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(MAL-original) - PRATHALAM

Planes
dialogues

What you meant by saying that the rain began to fall slanted while the beads from your broken chain scattered along the floor?

You need explanation? Or you're arguing?
if you're gonna prove it's just my illusion, then I'll declare even this rain is an illusion!
Are you here as my friend to rule out my discoveries?

My! I was mentioning about your magic mirror complex. But it's a pity we can't go on without so much question marks and exclamation symbols!

Ok, If you're onto change the topic, then I'll have to switch off this light.

O, my Snow White!
You'll never change from a performer to a spectator!

I feel you'd better call me Desdemona!

Please stop. If reactions tend to fall at right-angle like this, friendship would be at risk.

To talk a little obtuse - I mean mathematics - it's not necessary to be a mathematics teacher.

Sorry, if I become too self-centered.
Now I remember one short story by Mukundan Unni, named "Ee arddharaathriyil veena vaayickunnathaaraanu?"*1

You mean Raman Unni?*2

No, he can't do such a title.
More to it, he can't call it a story where it's nothing but some dialogues.

Yes, dialogues alone can't form a story. Story is a plane. There falls the shadows of dialogues. And dialogues, they are the lines which do intersect each other or not. Where do the shadows fall depends on the angle of view.

Stop your reductionism.
Do you have any justification to save your observations from being labelled as stupidity?
I'll switch off this...

Hold it, I was not talking to you. It's too late. Got to go.

You're going nowhere.
Any guarantee you'll not knock on my door before half an hour?

I've no say while you behave like elders sometimes.

The question you've just asked is now looking at you.
-who's more unwilling to become the spectator?
-Sorry, if right-angled again.

No, in a way, it's the freedom of friends.
After all, spectator or performer, both are at the same place once they lose the upperhand.

I feel your inferiority complex will never leave you.

Agreed. But do you know that inferiority complexes mould the most sincere sincere personalities?

Make statements out of your such squint-eyed ideas so that I could easily ignore 'em.
But question marks tempt me to think of.

Ah! He's so correct who said women prefers imagining or recalling more to thinking!
But an article in SCIENCE stated that, comparing to men, thinking doesn't overrule physical activity in women.

In a sense, what's the practical difference between thought and imagination?

In your language, THOUGHT is using unknown variables while IMAGINATION is using known variables to work out.
Hence thoughts transform into ideas and imaginations into illusions.

You stole my mathematics so brilliantly!

At times our lines of thought meet together. Perhaps that's why two cold-blooded living beings like us succeed in uniting.
Or is it because both of us have the ability to laugh at our thoughts innocently?

My dear child, you're still struggling to justify yourself?

You know, there's only one truth about living beings, that's male and female. It's to hide this 'shame' that Plato defined his PLATONIC LOVE.*3

Even when you try to rule it out, SEX proudly declares its presence just because of the very reason.

Ha! How small we become while telling truth! Just imagine; How could we face each other if someone succeed in recording the trajectory of our thoughts!

You become too practical. Come back.

Can't you speak of rivers and stars or dreams or something?

What you think of river?
That's where Herman's Siddhartha*4 found the answer for practical life.
That's where he settled after a lifelong journey.

Sometimes I think, what could have happened to that example, if he had a vision of draught at least for a fraction of a second!

In a sense, examples are just helping hands. Letting us to get onto an alternate ideology which looks safer than the one which has already started sinking.

Is it that you failed to find out the satire hidden by Hesse? Or?

Please, when I gave you the subject, I sincerely wished you'd speak of love.
Philosophy, as I reckon it, is a by-product of pessimism.

Love:-
I'm not speaking about it just because I'm afraid it too would become hollow. Anything discussed becomes hollow and sticks to their inner skins. - Like the pressure inside a balloon.

The only one thing which holds me from falling into pessimism is the multi-faced love in me.

Then who made you feel that love is there in rivers and stars?
Aren't those things actually laughing at you, peeling off the skin of your love concepts?

Why do you impose your cockeyed visions on others?
Are you in line with that computer poet, who said heart is not the organ for love?

His declaration, that, 'love is the name of the unrest behind the third button of my coat' is still undigested in my stomach - leave the brain.

Don't abuse the reticence in poetry. Writers mix a bit silence in their declarations so that some truth should be spared even after the final assessment. Otherwise, what's the part of reader in literature?

I'm not interfering with your judiciary. But don't forget that one who doesn't accept established symbols, will find his place in anti-society.

Reactions falling at 180 degree indicates old age. Kindly change topic.

Then, my dear mathematician, tell me what is the distance from dream to the straight line drawn from fantasy to reality?

