Dud Sea Scrawls The Writing, clearly, is not on the wall!

I know I am going to die. I wish I would die soon and without this much pain. But, I know that is not going to happen. I know it; some things you just know, like you know you can die for a woman but unfortunately she is just being nice to you. I exhale and a stream of my urine hits the metallic bedpan. The sound is accompanying it is oddly satisfying. Did you cringe on reading that? I don’t blame you; I would have, just like the way we cringe at the ungainly stump on an amputee. We wonder what he will do with his life and think we pity him. We are embodiments of compassion and our hearts melt. I try to laugh as these thoughts hit me and my laugh comes out as a snort. Bull Shit, I say to myself. We are just glad that it is him and not us who has to live with an ungainly stump the rest of our lives. We might probably be more curious, we scavenge more and our thoughts may drift towards whether he is paralyzed or if he can still get it up. We want to know the extent of his misery; when people don’t have that many blessings to count, misery of another human being may transform their mundane pain into blessings. Don’t worry, I understand. If a distant cousin of a coherent thought about whether I use the bedpan just to pee or for its counterpart too ran across somewhere inside you, I would smile. No problem. But, please do not pity me. Can it, save it or whatever. I know we human beings, as a species are not entirely capable of that.

I realize that I am getting bitter; perhaps going mad and senile. That is to be expected. But, still hard to accept and deal with. If you are not a religious zealot, you would say I have not sinned much. I am not afraid of hell anyway. I have helped a few people and I do not expect heaven for that either. I know my son and his wife are expecting my death. After all, there are practical considerations. People have to be informed, schedules made, somebody should say a few good words about me and make me seem taller in my death. The nurse comes over to pick up my bedpan. I wonder if she resents me. Who in the world would want to do this for an old man day in and day out? She should hate me by now. That is okay, really. Then, she goes to the window and opens the drapes. It is raining. I don’t know why she did it. I had spent about 12 minutes without thinking about It. Now, I would be thinking about It and nothing else.

I was about ten or twelve years old when I saw It. It was raining, just like today. My greatest fear during those days was that somehow my parents would die and that I would never hit a boundary when we played cricket across the street. I smile. They seem lame now. Then I cringe. They were not lame back then. The fear was as real as anything I feared in my adult life. Time cuts off the edges of your worst memories. That is how we survive; we learn to forget our worst moments. I almost forgot mine completely for sixty years only for it to come back to haunt me from the dead. I don’t know what made the neurons in my brain rewire to bring back the memory of It. When the memory came back, I knew it was for real. I knew I had not been hallucinating and I know I am not going Schizophrenic. I had seen something I should not have. I had seen something that had no business being in our world and I would never forget It. The memories come rushing back. I try not to think of It and that makes me think about It even more. This time, the images are well defined. This time, I manage to catch the opening credits of the horror flick I made for myself. Perhaps, a few more neurons made it across and are firing. I did not know whether to be glad or sad for it.

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I watch the rain drops dance on the train window. They would scoot over to the direction opposite of the movement of the train. I feel at peace with the world. My parents were with me and alive and we are going to Bombay for the summer holidays. I did not want anything more than that. The rain stops a little. I bug my mom for permission to open the window a little since it is not raining now. She says it will start soon and the coupe will get wet. I give her one of my disappointed looks and go back to watching the scenery with a forlorn face. She knows the next act in my play as well as I do. My next move would be to refuse to eat. She sighs and decides she cannot take more than Act One this time. She opens the window and I feel the cold air backed up by a few stray adventurous drops of rain hit my face. A heady smell of wet earth and water on the rusted window grill hits me. I breathe deeply and feel light.

I notice that it has gotten dark quite suddenly and quite soon for a summer day. The lights come on gradually in the coupes. The lighted windows and the compartment make strange shapes. I am hooked. The ground beneath the train leads by changing its shape and the shadows follow with a rhythm of its own. I make out a dog amongst the shapes. I smile to myself a little. The dog changes into a buffalo. The buffalo becomes a bus and then a lorry. The lorry becomes a man and the man is getting transformed into something else. I watch without realizing that I am holding my breath. My heart is beating fast now. I can see something new; new not in the sense that it is something that I had not seen or something for which I did not have the vocabulary for, but new in the sense that I knew I had no right to be seeing that shape on good old earth. My heart feels as if someone with a hand inside the freezer for an hour is gripping it and squeezing it. The shape is almost complete now. I want to look away and yet I cannot. I want to close my eyes and I cannot. My mom shakes me and practically screams my name to eat my dinner. The spell is broken. I am thankful at her shouting for the first time in my life.

