The chairs are empty, three of them under the lonely spotlight. All three are draped with a white cloth. One is slightly in front of the other two as if wanting to stand out solely in the light. One is without a cushion and is made of pink plastic. The other two are wooden and have cream-colored cushions. They do not look too old and appear to be waiting for someone. Someone to come and occupy the empty space and throw an additional shadow taller than that of the chairs but blending in with their manufactured uniformity. Perhaps they are like the Sirens of Circe placed there for people fate has abandoned in the alleys of failed ambition.
Time passes. Now there is a man. He is sitting in the plastic chair, the least comfortable of the three. He is foaming at the mouth. His hands are clutching a thin black rope made of plastic. At his feet lies a disposable syringe, old and ugly. His eyes try to concentrate on the spotlight as if by doing so he can find all the answers he ran away from every time. But it is too bright for them. His pupils dilate suddenly. The light overwhelms him and rushes through his open mouth, up his nose into the brain. As everything turns a brilliant white he sees a young child walking away from him, hand in hand with his mother.
(second part in a trilogy of short pieces loosely based on the themes of light and death)
It was night and the lights were flashing, long streaks of them, white and bright. The air was still but not heavy. There were people around, curious and concerned. They were standing in groups, their collective whispers a pleasant background hum, faces lit up like old paintings in the intermittent light. Dull yellow tape marked off the inner from the outer. Bored faces on the inside going through the formalities. Their actions familiar yet unfeeling. Their clipboards and pens glinting under the flashing bulbs, the chalk lines flowing together to form an unknown constellation of connected paraphernalia.
In the center, the body of the woman, oblivious to all the sudden entropy. Her arms splayed wide open on either side, pointing to some lost direction. Her eyes open to the stars, taking in the empty splendor of the wheeling heavens above.
(first part in a trilogy of short pieces loosely based on the themes of light and death)
One by one they all left, like migratory birds on the journey south, each taking a moment to look back and take in the surroundings one final time. The light outside profiled them against the darkness inside. They stood like solemn sentinels keeping guard over some hidden truth. I was in a corner, my territorial integrity intact from their invisible stares. Their extremities twitched and twirled from some internal rhythm. Or was it a new nervousness on their part? Perhaps they thought that I would leave my corner and claim more of the space outside. Or perhaps they feared that I would find the truth they had been hiding all along. I did not care for the answers. I was content to just sit there and observe their individual coronae visible in the momentary eclipse of detail and shadow.
We sat around the table looking at the light make patterns on our hands. The place was a vast cavern filled to the brim with people grooving to the big beats. Beautiful women glided through the air with sly smiles playing around their mouths as if hiding the intimate pleasures they could impart to those who dared to touch them. But we were not to be bothered. Sounds and images failed to crash on the shores of our awareness. We were in another world, a world where patterns formed hidden meanings, where life was lived between the lines on a palm, where speech was superfluous, where love flew on wings made of diffused light and where a glance was equal to a thousand words.
Ecstatic tears flowing down our cheeks we linked our hands and burnt packets of star flame with alcohol fires coursing through our souls.
Over the water the light was floating making color patterns. The gossamer light enveloped me in its mellow fold igniting the blue wick of my memory. I saw memories roll across the tunnel of light, shimmering and wavering in their wet intensity. I saw myself in my many moods. I saw her in perpetual hunger, for love and for the final victory. I saw symbols that made sense only to me. I saw sounds that could only be heard by me. I saw the past, the present and the future fused by the light and water of time.
The rain fell like warm feelings, wetting my heart with the tears of yesterday. I wandered down the street moving in and out of the long shadows. The street was mostly empty reflecting the state of my mind. My eyes stared at the way the raindrops rolled off the edge of my fingertips, drop by drop, and one after the other in slow motion. I like rain and the manifold forms it takes. The late summer evening shower is the best, washing away the heat and grime of the day with a gentle whisper. Lo! The sun peeked out of the corner of a cloud like a shy child. I bathed myself in this sudden radiance, cleansing my emotions with the weightless photons.
