Ipthakir

Today walking home, as I passed the town square, I was witness to a trial. To be precise, I did not see a trial as the outcome of one. A man was being sentenced to Ipthakir. The man appeared unperturbed and someone near me whispered that the accused had narrowly avoided a death sentence. The court adjourned, the criminal was taken to a holding cell for the night and the crowd dispersed. I dragged one step in front of another on my way home.

I felt sick. I was sweating profusely and I felt like throwing up. A deep seated uneasiness had taken root in me.

I hurried home and once there as if in a dream I saw my very first memory flash before my eyes. Jerome shaking me by the shoulder and calling to me as if from far away- me waking up sputtering and coughing on sun warmed sand with the taste of salt in my mouth- Jerome asking me my name and my incredulity that even though I understood what he is saying to me I could not for the life of me remember who I was or what I was doing there- and his pronouncement.

 ‘You must have escaped from Ipthakir.’

I finally remember that I am a product of Ipthakir as well.

I can only make an estimated guess at my period of incarceration in the Ipthakir penitentiary. I don’t remember my previous life. It has been wiped clean like sand drawings on the beach. I don’t remember for what I was incarcerated much less for how long.

The Ipthakir penitentiary is neither heaven nor hell; it is oblivion. The tales told of it by those who have worked there abound around us. But we have given it no heed. We would rather ignore such things, thinking them inconsequential. We are all caught up in our own struggle against life and death.

Inside Ipthakir, one is kept inside a room of stone with no doors or windows. Once there you are forgotten for all time. No one comes to feed you or check up on you- there are no baths or exercises. Inside those cells there is utter silence and darkness. Even the guards, not that there are many there- there is only enough need for two or three at most, fear to enter the empty cells that wait for its new occupant. Ipthakir is where people go to cease existing.

It has been said that no one knows how many prisoners there are in Ipthakir as nobody has bothered to count them. But what one does know is that those that go in don’t come out. What comes out of that prison is not what goes in.

The Ipthakir penitentiary is said to occupy, phenomenally, 4 leagues northwest, 8 leagues southwest, 9 leagues northeast and is bounded by the sea on the southeast. As to its nominal presence one can only surmise.

The prison is infinite though bounded by material expressions of length. Its fixed lengths are said to be a mirage. The newest prisoners are always kept in the first cells from the entrance. But when the next one arrives, it is as if no one has occupied the first cell at all. It appears empty, as if it has never housed anyone in its entire life. The question of the mechanics of the prison remain unanswered. No one has made any effort to find out how this finite prison works in an infinite way. Even curiosity has walls it cannot scale.

It is said to have been created under the wishes of Pedro Garcia. He intended it to be the place of incarceration of all those who stood against him. But misfortune did not allow him to see the completion of the prison. The prison was built with the combined efforts of the Architect and the Artist. It was their inherent talent that allowed them to fashion an infinite prison with a finite appearance.

When the prison was completed these two maestros handed over the keys to Pedro Garcia’s son. He in turn handed the keys to the state, repulsed as he was by anything his father had fashioned, under the strict orders that it be used for the good of the community.

People sentenced to the prison are the vilest of the vile. Their crimes have excluded them from all the normal forms of punishments, even death. It is funny that had Pedro Garcia been alive now, he would probably have been tried and sentenced to the very prison he had commissioned.

The decision to send someone to Ipthakir takes place after a lot of consideration or so it is said. I doubt that now. The decision today seemed almost rash, even reckless. Ipthakir is the perfect place to send criminals away. It is the perfect place to hide affronts to beauty and order and then forget about them forever.

The sea in its quest for dominion over the land is the only thing that can free the prisoners of Ipthakir.  The walls of the prison erode and fall away to the constant onslaught of the sea. It frees the prisoners whose cells face a sea that they have neither seen nor heard.

No one goes after the prisoners who manage to escape by the sea. In fact no one remembers the ones who escape by sea. They are the ones who have served out their time. In Ipthakir you don’t serve out fixed periods of time like in other prisons. No, in Ipthakir you are incarcerated until the sea frees you in its slow crawl forward into the prison. The prisoners who escape are no longer a threat to the world as they are no longer themselves. They are not even a shadow of their former selves. Ipthakir is a womb.

And it is by this sea I have reached my new life.

There are no memories of Ipthakir inside me. Only this feeling of great dread whenever I try to recall something. This feeling of unease, like something happened to me there. In truth I suppose it is precisely because nothing happened to me there that I have been reborn. Whatever I was before, whoever I was… it was wiped out. Inside that cell with no light or water or food or anything….. one cannot believe in one’s existence anymore. My friend Jerome says that existence needs existence to confirm it.

