Author: diaryofaloneman

race (microfiction)

24.09.2025

It was eleven fifty five in the night time. I was still full from the dinner I had eaten at ten o’clock because I had been out singing with my group. Alfonso was sitting in another country. An expensive country for a holiday. I was writing to him:

Black was the night. At the end of a long day, I was coming home. As I came out of the tube station, shining in the lights was the red livery of a bus. Without thinking about it, I started running towards the bus station at full speed.

In front of me, quite a few paces in front, there was a young man. He had also started running. Now I do not like anyone being in front of me in a race. And this was a race. Why? I made it a race. Because I have an ego. I am a narcissist. And I am a narcissist because I live in a world that tries to devalue me and tries to tell me that I am nothing. And I fight against it. I refuse to be nothing. I am special.

I am not a narcissist like other narcissists. Because I am a narcissist for my community. For us. I am the champion of my people.

I was a schoolboy athlete. I won because I had the body of a god, nerves of steel and self-belief. My mind is stronger than anyone else’s. I am invincible, undefeatable. Even at my age, I am still quicker than most people.

And then, even though he had started so ahead of me, I was running past him. Now, it was me that was miles in front. I was the winner. I never doubted it. It didn’t matter how far ahead of me he was when he had started.

The difference between me and anyone else is that I will run to my very limit, even so hard that I feel nauseous and dizzy at the end of it. Because nobody else can bear the pain that I have had to live with. No one else is as hard as me.

You are wondering why I am writing this anecdote of these very real events. You are wondering why I race against buses on the streets to the next station. Because I love fighting. I love running. I love winning. I love a challenge.

I have always been the underdog. In India, they scorned us as Untouchables. In the United Kingdom, they treat me like an outsider even though it was my grandfather that first came to this country. I will fight until my last breath against the disrespect and hate that is given to my people and to Mother India. It is why my mother gave birth to me. She prayed for someone to save the honour of Mother India.

Even after a major leg operation a few months ago, there was no way that I would lose to that young man. People see the white hairs on my head and think my age has passed. I am still fitter than everyone, I still have more stamina than everyone and I still have more ability than everyone. You can’t beat good genes. My grandfather was a university level athlete. The top in his university. I come from farmer stock. My parents married young. It is hard to match the power in this body. It is not a boast. It is reality.

And I have been expected to be the best at everything every since I was a baby. And so I am. My ego is absolutely unassailable.

That’s why I win. I was born to be a champion and raised to be a champion. I was born to be Tiger and I am Tiger.

a single day (microfiction)

21.09.2025

A: What did you do today?

Me: Grew older. Walked towards death a little more.

A: It’s so refreshing to find you cheerful.

Me: Cheer. Jeers. Fear. Who knows when you will find them?

A: But to the question…

Me: One is permitted to meander towards it, no?

A: Come.

[claps his hands]

Me. Here is a list. And in order:

– reading the BBC news

– meditating

– light weights

– listening to new Hindi music while eating breakfast

– editing and publishing photographs (3 hours)

– juggling

– writing to friends

– fifty push ups, thirty stomach crunches, abdominal cycling with legs

– lunch of lentil curry and bread

– walk to the local shops

– grocery shopping

– phone call to friend

– job application

– five minutes on my exercise bike as fast as I could go

– gelato in the town centre – cherry, chocolate fudge brownie and white chocolate

– walk in the park

– learning Hindi songs for a performance in a choir on the walk back home

– browsing in the shops on the walk back home

– organising a trip to a comedy club with a friend

– writing a newsletter

– reading ‘Abroad in Japan’

– language learning of Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Spanish and French

– looking at art and photographs on Instagram

– sketching

– more writing

A: Another day of producing.

Me: With no result.

A: Why produce then? Why do anything at all?

Me: Krishna told Arjuna to do without thinking of a reward.

A: Are you Krishna? Or Arjuna?

Me: I am both. I am Karana too. I am Indian.

the fruition of desire: a philosophy (microfiction)

18.09.2025

Dearest Alfonso,

It was a certain time in the night. The thoughts would come.

But then, the mind rebelled against the absurdity of it all.

After all, what is the fruition of desire? Friction. That’s all it comes down to. Friction. Two bodies colliding against each other randomly, meaninglessly. That’s what we call sex.

It is absurd. However much you love someone, that is the consummation of your love. However much you connect with someone, that is the consummation of your connection.

