The Weeping Waters

Sometimes, in my flashes of forgetting, I couldn’t remember the first time I had slit her skin.

She told me there was no first time. No first of its kind. No beginnings. She introduced me to her realm of déjà vu — where all beginnings kept repeating from time immemorial.

Blood was her expression of déjà vu. Recurrence.

Her blood was strangely cohesive. They sprang from the association of her being, defied the gravity and froze somewhere in the air. They captured a block of air in my room and made a home. When the sunrays touched them, the red droplets kept glowing for a few hours until they turned brown. Drying. The patches kept lingering in intangible spaces of my room. They smelled of the sea.

Her blood was also volatile. I could remove the strains of the brown blood from my undiluted air by simply holding the burning end of my cigarette beneath it. And see them fade like my memories. But I’d never be able to take a puff of those used cigarettes, ever again. Their taste would change. And they smelled of the sea.

In the centre of her solitude, I had found a dusk. The red seawaters. The setting sun. She walked towards it. As I sat on the shore, I watched her from behind. I couldn’t help noticing the details. She walked straight. She moved farther away from me; closer to the sea. Her pace was constant, as was the rhythm of her footsteps. She stepped into the wet sand, then to the shallow waters and then to a place where the waves broke. Slowly, into her unchanging rhythm, I discovered two personal disturbances – One, was the realization that she’d never stop. The other, a question that I needed to ask her.

So, I got up and ran behind her. I reached near her. And even in my ever accumulating forgetting, I remember holding her right palm with my left hand. Perhaps, it’s the instinct. The instinct of feeling her warm skin. The instinct of touching her cold solitude. Her unwavering stance. She didn’t turn her eyes away from the sun, even for once, as I held her hand. She didn’t speak.

And therefore, I started walking with her towards our sun. We walked deeper into the sea.

When the sea had almost reached our neck, the sun suddenly sank completely into the sea, leaving some fading traces of red to the horizon. She suddenly, pulled her hand away from mine and started running towards the shore.

When she reached the shore she set her body free to crumble on the wet sand. As her body fell on the sand, it got fragmented and scattered into the sand. All over the places. I tried to collect the pieces when I reached near her. That was the time too, when I’d ask her the question, for the answer of which, I had wanted to save her. And only for the answer.

“Why do you want to die?”

She had opened her eyes slowly, making me realize for the first time that they were closed until then. I don’t remember if that would be one of our recurring first meetings. The beginnings of déjà vu. Maybe, my voice was unknown to her, as was my face. Faces. None of these occurred to me before she looked at me. But she looked at me as if she had known me for centuries and my asking of such a question was too common a fact. As if I’d been asking her the same question since so long a time that the answer wasn’t really important anymore.

But it was important for me to know. To ask.

“Why do you want to die?”

I repeated.

And I remember that repetition. Resounding. On the walls of my forgetting. Perhaps, she had answered me. Maybe, she hadn’t. But the question had become the way she wanted it to be. Unanswerable. Constant. Flowing. Like the red seawater. And her own blood.

She had come out of the sea one moonlit night. Naked and bleeding.

She had slit herself beneath her neck and above her breasts. Droplets of the sea played all over her body. Running down. Crashing, jostling, mingling, magnifying. Making its way through them was a stream of blood.

I never knew the origin of her blood. Was it her body or the sea? And were the sea currents so strong that they’d cut through her skin? She seemed wet. Drenched. She hadn’t seemed so wet that dusk, when she returned from the sea. Tonight, it seemed she too would melt down into her own bloodstains and flow back into the sea. And somehow, that leave-taking of hers seemed oddly perpetual. Recurrent.

However, she didn’t leave that night. She fell asleep beside me on the shore. I kept lying there beside her and watched her. I don’t remember how long I’d been looking at her. I don’t remember when I fell asleep beside her. And I don’t remember what those strange dreams meant. I felt someone was playing with my body. Slitting my skin. Making love to me….. whom I couldn’t see. I just couldn’t get my eyes open.

