The Fool - Part I

It is that limitless time. It's that plateau amid the infinite slope, rising ahead to a height that spins your head, to those ambitious dark, damp cliffs. Just behind, you see the uncertain, undecided depth of recent times, stray facts, flotsam and jetsam of revelation trying to drift across the line between recentness and history. History, that stretches beyond this, beyond all else, like an unending, non-changing dream hanging in the horizon, blurring under its shadow all faces - familiar yet vague, singular in multitude.

It was that time, in short, when age-long wisdom withers, people look at people through the corner of their eyes.

Change and turmoil, suits me fine. I belonged to that time. Not just in body, but also in mind. This is the town that has seen me grow, has engulfed me from head to toe in the harsh wisdom of the hard pressed time. Something that stands like a stained glass wall between me and you. My father.

A whirlwind of events, as confusing as a revolving door. That's what I see when I look back, my dear father. Not a path, I'm sorry, not a damned path as you had always wanted me to see. Instead I have been treading these bushy causeways for the last 20 years of my life. And it all started in that plateau-time. Obviously, it was after your time. Way after your time.

Today, when I look at a case, I don't think how you would have dealt with it. No way. But I have to admit, that was not the case the first time. A fool, I have been. A fool who rushes to his folly. I remember the morning. A rare sunny one, in the torrent of the gloom. I remember the face. A sunny one.

It was Jennifer the lackluster beauty. Yet beauty she was. I stoked the end of my cigar. The hanging ashes gave in. How in this impossible world, I am sitting opposite this face, this voice I asked myself, without answer. The voice of my secret well tended love. Jennifer.

You remember, father, how she used to be my playmate. All those youthful days. Then she drifted. Drifted in a way, that all things drift away. Drifted as if in a dream. Or in the wake of the dream. Across the jagged surface of our mutual battlefields, she calls my name even today. The Fool.

She says she's surprised. Who wouldn't be, in her position. Born to riches, married to riches. Twice. Then you have The Fool of your childhood sitting across your desk and you are supposed tell him your deepest troubles. Who wouldn't be surprised, I ask you.

I play with the piece of wood sitting on my desk with my own name written on it. Ray Simmons, Private Cop. I toy with it in my hands. I was not listening. Random words drifted past my ears. Something to do with Dawson. That plush guy who smells of bad money. Someone wanted her killed.

This is where you came in. I remembered something about Dawson family. I remembered something you told me. I couldn't quite place it. But I didn't show. I somehow wanted to help her. The poor little widow. The love of my dawn. I was desperate to show her, I have got a hold already. And she looked surprised. She said so.

I was so desperate, I thought of you and your methods. Vainly thought of your deductions and logic that never clicked for me. What would you have done here? Start as a start, you always said. I chose a start. It was a wrong one.

I started looking up the history of Dawsons in the local police files. She talked about a murder somewhere near this grisly town of mine. I forgot the name of the victim. Clumsy me, too busy looking down those blue eyes. But I know this has everything to do with Roger Dawson. He is the push for a man who is leaning dangerously. And that man is me.

But that's for later. As I rummaged through the unkindly memoirs that only a cop can keep, I found the name of the Dawson family thrice. The bastards are not clean. I always knew it. First the Godfather of them all, Francis. Selling dopes to innocent kids. This was in fact your time. Those straight jacket crimes, forthcoming criminals. Served 2 years in the hellhole of the town, Cracked Rock Jail. Saved a man from another. Released.

Second time, they make a entry, it is the turn of the preacher Roger himself. What a lewd. Raped a girl when he was 23. Arrested but bailed. By whom, is something not recorded. I start to see the silhouette of a hand of power. But I ignore that. Too big for me. Too big for anyone who cares for life.

Third one caught my attention. It's about Sammy. Sammy Dawson, the heartthrob of the town. Talented and tainted, as much as it comes. There is no record of the crime. No punitive action, no sentence, Just the name like a ominous sign.

