The days have turned into evenings. Evenings, when no one returns back, but you remember they left. There was a promise to the world, and you took it very personally. Evenings when awakenings of the day are over, but sleeps of the night lay far. Warm sleeps - One inside the other, layers that you wear to resist the coldness of your being.

Evenings like a sore in your mouth, and the tip of your tongue keeps on moving to the wound.  

I have played with your body like I touched a ghost. We made love like mournings. We planted the memories in our garden of loss, and we watered them after sundown. The trees didn’t bloom, but they didn’t die either. The seedless trees of lost moments kept on existing. Those would have been nice little gifts, but we never had much occasions, did we?

There were people who tried to trace our heart from the junkyard of our breaths. I remember them, wearing facemasks and radioactive costumes, with a rudder in their hand, looking for a beep or blink on the screen of their dusty machine. They were moving like white cautious robots, who did not know what to do if the thing is found. Preserve it? Destroy it? Do further research with it? Eat it up like a successful hunt? Not-belonging to someone - it feels like eternity. You would not be used, but there would be no use of you. So, you keep on existing. Then one day they forget you, but remember to celebrate the day when they found you.   

           

 

I read the story of Sandhya, the goddess of Evening. Her name was Evening. She was born out of the body of the primordial all-father. She was born young, never knowing the warmth of the womb. And when she was born in the celestial court, the father, his son, and all old gnarly sages with bald heads and grey hairs came under enchantment of the God of lust. And they all felt desirous to the newborn woman. They looked at her untouched young body like house-lizards look at lost fireflies. She herself, wounded buy the unknown arrows of lust, gazed back to them. And the sour, sinned moments passed like ages: bodies trying to find uncharted routes to other bodies, beating hearts becoming tired of greed but never knowing how to resist… finally when the enchantment was over, shame covered them all like fog in the mountains. She looked at her father, her brother, everyone else, and herself. The girl whose name was Evening, looked around and failed to find anyone she could recognize with the experience of our perceived relationships. Not even herself. So, she left everyone, and moved to a lonely mountain to perform penance for a sin she didn’t commit. We really do not remember when the evenings of our crooked world have silently moved to the lone, cold mountains to repent for our sins.

So, what is this gloom after sunset, when the dust of the day settles in the dark like unwritten transcripts of lost conversations, miles and miles of pages filled with words, unread but outlived by the speakers?

After ages, the girl whose name was evening, finally finished her penance. And when the lord of the Gods came to her to grant her boons, she wished for a strange one. She wished: “Let no living beings, O lord of the Gods, born in this atmosphere be full of lust at the time of its nativity”. 

‘She said all men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them’.            

She borrowed some time before desires could take hold of the living body. And then she sacrificed her impure body to become the purest immortal lone star. Evening left our desires, and the night followed, gathering them one by one from the dusty alter of the penance.  

These evenings make me guilty. I have carried the desires with me for so long, I do not remember my days of ‘nativity’. I feel like I always had the urge to touch a golden body with the hands of a beggar, who touches gold and it turns into flesh.

 

And what is this ‘nativity’, then? When do we stop being ‘native’? Isn’t it when we step into the world of language? Don’t we perceive desire, much like all the other discontents of being, through language? The moment when language, the arrows of the god of lust, pierces our unperceivable being, we begin to want specific things from our immediate environment. The idea of ‘specificity’, wanting exactly that one petit object of desire, or to recognize it, point it out from the jungle of other objects falling under the unbounded category of things having the potential-to-be-owned by a person, in short: the world itself - comes from language; and it is, eventually, lost in language. That object is never found, but it is also never lost. So, the empty desire upswells like the mad echo of its own nothingness, and tries to find something close to what it wants. But that ‘thing’ is always forbidden, and thus, the true desire is. 

But how do we express that true desire in the world of languages, if not through language? Maybe, by pointing out to a particular ‘space and time’, which is devoid of desires: when and where that vague object, close to the actual one of our desires, is absent. Absent, but there are remnants of her undeluded presence in that futile coordinate of existence. She was present there, at a past which is too close to be past but too far to be present. But she is not there anymore. In absentia we silently point out to that hollow where our desires have left footprints of water. Not unlike everything else, we express our desire in relation to un-desire.

Evenings are those ‘space and time’. And the evenings are silent. Silent like concealed guilts. And they are dangerous, forsaken and chilling to the bone. But we all must pass through them.   

 

I have always wanted to make things mortal, perishable. And it was always sad when we ended the little game of ours, and pull our flesh back from each other’s pits. Once it was over, it used to be dark outside, and we could hear people coming back home, children are being called by their mothers, and I felt like I need to fall asleep as quickly as I can. But the evening, the pure lonely beast of a fallen woman, she would not let me. She would make me repent. It was like I was just born moments back, with a body touched by lust, failing to hold the wish of the Gods, failing Her. 

The days have turned into Evenings.   

 

 

Images: Wikimedia Commons