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It all began with a yawn. A yawn which has always been like a smile. The perfect non-being that spreads across your face. And for a moment you forget yourself. As if you had no past. Or memories. Now, before you start thinking too deep on the association, let me just set them apart. For the truth is that no one had ever smiled within a yawn or yawned within a smile. They could never go together like laughter and tears can. A smile and a yawn, therefore, are always isolated from each other. The way I never want it to be. And ways (I wish there were any!) in which I could change it. But the order of this world is too rigid and….. Wait a second! He realized, right at that instance, that the order of the world could be changed just as easily as his father’s lessons to him – All one had to do was shake his head in a desperately cruel sort of way. Yes, yes, I’m quoting a line from the 2nd chapter, but don’t you see that’s all I need. So, I’ll just shake my head “in a desperately cruel sort of way” and let the tale begin, once again.

It all began with a yawn and a smile. Together.

Before he was to be born, the doctors had promised Dubleu’s mother that she would have a pre-mature baby. She had anticipated this and the doctor’s words assured her of the same. But then, she kept on anticipating with Dubleu showing very little intent on springing out of her belly. Almost too comfortable in there. As for his mother, she, like all would-be moms, wished to take him in her arms. Tending him.

For about a month she sat beside the window waiting for Dubleu to move. To show her the intent of breathing the free air. And he showed none. And she waited – staring outside the window. It was almost as if Dubleu would come tracing the long, straight road that led to their home. She waited.

After about a month there were the first signs…. No, not of Dubleu’s homecoming…. The first signs of her exhaustion. The intermingling of tiredness and boredom. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t slept all this while. And therefore, she decided to yawn.

And Dubleu decided, too.

That morning when Dubleu woke up inside her belly, for the first time he didn’t like it in there. It was dark and claustrophobic. Well, it had always been dark in there – In this world where he lived. But he remembered that there used to be lots of empty spaces. Lately, this world had shrunk. Its darkness had become darker. And as he thought further he imagined there might be more empty spaces outside this world and who knows, maybe even a lesser form of darkness? And being just the over-optimist he was about to become, he decided to knock on the walls of this world, hoping that someone out there would listen to him.

All this while, Dubleu had thought of himself to be an atheist. He believed there were no super-natural forces guiding his life. And of course, there was no species that one might call – ‘un dieu’ – A God. The reason of his life was simple. He had an existence because he existed. No more, no less. That was before today. Today he felt a strong urge to believe that there were forces outside…. Maybe, even a god.

And so he knocked. Hard.

His mother had just began to yawn, when she heard the first knocks. Yes, it was certain there was movement. Not having enough time to complete her yawn, she started to smile inside it.

When Dubleu was born the first thing he noticed was ‘the lesser form of darkness’. And not only was the darkness so less that it hurt his eyes but had an even stranger property – ‘Variation’. You could differentiate one part of the darkness from another. Slowly, he kept learning that these variations had many names – ‘color’, ‘shape’, ‘size’ etc…. and not all of those meant the same. As Dubleu grew up his dissatisfaction with words only kept growing. I could discuss some of these with you at this point, but Dubleu asked me not to (let the poor fool have it his way this time). As for Dubleu’s word dilemma, remind me when I reach the correct section and I’ll tell you.

The second thing that Dubleu noticed after his birth was God. He had brought his thumb out of his mouth as it (or rather, she – as he’d later learn it’s been said) took him in her arms and looked at him in wonderment. At this moment Dubleu realized that he must have had a ‘variation’ too and for a while he started believing that his ‘variation’ must have been an even frightening one, until she said –

“My God, you’re Chooo oodly-woodly”

Dubleu’s dilemma with words could have started right here, but at that instant he concerned himself with something else. “My God”- did she say? So, do gods worship other gods? The ones they had never seen? And what if there are some gods who are atheist themselves? How do they themselves exist? And so, Dubleu decided that he’d once again keep believing what he had been believing all these days – He had an existence because he existed.

The third thing that Dubleu noticed after his birth was a creature on the wall with a strange variation. They called it a lizard.

