THE GIFT....

I put her to sleep with a snorkel in her mouth, held on resolutely as her pink rubbery lips tried in vain to push back the intruder from storming its portals, and having finally succeeded in my seigh, kissed the two faint eyebrows good night....and waded out.

The brown envolope lay on the shelf, i had read and re-read it, memorized the obese words spattered across the page, till they had started to do somersaults around me with surprising perfection. Now, i stood ready for my oration....
He, my singular audience, sat on the couch, dispassionate eyes tracing the trials and tribulations of a terrified treadbare duce ball as savage men hit at it mercilessly with bats and still others, chased it to the farthest ends of the arena. I could hardly see him, the world swam before my eyes, like looking through a curtain of smoke....he, knitting the curtain with a deftness that shocked me, still....
Finally, my cue...the comercials came on...
"Thank you for giving me this...", said i, and threw down the X-ray report before his eyes.
Two over-cooked brinjals with their stalks sliced off, stared back at him, glumly...
"What the hell are these?!", he exclaimed....
"My lungs", i replied.

Trudging through heaps of ash, diving through giant smoke rings in an act of mock celebration of my fate, i turned back and looked at him for the last time...
"Don't worry..i havn't told her that she has it too...not that i wouldn't have, only, it would have been a tad difficult explaining the beauty of cancer to a six year old..."

DARKNESS....

The Night gathered strength, forming ominous dark puddles at the foot of my bed. Where the rheumatic street-lamp offered its last bleak services to the world, the coconut tree, reclining against its quivering net of light, rose to a menacing stature against my wall. Moonlight there was none...just wisps of greying hair gliding indifferently in a bucket of inky black. An eclipse formed over my eyes, disturbing shades of darkness waltzed around me...every single object in my room seemed draped in black...draped and sashaying about, their feet barely touching the ground, or so it seemed to my blind eyes, for not a single noise did they make. The Night walked barefeet, painting my oh-so familiar world with the shades of unfamiliarity....'What was this place?', I wondered aloud...a timeless, formless space...a space that escaped the clutches of definition. This space i knew not...this place was not Home.

Do not forsake me at the tentacles of rabid Supposition.
Love does not dress in mourning black, but, in pristine white...in shining yellow... in rippling blue.
Our childish little plastacine world i have carefully built...the walls against which, many a times i have rested my tired head and dreamt...dreamt of petty squables over the logic of hanging a Chinese fan on it's face!
When your boat hit the side of mine, the wound was mortal...my boat sank, but my heart...you saved. After years of dormancy bordering on death, my heart finally gave a little leap...a tiny, elusive jig...and the world unfurled before my eyes.
Finally, i could see where Life would travel from here...the ports it would visit, the inns it would put up in...the inconsequential feats of greatness it would perform in public reading-rooms. Finally, i could build...build and make indomitable Hope the skeletal framework of my creation...
So, having lighted up the candles along my way, do not snuff them out now.
The darkness will raze down my dreams....it will trample over the candles, make them moan in pain...our plastine world will melt into nothingness....Armies of Doubt and Fear will march in, lay seigh...
All will be lost in the hot frothing claudron of Darkness...of death before dying...and my heart will stop breathing...again.