Manu

Manu was a shaman, a psychic, a telepath, but his psychic condition was not his only torment. To describe him is as meaningless as separating two drops of water in an ocean. To articulate who he was is nothing less than a deep dive into his thoughts, and they were not at all coherent. It is simpler to say that he was bent. It was one thing to hear him recollect his encounters with other people, and entirely another to hear him talk about his contact with the spirit kingdom. He spoke with great paranoia because half of the time he was unaware of what might become of him. Sometimes he wouldn’t care what his own fate would look like. He was insecure because he was lonely. He felt lonely because even his most honest observations were invisible to the rest of the world. Manu kept a little black book with him at all times. He called it his companion. Tragically, the book could not prevent him from becoming what he was destined to become. Nobody could have guessed that he was destined to become something less than human. That black night, when the little black book came to life, Manu must have been in an unconscious state. It was that book which drew him out of a void that was eating away half of his soul. Nothing can be said with certainty about the state of mind he was in, though, because of how he remembered it; someone else was there in that empty room with him that night. He saw a shape in the shadow. He called it inhuman. As the shadow drew closer, its footsteps were clearly audible. Manu would often admit that many of his episodes were hallucinations. But that night, a chilling sensation had run across his body and held him in its grip. He said it had felt as if he had been bound by a rope, and the chair on which he was sitting trembled as if there were tremors in the womb of the earth. He said the room was dark, but the shadow had an iridescent aura around it. He said it had “the shine” of a diamond. Manu named it the Leviathan. He blamed himself for every episode. He believed that the Leviathan, which was nothing but a mental image of a failed state, had approached him with sinister slowness, and froze him with its terrifying reality. He didn’t wish to know anything about the Leviathan at all. It was his own suffering he was more interested in. How painful is it to be psychic! How utterly painful to be awake when the boundaries of space or time have been distorted! How miserable is the unconscious state of mind, and how incredibly lonely it is to be incapable of communicating the uncommunicable. But that night, when the shining force flowed through his mind and his body, he felt it leave its mark on his body with an evil grin. That grin, which belonged to the shadow, that appeared on Manu’s face, was meant to communicate that some great, irreparable damage had been committed against his soul. Manu said the possession left him with pains, aches, and a ghastly fever. When someone loses their will to live, fear of death becomes a natural consequence. His flaw was that he was a recluse and lacked any real curiosity about the material world. That night was the chaos this malicious spirit wished to normalise, making his soul self-sabotage and self-destruct. The shaman could neither wince nor twitch a single nerve. He was neither asleep nor fully paralysed. It was not a dream because this was not what dreams were supposed to feel like. Dreams have colour, and the Leviathan had the shining. On experiencing such psychic episodes, on most days, Manu talked to the little black book, and it led him to their triggering point, back to some lost symbol, or some mythical fable. But that night, even though he had no energy left in him of his own, it was the book which began speaking first out of its own will. Manu, being Manu, resorted to self-destruction. That night he wanted to find utopia. He could have laid his life for it. He found tranquillity in the thought of a life devoid of everything he ever wanted. He wanted to transcend his suffering. He had made peace with never asking for what he loved, and once the Leviathan had fully let go of him, he felt as still as stillness could be. Manu wasn’t a lunatic. Was the wailing spirit real? Maybe it was real, or maybe it was just a sign of his repressed desires for cosmic destruction. But then, from the abyss of that chaos, he heard the little black book speak to him in whispers that had neither origin nor end, neither rhyme nor reason. He did not recognise that language, at first. But as he held on, and once the terror passed, he saw the shadow crawl out from beneath his skin. It must have been something immortal, because, in the realm of the psychic, desires are never irrelevant. If the Leviathan had chosen to show Manu compassion, then surely there must have been some method to its madness. Else, how utterly absurd for any of this to have happened? How else could the Leviathan have wished to show Manu reality? Desires are often the subjects of expression, and the objects in question are almost always indifferent. Today, when I write this tale of what took place that night, both Manu and the Leviathan are still caught somewhere in the limbo, fighting each other with crossed swords in the distortions of space and time. Such is the damnation of the shaman called Manu.

