Tiny Red Hyenas

One thing that makes the idea of committing suicide at this place I stay obnoxious are these carnivores ants that seem to devour anything from dead spiders to raw rice. I tried challenging them with a lot of things inconsumable by usual creature standards, and they kept outflanking me at every stage. Nothing could stop them when they made up their minds to have something. They drilled through the thickest plastic packets and slid through the tightest container lids. 

But it was when I read a report about these stray hyenas in some African city which gnawed off bits from the bodies of homeless people sleeping in the streets that I started thinking about the ants polishing me off. Leave suicide, at least I wouldn’t feel them. What about a paralysis? What if I pass out inside one of these days maybe from food poisoning or something? In a couple of days, these tiny red hyenas would turn me into a shining white skeleton. 

The next couple of days were pretty dispiriting. Every night I would listen to the uncanny stillness around me and I felt nature armed with all these creature extensions waiting like a fossor. 

It’s not a pretty thought, being slowly consumed by a swarm of tiny red ants.

Grave Digger's Blues

Back in Turin, I was once the part of a group that was trained by the Italian army to handle captivity as hostages. It involved a simulated hostage situation in which we were ambushed by their soldiers in a bus journey and held captive/killed.

I don’t recollect everything with any great clarity from the exhaustion and stress that we all endured that day. It was pretty much like a real hostage situation and they did everything possible to drain the last drop of our energy and hopes. Threatened, shouted at us, made us kneel on our knees for hours under hot sun, shot us with blanks using AK-47s and made us dig our own graves. 

It was exhausting and depressing. I’d never thought mere physical exhaustion would induce welcome thoughts about death. At one point they forced me to lie head down on the grass in the noon sun for a thoroughly long period of time. I spent most of the time studying couple of grasshoppers. The key was to divert the mind from paying attention to physical suffering or mental stress.

I toyed with the idea of escape twice, once identifying a blind spot taking advantage of which I could make run for one of their trucks and if it had the key, I could pull out from the situation. Next was when one soldier was forcing us to run while being attached to each other and we reached a spot far from his company. It was five of us with him alone. But our instructions were not to escape and just bear the experience without attracting their attention as any such antics would have invited harder punishments. 

By the end of the exercise they covered our heads with sacks, led us blind to some kind of a grave or pit of some sort, dumped us in it and started shooting like crazy. The bullets were blanks but they sounded very real. Moreover, we had no clue that it was the end of the exercise. A couple of false hopes before had deceived us and a sort of crazy desperation had set in. I started penning down the stuff below in my mind to pass time and keep the desperation under check.  

“I could feel the blue sky above, the fluttering leaves in the spring breeze, the teeming life of the wilderness and the damp earth tempting me to burrow. It was fresh air that I took in and the moist winds filled me with an unhinged excitement.

And I decided to dig. Loosing myself to the surreal deception.

The dark milieu of roots surrounded me. The blue sky was no longer the vastness but a fast fading patch I no longer cared to notice. Breathing in the stale air, I panted and dug on. In a while, I felt the damp mud covering me and I still kept going. My grave, I decided, would stretch to the centre of the earth.”

Kept repeating it to myself. 

It was quite an experience. Once it was over, we had drinks with the soldiers and all that but I really started doubting whether I’d survive something like that in real life. Got over that bit of immature enthusiasm which used to associate such situations with some sort of a thrill. 

Found the passage above in some old folder in the computer today. “The End” by doors was playing in the background. And thought I’d write about it lest I forget it all. 

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Image courtesy :  Brian Jackson (Rhunyc @ deviantart.com)

Man with a bandaged hand

The ravine oddly stood in front of the house. Seeping rain water had led to the growth of some kind of a mossy muck on its walls. The man with a bandaged hand was standing on the other end, a mere silhouette in my sight. Gingerly, I stepped down.

Halfway, I took a peek and saw him turning to my direction. I halted and started throwing mud into the bottom of the ravine. Crushing the brittle chunks and watching a red clayey layer forming over the reluctant green that seemed to have remained undisturbed for years.

The man with bandaged hands had started walking towards me. Definitely, the silhouette was closer than where it was when I looked last time. A mild panic was reluctantly setting in. I looked above, doubting whether I’d be able to make it.

Maybe reading my unrest, he spoke. His voice, devoid of any haste, got echoed within the mossy walls. “Wait” he said, “We need to talk”.

The panic was far beyond mild with the distance to climb looking inconceivably high up. The only hope I had was some kind of a déjà vu, in which I remembered making it to the top. Drawing some hope from it, I pelted along clambering awkwardly. The sound of his feet sloping across the slushy floor was nearing and the panic wave hit me with full force. Muscles felt like pieces of rubber and joints proceeded to a grinding halt like a rusted piece of machinery. Even the slightest movement demanded a great lot of effort.

The déjà vu had betrayed and I knew he was somewhere near. Terrified to look back, I took a peek at the shadows on the wall beside me and his was there with that bandaged hand stretched. I thought I saw a gun in it. I froze.

The voice spoke, "Why do you fear? I am you."

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Another nightmare with an absurd ending.

Image courtesy: Motortion Films

Aslan in Udyog Bhawan

On the dry scorcher of a Sunday afternoon, I came across Aslan near Udyog Bhawan Metro Station. 

Dusty July roads were yet to be dampened by the scanty rains that the Capital earned and stray leaves flitted around in an occasional dry breeze. Metro and its surroundings were devoid of commuters with all offices closed shut. Green sentry boxes by bungalow gates were empty, their dopey occupants lying in front of the whizzing large coolers inside.  Monkeys dozed away on the trees, waiting for the sun to go down. 

Standing outside the metro waiting for a rickshaw on that desolate day, I found him walking across with none of the grace that his picture in my mind carried. Apart from that, he was still the same Aslan, huge with the gilded skin. 

“Afternoon,” he said with a frigid sadness, the voice still sinewy. “I wish it had been a good one,” he added and licked few tiny blobs of blood on his legs.  “Dogs...” he paused and continued after cleaning the bare wounds for a while that looked like ugly tattoo patches on his perfect skin, “those infernal street dogs.”

He curled himself down on the exit of the Metro where the excess treated cold air from down below bunked out. When the silence started getting a bit awkward, I asked, “Don’t they get scared?” He looked at me for a while and replied, “No. They probably think I’m a plump calf.” Raising himself up, he said, maybe to himself, “got to leave before the monkeys get down”. 

He walked away in the evening sun, the leaves and the dust.

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Image courtesy: www.randyelrod.com