Your whole adult life as a man you seek out the act. It is the prime motivation in your life. The act sculpts out who you are, who you become, what you want, who you want.

However complicated life becomes, however complicated society becomes, however complicated the brain becomes, at its kernel lies one simple rule: touch.

Beneath everything, in spite of everything, we are bodies. We are absurd. We are meaningless.

They like to talk about civilisation. What is the story of civilisation? Sex.

They like to talk about the arts. What is the story behind the arts, the story of the arts? Sex.

They like to talk about happiness. What is happiness? Sex?

And this act itself? Villified, misunderstood, cheapened, even, foolishly, resisted and deliberately prevented. In a culture of repression the act loses all of its beauty, its joy and its giving of joy, its ultimate significance as freedom and connection. I myself am almost succumbing to the false picture that they paint of sex.

The struggle is to retain a sense of the act’s urgency, its importance in life, the happiness of the act and its role in creating happiness and healing. Against the denigration of the act, against its attempted exclusion, its supposed meaninglessness.

The struggle is to fight against the construction of the act as a giving and a taking of power, as an abuse in and of itself, as not being important in its own right.

The struggle is to see the art as not absurd. As necessary. As light. As guidance. As the realisation of beauty in this world and all worlds. On the walls of the Indian temples are adorned the acts of love, the energy of sex. The power of union, the power of connection. The amalgamation of the divine feminine with the divine masculine. The meaning of being a god or a goddess. Shiva as the lingam. The Mother Goddess as the yoni.

when skin channels skin

when we just are

and stop crying virtue or sin

when the animal regains the flesh

then

then there will be no fear

then will come the freer

then the bodies will truly mesh

Poetically and prosaically, above all philosophically and loverly,

The Tiger.

who are you? (microfiction)

17.09.2025

‘Who are you?’ asked Alfonso.

‘Don’t you tell me that I talk too much about myself?’ I responded.

‘I am inviting you to dwell upon the subject. A straightforward question.’

‘I am a man named after a love story. I am a man named after honour and protection. I am a man named after a god. The god of love. All my names are the names of love.’

‘Even Tiger?’

‘Tiger is ferocious because Tiger has a big heart.’

‘Forget about your names. What are you?’

‘I am The Tiger. I am my enemy’s enemy. They say that you have to fulfil all your relationships in India. I fulfil them. An enemy’s enemy. A hero from the Sikh and Hindu community’s idea of a hero. From India’s idea of a hero. A fighter for the justice of the oppressed. An Untouchable.’

‘And what about the shadow? You are not all light, are you? You love to fight.’

‘What of it? It is for the good.’

‘And this hunger of The Tiger?’

‘Don’t be like them. There is nothing wrong with it. Don’t be deluded into thinking their way. They do not know how to live or love.’

‘You miss out everything. Do you not write? Do you not sing and make music? Do you not act? Do you not read all of the time? Are you not a poet?’

‘You did not ask me what I did. You asked me what I was. Yes, I am creative. Yes I am all those things, writer, poet, singer, music composer, reader.’

‘The sulking? The silence? The anger?’

‘You would want one that has been disappointed and never given his true value or what he should have been given to dance, laugh, clap his hands and cry tears of laughter? I am not a clown for their amusement.’

‘Any other thoughts upon what you are?’

‘Introvert. Extrovert. Sensitive. Callous. Quiet. Loud. Everything and nothing. All of these labels, categories. There is one constant. The Tiger is the warrior and the lover. Honest and loyal to the death. Braver than everyone else. Brimming with fire and heat. The power and energy of India.’

‘Vain. Boastful. Childish.’

‘Innocence is not childish. It is the mark of the brave and the honest.’

Alfonso clapped me on the back. ‘You have not said it all. I know there is more in you. I agree with you. You are a genius and an athlete. I have read your thoughts. You deserve to have whatever you want tossed at you. Remain The Tiger. One day there will be somebody on your level. And on that day, you will be recognised for your reality. They that pretend they do not know? They lie.’

puzzles (microfiction)

16.09.2025

‘The more you watch the games of other people, the less you understand. Rather than increasing understanding, age takes understanding away.’

Alfonso asked me if I was saying that the more people I came across, the less I understood them. Which seemed counterintuitive. Surely the more experience I had with people, the more I would be able to figure out what was happening in their behaviour?

