Shivankar's Journal

It is quite possible that remarkable things do happen when one imbibes alcohol, especially of the exotic kind. In My Talks with Dean Spanley, Lord Dunsany writes that the Hungarian Imperial Tokay wine is known to cause the drinker to go into a trance which brings forth visions of his past life. The Dean, who is otherwise a fine gentleman, finds himself remembering, and enacting, canine-like behaviour after two glasses of vintage Tokay which presumably suggests a previous life of lower birth. I haven’t been able to determine if there was any truth in Lord Dunsany’s tale as Hungarian Imperial Tokay wine is hard to come by for a man of modest means such as myself.

I have found myself drinking alcohol of mysterious provenance quite frequently in the dingy backrooms of liquor stores here deep in Southern India. I enter one store that I’ve grown fond of, and greet the man I call the Innkeeper. He does not understand, but recognizes me and takes me to my table. I ask for his finest wine, and he smiles, not understanding a word again, and places a grimy looking bottle down in front of me. I take a swig and wait. Nothing happens. The Innkeeper is amused. He has seen me do it everyday.

I remember being mystified with the food too, as I tried once to determine the species of meat served to me by checking the length of the thigh bone of the animal. It seemed to be a small four legged mammal. I wonder if the unfortunate animal wandered into the kitchens unknowing of its fate. 

I measured dimensions one day of bones that suggested a human origin. My eyes widened as I looked at my plate. There was talk of a brawl that occurred the previous day. Not all the fighters survived it. Were all the bodies accounted for?

It was when I landed on the shores of Tuticorin that I discovered a place that was quite simply extraordinary. I asked the locals where I might procure myself a drink that would induce, I described to them in exaggerated gestures, the mythical effects of Hungarian Imperial Tokay wine on Man. At this point I had begun to lose hope in my quest and was pleasantly surprised to find a sailor who claimed to know of a place that might serve such a drink. It was like no other bar I would have ever seen though, he warned. 

As I entered the place, I could see that the sailor was right. It was indeed like no bar that I had ever seen in my life. I found myself standing in a wide open space surrounded by the forest. It took me a while to locate the other patrons. They were seated on what looked like machans which were bigger than their traditional size. And purpose. These raised platforms weren’t built just for a hunter lying in wait for his prey. They had tables on them where the patrons were served their meal.

I stared in amazement. I quickly understood how this place worked. A keen eyed patron would notice something rustling in the bushes and indicate his desire to eat it. If the hunter happened to be at the table, he would get out of his chair and fall to the floor in the prone position and take aim. If the animal emerged out into the open, a shot would ring out and a while later, it would appear on the table. Cooked, of course.

Not everyone got their meal served this way though. The process of spotting an animal, shooting it and cooking it happened quite infrequently. Most patrons simply picked a meal from the regular menu. Eating meat so fresh that you could probably taste the fear in the animal was a rather costly affair.

I sat beside the hunter that day. He turned out to be a veteran of the Second World War. His unfortunate circumstances following the war reduced him to working as a hired killer of small animals. There were no man-eaters in this part of the country he said, wistfully. Killing them would bring him glory. 

Did you ever shoot a man here, I asked him. It was a strange question to ask, but for some strange reason I expected him to answer in the positive. He was quiet for a moment. And then said yes. He did kill a man here. Men, actually. Accidentally and sometimes on purpose. 

I could imagine drunk patrons wandering about even though they were warned to remain seated in their machans during hunting hours. And finding themselves in the line of fire as they emerged from a bush. But why were men killed on purpose, I asked. 

Men do strange things under the influence of alcohol, he replied. I understood what he meant. They might fight with other men or try to force themselves upon women. A warning shot usually brought peace again. But was there something else they did, I asked. Something bizarre that he had never witnessed before. Perhaps a man remembering his previous life?

The hunter looked at me with a curious expression on his face. There was this drink, he couldn’t remember its name, which made men become strangely fascinated with rabbits. Rabbits, I asked, intrigued. He nodded. There were hundreds of rabbits in this part of the forest and somehow this drink awakened some primal desire in men to chase the little creatures around. It was later that he discovered that they weren’t running after the rabbits to scare them, but were following them instead. 

