented for the day with one large living room comprising the entire ground floor), I immediately hit the bathroom upstairs where I retched up every single thing I'd eaten ever since the day I was born. It took me an entire half hour to get off my knees and onto my feet, flush the little toilet, adjust my glasses - without which I was blind as a bat, and assure myself that I was leak-proof for the present and would not make a mess of myself before company downstairs.

By dint of grabbing on to the rails, I somehow stumbled my way down the staircase. Some rock anthem that was quite unreasonably the rage of the season in those days played about a hundred decibels too loud. A tangled mass of bodies moved in unison with every beat like unfinished Michelangelo sculptures - trying to break free of the rock that contained them. Finding a couch handy near the window, I promptly threw myself upon it face down, and closing my eyes, fell in a deep slumber.

I must have slept for the greater part of three hours. I opened my eyes to more mellowed beats and glassy-eyed, half-awake teenagers. Thanks to the fact that I'd gotten most of the alcohol out my system prior to falling asleep I could open my eyes quite easily and didn't have even a hint of hangover. There were all kinds of people around - people from my class that I knew quite intimately, people from other classes such as the arts class I'd never laid my eyes on. There were people in a state of stupor lying spread eagled on the floor, people dancing like in the Toulouse-Lautrec posters, couples in corners making very, very exclusive kinda conversation that could not be heard outside their realm, and the teetotaler geeks - doing, well - geeky stuff. In short, there was no one in the entire room that I could talk to. I fumbled in my jeans pockets for a cigarette and finding a pack, took one out and lighted it, following which I slipped out the door into the silence of the night.

Outside, amid sounds of the raging sea, the night sky shone like a many splendored thing. As I stood there hugging myself from the chill, I realized that the sky we get to see at home isn’t quite the real deal. With the light pollution not being present to play spoilsport, the stars had a keenness to them that was simply marvelous to behold. You could even make out a faint outline of the milky-way running across the middle of the sky like the backbone of some enormous ancient whale, holding everything together. In the moonlight, the trees looked surreal, contorting themselves in the most grotesque forms from an agony we were all too young to fathom.

“I like that yellow star just above our head the best.” The suddenness of the voice behind me had the effect of making me jump out of my skin. She wore a denim jacket with these enormous brass buttons, leather shorts that revealed a stingingly beautiful pair of slender, ivory legs, and white tennis shoes. In age, she might have been a seventeen who seemed twenty at best but might easily have passed for fourteen. This was no Venus de Milo of the voluptuous curves, but smaller – about five-five to be more precise, with a stick-insect figure styled in the manner of the friezes on the pantheon walls – flat and yet most exquisitely contoured, if you know what I mean. I realized that I’d never laid my eyes on her before.

“In the first place, that’s not a star; it’s a planet – Jupiter, really.” The moment I said that, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. She turned to look at me full in the face, chin jutting out slightly. She had dark eyes that glistened eerily in the moonlight, a small, straight nose, and very full lips.

“Gimme a cigarette”, she said, and before I could dive into my own pocket, she roughly pushed past my hand and fished out the whole pack, plus the lighter, startling me considerably. She extracted one cigarette using only her lips, and keeping the cigarette there, proceeded to light it cupping the top of the lighter using her right hand thereby shielding the flame from the wind, and yet not looking at me once during the whole performance.

“You know what your problem is?” she continued, staring back at me. She was holding the cigarette lightly between her forefinger and her middle finger, smoking in small and exclusively oral drags. “You’re too goddamn scientific for your own good. You have to break everything down into these neat little packets - one that contains stars, one for the planets, another for asteroids, and yet another for comets and stuff. You have to have a bunch of dead people telling you stuff through books for you to know whether a thing is beautiful or not. You have no spontaneity. All you’re left with is a handful of packets and a head full of shit.”

Then, after a brief pause – “Here, let me help you.” And, saying this, she took off my glasses before I could protest. As a recap, let me tell you that I’m very, very shortsighted without my glasses. All of a sudden, the world around me became a blur, and all that remained were the tiny pinpoints of light above me, the city lights in the distance, and those coming from the windows of the house.

