Coming Back To Life

I’ve been rediscovering myself for the last few days after the stay with RCB in Windsor Manor got over. Following facts have made themselves clear:

1. No magical powers are working for me in the background. When I return from the office, I find that the bed is still not made, the towel is still where I left it and the mirror in bathroom still has traces of splattered water.
2. When I am hungry, I need to do a little more than picking up a phone beside the bed. The terrible truth, that something as basic as food isn’t free these days, is yet to sink in fully.
3. While creating the rules that govern the universe, God was sloppy enough to allow temperatures to vary outside the range of 22-24 degree Celsius.
4. On stepping out of my house I am more likely to meet a cow than bump into Rahul Dravid.

Co-incidentally, my Mom too discovered that her “Sarvaguna-sampanna, Ram-avatar” son isn’t quite a teetotaler:



Grappling with so many changes hasn’t gone down well with my brain. I was going to write a story which begins with an introduction of a seventy year old Afghan whose wife disappeared forty years ago. But the structure and flow isn’t coming naturally in the writing. I wanted the story to raise your hair with horror. The title would have been “Raven”.

As the story would have moved further backwards in time, you would have learnt that Noor Mohammed (henceforth referred to as NM) lived near railway tracks when he was a kid. Being a lonely child, his favorite time pass used to watch vultures and eagles eat away the bodies of cattle that came in the way of trains. Through a series of events, the story would have shown the possessive character of NM. In the end, the reader would have been left to connect the dots, which when done correctly would have pointed that NM grew into a cannibal and ate his wife for infidelity.

In an attempt to add to the shock value, I would have revealed that the story is loosely based on my childhood experiences of watching scavengers doing the same thing to the unfortunate buffaloes and goats. Our house isn’t far away from the railway tracks. I was seven when we were the first family to move in that area, which now doesn’t have any open spaces left.

Although I haven’t demonstrated any inclination towards cannibalism, the smell of rotten flesh, whenever encountered, brings back fond memories of a silent childhood. Those vultures looked so huge that I used to hold my little brother’s hands fearing that one of them might snatch him and fly away.

Relying on a meticulously planned inactive weekend to restore normalcy.