S: All that this world does is to cancel love. We are not allowed to love.
A: Anyone? Everyone?
S: Us.
A: I knew you would say that.
S: Why not tell the truth? If we dare to love someone, everyone stands in the way of it. The family. This society. The one that you love themselves. Years even of a lover’s endeavour for a refusal…
A: Forget love. It is a snare. You have done well to escape it. The tragedies of your love only appear to be pitiful.
S: The real snare is loneliness.
A: This love that you wish to end your loneliness, do you really think it will do so? Enjoy freedom.
S: The solitary freedom of a Crusoe. Without a Friday or love in his life.
A: Why has your love been cancelled?
S: Because of my freedom. My heart is too free for this world. The lover’s love is the love of the Revolution.
A: You have said this before. What do you mean by it?
S: The lover does not look at status. The lover does not look at race. The lover does not see another culture and despair. The lover does not follow convention or care about what anyone else thinks about it. He looks into the eyes of the loved one to find unity and connection across status, race and culture. The lover has humanity. The lover has the prize of love. And in this world of hate, separation, the oppression of unjust power and differences, in this world of inhumanity, the lover is the Revolution. Because the lover only loves. That is why his love is the Revolution.
A: You are not the lover. Your loves were all unfulfilled.
S: They could not stomach it. But you know, I am named after the god of love. He that came to all the women at once. The power of love itself.
A: A name is not an identity.
S: I disagree. I am love. The love that goes against the sword.
A: Love itself is a venomous blade.
S: I tell you I drink the poison. And I smack my lips at it.
Without a fault, that was what this duet of love was. Voice, perfect. Words, beautiful. Music, immaculate.
Then why did the song inspire such sadness?
Melancholy ran through the melody and his mind. In his life, there was no duet of love. In his life there was either a song of yearning and unslakeable thirst or a lamentation of grief. Out of all in the world, there was not one that would make the music with him, share the song.
These Indians, these Hindi speakers, what words of love they would sing. They would promise their life. They would promise their love the stars and the moon with her peerless radiance in the night sky. And his own promises of love? They had never let him fulfil them. Instead, them and their world had stood up against him, threatening to crush him if he expressed what was inside his heart.
But India knew this. He had known it himself. Still he had dared to love. He had had to love stealthily in a world full of hate. Dressed in black in the night, like he was a thief in mourning.
Difference does not find love.
Integrity and love do not hold hands.
For resolution there is no romance.
Desire does not dance.
The classic Hindi song and the classic Hindi film pursue one theme: love in and against a world of hate. This new generation with their inexperience and their betrayals mock the Hindi film and the Hindi songs. The traitors to love scoff at her, pursuing practicality, power and convention.
For those of the old world, for those full of love, loyalty and passion – even obsession – the Hindi love song is the template of ourselves. For our love, we can give our life. For our love, we can give the moon and the stars and the sun. What we cannot give is our honour, our promise. And that is what a world without honour asks for. But honour has been promised to the Mother Goddess. You can’t live without love but you can live without a love duet. It is poison. But we swallow it.
An unaccountable crash had deafened everyone on the bus. A moment of shock and surprise. Its origin unclear, a bastard noise.
The explosion had come when he had been getting off at his stop. He had been gloating to himself about how quick his journey from work had been. He had cleared it all in about thirty five minutes. The train had come exactly on time. And then the bus had come exactly on time. It had even stopped raining.
In the first few moments, while the public were immobile and dazed, the duty of a hero called. He was a man of action and a man of quick thoughts. He was the only real man on that bus. Investigation to see if there was anyone that needed help. Instinctively, he had jumped out of the bus and gone round to the back. Without knowing what had happened. It could have been a terrorist with a gun. In the eventuality, it was an expensive white car which had collided with the back of the bus. They were fine. Stupid and incompetent. But fine.
As he had walked home, he had reflected to himself that it is never the ones that are tired of life that die. The ones that are tired of life, they are preserved. Priam in the Trojan war longed for death and it would not come. He had to watch all the ones that he loved die all around him. It could have been so easy, so peaceful. A loud noise and then sleep…
Even the stupidity and ignorance of these people around him, their sheer incompetence, these things could not kill him.
It was just a fact that the hand of the Mother Goddess was upon his head. Nothing could touch him. So many incidents in his life. So many encounters. The blood clot. Assaults. Being mugged. The bombing of London. The sickness. She had given him the strength and endurance to last in this cold and hard world of enemies and suffering. He would always live to fight another day. Whether he wanted to or not.
