PUN CHRONICLES 11 - DOUBLE DATE

As Charity skipped excitedly to the edge of the cliff, striking a yoga-inspired-pose with perfect form, Shubham sighed, raising her Canon DSLR to his eyes for what seemed like the 100^th time.

“Try and see if you can get the sun placed between my palms in the picture,” she said, holding her hands above her head in the shape of a lotus.

Behind the camera, Shubham rolled his eyes, but did as he was told, nevertheless.

He was not particularly enjoying his first date.

It was Charity’s idea, just like everything else they did. They had first spoken on Tinder one week ago. Shubham had seemed like an exotic choice to her, something her whimsical mind always loved. She had never dated an Indian before and was interested in seeing what they had to offer. Shubham, on the other hand, had never matched with anyone before Charity on Tinder, and was therefore not in a position to really exercise any form of choice. 

Charity was significantly more attractive than he was, and she had immediately taken command of the conversation and before Shubham knew it, he had agreed to a 6-hour trek amongst the boreal forests of Canada.

And so, he found himself on a Saturday morning, hours away from civilization and his beloved television, walking a forest trail with no prospect of a rest anytime soon.

“So, what’s the story behind your name?” he asked, prying his mind away from the trail.

“Well, my family has always believed in working for the betterment of the community. Philanthropy is our family business, you could say,” she said, her pristine teeth flashing a dazzling smile at him.

“So, you work for an Non-profit?” he asked.

“No, no, I just got done with my Arts Major. I decided I wanted to take a break before I start working in earnest, so this year I have just been travelling and seeking new experiences. I feel it is very important to witness first-hand the troubles that people all over the world face. It teaches you to not take what you have for granted. Don’t you agree?”

Shubham smiled and nodded.

Coming from a country that overflowed with such “troubles” and never having had the luxury of taking a “break year”, he could not really bring himself to see her viewpoint. But he did not see the value in pointing this out to her.

And what the hell kind of a name is Charity?

“How much longer before we turn back?” Shubham asked.

Charity looked back at him, slightly bemused.

“It’s only been an hour and a half, we have a long walk ahead of us. Are you getting tired already?” she asked.

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” he lied, “I just like knowing what’s ahead of me so I am prepared mentally.”

“Ah, well, we have another 45 minutes of walking along this trail, which is level all the way and so shouldn’t be much trouble. Then comes the hard part. We have approximately an hour’s climb up the side of this mountain that is slightly rough going, and then it’s down the other side and looping back to the road, and we’ll be just dandy.”

“All right,” he said, defeated.

For the next hour, Shubham did not speak much. Charity did not notice it, she was used to dominating conversations and spent the entire time regaling him with tales designed to move all sympathetic beings to tears. Shubham proved largely impervious to her tragic stories, however, limiting his reactions to grunts and nods.

As they reached the foot of the mountain they were to climb for the next leg of their trek, the skies, as if reflecting Shubham’s inner state of mind, clouded over. He immediately felt the temperature drop and the world grow noticeably greyer. The breeze picked up, and Shubham thanked the Gods that he remembered to pack a sweater for himself.

Ten minutes into the climb, the first pitter patter of rain reached Shubham’s ears, bringing with it dread and fear akin to the Nazgul’s cry.

“Uh-oh, it’s beginning to rain. I hope you brought a raincoat,” Charity trilled, pulling hers out from her rucksack.

Shubham stared at her, hoping that her half-joking tone was an accurate appraisal of the seriousness of the situation if he hadn’t, in fact, brought a raincoat.

It began to rain in earnest, and Shubham’s weary muscles now had new foes to contend with. The wind now struck wet clothes, making the cold much more severe than he had accounted for. The rain had turned the trail to slush, making the uphill trudge slow and slippery. Shubham fell often, and every time his fingers touched the ice-cold rocks, his hands seemed to drop five degrees in temperature and never recover.

Even Charity’s spirits, which had tolerated no drop in levels of joviality until now, appeared to be dampened somewhat by this unseasonal downpour. She had meant for this trek to be relaxing and rejuvenating, not a battle against the elements.

“Shubham, you better get out that raincoat, these storms can get pretty harsh in these parts.”

“I don’t have a fucking raincoat,” Shubham snapped, shivering.

“What? Why would you come trekking without a raincoat?”

“I don’t know, I have almost no experience with this kind of stuff. I’ve lived in cities all my life. And tropical cities at that!”

“You told me you had been trekking before,” she retorted. The abrupt change from cheerful chirping to fearful interrogation did not go unnoticed by Shubham.

“Yes, I have. But not like this. I went for walks into the hills around a hill station lodge, I haven’t climbed mountains in the Canadian wilderness.”

