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جديدة [بدم] علامة تجاريّة
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شكور إلى [بدم] لمداخلهم.

by Hussein



Blue rose. Folded Petals. Soaked in dew.
Cold bareness. Dancing line. Traffic brew.
The morning sun. Shadows cast on a sun-baked block.
What wonder. New beginnings. A strutting peacock.

A famed man. Reminiscence. His famous line.
Clock-hands ticking. Tropical summer. Sixty-nine.
Morning yearning. Come now. My phantom night sky.
Proverbial queen. Savannah lion. Hear me cry.

A knife. A mind. Show me your hand.
Bleed. My feet. Deep is the sand.
To walk the path. To hide behind these walls.
One choice. Untold story. A grown child calls.

(penned on the 28th December 2004, inspired by the tragedy that befell Asia)


Amidst the rubble of a blood-drenched village,
Once filled with voices of playful tranquility-
Now disturbed by echoes of departed laughter,
Sat a woman with void tears, alive yet abandoned.

Hair billowing against the contours of her broad, naked back,
As one clasped the calloused hand of a loving husband,
As a thumb grazed the flushed cheek of a beautiful daughter,
She called out the names of her loved ones, and waited...

Some nice chikas from Beppu...(L-R: Sana, May, Hussein and Yen)

I was watching a Discovery documentary on Hitler's disaapearing act right after the WW2 and felt really puzzled as to how a man could just vanish from the face of this planet without leaving any trace. Some think that Mr. German demi-god had been abducted by the aliens or had been extricated from the mess he started leaving him helpless in the hands of the much inferior human race. Now, Im even more puzzled because I dont know where Im going with this! I just wanted to let you know that Im still around, free from human-abducting uchujin and sadly drawing breath from the polluted air of Tokyo, as I push my way towards the end of another week of my three-month long internship at the United Nations University Press.

If anyone is as nonchalant to even give a dang, then just pretend to read over my blog and close this window before any more muddling is done.

-a short story by Hussein

The phone rang. Once… twice… why didn’t I pick the receiver up? It just laid in its rest as the answering machine triggered another round of tedious blabber by an electrified voice that uttered “Not home at the moment. You know what to do.” As if the person on the other end of the line had been hurled a bolt of electricity, he started talking without even waiting for the ‘beep.’ My cousin, Kaine, had always been a restless, spirit-wired little kid, but this time, he was talking to me as a full-grown man, stumbling here and there but, otherwise, unusually straightforward. “…pick up the phone. She’s dead. She died from a car accident on her way home from the city yesterday. Her dad wants to talk to you.”

The moment I heard that Kristine had died, I plummeted deeper into the hollow of the bed. “I was just holding her hand yesterday and now she has left me, without giving me any premonition,” wait, she wanted to give the necklace back, the symbol of our relationship. She said I would never see her again… “My god, she’s gone.”

The light from the lamp invited its bleeding presence into the four proportionally disturbed corners of the half-lit room. My throbbing chest had swallowed the warmth of the sea breeze, followed by a pregnant silence. The silence had crept inside me, engulfing every explosive ‘tick’ of the wall clock that vomited a primeval bird with eyes on the outside. My bare feet napped blissfully abandoned, lost in a smothering of some counterfeit Kashmiri blanket. They were numb to the mercurial cold, while my arm was pallid, the other fast asleep, and a diaphanous image drifted over my waning thoughts.

I tried to recall the day I last saw the only one I loved.

Kristine walked in the restaurant with a smile on her face. She was wearing her usual look -- wash-and-wear denims, snug-fit white cotton shirt, and a slanted crown of soft, dark hair. She just turned 21 a month ago, but her youthful countenance was always coupled with nippy wits aimed at juvenile jokes, which I never ran out of. She saw me before I waved at her to tell her that I came ahead of time, a rarity in most, if not all, of our dates. I sensed a feeling of hesitance in her eyes but she kept walking towards me. She sat across the table, looking me in the eye, imploring the first words to be mine.

She spoke first. “I’m pregnant.” She knew that those words had taken me by surprise for I could not hide my unspoken ‘WHAT!!’ We had always practiced safe sex but this time things went awry on a fast curve.

“What do you want to do? I don’t think I’m ready for this,” I asked.

“I’m not either, but I can’t abort this child. Not while I’m alive, no.”

“But Kris, you know we can’t support this child. I’m not ready.”

“My dad’s going to kill me. She didn’t want me to go out with you in the first place.”

“I know that he hates me and this is not going to help,” I jokingly said.

“Please say that you will go through all this with me.”

“But Kris, I don’t think…”

She started crying. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. Here, take this,” she handed me the necklace but I refused to take it. She took it back, put it on, and scurried out of the restaurant. “You will never see me again.”

Those were her last words. I didn’t even have the chance to take back what I said. I could have said sorry to her that night, but instead, I ignored the guilt and shame that told me to run after her. I called Kaine and another friend, and we went to the theater to watch a movie without a name. A name that could have existed but still escapes my memory until this moment.

At the movie house, there was a girl who was sitting two rows down and she could not stop glancing at us. She would turn her head towards our seats and I knew that she was looking at us, or at me. The room was quite dark but once in awhile a sun-drenched setting in the movie would light up the room and there I thought I saw Kristine catching a glimpse of me and smiling. That was a little after 11:00 pm, twenty minutes after her car crashed.

I couldn’t believe I lost her. I didn’t want to think of her, stuck in her car while the last piercing pain finally robbed her one more breath of life. My Kristine, my love, why did you leave me like this?

I gently lowered the lids of my sodden eyes, dilating in the dark. I pressed my left ear against the sunken pillow while the other was jutted out as calmly as the night perpetually went by. My tongue brushed the contours of my mouth, purging it of last night’s unfortunate incident, which I could still taste with every effort to cry her name out.