S: When you think about it, there are millions of children that I am producing in a day. But none of them ever see the light of day.
A: And? It is the same for every man. You can’t regret potential for not happening. Everyone is full of potential.
S: Are they though? Is talent that common? I doubt it. But the point that I am making is that there are possibly hundreds of geniuses that I could be producing.
A: Here is this claim again. What qualifies you as a genius? Presumably you are saying that you want to pass on your intelligence?
S: Being able to see what no one else can see. I have proved it time and time again. Look at each of my publications. For these famous authors, they have been studied by experts for their whole life. And those experts still can’t see what I am seeing.
A: If you are such a genius, why don’t you have any recognition?
S: Racism. Ignorance. Difference is marginalised in this culture. If you can’t take my word for it, look at the studies that prove it statistically. The intelligensia in this country is one of the most racist in the entire world. Do you know why I was rejected from Cambridge? I passed the interview. It was my brown skin that got in the way. So they pooled me and eventually did not have me. It doesn’t matter what anyone says about it. That is what they are like. Full of racist shit. There is always the reluctance and the excuse. Any excuse. Exclusion on the flimsiest of pretexts. How many of those people they chose over me have published books and articles like I have? Exactly.
A: If you are a genius, don’t you owe it to the world to write?
S: I don’t owe this world of shit anything or anything to anyone.
A: You are squandering your talent.
S: Fuck these people. Let them drown in their ignorance. The gift is too precious to give to them.
A: Yet you told me that you are writing that new book, that colossal and earth-shattering book.
S: I will write it. Because one has been chosen to know all alone of the countless. Because one is a genius. Because a genius is proven by work, not by recognition.
A: If you are this genius, work out a way to pass it on. The waste if you are right…
S: I am working on it. In love, like in work, like in life, genius is not rewarded. Whereas ignorance…
Life had become a thing with thorns in it for many. A complicated and crushing thing. It was evident that happiness was only for the others. So now, the people did not want to live.
So they would go to the game of dying.
You could die any way that you wanted to. For a moment, you could feel the ease of death. Just for a few pounds. You could escape this thing called life and this trap that was the world.
The game of dying promoted itself as moksha, the Hindu ideal of freedom and departure from the chain of being and constant rebirth.
The downside was that even after dying, you had to go back into the world.
You could choose how you wanted to die. Poisoning. Being stabbed. Burning.
First, I started off by being poisoned. After all, was this world not poison that one had to swallow? It was exceedingly painful. The throat would swell up, there was severe nausea. It was hard to breathe.
My next death was the revolver. I would sit there with it, staring into the barrel of it, completely focused. I would forget about all the many problems and the unfulfilled cravings, of the friends and loves that had betrayed me. Then when I pulled the trigger, the beautiful oblivion…
But now, the death I chose every time was burning. It was the most painful death. Excruciating and unbearable. The most intense death.
They would watch us. The ones that had led us to death, they came in droves to watch us. The ones that had taken all the happiness would watch, eating popcorn, smiling at each other. It was an amusement for them and we were their clowns. They had always watched our suffering and poured petrol upon us while we burned. That was how the world went around.
He was known for work. But why was he known for work? Why did he work so much?
First of all, there was the empty ache in him. No one had come to fill that space. So he crammed it in with works. Time yawned open unforgivingly. The loss of her and the family that there would have been… There had to be some substitute, some forgetfulness in the work. When he was not working in culture for money, he taught, wrote, photographed, drew, painted, sang and acted. When he worked, he always had the desire to meet someone through that work. He did not. So he kept on looking and looking. So that was why he was the maximalist for doing.
Secondly, there was the relentless energy. No one had come to claim that energy. So he crammed it in with works. And still, despite that, he could never get tired. So that was why he was the maximalist of doing.
Also, the ambition. To be someone. That monstrous ego. To be everywhere, to be god upon this earth. To shape the world in his own imprint. Ambition was a monster that had straddled his back. The self belief: I am one that will live eternally in my name. Not just for himself, for his people this ego, the ego for the Oppressed that had been crushed into the ground for thousands of years. To be their champion, their light and guide.
Then, there was the background. A father who had always been working. A family who had always been working. His working culture background. A family and a culture that always kept busy and productive. That had worked as farmers and shoe makers. A background of hard, labourious work. So that was why he was the maximalist of doing.
