Homecoming (IX)

"It is not something that will go unnoticed. Were I to try and ascribe an adjective to what I make of this lifetime, it would not be much different than dull. Why then, you would question, is this likely to get instantiated at all? Because this is how we live - vicariously through someone, someone who we think is far removed from what we are, a life that we secretly wish was a part of our definition of self, only a little covert. For certain things are pleasurable and hurtful alike to all of us; for certain things wouldn't necessarily be wrong - just that a surrogate experience would make us that much more complete. Who I am or what reasons had I to eschew a life more meaningful, in certain respects, should be peripheral to you. That I am giving you something which shall go a long way in defining you in your moments of indiscretion should alone be reason enough for you to savor this."

This had, over time, stopped being funny to him. What had germinated as an idea of excusing himself from the real world into Elysian Fields had now started blurring in vision. The glass underneath had started cracking and the soot from a charring life had started darkening the air. There was no quick fix. Rather the only one he could think of was the absence of smoke. Unsurprisingly, he would himself have to come down. All this while had been spent procrastinating. On a second thought, not really. All this while, a larger question of making a choice had been impaling his mind. A now-imperfect world lay on both sides with a fractured glass film somehow holding them apart. Which of the two he wanted to see through to fruition was the question that had made him dispassionate about either.

“I am not going to lay blame at anyone’s feet, and there is no reason for that either. I was born, and with me were born certain identities that I carry with myself – that I lend meaning to. The metamorphosis into what you read now is perhaps a little simpler than what it would seem. I seem to realize now that we are all bodies floating somewhere, with or without its cognizance. A nihilist in me would go to the extent of calling us all the constituents of the Styx. But I pull back. Some of us do – we fight against a force which does not exist, towards a cause that now seems an empty ecosphere. What are we to make of our lives? The dichotomy here is if chance is all that separates us, and to what extent. From where I see, it’s an external agency that causes ripples in an otherwise perfectly harmonized flow.”

He got up to get a glass of water. Some people have the knack of finding humor in craziest of instances, he thought and laughed aloud. Glass and Water. A quick gulp and he felt the smoke getting doused. Life has its quirks. He was distracted by this little stream of consciousness. On the way back to his table he dropped a gaze onto a sleeping wife and envied the peaceful state she must have been in. He saw his kids lying on the mat in the other room, and cursed his inability to prepare a more comfortable bed for them. As a consolation, they would have never known what difference that would make. All they knew, he sighed, was a particularly capricious princess who would not sleep on twenty stacked mattresses. He could not decide if this was a welcome break.

It was getting late in the night, one of many when he had tried to write something. Anything. He absolved himself of any shortcoming, though and declared to himself just what he had written – his life had largely been dull. What he wanted to get across through this effort was that there is a spectacle in everything. He thought he could do justice – and had been struggling to find this in every one of those notes he had been writing since. A couple of those nights, he thought, were more about indulgence than urgency. This was slowly turning out to be one of those.

“I will begin by stating that I failed in almost every major decision I took towards forging an identity for myself. I will start by calling out every decision I took as being thoroughly moulded by stories I had heard all my life; a desire to live long after; a wish to hear people talk about me in the same vein as those stories and a hope that I would be alive to see all of this unfold. My name is Mantu.”

There is no point in conjuring up an alter ego, a thing of myths he thought.