Rage Against the Dying of Light

Ajay Mishra

For a brief moment, the day after he tried to kill himself and his parents told him he was going home, S__ was happy. He was thinking about the well, about the storyteller who lived in the well, and about one particular story the storyteller had told him. It was about two monks who go into a forest and never return. And even though he could not remember the entire story, he was not too concerned because he was going to see the storyteller soon.

It was an old well, where the storyteller lived, wide, brick-walled, mossy. There were frogs living on the cracks, and a layer of dry leaves always floated on the water. It was built by the king, they said, when there used to be kings, for the travelers who were on the pilgrimage to the Holy Northern Temple. It was far from the town, on the edge of the forest, beside the fading trail that was the old Pilgrimage Road. Nobody came near it anymore, nobody except S__, the occasional pilgrims and the storyteller, who lived inside the well.

Once, when S__ asked the storyteller if it was uncomfortable living inside the well, the storyteller had laughed and said that S__ should not underestimate the richness of the world inside the holes under earth, and then he had gone on to tell the story of a little girl called Alice. But it was not the Alice’s story that S__ remembered the day after his failed attempt to kill himself. No, it was the story of two monks. It was the only story he remembered out of the hundreds that the storyteller had told him.

It was also the first story the storyteller had told him, the first story he had fallen in love with. Even years after that first day, S__ used to ask the storyteller to tell that story again, but the storyteller never did. Learn to let go, the storyteller used to say, but S__ never understood why. Why let something go when you love it so much? He never voiced that question, though.

There were many things about the storyteller that S__ never understood. The storyteller used to call him, “little girl”, for instance. “You are here, little girl!” Or, “You came early today, little girl.” Or, “I can’t tell you a story today, little girl. I am not feeling well.” S__ always assumed that the storyteller was blind, and so never really corrected him. The storyteller lived on the bottom of the well and always looked straight up, out of the mouth of the well. S__ did not know if that was because the old man was looking at him, who was peering from the top of the well, or because up was the only place to look at. He preferred the latter because he thought the eyes of the blind men could at least sense the presence of light and like a sunflower always followed the source.

When he returned home, S__ could not go straightaway because he had broken his ankle jumping from his second floor window. He had to wait almost a month for his ankle to get better enough to walk a few miles. In that long and lonely month, S__ spent every evening sitting on the window sill and watching the tall and white eucalyptus trees swaying to and fro with the wind. One moment they were bent all the way, their tops almost touching the ground, the wind hell-bent on making them touch the ground, and the next moment, they were on their way back to the top, soaring through the air in the moments of their fleeting freedom. And the cycle continued, on and on, the wind’s tyranny and the trees’ freedom, on and on, until the night came and he could not see anything outside.

He loved the night. The night broke the monotony of the day, and there was the silence, or rather there were the lovely sounds that remained undisturbed by the cacophony of the day. The sounds were faint yet so clear. They entered deep into his mind and echoed for a long time and calmed him and made him happy. He loved those sounds, the constant chirping of crickets, the occasional barking of dogs, and the rare singing of a woman in the distance. About the latter, he was not sure if it was real. Sometimes he thought he was only imagining the woman’s voice, but in the rare occasions when he heard the voice, it was clear and distinct and felt as real as the ledge of the window on his back.

There was one sound, however, that S__ hated, a remnant of the day that travelled well into the night and disturbed the peace, the sound of vehicles speeding through the road: the roar of the engine, the screech of tyres against the hard concrete, the sharp whistle of the metal cutting through the air. In the beginning, it was only a mild irritation, something that disturbed the calm of the night, that created a clamor and jumbled the soothing sounds of the crickets and of the dogs and, especially, of the woman. However, as the days passed and the vehicles kept disturbing him, his irritation grew and grew and soon it became a hatred the likes of which he had never felt.

He had felt sad. He had felt lonely in the not so distant days. He had felt like he was trapped in a cave and a mountain had just fallen over the mouth, and suffocation was the only future he could imagine. He had felt that there was no light in sight, not even soothing darkness of the open world, but only suffocation, the suffocation of a place he did not know how to escape. But even those dark times he had not felt the rage, the anger that he had started to feel for the sound of the vehicles screeching through the road.