Next morning when I woke on the shore, half-naked, I found out my body had been disassembled. With pieces lying on different parts of the shore. And suddenly, I was not one but many.

When in my room, she wouldn’t let me turn off the light. She wanted to see her own blood.

“You know I can’t cry.” She’d always say handing me the razorblade, “Let my body weep the blues.”

I’d do as she said. She’d sit mute. Watching the blood flow down her skin.

She said her blood were also the memories of things that had been and things about to come. Of things that should’ve never been or would ever be. She said blood were her weeping waters. An ablution of difficult times. A difficult nation. She said. Silently.

Amidst all my collective forgetting, I remember one night. Distinctly. We were sitting on the shore.

“I wish you’d let me slit your mind too sometimes.” I told her.

“Nothing but my body belongs to me.” She answered “My mind belongs to everybody else.”

“Don’t you believe in yourself?”

She smiled looking at me as I said this. Somehow, that smile didn’t look natural on her face. And then she said something that even my celebrated amnesia couldn’t take away from me –

“The man I loved had been a soldier. He kept fighting when he had none of his comrades left beside him. In the end he fought not because he had any hopes of winning, because he couldn’t return unless dead. Because retreat is shame. In the end, perhaps, there was only one bullet that pierced right through his heart. It never mattered where the bullet came from. Actually, he had slit his own skin, his own heart too, to be called a hero.”

She paused for a while looking at the dark sea, then continued –

“Self. Belief in myself. Where does a self begin? Inside a body or outside? Inside one’s family, one’s culture, one’s society? Is self an individual term, isolated from others? And where are the places that our ’selves’ reside? My mind belongs to everybody else. And I can’t help but slit my skin. Cause that’s what we are meant to do. In our growing up years, we’ve been taught to become sadists and masochists. I can’t help it. We can’t.”

She started screaming. The music of the sea broke into her screams. Creating silence. Breaking it. And creating it all over again.

That scream would later be her salvation, too. As she would learn to step out of herself. Detachment. The only form of serenity.

And I wished her scream would be louder, shriller, harsher than it had been. So that all of us could have listened to its broken melody too. Resounding and filling up the nooks and corners of the streets. The town. The land. The world. The heart.

The feelings of déjà vu.

The Thriller Novel

1

The cops came looking for the summer breeze. They turned everything I had in my room upside down.
“This place’s so dirty”, one said holding his handkerchief firmly on his scarred nose “don’t you ever do the dusting?”
“Not since she left.” I said
“What is it exactly that made her leave?”
“I don’t know. She said she had seen me making love to the summer breeze.”
“….. which is true?”
“Depends.”
“What?”
“I said, it depends.”
“What d’ya mean….. depends on what?”
“On the circumstantial evidences. Are you going to arrest me now or should I go and finish the painting? I’ve an art exhibition tomorrow.”

2

Voices played inside her head even when she sat on the roof. Voices she couldn’t discriminate. Nor own.
At times she wondered if they were the voices of all the people she had killed.
“Is it you, Kelly?” she’d ask.
“No. I cannot be there inside your head.” Kelly would answer.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve never killed me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m still alive. And I’m sure that I’m living somewhere.”
“Oh Kelly, please forgive me. I’m so sorry. I just can’t seem to differentiate the living from the dead, anymore.”
And then, the voices would disappear. What would follow is the terrific silence. The silence in which she’d wish she’d once again get to kill someone.
“Who?” she thought.
Moments later, she shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter. Blood needs no calculation.”