“Hey, its stars everywhere!” I said.

“Atta boy, way to go! My, you’re catching up fast”, she shouted enthusiastically, exactly like the nursery governess who, after a long struggle had finally got her charge toilet trained, and was viewing the results for the first time. “Here – let me give these back to you. I don’t want you to go bumping into things after all.”

Having regained my eyesight, I decided to make a fresh start of it. At that time, I was single and she was wholly beautiful. Did I need a reason? “So you are - ?”

“Shh, no names!” she said in a whisper and put a finger gently on my lips. She did this with such earnestness that I could not help but smile. She too smiled a little, trifle nervously though.

“So, you’re in science class, huh?”

“Yeah”, I said. She nodded, signifying that she’d known it all along.

“Hey, don’t get me wrong. I actually love science. The quest for knowledge, it is the only other thing you could die for.” I dared not ask her what the first was. “So, in all the science that you learnt, which part did you like best?”

“Mm, well, the special theory of relativity, I guess.” Which was true, really. I’d studied it from pure fascination, all by myself, long before I’d been taught the mathematics needed to fully decrypt it. And once they did teach me, the theory rose not a little in my estimation.

“Tell me about it.” And, so I did. Had anyone else asked me under different circumstances, I would not have bothered. Most people, when they ask you for something like that, do it only to poke fun at you or call you a bore behind your back. But here was a girl you could even read out the telephone directory to and feel ecstatic about it. Back in those days, I was considered to be pretty good at stuff like these by one and all, and as I’d never had a sincere audience before, the words came out all by themselves. She had this way of getting your thoughts before they took off from your lips. There we were, strolling in the moonlight under the trees in a tiny world completely ignored by the passage of time, speaking of things we neither of us fully understood.

About an hour later, when I’d finished, we were both silent for a while, not daring to look into each others’ faces. As an afterthought I added, “You know the best part? This entire theory is not about learning; it’s mostly about forgetting things that you’ve learnt so many times over all your life that you take them for granted. Like, if I say the sky is blue, it has to be blue for you as well. But for all I know, you could be living on Mars where skies are orange mostly, or on Venus, where they’re yellow. So, if you tell me that the sky is purple, I tell you that you’re a freak, or colourblind at best, for I have gotten so used to a blue sky I could not conceive of any other. But maybe, you’re from another planet, or maybe in your language the word purple means exactly what blue means to me. So here we are, two normal people, each equally correct in his or her own way - yet so different, and probably loving it as well.”

The piercing cry of a nightjar. That scared the wits out of us. “I’m scared”, she said simply, her eyes as big as billiard balls.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.” And holding each other by the hand, we pitched forward blindly towards nowhere in particular; stumbling, falling, getting hurt and yet not daring to look back, her hand slightly moist, but warm and comfortable all the same. We finally stopped in a little clearing by the edge of the cliff, out of breath and panting angrily into each others’ faces. At last, she threw her head back and stretched out on the rocks. She undid her shoelaces and jerked her feet with the effect of sending her shoes flying through the air.

“Hey, you gotta take off your shoes as well.”

“No way”, I said. “There might be bugs around.”

“Don’t worry, they’re no more eager to bite on your stinky feet than you are to bite on theirs. Come on, be yourself for a change, without giving a damn about what happens next.” And saying this, she roughly wrenched my shoes off, not bothering to undo the laces or anything. She had this way of taking whatever she wanted without bothering to ask - not in a bullying way, but quite naturally, as if the whole world was one big extension of her body. And, it felt surprisingly peaceful to sit there on the rocks with the wind blowing in between your toes.

Lighting a pair of cigarettes, she handed one to me. “Hey, we need to make a fire”, she said. “Help me gather some wood.” We scourged the landscape picking up twigs and dry leaves, occasionally bumping our heads together going for the same fallen stick all at once and laughing like crazy. Twenty minutes or so later, we were back with our booty. With our back to the wind thereby effectively forming a screen we, after a painful struggle, did manage to set it ablaze. There we sat - not side by side, but on either side of the fire, devouring each other with our eyes; watching our forms shimmer in the firelight and the world around us blur, swaying in rhythm to our breath, our naked feet occasionally touching. Her eyes lit up the night, glowing like a cat’s and she had this odd, animal smile to her lips. Time, language, age, sex, culture, race – everything seemed to dissolve in the flames. We spoke very little, and whenever we did, it seemed to end in wild laughter that oddly contrasted with the silence around us.