Following rabbits, I asked, incredulous. He nodded again. And asked me if I had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I had read it, many times in fact. Well, the men seemed to follow the rabbits and go somewhere, he said. And always narrated the most bizarre tales when they returned, though strangely sober.

What sort of bizarre tales, I asked. Did they meet the Mad Hatter and see the Cheshire Cat? He laughed. Nothing so fanciful, he replied, they merely saw animals which they believed were themselves in their past lives. One woman even saw an otter and described its feeding habits to me.

I could not contain my joy. I had finally found what I was looking for. The name of the drink was still unknown to me, the hunter said Tokay wine was not available here, so it had to be something else. I ordered a bottle of Army Rum and rolled up my sleeves. It seemed like a good place to begin. 

May this be a glorious year for you all.

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I have come to realize that this journal may never be used the way it was intended to be. Finding to my dismay that I was not recording many remarkable events in my life that usually fade away from my memory as I grow older, I wondered if it was probably because they never took place.

I have had trouble in differentiating fact from fiction before, frequently remembering events that may have happened only within the confines of my mind. They seem real to me, but no one seems to bear any recollection of it. They consider large parts of my journal to be fictitious.

I shall attempt then, to go into the deepest recesses of my mind, to the places where past events are recorded without the embellishments of fiction, and reproduce them in this journal. It is true that I have picked up my journal on some of my darkest days, in the depths of my despair, to write down my thoughts hoping that it would provide some clarity to a clouded mind, but sadly I haven’t been able to write a word. My wretched existence doesn’t seem worthy enough to write about. I feel alone without my characters.

But you aren’t alone, says a familiar voice in my head. I look around and see a shadowy female presence. I glare at her. I have sworn to tell the truth henceforth, I tell her. No more fanciful tales of buxom buccaneers and galloping seahorses. My stories shall be grounded in reality. 

She sneers and calls me a lowly landlubber. That isn’t true and you know it, I tell her. She concedes, remembering our adventures on the high seas. She is still fond of me, I see. Don’t do this to yourself, she says, imploringly. You are still the Lampooner. 

I lean back, stunned. No one has called me by that name in a long time. I am engulfed by memories of an earlier time. A time when I did not bother about my disheveled appearance. Or my bank balance. It was a happier time. I spent most of it lost in thought, trapped in a fictional world of my own making. That world still remains, she reminds me.

I have grown older, I tell her. What if I’ve grown old enough to see a stuffed toy instead of a fine coated animal companion, I ask. You will always see Hobbes the way he is meant to be seen, she replies. I begin to tear up. I see the ship. I see the Deckswabbin’ Devi. I see the Captain. Perhaps some day I will return to the shores for good. But, now it is time for me to sail again. 

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It was quite amusing that the greatest seducer of the Space Age turned out to be from a third world galaxy called the Milky Way. It was a backward area by every standard, but it stood out in one way. It contained a planetary system that evolved life differently. In a universe populated with species which had a dominant birthing gender, the planets of Sol made their birthing females second class. It was an anomaly in evolution, hypothesized historians, but why did it continue to remain so, they asked. Long into the 24th century of the Solar calendar, their women still spent most of their lives in the kitchen. Perhaps they resisted change argued a popular theory. Or their species was afflicted by a crippling lethargy that slowed down social advancement. Their technological advancement was certainly slow by universal standards. It wasn’t a long time ago when they began to venture out of their star system. They wouldn’t have reached the border outpost of Alpha Centauri in a thousand years at this rate if it wasn’t for a scientific discovery that leapfrogged centuries of regular, non-lethargy afflicted research.

