Slices of Life

When I went home after talking with Paul and Leo that day, I couldn't stop thinking about human bodies. The exhibit of human body as a sight was my concern. The pleasure it drove to the watchers. The show that was thriving in my neighbourhood. I could remember my first view from the "pretty eye." I was made to watch two to three times after the first visit. I saw a body of a young woman, who was totally naked with a not-so-handsome man.

A woman took off her panty very slow. The man kissed her and took of her brassiere and licked her prick nipples one after another in fast succession. He slowly kissed her in the neck, and he went down her waist, sniffing the scent of his woman. The man's erection kept him tight. He patted with his organ outside the woman's organ. He did not enter directly, but continued with patting around the woman's organ. He played and kissed the woman's soft breast, that looked soft like a cotton candy. He would sniff her, and kiss her gently. The woman had marble-white skin and her body below the waist was slowly touched by the man. When the man first tried to push his organ, the woman moaned a little, and then her moaning increased. The man pushed harder and the moaning increased slowly and slowly. When the man finally entered his organ, the woman pushed him slowly, their hands folding palms together. The woman moaned softly and tried to push the man away in her painful pleasure. During this event the thing that I observed was that below the waist a woman's body had different shape. It was different from man's body. The woman's body widened outside the curve, below the waist.

I was just a kid, I couldn’t understand how they were sleeping together. What was the social semantics which brought them together or how did they choose each other for the playful act of sex? There was beauty in one body and another body seemed to lack it. You never know, how bodies can act to be together for an hour of conjugality. What would they say together when such bodies departed?

I did not feel like meeting my friends after the first night of "pretty eye." I had always been curious about telephones, when anybody called. I had received few calls by boys, of that I am sure. But I did not answer it. I had always liked the idea of picking up the phone and making conversation with the person on other side, but the nights like pretty eye changed my mood. I had begun questioning things that were so evident, all these physicality theories. First you had to see, then you had to think. A childish mind being tempted by physical temptations could only see, and not do lively things. Well, this was a memory. When brought to actions it was bound to result something. Could it be love or desire? "Hoodlums desired, and gentlemen loved." Just like the quote of love book said. How could I question love back then, without ever being with anyone? I only heard my heart beat. Even love is not socially acceptable, when there's rich and poor trying to walk the steps of life together.

In candlewood, the city where I grew up, old people always had a lot to share. Just like the proverb that said something like when an old person dies a library burns down to the ground. Old people in wintry evenings would try to warm themselves with stories. All they had to tell was life experiences. Most of them wanted youths to know what

they were doing, rather than acting in the whim of the moment. It was all up to the youths to know the elderly. Candlewood lighted like a candle and the ashes remained as a wood burn. The city had its own consolations and its own grimace.

Chapter 2

The History of The Land

First, I was born, then I call the land mine. I grew with my culture. I recalled being under the stars that blanketed me in the wintry night. Candlewood had grown when trees started to fall. My grandfather moved in when he cleared the forest and claimed the space under the open sky. Many moved with him, and settled down nearby. Candlewood had given birth to people of my generation, who had nothing to do with woods. The suburb had thrived like a city. There was art in furniture shops, where carpenters built a beating wooden heart.

Poison not my waters

For I cannot swallow my thirst

Sell no my sands

For my white dove has to rest in it

The air can tell my news

When I befriended the dew

Most of the time,

We tend to forget about the dust way soon,

After we rise.

Many unrhyming poetry without titles were published just on the walls of Candlewood; usually the paintings accompanied them. Large hording boards displayed poetry with painting, semiabstract and some totally abstract. Anyone visiting the green pastures of Candlewood travelled with the poems and painting on their mind, as they saw them. Even paper posters decorated the walls of Candlewood. They became literature on display. Poetry had always been part of Candlewood's culture. I grew up in the place where wooden name plates were hung in the gate of people's house, with gold carved alphabets naming those people. However, people in Candlewood understood how yellow and golden were different. That should tell a lot about people of Candlewood.

