As she walked out the first one to spot her, to his great disappointment, was the little man in the green shirt, swathed in his sweat, the stench of a week‘s worth of moist tobacco clinging on stubbornly. Too many nights spent burning oil and burning holes in corduroys. He’d been waiting and watching. Hoping to quietly slink away, unnoticed, in her direction and get a word- in and out. How he hoped that she had hung about inside for a bit, tentatively peering out to give herself away, only to him. So much easier. How he would’ve thanked all those around him who were unfortunately just about like him, if they hadn’t sooner or later spotted her too. How easy it would’ve been if all these cars and these cameras parked around them, as they swarmed insignificantly until that moment, had never been invented or discovered or whatever. How nice it would feel in fact if the sun hadn’t bellowed down upon them day after day, chasing them in and out of one political parish, chasing them down. Relief and luck, he thought, too often graced hypocrisy and ignorance; of which he had seen and accepted much, for far too long, as long as he could remember now. He longed for his youth. Whatever it meant. He would’ve loved to be ignorant in that way. The youthful and pure ignorance of ignorance itself. The first freshly laid layer, preordained or whatever, present since time allowed him to breathe and till he allowed nothing to breed within it, attempt to define it or be revealed to it. That kind of ignorance was alright perhaps. Anyway, it was alright probably because it really did expire and wasn‘t viciously cyclic. Somewhere in his youth, he thought, he perhaps had been on the other side of this life. Distanced and comforted by the forethought of nascent education and huddled in warm sleep between the copious flow of unrestrained opportunity and self-creationism, he had perhaps, only the slightest idea of one day facing the possibility of being trapped within this conjugation of measured opinion and after thought. Both of which had left him with little to be relieved about. Luck was absent altogether. He didn’t understand luck, more importantly he wished not to, unlike his young days. However incomprehensible though it might’ve been to him, he was sure of the symmetry between all such things, not necessarily evil or wrong- he wasn‘t sure if these existed either, but based on qualified ignorance. Luck was for the ignorant and for those who never expected it to chance upon them. In many ways it was the ironical extension of ignorance, created by the ignorant who wanted perhaps to search no more or didn’t feel the need to do so. And those whose objective was defined and to which they committed in such a way that it drove them or compelled them to ignorance of which they might have later reaped, luckily of course. All this cyclic contemplation was too much. How he would love to be confused and effused again with his own preconceptions that followed his youthful thought. But knowing so snatched that away from him.
Everyone had noticed though, the woman as she strode out. Why? Why could she not have stayed inside he lamented again. The loathsome passel, that had been buzzing like presumptuous flies over fresh turd, suddenly congealed into one tight swarm, like one big, frenzied erection. Collectively they moved like a mob of termites, eating into each other, toward the woman- mikes held out as far as they would reach, cameras propped on the shoulders of men sitting atop the shoulders of another- the press. He had been wondering whether they would all go back home, not today maybe, but someday. One day, he thought, they were all sure to understand, like him, the futility of their individual concerts around the super bowl of inscrutable politics. Maybe, he tempted himself, that day would arrive when democracy for once would aid those like him. Even a flaying majority would be sufficient to drive home his point, wouldn’t it? If most of us conceded that we were byte grabbers and tired of being so, then maybe journalists like us would have it much easier on our supposed conscience, he amused himself. But the latter bit, about the conscience and his own supposition consumed his rationality. Looking around, he found it hard to believe that many of these men and women, their own consciences locked away and preceded by the practicality of various things, cushioned by the lard that reflected their remuneration and hunger, were even in a position to reconsider their mediatory existence as conveyers of compromised information carefully repackaged to placate and instigate the audiences they were catering to. But then who was he to settle the conscientious matters of the world? Specially since the world he intended to opinionate upon was full with people who thought they did in fact possess a conscience which most in fact, in their eyes, seemed to lack. Rather idiotic, he thought, this conscience business. But how easily we all seem to sway in its tender understanding, always exclusive to each person and eluding his contemporary. Which too we ourselves gauge. Strange.
