“A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his own stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.”

                                                                                              -          Jean Paul Sartre

Prologue

Doctor XYZ was in a habit of losing his way back home from his dispensary. He had acquired this habit a long time back when he had been less old. Although children in his town (including his own grandchildren) believed that he was 200 years old and had never been any less old; he had been living in this town from a time when there was no town, instead in its place stood a kingdom where wars were fought daily to keep the king busy.

As happens with all doctors, people in his hometown had long forgotten his name and he was generally known as ‘Doctor’. In due respect to the memory of the township, we shall not disclose his name, so that anyone from his hometown who chances to read this story might have no problem recognizing him. Although at times people would claim he was barely recognizable nowadays and nothing was left of him except for an old rugged pipe that had been there between his lips ever since he had stopped speaking.

A Traditional Beginning to a Conventional Tale

Once upon a time…. Or perhaps, once upon many a times and a very long time indeed, the Doctor had been a psychiatrist and his field of specialization had been amnesia. He loved his patients. In rediscovering the colors of their forgotten past he found a tremendous interest. He felt his job was equivalent to that of a detective, the only exception being that everything recovered had a precondition of getting lost, back into the milieu of daily events.

But this only increased his determination.

He devised a formula. He would keep reliving a single memory from his patients' past, over and over again, so that the man might remember it as his present, and not just the immediate present but throughout all his repetitive presents. He remembered he had rejuvenated the memory of a man swimming with his wife in the vast ocean so many times that in the end he himself started to feel aroused by the thought and found he had transposed the face of his own wife in his patient’s memory.

But all the same he was renowned as a doctor. The Doctor. (Which itself proved that his patients had improved out of their amnesia.) And when his patients had already informally rechristened him as ‘The God of Reminiscence’, he found out one day while having his lunch that he could no longer remember what he had had for his breakfast. He shuddered at the realization and thought –

“My God, amnesia is contagious.”

Since it had taken a long, long time for the disease to take him in its grip, he concluded it was a slow infection and spreads only through long contact.

From that day onwards he gave a huge importance on imposing quarantine on his patients, especially from their family members. As much as this was against the wishes of their family members, he was very particular about his patients well being. He was soon to find out that the patients always thought of their family members in their imposed isolation, and they missed their parents and wives and children with such dedication; with such sure signs of significance that it cured them of their amnesia.

The Theory

He concluded, therefore, that amnesia is a much severe form of malaria. It was not just an infectious disease but was essentially parasitic in nature. The virus of amnesia lives only in contact with non-amnesiac people and on being taken away from them, it dies. The man who has amnesia acts as a carrier.

He decided that amnesia was more disastrous than malaria because malaria had its limitation. It could only take the life of the man being infected. Amnesia, on the other hand, in its spreading, has the power of permanently erasing the past. It can erase history. It has the power of taking lives of those who have already been dead. It has the power of erasing the creation of this world.

It has the power of self-annihilation of the entire human race. For it is not our heartbeat that keeps us alive but our memory. We are alive as long as we live in someone else’s memory. And everyone else, who lives in our own memory, is alive. We are bound in an infinite chain of memories. When this chain starts breaking, it is the beginning of our death.

A man, who can’t remember, lying in coma, is pre-living his own death.

The Antidote

The Doctor realized later that he had become both the carrier and the cure of amnesia. In his long war against amnesia, he found that the viruses of amnesia had turned bolder and had started attacking him. He always dreamt of defeating his own amnesia. Soon, he found out that amnesia is nothing but the creation of a new sphere: The Sphere of Forgetting. And it was connected to the sphere of remembering, not through the long, tiring roads of memory but through a much shorter by-lane of rediscovery.

In the sphere of remembering, almost all was older and known; in the sphere of forgetting, everything was new.

He started to recognize everything in his sphere of forgetting by some points of identification and later relate it by its true name in his sphere of remembering. For example, if on passing a tree he would be unable to remember its name, he would identify it as a big tree with a dark brown bark, deep green leaves and with green and yellow fruits almost the shape of eggs, and register them in his forgetting. Later, in the sphere of remembering, he would relate it to a mango tree.

He used the same process in identifying the roads that he mistook as the one leading to his home. He would name them as forgotten lane-1, forgotten lane-2 and so on. Based on their synchronization with each other, he had developed a map and in it connected each of them to the one leading to his home. So that in his forgetting, it would simply be a matter of identifying the lane in his map and taking his way back home.

