I Disappear

I woke up and realized I did not know myself. I looked human enough. But who was I? What was I when I went to sleep? The questions loomed in my mind because I feel it is essential to know who you are. I mean, without knowing who I am, who am I? No, it is not the whomai of Unix or the ‘who am I’ of religion. It is just a question of a person who has no idea who he is, except that he exists in the body but not in the mind. As if the paradigm has fled the mind and the soul.

This was the first thought that occurred to me when I woke up. I was lying on a bed that I did not recognize, in a room I did not remember. I did know that I was in a body. I lay very still. I was still human in appearance, not a bug or a cockroach. Luckily, I still remembered what humans looked like. It was like I had gone missing in a single room during sleep. All that remained of me was my body.

After I went missing, I was anxious because I did not know where to look for myself. Not that I became invisible or got buried or burned. Like I said, I just went missing to myself. That caused me considerable distress because I had always liked myself.

Let others think what they will; I was fond of myself. But each person had his opinion, and I had mine, and I was sure I was an agreeable person, no doubt about that. I was somewhat of the moody, lonely sort, but well-mannered and pleasant. Nobody noticed my presence or absence. Ergo, nobody would miss me. Most of the time, I hurt no one and got along well with others. I did not have very many friends; so I could be wrong here. Maybe someone in some dream would miss a voiceless being whose existence baffled even himself.

How do you know you are around? I mean, like you are not lost or missing? Say your house or your workplace or anywhere? Because you notice, see, touch and smell things you know and are familiar with. And how do you know you are missing? When you do not get those things to see, smell, or touch. Or do not recognize them.

I knew I was missing. Now, this was a little
tricky—this business of getting lost.

If marooned on a lonely island, with not even an ant or a worm on it, you might feel lost regarding the rest of the world. But you know you are you and are missing due to a shipwreck or something. But have you gone lost and missing to yourself? That sensation is bewildering altogether. I mean, here I am, and yet I am not here; I am missing, to myself. That is bizarre. Imagine yourself sitting in your home with your family, and suddenly you feel lost as if you miss yourself, as if even the body you are in does not belong to you. But nobody else misses you; they know you and talk to you, and they can see you as well. That is not a delightful feeling. It causes panic initially. Then you wonder what happened.

But no matter how much I wondered, I could not catch up with myself.

I looked around the room. This did not look like the room I went to sleep in. I had woken up in a strange room in a strange bed. It jars your mind when you go to sleep in one place and wake up in another, like waking up in another body. The first thing that caught my attention was a brown ceiling fan that whirled round and round like it was running away from itself, as if it had a secret of importance. The little clock in the corner with its pallid face ticked away on the wall monotonously, like it had done all its life. I could not make out the time, as it was still dark. Some birds had woken up and they called from far away. I knew little about birds, and their calls were strange, like the distant whistles of an anonymous train, but full of sorrowful misery. The bird was a mystery, a herald, and its voice was sweet and ominous, like a comic dirge.

I did not move. The brown ceiling smiled at me. The bed was not the softest, and the fan was still chasing itself. The wind blowing down on me was as hot as the heat from an oven. The ceiling and the walls had a faint shimmer, like a little stone falling into a lake. This undulation was strange. I mean, it was a room in a house on solid earth, not a boat in a bulging storm. I had been in an earthquake once; I think it was the one at Lathur. I was over a hundred kilometers away, on a fearsome night with a ghostly moon staring balefully at the earth. I was awake, and I could see my feet sink abruptly away from my sight, only to come back and rise above my head the next second. The almirah at one corner of the room moved towards my bed like a train, its cabins open and threatening. It wanted to crush me. The air I breathed had a fetid magic.

Now I felt the same way, although my feet and head were where they ought to be. Everything looked familiar. But I knew. Somewhere deep inside me, I knew this was not the way it should be, that I was the victim of a big trick. I did not understand why anyone should play such a trick on me. How could it be worth the effort of whoever it was, who was playing with me? I was a small fry, not even worth a glance of sympathy.

I got up, almost expecting to fall and collapse into a heap with no bones in me. But I could get up. I walked into the next room – the main one, so big that about twenty people could crowd into it. This was an unfamiliar place, which I had never noticed. I did not recollect being in a house with such a vast hall.