In the solitude of Ipthakir, without confirmation, you cease to exist.

There are no records of me, no photos in any newspapers. I can only then surmise that I was incarcerated atleast 20 years ago. I am still very young. Jerome says that I must be in my 20’s. I do not believe I was incarcerated as a child. A child commits no crime.

Then it must be that even time loses itself inside Ipthakir.

I now lead a calm life. I work a menial job, I have friends and I follow rules. I should have no interest in things that do not concern me. Dread is my recollection of Ipthakir. Yet I feel suffocated knowing that that man, the one I saw today, will be going to Ipthakir tomorrow. He is having his last hours here on earth.

I cannot…. I will not. The right to a man’s existence is his own. I cannot let them take away what he is. He does not know what the sentence means. I must save him from oblivion. I cannot stand by mute this time.

I must prepare some things…… there is no time to loose. I will save that man.

-Rohith

Abibliophobia

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it”    ― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What he did for a living is not important for this tale.  He might have been a politician, a murderer, a post man, God himself or any one of those countless mundane things a man is forced to do to earn his daily bread. The only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that made sense, the only thing he loved, was books.

He was not a rich man and books could be expensive. But his ancestors had enough in their coffers to leave him with a mansion and just enough money for him to indulge in his obsession. And indulge in it he did. He collected books of all kinds, in every language he could understand, on every science and philosophy he enjoyed, in all genres that excited him. He collected books and he collected a lot of them. And he knew each one of them intimately, whether he has read them or not, like his children.

It was in the ballroom of his mansion where he setup his library. The library had 8-feet high wooden shelves stacked to the point of bursting with books of all shapes and sizes. The shelves were arranged in the room as if someone threw them from above while playing a game of chance, a chaotic maze. During nights, the dim lighting combined with the play of shadows between the shelves made the library a treacherous labyrinth. A maze of diabolical complexity which was enough to drive a man mad and humble him at the same time. But there was nothing more he enjoyed than getting lost in this maze, because for him it was not a mere labyrinth of bookshelves, it was a labyrinth of books, a maze of words and stories.

It was not that he didn’t know his way around his library, but rather he enjoyed those aimless wanderings. He loved to walk through the narrow alleyways the shelves made, surrounded on both sides by books. He walked casting random glances at the shelves relishing in the thread of memories that each book spine triggered. Sometimes when a book caught his eye, he used to take it out of its perch, run his thumb through the pages, read a few lines, and perhaps even smell it, winding his mind back to the time when he first read that book or casting it forward into the future, imagining that moment when he will finally read it. He didn’t know how the human brain works. But if he had to guess he would have said that it was a library. An edifice of bookshelves stacked with memories, a nexus of the past, present and future.

It was raining that night. Loud drops of rain tore through the thick blanket of darkness spread over the countryside. The incessant bombarding of drops on the window panes filled the library with the irritating chatter of glass. Unperturbed by the cacophony of nature outside, he walked between his bookshelves. He was its Theseus, its Daedalus, and he was Ariadne who had the ball of string to lead him out. But he didn’t want to be lead out, for the dreaded Minotaur, the quotidian life, was out there.  His books were his refuge from life. He wandered on enjoying the heady smell of moist air mixed with dry paper. He was looking around, searching for a book to tide him through the night. Then suddenly something caught his eye.

It was book, a green spine with gold lines traversing it. Snuggled between Goethe’s ‘Faust’ and Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ it almost seemed to wish that no one would notice it between these great works. What perplexed him was that he could not remember the book. He went near it, took it out and opened it. The book was called ‘Abibliophobia’ by Jay Garcia. He read the title and his mind hit a brick wall. He held the book in his left hand and ran his right thumb cover to cover as if to jog his memory. Nothing. There were many books in his library that he had not read, but each had a story to tell. About the blind man near his old house who used to sell used books or about the clear-out sale the local library had when they closed down. Every book he owned had a story, an origin, or so he thought.He examined its front and back covers to see if there was any clue about where it came from. He found nothing. He was irritated by his inability to recognize the book or its author, but somewhere deep inside he felt a tinge of elation. For he had found a new book, a new story, a new ball of thread, that would take him deeper into his maze.

He sat down at his table to read the book. It was a small book, a collection of three stories. Its green hard bound cover made it look twice its size. He opened the book carefully as if something rash might shatter its aura of novelty. He was an old man who had nearly exhausted his list of favorite things to read. A new story, a new book was a thing of his youth and he was extra careful not to let it go.

