The Sandwich Horror

L'Chaim

noreply@blogger.com (tarantinofan) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:10:00 +0000

Childhood dies a small death every time the child gains a little more of the "experience" that is supposed to bring about "maturity". As quietly do I mourn for my lost childhood as I celebrate all the joys of life.

He sat by his hard-won window seat and played a game with himself, imagining that his hand were a superhuman flying at the same speed as the train, skimming along the distant hills, riding across the fields of paddy and wheat, hopping over the occasional lone house. The chaiwalla came by and he declined his mother's offer of tea, preferring instead to wait for the vadas and samosas and cutlets. He had never found a more unique and enticing specimen of fried food than the IRCTC veg. cutlet, bought with pleading effort and consumed with joy and squirted "tomato sauce" on a flimsy paper plate which aspired through its thin foil top to the pretence of a better class of utensil.

He loved to wander off from the compartment and ramble about the train, looking curiously at tired people longing for the comfort of their homes, squalling babes shattering what little was left of the private worlds people wrapped around themselves to give their lives some sanity while they waited to arrive at their destination, children playing one moment and fighting the next. He always landed up at the pantry car; wondrous and goggle-eyed, he watched as the heroes of his train-life - though they were but unskilled labour eking out a miserable living making bedraggled food - employed arcane processes to conjure up the magical packaged meals that would end up as lunches and dinners. The sights, sounds and smells of the pantry-car always took his breath away.

This child travelled on the Rajdhani to Chennai and back to his beloved Delhi every vacation - his friendships at school suffered from the neglect that comes from distance, but his introverted mind never noticed - but he never ceased to make this pilgrimage to the pantry-car, and as his weary parents dragged him back to the compartment, they must have noticed the contentment deep in his soul.

Discomfort

noreply@blogger.com (tarantinofan) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:58:00 +0000

I wrote this piece of flash fiction in a bus while half-asleep. Here it is, unedited and in its full glory.

By the time he had made himself all warm and cosy with feathers and leaves in the nest he had set up in the clearing, he needed to pee.

Life as a castaway was going to be hard.

The Needle

noreply@blogger.com (tarantinofan) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:54:00 +0000

The needle is painted black, as are all her implements. It seems to gleam wickedly like the void-black eyes of The Man; The Man who haunts her waking as well as sleeping moments, filling her head with his soft whispers of cruelty and damnation. Jeff Beck's guitar wails Cause We've Ended As Lovers in the background. She has chosen to play the song on an infinitely repeating loop, but she does not hear. Her head is filled with the weird, terrible piping that leads her thoughts astray, the music to which the Other Ones, the Outer Gods dance slowly and awkwardly, forms that chase the sanity out of even the most jaded of humankind.

Forms that she is attempting to engrave on every inch of her skin using that black needle.

Her eyes do not see the dark, deep red blood that oozes from every stab of that thrice-damned needle that had been sanctified for this use after she performed ancient and horrendous rites with it, practicing rituals and performing obeisances that would strike us blind and deaf to just know of them. She has been numbed to the blasphemy of it all that would astound and terrify the inquisitive and sensitive mind. Perhaps she has even forgotten that she ever lived a life out of such a Shadow.

The Black Man gloats and urges her on. She has long since forgotten the seething sea of humanity from which she has been raised, raised upon that terrible pedestal and placed there by He who acts as the messenger and the living soul of The Other Ones, especially the blind idiot god Azathoth, who rules the universe from his terrible throne. She embroiders a great tale into her flesh, using the needle that she holds upon her skin and the needle of her prayers to The Outer Gods upon her mind.

What will become of her once her magnum opus is done, she knows not, and she cares not. Her life for Nyarlathotep, her all for Nyarlathotep. That is the littany that she has always known, being the progeny of like-minded parents who have introduced their only daughter to their life.

The police find her laid out neatly as though she were just asleep. Body straight and flat upon the bed, hands clasped at the bosom, head on her pillow.

There is no trace of blood anywhere in the small, yet ostentatious apartment, a final gift from her parents. Her skin and hair are missing. The rest of her body, though, is inviolate. The coroner is unable to find any cause of death, the flaying he declares to be post-mortem.

The next night, and for the next month, thousands of the sensitive-minded will dream the same ominous dream: a coterie of almost-nameless terrors, a galaxy of cyclopean entities and terrifying geometries, and A Shadow Upon Earth.

Mors Principium Est. And with strange aeons even death may die.

Delhi

noreply@blogger.com (tarantinofan) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 17:06:00 +0000

There is this fat, jolly old man who is a really good friend to me. He is not fat from eating too much and laying about on the couch in front of the television. His fatness comes from eating hot and fresh jalebis, sneaking them out from the parcel when walking back home and immediately stuffing them into his mouth, blowing frantically because they are much too hot, yet enjoying them. His fatness comes from early morning Modern bread from Shankar Market with uncle-ji-ke-chhole, dark brown, nearly black from chai patta, downed after samose-garam. Thick, huge paneer de pakode and Roshan Di Kulfi ki kulfi falooda ishpecial. Paneer tikka at Khan Market. Lunches at Kake Da Kotel on Connaught Place, followed up by a treasured dessert at Wenger's or at Nirula's, often both. Chaats (Alu Tikki, Gol Guppe, Mixed Fruit Chaat, and so on) from the same old red-haired chap near Punjab Sweets and Roopak Pik-N-Pay at Ajmal Khan Road (he is still there, even today).

