Folds

I don’t have much time. The world- my world- is full of pain. My eyes water, my ears ache, my hands grow numb and they are starting to dry. My nails just fell off. These rocks, they will be the death of me.

This craggy humid place is not the worst I have ever seen but it isn’t the best either. Of course in the worst of places I was protected from the outside by layers of garments that would not let even a molecule reach me in my safe haven inside. Here though, I am naked; naked and dying.

How anything could survive in this desolate and inhospitable world is beyond me but yet here as well life flourishes. It clings on multiplying and making the land its dominion. In my world we used to sit around and question the importance of life, the meaning of it. We, in all our intelligent discussions and solitary thinking never found any answer for life. Yet it must be something of import for how else could it migrate to every part of the galaxy. How else could it be here in this desolation and hostility? It clings and grows and its meaning is invisible to us. Life will not disappear. Here and now I realize that even when the universe ends, life will not disappear. It will find a niche to crawl into and proliferate. An experiment gone wrong, who can say if horribly?

They search for me those accursed fools. They are one life I wish had never existed in this universe. The throw of the die and a cell evolves and there they are our mortal enemies. We both grew and we both hated each other. A hatred transferred through procreation, a chromosome of enmity. A race to laugh at the last of their ones while they lie bleeding on the floor; to dance around this dying, dilapidated creature and to tell it again and again how foolish it were, how they could ever think they were advanced than us. They are a part of evolution that should never have happened. We are the successors. We are the rulers.

The beacon from my ship draws my friends here, but so does it draw the enemy. It is sad that I won’t be here to greet either of them. But my life ends and my destiny lies here, on this godforsaken planet. I must pass it on.

Living amongst the enemy was the hardest part of my life. A spy- an angel of death lurking in their very midst- seething in hatred silently. An experience I will not wish to have again. I wish to take them by their hair and kill them all. Yes, let me be killed. But let me take a few of them with me. But I was taught to be silent; for a greater good, for our victory, I kept my hate locked up inside. I pushed through it all. I made friends that I hated. But finally all my pain was rewarded. I have here with me their plans, their blue prints, their capabilities, their undoing. It rests in my hands.

The vagaries of the universe and its laws have tossed me way out here, far far away from my people. This outskirt of civilization, on the fringes of the no man’s land. They will take long time to reach here so I shall have to leave my true friends- my kind- a message.

I look around and I see these creatures. They are the closest things to intelligence on this planet. They appear curious but they refuse to move forward, to attempt, to innovate, to make a difference. These beings that are trying to learn to walk on two legs, these hairy smelly beings.

This infantile race shall carry my message. I shall imprint it in the folds of their cerebral tissue. I shall hide it there. And as they procreate and spread throughout the world so will the secret. In the end it will be spread too far and too wide. Nebulous but never lost. For the larger pattern will be discernable to the keen observer. Hidden everywhere yet hidden in only one. So even if the enemy comes first they will not be able to garner everything immediately. I shall give a chance to my friends. Even half of the knowledge I possess is dangerous to the enemy. Even half is enough to ensure our victory.

Come here…… come here you walking talking two legged being……. Come here. This will even help your intelligence you pathetic creature. A part of my intellect shall carry over, a part of my vocabulary as well. Many will be your languages but my words will reside hidden and common in all of them. You will live the short lives you have as kings. But soon my brethren will descend upon you. Until then live….. kings.

There….. there……… go now. Go procreate, spread my knowledge and wait for our arrival. GO!!!! NOW!!!! GO!!!! BEGONE!!!!!

It waits here my brothers, on this planet I choose to call Earth. Come, come and seek the knowledge of our victory.

-Rohith 

Conqueror of Maladies

(An excerpt from the speech given by Dr Mikhail Solzhenitsyn on accepting the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on ‘Selective genetical eradication of Cancer cells’)

….Whenever I walk past his room, I remember him and those days that changed my life. It was 1979, I was a fresh faced doctor whose excitement for medicine was replaced by disillusionment after a few months at the hospital. Those days I longed to get out of medicine, to get out of Russia, to get out of this humungous gulag of a country, to jump over those 10 feet tall electric fences and dash for greener meadows.

The first time I saw him he was already beyond hope, we had told him that, his 16 year old body under his pale skin was devouring itself in an unstoppable cancerous rage. The only thing we could do was give him painkillers. All I wanted to do when I stepped into his room was to check his pulse, give him painkillers, and go home as fast as I could. But then I noticed that he had a book with him. At times he would read it at, then write something on white paper with his frail shivering hands, sometimes he would stop and watch the snow falling in Moscow, perhaps thinking about what he had just read. I was curious and asked him what he was doing. ‘I’m learning how gravitation works’, he said, smiling. I didn’t think much of it then, perhaps I attributed it to the ramblings of a mind condemned to a premature end, you heard a lot of that in the cancer ward. But I kept going back to his room, sometimes for no particular reason, and he would still be at it, propped up in his bed, battling with the equations of space and time. We would talk for a long time and sometimes I would ask him how his book was going. He would tell me that he just finished learning the tensor notation or that now he knows how the space time is represented or something of that sort. I never understood what he meant by all that, but when he talked about gravitation there was a gleam in his eyes, a gleam that was almost never seen in cancer wards, or even outside cancer wards.

