THE WALK

And on the seventieth floor of the skyscraper was a room numbered 7T57 that is where I had come to. As I put the key and pushed in the door of the room, it opened out to a garden, well, that was what it looked like. There were chairs and tables of polished wood and benches of fallen trees; there were dogs in kennels and cats in shoe boxes and monkeys on trees and squirrels on run. The room was huge; the garden was a universe in itself, endless and unfathomable. I was mesmerized and could not wrap my head around what I saw before me. I stepped into the room numbered 7T57.

I was cautious lest the grass under my feet be an illusion and I fall down forever but as my foot hit a firm but soft ground I believed in the freshness of the reality. I walked a bit and came to a table which had a lone chair for a company. A cup of hot tea and a couple of books lay on the table, Murakami’s Hardboiled wonderland and the end of the world and Wilde’s The picture of Dorian Gray. The set-up was inviting and the chair looked reserved for me. I knew I had paid to be in the room but I was not sure that everything and every moment in the garden was mine. I sat down on the chair and opened a book and started sipping from the cup, a sense of déjà vu hit me; I had been here and done this. I looked around and saw a table like the one I was sitting at but the things on the table were not disturbed and the chair was not occupied, it was strange and exciting at the same time. I looked at the door I had come in from and there stood a man, exactly like me, staring down at the ground. Every time I was making a decision, I was leaving a memory, I realized.

Déjà vu made sense.

My world was not only what I was conscious of but all that I had left and all that I wished to get.

I am not the only one version of me but all that I chose not to be. They were all living and were getting to their own destiny.

And here I was conscious of only one me.

Everything around me started to make sense. It was frightening and interesting. I left the table and decided to take a walk around, bold and daring. The fragrance from the flowers came strongly to me and the chirping of the birds was louder now. I ate from the apple trees and drank from the clear streams. And as I walked scratching the itch from an insect bite on my arm I saw things strewn on the path. A scarf, sunflowers, sandals and a few other things those were not clear from where I stood. The grass was disturbed and in the distance shone dew drops on grass. I came upon it and the drops tasted of nectar. I gathered the things and put them on a table to take them with me out. The beads of perspiration felt good on my forehead and the realization of the moment had an orgasmic effect. Satori. The ephemeral ecstasy and the perpetual memory made me believe in the world inside me. The arms of the world were open for me to enclose me in a tight hug. Everything was tangible hence, everything was real. But trust and belief are abstract and so is the soul. We pursue the intangible throughout our conscious life and the momentary tangible material is soon left in oblivion. All these played in my mind as I travelled the valley drenched in the sweetness of the honey. I climbed the mountains and slept on the ice peaks for what seemed an eternity. This was my home, my heaven.

I woke up and found myself trapped in a maze of mirror walls, I ran hither and thither and bumped into myself everywhere that I went. The place was filled with innumerable me and each image of myself was only created when I came in front of the mirror, in short I was the progenitor of the entire race. And as I ran amok bumping into myself time and again, I understood that the way out was not through this labyrinth but somewhere else, somewhere inside and high above. I stood still and closed my eyes and opened them to look above.

The trap is but a way to freedom.

I opened the door out inside the building and walked down all the stairs of the seventy floors carrying the scarf. The key to my room still lies in the breast pocket of my shirt.

Kashiv shuts the diary and bookmarks the page with a dried up fragrant sunflower.

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