Friday 5 December 2014

On a sunset

The sun set on the 3rd of December was the best so far.

The Himalayas were mountains of the moon, shining jagged pieces of blemished silver, looked so sharp and bright as if pain got personalized and projected on to looming granite. Lustrous. The sun did its business for the day and came home for the night, met by the blushing mountains, blushing of the night ahead.


The valleys filled with a gray black haze, a miasma arising from the depths of the earth and filling up the hollows, the crooks and the deepnesses of the valleys while the sunlight fled up the slopes, anti gravitic, hurried and ungentlemanly. The darkness was the ink into which an accidental writer dipped his pen and sketched scenes from memory.

Motor cars turned corners on roads stencilled in to the hill sides, their headlamps intermittent fireflies. Or they were sprites of the seas playing peekaboo with the intense looking sailor gazing at them from the portholes of the upside down star ship Mycadea. The sailor plodded midway through a thin book of stars to chart a course for Mycadea. It was slow work, involved turning pages aided by the infrequent wetting of the index finger tip to provide a grip. The sailor was confused, tired and he clicked the pages with his index finger thinking they were virtual. He felt stupid and so gazed out of the window. It has been 93 days since Mycadea crashed on to this strange sad planet. He had been asked to plot a course to Phase 1 star system. He did not understand the point of the exercise when their star ship was stuck headfirst on a hill on earth. How was the captain planning on getting them unstuck, for instance? How would they be airborne? Do they have enough fuel even to upright themselves? He had no answer and the captain was his usual inscrutable silly self. The cadre comet was a fizzle compared to the anticipation it created. The Toughened Operational Turnips (T-OTs) had already calculated the trajectory and the probable crash points of the comet and braced themselves.
Exhaust vents of Mycadea
The middle ranges were bald nude brown in the sun light and in the rapid night rise were menacing hulks of negative space. Villages on the slopes shone in clusters of light and, to the sailor disoriented by his thoughts, they looked like boats tossed about by gigantic waves. The star ship made sense, but it has capsized, and the aliens and the T-OTs were breathing air trapped under the belly of the boat.

He felt heroic, clever even, for having thought of this analogy. He felt sea sick too, imagining the mountains as waves and himself as driftwood. The villages must be underground cities, populated by pretty mermaids. He thought of all the hill women he saw, prettier than pearls. He wondered if he could stay back on this planet, live in a village for a while, love a lovely hill woman, move to another village, love another woman, an itinerant romantic in eternal search for happiness.

Just then the captain Chip Spik bellowed at him for day dreaming when on the job. He wanted the course on his desk five minutes ago and warned the sailor that in case he falls behind schedule one more time he will be delivered to Ming the Merciless.


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