At last, the fire died down. She rose, trifle wearily, and we walked all the way to the very edge of the cliff. She looked down at the sea some fifty feet below us. “It will soon be dawn, and all of this will be over. It’s a pity you cannot take it all home with you”, she said. “Look at those waves glistening in the moonlight. They look awfully nice. Know why them waves destroy themselves on those rocks like that?” I said I didn’t know.

“It’s because they’re too beautiful to live forever. If you didn’t stop them, they’d grow on you till they’re so big and so beautiful, the world will no longer be big enough to contain them.” I too watched and waited for it to set in.

“You’re beautiful, too”, she continued. I did not know what to say to this, so I merely muttered something to the effect that so was she. “I know”, she said simply, and not with a hint of pride. It was as if I’d read out some empirical fact straight from the encyclopedia. “We too are like the waves down below. We go about our business, seeing all kinds of stuff, and then we hit this dead end. Whenever things look too good to be true, you have to get out before they grow on you and smother you. It’s not within our rights to be quite that happy as long as we’re a part of this world.” She brushed the back of her hand against my cheek and let it fall gently on the lapel of my jacket. She let it rest there for quite a while, as if undecided what to do next.

All of a sudden, she ordered me to close my eyes. I turned round to face her. I was standing with my back to the sea, my feet precariously poised on the edge of the cliff. She was there right opposite me, looking directly into my eyes. I did as I was told. She kissed me once, not on the lips or anything, but on the forehead – right between the eyes. It wasn’t exactly a shove; more of a tender caress on the left side of my chest, and I had a weird sensation of weightlessness as the ground slipped away from beneath my feet.

*************************************************************

I am forty now. I live in a tiny apartment all by myself. I keep changing lanes, not staying on the same job for more than two or three months at a stretch. In the past one year, I have been a freelance writer, a math teacher, and a graphics artist doing advertisement banners. I look much older than my age in years and smoke far more than what’s good for me. A strange weariness follows me wherever I go. Perhaps the happiest time of the day for me is just prior to falling asleep at night, when I take advantage of the quietness to slip out of the present and take a walk in the past.

I still go to visit her sometimes. She talks to me from the other side of the glass over a telephone in that maximum security prison about books she’d read, thoughts she’d had, etc. Sometimes she is content just to listen, smiling all the while, especially when she’s too high on the medication they keep pumping into her all day long. She doesn't seem to have aged a day since I first saw her. But no matter what we do, it invariably ends in her darting off her chair and lunging forward at me, trying to rip me apart, and then the prison security coming in and dragging her bodily away.

It had taken me over a year to recover from the fall I’d suffered that night towards the end of high school from the edge of that cliff. In fact, had it not been for this rock jutting out from the vertical walls that caught me in mid air, I’d have been a goner just like the others. I spent the next six months or so entirely in bed, with my neck in traction, my left leg suspended from the ceiling above. There were three major fractures and four hairlines. Plus, some hemorrhaging of the head. When they’d finally caught her, she was convicted of 11 cases of homicide and a twelfth attempted murder. She never denied the charges pressed against her and the trial had been a nominal affair. Mental derangement had saved her from the gallows and since then she’d lived in solitary confinement in that same prison cell, with no hopes of ever seeing the sunlight again or walking barefooted by the sea.

Oh, but don’t you know, I’d die for you gladly – I swear I would, if they’d only let me live.