A table and several chairs decorated the room. The chairs were all red, as were the tables. No, it was not the tablecloth or the cover of the chairs. The furniture was blood red. I almost expected the blood to drip down on the floor and flow into the road. The rest of the room was a stark contrast to the furniture. On the roof and the walls, balloons knocked against themselves and the wall like little children. The mustard-colored hydrogen-filled balloons hugged the ceiling like so many butterflies. Colored paper hung all over the place in a dance with a rhythm of its own. It must have been a kid’s birthday, although I could not detect any human presence just yet. I seemed to be alone in the house. All the revelers had gone, probably to sleep. Some uncleared plates and Pepsi cans lay on their sides, a few here and a few there. I had been in the next room but had heard no sounds of merriment. But no one had told me about any birthday or invited me. Neither did I hear children or the sound of happiness. No noise whatever. The entire house seemed like an empty whale’s inside.

I saw many closed doors pointing into the hall in which I stood. All of them existed in my previous life too, which seemed like yesterday. Yesterday is usually the day before today. Anyway, that is what I had always believed until I realized strange things about life. There was nothing weird about that, the rooms or the previous life. The entire house was adamantly silent. I was surprised.This abode is s usually noisy to the point of driving a peace-loving man like me crazy. That is sound sleep, for me. Funny oxymoron this one, sound sleep. But I knew some people who were noisier when they slept than when they were awake. I knew a lady who had been divorced by her husband because her snore was insanely loud after a surgery on her neck.

I looked out of the over-sized window. It was only partly dark outside now, not yet dawn. A pair of dogs kept a vigilant guard of the house, walking about sniffing in the dawn’s aroma. They were alert and looked as if they wanted somebody’s leg to bite. They were friendly guys. A couple of giant Labradors. One brown male, the other a black female. They must have caught my smell because they looked at me through the window and wagged their tails. And they seemed to recognize me, and I had heard that dogs never made a mistake.

I love dogs. They are better than humans. They seem to have emotions and feelings that humans lack. And they do not snarl when they are happy.

***

I stepped into the cold pre-dawn. There was a golden-brown glow in the east, owing to the sun god getting his chariot ready. Arunan must be doing that job. That was what this bewitching color meant. ‘The sun is about to rise’ seemed mundane. I recalled the old story about the sun god going on his inspection in a chariot driven by Arunan. Now that was poetic, mystical and heavenly!

I walked towards the east, breathing in the fresh air dripping the moisture of dawn and marveling at the glow in the east, like a distant flame, listening to the birds’ chirp and flap their wings in the happiness of being alive—the euphoria of having survived one more day.

Very few people were up. The walkway was for me and some stray dogs. But the dogs were friendly, wagging their thin tails. Thin with their ribs showing like bowsthe friendly dogs followed me for some distance and then went back to their morning activities, looking for food in the waste thrown about.

I kept walking on sturdy legs, not yet tired by age or running. The night merging into the iridescence of the early dawn transformed the world. The trees, mostly coconut, and the happy birds were entirely in paradise. They were part of the morning on the earth. I was the only person out of place in the peaceful and beautiful scene. Still, a part of me identified with the glory of the breaking day.

There is glory in the ever-repeating cycle of day and night. There is glory in birth and death.

I could make out vague human shapes in the mild mist of the dawn, and I walked rapidly, like a dog with an anxiety disorder. There is no need, no point in hurrying, my mind whispered to my brain. The earth would not run away. But still, I had to rush, even though there was no reason for that. It was like I was running away from my past, away from me. There was no way I could escape myself; I knew that. I was all tied up with everything in the universe, entanglement, quantum, or otherwise. I was also a product of the Big Bang, like everyone else. And therefore, I was entangled with the sun and the moon and UY Scuti.

But that did not explain why I was almost running, risking confusion with a thief, in the dim light of the dawn. Some power drove my legs onwards to a destination I did not know. I slowed down after about an hour of brisk running, which slowed down further to a walk. I did not understand where I had run. There were no people around whom I could ask. The road was bereft of life, even of dogs, which always menaced people in my country because the law was on the side of canines.

***

In the faint light of the early dawn, I saw a cemetery in the distance with moldy crosses adorning long-dead folks, now reduced to bones. There was a low granite wall, with plants growing in the crevices of the stones.

Cemeteries do not require advertisements or billboards. Clients will come, anyway.