Ironically enough, the discovery was called the Faith Propulsion Drive. After a long history of war between the supporters of blind faith and the representatives of science, the single greatest achievement of their species turned out to be a combination of the two. Their prominent religion started dying out in the 22nd century of their calendar and would have almost been forgotten if it wasn’t for the oversight of one of their governments. In a routine mission to a neighbouring planet, a man who became an astronaut despite his inclination to religion, which was overlooked during the qualification exam due to a clerical error, found himself abandoning his faith in the one true God as the spacecraft lost control and hurtled towards certain doom. Invoking, in a moment of desperation, an obscure God who was believed to have presided over the lives of a fringe tribe of the Amazon for a period of three hundred and forty two years until they died out from natural causes, he was surprised to find that The God answered, and the spacecraft teleported, quite magically, into a deserted location of the Kuiper belt. After a moment of staring in wide eyed wonder, the astronaut prayed for a safe return back to his planet. In a later investigation, after dozens of interviews with the astronaut and his crew who made it back home safely, it was determined that the combination of the prayer to the long forgotten God and the presence of an ancient relic which was, quite coincidentally, a talisman blessed by that God and carried as a funny looking bauble by another crew member created a situation where a miracle was performed. The scientists concluded the investigation with a note that the miracle was going to be currently called an unexplained phenomenon and left further analyses to their colleagues in the future. They were only certain of one thing though. Humanity could not simply seek divine help to fix itself. Not every prayer to the God, more specifically the frivolous ones, would be considered. Only the critical ones (the choosing of which, no one could explain) were answered and acted upon. Interstellar travel somehow fell into the list of requests that got divine approval.

Ion thruster engines were subsequently stripped out of spacecrafts and replaced with idols made out of the sand found in the Amazon, which was used to create the talisman. Its properties were as yet undetermined, so it was simply called magic sand and it was mined for many years to supply the construction of the Faith Propulsion Drive. Astronauts were now selected on the basis of their piety, and logical thinkers found themselves grounded in desk jobs. 

Giacosmo was not a very pious man though. As a child, he frequently disobeyed the new one true God. Two centuries had passed since the rediscovery and rebirth of this one True God and an organized religion had sprung up about Him. The neo-shamans were probably very unlike the original ones who dictated the lives of the tribesmen of the Amazon. Giacosmo despised religion even though he knew that this one actually worked.  

It was at a later point in Giacosmo’s childhood, that he discovered women. 

It was a dull Sunday afternoon at the club. I could see young gentlemen strewn about in varying degrees of immobility. It wasn’t a mystery how they ended up here. Not to us in the club anyway. These men were sent on errands by their womenfolk, never to return, at least until sundown.

I spotted Proffie amongst a group of fascinated gawpers near a cuckoo clock. They were waiting for the bird to emerge, they said. I raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t an ordinary cuckoo clock, they replied. The automaton was made in the image of a rare bird which was the last of its kind. It promptly died after the clockmaker added the last touch to his wooden creation. I had no idea there were many species of the cuckoo bird. One learns new things in the unlikeliest of places.

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading the papers. “Has war broken out?” asked Proffie, walking in. The elusive bird still hadn’t showed itself. No one knew what hour it chose to herald the passage of time.

I put the papers down. “I’m afraid not. The Grecian states had a tiff over a princess, but the League of Nations settled the matter.”

“What did they do?”

“They sent her to a nunnery in Vienna.”

“Shame.”

“Indeed.”

The prospect of peace dulled our spirits. We were born in the wrong era, we decided. Too late for the swords and sorcery of the Dark Ages and too early for an overthrow of humanity by mechanical men. We sighed in unison.

“Look at the Financial section. Perhaps its time for a collapse.”

I shook my head. Everyone seemed to be paying their debts on time.

It was nearing nightfall when Proffie and I heard the joyous screams of the bird watchers. The cuckoo had been spotted. We did not notice the man who must have walked in unnoticed in the midst of our celebrations and was now sitting in our chair and reading the paper.

“Are you a doctor?” asked Proffie, studying his appearance.

“No,” replied the man, who was middle aged and smoking a pipe, “I am an anthropologist.”

He proceeded to tell us a tale so bizarre, I would not have believed it if it weren’t for the sadness in his eyes. The eyes don’t lie.

He pointed at the picture in the papers. It showed a vase painted in different shades of red.

