The calm set in again. The silver streaks of dawn were looking through the now tired and resting sky. It was as though Bert had met a mirror in the unexpected thunders of the night before. Or the heaven must have cried with him too. But he was calm now, like the dawn and looking through it with a tingling shiver of the morning chill.

A lonely abode in a forsaken cave and now the grandeur of being the lone surviving savage in a hostile war descended on him with a smile that at other times could have passed of as mirth.

Finally, he shut his eyes for a brief moment and the sweet angels of sleep took him in their arms… he lay asleep after a long fitful night of vacant empty staring, waiting for the fate to befall… a curse or a miracle; does it matter?

A man is a slave to his cowardice and reasons are what he carries as spoils of his frugal existence! But he was strong and wanted to fight. He had run away, away from the compelling order of routine, from the comforts that drive the whims of an aging body, from the vacant ringing pursuits of an idle mind, till one day he met the wolf in him…

Curbed in the many lives that he forsake and those that he lived in fancy and in doubting pasts, Bert finally met an equal and life was bound to change finally.

He had been sleeping for long because when he woke up the stars were shining bright and there was no trace of the strife that had rocked the skies as they rocked Bert alike just the night before. He felt at ease, feeling light and like a little boy in his head, picked up his rug sack and resumed his journey from nowhere to nothingness. Yet a strange fear still gave him company, that of being left alone, terribly lonely just when he would have wanted to speak to someone, even if it was the devil incarnate. Having doubted his own being so long, after all, how could he hope for company… he feverishly sought the nearest city and as his steps bargained haste, the eyes longed for that glimpse of flesh and blood that make a man.

"Those who trade in flesh have a virgin hinterland in a brain," so thought Bert and headed to where strangers belong most in unwelcoming cities. He had been here before and now he would give up a night to the pleasures of flesh and fate, to wake up again with a sense of half accomplished purpose of mankind… to keep up the hope of generating a new generation.

Man is a being of illusion as much as is illusion a creation of man. Liz, his mate for the night, was singing to the night, the songs of forbidden pleasures, and Bert patted her acknowledgement of being a magus love maker. For a while, the thought of the next day could wait as he lived in the moment, for the moment… lost in the oldest and the noblest indulgence of us mortals. Is it any wonder that Indian society often tabooed sex to hold on to pillars of social harmony and complete thralldom! "Paradox," I heard you say, Bert smiled. "How was harmony ever slavery?" He dismissed these defensive questions that the imposter in him often posed as a vain attempt to cling to old values. No, not that he believed in a sexist society, but at any rate, knowing one's sexuality was definitely more liberating then not recognizing it and, hence, trading the huge reserves of energy to the cause of general harmony… if you can't use it, you find someone to channel it and he is a master… but often we don't want to think that which will not suit the comfort of another thoughtless day.

The art of love making often taught him things that he could smile back at later. "To get what you want is to give up what you have, than give up what you want then give to the other what you want. I wonder if you will want it when you get it after all this" and yet he knew, from the floating lightness in his head, that he loved it even more because now he could love it with the freedom of not having to lose it.

Liz lived in bliss that he was thoroughly jealous of, at times contemptuous, nonetheless jealous. She believed she could look up to each day and know exactly what it would hold, and then one day she would die, but that was so natural that it incited no thought from her, while Bert, our hero for all the lost causes of humanity, will have to go on to a new journey yet unsure and still unconfirmed what he had in store and where will he rest.

Bert was an avid reader till he read the same things again and again in all the different books that he found. Bert was an avid thinker till all this thoughts led him to the same deadlock of unanswered maze. Bert was a die-hard believer till all his belief was only a manifestation of what he wanted to believe.

Now Bert was an aimless wonderer and alas! Each time he found himself in the same cities and jungles that he wanted to run away from one at a time.