As the eager throng, in the middle of which he was pressed and sandwiched, tided over the heat emanating from the tar below, closer to the woman, some clever folk tripped and nudged each other; they were all out to grab what the other could not grab. And if the other could grab it, it mostly lost significance in terms of elusiveness. Less thought was given to dissemination at this moment. There were many things that the job required at that moment and the latter was just not as highly prioritized. Their job, just like his, meant many things too. It meant a legitimate opinion at social gatherings, one that everyone would be keen to hear. It meant a well decorated name plate at the head of the front porch of a mildly decadent colony brimming with the unique middle class of a country forever in transition. All this of course, only if they had managed to buy into a hot property deal. It meant remuneration and independence of elderly opinion, so essential. Further, it probably meant reverence. For many it was a mere stepping stone to greater glory, there was so much out there- regional analysts, editors, commentators, authoritative debaters and perhaps even politics. The noble pursuits of journalism long lost in the search of the elusive, which in itself was not a problematic or intrusive quest, except that elusive increasingly became what could be kept out of reach once held onto, however accessible it may have been before that. Amongst the rhetoric of front pages, bolder titles, the impugned editor’s breakfast preference, bracketing requirements, regional recovery programs and other things, the biblical tenets of journalism seemed inane. Maybe they too felt like him- very little like their ideal journalist (which he presumed was better), whoever that was, and much like their neighbor’s envy, in which most had perhaps sought and found satisfaction; of course all this behind the veil of responsible and reconciled adulthood. But then he never managed to find satiation in that. Maybe that was because he didn’t know who his neighbors were or what language they spoke. But nonetheless, he wasn’t daft and understood that he was surrounded by men and women who fit many an Indian’s most befitting description of a practical adult, absolved of the stoned haze that engulfed the rebellious English speaking youth of the country- the redeemed soul of an even handed journalist. And this thinking wasn’t necessarily abrupt or unreasonable, he reasoned. At least whilst he was unfortunately familiar with domestic realities of his people. The people around whom and amongst whom he lived. With whom he bore striking resemblance to the untrained eye, the eye which most would possess. If this was not the case it didn’t matter much. Journalists had been a feared specie amongst the hapless many who whiled away their middle class mornings reading newspapers, quizzing their children playfully or sternly at breakfast and faded away into the vast night of opportunities- falling into punctual slumber as the whiff of onions consumed at dinner filled their knowledgeable heads- the news channel buzzing softly in the lobby, projecting on the unlikely couch.
On really offhand days he would bark at his dog, everything outside their little concrete safe house was an inheritance of compounded ignorance. And everyone and everything could be blamed- capitalists, communists caught in crossfire, the knowledge revolutionaries, the littering housewives, the internet, children with more facial hair than civic sense, the beleaguered student, the woeful farmer, the traffic police, the auto rickshaws, the eve teasing youth, illiterate labor, pension schemes, apparatchik, renovators, planners, anyone. But in the end, the finger always pointed conveniently at that which he best comprehended and lived for and amongst- journalism. Journalists, to him, were barely worthy of being considered as a collective. If anything, it was problematic to do that. To him, they represented and symbolized, as a consequence of their oath, the vast gorges- gaps that lay between the many peoples submitting or inheriting their acquiescence to the national democratic ideal. He often felt that the news media could not, as much as it may have tried, bridge these identities and present them as intertwined and co-dependent. At best, there were those who lived either above or along or below the surface of the vast national polity which affected them accordingly. Each people isolated but not insulated from the other. Journalists, like everyone else in any other observant profession, seemed desperate to live in the denial of the nation’s multiple personality disorder, one it had inherited because of the incestuous ties of the Raj and his daughter kingdoms. One had bred into the nation a familiar bureaucracy at ease under the eternally swiveling sarkari fan, distanced cleverly from the faceless proletariat. And the other had imbibed a plethora of disconnected levels of functioning- thought, reasoning and tradition. After much adultery with the globalized West, each culture, each strata of our collective society had brewed up its own concoction of life and existence, in the process severely distancing itself from each other; all this under the cool, clever eyes of the democratic ideal- the people’s sarkar. So that while a handful sat educated in towns and capitals, content within their golden cages replete with imports that brought them mindfully closer to a reality much farther and unconcerned but definitely more entertaining and intelligibly packaged; many tiny human eddies snaked slowly through the forgotten deserts of time and space where independence had always truly prevailed. This void, the factum of mutual alienation, however inadvertent or justifiable, the journalist displayed best.
