An Idiot's Tale

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An Idiot's Tale

Cacography of a madcap story teller, JAYEETA GHORAI

After one and a half years, sixty-seven posts, fifty-two following, seven thousand plus page hits most of which were robotic but some interesting interactivities, why was she still blogging?

Lying awake in the darkness strings of words ticker ribboning through her brain?

Eschewing more serious, commissioned pieces in favour of rambling craft?

Neglecting a pile of good reads to go at her nonsense?

More urgently, being unprepared to meet exam deadlines?

While it was a common adage that working at something one enjoys, being paid for what one does best, was desirable, she was sceptical of the concept. For experience had taught her, ‘livelihood’ was not without a degree of coercion, some expectation of toeing an invisible line drawn by the payer or patron. She could not imagine the horror of unseen shackles tugging her down when her heart was begging to fly. The freedom of uncommisioned writing, the corner space it allowed her to explore at will, though it did not put rice on her plate, could not be matched to the shadow of a financer ominously looming over her.

But then, when had a creative crackpot survived on morsels shoved in through the mouth?

It was the unsavoured heap of paperbacks that plagued her most.

Being tempted to not put the book down to reach for pen and writing papers is agonising dilemma. In her little world made entirely of ivory towers and aereolar castles, such a decision can be equated to life threatening. For to her, reading and writing were the two actions that seized her.

At times she worried turning into a jelly fish. How she was torturing her temple with immobility made her sad, a teary eyed mother forced to look at her neglected child. For this body was all that was given her at birth. This body that from childhood was appropriated and usurped by others till she had come to hate it, was the sole thing given exclusively to her. It followed her, like a dumb loyal beast, everywhere. It would be the only witness and compatriot of her passage, the only they'd put with her to the pyre.

But then, theology says, she would not be on that pyre. Only the body remains. What will it feel like, so much fire, the heat of electric charring, she wondered alarmed, enchanted.

It would be she being disloyal again. She was saddened by her many acts of betrayal. Memories of never being good to her body, or to her people, never being able to protect it, or them, came and went in her head, intense flashes of disturbance and increasingly slowing tides of weary surrender.

She worried about all else she was supposed to be seized by, more useful, more worthy. There was one thing more important than reading or writing - to hug an animal. To hold onto a physical container, small and fragile in the cave of her arms, to sleep together on the same pillow, snuggled heart to heart till it was the same rhythm beating through their bodies. To take one life and care for it with complete dedication, see it through its whole journey end to end. For there was greater fulfilment of her measly life, if it could take care of even one other life, tiny and made satiated till the very last.

Animals find it easy to be happy, they don't have a gene for discontent. Regrettably, being born in an urban hospital ward, she had lost connections to her animalness, as well.

Here too she had failed, she knew. There was none she had accompanied the whole way.

As a literature student, sitting on the college lawn one off-period, she had wondered what she was doing there. Saving lives, medical study, now that was the only academic pursuit with immediate purpose. Like Delilo's Falling Man, every other academic industry was a trivialisation of effort, a beguiling wastage of time, an excuse to appear occupied on the seemingly endless travel thrust upon oneself. Working towards saving another life, now that is the only legacy worthwhile to another.

Why, when life had so less meaning for her, did saving one seem always the all-important task?

One of those contradictions that she couldn't answer for, merely embody.

Her joy of selfish knowledge gathering then, like her need to hug another, was a futile pathfinding, half attempted, half cherishable. Like life, which she pretended to find funny and put up an act of enjoying, past midlife, run out of alternatives.

She felt Plath. She understood Fossey. Except the rambling end to her travails was not yet mercifully met.

She had begun to enjoy writing blog posts, because, they could play out their whims, go anywhere and nowhere, and abruptly end, wherever they chose.

Like breathing. Hopefully.

 

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