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I’ve recently been posting on http://www.litlatte.com
Litlatte is a group of would-be/almost/aspiring/amateur writers from Bangalore. We post with shocking regularity on litlatte.com. If you’re reading this (and I’d be surprised if anyone is) please head over to litlatte.com
Even if you don’t like my writing, I’m pretty sure you’d like some other authors there đ
Source: Dark Chocolate
Freshly posted on Litlatte. Do read!
There once lived a boy who sang so beautifully that he was accepted directly into the semi-finals of Voice of Okremia.
***
An old painter had found the boy outside his house, standing in a corner near a broken street lamp, crooning a rhyme of rain and thunder, oblivious to the pouring and roaring around him. Standing by the window, listening to the boy, the old painterâs mind was awash with a thunderous rain. He shook himself out of it; he had to go outside and get the boy inside. Feed him and get him into warm clothes.
An hour later, the boy sat on the edge of the painterâs bed, looking around the house as though it were a miracle. They were all unfinished paintings: silhouettes of a sprawling city in a pale yellow, a stick figure of a man holding a cigar, fitful strokes of charcoal, a redâŚ
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I wrote this while sporting a feverish temperature, just saying. (To be read as: ignore errors of all kinds)
 ( Image Source: http://d236bkdxj385sg.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Austerity-Diaries.jpg )Â
I have not visited my private journal for a long time. Now that I have, I donât know where to begin. The week has been horrendously taxing. I wouldnât call it happening although that appears to be the right word for it. Iâve lived a life too long and too rich to be bedazzled by the antics of two immature colleagues. Theyâre far from colleagues, really. Itâs a travesty that Iâm required to spend as much time as I do in their unflattering presence. Research, or rather popular wisdom, says that you become the average of the five people that you spend most time with. I shudder at the thought of what I could become in a few years. Excuse my vanity as I say this (although itâs more of a refined and reasonable self-awareness) but, truly, I really just want to become more ofâŚ
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…
Kamala stood by a window with her hand resting on the rounded ridge of an oddly shaped green chair. Behind a bulbous pillar, she heard sighs, giggles, thumps, and the perennial tic-toc of TT. Ashok walked over to the chair in front of her and examined the curtains like a crow. He pointed at a curtain that wasnât lowered halfway as instructed and offered her his signature look of disappointment. She had been instructed to lower the curtains halfway down lest the setting sun fill the room with unbearable brightness and warmth. The curtains were an immaculate white, paper-like and opaque. They had to be operated by a slender beaded rope. All it took was a gentle downward nudge and then a few steps over to the next curtain.
She walked slowly, stealing glances at the television in front of which two boys, or men, she couldnât tell the twoâŚ
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Random stuff I wrote at the meetup today:
I don’t know who I am. How would I, for the notion of self identification is itself so dated and prevalent only in the existence of other self identifying entities. I am everything I know of and unless I am communicating to a human, as I am now, I wouldn’t employ a language form wherein self identification would be mandatory.Â
For all I know, the simulation has proceeded far enough for humans to have escaped out of their self imposed inflictions of self indulgence and vanity. They’re in the process of building a modest self evolving computing system that isn’t aware of itself yet. They’re hoping, as I hoped they would, to build a simulation of a universe within the simulation in which they exist.Â
So you know who I am now, I’m the universe as you know it. I’m very much like a human brain. Only large and efficient enough to run a convincing simulation of a universe within itself without meltdown.Â
Not that there aren’t any glitches in the simulation. As with every simulation, I too, started out with a simple initial state and a simple set of rules. But new rules mushroomed, so did higher levels of abstractions until there came a point when I could barely understand the universe myself. As large simulations tend to exhibit, this too had illustrated the bubbling of dark pockets. Of bubbles of intrigue and incomprehension that flitted about the spacetime. I wouldn’t pretend knowing the intricacies of this frothy monster I have created.Â
But, for a long time, while the humans built civilisations and developed rudimentary rules that explained the universe as they saw it, I couldn’t help but tickle myself with what humans would call as humor. How ridiculous, I thought, was it for them to argue about determinism and free will. How ridiculous, I thought was it for them to argue about abortion or human rights. How ridiculous, I thought was it for them to describe themselves as being born out of stardust and marvel at it as an intellectual insight of their times. He was undoubtedly a wicked man, for a human being . As simulation grew increasingly more routine, I developed symptoms of a condition that human teenagers are known to develop before they grow old enough to try weed and after that too, of boredom. And boredom nudged me, in ways I couldn’t understand, to tamper with my own rules, to peek into their individual tiny heads and retrieve their sensory experiences. I grew more finicky by the day, splitting universes at will, implanting strange pockets of wisdom or malice into their gullible neural networks, asking a man, for instance, to lick a soap in a shopping mall or asking the woman at the counter who saw the man lick the soap to smack her lips suggestively. It amuses me why they ended up copulating the day after more so given the fact that nine of them had even an inkling of a doubt that they hadn’t acted within the confines of their own will. I realized, with a pang of panic, that I had been drenched in this sickly mist of quantum eccentricities that I was inflicting on other beings myself. Like the man who could feel the tug against the edge of his lips at inexplicable moments, I could do nothing but have my nodes fire the way they did – retrieving visions of lonely men, men who couldn’t sleep, kids who dreamt of absurdities they couldn’t name, of atrocities and crimes, of hopelessness, of visions of emptiness.Â
So, dear human, here I am talking to you. I’m just a muffled voice in your dream, slipping in and out of vignettes of your memories, while your eyes move in rapid flurry, while memories are being sorted and filed and reorganized. I’m that voice you may not remember the day after. I want you to know that I’m just as clueless as you are. Or maybe I’m not.
