The argument.

The Argument

The Greeks were wrong about the sun; she is definitely a woman. I know her well. She often visits me, but not often enough. She prefers spending here time on Mediterranean beaches with richer people, foreigners mostly. I never complain. She comes here often enough to keep me hopeful. Until today. Today, perhaps because it was spring, she arrived unexpectedly in all her glory and made me perfectly happy.

I was astonished, grateful, and properly appreciative, of course. I lay basking in her golden warmth, a bit dopey and dozy but murmuring the sort of compliments which are appropriate at such time. I realized she was talking to me in a more insistent tone, so I occasionally said, “Yes” and “Mhm”.
At last she said, “You aren’t listening.”

“yes I am __” (I made an effort of memory) “__you were talking about your spots.

“what can I do about them”

“Honestly, Sun I don’t think they’re important.”

“Not important? Not important? Oh, it’s easy for you to talk like that. You don’t have to live with them.” I almost groaned aloud.
Whenever someone makes me perfectly happy they go on to turn themselves into a problem. I gathered my energies to tackle the problem.

I said, “your spots were first noted by Galileo in the sixteenth century, through his new improved telescope. Before that time you were regarded as the most perfect of all heavenly bodies.”

She gave a little wail: I said hastily, “but they aren’t permanent! They come and go! They’re there when you have a very spotty year the plants grow extra fast and thick,”

She hid her face and said, “Why can’t I have a perfect heavenly body like when I was younger? I haven’t changed. I’m still the same as I was then.” I tried to console her. I said, “Nobody is perfect.”

She said nothing.

I said, “Apart from a few top level physicists and astronomers, nobody gives a damn for your spots.”

She said nothing.

I said, “The moon has spots all over her and nobody finds those unattractive.”

The sun arose and prepared to leave. I gazed at her in horror, too feeble to move, almost too feeble to speak. I whispered, “What’s wrong?”

“You’ve just admitted seeing other planets when my back is turned.”

“Of Course, but not deliberately. Everybody who goes out at night is bound to see the moon from time to time, but I don’t see here regularly, like I see you”.
 She said, “Perhaps if I played hard to get you would find my spots interesting too. What a fool I’ve been to think that by giving myself up seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, a hundred years a century was the way to get myself liked and appreciated when all the time people prefer a flightily young bitch who borrows all her light from me! ME! Well, I’ve learned my lesson. From now on I’ll only come out once a fortnight, and then perhaps men will find my spots attractive too.”

And she would have left without another word if I had not jumped up and begged and pleaded and told her a lot of lies. I said a great deal had been discovered about sun spots since Galileo’s days, they were an electromagnetic phenomenon and probably curable. I said that next time we met I would have studied the matter and be able to recommend something more concrete. So she left me more in sorrow than anger and I will see her tomorrow. The thing about the sun is – she’s easy.

But I can never hope to be perfectly happy with her again. The sun is more interested in her spots than in here beams and is ready to blame me for them.

A love letter to the enemy.

A Love Letter to the Enemy

With us time doesn’t stop. It doesn’t end. It does not progress or rescind. It revolves.
It circles and rotates around the centre of anguish. If the muses were still alive they would sings songs about our lives. About your life and my life. For us there is only the season of sorrow. Outside it might be gold and clear. Inside there is perpetual bedlam and strife. There is a pulsating inside, not unlike the painful throbbing you feel when you are hurt or cut or wounded. I am. Hurt. Cut. Wounded
I ran into you. I ran into you and you changed my life. Not in a good way. I was fifteen. A ripe age for you to pick.

Before we went to war you had already won. You had won six years ago. You are, in certain ways, still winning. I gave you everything I had kept and then gave you everything that I had left. And you took. Took. Took.  And still wanted more. It would be criminal of me to suggest that I didn’t ask for anything back. I asked for a little part of your spirit, your essence, your smell and stored it in the treasure-house of my heart. I embalmed it with myrrh, frankincense and my tears. Tears, too, are sacred- how I wish you had realized that. I thought you told me you could turn mine into pearls. You did. But they were pearls before a swine. 

Debate became pointless to me – you were always right even when I wasn’t wrong. Philosophy became barren, knowledge profitless, words and sentences of the great minds stuck in my mouth like soot and dry ash.  This was all your doing. Then you did more. Your silent act of love unsealed and liberated me. In the beads of sweat that clung to your skin I could see my reflection. I looked happy.

