A Suicide Letter

A suicide note is an unfair way of having the last word in the argument. But it is the unimaginative that would leave the party without a punch-line. To have the screen drop without an encore seems like a betrayal of the entire act. So, forgive me for dragging the epilogue. If you are reading this, I am obviously dead. Thus, you must also know how I did it.

The most effective way to commit suicide, it seems, is to use a .38 caliber revolver and shoot the back of the head – somewhere just behind the ear. The brain bits would be all over the place, the head slumped sideways – perfectly positioned to land a slot on the prime time news channel. Utterly painless and utterly déclassé. Not my style.

I would have loved to jump off a cliff – very much like The Fool in the Tarot deck. The symbolism would have been complete – not to mention the joy of succumbing to the ultimate temptation of the precipice. But poison seemed the most aesthetically pleasing, spiritually satisfying option. I now belong to that elite company that has sipped the Shiva Merlot – I now rub shoulders with Socrates. The intentional symbolism here too was satisfying. The act of drinking to see new visions is an old, archaic practice. The ancient king Raghu drank the divine cow’s milk to see the way to the heavens. The True Guru gave Kabir bhang to open up the existential bubble.

To say that no one is responsible for my death would be to deny the interconnectedness of everything in the universe. It would have been a shame had I lived without making anyone responsible for my actions. It would have been a deliberate attempt at understating the influence of some exceptional men and women in my life. But in these paranoid times, even a dead man has to censor his words to please the frightened masses. So, let me forgo literary embellishments for political correctness. No one is responsible for my death.

The frugal setting in which my body must have been found might have given you the idea that poverty was the reason for my death. But I had never considered money to be the yardstick of the quality of life. Nor was the reason something as shockingly refreshing as a failed love affair. I believe such cases are a rarity these days. No excruciatingly painful diseases either. In fact, I could dance around here all day like Rumpelstiltskin, and you would never guess.

I did it because I wanted to be the only person to have used Rumpelstiltskin’s name in his suicide letter.

With much love,
Formerly Anonymous

You may say I'm a Dreamer

“Many, many happy returns of the day!”

 

As far as dreams go, this one was certainly lame. There was no surrealism in the events that unfolded after the pronouncement of that statement. ‘Unfolded’ seems to imply an unfurling in the past, when it actually happened outside time. And space. Our consciousness is no more limited by the now than it is limited by the skull. Thought does not happen in the corrugated alien surface of the brain. Awareness is not an electric spark that arches from the medulla oblongata. Reality is the self. The universe is an idea – and not a well thought out one at that.

 

People that know me are not surprised that I keep writing about dreams. For reasons that are perceived by various individuals simultaneously as laziness, cowardice, deviant behavior, complacency, introspection and imagination, my love for these visions of alternate realities are known to many, if not understood.

 

The fogginess of a dream is purely retrospective. Furthermore, though it is often diagnosed as a cataract in the mind’s eye brought on due to the supposed linearity of time, the haze is purely the result of ignorance and a refusal to be awed.

 

My birthday party is held in an all-girls’ school. I am slightly irked by my assumption that I would automatically enjoy revelry in the presence of pheromones flowing like tiny rivulets down a mountain hirsute with sage and oak. It is the cafeteria, and the other tables are occupied completely by teasing teams of teens tickled by the thought of testosterone. None of them look at our table, preferring to ignore the rather raucous party thrown to celebrate my birthday – which it isn’t.

 

Sitting right across me is you, happy and mischievous. You love such parties – not because you enjoy being part of such social extravaganza, but rather due to your propensity to come up with fabulous one-liners and sharp retorts. It is only the unimaginative that would leave the party without a punch-line, you think.

 

Two others are here too – but what good is it in trying to paint their faces for you? They could be anybody. They could be my brothers, or my sisters. They could be elves or Martians. Their heads could be oblong or ovoid. They are fillers – twenty-second commercials. They provide the comic relief in a humorous play. They shout and cackle like the heroine’s friends in a Hindi movie. They are here for the cake and the ambience.

 

Breezing through the throng of a million more girls entering the cafeteria is your friend. I do not know him. He is my mentor. He holds a tray full of what ought to be tequila shots. Up close, the tray is empty. And I am drunk.

 

“What whiskey was it?” asks my mentor.

 

I struggle to remember. “The name had something to do with a shore. Ivory Coast, Green label?"

 

You let out a snort. Incidentally, snorting is rather difficult to do. You can easily swallow your spittle and choke on it. And snorting is very unbecoming too. It sounds like an immoral guffaw.

 

“Mulberry Coast! How can you forget?” You are scandalized and amused that my knowledge of elite whisky is still not as incomplete as yours. The girls are laughing – like thousands of metal dishes eloping. Like millions of angry fiddles bitching about cats.

 

“And now,” says the unfamiliar mentor with a flourish. There ought to be a cape and a handlebar moustache jostling with that flourish. “And now, for your gift!”

 

A man seated amidst the gaggle of girls undergoes spontaneous combustion. If I can save the man, the girls would shower me with French kisses. I approach the burning man and he stares me down.

 

“Pitiful,” murmur the three or four comic goons at our table. The mentor shakes his cape mournfully and departs. When one is mournful, one doesn’t just leave. One departs.

 

Standing to my right is a dog. I pet him.

 

“Really?” he asks before bounding away.

 

Pitiful.