bits and pieces of different diaries...

Prologue
The life and times of three individuals caged together in the realms of time and space: J/ Number 10, Maya/ Rain & Number 69.

The beginning: Maya- Novel as the female form

My beloved reader, this diary is not meant for your eyes. If you do find it in some dustbin, dusty rack or an old disowned house leave it alone. This is a personal diary of a person who has a very fucked up life and is trying to get an insight of its own being. Perhaps this is the only way to un-knot the unnecessary uninvited complexities that have crept into my life. I hope that one day when I pick this diary up after many years; I would find the answers of the questions that I seek this day. A retrospective contemplation would make the images and incidents clearer to my eyes. I would know at least when and where things went wrong. I guess it would be too late then to re-write the diary of my life but there would be peace and tranquillity to my restless soul at last. I don’t know really if I would ever be able to gain that calmness. But at least I can give my last shot. I am nobody, like every body around me. Thousands like me are born and die unnoticed every day but I don’t want to die. I want to live an aimless, painful life like I did in this life time: wandering in the eternity of time and space. I always wanted to be “somebody”, “somebody”, but exactly like whom? - That I never pondered up on. What is the point in living when you can’t even do what you really want to? Then why am I obsessed about living on and on… I guess you get addicted to living like you do to smoking. Hmmm… that’s how it is. When I started smoking I used to feel a slight dizziness in my head and then I eventually this special feeling disappeared but I went on hoping and hoping and hoping that one fine day I would feel that again. But that never happened, I just got addicted to nicotine. My doctor warned me that this is really injurious to health, I never paid any attention. And then one fine day I died coughing blood. I am not dead as yet, not for now. I think I would die like that. That is my ‘pre-constructed’ image of my death. I want to look at my life, my death, my past my present, my future from a distance so that I can analyse it from a point of objectivity. I wonder if my reflections on my current status would differ when I read this in future, I guess it would. This is my narrative of my life, my history. People have talked about me, commented on my wayward life and crossed me out as a lost case which I too often do with others. But in this diary I would be the ‘subject’. I would muse about my aimless wanderings of life and imagination. I would create my own world outside the world of people within which I exist. I am tired of living the life of in-betweeness: of “tong” (telegu born and brought up in Bengal) of being a “tom-boy” and what not! This diary would be a medium to transcend these discriminations.
Firstly, I am not a Vampire, vampire is just a metaphor as it was meat to be in the writings of Stroker, the last vestiges of a feudal order. The attempt to humanise this creature of darkness as well as the first person narrative is just a ploy to create the illusion of reality. Secondly, I would love to be a vampire. Thirdly, I cannot read people’s mind but can vaguely guess about what’s going inside their brain and most of the time it goes wrong. Where was I? - just went down for dinner, I gobbled up my thoughts along with the badly cooked cauliflower curry. These people don’t even try to make the sabji better. They should learn from me: not the art of making cauliflower curry but the zeal to try, try and make things better even if it is boring, ritualistic, prosaic and dull. You know what? - I am a narcissistic moron. Look up and you would find so many “I’s” sprinkled all over the page. All ‘I’ can do’s, why ‘I’ did, why am ‘I’ writing, what do- ‘I’ think that would happen to ‘me’. Oh! My gosh I am feeling so happy, overwhelmed, glad: I am important. I am important at least to myself.
So I would start with naming myself: a pleasure that I had been deprived off by my parents. You know what they did?- they were quarrelling on deciding my name in a government hospital that was stuffed with people and all the turned heads extending their ears to decipher the reason of the fight. What would I name myself?...I don’t need to think much- Maya(illusion) would be good, not good but perfect- It suits my personality!!! This name is also supported my astrologer who thinks that I drench people around me in the emotions that I undergo. And from now onwards instead of using “I, me, myself” I would refer to myself as Maya. And Maya would call people around it by using numbers instead of proper names. These are all people who are prisoners of structures woven around them. They are all escapists in one way or the other; who are trying to get out of this prison by subscribing to different means and methods, they try, they fail yet they keep on trying. But they realize, yet fail to register it in their minds that this prison had the flooring of quick-sand, the higher they try to jump- the deeper they get into the mud. Maya is in a better condition, it sees the trick of the panoptican structures around it, the surveillance that is always on, restricting, disciplining and keeping a check as well as punishing people. Rain found a medium to cheat these structures one evening when it was walking back to her hostel with Number 10 accompanying her. The conversation was
Flashback-


You just can’t go on waiting for that ‘bolt of lightning’ which would wake you up from that slumber in which you are so lost. ‘Are you actually considering a situation when enlightenment would dawn and you would transform into The Buddha?’
Or your ‘flash of fame’ would walk in into the crowded dhaba, smile to you apologetically and say ‘Oh dude I am so sorry, I am a little bit late. I had to attend a few more lost cases like you and oops… I am getting late- there are millions who are still waiting. Tata. See you when you wait, wail and wobble for ages again.’
Or are you waiting for that tiny spark in your head which you turn into fire with the help of ‘the few pegs of alcohol’ that you are ritualistically consuming everyday? Or blab la bla…Trust me there can be infinite reasons and all well justified of course.
‘What happened? Did you decide to not even notice my blabbering- boycotting my nonsense in the truest sense of the term J?’

