As soon as he was in it, the cold hit him. Waves upon waves. He gasped and immediately, water rushed in. His nostrils, his ears, his eyes were being blinded. He closed them shut. They felt red and raw. The water rushed him along. He could imagine, and that was the last thought he had of anyone other than himself, he could imagine his two captors, one standing there watching him still, the other turning around and moving away. ‘Time to go. Our job is done.’ ‘

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It was a nice neighborhood. He didn’t appreciate it enough. It was also a shitty neighborhood for what it was. Houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which for a third world country was a lot. You had to keep security guards. Light was infrequent. Plumbing was only good if you were the one to supervise every inch. The water was not drinkable. The sun was rising, stretching, and yawning as it sailed across the sky. The sky was a light blue, the twinkling deep blue of the night had faded. Soon it would be white. Drowsy clouds would float through the sky. The car was cool. He shook the cup with his left hand and smiled. It looked like he was doing something else. It was a funny thought.

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The streets were unusually empty. It was six in the morning on a Sunday. Made sense. The people wouldn’t wake up for another six hours. He drove the car slowly under the bridge. And then he would go around. He was comfortable. Of course there had been the incident where those two children had knocked on his window about twenty minutes ago. He knew now that they were probably harmless. He didn’t know that twenty minutes ago while they knocked on his window as he was playing Pokémon. He had waved them off, a neutral expression, and drove away. In the rear view, he had seen them laughing a little. In an awkward manner. They were harmless. If they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have come over to the passenger side in an attempt to build his confidence. They would have gone straight to his side. But he didn’t think of that then. He thought only of driving away and had a little bit of resentment. He almost had the gym in his location based game. But it was over. He was slowly driving towards the light. In a street that led away from him, a fork he wouldn’t take, he saw two dogs frolicking and playing. Tails wagging furiously. Tongues out. It was hot. Nipping at each other. He smiled. Then his eyes fell on a boy and his mother. The boy was around eight. The mother was aged. She was draped in a shawl. The boy was in a clean, starched white shalwaar kameez. Her lips moved. The boy ran over around his mother and bent over at the grass on that side, and there was something in his hand based on how he had closed it. They were probably coming from prayer. In hindsight, they were probably going to a religion class.

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Mood is a fickle mistress. One moment, you can be singing loudly to the stereo in your car, the other moment, the sounds can be just as loud, but your voice is gone. Your eyes are filled with sorrow. And with joy. How can it be both? Of course you don’t trust the author enough to believe that two contradictory things can exist at the same time. The answer: nostalgia. I read somewhere that nostalgia is just optimism looking backwards. I think that’s beautiful. Poignant. Sharp. To the point. It’s beautiful.

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Dimly lit room. Well, not lit but by the glow of the television. Comfortable. One sofa facing the television. One small table on which he had his legs. His arm stretched out over the neck of the sofa. A comforting presence next to him. His wife. But more important than her, than even her, the thing they had made together. Her soft hair streaming down her neck as she stared at the television, her teddy bear clasped to her chest. He could imagine the tiny eyes in awe at the scenes playing out on screen. It was Aladdin or lion king. Some movie from his childhood. It didn’t matter. What did matter was this feeling, right here. In his heart. A warmth, a filling up of the hollows of his heart.

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There are very few Big, Important questions in life. Today, I’m struggling with one.

TLDR version: heart or mind?

But first, a prelude. My birth certificate says January 1st, 1995. My parents disagree over what time I was born. Whether it was the wee hours of the morning, or the drowsy hours in the evening. That should have been the first clue. The second? When I was between the ages of one and four, my mother ripped my right arm out of its socket. It’s not important. I don’t say this to elicit pity, I say this as an explanation for what comes next. The third? For seventeen years of my life, my self esteem had its head under the ground because of my parents. I only gained any shred of self confidence from the first girl I dated, who would later go on to cheat on me. I think that says a lot.

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The drive was nice. The first pleasant thing that happened was that the shortcut to the main road in the city was open. It led through the old stadium. Sometimes the gates were closed, sometimes they were open. It didn’t make sense most of the time. Very few times, they were being cautious. And they hadn’t not prevented another attack like the one on the cricket team that happened more than a decade ago, because they were cautious. They had prevented it simply because those who would perpetuate such attacks had decided not to. But of course, the security forces would laud one another, clap themselves on the back.

