1.

​

In the mountain foot, on the forest bed, where there were sometimes murmurs, but you couldn’t tell if they came from houses nearby or the jungle, I was found there. There was an anthill, and so soft and brittle the humus was, it would have been crushed by feet long ago — but no one went there. The ants carried in bits and pieces of everything — but rarely food — and God knows how they subsisted on it, but they had had it good since I had found them. I would drop crumbs of biscuits in careful treasure trails leading up to the granaries of heaven and watch transfixed the stream of life roll up and down the road. 

But enough about ants. What was the need for taking me to the football field? The ball was the fastest there anyway — no matter what one did — always keeping ahead, going places. And I was not even the second, third, or the twenty first fastest there, and wherever I thought the ball was, or was going to, I still somehow found myself in the quietest part of the field, nowhere to hide, object of attention. They all left me, the gaggle and the ball, because I didn’t have it in me, and then they all came for me, perhaps with good intentions, but like a thundering earthquake. And I couldn’t move. Then they were past me again, somewhere behind me, perhaps somewhere behind reality.  

Why take me to swimming class? Did I have to go? When no one was watching, I thought I could grip the handrails, paddle my feet like a duckling in training, and then go home. But when no one was watching, the big guys thought they should come to me, all smiles and compassion, sit me on their backs while they swam, and then drop me like a sack in the deepest part of the pool. What was the secret to swimming, after all? I never could learn it, even though I was gifted many and many chances by them, with the life on the line, and nobody informing me it was but a lesson in disguise, and me clawing at the darkness with all my might to somehow go up instead of down. No one must have been watching. If they were, why did no one take me out? 

Why did they always speak like that? While words and phrases occasionally struck my ears, I never could understand what they were saying — and always found myself at the darkest spot in the classroom, surrounded by sparkling courtrooms discoursing in dialects unknown. It was better to look for ants near everyone’s feet, or make the desk the backside of a plateau, and the student’s accoutrements regiments jostling for space. Why did that teacher always glare at me like that? Why did I once slap that little boy that followed me everywhere, and why did his mother always look at me with those disgusted eyes thereafter? What lived in that plot of land closed off with nothing built on the way to school, that was so overgrown with trees that I could not see what lay inside even in my recurrent nightmares?  

Why was I there that day, having set out in the morning, feeling light and capable, questing for ants? It was the afternoon, and the hunger had come and gone by noon, as had the harsh sunlight. I could not remember the sweat, but the sunlight was still in me, making me feel I could still go on for a long time to come. My anthill wasn’t there. My beloved ants had left me. The ground was flat as if a meteorite had struck and then millennia had passed to leave no trace of the crime.  

Why was I like that? Where had I come from? Was there a world where I could run apace with the ball — my friend — and where I could play infantry regiments, artillery batteries, and fighter squadrons off against each other on the desk-top with my classmates in the happiest part of the classroom? Where we would be so happy and invested that not even the Chemistry teacher could scare our attention back before class time could escape through the window?  

But then my sister was there. “Maa said it’s going to be dark soon. We have to go back. She’s really angry,” she said. 

I looked at her, but my mind was busy mulling other things — she had to wait. “Hey, move away from there!” I ran, lifted her up, and set her a bit off. A froth of red ants would have been up to her knees had I been a moment late. As it was, there were only a few climbing adventurers hanging on, nothing I couldn’t deal with a few moments of pat down. The anthill hadn’t moved. I had.  

“How come red ants bite, but the black ones don’t?” she asked me. 

“Did they bite you? Where?” I was anxious.  

“They didn’t,” she said, looking anxious that I hadn’t answered her question yet.  

 If the anthill was there, and there was that patch of yellow grass among a sea of green, the dead log had to be to our right — right where it was.  

“Watch,” I said, and posed a tiny, tiny bit of biscuit on a stalk of grass, and what do you know, a red sentry was there not too soon, fluttering her antennae skyward. A convoy of seven had departed for the area of report as soon as the sentry had gone back in for the briefing. But again, what do you know, a black runner was also seen around the area, no doubt sallying from their temporary base in the dead log. 

