Mushtaque B Barq
“Welcome to this part of the vacancy,” the echo said.
I felt as if I was pushed into a vast, undefined realm of desolation. Despite being a part of that nothingness, I was drowned in the currents of abstraction. But then, a sensitive eye and an awaking mind can’t be dissolved so easily. I lived in the vacancy and observed. These observations were either roaming around in the form of a soliloquy or, like my uncontrolled projections of undefined state of mind.
Believe me, which is the only primary source of my tale. A hanging skeleton caught the attention of my eye like a first dawn after a prolonged dusk. The cage on every minute pats my right shoulder for a few reasons: The first is that I prefer a window seat as one of my oldest preferences, for which I messed up with most of my childhood friends, and the second reminds me of the reality of human existence. The muscles are only meant to serve worms, and the bones make us serve longer. It reminds me of Hamlet and Horatio, who, from a distance, were watching a gravedigger at work. Hamlet, like me, speculated about the occupation of the owner of the skulls he served in life. In my case, it was crafted using plastic, while Hamlet witnessed the original skull to carry on with his speculations. To the far end of the room is a blank white board that winks at me at will to mock my being blank.
These blank spaces are horrifying; they exhaust you and leave you with junk. Next to it, like a dead wood, stands a fire extinguisher that only poses to be important for the reason who knows, can it extinguish the fire like my plans, which my fancies weave before sleep corrupts the senses and transmits this mass into the unimaginable realms of unmapped routes.
The second is more obvious: continuous confinement. Confinement at times opens up a world before your eyes when the rest of the things only move like impressions and silhouettes. The foggy presence of frames roaming in the backyards of old graveyards recalls memories, half-scripted texts, partially drafted headlines, left-over conclusions, and above all, the fear of losing the frames to let the soul explore the space.
A cluster of bottles bellied with chemicals. A few locked steel racks stuffed with chemicals always put me on the litmus test to prove my chemical combination. I prefer this blend because most of the time, chemistry faculty create their chemical locha on the tables installed for it. On the other side of my mini desk, which only carries the burden of my laptop and phone, lies another desk loaded with everything a coordinator requires and demands. A book rack bulged with wrinkled and withered volumes—who knows how many authors are worriedly looking for the treatment they hardly had thought of? These books preserve the author but fail to prevent the silver fish from invading their territories.
A lonely woofer lying beside the steel rack never barks unless a chord of live wire breathes life into it, and once its volume surpasses the audible acceptance, its throat is squeezed by adjusting its knobs in an anti-clockwise direction to set our clocks right that only go clockwise to criticise our anti-clock cocktails. We move like limbs of a time wheel that only acknowledges ‘onward movement’, and even though we wish to reverse the limbs, destiny draws a thin line that decides life and death. But between the two extremes, a slice of time is a mystery, which I was searching for badly in the vacuum created by the echo that invited me like an unwanted guest. Anyway, invitations are for the guests, and infiltrations are only meant to be dealt with severity. Sandwiching between the two can only be sympathised with, and the quietude was on to do so. I let everything try its hands on me.
Next that passes my myopic eye is the long line of charts and notices, a workable walk clock, and a ‘Found Box’ carrying the forgotten things the children leave behind to justify Robert Lynd’s theory of ‘Forgetting’, a topic that stirred a lot of minds when our facility members would in their leisure time create echoes in the staff room, leaving a few leaving the room on one or other pretexts. At times when the ions diffuse within the given space, the lungs roar and the nose enjoys rather forced to abide by the melodious symphony from the nose. This circumstance leaves me no choice but to unlatch the windows and swing open the solitary door, allowing the air to reclaim the room, rescuing the occupants from its control. Well-stretched empty tables never spare my eyes to visualise the silent and blank backyard of my house evoking shadows to frighten anyone who passes through it when the entire city contends with power supply schedules.
The four enclosing walls of my immediate surroundings seem to exacerbate my physical discomfort. My dislike of sickness doesn’t just come from its physical toll, turning a person into a mere vessel, but mostly because it quashes the boundless wellspring of creativity within the mind. My chair, while it may carry a professional connotation, falls short in bearing the weight of my boundless imagination, which reigns supreme within the vibrant expanse of my sensory city.
Pushing a window to let the sky grab me is the only way to unburden my chair and make the room a place to hold things, but not a sensitive mind which is still swinging at will reaching two extremes of destiny.
To me, the simple act of parting the window and allowing the boundless sky to envelop me remains the singular means of releasing my chair from its mundane identity as a piece of furniture, thus metamorphosing the room into a haven that nurtures not just objects, but a thriving and receptive intellect.
“Why have you finally chosen the path of escape?” queried the window.
Mushtaq B.Barq is a Columnist, Poet and Fiction Writer. He is the author of “Feeble prisoner, “ Wings of Love” and many translation works are credited to the author like “ Verses Of Wahab
