Myoclonus

Every waking hour, I think about her,

So right now, I’m not.

Right now, I’m on an island, where it is raining carcasses,

And a giant stands in the middle, trying to absorb the sea from around the land,

While I cycle around the periphery, trying to pedal fast enough to shield the water.

Right now, the raining carcasses are hindering my attempts,

And the giant is slashing the throats of more and more people to produce more and more of them,

Which he flings into the air and they shower into the sea and splash the water that the giant collects in his palm.

And he laughs, while I cycle.

And then, I see her.

And I feel the pain.

My foot looks to pedal,

But now, I’m the rain.

Apocalypse (a short story)

It was getting hotter. There were people at the equator who were trying to run from the inundating water. And then there were people at the North Pole, who were trying to annex to their piece of land, the ice; the ice that was slowly melting and causing the aforesaid inundation at the equator. All in all, the world was coming to an end.

I was amongst the 50 who were floating on a block of ice at the North Pole. We were all holding on to dear ice, or life. There was exactly a square foot of ice for each one of us. The lucky ones were towards the centre, where the ice was melting gradually, and the sun wasn’t directly overhead. At the periphery were the ones whose end was near-er. They were more scared. They were holding their little children in their arms, trying to save them from the apocalypse. They were covering their eyes and ears to protect them from the sight and sound of death. And all I could think about, from the comfort of my spot in the middle, was that that square foot of ice held two lives.

I also had the advantage of being tall. A twist of the head and a panoramic view of all the other less privileged 49.

I could see the ballerina, who stood on her toe till her spot melted and she drowned.

I could see the pundit, who closed his eyes and prayed till his spot melted and he drowned.

I could see the scientist who was calculating his time of death till his spot melted and he drowned.

And I could see the fat man whose spot broke off from the mainland and drowned with him.

The man at my side nudged me. “I never had a good friend in my life. Will you be my good friend?” I nodded. And for the next three hours, or should I say 30 people, he told me the long story of his life. How he was bullied and how he relented, how his father died when he was six and how he made a living out of shaping shrubs. It was slow torture. But when the world is ending, it helps if time passes slowly.

A teenage girl on my other side tugged on my pants. “I never got kissed,” she said. “Would you kiss me?” I nodded. I picked her up in my arms, and gave her a kiss on the lips. Her cheeks got flushed with red. I kept her down. Still red in her ears, she looked up and said thank you. I smiled. Another 3 people passed.

2 people later, the old lady behind me patted my buttocks. A twist of the head and I could see her small fragile body, and her wrinkly face smiling away to glory. “I never had a son. Would you be my son?” I nodded. “Yes, mother”, I said. Her life was complete. She died right then.

Her death was a source of error in my units of time.

4 people later (or 5, if you include the dead old lady), the schizophrenic on my front turned to look at me. “I knew Abraham Lincoln is still alive!” he said, looking up at me. I nodded. “Nobody has ever expected me to be president. In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting,” I said.

The schizophrenic’s purpose of life was complete. He went hysterical and pushed 6 more people into the water.

Damn. Another source of error. And then he died. Another.

Now it was just me and the friendless man and the teenage girl.

Their spots melted and they drowned.

It was just me now. And my square foot of ice. My own little space under the sun. I had never owned a house. Here was a piece of land that was entirely mine, floating on a liquid cemetery.

I had lived life to the fullest. I had visited the places I wanted to visit, dated the girls I had a crush on, made a job of what I loved most. I had no regrets. I had lived on my own terms.

And there it was: the realization that even in my last moment, I was going to live on my own terms.

There was no waiting.

I was going to die on my own terms.

I jumped.

Prison Break

It was 1993.

I stood in front of the mountains and took a long breath in an effort to inhale the beauty in front of me. The mountains seemed like they were falling backwards onto a sheath of light, and the light was splattering along their edges, resisting in pain whilst giving birth to rays. The hills seemed so black, and yet I could distinguish shades of blackness in the contours of the rocks that reflected the falling light. The exhilaration that I felt at witnessing such beauty was, however, neutralized by a fear of what lay ahead. The surroundings made me feel free, but somewhere at the back of my mind, and in my throat, there was an acerbic feeling that I had committed a crime, and they were going to find me. Soon.

And they did.

I remember sitting in a van with three policemen, recalling the loveliness of that moment. I tried to thwart the stink of the men with the vestige of the smell of jasmines, and closed my eyes to escape the dullness of their brown uniforms. I was trying my best to focus on the present, but it wasn’t helping.

I consoled myself by reminding myself that I was used to living a trapped existence. Even though I had traveled to a number of places, I had always been bound to an ambition, that of making more money and getting more success. In going to jail, I felt that my life would reach a standstill, and I would be free of that enterprise. But even then, I knew I had no motility. I knew that I was about to get trapped inside a ‘chardeewari’, and the only scenery I would get would be that of Hari Nagar; that too, furrowed by the window bars.  I would have to curb my creativity, my thoughts, and my intellect in order to survive a prison environment. Complete freedom always evaded me.

I remember the railings adjacent to the road that led to Central Jail no. 4 of Tihar. They seemed to be a continuous sheet of metal from a distance, but as the van approached them, the bars untwined: the magic of perspective. After crossing, the bars fused again. As will be clear to you eventually, this was an apt representation of what was to be my life.

 Just before I got arrested, I had heard that Kiran Bedi had taken over as Inspector General of Prisons. This was supposed to be a good thing, because it was said she joined the police service because of her urge to be ‘outstanding’.

Bull shit.

