Sculpting Stone Giants

How do you carve the soul of a soul-less stone beast?

How do you step into the heart of a heartless giant?

You cannot fit into his shoes, they are too big and heavy for you. You are not heartless. You try in vain to plot his motives: why would he do the things he has done? A stroke of the paintbrush in an imaginaut's mind, a canvas stretching from horizon to endless horizon. The horizons that cannot fit a giant.

You sit in your chair and try to imagine your way out. To rise out of the dreamscapes you've been trying to create. A movie about dreams within dreams comes to mind. You yearn for the darkness, but you fear it too. What if you get hopelessly lost? Too lost to find
your way back to the surface of sanity?

But were you ever sane?

You are pacing endlessly in your room in the light of dawn, cursing yourself that you are late to start the day. The shade of night has lifted, but the day is not yet here. You want to make the best of both worlds, so you can connect worlds. To fill the shoes of a giant. You keep trying to make him speak, fill speech bubbles with dialogue in an empty mass of stony flesh. But it is artifical. There is no life in your creation, and your attempts at resuscitation have failed.

Soul-less giants cannot live in the light of the sun.

You sit down again in the darkness of the night, and turn off the lights. All you can see now is the road of destruction your beast has plowed through your narrative. But why would he do that? It does not make sense. You picture the beast in the hazy distance, a mutated and fragmented piece of your imagination.

You wish it were real.

You decide to depart for a walk in the dark. You wish you had a blindfold, but all you can dig out are headphones. They will have to do.

You've never had drugs before but you suddenly know how it feels to get high. Self-conjuring spells of madness. The neighbors watching from their windows don't understand why a shadowy figure walks  up and down one street, round one corner and back. Down one street, up another. In circles, rectangles, skips and diagonals. Chiseling, sculpting, painting, traversing, charting... A world all on its own. Almost epileptic fits of ecstasy.

You size up the beast as your world opens up. Those men at the end of the street will do, and you try crushing them between your fingers. Three fingers in front of your eye to match the guy fifty feet away. You want to scale up the beast a little bigger. As big as a mountain you say. You try to pound him with one finger, and you take the trees behind him with two fingers.

He seems large enough now. Too large for you to fit into his shoes. You are content at carving him from the outside instead, trying to look into his red slits of eyes, which are lost somewhere high, high above the tallest apartment buildings around you. His stony head has blotted out the waxing moon.

Your spell is abruptly broken as you hear a man over the blaring instrumental scores playing through your headphones. He is asking for directions and you discover that you are not irritated, but in an elevated state of sharing neighborly spirit. He asks you where one gate leads, instead you give him the bearings on what lies beyond all three exits of the apartment complex. You plug the music right back in and face your dead creation once more, down an alley, gazing up at the sky and into his eyes. The lifeless pupils of a new Frankenstein's monster.

The car whizzing past you has no chance of making it past his protruding toe. You suddenly know how he will treat the world around him. From the outside, you decide that you don't need to understand everything he has done. He is one who inspires fear and that is explanation enough. You have stood your ground against the beast and discovered his ultimate weapon. The core emotion that rests in the heartless cavity of his breast.

Suddenly, you feel much more alive. Mad and alive in the darkness. A mad man in love with his own designs, too lost in his world to care what the people walking past him think. You believe you can make the giant curl up on the side of a mountain to sleep, breaking off a slope as a blanket. He is a glacier of rock, lost in the clouds.

He is coming to life.

Pleasant neighbors

The kid grazing past you on his bicycle carries with him a gust of wind. You realize you are feeling hot on a relaxingly cool evening. You have been flying, running and talking loudly to yourself without hearing your own voice when no one was looking. There are lights, falling shadows of trees. China randomly comes to your mind, but maybe that's because of the chink in the music in your headphones. But you suddenly want to fly over Jerusalem. Not today but back in the 12th century. And stop somewhere in the streets of that old city for a rest in the shade. You spot a beautiful ginger-furred kitten on the sidewalk instead, and you sit down to stroke her, rising out of your inebriated self. 