With you I lived entirely for pleasure. I shunned sorrow and remorse. They became strangers to me. They were about me in the faces around me. Yet I was Invictus. You were the rain, you were the sun. I needed both because I needed you. I knew then how to be happy or rather Happiness became instinctual. Continuous. Constant.
 People Judged me.
 People must judge me.  In the way that I act. In the way that I am. In the way that I love. They  judged my act of love.

Without you Life has come to be a dilemma for me. But as you most certainly know I have always been a Dilemma for Life. Life will give up. Until then I wish to spend my existence amongst people who share the same spirit as I do, whose essence is akin to mine; I want to live amongst artists and sufferers; those who have known Beauty and those that have known Grief.

Now, distance makes me a pariah. You and I are in a different place; separated, Isolated. I more than you.  Do not tell me it is morality that has kept you away from me. Morality does not help me. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, who don’t fall neatly between the margins. I stand for the exceptions and not the laws.

You must be getting curious as to the point of my writing this. Anything can be made pointless. You taught me that.    

About that boy.

About That Boy

A star had fallen beyond the horizon, in Canada perhaps. (He had an aunt in Canada). The second was nearer, just beyond The Chief’s College, so he was not surprised when the third fell into the backyard. A flash of gold light lit the walls of the enclosing tenements and he heard a low musical chord – It sounded like how love would sound-like. Sweet. Gentle. Calm.  The light turned deep red and went out, and he knew that somewhere below a star was cooling in the night air (it is difficult for stars to travel so far away from home – it drains them). Turning from the window he saw that no one else had noticed at the table they were too busy in the mundane. His father, thoughtfully frowning, filled in his Sudoku book, his mother continued ironing under the pulley with its row of under wear.
He said in a small voice, “A’m gawn out for a stroll.”

“See you’re no long then” replied his mother.

He slipped through the lobby and onto the stair head, banging the door after him.

The stairs were cold and coldly lit at each landing by a weak electric bulb. He hurried down - three flights of steps at a time-  to the black silent yard and began hunting backward and forward, combing with his fingers the lank grass round the base of the clothe pole. He found it in the hidden on a decayed cabbage leaf. It was smooth and round, the size of a glass marble, and it shone with a light which made it seem to rest on a precious bit of green and yellow velvet. He picked it up. It was warm and filled his cupped palm with a ruby glow. He put it in his pocket and went back upstairs.

That night in bed he had a closer look. He thought what people would think if they knew he was sleeping with a star. They probably wouldn’t be supportive. Wriggling carefully far down under the sheets, he opened his palm and gazed. The star shone white and blue, making the space around him like a cave in an iceberg. This was odd for a star to change color and temperature so sporadically. Maybe it was broken, he thought. He brought it close to his eye. In its depth was the pattern of a snow flake, the grandest thing he had ever seen. From this angle the star looked like the most beautiful thing he had ever laid eyes on. He looked through the flake’s crystal lattice into an ocean of glittering blue black waves under a sky full of huge galaxies. He heard a remote lulling sound like the sound in a sea-shell, and gently he fell asleep with the star safely clenched in his hand. In that place between wakefulness and sleep, the place where dreams were born he made a solemn vow never to let go of his star – he would have it forever.

He enjoyed it for nearly two weeks, gazing at it each night below the sheets, sometimes seeing the snow, flake, sometimes a flower, jewel, moon or landscape. At first he kept it hidden during the day but soon took to carrying it about with him; the smooth rounded gentle warmth in his pocket gave comfort when he felt insulted or neglected.

At school one afternoon he decided to take a quick look. He was at the back of the classroom in a desk by himself. The teacher was among the boys at the front row and all heads were bowed over books. Quickly he brought out the star and looked. It contained and aloof eye with a cool green pupil which dimmed and trembled as if seen through water.

“What have you there, Zain?” the teacher bellowed

He shuddered and shut his hand.

“Marbles are for the playground, not the classroom.

You’d better give it to me.”

He just shook his head.

“I don’t tolerate disobedience, Zain. Give me that thing.”

The boy saw the teacher’s face above him, the mouth opening and shutting under a clipped moustache. Suddenly he knew what to do.
He put the star in his mouth and swallowed. As the warmth sank toward his heart he felt relaxed and at ease.

The teacher’s face moved into the distance. Teacher, classroom, world receded like a rocket into a warm, easy blackness leaving behind a trail of glorious stars.
In an instant he was complete.