S__ spent that month fluctuating between the monotony of the day, clam of the night and the rage fuelled by the vehicles on the road.

It was a cool summer evening that S__ decided his ankle was good enough to walk to the well. He took the road northwards, the old pilgrimage road, the road he had taken so many times, so many years ago. He walked slowly, one step at a time, not straining his feet too much, and waited patiently for the black-topped road to end and the soft dirt path to begin. The well was still about twenty-minutes’ walk along the dirt path, but he had always felt the beginning of the dirt path was the beginning of the storyteller’s world. However, on that day, as he walked with his heart full of hope, hours went by and the concrete went on endlessly.

The sun was going down, the light was fading, the stars, powerless as they were against the darkness, were starting to appear one by one in the sky, and still S__ walked northwards, thinking that it must be the ankle that was making him walk slowly, and the road longer.

Eventually, when the light had all but faded, when the moon shone as a lightless crescent, S__ decided that it was time to return home. At that moment, the end of the day did not make him feel better. He did not even hear the crickets chirping in the wild. He was only disappointed, but still hopeful about the next day. The next day, he was going to start a little earlier and the ankle was going to be better and he was going to find the well.

That night, back in his home, he dreamt of the storyteller, of the storyteller telling him the story of the two monks. They had taken food inside the forest, the storyteller said, but they were not allowed to. The forest was sacred and anything from the outside world was a contamination. That was why they never returned; the forest did not forgive them for their error. In the dream, when he asked what happened to the monks inside the forest, the storyteller told him nothing, told him let it go, to not let it become an obsession. And S__ was angry for he wanted to know, to know more, to know everything there was to know about the monks. He left the storyteller to go far away, far enough to make him forget about the storyteller and about the story of the two monks. If he could not know more, there was no point in knowing little.

So, he went away, or he tried to go away, for he had not even walked a few steps from the well when he heard a horrible sound, the sound of the vehicles, the dirty amalgam of the roaring engine and the screeching tyres and the whistling air. He heard the sound first and then saw the dark menacing thing speeding towards him. When the bus was just about to hit him, he woke up with fear pulsating through his veins. It was morning. When his heart relaxed, and his head cooled down, and the fear dissipated away, he decided he was not ready to face another day. He decided to go in search of the well right then.

S__ sneaked out like a thief, carefully and noiselessly. He did not want his parents to be too concerned. Outside, the mist was thick and the ground wet with the morning dew. It was cold and S__ had a sweater on, and a jacket over that sweater. The time went by, and the road went on and on, concrete road passing through the meadows and forests and over the rivers. S__ did not like the hard road tarnishing the softness of the surrounding. Had they built the road all the way to the Temple?

The mist slowly dispersed and gave way for the sun, the dew-drops evaporated, the air got stuffy and hot, the road below started to heat up. There was no telling what he was thinking as he walked through the scorching ferocity of the mid-day sun, through the dry, feisty afternoon wind, and under the redden evening sky. At times, when he spotted some kind of mound, he got excited and rushed to the mound, only to be disappointed to see nothing but a pile of earth. Towards the evening, when his excitement on seeing the mounds was waning, he saw a mound that looked like a pile of concrete, grey and solid against the soft green surrounding. He rushed to the mound, only to find not a well but a heap of mud and concrete chucks and bricks and stones and charcoal.

In that moment, he was troubled by the fact that he could not picture the well. How could he think something concrete was the old well? Wasn’t the well brick-walled and bare? But there must have been some cement to glue the bricks together. Or was it mud? He tried to think of the surrounding, to picture other things around the well and then from there piece the well. There was a forest nearby, he knew, not because he could picture the forest in his head but because he knew that like people know facts, like the way people know that Everest’s peak is the highest place in the world even though they have never been to Everest’s peak. When he tried to think of the details of the surroundings, like what did the nearest tree look like?, nothing came to him.