3

In his childhood, he’d make exact errors on every mathematical problem he was told to solve. Even his teacher was baffled.
“You need infinite imaginations to make such absurd calculations.” She’d say.
And it was not an exaggeration. Each of his mistakes was carefully calculated. So well crafted that the possibility of any other error but the one he had committed would be nullified. His teacher would have to go through the heaviest of books in permutations and probability, and yet she had nothing to prove him wrong. It was impossible to be wronger than him. Because English had never defined a word called ‘wronger’.
“One problem could have exactly one perfect error” he’d say, “nothing less, nothing more. Once you get to it, you can feel the beginning of all fallacies.”
That is exactly how he had learnt to paint.
“A painting is the mathematics of distances….. between the root and the tree, between the bird and the sky, between the color and its absence, between the river and that drop of tear on the man’s cheek. And you could infuse movement in it once you discover the perfect error in it. All of us were nothing more than a painting until god made the perfect error. He made Eve do the same too, to introduce the concepts of reproduction. There could be no creation without the perfect error. It’s hidden in everything to be discovered. It’s just that we never do so because we have been taught to be afraid of errors. When we land into an error, we are told to learn something from it so as not to return to it. Instead, if we were to delve deeper into the error we’ve made, we’re bound to find the perfect error. And we would find natural creations. All my paintings linger in the glory of the perfect errors.”
He had written a book once called ‘Human and Fallacy’, but whoever started reading it said they couldn’t find its end. They said the book repeated itself with the page number being in a perpetual ascending order.

4

When your corpse was brought in my house, you had turned your head and smiled at me. So happy that I could recall you.
“Well, I’ve to do something ‘bout you, else you’d start leaving your stench on my paintings. Where would you like to stay?”
“In your garden.”
“That place’s already congested with the trees you had planted last summer.”
“Don’t worry. I’d find my place down the roots.”
“Who did this to you?” I said looking at your wounds, “you’re bleeding profusely.”
“Oh! Let’s not talk ‘bout that.”
“I wish I had some medicines. I’ve also misplaced my first-aid kit.”
“So….. you still care?”
“I’m….. I’m just afraid of blood.”
“Those are not your words”, you whispered.
We both smiled. I could sense my heart beating faster as I did.

5

The cops came in the evening. They said they’d like to question her about the murder.
“Murder! What murder?” I asked, taken by surprise.
“Don’t you know, she was killed?”
“What’re ya talking ‘bout?”
“Yes. She was. And you are one among the suspects’ list. Now, if you don’t mind, can I talk to her?”
“But I’ve already buried her.”
“Don’t worry. Our men would bring her here. Where’s the shovel?”
And thus, you were brought, still smelling of the wet mud that covered most of your skin.
“Gosh! Didn’t he even think of giving you a coffin?” The cop asked you.
Meanwhile, I thought of the rain that fell this afternoon. And the maddening fragrance of the first wet mud. The Frenzy.

6

Their first meeting was a mistake that repeated itself, ad infinitum, like the book he had wrote. He had been sitting that evening in the shade of the summer breeze. And he had been painting the summer breeze. For the last few hours he had been mixing the different shades of the colors. Waiting for a perfect error that would create the exact shade of the summer breeze.
She came following the summer breeze. Since the summer breeze went right through his paintings, she passed through his paintings too. Later, when his painting was completed, since he didn’t know her, he mistook her for the summer breeze. It was a perfect error – The beginnings of the perfect love story. And the beginning, as she had told elsewhere, does not lead to an end, but create newer beginnings. Perhaps, there was never a first time when they had met. There was only a sequence of moments – each preceded by some and followed by the other. And each time, for him, she was the summer breeze.
Each time, she’d pass away like colors on his drying palette. He wished his paintings were yet to be completed, forever and evermore. But time did to his paintings what a full-stop would always do to a phrase. For time was always the hole in both the barrier and the bridge to the accumulating moments. And then, to set them free, like birds from a cage, in a kiss.
“Too much of a perfect error in there”, he thought. She nodded.