 They both stared at each other, Charity pale with worry, and Shubham panting heavily, with his hands turning noticeably purple in the cold. The wind was verging on storm levels now, and the intensification in the aforementioned pitter patter alerted Charity to the fact that they were now also in a hailstorm.

“Okay,” she said, “There’s nothing to be done now, we just have to push through. Let’s stay calm and just plod away, it’s gonna be all right. The storm will pass.”

Shubham stared up at the climb before him and internally asked his legs if they had it in them. The answer was a resounding “No!”

“No, he echoed to Charity, “I’m done freezing my ass off. I’m going back.”

“Okay, wait. Have some of this, first,” she said, pulling out her flask.

“What is that?”

“Brandy. It will warm you right up.”

“I don’t drink.”

“It’s all right, it’s to warm you up, it isn’t going to get you drunk.”

“No, you don’t understand. I don’t drink. I am forbidden to do so by my religion.”

Charity stared at him, wondering if he was being serious or just being an asshole.

“Okay, at least have a sandwich, something to keep you going. You look half dead.”

“What’s in the sandwich, Charity?” he asked, wearily.

“What?”

“What is in the sandwich?”

“Ham and cheese.”

Shubham turned away in disgust and starting making his way back down the slope.

“What? What’s your problem?” Charity asked.

“I don’t eat meat. I’m a Jain.”

“Is that like a vegetarian?” she asked.

“A more extreme form of that, yes.”

“But you need to have something, you’re too weak right now.”

“I…don’t…eat…meat!”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I need some meat.

The lynx slinked along, slithering silently between the trees and through the foliage. He had a pronounced limp, one that signaled the beginning of the end for a predator. Sure enough, this lynx, once majestic and in command of prime territory, had now been relegated to the foothills of the Canadian rockies, where prey was sparse. The fact that one of his legs was pretty much non-functional merely added to the difficulty he faced in getting himself a meal.

It had been three long days since he had had anything to eat, and he saw no reason for his fortune to turn favourable. He had begun to notice prey standing brazenly in his vicinity, no longer afraid of his predatorial abilities. His limp pronounced the absence of a threat loud and clear to animals all around him. There were even traces of lynxes from neighbouring territories making inroads into his territory, sensing the weakening of its owner.

As he stared at his crumbling empire, sullenly, drenched in the rain, his ears picked up a commotion. Loud, aggressive voices reached him over the sound of the brewing storm. Every instinct told him to flee, but these were desperate times. Even the hint of a meal warranted an investigation.

He picked his way through the brush, moving, as felines always do, in complete silence. He circled around the source and came up from behind it. He saw two bipedal creatures stumbling down the face of the mountain. He saw, with a hunter’s eye, weakness. One of them seemed sturdy, resolute and calm. The other, of darker skin and more appetizing scent, was in no condition to live.

Humans were familiar to the lynx. In his heyday, he had watched many a human walk these very paths, while he remained unseen in the undergrowth. His instinct had always taught him not to interfere with larger creatures and he left humans well alone. But this was a question of life or death. He needed that meal.

The choice was a no-brainer. The weaker one would be the target. The lynx could smell the fear in him. He would make an easier prey.

Poised as all felines are when ready to pounce, the lynx felt the rush of the hunt return to him. His rear legs jettisoned him into the air and he let out a menacing snarl as he lunged for the throat of his prey.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shubham’s weary walk down the trail was interrupted by a snarl coming from right behind him. He snapped his head around, arms raised, to see what new abomination fate had in store for him. He immediately felt a searing pain in his arms as he felt a set of teeth sink into his flesh. Squealing with terror, he flailed his legs and arms desperately in an attempt to deter the attacker. He looked around to his companion for help just in time to see her fleeing into the distance.

Around them, the storm came into its own and the wind howled through the trees, mocking the screams of the dying man.

The lynx let go and lunged for his throat once again. Shubham tucked his chin into his chest, and this time he felt the teeth clamp onto his face. All the while, the lynx’s claws sliced his clothes and then his skin to shreds on his torso, shoulders and head.

The agony he felt had was unparalleled, but it also woke him up. His muscles forgot their weariness, his skin forgot what it is to be cold, and his brain forgot the feeling of fear. His entire body geared itself to aid him in surviving this attack.

Shubham, face still clasped firmly in the lynx’s jaw, felt about for a decent sized rock with one hand, while punching the lynx and pulling at its fur with the other. He managed to get hold of an oblong rock about the size of a brick and jammed it into the lynx’s skull with all his strength. The ploy was successful, as the lynx let out a roar and let go of his head.

The next time the lynx lunged, Shubham was ready. His vision was blurred by the blood streaming down from his scalp and the tears from the sheer pain he was experiencing, but his adrenaline pulled him through and he swung at the lynx while it was mid air and knocked it to the ground. He then let out a primal scream and, raising the rock above his head with both hands, pummeled it into the lynx’s skull again and again until nothing but a red pulp remained.