The day was getting dark and S__ was getting tired and sad and hopeless and lonely. The feeling of being trapped inside the cave was slowly returning, getting mightier and mightier. Until a few hours ago, he had seen the light, a tiny crack in the mountain, a glimmer of hope. He had thought he might see the open air again. If he could just widen the crack a little more, he might breathe the fresh air. But now, he was beginning to feel that the light he had seen was a mirage, his own mind playing tricks on him.

The night had fallen and it was a day’s journey back home, so there was no question of returning. He sat down under a solitary tree beside the road, and closed his eyes. He heard the crickets starting to chirp but felt no calm he used to feel. He heard the wolves howling in the distance, but he felt neither the thrill nor the fear. He even heard the woman’s singing, soft and mellifluous, each word ebbing and flowing in a gentle rhythm, her pitch going high and low like small waves in the calm sea, and he felt bored.

Tired as he was after walking for an entire day, he soon fell asleep. In his fitful sleep, he saw a dream, and in his broken dream, he saw the storyteller. The storyteller was telling the story of the two monks but he could not hear anything. There was a constant droning voice of some heavy vehicle, a truck or a train maybe, that was drowning the storyteller’s voice. S__ was craning his neck, trying to push his head as far inside the well as he could but he could hear nothing. S__ turned to the road, trying the find the vehicle, trying to calculate how long till it passed. But there was nothing on the road, only the irritating sound that did not seem to come from a certain source but present in the ambiance itself, as if each molecule in the air was producing the noise. Not knowing what else to do, S__ decided to jump into the well. He might hear the storyteller better inside the well. Only, he never seemed to reach the bottom of the well, never felt the water on his feet. He kept falling and falling forever into the bottomless abyss. Everything was dark and there was no storyteller, there were no walls, only the emptiness and he was falling through it, into it, and following him into the abyss was the droning of the vehicle.

S__ woke up very suddenly, the eyes opened in a fraction of a second but the body remained motionless. In that fleeting window of awaken consciousness, he saw a large truck passing through the road, making that awful noise. Then he fell asleep again.

Once again, he saw the storyteller in the dream. This time he was sitting on a rock outside the well, silent, no story on his lips. Never before had S__ seen the storyteller outside the well and never before had S__ seen him silent. Even when the storyteller was not telling a story, he was always speaking, giving advices, saying something philosophical—although S__ remembered neither his advices nor his philosophies, nothing except certain fragments of the story of two monks.

The storyteller was staring vacantly at something. S__, following the storyteller’s sight, saw that some people were throwing cement and pebbles and coal tar and rocks into the well. They were trying to fill the well, he thought, they were trying to fill it with rocks and pebbles, then plaster it and finally top it with charcoal. S__ could not understand why they were doing that, why the well should be black-topped, but he did not question them. He could not.

He went near the storyteller and tried to say something, asked where he was going to live now that his home was being filled, but no voice came out of his mouth. He tried hard, stressed till his throat was aching and his cheeks were tired and eyes were hot, still only the silent air came out of his mouth. In that very moment, as if mocking his helplessness, a vehicle moved past the road, showing off its thundering sound.

Again, S__ woke up very suddenly and found out that there was an eerie silence around him, no chirping crickets, no howling wolves, no singing woman, only a giant truck passed through the road, disturbing silent balance. He lied there for a moment watching the truck move past him, then a sudden burst of rage got hold of him. He woke up with a jerk, picked a stone from the ground, ran along the road towards the truck and threw the stone with all his might. The speeding bus had moved a long way away. The stone hit the road, bounced a couple of times, and fell into the earth beside the road with a thud and stopped, useless.

Lost in that tiny conflict too, S__ fell on his knees. Hot, angry tears formed in his eyes. He tried to stop the tears: shut his eyes tight and took deep forced breaths, but that, instead of stopping the tears, caused violent sobs that formed in his guts and forced themselves in a series of fits. The tear were now falling freely, out of his eyes, down his cheeks. The breathing was ragged—he was almost hyperventilating. The sobs were loud and intense and no matter how much he tried to stop them.

Unable to controlling anything that was happening to him, he fell on his back and let go, allowing whatever was happening happen, and he cried, with loud violent sobs, his chest ballooning and deflating, eyes tearing up like hill springs, snot falling down his nose. Everything out of his control.