Yours sincerely

Jude

The Giraffe (A story)

She looked at herself in the mirror, with all the poise she'd learnt to muster in her eight years of existence. She fell back a step or two to get the complete view right down to her tiny pumps and all and narrowed her eyes in the style of an an art critic examining an age old masterpiece. Decidedly, she was exceedingly pretty - with that enormous strawberry mouth, the small, heart shaped face, wavy hair fashionably disheveled, and eyes skewed ever so slightly to remind the viewer that she was human after all, and therefore with the license to be loved. In form, she was small and delicate-like, like a blade of grass, so that it felt as if she were constantly fighting this battle with her attire to save herself from being devoured alive. Coming closer, by dint of increasing the separation using the thumb and the forefinger, she checked for any unseemliness in and around her eyes, her teeth, and her nose, exactly in that order. Dissatisfied and frowning slightly, she lifted her skirt and fished out a small, sky blue handkerchief with a white lace border, neatly pressed. Keeping it close to her face she blew on it, so hard that a casual observer might have been afraid that she'd eventually blow her brains out. She then proceeded to wipe her nose with it, using the pinky to get a better reach, following which the handkerchief disappeared back beneath the folds of her dress.

"Marvelous darling," the inevitability of that shrill voice from behind her cut across the silence of the room like death itself. "You look so nouveau chic!" She tried to give the last word a French twang, but possibly because of never having heard a Frenchman say it, she ended up making it sound like a hiccup. "Word of advice - wear a paper bag over your head 'cause we need to pass the monkeys to get to the giraffe, and one of them might just fall in love with you." The bearer of this voice might have been the perfect arch-nemesis of the former, had the former attached quite so much importance to her.

"Ah, wouldn't that make you jealous, now? Anyway, the paper bag might come in handy in case I need to barf if mum insists I sit with you at the back on our way." On hearing this, her thirteen-year old sister made a face that reminder her of a she-mandrill in heat that she'd once seen on the discovery channel, and stomped her way out the door. The giraffe she'd referred to was currently the main reason behind this rather elaborate toilette (that, and the fact that it was her birthday, which was by no means a coincidence), not with any intention of forming a romantic liaison with the giraffe, as her sister had once remarked to explain her obsession with it, but because ever since she could remember, she'd had this tiny offshoot of her personality that kept a parole officer's vigilance on every move she made - pushing her constantly towards perfection, making her do the right thing everytime, of which 'looking right' was the uppermost.

For a whole week it had been all over the local papers. The local zoo - a modest establishment, in a bid to attract more visitors had succeeded in procuring a fully grown giraffe straight from the Savannah. Living in a town where even the elopement of the butcher's son with the fishmonger's daughter was 'news', it had caused quite a stir. And from the moment she'd heard it, the excitement of actually seeing a giraffe in flesh had been too much for her and she'd started losing sleep over it. Yes, she had always been one for the animals - not the ugly, drooling puppy dogs that her friends at school used to hug and pet all the time, possibly for the sake of making themselves look pretty in comparison, but 'real' animals in the unadulterated wilds. And, size had always mattered- she, for some reason preferring the big-boned clumsiness of the elephant to the subtlety of a mouse. Going on a hike through the Savannah was her fondest dream, and it seemed that a particularly esteemed inhabitant of the Utopia had come to humble himself before her.

Possibly for the fact they considered her to be a nice enough girl (for she was, too), or maybe because they themselves were not a little curious about what it looked like (although they'd never admit to such childish preferences), it was decided by both the parents unanimously that they would go as soon as possible (which of course, meant a Sunday) and since it coincided with her birthday, the arrangement was all the more desirable.

So there they were, all the four of them on a bright Sunday morning amids cries of "Do hurry up, dear", "What kinda sandwich is that?", and "I wish they'd do something about the price of gas". The antique family car rattled into motion through the by-lanes and soon they'd left the familiar block of flats out of sight. She had been cloistered on the back seat with her sister, exactly as she'd predicted, and from time to time she waved her hand in front of her nose as if she were being smothered by the stench, for which she was constantly being kicked on the shins by the latter, having the advantage of a longer leg and higher heels. She longed for wider roads and better view.

