The Last Man On Earth - II

   He could recall the second year of infection, a time when quarantine units were dispatched by the govt. to take the blood samples of each and every one, then to separate those found infected  from the uninfected ones, to be taken to a facility where they could be cured or so was believed. Ideally, once cured they were to be rehabilitated or were to be sent back to their homes. However, the quarantine operation soon turned forceful and rogue, owing to excessive use of military and para military involvement in it, which was probably pre decided, for the infection was definitely a pressing matter for the govt. But the people just won’t comply, none of them were ready to let go off their families, for there were rumours, dreadful and prevalent about the operation. It was heard that there was no disinfecting facility to cure people, instead there existed a concentration camp where all those found with an infected blood were to be taken. They were lined up against the wall in batches and were shot down there and then. The officers on the camp, if were found infected were served cyanide to ingest and the performance of that to the amazement of many was deemed a national honor, the highest service to the state, one undead less. If at all it meant anything, it was that the global and national authorities were not looking for any cure, there was no cure, save for a bullet right through one’s head. Those who managed to escape those camps had horrific tales of mass violence and torture to narrate before their fall. The last man who was once an officer in the paramilitary and was also posted at one of these establishments or so called Isolation Units, saw the gruesome horrors of the camp. He was moved deeply by what he saw and so he wrote:

9^th November 2015,

The Camp

Each day truckloads of them arrive. Hoping for a cure and unmindful of their fate they step inside the premises of the Isolation camp, that large rusted iron gate and the twisted barbed wires running over those altitudinal concrete walls bring a dreadful apprehension over their faces. For the place looks the least like a medical facility, the milieu is more militant. At first they would be perplexed to see that the place boasted of no doctors, the only doctors they would have last seen were possibly during the blood tests. Armed men and women would direct them in herds, towards a few tunnel like openings, passing through a wall, broad enough to support an entire military base on it, that is where I stand day after day, obeying govt. orders, seeing thousands of them dying bit by bit, everyday, without any discrimination, an equal law for the equals. When they would reach the other side of the wall,  they would find a large open area, roofless, where they would see hundreds like them, without food, water, at occasions without even clothes and certainly without a cure.  It is then that it becomes most unbearable to see their horrified faces, drained of hope and life or whatever of it is left in them. They would look at us, the armed men on the wall which we were, in sheer disbelief. There is no reason whatsoever why should they not, we have misled them here and they have been cheated, a simple yet a ruthless equation of circumstances it is. At first they would ask us questions of Why, What and When, we won’t answer to any of it. Then they begin to abuse us, repeatedly in huge crowds, they would cry, scream, some would laugh like mad men, and many of them also try to break away, so we shower bullets upon them to bring the chaos under control. I wish we knew that we were only adding to the chaos, in fact we are chaos, we are the real scourge of these people. A plague can still have a cure but what cure can one find for tyranny and mercilessness shown by men, over fellow men ? A few have begin to pray, some of them have followers, already. Religion can shamelessly creep in anywhere, I must remark.

  Every day I watch  innocent children, some of them stare back at me with those adorable faces, swept with confusion and fright, they do not play any more with each other, all they do is scribble the wall. I see men and women tired of this ordeal, having eyes blank as oblivion itself and stone cold faces, the look of which one can stand with no ease, they sit and wait for their turn to be shot. I see couples both old and young, walking hand in hand towards the barricade against which they would get shot at in the head, as per their turn. I see families ending in no time, I see fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, dying together and I see mothers holding their infants with all the affection in the world when being fired upon. One day out of curiosity I went down there to see what the children have scribbled. What I saw had shattered a part of me, that  shall never impart me forgiveness, I am a sinner of the sins so terrifying that it would not be unusual if someday I find myself paying for them in the gravest and the unjust of the fashions. Where was my conscience and its voice, for all these days? What reason shall I narrate, if I seek the pardoning of my sins?   SAVE US, it was inscribed in block letters on the wall stained with the blood of many. When no one remains, we clear out the bodies and burn them in a trench nearby, so that there could be room for others who could not pass the blood test. After watching all this I often ask myself, what good are we doing to them? How is this in any way an effort to save our race? Are we any better than the infection itself, which will kill them eventually? What if we had invested all this time we were spared, to find a cure instead?

