My parallel Universe

Someone is knocking on my door -its sound is now gradually getting fainter. But I won't be receiving this visitor, whoever it is; in fact I can't, and I don't wish to. The wind is tousling my hair and I can feel it against my face. I am presently falling down through thin air, closing in on the roadside pavement every moment. Having exhausted my desire to live, I have leaped out of my 20th floor apartment window. I have been contemplating on it for quite sometime now, ever since my wife and son died, but only today I finally summoned the courage, in a fit of severe pain, to jump out of the window.
I have often wondered before what I will be thinking of in my mind as I fall down -will I scream with fear, struck by the realisation of imminent death, or will I cling on to the hope of being saved miraculously, or will I just be silent, still thinking about my beloved ones, hoping to meet them soon somewhere in a place where we all land up after death? Or will I be damned and sent to hell, as the priests say, without getting to meet them ever?
But now as I fall, I am getting to know the answer to all those questions that had troubled me at times. I am actually thinking about myself, as a matter of fact a bit optimistically. I think I am watching another image of myself -another 'me', in a parallel universe, who is still going to be alive, for having decided against jumping out at the very last moment. That 'me' had also wept form the morning, sitting in front of the two photos, caressing the frames with his hand, eagerly digging up old memories, and somewhat voluntarily getting choked with pain. After scribbling down a suicide note and placing it on the writing desk, I, in my parallel universe, walked up to the window, took a leg out, closed my eyes, but finally couldn't hurl myself out; instead I kept thinking of a parallel universe where my wife and son were still alive, staying with me, and that my wife was knocking on the door. I slowly got back from the window and went in to open the door to let the visitor in.
As I fall, now only moments from death's arms, I smile at what I see. I realise that though I will cease to live in this universe, I don't cease to exist. I am alive in many of my parallel Universes where I have chosen to live on, and actually living happily in some of them. But these Universes are all secluded and a great distance apart from each other, yet they are all so close to me even without my having realised that before. I will die in this particular Universe now, but I won't perish, or to put it more correctly: I have just chosen to make this particular Universe cease to exist for 'me'.
Thud!

Todo sobre mi Ra/ All about my Ra

[Due to some of the matured contents in the following story, the reader is advised to use his/her discretion in reading it. The characters and the circumstances are fictitious. I am sure to earn the wrath of a few of my more conservative friends for writing this piece.]

When Ra told that he was going to tell me his life’s greatest ‘secret’, I had been a bit puzzled, and wondered what it could be, for I had always thought that we didn’t have any secrets between us. I had felt a little betrayed. We were each other’s confidants, and had been very close friends for more than ten years, in fact quite intimate.

