Maybe, truly

The gray insides of a girls’ school beckoned me, and I slipped inside, not knowing whether I was allowed there or not. Strangely, the room which I walked into looked more and more like my nursery classroom, with low wooden chairs that seemed to be as much for toys as for human babies. I was looking for somebody, I think. A young girl. A girl who on meeting seemed to be close to my own age. She was sweet looking, and had pretty hair. No, she was decidedly younger than me, even if by one or two years. She had a loving adoration towards me.

As I tried to know her better, I saw myself in my Amma’s two-beds-in-one. Beside me, in the next section of the bed, was the girl in the arms of her lover, who was all that good-looking with curly hair and dimpled face. As I looked at them, they looked at me, with the same loving adoration that the girl had proffered to me before. I noticed that the boy was tugging my hand, and that I didn’t wholly dislike it; his touch on my hands. He wanted me. He revered me, looked up to me and idolized me in every breath. His laughing advances were not checked by the girl. She smiled, a lovely beckoning smile, and didn’t seem perturbed at her partner wanting me. And I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing. But as he tried to get me into his lap, I coyly drew the line. ‘I’m all for monogamy, you know. I have a boyfriend.’ He seemed disappointed, but not wholly so. He knew that his playtime was over. As I rolled out of bed, I wasn’t satisfied either.

Then there was this group of white musicians whom I bumped into, near the elevator, I think. One of them, (I don’t remember who, all of them looked about the same) with a guitar slung across his torso and cropped Bermuda pants, with a kind face, incidentally, who wanted me to accompany him. Or it could’ve easily been the other way round. And I did. I sat in his lap, or he in mine, and sang duets that needed two people, but he could sing for both. He could even produce vocal harmonies on his own, as I listened to the faint vibration in his back as he sang. As he sang, he kept caressing a sliver of flesh above my navel which my shirt didn’t hide.

Ramble

Walking down the forest path, we kept moving, never stopping, always moving, for fear of the forest engulfing us. The drone of the insects was a living, throbbing entity. Yet it wasn’t quite the fear which kept us from halting. We were caught in a frenzy of inertia; we couldn’t stop. Our feet kept carrying us until we could walk no more. As long as we didn’t stop, we wouldn’t have to acknowledge the reality of the moss-covered trees, the rolling slope that fell away from their feet, or even the road itself, unused, unpopulated. There were tyre tracks, that had bared the muddy foundation of the roads, but insects were breeding in those puddles, and we walked past, and they remained undisturbed. What are civilization, and custom and manners to this inhumane forest? What do clothes or food mean to it? What does it matter to it, whether we’re there? We only need to keep walking.

There was this peculiar sanctity, yet an unholy haunting in the atmosphere which we couldn’t ignore. It wasn’t sacred, it wasn’t profane. Even places where humans had dabbled with the inherent obtuseness of the forest were infused with a sort of nothingness, or a feeling too strange to be described. There were vermillion flags, nestled in the cleavage of the mountain, and one or two pictures of Hindu deities that were perched on a rock shelf. In spite of this intrusion, the place retained its obstinate, impenetrable aura, and the flags didn’t flutter, and the pictures lay, where nobody has ever laid his eyes. A thin, very thin trickle of water issued from the wall, and pooled in the road. On our way back, it wasn’t there.