 Oh, God!!.. the fearsome cries of those women and dejected faces of those children, haunt me every night when I go to sleep. No peace can ever be yielded from what we are doing, neither for our own selves nor for anyone else out there, infected or uninfected. If we all are to succumb to the disease, then shouldn’t we all die like these unfortunate people?  Is humanity saved here, by any means?

   I can bear it no longer, I do not wish to do this anymore. But I know that they won’t let me leave so easily, on the pretext of lowering the morale of  other soldiers. If they don’t , I shall run away, I shall escape. For I do not belong here, none of us do and therefore I do not intend to be a part of this grotesque process, which had drained out of me all the humanity that I had and so I wish to reclaim it. I want to go home, back to my wife, in her loving arms, where I can finally seek some tenderness, some comfort. For now that is all I want. May the souls of those who have died here rest in eternal peace.

 One night he left the isolation camp, for if the humanity was to perish he wished to be the last man to put his hands in the filth, he realized that he had seen enough monstrosity for one life. So, he left, left for the place he called home so dearly,  for his wife who with her charms and caress was to fill him with hopes, even if they were to be proved a mere myriad of an unrealistic optimism later and a renewed zest for living, for a cup of coffee prepared by her, whose aroma, delightfully diffusing when would pass into him was to rid him of the stench of blood in that camp, percolated in the walls and the ground, against and on which have died and lived to die thousands lured by a sheer fallacy of a promise. If at all he had had any regrets, the only one he could possibly recall was the regret of not having left the paramilitary an year before that gruesomeness and escape with her somewhere, maybe escaping into his most cherished dream was a wonderful proposition but only if dreams were real. The only thing which was real were the catastrophic horrors back there and an overpowering love for his wife. Yes, he had loved her so much and yet to him that moment it seemed that he had had so little of her, but never did in his life he had such a strong desire to see her and to see to it that she was alright, to make love to her once he is sure of it and to make her love him, with almost an unperturbed eternity paving way for such indulgences meant for those in love.

 There came many abandoned towns and some dead cities on his way, as he rode on. There walked no living men but a strange oblivion and nothingness lurked into the streets which had fallen so badly into the habit being visited by commotion each day. No one attended to the shops and stores anymore, offices were empty and so were the vehicles that stood motionless on the roads, as if they had been stranded for a long time now. Maybe, they were, he had after all paid no visit to the world of men as long as two years, it was in those years that much had changed. While he was riding past a city, he saw one of those familiar trucks in that camp parked before a cottage. There was a soldier guarding it, while the other two appeared on the scene as they led an array of young children in the open, after that came out a doctor or so the woman seemed with a letter pad, which probably bore some text on it for she showed it to one of the soldiers. After having read it, the soldier caught hold of two of those innocent children. They cried their poor little hearts out, kicked and scratched him but to no avail. Their wails told that they knew of their fate much before they had been led out, for sure the frightful tales of the isolation facility must have reached them as many have been taken and only some have managed to stay back and it could have been due to that very reason that though the towns and cities seem emptied, in each of those houses were people hiding themselves, afraid and unsure of what was coming, for them, for all of us. One of the two who protested most vehemently was shot first, point blankly, the other who begged for mercy was shot all the same. The most expected happened, coupled with the unexpected however. The doctor in the most unforeseen manner wielded a revolver in her hand which she might have concealed from those soldiers and shot to kill the soldier who finished the two young children. The other soldier, most shocked by the sudden death of his fellow turned around in a bewildered fashion, losing his caution only to be shot by the doctor. The doctor then stood motionlessly, her hands were hanging loose and an expression of hopelessness and sour dejection and sorrow swept her face, she still held on to the revolver, from the tip of whose barrel rose a thin and waving stream of smoke.

to be continued

The Last Man On Earth - I

'The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire, where, as in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive.

