strangely dreamin' (Oct 06, 2007)

Until a few days back, I took pride in my unique, though not so unusual, trait. I rarely dream. Quite literally, I could have counted them on my fingers. Why! Even Raven used to tell me, that she finds it peaceful to sleep inside me, 'cause I dont dream.
That is why, the last few days have been particularly disturbing. As if, all the dreams for the past 21 years were piled up and the dam just broke, my sleeps have been flooded with dreams. Every night for the past 3 days, I have had strange dreams, back to back, until I either woke to the sound of the alarm or woke up alarmed from the nightmare.
It began with one beautiful dream where I was in a different land, and in that land, the moon is really huge and itself had another globe revolving around it, eclipsing it quite frequently. When I stood looking at the moon, I remembered that the moon should have been iridescent blue; instead its grey. People of the land stared at the moon, grief stricken! I started off into the forest searching for somebody.
And after this dream came a series of dreams in which I was in a magical land. There was a girl with me in all the dreams, though in some dreams I was alone haunted by bats and shadows.
Its pleasant to be in a magical land even if it is only in dreams. But it comes at a cost: my sleep! Being the last semester with all its consequences, I can not afford to doze off in class and with these dreams robbing me of my little sleep, I can not help but be disturbed. Oh how I wish, the solar day were 30 hours!!!

a fragment of memory

something happened on my way to the other world: hell or heaven or whatever you want to call. I ended up somewhere else, where a moment was cursed to stretch to eternity unless someone or something that does not belonged to the place showed up. I was that someone. And when I reached that place, I saw the crimson red sun envious of the ground, for it was drenched to its core with blood and scattered with flesh and bones on the surface. So many that you would not be able to count even in an eternity. Your memory would not be big enough to remember the last long number! And yet, more creatures rose from the ground and took up arms. With my arrival, the moment ended and the creatures stopped rising and the sun once again began to go down; probably faster, for I'm sure it did not want to watch this gory place any longer. Hundreds more, may be a few thousands more creatures left, grouped in a circle, fighting. But this thousand is insignificant, shamefully insignificant to the number that lie slain. Were they fighting themselves? If so, it would not be a surprise, for they are so savage, so brutal, so strong and fast. But, no. They are not fighting themselves, for a moment later I saw the warrior or rather a part of him. He had wings! I saw the wings raised above. I saw only the wings. Black wings dripping with scarlet red blood. And then I heard a chanting in some strange language and then I saw thunder striking down a few hundreds of those horrible creatures. It made me shudder. I no longer knew which to fear: the ugly and the savage beasts or the lightning wielding warrior who killed hundreds of them in a moment. I saw more beasts fall. And then when the number reduced to a hundred, I was able to see the warrior. And I saw the warrior in full glory. The warrior was a she warrior! Her movements were fast, so fast my eyes could not keep up with the speed. I saw her wings and both the hands move and it seemed to me that in one thrust of her wings and hands she killed around twenty of those beasts. She seemed to have noticed that the curse was broken. She looked hastily for the object that entered the world. It was when she paused to do this, that I saw a long slender bluish silver sword in one hand and her other bare hand clutching a heart and crushing it. I saw her eyes fall on me, those red-black eyes that seemed to have tried to pierce me but failed. Something about her attitude changed. She seemed to have been relieved that the curse was broken and yet, she seemed sad. Her fury and vigor revived and she swayed her sword one more time and she faltered, fell on her knees while it rained blood and flesh of the remaining foul creatures. Falling on to her knees, she thrust the blade into the ground and clung onto it. I was considering approaching her. My path to her is laid with a thick wet carpet of soft and bloody flesh. Nevertheless, I walked to her. She did not seem to have the strength to look up. So I bent down and tried to raise her up to her feet. She was surprisingly light, though it should not have been a surprise. A winged creature, she is. She ought to be light. I slid her arm across my shoulder and tried to walk her away from that mess to somewhere else, though it was the same gory scene for as far as my eyes could see. She removed her sword from the ground and dragged it along. Her face was so close to mine. She was beautiful. I wanted to see her face more clearly and absorb all the details. I turned to see her face and then without knowing what I was doing, I kissed her cheek. I saw a drop of water down her eye and then it started pouring from heaven. It became too dark for dusk and it was raining so hard, I felt miserable thinking that this lady must now feel cold after such a epic battle. She did not open her eyes, nor lift her face. Not when I kissed her. Not when it started raining. But I saw the rain wash all the blood off her. She did not have a single wound, except for one straight cut across her wrist on the hand she is holding her sword. I realised she is beginning to regain her strength, for she was now weighing lesser and lesser on me and her steps became more steady. All of a sudden she stopped, looked into my face, held me across my waist and stretched her wings and .......
We are now sitting, very close to each other. I have never been so close to anyone when I lived. We were sitting on a hill top, a very tall hill, for the wind was blowing against my face and I could hear the feather ruffle in her out-stretched wings. She seemed to be enjoying this. But I could only see tears in her eyes.

At this the scene fades away!
Now, is this a figment of imagination? or a fragment of memory? I only know I heard so distinctly the ruffle each feather in her majestic big black wings made against the wind.

