Shoptomi

It’s 7:25, oh, sorry, 26 now. Today’s sort of a big day. I have an outing with her. I thought Life of Pi was a book on math. Turns out it isn’t. You know, sometimes the brain becomes so blank and stupid and you can’t extract anything from it and the more you try the harder it resists the production of any idea? That’s my state now. Nothing to write. Wait, then I’ll tell you about those moments.

Imagine you are in the middle of something. Really in the middle of something. Like joking with friends, and you’re laughing so hard your tummy hurts, and one of your friends is going around the room doing silly stuff while another tries to sing a song, and outside there’s the patter of rains and the faint sound of traffic. Downstairs the TV is on and someone’s watching a Hindi soap you hate. You can recognize it from the music. All you have in your mind at the moment is what joke to make next. You are completely immersed, you see, in the person you are. That is to say, the friends you have, the jokes you make, the things you can make a joke about, the sounds of traffic and the rain you know since childhood. Because these are, after all, what a person comes down to in the end.

And then, suddenly, while you were trying to make up that joke, something happens. No, no pop, wham, bang. No ghost, wizard or likewise. What happens is that you suddenly slip from the mental state you were in, into a state I cannot describe. All I can say is that it is pretty high, from where you can see the whole hierarchy, the whole structure and arrangement of ever-increasing complications, shell within shell, that lead to this final conception called yourself.

In a single moment someone just yanks you from behind and you’re receding fast from all the associations, your family, friends, lover, jealousies, prides, regrets, doubts, problems, dreams, into a deep grey void, just like in the TV they sometimes zoom you up from a street scene to the city then the continent and then planet Earth. Just like that. Someone pulls you up from that joke you were trying to make, out through the gripping arms of your life, individuality and self that enclose you. Up, up, escaping shell after shell, till you are so high you can see the whole hierarchy from His point of view, see yourself gripped firmly in a thousand arms of your own life, immersed in the convincing reality of your self, trying to make a joke among friends in a rainy evening with the traffic outside and a Hindi soap that you hate on the TV downstairs.

That’s when you lose yourself. You know at that point with crystal clarity that you are nothing but one of the pieces of coloured paper that float through the universe. Each one around you is a coloured paper. The colours on them are the result of their experiences, their dreams, wishes, their friends, hobbies, their enclosing arms of life and self, and hence each of those coloured papers is unique in the whole universe, unique and unmatched, until they return to where they came from, and He washes all colour off the papers, reducing each to the same white featureless identical rectangle they really are. Then they wait for their next life of colouring, of being someone else.

Then the moment is over and someone just drops you back quietly to where you were, in the middle of trying to make a joke among friends in a rainy evening.

You look around, trying to recollect who you are supposed to be at the moment, trying to recollect yourself like a tornado victim gathering pieces of his happy home among the ruins, struggling to believe again the truth you just realized in the last moment was a lie: that you have a self.

The name I have given to this piece is from an Enigma soundtrack. The name reminded me of another piece which the title would have fitted even better. And then I realized that this piece relates strongly to that one.

1Life.