When it happens?

The time is exactly twelve in the midnight. The world outside my room is fast asleep except for the grating noise created by the motor vehicles plying on the road a little further down. The lizards on the walls of the balcony hiss here and now. I wave aside the humming mosquitoes that pester me consistently. Blood suckers. The dogs in the streets, having nothing to do, howl their night away. Cicadas listlessly buzz at a distant and I can clearly hear the noise it makes.

For a quiet paralytic moment, I stay calm. This is the time when I am completely with myself. The floodgates open up slowly and my thoughts pour out. Initially, in bits and pieces, all fragmented, disjointed thoughts. Visually, it’s like a collage of different images put together on a white sheet of paper. It makes no sense.

Let’s try to understand and make some sense out of it because if much of my thoughts do not convey some sort of a sense, perhaps then, my head is full of nonsense. And sincerely I have a repugnant aversion for the word nonsense. It may be weird, strange, or even mysterious but not nonsense, to say the least.

There is this man, some forty or so year old that comes to my mind every time. He appears like an apparition, a shadow, for I have never been able to identify who this person is. His face is vague. Except for his startling, powerful eyes, other features of his face are very foggy. But he is tall and huge. And he looks dark.

Once when I was walking to my home, across the street, I saw this dark figure smoking a cigar. He wore black glasses and was leaning against the iron fence. Dark clouds of smoke blew out of his mouth. I was scared when I saw him standing there, staring at me.

But I collected all my guts to meet him face to face and ask him why he keeps coming to me. I wanted to ask him if he was real or just a ‘nonsense’ created by my imagination. But why should I ever imagine a dark man, following me all the time, I had thought.

I waited for the traffic to slow down, staring back at the man across the street. As I crossed the street, for a brief fraction of a second, I looked to my right to make sure there was no car coming my way. For that brief fraction, when I indulged in the habit of looking right or left before crossing the street, I lost the sight of the man. That instant, I saw a crow, the blackest of crows, fly over my head, cawing.

When I reached the other side of the street, the man was no where. He had disappeared. I looked everywhere but all I could see was people and cars, people after people, cars after cars. He was nowhere there to be seen. Confused and afraid, I increased the pace of my walk. After sometimes, I ran home. As I ran, the black figure reminded me of death.

Am I going to die? I asked myself. Am I dreaming? I think I am dreaming. This is all a dream, a very crazy dream, I tried to pacify myself. Everything is just a concoction churned out by my mind. That night I could not sleep. The image of the man kept repeating. It was around dawn that I had fallen asleep.

The next day, I went to see a doctor. I walked past the huge crowd of people at the lobby of the hospital. Sick people were every where. I hate to go to a hospital. It makes me feel sick. I climbed the stairs to the second floor. The small room in the lift suffocated me. Rather I preferred walking the flight of stairs.

As I reached the second floor, everything turned white, silvery, and shiny. The reflection of the white shaft of light blinded me. For sometime, I could not see anything. The corridor that was buzzing with a lot of people was suddenly desolated. Everything around was immaculately pure and white. Not a single stain of colour.

And then suddenly, the walls started to turn red. It was blood, I could smell it. I rubbed my eyes and when I looked at it again, everything was normal. People were moving like ants. A few of them glanced at me, giving me strange looks. I shuddered. What is happening to me? I asked myself.

I decide not to meet the doctor and return home. Drinking whisky, I lay on the sofa, thinking what is happening to me. The misty face of the dark man crosses my eyes. Am I hallucinating? Or is this something to do with my brain or is it that I am going mad?

I pour myself another drink. I have almost drunk the whole bottle of whisky and I am not even least drunk. I do not add the ice and drink it neat, in one gulp. The steamy feeling as if hot vapor is going down my throat makes me feel light. Relax, calm down, I use the mantra.

I throw myself on the bed and cover my head with a pillow. I close my eyes, and try to stay calm, and composed. I remind that whatever happening is not true. These are just illusions. My brain needs some rest, I think.

I never wake up the next morning. The phone is ringing, but I can’t pick it up. I exert all the effort I can to reach the phone, but I can’t. Then I forcefully get up, and as I do, I feel as if I am being thrown out of the bed, out of my own body. I hurl across the bed to pick up the phone. And just about when I reach the phone, it stops ringing.

As I turn back, on the reflection of the mirror, I see the same body as mine, the same dress, sleeping on the bed. I turn back slowly, trembling. And I see myself there sleeping. That’s me there, I tell myself. Than who am I, who is this? I am already shivering, and I can feel my heart thump at my chest.

