How I write

Like everything else I do, haphazardly, between the acts, half-heartedly.
Repetitively. A certain chef speaking at a dinner table would always talk about a colleague as Chef so-and-so, thereby drawing attention to himself.

Your hand reaches out languidly for something to write with. Your arm dangling like a dead man's. The crows are awake and seemingly goading me in the half-dark. No pen or pencil to be found, only the jumbled up wires of an i-pod. Try to remember the colours: a red pen seen somewhere, a blue one...Sleep-walk through various rooms, deeper and deeper. Come back, write in the dark so as to not wake anyone.

In a dream, the last one, though repeated because by a superhuman effort I thwart it so that it ends before the subconscious mechanism has played out its part, I hear music blaring away from the radio downstairs. On the stairs I try to call out your name. May God protect us. But my words are stifled, my dry rasping voice of no use. I wake. My mouth is parched, and lips chapped. Too many walnuts the day before or some more general failure? In and out of sleep until I wake, startled, bemused.

My eyes are blurred as they try to focus, pick out some familiar object. The mind struggling to give shape to anything. You remember some basic dimension: 1X1X1.2. Is it morning yet? The call to prayer must have washed over me.

Put the pen down. Crow is silent. Crow is dead. Your hand reaches down and disappears, as if into some dense fog, misplacing the pen again. You look up at the window, the light appreciably better now, less thick, bettering. There's a kind of solace to be had in the fact that the stars are burnt out, have passed through you.

The first thing you see clearly is the wall clock, hanging lifelessly, slightly askew. Of fist importance, you think to yourself: determine the time. Is it four or five? Please God, let it be five. And if God wills it, then it will be so. Oriental hat, and all that.

Put your head down again like a schoolkid in the late afternoon, moments before the day is done ("heads on desk"). The warmth of one's own body, something quite simple. You were young. There R lies, in her red shalwar kameez, gloriously care-free, out like a drunk. During the day she struggles to say "how are you?" Is there anything else?

You walk across the lawn, past the empty library, stunned, dazed by too much sun. You're conscious of the small steps your feet are taking, as if on their own, shuffling steps like those of a Chinaman. The piece of paper you hold, like a mouse's tail, with forefinger and thumb, falls to the ground. Clutch at it, as if it mattered, as if the writing of the day's beginning would steer how the rest of time would unfold. Random words thrown against the chaos. What else could there be from the one with the falsely designated title, 'black sun'?