“Can you identify the colours?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Neither can I,” replied the man, “I’ve marvelled at the ability of women to perceive shades of colour like cerulean or fuchsia but it turns out there might be an unknown number of women who see many more colours than the average woman. These tetrachromats, as they’re called, can see a hundred million colours, which if I may say so, is like looking at a world painted in a palette of colours beyond our imagining.”

We were amazed. What did they see when they gazed upon in wonder at the sun rising over the sea?

The average eye had three types of cone cells he explained, which meant we could see up to a million different shades of colour. The tetrachromats had four types of cone cells, which activated a super vision. There was possibly a fifth type too, he said uncertainly.

“A fifth? Wouldn’t that mean the existence of a mythical pentachromat?” asked Proffie.

“Yes.”

“What would they see? The colours that only exist in an astral plane?”

“Strangely enough, that is probably what they see. I have had the misfortune of being married to a woman who could see these colours and insisted that our house be painted in a colour of the fifth scale. I could not perceive this magical colour unfortunately, by virtue of being a mere trichromat, so I found myself surrounded by four walls painted in the greenest hue of a singularly awful tinge of purple. My vision was overwhelmed after a year and I saw spots dancing around everywhere I looked. Our marriage ended and I now live in a house painted in the white of clouds and Heaven.”

“She sounds like a fascinating woman,” I replied, “What became of her?”

“She is awfully fascinating, indeed. The last I heard of her, she worked as the royal outfitter for a certain European monarch who I cannot name. She unveiled her masterpiece on the day of his wedding, a suit like no man hath worn before. No one knew the colour of cloth she used to make the suit, but our eyes could not perceive it no matter how hard we squinted. We could only see the Emperor appearing as the day he was born. The wedding did not go well. She seemed to have escaped in the ensuing chaos. I have not seen her since.”

The anthropologist also told us of his dreams where she appeared; she was always dressed in colours of the fifth scale. He could not look at her directly but he longed for a glimpse of her. Miserable at being reminded of her again, he excused himself and left. We never saw him again.

——————————————

What was the origin of the extinct cuckoo clock? Proffie and I discover the shocking secret behind its creation in a later chapter.

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The End.

I have been gloriously lazy for a while now. My lethargy puts sloths to shame. It has taken a toll on my personal life. But what about the lives of others?

Civilisations have died out when I have chosen sleep over writing. Plots have been left unresolved as I step away from my desk never to return for months. My cliffhangers are unintentional.

It is terrible sometimes. Characters abandoned mid-birth. Half fleshed out. It is a motif that appears a lot in my writing. Why do I write about aborted character creation? 

Epiphanies are dramatic. Characters, on the other hand, pop into your head with lesser fanfare. As if they’ve been around all along. Maybe they get activated as you grow older. Come out of their birth pods as you hit a certain age. A puberty of sorts. Why do I live with characters much younger than myself? Does my mind have a different age? Am I a childlike person? When will I see the birth of mature characters? 

Or were they never there in my mind to begin with? That scares me.

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Coco drifts further away from me with each passing day. And yet, I refuse to write about her. It is a sickness. 

But there is some humanity left in me. I bring her back. It is hard though. Writing is like stepping into a mirror. The other side is unreal. As you return, you realise that you have left a part of you behind. How much of us remains when we have written our last tale? Have we lost most of ourselves to the other side?

Coco has no other name. She is a character without depth. I cannot give her depth. For I lack knowledge of her background. 

Coco is from Kerala. The land of coconuts. It is said that the men of Malabar have used every part of the coconut tree to build their civilisation. She loves coconuts. 

I cannot speak Malayalam. Neither can she. She could, if I could. I wish she would leave me and appear in another writer’s head.

She does not leave. The islanders of Vypin Island have never left their land. Ever.

Vypin Island has never been invaded. The islanders have defended themselves through recorded history. Even the British never stood a chance. 

That is not history. It is a version of the truth I made up for myself as I grew up in a land far away from Vypin Island. Coco claims that she fought alongside the island’s warriors. I believe her.