The only way a police officer would be considered outstanding was if they provided maximum prison security and tortured the inmates to the extent of lunacy. Tihar jail’s motto, as described by the then superintendent of Jail no. 2, Mr Taseem Kumar, was that “…oppressing and imposing maximum restrictions on the inmates would make them suffer; so that once a prisoner was released he would not commit crimes again for fear of being sent back to this hell.” An ‘outstanding’ Inspector General would only try and elevate the situation, I thought.

But then again, this is what I thought then.

However, in my term of life imprisonment, which in India is a minimum of fourteen years, my outlook was to change. For life.

My fellow inmate was a man named Mohan. He had been there for two years, and owing to the aforementioned ‘oppressing and imposing maximum restriction’, he was nearing psychosis. He had intermittent phases of madness, in which he would howl and run around hysterically. This used to be followed by more of the aforementioned ‘oppressing and imposing maximum restriction’ which furthered the hysteria. It was an infinite loop.

One day, however, a woman in uniform walked in. She was wearing the abominable dull brown, but somewhere in her face, I could see a faint smile of genuine care. As it turned out, she was Kiran Bedi. Her walk, like that of a Satyagrahi, was to change the entire prison environment. I saw her stroll around, stopping at cells and talking to the prisoners. The bars used to make us feel separated from the outside world of the heinous guards, but in talking to her, we felt the warmth of a human touch from across the gaps.

A year passed. Mohan’s condition had started to improve. On what was supposed to be the evening of April 4, 1994, some 1000 male inmates were gathered in an open tent or shamiana and given instructions by Mr. S.N Goenka on a course of Vipassana. The ten days that followed made me realize just how mistaken my idea of freedom was. Freedom, I realized, was a matter of perspective too, just like the railing. In that course of Vipassana, I felt liberated even though I was surrounded by gigantic electrified walls. I felt a mental elevation, the kind I had felt when surrounded by the mountains. Here too, I was mildly restricted, but it was better, because this restriction was of a physical nature.

It only got better. In 1994, Kiran Bedi was honoured with the Raman Magsaysay Award. In 1996, Jail no. 5 was opened. Eventually, many meditation centres were inaugurated. Kiran Bedi was taking all the necessary steps to prompt the evolution of Tihar jail into Tihar ashram.

In 2000, Mohan died. I felt like I was staring into an abyss for a long time after that. But continuous meditation helped me calm my mind, which is why I cannot talk about it anymore with an attached weight of sentiments. Nevertheless, it was another turning point in my life. I started preferring a lonely existence, and began writing. They shifted me to Jail no. 5.

A curator called Anubhav Nath of Ramchandar Nath Foundation, in 2007, initiated art lessons for the prisoners of Tihar. One of my fellow inmates, who had read my writing, intelligently said, “You should try your hand at painting. Writers and painters have a lot in common. They both create their own imaginary worlds and prefer to live in them. The only difference is, a writer uses a pen, and a painter uses a brush.” And so I started painting.

Fourteen years had passed by then. My sentence was about to come to an end. I was painting away to glory, literally. I painted the railings, and I painted Mohan. I painted Jail no. 4 and I painted Jail no. 5. As we neared 2009, it was announced that paintings would be selected for an exhibition called ‘Expressions of Tihar’. Thereafter, I started working on my masterpiece: the mountains of 1993.

In every colour and stroke, I relived a milli-second of that day. This feeling was even better than the Vipassana, because this time, instead of fear or physical confinement, I could finally look forward to complete freedom. The day that painting sold was the day of my release. Ah, kismet.

Today, I am a writer and an artist. I am free in the truest sense of the word. I am free from ambitions and chardeewaris, I am free in my creativity, my thoughts and my intellect. I am free of my guilt and my sadness. I am free. Completely.

I am free.

And it’s because I spent 15 years in prison.

Ah, kismet.

Die the Lie

I saw awfully little of him in the shadows. It appeared as if a ray of light had spliced him through the middle and engulfed half his body, leaving the rest in the unsullied darkness. His face showed the torment of the procedure, for his one eye stared at me with pain and anguish. “Step forward so I can see you,” I said. He took one step into the light, and it spat him out in his entirety. His red curls bended it into shiny fingernails, and now that I could see both his eyes, I saw millions of other emotions bubbling in his face. He was a very handsome man, and if I too were that light, I would ensconce him for as much and as long as possible.  Spitting was a misplaced verb.

“I know you’re going to kill me,” he said, “but before you do, I must tell you that I had nothing to do with your sister’s murder.” I smiled. “Of course you’d say that.” “I wouldn’t. I am an honest man. I have killed and sinned a hundred times but I do not wish to die for a crime I did not commit.” “Fine,” I said, “Die for the ones you did.” I took out my gun.

He looked at me. “I’m not going to lie and tell you I’m not scared of death because I am.  It’s not because I’m scared of the pain. It’s because that is that one thing in this world that eludes me. No one knows what comes after. In fact, knowledge is meaningless in matters of death, because death embezzles life of it.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “I need you to know that life encompasses death. Like light encompasses shadows. Life is that truth which readies us for the end, and death is that which rejoices in that consciousness life had by its mere ability to make us unaware. In a way, death is a lie, for it relies upon snatching the truth that life embossed into us. Just like darkness is only the absence of light.”

I gaped at him as he took a step back. “Don’t move further!” I said to half his body.

“I meant to explain to you that death and darkness are accomplices. You see half of me now, for half of me is already dead.”

Well, I’m sure as hell going to kill the other half,” I said.

I shot.

“You forget that darkness is a lie, my friend,” said a voice.

And a single hand strangled me to death.