Forbidden fruit

Sometime very early in my childhood, I learnt that one has a right to have opinions, and soon after, I learnt to hate the Apple. Every morning, Mumma filled a Golden ratio of my tiffin with neatly cut Apples to school, and I returned, smug, Apples untouched. She proceeded to give me some very curt words of advice and made me eat the Unedible, now almost brown and frightfully smelly. I felt like throwing up.

When I got old enough to have "insights", my favourite conjecture, which I liberally shared with whoever I met, was that the worst way to begin a child's introduction to English is to make it chant "A for Apple". I also decided that Mrs. Ambrose, my Std IA class teacher, was a most horrible liar, when she taught me an idiom on apples and doctors I found Absurd.

Ironically, I learnt to fear and worship that same idiom sometime around the turn of the century. You see, I fell in love with a doctor, and that changed the whole dynamics of the situation. An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away? But I Do Not, Do NOT Want My Doctor Away! Apple, Apple, Go Away! The Rebel declared, bravely, every once in a while - NO amount of Apples can keep you away from her, O Foolish One, or her from you! Grow Up! Yet an irrational fear of the unknown made me shrink at the very image of an Apple finding its way into my mouth. The Apple, already Unforgiven, now became the Forbidden Fruit.

So I diligently avoided the Apple. Come what may, I avoided it for dear life. When I visited Aunt M, she gave me Apples for breakfast; when I went to the Puja at R, I got a leaf bowl of prasad, and sure enough, Apples smiled back at me; God taunted and taunted Eve. But Eve, did not succumb. Sweating in terror, she did not succumb.

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Then, one day, I, Prodigal Sonofa, saw an Apple, a Gorgeous, Angelic Apple, and I Lusted for it. It was but a foreign Apple, not quite an Apple, yet still an Apple; I burnt with desire, and I burnt with superstitious paranoia, and desire, and paranoia.
I fought and I fought. Eve fought and fought. And Eve lost.

I tasted the Forbidden Fruit. I was tried, and acquitted. For it was but a foreign Apple, not quite an Apple.

Yet still an Apple?

Riddles, entropy, regression and Valentine

You pick up riddles along the way. You do not understand them, not yet, yet they awe you so, bind you in mystery and hope. You cannot leave them behind, forget, ignore - so you pick them up and take them with you. Your bag, your history is a set of partially solved riddles, most of them opaque, some translucent, a few clear. The clear, transparent ones you hold dear, for they are the evidence of your persistence, of hope not unfounded, of mysteries answered. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. (Søren Kierkegaard)

You may hope for the day when nothing surprises you anymore. You may hope for the day when entropy tends to nothingness. Equivalently, you may hope for the day when life is ready to slap you dead. When your bag is empty of riddles, when things are clear as they stand, in point and past tragectory , but with no spice of mystery for tomorrow, you have but two options. To find new riddles by noon, or freeze the game by midnight. For then, you would know that life is ready to slap you dead.

But while you have riddles, you are a busy, murmuring, humming human. You wonder the whys, you sigh the is-it-this-is-it-that-think-think-thinks, you whisper the ah-of-courses, you wink the twinkles in your eye. You are constantly trying regression on seemingly random riddles. You are constantly discovering curves to connect your seemingly random history. You are constantly unraveling the proof, backwards.

You have choices, which you exploit. You look to fit your hypotheses by tampering with the course of your life, so that tomorrow, you may whisper the ah-of-course you think you've been close to for quite some time now. Oh fool, fool you, but so human, you. Tomorrow, you find that something has gone quite wrong - something unexpected has happened. Your choices have spawned new riddles, your hypotheses are not quite there yet. Disappointed? But no! You have, oh fortunate one, stumbled upon the very means to keep you busy! You have stumbled upon a perfect plan to deny life slapping you dead.

Epilogue. And one day, after a taunting, exciting fight with your existence for a good many years lived well, Riddle No. 313* answers itself, suddenly, with a flash of genius insight into the phenomenon Hypermetropia. And you read -
"Riddle No. 313, oh elusive one, you have tormented me day and night, given me reason to scream and cry, wreaked my mind with countless euphoric orgasms of thought eurekas, seen me grow from boy to man. Today, you lie vanquished, and I sigh, with a nostalgic calmness, forever indebted."

* Find j.

Rabid

I always know when It gets restless. It takes a step this way, and a couple that, pauses, and thumps Its paw on concrete earth. It imagines that this will shake the traffic off the road, bring down some trees, cause a fire, but nothing happens. It bites Its nails. The tttttraffic, making metallic, shrill, nonchalant hammerings on the eardrums, honks its way past time. The gaussians of the pitch, the slow, sure ascents to deafening heights and the reluctant, inevitable descents back to silence, disturb, irritate and taunt It. It knows that time is going to win this race. It thumps its paw again, pauses, then thumps every one and a half seconds for the next five minutes, salivating, red, shivering, rabid. It throws up a low, rattling growl from Its stomach, clenching Its teeth so hard, wanting something to ttttttttttttear apart into atoms. It bites Its wrist, pushing the teeth into the flesh but not closing them as tight as It would, and so pushing as hard as It can - torn between the urge to vent and the sense to fear. The first pangs of pain shoot through Its nerves, and Its shivering drops a hertz or two. More pangs follow, and It gets calmer. Soon, It brings Its mouth out. Its wrist is red and wet, dented. It tries thumping again, but there is not enough strength this time. It stands still.

I always know, that then, It gets hot. Beads of slimy sweat appear on Its forehead, join into streams of pale colorless yellow and niagarate into Its eyes. Into the red, lightning-shaped veins of Its burning eyes. It stands still. The falls get heavier. A fly buzzes into the steamy halo around Its ear and takes three close peeks at the wax. It stands still. It seems, suddenly, the traffic has gone quiet too. It hears a pig being repeatedly battered in the head, a repetitive train of low thuds miles away. The fly sits on the wax, and It feels itchy. It stands still. A cool waft of breeze blows past. Niagara dries into menthol, the fly glides high into the air, hits a blade hanging from an electric wire, which pierces first its wing, then its body, then its other wing, perfect metosis, both parts fall on the concrete earth, disturbing the rhythm of the head-battering of the pig, and the plasma and the white corpuscles of its one drop of blood coagulate before falling on Its nose.

I always know, that this is when It wags Its tail four and a half times.