Written at some point of time in Europe between 1348 - 1350

No one could have possibly known what date it was, but for sure it was the coldest and probably the darkest hour of that night, certainly belonging to that date of which none could have been certain except for a man, who was the last of his kind, on earth. Yes, he had survived or maybe he just happened to outlive whatever had brought the end of times, or so it was called by the believers of religion and prophecies. I firmly am a non believer of both, for the reasons that I do not deem necessary to disclose, for it is not my story that I intend to narrate but that of the last man on earth. As of now let us just assume that to me all of it sediments to chronological randomness of events, boasting of the outcomes that are undetectable and inevitable, which unfortunately struck humanity hard enough to perish all but one. It was the sort of end that the world saw 5 years before that cold night and for all that time before it he had lived on aimlessly, having no ends to meet, no cause to subsist except for his listless pursuit for survival. You might now be harboring a will to ask me as to who he was before the world ended and what was his name ? That I believe is the temptation which the reader shall resist, for I see no good a cause as to why I should disclose his identity. A name after all serves a purpose to distinct a man from the crowds of many and the company of a few. Of all what was left of the living was him alone, so let us just call him the Last Man.

  But that night he sat, marred by apprehension, by possibility of being found and by an intuition of finality or whatever could have aptly accounted for his fear, that had been a terror to him for those 5 dreadful years somewhere at the back of the mind. He had finished that one packet of cigarettes he had for the night, it came to his mind only after having put off his last smoke. For all those times, even before the end, he had smoked out his fears, pains and agonies, day and night, but at that hour he ran out of cigarettes, his only solace, if any. He did not dare to scavenge for a packet of cigarettes in that dead world, lying outside the place he once called home and in the attic of which he was bound to stay and conceal himself. The windows of the attic were barricaded by strong wooden planks, a gap being left in between them to allow him to peep out, which was just enough to keep a watch, but on whom or what? The main door of his attic was blocked by a heavy and old fashioned closet, once bought by his grandfather to whom the house belonged and the closet which for long had remained disused was finally put to some better purpose to serve, and so were those antique silver candlesticks, which were lit more by necessity than by anything else. For the last man’s lantern had run out of batteries, there had been no electricity at all ever since the end of days, the grids of both far and near suffered a permanent break down. The incandescent flame of those candles in that room were dim, feeble and weak; strangely enough they were the only source of light in the entire world. The room was still and dead silent, the last man could hear his own breathing, he could hear the cold wind rustling through the woods outside, he was waiting to pass the night silently and hoped not to hear those who he was blocking out through his self imposed solitude in that room. He dare not peep out of the window that night, he dare not leave the attic, he dare not make a sound. He only sat still and alert on a chair in one of the darker corners of the attic, where the light of candles could not reach. He firmly grappled an old crow bar in his hands, as he sat, constantly beholding the closet. You might now ask me as to what can be so horrific as to make a hopeless recluse out of a man? So, frightful that he lives no more but barely survives like a vulnerable rat in that narrow crevice on a dilapidated wall. His dread, his fear, was that of those dead, who did not die but began to rot, until they were rendered lifeless, but then they returned, roamed and hunted like the living, which they were, before all of them other than the last man changed, for a fate worse than death itself, when they succumbed to what was soon enough known as an unstoppable scourge, a plague and an incurable infection, a global  pandemic that spared none. He had known and seen what that disease could do to a man and then to the entire mankind, Red Eye Syndrome it was called. In the war of life and death fought miserably by the humans, if anything that had won was the infection itself. A thousand manifestations of which now strolled and walked the earth outside the last man’s attic, as a grossly outnumbering and savage horde of the infected, the undead, knowing no reason or meaning of any sort, but governed only by one primal urge of inexhaustible hunger.

 Nobody really knew as to what triggered the Red Eye Syndrome and where did the disease start from, but when the initial strain of infection hit the humanity, the weakest of the weak fell at first. Those were the years when the Syndrome was nothing more than a modern day conspiracy theory or a myth, allegedly devised to cause mass unrest and wage war among the nations. Those who vouched for its truth and spoke of its evidence were put to rest forever or were locked up by the disbelievers which were many, to the misfortune of mankind. The last man had pondered a great deal over the final days of humanity and the only conclusion he could ever reach was that, that the ignorance and distrust amongst the people had a greater hand in their own destruction rather than the infection. However the propensity and the rate at which the Syndrome consumed the entire populace, any belief or disbelief would not have made any substantial difference to our fate. Nothing could have made it any clearer than the second strain of infection, which followed an year later. A monumentally large part of the living population died, only to walk the towns and cities again as the undead, and yet so much more was the entire human population that half of us were still left to watch a purgatory emanating from the world of men, only to fall later and become a part of it. It took all of it to make us realize that the threat was real and that it was coming for us too, that it can be ignored no further and that we must do whatever ought to be done, if we wanted to live. By the end of the second strain the last man had seen people resorting to prayers, more than they could ever have, their faith and its patience had been tested for long. Now was the time for their God to decide their fate, so that those who have led a life sinful and astray from his path, his so called path of greater good, shall be punished and left to no aid and those who have adored and feared him in their actions shall be rewarded with peace, safety and renewal of their pious lives. They awaited a judgment by the almighty himself, they expected the words of the divine to guide them, all of it proved to be farce and yet was fed to generations together, all meant to be laid to waste someday. Unfortunately God did not come for any of us whether and neither did any of his direly awaited messiahs or word bearers. Soon it came to us that we were alone, we always have been, the very idea of God seemed no better than a crutch now. There wasn’t anyone coming for us, there was no God and even if he was he had left us all long before we could come to know of it.