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Sapiens were once foragers. Disease was uncommon because there was a variety of food. Obesity was uncommon because the obese had died out. Be lean and able to travel long distances or fall behind and die. Sounds cruel, but it was in tune with nature. And nature is unforgiving. Sapiens were once foragers, and as such, they had to travel dozens of miles a day. Makes my measly forty eight running mile weeks look weak. But it still gives them purpose.

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It was just out there. I leapt at the chance. Anyone would have. Tail squirming in delight. Around and around.

It was out there, a light over it. The exhaust was running. It was kind of humid. Not too hot. Just the right kind of temperature.

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Have you ever had someone rip your arm out of its socket? The pain is exquisite. Excruciating. You want to pass out, but it won’t let you. Every molecule in your head screaming for sweet, sweet relief but relief eludes you. Your senses are filled, replaced by the pain that is none of them. It is a sense of its own. Sight is blurred. Sound is ringing. Only that of pain, of your heart that is threatening to burst, and of the silent screams that escape you. Smell, the blood throbbing through your nostrils. Tangy, metallic blood. You can taste it on your tongue. You feel the sensations that accompany pain, and those that stay longer after it has gone. The senses are dulled, and precise. The pain maybe be temporary but it wrenches the velvet curtains of time from their hangs and shreds them to make seconds feel like an eternity. The pain makes you feel you are drowning, and doing irrational things is the only response. Animal things. Rational, maybe. You claw at your head feeling like you can tear it out. You can not. But you try anyways. You need to feel like you can do something about it. You can’t.

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I was there when it happened. I looked over at his face, and saw a plethora of things, some I recognized, others I didn’t. There was the air of arrogance, of course, they thought they were better than us. And they had made us believe that. For centuries we would believe it. We needed to be fair to be lovely. There was joy, he had done what he had been tasked to do. Finality, they had landed on our shores almost five centuries ago. On this day, they had officially divided up our land. Exhaustion. They were tired of it. Of us. That made sense. I was exhausted too. By all this fighting. By all this division. Why did the fictions that were invented to bring us together now pitting us against one another. One of those fictions had originated on the banks of the Ganga, another in the scorching Arab sands. Sadness. I didn’t understand that. Relief, I understood, and he displayed that. Relief that they were done with us. Sadness? Only later would I piece together the puzzle.

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It is different things for different people. And it’s so vague that you really know what or how someone else experiences it. With time, it may alter. It matures. It evolves. It can become cynical. But never cyclical. It does not repeat itself. For each person, it has a unique signature, a rocky fingerprint, an alluring scent. It can be an avalanche. For each person, it’s one avalanche throughout their life. Snow rolling down from the tip of an upset mountain, sometimes it will snag and fizzle out. Other times, it will snowball into something bigger and powerful, more magnificent than the clump of frozen water that it came from. With the first, it was excitement. With the second, comfort. The third was falling into the snowball. Immersing yourself fully in it. Enjoying the ride. The fourth. A cleanse from the black snow that had swirled inside. That was drowning, suffocating, poisoning. And then there’s hope. Maybe there’s more. Maybe there’s one that isn’t an impediment. As it rolls down the hill while the sun glows on the horizon, warming the mountain with its groggy tendrils of light, the snowball helps you become stronger, firmer, wiser. Happier.

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He turned away from looking out the window. He began to tap on the wheel in tune with the music. It was growing on him. The car was air conditioned. The outside was sun burnt. This had been a nice ride. Not looking at the phone every few seconds. He didn’t have data, he didn’t have to worry about his game. Stress free. He had some time to think. Instead of managing driving, his game, and his calls, at the same time. He had just been driving and listening to music. It was nice. The light turned green, he slowly pushed the pedal. The car accelerated forward. Motorcycles swirling around like bees. Rickshaws. The chaotic traffic that was the heartbeat of this city. The hum drum. The noise. The chaos. It was all part of the system of red throbbing veins that connected this city. Clogged with traffic like the arteries of a fat man who eats nothing but oily greasy junk food. But it was home. The canal was to his right. On his left, there was a cart. A shirtless boy was sitting on it, swinging his legs. He didn’t have the shorn abs of some of the other children. His stomach was flaccid. Not big. Just soft. He was small for his age. His face looked much older, a little big and unwieldy on his skinny shoulders. The cart was led by a donkey. A few slabs of wood. A woman with a red shawl around her head, the same color for her shalwaar kameez, was holding the reins guiding the beast along. The boy was looking in front of him, eyes blank, uninterested. More frequently than not, he would be tossed up like a limp rag doll as the cart shuddered. His expression would remain unchanged.

