THE BOY WITH THE BLACK MIND                                                                

                                                                        PART 1

It all happened in that dim lit cafe that sat beside the busy south Kolkata road. It had two distinct portions which were divided by a hard glass door. Inside the door, air condition soothed his mind. But then, he cannot smoke inside. He opened the glass door to sit outside. Warm polluted city air warned him to stay inside, but he was planning to light a cigarette. Sitting outside, sipping a Darjeeling tea, Animesh remembered that it was the month of September and yet there was no sign of rain. Watching the rain, sitting and smoking inside the cafe was always comforting. Whenever Animesh was relaxing, he remembered his mother’s smiling face. Her lips moved, always, but Animesh could never hear what she said. Animesh would concentrate hard, but no...He had forgotten her voice. Only the smiling face existed in his memory trying to tell him something that he would never ever hear.

An orange fiery than a sun,

A sun redder than a rose,

A rose that oozes of a heart,

A heart that melts like a rose...

fractured...

i have to learn to live without you; failing each time teaches me how much i love you...
Florescent lights lit up my two-room apartment. Clinking of empty wine bottles deepen the silence of the shadows that are cast upon the whitewashed walls. Shadows of different shapes communicate with each other...they feel the void, the desperation of my urge flowing through my veins tearing me apart. It is impossible for me to tell everything in a single sentence...cluster of thoughts and visions occurring and reoccurring at the same time. My phone lay dead at the corner of my bed waiting to feel alive once more. We both wait like hitchhikers ready to jump upon a lonely car in a dark deserted road. Like a robot, I do my daily jobs. My mind is glued to the phone. Every moment kills a budding hope.

The phone never rings.

i have to learn to love without you; failing each time teaches me how much i live you...

what is the purpose of our life? What is the purpose of our existence? Is it merely to follow a certain age old structure built out of emotion and intellect? Is it just to follow a set of rules and keep on following them till we breathe our last? On a certain day a million men and women reach their 90's. More than half of them had spent their lives going to office and coming back at a known time, watching television, having sex and thinking that they have achieved love or something like it. Each of the million souls think, rather love to think that they are unique in their own ways, and they somehow manage some glory to fall on their life path from somewhere. The question is still there...what is the purpose of our existence? Isn't it just a physio-chemical reaction of certain things and above all evolution that we are what we are. The DNA is gathering information generations after generation. We do certain acts and these go through generations. We fight and create and love and hate and suffer just to amuse ourselves...we love to think that each one is unique, yet hate the other whenever we can afford! Just as birth is a biological phenomenon, so s ofeis death.In between, the mind creates illusions that offer comfort. And it is all for the self, where i love you is actually i love myself, i hate you is also a harsher way of saying i love myself. A million 'I's thinking each one is the important thing at the same time. We are always rushing to prove our brilliance. Ego satisfaction is guaranteed once you are born human! We love to say the words - God! he is a looser! Demeaning oneself to satisfy the self ego, this creature is the human being, the one standing above all. again the question- what is the purpose of this? Earth is a place where a man getting a kiss from a beautiful girl and a man dying out of hunger happens at the same time. In both cases, it hardly matters to a third person who is, say for example, sleeping and to a fourth one who is writing the last lines of a post in a blog. What is the purpose of all this? what are we reaching at? I don't have the answers.

God knows!

Abhijit Mallick | Create Your Badge

perceptions

PERCEPTIONS


It could not have been any other time, any other ambience, any other setting; the mise en scene had a major role to play as it connived with the weather to bring in a roaring thunder shower on a certain summer afternoon, when Raktim had seen her for the first time.

Raktim, of middle class family habits, had grown up in no unique way. Yet he cherished a mind that could think. He studied in a more than decent school, where his friends came in private cars. Raktim didn’t have a car, though he did get money for the bus fare. But he liked to walk. It took him exactly 20 minutes to reach school. During his stroll, he started to observe the pedestrians, the roads, the fast food shops; he watched himself in taxi aisle mirrors as they whizzed past. He liked his own fleeting glimpses. In that way, he thought, he looked perfect. If he would have seen his image in a mirror for long, he feared he might find a thousand defects.