  The third and probably the final strain of infection left only a few of us to see a devastated world. It was not that the last man had never had any company. In his diary he once wrote:

23^rd February, 2021

Midnight

I have limited resources and so do my fellow survivors, it is therefore understandable that at times we resort to a fair barter of anything ranging from the essentials like food, anti depressants, batteries to cigarettes, caffine and some alcohol. We do not live at much distance from each other, there is no reason why we should, for greater the distance we would be bound to scale, stronger the incidence to encounter the undead gets. But we dare not live together and to that there is one good reason. It cannot be said with any relieving surety that we are immune to the infection, we aren’t certain of it and also of the eventuality as to when we would become one of them. Even if we do not, we might out of some misplaced sense of judgment or immense frustration end up hunting each other one day, for whatever resources we are left with, they aren’t much. Therefore I must live alone. There is nowhere to go.

  A few of the survivors who were left post third strain were bitten, either to be turned into the undead or to be driven to commit suicide. The rest of them were marauded by the horde to which they fell prey while venturing in the open, scavenging for food and other resources. The last man however had remained unscathed, for long. But it did not seem to him his good fate, he saw it as a punishment to see all of them die one by one and then to wait and cerebrate, as to when and how would his end be like. Even he had encountered and also hunted the undead, he had searched for food, water and medicines, in empty stores and abandoned vehicles. His long and meaningless survival had imparted him enough time to observe the nature of the undead. It did not take him long to note from their behavior that the higher functions of their brain, such as intellect had ceased to exist, the reasoning ability, if any, had descended to the most basic need of food. He also observed that they had completely lost their sense of personality, possibly owing to their death, which also brought forth the rotting of their bodies. That was the only possible explanation the last man could reach. For what were they if not corpses? Yet it was as if something drove them, over the years he came to understand that they were mere vessels, what lived in them now wasn’t them, but the infection, controlling the flawed copies of the former selves of the dead. The last man had at an unfortunate occasion stared right into the eyes of an undead, they were nothing but stark crimson in their hue. Encapsulated by blood, probably due to excessive clotting in the Iris, which according to him was one of the symptoms of the Syndrome.  He had seen how they hunt the living, at first one of them appears, then a few and within no time an entire swarm of them reaches and collects to maraud the unfortunate man. They were growing aggressive year after year, their hunger getting stronger than ever, for there wasn’t much for them to hunt, there weren’t many survivors. He had noted this in the previous rains when one of his fellow survivors fell into the hands of the horde.

     The last man rose from the chair and walked towards the table on which the silver candlesticks stood, leaving the crowbar leaning against a leg of the chair. He beheld the reflection of the flames in a photo frame on which rested unperturbed a thin film of dust, which he wiped off gently with his palm and intently gazed the photograph positioned in that frame. It was that of him and his wife, a beautiful woman. In that picture they sat together wrapped in the affectionate arms of each other, on a beach, looking at the endless ocean lying before them, with not a sign of hurry on their content faces and with abundance of peace in their eyes. They seemed to be complete with each other. The picture had broken and twisted him innumerable times in those five years,  only when it would appear that the memories both worth cherishing and painful about her have faded for the good, the photo alone would be able and ruthless to bring back  to him her loss which he knew can never be made good. Just a picture, but definitely worth a thousand heartbreaking words, told with the same cruelty, over and over again. It seemed to have attained a character of its own like all those other inanimate objects, same as that old ancestral cupboard or the silver candlesticks or the dusty old chandelier lying with sheer indifference in one of the corners of the attic. The glass of the frame developed a few cracks all of a sudden, the last man realized that he had pressured the fragile glass a little, with his thumb in the surge of emotions. So, he kept it back and went on to stare at it with watery eyes. A tear probably left his eye, for a faintest thud was heard on the table. He had tried to muster up the will to throw that picture away, how hard could that have been? A determined motion of wrists and its gone, but he had found it difficult, as always. Maybe that is why for all those years that photo had held its place on the table.

