I mean is our map the same as it used to be? But of course it has been altered and altered many times. We do not even have the original. We are not agreed on the original. There is no original. Everything is a copy. Or a copy of sorts. Look at yourself. Are you original? You really think you are?

Let’s call Friar Mendel, that Gregor of the peas and the rabbits. Don’t know him? Google, employ the reigning Gospel. He will tell everything is a mixture of everything and what goes into the making of one thing also goes into the making of another, though it is not necessary one and the other will be the same or different, although it is fairly certain everything is a mix of many things, a proper hodge and podge, kedgeree as they use to say. It used to be good to be part of mixed things, melting together in pots, getting from each other and giving, and become richer and richer in the process. All sorts of shapes and sizes and dimensions, each distinct and each inseparable from the other. Things like those in the picture kind of things, different and woven into a seamless one.

It used to be the way we were. Now we are not the way we were. We are separate things, sifted, picked out, kept, and kept out. That is the sort of thing we have become. We do not fit into a picture, we are not the things that together form and make one picture. We are torn and fractured things, ripped away from ourselves and the things we also were part of and woven into. Where have we come, will someone please explain? How did we get here, will someone please tell?

Where are we headed? Would you know? It’s dark outside, and from all that is visible, or not visible, there is nothing leading anywhere. Koi hai? Torch please!

But are you sure? I mean about calling out for a torch? Considering where we are? Torches can torch. You know that. Or you must, by now. Things can suddenly be aflame and all can turn to embers and ash. And nobody will be able to tell whose embers and whose ash. It will all become a bygone sameness. But we don’t want that, do we? A sameness that is achieved as a consequence of the act of burning and charring? No that’s not the same we want. We want a sameness, but a sameness of differences co-existing as a larger sameness. But why do you forget, we do not want differences; we want a sameness, we want the homogeneity of embers and ashes.

Is that where we are? Is that where we are going? In this darkness? I am asking simple questions. Why is it dark? Who brought us here? Where are we going? Will no one offer an answer? Why are answers so difficult to find? Have we become bereft of sense and reason on the way here? Or of our ability to speak and tell? Or do we know the answers and are too afraid to tell? Who of? Or are we merely reconciled we will be told lies and be commanded to be happy with them and not dare question them, and therefore we have come to this pass that we no longer bother asking.

I mean, we did ask that question we asked at the very top, didn’t we? Have we been forced to become another shape on the map? Do we look different from what we used to until a while ago? Did someone violate our fences? Is someone sitting there, having violated us, and telling us to be happy with the shape that we have now been battered to? Dented. Then painted. Painted over so nobody can tell the dent. We asked. We were not clearly told. Or we were told things we don’t want to believe because we know them to be not true. There are so many such things that we are told but we know not to be true. There are so many questions whose truth we are not told and whose lies we live with. Is that where are are? Can we not go someplace else?

Yeh kahan aaa gaye hum

Yuunhi saath-saath chaltey?

Yeh kya jagah hai dushmanon

Yeh kaun saa dayaar hai?