Rage Against the Dying of Light

Ajay Mishra

For a brief moment, the day after he tried to kill himself and his parents told him he was going home, S__ was happy. He was thinking about the well, about the storyteller who lived in the well, and about one particular story the storyteller had told him. It was about two monks who go into a forest and never return. And even though he could not remember the entire story, he was not too concerned because he was going to see the storyteller soon.

It was an old well, where the storyteller lived, wide, brick-walled, mossy. There were frogs living on the cracks, and a layer of dry leaves always floated on the water. It was built by the king, they said, when there used to be kings, for the travelers who were on the pilgrimage to the Holy Northern Temple. It was far from the town, on the edge of the forest, beside the fading trail that was the old Pilgrimage Road. Nobody came near it anymore, nobody except S__, the occasional pilgrims and the storyteller, who lived inside the well.

Once, when S__ asked the storyteller if it was uncomfortable living inside the well, the storyteller had laughed and said that S__ should not underestimate the richness of the world inside the holes under earth, and then he had gone on to tell the story of a little girl called Alice. But it was not the Alice’s story that S__ remembered the day after his failed attempt to kill himself. No, it was the story of two monks. It was the only story he remembered out of the hundreds that the storyteller had told him.

It was also the first story the storyteller had told him, the first story he had fallen in love with. Even years after that first day, S__ used to ask the storyteller to tell that story again, but the storyteller never did. Learn to let go, the storyteller used to say, but S__ never understood why. Why let something go when you love it so much? He never voiced that question, though.

There were many things about the storyteller that S__ never understood. The storyteller used to call him, “little girl”, for instance. “You are here, little girl!” Or, “You came early today, little girl.” Or, “I can’t tell you a story today, little girl. I am not feeling well.” S__ always assumed that the storyteller was blind, and so never really corrected him. The storyteller lived on the bottom of the well and always looked straight up, out of the mouth of the well. S__ did not know if that was because the old man was looking at him, who was peering from the top of the well, or because up was the only place to look at. He preferred the latter because he thought the eyes of the blind men could at least sense the presence of light and like a sunflower always followed the source.

When he returned home, S__ could not go straightaway because he had broken his ankle jumping from his second floor window. He had to wait almost a month for his ankle to get better enough to walk a few miles. In that long and lonely month, S__ spent every evening sitting on the window sill and watching the tall and white eucalyptus trees swaying to and fro with the wind. One moment they were bent all the way, their tops almost touching the ground, the wind hell-bent on making them touch the ground, and the next moment, they were on their way back to the top, soaring through the air in the moments of their fleeting freedom. And the cycle continued, on and on, the wind’s tyranny and the trees’ freedom, on and on, until the night came and he could not see anything outside.

He loved the night. The night broke the monotony of the day, and there was the silence, or rather there were the lovely sounds that remained undisturbed by the cacophony of the day. The sounds were faint yet so clear. They entered deep into his mind and echoed for a long time and calmed him and made him happy. He loved those sounds, the constant chirping of crickets, the occasional barking of dogs, and the rare singing of a woman in the distance. About the latter, he was not sure if it was real. Sometimes he thought he was only imagining the woman’s voice, but in the rare occasions when he heard the voice, it was clear and distinct and felt as real as the ledge of the window on his back.

There was one sound, however, that S__ hated, a remnant of the day that travelled well into the night and disturbed the peace, the sound of vehicles speeding through the road: the roar of the engine, the screech of tyres against the hard concrete, the sharp whistle of the metal cutting through the air. In the beginning, it was only a mild irritation, something that disturbed the calm of the night, that created a clamor and jumbled the soothing sounds of the crickets and of the dogs and, especially, of the woman. However, as the days passed and the vehicles kept disturbing him, his irritation grew and grew and soon it became a hatred the likes of which he had never felt.

He had felt sad. He had felt lonely in the not so distant days. He had felt like he was trapped in a cave and a mountain had just fallen over the mouth, and suffocation was the only future he could imagine. He had felt that there was no light in sight, not even soothing darkness of the open world, but only suffocation, the suffocation of a place he did not know how to escape. But even those dark times he had not felt the rage, the anger that he had started to feel for the sound of the vehicles screeching through the road.