Sorry, if the question is aimed at a mathematician.
He could accept such a question only if these three are taken as points. In fact, these are no points but different planes. He can't draw, but can only expect such a line before tracing the ordinates of those planes.

If I say you're slippin' away?

Pardon me. My answer disappointed me too. Because I was also visualizing such a bridge using arbitraries.

Still you've to admit one exists. Otherwise you won't be able to understand John. Poor soul, he's still striving to come out of that bridge. I must find it to rescue him.

Perhaps, a good psycho-therapist could do it.

Don't think so.
Mental disorders have only one face in a psychiatrist's eye. They get used to approach things too materialistically.

I won't say he should be sent back to that hell.
I'm desperate because I find no ways to communicate with him.
It worries me that, even after returning to a normal life, these poor souls still don't completely lose their newly gained communication codes.

Don't think I'll let your worry to become an excuse for your cigarette. Throw it away before I'll throw you out.
Actually, why do you smoke this much?

One of the characters says in Anand's novel, that he restarted smoking to enjoy in resisting the temptation to quit smoking!

Whatever be the justifications, smokers find smoking sometimes becomes a key to some activities in them. To say correctly, an access code for an unplanned diversion of thought or activity.

An autocrat who appoints his dear men in key posts. Eh?
Don't let your jargons make me laugh.
But, to use every lighted cigarette to its end has no clearer explanation than the theory of maximum utilization, I hope.

The real reason why women don't tolerate smoking is just that our morale doesn't allow them to do it. They were not so annoyed in the days when the world was recognized as a man's world.

Why you hesitate to replace 'recognized' by 'believed'?

Try to find out the answer yourself before leaving question marks. Still living in a patriarchal society, how you could daydream about transforming it?
Anti-society has no existence inside society. Try to demolish it and start from zero if you could.

Goal!!! But alas, no goalie in the post. You become a mere street preacher while speaking like this. I'm correcting Gibran who said one starts speaking when one could no longer compromise with thoughts.
Telling more accurately, When we start speaking our thoughts are being slain.

It's not for talking that I come to you. In fact, I come back to you every time in search of my broken memories.

Eh?

You always break my memories and thoughts in middle. I get them back when I'm here again in this room.

Again, didn't get it.

Memories are collected and recorded not only in the specific address locations in memory cells. But I strongly believe they are also collected in the external three-dimensional spaces.

God!, you mean, your memories are hidden in this bed and that corridor and the backdoor as witness for Alex?

Don't worry, even if communication becomes effective, one could not easily distinguish it. The logic 'Something smells in the air' is maximum.

Ok, agreed. That means, as long as I'll keep ripping your memories, you'll continue searching for me. - But, I can't name it Love!

Why you insist on naming your feelings and  keeping in inventory register? It's our limitation that we've to classify the realizations according to sample.
If it is named Love because of any known symptom, then naturally it's supposed to obey all the laws of Love.

I had a lover who kept on weeping after the love which he himself had ruined...

Ha!, it's the victory of practicality, to successfully summarise the first love-isn't it?-in a single sentence.
But memory of love, it could be stinking for woman, but man prefers to nurture it in the bottom of his mind.
May be because of the difference in the angle of view. Woman considers Love as a divine and sacred contract. But for man, it's a part of his own existence.

Why do you design common laws and hang on to them?
If I go on saying, some young men whose hair started graying at the back of their head consider their idiocies as psychological theories...?

Sometimes I feel, Love could just be an illusion of ours. That it's not a natural one.

Saying materialistically, it is the price we pay for something we received or for something we would like to buy. - Like in barter system.
At a point where we decide we have nothing to buy, or when we feel we were mistreated, it disappears itself.
What remains is a mere feeling. - which we call ego.

Is this what you called your multi-faced love? This is faceless. You know only to speak of Love. You don't know how to do it.

How could I argue when you declare it with such confidence?

But, as it's an attack on my sincerity, I feel ashamed. That's why I refused to speak on Love thinking it too might become hollow.

Get lost with your philosophy. In a way, I'm grateful to you. You're to me like the parrot in SHUKASAPTATI.
Now I started loving Alex more than ever. Lover and husband change places in my dreams. Ha!
Thanks - if it makes any sense.

As a matter of fact, one of my major problems is solved. This strangeness troubled me a lot that our happiest moment inevitably demands someone's private tragedy behind it.
Thankfully, I see you walking back.

God! What I just said? Or was it you? Forgive me, if I can't go on. We've broken the rhythm of this night.

Be cool, It doesn't matter who said it. Fact is, it's been said.
Try to face things without the guilty conscience of the First person or the anxiety of the Second person.