“Give them more,” my sister demanded. And I did, on an empty little clearing. There was an army of red — maintaining a perimeter, rotating soldiers, and carrying the loot back home — and that was only the tip of the iceberg. There was also an army of black, changing shape, hitting and running, hefting and lifting big pieces away. There also was, unfortunately, a frontline, where red and black embraced each other in hugs of death, and it took a lot of time for it to become clear who was winning.  

“Why do the blacks lose? They’ll all die!” my sister declared. That was easily averted. One more treasure trove near the home of the blacks, tellingly near their main supply line, and they had soon happily abandoned the site of battle to the reds to fully commit to the new bounty — and they would clear it all up fast too, much before any of the reds caught a scent, ventured onto there, and successfully made it back.  

My sister was happy. I was not, and said, “I can’t help it, you know. Even if I don’t do anything, a bug would come and die in the worst place ever, or a fruit would roll down and rot, and then they’d be at it again.”  

“That’s why you are always here, aren’t you? To keep them off each other. I will help you too!” she exclaimed.  

That was not the reason I was there. But perhaps it was one of them?  

“You made this?” she asked me, noticing the strange shapes of the ditch some ways off and the many furrows that ran towards it. Grass had grown around it, but that only made it look like a prehistoric river shrouded by tall trees when rainwater overflowed down those drains into the reservoir, keeping the teeming of civilization safe and sound. I was not all-powerful, but many of my small actions still had serious ramifications. The patterns I took care to maintain while feeding the cities — red and black — for example, always leading them away from each other and bloodshed — was I doing the right thing? What if I led them to some ghastlier discovery or surer danger that washed everything away? Their numbers multiplied and they thrived under my rule, but even I felt unsafe and unwelcome sometimes, when some dauntless explorer would be found cavorting on the top their own God’s head, or scurrying perilously close to his ear. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, and was still doing it — because an impostor can’t stop — and they would soon rise in revolt and reject me. 

“To tell you the truth, this is all very interesting,” my father said. Both of them were standing behind us, my father and mother, and my mother was still holding her steaming steel ladle. 

“Now I know where my biscuits have been going. All this mess will soon invade my kitchen, or come home on your clothes and nest,” she said. But she didn’t look angry.  

“When I was young —” my father made to sit.  

“Don’t!” I said. My plants that the black ants loved were there, growing in a row. A river would go by them in a straight line, and the reds will be on the other side, fed from their fish bones and orange jelly. They would forever look at one another, and wonder, but never cross over — that is, unless someone put up a bridge one day. My father was embarrassed as I explained.

“What is the purpose of all this? What do you want to make? What do you want to end up with?” my mother asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I was sure nobody else did either, including the ants. “But I am here… just here with them. I like being here.”  

“What do they do?” my father asked.  

“They travel. They talk. They fight. They stop fighting. They move. They move on. They die. They are born, and sometimes they just come and vanish without account.”  

“Go figure. Would you say he’s only eight years old?” my father asked my mother, eyebrows raised, blown away by my ability to look at ants.  

“Aren’t they… just ants?” my mother asked.   

“Look at this one,” I showed her, “This is half-albino, his lower half is white somehow. See? How he always gets too close to the danger? This is not the hundredth time I am saving him,” I said as I picked him with a feather touch from where some of the dire fighting still hadn’t died down and set him somewhere else. “See? He is still running in that direction. He is strong, he is smart, but once with three–four determined reds, and he’s done for. He’s too waywardly stubborn for his own good. Always has to be where he doesn’t have to be.”  

“Like you?” mother quipped.  