S__ spent that month fluctuating between the monotony of the day, clam of the night and the rage fuelled by the vehicles on the road.

It was a cool summer evening that S__ decided his ankle was good enough to walk to the well. He took the road northwards, the old pilgrimage road, the road he had taken so many times, so many years ago. He walked slowly, one step at a time, not straining his feet too much, and waited patiently for the black-topped road to end and the soft dirt path to begin. The well was still about twenty-minutes’ walk along the dirt path, but he had always felt the beginning of the dirt path was the beginning of the storyteller’s world. However, on that day, as he walked with his heart full of hope, hours went by and the concrete went on endlessly.

The sun was going down, the light was fading, the stars, powerless as they were against the darkness, were starting to appear one by one in the sky, and still S__ walked northwards, thinking that it must be the ankle that was making him walk slowly, and the road longer.

Eventually, when the light had all but faded, when the moon shone as a lightless crescent, S__ decided that it was time to return home. At that moment, the end of the day did not make him feel better. He did not even hear the crickets chirping in the wild. He was only disappointed, but still hopeful about the next day. The next day, he was going to start a little earlier and the ankle was going to be better and he was going to find the well.

That night, back in his home, he dreamt of the storyteller, of the storyteller telling him the story of the two monks. They had taken food inside the forest, the storyteller said, but they were not allowed to. The forest was sacred and anything from the outside world was a contamination. That was why they never returned; the forest did not forgive them for their error. In the dream, when he asked what happened to the monks inside the forest, the storyteller told him nothing, told him let it go, to not let it become an obsession. And S__ was angry for he wanted to know, to know more, to know everything there was to know about the monks. He left the storyteller to go far away, far enough to make him forget about the storyteller and about the story of the two monks. If he could not know more, there was no point in knowing little.

So, he went away, or he tried to go away, for he had not even walked a few steps from the well when he heard a horrible sound, the sound of the vehicles, the dirty amalgam of the roaring engine and the screeching tyres and the whistling air. He heard the sound first and then saw the dark menacing thing speeding towards him. When the bus was just about to hit him, he woke up with fear pulsating through his veins. It was morning. When his heart relaxed, and his head cooled down, and the fear dissipated away, he decided he was not ready to face another day. He decided to go in search of the well right then.

S__ sneaked out like a thief, carefully and noiselessly. He did not want his parents to be too concerned. Outside, the mist was thick and the ground wet with the morning dew. It was cold and S__ had a sweater on, and a jacket over that sweater. The time went by, and the road went on and on, concrete road passing through the meadows and forests and over the rivers. S__ did not like the hard road tarnishing the softness of the surrounding. Had they built the road all the way to the Temple?

The mist slowly dispersed and gave way for the sun, the dew-drops evaporated, the air got stuffy and hot, the road below started to heat up. There was no telling what he was thinking as he walked through the scorching ferocity of the mid-day sun, through the dry, feisty afternoon wind, and under the redden evening sky. At times, when he spotted some kind of mound, he got excited and rushed to the mound, only to be disappointed to see nothing but a pile of earth. Towards the evening, when his excitement on seeing the mounds was waning, he saw a mound that looked like a pile of concrete, grey and solid against the soft green surrounding. He rushed to the mound, only to find not a well but a heap of mud and concrete chucks and bricks and stones and charcoal.

In that moment, he was troubled by the fact that he could not picture the well. How could he think something concrete was the old well? Wasn’t the well brick-walled and bare? But there must have been some cement to glue the bricks together. Or was it mud? He tried to think of the surrounding, to picture other things around the well and then from there piece the well. There was a forest nearby, he knew, not because he could picture the forest in his head but because he knew that like people know facts, like the way people know that Everest’s peak is the highest place in the world even though they have never been to Everest’s peak. When he tried to think of the details of the surroundings, like what did the nearest tree look like?, nothing came to him.