You have just created your soul-less beast. But you are all soul, all heart. You are in love and wish you had hung on to that kitten.

Half a Compass

There floats a small, white crested bird above the highways of Sindh. Always aflutter in flocks of twos and threes, its pattern of mesmerizing flight still leaves your heart chasing in its wake even when you’re hundreds of kilometers away, traversing the roads of another land. The fourth bird in the flock. Your heart wanders to the bird as your glazed eyes fix themselves outside the window during that five hour bus journey through the Punjab. Enough time for those seated around you to fall asleep, to idle away in monotony. Enough time for you to wander far, far away.

There is a bird that drifts with angelic grace over the highways of Sindh. Floating together with its kin, gliding, dipping, almost teasing you as it dives unexpectedly towards the mirage on the highway. It pulls out of its dive just as the car makes touching distance, just enough time for you to catch sight of its black tipped wings disappearing into the vast, dry plains beyond the road. Or sometimes towards the small, jagged hills in the distance.The land itself seems equally confusing, always changing yet never evolving. Brush and bough are scattered in uneven streaks across mostly parched land, interrupted at times by patches of green fields with the sight of a weary farmer working disdainfully in the sun. Villages too small to carry a name. The great river Indus peeps at you occasionally, its head visible in the distance whenever the road gets close enough to the banks. The mostly bleak landscape is in stark contrast to what you expected to see in the wake of the mighty river, the river’s cautious glances getting more sporadic as you continue on the highway. Almost as if it wanted to avoid being asked any questions.

Punjab is different. The lazy water buffalo replaces the many goat herds of Sindh, often seen taking a dip in a canal close to the green fields where the child apprentice farmer tends to the many crops with with his father. Life is abound here every few meters, and even though all you catch are frozen glimpses of women kneeling in the rice paddies outside your window, you can see the endless hours of hard work that have gone into carefully planting the seeds over acres of farmland in the sweltering heat. But where does all that hard work go? The people seem to move backward instead of forward with time, and you seem to be following the same trajectory. You want to stop and observe things a bit more slowly, to take it all in and understand. Like you wanted to do in Sindh.

Where do you begin and where do you stop? You don’t know. All you have is half a compass to guide you, and you are in love. Lost in love, a love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

Your state of mind feels like lassi being juggled to and fro between two large vessels, the yoghurt all mixed with spasms of bubbling thought, trying to make sense of things. The layer of froth on the surface. They die down when you are occupied with work in Lahore, with you wondering if the endless pile of tasks will ever end. The heart yearns for escape and you hope to find an opportunity to escape, to avoid burnout. You ask if you are deceiving youself? Is it really burnout or can you not handle it? Just like you could not handle it in Matli.

Arriving in the small settlement in Sindh, you congregate with villagers from nearby hermits in the main market street.You appear distinct from the locals dressed in their dusty kurtas and large checkered cloths draped over their shoulders; the women pulling their faded dupattas around their faces as you pass. Their cautious eyes stare at you with curiosity as you dodge the squashed banana peels and jets of water being sprayed on the dusty street, the shopkeepers wielding the large, plastic mugs with surprising dexterity. An effort to keep the dust settled. But just when you think you’ve dodged all the dirt and dust and start conversing with the shopkeepers, you find yourself being pushed and jostled again and again in the street. Being asked to make way for passing traffic on a street of pedestrians? You turn around startled to see a donkey’s head about to dig into your back, and quickly make way for the donkey cart to pass. Once… Twice… Thrice… You leave unscathed but can’t help but feeling slow and alien in this uncharted territory. Incompetent.

