Nameless in a Faceless City by Prakash Kona

Table of Contents Part 4 appeared in issue 151.

part 5 of 6

I was terminated from existence by an orgasm made of light. Death was another aspect of the orgasm. I lived in the light because I had to see the body I made love to. Visualization was a weight on my soul. Why did I have to visualize what was real? Visualization was secondary to the experience of reality. I experienced the real as the real. I owe this to nights I walked on pavements from where I could watch traffic lights flickering in the dark.

Picking a woman is an art that has to do with the motion of eyeballs. I could communicate with rolling eyeballs from a remarkable distance. I desired women whose faces exuded innocence. I picked them up with rolling eyeballs and inhaled them into rising fluids of my eyes. I enlivened the days of a child. I saw him in a mirror when I was five. I never looked into his eyes. They were in the habit of asking questions for which I had no answers. Smokey caves were brothels of my imagination. I picked up straws to make a person. But the person fell. There were fires and I burnt not too easily. I was straw.

What could I do with a world that meant nothing? This city is an old man on a life support system. I am the narrator who pries into the body of the man. Is he made of dust or clay or nothing? Nothing, most likely! I was seeing nothing with my eyeballs. They had glue in them. They picked imagining women and bound them in imaginary caves. I was a master before I was a slave. I was a boy before I became a man. I was a woman and I chose to be a man. Random occurrences. Days are reduced to ashes of light. Light rebounds as the face of a lusting woman in the heat of the city.

The man who missed the orgasm became a conqueror of lights. I walked when there were no lights anywhere in the city. It was not dark either. I could never understand where the body started walking from and where it was destined to go. The body rolled along like the eyeballs. It picked nothing. Women refrained from this body. It was the body with strange eyeballs that could pick up any woman from anywhere. That body belonged to hot eyes of the narrator. In effect the eyeballs controlled the rest of the body. The body was a slave to rolling eyeballs.

I am enslaved to bodies of women. I looked for innocence when I looked for nothing. I got grapes in return. Grapes in a bottle in the form of wine. If wine is a form of grapes I am a form of femininity. I must have access to spaces denied to men. As a narrator I am allowed to go into nights of women’s bodies. There is something I am not told. In Bombay you know the women. You don’t know that you don’t know them. You think you know them.

I learnt the art of forcing myself upon stones. They cracked when I put my teeth against their hardness. One night I wore the clothes of a woman and went to bed. I woke up feeling like one. I touched my face. There was a slight trace of hair on them. I was mesmerized by the new role that my body had assumed. I was wildly ecstatic. I tore the bed sheet and pillow into shreds. I fell exhausted after a while.

I had a nightmare that I was flying. Wings were made of linen. They smelt like fresh lemons. I flew through galaxies. I woke in the nightmare. It was beside my mother’s grave. She sat quietly on the tombstone. I wanted to fly. My wings broke down. I could not see her face. I heard her voice. It warned me of things to come. I tried to run. With horror I realized that I was sinking. When I woke up I had the feeling of having walked out of a swimming pool. The narrator referred to his story as: works of torture.

Works of torture. It took one body to destroy my world. He could have been the son of my thighs. I was tortured by the image of wings coming out of the anus of the city. Anal city. It deserved to be raped until it bled to death. In all innocence I blamed the nose for the morbidity of my soul. The nose smelt too much. Merely because I had the orgasm that did not entitle me to be narrator of the story. I fought for that privilege. I wrote with a pen that had a blade attached to it. The paper suffered in agony.

My words were blood. The paper was the body of a lover. I spared no one that loved me. Blood was a proof of unconditionality in love and narration. I forced the page to bleed words. Words that were intrinsic to the page crept out like red ants from an anthill. The virginity of the page was lost. My manhood was stigmatized by femininity of the city. Its legs were open and high in the air. What I took I never returned.

That was an old habit of mine. It goes back to first days of memory. I played with myself. I thought I was not being watched. A teacher at school observed me from a distance. She saw what I was doing. She almost beat me to death. Years later I justified her. If she killed me forgiveness for her would be written in my blood. She was purer than the air of the city. I acknowledged it. She inspired me with an attachment to femininity. The teacher at school. Mother-like. Stimulated by torture I tortured the bodies of my lovers. I stimulated desire in them and waited at a distance. Quietly I watched them suffer. I recollected the body of the teacher. I took her fragments and went to a hotel room where I could have my orgasm in peace.

The wind in distress. I marvel the patience of tigers. I could never wait for an imaginary second. I plucked a thorn from a bush and used it for graffiti on government buildings. The liquid in the bucket was my blood. It had the color of the bucket and not my body. My blood is a derivative. I wondered if I carried something of my mother’s menstrual blood in my body. My mother gone, what am I. The universe in its eternal menopause. I carry the discharge of the vagina in my blood. I am rotten to the core. That was a joke. Writing writes itself out the way a razor wipes out the hair of the face.