His condition kept worsening, his body became frailer. Sometimes I thought I should tell him that he had at most two weeks to live, and learning gravitation with a mind numbed by painkillers was no way to spend it. I couldn’t tell him that, because I knew he wouldn’t listen. Then we decided to stop wasting painkillers on him. I saw him for the last time that day, the first time without his book, a skeleton with skin, he smiled at me and asked ‘How are you doing doctor?’ he asked with a smile. I just nodded and said I was fine, and I asked him how his book was going. ‘I finished it”, he said, his eyes wide in their black sockets, ‘It’s simple really, matter tells space-time how to curve, then the curve tells matter how to move’. He pointed to a 3 inch long equation written on a paper near his bed. ‘It’s beautiful, is it not?’, he asked me. I couldn’t say a thing, in my chest I felt a pain I had never felt before in my life. I looked at his face, a face that was the reflection of an inner state that we all long for.  A state I realized I could never achieve by worrying about how much I made at the hospital or how fast I could go home after this patient. In his face I could see the joy of doing what he loved doing.

The next day the room had a new tenant, but this time I went in not worrying about the time after which I could get out. 

- AJ

The Two

 Things of the past are obscurities, they exist only in memory. Inside me the nebulous cloud of remembrances are ever thinning and one day will be no more. I must pin them down with words before memory becomes no different from the northern lights of old age.

Across the road from the old white building of Quetzcal, built by the lost founders of this city, there is a statue. The restaurant I work is on the slopping road behind the statue. People from the archaeological department inspect the statue every year and every year they reach the same conclusion- no one knows whose statue it is. It is a man who is remembered because his name and his language has been forgotten. Some times when customers are sparse I go out to look at the bronze plaque that bears his name, but like the rest of Quetzcal I cannot read the now forgotten script of our founders. Then I look up and I often see white fumes coiling upward from the shabby dome of the white building. Perhaps this is how all things die after they have been abandoned, evaporating away in the summer sun. I see these fumes every day, exhaled by the old men who visit my restaurant, as they catch the beams of sunlight that comes in through the glass windows. Sometimes I see those fumes on horrid days, coming out from my own nostrils, those days are more frequent now, the fumes and the sepia air haunt me like the bronze plaque of alien tongues.

The memory of the two is a hundred years old. I was young. The beef ularthiyathu that I carried from the kitchen counter to the tables in white porcelain plates did not tremble from the fear of death. The two spoke the same language as that of the statue, which I knew back then. I have forgotten it now. Their names too are lost, but I remember what they spoke for I heard it when I was young.

They always ordered the same things. Beef ularthiyathu and two black tea, sulaimani as they called it. The one with the mustache ate more. Picking up dark pieces of meat off the white china, talking while he sipped the black tea. They spoke of trivial things and rarely of their work. They spoke about the weather, rain always excited them, food, politics, and the police of Quetzcal. They were journalists, and sometimes they spoke about writing too, but always about writing of others and never about the process of writing itself. Rain excited them, words seemed to roll of faster from their mouths when it rained, and each syllable reverberated with enthusiasm. Back then it used to rain often in Quetzcal. It rains a lot even now, but the rhythm of the raindrops is lost, and forgotten.

I remember that day. Students (that’s what they call themselves) clashed with the police in front of the white building as usual. White fumes of tear gas rolled down the road behind the statues. I had closed the shutters. The two watched the road through the glass windows, shaking.

‘Shouldn’t we get out there?’ one asked the other.

 ‘No, we wait’, he said.

‘But the violence will pass us by, we need the photos of broken bones and smashed skulls.’

‘No we wait’, his eyes were unwaveringly fixed on the chaos outside and he continued to talk in a serious tone ‘These idiots will beat each other’s to death and while they languish in pain on these roads their leaders will come. They’ll come to pick up their comrades and wipe their tears and talk to them. But only when the fighting is over, only when there tear gas subsides. Because the white khaddar that they wear is too expensive to be thrown away if stained by blood and chemicals. Let the others have broken bones and smashed skulls, it is the scavengers that come after that will make a great story.’

Sometimes I wonder why he couldn't be satisfied with the bones and pieces of skull. I can only guess his reasons. They spoke a language and represented a culture that was forged in red. A tongue that had questions in abundance. Where is the equality you promised? Where is justice for our dying brothers? Tell me in what whore houses did you pawn our freedom to ascent the ladders of power?

Don’t they have wives and beautiful children to go back home to? Did they not know that in Quetzcal the people who are supposed to protect them with laws can harm them and paint their dead bodies as those of radicals, extremists and terrorists? Perhaps not. I heard the shots later, the sound had penetrated trough the shutters. On my way back I saw their bodies below the statue.

The road behind the statue slopes downwards and for an old man it is easier to walk down it. But sometimes the statue draws me to it with a pull stronger than gravity of the slope. The bronze plaque is usually covered by dust from the day’s traffic. I wipe off the dust and I try hard to understand those words, words of generations past, as if staring at it hard enough would bring back those memories, and I fail every time. Then I start my defeated descend down the road and sometimes the skies open up, as if the clouds are laughing at my failure to comprehend those words. But by drenching in the rain I understand how they made this culture and language. They made it from the sound of rain drops make as they skid off the green leaves, as the rain drops hit small puddles, as the rain drops are gobbled up by bright red flowers of hibiscus. Yet I have forgotten the language and those two are dead and now in Quetzcal there are no leaves, no puddles and flowers are grey from the dust of the day’s traffic.

-AJ