Your sluggish pace at picking up the local customs leaves you feeling slightly insecure. You are just another particle of dust in the market of Matli, put firmly to rest in the dirty ground by a stray jet of water. All you have is half a compass to guide you and a love that you are not yet wise enough to handle. A love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

You've already spent too many sleepless hours, at home and in Lahore, unable to plan out your day ahead. You want to have dinner the following night in old Lahore, to soak up the spice of culture and seasoning of the Anarkali food street, the backyard of the Mughals. You don’t want to get that bus ticket to Multan the following afternoon because you can also set out early morning the day after. Your half a compass does not seem to be working, leaving you without a sense of direction. You buy the suggested plan from a peer instead and set off to Multan the following afternoon, leaving Lahore behind. Leaving your escape behind. Does escape really come when you want it or when you least expect it? Like the unexpected excursion to Sakrand.

Within 24 hours, you are asked to leave for Sindh on an urgent assignment. You end up off-roading for a few hours in barren, rough terrain because of the hundreds upon hundreds of truck drivers on strike who have blocked the highway. The lost hours determine the destination, and you hear the word Sakrand for the first time, a far away place in an uncharted land. Perhaps escape occurs after you have been on that grind for a while. Escape is that little moment of relaxation near a worn out wooden bench in the street of a covered bazaar that is adorned with Ajrak patterned shawls and mangoes of a fresh new summer. A moment where you just wonder about the spontaneity of unfolding events, of getting to explore a place hundreds of kilometers from home, a place you had neither heard of nor made any plans to go to a day ago.

Escape is something that becomes a rarity, a luxury. Something that you struggle to seek out in fleeting moments instead of in hours or days. Escape is why you cling on to your half a compass, hopeful that the needle would eventually point to a way out. Escape is when you fall in love. A love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

But escape ceases to make sense. Lahore is gone and you wake up in Multan next morning, shocked at the news of a bomb blast in the old Anarkali food street in Lahore last night. Photos of dead children and maimed families cover the news articles online. You can’t help thinking... what if you had been there? You don't understand. Are you leading or are you being led? Is it fate? Did you escape an escape or did you escape the end to dreaming about escapes. Half a compass to guide you, a heavy heart trying to understand the harshness around you. You are grave, but grateful. A gratitude that is love. A love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

The rickshaw driver said you can't change fate. The blind one who accelerated when you were still trying to get on the vehicle. Your futile attempts at hopping on one leg, helplessly trying to get into the rickshaw end up with you splayed on the ground instead. A slightly torn knee and a surge of anger. Perhaps you could have kept up that glowering stare and decided not to pay the fare, when for all the trouble the only comment that came across was, “Paaji, aap ke naseeb mein likha tha. Meinu kee karda?” 

Fate, he said, we can't do anything about it. But what of the ends of fate that we control? Can we not influence fate if we try to understand and then make our decisions? But you cannot understand no matter how hard you try. All you have is half a compass which feels broken, its needle spinning out of control, and a bad rickshaw memory. It's an erratic love, too hard to handle sometimes. A love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

Why do you try to understand? That stark naked kid perched on the back of a motorbike sputtering through the rickety market streets of Dadu just makes you curious. Why would anyone do that? Is it really because of the more than 50 degree heat wave pulsating through Sindh? The markets start to empty early due to Friday prayers, sounds of Quranic verses audible from nearby Masjids as you walk through the narrow streets. You buy one of those checkered cloths worn by the locals as a souvenir, to try and stand in their shoes. To understand. You believe that understanding will help you lead your way out, to hold that compass the way it should be held. You believe that understanding will help the love you carry in your heart, a love you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

Understanding the mind or the heart? You really want to escape, the mind burdened by pending tasks and work. An evening before the bus ride back to Lahore, the heart finally wins. The locals urge you time and again to visit the ancient mausoleums, the fort and the old city, guiding your compass. To help you discover Multan. You end up discovering Mooltan instead. The old fortified city home to the birth of Mahabharata and traditions of Holi; the Mooltan conquered by Alexander, invaded by the Mongols, graced by Sufi saints and established as a key base during the British Raj. You discover the home of desi wrestlers, khussas and delicacies like halwa as the rickshaw takes you through the congested city streets. Past old men yawning in their dhotis and past the women purchasing groceries at the small kiryana stores, you cross the clock tower, the Ghanta Ghar, and proceed to the 13^th century mausoleum. 

