A thousand question and possibilities when the door opens. Should you enter or leave? Does a dog curl up at the feet of rainbows? Where is the city of love and what is the route to it? Gentle passion that unfurls like seed in dew covered field of grass. Then the heart leaps, runs up and down staircases of ribs all night breathlessly, filled with anticipation and fulfillment. Wonder too is born for to a lover everything happens as if it is happening the first time – last night’s rain dropping over him from oaks waving in the wind, a cardinal flashing by like a red rocket by his window, grass bending under the soles of his feet, the taste of a single drop of water snaking down the nape of a beautifully arched neck.

The world passes by him, a river, the surf of moments, a circle of light and shadow – he is the stranger on the street, looking at the sky, whom you pass by and perhaps in passing notice how his soul has become joy. This is because love is exploding out of his chest like fireworks on the day of liberation – liberation from the limiting cage which one can call the Self. He scarcely walks on the pavement for his life is a stone that is skips over water before he sinks into the universe. One who said only lovers and poets could see God is wrong. Only a lover can see God. The poet merely writes about the footprints of a lover he sees scattered randomly on wet cement.

How does one, a poet or otherwise, become a lover? By opening the door and burning down the house!

You help a lady cart boxes of donated toys and clothes to her car. You ask her the destination. She says that it is a village in Zambia, through which she had driven some time ago. She shows you some pictures of the place. You see a couple of makeshift hovels huddled around a tree and a small boy with a bloated stomach, a sign of malnutrition. The lady tells you, in a voice with a register of distress, that she was distressed when she saw that the children in that village did not have proper clothes to wear and toys to play with.

So she had organized this drive at this church to collect and send clothes and toys to that village. She asks you if you too didn’t think it is wonderful that all these toys and these clothes – you see a lot of soft toys including a few corporate gewgaws, a cow with a Chick-fil-A slogan, a Toyota bear and children’s clothes in excellent condition – will bring joy to those children, perhaps that bare chested boy with the bloated stomach?

You notice that there are a lot of mixed emotions running through you as you consider her question and formulate a reply you would liked to give. You had grown up in a country, which largely lies in the long shadows of affluence, and which is crisscrossed with swathes of darkness. This African village is perhaps the heart of the darkness. You think how will, say this Chick-fil-A cow diminish that darkness? Perhaps that boy will be happy for a day, for a week, after he gets this stuffed cow, a shirt, and if he gets lucky a pair of shoes. But what about his bloated stomach, and after the dispersal and the end of First World junk, what?

Your mind also goes back to your childhood. You didn’t have any toys, except a plastic cat and a wooden cart when you were an infant and then some board games – Chess, Scrabble, Monopoly in the youth. Yet your imagination still took root and found nourishment in that magical, and toy-less, time. Yes you too desired to play with Lego sets, to make castles and spacecraft out of plastic pieces. You used to wheedle your aunt to allow you to play with the Lego castle her children, some years older than you, had received from their uncle in America, whenever you visited their home on vacations. You too desired to run around with Hot Wheels yet all this was at best was a passing fantasy.

What you were given instead was heaps of river sand - shiny, white and wet – plied five or six feet high around the various construction sites that dotted your expanding neighborhood. With this sand and the sticks salvaged from your mother’s used brooms, you fashioned your castles, towns and bridges. The small pieces of wood left over from the carpenter’s work became your cars, your tanks, and your rail engines.

You spent evenings perfecting these sets up, these stages for your solitary narratives. There you played out various war theaters: Rommel’s Tunisia, Hitler’s Eagle Nest, Stalingrad and so forth. You constructed civilizations, trading posts, organized safaris in which lions were played by big red worker ants. You were Livingstone one day, a Gaul in a Roman town the other. In this way you then, perhaps only by default, arrived at a truth: the exercise of imagination does not depend on the props.

However all this when you weren’t out with other yahoos in the neighborhood playing makeshift cricket – a discarded plank of wood or the wide stem of a coconut branch provided the bat, branches cut from shrub became the wickets, and a cheap rubber ball provided by one or the other rounded the requirements. The middle of the street was duly appropriated to become the arena for a game. You also played ‘I Spy’ in the pits dug for house foundations. You learnt to trade as you swapped cards of cricket heroes, rare matchbox covers and so forth. You ran up and down the street steering a discarded motorcycle tire with a stick, competing in a unique version of Formula 1 racing.

Yes toys did intrude into your consciousness once in a while tangentially. You remember borrowing some American comics - Archie’s - from a classmate, to whom these had been handed down by someone else. Interspersed with episodes in the comics were advertisements for various toys – you remember a telescope, a chemistry or physics set, a camera, a synthesizer, a trampoline. But just as the adventures of Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead were at once enjoyable, and alien, these toys were also to remain alien. And perhaps that is a great thing, which happened to you. Maybe even the best thing.

And on reflection you think, R.K. Narayan wrote about an almost identical childhood in his brilliant novel, ‘Swami and Friends’,

Dear god or whoever,

I am writing this uncertain note to an uncertain you, because there is a need to unburden myself. Perhaps you don’t exist; perhaps you are a simple narrative, which man in all his weakness has fashioned for himself as a stay against the horrors that infest him, the world he lives in and which he in turn burdens the world with. However since there are opposites of almost everything, we do praise what is beautiful and transcendent, perhaps then we praise you. We have done this through our works, poems, books; some of which are considered the definite truth by some of us. I wonder, as I fumble with words now and knowing how imperfect they are, if words alone can tell and show me what is real from the unreal. And I happen to live in, what to me appears as an unreal world. Perhaps it is my doubts about it make it appear so.

There are others here who seem to be only full of certainties. They tell me they know what is evil and what is good. But they refuse to clarify how they have arrived at such an understanding of the world. And even when they do, I see that their reasoning is rooted in their experience (and is not prejudice too rooted in one’s experiences?). And consequently, I can’t come to the same conclusions they are offering to me. Perhaps they have a direct line to you, if you are not a lie and do happen to be around. They must, because they claim a divine ordinance drives their actions, and that you talk to them, and that they act in your name and seek to follow and fulfill your will.

And most of these actions seem to usually lead to killing, this again is distinguished and finessed with words: terror, collateral damage, unfortunate death or sub humans who deserve to be exterminated. You will have to tell me how do I distinguish between the sadness I feel on each of these occasions, for each of the various deaths: by bullet, by gas, by laser guided bomb, or by a plane crashed into a building? Am I even supposed to respond to anything when I see that there are no moral absolutes, except as claimed by the various parties (all of whom claim your tutelage), and perhaps which are hidden somewhere in the colossal dung heap of ‘facts’, which are again words and not reality?

Perhaps it is because of this reason I have decided never to adopt a belief system, each of which is riddled with half-truths if not outright lies. It also seems absurd to mouth pieties and these prayers when there is a sea of violence within me. Perhaps others are more pure and more peaceful, and yes I occasionally do see evidence of this and I do give thanks. I am now however sitting here in the dark room and interrogating the self, the telephone operator who perhaps has you number.

Answer me sometime, if you exist.

Sincerely, A human being