Unanswered Questions!

For me the night has arguably just begun. It is tender and fresh and offers promise.

It has been an extremely tiring day. Yes, to be frank an eventful one as well. I am here to ask a few questions. I wont get any answers; maybe. But I cannot move on without asking them. I have touched the rock bottom of my mental fortitude. Don’t be mistaken; it’s not all about today. It’s just that today I will have to ask. Today; yes, of all these days.

What was wrong with today? Nothing. Absolutely nothing!

It was day I of freedom. My exams were postponed and today opened the stage for a 20 something day long vacation. I am an over sleeper. That has never worried me, and as usual the sun was up and ready to welcome me out of my deep sleep. These days I do not forget to chant a short morning prayer before quitting bed. I managed the same, half dazed and semi-automatically. I practice a form of meditation, its part of my marga. But suddenly I ask myself, when was it last that I meditated. Meditation is peace. I am pissed off. I am. Of all days, today I find myself deep in the bottomless precipice of unanswered questions. Did I do my first two exams (incidentally they weren’t shifted to next year) well? Yes, I would say they went quite par. KK would know. So that is answered. I was talking about unanswered questions wasn’t I?

I sold off a few old newspapers that were cluttering my house. Yeah, I still remember Lawley Road (12^th ISC syllabus, dude) and the house being cluttered with correspondence. I wouldn’t take this to that level. But old newspapers are frankly quite a nuisance.

I went to Kochanman (my mother’s youngest uncle) and heard out a long story that Kochammai had to narrate. I was listening to a lady in her old age, a virtuous lady who led a teaching career for about four decades. She had lost her son (only son) to some heart problem in 1993. Around the time I learned a then new word ‘relative’ – a long story, that! She never asked me anything, but I could feel her question surround me. The question suffocated me and rendered me a listening machine. I heard her, I had no choice. Ramachandran had a keen interest in fiction, in agents and intelligence maneuvers, like me! He would have been 43 now. I didn’t have an answer. I won’t have one. I don’t want to find one. And she was speaking about Osho aka Bhagvan Rajneesh, and his broad-mindedness. He was poisoned by Americans! As if I cared.

Kovalam was fine. We had a blast today. The white sand at the beach, the towering red lighthouse, the Australian madames, the parking fee; I walked and enjoyed the tanning sun. I wet my feet and so did my friends. The whole of CET and SCT was there rejoicing their Christmas dreams. And yet the same question came back to me. ‘I lost a wondrous lady to cancer’, my friend had said somewhere in the most profound IMs I have had in Yahoo, (around this time yesterday). The statement doesn’t qualify as a question; ‘coz it read ‘I lost a wondrous lady to cancer’, I don’t have an answer! I won’t find you one, my friend.

On our way back we had food from ‘Viswanth’, in Pippinmoodu. That’s near where my uncle had lived for more than a decade. It was not long back that I had to sign in a white paper as a receipt of his body at MCH, mortuary. That was a day of signatures and a day of death as well. I didn’t have to refresh my memory for it has not really gone from the level one cache. I carried the body (partly; like we do it together) on the way to the crematorium. It was my duty. A sign of last respect! The last rite! In between I found enough time to tell a small ‘Thank you’. Thank you for having spent a few many nights with my father in Cosmo, MCH et al. I lost my old man to disease. I lost my uncle to disease. Nobody asked me anything. But I still kind of thought that somewhere amidst it all I would find an answer. I did not.

We went to the gym today; after all the chilling-out and after the 10 day gap, gym was fun. And then again I remembered a similar gym session a few months back, around the time a member of the place who had gone to China to answer his call in life came back in a coffin. I had gone there with another friend on that day. I didn’t know the guy who died but this friend knew him really well. That day I had used a coin phone. Yes, the coin phone! I didn’t have an answer to support my friend with. I still don’t. I am in no mood to find out one.

Today night we saw the movie ‘Saw’. Some people, it said, are really ungrateful to live. None of the people above fit in.

I started out in the mind to ask a few questions and ended without asking nor answering.