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THAT is what THIS is going to be. A love story with the beginning of a hero, the middle of a confusion and the ending of a heroine. A proper khichdi of mixed up ideas that have haunted me ever since ever. And now that I’ve told you what is going to happen, I might as well shut up, put the poetically weary pen to rest and start with a new book. (I don’t write novels, I write books. I don’t create I publish). Something a sight better than a love story.

But, Butt, double Butts, a billy goat Butt, I know that you know, judging by the weight of the book that faces you, that its not going to end here. Its just that I wanted to warn you that there isn’t really any more to my story – no deeper meanings, no frightening allegories, no symbolisms deeper than the cupped palm of an old knottled hand. There is, if there has to be something, nothing but fragments of confused imaginations. The book is a ghost, a dead past come to claim its pound of flesh; est tu Shylock? Oui!

My story is like a Return to Innocence inverted. Largely spoonerisms dressed in nothings – cheap thrills and lots of fun. It doesn’t know where it is heading. It rambles and rumbles, perhaps takes a step to the left, two to the right, does the mambo no. 5, treads over people, stubs its toes on boulders of time and relationship(s), gets scorched on invisible fires of dying embers. It reaches answers that were always clear to us, ever since the starry-eyed masturbation days. It goes towards a permanently delayed destination, blinded in me.

Then why write it? Boss, I don’t know. If I did, I wouldn’t be writing it in the first place. It is just that faced with a stone walled question, which disguised itself in a request – ‘Tell Me Something About Yourself’, I had no other steps (or staircases) but to retrace my way through all those proverbial foggy gullies of time and go back to THEN when I first met her. Different from what we are today (or tonight, or this afternoon, the vagaries of time aren’t important) and yet very scarily much the same as we always were, we met and then we met some more times. And who would have thought that…but that is for the later. That is, as they say (I for the life of me don’t know the who, what, where and when of the they said they said thing) is the other half of the story. All in due untime. Suspended as we are in memories that refuse to stretch out on a neat framework of chronology – like a stubborn bedspread that crumples in the middle – you have to reach the centre only through the smoothened out, stretchable peripheries.

At best, the whole effort is like pursuing the origins of Midnight and Dawn. One never knows which follows the other. Any attempts at dividing them will lead you into an eternity of dichotomies that will blend, one into the other, even before you can say…well even before you can say anything. Anything! Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee? I told you so. But yes, all said and done, this is just a smudged life in long hand. Almost.

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