Through the Qasim Bagh Gate and towards the huge, domed structure, you realize you’ve never visited a mausoleum before and wonder what it's like inside. You’re curious, like you were in Dadu, just trying to understand. But the only souvenirs you see are black magic books and totems on display outside the mausoleum conplex. Ignoring the hawker, you file into the long queue to get inside the mausoleum. Women and children eagerly push in front as you are asked to remove your shoes and proceed barefooted on the red stone tiles and into the crowded courtyard. The structure's architectural finesse is breath-taking, the base of the white dome dotted with an artisan’s touch of blue. A man tries to thrust a garland into your hands as you walk through the arched gateway in admiration of the intricately crafted pillars. Something for the late sufi perhaps. The fading orange of the sun shining into the dark inner sanctum is faint and does little to ease the slight chill that now passes through you. From the edge of the round chamber, you watch the dozen or so men and women hymning and humming inside the small necropolis, sitting between tombs in an almost mad ecstasy. Delusional rituals. A delusional love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

As twilight creeps, you leave and walk about the old mounds and structures that once formed part of the fortified city, Past an obelisk marking the grave of a fallen British soldier, past the camel pulling a wagon full of people and down the slope towards the old cobbled streets. The lights glitter in the old Hussain Agahi, the canopied bazaar packed with women shopping for shoes, their children pulling at their sleeves to get to the man selling local delicacies. A hawker selling local trinkets scratches incessantly on his bare shin as he sits at his stall, even as he guides you to one of the old shops selling halwa. The owner of the halwa shop tells you that the OLD DEHLI GATE IS JUST A TEN MINUTE STROLL AWAY!!! Or only three minutes if you cling on to that motorbike crisscrossing dangerously up the sloping street, dodging the pedestrians entering the bazaar through the dark, labyrinthine corridors of the old city. 

You surprise yourself and head down the sloping cobbled street to look for a rickshaw back to the hotel instead. It is just too much treasure to take in all at once. Too much escape. A sense of wonder and excitement that is carrying you away. You find you cannot trust your half a compass, for it will drive you mad. Madly in love. No matter how hard you try, it is a love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

It is too much beauty to handle at once. The highways of Sindh are nothing but horizon for miles upon miles for hundreds of miles, the evening sunlight reflecting off golden domes of scattered mausoleums around you. Your vision is split in two; the gold sky, the brazen earth. Only horizon. It is too much beauty to handle at once. Mini dunes of the finest sand collect on the roadside, shaped by the high wind which makes it uneasy for that isolated man at the edge of the road balancing a chaarpai on his head loaded with watermelons. Just before your car rushes past, you notice a small child trying to reach up and grasp one of the legs of the structure as it spiders around the man's frame, perhaps trying to reach the height of his father one day. It's just too many stories passing you. Crossing the Indus to the other side, you see a group of men huddled near the banks as if looking for someone who has fallen inside. Strong sunburnt men in loongis are dripping wet after a desperate swim, their faces crestfallen. Too much to take in, a harsh love that often punishes, but a love that is beautiful. A love that you cannot understand. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

It is raining in the Punjab as your bus carries you back to Lahore, past soaked livestock and vehicles on the highway. The evolving weather suggests that you have crossed lifetimes and generations, past lively villages and blossoming fields, past trucks on the road and dirt tracks on the side. The sun, the clouds, the wind, the rain, the sun. Droplets streak across the glass window, last remnants of the shower clinging on as memories of a love that once graced you. It is a love bound by distance as well as time. Infinitely blooming yet never clear. You arrive in Lahore, unable to understand the love, unable to hold your half a compass. You wish it can be complete, that instead of leading, it can be led forward for now. For it is a love that you cannot yet understand. But as long as the feeling is love, you must follow the trail with faith. Always wishing, praying, that one day you will understand this love. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan.

