A restless mother, a fatigued father, a noisy house awaited for their son. An illuminated town celebrating the return of their prince. With time their memory of him grew fainter. To them he was still the righteous man as 14 years ago. In their hurry, nobody noticed a dark-complexioned girl awaiting for his master. Her bruised hands holds flowers of a different kind. Only the writer knew his characters. He knew what truly awaits him.
Agantuk's Desk – Explore, Implore, Reverberate
Explore, Implore and Reverberate
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about
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2 children, twins from birth. Grew up to be adolescents miles apart – one stout, another feeble. The carriage came – to one at 7 and to the other at half past 7. At death they resembled each other. The confused coroner swapped their graves. At the gates both knocked the door. There was only a single vacancy. They decided to take turn.
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A tattered station, a lonely platform lined with banyan, neem & jasmine trees, a single train, a vendor serving meals – a gentleman is stationed there. Other stations had a station master but this one had a master. A master of stations. Static like the station. The station was built over an old crumbling crematorium. The village rests there, only the station stands. Her master waits for the train.
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Scorching sun in the sky. The customary ritualistic showers were missing. The otherwise desolated place had a crowded look. Trees whispered of their presence. Black was the colour of the day. Mud and clay found their utility again. It was a funeral day.
Roshmon was having a tiring day. It was her husband’s funeral. They had first met a decade ago, in a poetry conclave. They connected instantly. The day he bought 2 plots in the graveyard, she understood he was the one. They married a few days later. They visualized their resting places beside one another. As it is, she was fond of cemeteries and funerals. It was her place of solace.
Scarcely did she know a decade later, she would be organizing her husband’s funeral. Time hasn’t come for her to rest. She must wait for the worthy place. Her husband wanted a traditional funeral but the weather played spoilsport.
Thoughtful, repentant she was taking a stroll through the cemetery. The funeral ended 5 hours ago. The guests and the organizers left an hour ago. She was reading the epitaphs. At last, she came to an epitaph and read out loudly :
“Side by side they rest,
Warriors of lonely conquest.
Travelling afar hand in hand,
Blurring the lines of misunderstand.
Resting together in the enclave,
The Lad and lass of the conclave.”
She remembered the poem. She had written it. It was her answer to his proposal. Her return gift to his gift. He purchased the plot, she wrote the epitaph.
She smiled. It started raining. The ritual was complete.
Traditional funeral, it was.
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It was a clear sky that day. There wasn’t any faint hope of rain. Suddenly, it started raining with a petrichor effect. The day was October the second.
A national holiday for some, a day of restriction for others. For Sandeep, it was a day to remember an unknown fatherly figure; quite like his deceased grandfather. A bald gentleman, clad in a dhoti, fragile yet stern, feeble and meek in voice. A stick in hand, stealthily he walked.
Devotional songs sung thy name, very much little to gain.
Sweets dispersed in his name, for children of hunger to lessen their pain.
25 years later, the scenario remained quite the same. Sandeep gave an inquisitive look then, now he wears a distraught look. He understood the parody. There are no great souls, only great men. No, not the one who we celebrate in our schools, colleges and universities. They don’t hang from the wall. They ear a facade, all the while battling their own contradiction. Found amongst all of us, lost in each one of us. It is the soul in us – not good, bad, better, best or great. The entity which lets us think and never slips into oblivion.
It has started raining again.
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modified tree of life with virus on it
Ian Mackay of Virology Down Under fame (or notoriety B-) today alerted me to a new paper on the evolution of viruses – which is being touted via press releases as being something that “…adds to evidence that viruses are alive”.
To my mind at least, it does nothing of the sort: what it does do is provide evidence via the medium of comparison of protein folds that “…implies the existence of ancient cellular lineages common to both cells and viruses before the appearance of the “last universal cellular ancestor” that gave rise to modern cells”.
Arshan Nasir and Gustavo Caetano-Anollés took advantage of the fact that protein structure is at least 3 to 10 times more conserved than sequence, and analysed all of the known folds in 5080 organisms, including 3460 viruses. They identified 442 protein folds shared between cells and viruses, and 66 that are unique to viruses – indicating…
View original post 214 more words
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Here, resides the autumn leaves
Of plenty promised heaves.
Here, the sand travels afar
With the silent waves of a forlorn tsar.
Here, the banyan stands stout
Amidst the noisy devoted crowd.
Here, I love you –
In the sea of platitudes,
Blossoming river of gratitude.
In your breasts I gather,
My freedom plagues your solitude.
Here, I rest
In your grasping enclaves.
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seems like a wonderful book to delve on. very apt for the current scenario.
Reviewed by Rachel Harland
In an interview given shortly after receiving the 2010 German Book Prize* for her semi-autobiographical novel Fly Away, Pigeon, Serbian-born Swiss author Melinda Nadj Abonji was asked whether it annoyed her that in the run-up to the award announcement commentators had labeled her book “immigrant literature.” Her response? “It doesn’t annoy me, but I think it’s an uninteresting way to talk about books.” Of course, she acknowledged, the novel encompasses “different worlds.” It follows the Kocsis family—Hungarian-speaking immigrants to Switzerland from the autonomous Serbian province of Vojvodina—as they struggle to establish themselves in an affluent village near Zurich while making periodic visits back to their Yugoslavian hometown during the years preceding that region’s disintegration. And yet, Nadj Abonji added, ultimately “language knows no bounds.” If her first remark addresses the homogenizing thrust of a category that lumps together highly diverse authors and texts, the second…View original post 1,848 more words
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Sparrows twittering beside the bedside window. Young lads in their teens, playing with kites. A god riding his elephant, overlooking the work in progress. The work was to curve out a creature, a human. Faint music from a sarod, setting the stage for a maestro. Is there a story, my dear? Will the writer put pen to paper or wait for another harvest?
The writer is meditating. -
She opened the diary. Re-read the pages. It seemed like whimsical writings of an adolescent.
January 12, 2001- the lady graduated from college; easy, fun-loving, skeptical, cynical and childishly prudent. Eagerly waiting to embark on a journey to know the outside world.
October 21, 2004- the lady has finished her academic career; uneasy, restless, uncertain, discreet and sluggish. Unemployed and exhausted by the surrounding.
June 9, 2007- the lady has become an architect. Shapes and sizes of neo-liberal buildings have given a purpose to her life. Now she blends in victorian structures with local cosmopolitan architecture.
August 17, 2011- the lady decides to share her life. Her partner is an archaeologist ; whom she acquainted 7 years ago during a casual conversation over archaeology, in the national museum. It was a childhood dream, an adolescent hobby. Archaeology garnered her a lifelong muse.
She closed the diary. The writer is alien to her.
September 19, 2015- the lady is going to be a mother. She is 6 months pregnant today. Her fears have come back to haunt. Something is growing inside her. What is “It”? What to call “It”? What to teach “It”? Should she make “It” aware of the prejudices, the divide? Soon “It” will be a “He” or “She”. A biological difference, a difference of pronoun or a difference of life? Is anyone really living in this world? Aren’t we passing our time in this prejudiced realm to garner access to another realm? Isn’t our lives a struggle to blur these perceptions? Is she giving birth to life or death? Aren’t those living , struggling to live?
December 16, 2015- she gave birth to life. Her son has become a life. Buried in the fertile soil.
She closed the diary once again. “It” remains to be re-opened.
Agantuk's Desk - Explore, Implore, Reverberate 