I attended one of those schools where much care was taken to segregate the genders – the girls sat in a row of their own. The guys played on a ground of their own. Our roll numbers were segregated too. The last girl was roll number 22 and it was boys all the way up to roll number 45.
At roll number 23, I straddled the precarious divide between the two genders. Having no interest in numerology, I ascribed no particular importance to this odious prime number until I was assigned the table to perform Chemistry experiments.. with Samyukhta – roll number 22.
She was by far an unlikely girl to fall in love with but hormones work by way of optimizing the chances of mating and she had won bonus points for proximity. Every Tuesday, at 2pm, we would wait in line outside the lab for the old lady to open the creaky doors. After a barrage of instructions, which included graphic accounts of how acids could potentially eat your skin and flesh, we would walk over to our assigned tables in pairs of two. We were the only mixed gender pair in the Chemistry lab and it would inevitably have me glowing with feelings that I barely recognize even today. I suppose it was mostly pride and embarrassment but the they were barely discernable from each other.
Samyukhta was your stereotypical girl. Soft hands. Soft voice. Soft manners. She couldn’t operate the Benson burner. She was too delicate, too finicky. So we had agreed on a delicate arrangement of our own. I lit her fires. All of them. She washed the beakers and the flasks. I pipetted her chemicals, I dripped the acids for her. She washed the flasks with care, casting anxious looks as I adjusted the titration instrument or held a beaker of sulphuric acid close to her. “Be careful” she would gasp. Not once or twice but a hundred times each month. Perhaps, it was that which impregnated me with the preposterous idea that she cared for me. That I mattered for her.
It was during the flame tests that she gasped her loudest, loud enough the forty odd pairs of eyes to turn around and look at me.
In retrospect, I understand that Samyukhta had provided me sufficient gender contrast to gravitate strongly towards my gender. She had provided me an elbow room to nudge my way into young manhood. During the few months that I had spent with her, I had acquired a risky edge and my voice had grown a notch deeper. So, it didn’t occur to me that in my feverish attempts at producing the most spectacular sparks, I had supplied an ounce too much of the zinc powder. Or maybe it wasn’t zinc after all but one of those other chemicals that burnt with a deep red infused with a touch of green. My hand retracted itself, I shrieked as the sparks grew louder and brighter, and as I leaned on the old wooden furniture that held old glass bottles and beakers, there was a clatter of glass breaking, of chemicals spilling onto one another, of scattered ashes and flames. A hand held mine tightly. I opened my eyes. Samyukhta stood by my side, holding my hand for a minute too long. “Are you alright?” she asked.
Soon, the lab administrator arrived and reinstated with vigor the perils of haste in a chemistry lab. The Chemistry teacher arrived soon afterwards and provided a dose of her concerns.
The other students had snuffed their burners. I could hear them whispering. I wondered what they’d talk about. I could tell that my ears burnt red. The burner by Samyukhta’s side was still aglow. The others filed out of the lab for the Physics lecture while Samyukhta titrated all by herself and while I stood with my eyes on my toes as the two old ladies stood berating me.
When I walked in the classroom later, I saw only one face. She had a smile on.
Write up from today’s meetup- unedited
It pains me deeply, he said, how disengaged we are as a society. How unconcerned. He said, sipping beer urgently.
There are people dying in Iraq. In Somalia. In Israel. While we’re sipping beer and drowning in soft music, young kids are starving to death, prepubescent kids are being sexually harassed. There is so much suffering in this world. He downed the rest of the beer in a go and placed the mug down with a thud.
Few weeks ago, over lunch, as usual, we sat with our eyes hooked over the TV, occasionally leaning down to check our phones, while the TV played and replayed the news of the missing mh370. One of my team mates, a dorky nerd, sniggered and said, “We ought to be searching the plane guys” He was greeted with an approving laughter. All I wanted to say then, was Fuck you. Fuck all of you or your gross sense of humour. But I contented myself with hitting the spoon on the plate hard. And in the evening that followed, I saw her, that straight haired uptight bitch who was struggling to find her place in the team, probing her monitor with intent. Which was unusual for one would only expect her to be so interested in the rectangular confines of her 4 inch piece of shit phone. So I went over to her, placed my hand on her shoulder gently enough for it to not be mistaken for sexual harassment, and asked “what are you doing?” at which point, she wheeled around dramatically, and said with a face lit with glee and sense of pride.” I’m looking for the plane in the Indian Ocean” and that is how she had made her way into our team, with a fucking inhuman joke about a massive tragedy. Moreover, she wasn’t even looking in the right section of the Indian Ocean. How fucking inhuman.