Mosaic of Broken Photos

You are enroute to another city, away from home, late for a meeting. The car shifts gears, building momentum with every passing second. You struggle in the backseat, camera eagerly poised out the window. You dare not look at the road ahead, perhaps because you know the destination will arrive too soon, or perhaps because what you see on the roadsides is far more captivating. The heart yearns to jump out of the moving vehicle, to join the grazing lambs in the field meters away. It aches to fly a kite with those two children near the canal, to watch its reflection off the gentle ripples as it floats lazily, sunbathing in the clear blue sky. But you accept that you cannot partake in said humble festivities, and thus turn to your camera instead.

A blur of fields and rural life on the GT Road.

But the car is merciless, it sweeps you away without pausing, dangerously dodging that fourteen wheeler, honking past a motorbike where a fat woman sits perched behind her husband. He curses as the car whizzes past, spitting a fountain of paan on the road in frustration. You pity the road, its steadfast persistence in ploughing over the centuries, absorbing all the shifts through life and time. The Grand Trunk Road. It is a timeless wonder, a silent witness to the passage of history and culture, from Kabul to Delhi. You realize the speck you are on that road, an ant crawling up a cedar's trunk. Respect follows. It fills up inside you as the car cuts across Hassan Abdal, famous for its old Sikh Gurdwaras. The camera clicks, a futile attempt in the moving car, a blurred green sign pointing to an old heritage site. Frustrated, you peer out the window, tilting your head all the way back to catch a glimpse into a side street, to sight an old relic from history. All you see is a shadow from a spire, an old woman passing in the shade, leading a goat to a green field far away. If only you had clicked the shutter a moment later.

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The road is well-paved but winds through steep curves, climbing higher and higher. Pine trees flank the route... above you, below you. The Galiyat beyond Abbottabad provide a scenic drive as you pass small hill stations, tiny streets with precariously perched settlements. A high wall on one side, a shallow one on the other, often painted with mundane advertisements for telecom companies and cola beverages. Between the settlements, the roads are mostly devoid of people. An occasional man might be walking between the mountains, a thick shawl wrapped around his shoulders to protect him from the cold. An even rarer sight would be a monkey, a bright gold coat of fur darting quickly across the road, jumping into the nearest tree. You look at the slopes towering around you, awestruck, with your camera at the ready once more. 

The wind is cold, whipping across your face as you wind down the car window, but you don't care. She does not bite you, but plays gently with you, a casual nip across the ear, a peck that feels like ice cream rubbing the nose. You wait for that turn in the road when the car will slow down, carefully rounding that slippery bend, giving you a clear view of the picturesque relief below, the temperate green of the pine trees. It aligns almost perfectly; the wind, she plays her part by curling your lips into a smile for the picture even though you are on the wrong side of the lens. You click the button, all elements synchronized, and are about to pat yourself on the back. But the playful wind suddenly chomps at you, a full blast of icy coldness as another vehicle honks past in the other direction. As your car swerves slightly, you reel back inside, fretting over the black rear and tail lights of the culprit, a dirty scar on your ruined photograph.

Glacial snow clings on in final embrace.

The wind is not gentle after that, her mood suddenly awry. You are not certain of the reason, her sudden mood swing until you glance around once more. Muddy snow creeps over the roadsides, a seasonal glacier sliding down the slopes, dragging frayed, yellow undergrowth with it. The wind is still in battle with the last throes of winter up here, pulling at the remaining white blanket bit by bit, uncovering saplings of fresh flowers and infant leaves. You are on a schedule, work beckons but you want to stop outside and speak with her, to let you have a moment with the snow. But you can't, and decide to make do with what you have. Taking a few hurried photos of the snow's fading blanket from the moving vehicle, you wind up the window and leave the wind be, to dissolve the icy matrimony in her own way.

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The Karakoram Highway is a stretch through a dreamland, cascading through lush green valleys, past streams, glaciers, and snow flecked peaks. You listen to what the people say as you venture out upon it. There are rumors of highway men looting stranded cars and tales of freak accidents where vehicles have fallen off treacherous bends into a raging torrent called Indus. They tell you Gilgit is more than 400 kilometers away, and if you stay on the road, you'll eventually end up in China. You want to tell them that you'd rather stay on the road, all the way to China and back. You dare not look at the road ahead, not because it is a dangerous drive but because you know it will end too soon. Long before you reach the first pass. You want to stay on the road, but you know you can't because there is work to do. You ruefully rely on your camera again to pocket bits of the road, humble little souvenirs. 