“The blacks are so mobile, so watchful,” I wasn’t about to be interrupted, “They are always on top of everything, as if a nation obsessed with progress and freedom. But there’s this strange indifference in them, as if they know they’re weak and death is to be accepted. When a comrade is sick or captured, they run, run fast — preferably forwards, but not always! The reds, on the other hand, they are always so together. They are bound and wound so strong! They come, go, and stand like a wall, and roll down like a tsunami sometimes. But there’s a kind of indifference in them too. Sometimes you will see a red that’s too small or big, or not red enough, or too red, and it’s not like they oust her, but you can tell she doesn’t feel at home, as if there’s a halo of empty space around her, pushing others away. I’m afraid half-albino will get eaten someday, or the blacks will leave somewhere too far, so I’m trying to keep them together and nearby while I still can.” For how long?

“He’s going to make a fine teacher — don’t I always tell you! But you’re swimming this — swimming that,” father exclaimed.

“Hmph,” from my mother.

“Brother will become an ant-o-logist!” my sister revealed.  

But I was already that. My father was the young principal, gifted in geography and also geometry. My mother was the writer of cookbooks and the president of the local club’s festivities. Swimming required drowning. Scoring goals required eating the roaring ball on your gut. Being a politician took white hair, and becoming a general took twenty years of service as a private, and becoming a private required twenty years of service as a nobody. I was the nobody, and the nobody that had no patience couldn’t wait. I knew the ins and outs of the world of the ants — what they liked or disliked, what they did for work and leisure, and what they would be doing whether disturbed or not. No geography teacher, nor any rocket scientist, could know them as I did, and neither had any entomologist my passion or my care, or my belief, for that matter — and they weren’t there, in any case.  

In the world that was not of ants I was a watcher. I had to watch them solve problems, butt heads, lead events, and cast judgment — and I was too short to be able to see even that sometimes, needing someone’s shoulders to sit upon. But here there was politics too. Here too was gory death and the bloodcurdling laughter of escaping it by a hair. Here hearts broke too, cities founded, and armistices signed. Here too was discovery and depth, boredom and serendipity, history and legend — and I was not a mere watcher here, no. I was the only watcher, the only doer as well. I was an ant, I was their God, and I was their human friend.  

Here was I. Me. And they found me — my sister, father, and my mother — even if they didn’t understand, and neither was I about to unveil more than a little of that secret universe to them — they found me. We never talked of ants thereafter, nor did we ever meet there again, but they knew me now, and so did I.

​

2.

 

No flowers ever bloomed on the mountain top, and no bees ever buzzed over them. It was a dry and dreary place, castigated by the sun day in and day out, pricked by the stars and needled by the moon when nobody watched. It was not a place anybody would ever want to visit by choice, and their smiles of sympathy if they absolutely had to would be tighter than masks of death. It called, but the point always was to go near and leave as soon as one could.  

I was found there on a day cold as the drafts of jasmine and woollen half-shirts. I did not want to be there, but there was nothing else I wanted. My heart was so full, but there was a strange sense of pity and the beginning stages of a smirk left on the corners of my mind. I walked, and I walked. I closed my eyes, swung my arms, thrust my heart forward, and onwards I marched. There was no pebble or boulder that could inhibit my progress, nor a cliff or a grassy, rocky gorge that would close its arms around me — such things only happen in stories.  

There was a song I wanted to forget. “Why is it always my fault?” my father had said. “Oh, don’t you act like that. You’ve been responsible for all of it. Ever since fifteen years ago,” my mother sung. “Huh,” my father snorted and whistled at the ridiculousness of the charge. “Oh — yes, not huh. I have always let you do what you wanted. And you have always meddled in everything, everything. I shouldn’t have. I should have put my foot down a long, long time ago,” my mother said. “He has to find himself. I’m not about to force him to do something he can’t. Not my son,” said father. “Life is not infinite, honey, he needs basic life skills,” mother said, “I’m nothing. Look at me. I wanted to write books, not cookbooks.” “Why do you look at me like that, as if I am to fault for everything? I didn’t tell him not to study, and besides, if you tried just once more with the manuscript,” sung my father. “What shall we do about this?” my mother asked in the meantime, “All your colleagues will be asking about how he did.” Father’s silence was the perfect interlude.  