                                                                                .. to be continued

When it Rained

A fair estate and a handsome fortune was all Badrinath was left to. Summing up of the former and the latter in that ‘all’ would be nothing better than a mockery of the poor and the destitute, it is however not the case herein , and of that, one should be certain once I narrate this fable about Badrinath’s constant longing for the rains. The one thing he cherished the most in his life and the only thing that was the most uncertain in his town. One heck of a dry terrain it was, just to add to the trivia.

  Withered, old and confined to a wheelchair, Badrinath was definitely not in the best state of affairs in his life. He was a humble and considerate man, but he hadn’t been likewise all his life. Certainly not when his father used to lament over his blind pursuit for wealth and possessions, devoid of compassion and of those finer joys of life. He, like most fathers would tell him that all of us in the end reach the same conclusions in life, some might arrive early and the rest shan’t be there on time, but we all know that no better a good can be yielded from life than peace of mind. Adherence to materialism is sadly a renowned virtue of our times, it was back there in Badrinath’s youth too, for he was an exceedingly pragmatic and hard man, a good man of his material business. He on a summer afternoon, occupying his wheel chair was staring dispassionately at the barren milieu that was thrown open before his verandah where his caretaker would often leave him on his own. It had been five years that it did not rain in the town, that made him remorseful. “ is it too much to ask even for a drizzle if not rain?!”
he would often ask himself in his self inflicted agitation. He had realized, for the times he did not care to remember, that he had beyond any reasonable doubt succeeded in his most material pursuit, but to what end? Even his fortunes and estate put together could not have brought his most awaited showers in that drought ridden town. But then there were whole lot of things that couldn’t be brought or brought back in his life. Damn! He lost all of it to his silly quest. How right was his father all those years when he was alive and how foolish was he that it took him almost his entire life and all those who were once a part of it to understand one most simple truth. Maybe he was one of those who draw their conclusions as the end draws near. He was a lonely man, with no idea as to what to make of his estate and how to spend his fortune.

  Yet it cannot be said with much conformity that he remembered his father’s words of wisdom, of all the things he could recall it were the rains that had brought respite to him and then there were fragments of memories revolving around them, the only joy if any for him. He had always known that it was the only thing he would and he could ever remember. How could that not have been? Recollecting his childhood, when the life was way too simplified, he recalled the memory of his mother. When Badrinath was a small child, his mother would wrap him up in that tiny little rain coat of his and would walk with him, out in the rain, with an umbrella in her hand, while her other hand affectionately holding his tiny wrist, to the bus stop, so that her son could reach the school on time. Little Badri would insist on staying back with his mother, saying that he did not want to go to school. His mother would laugh at his innocence and gently pull a cheek. The bus would be a bit late owing to heavy rain but it came nevertheless. Badri dreaded by the sight of bus would turn around and hold on to his mother, but then he knew that he had to go. She would pacify him saying that, as the afternoon draws in he would be back to her. Years later it was the time for Badri to leave the house, coincidentally on a rainy day,  for he had started a new concern at the town where today it does not rain. His old mother tormented by the sight of his departure resisted his decision, she had loved him for too long and too much, her little boy Badri had grown up only to leave her someday. He pacified her that he would be back to her, every now and then. Badri, as I have earlier remarked was a good man of business. So, he left but did not come back for long, his concern and its concerns had kept him aloof from the family. When Badri finally decided to return it was only at his mother’s funeral.