Shubham’s mind was overwhelmed with emotion and, in a final insult to the once-might lynx, he picked up a piece of flesh from its brain and began to chew on it.

The storm abated, the rain slowed to a drizzle, and Shubham, kneeling in a pool of human and lynx blood and rainwater combined, stared up the mountain face into the sky.

Silhouetted against the grey clouds was the blood-curdling figure of another lynx.

Shubham blinked, sure he was hallucinating. But there was no mistaking it.
Before he had time to contemplate what he had done to deserve his luck, the second lynx, a hunter just coming into its prime, pounced.

This time there was no struggle, this time there was no fight. The prey had lost its will.

Shubham’s clothes were found hours later by a search party that had been alerted by one Charity Faye.

The spokesperson for Canadian tourism warned the public that though lynxes were known to be reclusive, they posed a threat nevertheless and thus warranted caution.

Using the example of Shubham, a life lost to bad preparation and bad luck, she said, “Please remember, a Jain is only as strong as the weakest lynx.”

PUN CHRONICLES 10 - IT’S NOT CRICKET

1904 – Congo

Shiva had lead a most peculiar life. Having travelled widely in Africa, he had seen sights so outlandish, so outrageously beautiful that even his patriotic heart had to accept that this strange land was prettier than his own. After a while, however, even the unimaginable becomes mundane, and Shiva found his heart yearning for the monotony of his home. India, enslaved though it was, still figured in all his fondest dreams. He was not suited to the harshness of this continent.

Shiva used to be an intimidating sight. Though not overly tall, he was as stout as they came, and had immensely broad shoulders and burly arms. However, his recent travels had seen him fall victim to various forms of diseases, and, though he survived them all, he did not make it through unscathed.

He had lost his former stockiness, his body having shrivelled up into a much tinier frame due to weakness. His skin had a jaundiced tone which lent him a slight radiance, but a sickly one. His muscles could no longer bear the strain of the soldier’s life, and he had been allowed to leave the forces, provided he aid the soldiers in other ways, doing odd jobs around the camp. This allowed him some time to himself, and he used it to roam the wildlands and soak in all he could before he set off on his journey back home.

It was on one of these meandering walks that Shiva met the man that would unwittingly change his life. Walking leisurely through the tall grass, Shiva heard the unmistakable sound of a man running at full pelt. The intermittent prayers being offered up in the local dialect and the absolute abandon with which he ran told Shiva that this was a flight for survival.

Moving towards the sound, he intercepted the man, a petrified looking local, and asked him if he could be of any help.

“A spirit!” he gasped, “An evil spirit is come.”

He continued in this vein for many minutes before Shiva could calm him down. From his incoherent mutterings, Shiva gleaned that some beast was on the prowl. There seemed to be a lot more to the tale than that, but it was beyond Shiva’s ability to comprehend the rest.

Armed with his rifle and the confidence of his days as a soldier, Shiva undertook to seek out this beast, if only for the thrill of hunting and the gratitude of the locals. Crawling through the undergrowth, he came upon a clearing within which a little round hut sat, drawing attention to itself by means of the plumes of smoke emanating from it.

A menacing growl reached Shiva’s ears, one of a large cat partaking of its victuals. Crawling sideways to get a better look at it, Shiva espied the lion tearing into a woman’s corpse.

The lion was a majestic specimen, its coat without a blemish, its fangs glistening red. A shudder ran down Shiva’s spine, one that was an admixture of fear and awe. He sat there for who knows how long, contemplating the clash of civilization and the unabashed brutality of nature that the spectacle before him presented. However, as he watched on, Shiva’s eye was caught by a protuberance on the lion’s forehead. At first glance, it looked like the beast possessed a third eye. It’s positioning and otherworldly appearance fell right in line with the many mythologies Shiva had acquainted himself with regarding this very characteristic. It was only on more careful and considered examination that he realized that it was merely a tumour, or an overgrown wart.

The ramblings of the local man now made much more sense to Shiva. The mere appearance of a wild beast in these parts was no anomaly and would not command such fear. That man must have fallen prey to the same sleight-of-mind that had at first attempted to take Shiva in. A supernatural being in the form of a lion with three eyes is a matter that would legitimately warrant widespread panic, especially when the beast set about attacking the population in broad daylight, with nary a care for the consequences.

A cunning plan began to form itself in Shiva’s head. He had scoured the plains of Africa for many a long year searching for something that would break the monotony of his life. He had given up hope of returning to his homeland with anything resembling a fortune that would allow him to live out the rest of his days in a restful vein. But here was providence dropping just such a fortune into his lap.
With just a little prep and some inspired marketing, he could charge people for the experience of witnessing the all-wise, all-seeing, three-eyed-lion that he, Shiva, had risked his life capturing alive.