What have I written that I should feel ill all the time? Sensuality is an idea for the consumption of the senses. Consuming an idea is the job of the senses. My eyes that view naked streets are made of the idea of nakedness. Without naked bodies streets are immaterial. Naked bodies and immaterial streets occupied the senses. Nakedness is produced in my eyes by an external force. The lingering idea of nakedness.

My blood is derived from the idea of sensuality. It is neither literal nor metaphorical. Immaterial is my blood in an immaterial city. Sensuality makes it go day and night. I sleep but my blood is awake creating naked desires. I must live life to the last minute. I must exhaust the blood of my body and replenish the same body with ideas of women.

The waking state is closer to the universal rather than sleeping and dreaming states. They are extensions of the waking state. The universe neither sleeps nor dreams. Unlike my blood it is literal. It cannot be metaphorical unless my blood offers to charge the dying batteries of the universe. The sensuality of the idea charges the stars. The universe is one big blot of darkness without the idea of sensuality bringing colors out of the dark.

City of revelation. There is no city. Only a revelation. Bombay reveals to my blood the idea of sensuality. The idea is not me. Sensual city. A man I am who becomes a man in the body of a woman. The sensuality of the city takes me far across seas. I confront the devil of my sensuality. Like God sensuality is infinite. It infuses my breath without complaints. Mint in my mouth. I objectified a state of mind. The city was a state of mind for me. It can be understood in language. Words are vital for the existence of the city. My senses are extensions of words. My words are reflections of sensuality. My senses mediate between words and sensuality. They are bridges of destiny that connect fires of sensuality with houses of words. A city of burning houses. Permeated with objective narrators. The orgasms keep coming. Life is not ours but time is there to be filled. I die and I am still nothing.

When the train leaves Victoria Terminus station that connects all railway lines of Bombay city I get the feeling of stepping out of a deep cave and the light waiting to garner me. Streams of light on the morning that I leave. Stones beside railway tracks receive that light. It is a yellowish bluish creamish light that happens in mornings. Out there is a world. In here is me. I will not let the world outlive me.

Tunnels. The earth is a tunnel that connects the horizon with the sea. Shyly I watched the horizon spread its hands across the lukewarm belly of the sea. The sea responded with ticklish passion. It rained heavily that afternoon. The streets were full of water. Children played in those waters. I must have been a child. I recollect losing a shoe in those waters. I cried that my mother would be terribly upset. I longed for words to cure my pain.

My lips said no but my heart missed the blare of morning train.

Narration takes from reality what it does not give to reality in return. Reality pays the price for narration to emerge. The process is called objectivization of reality. Reality is a gray viscous fluid that flows down the hill toward the river. I am wet with reality while I speak these things. The narrator is as real as the orgasm of a dying pig. I am not the narrator. I give reality what is really mine. The dream to touch the bare bottom of a harem slave in a palace of nerds.

City of ideas. One idea grips me. Narration for the sake of narration. Narration for the sake of the idea of narration. The ideal of narration. The narration of the ideal woman and the sensual man. I am older than the city. And wiser than the wisest. I can count the beads on the neck of an imaginary woman. I am not thinking of beads. I am concentrating on the neck of the woman. My hands are pitiless when they take what they take. I take the light from a bulb and use it to warm my genitals. Warm genitals produce sweet sensations. Orgasms produce exclamations of fun. I feel funny when I think of them.

Serenade in a seraglio. The candles of night are about to disappear to let the sun of day come in. Another morning but same life. The city is my concubine. My right foot rests on the body of the concubine. She has the power to tantalize. I depend on her presumptions to give her self unconditionally. I can offer what I do in a state of orgasm. I offer the gift of narration. I write with my foot. The body of the concubine perspires. If time is a man the times cannot change the lives of men. I vociferously fought other men when they dared to come near this concubine of a city.

Men of this city. City of men. Bombay made men of us all. The milk of the mother was secondary. The breasts of the concubine were ponds of fresh dew. Water does not satisfy me. I had drunk enough of milk. I wanted breasts that produced wine. With a fixation for an imaginary mother I made claims over breasts of the concubine. Cities are whores in the eyes of men. To my body Bombay is a concubine. I protect her from strange looks. Changing times will not affect my view of things. For an aging author of a dying story I am unbelievably serene.

A disconnected city. City of disconnections. I prized whatever I picked along the way. Without doubt they were bodies. The moisture on insincere lips makes me come with joy. The traitor’s lips are sweeter than life.

I am possessive about breasts. Sometimes about lips. The lips my lips intruded are untouchable. The breasts my eyes kissed are closed to eyes of mankind. I die with lips sealed to breasts of a woman. I am ambivalent. I carry the loneliness of an adventurer in me. I am not an exile. I come in bed at home. The city lies prostrate. I come like a goat.

Coming and becoming. My life is a circle. In the dark I am a straight line.

Before I die I want my lips to be touched by a man whose lips were never touched by a woman. My soul purified of longings. I want male lips to take me into their selve s. To wash me. Rinse and dry me. I reach heaven to be kissed at the doors by the gods.

To be continued...
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Copyright © 2005 by Prakash Kona