Chapter 2

It was a bright June morning with the sun high in the sky, washing all of the townscape in its glorious white light. While the rest of the world reeled under the slowly growing heat of the summer months, Kerala reveled in the onset of the monsoons. Forgotten streams gurgled with full bellies and dew drops shone like crystals hanging from the razor edges of variously shaped leaves.

Yohan woke up late, cursing the well connected synapses of logic that fooled him into thinking he was someplace else under a tree of violet flowers and making inroads with a pleasant looking stranger in gothic boots. Rubbing out the sandman’s routine deposit, all of the past few days’ events resurfaced and inscribed itself on his memory. Reasonably proud still of his handiwork, he decided to take a walk about town to gauge where opinions lay.

Now we’ve been told his provocation, or rather the plural of it, was slight; so much as to say all of them together still failed credence as one real reason. Yohan had come back to Thrissur after five long years at the capital, attending college and generally being pounded into a powdery waif �" speaking emotionally. Like many other big fish or, self imagined ones - as might be more fitting for the case in point - Yohan lived his life waiting to strike out. Somewhere out there in this big wide world, there had to be a larger pond with more entertaining fixtures and hopefully, prettier fish. But the lessons he took with him and the hope he had fostered, failed him. Kindness was seldom rewarded; well begun didn’t always mean there had to be an end; respect hardly begot respect, and karma if there even was such a thing, was an incompetent bum. As an over empathetic human, the only way to survive the city was to let its soreness creep under your skin. This clever adaptation guided him through his breakup with one of the before mentioned fishes. The relationship began like a dream, an exotic stranger in a new city at the start of four academic years together. Of course, the exotic stranger did warn him of how their religious differences meant this could be no eternal union like dreamers are won’t to dream of, but she did give that dream her own magical spin. You see, being born a muslim the freedom she had to steer her own life was for most part restricted to picking what she’d have for lunch. So, circumstances as they were and shackles bound so tight; these four years were to be ‘her’ life. Her life when it wasn’t dictatorially controlled by a muslim man she was arranged married to and she chose to spend it with him; body and soul.

Yohan, the fool with philosophies drawn from fairy tales thought it nothing more than fatalistic rambling that we all sometimes indulge in, like thoughts that emerge on the wrong side of a bender or ill moods brought on by lonely Sunday afternoons. As the years went on however, sourness ensued and the only way to survive was to take to heart Dr.Johnson’s advice to get rid of the pain of being a man. He still looked back on the affair dangerously often in hopes of figuring out how the million things that were wrong with it to begin with, went wrong. Maybe the city if you grew up in it, gave you enough tolerance to see such things off as part of daily existence. The fast paced life sure helped you forget, if anything. Even Yohan understood that first hand. In the end, it was his own rash decision to make such a huge emotional investment that stood out as the witless move that brought a million empires tumbling down. It had to be moronic to think a girl that survived abuse as a child and could accept her circumstances as one would, the rules of a sport in which cheating meant winning even when the risk was being handed the fearful triple ‘talak’ and severe communal shame, needed any rescuing. It is one thing to imagine the princess locked away in a tower wanted out but the reality of it could just as easily be quite the contrary. Who is to say she didn’t enjoy the view? And a life of no real responsibilities, no requirement of purposeful initiative �" can anything beat that when the added compliment of putting your family’s honor over yourself was shrunk to fit into that perspective?

 But a broken heart didn’t warrant self righteous acting out, as much as such matters have through history caused great people with the lives of others in their hands to go haywire, Yohan himself, was reluctant to credit the foul experience with the honor of inciting him to do anything �" either constructive or destructive.

In his mind, the world as he built it up to be had turned out to be a bleeding lie. Once every living being was somehow blessed by the divine just for the simple fact that it was alive. He was sure everything on earth was tied to invisible strings stretching up to the heavens. What we did everyday was a dance; glorifying the single true state of being �" joy. It was a world without coincidences. But now, those invisible strings seemed cut down and all of us moving and breathing instilled with only the base instinct to survive; over which everything else was built; just cruel jokes of nature �" clockwork toys that had no option but to walk onwards to mortality and blind their consciences  with stupid traditions and irrelevant histories.

Of course, for all the one liner proverbs and passé clichés that despite their tastelessness were steeped in truth, the only real thing that could be said about life, as Mark Twain pointed out, was that it goes on. At every heart wrenching juncture and triumphant turn, all you could say with surety was that it too would pass. And so it happened that Yohan, realizing that most of his fears has come to pass and all of his dreams had fallen to ruin needed to find something else to live for. The idea of true love was exchanged for logic, the romance of ancient religion spit upon and love for life decayed.

We will, in the course of our lives come across events or information that renews the colors we see the world in. All we could hope for in these situations is to be thinking individuals, people who at their worst, at least try to make sense of the signs around us in order to find an influence for our actions. When all else is lost, think still that you are alive, for whatever reason it might be , unknown powers had taken it upon themselves  to gather various elements from the soil, shape it into human form and breathe into it the conscience that is you. Despite the hopeless irrelevance the world may seem to place on your life, it was similar living, breathing, thinking men just like you that shaped through the ages how humanity conducted itself. The world today is a far cry from the savage cutthroat reality it once was. The differences from our fathers, that we chose to exaggerate through our lives is what progressed mankind; albeit like a blinded cripple maneuvering winding stairs of uneven cut.