If he could get this creature back to India, somehow… But there were far too many obstacles in the way for him to be thinking of that just now.

With his adrenaline pumping, Shiva’s thoughts were all action. He fashioned a trap similar to the kind the locals used when they wished to capture a wild beast. The trap was simple, involving a carcass, some primitive, natural tranquilizers and a cage. Within a couple of hours, the three-eyed-lion was unconscious, in the cage, and at Shiva’s mercy.

The next few weeks were spent making arrangements. First, he obtained permission to return to India. He cited health reasons that were all too well-known to his superiors. He then set about bribing the various officials that he would encounter if he wished to take the beast with him.

Being a lowly soldier, he did not have much in the way of wealth, but he drained most of what he had put away, knowing that if this gamble paid off, the influx of wealth would far surpass his wildest dreams.

The rest of his savings went into arranging for the maintenance of the lion for the long trip ahead. It would not do to have a malnourished, mangy lion when the whole point was to dupe the public into thinking this was a supernatural beast. The beast had to be fed, cleaned and kept in luxury so that, on arrival, it still possessed the aura that had sent the local man scurrying in terror.

The terror was key. Fear kept people at a safe distance. Far enough away that they would not see through the makeup and the ruse.

At long last, Shiva found himself approaching the shores of his country. The very air seemed to wrap itself around him, welcoming him into his new life of comfort and luxury. No longer did his eyes catch the misery of the common man, trampled underfoot as the British Empire wreaked its havoc. No longer did he see in his neighbour’s eyes the vestiges of dreams crushed by colonial rule. Shiva had eyes only for the opulence of princes and the magnificence of the many castles. He snorted in contempt at those who accepted their lowly state and stagnated while they were ruled by the white man. He would show them how one breaks free from chains.

With these thoughts and others akin to these flowing swiftly and nobly through his head, he set foot on his beloved nation’s soil and breathed a lungful of air.

It was to be his last breath as a free man.

Immediately, he was accosted by a group of guards. A large, white man dressed impeccably in a military outfit watched on as Shiva struggled to free himself from their grasp. When they succeeded in finally subduing him, he approached Shiva, somehow seeming aloof while obviously orchestrating the entire episode.

“What is the meaning of this ruckus?” he asked, “Why are you resisting arrest?”

“What have I done, sahib?” Shiva asked, nearly in tears at this point.

“You have been charged with dereliction of military duty, illegal smuggling of animals, bribing members of the army, falsifying reasons to leave military service and a whole bunch of other crimes of which you shall be duly notified in court.”

Shiva’s ears turned red, his breath came in short bursts and his face drained of all its colour as he saw his visions of vulgar excesses turn to dust before his very eyes. Half blinded by the tears now openly streaming down his cheeks, he turned to the imperious white man one last time.

In a broken voice, he asked,

“And what will become of my beast?”

The white man smiled and said, simply,

“The lion belongs to the Empire.”

The Internet as a Saviour of the Absurd

We have had innumerable chances. We have lived through monarchies, oligarchies, communism and capitalism. We have built empires and watched them crumble, raised conquerers to the status of Gods and then stabbed them in the back, crucified our saviours and deified our tyrants. Every age has seen its follies reveal themselves just when the collective human hubris was at its peak. And yet, every age that followed would inevitably follow the same path, making the same errors, albeit under new guises. Our only consistent system of ruling has been hypocrisy.

It is hard, when reading history, to not see societies evolve and devolve in cycles. It is hard to ignore the inevitable feeling that all we read will come to pass again. Or at least, it used to be hard. What has changed my mind today? Just one Goliath of a phenomenon — The internet.

Never before has so varied a mass of populace been privy to such a vast treasure trove of information. Never before has the news of the world been at one’s fingertips, no longer discriminating against you based on your financial or social position. Of course, humans still being a flawed species, it does not prevent us from misusing this power: The internet is famous for being a cesspool of hate and vindictive bigotry. However, even from the fumes of this depravity, an unexpected solace arises.

Absurdism.

In earlier times, it was the unknown that gave us hope. We did not know enough about the flaws inherent in whatever system we chose to believe in, whether political or religious, and thus had no reason to douse the flames of our fervour. This fervent belief kept absurdism at bay and limited it to a fringe movement at best. We worked with gusto and lived with an eye to the future, because we believed in a future. We believed in our ability to build a wonderful world with inexhaustible resources and overall satiety. We birthed children by the dozen, hoping that their acumen would be of some use to this utopia-to-be. This was an age where one was taught that, with the right attitude and the right effort, anything was within reach. Many a kid set forth into this world with the fire of imagination burning bright. And, before the internet took over our world, many of those kids died without ever knowing what killed their dreams. Perhaps many blamed themselves for their shortcomings, perhaps some of them were right. But always there was an ever-present, malevolent force at work.