But that leads me nowhere. I just feel a bolstered ego. I am coming for you. Sooner than you think.

On the way back from the Police station, I took a deliberate walk around the town. I tried hard to remember what you had said about the family. One thought battled with hundreds of others in my mind. I found it hard to concentrate. Oh Jennifer...

It was a bright moonlit night. Not a sign of wind, not a faint rustle of leaves. It's a queer night, a dead night. I turned the corner of the Gray Street and cast a long obscene shadow on the pavement. Suddenly, another shadow crept behind. As I turned and looked up, I only got a glimpse of a bar or a baton blocking the moon. It's silhouette fresh in mind.

I lay there in a pool of bloody red, oozing onto the Gray St.

The Fool - Part II

A shadow passed over me. A very distant and dim light twinkled once before it vanished. The darkness squeezed around me and then released the grip. A pain seared and a few glowing holes appeared in the dark canvas overhead. They slowly widened to let some more light while the pain throbbed in the back. A question lurks in the backwater. Where am I?

Through a narrow slit of my own eyelids, world crept in like a wounded animal. Smell of corpses swept past like a morbid wind. Pain on the back of my head is by no means gone. This place stinks of death - most of them untimely and swift. My ribs are etching like hell and a dead hand is brushing my cuff. Whatever this place is, I need to get up and get out quick.

It's still the dead of the night. Memory flies back to me. That accursed shadow and that silhouette. Then a sudden drop of darkness. How far is this place from the town? Who was the creeping beast?

I see ahead a filthy river flowing through a filthy suburb of sparse tainted lights. The horizon lies far shrouded in a dampness worthy of myths. I don't know why but something tells me that I need to get to that side before it's too late. I see a bridge upstream with its dark structure melting in the overhauling gray. It was my only way back. I ran for it.

Some more memory comes back. I remember the face of Jennifer. The task she has entrusted me. Have I already put my hand in the burner too deep and too long? Does that mean, like a complete fool, I have unwittingly stepped on something big? The questions kept haunting me as I panted once I crossed the bridge. I was wrong about this side of the river. It was not my town at all.

Someone's played a big joke on me.

I have a Blog

I have 6 blogs. One of them was created for office training. Let's leave that aside.

I have 5 blogs. The one that meant to stimulate and inspire young generation into charitable activities for impoverished children, had 3 posts in total. All the posts sincerely called the youth for conscientious contribution. Last entry was in 2006. Friends dissembled. Fatigue murmured.

I have 4 blogs. Not really 4, as one of the blog was really a stray ray of inspiration that touched the surface of reality, spurred a few wavelets (5 posts) and died. Incidentally this was the one that was created to impress a girl who was never a friend and who understood English better than Bengali. Hence a blog in English. A poetry or two. Last entry in 2007

I have 3 blogs. Although one of them is not really my personal blog. It's a blog created by me all the same but a group of author can share their views/reviews on any artistic creation. Got immediate success with a catchy name and all, people who never got opportunity to write reviews in formal platforms, wrote with passion. I value this blog, as a relic of personal history, as I can hardly find any interest in this blog any more. I most dejectedly announce that I can hardly see what is there to appreciate in obtuse art forms. May be, hypocrisy of the artists and devaluation of the artistic media, has brought about this personal downfall. Over the years, I have changed and last I wrote in it, it was summer of 2008.

I have really 2 blogs. One of them is in Bengali and really is my oldest blog. By publication date, this is the blog where I published last. 's a poetry blog where one can clearly see the evolution of both style and theme starting from my early poems. Nearly all of them are heavily influenced by a number of my favorite poets - Rabindranath, Jibanananda, Shakti, Shankha, Binoy, Utpal. In recent years, most of the poems are focused towards infertility of poetic inspiration. As an excellent example of how poetic and realistic worlds are tied together in their fate, last post, after a few sporadic ones, was published in April of 2010. One year back.

