the almost “me”!!

Silence!! There’s something contagious about that word. It grows, multiplies and conquers at a peerless pace. The way it floods around and chokes a crowd to muteness, is one of the least noticed acts of predation.

 A dark room shadowed by the grips of the long stinging tentacles of silence. The soft aqueous thud made by the ice cubes as it drown into the dark liquid, remained the lone notes of sonance that survived that hush rush. A scene full of moving shadows, sans faces or colors, and there were plenty of them. The more I stared, the more similar they seemed. A very uncommon genre of calmness hovered around. Every breathing nostril chanted the same hymn that “I’m alive this moment” and there were no added meanings or feelings clinged to it. It’s a rare piece of the world which is much simpler than the rest, where one action has just one essence with no further tributaries of complex explanations and interpretations.

“Why a pub is always so ill lit” a doubt that was born in me years before and still remaining hesitant to melt off. Now I feel it has something to do with man’s affinity towards “mistakes”. A word that has a peculiar pessimistic mark all over, stamped by ages. So it’s been said, passed and hence proved over the years, the notion that “the word MISTAKE is negative”. And I have no plans to rethink on this, but still I believe, no matter it is negative or not, man has an instinctive urge toward this word. He just loves doing mistakes. This is a corner for it, where people come to hang their “coat of niceties” by the side and then breathe out the sin within and it’s a long followed custom, to do bad when the lights are dim.

“MAAN…What was your favorite mistake” I threw my head in the direction from where that weird question sprung up. A shadow, one among the numerous clones that crowded the room, I couldn’t decipher anything more with my curious stare. I tried a trick or two by adjusting my glasses, to see if that can do some magic with the quality of the sight. A dark figure outlined by another strand of darkness, nothing more. I gave up on my effort to know more about the source of that statement, and started talking back to the darkness. “How weird…how can you put that two words together, ”favorite” and “mistake”. They just don’t gel up like that…too unlike textured words.” There was no notable reply from the anonymous shadow, noting more than a few withered bits of a sarcastic laughter.

Tough it didn’t grow and branch up to form some bright crafty talk, what it did to me was, it set my thought wheels rolling. “Favorite mistake”!!…do I have something like that. The more I pondered on that topic, the more it made sense. Most things that made me smile, and most things that I cherish about, somehow they all ended up belonging to the famous “DON’T DO LIST”. In fact, I have a list which is not too short, from which I can select my most cherished sin.

Either don’t care about the nature of your deed or be smart enough to frame crap theories to fool yourselves, the two roads that we all choose to get to our “loved mistakes”. In most cases, the later remained as my pick. If it’s called “right”, then do it, or if it’s called wrong, keep milling it in your brain till you find enough reasons to call it ‘right”. I guess we all do this, no matter how hard you believe in that famous right-wrong theory, the ultimate decision maker is always your “WISH”.

My fingers swept lifelessly over my ten day old beard, and my glare did a final roam around the room. Still it’s all dark and alien and I could hear that sound, carving out his own theories on mistakes. I wasn’t listening to it, but I had a silent thanks for him for that vague blunt statement which made my mind fume with some real new realizations. A faceless man has just appealed me with his madness. As the doors of the pub closed behind me, my mind was still rolling behind that shadow, for whom, “Mistake” was not another negative word. I know nothing about him, not even his face. And the only line that I have on him is.. he was…

“almost me”!!!!