Today he is sad, or maybe just pensive. Having given in to impulses which have only become more learned by the conditioning of all his past lives, and the alternative lives, to the ones governed by the alternative decisions that he could have taken yet did not. He looked back sometimes in his early days to reminisce the life that could have been. He did that often now. It started with bitterness for what he could have been and what he had become but now it no more inspired any reaction… just a string of thoughts that wondered in his realms as he did in the limitations of the five senses he related to as man.

There is something bothering him, suddenly overwhelmed by a desire for riches and a life given to vices. He could earn, he feels confident, yet he will not be able to, and he is confident of that too, that's the reward of knowing the futility of it all, life which is fine either ways is seldom right at the centre, and then which side you fall does not matter. He flirts with the thought a little longer, knowing it will pass soon and then it will be night again. He decides to stay back another day here, in the hope of meeting Liz again.

Liz is glad to see him again. After all, in the drab regularity of faked orgasms, she would give a lifetime's earnings to actually feel one. Now, that's the sad part. Her mind has started flexing nerves cause a self- imposed ignorance is now a desire. She had not been feeling up to living till it was night again and she would hope to see Bert. It's kind of strange because these are strange bed partners who never make a habit of sleeping together, yet these two strangers running into their individual escapes wanted to see each other again and they did.

Thought is a powerful tool available for use and misuse, so thought Bert as he slipped in to the warm embrace of Liz. I am sure Liz would have felt no different though not recorded so well. But does this knowledge leave Bert better then her?

Anyway, as though a strange prophesy had promised to throw them apart with another dawn, they made love feverishly and with desire, each resigned to the other and to another strange thought that made them intermittently uncomfortable and will revisit them later. Yes, for a moment, Bert no more wanted to be a gypsy caressing strange roads and Liz no more the fake object of flesh, as she was to her other "admirers". Yeah, that word is mirth but I borrow from Bert and he has red chilli powder for a simple sense of humour.

A smile returned to them as they peeped into each other and the shy exchange defied the truth… of course, this is not a love story and they will go their own ways. Just that, now, we have two lives to track.

"Love after all it is, or sex, I am not sure, either ways, one is the basis of the other or the bearer of the first, so to me they are the same… almost, the order might not matter, this ambivalence ha! Yet, what can stop a man is his desire to meet all that he is not, or has not. This feeling of completeness in Liz's arms, her reciprocation, is the only string of sanity I have held in a long time, and with some degree of grant I can confess the same for her by virtue of being her complete being for two nights as she has been mine." Bert enchants me sometimes with his firm grasp of things, like in the above monologue that I glanced perchance, yet I have seldom been able to resist the urge to call it inconsequential madness.

Bert left the next day and took refuge in a highway motel. He had been used to living like this for more then a year now. Not quite cut off from the man he was, because he still maintained a contact with his world that was so he could return to it someday. A different man but similar surroundings, he was not only aware, but also confident, about the little eccentricities of man. Besides, a long time out of static order is also a static order in itself.

Liz, on the other hand, was more prone to carry on her regular business, after all Bert was not the first best man to happen to her, and she had this strange confidence, resting on a child like a fantasy, that she will find another later. I really don't think she thought of life as anything more than a nightly errand that needs the occurrence of the day to organise for the next night. But neither today nor any day after this will be the same for her again. Bert after all was the singular best man to happen to her because he also made her feel like a person, kicking and alive. Still in her prime, and the Goddess of sex out of choice, Liz left the town the following night. No, not in search of Bert, just to discover the 'her' again. In fact, justifiably so, she cursed Bert for taking the perfect sanity out of her life, so what if it was fake!

The days were not going good any longer. A strange restlessness kept creeping in and Bert knew no way to run away from it. Man is a strange animal. He struggles to free himself from just that one bond that he so deeply cherishes. If someone could convince Bert that Liz and the night could be his perpetual reality and bliss from where he will never want to run, he would have fallen to his knees and kissed the ground, but he knew it was a lie he so wanted to cling to. What an irony, having realised that the only life is NOW we still hope for perpetuity, I wonder if Bert is just another guy next door going around in circles, which might be less obvious than the ones he decided to break free from. But I want to give him the benefit of doubt and the freedom to return to where he started… at least he tried to go see the far end.