I noticed there was no caretaker in the cemetery. That was good. My legs were tired, as was the rest of my body and soul. I liked the peace and the tranquility of the abode of the dead. In one place of the wall of the residence of the deceased, there was a small entrance closed with a rusty lock against a rusty iron grill. I climbed over that, careful not to injure myself, to avoid tetanus. An evil disease that; one of my relatives had died miserably from tetanus he got from cow dung.

Inside the cemetery, the peace and tranquility increased even more than I had expected. It was so tranquil that I could almost hear the dead. The dead lay buried under several feet of soil, mostly decayed into bones, lying in calm and quiet, waiting to rise someday.

Only the living hurried; the dead are relaxed. “We have an eternity ahead of us, oh mortals!” they seemed to say in silence. “Therefore, we do not hurry. It will be better for you not to rush too. How long can you run, about sixty years? Learn to relax,” the sound of the cadavers resonated in my ears. “Learn to be slow like the tortoise. look at the Galapagos tortoise – it lives over a hundred years because it never hurries. It never achieves anything either, but it lives long.”

I looked around the cemetery; it was desolate. The cemetery and the cadavers need an architect and a beautician, my mind joked. The small clumps of grass looked scrawny and hungry. Moldy, black burial places, once moist with the tears of loved ones, had now abandoned the bones of their dear ones. Even the headstones were a strange mix of gray and sunlight. Must be suitable for the dead, this dose of the sun, a change from their everlasting darkness, waiting to wake up. I walked into the cemetery. It looked abandoned as if nobody wanted the shiny bones weeping inside the cells. Why would anyone leave a graveyard when there wasn’t enough space to bury the dead!

An old, gnarled tree struggled to grow inside the graveyard in a far corner. It must have been easy for it to grow in its younger days when new bodies were interred regularly. A container of fertilizer, the human body, the tree must have thought then. Its roots could slowly penetrate the poorly fabricated coffins of plain wood or wait patiently for the decaying flesh to ooze out with the smell of the dead and the maggots. The tree was happy, and it grew into a giant. But then people no longer buried their dead in that cemetery, leaving the tree to starve. And the tree knew not why they no longer buried their dead in that lovely cemetery.

The sun was now well up in the sky, on its eternal journey, to its own death and resurrection. I saw the scraggly shrubs and green grass around the tree well now in the light of the Giver of Light. They must have grown in abundance once upon a time but there were just a few scatterings here and there now. They had neither food nor water to flourish and shine. They had not withered, but they were unhappy, as were the people under the soil.

There are more people under the ground than above it, and the number above the earth itself is staggering. This is a funny thought.

What would it be like to lie in state in a casket, I wondered, get covered and inserted into the earth, and then have the earth filled – to make sure you will not come out at night to terrify the living, who are so easily frightened.

I leaned my back against the tree, which must have dined on many humans. The consolation of the tree ran up and down my spine, and my body relaxed. I will not be buried. I will be burned to ashes, which will still be food for the plants. Strange.

My senses must have been on a high because I could feel the heat on my flesh already—the melting skin and muscles and the creaking of the bone before becoming embers.

I was alone in the cemetery with only the dead for company. And Cannabis sativa. My consistent friend for a while now. That alone made me rise above the earth and the dead, above the mundane into the sparkling realms of my Lord himself. How about one now? No, I will keep that for later. But then, there may be no ‘later’.

So, I took one of my cigarettes, prefilled with powdered weed, and smelled it. The smell was romantic, like the smell of the woman in heat.

The grass, as the heretics call it, is indeed my love and my life. I commune with the dead and the yet-to-be-born. I float in space and time, which is where I am right now. Space is the domicile of the deceased and decayed. It is this cemetery of the ancients who walked the earth before me. They had dreams and hopes, expected miracles, and finally went to the grave with the same dreams, hopes and miracles locked up inside their brain. Why they put two crosses on each gravestone was beyond me, maybe for the twice born or twice dead.

The dry soil bit into my bottom, without remorse. I felt no pain or discomfort, only the playful pinch of old earth reminding me that real friends were never too far from each other. She told me that I must rest in her depths soon. I am glad you welcomed me, my mother. I have been waiting for a long time now. Even though I am not quite sure how I disappeared, but now I am ready to sleep.