‘But that is the assumption that the quantity of the interactions would increase social intelligence.’

‘Is that not a valid assumption?’

‘I don’t think so. Why don’t I understand anyone if that is the case? I know hundreds of people.’

‘But at what level do you know them? You are not in their personal life, are you?’

‘Exactly. There are certain classes of people that you interact with. Elders for instance. Nodding acquaintances. And then other demographics. No matter how many interactions there are, you will never understand. Because they keep you at a distance.’

‘Who is it that is perplexing you? And what are they doing?’

‘Why say? There are a few puzzles. And then there is a major puzzle. The puzzles can’t be solved without going into who they are.’

‘How do you know that you don’t puzzle them?’

‘I doubt anyone thinks much over anything that I do.’

‘Everyone is interpreted. Every action is interpreted as part of them. They think you are your actions.’

‘Are you your actions though, when all you can do is to play a role? Why do you think most of them are conformists? But let us stick to the topic. I am sorely puzzled. And my puzzlement only increases.’

‘It is good. Puzzlement is the modesty of knowledge.’

Still, the main puzzle was of incontestable significance. How to go about solving this particular riddle?

suffering and reading (microfiction)

15.09.2025

‘Instead of suffering, shall we have another topic today?’ Alfonso asked me.

‘Well then, what would you like?’ I responded.

‘Isn’t it more the case of what you think your readers would like?’

‘Is it going to be a question for a question?’

‘Why not?’

‘You would rather have a whole conversation as a question?’

‘Don’t you think it’s possible?’

We both laughed. Fighting and laughing. We did those things the best.

‘So, the topic I will introduce,’ I continued, ‘is reading. When I finished that long trilogy that I was reading, I did not manage to slip into anything else. I made a desultory few pages into a children’s picture book about animal languages. That one is on my library app on my phone. Life is so busy it is hard to read anything.’

‘Didn’t you tell me,’ Alfonso smiled, ‘that there was a certain someone that read everything that you wrote on your blog for two whole years? Every night. Why were they reading and how did they accomplish the feat?’

I ignored the question. I had a theory. But dwelling on such topics was dangerous.

‘I am speaking of myself. I don’t have the requisite tranquillity to read nowadays.’

‘You are lying,’ said Alfonso. ‘How do you get such good marks on your part time university course around work hours? You do seventy or so hours a week on work, maybe even more. And yet you are still doing the reading and getting good grades on it.’

Alfonso was good at cross-examination.

‘I am talking about fiction. Which is supposedly the easiest of reads. But it goes back to the beginning of this conversation.’

‘In what way?’

‘You wanted a different topic from suffering. But suffering is all there is in my life. Reading is a great pleasure to me. It has been since I was a child. I was a precocious reader. Later in adult life, I did an English Literature degree and then a PhD in that subject. To give myself time to read. Yet now? Because I suffer so much, I find it extraordinarily difficult to lose myself in a book.’

‘You blame suffering. Why not blame distractions?’

‘Do you really believe that my attention span has atrophied with these users of their smartphones? I still read more in one day than most people manage in a month. Psychology articles, newspapers, magazines, poems, posts about history, art and culture. I don’t touch the fluff that they degrade their minds with. You are fortunate. You do not suffer. And therefore you read.’

‘Perhaps you should read to escape suffering. To lose yourself in another world.’

‘Before you take a step

Look where your feet are

Before you take a leap

Find what you are anchored to’

‘I make the wish for you to read.’

‘I make the wish to discover life instead. Instead of living as the dead and the dying.’

con-nection

14.09.2025

‘Connection is a con’ I pronounced sententiously.

‘In what way?’ Alfonso had just been admiring a vase of flowers I had put together, with yellow gladioli, pink roses and then some purple asters. I had gone at the stalks with some Japanese pruning scissors which were one of my prized possessions. They made me feel like a professional florist.

‘Whatever human beings have done for connection, it has always led to disconnection. When they created a religion to tie people together, it led to wars of religion and separatism. The same with the state. In our time, they created dating apps to draw people together. All that led to is total disconnection. People have sickened from the dating apps.’

‘So disconnection is a constant of connection?’

‘Perhaps there is a history of disconnection. Perhaps it accelerated with the decline of religion which fostered a community.’

‘Evidence?’

‘There is an argument that newspapers fostered a new public sphere, a nation of readers. Now the newspapers are not even read much any more. More disconnection.’