There was a story I wanted to forget. There was someone hiding in the darkness, with shadowy arms and neck, and a face that didn’t have a mouth. That was a brother, who loved his sister very much, and wanted to protect her. But he had missed the time she thought the world of him, thought he could do anything and should do so, and now she was disgusted with herself for ever thinking that — even as a child. Her brother was misled, a failure, and she had to protect him. For that reason, he couldn’t come out of the shadows, even when he knew her friends were dangerous, even when he knew she was making mistakes. She shouldn’t go the library alone when she was angry at something and everything. The librarian at night was not a good man. She shouldn’t dip her hand in the ink and write swear words on the black paint of the fencing. It was poisonous and it wasn’t funny. She should just come to him instead, and cry and snort on his sleeves. But she was the one already earning somewhat from her growing skills, and he was the one always needing to be taken care of, so he couldn’t come out and say it. He wouldn’t be able to stand the look she would give him.  

There was a myth I wanted to forget, with something of an idiot of a hero. He thought numbers were his friends and he would change the world with them, look where no one had before. But there was a mountain of text to cross before getting there, and the numbers screamed like monsters if you so much as dared to look away for a moment. The idiot thought he could do something by helping feed the birds that always looked dejected in a dirty cage near the cycle workshop, but the owner thought something else and called him a name he would never forget. The idiot thought he could help his sister’s friend overcome depression and lost his bus ticket in the thought. He said he was not a freeloader when the conductor remarked that people from his town always did this, and was let off ten kilometers from his mountain in the humiliating darkness, as the conductor had this unfailing memory and couldn’t remember handing him one. His sister’s friend told her he was a creep, and he heard about it, called her ungrateful, and everyone asked him to apologize, but he was never going to do that. Never.  

The street with the birds was to be avoided if it could be helped, and so was any other his sister and her friend might be on. The time when the bus made its daily stop at his town was to be avoided, as was the time the library opened and closed, as there was this time he borrowed a book, then forgot to return it, then couldn’t go back to return it from the shame. In all this helter-skelter, the numbers surrounded him and started singing a mocking chorus too, and he could not entreat a single one of them to appear on the other end of his pen during the yearly test. But there was still hope, you see? The hero was going to overturn all of this somehow. Somehow. And emerge victorious.  

I closed my eyes and marched in the darkness, and when I opened them, there was the mountain man, sitting on the deserted bald of the mountain’s head, wearing khaki shorts so discoloured it could be old age or military camouflage. The mountain man was pointing a thin rifle over his shoulder while leaning back leisurely on an invisible rock. Time ran slow here, but there was no time to lose. A long line stood before the mountain man, disappearing into the tiny foothills, and it moved slowly upwards as each person at the head got what they wanted. There was a squirrel at the front, and she was old and hurt. She had no patience. There was a bear behind her, and he looked a bit sluggish, perhaps only being there because the others were. A lion was third in line — and full-bodied, glossy-maned, he had no reason to be there, like me. But he was.  

The squirrel came up to the mountain man, puffed her chest out, and stood holding her breath, sardonic gaze questioning if he was up to it. He put his bayonet straight up, pushed it into her heart, and twisted — right where it hurt. Right where it pulsed, and swirled in some yellow poison, slowly melting and infinitely stretching. Right where it munched on itself and demanded for more, and right where it writhed in lust and cracked dry in envy. The squirrel laughed, and cried, and said something, and all that simultaneously, but I only remembered her open mouth. This was all — all this pain, and this was all — the realization made my heart so heavy, and it pushed me forward, made me cut the line, and stand in front of the mountain man as the empty squirrel dropped from rock to rock towards the lap of the mountain.  

The mountain man took one look at me — from top to bottom — but he sighed. He put the bayonet on me and the monster inside me lit up in joy. It pressed but did not prick — oh, it was such a soothing presence through my shirt. He held my eyes, and sighed through his lips ever so softly.  