After a few years of wandering in all of these possible forgotten lanes, he became acquainted with each of his forgotten lanes so well that he no longer had any need of the map to find his way back home.

Another Traditional Beginning to Our Conventional Tale

Our story starts in an evening when the Doctor in his habit of forgetting walks into a lane that doesn’t lead to his home, and finds that it is none of the forgotten lanes that he has in his map or his mind.

It was not an insignificant day. He had realized this morning that the premonition of everyone who knew him was coming true: He had reached the stage where senility ends. It was the beginning of the age unnamed. Forever. The anticipation of death does not terminate in death, but in the end of senility. After which man becomes immortal. Death becomes insignificant, life irrelevant.

The terrible loneliness that you didn’t mind forgetting at the time of your birth dawns upon you. And as you push yourself deeper into walls of silence, you realize that life and death are two ends of a hallucinatory passage. And you yourself are everything else that you ever knew – the ant, the lizard, your son and God.

This evening when the Doctor was returning home from his dispensary his head, unlike all evenings, was not blank. It was burdened by the thought of being so many different selves at the same time, each of which was his own creation and yet, fallaciously, unimportant. Connected with it was a realization that amnesia had been a part of him from times immemorial. He wondered whether his memory too had any beginning and he speculated that memory is like time: cyclic, because time itself is a memory. It is the forgetting of a repetitive existence; a thousand years of reenactment of a single day.


That explained for him this evening’s digressive unknown. The forgotten lane that he failed to recognize was not new. Nothing can be new. Everything that seems new lies in the sphere of forgetting. He had no doubt been in this lane innumerable times but each time in his self-same forgetting.

The lane led to nowhere. It was frighteningly straight and faded into a distant blankness. White. The Doctor had been walking looking straight at this white horizon for quite some time now. And yet, he realized, the distant blankness stayed at the same distance from him. What changed, however, were the scenery around him. He walked further into the freshness. The freshness of the unfaded. With every step that he was taking the scenery around him became better contrasted, more colorful and sharp. It was almost as if he was retaining his better eyesight. He could discern, for instance, a thousand shades of green within a leaf, could differentiate all the innumerable dust particles from each other and all curves of each minute body became so sharp that they hurt his eyes from a distance.

Once again, the feeling that he had invaded the age unnamed and everything he sees is his creative hallucination pressed upon him so hard that he negated the existence of the tiny, little boy that he saw sitting on the pavements beside the road. He went and sat beside his hallucination. Sensing the doctor sitting beside him, the tiny, little boy started to tell his story.

Another Traditional Beginning to Yet Another Conventional Tale

I am the little boy and I live in the distant village that this lane would never lead you to. But, unlike you, I haven’t lost my way back home. I’ve lost my home and now am a destitude. And I am going to tell you how all of this happened.

I lived in the village of prosperity, where all of us were illiterate and none of us were poor. There were no schools in our village because we believed learning was a waste of knowledge. A kind of forgetting. Our fathers taught us that learning was a continual forgetting of the basic knowledge we need to survive on. I remember my father used to tell me – “My son, knowledge is the deep, dark well that has no bottom. Once you get in you are lonely and you fail to recognize the people who live with you. Try to know as less as you can and you’ll be happy, forever.”

Thus, our lives had no complications. There wasn’t even a drought, a flood or a devastating storm in our village, ever, because we didn’t know the consequences. We were born farmers and artisans according to the blood of our forefathers and could plow a land or spin a yard before we learnt to walk.

The air we used to breathe in was light and fresh, the order of our world was constant and inviolable, until the day that a hermit arrived in a village. Everyone in the village hated him because he had intruded the world of our sacred ignorance and was polluting it with his knowledge of the greater world and the other world.

He had brought a sack which he used to carry everywhere. We believed he had all the knowledge trapped in it. Gradually, he learnt to read the detestation in our eyes that we bore for him always but never related to him in words. Then, one day, he retired from our village completely. He made his seat beneath an old oak tree that stood at the outskirts of our village. And sat there silently, not moving, not opening his eyes, not even breathing.

A few days later we started realizing that food went missing from our houses everyday and we sensed something was amiss.

There couldn’t have been a thief in our village because no one had learnt the art of stealing. We sensed that someone was coming from some other place to steal our food. So, all of us decided to stay awake one night in our respective homes. We decided to sit in the dark behind our doors with bamboo sticks in our hands and wait for the thief. And so we waited.