We seek a sense of loss by visiting the obvious pain… just a little help when you don't know what to do with life any longer. Not that you do much with life anyway, because all that is to be done is done by life unto you, but what is the harm in indulgence… after all don't we all like to feel in control. Why else would we define pillars of achievements and then spend a lifetime trying to achieve them wearing the mask of wishful amnesia that effectively shields all the other lives that could have been, if we could have let them be. Bert had moved out of them and now he was a prey to the more banal thoughts, those of physiological satisfaction. Maybe he did not want to believe that what he felt for Liz was not just an exalted desire for sex, the strangest and the smartest physiological need because it requires two for satiation. After all, if it was just the banal need he went to her to fulfil, any woman could be Liz and tonight in his motel room with all the flesh money could buy, he was still a stranger to his own art of lovemaking.

He followed instinct and immediately left for town, to find his Liz.
Liz was already gone, and with a bitter smile Bert just sat by the lamp that gave the only hope of warmth and light in the otherwise cold and desolate night.

Tomorrow was a new day and he would move on. Bert had a strange way of maintaining very high standards of motivation. " So what if she is gone, at least I felt a strong feeling that made me cling to a day, to await a night and seek bliss and where would she go but to find a me in her as I am seeking her in me"

It has been many months since then and now Bert is back to his little town, running errands and fulfilling social obligations, some willingly and others unwittingly. He is trying to find sanity in the mediocrity of life because the order would not have been maintained if it had none. He is sure that this is not his reality, yet he also knows that his reality owes something to this existence and he will not dismiss it just like that. Not any longer!

It is not funny, the ease with which the mediocrity that you can see so clearly from a distance takes you over when you decide to get a closer look. Bert is our protagonist but by no means the hero with celestial powers. He is one with the world and the physical fatigue now gives him peaceful sleep at night. The faculty of mind is prone to rusting for lack of use and then it's the virgin unattended fertile land that can be tilled again. Bert is now ambition personified, running for the top job in his humble vocation and the passion is undaunted. Maybe only his heightened enthusiasm in the arms of Liz can parallel it, but that's only a calculated guess.

I have this strange feeling that failure or lack of recognition for what Bert thought he was capable of had driven him away. Yet, all the while he belonged here perfectly. But no, I have the privilege of hindsight and the dying desire to make a hero out of him or a martyr maybe. And thought is prone to change the course of ordinary life. But for now, Bert is, could be just anyone else.

I can see despair masking my SELF. I was hoping to make a scapegoat of his life and answer my questions but he seems to have resigned. Yet, I will follow him through because if I dismiss this life of his as a breach, I just might be rendered so much poorer about the magus called the ordinary.

In a way, living for the now could be a very monotonous job. Not having to think what the next moment is likely to be because you have rehearsed it so well over the days. The dichotomy being, if my today is like my yesterday, then I have hardly lived a today, or maybe I am just a cynic. At least so did Bert tell me when I asked it of him.

It is easy to give in to a good well-paid job. So what if it takes 10 hours of your day, if you search hard enough, you will find the worth of creating and learning in it. Bert had grown quickly from the ranks till he was such a darling of a nondescript company, at least for all practical purposes, but he earned well, his cash registers jingling and he could spend on others, now, that is what made men around him happy and doting on him, but since he had worked hard to gain that reputation that made him enviable and adorable at the same time. Very simply put, "If life is about being wasted, let me be richly wasted with all the affluence that indulge the five senses." Bert had indeed found a way to go through each day and was now pleased.

He dreamt of finding the woman who would be his soul mate and he believed in the simplicity of love as an eternity that will breed a new generation that he will provide for and hence be useful to the cause of the social. Not that Liz did not return to his senses whenever he thought of life and love, yet, he had made a secret pact with himself. "I don't need to defy destiny, if Liz has to be back, she can change from." Everything that was seemed like such a mistake that Bert could run away on the mere mention of it.