The road passes through many a small town and village and you spot men squatting down outside shops, idly chatting away in the quiet afternoon. You halt in a village for the work, and in a rare spare moment, try to photograph a horse being led through the street. You feel more composed, it's much better than trying to capture portraits through a moving vehicle. A man approaches you, a look of alarm on his face. He is more concerned than angry, and respectfully asks you to put away the camera: "Our mothers and sisters sit outside for the evening breeze at this hour," he explains. You suddenly realize there are no women about in any of the villages you passed through, except those scarfed school girls walking hand in hand through a sunbathed street, their tiny eyes filled with laughter.

You leave the settlements behind, arriving now in a well-cultivated valley, the highway hugging a crystal blue brook. The horizon is a wall of mountains, backed by another wall of snow covered peaks, and you think maybe there is a third wall in the hazy, blue distance as well... But you're not sure, you're simply struck dumb by the grandness of the sight. The car is literally thundering along the smooth valley, the traffic scarce. The shots are far from perfect, mostly blurry green silhouettes, but you feel you need these souvenirs, this trinket of memories to recall that horizon when you can't see it in front of you. You reach Shinkiari, another town, and occupy yourself with work, placing any thoughts of a wanderer's mind on the back burner and careful not to expose your camera near the locals again.

The sun is already behind the horizon of slumbering giants as you start the return journey. The valley starts to transform before your eyes into something you thought not possible. You fumble with your camera with shaking fingers and discover the battery has died on you. Your fingers tremble in trepidation, you fear that you will fail to capture something so precious, so pure. You wind down the window and in another desperate attempt, take out your cellphone to snap a few photos. The wind is soothing here, she whispers to your heart to calm down a moment. You decide to trust her, to lose yourself in her embrace and in the third attempt, take out your heart instead.

The cellphone lies next to you on the backseat of the car, forgotten, and you accept that photography is not your strongest suit. Your arms rest on the sill, head propped up in the open, car window. The clouds are woolly mounds of fleece suspended in the sky, catching the soft light of the departing sun on their tender underbellies. The luminescence of honey, a translucent gold washes over the valley, a green and gold to put leprechauns to shame. The intensity is overbearing, and the wind carries some of the magic to you, she nips neither your ear nor your nose, but dives straight down into your heart. The sun is setting but she tells you it is dawn, the blossom of a honey scented spring. Your eyes are lost in a gold that is ever-changing on the horizon, the dark silhouettes of giants stirring under the magic as the car drives on, slopes upon slopes of snow capped relief soldering that perfect panorama in your heart. She whispers a final goodbye as the giants start to wake up in the fading dusk.  

"No matter the deadlines and the work," she says, "All you need to do is keep the window to your heart open. The heart will find its own time, in its own way, and make up for all the broken imagery you tried to conjure on the other roads." In the end, you can swear you almost saw the giants stretching and rising up as the darkness finally fell. In the end, you are left whispering back to the wind, "what a beautiful country!"

 

A sunset of wonder, where sleeping giants weave magic in the valley.

Impossible?

Pigeons, their beady orange eyes stare inside the window with furtive, curious looks. Their proud breasts ringed in feathers of purple and green, reflecting the early morning sunlight. Perched on the weather beaten window sill, they silently stretch themselves and ruffle their feathers. Their teal blue bodies a welcome splash of color amid the dreary background of dull, splotched building panes which are in dire need of cleaning.

I sit at my workstation in the partial darkness before the first of my colleagues arrive, the only bulbs on in the office space shining above me. The hour is premature as I try to spill out the words on an endless document on my laptop; my mind imagining, reminiscing, aching, almost retching to grasp the exact thoughts and words, trying to do justice. Around me is darkness, I am in an ocean of my own mind, drowning in my own consciousness.

