14th October 2012

KLARKE lie on his bed, looking outside at the beautiful painting-like scenery, embraced by the golden rays of the morning Sun.

It was truly miraculous, he thought, to find time to just lie there, without moving much. Feeling his warm breath while acknowledging the soft sunny embrace - much in contrast to the cold winds that struggled victoriously to enter the room aiming to challenge any entropy resistance. Everything else seemed to be a part of one game or another. Everyone was a player participating in a rat race – the result of which was silly moments of superficial satisfaction, too temporary to last even a microsecond on the Universal clock. But then, so was life, he accepted with a grin.
His last week at the University had been a strong evidence. It was strange, yet pretty self-explanatory, to see how people would sing songs of selflessness, while striving to push all others back when it came to their own race. This was a pseudo setup being worshiped since ages not recorded by human history, but which continued to infect the basic driving gears of our subconscious existence inside mortal structures of flesh and blood.
A hand gently moved over him, like being humbly jealous of the thoughts that occupied his mind. He glanced towards the delicate fingers – which seemed to draw random shapes on his bare chest. He remembered this illogical addiction of his - with how childishly possessive Christine would suddenly be for him at times. Earlier anomalies faded into nothingness, and he was wearing a smile gifted by the thoughts of the delicate figure lying on his side.
Mimicking legs using two of his fingers, he started a walk from her finger-tips, passing by her shoulders and neck, finally stopping on her lips, where his fingers skated over the crimson reddish shade. Christine, still in sweet slumber, squeezed into his curvature like a little child, her head resting on his chest. He could smell the scent of her soft hair, as they brushed past his face. He held her close, while the warmth from her breath on his chest increased their intimacy even more. He locked his fingers in hers, and kissed softly on her neck. She chuckled from the tickling, still half-asleep. She was like a snow-white charcoal sketch of his – just a lot more real. With his thumb, he traced the corners of her lips, like trying to smoothen the redness which seemed to increase more and more as she blushed. As he kissed on her forehead, she opened her eyes and closed them again, shrugging softly against the warmth of his body heat, intoxicated with pleasure. She looked at him – at the roughness of his young face, at those eyes which seemed to always say so much, feeling his strong arms hold her tight around her waist. She put her arms around his shoulders and bringing her face closer, gently stroke her nose against his. He gave a soft bite on the top of her nose, after which she giggled and hugged him tight. They stayed like that for a very long time.

K

6th October 2012

LAST night, Klarke sat looking up at the dull reddish moon, fresh after the full moon a couple of days back. A thought suspended in his conscience, like a copy of him, kept on talking without a pause. As he saw the gradient at the corners of the moon – sudden but smooth - reddish white light dimming into darkness of the night, he felt a deep connection with this gradient. Men were, he thought, like this gradient, sailing in the dark sky of our life.

We take birth as a bright white moon, glowing with a heavenly smile. Time passes on, and we rise – moving up the ladder. The glimmer seems to dull gradually, and spots of impact appear on our contour as we experience 'life' as it is. But the fight remains, and the light struggles to keep the darkness away. Teenage, adulthood, old age – they come and go gradually - a sharp contrast to the actual speed of our life where each moment seems so important, that we forget that all it is, is to rise one day, and set another.

And then this man reaches his peak. He stands conquering the darkness below him. His elegance is unmatched and unquestionable. But then he looks at himself – at his own dark spots. He wants to hide them, forget about them. But his life is an open book, inaugurated by none other than he himself, a book he would hate to read. 'Hate' was somehow inadequate – hate and dread, maybe.

But time is merciful, and all this passes away, like an obvious joke on all what was felt. The progress now, is towards the end. The man knows his inescapable destiny. Some wish to face it with a smile, others accept comfort in shooing the thought away.

Time would, meanwhile, sit on its couch, eating pop-corns, watching the second half of the movie – aware that soon it will have to get up and switch his movie off. It watches man, with his billion emotions, each given worth too exaggerated.

Klarke stopped the thought for a second, looked up again, and smiled. This was our success, he thought, the most successful failure. To be embedded immortal in stone, or to die in a gutter, seemed synonymous to him now. But his reflection was not to conclude here. Suddenly, he spotted a shooting star. The star seemed to smile at him, a humble calming smile. And Klarke was overtaken by a gust of joy – that there was, indeed, one exception!

The exception was love. An abstraction, and a reality. Suddenly, his conscience was filled with a billion thoughts – yet he felt he knew nothing about it – that there was so much more to learn – so much more to experience. The love when a mother watches her new born child. The love when a father ties your shoe laces on your first day of school. The love when a child sees his first toy. The love when a child watches his elder brother fight for him. The love in the eyes of the grandparents, as you touch their feet.

There was so much love around him, he felt delighted. Love, as he deeply felt, had the divine power to warp time. A long walk with a loved one passed away in a matter of microseconds, while a hug seemed to last a lifetime. He realized he had found a small scratch on the smiling ego of time, and this thought was highly elating.

He looked at his hands, felt love in abstraction, when for instance, he touched the dew on a morning rose, washed his bike, plowed the garden when he was a kid, made his first sketch, stood looking at the sunrise on the Ganges, took a deep breath of fresh morning air, and...embraced Christine's hands.

The thought brought back the pain lying dormant somewhere in his heart. He tried to recall if ever he was in love with a girl. He was together with a girl a year back, but that was more of a 'growing up' than love – at the same time, his recognition of the impurity that humans are prone to induce in the purest of gifts given by God. She was a passing phase, long gone, without leaving its mark on the sands of time, forgotten as quickly as the thought had come.

