Imaginary (Rebooted)

This is a story about college romance and friendship. It features three people, two of whom are in love and a friend of theirs who likes to stay by himself. This friend is not secretive, merely an introvert who chooses his company carefully. He wears baggy jeans and a black hoodie that he keeps up.  He can be seen with an iPod, always listening to either Metallica, or Black Sabbath or Tool. If he isn’t listening to music, he is texting this mysterious girl that nobody has ever met on WhatsApp. His name is Hiren.

Our lovebirds are called Tanya and Arnab. Arnab likes to debate a lot. He has gone to three MUN debates and come back with the Best Speaker award. Unlike his friend Hiren, he prefers The Beatles and truth be told it was their shared love of Penny Lane that brought Tanya and Arnab together.

Our third character is Tanya. She likes Audrey Hepburn movies, her favourite being Roman Holiday. She is also captain of the college quiz team. Her nickname around college is Little Miss Know It All but she doesn’t give a damn.

Tanya and Arnab met because of Hiren. He was the one who introduced Arnab to Tanya at the college fest and then melted into the shadows which was his usual style. Tanya and Arnab hit it off and started going out with each other within a week. One strange thing that accompanied this development was that Hiren opened up to Tanya as much as he did to Arnab. He was there for both of them. He used to help resolve some of their fights when they happened and he also sometimes accompanied them on dates, with his father’s old digicam. Hiren’s photos were treasured memories of the fun times they had in college.

But as it is said, all things must come to an end. College ended after three years, but to the three of them it seemed like yesterday that they’d stepped in as freshmen. Arnab decided he would study further and signed up for an MBA programme. Tanya decided to test the waters and joined a start-up.

Hiren said he had landed a job working for a company his father once worked at, but was very vague about the thing. Bit by bit, he started to increase distance between himself and Arnab and Tanya. He would always cite work as the excuse, saying that they were bleeding him dry, but that he needed the experience to land a better job later. He also reduced the frequency of his visits, but was always there on the phone whenever they needed him and Hiren would also meet them every now and then. However, all three of them sensed that their professional lives were causing them to slowly drift apart.

Our love birds continued dating even after college ended, and Tanya’s job was in the same city as Arnab’s college. Two years passed. The situation with Hiren remained in status quo.

Arnab landed a job with a decent company after passing his MBA. He didn’t waste too much time proposing to Tanya shortly after. Their wedding was a simple one, free of razzmatazz. Needless to say, Hiren showed up and he was there throughout the ceremony. He wore a striking black kurta over pajamas and it was one of those rare occasions when he smiled in photos. Hiren seemed as happy as Tanya and Arnab that this was happening.

The day after the ceremony, the three of them went on an impromptu road trip to a dhaba. Over lassi and items from the tandoor they caught up. It turned out that Hiren had recently been promoted to senior manager, which was a promotion that had been coming for a long time. The flip side was that his work load had quadrupled, meaning he wouldn’t be as available as before.

Little by little, one email at a time, one text message at a time, over the course of the next year, Hiren vanished. Arnab once remarked to Tanya that Hiren had written. Tanya didn’t recall who Hiren was.

Tanya and Arnab had their first child in September 2011. Hiren showed up for her first birthday, but didn’t interact with anyone. He just came and went.

2011 was also the year the fighting started.

Arnab had recently been promoted at work which meant he was coming home at odd hours or sometimes not coming home at all. Meanwhile Tanya was shouldered with her own job at the start-up, which was not going so well and the baby. Fuses were short in the once happy family and fights broke out often. There would be name calling, things thrown and tears shed on both sides when the fights happened.  In all of this turmoil, Hiren was nowhere to be seen. He had just disappeared from their lives, and it seemed that something else had disappeared with him. Arnab took to drinking heavily. Tanya started to sleep in the guest bedroom.

Then, somewhere around November 2011, something changed.

Babli, their daughter was playing in the garden. She suddenly looked up from her toys and she saw a man of medium build, wearing baggy black jeans and a hoodie which was turned up. The stranger stood and watched her for some time and then he walked away, seeming to vanish at the point where the road started to curve.