Jade.

31 May, '07

Withdrew a sum of Rs 500/- through ATM, and went for a stroll to Galleria along with Amit, to get my eyes checked (I have been having a irritating headache) and to buy some coffee and tea powder and an UMBRELLA. We dined at Jas, had a scoop of ice-cream each from Baskin Robins and walked back to IIT through lake-side gate. Around twenty steps away from the hostel, the first drop of rain fell over my face and my shrivelled spirits bloomed, striking a chord with in. Slowly the drops grew larger in number and denser and then the smell of Earth....!

Report: Lizard

This is a report on my observation and further musings on Lizard. {:D}
"Hibiscus is red in colour."
"Hibiscus is red in colour."
"Hibiscus is red ..."
And so on, the kid wrote his homework. After writing this for over fifty times, the kid was asked to draw and colour a hibiscus. He drew it well, alright, but coloured it blue! (Not that blue hibiscus does not exist, but the kid did not realise what he has been writing). Similarly, I have been ignorant of some aspect of lizard, though I have learnt it by heart in school. Well, I decided to write on this, because there are two lizards playing hide and seek in my room.
One night, I happened to watch a lizard crawl over light yellow painted wall of my room. The skin of the lizard was of a similar colour and appeared so smooth and velvetty, I felt if I touched it, the powder would stick to my finger just like when you catch a butterfly (I should have realised that aspect now, but it took longer). And then it crawled over to the dark brown painted wooden ventilator. A few minutes later, the lizard changed its colour from light yellow to dark brown! I was amazed to see a lizard change its colour. It was the first time I saw a lizard do it. I have seen chameleons and garden lizards do this camoflauge thingy, but never thought a lizard could do it. The thought soon began to prey on my mind. I wanted to figure out the mechanism of this colour change. I could have done a google search, but I did not. The only two colours I have seen the lizards in my room are light yellow and dark brown. And thats when it struck me: Lizards are reptiles! Yep, how foolish of me to forget this. Reptiles have scales. With scales, the mechanism to change colour is rather easy: have one side of the scale coloured light yellow and the other side dark brown. Scales are attached only at one end to the body. By flipping along the edge where scales are joined, lizards can look either yellow or brown. They can probably also bring about different shades by choosing to flip only a few scales. I do not know if this is what happens really. But its a possibility. And I was smiling, proud of having figured something out!

By the way, the powdery stuff that sticks to fingers when you catch a butterfly are scales too!

Now that I have explained the colour change, I now want to talk a little about the tail. The tail is infamous among the birds and snakes and cats to which lizards are prey. Thats because, the lizards can drop off the tail when attacked. The tail wriggles as if alive and confuses the enemy giving an oppurtunity for the lizard to run for its life. Whats marvelled in science is the ability of the lizard to regenerate the tail in a very short period. But when I came across this incident, what amused me was the tail that was left behind. It was dusk, when I was walking back to my room when on the corridor I saw a bird pecking at a lizard. The lizard dropped its tail. But the lizard was unfortunate. The bird ignored the wriggling tail and carried off the lizard (either the bird was intelligent or was greedy and took the larger piece!) Both the hunter and the hunted, having gone, I went closer to the tail that was still wriggling. It kept up for quite a long time, which I did not find so very interesting, because even in the most laziest human, the heart, eyes, liver and other organs stay alive for some hours after the death of the organism. Tired of watching, I went back to room. Almost an hour later, when I walked across the spot, the tail was still there. It had stopped moving. Curious as I was, I picked a twig and poked the tail and it started wriggling again. Now this was a surprise! When it stopped, I poked again and it moved again. This happened for sometime until, the tail was probably out of life!
The tail was sensitive to touch. I had always thought that the tail was programmed to wriggle randomly when dropped off. But no! To be sensitive to touch, it must be having a nervous system and a small localised brain to process the signals. The lizard is kind of an organism with out a mouth to feed, which is probably why it dies! This was another revelation to me.

Jade.