It is that time of the year when winter had almost taken its leave and summer had forced in. The city is Calcutta, where winter is a mere matter of a couple of months. New leaves have started to show their innocent green faces on every branch. Sun rays have strengthened and the roads emit heat that has invited bothering for pedestrians. The days were torrid, the nights were cool; torrid days brought in grey clouds and occasional thunder showers, making the nights cooler. Raktim had seen this girl on such a summer afternoon on his way home from school; on the other side of the footpath. The girl was from a different section; he had seen her before. Grey clouds had brought in heavy winds that swam around her blue skirt and danced with it. Her hair was flowing all over her supple features; her school bag was swaying on her shoulder. The blue skirt, the flowing hair, and the swaying bag- she was in a helpless position that had a rhythm in it. Raktim watched her with blinking eyes; lest the dirt blown in by the winds got into his eyes. Soon swirling dusts filled in the air where no eye could see. Raktim guarded his eyes with his hands only to see the girl vanish around the corner. He ran in the same direction. Rain drops had already started making frequent spots on the road as he crossed the road.


Distant roar of thunder filled his ears, as the old man turned downtown. He took quick feeble steps in spite of the big black polythene bag in his right hand. He had already seen reflections of incoming grey clouds on the glass door of the grocery shop. Instead of the stifling atmosphere, a cool breeze was creating a coolness that had the forecast of a storm in its lair. With timid steps, he entered the shop. A pretty girl was standing at the cash counter, her hips pressed against a cupboard full of various pickles and jam. The old man took a few household things, salt packets, soaps, and handed them over to the counter. A sudden gush of cold air and the old man looked to the glass door. A little school boy had rushed in half drenched in the rain, that was slapping the glass door and falling incessantly. The road outside the glass door was in semi darkness; with each clash of thunder, shadows became harsher, the lighted areas burnt white. The old man shook. A cold hand had tapped his shoulder.
“Sir, your balance!” the girl replied, irritation curling at her forehead.
“Thank you”.
The old man approached the door and searched for the kid. He found him standing near a glass window viewing something minutely outside.
Is he lost? His mother might have been searching the roads to find her son lost in the wilderness.

Two more timid steps and the old man was watching the episode along with the boy. The roads were narrow streaks of flowing water; here and there, people stood under some feeble shade in clusters, trying to do away with the dashes.
Two street kids were playing with water on the opposite footpath. Jumped in mid air, they fell again with a splash! Fun played on their minds, faces and feet that in a chaotic cadence disturbed the flowing water and the falling rain.

The kid shook.

A wrinkled hand fell on his shoulder. In a moment, he ran to the cash counter and hid behind the pretty girl. The girl moved her lips, but it was hard for the old man to discern.

With timid steps, he proceeded to the exit, opened his black umbrella with a bland click, and looked back at the shop for a moment and left. Soon he was an umbrella moving through many as the crow could see, sitting on the window pane of a certain whitewashed building, waters dripping from its greasy black feathers.

Those were the happiest moments of her life whenever she had fallen in love. Notwithstanding its physical attributes, her hormonal ejaculations that coloured her emotion were far deeper than an ordinary person. She felt more than she could survive. One second he would see her smiling affectionately; a single change in his behavioral pattern, one word wrongly put in a righteous conversation, she might burst out in protest. She always cried when she was angry, speechless, words overflowing her meaningful eyes, falling in droplets, soaking her dress.

They sat overlooking the river.

It was dusk. Clouds carved out of the crimson sky as mountain peaks marked the horizon. Water flowed like music; like a raga it had its prelude, interlude.

They were friends for more than a year now. They had met at the university office counter where they both had come to collect admission forms. He was then thin, long haired, wearing shirts more that did not fit him; she did not notice. She wore dull casuals, her jeans wrinkled and her hair all messy, she smoked behind a tree to avoid severe eyes; he did not notice. It was when she had asked for a pen from him to fill up the admission form that she noticed him. A casual glance did notice a hint of smile at the corner of his mind.

What looked like a black piece of cloth waving with the rhythmic waves was a boat, as he saw it, when it came near. He was observing the river, the boat acutely; more acutely, her postures and movements, expressions. He was like an ardent observer who saw everything; an eye outside him, that even saw him and her, sitting in a certain typical position in front of a typically flowing river overlooking a typical sunset.