I took a puff of the cigarette, holding it the way a lover would keep his sweat heart. The smoke with ganja weed responded better than a lover. The first puff blew my head; it was a new brand. It blew my head so much that I just sat there staring at the tombstones with great affection. The warm white smoke diffused into my soul like the milk of all kindness in the world. It nudged parts of me I never suspected I had. The gravestones glimmered and danced like phantoms, like live versions of the skeletons inside. I was happy. I was communing with the ancestors who had left long ago. They were one with the universe and its Creator now and happy about my little tricks to survive. I watched the dance of the gravestones as they glimmered and shone. Their dance was the dance of satisfied souls. I drowsed as I watched the eerie dance unseen by the human eye till then. As my eyes remained open while sleep trickled into my being, I saw the tombstones carried by their owners, the skeletons of the wise. The bones were happy, and they all smiled broadly, showing all the teeth they had left in their jaws. They looked at me now and then, and some seemed to beckon me to join them.

This was some new breed of weed given to me by a friend. I thought he was a friend, a kind-hearted gentleman. He must have been; why else would he have given me such a potent sniffer.

I was levitating slowly. My back disengaged from the earth and took me up, not too much, in order not to scare the skeletons, but just a bit so that the stones on the ground did not hurt me anymore. My neck bent forward and hit my breastbone. I could feel the pain in the back of my head, somewhere in the neck. I took another puff and then rubbed the cigarette on the ground to put out the fire. I put the cigarette in my pocket so that my shirt would not burn. Good ganja was not easy to get; so I used it carefully. I continued to watch the dance of the dead. They danced well. I had always thought the dance of skeletons would be noisy, what with all the two hundred-plus bones clanking against each other. I was surprised that these skeletons danced in silence. Some of them had picked the tombstones. The less affluent skeletons, who did not have a headstone, danced, holding the divine cross on their hands. The crosses were made of wood and partly eaten by termites, who did not seem to like the taste. I saw some of the skeletons turn their eye holes towards me, but not one of them bothered me

When I woke up, it was dark. Night had descended upon the dead without telling me. The graying crosses looked happy in the pale light of the tired moon. I was tired, as tired as the dead folk all around me. I did not even have the hope of being interred in the moist earth. I would be burned, with coconut husks and branches of a mango tree, or an electric crematorium. That would make short work of a human body, reduced to ashes in minutes. Such a waste! The body would have made good food for the grass and trees. About seventy kilos of flesh and bone would go to waste. In my case, above ninety, because of all the food consumed. But of late, I had become lean.

Where Am I?

Eventually, I got out of the cemetery. Do not ask me when because I did not remember. I only remembered it was early morning, and the same birds from yesterday had started their chirping.

Leaving the cemetery, I missed the dancing headstones and the happy corpses and the generous friend I had made in the cemetery.

I forgot to tell you that. I got a new friend who was also fond of cemeteries. For this guy, the graveyard was his domicile. He had lived in the abandoned cemetery for a long time. Sleeping inside tombs, no one even suspected that the quick and the dead lay together in the same grassy bed in the same grave. His was a life of adventure stilled only in the cemetery in the company of the deceased.

I was still off this world, on account of the ganja. I sat with a drooping neck under the tree. Then I saw a vague slice of darkness jumping over the low wall of the abode of the bones, the granite wall, which had broken down in a place not easily visible from the road. It had the shape of a man creeping into the hallowed ground of the dead. He was noiseless like a vampire and moved with the ease of a phantom. I could see two of him, but that was only an illusion. I knew that. My eyes had dissociated and separated and they saw on their own separately. Now one man looked like two. That was all. It was not an army marching into my place of rest. I wanted to address him but I could neither move nor speak. He did not see me because it was dark as Hades under the tree, I did not move a muscle, and that was not fair to the visitor.

He went about his work methodically. I had already smelt the fried beef in his hand. There must have been paratha along with the meat because no self-respecting Keralite would ever think of the two in separate breaths. Paratha and beef went hand in hand.

He deposited the food on a tomb and, humming a barely audible litany of his own authorship, he sat down on another grave. Then he pulled out a plastic bottle from the folds of his lungi. Even from the distance and with poor visibility, I recognized Jawan, the favorite rum of Kerala, a poison manufactured by the Government of Kerala for its citizens. You do not believe me about the poison? Check the bottle. Here was a true son of the land of Parasuraman, the land of coconuts, all desolate with mandari, a kind of mite that eats the head of the coconut. He had an abrupt call of nature, my friend, and he relieved himself sitting on the tomb.

For those of you who are in the darkness of ignorance, I will add that Jawan, which comes in a plastic bottle, is a full liter of golden rum. It is not only the favorite drink of the likes of me, but it is also challenging to lay your hands on.