But now, you would be hard pressed to find idealism in such abundance. There are vestiges of it still, for sure. But these are mere fragments, mere spectres. Amongst the younger generation at least, absurdism rules. And the internet was the battering ram that broke through the fortress of our sheltered existence and introduced us to its invading horde.

The cardinal rule revealed to us in this age of free flow of information (somewhat), is that every endeavour, no matter how nobly undertaken, and no matter how pure the intentions, contains within itself its own bane. And its collapse is not probable, but inevitable. A system even now is judged by how long it sustained itself before self-destructing, which tells us that we already knew better than to expect an eternal solution. Perhaps it is fitting that everything has an expiry date. Perhaps it is an unwritten rule that our very universe follows, and therefore, everything in it as well.
But full acceptance of this fact had never been so wilfully embraced as it has by this generation.

Now, to switch things around, let us take a look at the world through the lens of the much- maligned millennial. As one grows, one learns both by observing and by means of access to events worldwide that, essentially, everything has gone to shit. There is no room for anyone, no food for most, no distribution of wealth. We have endangered our existence by totally destroying our environmental well-being, by running through resources way faster than they can replenish themselves and by a blatant disregard for any form of a pragmatist reigning in of our splurges. Children are expected to study much more than any previous generation ever did, but are also expected to start working much earlier, and compete for worse positions. We are the most over-qualified generation to be unemployed and no, it cannot all be put down to millennial incompetence.

We no longer live in a world where people believe that they can turn to the government for help. At best, they hope to survive what the government puts them through. Corporations are the only escape from abject poverty to most, but they are soul-sucking machines that turn people into grey-lifeless blobs.

So, a child growing up now has the choice between being a penniless individual, or a decently well-off slave. Not exactly salivating prospects, either of them.

And so, what can we expect of this child who, wherever he looks, sees only rivers of shit through which he must wade, without the solace of a reward on the other side? Why do we feign surprise at his unwillingness to break his back working for the future of our planet? Why do we shudder when he displays pride in his dark humour and cynicism? What else have we left him?

Nothing.

So far, we examined the destructive element of the internet. We had a glimpse at the crippling effect it had on an entire generation by giving them a too unadulterated view of the world they live in. A microscope powerful enough, pointed in any direction, will reveal only chaos.

But here, the internet comes into its own. When all is nonsensical, when all is absurd, then none may challenge the supremacy of the internet. A casual browse-through of even the most mainstream of social networking sites will reveal to anyone, no matter how ignorant, the identity of our prophet: Memes.

Originally, the word was, at least in appearance, much more profound in meaning. But, and fittingly so, the internet adopted it, corrupted it, deformed it, and created from it a phenomenon that cannot be controlled.

The internet offered anonymity, the meme offered ease of access and creation, and the collective frustration of the new generation did the rest.

When nothing makes sense, then there tend not to be too many subjects that are sacred. And nowhere has this rule been followed more religiously (oh, the irony) than on the internet. There have been incessant attempts to control the content on the internet, to ban certain words, sites, images or forms of jokes. But the internet blew every attempt at impeding it out of the water, and effortlessly at that. Its power is only now being recognised, but by now the seething, sprawling, flourishing underbelly that is the human network on the internet has grown so immense that it is all one can do to even partially regulate it.

And now this power lies in the hands of every man, woman or child, anywhere on earth. A meme allows one, from one’s basement, to poke fun at the institutions or people that were formerly irreproachable. Sarcasm and dark humour have revealed themselves as the primary weapons of internet humour, and they are terrifying weapons when aptly used. There is no comments section on any platform on the internet that does not, before long, deteriorate into a pun-fest, or a reference war or simply a concoction of absurd, layered, internet inside-jokes. It takes extraordinary strength of will for a regular user of the internet to still take things too seriously. And most of us do not bother to make that effort, we do not see the point. The meteoric rise of irreverence and the complete abandonment of ideals that were held aloft for millennia before us is the only logical consequence of this phenomenon.

On the internet, you cannot be too pedantic, but you also daren’t be inaccurate. And even if you, by some miracle, say something completely accurate, you must also be interesting and witty, or else you were better off having spent your time elsewhere. The same comment, whether true or false, could incite polar opposite reactions depending on whether you gauged the underlying mood of the conversation correctly or incorrectly.

Whole communities of strangers will band together with no prior planning, just to ridicule a person who trespassed any one of the countless unwritten internet rules. And once you have been handed over to the internet for purposes of ridicule, then there is no hope of escape. Some persons have become so adept at satirising artists or celebrities that they have outshone their victims and become celebrities in their own right.

It is a vicious, unforgiving and, above all, nonsensical alternate world that we live and flourish in.

