* Morti

Quel est son nom? (My maiden effort at blogging although cannot say the same about writing though .... here, my first complete work!!)

As he lay there, slowly bleeding to death, his mind had quickly done a rewind of his memory and was rushing through all those happy things (which were pitifully few) all those torments (quite a lot that he could have done without, which were also in part due to his over-imaginative mind!) the in-betweens, everything, but he was hardly aware. He was like an underdeveloped person who, sitting amid the bustle of a busy street with all its comings and goings, is hardly aware of the world moving on without him, gaping wide eyed at all those small things that we think are inconsequential but of which we were aware of once in our childhood (the fact that these kids are a whole lot smarter and contended than us is another topic for another day).People circled around him, somebody administered CPR, somebody called for an ambulance, somebody puked. He was unaware, and slowly as his life force ebbed away from him, his parting thought was, “Anywhere but here, please god, anywhere but here!!” He was 20 but the lines on his face announced anything but. He was dead, at last. Don’t pity him for his early death, yet. One of my favorite authors had this thing to say about long life, “You may never know whether it is salvation or damnation” or something like that. Same goes for an early death. It is not always an “unfinished business” with favorite haunts or spooked family and friends. You don’t have to spend some 100 years living to become worldly wise nor do you die an innocent waif if you manage to live only for one quarter of the century or lesser.

Life needn’t always be brutal in a physical sense. I know that many people would agree with me if I say mental health is far more important than limbs. Am sure a quadriplegic with a positive thought process would be more contended with his/her life than a limbed counterpart, but again, I may be wrong. Denial, loss or disappointment (any or all of these) may drive a human to a point of extreme decision, however inconsequential the original event was. It is all about aggravation of spirit and it might as well be the last straw on the camel’s back. So, what is this aggravation business?

Searching for the light switch in a dark room, with your finger traversing the otherwise unknown terrain of your switchboard is an event, to actually have a lizard/centipede/a stray plug wire caress the back of your hand is aggravation. The point of extreme decision comes when this aggravation is accompanied by wind buffeted curtains, your coat hung on a hanger billowing in the same draft. You know? I have a confession to make here. People who are short-sighted suffer more from this excessive imagination syndrome than normal people, because you have to imagine a lot of stuff when you are alone in ur bed, your vision blurry, frozen stiff due to some apparition (the thought that it might be ur curtain never once crossing your mind, add to it the shadow of a branch from a tree outside and leaves …. enough enough) your spectacles some 2 feet away from your reach, but you just don’t want to break that charm, once you move, the figure would also move, somehow, it may see this movement as hostile and would take up matters in its own claws (gulp!) and proceed for a slow and painful disembowelment! I digress.

Back to our protagonist, he had a pretty uneventful childhood, growing disillusioned by the day, not the apple of anybody’s eyes, always the outlier where in general behavior was benchmarked against that of his cousins who were thought of as saintly by his relatives but if truth be told, they were anything but!

He was not an underachiever but neither was he a prodigy at that. He grew up, went through the process of living his life with such a lack of gusto, that when he passed by, you can’t help but notice his lack of exuberance that is characteristic of the boys of his age. He was like an embroiled thundercloud, which rather than bursting into a torrential rain, is going to implode into itself and get lost in the great void. But few pitied him. That at least salvaged his pride. Sometimes, pity towards a person hurts more than ignorance towards the existence of such a person.

He was sure that he’ll get an answer to his question “Why?” It would be like the enlightenment of the Prince from Lumbini. He read a lot. They say what you read reflects on what kind of person you are. They lied. He could read whatever orbits into his path, anything. But did that make him a romantic? A sadist? A philosophic? A carefree human? A deeply disturbed person? None of the above, all of the above.

He was just going through the proceedings of living, on a collision course with destiny that would cut his life brutally short.

There is nothing called unconditional love! It’s all in the percentage of wanting split between either parties. Some people give a lot while taking little in return and vice versa. And need I say that in relationships, this split of percentage is never equal but is always complementary such that the mathematical doctrine of a percentage is maintained but is never found to be in equal proportion? He was a giver, he was a very generous one at that, but people who understood him were hard to come by.

He had many friends, but not all of them at the same time. Every split from every friend was doubly painful than the previous one. He was like a fly on the wall, never contended with whatever place he was currently, scuttling about, always in search of bigger and better eats. He was always flitting from one bar to another, one town to another, looking for “the person” but always in vain. All that was left was despair about his life, the futility of the whole exercise, the near zero probability of never finding answer to his “Why?” was slowly seeping into his mind. He knew who it was, vaguely, but unfortunately that person was long gone.

That night he was in a bar, savoring his beer, thinking of nothing, thinking of everything, as usual alone, tuning out the boisterous party going on to celebrate the birthday of some person. There were a lot of cat calls, lot of whistling and “hurrahs!” Suddenly, silence, he could see the people’s lips moving, some of them were clearly shouting. He couldn’t hear anything, he felt like he was standing along the coast of an ocean under the influence of a low pressure trough. All he could hear was the grinding of the waves, but no, wait, he could hear a wailing, calling out his name. He was astounded, nobody has ever called him like that except for his sweet mom, but she was dead, died of a heart attack when she was 39 and he 17. A difficult age to lose your mom, heck, any age is difficult to lose your mom. She was calling him, he looked up, saw her across the street, waving at him. He knew then, this is it, this is when I know. He rushed out, unmindful of the bartender’s yell about the unpaid beer, unmindful of the birthday party he unsettled quite a lot of people from their stools, one of them suffered a prolapsed disc and another, a shattered elbow. He ran, his feet felt like they were running through taffy, he was scared, thought that he could never run fast enough, his mom’s wails would taper away to the nonsensical babble of the traffic or people, he didn’t know which was what! He ran, cleared the bar, crossed the pavement in a single stride and set foot on the road; he never knew what hit him. He wasn’t bothered about the pain neither did he know that he was shouting, not in pain but in vain. Shouting for his mother, asking her to wait, that he is coming, just a minute, sorry that I am tarrying but some stupid old man with the reflexes of a sloth had hit the breaks a bit late. I am coming MA! And close on its heels, “Anywhere but here, please God, anywhere but here!”

And somebody else asked, must have been the bartender (its hardly important), “I’ve seen him around for almost a month now, say, what’s his name?”