I get the upper berth because I fight for it. My father gives up and asks me to be careful. I see that somebody had written something about the stuff grown men and women do behind closed doors on the compartment roof. I know it was something vulgar and that makes me curious about the graffiti. I trace the drawings etched on to roof of the train and see a few more scratches her and there coming together. This time I close my eyes before it could start. I open my eyes after a sold minute. I look down into the middle berth and see my mom and reassure myself. I look down the aisle and see the blue lights down the aisle. It looked creepy. I close my eyes and start scoring imaginary centuries. I fall asleep.

I am dreaming; I cannot catch the images of my dream. I have a feeling I have had the same dream many times after that night. It irritates me now. It is like food which gets stuck somewhere inside your mouth that you can feel with your tongue but cannot get it out with your fingers. I shudder and gasp and moan in agony. My body performs gymnastics and writhes into angles I did not know I could do without breaking my bones. I hear a great sound approaching my younger self. I now know it is called the Doppler Effect. I scream in unison with the train traveling on the opposite direction. Our train vibrates. The noise goes back and forth between the two trains crossing each other. My body goes into yet another impossible angle and I fall onto the bright red floor of the coupe.

I cannot speak. I want to cry and shout in horror but I cannot. I feel an acute shortage of wind and breath. I realize how red the floor of the coupe is. The bright red is beginning to hurt my eyes. I see the shoes stocked away underneath the seats and the musky odor of an unwashed sock hits me. I want to vomit. Some bile and blood comes out of my mouth. My mom’s face hovers over me. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. Absurdly, I am glad that my parents are still alive. She is screaming now. I can tell by her wide open mouth. But, she sounds far away from me; far away and receding like the train that is continuing on its way after having played its’ role in my life. I find it difficult to breathe and to hold my head straight on my neck. My neck tunes sideways. It gets dark. Not the kind of dark anyone alive would have probably experienced. I know that I am going away into it. Forever.

I hear my mother’s voice from somewhere. It is still dark in here. I don’t know where I am. There are no roads, no landscape, just wide plain space in complete darkness. My eyes hurt. Then, I feel It. I can feel It’s being. I shudder. I shout and nothing comes out. I know It is nearby. I realize no one sees It when they are alive. It does not belong to our world. I deduce I am probably dead and that makes me cry. My eyes adjust better to the complete dark, if that was what it was. I wipe away some of the snot running off my nose with the back of my wrist. I wish my mom was here. Then I see It; in all it’s glory. I realize there is no seeing with your eyes here. It is all about feeling and the feeling of It is thousand times more richer for the senses than seeing. I can feel it pervading me, eager to suck me into It, into one of the many million lost voices howling inside It forever.

I open my eyes to feeling something with a bald head massaging my chest. I bring up some bile. The light inside the compartment hurts my eyes. For a second, the strange creatures and the bright light scare me. I feel I am blind. I am not able to see anything here with my feel like before. I then scream. Then something hugs me. I get it all back. I open my eyes, blink many times and enjoy the warmth of my mother’s hug. I hear my father thanking the doctor and God for the good luck. I feel intensely grateful. I do not realize why, but I feel I have won a great battle, perhaps the battle of life itself. Someone produces a Candy Bar from somewhere and I promptly forget the night for the next sixty years.

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My seventy three year old self opens his eyes to the same sensation of blindness and an intense feeling of not belonging on earth. I shudder. I sweat. I feel victimized. I also feel a little elated at figuring some things out. I know It is waiting. It had been cheated once and It will not stand to be cheated again. I should have died sixty years ago and somehow did not. It had waited sixty patient years in the dark, feeling its way through for the smell of my soul, hunting in its’ own macabre way. It knows and feels somehow that the wait is going to get over. I break down and cry like a baby. I know It is waiting and I have no way out.