Window seats

I once read a book just because the title interested me. I didn’t enjoy it much but I read the whole thing. ‘Window seat’, was the title.

Every average person has this obsession for a window seat, I do too. I love window seats; I am the most satisfied person on earth if I have a window seat.

In trains I love A/c, SL (side- lower); you get a whole long window for yourself, yes luxury, so what? You can lie half awake looking at the blue sky, even better during monsoon, you can sit up and be fully awake and see the paddy fields that go by, the stations and the people, the cattle and cattle people or should I say cow boys?, and the blackness in tunnels. In busses too I prefer A/c; yes I ‘prefer’ luxury. Feel cool even when the sun is scorching bright hot, get stuck in traffic and chaos and yet not feel any of it, enjoy the silence and stillness. Sit at ease and see people engaged in their lives, shopkeepers and customers, pedestrians, stray dogs, stray people, stray babies. 

It feels like watching a fiction, where you have no part to play, where you can just be a mute spectator enjoying the form of art and where nobody expects you to do anything or where nobody even knows of your existence. You are so free of responsibilities. It is so relaxing to be away from reality, to not care, think light, and feel good. Only luxury lets you do that. No general compartment or ordinary busses lets you to be a mute spectator, they get you involved, you have to take the heat, the sound, the chaos and the air and its smells, and you have no choice but care and when you care, feeling good is tentative.

Behind a luxurious window you see, behind an ordinary one you live. Fiction is enjoyable how much ever tedious it may look but falling into it and being inevitably forced to live in it needn’t be so. You cry watching fiction, you remember it, it changes you, you learn from it and you evolve yet there is always an incorrigible distance between you and that fictional account because you don’t really know how it feels to be that fictional character, to face those problems. How much ever empathetic you are there is a threshold up to where you can go, beyond that it is purely the victim’s own, something that is unique and one of a kind. Every individual has this fortune of holding unique pieces of knowledge, and every individual has reason to be respected. Nobody knows it all and nobody has it all. Whichever window is it that you are looking through you have enough within you of which you can be proud of and you have enough to be ashamed of. Making an effort to go up to that threshold and accepting the fact that there is a lot beyond it makes all the difference.

Some get to see bitter fiction while some get to live bitter lives.

Anyway, I was trying to talk about window seats and I have failed to do so, even there comes up richness and its antonym. Well, what I wanted to say was I enjoy looking out of windows and seeing the sights outside while travelling like almost everybody else. I don’t know where all that rant about fiction and threshold came from. My intention was to speak of window seats and only simply that, may be that was a mistake. I am not good enough to write paragraphs about window seats. So I guess I should stop.

Open all windows, see and live, live and see.

Abyss

My eyes are closed and I am seeing it, I can even feel it. The green tall grass, the shrubs, the trees swaying in the wind, I can feel that wind in my hair, on my face, it is so good. I can see a pond there; it looks beautiful amidst all the green. I am leaning onto a rock, the rock under the blazing sun isn’t burning hot, I wonder why? This is a new feeling, a pleasant one though, to be a tiny speck in a vast land of green. There is nothing blocking my vision of the sky, there is nothing intruding the sound of wind and birds. The woods look rich with the wildlife hidden in there. Everything looks so perfect, so pure. I don’t want to open my eyes but I have to, I don’t want to let go of this beautiful vision but I have to, because that beautiful place isn’t where I am anymore. I am in the man’s land again, the land that was given birth by murdering its own mother, nature. I see the shadow of a broken and bleeding family here, the mother nature married to the dangerous species called human being to have a baby that is monstrous enough to kill its own mother and eventually and inevitably its father too who for now is blissfully ignorant of that awaiting ill fate. I look up from there and I could see that mountain there, where everything was pure and perfect, standing tall and gay, but I could sense the slow movement of the monstrous baby beneath me, nurtured by its ignorant and arrogant father, crawling up towards that beauty, all armed to consume it, to take away the faint heart beat of its weak and dying mother. A dark cloud was hovering over me, plunging me into darkness, the cloud had moving figures in them, white and smoky, and they were featuring a story, a play rather. I saw them act before me and I began to enjoy it.

In the play, the shadowy figures, the beautiful mother, the cruel father and the monstrous baby, enact their story in silence. They spin and turn, they split and shatter. The play ends and the last scene has the baby growing by consuming the dying mother, there is a red glow around the non consumed parts of the dying mother, the father is huge in number, the entire species of human beings sum up that one father and this father has a lot of characters, a lot of cruelty, a lot of anger, a lot of ignorance, a lot of beliefs, a lot of helplessness, a little love, a little purity, a little intelligence and a little joy. All those little characters are white and glowing but they are so small and easily suppressed but one can see a faint glowing line linking all those little ones, and the big black ones going listless and hollow. I felt myself being absorbed into that cloud, I was being pulled into the hollowed black figure but I resisted and I lost the ground beneath my feet and fell into an abyss. I was falling, the fall was forever, and I wasn’t hitting the ground. My eyes were burning, I had to close them, I hadn’t yet hit the ground, but I had to close my burning eyes.

I closed my eyes, I wasn’t falling anymore. I could feel and see things the way it was. I was back in the normal world with normal people and normal stories. All of us had our eyes closed and happy and not falling.

All of us know that the fall hasn’t stopped; we have just closed our eyes and shut off the unwelcome things. The monstrous baby will soon perish with the ignorant father; the mother will be born again.

Humanity is falling and one day it will hit the ground and die. We are falling into the arms of death. We can save ourselves, if together we can open our eyes to things and look out for something to cling on and save our lives from the waiting arms of death. Let us open our eyes together before it is too late, before the arms of death sweep us away. Let us treat the mother right.