And what about the commitment? The desire to change the world. The desire to contribute to society. The desire to be a productive member of this reality. To not just take but to give.
Do not forget the money. To have those savings. To always be ready to provide for a family. Money not for the self but for the family which never came.
And what did he get from the work? Did Sisyphus cry? When you move the rock up the mountain and never succeed, do you cry? Does the maximalist of doing ever cry? He did not cry. He could not. But he wanted to cry. His life was a punishment for some grave sin. He did not have the happiness of undoing, only its tragedy. Because the more he did, the more he was undone.
They wanted to liberate the people from love. But instead, they were liberating them from their humanity.
In this era, online interactions had replaced real life ones. It was no longer fashionable to date in the pool of people that you knew. The desire was for the stranger because the grass was always considered to be greener on the other side. And the stranger was appealing because prolonged human contact was no longer desirable in and of itself. Superficiality reigned, not deep knowledge of someone. That was what was undesirable. Knowledge was regarded as poison, ignorance as bliss.
As a result, the online dating companies grew and grew in wealth. Love was an industry. It had always been an industry. The Victorians would sell off their women to the highest bidder while canting about love in their triple decker romance novels. The royals had always looked at possessions for their matches.
To preserve their wealth, the dating companies needed their users to be always single. Or only to be in a relationship briefly. They decided to make it so that it was so. It was the grand conspiracy against love.
They took their cues from the world of work. They taught the people that everyone was expendable. You could just throw away someone when you had had enough. They taught the people that the most important thing in life was to be independent. So that the people could never tolerate being in a relationship or endure being connected to anyone. They taught the people to be selfish and grasping. So that they could never be in a genuine relationship with anyone and to give rather than to take, to give their whole heart without ego. They taught the people that there were only workers. Not lovers.
So there was no longer any love. I watched the bodies move in a loveless world. A sordid, practical world of money. I was all alone. Everyone was all alone. Just like the book, it was a lonely planet.
‘Imagine there is a lie,’ I said to Alfonso. ‘A great lie that you are told, that I am told, that we are all told. A lie we have all spent our whole lives trying to obtain.’
‘Is this a riddle?’ asked Alfonso, looking over at me from above the pages of his magazine. Again, it was just us at the end of the day. In the lonely night, he was the only one there for me. The only one to say the things of the heart to. My most intimate friend.
‘It is no riddle. The lie is connection.’
‘Absurd. You have friends. The obvious example is before you. You are connected.’
‘Real connection is romantic love. It is the highest order of connection. Romantic love is the highest form of connection, whatever form it takes.’
‘Some people have romantic love.’
‘Not people like me.’
Alfonso tutted at me. ‘It is the case,’ I continued. ‘They lied to me. They said to become something and you will find real connection. They are all fucking liars.’
In a patronising tone, Alfonso asked me how that made me feel.
‘I have learnt not to trust anyone. So now there is no trust in my life.’ Tut. ‘I have learnt that there is no connection with anyone. So now there is no connection in my life.’ Tut. ‘I have learnt that there is no warmth from anyone. So now there is no warmth in my life.’ Tut tut.
‘You are suggesting,’ Alfonso said, ‘in your wallow of self pity, that you are a meaningless, isolated atom that is removed from the whole of humanity. When all you do is build communities around yourself. You have literally hundreds of people that you know. If it is the case that no man is an island, you in particular are no island.’
‘They are all strangers.’
‘Because you can’t fuck them?’ Alfonso asked incredulously.
‘There is no need to downgrade the sexual act. That is real connection. The chemicals that it creates. Its alteration of the mind.’
‘You only feel lonely in the nights.’
‘We only talk together in the nights.’
‘You are not lonely.’
‘When I lie in my bed alone in the night time, I feel the loneliness of death.’
‘Love is heartbreak. Love is sorrow. Be thankful you don’t have to have your heart broken every minute.’
‘What do you think this world has done to me? Why do you think I am like this?’
We sat in silence, ruminating on things. It was past eleven in the night time. Soon would come the witching hour.
Absolutely superb. That’s what the weather was like for the long walk. I met up with my friend at Newbury station and we bundled ourselves onto the Tube at nine o’clock for an early start on the day.