I rush to the mirror. I look at the mirror and I see the dark figure of the man instead of my reflection. The vague face slowly becomes clearer like the reflection that becomes visible when the water stops rippling. A pretty girl, with a smile, stands opposite to me.

You have been there lying dead for the last three days. For the last three days the phone has been ringing non-stop. It’s now time to go, she says.

She stretches her soft hand across the mirror and I take it. And I disappear in the mirror.

The dogs howl, and the cicadas listlessly buzz. The motor vehicles produce that grating noise. The mosquitoes feed on my blood. The time is exactly 12 in the midnight.

Death shall complete us?

I have lived this far and I rejoice I am still living. I rejoice at the bounty of this beautiful earth that it has so much to offer. I rejoice at the rivers that flow peacefully. I rejoice at the early morning sun rise that I have not seen for a long time. I rejoice at the sun sets, and the smell of the evening aroma filling the air I breathe. I rejoice at the scent of the flowers and the colors of the trees and the birds that fly around in the sky. I rejoice all that is mundane, all that is around me, all that is common.

But this is not enough. There is more I want from life and I am unable to quell that desire for something more. Sometimes I even do not understand what that something more is. Deep inside, an empty feeling that something is missing, that everything is not plainly fulfilling, pricks my heart to death.

And I reckon. I have had everything possible I could ask for. I have been born to loving parents, and I have siblings who love me as much as I love them. I am educated and I have a job. I have friends who stand by me through good and bad times. I live a descent life by all standards. Above all I am alive, living, breathing and feeling.

What more can I ask for?

But there is a hole that needs to be filled up. A hole that is gradually becoming wider and bigger each day. Eventually, I feel that the hole will engulf me and I will just perish as if I was never been there at all.
This incarcerating feeling turns into fear, the fear that I may never be the one I have always dreamt of becoming. This fear cuts me piecemeal as though a butcher is peeling off the skin of a live animal layer by layer. I can see the tears of pain in the eyes of the animal and feel the pain it is going through. I empathize with the animal for the pain that is hurting me is no greater than the animal’s. Just that I am lucky to be enduring the pain not having to be peeled alive.

Euthanasia is not such a bad option, I wonder. Perhaps, it is good that death could be enticed to come in a peaceful manner and silently snub the life out of you. Without a groan of pain, without the sensation and the slightest idea that you are dying. Man finally seems to have conspired with death.

The other side is where man believes lies a shroud of darkness. Am I afraid of the darkness? Or am I just afraid of not seeing the light anymore? Does death mean darkness or liberation, as some call it, from the mundane existence we are deeply rooted to? Is death just a transition to the other world of the heaven, the world of the rebirth, or the hell?

Or what if it is just nothingness thereafter? When you die, what if there is nothing but blackness? What if there is no soul, nothing called life thereafter? What if there is no hell or heaven or rebirth into different realms of existence? Perhaps, we are a mass of energy and this energy goes back to the universe it was created out of. What if there is no consciousness. I wonder.

Often I have experienced the worst of darkness where for a moment you just see blackness and nothing else. But even in that blackness I have seen illusions of somewhat bluish, some greenish rays of lines moving, sometimes I have seen whirlpools of distorted figures come and disappear in that absolute blackness? How black is the darkness?

Fumbling through a dark room looking for a torch or a mach box to light a candle, in several occasions, I have felt so blinded, deprived of my ability to see. And I have wondered that blind people must be feeling the same way. How true it is, I have never bothered to find out. But that is how I have always felt and wondered.

There is so much you will miss in a life time. A lifetime is therefore so less a time we are given. Some incompleteness will forever remain. And perhaps that’s why there is this whole concept of the other world. It is a huge consolation to hear that our journey is not ending with death. We have greater journeys to take, be it through the dark gates of hell or the golden doors of heaven.

What is incomplete can be completed there. What is left undone can be done there. You just need to have the right sense to believe it or not. But people like me, who desperately feel that time is running out of hand, and that there is not much that can be done; melancholy and misery are the best companions.

That’s why despite an unreeling sense of hopelessness, I carry on rejoicing at life at hand. That’s why I enjoy the choking puff of smoke that kills me every little inch. That’s why I rejoice when I look at people who walk the streets in millions, with a thought or so many, in their head. Because they are just like me who will die one day. That’s why I appreciate people who make merry, and live as if they are dying tomorrow.

That’s why I am writing this despite a heavy feeling that there is no use writing. It is just a mere consolation.