When his mother left the house for the day to visit her ailing sister, we went into his bedroom. Normally at this time we would either play cards or end up debating on social issues, or discussing Lorca (1). I stretched out myself on his bed, which I had always found to be softer than mine, and indignantly demanded to be informed about his secret. Ra kept silent. Then he pulled out a low stool and sat down at his desk. I was waiting for him to begin, but he started rummaging through the lowest drawer of his desk and brought out some boxes that were lying hidden under a pile of junk and old newspapers. From another drawer he brought out a mirror and placed it on the desk, supporting its back on the wall. I kept watching him curiously. Ra made two big paper balls with the old newspapers and then stood up, stealing a quick glance at me before undressing himself. Since we almost grew up together, we weren’t much ashamed of our body. I watched his curly dark hair, flowing gently down his long neck and resting on his shoulders, his big shiny eyes, his sharp nose -in all, he reminded me of Michelangelo’s David. To us, being comfortable with each other's nakedness or being bawdy at times was just another aspect of our closeness, rather than anything sexual. We were lovers as in the Platonic sense (which unfortunately most people simply don't seem to get). ‘Ra is quite beautiful…,’ I briefly wondered – and then abruptly jerked the thought out of my mind, suddenly shocked and a bit ashamed on realizing how unexpectedly these thoughts had silently crept up in my mind and taken over its fantasies. I quickly diverted my attention to a book by Andre Gidé (2) which I found lying on his bed. Ra went away to his mother’s room, but came back in a few minutes, dressed in a white petticoat and a pink blouse, probably inflated with those paper balls. I was about to laugh out loud at what I thought to be a stupid prank, but then I looked into his eyes and froze. I sat up quickly, bewildered. He walked up to the desk and sat down in front of the mirror. He opened the boxes; they were full of eyeliners, rouge, face-powder and other cosmetics. I watched him with surprise and a slight disgust as he brushed the powders on his cheeks, coloring them red, blackened his eyelashes, and applied purple eye shadows, gradually changing into something revolting; something that escaped my reasoning. He wore red lipstick and pressed his lips against each other twice in quick successions, smoothing out its effect, before carefully wiping off the borders with a soft handkerchief. Having finished his make-up, he remained seated silently, gazing at his reflection. I walked up to him slowly, dragging my feet a bit, as if under a trance. I could see myself in the mirror, standing behind Ra. He didn’t turn back; instead he raised his misty eyes to look at me in the mirror. I kept staring at my dear friend Ra, somewhat painfully, as I struggled to accept his new feminine appearance –ugly and inexplicable. My heart was beating faster and my head felt heavy. Old memories rushed in and the frightening uncertainty of future posed doubts and threatened me with questions. Disgust, surprise, shock, fear, and a gamut of feelings that probably have no names, rose and ebbed in my mind. They were tearing off my nerves, gnawing at my heart, and thwarting my reasoning. I took a deep breath and waited for it all to subside.

After a while when I had overcome my initial revulsion, I slowly whispered in his ears, 'Ra, I will always be your friend.'
I heard his faint sobs, but I turned around and left the room silently, closing the door behind me.

(1) Federico Garcia Lorca was a famous Spanish poet and dramatist, who was killed by Falange militia in 1936. His executioner proudly commented, 'I shot two bullets into his arse for being a queer.'

(2) Andre Gide was a Nobel Prize winning author who championed the cause of homosexuality and Platonic love through his works as early as in the 1920s.

*This story was inspired by Pedro Almodovar's film, 'Todo sobre mi Madre'; the title goes as a tribute to his films.

The heart that stopped beating

I lay there with my eyes open, almost stiff as a corpse, quite aware of my nakedness beneath the white sheets which smelled faintly of lime. The white sheets weren’t completely white anymore; they were in fact red, and quite wet, soaked in my blood.
“Systolic 56, Diastolic 44, his blood pressure is falling Doctor!” exclaimed a female voice.

Many machines were beeping and droning at my bedside, some with colorful displays on their monitors. The machines had spread their thin tentacles all over my torso, and even extending a few down my legs. I could feel a cold sensation at the spots where they touched my skin.

“Look at this cardiogram, his heart has stopped beating!” said a male voice.
Soon two faces were bending over me. They were staring at me worriedly.
My left hand was resting on my chest, bandaged with a white gauge that had turned quite red. I tried to raise my right hand, the one that carried a band with “Patient Number 2051874532” written on it, but I simply couldn’t. They had pinned it down and had punctured its veins with syringes- one of them was connected to a pipe which fed in blood, and the other to some colorless liquid- saline or glucose perhaps. The fluids from the bottles were trickling down drop by drop into the pipes, and then down their entire length into my veins. I could feel my body gluttonously gulping down every drop of blood and the liquid. I tried to say something, but couldn’t even part my lips.

“His heart has stopped beating!” repeated the nurse anxiously. I could now see her round face, the two small shiny eyes on it, and the dilated cave-like nostrils of her little nose. I could finally recognize her. It was the same pig-faced nurse that I had seen in the doctor’s chamber previously.

I blinked.
“Oh look, he blinks! He is alive!”
“Is the machine working?”
“Check the pressure”
“The ECG shows his heart isn’t beating”
“Get the Doctor. Quick.”

I could see many creatures, dressed in green clothes and white apron, some with blue caps, gloves and ear-loop masks, running around me frenetically, and some of them occasionally stopped by to take a peep at me, as if I was some interesting animal lying there. Interesting indeed! An animal that is alive, but whose heart isn’t beating!