Just as well though no one could be blamed except the dumb route of agreeable intelligence and the inevitability of absurd existence. But then he saved that thought for better days, when he would perhaps buy himself an early drink on a weekday or something. These were much less specific thoughts and more shapeless in their abstract objectivity, however futile. Thus they were thoroughly entertaining to him, since answers to such problems were best clearly unanswerable than frustratingly disjointed in their logical conclusions as he perceived them to be.
He could not see her when the mob got there, screaming and shouting questions that ate into each other, muffled and fell to the ground without making much sense. Behind all the camera work, reasonable opinion, measured announcements and steady flow of trustworthy reporting lay this utterly clattered, perpetually flogged and combustible world of the quick, churlish and sly. Any minute now the family of journalists would go nuclear, he sneered. He secretly loathed being short- specifically since his tenure in political parishes involved as much on the spot reporting amongst such throngs as it did trying to get his face out of another’s baked armpit. Pushing and shoving were at their professional best today. He hadn’t quite seen such frantic appeal overwhelm these familiar faces against whom he had found himself pitted for as long as he could remember now. Strangely though, he felt sleepy and tired. He’d had all these ideas which perhaps he too was confused about and which probably directed him away from anything not alternative, for some equally baffling reasons of course; but he had successfully managed to avert the blasé nature of his ever-concluding remarks from seeping into his work. Thus he took it quite seriously even when he found himself around a bunch of social magnets. Not that he had much work, no sir. If there was one inborn talent in the man, one virtue he had built upon with dedication and ease, it had to be his ability to avoid most work. And yet be recognized in some way or another. This he considered a part of his serious outlook. A smart chap, his colleagues would say. “He’ll get the slot someday”, “Very earnest chap!”, “…but rarely have I seen you complain…”. Such opinions were commonplace. They had always been among the people he worked with. Only in the end, an end which he decided, had someone the misfortune of being revealed to his equally abrupt facet. Most thought of him as a rather simple fellow, just like any one of them. Only slightly more talented but lacking in social skills that could propel him toward greater authority. But they were quick to regard the latter as a temporary handicap, soon to be revealed to the all encompassing eventuality of experience and exposure and “duniyadaari” and so on. They thought of him as a man of the world too. But there own world perhaps. A world he would go on discovering with each passing day. Greater monotony befalling the hours as they lapped into each other warily, forgotten and disrespectful. They were pretty confounded though as our man was anything but like them. At least to himself, he would never admit so. So much time and effort, among other ideological proprieties of youth, had been invested into the careful and slow alienation of his opinions. His talent, his punctuality and his ease were all mechanical extensions of how he now thought and perceived. This he had realized or rather compromised upon not long ago, the memory was yet to settle and harden up. Like fresh cement, he thought. The idea of surviving as a Roman in Rome had made sense as life had narrowed and receded, hand in hand with his hairline. He never bothered correcting anyone, neither out of the urge to be brutally honest nor to appease himself. Both were, in a certain way, the same thing now. A man must only be brutally honest if he must consider himself to be better disposed in the company of truth, which must in turn appease him. It weighed lightly on his conscience though, the incumbent hypocrisy in lying to another bunch of likely hypocrites. He wondered that he was growing old and beginning to think just like each of them. Those he passed silent judgment on in the blink of an eye. But the degrees were different and as of now they did matter. There still did exist a difference between a white lie or a white collar lie, indifference or arrogant apathy, irritability or intolerance, ignorance or denial in his world just like there existed a difference between transvestites and homosexuals in the surreal world of a straight non-conformist. Baffling but conveniently distinguishable and imputable in case of urgent need. He didn’t care.