After he gained consciousness, he was ready to cross swords with Leviathan again because it was in his character to revolt. Imagine, the torment! That night was different, though. The Leviathan did not wish to hurt him. It wanted to passivise him. It oppressed his primal instincts and rendered him helpless. It had only caused him disappointment afterwards, because there was no one else in that room but him. He would punish himself, but what was his crime? He couldn’t bear the weight of accepting work in the name of mercy and compassion. I was curious, though. Yes, I wanted to know why he would prefer extreme suffering instead of compassion. My circumstances alone torment me”, he would say, and he was convinced his circumstances were of his own creation. He did not even believe in the forces of the universe. It was already bad enough that he had been damned with the gift of intuition, that all his interventions too, he wished, would rise from his will. It damned all the rest of the consequences of his circumstances equally too. Sometimes, when the voices inside his head would get too loud, he said they were accompanied by a sharp, shooting pain in the left side of his brain where an untreated concussion had been sitting, something he had received from the push of an angry spirit from behind into the edge of his living room door. But the shadows never stopped wreaking havoc in his life. Manu never resisted them either. Though he did not believe in the existence of God, he was gifted with remarkable insight, and he would torment himself with philosophy. He wanted peace, not some absurd inner peace, but world peace. In life, when we are faced with conflict, we have a choice. What we choose is our character. All that we wish we had done is a shadow. It is our shadow. Sometimes, when we see the dark, we think there's someone there. Something that we cannot comprehend. But when that moment is past, we realise it was nothing but delusion. I still pity him because he was nobody. But I also dread him, because despite all his torments, he lived a life of good faith. He put trust in shadows because otherwise they wouldn’t have let him live. In a world crowded with poverty, his wealth was his real torment. Was he the only one to whom the nature of work in this modern world did not make any sense? No, I suppose not, because that is what he and I have in common. Manu was grateful, if not to God, then to fate at least, because he inherited what most aspired to achieve. But he believed that God was, after all, another one of humanity's greatest delusions, so he gave karma highest significance. We live. We work. This is our karma, he had said.

Manu felt insecure that night because his psychic abilities were no match for the brute force powering through the Leviathan. He knew no one was coming to save him. Had he not chosen the life of a recluse, maybe this tale would have had a different beginning. He was loveless and enslaved. His whole life was something of an absurd accident. But in a way, Manu's dharma was beyond life and death, beyond good and evil. His dharma was in becoming what he never thought he could become. But acts of grit and determination make a man who he wishes to be. Manu knew there would come a time when he would feel stuck in place and time, because he was speaking to the spirit kingdom. It might have appeared from a distance that he was talking to himself, but that was his slavery. That night he breathed as though he was counting his last breaths, and soon he had started to feel it wasn’t him breathing at all. Then he let go because he knew that shadows preferred to pass, that they loved to wander. Manu was just as stubborn as well, but his indiscipline, in some ways, could never resolve his lunacy. It was all so simple once these episodes would pass, but after that night, nothing could have remained the same as before, free from the complicated interpretations that spun in a disordered network of delusions; that was his existence. He tormented himself that night, because he never feared getting tortured by anyone other than himself. He sabotaged his story in the prose of the little black book because there must have been more than a hundred souls within him to wage war in the time of his vulnerability. Inside his head, Manu could not move from adharma to the path of dharma, because the cosmic order was conspiring against him, to turn him into an immortal master from a mortal disciple. The shaman had told me, on his way to the eastern highlands in search of the sun of a black night, that maybe it was God who had upheld an order in the disorder of chaos, and that everything, from the stars to the sun, reflected what God would will. But the sun hid itself from his life, casting an ever-long shadow over his existence. Even in that darkness, Manu could see what most could not see. Who am I, and how do I know what I know? Even the invisible and the silent are as clear as darkness in a mystical world. Certain roots cause certain effects to appear illogical because stories are never linear beneath the surface. The heart of a story is buried deep beneath the ground. It is suffocating to even remember how the story goes. Manu was not the flesh, and he was not the bones. His existence wasn’t even within him. He was in my imagination, in my paranoia, in my anxieties. He never talked to anyone about his world of ideas openly because his world was far from the utopia of his dreams. Whenever he talked to himself, he sounded like a book, like a good friend, and still, all he ever found was abandonment. He accepts it because he is a cynical pessimist, and that is exactly why I pity him. For some unknown reason, human beings think it's perfectly okay to leave abruptly; if they didn’t, why would they choose to go? And, as for the story, it is a real breakaway from the bondage to this boredom of existence, isn’t it? He lived a life of regrets, and yet never once attempted to retrace his footsteps back to those he loved. Manu never laughed at his errors. He took them all too seriously. He did not think this life to be a comedy of errors, but a tragedy. For him, after everything was set and done, where was home? That night, he fell from the grace of compassion into the depths of anxieties and frustrations. Manu would draw as much pleasure from restraint as he could, because he could never get too close to love. He philosophised romance, and maybe that is why he did not find love. Philosophy is a strategy for suicide, not for romance, he taught me. He said, “Life loses all of its innocence to a disturbing kind of shamelessness once the search for novelty sets in. Romance baffles us because it is the first thing we lose once we realise who we really are.” “Romance has lost all its novelty”, he had added to further distract me from the plot of his story. I remember he had also said that the renunciation of pleasure was the only way to accept those who live their lives without a worry for consequence. But from where has romance made its way into the story? So, one fine evening in the monsoons, Manu had gone walking to ease his anxious mind from the mundane matters of everyday life, when through the window of someone’s kitchen, he saw a mother teach her daughter, of about ripe age, how to cook. It struck him when he suddenly saw this that although what he had witnessed was customary in the Indian tradition, in modern life, in his city, this had lost all novelty completely. This wasn’t an encounter with spirits, but he could not easily let go of the sentiments showing on their faces as they bonded. The mother was stern, and the daughter was nervous. But it sparked in him the resolve to his torments. It sparked in him a deeply contemplative mood. He had been greatly tormented by a philosophical inquiry into the consequences of accepting compassion. But this episode reminded him how increasingly common it has become for human relationships to wane in ways that suit the virtues of selfishness instead of a romantic sentiment. 