The sky opened its arms for me. I covered myself in the warmth of its blue embrace. Eyes closed, hand folded over my chest I fell into an ocean of dreams. Seldom does one find such a perfect stillness, a stillness which can be sliced with the edge of a sword. I traveled far, as far away as possible to a land where deserts wrote poetry with sand and rocks radiated wisdom with their silence.
I touched red water with my feet and kissed blooming flowers with the edge of my tongue. I held warm flesh in my arms and caressed the sinuous curves of beautiful bodies. I fought ugly moods and played with splendid emotions.
Green memories tumbled over each other in my head in an effort to gain the gift of permanence, each one a box of feelings and hidden insights, each one a window into time distorted by the play of light and thought. I moved on, counting the cobblestones receding under my feet like milestones of the mind. In the distance, I could see my destination appear out of the wet haze.
Nothing mattered anymore. The days may roll and the nights may flow but my memories will still be secure in their niche. I can listen to their mellow voices whenever nostalgia shoots its melancholic arrows again.
I opened the door and entered the white room.
(a personal ode to the utter visual splendor of the Chinese film ‘Hero’)
She laughed and it felt as if the sky had opened up like a new flower to bask in the beautiful light of that sound. It was the kind of laughter that made you feel good about yourself because what you said had caused that laughter. It started deep inside her stomach and traveled all the way to her mouth, picking up flotsam and jetsam along the way like a monsoon flood and then crashed on your soul like a wave. But it was not overwhelming. It was sweet and serene. Times like that made you feel that there was some purpose in living to make people laugh.
She stopped with the hint of a smile caressing the outer edges of her lips and said, “You are a very funny guy”. I smiled back, modestly but not without a touch of pride. I’ve always loved to make people laugh. It makes me glow from the inside whenever people crack up at something I’ve said. We look beautiful when we smile and laugh, when our lips open up and our shy teeth peer from behind them. It is like the first ray of sunshine peeking from behind the curtain of dawn. Yes, I’m going to repeat that adage again about how we need to laugh more often. Indeed, we should abandon ourselves to the sheer ecstatic delight of holding our stomachs and laughing our guts out. It is a both a physical and mental catharsis. We cleanse ourselves of every wrinkle of worry and every shadow of sorrow in the throes of that heavenly happiness.
My fingers automatically went to her lips as if wanting to hold the shape of that smile before it disappeared. It is something I find myself doing more and more frequently. Perhaps it is a reaction against the increasing artificiality in our lives, the forced smiles, the polite laughter, and the simple stretching of our facial muscles to mean something totally useless. How many times have we found ourselves feeling that strange pain after having gone through an entire evening just exercising our smile-muscles? Yes, the quest for natural laughter is the aim of my life and when I find it I want to hold it deep inside my heart, forever.
“But why didn’t you laugh?�? she asked. I smiled again and kept quiet. How could I answer her? They say that behind every comedian’s joke lies an immense story of sadness. Not that I’m some tragi-comic hero hiding deep sorrows behind my weird jokes. It is simply that along this journey to find true laughter I lost the ability to laugh. Strange isn’t it? But then stranger things have happened in life. Does it affect me? No, not at all. As long as I know that I can make people laugh I’m happy. Vicarious pleasure is all I ask for and all that keeps me going.
The night flowed like a mountain stream down the road. The city lights flickered like some surreal light show. People walked in groups, huddled, as if protecting themselves against the strange taste in the air. Unity in strength perhaps. Except for the occasional cab the road was empty. The lack of vehicles was vaguely disquieting. On second thoughts the scene looked more like a set for some dark film set in a post-technology future.
Across the road there were two men standing under a street-lamp. No, not exactly under it but at the outer edges of the light so that their faces would be in shadow. Why would anyone do that unless they had something to conceal? They seemed to be whispering although it was difficult to be sure.
There, it was flickering again. It was not just the lights around but the whole scene itself as if reality was shifting to another dimension. One could sense a sudden note of urgency in the whispers of the two men. Their hands were moving, making some complicated pattern. A pattern which brought an odd feeling that the shape it made was something very familiar but try as you might you cannot recall what it was.
And just like that they faded into the darkness. The lights flickered out of existence and I felt the warm exhalation of a world suddenly left wordless.
