Category: Uncategorized (Page 8 of 8)

(From here on the story will proceed in first person, as seen from Loktak’s eyes)

The meeting with Fielder had affected me deeply. For three days before that I had wandered aimlessly with all kind of thoughts in my mind. I used to hang around the house and see people visiting and the religious rites being carried out. My mind was filled with questions of all kinds. I was not scared, but nervous I sure was. What was going to become of me? In my life I was never a patient man, and now I had a wait that could last for well over a century, if Fielder was to be believed. On top of that, there was nothing much I could do except observe the world moving around me. People taking birth, living their lives and dying while I would just look on – a silent observer.

I was gloomy for many days after my meeting with Fielder. How many days? I can’t say. Time had ceased to have any meaning for me. Yes I would lie down and close my eyes but I never slept. There was no sleep for me and it seemed I would have to pass the days and nights in this dreadful wait. It is not hard to imagine how hard it is to wait for something. Time stops, seconds become minutes, minutes become hours and hours feel like months. I decided to use the time to observe life. There were many things about life that intrigued me. Maybe this chance was given to me to find my answers. What good it would do me, I did not know. I was dead after all, and even if I understood everything about life, what could I do about it. But then a part of me told me that I was in the realms of unknown, where anything could happen and anyways there was nothing else to do so I decided to study one thing that surrounded me-humanity.

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As Loktak was sitting there, he saw, a bus coming down the road at full speed. Right in the middle of the road, there was a man, standing, oblivious to the danger he was in. The bus would be on him in less than five seconds and there was no way he would get out of it’s way in time. Loktak, more out of habit than anything else, screamed at the top of his voice, but his voice was one that no human could hear.

The man looked up in Loktak’s direction and at the very same instant the bus had passed over the man. Loktak averted his gaze so as not to see the gory scene he expected. But when he looked back, the man was standing right where he had been before the bus had hit him. It was as if the bus had driven right through him.

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Loktak was awakened by the loud voice of his father. He heard the sound of the television and realized it was pretty loud and wanted to get up and reduce the volume but he could not get up, and try as he might, he could not even get his eyes to open.

Then he heard, more than felt, his dad coming near him and holding him. He heard him exclaim loudly and it was a sound of extreme distress. He heard his dad call the Para-medics. He wanted to get up and tell his dad that he was ok and that everything was all right.

But, the events of the evening flashed in his mind. He recalled how he had taken the poison and how after consuming his fatal drink, he had felt drowsy and finally succumbed to sleep. He didn’t feel dead, but then he did not know how it felt to be dead. It did not take him long to realize that the people were taking him to be dead. He felt his body being carried away and he wanted to get up and scream, and tell everyone that he was okay, that nothing was the matter with him.

He felt himself being put on a make shift stretcher and could hear some people trying to pump life into him.

“ It’s sad that such a young man would die like this,” said a voice.

“Yes, what’s wrong with the kids these days.” another voice, a female this time.

“Only if we had been here a few minutes earlier, we could have done something.” the first voice again.

So, the poison had done its job and he was dead, Loktak thought. What next, he wondered?

Loktak felt sorry for his dad and didn’t want to hear him cry, so he was glad when he was lifted off and taken into the ambulance.

“We are talking the body to the Hospital for an autopsy. You can come in the morning.” the female voice said, directed at his father.

“We would love to be able to spend some time with him in the hospital, if possible, and could you please hold off the autopsy till the morning.” It was his dad, “His mother is on his way and it would be best if she could have one last look at her before he is cut up.”

“I don’t know if we can hold it off till the morning, but we will wait as long as we can, and you can come visit him in the hospital. Tomorrow you can take the body back,” the female voice again.

So, now he had ceased to be a person, a human; but was merely a body. Loktak had seen a doctor conduct a post mortem before and he had not liked the sight and now he knew his body was destined for a similar fate. But he couldn’t care less. Though he could hear things, he could not feel anything. It was as if his being was trapped inside someone else’s body. A being that could hear but not speak or feel or do anything but passively observe.

He lost all track of time and space. It was like he was sitting inside a box, aware that things were happening to him, but things that he had no control over. He was in the hospital soon, and there he was laid among the other dead bodies. Earlier he would have been very scared to be in that room, but now he had nothing to be scared of. They were all like him in there. How wrong he was.

