Must finish writing this article tonight, I simply must. There would be no time to even think about Chola sculptures in the coming week. Ah… the peace of the night. It’s as quiet as a graveyard.

   ‘If the Pallava art in stone sculpture has an austere, ethereal beauty that goes far beyond the senses, the Chola sculptures reach us with a full-bodied, happy abandon that bursts out of the stones, as if it celebrates the very life in this world as a great gift granted. A fine example is the temple of Nageswara in Kumbakonam. On the southern walls are the voluptuous figures of the apsaras, the celestial maidens sculpted with an exuberance that leaps out of their faces, their shoulders, arms, legs, thighs, breasts, in fact their whole ‘being’. Collectively, they make a statement in sensuousness.’

   Sukumaran felt his eyelids press  him down, heavy with sleep. His hands went limp with exhaustion. If I let go of this now, I can’t even be sure if the day may dawn again or even if I’m going to be ‘me’, he thought.

   I’ve not been confirmed in my job as ‘permanent.’ I’ve been working with a  ‘temporary’ tag for god knows how long. Am I really tangible? It’s a doubt that’s eating into me, slowly unmanning me. I work for a whole day in office along with my colleagues Bajaj, Chandran, Pantulu, without being visible to anybody. Even the tables and chairs seem to be more solid than I. But I don’t know if they too think like me. When I’m getting blurred for myself, and I’m becoming rapidly unreal for myself, how come my doubts and disbeliefs gain their firmness and solidity, by what obstinate logic? How do they gather the force and the power to chase me so relentlessly?

   The top brass in the organization are much too secure in their positions to empathise that I’ve become sort of permanently ‘temporary,’ just doing all the undefined work dumped on my desk.

   ‘The dancing Nataraja in the temple at Chidambaram with an enigmatic smile on his face, drawing our eyes to speculate on its deep mystery. A smile that sends out different meanings each time one looks at it.’

   Are his lips moving now strangely, in Russian? “How can you tell a man who is wrapped up in warmth and comfort that you’re freezing and dying in the cold?” thinks the central protagonist in ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. How does it matter if I absorb it in English or ingest it in Tamil?

“Zeroing In”, Parijata and Other Stories