:: Vulpine ::

The night feels famished. The atmosphere is hot and dried of stars. I feel condemned by the heat―a captive yardbird, a pawn in the killing fields of mother nature. The day seems to have bled passed my fingers: the spoils of desperate times. These are unfed and unfettered hours, where I try to work a little more, write a little more, think a little more; these are hours of social celibacy, where the only company that really makes sense is the plastic rhythm of my keyboard.

Tonight my mind is filled with scar tissue. Tonight I'm convinced that we are nothing but playpieces of some vulpine and wretched fate, who drills us with militant resolve to madness and mayhem. Neither beauty nor joy can thwart the covert mechanism of pain―humour becomes a frightful subtlety, a trembling hand jerking off to the lust of death―what am I saying, you ask?

***

'My blood pressure―it's not looking good,' my uncle―Uncle K―said. He was matter-of-fact. Yet the news would have hit us―nieces and sisters and mother―like the backhanded wave of Moses' prophecy.

He took in our wide-eyed expressions and grinned cheerfully for our benefit. I imagined the effort needed to gash one's face opened just so, with that sort of smile―at that moment I ached and I ached and I ached.

'It's nothing serious, not now―hypertension can still be controlled. But the doctor warned me of kidney failure as the worst case scenario,' he rattled on, with the same casual confidence of the rockstar he had wanted to be in his youth. He popped another piece of chicken in his mouth and chewed nonchalantly. 'We'll see.'

The same cabalistic discomfort that has been seeping through the maternal side of my family―ever since we broke opened the fortune cookie of chance three years ago and cancer was the prescribed destiny that grinned and leered at us―is back. I can feel it. Soon we'll be talking about check-ups and hereditary diseases the same way other families talk about taking a holiday, and every now and then we'll look out of the window and feel the whispers of death and fear lengthen like an incongruous shadow outside our corridor.

***

I remember snatches of my uncle's youth: the way he looked in his Air Force uniform. The way he jammed on his tennis racket, pretending that it was a Fender Stratocaster. The way he drove with reckless speed. The way he always won at Carrom. The way he was, squandering his youth with the goodnatured ease of a demigod. The way we all were: healthy, alive, happy.

Now. My grandfather is dead; colon cancer. My two uncles are still in the shade of cancer's guillotine, as we all are. Haven't I always said―we are the wanton toys of the universe, and it has the libertine licence to bleed time from us like a leech purple with fateful promiscuity.