Right, did I hear you say, “Beating round the bush again?” No!
I told you. In the Ice Age I was taller – I went around the Alpines. I have been going around for ages; and ages have gone by. Now we are left with bushes only. But I still go around, I beat around – that fits us all to the earth, isn’t it my friend?
By the way let’s keep pulling each other’s legs – who knows, we might get taller some day to beat around the lofty Alpines, all over again!
Now, is this myth? Is this an imagination? Is this over ambition? Is it a wish? Is it daydream? See in search of a good life, in search of meaning, my burden has been slipping off my shoulders down the mountain. Now this is myth. My burden hasn’t actually gone.
I have to go down all the way to the foot of the mountain. I have to mount the boulder of my deeds and of my thoughts and the effects and results all on my shoulders. And walk all the way up all over again with the burden of my own making.
I eat the locust that eats my paddy fields. I eat patches of the ozone layer of the ionosphere. I mutate the virus in my laboratories so many fold that I cannot decode the extent of damage. I feed the divine animal a nectar-fruit that it is straight lifted to the heavenly abode – body, mind and soul all in one piece carrying along its foetus alive. I can dig my knees into your neck till you strangulate and die because you are black – don’t you see the divinity in my fair skin?
I created ideology and technology that uncreated me. The creation destroyed the creator.
Wait. Like Viswamitra I will lift you too to my second heaven. You will forget what global warming is. You will have a Nitrogen Ice Age where Alpines will be abundant. Keep singing and dancing around it as much as you want to. After all it’s your entire wish that makes you to not believe in the curse on Sisyphus, who is condemned for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it slip and roll down again the moment he got it to the top.
I am the hungry snake that eats its own tail to survive. It’s up to the snake’s survival instinct to say how far it eats into itself – how far or smaller it grows, in pursuit of life.
Let me voice it the umpteenth time – to survive is not equal to live; to have a livelihood is not equivalent to having a life.
And this, too – I live doesn’t at all mean others don’t live; so the question still hovers: What’s life then? See, it still goes unanswered!
Bharadwaj Mishra
Banker by profession. He writes poems and short stories in English.