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I don’t drink coffee usually except on days I’m waiting for Dubleu. I know you’d go ahead and ask me –

“What does coffee have to do with Dubleu?”

“Is he frequently late and you need coffee to restrain your senses from falling asleep?”

“Is there some deeper meaning too?”

“Or is it just something you say because you’ve been assuming that your readers are a freaking bunch of fools?” (That’s some serious accusation!)

None of those are correct, though. I’ll give you a more reasonable reason. This place that I’m sitting in presently is just one of those open air cafeteria that you find in the outskirts of a busy, busy town. And although they do serve many things other than coffee, either nothing is as good as the coffee they serve over here or everything else they serve over here is even worse than the coffee. So that I always end up hiding behind a monstrous coffee mug in which they serve coffee over here. See, it’s that simple. I don’t know why we always think in complicated terms. Why are simple things so full of complications for us? Aren’t we just an antithesis of Dubleu who finds all his complications frighteningly simple? And which one’s really better? You go figure that out as I sit here waiting for my protagonist, Dubleu.

On a second thought, since I have you today I won’t be waiting through silence. I’d rather be telling you about our first meeting.

I remember our first meeting not because it was our first meeting, neither because it was very unusual, but because it was the only time when Dubleu was already present in the cafeteria.

“I want you to write on me.” Dubleu had told straight away like most of my shameless clients.

“I generally prefer the paper”, I replied.

“No… I mean, about me.”

“A biography?”

“No. A novel.”

“Does your life have a plot?”

“It may if you wish.”

“Hmmm. Does it have any interesting things happening in it?”

“I’d make sure it does.”

“I can’t start writing a novel based solely on your promises.”

“Okay, I’d make you sign a contract with me.”

“And what would it state?”

“It’d say that provided you complete this novel much to my satisfaction, you can keep any one thing you choose from the novel for yourself.”

“Any rules and restrictions to that contract?”

“Nothing as such except that you must state what you wish to keep with the last few chapters to go.”

“Hmmm. I like your contract. It definitely sounds like some thing worth experimenting with. I’m game.”

I don’t know what Dubleu finds so interesting about this cafeteria. Okay, I agree that the cafeteria is in the centre of an endless field. And you find the horizon at an equal radius in whichever way you turn. The breeze blows from all of these directions simultaneously converging in you. So that you sit in the perfect balance of the rhythm of the blowing wind. There’s music in the wind itself – sometimes it plays through the subtleties of My Funny Valentine, sometimes the intricacies of The Blue Danube. And there’s fragrance too of the different lands from which each of these breeze returns. Falling into the embers of your infallible self. Therefore, what difference does it make? I am not (never was or will be) nature’s poet. I’m here just for the contract I had signed with Dubleu. And I find this place more disturbing than captivating. I’ll tell you why.

This place stretches to infinity in each and every direction. You never know which of the ways Dubleu would be coming from. So you must keep looking around all the while in every possible direction until he appears. And that’s not enough. Adding to this there is one more problem. A problem I find terribly disturbing to anticipate every time I come to meet Dubleu – This place stretches to infinity. At the beginning you see Dubleu as a dot (“a geometric element that has position but no extension”). Then, begins the journey. He walks through the eternity. And grows through continuity and slowness. Following the winds. Until he becomes himself, once again. And I must sit over here, unmoving, as he gradually gathers and gains extension. Watching him become. And while you do so you forget to let your eyes blink. And your eyes revolt to this. Thus, begins the war between you and your eyes. Dubleu steps closer to you, calmly.

An uncompromising, unchanging sameness repeats itself today as well. I watch Dubleu walk towards me from the distance far away.

In the end when he arrives I seemed more tired than he did.

“I’m not happy with the way you’ve gone ahead with the novel.” He says. “There’s no structure at all. You just throw bits and pieces towards the reader. What sense would it make to them without a sufficient background about…. about the entire thing.”

“And that would be…?”

“You should know better.”

“Exactly. I do. So, let me handle it.”

“But what if you end up turning it into a total disaster?”