We sat waiting when the midnight came; we waited when sleep came and we sprinkled mustard oil in our eyes; we waited until the night was bright and we realized that we have succeeded in staying awake even into the last phase of the night: the dawn. But the thief didn’t come.

The food, however, we found out in the morning, was stolen. “We cannot catch the thief” my father said, defeated, “because he is immaterial. Invisible.” I couldn’t sleep the following night, full of curiosity. I wanted to have a glimpse of the invisible thief. I sat waiting for him. But instead of sitting behind the door I sat waiting beside the food.

At some part of the darkened night I felt a deep, trenching pain surging upward from my feet. It was as if I was standing on an infinite valley of pins. But curiosity, as it always is, was greater than pain, and I was able to light a fire. In it I watched the unwavering regiment of ordered unity: Ants. All over the floor and the food. Innumerable. The light was unable to illuminate their dark troop and was soon diminished into their being. Even when the light went off I realized that their movements were visible, because they were darker than the darkness.

When I related it all, the next morning, to my parents in front of the villagers, the incident seemed unlikely to them for a simple reason: there were no ants in our village. But still they had no other option but to believe me because none of us in the village knew to lie.

So, for the first time in our lives, I and some of my friends were presented with a duty of finding out where the ants were coming from. We searched all day long in every possible place. By the evening, we reached near the oak tree under which the hermit had been sitting. Then, we found the ants and learnt to be afraid.

The hermit was still sitting in his unmoving posture. Two separate lines of ants walked over his body. One moved up his chest and the other went down his spine. The ants went in through his nose and came out through his right ear. Behind the oak tree, five feet away from it stood a hill of mud almost the size of the old oak tree.

“The ant-hill” one of my friends whispered.

That evening when we returned home, we could barely speak. Fear had gripped us completely. But the next morning when we found out that the food had been stolen once again, we decided to put an end to the ants and more importantly, to our own fears. Throughout the day we gathered kerosene oil from all our huts and by the evening we were back to the oak tree.

Fire. We made. Being children, we knew little of what it meant. We knew that it burnt, but we knew little of what it burnt and what it didn’t. But most of all we didn’t know that a fire could never bring about an end; that burning is merely a conversion of forms and an invocation of disaster.

The hermit was at once woken from his state of unmoving as the ant-hill caught fire. He came running towards the fire shouting –

“Children. Children. My seeds. Atoms of my sanctity.”

The fire burnt, unanswering.

He sat down on the earth and wept like a child. Then, he became unusually silent as he kept staring at the fire with the cold glance of a dead man. Only when the last flame of the fire had extinguished did he turn towards us. It was a strange glance – burning yet cold. Chilling. Then slowly his fingers went pointing towards the dump of burnt mud and ashes and he said –

“Those were my children. My little ones. Those who are dead.”

Then, the same finger came pointing towards us –

“You are not children. You shall never be. You are devils. All of you shall die like those who died. All of you shall die like those who shall die. All of you shall die like the dying. All.”  

Saying this he put his palms into the sack and brought out a bronze can. Slowly, carefully, he opened its lid and nothing but five mosquitoes flew out of it. And now, he spread both his hands and uttered those last two sentences; the two sentences, after which we shall never know him again –

“I condemn all you children to infinite dying. I curse you to a death called malaria.”

A Dialogue Preceding the End

At this point the tiny, little boy paused the rendition of his story because he sensed that the Doctor was trying to say something, as he had been trying for a long time now. Perhaps, it had been a very long time, since he had stopped speaking. Now, unable to contain it any further his entire body trembled. And he had to blurt out from behind his pipes –

“You’re telling me the story of my own childhood, not yours.”

“Neither mine, nor yours. I’m telling you the story of our childhood.” The tiny, little boy corrected him.

The Doctor who had been unusually conscious of the fact that it was his own childhood that was being reenacted in front of him even in his amnesia was certain that he had unmistakably recognized his childhood. And now, slowly he could decipher things a little better.

“My amnesia has brought me back to past” he said, “and in this creative hallucination you’re my own childhood. Now, I get it. You’re my own past. And at present, you’re nothing but my sheer understanding. You’re my imagination.”

“No. You’re mine.” The little, tiny boy corrected him yet again.