This fat old man curses like the hordes of truck drivers that throng that tiny little dhaba where you get the best dal makhani (Even better than the Dal Bukhara, I say) and some of the best paratha, naan, roti, and other hardy, sustaining foods that keep those inner fires burning in the winter. He attends those all-nighter jaagrans not because he is a religious zealot, but because he loves the puri-halwa-kabuli-channa they serve up for the devotees all the time. He smokes bidis so strong, he is eternally surrounded by a cloud of smoke. He is, though, always generous, polite to a fault once you get past the rough and callused exterior, and always has some sweet or the other for the multitudes of kids that travel to and from their school (such a cruel school, forcing little boys to wear shorts till the 9th grade even in the chills of winter, yet such a happy school, letting kids go naughty and freeing them from unit tests till 6th, and exams till 9th) in his auto-rickshaw.

This hoary old man is Delhi. The Delhi of my childhood; the Delhi of my memories; the scarcely-changed-at-heart Delhi that I returned to for a short while two summers ago. I'll be back with him someday, and that day, I shall be Happy.

General Sadness

noreply@blogger.com (tarantinofan) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:53:00 +0000

I wrote this story for to make a Really Lovely Person happy. It talks about ice cream donut sandwiches in a place (making it a fitting first post for my third blog), begins after this sentence, and ends with "...there is Joy".

General Sadness was an evil, evil man.

That does not mean, Gentle Reader, that he was twice as evil.

Twice as evil as what, you ask? I know not of any units for evil. A Hitler? An Idi Amin? Those sound too great to measure everyday cruelty, like the poor bel, that unit of sound intensity, pared down to mere tenths for everyday use. Does anyone even know about the bel, nowadays? You could stop a man on the street (equally a woman, yes) and ask him (her) what a decibel is, and he (she) would know. But instead, Gentle Reader, ask about the bel, and you will receive answers about its unrelated cousin, the bell. But I digress.

General Sadness had a heart as black as nothing, a canker within his body.

I wonder if pitch is really the blackest there is. Which pitch, anyway? The movement of a body about its lateral axis? The measurement construct? I do not think the first person who said "pitch black" was referring to the resin, and if he (she) was, then he (she) needed an opthalmologist. Pitch, the resin, is not the blackest there is. I would rather say "nothing black" or "as black as nothing". You may very well point and snigger, Gentle Reader, or burst into hearty guffaws or sundry chuckles, but true darkness is the absence of everything. Just as a shadow is the absence of light, true black is the absence of anything. Even if pitch is not the blackest there is, you should take a look at, find out about the pitch drop experiment. It shall tell you a little about the vagaries of academia.

Vagaries! It is such a lovely word. Vagary owes its birth to the Latin word, vagus, which means to wander. A vagary refers to an erratic action, an impulsive desire. But I used vagaries in its parent's sense. I meant to signify how academia is a wandering world. A world where the rules change all the time, and everything depends on your immediate superior. I wonder if academia is a microcosm of the whole world.

Well, General Sadness did have things in his heart. Sinews, blood, and other such jazz. But I refer to his metaphorical heart, the heart you love with, not the heart that strains away to keep you alive until you die.

Is the heart the best organ to delegate the task of Love's mascotry? You may view it as ironic, how we take the most hardworking of organs, and tie it to the emotion that fells many among the industrious, incapacitates its victims, makes dreamy weak-kneed lads and lasses out of strong, hearty men and women. You may also view it as ideal, tying the strongest muscle to the emotion that is the most powerful of all. But I am nobody to comment about love and language.

General Sadness had an empty (for-loving-with) heart. He was never loved as a child, and as a result, nobody could picture him as one. He had never known the warmth of a woman's embrace, and as a result, he ordered many of those who knew to their deaths, and ordered their deaths (depending on which side they were on).

Gentle Reader, he was beyond reproach, beyond redemption. He was truly a devil, a demon, a shaitan.

General Sadness did have one weakness, though. He could not stand Joy. Joy came upon him in many beguiling guises. Joy as Love, Joy as Happiness, Joy as Mirth, Joy as Merriment. But whenever Joy strode into the room he was in, he had to run for his life, cadaverous as it was. He had to run far, far away, and live in another place.

The problem with our world, Gentle Reader, that so many places exist where General Sadness can take up residence in. But the beauty of it, the reason why all of us strive to live, is that Joy is always there. Just around the corner, eating a ice cream donut sandwich, there is Joy.