Loktak did not know how much time had passed but after some time he heard the door open and his mother and brother walked into the room, He could hear them crying, his brother in sobs that he was trying to hide and his mother was letting the tears drop freely. For the first time he felt guilty and sorry for what he had done. He had been selfish; he had not realized that his life was not his to take, for life and death were best left in the hands of the almighty. His future was not just his but something that his parents had looked forward to. He recalled every little thing that his parents had done for him and he felt that he had been thankless in paying them like that. He wanted, with all his heart to open out his arms and embrace his mother and brother, but it was too late. The deed had been done, the curtain had fallen and all he could now do was listen helplessly to the sorrow he had caused his family.

The doctors had agreed to the parent’s request to not conduct an autopsy as it was agreed to by all parties concerned that Loktak had committed suicide. So the next morning his body was to be taken to the funeral site where the last rites would be performed.

The next morning he could only hear that a large crowd had gathered and every now and then, he could hear a familiar voice. Most people were commenting on how sad it was that Loktak had decided to do such a thing. Some said how young he was. Some said they knew he would do something like this; it was but a matter of time, as per them.

To cut a long story short, the talk was the general talk that takes place under such situations. In fact, some of it amused Loktak. He thought how scared everyone would be, if he could somehow manage to get up and tell them he was alive. He knew he would try to pull a prank of some kind on them, if he got his chance. But, no such luck was in store for him. He was laid on the pyre and the pyre was duly lit accompanied by the chanting of religious hymns. Loktak tried to pay attention but he never had understood what they said, and now was no different. As the fire grew and enveloped Loktak, he could hear the crackle of the burning wood around him, and as the fire begin to burn his body he began to have a strange sensation. It is not possible to describe the sensation in words because it was something out of this world. It was for the first time, since he had died, that he felt anything, he began to enjoy the feeling but then he was scared.

A thought suddenly struck him. What if he was brought to life again and by that time his body would be burnt and then he would have to live with a burnt body for the rest of his life. This thought was very scary and he tried his best to move and get out of the fire before it did any real damage to his body. But all his efforts, like the ones before, were in vain. He was as dead as dead can be.

Soon his body began to burn and surprisingly as it burnt he could see light of some kind. The light grew brighter as more of his body got burnt. Soon most of his body was gone. He felt as if he could leave but something was holding him back. Then he realized that the head was not yet burnt enough.

“ So this is where and what life really is”, he thought to himself. Strangely enough, he felt no connection or longing for the body that he was about to leave.

Soon, there was a “plop” sound and something gave away and Loktak was able to jump out of the fire.

“So this is what happens to a person, when he dies.” He thought to himself. Loktak had believed in ghosts and most of his friends had made fun of him for that. He felt vindicated now and thought that if he could haunt them, he would.

He looked around and saw the gloomy faces of his friends and relatives and remorse stuck him once again. He felt sorry for what he had done once again. Most of all he was sorry for his parents, who had so many expectations of him. He wished for a chance to talk to them just once more.

Soon all the religious rites were performed. People began to look at their watches and one by one began to leave till only the very close friends and relatives remained. Loktak’s mother and father did not want to leave but were convinced to get to home. Loktak, with nothing to do, decided to see if there were others like him from the other pyres. He waited till another body was brought for cremation and expectantly waited for his soul to show up. For he believed that he was a soul now and he thought he now knew the answer to the question that every human mind wanted to know: What happened to a human after death?

He wished he had a way to tell about it to people. His death, then, would not have been in vain.

Loktak was having a bad day. Having a bad day was something that was not new to him. It had always been like this for him, day in and day out, for the last nineteen years. His life was routine, as routine as routine can be. From the day he had become aware, he remembered being average at everything: average build, average height, average student; name it and Loktak was average at it. He hated the tag average so much, that sometimes he performed even worse than what he was capable of.

Today was his graduation day from school, and where everyone looked forward to college and the future with great expectation, Loktak looked at it with dread. He, like everyone else, wanted to carve a name for himself on the mountain that was the society. A deep-seated desire in him to be recognized by one and all tore away at his heart and he felt restless all the time. Whenever he saw, or read, about someone his age, or younger to him, achieve something, he felt jealous and wished that he could be in the shoes of that person.