But Christine was an impossibility he would be in love with forever. Each time the name came in his mind, the brightness in her eyes filled his dark sky. She was like a shooting star – and he was the moon. For a couple of moments, she would come and his night sky would glisten with brilliance. He would lock his fingers among hers and get flooded with a divine warmth – a bidirectional connection of two souls. It was worth living life this way – howsoever temporary it might be. Klarke wondered - how easily this four letter word – love - stood powerfully facing two more four letter words – time and life. How easily the thought of Christine changed his conclusion that life was going to be a tragedy no one could avoid.

He wondered what Christine might be thinking at that moment. If she could feel his heartbeat increase more and more every time he thought about her. If she knew that Klarke could feel her scent enter his system and intoxicate him with her beauty.

Something inside him said - “Yes she does” and he wanted to think no further, say no further.

K

2nd October 2012

KLARKE had a talk with Christine on phone, today. Though the urge to hear her voice was stronger than the urge to breathe, it was he who did all the talking. Strangely, the reason was pretty clear - the lesser he heard her voice, the lesser would be the insatiable want to hear her more.

The conscious mind knew it pretty well – her camp starts today, and for the next 10 days, they won't be able to share a single message, a single word of everything that was impossible to be expressed in words. He collected himself and asked the formal and obvious questions, afraid to jump to the uncomfortable ones, from where there was no turning back. She answered his questions in her own sweet way, each word of her's hitting him like the world's strongest, most pleasant intoxication. He wanted to be drugged, to be carried away by those careless words to the lips which spoke them. The sweet notoriety in her voice was tempting and teasing – like she could actually see him trying so hard not to say it again and again – not to say how much he loved her and wanted to be with her.

Occasionally, she would chuckle, and Klarke imagined her smiling like the evening when they sat together holding hands, he caressing her slim fingers, looking into her eyes, noticing how her beauty could make angels swell in envy. He did not mention this. He knew of no known language with which he could communicate his thoughts in their pure original form. All he could say was 'Take care', with the same degree of pain and pleasure – pain of being so away from her, pleasure of still being able to love her more and more each moment.

Somehow he felt that she could sense the beating of his heart, and he could sense hers. The rhythm of two hearts, of two souls, so far away, yet so near, so synchronous and pure – it was like living in the childhood dream where everything was good, everyone was happy, there was no grief, no guilt, no despair, no hatred, just love...pure untouched love.

The 2 minutes 52 seconds on the phone were like a beautiful evening walk – by the sunset at the river bank, golden rays of the setting sun meeting the sharp corners of her smiling lips, her eyes looking into his while he puts his arms around her waist and brings her closer. Planting soft kisses on her neck, he whispers something in her ears, and they both – Klarke and Christine - together watch the sun hide behind another majestic beautiful evening.

Suddenly the crude reality of life strikes Klarke, and he knows its time. There is an uncomfortable silence lasting various microseconds – there is so much more to tell, so much more to talk about, and yet no means to express any of it now in that moment. The fight inside him finally ends, and an unknown voice unwillingly whispers - “Goodbye Christine”.

K

Klarke

Some men personify determination. Klarke was not better than them – he was the superlative. His personality radiated itself everywhere he would go – to the walls, to the machines, to the people around him. Sometimes it would make the aura uncomfortable for the ones who felt it, and made them almost certainly sure of standing not with a normal being as themselves, but with a divine heroic presence. But the chapter would not close there. It's not natural, they would say, in this age, for men with sharp determination to be honest and humble as well – words whose origin must certainly lie attributed to a prophecy or a vision of Klarke's, by the men who invented them.

He relished learning – and that seemed to be an unstoppable motivation towards his self-actualization. The level of detail with which he could absorb the observable enabled him to mix his essence with the unspoken beauty around him. Many a times, he would just stand close to random subsets of random universe, feel the rhythm, accepting it with a strange intimacy.

His sight was sharp, as sharp as his other senses of hearing, smell and taste. Somehow, they seemed to symbolize a non-stop information flow between him and his compliment – consisting of everything else. But the 'touch' was the most sensitive – his fingers would elegantly trace the outlines of a morning rose, like it was someone's most prized piece of art. With a pencil between those fingers, he could create abstraction and reality in unparalleled synchronization. With his thumb, he could feel the piece of a charcoal sketch freshly prepared by him – breathing, sensing, having a life of its own. For him, it was not just carbon spread on paper in a randomly ordered fashion, but the ability to give birth – to be a miniature God.

A die-hard romantic he would be. His philosophy about life - “Live each moment like its your last.” He could have silent abstract romances with the beauty around him – beauty not just noticed by normal humanly perceptions, but whose sole existence could make you forget the concept of 'me' and 'I', as you delve into a universal plurality of homogeneity. These moments were rare – rare but glorious, and for days altogether he would be mesmerized by thoughts of capturing it forever – giving it the immortality it truly deserves.

At times, he would imagine of a beauty surpassing all previous unchallenged notions in his mind. A strange consciousness would tell him the moment was near – he knew not why, he knew not when. He did not know the sweet beautiful pain that was to flood his heart. All he knew was that when the time comes, he and his lady would be intoxicated with the purest forms of emotions impossible to be captured by any known tools of human brilliance, including he himself.

K