Often, the flights of the mind are means to relax. For the uninitiated, Bert had mastered the art of daydreaming and creating visions of the beyond out of nothing. He could spent hours at length trying to create sense out of travel across his past and future, and the alternative Bert that could have been, had he replaced one decision with another. Someday he had wanted to master the art of hypnosis, and at others he would be the harbinger of a new order by propagating the cause of natural medicine to scientific blunders we as men are so prone to accept as miracles in our modern medicine systems and all. Now he had no time for all these frivolities. There was a new day to meet each day and the day had such compelling, though so mundane demands, and Bert was the hope that he had forced himself to believe. How else would he hold on to a sanity of the deteriorating self in all but material pleasures? After a point, man restricts his life to eating for survival, some go to the extreme of surviving for eating, but I will not hold Bert to that institution. Not yet, at least… There are others who compromise.

Compromise? "Ever wondered where does the little baby, till a few months after birth looks up to everything like a new avenue, wanting to constantly grow and learn and then, when he is so much a man and in control, degenerates into the same child like diffidence till he is old and brittle. Our world is symbolised by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. Need I say more."? Bert often laughed out loud, having gained a reason to go get wasted at the bar in his profound statements that would relieve him of the need to grow, after all if the tail is in the mouth, won't he and I alike perish as would you. "So what if my snake is smaller…"

A strange restlessness was setting in by now. It had been months, or maybe years, since he was working in his small town. It is easy to win affection. Just do, as everyone wants you to. Else, do what no one can dare to do. And you will be rich and famous and wanted and hated, all at the same time. In short, the epitome of a social life. Having all that he could have asked for to be successful, he was still wondering if he belonged here. I guess he now sought love, and since he would not get it he would run away again, just like lack of recognition earlier had made him run from what he was so good at today.

Fear? Yeah, fear, of losing that which you have earned. Fear of having to start from where you have sprung. Of living in penury that you so arduously replaced with luxury, that you spent so much of your existing energy to it. A man who has none loses none. Could he pack his bags again and set out for stranger shores? Bert was not sure and he realised the weakness that he was not ready to face. It is strange how comfort breeds numbness and quiet, an impending storm. Living in a destruction get together, that's what we do, nailing with ghastly blows our being for the cause of the oft-repeated unknown.

His time had come, he will have to go, but there are tasks yet unfinished and he be damned who leaves the affectations of a demanding set of admirers. It's a strange bond. It breeds fear and insecurity and, after a while, you cling to the race to be good in such exacting disposition that an onlooker will call you sick. But I guess, when a majority is sick, the healthy is the odd man out and by virtue of the first law of mediocrity, " the law of averages" he is sick.

Salvation can come in death or it can come to the living. It's the way you look at it. Bert needs to go and Bert has to stay and this strife will take the better of him for a long time to come. Sometimes this long time is known to exist beyond one physical life and that also explains why a man gets 84 million lives, according to Hindu mythology. The next few months are crucial for our protagonist. He will be cast to the fires of hell for running away and he will be greeted with the freezing coldness of hell for staying. One of the two is an illusion, but then a man, himself an illusion, cannot be charged for ignorance. He has a right not to take both and keep living. Sorry, did I say living? I meant existing and reminding himself of the empty clamouring of a vacant life. Bert will have to meet his salvation right here, right inside his head, and he knows he has a right to be wrong, and so he is scared. He has put aside this impending civil strife for a long while and let the moments of uncertainty continue in the backdrop to meet the more pressing demands of his job and family and living but one cannot hope to hide in these for ever, though many do. Tomorrow, when he leaves, they will make a villain of him. Condemn him for the same independence and sense of justice that had made him their demi-GOD. He is not feeling up to it and all the struggles can be postponed till tomorrow. He is seeking the traders of flesh tonight and hoping to harvest in their fertile hinterland of an unused mind.

