Our party office is like an island of light. Those who walk
past in darkness, when they just cross this spot, turn their necks and look at
this block of light. A few in fact walk by. Most of them are inside the
vehicles; cars or buses. They too crane their necks to see this patch of light.
Two momentary visions come into a speedy collision, make a spark and depart,
leaving some sort of mark in memory. Some boys race into darkness by their
speeding two wheelers with utter disregard for safety. Most of them think that
they are the characters from a video game; programmed to win or die. On these roads,
death is a deferred possibility and life a wish. Survival makes a tight rope
walk in between. I could see it balancing on the invisible thread of hope,
moving a step at a time and shaking more than it could proceed. We, from inside
the office of light get to see them. We too are hopeful and we want them to
walk on without falling into the deep darkness of despair.
What do these people see in us, when they look at us? What
do we see in them, when we look at them? They see madness, poetry and love in
us. We see rage, contempt and sympathy in them. One of them calls out to us and
says, ‘I thought some of you were sensible. Now I am sure all of you are crazy.’
We smile at him. We see young women and old women passing by, with their heads
bent. We see men wearing yellow clothes going back to their homes reluctantly.
They were teachers once. Students hesitated to enter their classroom. Today
they themselves find it difficult to get back to their homes. Trapped in a
village, trapped in habits, trapped in moralities and beliefs and trapped in
one’s own self, they move like ghosts that have lost their graves. One of us
tells them: ‘We are mad. But don’t you see our madness is poetic. Poets have
changed the world.’
So have mad people. One of them comes up from the darkness
wearing a crown of light and clears his throat. He tells us a story about a mad
man who had just lost his life a couple of days back. Madmen live longer.
Madness is a sort of ultimate disease. Mad people generally do not get any
other illness. They drive even the diseases away with their unconventional
lives. Illness colonizes a structured body, a structured life and a routine
thinking. Madness defies all these. So madmen live long. Madwomen speak to
nothingness so they make epic poems of nonsense which we do not understand.
Their grammar is different and form unpalatable. In their metaphors acid rains
and merges with the ocean of dark dreams. So we say we do not understand; and
they do not understand our grammar, our form, our structure and our done to
death metaphors.
This madman lived a royal life. He had two horses. He never
rode them. He bought them and let them free. He but rode on winds and clouds.
He ate breakfast in one city and lunch in another and dined with beggars and
slept in railway platforms. Back in the village his horses appeared in dark alleys
scaring people away from their own skins. Some said that they had seen those
horses flying at night. Their owner never slept on his fluffy bed kept ready
for him by his beloved wife. He was fighting world wars in railway platforms and
sharing coffee and pizza with Italian mafia dons. He felt the iron bucket that he
always carried had pearls and diamonds in them. So much was his anger if
someone dared to touch it or even tried to come near to it.
A couple of days back, he died. He was found dead in a
railway platform. His horses came flying. He thought so, at least. We do not
think much about the people who are really dead. But we in a lit up party
office could even discuss a dead man’s thoughts. The narrator continued: the
corpse had to be taken for postmortem. They found nothing but maps of
non-existent worlds, weapons of mass rescue, languages that have been never
spoken and a rhyme he had learnt in his primary school in his body. Doctors
wondered how he survived on without the usual innards of a human being. They
even suspected whether he was a real human being or an alien. But his wife
confirmed that he was real as she had made love to him and made babies. Finally
his body was handed over to his wife and our narrator. They took him to the cemetery
in the town. They gave her a receipt of the body.
Madmen’s wives and friends are not really mad, though madmen
strive very hard to lift them to his own realms. But the unfortunate ones
remain the regular world of struggles. The dead man’s wife was not mad. But
somehow she lost the receipt of his body at the cemetery. On the next day she
went to collect his ashes. She wanted to immerse it in a sea. He and his horses
had tried once to cross the sea on a plank of strong intuition. Horses flew
away and the madman sunk. He was saved by some fishermen and they knew him for
they had shared some country liquor with him in one of his revelries before he
had gone completely mad. She went to the manager of the cemetery and the man
refused to hand over her husband’s ashes as she failed to produce the receipt.
She had lost it in the commotion. You could say that the horses came, stole it
and flew away. Whatever be the case, as we do not have proof to disprove the
existence of these flying horses, she did not get the ashes. She cried and
pleaded and the manager finally gave her a pot full of ashes upon seeing her
plight. Before she left, he called out and said: It is not necessary that you
get your husband’s ashes.
She did not stop to hear it. She wanted the ashes and she
had it. The narrator stopped there. He was about to leave the office, out bit
of light. He stepped out and we too got up to leave. Before we could say
anything, a pair of flying horses appeared from the sky and took our narrator
away. We stood there in silence as if we were participating in a communion of
ghosts. Then we too decided to step out into the darkness. We smelled a dead
man’s ashes somewhere in the air.
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