I quickly turned and laid on my back as I felt a gush of panic as if someone was choking me. Then I felt a cold metallic object brushing against my neck. I opened my eyes and I saw Kristine floating right above me with eyes wide open, the necklace hanging around her pale neck. I closed my eyes and said ‘Forgive me, my love.’ When I opened them again, she was gone but the necklace was heavy on my chest.

I don’t know where to begin my story. See, I had this dream last night. A strangely enthralling dream it was although I would never want to be in it again.

I was perched on the edge of a stumpy chair towering over an army of red ants. It must have been the reigning lassitude that made me plant my foot in the army’s scent-trail, thinking that a giant’s sleepy foot could be just as harmless as a wall; but one soldier fought back. The sting was quick but perpetual, or so my dream told my brain to heighten the working of my sweat glands.

The other workers were blind but they seemed to have borrowed an impeccable 20-20 eyesight from a pretentious bum as they ran away from their end. The soldier faced me, meekly braced to the ebbing hold of gravity that abandoned another of its expendable champions. David and Goliath, in a dream where the small is anything but the victor. The crushing sound was not even close to the buzzing of a mosquito from a faraway planet but I could see that the red ant left a gaping hole in the face of my own universe.

Then I felt what my worthy enemy did to me. It gave me poison. A poison that could not kill a mosquito, not even the one from the faraway planet. A poison that did not show an X over a picture of some famous skull. It was not a snake’s spit. It took the form of saturated glucose and it flowed in my blood. I could taste the sweet in my empty mouth, smell a whiff of honey from an unseen beehive, and see the lines of red ants running haphazardly towards me. The red ants were real in my dream.

I was devoured alive but not completely, for I am telling you now.

Back in the real world, I sat, stirred and soaked in sweat. My left arm felt numb, my pillow gone. I could see the markings of my own head etched on the brown skin that ended in the black of space. “I had a dream,” I said before I thought.

I touched the ground with my bare feet, feeling the warmth that refused to leave with the drowning sun. While the cold wind brushed my nakedness, my feet, ah, they giggled. Left foot first to keep my balance, my left arm still asleep. I headed to the sink, opened the valve, and swallowed. I drank. I swallowed.

Four hours and twelve minutes past midnight. I puffed my last cig from a box that said “6mg tar, 0.5mg nicotine.” Looking out the window, I saw another hole in the universe, this time it was for me, placidly waiting in time, maybe longer than what the doctor had told me. But he told me ‘there is no cure.’ I am dying. Positive — HIV.

How did this ever happen to me? I ask myself everyday, and hear laughter, no, more like disdain. It was almost three years ago. I was walking in the street of what people might call the ‘subcity’ where the lights did not shine but rather cast a shadow on young girls. Girls in skimpy skirts and counterfeit pearl necklaces. They were too young to wear make-up but they did anyway even if it meant looking like a page in a child’s coloring book. Three girls stood beside the pavement and held each other’s hand. They had a look of fear in their eyes but they stayed bold.

I walked towards the three girls, anticipating a move from one of them. It wasn’t a move, just a slight invitation. “You wanna have fun?”

“Sorry, what was that,” I replied.

“You wanna get laid tonight?”

“Why would you think I wanna get laid tonight.”

“Well, first you’re here talking to us and second you look like you wanna get laid tonight,” she proudly added.

A smart prostitute, I thought. “I suggest you look again. I am here because I need to go to another place and this is the road that leads to that place. Also, I may look like I wanna get laid but I’d rather if it was clean sex than with you girls.

“Why do you do this kind of dirty job, anyway? Have you ever heard of AIDS?”

One girl obviously looked like she was going to jump on me and bite my head off. But she didn’t. She just went really close to my face and said, “Dirty, yes. But we only want to live. And if living means we have to do this kind of job, or get a disease, then we’ll take it.”

“This is not living. This is…”

“Your words are poison. We don’t want to hear it. If you don’t want to do it, then just go. Loser!”

I would have made the exchange of harsh words a little longer but I just let this one go. Who were the real losers anyway?

“Oh, I have AIDS. Would you still do it with me? I wish you could feel what I feel. It’s great,” the girl with the gruff countenance paused for a while realizing that she said something silly but she started to laugh and the other two joined in. They all laughed at me, with disdain. And I laughed back at them, only in my head.

Feeling defeated, I swore to the grave of whosoever that this memory would be forever buried in the tomb of dead cells, which I kept smothering with deeper puffs of smoke. Death I bestowed, and death to be reciprocated. But forgotten, yes, I lived without a trace of the memory until the day I met an artist with the sterilized needle.

Tattoos. The thing of the day. How about one? Sure, a clean needle is all there is to feel the pain, quick but not perpetual. Oh, how I was deceived to believe. The artist lied about the sterilized needle; the needle, although pristine as it looked, had touched the blood of a girl who was not the girl, but nevertheless shared the same venom in their blood. The sting of the needle lasted for eight hours and more. That day, that year, this lifetime and more.

There was no turning back. I wish I just walked past the three girls in the subcity. I wish the artist had not lied to me. I wish this had all been just a dream. A dream with no red ants. A dream and only a dream.

My tongue grazed the cracked surface of my lips and tasted the sweet of sugar that wasn’t there. The red ant had vanished but the hole in the universe loomed over me.

Important Note:
This is only fiction.

Is there anybody from TIG attending the Global Development Network Conference, New Delhi in January 2004? I sure hope I could meet any TIG member there.

Or maybe the World Social Forum in Mumbai. I will also be there so please respond asap so we can chat about it.