God in heaven, how I love being alive! The amount of shit one has to face up to is unbelievable. It never gets boring for one moment. It starts from the moment one wakes up in the morning. No, not at dawn in my case, god forbid! To be frank, I have never seen a dawn in my life, dusks and desks yes, plentiful, but no dawn as yet.
I had often heard my father dispassionately remark to the visitors at my house.
“Who my son? He usually warms up his butt in the sun before waking up.”
Well raising children can be hard. My father raised five children. He did not need any further divine illumination at all. By the time we all grew up he was a liberated soul. He had all the pros and cons of life fully worked out by then.
The poor man was an early riser. “The early to bed” type. I was a nocturnal being right from the start.
I was born at night, and have some strange affinity to it. I come alive only at the night fall. May be I was Count Dracula in my former life. Some say that Dracula is not dead and is somewhere in a coffin guarded by the gypsies. Perhaps I am him and am still living in a coffin. And possibly it is my astrally projected body that is doing all this, who can tell!
If so, the sorry fact is I can’t do a single interesting thing like Mr. Dracula at all, like crawling up walls on all fours, vanishing like a mist into the thin air, conjuring up thick fogs when needed, controlling the wolves by the packs and deploying them anywhere he wanted and ordering elements of nature around etc. All these would have been nice gifts to have at certain moments in your life. The vanishing act in particular. I know you would also agree on this point- everybody would, friend, everybody would!
Well the only consolation is that I might still be able to drink a little bit of blood even without fangs. But the problem is how do I check whether my victim’s blood matches my own blood group? I can’t carry a medical kit around and politely ask every one I meet:
“My friend can I take a blood sample from you to check whether you belong to my own food source or not?”
Can I? Hardly!
And even in direct blood transfusion the wrong blood gets rejected. I rely on my sweet friends to verify this statement. As to the eternal doubters asking “do not the vampires drink blood directly?” I can only say this:
No my friends, according to my information you are entirely wrong. It is not by digesting blood that vampires live. It’s by injecting it into their veins. That is what keeps the body fresh. A dead body can’t digest anything.
Interesting character Dracula. He must have been a yogi to have such powers over elements- definitely a poor and misguided soul. Yet what is wrong with following any of your inner urges as long as you are satisfied with the results. You can even kill if you want but escaping from the consequences is the toughest part. You can’t have both. Killing and saving your ass for all time. People have tried and failed.
Anyway coming back to dawns, I think the only chance I have of ever seeing a dawn is when I am posted to do election duty. No one can sleep during the preceding night at all, what with setting the booth and swatting flies and worrying about going to the toilet on the morrow in distant and inhospitable nooks and corners of the country. (Some of my colleagues tell me that it is particularly irritating to have the light breeze touching your naked butt in the open. I never had the guts to experiment on those lines. Only the lucky ones get posted in good localities. The sacrifices that we poor civil servants make to uphold democracy!)
As you can see I can’t look at dawn in any aesthetic way at such horrible moments of my life. Even the brightest of dawns would look like the blackest cow’s ass to me then. This is no mere fancy rhetoric. Honest to god, I have seen a black cows ass and that too on a daily basis for some years; we had some cows at home when I was young.
I still remember my uncle trying to milk one of them and being kicked away by it into the dung ditch on the other side of the cowshed. I was standing to one side in the rear and holding her luxurious tail up for uncle to work more comfortably. And of course I was directly looking at the cow’s ass. I missed her tremendous thwack by the proverbial whisker, the leg just scraping mine in its quick karate kick on the crouching body of my uncle.
The cow kicks by throwing her leg just a little forward and back in a lightening motion. It all happens so very quickly that a Red Belt in Karate would fail to notice the actual kick. The effect is deadly. The country cows are small, but have very bad tempers. They intensely dislike some one touching their sensitive parts especially with rough hands like that of my uncle. He applies oil on it in preparation for the milking job, but that had very little effect on his rough concrete palms.
My uncle was a fierce customer too, country born and country bred. He picked himself up from the dung ditch and roaring “You bitch” smashed a flat and heavy plank onto her broad back. It was a mighty and resounding blow. I was rooted to the spot even forgetting to run away. The cow buckled under the smash and knelt down and tried repeatedly to get back on her legs ineffectively. Big tears fell from her eyes. Not a sound had come out of her mouth.
The noise of the blow had echoed through out the entire area and people came running to see what had happened. Some remonstrated:
My god, it’s a mute animal, did you think about that.
Monster, you broke its back.
Well like always I have started on one thing and seems to be nicely progressing to every thing else but that. Perhaps this is a new genre of prose. The inexact variety. Well any way I am not dishing out world literature am I? Perhaps no one is even reading these. Why should they, their own life is filled with enough shit to care for that of others.
As I was saying I dislike waking up in the morning and I am just like anyone else in that case. I know you are surprised. Let me tell you a secret, I am just like you and other people are. I know that it would take some time for you to digest this fact. Yet there it is.
Just before waking up is the most wonderful moment of my sleep. May be now it is the sweet kisses of my wife that is waking me up. But that has little importance. I still love my blissful sleep.
Many others do not bother about sleep at all.
I have seen Doctors work round the clock, no, no I am not kidding, it is the honest truth, and the work they do is great. The other day my mother had a bit of chest pain. I was urgently called to my home in the village at around 1 ‘O” clock in the morning. She thought she was going to die and wanted to see her first born (That is yours truly). It was a chilly night and I had to ride through the chill to my ancestral home. Perhaps it was the chill which saved me form dozing off on my bike.
She was in bed and was in pain. I took her to a hospital near where I am now. When she was admitted it was around 3 ‘O” clock in the morning. There were a lot of preliminaries. Registration admission, payment and what not. Every soul at the hospital was fast asleep and had to be kicked into action. And the duty doctor also had to be woken up to examine the patient; the poor girl was all sleepy. Well it was an untimely hour if there was any.
The duty doctor was not at all sure about her diagnosis. So she called up the MD General Medicine at his home. I can never understand how the guy’s brain functions at that deadly hour especially after being called up. He was precise in his instructions and the duty doctor carried them out. I had no sleep of course; it was my mother who was in pain. But this wonder of a doctor came to the Hospital at 7 in the morning and was on his rounds at about 9 ‘O” clock in the morning, unbelievable. When does the poor bastard sleep?
There are such souls in the world too as against people like me who has to work their butts off from 10 to 5. I am not complaining though.
Some of us have to suffer for well being of others!
Ah! My friend, that is how life is!
No comments:
Post a Comment