He fought his way through the arm trenches, careful not to breathe unless the sun burnt his temple. The woman was announcing something in what seemed to be a well practiced rhetoric- a theatre like voice over. Journalists who’d hotly disagree, perhaps later on prime time, nodded feverishly in agreement so as to move quickly to the next bit of hopefully dramatic sound byte. Some of them, the older ones, the quieter ones, the newer, shyer ones and the tinier ones like himself, had been relegated to a less strategic position and were now attempting to imitate those invigorated souls that preceded them, trying failingly to float their question successfully across the roving overhead cameras and over the flashing and clicking flash bulbs. When he finally got out he realized that his recording piece had fallen somewhere under the drunk legs of a swaying and thrusting mob. So much for the exclusive piece which he had carefully planned to extract. Life was it its random best. Murphy was watching with utter delight perhaps. He walked away, sighting a roadside tobacconist to his glee. The world was too fixated or too random to be enjoyable. It was not to his taste perhaps. From the outside, the dots forming the big snake seemed to be gyrating and grinding into each other, it was such parody, he smiled exhaling smoke. Amongst so many men and women finding pieces to fit their many meanings into levitates the best possible carrier- the shapeless smoke. But no one would take note or take advantage, what a shame. If only audiences would tune into prime time to watch wisps of smoke cut through the morning sunlight as it filtered and fell through the canopy of leaves above us, he sighed and then laughed. For the longest time he would continue to think of his travel plans when he aged a bit more, always keeping in mind the next prospective expiry date. They were surely like the smoke. Shapeless, unrestrained and vulnerable in the fact of their sudden disappearance. At ease even with compromise. It was another experience waiting to unfurl. One which would at least not, he could be sure, entrap him in the monotony of its predictable structure. Predictability itself, perhaps, was the last bastion of his inner defeat. A feeling he experienced so often, so difficult to describe. All that he knew was that this predictability, cycle and structure, with all these people as its symbolic, powerful constituents had left him consuming, every morning as he woke, a concoction of thoughts congealed with frustrating contradictions and inner turmoil. The devil who resides within the idle, he thought. His monotonous ways were magnets for these things. He would travel. Yes. But in this increasingly uninteresting and servile world, where the consumerist man was at best a survivalist, an animal no better than a plump, leashed dog, his curiosity to feel and see humankind spread everywhere was fast turning into a subversive arrangement. He would have to search beyond that which was already elusive, which so many wanted. Like a sound byte, disgusting. He felt as if the human herd was too much too handle all of a sudden. It’s collective search for elusiveness suffered the debauchery of its inherent commonality at every layer. All pervasive. He would prefer a quick personal derangement if that were the case and if the case was not to his liking indeed. Stubbing his beedie, he turned to look for the last time at the uneasy congregation and its symbolic, mindless, haphazard and inefficient pursuit despite all the attempted civility education, progress and other rhetoric. He looked at the woman, at her smug party workers. After all that they had done politics had absolved them. From all of it… This case was indeed not to his liking. He’d continue to wait and watch then. Hoping he could quietly slink away, get a word in and out. Not today, some other day, perhaps. Smiling, almost cynically, he touched the holster of his 9mm- it felt warm, in anticipation; shook his head warily and walked away- relief and luck, he thought, too often graced hypocrisy and ignorance.
Everyone had noticed though, the woman as she strode out. Why? Why could she not have stayed inside he lamented again. The loathsome passel, that had been buzzing like presumptuous flies over fresh turd, suddenly congealed into one tight swarm, like one big, frenzied erection. Collectively they moved like a mob of termites, eating into each other, toward the woman- mikes held out as far as they would reach, cameras propped on the shoulders of men sitting atop the shoulders of another- the press. He had been wondering whether they would all go back home, not today maybe, but someday. One day, he thought, they were all sure to understand, like him, the futility of their individual concerts around the super bowl of inscrutable politics. Maybe, he tempted himself, that day would arrive when democracy for once would aid those like him. Even a flaying majority would be sufficient to drive home his point, wouldn’t it? If most of us conceded that we were byte grabbers and tired of being so, then maybe journalists like us would have it much easier on our supposed conscience, he amused himself. But the latter bit, about the conscience and his own supposition consumed his rationality. Looking around, he found it hard to believe that many of these men and women, their own consciences locked away and preceded by the practicality of various things, cushioned by the lard that reflected their remuneration and hunger, were even in a position to reconsider their mediatory existence as conveyers of compromised information carefully repackaged to placate and instigate the audiences they were catering to. But then who was he to settle the conscientious matters of the world? Specially since the world he intended to opinionate upon was full with people who thought they did in fact possess a conscience which most in fact, in their eyes, seemed to lack. Rather idiotic, he thought, this conscience business. But how easily we all seem to sway in its tender understanding, always exclusive to each person and eluding his contemporary. Which too we ourselves gauge. Strange.
