HUMAN EGGS By:- Mushtaque B Barq

   HUMAN EGGS
        By:- Mushtaque B Barq

A sleaze ball fancy giggled the partially parched mind; the current that was so strapping from the back doors of the semi consciousness settled in. What metamorphosis! This majestic globe was just précised to a dot in the park wherein, grass and grasshoppers were nakedly narrating their naughtiness.  With their gestures so weird and strange, few leaves from the nearby tree had shed their frill. And down the lane a few wanton boys followed as their playmates had long been locked.  The weather took an  ugly turn, the sun moved like a kid under the breast of clouds to share the grief and thunders broadcast the agony.  “There is a sorrow that lingers in old parks”, the old man said, looking around wistfully. He is yet another fallen leaf from the branches of the  family. Wrapped in rags, this feeble frame was too heavy to be carried on, the grief on his face had along settled down as his wrinkles were narrating saga of his sadness. A fallen leaf on his shoulder was not all a mismatch, but a pictorial representation of his veracity. “Let somebody lift this mount of me”, he yelled. For there were only kids around and everything in them was a thrill. He was flocked round and examined by those innocent eyes carrying a ray of naughtiness to tease when compassion would have been employed.  He was lifted like a sac and bundled in a corner under the tree that like him was shedding leaves occasionally. 

The wandering kids had their half pants at their bases torn and like old man’s shirt near his shoulders, but covered by withered leaves. What harmony between the hunger and heed. The fallen leaves shrouded both need and the heed. A few shamelessly glued at their bases but failed to stay on the shoulder. Shoulders must have been taken to toil and the fragility around was just an accidental whiff. The rain brought down few postcards reading his tale of worries and the storm with its carry bag knocked every door to drop the mail. Most of the people fail to read between the lines for their eye glasses were already broken into pieces because their own pieces were scattered by the roar of the clouds. These clouds are scary; they take the life out of the cage. Merciless! Moreover, despondent coins from the city of ether banged the already bald head of the old man waiting for an out of order umbrella. The weather brought back unrest in the park where the old man and the kids had nothing to fall back upon save the giggle and the glare.

Kids are funny things. They weep and laugh for the reasons they only know. In one voice, beating the rain and combating with the storm, a coil around the old man they made. One holding the other, one giggling the other, one teasing the other, one pulling the other and one naughty reaching the privacies of the other making a human fence . The movement up in the bowl and the wrestling down the Dale was on the whole poles apart to send a signal of relief. He cried, “Where must my sons be?” His words irritated the vacuum of the kids and in reciprocation a few made ill faces, a few just laughed and the rest of them  were still roaming in fancies to portray the fate. The naughtiest among them responded, “They like our parents must be ignorant.” The old man raises his head and they just fixed his eyes on him, he was about to say something when all of a sudden a spell of chill turned his words into a vapour and he only sighed.

 They made around him a pulsating umbrella.  The old man under the umbrella of love looked like a hen in the pen ready to incubate the eggs. Eggs, of course, but not of the human race, of but aliens, for human eggs have no shells, they move with the flow and leave, leaving their own race.  Human eggs have rich yolk, but fragile shells. We are all but eggs, luck ones find the pen to get hatched; unlucky ones are on to peck from the heap of dust to produce a race that in the backyard of the temple perform inhuman rituals. And produce for the dust bins. What a discovery! These dustbins in a corner of the park are still waiting for the morsels, in their infinite belly baskets, the sins and sensitivities are nursing the worms, these scavenging tiny balls that finally fill their miniature bellies and compel the decomposed tissues of a sinner to travel through the darkest and the longest pathways of their innards just to mark the end of the man who leaves the old man in the park.

He opened his arms, and broke the rim of the umbrella; a boy , immediately pulled his arm and forced him to be fixed at his chest.  He felt his palpitation; it was not at all different from his own. Full of wishes, copious with needs and equally painful.

“Are you looking for eggs in my bony breast?” the old man asked.

Laughter under the human umbrella died soon when the boys reached his pockets to find what all they needed.  His pockets like him were full of agony, empty and wet.

“We hate eggs”, they responded.

“No, we cannot hate eggs as we too are eggs, human eggs”, he responded.

