In Defense of Nonsense

[As the scene opens you hear,

Voices:

“Off with his head”

“The impostor,”

“The idolater (he believes in Buddha of all people)”

“The primordial biped”

“The bloody illiterate injian”

Then there is a scuffle, something falls down, and some one is seen running.

Enter on stage, the Scribe in abject terror, running for dear life, holding dearly on to the dilapidated computer of his, trying to type in words with a single digit in his hand. (He hasn’t learned typing; it’s an uphill task every time he tries to type anything)

Sounds of running feet coming nearer, the scribe cowers, and runs to a corner of stage trying furiously to finish what he was doing.

Enter on stage armed: Men and women boys and girls.

There is laughter and animated conversations,

Some of them shout.

Draw your weapons

Several draw their acronyms, and witticisms, glistening like sabers.

Shouts of “ Kill, kill “

They lunge in unison

The Scrivener falls, all bloodied over.

The scene darkens; infinite bathos is playing in the back ground.

When the scene lights up some one is rummaging in a garbage bin. He comes up with a machine, flat and damaged.

He opens it up and begins to read:]

"IN DEFENSE OF NONSENSE


I was reading Rebeca, and I was entranced.

How beautifully the prose moves,

rhythmic, undulating, shedding liquid light on unseen and minute substructure of sensitive experience.

[Oh God did I just write that, what would the Madame say?]

What a wonderful name -Daphne du…..Maurier …..Brings Eliot and scriptures back ….damyata ….

[You loafer, think you are him, who shook his spear during the reign of our majesty the queen Vittorio de sica?

Don’t be bombastic.

Eliot indeed,

and that da da da is from the epic Gilgamesh, not from any horrible injian scriptures.

I studied it for great many years at the Universal City]


Have I read Rebeca before?

May be, but it appears fresh at every new look.

-Oh no, I do not care for the slushy romanticism in the story,


romance murders me,

I am an unabashed believer in practical life.

(Don’t read too much into it, I am not amoral and even immoral)

I too had once caught the fever of platonic love in my teens, (damn Plato)

my, the pain and torment I underwent on those days!

It still brings tears of pity into my eyes for my former self.

-Platonic relationships- whew, not in the case of love my man, not in the case of love, may be in everything else.

As I had once fallen into the trap I was over cautious on all other occasions.

There was this incident where I was in a train at night and had the ill luck (others might call it sheer bliss) to get acquainted with a girl on the next birth.

I can’t sleep on a train,

it reminds me of cradles and rocking of mothers and aunts and women in general and about all who picks you up when you are little to pat, cuddle, squeeze, poke their noses into you and generally have fun with the soft little body. {Madame, my apologies again]

- It makes me feel helpless and dispirited.

- I need firm ground beneath me to sleep.

Well there was this girl and we got talking.

She was to get off the train some where in the middle of the night and so was sitting with eyes wide open

- and they were good eyes too, judging by the passing lights from stations.

Our portion was totally dark;

the holder of the bulb looked like an inverted mammary gland.

(Strong maternal imagery all through the post I see!)

[You mope; you said it was totally dark,

how did you see the holder then?

-Your esteemed honor, may I invite your kind attention to an earlier reference that I had the occasion to make?

-That of the passing lights?

I have 20/20 vision my lord.

I could see even in pitch darkness, or so some sweet nymphs say]

All the other wonderful people around us were sleeping as if they were doing their major in sleep and all else was subsidiary( may be they studied at the Universal City too)

- such was their total involvement in the sweet repose.

So she was in the middle birth and I was on the lower,

I was talking to her standing up out of politeness.

- Any thing could have happened then you know, other than the most bizarre, the proximity was such.

I had to struggle with the real villain inside me.

I was learning it the hard way that sometimes even faint smells would make people go crazy.

She was swishing the hair around a lot too. (Was it intentional?)

What the bloody hell…

Now she slithered down and sat on by birth and suddenly came up with a line which I hold in holy dread.

“You know, it is as if we have known each other for a long time.”

Lord God Almighty,

(this comes of being decent! she had me measured)

I bolted under the pretext of lighting a cigarette and had to spend rest of the time

(till she left the train)

in the corridor, praying to every known deity that she wouldn’t push any further on it,

and talking to some bums loitering there with an occasional nod to her from a distance.

Later that night I wished her good bye at last

( being of a good sort I had assisted her with her baggage too)

and she introduced me to her brother,

man, I had a terrible time 'hum'ing and 'haw'ing to him on the platform to dispel any doubts that he may hold of having something of the matrimonial line in the incident

-There was nothing wrong with her credentials mind you.

Employed, educated (she even taught me how to spell Quasi Govt- I wonder how that came up),

sensitive, (“there is moonlight outside isn’t there?”

Oh man, I can tell you, that one was tough under the circumstances.

It seemed pitch black to me all the time)

Not bad looking either,

somewhat wheat complexioned,

small in figure

(Me, 5 / 11 and a half inches, could turn a heavy iron rod umpteen times over head-

you get the idea, I hope

- would be the first to run in any dangerous situations too!)

small hands and feet,

nails polished black

(hate nail polish on women and abhor on men, some men in the country side have this habit.

My soul shudders at it every time I view one.)

Had great loads of hair and two very good eyes.

Nobody feels bad when such treasures fall into their laps out of the blue except perhaps yours truly.

No, no, don’t even dare to go there!

I can bring whole constellations into being if I want to.

At the time I was speaking of, I could have generated the bloody cosmic evolution it self.

-Man, you have to stop raising your eyebrows like that and mumbling,

“You hooded egotistical …….”,

I may have some chauvinism in me but it is not chronic and untreatable.

My fear of a girl’s affection stems from two other things altogether;

one is the great fear of responsibility.

Though I might tow the line once I was really caught,

I preferred not be caught at all and the other is this inherent weakness of mine,

can’t say no to a girl who professes to like me.

I can never be firm in such cases and would go through terrifying internal conflicts if I did,

having absolutely no judgment on these.

I still remember the incident when a girl offered me sweets at school and I had brashly declined it out of pride.

I thought she was not my type, if I had known any better then!

Whenever I recall it, I still sweat blood for my insensitiveness to her.

No kidding man, no one knows how I regretted it afterwards,

she would have long forgotten it by now, but not me my friends!

I had too many such experiences in my life with girls, not that I am an Apollo in human attire

- I have seen Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri look like a trillion bucks at the age of fifty-five-

It was a very sobering experience.

I am not hideous to look at, that is all.

But I wonder why it is always the other way round in my case all the time.

Normally men chase girls,

well, surprisingly every girl I got a little close to, sort of wants to cuddle me and play with me all the time!

(I must say that those that I keep at a distance hate me like hell,

or usually manage to portray that they do.

Some even glower at me for no reason at all!

Why I wonder!)

I may have the Eternal Child in me,

and may be I am projecting my child unbeknownst to myself to all and sundry.

I could gauge the maternal feeling coming through in them almost always,

there would be the gentle smile, the wistful look, the change in tone the sigh and the slight but ever so slight leaning towards me.

I hate that when it happens.

The end"

The man stopped reading and threw the note- book back into the bin.

He sighed:

“Lies are always more attractive than the truth.”

As the light slowly fades on stage he starts to sing.

“If non-sense could turn into petty pence
This man had it in abundance.
As the matter stands, he uttered sense
And was done in for his foolish-ness “

Closing chant as the curtain falls:

“He was pretty dense, he was pretty dense
He was pretty dense, he was pretty dense”

Finis

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