“Nothing serious. You wouldn’t like it and I wouldn’t have anything to keep for myself from the novel.”

“I swear, you’re giving me quite a headache.”

“I know.”

“Just tell me something. When do you plan to start the actual novel?”

“Right from the beginning of the next chapter.”

“I swear I’d kill you if you don’t”, he says, smiling.

But it sounds just as unbecoming of Dubleu as is his returning through the endless field. Against the breeze.

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It was always difficult for Dubleu to differentiate his thoughts. To set one apart from another. Dubleu felt all his thoughts were sticky. Always ready to overlap. Become one. He frequently wondered if he should call this a unification of thoughts or a diversification. But whatever this was it always left his head clogged and moist. So, he decided to call them his damp thoughts.

Tonight, Dubleu found himself frequently confused between the image of the lizard and her.

Dubleu knew what this would mean for the readers. They are far more prone to find symbolisms in situations as such than there often really is, in the reality. Dubleu knew for himself that his thoughts were mostly meaningless but he found it hard to convince others of the same. When he had signed the contract with me he would have seldom thought that his thoughts would become this important. Dubleu never used to think of his thoughts. But now for the sake of the readers, Dubleu would not only have to think of his thoughts but think more specifically on what to think of his thoughts.

I just found that in the last paragraph I had written a sentence like – Dubleu knew for himself that his thoughts were mostly meaningless but he found it hard to convince others of the same. Most definitely not a statement that should be ideally introduced in the third chapter. Without the order of the particular events that sentence is more meaningless than Dubleu’s thoughts. And I know Dubleu won’t exactly be praiseworthy of the fact that I’d brought it up over here. Anyways, I’ll have to deal with Dubleu and that sentence later on; right now, let’s get back to the story.

Specific thoughts.

She didn’t like lizards. Niether in person, nor as delicacies.

Shit! What does that mean? Be more specific.

She didn’t like lizards. Not even in person, let’s leave out the question of those being served as delicacies because she hadn’t been eating them.

Oh no! That’s worse. Much worse. Come on, think think think. Think before it’s too late.

Ah! Got it!

She didn’t like lizards. Living or dead. When she had found a battalion of ants celebrating one its corpses, eating through it, she had asked Dubleu –

“What do they find so delicious about that?”

“Flesh.” Dubleu had answered innocently.

“But ants never ate lizards. I dunno but I think they’re poisonous.”

“Maybe, they’re eating him now ‘coz he’d been eating some of them when he was alive.”

“You mean, revenge? But what help would that be?”

“Ants have their own civilizations. And with civility comes severity.”

Tonight, Dubleu found himself frequently confused between the image of the lizard and her. When the lizard waltzed inside his head, so did she. At times he wished he was there inside his own head. He wanted to waltz with her. But the lizard won’t leave her alone. The lizard took her away in the hidden corners of his head. And his head-ek would return. He would find the world outside becoming hazy and dark, once more. And his world inside would illuminate.

I see this same illumination coming back to Dubleu a few days later, when he’d run out of a room filled with strangers and her, and run through the hallway. On his way he’d step on the last lizard that he’d find dead. And it’d change everything about the two worlds.

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One day, when Dubleu had been a kid, one of his friends had held Dubleu’s head firmly between his two palms and shook it hard. Yes, exactly as one shakes a bottle of medicine before drinking it. I don’t remember with any clarity what made Dubleu’s friend commit an action so awkward. Perhaps he did so because Dubleu had been feeling sleepy in the middle of a game they must have been playing. Or maybe, he just wanted me to begin the 2nd chapter with a reference to him. People could go to such extents just to hog the limelight. Anyways, not to fulfill his wishes any further I’d rather stick with Dubleu, whom I’m considering the protagonist (as yet) of this tale.

