Monologue

1.
Last year I lost my mother. For a few moments her corpse had reclined on a steel stretcher on the portico of a modern hospital before it was loaded on to a flower decked hearse. She was surrounded by family, friends and relatives all crying hysterically. I had not cried until then. As I took a last look at her – she almost resembled a happily-sleeping fluffy doll – being drowned under a white ocean of flowers and garlands, tears welled up from nowhere blinding and diffusing my sight with the thunder of another thought and later replaced by a strange succession of images. Was she able to look through my flesh and blood, now that she was dead and could defy the universe of mechanics and quantum theories, to that vortex of nothingness and darkness that was essentially me? What happens when mothers realize that their sons are very different from the shadows they beam in social life? And then, all of a sudden, I saw my corpse illumined and stretched on a marble tiled floor looking into the soul of my son against an azure sky. He was looking at my swollen cold face with emotion and as the clouds emanating from my decaying stagnant body floated through the chill of air and entered his skull diving past his large beautiful eyes I could hear the complex tunes floating on the waves of a lonely sea: a sea that was eager to last a lifetime and show brilliant paths inside the cosmos to its earnest navigators. Was he relieved that I was no more there to pile on him with what I thought was right and wrong? Did he move away from me long back: in his adolescent years? Was he tired of and suffocated by me? Did he repent about following to tee what I asked of him to do in life and most of it that he did so wonderfully? Did he feel wasted and pent up in life that I felt many a time during my own lifetime? Did he sometimes wish to hit me or kill me or just that I was dead? Did he feel lonelier, after I was declared dead, like a sea with its lighthouse vanquished by its majestic shore?

2.
Two images terrify me constantly. I will share with you these images: a half-slice of a crimson moon staring at you through the grey veil of a swimming monsoon cloud suddenly sighted from a dilapidated terrace window (it takes my breath away making me feel somebody - the Surgeon of all Surgeons - is drilling through me and dissecting me inside out) and the view of the Bombay city from a distance on a monsoon night as your flight takes off westwards flying atop the Arabian Sea and then taking a swerve north-eastwards towards the city and the lights of emeralds, diamonds, pearls and neons blazing and some of them forming trajectories of sparkling photons visible through the flock of low flying dark clouds giving me an impression that the city is on the verge of a terrible exothermic explosion and the world will come to its end just in front of my eyes.