But once they reached the highway, it was like leaping from the frying pan into the fire. The traffic seemed endless. Caught in a driver's limbo with space neither to edge forward nor to back out, the father had nothing to do but toot his horn. "Well, this is really the end," he prophesied. To which the mother replied with asperity, "All this would never have happened had you made the right turn like I had asked you to". Here, the girl stopped listening, knowing that a string of bitter reminiscences would follow of the pains that they could have avoided had her family been more mindful her counsel, instead of treating her like dirt. Her sister, meanwhile complained that the sweat was making her itchy, and not being uncommonly kind to her hair either. Feeling irritated beyond endurance, she said to her sister, "Oh, dont be such an --", a word beginning with an 'a' that she was under the strictest injunction never to bring to her lips. Immediately the world outside disappeared and three pair of eyes had directed their undivided attention upon her. She gazed at her feet, waiting for the storm to pass. Whatever harm it did, atleast it had the effect of restoring silence back inside the car.

Inch by inch, they'd made quite a bit of progress. At last, they seemed to be in for a bit of a breather with the traffic easing a bit on the turn ahead. But just as the dad shouted, "full speed to starboard" something went 'phut' and with not a garage in sight, he knew it had to be the tire. So out the antique hood the antique jack was hauled and with sleeves rolled up to the elbow amid bitter remonstrations by her mother and her sister for careless driving, he set out to change the tire all by himself. It took him over the span of an hour and a half, being a person who had never tightened a screw in his life prior to matrimony. The girl, meanwhile passed her time drawing cartoons on a wad of paper she always carried in her pockets and counting the number of cars of a particular colour that passed by. Finally, the tire was fixed and they hopped back into the car, nobody daring to see anyone else's face, each of them thinking the same thing - whether all this was actually worth all the trouble, but not daring to say so in front of the girl.

At last, they reached the zoo. It was hardly ten miles from where they lived, but looking at their faces, you'd think they'd crossed the Atlantic to get there. From experience, the dad knew it was his job to get the tickets, not out of chivalry, but simply because the others wouldn't move a muscle. So wearily, he stepped out and made his way towards the counter.

When he reached the counter, there was hardly a person. He'd expected a great, long queue, but instead there was only the clerk at the counter munching on a donut and getting his fingers all sticky. Nevertheless, he asked for four tickets.

"Oh, I'm sorry sir, but there's been a small fire last night. Not much of a fire, mind you, but we have decided to keep the zoo closed to visitors for the day for maintenance reasons. I hope you'll understand, sir", he said in the droning monologue of one whose job it was to act as a human phonograph. He stared at the clerk for a full minute, trying as if to rouse himself from a nightmare, trying to find a way out of it. Then, of a sudden impulse he turned round, breathed a sigh of anguish and dragged his feet back to the car, thinking not of himself but his poor six-year old pink and white daughter who had had such fun watching the discovery channel with him, and who had been made fun of by her sister saying she wished to marry a giraffe.

"Sorry, its closed", he said flatly. But he need not have said it for they already knew. In return, his wife merely said in a hushed voice, "Sshh! She's sleeping. Let's get the hell out of here." Looking through the window on the backseat, he could see his two daughters curled up in an indistinct pile of arms and legs. His younger daughter had a very peculiar smile to her lips as she slept. She seemed happy, as though she didn't have a reason to complain.

She was dreaming. The sky was yellowish from the dust that was blown up by the hooves of the wildebeest. Out in the distance, the elephant herds mingled with the mountains. And just towards the left, in a towering forest of acacia were the most graceful necks in the whole of the universe.

Yours sincerely

Jude

To and Then Fro (A story)

Little Edward inhaled sharply. Through trial and error, he'd figured out how to overcome the feeling of emptiness within his bowels caused by the fluctuations in the apparent force of gravity, by highly controlled inspirations and expirations accompanied by certain expert contortions of his abdominal muscles. Little Edward reveled in his discovery, and like the true six-year old scientist that he was, he liked to repeat his experiments in order to prolong the pleasure of his find. Hence, at present the small but high amplitude swing in the garden was what seemed to have the major share of his attentions. The swing, possibly unaware of the genius it played host to, continued its to and fro motion, the only way it knew how, and each time little Edward got a momentary glimpse over the garden wall of the sheep in the adjacent fields. Having mastered the skills of elementary arithmetic only recently, Edward tried to apply it to almost everything he saw or felt. There were numbers in his fingers, the stars and the clouds, those little orbs fleeting across his eyes when he half closed them (eye jellybeans, he called them), and even the beating of his heart. In the present instance, he was keeping count of two separate things - the number of oscillations of his swing, and the sheep. It was engrossing work, since he did not get to keep the sheep in view all the time, but only for a fleeting moment when the swing was at the pinnacle of its trajectory. He counted them one at a time, then two at a time, and it left him a little awed, but overall greatly relieved to have obtained the same result on both the occasions.

