End Of A Dream

This is it. The End. The much awaited, the badly feared, the inevitable. The End. Sitting on the edge of the cliff on his haunches Guddu was realizing that life in itself is meaningless. The meaning of life is in death. It’s the end, it’s the remaining part. It’s the last piece of the puzzle. All emotions, feelings are games of the mind, games which mind plays for its own amusement. Emotions don't have an independent existence; they exist through their converse, their opposite. They draw meaning from their opposites. And man spends his life dwindling from one end of emotion to the other desperately trying to attach meaning to each of his motion but in vain. And then in due course of time man realizes the true nature of his life, the oscillations of a pendulum which never stop and which give birth to another opposite-indifference. When man finds that his belief of reality was an illusion. But up till then his belief in his illusion is so rooted that he cannot get rid of it, for it is what defines him, is a source of power and comfort for him, and is now false. He cannot believe himself to be misled for all these years yet he believes that reality still eludes him. He desperately wants to know the truth and yet he does not want to leave the comfort of his illusion. With time he gets torn between his contrasting desires up till the point he realizes the solution. The solution is in the problem itself. And suddenly his life finds meaning. Everything and anything that happened in his life finds meaning. Man discovers the purpose of everything. And he finds beauty in the ugliness of the solution. But his pain will be relieved for there will be no more pain. But he does not realize that he is not alone, he was never alone.

Guddu turned around to look back as he heard the crunching of gravel. He saw shiny black leather shoes. He looked up to see himself or what used to be him. He was not surprised.

"I thought you would be surprised." said Charlie with a note of slight hesitating amusement in his voice, yet not enough to suppress the confidence in his tone.

"I knew you would come." said Guddu matter of factly.

"How?"

Guddu kept staring at the bottom of the cliff.

"Well…Listen I am sorry" Charlie said in a bored looking the other way "I shouldn't have come but I couldn't help it…"

"Of course you couldn't"

"What does that mean? Anyways I just don't think... you should…do it…"

Guddu snorted.

"And why do you think I should listen to you when you never heeded a word I said all these years?" Guddu retorted fiercely.

Charlie retraced back a few steps. He could not understand why he did that. But he felt a strange pull towards Guddu which he resisted. He suddenly realized that he was afraid of heights and that he did not want to go near the edge. Guddu was looking at him as if trying to understand something. Charlie felt scared. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket. Guddu turned away with a strong jerk of his head. Charlie lighted the cigarette.

"You want one?" he asked with the pack in his hand and a knowing smile on his face.

"Funny you should ask"

"Funny you should retort when we both know you introduced me to it."

Guddu turned to look at Charlie and glared. Charlie smiled.

"Oh! Stop it." said Charlie waving his hand, "This angry look doesn't suit you." Guddu turned away and Charlie continued. "You are the calm, overbearing kind. You cannot be angry, you will just bear it. You can just think, visualize and imagine and do whatever you want in your head. That's why I was here, I knew why you would want to do it, but I was wondering whether you would be able to…why are you smiling?"

Guddu had a kind smile on his face distorted with a little contempt. It appeared like the one parents have when they know their kids have been doing something wrong and are hiding it but with a little malice in it. Charlie couldn't help it and tried to smile too but half-heartedly while Guddu said:

"At your reason or rather justification of why you came here"

Charlie was puzzled and continued smiling weakly thinking that the thought of death had actually driven Guddu mad. Guddu continued:

"You never wondered why we were best friends, why we hung out together?”

"It's because we are twins."Charlie said but suddenly unsure of himself.

"Just because we are twins?" asked Guddu getting amused by Charlie sudden drop in confidence.

Charlie kept quiet. He suddenly felt handicapped. He felt as if he knew what to do but did not know how to do it or perhaps could not do it alone. He suddenly felt alone. Seeing him silent, Guddu was enraged.

"What happened Charlie? Unable to think?" Guddu stood up and plunged his step further into the edge of the cliff, a few stones trickled down.

"Do I look like a man who is not going to do what he has come to do?" he shouted as if challenging the open sky and the birds flying freely across it. Charlie was puzzled and a little frightened. He did not know what to say. He put the cigarette to his mouth while Guddu regained his calm and turned around to face the depth of the cliff which was hidden by the clouds hovering below oddly metaphorical to the question he was facing: What happens after the end now that it is so close?

"This was avoidable you know" said Charlie breathing smoke from his mouth and regaining himself, "you just had to be a little flexible."

"It was a never a question of flexibility or rigidity."Guddu snorted. "It's about being true to yourself and you can either be true or cheat yourself. There is no gray area in between. And why am I telling you all this? If you didn't understand then, you wouldn't now."