In the morning, it took about the same time to get into Chigwell as it would take me to get into Central London for work due to a change at Hainault and a long wait for the next service. On arriving at Chigwell, I was struck by the beauty of the place and the grandeur of the big houses out there. Really a dream destination to live in. Chigwell is called Chigwell because the name derives from an Anglo-Saxon personal name, ‘Cicca,’ and the word ‘well,’ meaning “Cicca’s well”.
We came across some beautiful horses but I couldn’t get a good shot or composition. I have a personal ambition to ride a horse but haven’t got round to it yet. It is a very modest and achievable ambition but I am always too busy for it.
Almost at once, we came to a beautiful view and the farmlands. I had already got out my camera and was trying a few shots. As I did so, we came across some fellow walkers and they told me and my friend that they had been doing the walks on the London Loop for about two years. They were finally going to finish off the walk today. It was an old father with two young blonde daughters, one of them wearing a red jacket and looking somewhat like Red Riding Hood.
As we trailed after them when we were ready and they were already in the far distance, we worked out the percentage of weekends they had committed to their mission as we were arguing about how committed they were as walkers. If they had taken two years for about twelve walks on the London Loop, that would work out as them having invested 6% of their weekends on the trips over two years. I maintained that that was quite committed but my contrary friend disagreed with me.
My friend is a birdwatcher and I was trying to one up him by spotting more birds than him. I got a robin that he hadn’t noticed and felt quite chuffed but then he showed his experience and expertise in this subject. He spotted a woodpecker, a brilliantly yellow coloured creature that I had never seen before. It was winging its way through the air. He also spotted some buzzards and regaled me about the story of the corpse of one he had encountered recently as roadkill. On the trip, we saw about nine different species of bird, so it wasn’t a bad day: peacocks, hens, Egyptian geese, robins, a white egret, the woodpecker, crows, some little ones I forget the names of and seagulls and magpies. So for birds, it was certainly a great day.
It was a delight to stop for elevenses at precisely eleven on a little bench in the woods as I had a Dairy Milk with me. I shared the chocolate with my friend. I was watching the birds fly into the trees. A Dairy Milk always reminds me of the war. Probably it is because Roald Dahl, my favourite author as a boy, mentions being a taster for Cadbury’s chocolates in his biography and he fought in the war.
Around Chigwell and its forest, we came across an Islamic chapel with Christian gravestones in the garden which was quite an example of religious amalgamation. We didn’t go inside but looked at it with intrigue from the outside wondering what it was.
The next phase of our walk was Hainault Forest Country Park which is not too far from our local area. Hainault Forest was an old royal hunting forest. I had gone there many a time with the family. We saw the two daughters with their father there and I shouted out to them that ‘it wasn’t a contest, but…’ and they all laughed which was pleasing. They were sitting on a bench looking out at the lake. We kept on walking and didn’t see them again and probably won’t in this lifetime.
Hainault gets its name because its original Old English name, recorded as “Henehout” in 1221, meant “wood belonging to a monastic community”. The Abbey of Barking owned Hainault Forest. The name’s spelling later changed because it was incorrectly associated with Philippa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III.
We stopped for a hot drink in the cafe and it was absolutely chock-a-block with young families. So we sat outside. Lazily, I watched two brightly coloured aeroplanes flying about in the sky and the families with their dogs all making their usual Sunday walk around the park. I was telling my friend that I should buy a dog so that I could also talk to the dog people.
After that I persuaded my friend to go to the farm and look at the animals. The goats were all butting heads with each other and the peacocks were sunning themselves. I got a few okayish shots on my camera as the light was quite good but missed a dramatic fight that the goats with brown hides were having as people had stopped to watch them and I didn’t want any people in the shot.
We walked through the golf course next and then we were back in the forest and in the farmland and then the forest again. There was a rough swing rope that someone had put up in the trees. The only way to get to it was up some precariously placed logs, so it was a challenge of balance. I climbed up it childishly and recklessly. It was only a few feet off the ground but felt like I was walking in the atmosphere and slipping about. I managed to get to the swing rope with my hands but then there was no way to get any momentum to swing about! I had almost fallen off once, but only once. And I hadn’t. So man nature was appeased. My friend shot a video of me doing it.
When we had walked through an enchanted pine soaked place with a delicious scent, I decided that we should stop for lunch. I had brought chicken satays from the reduced aisle with me and the scent was too much. Because we were accosted by two dogs that wanted to partake of the feast. The first one was a giant and was very forward and slightly menacing. Two young boys had to run up and grab him by the leash to get him away. The other dog was a black miniature hound and his owner, an elderly lady, said that he was ‘incorrigible’ as she rushed off with him.