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He always hated encounters like those. Glance over in their direction, even for a second, and they'd be on you. Treat them like they were invisible, and they’d leave you alone. He had looked at the man that had been making the ruckus. Not ruckus, that wasnt the exact word. But the man that had been loudly calling out to passerby’s. He had looked, and now the man was moving towards the gate, same as him, trying to intercept him. He had loudly slammed his trunk shut, it had been a subconscious effort but the threat of anger didn’t deter the man. Why would it? What did he have to worry about from some pampered looking prissy boy in white collar clothes?

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The machine hummed on. His ears were red. The droning of the machine, up, down, up, down was throbbing in his head. His heart was aching. It was beating slow and fast, erratic. That was the word. It was making him feel nauseated. His stomach grumbled. Full and sickeningly empty. Swollen and taut. The sight in front of him was normal. It was not as if you could tell. He felt as if he could smell the horses from his childhood. Which was odd, since there were no horses here, and probably had not been here for at least the last four decades. His stomach did a backflip. It was now full. He felt like throwing up. He could taste the sweat and animal fur in the air. The ground was squelchy and squishy beneath his feet. The machine droned on. Up. Down. Up. Down.

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Cain looked at the horizon and smiled. It was time to meet his long time friend. How many years had it been? He walked over. Cain preferred walking. Sure it took longer, but what was time to him. He had all the time in the world. He had come to enjoy walking. Every few centuries, he forgot the last lesson, and he walked take one of the modes of travel unique to that era. The last time he had done something of the sort, the mode of transportation had been a plane, and it had crashed. Cruel lesson, if you asked him. All he’d done was kill his brother. To teach him a lesson, hundreds had been killed in that day alone. He was injured, of course. But he wouldn’t die. He had had the identity then of another man from the one whose identity he had now. The plane had crashed. He’d been the only one that had survived. To avoid the questions and the interrogation, that too was a long process, he’d vanished. Let them put him in their missing persons list. They’d never be able to solve the case, but they would ‘solve’ it officially and none would be any the wiser. Finding another identity, it had been a hard struggle. So he was set for another few centuries. Doomed to walk the earth, until he forgot. And then the cycle would begin anew.

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He ran. Three rounds left. It was harder today. It felt harder today. The sun was bearing down on him, drowsy still. He thought about the lassi he had waiting in the car. It would have thawed by now and would be a comfortable cold. He almost salivated. Three rounds. He turned and stared at the man who was inside one of the cages, a rusty can probably filled with food. The ducks and ducklings were cawing and honking around him. His arms swung, and with every rotation, every step, his scapulae rotated. One turning inwards, one outwards, they hit the sweat drenched shirt. The shirt had been thick, but light, like clouds, earlier. Now, the front of it was heavy, the sweat a veritable weighted vest. The back was cool as it smacked his retracting and contracting shoulder and back muscles.

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The heat was drifting under his chin. Making his freshly shaved face itchy. The jeans were too tight, he had to keep pulling them down so that he could breathe down there. His shirt was drenched with sweat. The heat was humid, and it’s thirst never ended. It kept on drawing more and more sweat out of him. He used his forearm to wipe the sweat away, and it helped. But briefly. He hoped that they’d be done with this soon. He couldn’t wait to get into air conditioning. This was his first time. He stood by his motorcycle, trying not to look out of place. But even if he hadn’t pretended to work on a bike that was actually broken, it wouldn’t have mattered. No one paid him any heed. Like the millions of people in this country who were born and who died in the trash, he was invisible. His life didn’t matter. He noticed that his fists had clenched and he relaxed them. He looked over at the two who were leaning against the truck. Calm. Taking it all in. They had done this a few times. One of them was his cousin. After his father died, and after he’d lost his job, his cousin took pity on him, and involved him in the plan. He had the easiest job.

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The rajah was nowhere to be seen. The shadows too, were mostly gone. A few flitted here and there, but mostly gone. The thunder still raged above, the fires all around, the water, the lightning ran ragged.

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