We've built a closed world where our own privacy alienates and smothers us. How would life be if we could do away with our wrong perceptions? He had been inflicting great suffering on himself in search of a resolution to this philosophical inquiry, and it had made him super paranoid and hyper vigilant. There was something about what he had seen which he thought would bring him the noble truth. But there was, in all of this, an unacceptable self-importance that he could not justify with mere altruism because, under the shadow of a strange Leviathan, in an age when traditions are eating away the romantic sentiments in the human condition, an amateur independence of individual expression is being devoured by materialism. He thought about his circumstances, which had kept him tied down to the search for an answer to his long-time torment. He meditated on the question he once thought was unnecessary as if the answer would bring him life or death. But, possessed by the idea of novelty, he had already settled into the emotional richness of a hope that he might finally find an answer and liberate himself from the complexity of the philosophical question about accepting compassion. One thing had made itself absolutely clear to him: if he could resolve just this, the very reason for his enslavement could be defined and give his life purpose. Becoming had movement. Being had stagnation. Resistance had movement. Manu's torment was the imaginary disorder which he discovered every time he looked back at all the years he had lived with perplexity. He was a phantom seer, and he had to live in a world that was at war with both fiction and reality. Yet, he could not say which was enemy and which was foe. He was so terribly enslaved by his circumstances that he never wished to hide from any judgements. His manner was restricted and restrained, for he could not freely expend his character onto the lives of others without any knowledge of how modernity could fail so badly to mean anything more than an elaborate glitch in the spiderweb of lies and deceit. His dilemma was still confined to the logical development of his character because he hadn't a clue about the story in which he was playing a part. How can someone tolerate that his own character remains to him a very confusing mystery? He did not blame anyone else for how his own life would turn out, and although he was limited by his character, by the world of his experiences, he believed the human condition would always shape his perspective. The world he lived in had become increasingly hesitant to share with him a static reality on which he could shape any perspectives. Though he tried not to give up on kindness, accepting compassion thoroughly alienated him from his utopia because he, too, was a man of few words. He was forever in search of friendship too, but he did not have the luxury to express it; he had difficulty putting his faith in anything or anyone that promised to be real. His story cannot really ever be called a story because it is neither true nor linear. Manu's life was nothing but a paranoid monologue. Whenever any signs of life would begin to show, he would lose himself terribly in the fictional world of hungry ghosts. It might not be fallacious to think that he was an adharmi, a deceiver, because his existence and his strife were both birthed out of a lie told by his mother, and for him, she was the mother of all things. Then began the voice of the little black book.