After the forest, with its beautiful light and soothing smells and ambience, and after watching the little trickle that was the river Rom, the next thing, we were sitting in a pub called The Deer’s Rest which was in Romford itself. The whole pub was tricked out in Halloween decor. I got us some drinks and downed an ice cold Pepsi. It was absolutely delicious in a way that Cola is not always. My friend told me that I had worked enough so my body was rewarding me for the work with that delicious sensation. He said that he was having it with his drink as well. The pub had this wallpaper of framed butterfly specimens and it was something that I quite wanted for myself as I thought it looked very sophisticated and cool. And much nicer than real specimens of butterflies which I have always found slightly creepy. Because they are dead beauty.
We walked on through the beauties of nature talking about life, the universe and everything. At some point, we found ourselves in a park. I was keen to watch the young people at the skate park but it was disappointing. They were not doing any tricks! The kids were quite young, but then that Olympics gold medallist had been about thirteen. As we progressed through the park, we came across a father at the top of the slope throwing around a brightly yellow coloured glider aeroplane towards his son. The son was babbling away at us as I remarked that the dad had made a good throw. It was a really touching scene of family and its happiness, the joy of children.
The last stretch of the walk took us to Harold Wood. The name Harold Wood refers to an area of land associated with King Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. It was about four o’clock. We had initially decided to do a bit more but decided to pack it up before the light started going and we’d done about thirty thousand steps. It was about eleven miles well spent.
‘You don’t have any self-control’. Alfonso commented.
‘On the contrary, I have the most in the world.’ I responded. He was always accusing me of something or the other. Everyone was always accusing me of something. That was all that I was to them. Someone to accuse. Well, I accused in my turn. I accused them.
‘In what way?’ Alfonso asked incredulously. ‘You have fallen in love with women that are not even your type just because of close proximity to them. Several times.’
‘Have you not read Proust’s magnum opus?’ I asked. ‘That is how they get you. Through the proximity. You are assured that you are safe. You are not.’
‘So how do you have any self-control?’
‘Because even though I loved them, I did not even touch them.’
‘That is not your self-control,’ Alfonso sneered at me. ‘They did not let you touch them.’
‘You should be around beauty all day and not get a taste of it,’ I said to him. ‘Then judge me.’
Alfonso snorted. ‘Let us chisel past that front. What original thoughts did you have today?’
‘There is an author who has written a new book about how we know what everyone knows, how common sense is created. It is the mark of a philistine and a mediocre Western mind that this book was written. Because their conceit is to always talk about a positive form of knowledge when it is not knowledge at all. Socrates knew that. Here, common knowledge. What everyone knows. In fact, common knowledge is just a form of ignorance. It is what the fool knows. The wise man is the one that knows. What is common knowledge? That you should pour wealth on yourself like excrement to be considered attractive and influential? That education is worthless? That hate sells? Why do you think that living piece of shit Trump and that specimen of rancid ear wax Farage are in the ascendency? Because they know what the scum think. And what the scum thinks is ignorance, lies and stupidity. That is all that they can accept. Not love, truth or justice.’
‘You are full of hate,’ Alfonso commented. ‘Even more hate than they are.’
‘This poison that is in me,’ I said. ‘It will kill the evil in this world.’
‘You will choke on it,’ Alfonso said. ‘You are the only one that will be hurt by it. Come, forget this. Something else.’
‘How about this for a thought? What is this garbage?’
‘What do you mean? Alfonso looked at me keenly.
‘This life. It is garbage. What is this garbage? Even religious people want to escape this life. The Hindu wants to escape the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation. The Christian, the Muslim and the Jew want to go to heaven. They want to die rather than to live.’
Alfonso shook his head at me. So what? It was the truth. Nobody wanted to live here. Look at this fucking garbage that they had made. Alfonso was asking me about original thoughts I was having in this fucking garbage. The stench of it was making me sick. The sight of its ugliness was denting my mind and my eyes. Its extent was polluting the whole of society. And Alfonso wanted an original thought from me that wasn’t cynical and jaded, weary of this fucking garbage. All there was was this fucking garbage. And when you pointed out the garbage, nobody listened and they tried to attack you. That was the triumph of the garbage.
diary of a lone man 