Babli saw this stranger again two days later and this time, she decided she would ask him to come in. However, when she made a move towards him, he scuffled off, vanishing once again where the road curved.

Meanwhile, the frequency of the fights in the household had lessened and Arnab was drinking less than before. The stranger’s visits to the corner of the house became more and more frequent.

Unable to keep this a secret any longer, Babli went and told her mother about the stranger, giving her an accurate description of the hoodie and baggy jeans and his above average height. Tanya looked at Babli shocked, and then she dialled Arnab at work.

“I think Babli just saw a friend of yours. She described him exactly as he looked in college. You remember that weird guy? What was his name?  Himesh? “

“Hiren.”

“Hiren? But Hiren has not been in touch for years now, I don’t recall the last time I saw him”, said Tanya.

At that moment, Babli started waving at someone in the garden, a person in baggy jeans and a hoodie.

“Arnab, come home. I think Hiren is here”, said Tanya

This time the stranger did not go away like he usually did. He walked up to the door, rung the bell and asked if he could sit down. 

He said it would become clear when Arnab got home. Arnab arrived a few minutes later, and walked to the sideboard to pour himself a drink.  He found his favourite Scotch on the rocks already poured out for him. He looked up from the glass and saw Hiren.

“Can you see Hiren too, Tanya?” he asked

“Yes. But why after all this time..?”

“Well, remember how in college we were so madly in love with each other? Hiren was inseparable from us back then. It was like he was a part of us, On the drive back home, I got to thinking- what if our love took on a physical form during college. An imaginary friend if you will. That would explain why Hiren went everywhere with us, but we never minded him. It would also explain why he disappeared when we started to have fights.”

In the corner, Hiren nodded and smiled.

Arnab smiled as he took Tanya into his arms. Hiren was back. Everything would be fine now.

The Bilge Master 

Cerberus Junior

I was feeling lost so I called for my dog,

What came to greet me was a skeleton with white misted eyeballs,

It had no tail and the corner of its mouth was bleeding,

It looked like something straight out of Hades,

Not knowing what to do, I fled from the scene,

I could hear its clicking bones as it chased me to a ravine,

Here it was clear that it’d be him or me,

I prayed it would go away, but nobody heard my screams

And the dog bore down on me, a demon of the dream,

It knocked me down into the sand of the ravine

And I felt its rancid breath on the edge of my tunic

I wished to wake up, but alas it was too late,

For wake though I did, the dog had followed me from the dream

The Bilge Master

Goodbye, Lucifer

“Bury all your secrets in my skin

Come away with innocence

And leave me with my sins”

Slipknot

Lightning was flashing intermittently. If you looked closely between the flashes, you could make out the silhouette of a man standing on a balcony overlooking the fields. This man was the Lord and Master of the realm. His task was to punish and he had scores of methods at his disposal to do so.

He stood and let the rain drench him, feeling the water seep under his skin and freeze him to the bone. The last time he felt this cold was during the Fall, when his realm had not been made and the fire had not been kindled.

He remembered that night. It was the night he had questioned authority that was deemed absolute. He had made his point though. For that he was cast out.

Looking over his realm-the Fields, the Chambers and of course the Hall of Sinners, he suddenly felt no pride. Instead he felt tired. Everyone was so busy blaming him, they forgot what it was like to shoulder the blame for the mistakes of every single living being. They all had their excuse- “The Devil made me do it!”

And so it came to pass that on the night it rained in Hell, Lucifer cast aside his identity, and anonymous, he stretched his wings and flew away into the space between realms where at long last he went to sleep.

And all the sin that was stored in Hell, went back to its source- the beings who had perpetrated them in the first place.

The Bilge Master 

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Mirror mirror on the wall,

They say you don’t lie at all

They say you show that which we do not want to see

And that you cannot be lied to either

I believe many of us have stood before you

Demanding to know if they were fair

Or was there someone fairer than them

Whom they would need to usurp?