Dubleu was too astonished to react to the shameless shaking of a head which, until now, he had considered to be his own. Dubleu’s father had taught him early in his life that his body parts were essentially his own and so, he must be careful with what actions he made out of them. He was too surprised by the fact that his father, after all, had been wrong…. Much more disturbed, perhaps, by the fact that he could be proved wrong in a mere fragment of an unconditional moment (a reason why Dubleu would never trust anything that his father told, ever again, in his life). His head was as much a property of anyone else as it was his own. It could be moved involuntarily. This was just the beginning of his intricate dilemmas.

After it was shaken, he found everything inside his head was dislocated. But that wasn’t as much of a frightening part as was the dislocation that he noticed had occurred in the outside world. He could swear that, for a moment, the order of the world had changed. He realized, right at that instance, that the order of the world could be changed just as easily as his father’s lessons to him – All one had to do was shake his head in a desperately cruel sort of way.

So, even after the shaking of his head was completed, Dubleu seemed visibly shaken. And that was the first time Dubleu experienced a phenomenon called headache. Yes, a headache….. even though he didn’t know to spell the word then. He had went home that night and written in his diary –

“Today I had a head-ek”

He didn’t write about anything else that had happened. It was almost as if the headache was the only conclusion he needed to draw from the entire incident. He wanted to persuade me of the same when he had shown me the diary entry, but of course, I knew better.

Many years later, Dubleu had to be present in a formal meeting (the first of its kind for him) where as the prevalent rule was, he had to shake hands with all of those present. Most of them were exceedingly pleased with what Dubleu had said a few minutes earlier, thinking it was an extremely intelligent speech and they felt words weren’t enough to congratulate him. So, they had decided (it seemed) that each of them would make it up by shaking Dubleu’s hand as violently as possible. What happened next was really strange.

As his hand was being shaken, he felt a pain surge inside his head. It took him a few more shakes completed through turns, one by one, to recognize it as the head-ek. Once again, he experienced the world losing its order; his friend’s distorted face; his father speaking in an intelligible language…. And the woman standing at the end of the queue. Oh no! She wasn’t an illusion. Not his nostalgia. She was there in the room. The last person in the queue to be shaking his hand. He knew she wasn’t here to congratulate him like everyone else. They would speak, he had thought. But he could think no more, as he kept shaking hands with strangers. A few unknown strangers. Jumbling thoughts. His father had taken Dubleu’s head in his hand and was shaking his own forcefully; he heard himself screaming something out to his friend and his friend answered – “man, you’re so clearly unintelligible. I’m amazed.”

Before Dubleu could reach to the last of the hands to be shaken, his eyes went hazy and he felt his head was about to burst open. He was afraid for more than one reason. He had to turn around and rush out of the room with whatever sight he had retained.

It was a dramatic exit. It left everyone in the room stunned and worried.

Meanwhile, Dubleu kept running through the corridor. There were more lights inside his head than there was outside. It seemed he followed those lights. I couldn’t keep up with him because those lights weren’t there for me. He became frequently invisible.

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“You’re no less madder. Are you?” is what she’d say, “There’s a lizard inside your head, Dubleu.”

Dubleu never told any of these to her for he knew what she’d say. But even when he thought of telling any of these to her he could still feel the headache surge inside his skull, feeling the lizard move inside his head.

Tonight wasn’t like any night. It was darker. Perhaps, it was so because Dubleu had been approaching a phenomenon called Nyctalopia (Dear Mr. Author, we all know you’re good with scientific names. You won’t really want to scream it in your reader’s ears. Okay, so ‘Dubleu had been approaching a phenomenon called night-blindness’) and if you’d ask him he could swear (for the third time) that he had no idea of anything as such happening. It was always the same with Dubleu. All his complications were frighteningly simple to him. Let’s take tonight, for example.

When he entered his room tonight, it was darker than the darkness. He knew all his mindless accessories were lying scattered all over the floor. He didn’t bother to find his way through all of those to the light-switch. He knew exactly where the stench had been originating from. He walked straight towards the waste basket, picked it up with whatever there was underlying the lizard and threw all of it straight out of the window. Never for once did it occur to him that the switchboard was exactly in the midway from his door to the basket.

And whenever he had been unmindful like this, he could feel the lizard waltz inside his head.

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