“A long, long time ago,” he sounded so sleepy, but his eyes were so alive, “a lot of men came up to the mountain. But they didn’t look at it; they all hid in the trees and put the bitterness in their hearts on their arrow tips, and soon enough, there was another group of men coming to the mountain, but the mountain could not move. It could not run, it could not scream, it could not close its eyes.” 

“A long, even longer time ago, they built a village on its weaker shoulder. And they were sleeping on a wooden cot, father and mother, when the land lunged on them. The mountain saw it, saw their hands, legs, and bellies crammed in with a lot of bamboo, straw, rock, and water. The mountain heard them breathe in the headful of space, and saw them open their eyes in the darkness, and felt the itch on their nose and the dirt inside their mouths — but those were the least things then, weren’t they? The mountain watched them see and breathe for two days — and they tried to scream too, but the weight on their bellies was too great. The mountain could not turn away, and neither could it focus on the whispers of the waterfall instead.” 

“A long time ago, a boy came up to the mountain…”

I was alerted because the pressure on my shirt was so much stronger now. I was gripping the bayonet now. The one in me did a cartwheel of pleasure, anticipating the feeling of something new — but both it and I knew we would be disappointed. The bayonet in the heart feels nothing more than the kiss of life, nor anything other than it; it’s just that it ends all feelings. It was so horrible a taste, that kiss, but I still didn’t unlock lips — was I addicted? Was the mountain man too? I put the bayonet tip on him and looked into his eyes, but didn’t see anything I didn’t see in me — or in the sky and the ground and the seas beyond. 

I tried my best, I did. It practically wanted to break my chest and leap onto the metal. It wanted to reject me, reject the pain, and reject itself. It wanted to put itself on top of a bullet and pounce on one in the queue, which was by now getting visibly impatient with this disruption of regular business. And it would feel good too, rejection meeting the rejection in the target’s heart — but oh, that would not be feeling good — just more rejection, or whatever it is called.  

I tried, but I couldn’t. But when I looked at the mountain man, I teared up. He was leaning even further back, hands splayed on the rocks by his side, face relaxed after who knows how long. I wanted him to keep feeling like that, when he could close his eyes and didn’t have to look at anything inside. So I took out my flute and played a note. It went right through the hole in me. I played another note, and it took away all the light in my world. I played the song, and it made me grow smaller, or the void in me larger — either way, it was me now, and I it, a giant ball of heart and ache. But the mountain man was almost on the ground now, head drooping backward, he had fallen asleep somewhere along the way. The bear was snoring — loudly. The lion had a bubble coming out of the corner of his mouth.  

The music, the flute had found me. And I had found the mountain man and the rest of them. The music couldn’t give me something I already wasn’t — or the ground or the sky or the seas beyond weren’t. But when I played it — me — the mountain could fall asleep, and together we could get through it for one more night, and so I would be playing it forever. I would never let it get away from me. 

The mountain had found me too, in a way. I was the one who found it, who stood there, and who didn’t want to just put it to sleep. I was the one who wanted to sing it softly to sleep, and draw a quilt of warm clouds over its breast, and whisper my notes whenever it looked like it might break up into a nightmare.  

Lastly, my mother found me. She looked at me, and she saw all the holes and tatters and patches inside me, and a tear came out of her eye. She touched my forehead, but she touched all of my open, cold, seething wounds, and closed them shut with a warm caress. I cried a bit too, because I was found, but I wanted to perform a song for them then — the song of the mountain. I was her old comforter, with miscoloured stitches, old tea-stains, and so many apertures you could sneak an army of lies through them, but it was so very warm on her lap, and I was found there.

​

3.

 

That was a time when I still loved the mountain. That was the time when I picked up my flute and set out to carry the mountain’s song to the world.  

