India Today

It was as if sleep was slain from his mind by the dreams. He would wake up his wife also and start twitting her in her half-sleep. He wife would, however, not mind as she knew that he was just sketching his hilarious colored one lined type of banter backward with a pencil; he was drawing these backward arrow lines overwriting the black line vectors of his pain for annulling the pain vectors.

At midnight hours he would wake up, drink 3 or 4 glassfuls of water and drift away in the garden. He would find entire locality sleeping in equanimity. None was aware that how much he envied them. Like a steel round shaft it was, clamped at one end in jaws of the machine and left for machining the next morning. Only the small part of the shaft held in crippling prehensile pressure of machine jaws was bearing the pain; rest of the shaft was stress free.

This morning he was astir quite early, or was it still night? Sometime between 3 to 4 of the morning. He sat in the garden that had an L shaped cemented raised strip. He was sitting at some spot in this concrete strip. A white light beam in the exterior of the house was dimly lighting the place. He looked at a winged worm that had several tiny feet as well, and who had somehow got turned upside down. The little creature spun it in circles at rpm too high for his size. He, at first, could not make sense. Only when the worm started inching towards the wall, and then colliding its spinning mass with little impact against the wall, he discerned the motive. Soon the worm succeeded into turning itself upright, and then walked in succor. An altercation drifted in his mind with a taxi driver who would not back on the narrow gully. At the end he accepted defeat and had to drive his car a kilometer in back gear until when he found a little space to direct the vehicle in forward drive motion.

He had resigned from his job and was finding nothing better than helping his wife in her household chores. That day they both were in an ordinary looking shoe store in the old market as his wife had to buy footwear. He gave the shopkeeper a torn note and asked whether it would do. The shopkeeper said so long the note was genuine, he would accept. The man was just afraid of counterfeits. Everywhere in the old market, the thing or person was to be genuine. They just scorn fakeness- fakeness of every ilk. They are the examinees who could read little for the exam; but who would not write copied answers to pass, come what may.

Once he tried to run away. He found it slitting his mind soon after elopement. He thought he was a pulley that stood at the top of a water well for 22 long years, and none- the pulley, rope or bucket were changed in these twenty two years; and that he was hardly fit for installation on some other well. The new rope would shy away from old pulley’s groove, and would, under utmost reluctance, inch upwards- ready at any moment to overturn her so as never to reach the top to confront the newly installed pulley. So he, finding himself beleaguered, returned home and never tried at elopement again.

He was being interviewed by a panel of professors who, due to some reason best known to them, had decided beforehand not to select him. They threw his overseas publications on the table; somebody asked some question carefully and appeared not to bother for the answer he gave. The questioner would simply declare him a dolt. They all tried to discourage him by their well used methods. But he proved to be a difficult mathematical equation the professor could not find the minima of which. So they could not pinpoint the corresponding annihilating variable in this stubborn equation and looked at him nonplussed. He himself walked away from their assembly ridding them of their difficulty.

He would tell his wife,” Do you know Chambal river as well. The Ganges you know. The Ganges is sacred only at Gangotri. Downstream, the cities, towns pollute the river. But would they pollute Chambal? Dacoits that drink the river's water would kill the pollution makers. This age is the age of validity of the reverse; you do good, you get bad in return; you do bad, you get good as a reward. Don’t read that ‘India Today’. That is just a magazine. Hear me; I am reciting a complete ‘India Today’ to you.