In the plane of Story, There are only shadows of the lines called Dialogues. Characters are unreal to an extent. Just as the Cause for words. Try the fourth dimension.-You won't be able to distiguish the characters. They change at every moment. Till they cease to live.

Your thoughts make me remember my ex-lover. Once he wrote to me - with the support of N.S.Madhavan, that he's not leaving me alone because he consider time as a lake.

Madhavan's declaration influenced me also. If events are true, then their vanishing is an artistical deceit.- Provided, truth is eternal. Only a stupid realist could believe that a great artist who created the whole world could do such an artistical treachery.

Come on, Who are there alongshore? - I mean your lake.

All of them, all those things, all the time are present there. Selective viewing is only important. Plus, your state of mind.

Say, if I tell you that, on the wedding night of the girl I loved, I was watching NALACHARITHAM NAALAAM DIVASAM Kathakali with her in the town hall which took place before two years, tell me, does that lake make you laugh?

Of course.-I count on fantasies, not memories. That's what enlivened me through my life. A married woman must need fantasy. Otherwise, how one could love a big belly, bad odour and dirty evenings?

Let it be, do you also have a girl in your fantasies?

Surely. But she's not like you. She walks with the wind. Pride dwells in her bluish eyes.
"...there she goes,
with a wind in her head
and a smile on her face...
...
but she'll never be mine"
(Chris rea - album: God's great banana skin)

Damn it. Your inferiority complex won't leave you even in your dreams?

It does make difference if I realise it. Where's inferiority complex if there's no attempt for comparison? Think otherwise. The one who's aware of his inferiority is far more acceptable than the one who's not aware of it.

But, can you deny this 'virtue' was responsible for the failure of your first love?

How easily you announced it! I still struggle to summarise my first love in a statement. It was perhaps the ghost of Othello, once died in my mind...

Justifications are useless for failed loves. Because, justifications are always intended for the third person.
As for Love, it never opens its doors to a third person.

Anyhow, I don't know. But it altered my personality completely. Lately, it was clear that I became very flexible. That I could mingle with anyone.
Negatively speaking, a state of mind having no intimacy with anyone.
I made a new discovery - loss of first love helps one become more practical. So I left the decision of my marriage to my parents. - Because, they were much more concerned about choice. - which I was not.

This is, to me, the merit of having no intimacy. Intimate to a particular person means narrowmindedness. - being unable to mingle with others.

How can you speak so immaterial and yet to be in bed with a married woman?
Or, is it that you are a total fraudster? - from top to bottom!

The logic of reciting Gita in the bedroom of someone else's wife is confusing me. It may rather underline your doubts. But, believe me, you'll have no more doubts about life, if you would match Krishna's teenage with Gita.

How I tried to insult you and insulted myself!
Pardon me. May be it's my guilty conscience, that is disgracing me this much.

Sin is always relative. It's our society which makes the difference that illicit relation becomes taboo for human whereas for animals it's not.
Even though the society is our product, its laws grow taller and make us its slaves.

Alex also has the same say. But do you think he could digest you?

No, it's not his fault. Logic makes a man stronger, but after all he's a society animal. He has to fit himself in its framework for the safety of a bad tomorrow where there's a chance he might become a parasite. He's bound to obey its laws.

You approach everything in barter system. At the same time you adopt the logic of 'ma phaleshu'. - as far as you accept society, what type of punishment you expect from it?

Society uses its judiciary not to refine its prey, but as a lesson for the spectator. Then the most justified - I mean the most possible - punishment is exile. All those relations you had built through your life topple down and...

Hold it. you said 'Prey'. Is it your pride? or rejection?

Truly speaking, punishment is not for crime, it's for being caught red-handed.
Even when I insist I know everything, I suspect one thing. -Beneath that ultimate power which never discriminates between good and evil, is there an unsatisfied god who keeps account of our sins. I often see a finger pointing at me in dreams.

How you will react, if you want to pay for it- on judgement day?

There will be a smile in my eyes. Purely innocent one. How he will face it?

[A wind came in through the open window and took him away. Mary closed her eyes, chanted a hymn and fell asleep.
In the morning, while going for the Sunday Mass, she found people gathered around the body of Ramanathan who committed suicide jumping from the sixth floor. Turned back and signed a cross on her forehead, she left for church.

She had nothing to confess on that day.]

www.vaishnavam.com/mystory

*1 - Mukundan Unni - A Malayali writer who appeared once in Mathrubhumi Weekend Magazine. Being impressed by his style, I tried to trace him in vain.
*2 - K.P.Raman Unni - An established Malayali writer.
*3 - I hope anyone would ever redefine this PLATONIC LOVE. To me it's nothing but absurdity. I'm not ashamed to admit I failed in understanding PLATO in the real sense.
*4 -