“Wait a minute”, it said, “How dare you accept mercy when you know you have lost all innocence, that you are not fully deserving of mercy or compassion?”

"It is nothing of the sort", Manu thought. He had been aggrieved by the loss of all his ideals and dreaded any mental intervention of everything he had ever loved. There was pain in his voice and nothing but pain. "My mother was appalled. She did what she did bearing in mind what she felt was the best for her child. It was a mother's dharma to do what she felt was necessary to keep her son alive and to nurture him with what she thought appropriate". He seemed happy with himself for discovering the answer to the question which had caused him so much torment. 

“What about you, Manu? What is your 'dharma'?”

“My dharma is to honour my parents' struggle,” replied Manu.

“So, will you tell a lie every year?

“Does a piece of paper make something true or false?”

“But you testify, and that is what matters.”

“Humanity is lived above such petty accusations. Why make myth the foundation for humanity? We can arrive at the truth of each moment if we are willing to tolerate the differences in our perspectives.' Manu pauses for some time. He looks around uncertainly, then breathes deeply and continues with an expression of confidence. “It is true my parents bought this house. I was juvenile when it happened, and I had no say in the matter. My name appears in it, but being their son does not make me deserving of the fruits of their labour. I wish to make the world a better place, and that cannot be done through tolerance alone; to become worthy of executing punishments on myself for crimes not my own has somehow become my dharma. The struggle my parents once called their own has become my inheritance. My purpose is to tread the middle path which leads me home. Bricks do not make a place a home. It is the love and familiarity between the people within closed walls that makes a place worthy of being called a home.”

“Yes, but where you live, and the people you live with, have nothing of that sort but only dysfunction. Do you feel beauty? Do you feel love?”

“No, I do not feel any love. Neither do I feel any familiarity. But I do feel a sense of duty. Not even the passing away of my father could extinguish the light illuminating the dead end of my human condition. Beyond these borders, I take my flight of freedom. I am a messenger of peace, and my only prayer is that I keep my patience and my sanity, and remember that my purpose was always to make the world a better place. It is what I strive for every day. It is my paranoia alone that deludes me away from the right perception of reality. For the sake of my sanity, I have left in my heart an instinct for indifference towards the lie I tell every year. I am detached from the consequence, but at last I have realised the reason I tell that lie: that this is not my home. How the world might perceive the truth is a matter of indifference for me. If this is my crime, I am prepared to hear the judgement and my punishment.”

“Why do you torment yourself, Manu? You should resign, and begin again. Why do you torment your soul with such afflictions? I pray you, let go of vices and move towards the path of virtue and enlightenment.”

When he heard the little black book say what it said, his expression softened further into tranquillity. He had brooded often on the idea of beginning again.

So reaffirmingly he told the voice of the little black book what had been on his mind, “I am already on the path of virtue. I am told by this world how a noble man ought to be, and I am learning to walk on the path of letting go and renunciation. This is the only path that will lead me to the end of my tortures. It is true my soul weeps for my circumstances, but it also weeps for the state of humanity finds itself in.”

“Humanity seems to be indifferent to destruction”, the little black book continued.

“The world we live in has been swallowed whole by some disgusting sickness that does not seem escapable. But I must not deviate from the path this life has paved for me because I know if I keep going, I will erase some of the pain which lingers not only in my heart, but also in the hearts of others. I greet the morning sun and the shadow of the night with a smile because I know what my mind often urges me to take for granted is the happiness of my birth, and I am grateful to my parents for it. I have nothing of my own in this world, and I am right to declare it. If I momentarily forget to detach myself from any of the objects in my possession, then I am wrong, and my malicious intent towards other human beings must be addressed in a calm tone. I was very angry once, and I let that anger eat into my home. I lost everything because of my anger, but I must never let that happen again. That is why your enquiry about the truth may not be fruitful, because you are enquiring about my thoughts. I know that when the source of my suffering is brought to illumination for the world to witness, I will have to remember how the life and death of my father affected my grieving mother, and how its aftermath drove her to near madness.”

“Do you have any sympathies reserved for her?”

“No.”