So I have this one blog. In which I am writing now. Fighting against the fate of literary sterility, fighting against dissuading depressionism, fighting the hell out of demands of reality, I am writing. If I can't write anything else, I'll write how and why I could not. I'll talk about how many times in this very blog, I have started writing after getting brilliant idea, but after writing few paragraphs have fatalistically forsaken the children of my thought - unpropered and underdeveloped - as my dreams had been, all the time always. But now I want to complete this one piece of writing - and post. It is no way near being my best creation, not a masterpiece by its own face value. But I will show it the daylight in the memory of its superior predecessors. Here it comes, in this last blog - last post of mine.

Where are my dreams sleeping?

It smells like betrayal though brain says it's only to happen. There is no other way. That is how this world has come so far and that is how it will go. But anchored to one time, one generation and one mindset and not being able to move on with inanimate world, us, the mortals are doomed with the double feeling of apprehension and rejection, when something you believed to be eternally true comes to an end, when beliefs that you held dear goes adrift and when 'evils' that you drove out so far knocks at your door.

Yet, unwary must have been the sentinels who had promised unceasing vigilance over these lands and its shadows. Where are those who had renounced their sleep for their dreams? From the tomb, no one will rise again to combat the fair evil. And the living world is now a waste of past deeds.

My movie unmade or its memoir unfinished

For the first time in my life, I got a glimpse in the eye of my mind, of the movie I always wanted to make. The vision was clear as daylight of a cloudy day. The background was bluish with a tinge of gray. The inspiration was so sudden and compelling, I am afraid it would also melt swiftly and die in a quicksand of whim. It's better to leave some trace of letters in its memory, so I thought.

The movie would be based on One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Why so? Why a popular novel? We will, in our haste, leave these questions on the road side and move ahead.

It can start with a blank screen. Or a completely white screen. After a determined pause of 5 sec, a voice will take over the audience like a guide or hell-guard.

Where have all the toilets gone

Finally a shooting star! After 28 years of life, it comes scampering across the sky, dripping from the skin of sky - a chance to wish for.

What I wish today, the ashes of the star will know! And no one else! Those dreams of faraway times in past will jump into oblivion and turn to ashes in the midway. But we will still be going to where everyone goes, in this rickshaw.

The rickshaw-wala will ask for more money than deserved. (And yet what does he deserve? What do I deserve? ) We will have a good fight over the fare and lose our temper for good. But one of us would give in and the rickshaw-wala would go on to carry other people somewhere.

Where do they go?

Where do everyone rush?

Obviously, to their workplaces! or toilet, mind!

This eternal going back and forth to toilet, this inevitability ingrained in the fabric of human civilization - doesn't it tell us something about that which can not be told? Does it not whisper in its husky voice and faded language like rustle of the leaves in a storm? Wherever you might fly, you are to return unto me - spoketh the toilet in its vitrified vice. A binding contract! A non-negotiable liability!

Every soul on this planet is laboriously complicating their lives, others' lives, twisting their fate and essence of existence to seriously unwind themselves eventually in the toilet. That is the fate of our race. Believe it or not! Hence the dream that I had last night can be the inspiration for the greatest horror-cum-scifi-cum-action-cum-musical drama ever made.

I saw I was in a mighty room, the room was filled with troubled men. Their face was red and haste was great, but all the toilets had fled.

Name... for god's sake

It is hard to explain what I feel. You may have come across thousands of people who claim...

I crossed the lines above. That was not a good beginning. I'll eventually come to them through the uncertain landscape of rotten words, figures, statues and memories. After crossing innumerable more such beginnings.

I can talk about a lot of stuff at length. But my problem is that I can not fold them and press them into a book and into a shelf. Thoughts that I have...I feel pity for them. Because may be I am doing injustice to them by not expressing them. Had they been some others' thoughts, they would have been perfectly happy and well brought up ideas with proper grooming.