Oh no! He will not find Liz there. It's strange how things that we forsake often return in their wanton and when you want to reach them, they forsake you. Like the divine justice of constant energy, which has never increased or decreased in the universe. Merely changed from and balanced out.

We often like to revisit the past to dig out those moments of bliss that will soothe the breaking nerve today. The more we think of them the more we despise what we are to what we could be and the more we disown the gravity of our decisions in another man's fault the more we become miserable. Bert is not a hero on the pedestal and he has a right to make mistakes. "Only if Liz would have stopped me and not let me go" but what is the point, anyway.

The mirror reflects an ugly Bert. He is seeing what he wants to see and just a smile here could have livened him up and make him the handsome him again. Now he has to go, to find a new beginning or maybe an old end

Eating is as much a precursor of an approaching depression as it is an anti-depressant, though short-lived. Bert has developed a huge appetite and drinks and eats to his heart's content every few hours. No, he is not living to eat, he is just eating. The choicest cuisines, and all else. It keeps his body occupied and mind numb, and now he need not think of the returning strife. Actually, there is no strife. He has a warm and a comfortable life, he can get married to the prettiest eligible lady in town and he will keep her happy in her own limited way. He is comforted by the repeated staticity of this life and now Bert will get married to Bertha.

No, I don't know Bertha, I heard Bert mention her and I am taking a wild guess. Bertha, it is said, was a mannequin, very pretty and full of life and longing in her eyes. At other times I would have used the two words as synonyms. The legend has it that she is looking for a perfect master and Bert has taken the task to his head to make her feel one with the humans. A saintly mission, I must say, because she now represents the majority of a strange kind. That of the seekers who might not get, and yet will be quenched.

Somehow, years of cynicism at the institutions that man has held sacred in the collective, and shunned in the private, yet leave a trace of desire in Bert. He seeks true love. He respects the institution of marriage, though not sure why! He is committed to give a good life to the little children he will bring to life and be the ideal man. Strange, because just the other day I had seen such a disdain in him for these.

Bertha, for her part, will learn the ways of man with him. She was born and has grown up in the hope of completeness. What that is, I have a vague understanding but no experience because I, Bert is still incomplete. I can be the optimistic commoner here and hope she will bring him the full circle. It's ironic, the words I use, but without wanting to justify I will not change.

"No, I am not against love," Bert would often say. "It's just the over-commercialisation of love. Everything around me sells on love. Everyone lives in the hope of an eternal youth. Love is sex or maybe the other way round or I have a right to be wrong. But apart from a jungle of expectations and compromises, I have found little virtue in spending a life in subservience for a thought that has become so glamorous on the strength of a shinning, sweet smelling skin. After that its pure camaraderie, forced or otherwise, but I had it today too, did not I?"

Bertha is a very nice person in the most classified sense of the word. Good looks, good upbringing, educated, independent, forward looking and loyal. This word in the end might just prove a wee bit too much for Bert. What with Liz in his mind, and the many others. How badly is he hoping to mitigate his stand! Hoping Bertha will be less then perfect in the most social sense of the word. But there is some pleasure in knowing some one so perfect in a particular frame of reference I guess Bert has fallen for her. And they will get married. I am going out in search of Liz here cause we all know the next few years in the life of Bert. Like his newfound position in his sleepy town and all the affluence, he has again hit upon a jackpot of tranquilisers in Bertha. Till his mind rebels again, we will let him to his bliss.

Liz is a stranger to herself no more. She knows exactly who she is, what she wants and how she will get it. A tall claim by all means but she just might stand up to it. Bert, does she remember who he was, just another customer after all. And yet, she does. No, it's not the flame of love burning in two souls now far away, it's just that light of awakening that each had imparted to the other. And thankfully, they see it as exactly that. No pedestals, no expectations, just a word of thanks and just a mischief to twinkle in the eye.

