A Pantaloon’s Monologue.

A Pantaloon’s Monologue.

 I wish i could go back and stop the time. I am not sure if i can rewind the long thread of time with my old, wrinkled hands. When the days were bright and charming, i missed them, dreaming of future. I escaped the present and saw in the future, future as i wanted to see. Now i try hard to envision the next moment and can find nothing but a dark, frightening abyss that’s what, maybe, they call death. I can’t see anything beyond it, as if it is stretched from this moment to eternity, as if this abyss is the only truth and what i thought as life was nothing but its shadow.

A farmer who had torn clothes, bare feet, disheveled hair but promising and bright smile as bright as the morning sun, had once told me, “ Death is the ultimate oblivion”. The remembrance of the death hadn’t faded away his smile. But something had pulled my heart down to sink and my head had become a heavy stone. I had waved him bye while dusting rigorously something off my new brand coat. I never wanted to see the farmer again who reminded me of the ultimate oblivion, never again.

After some years, the farmer was on his deathbed, i heard the news. Everybody in my town went to see him in his hut. I didn’t. I dared not. I was afraid he would still look happier than me.    

The farmer had nothing but it seemed he had grown a garden in his heart that would be with him into that ultimate oblivion- the garden of wild flowers -as wild and vulnerable as his very soul.

I have nothing, not the garden either. When i look inside me, what i see is the overgrown weed of unfulfilled, unyielding desires, the thorns of repentance, the serpents of fear hissing everywhere on the unattended land of my heart. Once or twice i have looked there and since then ceased the venture of even peeping inside me.

Sometimes those serpents of fear, when i ignore them for so long, come outside me and litter in my apartment- on the walls, sofa, kitchen floor, in the balcony, on the television set, wriggling around my  i- phone and on the bed, all hissing and screaming to announce their existence. On such days i go out searching for a quite nook in a bar and drink till they get drown in the pond of whisky. I drink until they cease twirling.

I know i can’t travel time and change the past. Do i deserve this privilege? No one deserves this. And  those unlucky pantaloons who don’t know what they have missed while collecting pebbles that had thought to be diamonds are hell away from it. Past gnaws to the hearts that have left those moments unlived. The irony is that the ones who are blessed with this privilege to journey into the past don’t want to take its benefit. They have already lived those moments to the fullest.

Now it’s raining outside. It’s one of those rains that i ignored and that many times had beckoned me from the glass windows of my office on the 11^th floor. At that time i might be working on the brand new project which would flood money to my bank account or i might be pondering over the declined profit margin of our business that month or probably i was cursing my wife who had insisted to have an excursion for a week to some hill station.

Today it seems the rain doesn’t call me out as if he has got more youthful and welcoming companions to dance with. But i will dance and try to pay off the chances i have missed.