There were all kinds of flowers in the garden - flowers crying out desperately for nomenclature before Edward the messiah arrived on the scene. And Edward had gratified their wishes to the fullest the way only he could. The 'aunt Tabithas' chatted gaily with the 'grampa Millers' as they swung in the breeze, looked on by the 'little-Johnnys-in-socks' from a separate bed. There were the prudish 'blue chalices' in the middle row that talked to no one except their own kind, unlike the 'Gypsy flowers', who seemed very much at peace with all those around them. His mother had once tried to teach him the 'correct' names of flowers, but he could not for the world understand how such unimaginative names had caught on.

A huge bird that Edward had never set eyes on before suddenly flew down from out of nowhere. Bigger than Edward by at least an arm's length, it had a beak of the most provocative shade of orange that Edward had ever seen. And the splendour of its wings - he could describe that for hours on end if he only knew the words. There were at least seventeen different colours on its feathers, colours that Edward never knew even existed. It seemed to him that the bird had been sent straight from heaven as a special favour for being such a good boy. The bird gazed at Edward with the solemnity and steadfastness of a spaniel in game. Edward smiled at the bird, half-expecting it to be reciprocated. But the bird, apparently unmindful of the favour, turned around leaving Edward to gratify himself with a view of its hindquarters. And lo! All of Edward's enchantment with his surroundings vanished in thin air, and he got down from the swing muttering something about the general injustice in this world under his breath.

Walking slowly with his head bowed, he entered the house. He loved the house - the clear-paned glass windows, the odour-free cleanliness of it all. Last summer, he'd stayed at his aunt's place and there was this smell of food gone bad combined with cheap perfume everywhere that had left him nauseated for days. He knew every nook and cranny of this house as if it were the back of his hand. The china on the mantelpiece, the stains on the carpet, the peculiarities of every chair in the dining hall, and the little plants in their flowerpots so near to his mother's heart - he could see them with his eyes closed. He began climbing the staircase leading to his room upstairs a little wearily, but about halfway up he felt all of a sudden somewhat invigorated and climbed the remainder two at a time, almost in a stumble. On reaching the landing he hesitated for a brief moment, as if deciding which way to go. But he almost immediately made up his mind and instead of going to his room, turned left, towards the library.

The library was the one place in the house that let you savour a bad mood. The dark mahogany walls and the cold, marble floor could stretch a grudge for hours. But he really loved the library, he did, even though he was hardly what even he himself would call proficient in reading. But there was this giant children's encyclopedia in twenty-one volumes with the loveliest colour illustrations that had a life of their own, and that was good enough for him. They were kept in the topmost stack of the third shelf from the door, and he could not reach it from down below. So he grabbed three of the fattest books he could find and lay them one on top of the other in front of the shelf, himself on top of the last book so that his head was only a little below the topmost shelf. But for all his ingeniousness, he failed to grasp the imprudence of having the smallest book at the bottom, and as he reached out for his favourite volume on tiptoe, he lost his equilibrium. He spent a second and a half hanging on to the binding of the book, for it was very tightly stacked, but then fell and the entire stack came cascading down on top of his head. He closed his eyes tightly and braced himself for the pain, yet as the deafening sound of about fifty odd leather bound books falling through a height of six feet on hard ground stopped he discovered that as if by miracle that none of the books had actually hit him, save for an Alexander Dumas grazing his right shoulder. He picked the book up, with something of a tenderness - for it was a great favourite with his father and opened it. The yellowed pages were dented in innumerable places by moths and those tiny, silvery worms that actually ate paper. What distinguished it from all the other books was a faint smell of tobacco from being in his father's study over extended periods of time. Slowly and even respectfully, he brought his nose close to the page, and kept it there for what seemed all eternity (but really the greater part of a minute). When he lifted his head again, he felt almost heady with joy and his eyes felt a little itchy. He got to his feet, tried briefly to undo the mess he'd made with all the fallen books, lost interest, crept back to the Dumas, and on a sudden impulse, hugged the book tight and fell sound asleep.