I lay there, turning the sentence over and over in my head: “My heart has stopped beating…My heart has stopped beating…”

However I won't say that I felt alarmed or afraid of an imminent death. Actually it didn’t even surprise me a bit. I knew that my heart had stopped beating a long time back, in fact many years back. Perhaps I could probably be best described as a ‘heartless’ person. I had locked up all my human emotions in some dark corner of my heart, and then deliberately lost the key to that inner chamber. That was the day when love and faith had deserted me; and that was the very day when my heart had actually stopped beating for me. Everything from then on has been ugly, hideous, and nightmarish. Everything! Yes, everything and everyone!

Yet there was a time, I remember, when the sight of slightest plight and suffering would move me deeply; my heart would thump frenziedly against my chest, making my mind heavy with grief till pristine drops of tears swelled up in my eyes, wetting my eyelashes, and crowding at the corners before rolling down the pale cheeks.

But I never cried since then. I had always been able to absorb the severest of all misery and torture without letting a single drop of tear escape my eyes. I became ruthless to an extent that I could even laugh at other’s misfortune- that actually entertained me; almost gave me a fresh breeze of life. I had loved to see others suffer; suffer the same way I had once. I held them all responsible for my lifelong pain.

I looked down and saw the pig-faced nurse busy in removing the suckers of that octopus-like machine from my body, carelessly tearing away tufts of hair as she removed the tapes and bandages. Soon I could see the lights on the overhead ceiling appearing and receding fast from my view; they were wheeling me down the corridor to another room. The fat pig-faced nurse was running on my side, panting for breath, and looking back at times to catch a glimpse my blank eyes. Another doctor and a nurse were running on the other side, pushing the bed. The bottles were hanging from a tall bedside stand, and they swayed and occasionally clanged with each other. I saw hazy figures moving aside to clear our way.

I could suddenly hear the scream of a newborn at a distance. That terrible, wretched wail! The wail seemed to shatter the peace of my hour of death. I could clearly imagine that mean, little, ungrateful creature emerging out of nine months of darkness, bringing upon its mother as much pain as it possibly could, deliberately withholding itself from coming out, and then later on trying to earn everyone’s affection with inane, charming smiles. I could picture its small body, still mottled with its mother’s blood; its round red face, with two slits and two little nostrils, and a large open mouth with which it cried and wailed menacingly, announcing joyfully its existence in this wretched world, and defiantly throwing around its clenched fists and legs in thin air as if preparing itself for the forthcoming struggles for survival in this world.

I had always hated to live, and perhaps that’s why I also hated those who were alive, and those who bring forth more life on this planet in an effort to perpetuate this disgusting human race. I recalled with horror the sight that I had witnessed when they brought me to the hospital by force. I had kicked and fought with the doctors in the ambulance. They had then kept me tied to the bed with belts to prevent me from escaping. They probably thought I was mad. But they never realized that the very sight of sick people coming to hospital for cure repelled me the most. They had sedated me with injections and brought me inside the hospital lobby, where much to my disgust, I came across a horde of wrinkled, old people, scurrying about in wheelchairs, earnestly waiting to be cured. These senile creatures were breathing only to cling onto life with a never-ending desire to live on forever.

Thereafter while I was passing by the maternity ward, I saw something that was even more repulsive. There were mothers sitting on the bed and feeding their newborn babies. The newborns were clinging onto their mother, greedily sucking tasteless milk down their throat, and to me they seemed to be growing bigger and fatter every moment. There were hundreds of them, suckling on like leeches, getting larger and stronger. 'Disgusting creations of Satan,' I had shouted aloud like a madman, and they had hurled me off into a doctor’s chamber where I met that fat pig-faced nurse. She is a bitch, a real one. She had given me some injection that had left me unconscious -completely defenseless against their aggression on my body. She had laughed when I was shouting and yelling with pain- the pain that was entirely mine, and only mine to bear. Nobody had ever got to understand or feel my pain, yet some of the more treacherous ones would try to sympathize, or even show pity! To most of them I was a crazy fellow, a laughing stock. The doctors knew nothing about my pain, yet they wanted to perform some therapy on me; they thought they could cure me with medicines and surgeries! What fools they are!