‘Na na, bol le bol le. No wait. I was thinking…chuck it. Ya…but…

‘Oh J please don’t go on with your incoherent mumbling again and I really hate this. Either you speak or get lost. I hate this. You did this even the last time.’

‘Ya…sorry… I can’t express in words…things…anyways I was thinking, is there no fiction in reality?’

‘Hmmmmmm…you said this too a few minutes back: there is fiction in reality and it is we who make reality, with a stress on ‘make’. And to quote you: ‘We all make fiction-reality and reality-fiction’. ‘Hey did you intend to confuse me or I got it mixed up in my head?’

‘No problem M I was not telling you that anyways’

‘Oh J then at least be clear about what you say’. ‘You are confused eternally and you try doing that to others’. You know what you are good for nothing Mr.Freeman- trust me.

‘Trust you?’

‘That was the first sentence which didn’t have ‘hmmmm’, ‘…’, ‘but’, ‘I was thinking’ and all those pauses and doubts that your uttering is loaded with.’

‘But am I actually so not trustworthy?’

a conversation that really disturbed Maya, and made Maya write a ‘book length prose about herself’. Maya came back to her room that evening and noted down the conversation as much as Maya could remember because that was the first time Rain came across a way to survive even after death. The wavering memory was not of much help. Amidst the angst to scribble as much as she could in the dimly lit room she could hear the chailwalla screaming at the top of his voice downstairs. Memory is treacherous. Memory is as treacherous as the world around, as treacherous as Maya. This treachery is an integral constituent in the broth of life. One has to either convince or confuse others inorder to prove a point. What becomes important is the narcissistic self which denies to bestow any voice to others around. Even Maya is like that. Self-indulgent. The realization dawns on Maya after the conversation that answers can be excavated through the labyrinths of mind only through dialogue. The necessity of the critical engagement in dialogue prompts Maya to write her life, the self that she is, using the metaphor of a vampire whose reflection cannot be seen in the mirror. Since the real cannot be represented outside its temporal and spatial context what one can attempt to the farthest level of exertion is to place in a document it. The documentation is nothing but a medium of embalming whatever is left for preservation. Remember the Egyptians who would embalm the body of the dead but could they actually preserve the person? The body without the soul could never bring back the individual similarly Maya could not be understood if you it/her out of the times that she existed as well as without understanding the people around it/her. Therefore this diary/piece of writing would include the dairies or lazy scribbles of people surrounding her. This instance again which she would fictionalize keeping in mind the myths, lores and tales about vampires and present as the “special gift” of reading the minds of her friends.
Maya can afford this luxury of reflections as a student, a status which doesn’t pressurise her to get into the routine life of house-hold chores and earning money for survival. But may be if this project turns up well it can as well be sold to some nutty publisher and earn a few bugs- a good reason indeed to throw a party, get drunk with friends in some corner of the university. On a very practical ground there are no “problems” as such in her life except for the interruptions that come in with exams, term papers and with the insight that the pursuit of pleasure and blissful life becomes a matter of envy for others. This experimentation with self was going on fine till one day the Professor who was teaching the English novel course asked her to submit a term paper on the rise of the novel. A term paper! Not again she thought. Now this can’t be a pure ‘pursuit of pleasure’ but this would turn into an unwelcoming amalgamation of work with play. Dude Mark Twain was smart he said this long long time back, possibly he too had a lot of interruptions in the pursuit of pleasure. Now the problem was to give a theoretical insight into my work. How I hate theories, are they not very obvious things re-stated by the theoreticians using complex terminology. And anyways all is said and done according to Jameson when he talks about the “postmodern condition” so what am I supposed to do when all that I would say and do would look like a “blank parody”, “an imitation”. Not again the conscious effort to write Rain instead of “I” failed. Fine I’ll do whatever I feel like. Where was Maya?- ok! about the term paper…Yes. The solution lies when one has to talk about the rise of the novel is to get back to the natural way it emerged. This all started with periodicals, travelogues, diaries, letters then why not get back to same forms in a piece of writing and make it a salad of letters, diaries, dialogues, gothic creatures etc., to write a meta-fiction. Since the initial idea was not to write a fictional piece but a diary to analyse “self” which turned into a medium to sort out problems amongst friends by exchanging these pieces in the circle and ultimately which got stranded on the tight schedule of finishing it off before the deadline it passed different terrains of representation and also had to face the brunt of realism and the array of problems attached to it; to exploit the dialogical possibilities of an apparently monologic form of writing. This about the life and times of a “female picaro” in a postmodern world who was taken in by the ideologies of the beat-generation…where things are falling apart but there is a constant urge to unify under the ceiling of theory. And this novel or a meta-fiction or what-ever it turns out to be would be for sure end up like a documentary that has the un-questioned notion of truth claim attached to it but it is not about the “facts” but rather personal histories woven together where the “I” becomes important. And all the attempts to drag the reader into the narrative are cases of “referential illusion” as defined by Barthes.


DISCLAIMER: There cannot be ‘The absolute Truth’. History is subject to interpretations and every truth has its own share of fiction attached to it.