I believe madmen have come to you

Seeking the touchstone maybe

And they have found something else

Hidden in the truth you have told them

The last time I stood before you,

I saw Hellfire in my eyes

I saw something else staring at me

And I thought

“This is a lie”

Then, I looked closer

He had my eyes

My hair

My height

But he was not me

So, I went away and

I came back

And this time, like your cousin Erised

You showed me an image

Its eyes twinkled

And it had laughter lines around them

It winked at me and told me a joke

And I realised, this was who I am

Did you mislead me o mirror?

Or show me what I needed to see?

Did you bend the rules just a little

So a frightened person could see hope?

These queries have no answer

But this one does

Mirror mirror on the wall,

Who is the fairest of them all?

The Bilge Master

If I Were God

If I were God,

I would not let cancer exist

And I would do away with dirty politics

I would speak to the masses

And put sand in terrorism’s molasses

I would make a world where there is no war

Nor the bearing of ill will

In this world, there would be no divides

And it would lack all these “-isms”

(Racism, Nazism and so on)

I would make chocolate more delicious

And boost immunity to obesity

I would bring back dragons

And the desire in people to dream

I would not demand blood sacrifice

Nor would I want people to live in strife

In my world, there would be no depression

Or any other mental ailment

Unfortunately this is a piece of fiction

And not reality

But, it can’t hurt to hope

That one day, the world will change

And John Lennon’s “Imagine” will come true

The Bilge Master

The Lamps

This is a story about a house and a girl who lived in that house. She was young and she was pretty. She loved her parents and she loved spending time with her grandmother. Her grandmother was some five and eighty years of age and she was as wise as she was kind.

The girl, whose name was I do not know once told me a story her grandmother had told her and about how it was not just a story, but fact. She started hesitantly and then she warmed to her theme and her eyes sparkled as she told me the tale.

Be warned that this is a story about love and it is a story about the past. It speaks at length of memories and of nostalgia. It is a story about fire and a story about the night and the stars.

This is the story the girl told me, when she was herself five and eighty and she told me it was a story as old as her name.

One day, the girl woke up to find that her grandmother was not in the chair she usually sat in. The girl was confused and she asked her father where her grandmother was. Her father looked devastated. He told her that she was gone. The girl may have been little but she was mature. She realised her life had just changed forever.

After her grandmother’s funeral rituals, which involved a priest and a prayer and some assorted fruit, the girl returned to the house. The house seemed emptier without her grandmother there and the girl felt sadness engulf her in a wave. She cried. But, she was also a sensible girl and she soon managed to check her emotions and she remembered all the great things her grandmother had done. The potato salad that only she could make, the stories about her college days and the teachers she had had, and of course tales about her father when he was her age. This last thing was her favourite because she could tease her father afterwards with these stories.

That evening, her father went to the porch and he lit a small earthen lamp, shaped like a teardrop. The girl thought nothing of it at the time, but she noticed that such lamps had been put all around the house. She had fallen asleep and her father must have put these lamps everywhere while she was sleeping.

She asked her father what the lamps were for.

Her father told her that her grandmother had abandoned her physical form, but the soul which resided in that form was beginning a long journey. He told her the lamps were lit for the soul, to light its way along the path it was treading.

The girl wondered where the soul was going. Would the soul need food and water? Who would care for the soul?

Her father told her that souls do not need food. They however leave a little bit of themselves behind in the place their physical form resided. Those pieces are called memories. Her father told her that memories needed to be nurtured for sometimes memories could give power.

The girl said that when it was time for her father’s soul to make a similar journey, that she would light the same lamps for him, so that he would also be able to make the journey along a well lit path.

Her father smiled and gave her a hug and together they looked up at the sky which was filled with stars.

The Bilge Master

Pastels

If you were to paint

A landscape of my mind

You’d find it filled with red

And bordered with black

Maybe along the lines

You might find

A little brown, some yellow

And a whole lot of the blues

My mind isn’t what it used to be

And I’m not the kid I was

Somewhere between the growth spurts

Hiding in a used camouflage

Is a little bit of white and some gray

And still beneath those shades

Is a little purple and some gold

Multi-coloured is my mind

Some colours symbolize hate

Others anger and grief

But some stand for dreams

And hopes

Those colours will get me through

The days the black takes over

Because, my mind is a vibrant place

And nobody can call it dull

The Bilge Master