Galaxies Apart, Remembering the Earth

Sitting inside my room, its door and windows closed, I am feeling that I am sitting inside a closed box isolated completely from the external world. There is not even a ventilator to this room. Inside here, in this moment, I am currently coexisting with numerous micro-organisms and a few small insects, which include three or four mosquitoes whose music I can hear. Some of these micro-organisms live inside my body. Among all these living beings, who incidentally constitute my society, perhaps, I am the only one who is aware of its own existence; I may be the only one with a thinking mind -- intelligence. Science says so. Who knows. I am a skeptic, always, in almost everything. Kindly, excuse me for that.

It is completely quiet here; a dead silence akin to a cemetery in the darkest hour prevail here. The only sound that I can hear is the rhythmic rustle of my breath. And a generic humming noise coming from an unknown source -- perhaps, from the external world, but I cannot judge. Listening deeply, and listening intently with my mind, I also hear, at least I feel I hear, a humming sound emanating from my head. A ceaseless sound, which threatens the peace of my mind and the beauty of this moment. This moment is nice: to stay away from all the human existence, thus to break away from the absurdity of existence. Inside this room, I do not encounter within me the need for a meaning for my existence, unlike the way I feel while living in the external world. Here I feel calm, silent, and protected by the definiteness of this existence.

Slowly, my mind fall into the great depth of forgetfulness. The ocean is calm, but dangerously fathomless. ............................................................

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I do not know how long I stayed like that. I was not asleep. My mind was not at rest. It was, and still is, reverberating, beyond my control. I can't help it. I hear imaginary sounds; I have strange visions; Once in a while memories from the past haunt me. They come together to form sequences of images, quite like an imaginary movie, in front of my inner eyes. They don't have any meaning. I cannot interpret them. Yet, they haunt me, because they are seemingly real, belonging to my distant past. Of many of them, I don't understand why they arise within me now. They don't have any significance. No importance at all. Yet they haunt me, because they are real. They are real, but distorted and nonlinear. They haunt me because, although distorted, they are real.

There was this boy, myself, years ago, I don't know how many years. Perhaps he was just five years old. Or, maybe, just six. His old grannies, aunts of his mother, there were two of them, both of them almost blind, one of them stooping forward due to age and weakness, asked him to take them to the doctor's house across the road. He was scared. For, he knew that he could not manage that kind of a responsibility. That was huge for him. He said, ask my mother or my aunt. They replied, no, you can, my child. With a lot of hesitation and fear, he took them to the doctor, for he loved them and did not want to disobey. They had to cross the road, with relatively no traffic at all if I compare with the contemporary times. He was cautious. He looked around. Both his grannies, whom he loved as he loved the god, were almost blind, one of them stooping forward due to age and weakness. He took them to the other side, firmly holding the hand of one of theirs, and she holding the hand of the other. He sighed deeply on the other side of the road, a sigh of consolation. The grannies met the doctor. He stayed outside the doctor's room, looking out at the road. One or two buses passed. Seeing that his mind started getting agitated out of anxiety. How would he take the grannies back to the other side? When the grannies came out, he saw one more bus passing on the road. He was defeated fully. His mouth was salivating, his heart fluttering fast. Oh my god! What will I do? He lost all his hope and faith. Asking the grannies to sit there in the doctor's waiting room, he rushed home. He could cross the road, that was not difficult. He called his aunt, who was surprised and also perplexed to hear the news. The anxiety he felt that day is still alive within my mind. I can still feel it with its full intensity. Those days are gone. Those grannies disappeared from the earth. Yet, the memories are haunting me, but I don't know why!

The silence has deepened. I am alone in this room, isolated from the human society. But there are still things in here that connect me with the external world. The old iron-made shelf; the cot; the bed; the cloths; the electric lamp and fan; and so on. Yet, I don't know why I feel it so strange to sit here alone. I don't know why I feel like living galaxies away from the human world.

Oh! galaxies! Have you gone to the end of this world?

There was this road. The same old road. And there was this gate. Opening directly to the road. Behind the gate, there was this house, a big house, now lost to the eternity, but then surrounded by plants and trees and empty lands. One day, this boy, myself again, when I don't remember, went outside the gate to see buses and bicycles and auto-rickshaws and, very rarely, scooters passing. He was waiting for his uncles. They would bring candies for him in the evening when they come back from work. He was waiting there in a joyous mood. In those days, there was something called the joy of existence, which has been lost by now to the entire mankind, I don't know since when. There! It was quite unexpected. He was scared to death. For a few moments he did not know what he should do. In the distance, from the other side of the point where the road curved, there appeared a giant, black mass. With big ears on two sides, with a long trunk! The sight of the two long, strong tusks got the guts out of the boy. Soon he woke up from the initial shock of the moment. He was after all an animal; an intelligent monkey. He had to survive. He had an instinct for survival. He ran back behind the gate. I don't know how he managed to close the gates. He just pushed it back with all his might as he was running towards the house. He heard the gate getting closed with a loud bang behind him; that sound is still ringing in my mind. That was a domesticated elephant. His uncle could not help laughing when he saw how he ran into the house.

Memories may torture you; but they are also a bliss!

If I forget all my memories, I would be nothing, but really a dust in this universe. I lose my identity. It is like I have never been born. That intensifies the absurdity of existence.

Memories are memories. They influence you beyond your understanding of them. They don't need you to understand them. But they work in the back of your mind, always reverberating and making strange sounds and visions. Perhaps, they are haunting me because I clearly know that they belong to a lost world, a world that will never come back again.

Sitting here in isolation, undisturbed, I could feel like the god of this world. World, this closed world. Yes, I have already started feeling in that way. But, remembering what Nietzsche wrote, the stomach prevents me from continuing to live with that illusion. In some sense, the stomach brings the primary meaning to this world. The phallus and vagina, the secondary one. Like the Thomas Mann's protagonist, who was very content in leading a frugal life, reading his books and eating what he had, refusing to do any work for the external world, but whose peace of mind was slightly disturbed when he saw a beautiful women and was completely destroyed by the sight of her beautiful palm resting on her seat near him while they were inside a theatre, I am also disturbed by the reality of the emptiness of my stomach. The stomach is aching. The first thing next is to devour.

--Sandeep Palakkal, Chennai.