Scared of what wrath her thought might bring upon her, she became desperate to rid her mind of it. And in her desperation she thought of it more. Her mind imagined it for her. Without warning, it recreated her little thought into an imagery of vivid shapes and sounds. And what she saw sent frigid currents running down her back. Almost immediately little goosebumps burst out all over her fair arms making her skin feel taut. She felt scared yet oddly her nipples hardened and she felt slightly dizzy. Yanking out her hand from her panties she jumping off her bed frantically. She began pacing up and down her room trying hard, her hardest, to think of other things. Like when Anoushka was born, how the baby had bawled and how her mother, cradling the little Anoushka in her arms rocked her silently to sleep. She tried to think of her father driving in the new sedan through the gates of their house. She tried to think of happy things, of good things, yet the mind tenaciously held on to her thought like a child would a candy. No matter how hard she laboured, Vijaya couldn’t extricate the vision of herself urinating on the idol kept in the prayer room off her mind and it’s blasphemous eye.

She bunched both her wrists and struck the sides of her thighs violently. Jumping up and down she stomped the floor for a good few seconds, yet the thought wouldn’t go. Rushing to her table she flopped down and shut her eyes. She tried to imagine the idol sitting before her, decorated beautifully in flowers, redolent in the fragrance of incense and surrounded by devotees, many devotees, loving devotees, their heads hung and hands folded in concentrated prayer. Her lips began moving frantically, as she sought forgiveness from the deity for her ghastly vision. Hands folded she pleaded with her deity earnestly, apologising to him with a face screwed up with intensity. She waved her head slowly from one side to another to effectuate the intensity of her prayer, a range of supplicating expressions running across her beautiful face. Anybody else in the room would think that Vijaya, sitting at her table was begging, passionately to this invisible entity for mercy or for forgiveness for something ostensibly quite horrendous that she had committed. This would, of course, occur as an afterthought to the notion that poor Vijaya, must have gone quite mad.

Nevertheless, this imaginative trip did help a little. She saw the God nod his head and smile. He then raised his hand in a gesture of blessing and spoke in a stentorian yet gentle voice than seemed to boom from everywhere. He said;

“Fear not, little one. I am not angry at you. Although I do not understand the cause for such an imagination, you are forgiven. You have incurred no divine retribution young one. After all, it was I who invented teenage and puberty, I, who composed hormones, I….”

Vijaya brought her wrists down on the table hard and gritted her teeth. Damned mind.

Fazal must have been louder than he realized, as, the minute he had uttered the words the crowd fell silent. Whatever he had said rang out loud and clear over the din of the crowd and echoed across the grounds. Everyone had heard him. A gentle breeze blew across the arid desert and carried plumes of sand swirling and rushing like waves over the dunes. One by one, the warriors turned to face him. In the deathly silence the gravity of his remark began to bear upon him in a way that scared him into feeling that he might just have made the biggest mistake of his life. Fazal grew nervous, enough to run away as fast as his legs could carry him, he was least prepared for such a reaction. He would get far though, and he knew it. It wasn’t just these people’s unusual coldness towards him, he wasn’t even sure if they realized that he understood their cause or for that matter their lives, their stories. He drew in a lungful of the hot desert air, adjusted his helmet and fought against himself to stand absolutely still.

The faces surrounding him bore no inviting expressions. Slashed faces, gouged eyes, bared teeth and open wounds stared at him from a distance of a mere few feet. There were eyes that penetrated him causing his stomach to twist with fright, scowls and clenched jaws, which looked piercingly into his soul engraving bloody depictions of death on the empty walls of his teenage mind. These people were seasoned fighters, children of the sand, they had grown up seeing their houses blown to pieces, their mothers, sisters and wives raped, their newborns trampled upon and their brothers and friends cut to pieces by the Wahadis. Their scars told sordid tales of decades of rape, mutilation, economic exploitation and a systematic and rapid genocide that had stolen from them not only their childhood, but also their forefathers, their history, their heritage, friends and family. These souls did not know love, nor did they tolerate happiness, even compassion. Happiness, they believed distracted their minds from their cause, which was and always shall be the utter annihilation of the last of the Wahadis. If there was any education these rebels had given their children it was to hate the Black Army. The rebel children were schooled to repeatedly chant oaths of the Black Army’s destruction every minute of their growing days, children, the minute they learnt to stand steadily on their two legs were taught to nestle automatic rifles to familiarize their tender arms with the cold metal of the firearm.