The first story was called ‘Funes- the murderous’. The title set off alarm bells in his head. Funes was one of his most beloved characters in literature. The sad lonely man with an indefatigable memory, whose story Borges told the world. The Funes of this story shared the same curse, the curse of memory. And to make matters worse he was a hit-man. His head did not help him forget his guilt, every kill was fresh in his mind like his last one. Every scream, every drop of blood, every plea for mercy was etched in his heart and he did have the gift of forgetting to wipe them off. Crushed by the weight of his own guilt, torn apart by the forces of duty and remorse, Funes decide to take one more life, his own. Suicide is not an easy thing for a man so accustomed to death. He couldn’t shoot himself because the scream of a young girl he once shot still rang in his ears. He couldn’t get him to hang himself for the dying gasps of a man he once strangled mercilessly were still vivid in front of his eyes. Finally he decided to take his life using a method that was not tarnished by his guilt. On a rainy night Funes sat up in his bed and popped sleeping pills one after another into his mouth. One became two, two became many and finally the number of pills he had swallowed exceeded the amount a man who wants to wake up the next day should be having. Slipping away slowly, somewhere in the murky middle ground between life, death and sleep, Funes realized that he no longer remembers what he had for breakfast or the address of his last victim.

When he finished the story he was gripped by a great sense of déjà vu. The story didn’t seem to be written by Garcia, but rather buy a pantheon of different writers, many of whose acquaintance he had made in his maze. Unnerved he proceeded to the second story.

The second story was called ‘The village of Jose Enrique’. Once again he thought that he had heard it somewhere. But he shrugged off the feeling and proceeded. The story was set in the village of Jose Enrique. It was a magical place surrounded on all sides by wheat plants twice the height of a normal man. The inhabitants of Jose Enrique were hard working people, they toiled through the seasons to harvest this gift of nature and bartered their wheat for other goods from outside. The wheat from Jose Enrique soon became famous around the world and the village economy boomed. Even when the rest of the country was hit by drought or flood, Jose Enrique stood unfazed by the whims of nature.  Then a new priest came to the village and he changed it forever. The priest spoke from his pulpit on every Sunday on how the abominations of the devil was used by man to satisfy his greed, on how God would never conceive wheat taller than men that would stand through flood and drought. The villagers already had their doubts about the opinion of God regarding their prosperity. The priest turned their apprehension into a raging fear of the divine castigation that was to befall them. The village slowly transformed from a socialist utopia to a hell hole of religion and superstition. As a final attempt at saving their souls, the villagers decided to torch the thousands of acres of wheat farms surrounding their village. The great fire of Jose Enrique raged on for twelve nights and twelve days. On the thirteenth night the inferno got out of control and incinerated every man, woman and child in the village.

He read the story in frantic pace and at the end he remembered were he had heard of Jose Enrique before. In a novel he had read long back, the protagonist stops at a village where wheat plants grew taller than men. It was a novel he loved. The presence of the village in the book made him uneasy, He felt as if the book was a sort of a collective structure of whatever he had read before. He felt his literary privacy violated, his life trampled upon. Filled with trepidation he proceeded to the next tale

The next story was called ‘Abibliophobia’. He knew that it was a term used to describe the fear of running out of books to read. He, to some extent, suffered from this illogical fear. Once again he felt the book staring back into his soul.

The story was about a library and the man who owned it. It was no ordinary library, but one of magical properties. The library possessed the power of creating books; new stories, novels, text books materialized from nowhere. The man loved his library and it seemed that the library loved him too. He could read Plato and Marx, and the next day the book shelves would sport a book about the classical underpinnings of Marxist philosophy. But one day the cosmic forces that made the library work made it stop. And it drove him mad. He was gripped by the morbid fear of one day having no more books to read. He bought more books to read, brought wizards to rejuvenate his library, pedantically went through each and every page so as to slow down his pace of reading, but all was in vain. He felt as if life had lost its meaning for he couldn’t live without reading, but he didn’t want to finish the precious little pages he had left. Disillusioned by this cruel enigma of life, realizing that the letters have abandoned him, he burns the library down with him inside it.

