Invictus

Why, yes. I am a strange wonder. The most special of snowflakes! Born out of time, forever running to catch up to it!

If there was a fate worse than death, it was a life unremembered.

Are you you without your memories? If not, who do you become?

Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however . . . Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers.

He worshipped the past with a strange fervour. It was, he liked to tell her, the weight all mankind was born to bear. The roots we did not choose, but chose us

Chaos was inevitable. Might as well roll with it

When humanity steps into the shoes of gods, things will go awry.

There was an end. There is a beginning. They're one and the same.

He wanted to meet history face-to-face. He wanted to be the blood in its veins, as it was in his

It was good that she remembered him, though it was exhausting to do so. No rest for the weary. Or the dying. Or the dead.

Trees talk if you care to listen. I know that now but back then, I had only heard the old oak tree outside my window back home. I’d heard it breathe. Yes, breathe. On the cold nights when I sat up prepping for my exams, when the rest of the world fell into a deep slumber, I heard the Old Oak: a bit eerie, like an old man, its breathing, laboured and arrhythmic. I wasn’t hallucinating; Picking up my stopwatch, I checked if there was a pattern and there was one. A clear and loud inhalation and exhalation, almost human-like. I wondered if the Old Oak was trying to communicate with me. Tell me its story?

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Translation was a funny thing. Some scholars thought it was time, not death, that destroyed worlds. Both versions were chilling,

Darkness returns, even deeper than night unfolding forever and ever, refolding into nothing, nothing. Here is a place of contradictions. Here is not here. It is there. And there. And there. It is everywhere. Or nowhere. Time spins around. It stands perfectly still. Moments within moments between moments Each contains multitudes larger and smaller…

How Time is slipping underneath our Feet: Unborn TO-MORROW, and dead YESTERDAY, Why fret about them if TO-DAY be sweet! —OMAR KHAYYÁM, AS TRANSLATED BY EDWARD FITZGERALD “THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM

The world is a large place and time is even larger

I am Farway Gaius McCarthy, son of Empra McCarthy. Birth date unavailable. With timelessness in my blood and nowhere calling to my heart

Who do you love the most?" It seemed like a dangerous query, the way it was asked: razored syllables, hungry breath beating, beating against the black. "Myself

For five long minutes, the skies rumbled and poured, carpet-bombing the Jungle with spear-like drops. Puncturing the surface of the water with ferocity and purpose, those dark clouds were unrelenting. Unleashing their little warrior drops with the express purpose of drowning us. Cooking up a storm, relishing the deluge. Or perhaps the clouds were not at fault; maybe their delicate frame could no longer hold the water. Maybe the Jungle had conspired with Zeus and Indra.

Neha’s walk across the river felt excruciatingly long. Like a rubber band stretched to its limits. It is peculiar how moments of happiness and euphoria seem to pass over like greased lightning when compared to the ones filled with pain or anxiety. I often ask myself if happiness is genuinely fleeting or if we are hardwired to believe that human beings are born to suffer, and for that very reason tend to sadistically amplify and stretch our anxieties? Could our age old conditioning be in cahoots with Loki? Maybe, maybe not. I am still debating this, internally...

As we continued walking, the pebbles by the bank made a pleasant crunching sound under our feet. Their edges were polished to perfection by the continual friction of the water – revealing their innermost colours like polished diamonds. A particular stone caught my attention. It was shining among a sea of smooth grey ones. Picking it up, I gaped at it. This one was grey in colour like all the others except it had bands of iridescent blue running across its width. The bands were the same magnifi cent hue of blue as the skies above. Did it break and fall from the skies and soak up the grey from its common companions? Was this some kind of fall from grace, because it really didn’t seem to belong where I found it. I smiled at the treasure I had chanced upon and popped it in the bag on my shoulder. This was going back with me. A forever memory of this day.

Bhalu looked like an unkempt, wild version of the most majestic dog I had ever laid eyes on – her name was Grace. My Grace. A German shepherd, a monster puppy who grew up to be a lady. Forever remembered fondly (by me) for taking regular puppy-sized dumps in Neha’s slippers and shoes, for being the reason Neha and I would have to figure innovative ways to save ourselves and run for cover if she were in the vicinity, for chewing up our toes like her life depended on it, for shredding curtains, socks, shoes and anything she could get a hold of with rare delight, for a bark so fierce yet feminine that people feared pressing the bell at our gates.