  When he was a boy, he and his old friends paddled in the windy rain their bicycles, all the way to the tube well outside the town, where they would plunge in the cold water, made colder by the rain. Badri had always found a lot of joy and happiness in the company of friends. All these years his preoccupations gave him no opportunity to pay a visit to them, now there is no reason why he should. A lot of time had passed and so have all his friends. He had survived to mourn their loss. Making him realize that death is infamous by its very name, but life is no better when it comes to imparting pain and dejection. As a young man, his favourite sport was the football, which he played most willingly in the rain, again with his friends that were. Those days he loved torrential showers, they were as vigorous and as youthful as he was, and if I am to mention youth, there is no reason as to why I should not mention love. Yes, Badri had been fortunate enough to love and be loved by someone in his life. Those rainy rides with her on his motorbike, on those endless and solitary routes have been unforgettable. He as a young lover made many promises to the lady he loved, as if they were to last forever, none of them did, and then he made no promises to anyone. He had never seen her ever since.

   Badrinath as he sat in his verandah, lighted a cigar, a puff or two had always helped him to calm down. “ Gone, all of them, even the rains.” He said to himself with a nostalgic sigh. He knew that he had lost much in life, but he had made his peace with the truth, that stood before him, staunch and inevitable. His eyes beheld the sky, bright, azure and sunny, as if laughing at his misfortune. “ there will be no rain today, it seems.” He told himself and quietly took to his occupation of smoking the cigar, called his servant and asked him to hand over the hard bound novel that rested on the shesham table near the hearth and relieved him for the day. After having read through a few pages and taking a few more puffs, he fell asleep. All it took was a gush of wind, firm and cool to wake him up. He woke up with hope in his eyes and a feeble smile on his wrinkled face, for it was no ordinary gush, but one laden with the scent of soil. He had smelled it, inhaled it so many times, but today it seemed all anew. Yes, it was the same customary scent that preceded the rain and after so many years it had returned. His sight quickly reached for the sky and it was not the blue expanse that awaited him, it were the clouds, dark and gray, thundering with the promise of a shower. If it all anything was certain that day, it was the rain. Badri knew it and he was swept away by a sudden urge to be in the midst of the garden during the first shower. It was not possible without the assistance of his servant, who would have helped him down the pair of steps that led to the garden and who to the extent of the old man’s misfortune was relieved that very afternoon. He had waited for much time and he was desperate to be out there when it rained, to the extent that he unmindfully rolled the chair forward, only to tumble down miserably and thrown out of the chair. He sustained a bloody wound on his head, but he knew that it would clot, he couldn’t walk he knew that but he also knew that he could crawl. He gathered all his will that was left in him and pulled himself somehow to the centre of the garden and after having reached there he laid flat on his back, staring at the dark sky with hopes and high spirits. He was panting heavily, “ C..Come on, you. Make me wait no longer, end my penance and bring me peace.” And then it rained, in a way that it never did, bringing an end to a drought half a decade old and a longing that seemed as old as Badri himself. Blissfully drenched in it was Badri, feeling every drop and its stark coldness, just the way he did ages ago. He had never been a believer of miracles but that moment he did, he did not know what came over him, but he found that he could now stand, could now tread, roam and walk. So, like a triumphant knight, he stood up and beheld the rainy sky in whose waters he was soaked and spread out his arms in joy, so as to feel every bit of it. He turned towards his villa, boasting of a put off cigar on its railing, a hard bound book dropped on the floor and a tumbled wheelchair before which lied a man, fallen, still and lifeless. Badri was perplexed and walked a few steps towards him, the fallen man bore substantial resemblance to him. The thunder and lightning in the sky attracted his attention and forgetting all about his lifeless body that stood motionless before the wheel chair,  he with a smile, turned away from it and went on to feel the rain, as he closed his eyes. In it he heard the gentle laughter of his mother, the thud of a football, the voice of his lover, the noise of his old friends and the roaring engine of his motorbike.

Life, Per se

It is in the plainest of the sense, if a man and his life is to be seen,

What should I make of it, if not an interstice between his creation and then an inevitable ceasing to be?

With each breath that relays through me and with each moment, meaningful enough to substantiate my being;

I see no better a version of truth out of many truths so called, that it is the end of mortal stretch of my existence, scaled most dispassionately and with disregard to my insecurities by the consistence of change.

Nothing it is for that matter, my life, which is a mere illustration of a notion;

That what has commenced deserves a conclusion, creation of what is, is destined to be bound by the destruction of what was,  I and my life are the fact of the times, earmarked to be a memory to tomorrow.

Life is the child of time, like its parent entity it never rests but sustains motion,

Governs all by itself its greatest observers;

Who are they if not us ?