‘Just because you are disconnected, it doesn’t mean that everyone else is. Just because you are not loved, it does not mean that there is not love in the universe. Just because you are not valued, it does not mean that everyone devalues.’

‘True. But, after all, we care about ourselves. We think about ourselves. When you are in a societal predicament like I am, it does not matter how far it extends outside of the bubble of oneself. One is still caught up in that situation and feels it.’

‘Do you ever say anything cheerful?’

‘What do you want me to say? I am not going to be a yes man for this sick society.’

When I had had my dinner today, a little bump had appeared on my arm in the bicep area. An unexplained circumstance on my skin which itched, and not a little. Out of nowhere, issues come and assail our body and our mind. Suffering appears without notice. It is our lot in life. My skin is pulsing with trauma. Two spots on my face have erupted recently. Old scars are flaring up, the one on my elbow. The skin is inflamed. I am fire and everywhere the volcano is erupting.

tiger’s teeth (microfiction)

13.09.2025

‘They could easily have killed you,’ Alfonso admonished me. ‘There were eight of them and one of you.’

‘Death before dishonour.’

Earlier on in the evening, I had gone to a singles meet up in Hyde Park. I had arrived and there was absolutely no one there at the meet up point. I had sat in the beauty of the pink skies in Hyde Park pondering on this as a metaphor for life in London. There is no connection. There is no hope of connection. Whatever you do is destined to fail. Other people do not exist. It looks like they are there. They are not. It is an illusion.

On the phone, as I walked back to the station, my friend speculated that maybe they had been scared of the Far Right riots.

Later on, when I walked out of my dinner at McDonald’s in Leicester Square, I got my own experience of the Far Right.

There was a fucking little cretin with a flag walking along with his dickhead friends. He took a look at me and pulled a face at me. He was trying to intimidate me because of my brown skin.

‘Fuck you’ I said aggressively to him.

Suddenly, from being the aggressor and feeling safe in his little crowd of fucking Nazi scum, this piece of shit was surprised. ‘What?’ he asked me lamely.

‘Fuck you you piece of shit’ I said loudly.

From being full of stupid insolence and cheap impudence, this little shitbag was suddenly full of fear. Because my body had gotten ready to fight. I gave him a look of absolute ferocity. They were not just words. But he had his piece of shit Nazi friends to try and impress, to try and give them the illusion that they weren’t little coward non-men united by hate with no balls.

He took a few steps towards me gingerly.

‘What the fuck you going to do about it you fucking dickhead?’ I bellowed at him.

Ridiculously, I heard someone say ‘You little sausage to me’. It didn’t surprise me that these uncivilised dicks couldn’t even speak properly. And suddenly, all of his friends were standing between me and him, protecting him from me. I think bystanders got up to get between us. Because they knew. They knew that I was The Tiger. They knew what was going to happen to that little bastard.

I walked off. I didn’t look back. I’m not scared of anyone.

Alfonso was still telling me off.

‘What are you, my mum?’ I asked him.

Alfonso took a moment to laugh. ‘You are wrong. You are throwing your life away.’

‘I was born to fight. I come from warrior culture. He was up in my face. I taught him a lesson. These little fucking cowards melt before a real man. They show their true colours. Nobody in this society can handle a real man.’

‘You are wrong,’ Alfonso said to me. ‘You are risking too much.’

‘All I regret is that I wasn’t able to teach him his lesson’ I said sourly. ‘I love to fight.’

To show face in an encounter is the badge of honour. I don’t get scared. I don’t back down. They back down. That piece of shit was trying to put fear into us. Fear into The Tiger? Impossible. There was no one to write this little account of war. There was no one to sing the legends. But do you know what? People in my culture prayed that they could become The Tiger. They prayed for the will, the composure and the ferocity. They prayed for just one chance to become The Tiger. But who actually was The Tiger? It was me. I was built to be a machine of war. They didn’t just call me Tiger. I called myself Tiger. I had my real name and my real identity. It hadn’t been taken from me.

And that’s why these little chickenshits were scared of me. Even if they walked around in a group of eight and I walked alone in the night. Because the sheep walk around in a fucking herd. And The Tiger? The Tiger hunts alone.

Wherever The Tiger puts his feet, that is his territory. The sheep don’t count. They don’t have a territory. This is my country. Not theirs.