But I had no wish to give the nit-wits a chance to experiment with me. After a while when they had left me alone, thinking that I was asleep, I had got up stealthily, and slit my left hand vein with a sharp object that I had found lying around in the room. I hadn’t cried. My stoic heart had felt no pain; I had just lain down on my bed, letting the blood gush out, and soon I had become unconscious once again. Those fools fortunately hadn’t got to discover me soon, and I was probably lying there, bleeding for a long time.

But now I could see many doctors buzzing around me like flies, desperately trying to save my life, or rather to make my heart beat once again. They were hurrying me down the corridor. The doctor on the side reached out for my right hand and tried to feel the pulse. “His heart isn’t beating” said someone from the back. I smiled secretly as I thought, “I am a man who is living but whose heart isn’t beating. I have finally escaped life, leaving it astound, outwitting the Machiavellian strategies that it must have laid out for my future. I can now live without ever having to be physiologically alive. I am not a part of the human race anymore; I am not a part of life anymore. Finally my mind is at peace, finally I am free!”

“Emergency. Move, move out of the way”
“No, his heart isn’t beating”
“Hurry, hurry, we can still save him”

I could see the lights of the corridor ceiling flashing by. Two anxious faces were staring at me, hoping that I will blink again. But I was too tired to play their games. I just lay there, stiff and still, with my eyes wide open, watching the ceiling above.

Light. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark….

The night of fear

“NATO's alliance forces say that its warplanes killed an unspecified number of civilians during a battle with Taliban forces…”
Click.

“…suicide bomber attacks a convoy of soldiers killing a French soldier and several Afghans…”
Click.

“…Bangladeshi cartoonist Arifur Rahman is detained on suspicion of disrespecting Muhammad through caricatures…”
Click.

“…Coming up next is Bollywood Blockbuster…”
Click.

“The New York Police Department denies a request by the President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Ground Zero of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City…”
Click.

“…cyclist Floyd Landis is officially stripped of his win in the 2006 Tour de France and banned from competition for two years after an arbitration panel finds him guilty of doping during the 2006 Tour…”
Click.

“…Britney’s Ex wants legal expenses…”
Click.

“…Due to increasing rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians, The Government of Israel declares the Palestinian-controlled Gaza Strip an "enemy entity", and announces plans to cut utilities to the territory…”
Click.

“…the MTV pop icon of the year award goes to…”
Click.

“…Osama bin Laden calls on the people of Pakistan to rise up in a ‘holy war’ and overthrow…”

Click.

The tiny red light faded away, giving out a slight whine. The room was Silent again. And Black. Neither my chair, nor I were casting our shadows on the wall anymore. Another proof of my existence had succumbed to the darkness. With that effortless click, I had made the luminous screen instantly vanish into that darkness, taking away with itself, the images of a bearded man wearing a white turban and a clean-shaven leader in his black suit. But I hadn’t been able to kill all the images with the press of my thumb; they were still there, hovering around me in that dark room. In fact I could feel them hovering right above my head. A pair of bleary eyes, a naked orphan boy, a weeping widow, a dead baby in the arms of her splinter-ridden mother, the earth; red with dry blood, a burning vehicle of a Lebanese MP, a soldier’s mutilated body, and millions of refugees- they all crowded around me as images. I had seen such images in the past as well. They never cried or shouted, they just stayed; they just seemed to wait patiently for me to give them a thought, but every time I had desperately tried to ignore them. I did the same this time again. But they waited for me with a monstrous calm. I didn’t know what they wished from me; they just seemed to enjoy torturing me with their stillness, their eternalness.

I closed my eyes.

Black.

The sudden flash from the matchstick startled the darkness as I brought it close to light up my cigarette. An insect leaped up to the flame from a dark corner, but the flame died out before it could reach for it, and thus it went back into oblivion as rapidly as it had emerged from it.

