Ants

Ants are everywhere. Back then, I never realized this simple fact. When I think about it now, I am surprised that I could have missed such a thing. I am not the same person I used to be when I first met him. I am not sure if I have changed. ‘Change’ has always been an impregnable idea for me. I do not understand it. At times I think it to be just an illusion. I understand ‘transformations’, though.

---

Waking up in the sound of night. I sat cross legged on my bed, furtively tracing the patterns of the bed cover. Yellow curves, and grayish dots. As I squinted at them, they appeared to me like a caravan passing a sand storm. Flutters and grains, peppered with unrelenting shadows. Groaning, I twisted my stiff body and looked behind, near my pillow, still staring at the bed cover. I remained still for a long time, my eyes straining hard. They relaxed as I removed something off the bed in one sweeping stroke, in the process momentarily feeling the smooth texture of the sheet at the back of my hand. As I lay back, eyes closed now, my fingers started tracing a shapeless benign swelling that had surreptitiously appeared on my left shoulder. It stung for some time, but the pain subsided soon. I knew this feeling of emptiness well. A long persisting pain that one gets used to, and begins to savor it, when lost feels the same. 'People generally become aware of their treacherous body only in pain. Pain in that sense is an innocent reminder...', I thought. Gauging this sentence for a long time, I added, 'Of what?'. I went back to sleep, enveloped in the fleshy reassurances the swelling provided. When I woke up, the swelling had vanished.

---

This happened when his friend was still in touch with him. A long time ago. When he still had many claustrophobic inhibitions. Or so he told me.

---

Back then, these strange dreamlike escapades had become so recurrent that I couldn't recall a time when nights were short. A single blink; darkness and then a flood of fantastic colors. Nevertheless, to me these incidents were nothing more than innocuous dreams that one relishes for having dreamt and later forget. I never got preoccupied thinking about them, never remembered them consciously. Until, the day I mentioned this to one of my closest friend. It just so happened that we, one late evening, ended up talking about our strange experiences. It was a light hearted chat, funny in fact, where one speaks ones mind. After hearing his convoluted talk for some time, I gathered little confidence to share my recent experiences, I began elaborating, half in jest. It proved to be a laugh riot. We talked for quite some time. Later, getting up to leave, laughing, he said, 'I bet... you are going crazy'. Somehow managing to keep these syllables afloat as the world around us inundated in our laughter. It was an innocent remark, that made us laugh even more violently.

---

If anyone were to hear them that evening, it would have been hard for him to distinguish one from the other. This incident made me think –in retrospect- that simple conversation is like a smilingly innocuous path filled with invisible landmines. Unaware, you can many a times pass it without a scratch, but sometimes it can destroy you completely. After this incident, we didn’t meet for a long time.

---

The following day, while smoking my after-lunch cigarette I happened to recall previous evening's conversation. 'Did he really mean that?', I thought aloud. Then nodded and smiled. The foliage above me was stingy in letting anything pass through it, the light that fell at the small patch, near my foot, formed an eagle's head. A small breeze intermittently transformed this patch into a gramophone. After a long time, getting up, I thought, hardly audible now, 'I'd like to own a gramophone some day'. 'But, I wonder what's playing on this one', I added almost immediately. I could hear the rustling all around me, looking up at the small gaps between the leaves, I saw the whirling dust, that I thought looked like a tunnel directly leading to the sun. I stared at the tree for a long time, but decided to remain silent. On my way back, I resolved to prowl through the night and dissect previous evening's conversation.

---

That night, I cleaned my room. Swept the floor thrice. Placed the stacks of books lying on the floor back into the cupboard. Cleared all the scattered newspapers. Changed the pillow-cover, spread a clean bed cover. Wore clean cloths and tried to sleep. But sleep seemed very distant. And everything around me dripped with lethargy. At some nights though, and even in broad day light -but mostly at night- I have also seen them run like crazy, scary close, almost touching me. The night crawled on. To kill time, I stared at the grainy ceiling in front of me. I was pleased with myself when I was able to reconstruct the swoop of a magpie. And in that swoop, I began to doze off. When I woke up later that night, I was covered in a sheet of yellow calm. I knew this feeling well. Although still sleepy, I waited for the sting. The wait was not very long. It arrived, this time at the right calf. Wide awake now, I pressed the spot with my hand as hard as I could. Rubbed the surrounding part randomly. And then tried to see if I could find anything on the bed. I saw an ant, or what I thought to be something that looked like an ant, for it was dead and completely squashed. A tiny dot, a black grain, a symbol of discovery and pain. I got to the floor and scanned it to see if there were more, their colony, a column. Not a single one could be found. Nothing. The swelling had grown by now, and it stung bad. I started to place the shape again. I could not, the shape was completely new to me.

I was occupied with my thoughts for many days. Slowly, I tried to stack up all the stale nights, and winnow through them. During these deliberations, it occurred to me that as far as I could remember I had never been bitten at the same spot twice, the stings always found a new place. I was also tempted to think that each time the swellings took a new shape, although I was not so sure about that. And it surprised me when I remembered that I was always awake before these experiences happened. 'Never asleep, not even once; that's funny!', I reasoned timidly. I later realized that it wasn't funny at all, but having realized, found the irony of it funny. I saw my friend from time to time, since I thought he was bothered too. But he couldn't help me. Reassurances. None could be found.

---

All this started to bother me acutely. And understandably so. In the process, I started noticing my many idiosyncrasies, many of which I was confident other people - if not many, some - possess. A person talking to himself is not unheard of, one might have even seen one, but I did not know anyone who took pleasure in talking to inanimate beings, comparing the properties of stones with music, or who thought that the buildings opposite his were robots and that they communicated every night. There were innumerable other strange dispositions which I started to make note of for the first time. Nevertheless, I believed that people mostly do not share their quirky desires, habits and experiences with others. It makes them feel vulnerable. It is also true, I thought, that we not only filter what we experience, but also filter when we communicate it to others. '90% of universe is dark matter that we don't understand, and so is experience and communication', I reasoned.

---

Over the period of many days I continued to unravel the problems. To check if something was wrong with my room, I started sleeping in other rooms, until there were none left. I then tried hotels, my friend's place, railway station, airport, gardens. But to no avail. Like an ancient curse that doesn't relents, each night, I would find myself awake waiting for the inevitable. Scared, and wistful. As if I were a fallen tired prey staring at the limbs of a predator, longing for the final experience that can never be taught. After all this time, my initial observations about the incidents still remained true. Of course, there were some new ones too. I had, for instance, started to smell a pattern in the shapes and many a times could successfully guess the next one. I could never find where the ant came from though. It was always, a single ant.

It was somewhere during this time, in a state of frenzy, that I came up with my first hypothesis describing where these creatures came from. Later I also began to elucidate about the whys.

---

This is when he came to see me.
He began, 'I think my friend is loosing his mind'
'Do you think I shouldn't have told him that?'
'Is it all my mistake?'
...
...
As I listened him speak, I thought I felt a sting. For the first time. On my nape. It had an elusive shape. I remember well, it was the first time I understood him completely. We became closest of friends. All of this happened a long time ago.