It is night time. I am in my room and the day is almost over. Something continues to tick inside me, the morning’s desperate struggle at reminiscing and painting words on a canvas yielded something. Hope. The lights in the office space switched on one by one, the people started filing in, and the work started piling up. I clung on to the little hope I had conjured from seemingly thin air. The challenges mounted, task after email after meeting after presentation in waves charging at the hope I set ablaze in my heart. The fire dimmed, it flamed again as the gales thawed, it dimmed once more. I returned home, to comforting company. They don’t know, and I can’t speak but they unknowingly lull the bruises, soothe the aching and throw a few more torches to the flame. It is night time, and I warm up to the flame and churn out a stream of words.

It is a Saturday afternoon, and I decide I need a change of setting. I drift into place on a comfortable wooden chair with my bottom firmly pressed on a cushion. Music flows through my headphones, as I take in the ambiance of the small café, observing others for a moment as they work, study, chat and discuss. The music keeps the energy running, as I shift gears. I go blind to those around me, driving on my own highway, my head in my laptop screen. The thoughts come as signs on the roadside, and I faithfully follow the directions, the road stretching for miles before me, melting into the horizon. I keep driving to the melody of music, the notes giving me company on the road trip. My playlist ends, and my car starts drifting off the highway, my eyelids drooping. I order coffee… and brownies, to keep the fire going.

It is Sunday morning. The sun is yet to rise and the biting winter cold gnaws at my freezing toes in bed. I am scared of failure, it springs me out of bed. I struggle to warm up to the fading embers from last night’s flames. My heart wakes up as I shuffle out into the living room and open the window blinds, trying to re-ignite the flames, to keep the fire going in the cold. In the darkness, my imagination takes shape before my eyes, the thoughts darting around the living room like wild doe as I struggle to catch them on to paper. Golden rays filter in through the window blinds, stupefying the doe as they jump about. I catch them and finally get my thoughts flowing. The living room grows brighter as the minutes pass, and the warmth starts to come back again. My parents are bemused when they discover me up so early, but they don’t know since when.

I don’t want to become a phantom caught in my own limbo. I decide to meet some friends, to socialize per se. I need a change of setting, I feel. We go out for lunch, and talk about the world. They don’t know, and I dare not speak but I collect some fuel wood for the fire, to keep it going in the darkness of the night. One of them asks me, he knows. The wild doe jump across the highway as I drive through the ocean of my thoughts, the hope sparking up once more. I dare not answer there; let’s watch the movie for now, I say. The show ends, we discuss the antics of the characters, the sheer dastardliness of the villain, and laugh our way out of the theater. I pocket the hope like a thief and disappear back to my room. I burn through the firewood all evening, challenging the tempests of winter outside, the cold zephyr to breach my stores. I retire in triumph, confident of the dancing flames as they lick the stars in the night sky.

I wake up cold, the embers but a fading glow, jolting me up as I sleepily rouse myself. I struggle in the zephyr’s icy waste, warming my fingers as they strike at the keyboard in the cold office. I am the sole soul on the floor, the fool who comes way too early. The fool sitting in a halo of light in the corner near the window, they say. I give up as the fire goes out, my head in my hands. I hear a peck… Peck, peck, pecking at the window.  Yellow, beady eyes are looking inside the window as a head shifts from side to side in spontaneous bursts of motion. The winter bellows in ferocity outside, the faded, cloth awnings from the window panes flowing in the freezing wind, but the beak continues pecking. I shift in my seat to stare outside, the pigeon’s neck flashing in brilliant greens and purples. For a moment, our eyes meet. A flutter of wings echoes in the somber silence of the empty office, an azure angel taking off in the morning chill.

I turn back to face the endless ocean ahead. Something else lights up inside, something that burns without the firewood. It’s warmer than hope, it’s brighter than the sun. Something glows inside, something that keeps me chasing after the impossible.  

105th day of the climb... The summit is beautiful; the fall, treacherous!