Red bleary eyes, a naked red orphan boy, a red weeping widow, a red dead baby and millions of red refugees again appeared before me in the light of the glowing red butt.

I closed my eyes again. Black.

A Peaceful Silence had settled in the room. Only I seemed to be breaking the silence at regular intervals as I inhaled an air full of nicotine and exhaled it shortly afterwards, sending out a stream of smoke that blurred the images for a short while.

I opened the door to the balcony and stepped out. Only then I realized that it was night already, well past midnight. A slice of moon nestled cozily in the folds of the soft clouds shining gracefully in the night sky. A frivolous breeze was flirting with the trees, and made the trees blush and gossip among themselves; they swayed and danced daintily with the wind, and the tendrils below whispered in excitement. The gentle moonlight had colored everything on the ground in white. The houses were all quiet; their inhabitants were by then the audiences in the distant theater of dreams. The prevailing serenity was occasionally stirred up by the howl of a starving street dog or the sudden activeness of a cricket.

While coming back in I left the door to the balcony ajar, and through it the soft moonlight came in, wading past the thick air of nicotine, and creating a long trapezoidal white block on the floor. It fell on the curtains and a suffused white light fought its way to the darker corners of the room, busily cleaning up my dark world. Now I could see the time on the wall clock, ten past one; and next to it hang a poster from Andy Warhol’s contemporary art exhibition, and then below it, just above the old gramophone, was a miniature version of Dali’s The Persistence of Memory that I had cut out from an old art magazine. To the other side was my bookshelf with a photo of Tagore placed on it, and farther away was a photo of Che Guevera – a gift from a Leftist friend of mine who had seen some hopes in me. I went up to the old gramophone, something that I had inherited from my grandfather. After rummaging through the pile of records I placed one of Yehudi Menuhin’s disks on the gramophone and positioned myself in the comfort of my armchair. Soon the divine melody of the music started to have the soothing effect that I was looking for.

The music continued playing. Black again. Images flashed behind my closed eyelids. Unknown humans. I couldn’t identify any of them. They were all walking down the stairs, silently and despondently, into a dark chamber. They didn’t talk; they never looked at each other. Their dull swollen eyes had only fear in them. Behind them came a group of people, brandishing whips and sticks. Some were dressed in white, proudly displaying the bizarre religious insignias that they carried, and the others were dressed in black coat, with lapel pins, white collars and cufflinks. They all went down the stairways and shut the door firmly behind them. Then suddenly there was a bleating of a goat from the staircase above. A milky white goat appeared. It was a strange sight indeed. It could walk on its hind legs, quite erect like a human, and wore the black robe of a judge, complete with a gray judge’s wig through which its stunted horns stuck out. White strands of beard that hang down from its chin and curled up a bit towards the end gave it an old and wise look. It climbed down the staircase, with an air of dignity, and walked about majestically with its front legs clasped behind its back, seeming somewhat concerned and thoughtful. It walked up to the closed door that lead to the underground chamber, placed its goat-ear against the wooden door, sighed and looked around vacuously for a moment, and finally turned around and went back up in remorse silence. The sound of its footsteps got fainter and fainter, and I could once again hear Menuhin’s tranquil violin. It was wading down the waxy ear canals, tickling the little hair that came in its way, and beat softly against the eardrums, then transferring itself over to the footplate of the stapes, pressing against the fluid-filled ducts of cochlea, stimulating the ganglions to fire, and finally whizzing past all old memories and dark secrets, dashing aside many images and wandering thoughts, searching zealously for its destination- the mind. I wished I could help it in finding my mind, but alas, I myself hadn’t ever figured out in which corner of my six feet body it housed itself- in my head to control all my thoughts? In my heart to make it heavy? Or in my eyes to let me appreciate beauty? Or was it in the larynx to help me speak out? Perhaps in my bile and stomach to send out occasional pangs of hunger? Or in some flaccid organ to arouse my lust? Or did it always wandered around ceaselessly inside the mortal body that had trapped it for a lifetime?