Even a man who has outrun his times, living as a relic, possess nothing to bring him to surpass the cold hardness of time.

We are confined on potency and yielding by life, thus.

As I write these lines, it is my belief that they are strong,

Stronger than anything pertaining me and this life of mine that I try to befriend, every now and then.

It is not my face that shall stay,

It cannot, for it is that of a being marred by aging and mortal human condition, it shall therefore wither away.

It is not my voice,

Even my last breath is not a providence for this assurance.

So, beyond any reasonable doubt,

It is not the life of a man it is about.

On the contrary it is the life of a man’s deeds, which is to be measured and seen,

A man, anymore or no more is a precursor to what he was and had been.

So let my words and what I write be my deeds,

Allow my deeds to etch what I am.

For even though I shall come to pass, they shall continue to stay,

Let each of them possess a fable to narrate,

About a man who is and a man who would be, that would be me and me alone.

So, I shall write, to satiate myself with the complacency, that forever I shall live through them,

Being outlived by my words is far better a rest I could ever achieve.

It is not the immortality of being I seek,  for it is not an err the time would make,

What I behold to achieve is a human virtue, rare and all satisfying.

A state to be risen to and not be gained;

where all that remains is not the man but his name,

immortal in the pages of time, all the same.

A tale of Mr. Biswas

Mr. Biswas was not a very imaginative man, a plain simpleton of hills, there is nothing significant I can tell you about him except for the fact that he had a queer habit of scaling distances up and down the hills through the ways that would cut the paths short. It was not a deliberate and uncalled for habit, there were after all  shortcuts between his shop on the mall road and his humble house in a locality up the hill. I was told that there were only two of them one through a grove of oaks, which people generally avoided partly owing to the jackals that prowled the woods in the night and rest because of those eerie wails produced by the passing of cold wind of the hills through the oaks. The less educated strata of the hill town called these wails a warning from the old woods themselves, to ward off any passer by lest the jackals turn man eaters, but excessive game hunting at the turn of the century have rendered them as no more a threat to human beings. there were other beliefs however that pertained to these hunted and misunderstood predators " Sahib, who knows what secrets these woods contain in them, they have been there long before us. What to talk of Jackals? Who can tell in the darkness of the night as to which is the demon and which is the beast?" Maqsood my khansama once told me. The educated strata of the town had their own reasons to avoid the woods, their reasons were more pragmatic and close to what we call real. It was the fear of maniacs or murders that haunted them. It would not be difficult to infer therefore that people mostly avoided the path, except our very own Mr. Biswas, who would consider the intimidating possibilities as nothing but an eventuality for the unfortunate, which I believe they were. For all those years he crossed the woods, he saw nothing but the tall oaks, moaning with the winds and along with a few distant howls piercing the breeze of the night. then there was another way to his home, the one took by most and feared by none. it was a children's park, situated on a flatter elevation the steps atop which would lead straight up the hill. it consists of all sorts of swings, wheels and slides, a merry indulgence for the little ones. A harmless and least threatening way home. Yet he saw nothing wrong in taking to the woods, on being asked of this weird practice he would declare in the most dispassionate manner, " A path is a path, if it is one. If it exists, it exists for a reason. the reason if any for its existence which it is, should be serving the people as a passage." In this way he would dispense with the objections of the people.

   It was on a cold night of midwinter, Mr. Biswas had stayed back later than usual owing to a trying customer who paid a visit to his shop. the shops both far and near did close down already, on the mall road. the street lamps threw a few quanta of light around them, like radiating circles in the darkness. Mr. Biswas in his usual easy manner locked the main shutter and began to pace towards his home up the hill. Night was cold very cold, he drew his coat closer to himself and slouched a little, an easy way to walk up hill. A few stray dogs barked at him and a few followed him too, but then they would not dare to come near, Mr. Biswas always carried a wooden stick clenched in his fist. Hills appeared to be huge ominous shadows that night and every dark alley between the shops seemed to conceal a silent beholder from elsewhere, observing a man who made it late on his way back and thus was left behind to the many strange eyes which can see but cannot be seen. It is in these moments that even the most rational experience a gradual depletion of all rationality, only to be replaced by what we know as fear. A weak and crouching shadow in the blackest confines and reaches of our mind, beaten to obscurity by the will and the logic, but then it never dies its death not until its possessor and slave alike, which is a man, ceases to exist. Not until a man is left to be a lifeless piece of flesh, a worm food, fear, the dread of the dying and the living would just not leave, showing its sadist loyalty to the soul infested human. On the contrary it waits, waits with a terrifying patience, grows like a scourge in the weakest moments of heart and the blood curdling instances of the mind, you never know when the courage of beholding the unexplained would last, but when it would, a shadow battered yet resilient engulfs and drowns in itself the man himself. Like a parasite feeding and propelling on its host, which could even be someone as objective as Mr. Biswas. 