Alien noises broke his slumber. He opened his eyes slowly - in fact, they would not open at first, as if they belonged to somebody else. He saw or rather heard a young woman sobbing hysterically and a man with a black moustache saying something in a tongue he could not understand at all. He tried to move his head, but it hurt like hell. He looked down at his feet and they seemed strangely far away. Fear gripped his heart as it beat out the rhythm of the unforgotten. He tried to utter something but the words would not come.

Doctor Amarand knew it took all sorts to make up his profession. The wailing wife was nothing new to him. They had found the man on the public road near the pub lying unconscious after being hit by a truck, filled to the brim with alcohol. They had brought him home and laid him out on the bed. Since then, he had oscillated between life and death with a frequency that was simply unfathomable. "Señora", the doctor was saying, calmly, almost jovially, "su marido ha tenido un accidente. Ha sufrido una lesión de la cabeza y probablemente no recuerda nada*..."

Yours sincerely

Jude

[* Madam, your husband has had an accident. He has suffered an injury of the head and probably remembers nothing.]

The Boy in The Bunker (A story)

He looked at the sky - sort of purple. A cloud splattered, purple sky, smeared with grey here and there. The sort of sky that made you feel the painter did an overkill, and if they'd only give you a decent brush, you could tone it down and be proud of the results the rest of your life. It was also the sort of sky that made you wish you could touch it from up close and see if its real. But it wasn't possible - he knew that only too well - he considered himself to be a connoisseur on what was possible and what never was. He'd been up there more times that he'd cared to, on a fighter jet, and he knew that it all seemed as far away and unreal as from the ground. It was just the same everytime. The attainment made you wish you could fall back on the pursuit, while when in pursuit, the attainment would matter the world to him. All of it was such a big bore he almost wished he could die, knowing well that that wish could be granted to him sooner than he wanted.

The smell of the damp earth jerked him to attention once more. Living in that hot, damp ad-hoc bunker three days in a trot now, you did not feel the sick sweet stench all the time. In fact it only got to you when you cared the least about it. He did not understand this - often when he'd take a deep breath with his eyes closed, trying to waken his near-extinct latent senses, and he might as well be sitting in his little cottage by the sea the way it seemed to him. An odourless, insipid atmosphere. The kind that you are so familiar with you almost take for granted.

His partner-in-combat lay sprawled on the ground beside him, face down - the coolest guy he'd met his whole life. A year older than the boy, he never really cared about doing his hair right or brushing his teeth before going to bed, for he never had a mother to tell him that, not as far back as he could remember. And the least ambitious fellow that ever tooted a harmonica. And his harmonica did not just play, it sang! Not something that pleased him overmuch though when the boy once told him, for according to him if singing was what you really wanted, nobody was stopping you from crooning your larynx out. You played because you wished for something different, and he would be mighty pleased if the former were to keep his compliments to himself till the time he knew better. That was him, that was his partner, and he was proud of him, too on the sly. And yet he was quite tender at times. He remembered how once he'd helped him cross the busy street holding him by the hand. He, the boy, was an acutely absent minded fellow who, as his comrades put it, had let his mind wander long ago - so far, that it'd never found its way back. Later, he'd confessed he'd never quite forgiven him for doing that.