Digging under the surface a bit, it may appear that the internet and its brand of humour is a coping mechanism, the only means of expression left to a generation that has been strangled before it had a chance to breathe. A futile show of resilience and resistance in the face of overwhelming woe.

We choose, however to see it another way.

If, through despair and hopelessness, despite itself, we can create this beautiful global culture, this magnificent middle finger to the world; this untamed, unbridled, unmanageable deluge that makes a mockery of any attempt at sensibility… If that is to be our legacy, then let us embrace it and ensure that, at least in destruction of meaning, none were ever our match.

Let the absurd be the only true modern art.

Pun Chronicles 9 - Infernal Visions

Dante fled through the streets of Florence, his gaunt figure stumbling along, leaving chaos in its wake. And fittingly so, for Dante’s magnificent brain had begun to crumble. The very brain that gave birth to the poetry that was to captivate minds all over the world for centuries to come with its protagonist’s odyssey through hell, today used its fearsome abilities to bring hell to Dante’s own doorstep.

Wherever he looked, he saw evidence of the nine infernal circles crystallise before him. Florence was no paragon of virtue and nobility, but even so, Dante’s visions bore such extreme elements of ghastliness that he was forced to admit that even humankind was not capable of this, and this hell came not from without, but from his own mind.

It is a terrible fate for great minds to descend into insanity, but that fate is rendered infinitely worse when one is aware of it, but helpless to avoid it. And this was the fate the Gods had reserved for this king amongst writers.

Before his very eyes, his beloved city was transformed into a seething pit of despair. Red-cheeked children no longer frolicked on the pavements, but in their place, goblins crept out of the ground, foaming at the mouth, slobbering with ravenous glee, feasting on excrement. Proud men and soldiers graced no more the street with their presence, but hideous abominations, humanoid only in the broadest sense of the word, stalked back and forth, sullying every inch of the street with their filth, tearing each other to shreds in a wrathful frenzy. He saw no sign of the heavenly beauty that Beatrice wielded, but the hidden nooks and crannies of the streets were chock full of malformed whores choking on the entrails that the Wrathful left behind. The city itself had taken on a visage that would deter the stoutest of men from lingering. Dante’s constitution could not bear the strain.

With a primal cry, he ran at full pelt, vowing not to stop until the city was behind him. Around him, the goblins gawked, the abominations glared, and the whores tut-tutted at this unseemly behaviour, only adding to the surrealistic anguish that was being inflicted on Dante. Where was his Florence, his beloved, sophisticated Florence, his refuge from the vulgarity of life? Not even in his darkest moments had he ever imagined that he would see it like this.

As he approached the outskirts of the city, the Chianti mountains rose before him, still pristine and majestic. Certain that the mountains were his salvation, Dante made straight for them, unsure of how exactly they were going to help, and yet overwhelmingly sure of the fact that they were to be his saviours.

Nearing the woods near the base of the mountains, Dante’s feeling of dread deepened with every step. The mountain he was making for was surrounded on all sides by a forest, one that Dante had frequented in his youth, whiling away the days reading poetry under its boughs. Now it stood shrouded in mist, with the howls of fell beasts and the smell of putrified flesh the only evidence of its existence. He knew better than to expect an easy passage to his salvation, but he was beginning to feel he did not possess the strength to stand this test.

Nevertheless, seeing no other path open to him, he plunged into the forest, keeping his eyes low to the ground, determined not to let his surroundings add fuel to his fears. That resolution held for all of five minutes, however, as a vicious snarl set Dante quivering uncontrollably and caused his eyes to search frantically for their source. The source was a leopard. A massively oversized leopard was seen thrashing around in the thick foliage, seemingly struggling with another, smaller leopard. Dante, to his immense horror, saw that the oversized leopard wielded genitalia of unnatural proportions and the deadly struggle was caused by the smaller leopard doing everything it could to avoid being impaled upon it.

Quickly averting his eyes, Dante managed to avoid seeing the finale of this grisly performance, with only the anguished wail of the smaller leopard bearing testament to the victory of the larger.

Dante hurried on, still shuddering from what he had witnessed. There was to be no respite, however, as he was soon brought to a standstill once again, this time by a lion. In contrast to the unrelenting gruesomeness that Dante had been subjected to, the vision of the lion’s perfect coat and full mane of hair was a welcome tonic to his eyes. Its strength and vitality on full display, the lion itself seemed to know its perfection, and walked the floor of the forest with an appropriately condescending strut.

Mesmerised by the graceful motion of the lion’s muscular legs, Dante’s eyes happened upon what seemed to be a carpet of living mass. Looking closer, he realised that the carpet consisted of lion cubs, each writhing and wriggling, attempting to claw its way out of its predicament. Each held in its place by its neighbours trying the same. With every step, the lion stamped down upon one of the cubs, crushing its skull beyond recognition, accompanied by the inimitable wail of a dying child.

