Baboon Logic

At the onset of his madness, Philip K Dick remarks on the protagonist of his loosely autobiographical novel VALIS (a novel that is at once brilliant and tedious, capturing the essence of Dick’s madness) that he could be happy only because he was perpetually occluded to what was to come, to his own future and to the consequences of his own actions!

That is how I see myself now. I am at the brink of losing my oldest friend. Even if he survives this, the severe strain our friendship has suffered will resolve itself to some terrible conclusion over time, and I can find happiness for the time being only in my incapacity to see ahead into the bleak future.

We can barely look at each other now in the guilty knowledge of what we have done together, and yet, that fateful evening began in the most promising manner.

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Note:
(1) This was written as a part of a deal, about three and half years back. I planned to revisit it sometime and make it into an actual story (the original deal was to write about a single day on a particular theme, though I have cheated anyway :)), but it is not happening any time soon, I am afraid.

(2) This is not autobiographical at all. I imagined a guy very different from myself writing this; so those of you who know me, don’t think of me when reading this, because the intended mood of the story is quite different. But had this piece been any good, I guess I would have claimed autobiographical influences. :)

(3) God knows that I have had enough trouble people reading themselves into my stories! Did I mention three unjustifiably broken friendships?! All girls! And it is not even me, always. Twice, the girls read my story and broke up their friendship(!) with other people!!! I guess they didn’t broke their friendship with me because we were not friends to start with (which, I’m ashamed to say, I have been thankful for). :)

Stump
———-
It is a stump now,
Its art gone,
Its ornaments all gone.

It does not stir with spring
Nor bend like a bow when green
Nor from its flowers fly KamaDeva’s arrows
Nor in its shades are sighs of travellers heard
Or tears of lovers seen.

Only one old bird
Sits remembering something.

‭(‬Translated from the Hindi of Suryakant Tripathy’s‭ “‬Nirala‭” ‬by Vikram Seth.‭)

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This is a short story I wrote together with my brother some three years back. He was in grade three, and wanted to know how stories are written. So we wrote one together. The names have all been changed, of course.

I also wrote some poems for him when he wanted to know how poems are written, but I subsequently used them to flirt with a girl and have to deal with my ambivalence towards them before I can put them here. Read the rest »

That I had no clue to what waited for me behind those closed doors would have been a lie. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to believe what was about to happen. I was feeling misunderstood and misinterpreted. Everything about CSS that I had taken for granted was falling apart.

I held my breath and knocked on the doors.

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You two have been talking for a long time. She loves telling you all about her life, all the unnecessary details, and those silly things she made up to fill the narrative oversights that life commits while unfolding.

The windows are open and the lights have been switched off. The few rays that manage to come in get lost behind her hair and you have difficulty in figuring out the details of her face. You are lost. Everybody around has forgotten you and you are lost.

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NOTE : In case the reader is predisposed to believe that the following account is an invented piece of writing merely to amuse him, I’ll leave him to learn the lesson from his own experiences, or as Oscar Wilde said it once in his famous play (and repeated it in all subsequent plays), from his own mistakes. Much embarrassed as I am to admit it, all that is to follow did happen, and happened with that merciless cruelty with which life draws curtains from most of its plays.

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Rangin and I were sitting side by side, commenting on the appalingly poor standard of the kid batting, hoping he’ll do better when he grows up. He certainly didn’t deserve to be in the club which gave us our first batsman in the national team.

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AM – His Life
Years and years pass away, and a myth takes shape. Centuries of solitude and years flow by, and a legend is made. But only once in the lifetime of a human race, if at all, an AM is born.

“AM about to flash!”

Dumb arrogance and idiocy lay hid in night;
God said ‘Let AM be’ and all was flash light.”

Some people are born great; some people achieve greatness; and some people just define themselves to be great. As past historians tell us, AM did not stop at defining himself to be great. Inspired by his newfound greatness, he went as far as spending the rest of his life trying to prove his greatness.

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