1 a.m.
There is blood everywhere. On my palms. Arms. Shirt. And the moribund face.
As the night rages on and the remote whistle of the watchman finally falls silent, time plays bloody hide and seek games. It’s a slippery, cunning bastard, I tell you. It stubbornly hovers around you and messes with your brain when you don’t need it, and slips away faster than Kardashian’s dresses when you desperately want to hold on. When you are with a lover, it kicks you out, and sticks like a parasite when you are alone, dejected, left to rot.
2 a.m.
My fingers on the keyboard are wobbly, my torso almost headless. I lapse into sense in jerks, realising that I am typing less and backspacing more. Behind the ridge of the nose is the nibbling pain of too much alcohol. The springs of my eyelids have lost their elasticity, and on the dead-grey taskbar of my Windows, the open browser tabs are long fossilised.
Dead bodies are strewn all around. A riot of carcasses rather, of slain, dismembered mosquitoes. Though some have the filigree of their wings and bodies intact, others have their stripped guts burst and emptied, or their short, wretched existence ground to nothingness. Yet a few are alive, inverted and incapacitated, cycling their hair-like legs in a last-ditch effort to survive to resume their unfinished dinner of my hard-earned fluid.
3 a.m.
Lumbering in and out of consciousness, I feel my legs burn from a thousand pricks. For the past three hours, after having shut every entry to the room, all I have done is wait for the bloody rascals to stop fucking around, land between my hairs and start feeding, so that I could zap them with lightning speed. All this, while also trying to salvage some attention for writing a fatherless piece that shows no signs of going anywhere.
I repeatedly slap myself emptily, drumming my body like a musician gone crazy, grievously injuring my cheeks and any remaining self-esteem. Nothing seems to help. The invertebrate bastards keep attacking in waves, only a couple of them at a time, like the disciplined rowdies of Bollywood films. The more I kill, the more they keep coming — as if a bizarre procreation cycle is repeating all around me.
In the gripping suffocation of sleep and the lack of air, I hallucinate their angry, missionary sex.
4 a.m.
I am in the interminable grey zone between sleep and wakefulness, being constantly pulled between either sides by uncontrollable forces. However, sometimes, just sometimes, in the most ungodly of hours and in the most unlikely of circumstances, God, in his unfathomable wisdom, chooses you for something bigger. Do you believe that? I do, after that fateful night.
Defeated, and in abject stupor, I pick up a piece of cardboard lying on the table in the hope of quickly shooing the mosquitoes away. However, as I swiftly swing the discarded polygon through the air, it catches a few mosquitoes in flight and knocks them to the floor. They turn in random circles for a moment and fly away clumsily.
This works much better, an electric pulse in my body tells me!
Feeling like a modern-day Archimedes, though in a far lower state of undress, I swing the card harder all around me — this time like an opera conductor whose bladder is about to burst — filling the floor relatively easily with dead yet intact mosquitoes. It’s magic! My own little God-blessed weapon in the under-the-chair Mahabharata. For a bloodless victory in the epic Dharmayudh, between the bloodied and the bloodies.
5 a.m.
History might repeat itself, but I guess mythology doesn’t.
Before the war is over, before the enemy is annihilated, the retreating black of the night seeps profusely through my eyelids, spreading through my limp anatomy. I rapidly dissolve into the chair while grabbing the discovery, which unknown to me, falls to the floor resting on top of its kills.
I win. I am no dinner.
I turn into breakfast instead.
