Silently Awake

The cursor blinked twice before the screen went blank momentarily and the screensaver came into operation. The dancing figure of a nude child appeared on the screen…
Antariksh heaved a sigh of exasperation and banged the spacebar. The cursor appeared once more – blinking away to eternity. The timepiece at the bottom right displayed the time - 10:35 p.m. ….A particularly depressing time of the night!

Antariksh ran a hand over his forehead, wiping away non-existent beads of perspiration from his eyebrow. He reached for the glass of water kept on the far side of his workspace and gulped down the icy-cool liquid. Relief…for some time at least! It seemed cold in his dark room, even though it was early July. The all-pervading sense of aloneness seemed overpowering—as if smothering him under a mattress. Desultorily, he tried to type something…anything. Something to drive away the unceasing lonesomeness…

Tonight, perhaps…

He reached for the keyboard, and began typing. For sometime, only a short staccato rhythm of the keys being pressed prevailed. But what appeared on the screen was meaningless, useless, crap…
‘This isn’t me. Surely… this isn’t me?’

Antariksh wondered… He was neither a writer and therefore wasn’t suffering from writers’ block. What he was actually trying to do was to drive away his loneliness. He had tried it all, seen umpteen films of various grades, surfed the ‘Net, chatted with strangers, and once had even tried his luck at some of the gambling houses in Mumbai. And after all this, he had still not been able to feel un-lonely.
This time he tried writing a poem…

He began typing. Poetry flowed smoothly, purging his soul, cleansing his depressed mind. Sad thoughts, gloomy, yet providing much required relief...

‘Calm rivers have dried up, burnt,
the water gone, pebbles show
their blunt backs to the sun—
it shows no mercy, the clouds are
absent, I am alone, my feet bare,
I walk un-wincingly, gloomily,
past the dry pebble-ground;
my feet touch the blazing sand,
and bizarre memories spring to
my head even as my feet catch fire,
smoldering lumps of flesh, numb,
no sensation; I’m in a dream,
I’m still sauntering past naked
landscapes, stones, stumps, harsh
rays, stilettos of despair, rainbows
of relief nowhere to be seen—
I fall into a reverie, dreams,
pleasant refuge, wonder, amazement,
happily sauntering through untouched
land, rivers filling up, the banks bursting,
nightmare, water overflowing, extremes
of adventure, I come out of these unceasing
rumination, I spot a vermillion sky
glaring at me, I don’t stop, the river
does not fill up, desperation,
desolation, suffering, sadness,
I can’t bear it—I start running, the
path ends, blank walls, I jump
from the clif fand awake gleefully in
a lush, new, rejuvenated world.’


Antariksh felt calm after this sterling effort at poetry, but not totally at peace. Again the loneliness, the nerve-shattering solitude, suddenly Antariksh couldn’t breathe, he needed to go out. He went out for a solitary night walk.

Mumbai’s streets appeared dank, dark and unwelcoming. The streetlights flickered weakly and said all that Antariksh wanted to feel, express and think. He could spot no friendly face in the crowd that still thronged the streets.

He walked and reminisced…His childhood… troubled… parents uncaring… sister dying…brother thrown out of the house…days of poverty…left the house…never returned…days of vagrancy…at last a job…money…bliss?... and now this overpowering lonesomeness.

Suddenly he remembered a few line of poetry he had read once, as a child.

‘Perhaps this could have stayed unstated,
Had our words turned to other things,
In the grey park the rain abated,
Life, would have quickened other strings…’

His feet automatically led him to the city park. There, he noticed for the first time scores of other people like himself—lonely, wishing for company, afraid of their own selves. Every person was sitting clear of the other. No one came forward to share the feeling of the other persons. He sat down on a bench, and observed the countless depressed and gloomy souls in the park.

Suddenly he got up and walked towards the most depressed person he could see…

Hope is the first step…