Sleep overcomes me as I write the story. The man who lives in my head watches the world collapse around him as the mind slowly loses consciousness and begins to go into a dream state. What horrors might he see when I plunge into a nightmare? He hopes to make it through alive.

I disappear. He steps up and takes control of I. The first person is now in his control. He is the narrator.

I have always narrated his dreams. He loved listening to my voice. It echoed through his head, he said. He summoned me at times during the day. He found himself out of his depth frequently. So he merely observed. He could be detached that way. Recording events. And I would then narrate it to him.

There were no mundane moments in his life. I would not let that happen. He found the daily existence uninteresting. Banality bored him. He pitied the people who led dull lives. He had no idea that his was no different.

I engaged the services of colourful people. Characters. I found them in his head when I got here. I don’t know where they came from. The characters played their parts well. His life was dramatized right before his eyes.

Conversation was rewritten into dialogue. Emotions were amplified. Life became more interesting.

And unlike him, I knew precisely how every story should end.

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I kept her locked up in my head. A version of her that I conjured up with my imagination. She would be my muse. A person whose only task was to inspire me by her mere presence. To irrigate my fertile mind with creative juices.

She did it uncomplainingly. I suppose she had no reason to complain. My head was well equipped for inhabitation. A lot of characters lived there. And they’ve seen muses come and go. I think they have always had a weird relationship with my muses. It’s hard to behave normally with someone or something that plays such a huge part in your lives, I suppose. The characters knew that. Their life stories depended on my muses. If my muse was being moody or temperamental, they remained in stasis, unwritten and forgotten.

Many a time, my muse would leave me, in search of better opportunities. “You don’t write often enough,” she would say and walk out of my head. I wonder where they would go. Whose heads did they live in now? Could one of them have inspired a major work of literature? I would have been proud. It wouldn’t be my work but I would like to think that I played a small part in its creation.

Was that why a writer’s work would sometimes bear a strong resemblance to another’s work, I wondered. Did they share muses? Was a writer’s stylistic flourishes and his characters’ idiosyncrasies encoded in the muse’s DNA? Can muses travel between minds? I fear I approach the realm of the metaphysical. I cannot answer these questions.

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I remember a time when I thought I shared a muse with another writer. That was the only plausible explanation. How could someone be so in sync with me? So similar in thought and expression. If the external factors were the same, every variable a perfect copy of each other, she and I would weave the exact same tale. It was so inexplicable that it bordered on the supernatural. Can two writers be so connected they would write the same story every single time in a perfect vacuum devoid of external influences? They had to share the same muse. Or did muses have soulmates of their own? Was I letting my head out to a muse who had a soul mate living in someone else’s head? And I would never meet this other person, even though I wrote and felt the same things she did. Tragic.

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I am a failed writer. My muses have always worked on minimum wage. They get paid in fame, I suppose. Because fame goes to the head. Money goes to my body. I haven’t got money or fame. The little attention I get from my stories goes to keeping my muse happy. Fortunately, she isn’t a high maintenance gal. There are lean times though. When no one reads my stories. Or remembers them. And my muse changes. From a feisty woman bursting with ideas to a disaffected slacker. I take care to keep my stories well read. I might not make money out of them but I could get a laugh out of someone. People like it when you narrate stories to them when they don’t expect it. It interrupts the monotonous nature of the mundane segments of everyone’s lives, I suppose. They like it when the writer tells them a story as they wait for a bus. Or when he is struggling to keep with up your brisk pace as you walk to someplace as he tells the story, waving his hands about and talking, seemingly oblivious to the people around him. He does not care because it keeps his muse happy. She is clapping her hands gleefully as her writer tells his story. She can see that the lady he is talking to loves every word. But he does not see it. He is either in a trance, his head full of characters who are on stage acting out their roles as he narrates the story, or he does not understand women well. She does not know which one it is.

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My muse loves romance. She demands to be wooed, more than I have ever wooed a woman in my life. No line, no matter how cheesy it is, fails to work on her. You are my Goddess in a Godless world, I tell her. How could I live without you?