“But then if this is what it was all about, why did you plant the seed of the Leviathan in your story? Where is the image of the failed state you promised?”

“It’s everywhere, and you’re looking at it right now”, answered Manu.

“Why do you still go on? What’s the need of it all? Why must you live at all?”

“I carry in me a seed of compassion, and I must not let it die. It was given to me by my parents, by the world, by my circumstances, by the natural order of all things in the universe, by the human condition itself. That seed of encountering the Leviathan was a mask I had to wear to enter into the realm of my reality. It was my rite of invocation. A terrifying curiosity is what torments me, and that is what I had to instil in the people who come to judge me.”

“None of this would have happened had a lie not been told at the time”, said the little black book in disappointment.

“I know, but this is not about me alone anymore. I am merely playing my part in the natural order of things. I will not break the logical argument even if it is born from deceit.”

“You’ve been deceived a hundred times, and how did it make you feel? Do you no longer care about consequence?”

“My mother was suffering, and when one person suffers, the whole world suffers. So, was it not the duty of the world to see her through the lens of compassion at the time?" Manu asked and then remained silent for a while in contemplation.”

“Are you not angry with her? After you did not have a happy childhood, and as you became an adult, she ruined your life by pushing you towards a life you have come to detest. Her fears and anxieties robbed you of your one true chance at freedom and love. Have you forgiven her for all the violence, Manu?”

“I was young then. Over ten years have passed since father departed from this world. It took me some time to see that she was suffering just as I was suffering. Yes, I exhausted my numbered days finding my way out of the filth that I find myself in, and maybe, if it wasn't for her, life would have been very different. Every breath she took resulted in life being a very specific way. When rigidity gives way, chaos reigns.”

“Then Manu, why has this life made you so lonesome?”

“Must be due to guilt and shame. Many acts of fate and destiny collide to birth beautiful gentle flowers of a romance. But that world of joy and happiness falls beyond all the suffering. I am lonesome because I have learnt to romanticise death. I wait for the end. My end!”

“I thought you were waiting for someone, Manu. I thought you were waiting for that woman you love.”

“She won't be coming, but my end will definitely come, and there is no doubt in my mind about that.”

“Maybe novelty might arrive; you never know.”

Then Manu replied immediately without a thought, "That is what causes me despair, that one day novelty might arrive. I always thought it was reserved for the young ones, and if I am to mature, I must give up on both youth and novelty. I have to become as long-faced as a man of this time can be. I would have to learn from the greatest novelists the art of rhetoric because, given the circumstances I find myself in, I cannot afford to lose sight of cynicism. I am a pessimist by nature, but a cynic because of my company, and how great a number of cynics roam free today. Our time is rife with cynicism, but my fatalism isn't cynical. This fatalism is my mother's gift to me, and she once confessed that the humanity within her is dead.”

“Are you a fool to not let cynicism overrule your dharma?”

“What is the need to procrastinate when it comes to dharma? One must only become aware of the human condition and one's own circumstances. Would the world stop to notice what I choose to do with the chaos of reality when it doesn't even wait or stop when death approaches at the door? My action will be right for me alone if I remember my reasons, and this is a good enough story for me. The story of Manu's dharma. My reasons are righteous, though my circumstances may have been born of deception. The story of the father who left an entire world behind for his son to inherit is only a part of the joys and the sorrows of my story. The story of the mother who spun a scandalous deception to nurture her son is only a part of her story. Gods did not birth me. The order of the cosmos is not my story to tell, because I give my life meaning, and everything outside the outlines of my life is nothing more than a lengthy tale to tell. My dharma is to see that when the truth is brought to light, I fulfil the duty of a son who has been summoned to defend the actions of his parents. To honour their lives is my greatest duty. I bow to them, not to false prophets. Yes, I know this turns me blind, but this blindness is the foundation of my impartiality, of my sense of justice, which I know might even criminalise me in the end. But the fact is that I have parts of my life I find abominable and detestable, and still, I do not deviate from the path of dharma. This is who I am destined to be, and as I outgrow the need to uphold my moral ground, I hope it does not seem immoral in your eyes. Would you say my sacrifice was righteous, and that I gave up worldly pursuits for honour, or would you say that the plague on Manu's dharma was his inheritance?”