Readers, those of you who have amnesia and those amongst them who are fully conscious of their amnesia would have no problem in understanding the Doctor’s inability to understand the tiny, little boy’s word, because you could easily decipher what the little, tiny boy meant. The remaining part of this story is inconsequential for you and might consider skipping it. But for the rest… I mean, the readers who are not fully conscious of their amnesia or those who are fully conscious of their not being amnesiac, you might just have to bear the burden of letting the story reach its natural conclusion.

But first, we must let the tiny, little boy reach the conclusion of his own story. So let us make him speak once again –

The End

The curse did not bring much difference to our daily lives until one of my friends who had been part of that evil evening caught a high fever. A constant trembling took hold of him. And both in his unawakening and his unsleep he muttered –

“The preordained mosquitoes have stung me. The premonition has begun… I shall die… and then, mosquitoes… like flying troops of ants… deadly… all of us must be dead.”

It was exactly at this moment when people started hearing the murmuring of the first child of malaria, that destiny entered our village. Silently. Hand in hand came fear and foreshadow of doom, which were identical. Like twins.

Soon enough mosquito nets were woven: mosquito net to keep us children who had been cursed by the hermit, protected in; mosquito nets to resist mosquitoes and destiny.

Innocent children, ignorant parents.

The curse was difficult for us. One evening when we rested our minds assured in the mosquito nets, one of the new-born babes, who wasn’t or rather, couldn’t even have been with us in the cursed evening, caught malaria. The entire village was confused. The father of the baby started blaming us –

“It’s all because of those few children. The curse is now taking lives outside itself.”

That’s when I remembered the exact words that the hermit had cursed us with –

“All of you shall die like those who died. All of you shall die like those who shall die. All of you shall die like the dying. All. I condemn all you children to infinite dying.”

I realized then, that the curse was not confined to the mere few children who had been in front of the hermit that evening, but children in general. Children of the village, children of this world, children of oblivion.”

A Dialogue Succeeding The End

“But that is impossible.” The Doctor broke into the little tiny boy’s story, “You couldn’t have been dead. You’re my childhood. And I’m alive.”

“What is life, Doctor? And how does your society of medicines define death? And what exactly is the scientific name for your disease? You call it amnesia. I called it malaria. But don’t you see that names are of no importance at all. And the disease remains the same. The disease we all share: oblivion. We must all fade into our own oblivions. Children must die because innocence knows no preservative. Parents must die because their children will no longer be able to recognize them. And we must die because none of it surprises us anymore. But is death the final salvation? The end? An antonym of life itself? How wonderful it would be to think that way; but Doctor, death ends nothing but reality. After death we all become imaginary. But we keep on existing because imagination does. We die but we keep on existing in someone else’s imagination, someone else’s memory. We become the teller of tales and we resume our daily lives as memories, for it is not our heartbeat that keeps us alive but our memories. Take our own case as an example, yours and mine. Unknown to you, even now, we do exist in the pages of a story that some reader is reading. We are alive because we exist as imaginary characters for that reader. We are alive in his imagination, his memory. The same is true for our reader. He, too, is alive in the imagination of his reader, unknown to him. We, all of us, are characters of a never-ending story. We all, teller of tales.” The little, tiny boy stopped.

“All of this is so very absurd. Even if I assume that all of us are imaginary, you say none of us know about it; then how come you’re an exception?”

That’s the question I’m here to answer and you’re here to acknowledge.”

The little, tiny boy continued –

“All of us die in our childhood and become imaginary. Then, we start growing up in our reader’s imagination. But in the imagination, too, we must die. Today is the day of your death and mine, for from the beginning of the fragment of this story the reader has speculated your death, in his imagination. Right now we are standing on the edge of imagination. Our end. Look.” The little, tiny boy said, pointing his finger towards the distant horizon. And at once, the Doctor saw that it was raining. But instead of droplets it rained needles. Innumerable needles.

The little, tiny boy spoke once again, for the last time –

“You asked me how I know about our imaginary lives. I know because I’m standing too close to death; because I have a premonition of death; and with death comes a premonition of past. You’ve had the same premonition too, in the form of me. Our reader would have the same premonition too, in the form of you. The rain of needles awaits us. All of us must converge in this rain of needles. One by one. We, our readers, their readers and theirs. We all live in the infinite circle of other’s imagination and die in their creative hallucination.”

The little, tiny boy held the palm of the Doctor and converged into the rain of needles, fading into each other.