I scrapped Chapter Two as I had written it two posts ago. Hated it on second reading. Nearly as much as Arthur did who, in his (her?) disgusted comment, advised me to stick to quadrants etecetra. Here is a fresh one. Arthur tell me how much you hate this one. I'll tell you the next time I read it. Sunder keep me going bro.
Chapter Two: Same Difference
After my father died, for a few years I felt very lonely. Not that he talked to me that much. Besides the occasional friendly cuff and grunt. He was a man of few words. Instead my time was populated by the dyad that my parents were. I celebrated as they laughed together and in their happy muttering in the quiet nights of our lean-to on the beach. I experienced tragedy in their occasional fights and catharsis when the happy mutterings resumed. When my father died the dyad was broken and it seemed to me my mother died too.
That changed.
A gull rested, in splendid isolation, on a rocky outcrop in the limpid light of a November morning. Its apparent loneliness drew me to it. I got close, closer when it suddenly turned and looked me straight in the eye. It was not just a kin it was my twin. The next moment I was soaring in the skies with the sea and the beach a single entity, nay the entire world a single entity spread right before me. Suddenly I was a whole flock of gulls flying in formation and it was not just the world that was one, the world was me.
Me, us, them, someone, no one, everyone, same difference.
When I came to that November morning spreadeagled on that rocky outcrop on that private beach that belonged to the Mafia Queen and which my mother, like my father before her, cleaned every dawn and dusk, my life changed forever. I ran back to our lean-to and for the first time in my life hugged my mother burying my head in her slightly damp midriff.
My collection of people started that day with my mother. Collect people? You must be wondering what that means. Names and likenesses in a scrap books with perhaps a strand of hair pinned at the proper place? Facebook friends? Networking cogs? No I just collect epiphanies.
People. Epiphanies. Same Difference.
Path to nirvana or recipe for being dysfunctional. Same difference.
And as I walked that moonlit beach I put my bitchy ninth ex-wife out of mind as I shooed her out from that sunlit Nariman Point conference room.
My mother had walked back to the house leaving me alone with the one hundred fifty thousand odd people jostling for space in my head.
And then I smelt her hair. The one I didn't marry. The one I never could divorce. Damp, breezy, mornings lit by a lazy, drowsy sun. Objective correlative: that's what John Fowles called it. The memory of a memory.
Two years ago, I let one of my nine dimensions slip into her bedroom as she slept with her husband of twenty years. The genteel snores of middle-aged peace. She of the lazy drowsy sun was not there. Never will be. Except here, here on this moonlit beach, an epiphany rising from the sea.
What tosh! You fool! Promise never to use the word epiphany again!
The bordello done up as a fancy bar in Dubai was just beginning to come to life. The Russians eyed the Chinese varily across the border while the hungry eyed both species like cats enable to decide between cats and canaries.
Bored I dimensioned into Lords, leaving my childhood friend contemplating exercising that flabby piece of meat he left untoned at the gym. Another session, another trainer. Same difference.
Just an aside. Dimensioned is not like teleportation. It is instead like a light moving from one spot on the stage to another spot, in my case, one from a total of nine.
Why do the English smell so bad? Is it the balti food that they now regularly ingest. Or is it just indifferent personal hygeine. Same difference old chap.
I turned to the English Rose bosoming next to me. What's the score? Who's keeping score? The guy on the other side had his hand digging deep into his checked trousers.
The son I never had adored Tendulkar.
I was a red cherry careening down at 147 kph into the good length spot. I was already smirking having swung a neat outswing parabola, landing on my seam and swerving in ever so slightly.
The smirked got wiped off my face, as I bounced of the tin on the edge of the square leg boundary. 106 for 2. Boy that felt good. Almost as good as being manacled in the pink bedroom of a whipper snapper Bollywood matahari.
Same difference? Perhaps. Pleasure does come in seemingly endless variety. Did I tell you about the year or so I worked in advertising?. It was like playing the piano in a whorehouse.
But then that's a story for another day.
