{Of all lies, art is the least untrue - Flaubert}



Sunday, August 20, 2006

A Tale - 1

A frozen sea. Snow melts. Color changes. White to blue. Sun shines, painting yellow and sets with red smearings. Dark night, cooler than the day, quieter than the noon, slower than the dusk. Sea roars and breaks itself on shores. Life lives near by, it dies nearby too.

On the far side of the blue waters, a big boat with small people with books in little robed hands arrived, the boat was painted blue to match the sea waters, it had drawing of wild life, lofty hills to match the terrain and it had its peaceful music which didn't match the wilderness of the place it arrived. That peace obstructed the vastness of the wild, the music was no noise but no better than that. A stream of logic came with them, the sun should rise in east and should set in west, and an apple falls down. The oral truth became a written passage, more stringent, less fluent. The greens of forest, the dark greens of rocks and the colors of sea remained as they were. The truth has not changed but now it howled at them. The blue boat anchored. The little men walked on the sand with shells of gray white color, shells camouflaged to hide the pressure of foot that pressed them, the people lived there, and they died there too.

Little palms with books of wisdom touched the dirty hand of oral verity, Midas touch changed everything to words, note them down, no rote, no communication. A book opened the face of its folks, it said its art, it said its truth, and it said it's all. A garland around the neck, over the beautiful beaded breast, curved and dark, colorful flowers, was decorated. The suns of different seas saw it, changing their colors, falling in west every night without fail. A poem missed its tune, and the air missed its noise, better than the music.

A girl was asked to tie her hair because they fall too much. They spoil the cleanliness of civilization. They are decorated with flowers of the hill, the braids of locks married the words of books, the fragrance of the flower was fabricated, the smell ceased to grow, the girl rarely spoke, her hair became her identity, a mix of art and beauty, revealing some obscure truism, far from the noise of the wild. Smell, like that of the unwritten paper, is now killed by the precisely written word. It is not smelt, it written in some book, incisively, its an experience to read it, it reaches near the smelling sensation, can it ?

Sun of bigger truths now rises every day, without fail. The Gods of untied hair and oral truths have lost their noisy tune. At times, a fish from the far away sea comes to the shore, looks for the girl with untied hair, looks for the dark green of rocks. Once it made an effort to talk to a girl with a waist band of gold shining against the rocks behind that covered her deep dark navel, girl told her that fish lives in water, asked it to go back to waters and didn't answer anything about the untied past. She told the fish that whenever it sees someone with sweet voice and big ship, try to ask them about the past, there is a book which reveals it all. Fish never came back from waters, may be it read the book, could be.

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