It was raining heavily outside. He sat on his chair smoking his dope. His room had nothing but a table, a chair and the carpet.
A knock on the door. He walked up to the door and looked through the keyhole. A tall slender figure stood there with a small handbag on its side. He smiled and opened the door.
A girl walked in wearing a raincoat. She was completely drenched. She took off her raincoat and let it rest on the handle near the door. .
A small yellow light in the room made everything visible.
Almost visible.
"hey baby, ready for a round?" Her sexy voice dripped with sensuousness that would make any guy swoon.
he smiled and motioned her to the carpet.
She took off her shirt. The dim yellow light made her skin glow like gold in candlelight. She went and laid on the carpet, teasing him as she went. Her chin up, she looked into his eyes. The yellow light is all that she could see in the specs he wore. He was looking at her.
Her lips were red as cherries, her bosom as curved as the edges of a cola bottle. Her brown eyes were now, wandering around the room. Her hands, trying to touch the ceiling, were going swaying in the air.
He went to the cupboard and came out with a stack of green cards held together with a string. They looked old, as if worn out with time.
“what do you call them again?”
“Leaves.”
“Oh yea, I remember. The first time you told me you about them, I had not believed you. I was more intrigued than tempted the try them out. i had heard so much about them. I know they are supposed to be extinct. I don’t know from where you got them, But man. do they taste good. What is it that you always say abut them?..”
“Leaves that make you leave.”
He smiled as he took out one of the ‘leaves’ from the stack and made it into a roll. He started making them wet with the tip of his tongue.
She looked at him with an anticipation of pleasure. Her lips said it all. They were wet, almost drooling.
“I was reading one of the old journals the other day. They had an article about the lost art of smoking. You know, in earlier times people used to roll up leaves in small sheets and then inhale the smoke to get high? It was supposed to make them feel more in control of themselves. But the scientists came out with a theory that this was killing people and the worst part was, the government supported them. Together, they burned every fucking tree down. Fucking scientists. No wonder their race died down.”
He looked at her, passing the roll to her, smiling through his specs.
“What makes you think they died down?”
--G--
Its been a while now.
Alone.
Its not that bad really.
For the first few days, you feel scared, frightened actually. You look for someone to talk to, run around trying to find someone who is willing to hear your voice. But you find no one. All you can find are empty roads and vacant houses.
Hunger hits you and you hit the food joint. As usual. Only this time, you don’t have to pay.
Sitting in the empty mall, watching the microwave cook your food for the day, you think. That is what the human mind does when you do not have anything to do.
Think.
Silence speaks to you in whispers filling your head with the endless possibilities. if you are an optimist like me, you would know the endless resources to choose from. No one to stop you.
The next few days are spent ravaging and breaking window panes. Blowing petrol pumps and laughing at the fire. Freedom. No rules to bound you. No one to stop you from doing anything. You blow up a fire hose and have a bath right there on the street, and there is no one to stop you. Carrying a metal stick, you roam around breaking cars, shouting at the top of your voice.
losing head. Caring less. Free.
You try out all the latest clothes and accessories, admiring yourself in the mirror. The beard has grown bigger. The smile on your face grows bigger.
You leave the store naked. Just the way you came to the world. You love it.
A big smile on your face.
TV Reception is gone, but you have all the DVDs to pick from. If you are a movie buff like me, you learn the technicalities of running a projector and make the movie hall your home. A dark room with a small shining eye at the top. Lights from the silver screen light my nights and the voices fill up the empty spaces in my mind
Ah! Life could not be any better. And no one to worry you…
My only concern is, what happens when the food crosses the expiry date. What the hell, I have a lot of dead bodies to choose from anyway.
--G--
Robin sat at the shores looking into the sea. David sat beside him smoking his cigarette.
“So you say I cannot go back now?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“yes you did,”
“I just said you cannot go back to your world.”
“So that means I am dead, right?”
“No. that means you are just taking a break from everything that once surrounded you and when you go back to your world, it would have changed. YOU would have changed.”
“Huh?”
Robin could not say anything to that. He had been in that place for quite some time. The sun had just been circling the island instead of setting. it was big red in colour so you could look at it all the time and your eyes would not hurt. It was like a big red bulb without hinges. Or was it like an eye looking at them all the time. He had no clue.
“So how long is it now?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Robin did not have a watch. He never had a watch. He would wake up when the sun rose and sleep when the Diana’s side of the wall stopped making noises.
At this place, he could not sleep. rather, he did not sleep. because strangely, he was never tired.
"how do you know what time it is here?”
"I already told you this was a place beyond time. Why do you think it has a name like that?”
”Ok, tell me why is it called a land beyond time? And who the hell named this place that?!”
David just smiled and lit another cigarette. Robin noticed his cigarette did not have a butt. David would smoke the whole thing up. Also, the cigarette never left ashes. It was as if he was smoking air and smoking it away.
Into thin air.
“I named it the Land beyond time. Just like you named me David.”
“What?”
“If you were given the chance to name the place, what would you call this place?”
“I would call it a strange place. Thats it”
“ok.”
David went back to his cigarette sitting unassumingly at looking at the sea. He did not stare at the sun. In fact, he was sitting facing his back to the sun. He stared the side which had blue sea and a blue sky with nothing on it. It was like a blank blue canvas ready to be filled up.
“What do you mean by ok?”
“We will call it a strange place from now on.”
Robin could not make head or tale out of it.
“Ok. So when do I go back?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean by I don’t know?”
“When do you want to go?”
“Right now.”
“Ok. Leave then.”
David got up and started walking back to the canvas.
Robin looked at all his sides. There was water everywhere. It was like a hemisphere with the island at its centre. Only the sun gave any sense of direction.