"Then is this being true to yourself means" asked Charlie in a teasing manner and smiling "is this where your grand path ends? At the edge of a cliff counting the last seconds in your head as you glorify your otherwise pathetic end. You yourself used to say-it's what cowards do. "

"You think it is very easy to kill yourself. You think it is a cowardly act. You think it is very easy to face a world with a misplaced sense of ideals luring you to so as to cover their own guilt with your submission, to face it as it tries to prune down anyone who tries to grow too much, to face people around you change for the worse in the name of love, God and heaven knows what, to walk on lonelier and lonelier paths as others around either tire down or switch to different ones due to their own misplaced sense of identity, to face alienation by losing the people you love to the people you hate. Do you think it’s easy then to decide that you would rather die than live to kill yourself daily and calling it life. That is exactly the problem with you. To discard anything and everything that you do not know about or do now want to do as easy or futile. It’s a way to reconcile yourself that you can do it but you would rather not do it. But the truth is you just cannot do it. And that is why you are standing 10 feet away from me scared even to come near me to stop me from doing it." Guddu finished viciously.

Charlie looked amused.

"So you think I am a hypocrite?" he asked as if watching an entertaining TV serial.

"Aren't you?" asked Guddu testily, "You say you are here to see whether I would jump or not and yet you say you know that I cannot do it. And still you don’t have the guts to come near me lest I take you down with me."

Charlie's smile vanished.

"It's called fear." replied Charlie slowly as he shifted uncomfortably in his position. He noticed that his cigarette had finished.

"And you were implying me to be a coward just a few minutes ago, Charlie. So who's the coward now?" Guddu said insultingly.

Charlie could not bear the tone of insult in Guddu's voice yet he couldn't think of a reply. The handicapped feeling returned. He wanted someone to tell him what to say, what to do. Should he go out and pull Guddu to stop him from doing it or should he just run away and not tell anyone about it. He felt lonely, very lonely. He wanted someone. Something. A cigarette. He pulled another cigarette.

"I notice that the cigarette has finally started to talk for you, Charlie" said Guddu who was now looking at Charlie as if in completely new light. Charlie was disturbed. He was at a complete loss at what to do. He had never felt this way before. He saw Guddu looking at him with a strange glance. His face was expressionless but eyes were trying to unravel something in his eyes. He tried to look away but he couldn't. It was scorching him, that look. He felt as if he was naked, that nothing was hidden anymore to Charlie and that he was now the master of him and he was the slave.

"You really don't know why you are here" asked Guddu slowly each word hitting Charlie like a bullet, "Do you?"

Charlie had no answer. And he did not look for the answer. He knew that he had no answer. He stood there listening to him obediently, the cigarette still in his hand.

"All this time, you were building this illusion of life around you to suit yourself and now your illusion has engulfed you so strongly that you have absolutely no idea of who you are, where you are from, do you?" asked Guddu uttering each word slowly and emphatically. Charlie felt that each word carried a weight that he could not carry and that the weight was pushing him into the ground. Guddu had now started to walk towards him. Charlie wanted to run away, but he couldn't. He stood and listened as if an invisible cord held them together.

“You talk so much about me doing everything in my head that you yourself never understood the difference of what's real and what is in your head? Did you Charlie? What do you think about this?" he waved his hand around."Is this real, Charlie? Are you real, Charlie?" said Guddu with such malice that Charlie could never imagine him to be. This could not be true. This could never be true. He wouldn't believe it, not a word of it. He would run away. But he can't. He has to stand here and listen. That was all he knew.

Guddu suddenly realized everything, the purpose of his life and suffering was cleared to him in one moment of realization. He knew why he was here, and why Charlie was here and what was to be done. It was as if someone cleared his mind of all weight and left it with one single act that had to be done. He felt light. He felt enlightened. It was the end. The end of him and the end of Charlie. The end of opposites. The end of life.

Charlie held his head for the realization was too much for him to bear. He could not believe it and yet he could not contradict it. He suddenly realized he could not think. He wanted to someone to tell him that it is untrue for he was unable to decide for himself.

"Do you get it now, Charlie? Why you are unable to think? Why we always hung out together in spite of our growing dislike for each other? Why you are here? I think you do. And you can't believe it. You can't ignore it. You want someone to deny it. That we are more than twins."

Charlie looked aghast. This cannot be possible. Guddu cannot know what was in his head. But Guddu had a strange glow on his face and a vicious smile.

"You have gone mad" pronounced Charlie slowly, not sure of himself, not sure of anything.

Guddu pulled Charlie by the neck and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. He held Charlie close to his face and said:

"No, my brother. We have gone mad."

And they jumped into white nothingness.

Student kills self by jumping from mall builiding

India News Network

Lucknow: A medical student allegedly committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor of a mall in the state capital this evening. The boy, otherwise a bright sincere student, may have been driven to suicide due to his declining academic performance. Friends of the deceased, however, offer different reasons implying there may be psychological reasons behind the action as boy had recently taken to being reclusive and depressed due to reasons other than academic pressure. As clear reasons behind the rationale still remain unknown, search for a suicide note. . .

Inspired from Kaminey...