The music had stopped playing abruptly; instead there came a shrill cry for help reverberating from all corners of the room. It was followed by more wails, more screams, and more noise. Sudden announcements shattered the web of melody and they ran amok inside the room, bumping against the walls and the objects, and getting even louder and louder: “...a suicide bomber attacks a convoy..... warplanes killed an unspecified number of civilians..... Ground Zero of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York..... to rise up in a ‘holy war’...... increasing rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians.....Congolese flee from rebel forces.....the high school teenager went on a shooting spree.....Sri Lankan soldiers carried out an air-raid....effigies of the cartoonist were burned in the streets.....Red Cross is alarmed at the growing.....the World Bank has decided to.... the Darfur crisis.....elections held amidst widespread violence....”

Once again I could hear Menuhin playing his violin, but this time it wasn’t the soothing note, it was now fast and violent. Perhaps it wasn’t Menuhin. It was too bold, too aggressive. The notes crashed and thumped on the walls of my room like huge spiteful waves of an angry sea. They crashed and again rose back in tempo to strike with even greater force, like a gale in the mid seas. I sat up straight with my eyes wide open, partly with fear and partly in astonishment; still trying to overcome what I initially thought to be a hallucination. I watched the gramophone stylus as it incessantly produced colorful solid blocks of notations from the grooves of the record, which immediately flew off into the air and hovered above head. A host of red, yellow, green and blue G-clefs, quavers, minims, semibreves and crotchets were gliding inside the room, and some of the restless ones zoomed past my face like blind bats, flying in random directions and jostling against each other. Long strands of black ribbons appeared from a dark corner, shining brightly in the moonlight. They glided through the room like serpents. Five of the ribbons arranged themselves in parallel and were slowly encircling me. And then for each of them, one of their ends started to descend down, forming a helix around me. I stood there perplexed, with the five parallel helixes forming around me. When the ribbons had completed forming the staff, the notations rushed in mad frenzy to occupy their positions on them, they arranged themselves, and rearranged again, and constantly fought among themselves to retain their occupied positions. I looked around me and surveyed the colosseum, full of noisy notations that cheered and screeched. And I realized that I stood amidst them as their gladiator. I wondered who my opponents were- perhaps some wild beasts; agile leopards or hungry lions. Maybe even Death himself.

The vertical shafts were raised and I waited to find out my opponents, and then they stepped out one by one from the darkness. I could see that I knew them well; they were familiar faces… a scrawny man with a pair of bleary eyes, a naked orphan boy with coarse disheveled hair, a weeping widow with misty red eyes, a soldier without arms, a crippled girl, and behind them stood many more blurred faces. They all were moving closer to me. I felt a sharp pain in my throat; it grew more intense; something was strangling me. I felt my neck and my throat with my hands but couldn’t find that invisible noose, and I knew by then that I wasn’t going to win the fight. I got choked, froth appeared in my mouth, my nostrils dilated in a frenetic effort for more air, my body convulsed, blood gushed out from my gaping mouth, my eye balls were almost popping out of their sockets, the whites had turned blackish blue; they perhaps looked double their size, and the veins in them burst opened, spilling out blood. I swiveled in a last desperate attempt to fight my invisible adversary, and gave a violent jerk. There was a loud noise, but I didn’t have the ability left to decipher its origin. I felt the grip relax slowly. I lay on the floor unconscious, gasping fiercely for air.

At dawn I felt warmth on my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the gentle morning sun in the eastern sky, perched above the bonsai trees of my balcony. Surprisingly I didn’t feel any pain; there wasn’t any sign of a struggle either. The poster of Andy Warhol hung in its place on the wall, the Dali miniature hang below it. Tagore was on the bookshelf, and Che Guevera was holding onto his position with a defiant look. The clock was ticking away. The record cover showing the master holding his violin lay peacefully on the desk. Everything stood as it was before, except for the gramophone that lay broken on the ground. The dented horn had rolled off behind the chair. The diaphragm, the springs and the needle lay scattered on the floor; the broken wooden casing rested against the desk. At a distance lay the tranquil piece of work of a great artist, fragmented in two.