As the eager throng, in the middle of which he was pressed and sandwiched, tided over the heat emanating from the tar below, closer to the woman, some clever folk tripped and nudged each other; they were all out to grab what the other could not grab. And if the other could grab it, it mostly lost significance in terms of elusiveness. Less thought was given to dissemination at this moment. There were many things that the job required at that moment and the latter was just not as highly prioritized. Their job, just like his, meant many things too. It meant a legitimate opinion at social gatherings, one that everyone would be keen to hear. It meant a well decorated name plate at the head of the front porch of a mildly decadent colony brimming with the unique middle class of a country forever in transition. All this of course, only if they had managed to buy into a hot property deal. It meant remuneration and independence of elderly opinion, so essential. Further, it probably meant reverence. For many it was a mere stepping stone to greater glory, there was so much out there- regional analysts, editors, commentators, authoritative debaters and perhaps even politics. The noble pursuits of journalism long lost in the search of the elusive, which in itself was not a problematic or intrusive quest, except that elusive increasingly became what could be kept out of reach once held onto, however accessible it may have been before that. Amongst the rhetoric of front pages, bolder titles, the impugned editor’s breakfast preference, bracketing requirements, regional recovery programs and other things, the biblical tenets of journalism seemed inane. Maybe they too felt like him- very little like their ideal journalist (which he presumed was better), whoever that was, and much like their neighbor’s envy, in which most had perhaps sought and found satisfaction; of course all this behind the veil of responsible and reconciled adulthood. But then he never managed to find satiation in that. Maybe that was because he didn’t know who his neighbors were or what language they spoke. But nonetheless, he wasn’t daft and understood that he was surrounded by men and women who fit many an Indian’s most befitting description of a practical adult, absolved of the stoned haze that engulfed the rebellious English speaking youth of the country- the redeemed soul of an even handed journalist. And this thinking wasn’t necessarily abrupt or unreasonable, he reasoned. At least whilst he was unfortunately familiar with domestic realities of his people. The people around whom and amongst whom he lived. With whom he bore striking resemblance to the untrained eye, the eye which most would possess. If this was not the case it didn’t matter much. Journalists had been a feared specie amongst the hapless many who whiled away their middle class mornings reading newspapers, quizzing their children playfully or sternly at breakfast and faded away into the vast night of opportunities- falling into punctual slumber as the whiff of onions consumed at dinner filled their knowledgeable heads- the news channel buzzing softly in the lobby, projecting on the unlikely couch.