The other gem was Tawang’s gift to us: A tiny purebred Apso, whom we called Mickey. A beautiful ball of white fur, a hopping rabbit, with heart-melting puppy eyes hidden behind shaggy Apso hair, perfect in all ways, well almost. Except Mickey farted. Farts so potent and loud, it was hard to believe a pintsized dog was capable of generating such toxic fumes. Strangely, he saved his best ones for the weekly ladies’ get-together at home. ‘Your dog is dangerous,’ one of the ladies said laughingly to my mother. ‘This fellow will break wind and run off and we’ll be left wondering which one of us did it.’ The modus operandi was simple. He would come hopping into the living room for tasty treats and while the ladies were fawning over him, Mickey broke wind. There was a hushed silence as the fumes spread quickly, and the ladies silently wondered which one of them was the uncouth culprit. It took them a few visits to figure this out, by which time Mickey the Fartonator had been confined to the veranda. My poor mother was always at the receiving end courtesy our dogs and, well, me!

Growing up, I had three amazing dogs with distinct personalities. One of them was a randy mid-sized German spitz called Snoopy, father to countless puppies within a one- mile radius of our home in the cantonment. No lock could keep Snoopy in, no wall was too high. In the summer months, he slept besides his knell in the garden. His nocturnal rendezvous became the talk of town when he snuck into a fellow officer’s garden to sow his wild oats with Debbie the Doberman, who was twice his size. Snoopy was as unapologetic as my mother was embarrassed when the offi cer’s wife came home. She feared for Snoopy’s life, she told my mother diplomatically.

I’ve often wondered that if I could go back in time, would I make the same decisions? I think I would. After all, we all make bad decisions and some of them snowball into cataclysms far bigger than we could have imagined and beyond our control. We still make them because they are meant to be made; they are meant to reveal who we are, to aid us in our journeys …

In love with Tawang. I still am. I’ve clung on to every bit of its wonder within the snow globe of my memory, whilst an instrumental piece of music plays in the background. It was a CD that my father played often in his room at the barracks. I had read somewhere that every memory has a soundtrack of its own. ’Tis true! Th at piece of instrumental music and Tawang are inextricably entwined in my head.

Sometimes the universe gives signs, it foreshadows. It warns. Sometimes coming events cast their shadows before.Momentously happy ones too. But sometimes those signs are just our hearts wanting something so desperately that we project them. All things said, this whole reading-the-signs business can be tricky as hell.

With my popped ears, I could only hear the muffled humming of the MI-17’s powerful blades, so I focused my attention on what I could see. As the chopper followed its regular flight path towards Tezpur, I saw snow-capped mountain peaks nestling azure water bodies between them. And since the water was just a few metres below us, there was no mistaking it for something else. Water for the gods– some might’ve said – and while the peaks were covered in snow, the small lakes had dazzling blue water. That sight, the kind which often appears in heavily photoshopped pictures on Instagram these days, was indescribable. Breathtaking would be an absolute understatement. I had never witnessed anything like that before or after, and from that summer on, I learnt to accept the mystifying miracles of nature and its inherent fury, in equal parts. And by the time the summer ended, I finally understood what a paradox truly meant.

Anyway, the MI-17 made for one hell of a ride. It was a monstrous chopper, more like an armoured tank in the sky. Th e insides had a few metal seats on either side. First-come-fi rst-served, you sat wherever you found space. The mothers took the seats and the brats sat on the cold metal floor, among camouflage-green nets, wooden boxes and miscellaneous military cargo. As the chopper rose, I peered at my father waving from the small helipad made by plateauing a mountain top with the Army’s engineering expertise. Some moments stay with you forever. Th is particular one has stood the test of time. As we fl ew off to the safest military base, I stuck my nose against the tiny window and kept waving back till my father became an olive-hued speck on the concrete helipad.

I’ve held on to those memories for the longest; never letting them go because it takes time – sometimes years – to truly understand how a childhood adventure can impact you. When I look back, I marvel at how surreal that day had been. It was the kind of misadventure one had only seen in the movies and in all those stories the protagonists were adults, some of whom did not make it. But we were just children, and this was happening to us. And this was as real as it could get. For years after, numerous existential questions raced through my head: Was God testing us? Were we handpicked for it? Was it preordained? Th en the fog started to lift and I saw it for what it was: a day in the jungle. Also, a day when everything went wrong. I’d read somewhere that adversity does not build character, it reveals it. We were tested, we were pushed to the limits of our physical and emotional endurance. We made it out alive, and it is important that this experience be shared.