These people, Fazal realized, weren’t ones to tolerate so much as a word that had nothing to do with either beheading a Wahadi or a plan to steal into one of their camps and blow something up. But now that he had already suspended himself on the tightrope of their attention there was no other way, if not ahead.
Gulping gently, Fazal spoke;

“I have been inside the secret garden of Firdaus, I know the way in”

Silence.

“I…I can get at least three of you inside from a secret rear entrance at the foot of the mountains of Rooh, I know where they lie.”

Not a word.

“If we creep into their security bunkers as stealthily as we can and take out their peripheral guards, we...we can, maybe, make a quick trip to Firdaus and back before they call for reinforcements…they aren’t even that well armed, swords, machetes, the most we can expect is maybe a Kalashnikov or two, but that’s going to be it…I am sure!”

My Oars

They may be fragile and minimal, they may be small and frayed, they may not be existent after all, but they are all I have, my broken oars. Dont burn them. A long journey it is to His golden shores, I need to row all the way there, a long way it is to my Maker's feet, oh please dont burn them oars.

Wrath awaits all those who have tried to incinerate my oars. Wrath will engulf all of you who have gnawed away at my soul, may wrath decimate your jest of an existence, a dried leaf in a wildfire, may all you who have burned my oars incur Devastating ire. Failures you are, humble grovelers at best, what right have you to rebuke? You nod your heads at the bidding of others, you sycophants, your dazzle is but a fluke.

Boredom

There is not a punishment of greater agony than a man of passion catching a bad case of boredom.

Boredom is a malady, more pernicious than jealousy, more damaging than pride and definitely more addictive than any drug known. Boredom is that poison that goes first for the mind. And then, from the mind, it descends down upon the body. It creeps insidiously in its slow, serpentine flow and settles in your joints. It sits heavily on your neck, then on your eyelids and before you know it, it has you in it's lethargic spell, in it's torpid daze.

But it is boredom's addictive nature that is most harmful. Like a narcotic, after a point, you start wanting it, knowing fully well that it's fumes are systematically turning you into a vegetable, or a piece of furniture. A chair, for instance. A chair that stands all day in its place in a room. All the change in the world outside - from the discovery of electricity to the iPad- could not move the chair from its place. It just sat there all day long, long dead.

Things get all the more difficult to bear when it happens to a man of passion, of desires, someone of ambition. A man who, for some reason, explained or unexplained, has relinquished his grip on the reigns. A frustrated man.
But, here's the truth. His agony, often, owes not to his frustration alone, but to the inroads boredom has made into this frustration. Its the hand that twists the knife.

So despair not if you are frustrated and rest assured that it shall come back. But never, ever let boredom slip into your frustration, as it is then that the wheels of your death shall start turning.

Gobbledygook

It always wins, with me, it somehow always wins.

Peeving, annoying little bastard, that guilt. The Bugger managed to slap me out of my somnolence, grab me by the scruff of my neck and drag me to the table. Astonishingly strong, it arm-locked my neck and pushed me down hard. A dirty breath close to my ears began whispering. It ordered me work those fingers, quick, punch in the characters and get in...

I stood at the door and cupped my hands around my eyes and peeped into the desolate, dusty insides of my chronicle. After looking around a bit, I decided I wanted to stay a while. And if the fancy seized me, write a little. Add a little more Gobbledygook.

So Gobbledygook it shall be. Gobbledygook, as it has always been, you may think. Mindless, incoherent ramblings of a mad, directionless man. A tangled head full of dualities. A mind lacking equanimity, wreaked by a stimulant induced torpidity. Stimulant, material and incorporeal.

But answer me this first, has anything that I've ever scooped out of my heart ever made any sense to you? Have you ever been able to understand your heart, fully? Can one ever articulate, with the precision of a surgeon how one feels? Have you been able to, to the last detail, describe the exact extent of your hurt or your longing? Have you? I think not. You may memorise dictionaries, climb the Himalayas in a quest to awaken the inner eye, you may self introspect all you want, but you can never ever, to the fullest, truest extent, describe some things. Know why?

Because, they are not meant to be understood, leave alone describe.

They aren't meant to be articulated. They are yours alone to feel, to suffer, to enjoy.

Hence the Gobbledygook. A squishy-squashy, splodgy, mush of clumsily gathered words that can only hope to convey a feeling.

Want a second helping? There's lots to go around, there always is.