I. on the other hand, a poor little widow living by the side of a sewage, only dream of them being grown up one day and provide plenty of support for me in my old age. This I know will never happen. I will only look after my home grown rockets of pocket size and sell them in the market for free. That is my destiny. Ever since my husband died in the war of the Others' Land, my future has been sealed. I still remember the day when I first went to the market.

It was clammy day in the summers. I took my first batch of rockets (they were all pink and cute) and trimmed them well so that they all look the same and behave the same. Then I read to them the useless books as usual and made them recapitulate. That made them fall asleep. Then I cautiously put them in a fruit basket and made for the market. I was anxious with joy.

The first customer came and asked me : Sister, I need a rocket which will sing and dance when I ask.

I picked the pink one (They were all pink anyway) and gave it to him for free.

I think it was two days after that, the man came back to me and said that the rocket won't stop dancing even if asked, ordered and threatened.

I said I can include that option but that will require two hamados.

I took the two hamados that he gave me and jumped in triumph. And the two hamados fell in a pond.

This pond used to belong to my father-in-law when he used to practice fishing. The kind of fishes he used capture have all gone extinct. Nowadays there are water-creatures residing in the pond who feeds on hamados. That's why it is called the pit of Hamados. It is right beside the market.

One look at the pond and the shape of the half-emerging creature (shapeless), and I was sure that fate is irrefutable. Hence I stopped taking hamados from that day onwards. I sell my fruitful and obedient rockets for free.

My day comes to an end, with the twilight buzz up in the air. After that no sound can reach your ears and no thought can touch your mind. Spectres of lost nights and nights yet to come, haunts my small home. My little thoughts come running towards me and jumps on my lap. I pat them and think what'll happen to you when I am not there. I go to sleep, with the dream of a thought
that touch the tip of my forehead and will put me to sleep, deep sleep...

Spectre of a story that vanished

"Stories can't be written. There have been many attempts and many failures. But no story have ever been written."

- Abbas Hasrat

My cousin Manjima is 14 years younger than me. Yet I get on pretty well with her. She is shy and taciturn. Yet, we used to have quality chat whenever we met. It was beginning of this century and everything around us was quickly changing.

I got married at the age of 27. Four days prior to the actual occasion, my uncle and aunt visited our place and Manjima was with them, too. In a black top and blue jeans she looked more grown-up and taller than she usually used to look like. We sat down for our lunch. It was Rice and Dal and Fish Curry.

By the way, she was going, at that time, to the same school that once I used go to in my childhood. Memory of schooldays, drifted into our conversation and as these things often go, we talked about random things in school. At this point she casually mentioned that Nilmoni Kahar is dead. It was cancer that got him. Then we moved on to more charming topics.

Next day, I went to some places to invite some more people. (We had already invited people more than necessary). As I was walking from Tobin Road to Bonhoogly without having seen a single rickshaw or autorickshaw (It was a hot summer noon), a commonplace idea visited me.

I thought about writing a story on deceased Nilmoni. This would be quite different from all the stories that I had written. There are so many of these new experiments going on in story-writing. A character like Nilmani, washed by memory and its dark holes, would fit wonderfully. I tried to gather in my mind all the memories of the person that I had and had not forgotten.

It'd be great to start with the funny reference of the Principal (Actually he was HeadMaster, but little changes would drive away boredom of truth) asking Nilmani in his distinctly nasal voice to ring the bell before morning prayer. We used to mimic that to make fun out of it. Remembering that I had smiled to myself and some of the passers-by had looked at me in curiosity. My destination was there only and the idea sank in my mind.

Next night, I had a dream (this story is becoming too dramatic) wherein Nilmani was trying to find out how my chemistry practical went (He was lab assistant, did I tell you that?). If dreams had memory then I'd've realized that that was indeed true. But I didn't. I enjoyed the dream like watching a cinema. I got quite emotional in fact at times realizing that it was not my exam that he cared for but myself .Everybody loved me...then. And that caring person is not there anymore. (Facts lurk behind the curtain in a dream.)