"Women have a strange obsession with being liberated. If that means burning brassieres in the centre of a square so be it. If it means parading bare torso on a ramp so be it. I am wondering if this is a desire to be liberated or plain desire for acknowledgement that they are one with men. Or maybe one of them." Liz for her part is beyond all this. She is too well comforted and assured in her conviction that a woman is after all a woman and by the same virtue invincible. What she has will always be sought for to complete a life somewhere as much as she would desire it to complete hers. Morals or at least the ones imposed for control don't bother her much. She had visited India once and was surprised to see the men there, morally suppressed and incapacitated to come to terms with their own sexuality, leave alone their masculinity. It is about cultures and perfection is such a rampant diffidence across cultures that you can never be a true hero without being a villain somewhere. Sometimes it is purely the male to female ratio that defines goodliness over living. But Liz is not the one to contemplate, she just watches and moves on picking the necessary threads to weave her own reality. "It's not about opinions… just observations," she would often say.

Her memories of Bert are not that of a liberator but that of a liberated and she is the most courageous manifestation of confidence I have seen. Now that I look back, I realize why I always wanted company of the opposite sex. Just for this confidence that preaches where I seek and learns where I teach. Camaraderie, that leads to liking and love in sex. Okay I am fixated on sex, but that is for a simple reason and I will use the only quote I get from the rare soliloquy of Liz, " Why is a person so obsessed with sex or love? And the harder I think, I can only find the over commercialisation of the institution of love and the fact that it is the best symbolic of the beast in us cause I can hardly meet its satiation alone" It's not a reason enough to win a debate, yet it suffices that it satisfies.

Liz is a farmer now and she was a grocer the other day. She has learned strange languages and travelled the world. Not that Bert did not want to… but wanting is quite distinct from doing, as we realize only when we are long passed the scope for return. Or maybe, we force the wanting so hard on us that it leaves no time for action and then we carry on in our cowardly ways of the defined only to blame the incoherent image of a losing battle on our deathbeds.

"Will I repent this life when I am old and need the stability of a balanced life and a numb mind to keep living each day as though it was another yesterday personified?" Liz had often fought this question leaving the day to answer itself when it arrived. There is a virtue in not thinking too much and just acting on the momentary impulse if you are convinced that you deem the best for yourself. Liz had this strange share of confidence on her faculties that marked her for satiation.

Will she become a sage? Indeed, this is one of the glorious ends to a life defined by the five senses. The five senses need to be sacrificed to become a sage and by their scarce use one overpowers them and becomes a sage. "How drab, she thought" and moved on.

Will she get wasted to a stranger's bed or his wine? She had been there and done that at one time and met Bert and decided to move on because not all men were Bert and most of them were not even men. To come to terms with his sexuality is a struggle not many men can face and hence end up being the same piece of flesh that they seek in the dark of the night.

Will she strive for the epitome of a social life? "And the day will be when I will have work to do and children to breed and a loving husband who will help me go the full circle and together we will grow old and die. Learning, teaching and being the one we were to be, yet together." Perhaps the only life she was yet to get a taste of was this but yet she had seen it so closely and so often in everyone around her that she decided to leave it to the more tamed and people of the world.

I have serious doubts she will return to this one day, but I am not going to place my cards on that.

It's a nice cosy evening and right on top of the cliff where Liz makes herself comfortable, the sea below is beautiful in its vastness. "But what will I be?" Liz is thinking and it's an ominous sign. Soon she will want answers and there will be none. Soon she will despair and there will be nothing to comfort. Soon, she will fall to the first trap of experiencing before leaving, that which she does not want. Soon, she will want to beat the system that she wants to shun and hence unwittingly fall prey to the system that wants to be mastered and thereafter will make a slave of the master. No, these are not my prophecies, don't you remember, Bert?

"Can life be lived in isolation? Can one man lead a crusade that will then change the way things manifest? But alas! To change the way things manifest a critical mass of people will need to be harnessed and then there will be no more isolation. No art is complete without appreciation just like no cult is complete without followers. A little bit of madness and a smack of eccentricities can make one different then the ordinary but never apart from the rest. If I am a part of the larger whole, why am I not a photo image of it?

