Phobophobia

The shadow extends its hidden tentacles, their gray suckers smacking their lips eagerly. The table that gave birth to the shadow stands to one side, meekly watching the horror that it has unleashed. The walls retreat to a corner, like stunted spectators watching the travesty of a sitcom. I cringe and sink into the floor, but the tentacles seem to be unaware of spatial dimensions. There is a horrible noise, like a heap of shit belching. The hair on my skin stands up straight, not being able to withstand the suction.

Fear grips the heart like a cold steel glove. The chill spreads to the spine faster than bad news. Words are morbid. Taint. Torment. Macabre. Hideous. A darkness that seeps in from the back parts of the brain unleashes images of horror. Death. Insanity. Expulsion. Rejection. Failure. Paucity.

Don't cross the road - the car with its powerfully lit eyes and a leering radiator grill will throttle you to death. Keep off the lawn. Don't touch the fence. Choking hazard. Highly inflammable. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Stick no bills. No parking. No entry. Highly toxic.

We surround ourselves with symbols of fear. We take pride in being afraid. These images of fright are everywhere, encompassing everyone in an all-permeating fear. There is even a fear of using a different verb other than 'grips' with 'panic'. Society's tentacles with their masked suckers suck our inherent ammunitions against fear.

Paranoia. It scares me.

Calm writer home from heaven

There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar,
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron

Writing this fresh from memory is not easy. The images are still cascading, still trying to find their place in the huge jigsaw puzzle that will eventually be my reference for my Coorg trip. I am sitting right now on a cold floor, the sludge from the hills still not dry on my knees, and the keys on the keyboard look like enormous mountains, every single one of them. Enormous, mist-covered mountains.

Just ten hours ago, I was standing at this crossroads. The path behind led to a deeper and darker part of the bamboo forest all around me. The path to the left led further down upriver towards more trees. The squiggly line of dirt to my right disappeared around a boulder that had a velveteen sheen to it thanks to the moss. Straight ahead was the river, muddy and fierce. I stretched out my arms and let the scene wash over me, drenching me to my very core that was already drenched by the steady but mild showers. The rain brought alive the forest, making it look like an Amazonian dream. The whole region was so sensuous that even the clouds seemed to be ejaculating constantly.

Among all the TV commercials that captured my imagination when I was a kid, the best probably was the Old Spice commercial with these clean-shaven men bravely and joyously rafting down a churning white river. That, to me, was adventure. It was the high-point of any happy, balanced life. The kid-me knew then that if I ever rafted down a river, I would be going the right way. Cauvery had always been the river I associated with religion and festivals and temples. And though I knew Cauvery river-rafting was happening, I could never work that into my image of Cauvery that always flowed past temples in maroon and white and where brahmins did their sandhyavandhanam. That notion was happily shattered and sent into oblivion as I paddled vigorously against the rapids, dodging the boulders. Pity I have a beard.

What has nature to teach me? Was nature ever a teacher? Why do visions of mountains and streams and forests move my inner being? Being there felt like coming into my inheritance. Travel is a sound - a desperate cry resounding throughout the umbilical cord I share with the earth.

A murder mystery

A random beginning of a random murder mystery. Might turn into something...

One step inside the house and I knew that the news was seriously bad. There was a darkness in the house - not the palpable black, not the absence of light - just a lingering darkness. I could even sense the inspector's uneasiness. The lights were on - yellow lamps set at artistic intervals so that the place seemed to be lit by glowing torches rather than electric lamps. Right then, the effect was to amplify the shadows, to make them appear like savages dancing around a corpse.

One of the shadows belonged to Ruchika, Guru's wife. Her tall and usually-beautiful frame showed signs of agitation and shock. Her eyes met mine and for a second, I could sense her need to have a friendly soul near. But that was not to be. The inspector was interested in ushering me out of the hall and into the bedroom.

This was the scene of the crime, no doubts about it. It reeked of death, just in the neat arrangement of the room. Everything here was morbidly clean. The books were at right angles to the edges of the table, the clothes hung like extremely well-behaved gentlemen in a cannibal's butcher shop and the drapes refused to sway inspite of the heavy rain and winds outside. It is in a room like this that church organ music would usually rise to a crescendo. But there was no sound. Even the rain seemed muted from this room. Of course, all this were perepheral observations. What struck me as soon as I entered the room was the rather unusual angle Guru's corpse was making with the wall.

The scene was not particularly grotesque. Atleast, not in the way usually murder scenes are. There was something artistic about the way the kitchen knife was sticking out of Guru's forehead - like an evolution of Rodin's Thinker. The final outcome of the inner struggle in the form of a knife through the brain. What was scary about the whole thing was that the eyes did not look lifeless. There was nothing glazed about them. They still had the powerful, penetrating vision. Guru was intensely frowning at me while pondering upon a knife.

Another curious thing was that the room did not smell. There was nothing in the room to suggest a corpse but the corpse.

"Inspector, when did the murder take place?"

"About fifteen minutes ago."

Fifteen minutes. Just fifteen minutes ago a brutal randezvous had taken place right here. The time felt so near, almost as if I could just reach out and caress that moment. Just one step backward and I might be able to see it.

"Who-"

"That's what I am here for, sir. I would like it if you could answer some questions."

"What? Here?"

"Why not?"

I hesitated. It was not fear. It was something else. That creepy feeling of being watched. By Guru. No. Not Guru. The corpse.