The vendor of flowers

The vendor of flowers lay on the wayside pavement
his flowers strewn about him
they adorned his lowly bed and each night transported him
to a land where metal lacked worth
at the altar of Marigolds and Roses
where sleep was slept under an aromatic jasmine moon
and days spent in meadows of Lavender
to a land where counting petals was occupation
and impregnating the earth, worship
Where buzzing messengers from above
came seeking the sweet Manna of His


The vendor of flowers sleeps alone tonight
his flowers strewn about him
as the wayside pavement, his beloved’s bosom, lovingly cradles him
The stars tonight shall take him away from this wicked Nadir of Noise
Far away to his cradle land to her honey- sweetened voice
Away from this abyss where pieces of metal bought dreams
away to her address in the clouds where tender love held supreme


Tonight in the Nadir of Noise as the living dead bustled in haste
The vendor of flowers slept in silence, redolent and chaste

The Lulling Last Tune

The Pianist’s fingers waltzed daintily on the black and white keys of his Steinway and out came tumbling the lilting, honey drunken notes. Clear as crystalline dew drops, warm as dreams of loved ones, grey as monsoon clouds, now fast and confident, now shy and reticent, now slow, now breathless, now angry and gurgling, they told his story to the looming dark clouds, they sang his lore to the crying winds outside. From the stream of whiskey that snaked from the bottle that lay on the carpet, to the revolver that lay by his side, his material and immaterial audiences sighed and listened intently to his lulling last tune, their tune, swaying violently to the turbulent winds that rocked his little dwelling by the brook.

He played for her tonight, he played to her shadows, he let his fingers translate the dictate of his heart as the notes searched for her in the empty, desolate corners of his existence, searched for her beautiful voice in the dark, dusty air of his dwelling. They wanted to reach out to her, to tell her of his dark madness, to remind her, that one last touch of remembrance, of a loving kiss kissed, of a once earnest promise promised, of love that had once been and of a fragile mind that has lost to the heart in the race.

Elsewhere, she knotted her rich finery, bejeweled with her present and future with someone else’s. Yet, as she rose, a listless swan, to walk after him, around the fiery, holy, flame, an inadvertent song sprang in her heart and sweetly, she sang with him his lulling last tune.
His one hand rose from the keys and groped for his gun. Still playing with the other hand, he picked it up and rested his forefinger on the cold metallic crescent inside the ring.

As a thumb bloodied itself with vermillion, her song reached it’s coda, she knew she loved him, and for this folly she’d die anew everyday. Oh what a colossal folly. The time was now to act, to undo what was being done…
Two clear shots rang out amidst the windy carousel that night and her breasts exploded in a burst of red. Amidst all the hell breaking loose around her she fell in a flurry of flowers and jewels, her knot broke with a snap. The retreating, panicking well-wishers split to reveal the Pianist in the crowd. The silvery, wispy smoke from his gun coiled and hung low in the night air as he strode up to where she lay.
Her forehead bore no sign of red, the thick garlands, she had broken and the sacred, nuptial necklace followed a snaking, winding course of gold and black beads over the flowing red river.

“She was on her way back to you, you fool, on her way back to YOU…” cried someone.

For a split moment a crimson, ruby spangled crown formed on the fluvial stream of blood and disappeared immediately as a salty drop dissolved in it.

The air was split by another deafening report.

Beams of light from an early morning sun ushered in numerous tiny, illuminated particles of dust that seemed to come dancing all the way from the skies above like little blessings. In his bright, little chamber the Pianist cradled her in his arms lovingly and gazed into her auburn eyes as little songbirds chirped heartily at his windowsill. The little dwelling overlooked a luscious, green meadow by a busy, bubbling brook whose cool waters cascaded onto little terraces of moss covered rocks and formed playful concentric currents in the soft shadow of ferns growing on the edges of the water.
A pair of hands descended gently upon the old Steinway’s keys and drummed out a familiar allegro. At length, they were joined by another pair, dainty and small. Her demure fingers almost instinctively trailed his tune and played a subtler melodic progression to it and suddenly, they felt, they had known this intro. This faintly sweet melody, now fast and confident, now shy and reticent, now slow, now breathless, now angry and gurgling, a lulling last tune… their lulling last tune?

In some past life, perhaps, in another earthly existence.

And so sat the Pianist and his love painting the air with a lovely sonata, now fast and confident, now shy and reticent, now slow, now breathless, now angry and gurgling, a lulling last tune, their lulling last tune!