7

After you completed the bath, we all sat on the porch talking. The cops took the lead.
“Do you remember the events that preceded the killing?” they asked you.
“Yes, I was with him, making love.” You answered pointing towards me.
“Okay. That sure is news to me. You never informed us of any such incident, sir.”
I was given a harsh glance with that statement. However, I couldn’t make out if an answer was wanted of me…. And what exact answer was wanted of me…. And who wanted it. I fumbled a little.
“I liked you a lot better the day before yesterday, sir. I thought you were much smart then. Which reminds me – how was your art exhibition?”
I could sense the sarcasm flying in the air. A few drops of darkness were assembling in the horizons. It was much too silent in my garden. Exceedingly calm. I knew this atmosphere well. I knew she had wished to come. She had wished too long. And nobody stops her when she wishes thus. None.
The summer breeze is coming. She had sensed the break in the rhythm of my breath. She had sensed my heartbeat as I sat with the cop and, more importantly, you. She had sensed that I was trying to defend your point of view. She knew I’d fall. Fall down the edges. Of my Frenzy. Our home. Frenzy. I had refurbished. Frenzy. With her. And I was about to stumble. To fall. If she doesn’t come. The edges were calling me again.

8

The first time they had made love to was to the fragrance of the approaching storm. Few of his paintings that were on paper, were fluttering. Creating a sound of liberty. They knew that they must cover themselves up before the storm. He knew he had to set the summer breeze free before the storm. And she knew she would lose to herself.
The first sounds of the storm were unmistakable. The first dissociation, unavoidable.
She left, you stayed.
Still beneath the weight of incomplete recognition you lied. Looking into your blank eyes. Without the shine. Lifeless. You were never the summer breeze. You were her gown. The robe she wore before she came to meet her lover.
They made love in the storm, that dusk. Dusts converging on their eyelids. Rain washing them through. Rain washing his paintings, too.
“You must come back to me”, he said “for without you she’s faceless.”
You had smiled, darkly.
You will never be her but I shall keep being him. It was an error that never seemed perfect enough.

9

You never wanted to open the window to her, last night.
“Own me, not her. Make me your soul”, you said while she whispered on your glass window-pane. Your closed windows trembled on her sweet, cold touch.
“Let her in, Kelly”, I said moving my fingers through your hair. “Let her in, if you love me.”
And I found your eyes becoming just as hazy as your glass window-pane. But tears always meant you’d listen. You got up and opened the window to her. And as you stood motionless like a shadowy figure in front of the window, I found the summer breeze glowing on your skin and the shine returning to your eyes.
And I was once again becoming him.
“Tonight, I’ll hide”, she said, “and you shall find me in the deepest of her chasms.”
I accepted her challenge. Our love shan’t be confined to the shackles of skin. I slit your skin in the places she could be. You never made a sound – telling me she wasn’t there. Whole night long I kept on searching but couldn’t find her.
I was losing my perfection in erring.

10

“Do you trust him?” the cops asked you.
“Not half as much as he trusts me”, you said
“But he had killed you, last night.”
“No. He had killed her.”
“Her?”
“The summer breeze.”
It was true. For even though the atmosphere had every sign of her arrival, the summer breeze didn’t come that evening. She was dead. You had made me commit the perfect error. I felt defeated. How I wished I would kill you, too. But I couldn’t. It was impossible. You were never there inside yourself. You always lived somewhere else. Inside me.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical

A River Measured in Time

Alberto Banks had been saving all his life. He wanted to buy a river.

As a child, he had been given a ribbon by his father. A blue ribbon. His father was always this strange man who would scrutinize his past much more spontaneously than he would do with his future. When he had brought the ribbon for his child, he would have seldom thought what the boy would do with a ribbon. The consequences of his actions were never quite as important as the precedence of the consequence itself. When he handed over the ribbon to little Alberto and noticed his confused expression, he wondered why he had bought it on the first place. He wondered whether he had done it subconsciously. He wondered what particular knack or interest had he noticed in little Alberto which could have prompted him into an action so decisive for the child.

“This is a magic ribbon”, he said at last “if you spread it, it’d become as long as the river.”

His father’s words were just as unmindful or irrelevant as was his buying of the ribbon – once again, in total oblivion of the collective future of the child. But for little Alberto it was the greatest of prophecies ever been foretold. He had no idea till then as to how long a river is or for that matter, should be. It had never occurred to his little brain what a terrific mystery it might hold in itself. A river that could be measured in ribbons. The feeling itself was so big that little Alberto was too afraid to open the ribbon and roll it to be seen. “It is a great gift and must be dealt with lots of responsibilities” – is what he realized. He just went and hugged his father, who watched with great amusement how his child’s confused expression changed to something immeasurable.