That was a time I still wasn’t afraid to pull out my pockets and show them to everybody. My pockets led to the mountain’s belly — and it was full of things, all wonderful, from the ivory brooch to the verse you wooed snow fairies with. But now that I had gone around the world and come at last to the sea, I felt small, for it dances with you and it dances without you. It was happy for me, but its happiness wasn’t meant for me.  

It is also said that the mountain and the sea have a thousand-year relationship, and of all the things the mountain could be accused of, being small wasn’t one. And yet, the sea could hold it and a thousand mountains like it without being asked and drown them in a blanket of bliss. It reached out, perhaps for me, perhaps for the sky — and I didn’t have the guts to clarify — but I still threw the brooch. I gave the sea the verse. I gave it the story where a few braves stopped a tiding army, and I also gave it the tale where brother is pushed off the cliff by brother. How cruel was I? One by one, I gave it all I had — from the secret that wilted grass to the dew that was caught on the bird beak — and when I looked at it, it was still the sea. I didn’t even know if it wanted more, but it still reached up.  

By now, there was only one story left — and a very boring one at that. It was the story of the most shameless desire. It spoke of being a hobbling goblin with the personality of a hobbling goblin, and looking at the stars, and forgetting who you were for a moment — of wishing one of those stars would open its eyes any time now and be struck with wonder and desire for you just as you were for it. It was a story of the most baseless greed — of wanting to be a better hobbling goblin; it was a story of the most cowardly fear too, and of what other than being a hobbling goblin? But most of all, it was a story with too few words — and few that made any sense at that — what was a hobbling goblin, after all?  

There was a sea of faces all around me, chanting someone’s name to the violent beating of the earth. There was a sea of hands too, and it swayed perilously like an upturned pendulum to a world ending storm. There was my friend in front of me. He had burns and vices. Like the cigarette and the getting up and stomping away from the table anytime someone disagreed with him exactly three fishy minutes earlier. But he wasn’t a goblin, he wasn’t one. For one, he was too tall with his dirty hair to be one, and second, he still had a story to tell the sea. Now, what was the story of a tall dude with dirty hair, and what was a tall dude with dirty hair? Hell if I knew — but he did, and so did we all.  

He was beautiful, like a fresh grasshopper on a wet blade of grass, and he turned, and walked, and waved and sung to them. They were beautiful too, so very beautiful, like wet blades of grass that could accommodate a legion of grasshoppers with no problem. How well they deserved each other! And together they made a pretty picture; only I wished that I was in it rather than looking from outside. What was I doing there? I had run out of things, so I could not go forward, but there was nowhere I could go back to, now that I had nothing. I was where no one should ever be, in that translucent place between now and then, and I would slip away like that if I did nothing.  

I tried doing what somebody said I did really well, that I had told myself I would do properly, but I could not really believe that now. To do it well you needed fingers of flesh that could ache and sizzle, but all I had were the white sticks they put in ice cream, and they shook like disgraced statesmen for some reason. To do it well you needed to blow your life away to fill the throat of the flute — but I was hollower than it now. There was nothing — no substance and no passion, no belief and no judgment in my chest, only the faint trembling of cold membranes from fear, shame, and disgust.  

I felt really small. Really small, and yet I fell into the sea, which would not throw me back, I was sure, as there was nothing waiting for me. I had not asked it, but it still accepted me, and I could sleep somewhere safe, forgotten in my oblivion just as I was when my glorious friend still smoked and sung and enthralled the world around. I did feel the fear, and I did want to save myself from sinking with some audacious swimming, but I wept and gave up when I saw my fat little hands futilely try to find purchase where there was none.  

It was cold and dark, but strangely just warm enough for it not to matter. It was lonely, as my fingers had long stopped playing, and the only drop of tear that I had had the life to shed had long dried on the green carpeting on the stage, and as my friends and the audience went on, just as they should, sparing the impostor the space to hide in plain sight. I would be sitting there, long after even the cleaners and the packers had hidden the stage away and the sea had turned into clouds only to rain a flood somewhere else, but those pair of eyes saved me.  