When he was younger, it was easy to convince himself with a: “ I have a lot of time still. I will get there, sooner or later”. But days turned into months and months into years and yet there was no spark of brilliance, not even a momentary flash in the pan. Desperation was setting in. His teachers, parents and people around him were not of much help either. Everyone wanted him to do this or that or something else. What he wanted to do he did not know himself, for he had been too busy trying to come up to what everyone expected of him. He, more often than not, failed these expectations. He never thought about what he should do, just what he thought people expected him to do and now a feeling of helplessness was taking over him. He knew that time was a relentless force always eating away at his life and he felt unable to stop it. It never occurred to him that if instead of trying to stop it, he went with it, time would eat away at him less than what it was doing now.

Anyone who has gloomy thoughts overriding all other thoughts in the mind, sooner or later, will begin to think about death as a release. It was no different with Loktak. For some time now he had been contemplating suicide. It seemed to him the only way out of his sorry life. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was the right thing to do.

“What use it was”, he thought, “to live like this?”

The thought had become so overpowering lately that he had gone to the extent of doing some research into ways of dying painlessly. The result of his research was that he had decided that if he ever chose to do it, he would poison himself. Pain was something that he was scared of. Someone who wants to do something usually finds a way and one day Loktak managed to get hold of some kind of poison that, he had read, was very effective. With the little vial of poison close at hand, Loktak’s mind had been wandering in that direction more than usual in the last couple of days. Today watching everyone happy at school, his misery, in contrast, appeared magnified to him and all of a sudden he was convinced that if he had to do it then the sooner he did it, the better it was.

He was scared and afraid of death, hell more than death, because he had read and been told that people who committed suicide went straight to hell for all eternity. Hell was unending, unceasing torment. Was he jumping from the frying pan into the fire, he thought to himself? But something within him was strong today and wanted him to go ahead and end his life, whatever the consequences might be. Reason is the first thing that parts from a person on whom ill luck falls.

He was alone at home. His parents were away for the evening and his brother was staying over at a friend’s house. It seemed to him that even heavens had conspired to give him a chance to do what he had resolved. He had always read and heard that it was a coward that committed suicide, but now he wanted to tell everyone that doing it needed a lot of courage. No one wants to part with the thing that is most dear to them: their lives.

“So, this is it.” he thought, “My stay on this earth it seems was for nineteen years only, well if it was to be like this, so be it.”

He went and got out the bottle of poison from its secret place.

“It surely must taste bitter. And if I have to die let it be with a sweet taste on my tongue. He took out the carton of orange juice from the refrigerator and, in a glass, mixed some poison and orange juice. The color of the juice turned a sinister red. It was not a good sight to look at and the mixture smelled very bad.

“Beginning of hell.” Loktak thought to himself as he drank the whole glass in one go. For a few minutes, he felt nothing. He went about the house, watched Television and then began to feel drowsy and it seemed that the sound of the Television was getting farther and farther away. He increased the volume of the TV and still he felt sleepy.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he should at least leave a suicide note to tell his parents that he loved them and what he had done was in no way their doings. He was beginning to fade and knew that whatever had to be done, needed to be done quickly.

With faltering steps he went to his room, took out a pen and a paper and wrote:

“ Dear Mom and dad, I don’t know why I am doing this but I love you very much and I am very sorry for my deeds, this that I am doing now, and the others in the past when I hurt you, intentionally or unintentionally.”

He could think of nothing else to write and was fading fast too, so he just added an “ I love you” , folded the paper and grasped it firmly in his hand and somehow reached the couch in the living room and slumped down on it. Slowly, he faded into oblivion.

Since my childhood, I have attempted to write a book several times. But, every time after the first few chapters, the enthusiasm died and so did the unwritten book. Last year I happened to participate in NaNoWriMo, and somehow managed to write down 50,000 words and tie them together into one story.

That story, I am going to post on this blog and hope to have a few readers for it. Also, comments on any aspect of the story are welcome. So, with no further ado, here goes nothing.

Introduction

I am writing this novel or as I would prefer to call it a series of experiences, taken mostly out of real life situations and moulded to suit the rhythm of the whole story as my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month, an effort where 50,000 words have to be written in the time frame of one month, the month of November. I don’t know if this deserves ever to be published or if anyone is ever going to read it, but it is a satisfying experience writing it.

if ever any of you gets a chance to read this through, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. The thread that binds the various stories together is a young man who dies but gets caught between heaven and earth, and as a result has to spend his time on the earth with nothing much to do but observe the flow of the river of life.