[1] IT is very cold this morning,a couple of degrees below freezing, cold for these southern climes, in this city. So this little exercise of the cold fingers, slumbering imagination and tattered heart, by using words in order to approach the giant furnace – Sun - that hangs brightly at these windowpanes overlooking the denuded woods, and wake up. Is this humanly possible one may ask? And I respond, by remembering, very vaguely, a fairy tale – it would be either Russian or African – about a quixotic adventure of a little boy, when told that Sun is his father, sets out to meet him, throwing ladders up into the sky.

So what should we talk about? I say ‘we’ not because I expect a horde of readers clamoring under my windows for these papers I might throw out at them as t-shirts and other tochkes are thrown out to the crowds at rock concerts, but because there happen to be many creatures that live within me. There is the drunk who watches sentimental and maudlin films with great relish and weeps copiously. There is that Dr. Livingstone/ Jim Corbett character who pores over maps and photographs of remote and steamy jungles, as he dreams of wrestling anacondas and stalking big cats. There is the hedonist – some would say sexually repressed – Nero who organizes bacchanals of food, flesh and music. And no I am talking about my occasional spectating at rock concerts. Leaving aside most of the remaining devils who reside within me, we come to the saints marching by, brining up the rear. They are the worst trouble makers, always insisting on beating down God’s door with their hands, foreheads, legs, buttocks etc, not listening to the other devils who say, “Let that poor devil sleep, will you!”

Some buffoon just got up and said, “Hey it is end of another year, talk about it will you.” Brother Buffoon of mine what shall I say – I didn’t blaze or rage rage against the dying of night again. The artistic vows I took up at the end of last year remain unbuckled, safe under covers, bloody fools. If I was man enough, I would have thrown away this yoke of bourgeoisie striving for a stable profession, a house in the burbs and so forth, and fled right away to a perch above a city of daggers and beat myself to death, into some beautiful transcendence, over a keyboard. The buffoon is laughing, “Ha ha ha ha ha!” Thank god, no scratch that, thank the devil, he is laughing. Pity or sympathy would have been worse.

But I have been doing my duties to the books all year. I was such a good customer at a second hand bookstore that they gave me two books for free last week. And the county library folks were greeted with my visits more than they would have liked to see me. Yes sire, I was a regular nanny goat, bleating all night long, masticating on pulp, and avoiding direct experience. Is this what Salman Rushide preached to me, when he gave his subversive lectures here? ‘Stay in the garret, write fantastic reviews of books you have not yet vomited, install a knocker with the visage of Shakespeare - the complete man and curse of all who followed on the high seas behind him - on your door, so that you can bend and touch your forehead on his metallic head every morning, to give you one bloody splendiferous idea!” Oh Salman babajee, I have done that duty too, almost spraining a wrist as I tried to read Macbeth – yes I am drawn to bloody tragedies - from the dangerously heavy Riverside Shakespeare one night. Oh, where are my witches on the heath?

This tawdry whine isn’t piercing enough. No head banging follows as it does in qawwali singing – circling, calling and responding, man, god and the devil rolling down the holy mountain into a bathtub of madness, too much! And it is here I come to the understanding that I have only play acted at madness, never braving the elements or going over to the other side, even once the whole of last year. If I was mad enough, I would have chopped a piece of this heart – what heart is it now, like a small-shriveled raisin! – and given it away to every thing that I saw beauty in – mainly to women and children.