Vadake Kotattil

Its raining outside. Its only the second rain and yet, everything is already damp! The building is old and is dissolving in the rain, probably even being eroded! But I am not worried about it. I like these damp, dark vampire days! I just got back from buying bread, jam and crispies. I made black coffee for myself and when I sipped at it, standing on the balcony watching the rain, I remembered my grandmother's house in the west coast.... in Kerala. It was a big, tile roofed, mud walled house. (It was as big as a floor in physics dept, for my classmates' imagination. As big as a flat in HN, for those who might know) It was certainly huge compared to my tiny room, in which I have often felt the walls closing in on me, especially when I wanted more room to spread my canvas and paints and newspaper cuttings for a collage. A raised tulasi pot stands in the front of the house and a lamp is kept alight every evening. Fields lay spread across in front of the gate and on the other side, there is a thick greenery. Only in the night, when a lamp shines distinctly amidst this greenery, you realise that there is another mansion behind the trees. Yes, ours was a mansion, too, a 'tharavaadu', only a small one though, if you call it a mansion. Its three storied with a ground floor and an upper floor and a low attic on the top, where a sword, that my grandfather had obtained from the military I supposed, was kept amid other pots and plates and vessels and spices. Bats have made corners of the roof their home in the attic. The garden around the house is full of trees and plants: five coconut plants in the front and three elsewhere in the garden, three fully grown mango trees, two fully grown drumstick trees, two fully grown tamarind trees in the back, many banana plants, raspberry plants, many flowering shrubs and bushes among which 'thechchi' is distinctly vivid. There is a separate small house for the cows and another for cut fire-wood. There is a well, from which water is drawn manually. Electric connection was drawn into the locality only recently and children found it amusing to hit the street bulbs. So the streets are still dark in the evenings, but that darkness, I have felt, honours the gods and demons in the region. I have memories of every place I have visited in the town: a shiva kovil where you only do half pradakshinas, other temples near the town centre, where a yearly festival, 'puram' is held. The fireworks are a sight that I can never forget. I have never travelled much. Never strayed far from home. For that matter, even with in the house I never go around much. The narrow dark room between the dining hall and the living room and the room in the upper floor in which my great grandmother died while sleeping still give me creeps and I have always felt some ghostly presence walking behind me, and I can hear the sound of my heart beat.
Sitting like a ghost myself, in this tiny room, all I can do now, is to take help of my memories and imagine being there, with my grandmother who used to sing me to sleep when I was a kid... "thetti ninakunni chollaam, poo paatakkal alle athellam....", as I see the flowers on the creepers in the fence begin to bloom and fly into the sky.

Jade.

Narrated Twice

"Personna" is a subtle aspect of a story (in literature). Stories - legends, history, are narrated, and like the famous saying goes, "histroy is written by the victorious", usually there is a bias to the story. Most often, the narrator gets compelled or enticed to take a side in the conflict of the story. I know that there are short stories written to bring out the importance of personna, but I have not read one so far.
The famous movie "Roshoman", (an Akira Kurosawa movie) is about a murder mystery as narrated by different people. Often, when a story is narrated from a different perspective, the resolution of the conflict or the moral of the story or the entire story itself may change drastically. However, the movies "Letters from Iwo Jima" and "Flags of our Fathers" are a contradiction to this point. These two movies picturise the Battle of Iwo Jima, World War II - the former from the perspective of a Japanese soldier and the latter from the perspective of an American. As I already mentioned, these two movies complement each other (and were both infact, directed by Clint Eastwood).
The movies "Troy" and "Helen of Troy" are the most contrasting perspectives of a story. While the former was narrated by Odysseus (a Greek warrior), the latter was narrated from a Trojan's perspective. I was astonished and kept saying "I can't believe this", at every scene, for every scene, every trifle detail was a complete contradiction to what was depicted in "Troy", except perhaps, for the point that Achilles ties the body of Hector to his chariot and drags him along. While Paris was shown as a weakling in "Troy", he was shown strong, to be precise, stronger than Hector in "Helen of Troy". Achilles was not all that honourable warrior in "Helen of Troy".Why, he was killed even before he got inside the gates of the Troy! If you see/have seen either of the two movies, you must watch the other to experience the horror I felt when every contradicting scene played before my eyes.
Nevertheless, the character of Cassandra in "Helen of Troy" and Achilles in "Troy" is worth watching and the movies themselves are good.
I guess I will hit the sack now. My head is hurting from the sounds of all those explosions in the two movies on the battle of Iwo Jima! Oyasuminasai!

Jade

Metamorphosis

Now that I know how to solve a rubik's cube, whenever I see a disarranged cube, I fiddle with it until all the same colors are brought to the same face, nicely arranged. What motivates me to do this? Do I hate disorder? No. That can't be true, 'cause everytime I see the cube completely solved, I disturb it, move pieces randomly until it appears a mess again, so I can solve it again when I get bored. Does that mean I hate order?
I suppose its what some sacred texts say: nothing is constant. Everything keeps changing; everything except change itself!
Metamorphosis is a dramatic form of this change, where a ugly looking fat, slimy, crawling insect changes into a beautiful, wing'd one, signifying a change in status as well, from a "wanna squash it under foot" to "oh look! how beautiful!". I happened to recieve a forwarded mail which claimed that eagles undergo a similar change too, though not so drastic, yet just as painful: a five month process, in which the eagle breaks it old beak and talons and waits to regrow new ones and pluck its old heavier feathers to grow new light ones. Apparently, the eagle is forced to undergo this change in order to continue living.
This kind of change is often a literary element in almost all stories, especially the eastern ones: God descends to restore order when there is increase in the "evil" element. And those who are familiar with eastern legends might wonder then, whether God would descend to restore order when good "dominates" over evil, too. I suppose He would not feel it necessary to descend. His fallen angels would do the work!
The western literature is full of such fairy tales, where the protagonist finds a sudden inspiration/strength to fight his battle. Unfortunately, for those dreamy eyes who think life is like a fairy tale, humans are not blessed with metamorphosis. Like the slithering brethren, the snakes, humans need a change of skin every now and then - like it or not.

Jade.