For the longest time I have written in a confined space. A space that I call the writer’s habitat. I become a different person when I inhabit this space. To an external observer I might even appear irrational and insane. I speak volubly, seldom coherently, addressing inanimate objects that don’t answer back. I pace about, gesticulating in a body language of no known vocabulary. The observer might shake her head sadly, mutter something about failed lineages and go back to her activities. I remain oblivious, continuing my routine.

The habitat is not extraordinary because of its physical features. It is not aesthetic on an architectural level. Nor is it a place filled with natural beauty. It is merely a place that one is familiar with. Familiarity that builds enough trust to let you revel in your own imagination.

And I have reveled, on my own in solo adventures or ponderous monologues, and with people that only my mind’s eye can see in travels to places beyond human exploration, talking to them, listening, laughing, and breaking down in sorrow when they die, knowing fully well that they would return some other time. I pace about the room, covering kilometers, sometimes light years, reaching far out places and meeting people in encounters that last for minutes or span centuries. My habitat breaks down barriers, brings in historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, and I find myself staring intently at a face off between a pirate captain and a ninja assassin squad. The pirate captain is a recurring character in these journeys of the mind. Not of my own volition though. She defied the class system of literature. Designed to be of lesser birth than even a secondary character, she engineered a plot twist that killed off my protagonist and stepped in his shoes. With my handsome hero sent off page across a plank, she drove the plot along to a reasonably good ending. How she manages to come back time and again into my thoughts disregarding my hostility to her is a good question that I cannot answer. Perhaps she is a facet of my personality that I have hidden deep inside me. Nevertheless, Cap’n Hooker as she calls herself gained resident status in my habitat, a place where thoughts and people were ephemeral and permanence was a state of being unheard of before.

There were others to follow soon. Other characters began showing up uninvited and overstaying their welcome. It began to affect me. I could no longer meet deadlines. The construction of a story would go on schedule and suddenly a character would appear, a Victorian gentleman named Foogy Foplin right in the middle of a conference between the planetary leaders of the Milky Way in the 22nd century. I would try to shoo him out, explaining that he was ripping the fabric of space and time. Oh, if I may point out, he would interject, the fabric of fiction is more elastic. Elastic enough to explain his anachronistic presence and he would pull out his pistols in a flourish and offer his services as a coloniser. The leaders, having read of the exploits of 19th century Englishmen in the colonies of Earth, would offer their daughter’s hands in marriage to him if he would lead their forces against the enemy galaxies. I would throw my hands up in despair at this moment and let the tale weave itself. The author’s agency was lost at this point and the characters would begin to express free will. I could even perhaps leave the habitat while this happened if it weren’t for my role in penning down the story. I became a mere chronicler of the events happening in my mind.

In the years that followed, I began to spend more time outside the habitat. The outside world was charming and I would meet people with their own habitats. They had different names for it. Some of them called it their perches and their windows. And I would become an external observer. I wished I could see what they saw when they stepped into their habitats. I would follow their gaze but only see blank walls. What were they painting on them? I knew that as they would not see what I saw in my habitat, I could not see what they saw in theirs. That saddened me.

Later I would learn to share a habitat. Know so much about a person that her habitat became mine. And mine hers. Our characters would cross over into our respective universes. Stories would have two narrators instead of one. We would share histories.

And still later, I would be sent out of the other habitat. Forever. I would go back to mine, taking my characters with me. I would leave some of them behind, the ones birthed from two minds, unable to function in the presence of just one.

The days that followed would find me lonely. The habitat, forgotten in that period, would be a dark place where nothing happened. I returned to it in a morose mood and it lit up. Hands grabbed me and I found myself being pulled up into a hot air balloon. I was over Paris. Not a Paris that I knew. A tropical Paris. Why don’t you get your geography right, I screamed at the Captain. Paris be damned, she answered. “My ship has been stolen. And I have to get it back,” she said. I stared at her in surprise. How did they steal your ship from right under your feet, I asked. Oh, it’s a long story, she sighed as we entered the clouds and faded away.