The pair of eyes found me, and they looked straight at me even though they listened to everyone else. It was as if a star was peering down far below, and I could see myself from far above, and see what had so drawn its attention. I was so white — white that could colour itself in others and show them what they had. I was so frail — because you had to be frail to take what the strong couldn’t and still be standing. And I was so very tired, because who wouldn’t be after taking the mountain on his shoulders and walking all the way to the sea?  

Those eyes were persistent. They found me, and they unhesitatingly dove down to the bottom of the sea, where no one else would ever go. They came for me through the muck and the refuse, through the jungle of weeds and parting the veil of darkness, so that I had no choice but to look where they were looking — somewhere far darker within — somewhere something beat and pulsated with warm bursts of light at roughly even intervals. I had always tried to avoid going to that place, and I had always imagined it would be very red and raw — perhaps bathing in blood, something I couldn’t bear to see a drop of — and still not dissolving to cruel nature. I knew and believed that the touch of a single gaze there would burn my soul with a pain equal to a thousand thorny lashes, and it closed my throat and froze my veins when I thought of looking there — but now that I did, it was curiously empty. There was nothing else, except a huge space that was empty open for everyone else, and most surprisingly, there were those eyes there — they were looking at me, and I was looking at them.  

I couldn’t look away from those eyes, and I also couldn’t look away from myself. But then they flashed with blue embarrassment and looked away, focusing everywhere but here. I could almost hear the thoughts shooting behind those eyeballs — she was so ugly, so incompetent, so empty — how could she look up at a star and desire it? And I smiled; I smiled after such a long time — a slight one, but enough to dazzle a thunder out of its joy. But there was no way to tell it to her save one, as she would not look at me, and I so hoped that she would, so I brought my flute up to my lips.

​

4.

 

I have been found enough times in life. When I had to hold a job and I was told to fudge the bills, I had felt like I had never grown up, or why else would I not know what was to be done? I was told that either we did it, or we sunk. There was no ‘we’ though, and the one at risk of meeting with the children of past sins was my senior, but I was sure that I would be the one to sink somehow, never having learnt to swim. I was beside myself, and had been beside myself for who knows how long, when my friend had appeared out of nowhere and found me. I had not even been able to get out with a quarter of the circumstances when she had tossed out my worries like so much wastepaper. “I will beg if I have to take care of yours. You can take your time and find a new place. I will, because I would never be able to do what you do. You must have given him the what’s what and quit, right? I would have paid to see his face right then and there,” she had said. “So I did, didn’t I?” I could only have decided after a slight pause. She knew what I was about when I did not, and even though I did not, we were all going to watch what I, being the person I was about, was going to do.  

Then there was the time I had become stupid. I had begun to think that the earth was the earth, and the sun was the sun, and like that. It made me suffer a lot, because I knew that wasn’t the truth, but the truth is what we can see, and that was all I could see at that point. I went round and round, making an airplane out of my daughter and making sure the jagged ends and blunt edges in the house far eluded her, because I had to, didn’t I? But then I found myself among two generations of kith and kin descended from my daughter, mostly teddy bears and plastic dolls by vocation, sharing in a happy family meal. I was ordered not to leave my place and enjoy myself among people that supposedly revered me. The housemaker was very busy, but she still found time to check on me, and having found brooding silence, frowned very disappointedly. In my defense, I said, we were speaking very quietly. Too quietly for others to hear — but that didn’t cut any ice. Dolls speak telepathically, I said, and her frying pan was full of invisible food itself, I said. The frown only deepened, and it was making me sweat. “Fine,” I said, and I looked at the mass of cotton clothed in humanoid form, and frowned, imagining having to talk to that myself. She smiled instantly. It was a good thing that no one else was home. It still was very difficult to get the first word out, which sounded like something between ‘ack’ and ‘huff.’ But it was a good conversation, and especially as it was about something I was passionate about — the history of music — I had soon become very animated, almost standing on top of a table, and the housekeeper had forgotten her stew, listening to me with an open mouth. Raghuram the teddy bear and I had become quite close by the end of it, but he was my daughter’s special grandson, and she was catching on to us. That kind of talk was far too mature and heavy for his age, she intervened fast and strong. “He says he liked it,” I said. “No he didn’t,” said she, “Besides, he can’t speak.” We couldn’t agree on the basic facts, but one thing was certain. When the house was empty again, or perhaps when it was full to the gills and everybody I didn’t know from the locality had turned up for something, I would talk to him again, and just the thought of it made me enjoy the sumptuous meal she had prepared us of clay and grass from our lawn a lot.  

