It was the setting of another moving era. Of men moving like machines without brain. Of women moving like men without heart. In the meanwhile, a centipede was slowly making progress from a wall to a ceiling. It was now upside down.
Underneath, bereft of dreams, he was tossing and turning. Couple of steps away from him, in the loft, a lizard had just broken out from an egg looking inherently creepy. A few bricks down, beneath the washbasin, a spider was happy with his last night’s catch. And just below this spider, an earthworm was merrily gliding on the smooth vitrified surface.
He unrolled his cozy blanket. Sat upright. Heard the sound of the gushing rain outside. And immediately, felt sorry for himself. He wanted to sleep like a puppy; go in a hibernation mode like a bear; be with himself like a sadhu in a cave. But he never could. He was not a sadhu. Not rich either.
He resembled a scarecrow. Walked like a robot. Smiled like a witch. And lived like an alien lost on planet earth. So he chose the profession of being a writer.
Life was now a bit simpler for him. He could liberally bite his nails. Grow hair. Lazily spend hours thinking, reading, and writing. Take trunk load of criticism. Yank mouthful of shit. And at any moment, be mad or sad. Like a junkie.
He woke up from his bed, still feeling drowsy, took a few drunken steps towards the washbasin and interrogated his self in the mirror-
like an English officer cross-examining a Muslim post 9/11.
“Why are you here, you fuckistani?” the officer went hard on him.
Outside, the weather went pitch dark, the rain toughened, and that very moment, the interrogatee suddenly became a werewolf, and the lightning struck like a growl of an entire repressed race. Every motionless and helpless figure got pulled towards an epicenter. Stones and trees; roots and water; powerless and lost souls; nuts and bolts; earthworms and centipedes; neutrons, protons and electrons; everything, everything that was devoid of its potential came together and got fixed in timelessness into a nature’s machine to blow up in just one take which will curtail any further knowingness of any origin or an end.