"Can you tell me where you were fifteen minutes ago?"

"I was in my apartment!"

"How long had you been there?"

"What's the meaning of this? Are you suspecting me?"

"I have to suspect everyone. That's my job. Now, how long had you been there?"

"Not for long. I had been to my agent to discuss business. He lives in Benson Town and he can verify to this."

He had only started suspecting me and I was already giving alibis. His gaze was accusatory but I supposed that must come with the job. Or may be, it was one of the requirements of the job.

"I will see to it," he said, and his tone was such that I could make no mistake that he would see to it. His eyes were like steel, heavy and hard as he seemed to scan me. "How do you know the victim?"

"Guru? Me and Guru are good friends. Were. We used to work together at Wipro before I quit the place two years ago."

"Why did you quit?"

"How does that matter?"

"Just curiousity."

"I quit because I was getting tired of the mundane existence. I took up a career in writing and I have published one book." My one book. From the way things were going, a second book did not seem likely. I was degenerating with the failure of that one book.

I didn't expect him to pursue that line of questioning further. To a policeman like him, any information that is about books and music cannot have anything to do with a murder. I should have enlightened him on Munch and Gogh. On Dali and da Vinci.

"Do you suspect anyone?" he asked me.

"No. I don't. I mean, this is way beyond my everyday grasp of things. Something this surreal only happens in my stories. I have no idea what to do right now." My words were getting dumber and faster. I could sense my grasp of events go beyond my control. I knew I was panicking because I was not being articulate.

"How well do you know Ms Ruchika?"

"She, uh, she is a good friend of mine. I met her through Guru. All three of us regularly hang out together, you know. We keep meeting almost every other day."

It felt like talking to one of the really old computers that took forever to come up with an answer. The inspector seemed to carefully dissect every syllable and read what he could from them.

"Okay. Please do not leave this house until I have clarified further things. Till then, you can stay here."

For a minute, I thought he was going to force me into staying in that room with the corpse. At that time, the possibility did not seem laughable. Till a few minutes ago, he was Guru. Now, it was the corpse that could turn into a zombie and kill me. All my childhood hallucinations of monsters under the bed were reborn in the form of a Guru dressed in clown clothes and coming towards me slowly in that dimly-lit room, with the knife sticking out of his forehead and the inspector urging him on and laughing at my whimpering. I then realised that he was referring to just my physical presence in the house. I turned to go.

"One more thing." I stopped dead in my tracks. "What was your first book about?"

"It was about travel. About the inner journey of the soul. A travel-fiction. What does that have anything to do with this case?"

"Even the most bizarre, seemingly unconnected events can have a bearing on this murder, sir."

"Right." I walked out of the room and headed towards the bathroom.

Deconstruction

A short story...

Gentlemen! I have the most unbelievable story to tell you.

The above words can be visualized as follows: A Victorian house with heavily-mustached men sitting around a fire while one tall, lean, clean-shaven man stands in front of the fireplace and addresses the gathering - probably talking about his escapades when with the British Raj in India. Or, it could be a much travel-worn sergeant just escaped from the jungles of Vietnam, sitting at his debriefing session and recounting his experience at Phnom Penh. Or, it could be the broke-private eye, talking to his clients about his cracking of the case. Please note that the murderer could be in the crowd of listeners as well.

Gentlemen! I have the most unbelievable story to tell you...

Well, I did have a story tell you and it was on this blog for a while. But stories, like humans, not only write themselves but also erase themselves. This one did too. Mainly because I found it to be too abstract for public consumption. Every writer must do stuff like these to fill up the 'trivia' section on him in Wikipedia. So, here's one for the books!

People with stories

Two people were having a conversation next to me. Two people in an office, from their cubicles.

To recollect the exacts of that conversation would be a tough task even five seconds after that exchange. It went along the lines of:

"Did you try to do it using the New Java Applet Package?"
"No. We had decided to take the old route of finding a backdoor and trying to loop the program from in there."
"But don't you think it would have been easier to try the AOD?"
"And not to mention that Server 2000 guidelines. We did it the wrong way."
"It's like Heisenberg's Uncertainity!"

What I heard, for the first time, was not esoteric mumbo jumbo but life. They were having fun with it, discussing their programs and their technologies. It was their dream. I could see them, standing in the middle of their respective homes and happily thinking back to this moment. There would be mental black-and-white photographs of these moments, of such a perfect setting for the important episodes of their lives. If their lives were to be made into movies, these would be the scenes picked for a slower playback with beautiful music in the background when the movie ends. The scenes where they find stories.

I have the script all figured out for the biopic on me. I know how it should end. Slow Scottish bagpipes in the background. I am walking on a busy, crowded street as the camera zooms out from behind me while the bagpipes drone on. A slow flash of white light and a shot of me laughing at a joke at a coffee shop with a late-afternoon sun behind me. Flash. A shot of me kissing a girl under starlit skies. Flash. I am looking out of a train window with huge mountains in the background. Flash. I am jamming with friends in a Bombay apartment, with rain-clad clouds and jazz and smoke and vada pav and mini tea. Flash. I am walking all alone, in the extremely crowded street while the bagpipes reach a crescendo.

I am able to see other people's perfect scenes. I can see them moving in slow motion during these times for posterity. I can see them fixing my position in their world so as to get the picture right.