On really offhand days he would bark at his dog, everything outside their little concrete safe house was an inheritance of compounded ignorance. And everyone and everything could be blamed- capitalists, communists caught in crossfire, the knowledge revolutionaries, the littering housewives, the internet, children with more facial hair than civic sense, the beleaguered student, the woeful farmer, the traffic police, the auto rickshaws, the eve teasing youth, illiterate labor, pension schemes, apparatchik, renovators, planners, anyone. But in the end, the finger always pointed conveniently at that which he best comprehended and lived for and amongst- journalism. Journalists, to him, were barely worthy of being considered as a collective. If anything, it was problematic to do that. To him, they represented and symbolized, as a consequence of their oath, the vast gorges- gaps that lay between the many peoples submitting or inheriting their acquiescence to the national democratic ideal. He often felt that the news media could not, as much as it may have tried, bridge these identities and present them as intertwined and co-dependent. At best, there were those who lived either above or along or below the surface of the vast national polity which affected them accordingly. Each people isolated but not insulated from the other. Journalists, like everyone else in any other observant profession, seemed desperate to live in the denial of the nation’s multiple personality disorder, one it had inherited because of the incestuous ties of the Raj and his daughter kingdoms. One had bred into the nation a familiar bureaucracy at ease under the eternally swiveling sarkari fan, distanced cleverly from the faceless proletariat. And the other had imbibed a plethora of disconnected levels of functioning- thought, reasoning and tradition. After much adultery with the globalized West, each culture, each strata of our collective society had brewed up its own concoction of life and existence, in the process severely distancing itself from each other; all this under the cool, clever eyes of the democratic ideal- the people’s sarkar. So that while a handful sat educated in towns and capitals, content within their golden cages replete with imports that brought them mindfully closer to a reality much farther and unconcerned but definitely more entertaining and intelligibly packaged; many tiny human eddies snaked slowly through the forgotten deserts of time and space where independence had always truly prevailed. This void, the factum of mutual alienation, however inadvertent or justifiable, the journalist displayed best.
Just as well though no one could be blamed except the dumb route of agreeable intelligence and the inevitability of absurd existence. But then he saved that thought for better days, when he would perhaps buy himself an early drink on a weekday or something. These were much less specific thoughts and more shapeless in their abstract objectivity, however futile. Thus they were thoroughly entertaining to him, since answers to such problems were best clearly unanswerable than frustratingly disjointed in their logical conclusions as he perceived them to be.
He could not see her when the mob got there, screaming and shouting questions that ate into each other, muffled and fell to the ground without making much sense. Behind all the camera work, reasonable opinion, measured announcements and steady flow of trustworthy reporting lay this utterly clattered, perpetually flogged and combustible world of the quick, churlish and sly. Any minute now the family of journalists would go nuclear, he sneered. He secretly loathed being short- specifically since his tenure in political parishes involved as much on the spot reporting amongst such throngs as it did trying to get his face out of another’s baked armpit. Pushing and shoving were at their professional best today. He hadn’t quite seen such frantic appeal overwhelm these familiar faces against whom he had found himself pitted for as long as he could remember now. Strangely though, he felt sleepy and tired. He’d had all these ideas which perhaps he too was confused about and which probably directed him away from anything not alternative, for some equally baffling reasons of course; but he had successfully managed to avert the blasé nature of his ever-concluding remarks from seeping into his work. Thus he took it quite seriously even when he found himself around a bunch of social magnets. Not that he had much work, no sir. If there was one inborn talent in the man, one virtue he had built upon with dedication and ease, it had to be his ability to avoid most work. And yet be recognized in some way or another. This he considered a part of his serious outlook. A smart chap, his colleagues would say. “He’ll get the slot someday”, “Very earnest chap!”, “…but rarely have I seen you complain…”. Such opinions were commonplace. They had always been among the people he worked with. Only in the end, an end which he decided, had someone the misfortune of being revealed to his equally abrupt facet. Most thought of him as a rather simple fellow, just like any one of them. Only slightly more talented but lacking in social skills that could propel him toward greater authority. But they were quick to regard the latter as a temporary handicap, soon to be revealed to the all encompassing eventuality of experience and exposure and “duniyadaari” and so on. They thought of him as a man of the world too. But there own world perhaps. A world he would go on discovering with each passing day. Greater monotony befalling the hours as they lapped into each other warily, forgotten and disrespectful. They were pretty confounded though as our man was anything but like them. At least to himself, he would never admit so. So much time and effort, among other ideological proprieties of youth, had been invested into the careful and slow alienation of his opinions. His talent, his punctuality and his ease were all mechanical extensions of how he now thought and perceived. This he had realized or rather compromised upon not long ago, the memory was yet to settle and harden up. Like fresh cement, he thought. The idea of surviving as a Roman in Rome had made sense as life had narrowed and receded, hand in hand with his hairline. He never bothered correcting anyone, neither out of the urge to be brutally honest nor to appease himself. Both were, in a certain way, the same thing now. A man must only be brutally honest if he must consider himself to be better disposed in the company of truth, which must in turn appease him. It weighed lightly on his conscience though, the incumbent hypocrisy in lying to another bunch of likely hypocrites. He wondered that he was growing old and beginning to think just like each of them. Those he passed silent judgment on in the blink of an eye. But the degrees were different and as of now they did matter. There still did exist a difference between a white lie or a white collar lie, indifference or arrogant apathy, irritability or intolerance, ignorance or denial in his world just like there existed a difference between transvestites and homosexuals in the surreal world of a straight non-conformist. Baffling but conveniently distinguishable and imputable in case of urgent need. He didn’t care.