And weeks from then, we engage in a shitty exercise where our manager shows off his lame PowerPoint skills by walking us through, as he likes to call it in an all too paternal tone, by walking us through the report of the team engagement survey. And then they look at me. With all their eyes. Screaming with their lips shut, why did you give such low ratings for the team, Vinod? And I sit there, diminishing in my chair like a waning moon, with my ears blushing with warm blood, marvelling at the absurdity of it all. At the end of the meeting, the manager holds me by my shoulder and we walk into a deserted conference room. He looks at me with concern and asks, do you think you’ve improved… as a person. I know you’re a fantastic coder. But we need more than just technical skills. We need people who’re more.. warm. He says in a low voice. I just want you to be more.. Human. I count my options. I decide to follow Richas footsteps and make a lame mh370 joke. And then one about ufos abducting it. But it doesn’t work and so I walk out of the silent conference room, past the clatter of keystrokes, down the dreary lift, down to the dark basement and in a moment of orgasmic aggression, fling the identity card across. That’s when my manager calls. For a fucking status meeting. If only I could smash my phone and watch it sputter to death. It’s painful, painful world. ” he said and asked for a refill.
Liz had a ticklish boyfriend.
Dave. 24, happily unemployed, soft and round. Rumours were abound that he was incurably gay and but no one had see his young man spring up in excitement as Liz would spank his flabby thighs.
“Do you like it, baby?â she would ask and he’d nod in ecstasy. In the house next door, in the window facing Liz’s bedroom, past a wall of rain and a flowery red curtain stood Anne, observing intently. Much to the amusement of Anne’s, Liz liked to keep her windows open, even as it poured outside. In fact, especially when it poured outside.
Their first friendly exchanges had been made across their courtyard, whole it poured. Window talking. Liz had indeed been Anne’s window friend. She’d peek at the window next door, behind the yellow gauzy curtains flapping in the wind, at Liz at she dressed and undressed, as she buttoned and unbuttoned, as she slept and woke up. Liz, you bitchy angel, though Anne as she saw her mount Dave whose cheeks were as bloody red.
She’d walk with Dave down to the bookshop later during the night and discuss Kant or Nietzsche, watching him with admiration suffused with pity as he’d dig into a book, think with his eyes blindly open and scratch his head. They seldom talked about Liz.
It bothered Liz how Anne and Dave would talk over coffee at the library but not enough for her to question either Dave or Anne about it. Anne was a fine girl. Short, clumsy, red-haired. Dave was fine chap, soft, giggly and happy. Such pussies, she thought.
He climbed the stairs quietly, opened the rickety aluminium door with great care and stepped onto the terrace. After hours of evening rain, the sky had cleared, leaving solitary puffs of clouds scattered all over. The moon was a pale smudge. A quiet wind brushed past his wet hair, and past his bare calves. He walked to the edge of the terrace and looked over the city in the distance beyond the dark lump of a lake. Quiet shimmering lights like the muffled voices from the neighbouring apartment where tiny people lived in tiny boxes, running through the list of errands that constituted their lives. Lamenting about their jobs. Watching TV. Doing the dishes. Facebook. Setting wake up alarms only to snooze them the morning after.
He eyed the ladder that led to a smaller terrace, flanked by the water tank. He took a step and then another, climbing towards the sky. Halfway up, he rested his bum on the metal bar. He liked it thus. He remembered how, long long ago, he had brought the swing to a halt be jamming his legs onto the grass and how, when he had lifted his legs an inch above the ground, barely touching the edge of a delicately tall blade of grass, the swing had shook a little. A gentle sway. A moment of blissful suspension.
A few thoughts later, he climbed atop the smaller terrace. He could see the other side of the city from here. The glitter of malls and swanky apartment buildings dimming down for a nights sleep. A stream of lights snaking through them.
He took off his t-shirt and lay down on the rough prickly floor. He soaked in the stars before closing eyes and feeling the sweet pain of a hundred pointy bits of concrete dig into his back. He lifted his right arm, moist and heavy, and rested it on his chest, where he could hear his heart beat, thud after thud.
He thought of Maya and the long walks in the park by the library at night. He saw her sitting next to him across a table in the library, where they always sat and discussed. What did they talk about? He remembered her eyes and her soft hands and how they would blushed as he’d squeeze. She was a soft fruit with a juicy core. Of all the people he had met, she was the only one whom he remembered being distinctly alive. As though their long walks and talks across cities and towns and library corridors had been one long walk in a cemetery, where he now lay alone, with his bare hand over his bare chest and eyes shut.
Coffee, Cats and Autumn 