I will tell the story how my grandfather, Frank Marvin, came to Candlewood. On a stormy night, a horse carried a young fine man, who suffered from Hemorrhoids. The man had a thin but not weak appearance. He was neatly shaved. He had dark black curly hair. His leather boots were mirror clean. A sharp look went through his eyes when he froze things from his stare, regardless of the season. His eyes looked like they were finding something in the dense forest of Candlewood. He stopped his horse, like he had found something precious in the woods of the old Candlewood. It was night, and he was blanketed by musical stars, dropping their night song to him. He had nowhere to go, nobody to be when he came to Candlewood. He was just a dweller, not following where the crowd went. Listening to music where travelling musicians went was his passionate path. He followed folk artists. When a folk artist sang the loneliness of the palace on the street it grew like carefree wildflowers. The local audiences were wood cutters, carpenters who believed they were artistic with their skills. Once a carpenter made a real river boat after his granddaughter told him that paper boats sinks. My grandfather liked to smoke mild tobacco, and for it he had started farming tobacco in his separate small piece of land. He also sold tobacco to the consumers and the cigarette factory in the nearby city. It was after he developed friendship with Jim Muddy, the local seller.

Life must have been hard on my grandfather. His disease of uneasiness which he brought with him to Candlewood frequently set his morning sun. My grandfather kept trinkets in empty vessels. Even few of the trinkets sounded like many coins. He even collected stones to throw them to wild bears so that he could chase them away. That was childish.

He had never seen a real bear, but his night was about to be changed forever. Slurping footsteps in the sugarcane farm, invited the bear closer to him. He could hear the footsteps, he began counting it and holding each breath with the praying beads. He was sleeping in a mud bed, near the stove. The bear came ruffling in, it made huffing noise. The footsteps of a bear slurped the water in the field. Banging tins and showing fire sticks would drift the bear away, but Frank Marvin was all alone in a field covered with sugarcane. The bear experience was not going to be so sweet.

The bear came close to him. The huffing noise outside the door got clearer. The mud bed felt like a tray of ice. Frank Marvin started to shiver and he could not get up. His feet were like loosened rubber. Frank Marvin started to bleed. His Hemorrhoids started to trouble him.

The night rose, and there were no doors nearby where he could knock. He felt as if a storm rose in his stomach, and he bled like a girl. The bear left him most vulnerable when he bled. Men also bled. Some bled as a winner, some felt defeated on a war ground like this one. Frank was lucky the bear did not attack him, but he bled anyway. It was his own physicality responding to what happened. This was also a way to be defeated.

The bear slurped the sugarcane for almost three hours, every crop was destroyed. The bear ate some and destroyed other sugarcane plants. The bear passed above the roof of the tiny hut of Frank. In one stretch of a jump it had crossed the hut of Frank, only uprooting the roof of the hut with its limbs and legs while it passed from above. When villagers found my grandfather Frank Marvin they saw him lying on the mud floor, all red and wet. That was how his vulnerability showed true color.

From the comfort of a house, Frank was too far. Maybe a comforting wife would put him to rest. But out on the woods, he was practicing to be tough and fight the world. Still unmarried at this point, Frank planned to raise his own kingdom someday.

The first person to discover Frank on his lowly and colored state (because he was bleeding) was Murphy the woodcutter. It was early dawn, and the azure sky was about to open its curtain of light. The evening owl hooted once and had returned to its tree cave. Murphy saw my grandfather Frank lying on the ground, bleeding. Piles was the disease which Frank had, also known as Hemorrhoids to the medical world. Murphy came to see whether the bear left Frank alive or not. Murphy the woodcutter lived in a ranch house nearby. He had no sugarcane farm, that's why the bear had silently passed Murphy's house. The bear had created a noisy havoc, Murphy heard the gruff of the bear. The slurping of the sugarcane and the splashing noise of the farm water where the bear steeped was heard by Murphy. Murphy had turned the light off of his house from inside and had observed the wild bear on the loose. He was afraid that the bear might sense the light or see his house more clearly. After a while, when everything was still quiet and dark Murphy slowly opened the gate of his house and saw that a bucket of white paint had been spilt on the ground. Murphy had been coloring his house, and had left a bucket of white paint on the ground. There was a large spading fork on the ground, and it had blood on its sharp edges. Murphy could guess and he was right that the bear had steeped on it.

By the time Murphy reached out for Frank, Henry Gilbert the carpenter had also arrived. Frank's room had a mud bed in the left-hand corner of the room. He had a mud oven towards the right-hand corner. The room had a deer antler instead of the wall clock, right above the door. A knife passed through topmost middle part of a large poster of map of the world and fixed the poster to the center of the wall facing the door. Anybody who entered Frank's hut saw the map fixed to the wall by a knife.

By Sushant Thapa

From: Nepal

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