"The need to be alone and the desire to be beyond the system, is it a fear of not being able to face it? Am I running away in the facade of an alter self-while all the time the stigma of being unwanted and untouched follows me? Do I convince myself of the virtue of being alone cause no one talks to me? I force a garb so I am not understood because no one ever tried coming near to remove the facade and see the me in it, and I was crying aloud to be heard, wanting to be hugged!"

Liz was now wading into the sea as the sea of questions rampaged her head. The vastness of the ocean could be a blank satiation. They will soon ward away the breath and with that all the questions that trouble and doubt the very virtue of her BEING. She will drown unheard and un-helped and all the loud cries there will meet the nil in them. Now the empty expanse is soothing her pain and the quite rhythm of the waves is comforting her trembling nerves. She will lie here till eternity, She does not need the answers and all the questions are as futile as life itself. Though now, she knows she is not beyond the living yet she is not just another living soul.

Liz kept lying there amidst the waves watching the sun go down and the stars trying to do their bit at spreading light. They did succeed in creating images of beauty but there was no light if you decided not to see. The tide has regressed by now but not before giving the much needed balm to Liz. She got up and returned to the happy town, treated herself to the most exotic delicious meal, flirted with the best men around, then found comfort in her chamber all by herself in the embrace of a comforting sleep. Tomorrow is a new day and it has to be lived by the impulse of this moment.

"Men of word they say are firm of purpose as they are, firm of actions" How boring, Liz would often think to rob oneself the freedom to change, the freedom to grow the freedom to degenerate and the freedom to BE.

Bert is now a happily married man. Bertha was the Miss. Perfect for him, you would often here him say. Ranting in her praise all the goodness that was there. Bert had felt bliss, though in the dark of the night when he would bare his soul on the bed, he would still seek Liz and not find her there. I guess the price for our social mantle is the sacrifice of our banal instincts, those instincts that helped us survive so far anyways but then were banished by the same decree by which they gave power and authority to the man they built.

Bert had taken a lesson or two in taming his wild mind and no more the questions of existential validity bothered him. He was happy wasting himself to the cause of the electricity bills unpaid and the promotion not got or, at other times, the unexpected praise showered and in efforts to work hard and get the unexpected in the most expected ways. I don't know if it diminished the sense of purpose in his life, but if it did, Bert, I must admit would have become a master at concealing by now. Do I wonder that Bertha could never feel the dying desire that plagued her husband? The desire to see his Liz in her!

Bert had mastered the system and now the system had the last laugh. Bert was its torch- bearer and did a great job of it. Staticism has a way with men. Soon it can make him forget his struggles and stay intoxicated. Soon, he forgets that he was a fighter once. That he was a rebel for a cause. That he had held life like a darling in his arms and now he was carelessly warding it off for the cause of some defined rules in some corner of the mighty earth. The earth that he had once conquered on foot now gives him his peaceful corner and he is happy earning for his tomb there. What will my epitaph read? "Bert the good man who lead a pious life, never faltered in his duties to family and the state and when he is dead he is cold as a stone and we might not need him anymore." Of course some facts are not to be stated cause when everyone is a partner in crime, its better left unrecorded.

Every man is a rebel when he gets nothing or when he has finally got everything. Men who are yet fighting to get what they think should be rightfully theirs are often too busy with their own limited existence and at best are the fence sitters who will create or negate reasons to set precedents for a future. They will often times justify there insecurities in the acts of heroes or the villains or the jokers who has seemingly got everything and yet lost it all cause they were not serious with lives.

Bert had rebelled when he had nothing. He had wandered places till that fateful encounter with Liz got him back to the acceptable social order.

Today Bert has everything and again the seeds of revolt are raising their ugly head in him. "I have lied to myself too long, Bertha is great but she is not me, my possessions are objects of envy and awe yet they are not me. Who am I?"