Dante waited no more, and, his stomach dangerously close to emptying its contents, he fled further in, hoping to God that there was no more in store for him. But there was to be one last obstacle. Right in his path stood a she-wolf, her paw victoriously perched upon a buck’s corpse. As Dante approached, the she-wolf began to chew through the buck’s flesh at a ferocious pace. In a matter of minutes, the buck’s corpse was all but gone and then, without missing a beat, the she-wolf began to chew on its own leg, still chomping with the same gusto. Its roars of pain punctuated with growls of extreme satiety. Watching this morbid spectacle, Dante’s stomach gave up the fight, and his flight up the face of the mountain was intermittently patched with bouts of vomiting.

Dante was, with the help of the trauma brought on by his visions and due to his recent spate of vomiting, dangerously dehydrated and exhausted. Climbing up the face of a mountain, never an easy task, was rendered even less so by these unfavourable circumstances. His head began to swim and his vision began to narrow, and he knew he needed a rest and began wildly casting his eyes about in search of a shelter. A few metres up the mountain, he espied a cave. Muttering blessings gratefully, he entered the cave, descending lower and lower until the light from the sun outside was all but extinguished. After all the horrors his eyes had been forced to witness, the darkness was a much needed balm, and Dante went ever deeper into the heart of the mountain, hoping to snuff any chance of a return of his visions.

By this time, Dante was trusting to the sureness of his feet, his eyes had been rendered completely useless by the dark. He had been going downhill for a while, but suddenly felt a steep rise in the path. Having climbed some ten steps, his eleventh found no ground beneath it and sent Dante falling headlong into the darkness.

Fortunately, it wasn’t a huge fall, and Dante found himself on a flat floor, and, walking along the wall, Dante gathered that he stood in a cozy, cuboid room. His back to the wall he had just fallen down, he felt before him another wall rise up, with similar walls on either side closing him in. It occurred to him that he was trapped, but for the moment that comforted him instead of alarming him. He convinced himself that those visions could not reach him here and in this enclosure, deprived of sight, he was at the very least, safe from his own mind.

Time, always deceptive, gave no inkling of its passing to Dante, who was unsure whether he had been there for minutes, hours or even days. His stomach, emptied on the way to the cave, made its emptiness known by emitting growls that echoed in the dark, sounding uncomfortably like Dante’s experiences in the forest.

And then, almost imperceptibly at first, and then unmistakably, he began to see a light. It was not from a visibly discernible source. It certainly wasn’t sunlight. Its flickering told Dante that it emanated from a flame. His first instinct was to call out to the wielder of the flame. However, almost instantly, he remembered what sort of creatures his company had consisted of in recent memory, and the horrors he had witnessed in their presence, and that killed his voice as effectively as was possible. The flame, being the only source of light Dante’s eyes had been exposed to in a while, seemed to come from behind the wall, with the result that Dante still could not see himself or his surroundings. The only thing that had been leant visibility was the wall directly in front of him.

He saw it to be a remarkably smooth wall, and he wondered whether it was naturally so, or if it had been hewn by man. and if man were the architect, then it begged the question of why anyone would choose to wield his craft in the heart of a mountain where no natural light was accessible.

Even as he thought along these lines, he realised that the smoothness of the wall, coupled with the absolute darkness of everything else had leant to the room the aura of a platform wherein a performance was to be staged.

And what a performance it was to be!

Shadows began to dance on the wall before him. At first, they just seemed a menagerie of odd shapes and sizes, but soon he began to spot familiar shapes amongst the crowd. One figure, slightly hunched over, with a noticeable protuberance delineating an aquiline nose, Dante recognised as himself. Using himself as the focal point, all the other shapes now began to become recognisable and make sense. There were politicians and the Pope and there was Beatrice and there were his contemporary poets and writers and there stood his wife and his kids and an assortment of other acquaintances. Each shadow interacted with his own, showing in shadow art, a perfect representation of his life in short summation. All the key moments, some forgotten to Dante himself, were displayed to him now with unerring accuracy. As the performance rolled on, Dante found himself forgetting that he existed in corporeal form, and found himself gazing at the shadows as reality itself.

Suddenly the shadows shifted from humanoid shapes to ghastlier forms, and Dante realised with a shudder that they were replaying the events of the past day, a depiction of his own visions. He saw the goblins, the abominations and the whores. He saw the leopard, the lion and the she-wolf. And, as the last of the visions left the stage, he saw his own hunched figure contort and split in twain. Entranced, he watched with morbid curiosity as, from the depths of his own being, another humanoid shape emerged. Standing with all the grace and dignity of a nobleman, Dante did not need telling that this was the poet, Virgil.