The day was getting dark and S__ was getting tired and sad and hopeless and lonely. The feeling of being trapped inside the cave was slowly returning, getting mightier and mightier. Until a few hours ago, he had seen the light, a tiny crack in the mountain, a glimmer of hope. He had thought he might see the open air again. If he could just widen the crack a little more, he might breathe the fresh air. But now, he was beginning to feel that the light he had seen was a mirage, his own mind playing tricks on him.

The night had fallen and it was a day’s journey back home, so there was no question of returning. He sat down under a solitary tree beside the road, and closed his eyes. He heard the crickets starting to chirp but felt no calm he used to feel. He heard the wolves howling in the distance, but he felt neither the thrill nor the fear. He even heard the woman’s singing, soft and mellifluous, each word ebbing and flowing in a gentle rhythm, her pitch going high and low like small waves in the calm sea, and he felt bored.

Tired as he was after walking for an entire day, he soon fell asleep. In his fitful sleep, he saw a dream, and in his broken dream, he saw the storyteller. The storyteller was telling the story of the two monks but he could not hear anything. There was a constant droning voice of some heavy vehicle, a truck or a train maybe, that was drowning the storyteller’s voice. S__ was craning his neck, trying to push his head as far inside the well as he could but he could hear nothing. S__ turned to the road, trying the find the vehicle, trying to calculate how long till it passed. But there was nothing on the road, only the irritating sound that did not seem to come from a certain source but present in the ambiance itself, as if each molecule in the air was producing the noise. Not knowing what else to do, S__ decided to jump into the well. He might hear the storyteller better inside the well. Only, he never seemed to reach the bottom of the well, never felt the water on his feet. He kept falling and falling forever into the bottomless abyss. Everything was dark and there was no storyteller, there were no walls, only the emptiness and he was falling through it, into it, and following him into the abyss was the droning of the vehicle.

S__ woke up very suddenly, the eyes opened in a fraction of a second but the body remained motionless. In that fleeting window of awaken consciousness, he saw a large truck passing through the road, making that awful noise. Then he fell asleep again.

Once again, he saw the storyteller in the dream. This time he was sitting on a rock outside the well, silent, no story on his lips. Never before had S__ seen the storyteller outside the well and never before had S__ seen him silent. Even when the storyteller was not telling a story, he was always speaking, giving advices, saying something philosophical—although S__ remembered neither his advices nor his philosophies, nothing except certain fragments of the story of two monks.

The storyteller was staring vacantly at something. S__, following the storyteller’s sight, saw that some people were throwing cement and pebbles and coal tar and rocks into the well. They were trying to fill the well, he thought, they were trying to fill it with rocks and pebbles, then plaster it and finally top it with charcoal. S__ could not understand why they were doing that, why the well should be black-topped, but he did not question them. He could not.

He went near the storyteller and tried to say something, asked where he was going to live now that his home was being filled, but no voice came out of his mouth. He tried hard, stressed till his throat was aching and his cheeks were tired and eyes were hot, still only the silent air came out of his mouth. In that very moment, as if mocking his helplessness, a vehicle moved past the road, showing off its thundering sound.

Again, S__ woke up very suddenly and found out that there was an eerie silence around him, no chirping crickets, no howling wolves, no singing woman, only a giant truck passed through the road, disturbing silent balance. He lied there for a moment watching the truck move past him, then a sudden burst of rage got hold of him. He woke up with a jerk, picked a stone from the ground, ran along the road towards the truck and threw the stone with all his might. The speeding bus had moved a long way away. The stone hit the road, bounced a couple of times, and fell into the earth beside the road with a thud and stopped, useless.

Lost in that tiny conflict too, S__ fell on his knees. Hot, angry tears formed in his eyes. He tried to stop the tears: shut his eyes tight and took deep forced breaths, but that, instead of stopping the tears, caused violent sobs that formed in his guts and forced themselves in a series of fits. The tear were now falling freely, out of his eyes, down his cheeks. The breathing was ragged—he was almost hyperventilating. The sobs were loud and intense and no matter how much he tried to stop them.

Unable to controlling anything that was happening to him, he fell on his back and let go, allowing whatever was happening happen, and he cried, with loud violent sobs, his chest ballooning and deflating, eyes tearing up like hill springs, snot falling down his nose. Everything out of his control.