Practicing Dead

If you ever care to start out a quick browse through my old posts, you will find majority of them begin with an invocation kind of thing expressing the dissatisfaction on the lack of proper subjects to write upon. Well, you and myself call it the Blogger’s Block, or the Writer’s Block; but recently I found out that it is not so, at least in my case.  What I am trying to tell is that, despite of the common feeling, I have a lot of stories to write. Even during my childhood days, I had challenged my sister to ask me any alphabet, so that I could make a story starting with that alphabet. In that way, as I had boasted, I was able to coin at least one story starting with every letter. I can see you smiling, because that is possible by all. However, this imagination had once served as the theme of a poem, which I wrote during the beginning of my blogging days; you can read it here.

 Do you want to know, what makes me think that I am free from any form of creative block? Well, because, I have so many subjects right now in my mind. Some of such experiences happened during my past days, like the one in which I pretended as if I was dead, and the story of the uninvited guests. If you ask me to write about my present, I have this story of my friend’s love affair which is currently running in its blooming stage. And if you want some serious topics from me, I can pick up those curious cases of middle aged men who ‘loved’ younger boys (well, you can call it homosexuality or gayness), from the vast repository of my Trivandrum memories. 

Well, I want to pick up a less weighing topic for today’s post, the story of my death practice. If you remember the tale of the Love Messenger, you can easily visualize the backdrop of this incident. Anyway, for those who started following my blog lately, I can tell you that I was in Trivandrum – the capital city of Kerala, doing a journalistic job quickly after my education, and was just started to live with a pack of guys of my surrounding age group, as a paying guest in a home like place which was running by a middle aged man and his wife, whom we called affectionately (rather compellingly) uncle and aunt respectively.

I quickly befriended the boys there, of which some were younger than me, who were in the final years of their education. Some had been polishing their academic skills by attending short term crash courses and specialized classes after passing out from the college. Those younger ones liked me very much, and they were keen on doing favors for me, and sometimes playing pranks on me. 

On one fine morning, one of these guys rushed to my room and drew out my blanket, under which I was trying to bask in the last moments of morning sloth in a crouching manner with all my body curled up into a circular shape. My friend’s action irritated me a bit, so I decided to play a prank on him. I reposed motionless with my opened eyes straightly staring at some parts of the ceiling. As my mouth was covered by my arms in that curled up posture, he was not able to catch my spurting smile.

He looked at me in a funny manner at first, but later became a bit hesitant.  He waved his hands in front of my eyes to test if I was alive, and with a startle, he found out that my eyes were not moving. He did some more tests standing at a distance away from me. Terrified, he went to a senior one of the whole gang, and told that, the new guy was not moving. They suspected that I had come to that place after facing some traumatic experiences, and because of such personal worries, I committed suicide. 

The senior one also came to my room, and standing at a distance, he also played the same tricks to check if I was alive. I laid motionless with my eyes fixed on one of them. I feared that I was about to break into a huge laughter at any moment, so I covered my mouth with my biceps. After some more experiences, they both left with a decision to let some other one find me dead. 

The young boy frequently peeped into my room, and tried to make me laugh by enacting some funny gestures, thinking if I was alive, I would have laughed. But nothing happened as per his plans, because of the strong support of my muscles. 

I am not elongating the story. I stood up after some minutes, and began to do my routine things as if nothing had happened. When I saw them at the dining table, in that graceful manner, I said good morning to them by receiving some frowns and rough looks in return.