The last tale struck him as a wonderful one, for he found a bit of himself in the story. He too as a young man had this lingering feeling that he might run out of books to read. Every book became an agonizing ordeal because he feared the vast nothingness that awaited him after the last page. It was for this precise reason that he built his labyrinth of books. Every time the fear caught hold of him, he could look up at his shelves and be assured that the books would win the race of time against him. His imminent defeat made him happy. But he was also sad for he would not be able to read them all. That equilibrium between his mortality and the infinite nature of his books evaded him. Suspended on this thought, he dozed off…

The morning light crawled in through the window panes, sneaked between the book shelves and filled the giant room with refreshing illumination. The glistening droplets still on the window panes were a far cry from the destructive force with which rain had ran riot the night before. He was woken up by someone knocking furiously at the library door, she was screaming

“Wake up! There is someone here to see you”

Disturbed by the unnatural posture he had slept in, he made a futile effort to make sense of what was happening. But somehow he managed an almost mechanical reply

“Alright, send him in”

A few seconds passed. A young, bespectacled man opened the door. He peered in with great interest and trepidation. He approached the table slowly, one step at a time, and spoke with great difficulty as if from extreme shyness or even euphoria.

“It is such an honor to meet you sir! I have waited my whole life for this”, the visitor said in a quivering voice.

He didn’t understand what was happening, who this visitor was or the undulating admiration that filled his eyes. His perplexity was perhaps reflected on his face and this seemed to scare the visitor.

“Sorry Sir! You must be really busy. Can you just sign this for me?”

The visitor stuck out a book across the table. He took it in his hands, the book looked vaguely familiar. He opened its green hard cover to look at the title. It was ‘Abibliophobia’ by Jay Garcia. As if by habit he took his pen to sign it, opened its cap and put the nib on paper. But he had forgotten to sign his own name.

What he did for a living is not important for this tale. But perhaps he was a writer.

AJ

Isabel

The man lay on the bed with his arms over his eyes. Beside him the woman stared up at the ceiling lost in her own thoughts. The moonlight entering through the windows fell on their naked bodies. In that light both were equals in color. One wasn’t more beautiful or perfect than the other.

The man was old, 77 in fact. The woman compared to him was young. Her hair had gone gray only at the temples, the wrinkles she had were few and only helped in accentuating her beauty. They lay together on the bed but each confined to their own minds.

The corners of the man’s lips quivered in a smile. 'After many years the beast finally decides to hang up his coat.'

The woman was silent.

The man took his other hand and scratched his loins.

‘Age can do that to you.’ the woman’s voice sounded in the moonlight.

The man swung his leg out of the bed and sat there on the edge.

‘Yes. But you never expect it to come to you.’

He took a flower from the vase on the bedside table. It was from the bouquet he had brought for her. He sat there fingering it and tore each petal off.

'Is this the end?' asked the woman still not looking at him.

The man tossed the petal less stalk away.

'If it wasn’t this then another. I meant to tell you, I don’t have a job anymore. I quit the newspaper. Well more like I was fired.' the man smiled ruefully. 'The editor dropped me a subtle hint that I had outgrown my usefulness. I could either quit or wait to get fired.'

'What will you do for money?' she said sitting up on the bed and drawing her legs close to her looking at his liver spotted back.

'They gave me a small pension. They couldn’t let me go like that, after all once upon a time I was their star reporter.’ He paused.

‘Once upon a time…’ he whispered his eyes filling with tears. ‘That was a term I thought I would never use to describe myself.’

He put his hand over his eyes. She moved closer to him and rubbed his back.

He wiped his tears away and turned to look at her. ‘The pension is just enough to get me through each month. I can’t afford you anymore Isabel.'

They sat there looking at each other for some time. Then she got up off the bed and started to dress. The man still sat there watching her.

She spoke as she was pulling on her skirt 'Do you remember the first time you came to me?'

The man’s eyes shined in nostalgia. 'I remember. I was your first. You were just 15 and you were so timid and scared back then. You didn’t even look at me when I entered. Just lied on the bed turned away from the door. And when I turned you over I saw the tears that had run down your cheeks. I kissed them away. You were my first in over 3 months, the first since my wife died. And when I saw your tears I remembered her. I remembered all the nights of our marriage when I came into the bedroom and saw her crying as well.'

'You have been married twice since that. Why didn’t you stop coming to see me?’

He remained silent looking at her silhouetted against the silver light of the moon.

‘When I was very young I always wondered why you only saw me. I wasn’t all that good in bed, there were other girls that were infinitely more skilled than I, of that I was sure. And you were rich back then, you could have had anyone you wanted. Even Eliza, the queen of the most amorous dreams of men.'

She had finished dressing and was staring out of the window to the streets drowning in the moonlight. The man looked away from her silent.

'How is Melinda?'

'She is fine, doing better than me when I was her age. She inherited your wit and charm and more beauty than even her mother. She is lavished with gifts by rich men. Men bring presents to her just to have the luck of spending an hour with her. She makes her choices. She leads men around on a leash. They treat her like a queen.'

'Does she come to see you often?'

