We await your return. Bleeding, or having bled to degrees that there is no more blood to bleed any more. That’s quite all right. They also serve who can no longer serve. We have our ways, we can infuse purpose into those you believe have lost purpose. Trust us. We will find uses. We have become good at it. Didn’t you hear? You thought you’d been rendered worthless? Ungainly acrid fuming piles that nobody could make any sense of anymore or even wished to? A mangled mass of soot and grease that required removal from the scene so life as it was before could resume? No. How could we let that happen to this thing that we adorn with words like ultimate and supreme and such other superlatives, how could we permit it to pass without impact and import. We won big on you. Consider yourselves the receptacles of limitless gratitude, we shall put it all there, in those boxes, and around them. And then we shall conduct them with all the fanfare that we feel we owe you. Have no worries, you had your uses. Come to think of it, you could not have been more useful. What were you there for, after all, hain? You signed up for this. We sent you away for this. We wrote lyrics for this. We set those lyrics to rending tunes for this. We commissioned nightingales to sing along those tunes for this. We learnt how to cry to that song and to the lyrics and the tunes they were set to for this. Just for this. You did well. So well. You have all of those things. But this is not the end of it. There is more. Do not lose heart. Oh, solemn apologies, not heart, oh no, that is already lost, lost in that mangle. Spirit? Right. Spirit is the word. That which is contained in the soul, which in turn is contained in the Message. The Message which tells us the things that should be foremost with you, wherever you are, if you still are. But you must be. Or so the Message says, it is all there in the Jeeta. You cannot be destroyed, you are eternal. The same cannot be said about what became mangles, but that too the Message tells us. It is of no use, what becomes a mangle. Bother not. Do what needs to be done, worry not about what will come of it. What will come of it, let me worry about. Do your duty, become mangles. The consequences are not for you to worry about. They will be taken care of. There will be rewards, we are here to put them on the mantel. We won big. You see? You did what you had to, that is what matters. This is, oh you, your part on the eternal stage.

There is theatre and there are theatres. And there lie the differences. There lie too some among us, between our theatres and your theatre. Your uniforms do not sweat. Our uniforms are not dry. And let me tell you why.

Tear a falcon’s wings apart and stitch them to your flanks; flap them all you can, and see if you can fly.Theatres. Theatre. There’s a difference. There are many differences, more than merely one. Our theatres, they aren’t there for the show. No lights. No intervals. No audience. No applause. Only curtains. And those curtains are so wet, they come to fall to no plot, they just fall, as is where is; our curtains are wet, our curtains are heavy, often so heavy they fall under their own weight, and they fall all the time, around us, with us, and once they have fallen, we are no longer there to tell it’s curtains. It is you, usually, who take over. It is you who begin to stage the drama, I become a prop, a thing of the purposes of your stage. We sweated. We bled. Our uniforms are wet. And our tears have run dry. You stand on your stage, crying; that theatre is yours.

The colours and stripes I wore

You stain ’em with your sordid lie

Who they blew, who they tore

Currency, no more, for you to buy.