I have been found many times, in many places by many people, but there was one time I can’t ever forget. That was a time in my life when it had been decided that things had to come to an end. First to be taken away was my sight. I could still tell faces and fingers, but I couldn’t see the valleys and canyons in them anymore. Then my hearing got away. I could still respond when I was being called, but my mornings were never interrupted by cheeky bird calls anymore. My back complained if I sat up for too long, and my breath turned to fire when I thought about something too much. My day was shorter and freedom costlier — and both should have been cherished dearer for that reason perhaps, but all my waking time could only be spent worrying about the things that ailed me and resenting the things I couldn’t do anymore.  

Then I started to lose things that weren’t even mine. For example, I couldn’t tell my grandchildren what the red-looking fruit in their picture books was, I didn’t know what was made of bricks and held water, and sometimes I didn’t know why I was sitting on a bed surrounded by little cotton people on all sides. On such a day like this, I had a great craving, for what I didn’t know, and I couldn’t remember what I wanted to remember. I was in a neat grey room which held only one door, and one could only go out by that. I could remember nothing from the world that lay outside and seemed very bright — but there was nothing inside the room either, so I went out.  

It was a rocky street with quaint houses on both sides. The gravel bit into your toes and the wind was a bit too cold for such a sunny and wide-open afternoon. I watched a woman put clothes out to hang and a bunch of boys ruggedly pursue a stone pebble with their sticks. Neither the woman nor the boys knew what I wanted to remember. After that street there was a road with cornfields that stretched for an hour, and after that a few out of place trees. I strongly suspected that there was something else beyond those, most likely someone who would remember what I wanted to know, but my back, knees, toes, and a lot of things made me sit down and try better myself for some more time. 

Before long, I had given my head up completely to the lap of a strong tree and lay down with fatigue so exquisite that I couldn’t even close my eyelids if asked. It was the first time I had seen a sky so white. There was not a single cloud anywhere, nor a star, planet, or satellite. It was way too big, as if it had started walking, but then forgotten why it was walking, and thus had always kept going. There was nobody or nothing to call it back or stop it either. Sometimes I felt like I saw waves and folds in it, sometimes dots and dashes of colour, but mostly I realized these were faults of my own faulty eyes. But then there was something too big and deep to have been a flashy trick.  

It was a big mountain, and a deep forest clothing its body. In the mountain foot, on the forest bed, just where the worlds known and unknown to chroniclers touched, there was a little home. Inside it, there were four people — two little, two less so — and there was warmth in their hearts. There was my mother, who still wrote good poems the local club could never appreciate and nobody else would ever read. She also still played with her words and made my father laugh, even though it all went above our heads. There was my father, who loved his students no less than his children, and was often late to home, and never thanked by anybody in it or outside. There was my sister, who I loved so much that no world could be without her. And there was good old me, always looking for something else, somewhere else — perhaps for right this moment, right here.  

I opened my eyes, and saw all of them sitting around, laughing and chatting and not minding me. My mother was there, my father and sister were there, so were the eyes that had found me and that I had never stopped looking at, and my friend, my daughter, and Raghuram the teddy. I didn’t care if any of it was true. If I or the others ever remembered it, or if anybody ever heard of our story. It could keep flitting around like a lost bubble somewhere in the great river of whiteness, unknown and unseen, and onto never and nowhere, but for all reasons and purposes, it had already been found.