The purpose of this essay is to make a delicate incision through your thick skull and offer you a sip of mine. The human skull does not have sensory neurons, so this should not hurt in the least. Just be sure to have your scalp peeled off. The author conveniently holds no responsibility thereof.
You, trippy, tipsy darling with your subtle puffed up head corroded by too many fascinations, walk across the pavement, half lost in the dark side of your mind and dreaming of little bombs whizzing off as the rain lashes on mercilessly. Your umbrella harkens to the angst of mother earth raging in all her merciless furies. It leaves you and scurries off into its own distant dreams, receding from SSE – that ageing giant whose somber, pitiless stare scans the deep, eternal, endless pit. You wonder what hope it seeks, whom it seeks, and if you are among the ones sought after.
In the deep night, its stare persists, lingering on your skeletal frame as its gaze pierces right through you as if it can see all of your weaknesses. You, trudging on drowsily at this delayed hour of the night, are only holding up because of the caffeine. Yet, now as even then – then, when the machine was unborn, nature humbles the man at the edge – that lone warrior wages battle against the night. Calamitous against the night, nature humbles you with its own spells of drowsiness, with its own incurable spells of nauseating sicknesses. Across the void, it spills your guts, which now float in the abyss of space-time. Spilled, slashed, bloodied, and gashed to the truth of their bleak existence, remnants of your being roam past your containment, their freedom and their battles lost in a mere night.
At first, a gentle shudder. Then, a mighty roar from the heavens as a lightning bolt strikes and a glass breaks. Nature strikes again.
The giant SSE yelps in pain as a glass window breaks and falls off. In the deep pit of the night, startled science kids come running out of the building, looking around hurriedly to explain this phenomenon. The giant yelps and moans while they beg for the cause. The giant rages fiercely in the night – rages battle against this nature that turns to humble it.
You, lone warrior now spilled, bloodied, and lying half dead in the lawn, don’t bother about the goddamn glass. For you, it is the unknowable, and you have learnt to be at peace with your unknowability. Alas, you belong to the underbelly. You are to SSE as Will Graham to Hannibal and as Desdemona to Othello: doomed to love-crime. You swoon in its desire even as it torments you to the utmost, to the core, and to that which emerges as your sole in the myriads of all your selves. Deep within, you want as Othello wants, to “put out the light, and then put out the light.”
As the underbelly, now, you watch the mammoth building howling in its mad pain. The wind gushes through its corridors, recreating a strange phantasmagoria: howling banshees beating drums and lining the corridors. Bats rise from the trees as tiny aero battalions, their wheezing sounds numbing the life out of the air. With this strange custom of bats and banshees forging a new battleground, you struggle to choose your alliance — the giant howling in pain or this strange concoction of your mind.
Bloodied, broken, and with your wet clothes clinging to your bare skeletal body, you rise like a phoenix out of the ashes and push your way through even as you are terrified for your laptop in your bag. This is your sole battle now – to make it to the building. You wage this mighty war against nature with your bare skeletal body drenched in rain and your own blood. You push yourself through this ordeal as you push yourself to meet every deadline, as you wake your weakened body every morning for those godforsaken 8:00 AM classes, and as you take a quiz while a pandemic gently arrives.
Today, as on many other days, you return to this strange home to traverse the edges of its underbelly. You feel the haunting cold of the labs that keep the experiments running while you look for your fleeting soul in strange murky places – in other departments, on meme pages, and even in thick textbooks for graduate students.
Of all the unimaginable sounds, you hear that of a child arguing with his father – a well-reputed professor in this building. You suddenly feel more at ease; you ache for the shrill sound of a stubborn child weeping in this abyss, where only the machine hums. Yet another baby suddenly pierces the silence; the void is ruptured, the machine cannot be heard, and the cold is replaced with a sudden, startling warmth. The howling wind turns into a zestful lullaby.
The lullaby of revolution is sung. Even as the wind howls like a moaning banshee and the bats fill in with their wheezing, new drums are beaten. One by one, battalions of little babies pour in from the elevators, transforming into a giant ocean. An army rages in the lobby — to redeem the irredeemable, to reverse the irreversible, to do the undoable, to restore the disorder, and to stare back at the pitiless stare with the absurdum of infanthood. Your brain screams at you: “pick a side!” You, a mere spectator, have now become a historian of this strange occurrence that records itself as viscerally as if it were to become a live performance in your mind for the rest of time.
The helpless child crying for his mother emerges as the new hero — emerges as the only response that can pierce through the impregnable walls of SSE. Little babies invade its departments. One by one, they will take its labs down, lay siege to the offices, cut off their funding, build their own cradles, fill the refrigerators with milk, sing lullabies at the top of their lungs, and have their own melodies bemoan through the giant building that has now been overtaken.
The experiments are all ruined now, and the sheer madness of this dull delight – this delirium of the mad – has ended.
The underbelly roars in delight.
You sip your coffee in the ghastly hollows of your undelight. The brooding hour of the dark returns. It torments you, piercing you nauseatingly. Your insides swoon in the vomit that fills you in this loss. Sick to the core, your soul slips out into the night as you go back to studying quantum decoherence.
Author’s Note:
I would like to offer my sincerest gratitude to my editor, Irfan Javed.