Being Funny(One) :/

When I was a young boy, I did not have leash on my feelings. My heart, like they say in novels was an organ of fire.
I was so much in love with a girl that I wanted to see the whole world with her, that was my idea of romance, seeing the caves and caverns of a bucolic Crete, never accounting to the fact that she didn’t want to see so much of the world on the first place. Not with me, never with me.
It was like those passions of unrequited love, you know, the kind mentioned in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, except you get no points for being ‘ugly and sad.’ 

So I decided to put her in my heart, and travelled the entire world hoping she would see them.
If I put her in my heart, she would peek through my ribcage and see the world every time I ripped off my shirt, for say in the glacial moonshine of northern Norway, or beneath the midday sun of oasis-lined Sahara.
A very romantic logic.
That was my idea of obsessive-romance, you know, poor me.

Years later my grandson did the same for someone else’s grandson, except that he was ‘whatsapping’ every sunset over the Danube, or every moonshine over the Taj Mahal , thus cosseting a technologically advanced obsessive-romance of their time, a more practical one, with more shirt ripping.

Apple.

You
Are an apple 
That grows
In Summer
Feeding moribund
Birds
Whose
Wings are painted
Red
From yesterday's
Shower
In the land
Of Gore
Where apples grow
No more. 

A Man of The Rats

Chang was the Man of the Rats.

 He lived in a docile Beijing street corner where the walls bore the holes of the past, bullet holes, the strayed ones, from the days when they would line up those old boys along the wall and address a firing squad. 

He lived among those rats, inhabiting these holes, that bore the souls of the dead martyrs, who would feed on Chang alive, little by little, every day, until his bones had obliterated and his memory had receded into a vanquished settlement.

Once upon a Time, Colonel Chang was a man of the people.

A Man Of the State.

An Artsy Kite

Tonight I had seen a kite in my plaintive dreams. A kite made of newspaper cuttings, very artsy you know, like the ones they make to design a cultural fiesta-the kind of kites that do not fly.

I call them the sad kites, for a kite should fly and flutter, up and away in the blue sky. How limited are those artsy kites in their fashion school!

In my child hood we had made a similar kite, me and my brother you know.But secretly we had desired it to fly, so we had whispered the magic words of our secret book for it- so that it would fly and flutter, up and away in the blue sky.  Our life revolved around magic. There was so much magic everywhere.

 So in the pursuit of our artsy kite, I had gathered our neighbours’ newspaper cuttings. Our neighbour was a far-right politician, who collected only his party approved newspapers and was always gifting it to everyone to read. Since my mind was fresh and young as he boastfully mentioned, I was given many to read and from there my brother had cut out equal lengths of rectangular pieces, later only to be reshape it into an oblong fashion. He was the architect you see. I also gathered, withered broom-sticks to map out the backbone, and my withered memory does not remember much else, but the swift hand movements of my kid-brother who I swear could make Rome in a day, if he ever wanted to.

But I remember the kite, it was the same I saw tonight, two-feet by three-feet, braving the newspaper cuttings of a party news, and the cliched gold-promises for a bulletproof future. 

An artsy kite, you know. 

A kite that even after so much magic words and magic winds would get stuck in the single gigantic Pine tree-that had grown in our tropical city. 

A kite that was so dear to my brother-that he had climbed seven floors just to reach the top of the tree, and who in the helm of his adventure had stepped on a dead branch, and encountered a fatal fall.

This was the kite I saw tonight you know. An artsy kite- my brother made and died for.

While his funeral had passed and been forgotten in an instant, the kite had remained stuck in that pine tree. Soon there were critics that had blamed the mischievous kid himself who had dared to climb the cursed tree, and there were television-programs on how to tackle rowdy kids, others had blamed me, for being his comrade and letting him carry on with this meticulous suicidal act, my mother had blamed my father for not buying us regular kites, and there were all the ensuing bitterness and blame game that one associates with an un-natural death.

‘There is no magic left in this world’, in a state of utter shock and bitterness, I had declared. So I had decided to burn the magic book.  

But it won’t burn proving to me that magic did exist then, so why did not the kite fly? Why did kid brother have to die?

The religious activists were my sympathizers and with my help they had started the anti-pine movement so as to cut down the pine tree which was a bad omen, in a tropical city, according to the chief. After a long-lasting battle with the biologists they were successful in getting the permission to cut it down, but a pine tree in a tropical city is no ordinary tree, it had trembled its roots and had drove anyone who had tried to accost it.It had made me think again that magic was everywhere around me, then why did not the kite fly? Why did the branches not swing and rescue my kid brother? They had tried to burn it too afterwards but it had rained every-time, and so the pine had stood still darkened through time, flaunting our artsy kite, nurturing the ancient memory of my dead brother.

 Years later while attending a University lecture of an eminent philosophy professor I had come to realize that while the charm of magic laid in hiding the truth, never revealing it, lie corrupted magic. And then I remembered our kite was made of newspaper cuttings. 

An artsy kite.