"Its that same sky again", he muttered to his partner. "Lucky though, we have a breeze going. It was so beastly hot last evening I honestly thought I would start oozing liquid brain through my nose, I really did" And he made a pretense of inhaling with all his might, as if to hold the flow back, as long as possible. He took out a lulu of a handkerchief from his pocket that was once white but now of such an indeterminate hue as can be only caused by the lining of one's sidepockets shifting in the general direction of one's hindquarters resulting in the person's eventually sitting on it over freshly dug earth, and fanned himself with it. But he quit almost as soon as he'd begun, for the handkerchief was woefully damp from staying in his pocket for so long and his chronic hay fever, of which he'd had his fair share in the past few days.

"Hey, pass me that water bottle", the boy said to his partner almost exclusively out of his right shoulder rather than his mouth. And as such an attitude rightly deserved, he was ignored by one and all, or one rather, for there was noone else within earshot. So as if made self conscious by the sound of his own voice, he turned round and said - "hey, please pass me that bottle of water, would you?" But despite this condescension on his part, his partner did not respond. Oh, he could be an ass for the silent treatment, he could! That, in fact was the whole problem, in his opinion with all the ultracool people in this world. Most of the time they'd give about as much acknowledgment of your existence as a dog would to a flea. So he'd learnt to hold his peace the hard way. And yet, there were moments when he'd feel chagrined beyond all else and rather erroneously put the blame of most of the evil in this world to such attitudes. The problem, he'd then say is not because of the ultracool people there are, who are a rare species in themselves, with very low rate of propagation, god forbid otherwise. But there are these people who imitate them so crudely without actually becoming one of them, and that is where the trouble lay.

To ebb the flow of the rising anger in him, he thought of his girl. The only person he'd want to kiss and throw up on all at the same time. He remembered, oh how he remembered - that tiny pink frock and those saliva coated crimson lips. In fact it made you cry out to give her a different aperture for the purpose of speaking - uttering words as indiscriminately as the incinerators of Auschwitz. He was pretty young back then with cheeks as smooth as hers. He'd been jilted - indeed, he'd have been quite disappointed had it been otherwise. So, since then he'd been carrying around the ghost of her with him wherever he went, so that people he did not even know too well would have had no trouble figuring out who he meant at the slightest mention of her. "She was quite a one to share a good sunset with, wasn't she?" he said. He knew he'd said that rhetorically, and therefore, didn't even expect his partner to answer. " Oh she had a way of taking the sunset and turning it into one huge, wholly agreeable extension of her." He beamed to a passing slug as he said this. For a moment, he thought that he'd almost manufactured poetry and expected that very moment a swarm of admirers to materialize out of nowhere and congratulate him. But none did, and he started to poke the slug with a stick, till it fell down on the ground from the wall it was clinging to, acutely agitated.

Then, as he had nothing better to do, he started practising kung-fu moves against an invisible aerial enemy. He'd been brought up on a staple of movies where the combatants would not lower themselves to the level of guns and other artillery and preferred to use their bare hands instead. As a child, he'd often or whenever he chanced to find himself entirely unobserved, conjure up a magical enemy and pretend to pound his pancreas out. This form of amusement never left him, and later the enemy took up all sorts of forms such as an incomplete homework assignment or the playground bully (not to his face, though). On this occasion it was the heat in the bunker, and with sweat dripping down his face, he was very near to having conquered it. Then, as he was about to go for the finisher, the supreme move which could be executed only when the enemy is half dead already and which involves a 360 degree spin in the air with the right leg extended, designed to shoot the head off the enemy and send blood spewing all over. He made the jump, in fact it would have been his best jump ever, had it not been for that spoilsport of a loose earth beneath his feet. His leg rose a trifle too fast, before he'd actually intended it to and his head fell back creating a torque that the rest of his body simply could not counterbalance. He landed, hard upon his back, right on top of his lying partner, turning him over, exposing his anterior for the world to see. He did not expect a jump or a groan of pain and he did not perceive any. He wasn't even surprised by the pallor of his skin, the blue-black lips, or the bullet wound on the his tunic front right where the heart was. He'd known it all along, the past three days; in fact, it'd all been enacted right before his eyes, he being by no means the silent spectator! To this day, if you asked him which of the two had died, he'd tell you in the same tone that we would normally use to talk about the weather, that he still hadn't quite figured that one out!

Yours sincerely

Jude