Man is a social animal and if he grows larger then life, he will defeat his self defined purpose of a struggling being. Hence all of us often indulge in the destruction get together. The cocktail of the haves' who reminisce about life beyond, and the have-nots' who strive for the life they believe, IS! "If no force is beyond me I am indestructible and precisely for the same reason I will destroy myself" has often been the irony of man.

The chords of relationships often assume the stature of iron claddings if not stirred for long. We call it love or affection and breed the demons of expectations in it and when they are big enough, we are often inept at waging the war. Bert, I am afraid, will take a long time to break the bond he has made to life. He will not be able to leave Bertha, nor his power or position nor anything else that he has come to see and meet daily. He has made a confession of living and without the signs of ageing all around him he will not rest. But he has to move on and he knows. Till he decides I will leave him to wage his own battles. I can see him falling and failing each time, but in dust… each man to his own freedom.

Man had an abyss and he hid a treasure in it and then grew too scared to fall. Liz had found respite in a poor state with hungry people who could fight for food and called it a cause. I often wonder if man ever died of under eating, but it is no time for mirth. It is only when one is hungry can you tell him of the virtue of pride and make him fight his brethren. So much he will do for you, in a hope that he will get his bread in the evening to feed his wife and children.

There was a strange satisfaction that she could feel amidst the poor children of the fighting men. They had a strange longing in their eyes. The bread soaked in blood comforted not and yet they feverishly sought. She was the only symbol of sanity for them cause they could see compassion in her eyes where they were prone to seeing terror, fear or even guilt in the eyes of the elderly, the men they feared they will become some day. Liz had found some meaning in serving the young, instilling in them a hope, that the world was large enough to accommodate them only if they would reach out and grab it. She had made a promise not to seek answers to the questions that the cliff and the deep sea had inspired. Confident that she has all the answers and they don't need to be of comprehension to the institution of the five senses she head trodden the delicate path of observation and non-conforming compulsions. Impulsive by now she could be and not be at the same instance. Though this infirmity did bother her sometimes but she would not break the pact of non-reasoning.

It was strange, how tranquil her life had become. She looked up to the day though knowing that it had no promise of the happy isles, yet the fact that she will be greeted by the bunch of growing up angels and then a long day of answering their queries would consume her till she becomes tired and retire had a particular charm. Like a saint so disparately seeking pupils to teach too. Not that she always had answers, but so what, not that she was supposed to answer anyways. The obvious questioning life was never so profound as it was there, "Why us?" Tell me, she would catch herself asking often, as though demanding justification for the little kids who were yet not clear why had they to eat the bread soaked in blood when their was a plentitude just eating breads not knowing the colour of red.

Actually, she had often run away from the question herself, "Why had Bert to go? Why did he wake me up from the slumber of nightly errands? Why did I make the pact to stay blissfully ignorant, why am I with the kids? Why was GOD so unkind as to leave me confused while so many other women lived in an equally large bliss some as feedstock to nourish the next generation, some others, as pure slaves to pleasures and yet others, there to add to numbers."

Its easy to get into the sympathy seeking mode by listing all the curses befallen on us, yet so difficult to count the miracles that got us out of all of them to leave us where we are, capable of questioning so much, seeking so much…She smiled to this sudden realisation and went home that night with a strange lightness that was either the end of virility or the foreboding of a new beginning.

Liz tossed restless on her bed. Then with determined steps she went out to the local bar. She pampered herself to a few drinks, and then with equally resolute steps walked out. She walked all night till she reached the absolute sensation of fatigue where no sense is felt. She must have slept in this wayside motel for longer then 40 hours that time and now she woke up. Not really aware of why and where she was. Her head was still heavy with the drinks the other night. She suddenly remembered the small children and with a cry decided to get ready to get back when she fell with a thud on to the sofa. She was staring into her emptiness, if you were watching; you could pass her of as a lump of lard and put her to the fire that makes an epitaph. She stood up after an hour, and knowing that nothing will be the same again, started to reassemble her self all over again. Her time had come to move on and she will have to seek a new meaning somewhere else. But why? Well, she will not break her pact of not thinking and let her steps decide her next destination.