Balcony Piece I
One hand fighting with mosquitoes using a bat, a simple specimen of electrocution; another smsing with another sleepless soul for the immensely wide syllabus of DU; my fan creaking as it blows my unkempt countable hair that has seemed evenly grown grass on an asphalt; sweat itching my skin for the damp t-shit which has been on its third revision since it had gotten dirty; clearing my throat a number of times as I sneeze owing to the moleculizer (all-out) for the mosquitoes, again mosquitoes; my eyes, through specs, staring at littered files on Kafka, Joyce, Marquez and Conrad on my laptop screen. As I found the last one impenetrable, it has been long since I decided to use it as a pillow for the sponge one started to function as my soothing masseuse of the pain on my back. The other three take me far away back home: as Stephen tries to unshackle himself from ties of religion, family and patriotism as if there aren’t other yokes; as K. finds himself determined to clear himself off guilt for crimes he doesn’t know of as if we shouldn’t feel far more guilty than him for our hollow pities and lip services on humanity; as the Buendias count their seven generations as if I wasn’t able to do that when I was much younger than seven years old but when growing lessened my heed to it till I am now attributing my forefathers a hodgepodge of their deeds. Still incriminating myself for not feeling some sense of guilt as much as K.’s, no lesser than Stephen’s epiphany rules me as the first bird chirped much early than I am used to; who warned the bird that it should feel guilty if it didn’t make that sound at 4:30 am? Drawn by the increasing chirps to the balcony I keep asking myself this. The breeze outside makes me curse my tiny hot room; I feel like doing what a modern man got to do – ardently trying to enforce his ideas about nature and environment but adding his share of brick to deface it – I light my fag as if the dust on the fine breeze is not enough to chock this world. If this multi-taxing and self-conceit is more than enough to make us modern people, why do we still call K, J, M and C modernists?