“Where is our yoke, where are our shells, let you show us?” the naughtiest asked.

“If at all I tell you, you will break your shells and your yoke shall but only serve the worms”, the old man announced.

They looked at each other and all of a sudden folded their arms and exposed the old man under the weeping sky “Don’t go, stay here”, he tried to plead them. The wind hardly reads the post. 

“We are looking for the yoke to save our shells”, the naughtiest remarked.

Beating his stripped body, the wind brought down a limb of the tree to break the shell of yet another human egg.

 

 

Mushtaque B Barq is a columnist besides a poet and short story writer. His earlier translation work: Mystic Voices of Kashmir , Verses of Wahab Khar , The Wings of Love   were published by Jay Kay Books and Withered Petals was published by  Global Fraternity of Poets His poetic collection is available on Poetry Soup and Poem Hunter.Com. He teaches English Literature and is associated with various literary clubs and forums.  The author was awarded ‘Editor’s Choice Award’ for outstanding achievement in poetry presented by Poetry.Com and International Library of Poetry in 2007. In 2017, the author was awarded with a certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his poetry being published in The Criterion: An International Journal in English in February 2017. The author’s publications are available in New Age Islam , Shabnama.faiz-e- zabaan- org., Kashmir Lit ( On line journal of Kashmir and Diaspora writing)and The Tibet  Journal. Author is a regular columnist of Daily Kashmir Images, his column ‘Creative Beats’ is a regular feature of his writing. His short story collection : Feeble Prisoner, Aditiya Publications has been appreciated by readers. The author was awarded Late Ab. Rashid Farash Memorial Award by HF Foundation. He is a member of Jammu and Kashmir Fiction Writers Guild  

 

Mushtaque B Barq - Crocodile tears

Crocodile tears

By:- Mushtaque B Barq

From my school days, God knows why in the backyard of my junkyard ^__ I call it brain for the grounds that I was never given approval to dissent; these crocodile tears had illegally occupied much of my gray matter like my nation. A notion I used to nurse that crocodile tears are insincere expressions of sorrows. But when my gray matter started to lose its viscosity, the rush ruined the old bridges and wrecked the towers that my teachers had once raised for me to touch the peaks of excellence had stooped too low. ‘Fall’ in this part of land is yet another narrative of prehistoric misconceptions and contemporary mishandling of facts.  I was there to stand before my fall like a forlorn victim of ‘might’.  It triggered my rush and I started to reconstruct tracks and by lanes that would take me out of cesspool of ‘yes man ship’. It was not at all easy to start, but then a good start is half done.

While I was on to bring on the skin all the impression of my newly found fineness, a storm took over and in no time the dust laid its eggs in the safest nests of human breasts. The progeny multiplied like my curiosity. The crocodile tears cascaded down the cheeks and as a sadist, a man tries his best to satisfy his selfishness. In the rat race men of class were on to explore the trade and trend of empathy.

From a village a doctor learned that his grey matter has been infected. He rushed to city and settled after pleasing many headless heads for whom the human body serves as a living treasure to take advantage of it. After his infected grey matter was scanned by the mastermind, he was found fit to serve. Service that needs contaminated nerves to unnerve a common man, a mutilated ego that molest the mass, an eye that eyes on termination and a man who nurses within him a verve to satisfy a political need.

He once asked, “Why the researchers need poor man?”

“Poverty is basic need to do the needful, it is a creation , lot of money is pumped in to create underprivileged lot, we invest to earn, every poor man is our requirement, go and fetch them”, the boss replied.

“If I deny”, he casually asked.

“Denial is death, submission is life”, the boss directed.

The storm was no more a laughing stock but a package of lethal infection to a compromised immunity stock.  The mischievous spirit of luxury summoned the village doctor and settled on to his infected gray matter. Thus both learnt how to shed crocodile tears. These crocodiles were in jolly mood for they had already predicted the outcome of doctor’s infectious mind. I could see crocodiles in human form wandering and weeping, shedding tears as their trade mark, but in disguise waiting for the feast.  

As the dust passed from an ignorant man to careless people, the doctor felt the pulse of devil and moved back to village where the general gender was already affected. ‘In the country of blind men, one-eyed man is the king’ the saying echoed within the empty cans of my consciousness.