The embodiment of Reason in his masterpiece, Virgil was now being depicted as leaving Dante’s body, an implication that needed no further explanation.

As Virgil exited left, the lights were extinguished, and Dante found himself plunged back into the dark, alone with his mind, such as it was, forever.

And thus ended The Alighieri of the Cave.

I Fear The Light

I fear the light.

It is not a crippling fear. It is the kind of fear that has the tendency to spur one on to actions far greater than one’s potential. It is a fear that dictates one’s life, almost insidiously, and permeates its very essence, rather than a fear that restricts it. Moreover, it is not an irrational fear, one that crumbles under any form of examination. No, my fear is steeped in reason. It is a fear I cherish, for it bears the mark of verity. I fear the light, and whoever is forced to encounter it should be afraid of it as well.

“Why?” the reader thinks to himself.

What does light do? What is its most basic functionality? It illumines.
It brings forth from oblivion and nothingness the entire universe so that our eyes, those menial, insignificant organs of observations, can behold it. It allows no secrets. The only way light could ever conceal anything is if it shone with such exuberance that it blinded the observer. But this bedazzling variety of concealment has more to do with the weakness of the optic organ that is the recipient, rather than with an innate characteristic of light itself.

And so, what light does, essentially, is reveal.

“Fantastic,” says the reader, “All the better to see the world with.”

That is true, and therein lies the problem.

If we were residents of a perfect world, a beautiful world with beautiful people and beautiful monuments to beautiful deeds, then light would be our deity. If we found that the more we learnt of ourselves, the deeper we fell in love with ourselves, then light would be our religion, our tool that constantly reminded us to love. If delving into the labyrinthine, chimerical treasure chests of knowledge yielded pride and gave rise to feelings of harmony and unity, then light would be our identity, our source of self-respect.

Alas, it is not so.

What it is, is the perfect weapon. A weapon that lays bare every imperfection, retardation, aborted attempt, botched idea and failed endeavor that our species, or even life in general has ever had the misfortune of inflicting upon itself and this world.


There is a biological reason for humans sleeping better in the dark. That reason is well known. But for me, there is an addendum. When my senses are not inundated with images of futility, of the malformed fetuses of once noble ideas that populated our world, of the false equanimity that we project onto ourselves to hide the crumbling facade of society underneath, when I am free of this deluge of filth, only then can my mind know rest. While there is light, there is only disgust.

Primitive man feared the dark, because he did not know what it concealed. Fear of the unknown makes sense, it is a good, healthy fear. But if once revealed, the revelation turns out to be even worse than our fear of the unknown, then perhaps we were not so badly off when we hid in our caves trembling at the prospect of imagined monsters and ghouls hidden by the dark.

Light has always held a privileged place in human history. Our language and mythology reflects that almost ceaselessly. But once again, this makes sense only when seen in its historical context. If one were to objectively study this phenomenon now, there would be no justification for this reverence. But we, as a species, have always been lazy to correct our linguistic errors. We categorize or name things erroneously, and then obstinately stick by our error until habit and dreaded tradition takes over and then it is far too late to do anything about it. And so we still refer to a pleasant conversation as “a light-hearted” one and to embarrassments as “the black sheep” of a given family.

The only justification I can find for this continued infatuation with light is masochism. That same, morbid pleasure we feel when slowing down to ogle at a motorcyclist’s brains strewn across the road probably also derives its pleasure from delving into the bilge that is our existence. We enjoy seeing ourselves falter, stumble and ultimately fail, all the while aspiring to the noblest ideals. Oh, we may cloak it in many garbs. We point fun at others, not ourselves. We find the same faults unforgivable in strangers that we ignore or accept in loved ones. We are very careful that this window through which we peek when we masturbate does not turn into a mirror. But that is merely a lie that we have kept up so that our kinks are not revealed in all their perverse glory.

Nature provided us with eyes that work best at medium distances and at medium sizes. We were not meant to look at things that were too far away or too nearby, too large or too small. We are smack bang in the Goldilocks zone of eyesight, and we should take the hint. Close examination of anything, even with an intellect as botched and insufficient as our own, will still reveal to us far too much of the absurdism of the world we inhabit and far too little to arouse our reverence for existence. If anything, the entire universe exists to tell us we don’t matter, and the closer we look, the more bluntly it is put to us. Nature tells us to remain at an arm’s distance, but we hold forth with lust in our eyes, blindly groping, fondling, accosting whatever we can, wallowing in pleasurable humiliation.

And so, light is a weapon. It enables and encourages your masochism, it drains life of meaning and sophistication. It is garish, crude, brash, vulgar, libidinal. It is a device of shaming, of exposure and scandal, of mob mentality. Nothing remains sacred, nothing remains private, nothing retains value.

It is good to fear the light.
Light is nihilism incarnate.