It was from that day that little Alberto slept with the ribbon under his pillow. And he dreamt all night long. He watched, in his dreams, a river which was more like a brook. At its center was a blue ribbon stretched from the misty infinity from where the river originated to an equally hazy eternity to which it went. The ribbon ran right from its middle, as if dividing the two parts of the water, parallel to the flowing river. And that imagery was so intensely beautiful that every morning when little Alberto’s father would wake up he would find his child’s room fragrant with an aroma of his dreams. Sometimes it would rid him of his asthma, as he let his child sleep late into the morning. Slowly, it became the only medicine he would take for his ailment and he had never been healthier.

One night in his dreams, little Alberto noticed that the two equal parts in which the ribbon had divided the river were of different colors. It was the setting sun. One of its parts was red like someone had mixed, with uncertain ease, the deepest of bloods. The other part was yellow – a dirty yellow as if all its water was drenched in malaise before it was let into the river. For the first time little Alberto was experiencing a nightmare. And a premonition. That morning when little Alberto’s father came to his room, he found his child sweating profusely as he lied trembling in a fever and there was a stench of rotting flesh in the room. At once, his attack of asthma returned. This was the moment when he should have run for some medicines left in his cupboard for such emergencies. This was the last chance he had of changing little Alberto’s life….. But, as we said before his father was seldom concerned about the consequences. He didn’t want to leave the motherless child alone in his fever. And so, he let himself die, comfortably, as he watched his child still trembling in his nightmares. It was so cruel of him to leave his child alone in the very first of his nightmares, for even when little Alberto would break out of his sleep the nightmare would continue.

Alberto Banks doesn’t remember what happened in the next few days, but he recalls that it was in the womb of those dark hours that he lost the magic ribbon, forever, without it being opened even for once.

Alberto Banks had been saving all his life. He wanted to buy a river.

He had been to many rivers all throughout his life but had never found one that was much like the one in his childhood dreams. Alberto Banks was an old man now who lived with an equally aged wife. His children were married and lived in a far-off town. He had inherited the same asthma that had taken his father’s life. He was sure it would take his too. But before he died he wanted to complete his dream. He wanted to buy a river. His wife wanted to buy gifts for their children with the money.

“We’d leave back the river as a gift for them”, he told her

“What would they do with a river?” she asked

“The river I’m talking ‘bout is the magical river. It is the healer of all diseases. It brings with itself the gifts of immortality.”

“But don’t you see you’ve spent all your life looking for it. How much longer do you wish to keep looking for it?”

“Till I die….. and I cannot die till I find it.”

And so Alberto Banks decided to do what he had never done throughout his life. He decided to buy ribbons of different shapes, colors and size. Then, he spread them on his floor, hoping that they would give him some hint as to where he might find the river. The ribbons tangled with each other, forming a diverse shape, intermingling with one another.

“Perhaps, the river I’m looking for is a maze”, it suddenly occurred to him, “maybe, that’s why I couldn’t find it in all these years.”

“Or maybe….” It occurred to him subsequently, “We’re living inside a maze and the river is just outside. Maybe, the river is an object in time rather than in space. Maybe, the river crosses itself so many times that even though we see it we fail to notice it in our linear search. Maybe, the river in actuality is cyclic.”

And as he climbed the staircase of realizations, he found that the river was slowly becoming visible to him. Yes, it was the magic river with the blue ribbon flowing from its center. He wanted to get down inside the river and leave all his money into its sacred waters. He wanted to scream “you’re mine”. He wanted to go and touch the ribbon that divided the water…… but before he could do any of these, he woke up.

When he woke up, little Alberto found the corpse of his father lying on the floor. He put his hand under the pillow on which he slept and found the blue ribbon that he had never opened, was still there, intact. Exhaling a deep breath of relief, he smiled.

The Abstract, The Unreal, The Magical