'Yes, when she can. i am her mother after all and she loves me. She brings me gifts, helps out around the house. She asked about you the other day.'

'Hm.... she is too old for teddy bears now isn’t she?'

'She always loved the gifts you gave her and she loved you as well from the bottom of her heart. She would like to see you sometime. A father’s love is eternal just like a mother’s.'

He got up and started to dress. 'I guess this is goodbye Isabel'

'It doesn’t have to be you know. You can come by sometimes. I can cook you dinner, you can stay over for the night. It’s only you nowadays. You are the only one who comes to see me. Everyone else has left.'

He stopped while buttoning up his shirt and looked at her silhouetted in the window.

'I would like that'

She turned to him and smiled.

'I love you Isabel'

'I know.'

-Rohith

The Museum of Lost Connections

I am the curator of the museum of lost connections.

I walk through this museum. I watch over it.

The light shone through the windows placed at strategic locations throughout the hall in which the curator walked. The museum was an architectural masterpiece. With minimum of artificial lighting it managed to illuminate the entirety of its vastness with the aid of the natural counterpart. This is what all homes strive for. To be part of the outside. To bring the outside to the inside without all its tedium. In the morning the halls of the museum were as brightly lit as the outside to which the curator has not ventured in many years.

‘Give me that’

A woman’s voice; not loud not echoing but soft. Permeating everywhere.

The curator turns to look behind him.

A man is running and laughing, he has something in his hands. A woman runs after him laughing yet with an expression of happy annoyance on her face. He stops and holds his clenched fist with the shadowy object aloft, high in the air. It is out of the reach of the woman. She tries to hold on to him and jump to get at the thing he is denying her. He allows her this transgression with an expression of amusement. Suddenly he brings his arms down and hugs her close to him. He looks into her eyes and she looks back momentarily forgetting his childishness. She closes her eyes,  brings her lips to his and they kiss.

The curator sees all this and wonders whose they are. He wonders how they had lost all that they had, all their tenuous yet throbbing life connections. He walks on. He has seen many in his time here.

A ball bounces across the doorway to the next hall and a child laughing runs after it. It stops near a chair. A man sits on it weeping. The child oblivious to the man picks up the ball and runs back to his mother who is waving at him to come over form the other side of the room. A hand rests on the man’s shoulders, another man materializes beside him. The crying man’s shoulders are squeezed briefly. He looks up at the man standing beside him and smiles through the grief.

They are not there. The curator knows that these are merely ethereal products of connections long disappeared. He walks on.

The museum existed as a set of vast interconnected halls brightly lit with high ceilings and red carpet walkways. In all that vastness though there was some finiteness. A small room set aside inconspicuously from the hall where the curator slept and still sleeps.

The museum had no exhibits, just empty halls. The exhibits of the museum were ethereal. It was for incorporeal strings that the museum stood for. They were everywhere and nowhere.  Not a soul walked through the museum except the curator. It was like the world, it was the world.

Once the world was filled with people that made these connections; they walked and talked and sang and danced and loved and played and more importantly… lived.

But as generation after generations of humans came into existence some found it hard to answer the question of their lives.

Been taught to live for the future than for the present, they developed a nostalgia for the past that left them unrooted. In this great confusion that swept through the hordes of humanity, many took their lives as they felt misplaced and alone. But they could not have fathomed the consequences of their decision.

People related to them, who loved these takers of their own lives, felt the effect of the passing away as well. They realized that when the myriad of people who held the other line of the string of connections died, be it brother, sister, husband, wife, son, lover, father, friend or anyone, they took something away with them, to whatever lies beyond this firmament. They through their connections with the living had taken a part of the living person’s soul. A gaping hole that could not be filled.

The living realized that they had to go after the dead to feel alive again, a contradiction but nonetheless a dictum. And so people started following their loved ones in a chain that started to stretch on and on.

Finally now only one man was left. The curator.

He sat on one of the few benches that adorned the hallways at regular intervals. He sat there and stared at the high window opposite him. The light was waning. It was already dusk.

‘Where am I?’

‘Here’ the curator replies and turns to look at the women beside him. She is thin and fragile. Her face is wrinkled a bit yet serenely beautiful in the twilight glow.

‘What time is it?

‘It’s now dear’

‘I miss you.’

He raises his arms and caresses her cheeks.

‘I miss you too.’

‘When will you come?’

He just looks at her, his eyes moist with tears.

He gets up and walks back to his inconspicuous room. He will see her. The day is not far away. He is lonely…….. beyond words.

I am the curator of the museum of lost connections.

I walk through this museum. I watch over it.

I watch over it for………..

-Rohith