“How?” Robin looked at David. David had already reached the canvas. The painting in the canvas vanished with a touch of the brush. It had turned completely blue.
“How?”
“I don’t know. I am not the one who wants to leave.”
Robin looked around. His mind was racing. He looked at the water. He had come up from the water. So that must be the only way out of here. He kept his foot on the water. He realized his foot would not go into the water. It felt like a rubbery soft surface. He put his other foot on it.
Robin could walk on water.
He had no clue what was happening, but this was not some dream. he was completely awake. He tried to remember what he had had for breakfast and then remembered he had not had any. Maybe that was it. he had not eaten for three days, and he had just collapsed and now he was in some sort of Coma. It was all an illusion. A hallucination.
“Sure. If that makes you happy.”, Quirked David with his cigarette on his lips.
Robin looked at him. He was not angry at David anymore. It was a long time since he had painted the canvas. The painting of his life. He had sat there on the sand and had cried for a long time. His tears had stopped after some time. He kept staring at the painting for a long time. David had just sat there unassumingly staring at the sea. Soon, the faces in the canvas had changed characters. The faces he knew started seeming like someone else. And after some more time, It was just a picture. A canvas with paint on it.
“You know, you have a very strange sense of humor.”
David looked at him and smiled. He had painted Robin standing in the water with the exact same expression as he was having then.
“Who ARE you.”
__________________________________
“I switch through lives. I switch through times. I switch through worlds. I switch through time.
Call me anything you want to.
I am not who you think I am. I am what you imagine I am.”
This time, It made perfect sense to Robin.
He felt himself drowning and falling into a deep sleep.
____________________________________________
Writing is telling a story. It may be true, or it may just be a figment of your imagination.
There used to be a time when writing was thought to be restricted to the elites. Something only the learned would indulge in, writing about the times they lived in, their lives and their surroundings. For common people, writing for leisure was something like cycling for exercise in the 18th century. Unheard of.
So our first stories were stories of lands far far away. Either they had gods and magical kingdoms with demons to be defeated, or we had stories of brave men fighting for justice.
Stories were told, stories were heard. Stories were remembered and then passed on. We would always imagine how the other world would be, even the ones which were close by but still beyond reach. Sometimes we would find a picture and then we would compare our fantasy with the reality.
Writers knew that everything they wrote had a meaning and a consequence attached to it. Not much space was taken and each alphabet was treasured. Every word had a purpose and the writers knew the cause.Their thoughts echoed through the hearts and minds of those who read them. Every line had many different meanings and even more interpretations.
The Daily happenings were delivered at the doorstep as newspapers, two inches longer and wider than now, its yellowish tinge making it all the more special.
Mornings started with the elders sitting cross legged with a cup of chai and the paper in their hands and the younger ones trying to imitate them, sitting cross-legged and trying to open the supplementary section like a book keeping the hem in line. It was a difficult job considering the papers carrying the news were themselves half their size. Many failed. Those who succeeded, found a new world inside.
Lives were shared, Stories were told. Times changed with bold headings. Heroes were created with full page reviews. Celebrities were just frames on a piece of paper or pixilated laughing voices from a box. We lived in a world of fables. A simple, yet beautiful world.
But that was then.
The times I talk about has long gone by. The times when the only net known in households was used to ward off mosquitoes while we slept.
What we saw, what we heard, what we talked about, and eventually what we learned, we would pen down the thoughts that our mind cultivated from them into a piece of paper. Either to show it to someone, or to keep it closed in a journal, hidden from the rest of the world.
Now, things are different.
The late 90s saw the awakening of a different kind of a box. Only this one did not seem to be an idiot. A ‘social experiment’ by the CIA and a guy named Lee came up with 3 Ws and the World changed around us. Suddenly, the paper lost its magic. It was stolen by a plastic typewriter look-alike, only thinner and much lighter. The world did not seem that mysterious, and the land far away came within a click’s distance.
Lives were still being shared but they happened via a massage box on a screen. Stories were still being told, but suddenly, there were more variations than interpretations. Heroes were being created and pulled down with a click of a button. We were willing to believe, and believe we did. In ourselves, and the ones sitting on the other side. The Fog of mystery was being lifted for a world less ordinary and very much real.
The clock ticked by. People got closer. Relationships became like rubber bands. First coming close, and then too close for comfort. We now talked but conscious of every word that was typed. We were becoming writers in ourselves, writing fables of our own, creating identities that we wanted. We just needed a platform. And a platform we got.
We reached the time when the box gave us a chance to say something to the world. A story which we wanted to weave on our own. And this time, the world would be an audience. Suddenly, everyone became a writer. Everyone had thoughts that needed to be shared. Everyone had something to talk about and strangely, everyone had a listener. Every writer had an audience.
The paper was still there, yes. but now, it was just paper. you could not watch videos on it, neither would your comment re read and then commented on. The yellow tinge now reminded of old times.
Now, We live in times where clicks are paid for, and words are not weighed for thoughts, but by their numbers. Where memorable quotes are not remembered, they are re-tweeted. Where an article’s importance is not by its value, but by the number of comments it gets.
Now, every thought from every mind is God’s word. And you have plenty of gods to choose from.
I too, belong to the same group who want their ramblings to be heard and their words to be read. And this space which actually resides in servers and words exchanged by air, provides me a chance to speak out without the fear of being judged and without the insecurity of being incorrect.
Of course I might be wrong. Who is not.
I am here to tell stories. Of my times. Of my life. Of my people. Of everything I am surrounded with.
This space in the virtual world is a place where dreams are born. Some may come true. some may not. Who cares…
After all, its the thought that matters.
Doesn’t it?
---X---