 Yes, there was something uneasy about that night and Mr. Biswas had known it right from the moment he crossed the second street lamp and then all along thereafter. It is in such silent yet haunting moments that a man who is deemed to be a social animal yearns the most for a company of another like him. Our Mr. Biswas was not going to get any, not any soon though. Something had been following him, but then he had not lost control not yet, even when he was drenched in cold sweat. He stopped and turned around as unexpectedly as he could have, to find nothing but the shadows of the mountains and the trees casting meaningless shapes on the road flushed with the moonlight and the distance which he by far have scaled almost to its entirety. there was nothing but transparent air and the static street lamps. After having examined the milieu he moved on, however a little less anxiously but not any less frantically.

  Mr. Biswas soon stood on a divergence in the road, one which led to the oak woods and the other which went past the children's park. He with no other thoughts to spare chose the latter. Any man marred by fearsome anticipations is bound to take such a decision, Mr. Biswas of course was in possession of such ordinary prudence. Rationality and skepticism are the states of mind that could have been considerations put to rest for some other time, for then all what he wanted was to reach his home and lock himself up in a room with a blanket caving him entirely with its soothing warmth. A comforting proposition indeed but a distant one anyway as home was still a quarter of kilometer away. The fear of being followed did not abandon him and he was constantly reminded of a presence from which for a certain reason he wanted to get rid of. How can that not be? Unseen and unexplained are the cornerstones of a man's fear after all. the path that cut through the middle of the park had streetlamps like those on the road on either side. Mr. Biswas walked swiftly, crossing the first pair of lamps, the second and then the third. It was not before he reached the fourth lamp to his left that he heard something behind his back. Everything assumed an eerie stillness, the occasional barking of the stray dogs halted, the howling of jackals vanished and the wind died down for no reason. The crickets in the bushes nearby went silent. Everything was stiffened by the soundlessness except for a metallic creak, of that of a swing that began to sway, someone but not Mr. Biswas had administered motion to it,  for it had lain motionless all this time so convincingly that there was no reason as to why it should move other than a deliberate push, required so essentially to make it go back and forth.

  the movement of the swing however was more than a mere push, someone ought to have ridden it. Mr. Biswas froze like an effigy of stone and a chill of horror relayed through his spine. He could have made a sprint up the hill or he could have simply chosen to keep moving but logic was discarded long back and his will to resist the fright had lasted. So, like a man who succumbs to a nightmare, he turned, a gradual foolhardy turn that was to spare certain tacit and event less hours to the night at the end of it all. A final inevitable confrontation. Mr. Biswas's stood sans any movement like a piece of timber, he was pale, though it cannot be said with much conformity as to whether it was the moonlight or was it the hue of his skin. the swing oscillated in the ether, it would be empty when it came forth in the range of the street lamp and when it went back showered in the moonlight it would have an occupier. It was occupied by a little girl, or so did the thing manifested itself as. Her face was lifeless, morose and grayed owing to timeless wandering, but she was not helpless, not helpless as Mr. Biswas at least who was wood and stone for the time being. Her face though sad was appalling or was turning the same, each time the swing moved back into the moonlight. The other time it came in the moonlight the girl was wearing a weird grin, broken yet strong, enough to strike sheer fright in the heart of anyone. though the motives of this uncanny visitor remained unknown but Mr. Biswas was certainly had nothing to gain out of them, except for insanity. He was losing every form of composure, trying make sense of all this was out of the faculties of his simple mind that could accept nothing but what can be seen, but that night he saw and what he saw added on to his madness, which he began to succumb to. The ways of the dead are least known to the living, knowing is of little help at times though. Faint cries of fear began to escape his throat and he felt tears as cold as ice trickled down his cheek, and it was then he realized that it was not a nightmare, not at least a one where he could wake up.