“I have come to treat you” the doctor proudly announced.

Slogans filled the air, the echo puffed-up doctor’s malice and he smiled, but to gain sympathy, he started to shed the crocodile tears which people mistook as human salt leaking through his ice blocked eyes.  

The dust was whirling, sowing its seeds into the soil of human existence, but the doctored devil let it reach to every door, he let it grow and grow rapidly. Pace to ravenous raven is what wine is to drunkard.

The devil entertained the malice of doctor who while crossing a pond found a long line of crocodiles on its banks. He was terrified but the devil infused in him a consideration for beasts and the devil in the company of doctor started to shed tears for crocodiles, thus changed the maxim like a bitter truth erased from the chronicles. 

The dust in the village had reached every door to let the doctor step in.

He announced, “Death is inevitable, I cannot save all”

Initially an old man died, no one claimed his dead body. The devil knocked the doctor.

“Yes”, he declared.

A team of his favourites got clues to carry on shedding crocodile tears.

Only a few survived. Survival was a drama and death was a hit and miss fiction.

No funeral, no cremation, no burial, only a formality, but in the guise of formality various formats were followed. A protocol drafted by a sick mind.

With the fall of dusk a siren would mean: Keep counting. The siren would lock the people and the team would do the rest. Rest were arrested by fear, the horror was the only apparatus to put a ceiling on the foot fall.

These crocodile tears in the back of mind started to irritate me. My wits that I had after an unremitting persuasion flattened to the degree of flexibility somehow encouraged my wrath to take a forward movement. My newly found flow of intellect started to ooze the dew on my dry leaves that on the boughs of my repentance were looking for salvation.   

A graveyard and cremation ground in the outskirts of village after a demarcation drive got sanctioned and at the rear of their masks God knows how many crocodiles had been pissing on their cheeks. Pissing was a trade mark that behind the masks had choked t their taste buds to the extent sweet and sour had no stakeholders.   

A crocodile in me too stirred. It was a brawny push I felt in my thin grey matter. Graveyard and cremation too were shedding crocodile tears but unlike me there was nothing save a deadly silence. Bones and ash on one side and heaps and heaps of loose soil on the other side and a tin board reading: Death keeps no calendar was adding frustration. I got buried and cremated, yet I was breathing, breathing for the rest at the cost of my empty coffin.  

Hundreds died, no one claimed the dead bodies for the fear of infection. Fathers denied, sons claimed not, daughters and mothers attended not and the rest followed the suit. Mourners for the first time had put on the veil of silence. The screams of mothers, sisters, daughters, wives had long been died away. Silence and sorrow, sobs and shouts were on receiving end.   

What impulse brought me to the pond that day is still a mystery and shall stay perhaps. The gigantic crocodiles at the bank of pond were shedding tears. This time the salt seemed common and I realised crocodiles too wept and the empty graves too speak.  On my way back to home the ambulance had met an accident and human organs in a box were still pulsating like my lively heart.

 

Mushtaque B Barq is a columnist besides a poet and short story writer. His earlier translation work: Mystic Voices of Kashmir , Verses of Wahab Khar , The Wings of Love   were published by Jay Kay Books and Withered Petals was published by  Global Fraternity of Poets His poetic collection is available on Poetry Soup and Poem Hunter.Com. He teaches English Literature and is associated with various literary clubs and forums.  The author was awarded ‘Editor’s Choice Award’ for outstanding achievement in poetry presented by Poetry.Com and International Library of Poetry in 2007. In 2017, the author was awarded with a certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his poetry being published in The Criterion: An International Journal in English in February 2017. The author’s publications are available in New Age Islam , Shabnama.faiz-e- zabaan- org., Kashmir Lit ( On line journal of Kashmir and Diaspora writing)and The Tibet  Journal. Author is a regular columnist of Daily Kashmir Images, his column ‘Creative Beats’ is a regular feature of his writing. His short story collection : Feeble Prisoner, Aditiya Publications has been appreciated by readers. The author was awarded Late Ab. Rashid Farash Memorial Award by HF Foundation. He is a member of Jammu and Kashmir Fiction Writers Guild