He fought his way through the arm trenches, careful not to breathe unless the sun burnt his temple. The woman was announcing something in what seemed to be a well practiced rhetoric- a theatre like voice over. Journalists who’d hotly disagree, perhaps later on prime time, nodded feverishly in agreement so as to move quickly to the next bit of hopefully dramatic sound byte. Some of them, the older ones, the quieter ones, the newer, shyer ones and the tinier ones like himself, had been relegated to a less strategic position and were now attempting to imitate those invigorated souls that preceded them, trying failingly to float their question successfully across the roving overhead cameras and over the flashing and clicking flash bulbs. When he finally got out he realized that his recording piece had fallen somewhere under the drunk legs of a swaying and thrusting mob. So much for the exclusive piece which he had carefully planned to extract. Life was it its random best. Murphy was watching with utter delight perhaps. He walked away, sighting a roadside tobacconist to his glee. The world was too fixated or too random to be enjoyable. It was not to his taste perhaps. From the outside, the dots forming the big snake seemed to be gyrating and grinding into each other, it was such parody, he smiled exhaling smoke. Amongst so many men and women finding pieces to fit their many meanings into levitates the best possible carrier- the shapeless smoke. But no one would take note or take advantage, what a shame. If only audiences would tune into prime time to watch wisps of smoke cut through the morning sunlight as it filtered and fell through the canopy of leaves above us, he sighed and then laughed. For the longest time he would continue to think of his travel plans when he aged a bit more, always keeping in mind the next prospective expiry date. They were surely like the smoke. Shapeless, unrestrained and vulnerable in the fact of their sudden disappearance. At ease even with compromise. It was another experience waiting to unfurl. One which would at least not, he could be sure, entrap him in the monotony of its predictable structure. Predictability itself, perhaps, was the last bastion of his inner defeat. A feeling he experienced so often, so difficult to describe. All that he knew was that this predictability, cycle and structure, with all these people as its symbolic, powerful constituents had left him consuming, every morning as he woke, a concoction of thoughts congealed with frustrating contradictions and inner turmoil. The devil who resides within the idle, he thought. His monotonous ways were magnets for these things. He would travel. Yes. But in this increasingly uninteresting and servile world, where the consumerist man was at best a survivalist, an animal no better than a plump, leashed dog, his curiosity to feel and see humankind spread everywhere was fast turning into a subversive arrangement. He would have to search beyond that which was already elusive, which so many wanted. Like a sound byte, disgusting. He felt as if the human herd was too much too handle all of a sudden. It’s collective search for elusiveness suffered the debauchery of its inherent commonality at every layer. All pervasive. He would prefer a quick personal derangement if that were the case and if the case was not to his liking indeed. Stubbing his beedie, he turned to look for the last time at the uneasy congregation and its symbolic, mindless, haphazard and inefficient pursuit despite all the attempted civility education, progress and other rhetoric. He looked at the woman, at her smug party workers. After all that they had done politics had absolved them. From all of it… This case was indeed not to his liking. He’d continue to wait and watch then. Hoping he could quietly slink away, get a word in and out. Not today, some other day, perhaps. Smiling, almost cynically, he touched the holster of his 9mm- it felt warm, in anticipation; shook his head warily and walked away- relief and luck, he thought, too often graced hypocrisy and ignorance.
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