A Manic Monday

Why do people commit suicide?

This was the thought with which I woke up day before yesterday morning. Sternly conditioned to abstain from uttering or thinking of anything remotely macabre by generations of superstitious matrons, I found myself propped up in bed in the wee-hours of a madras Monday pondering over this with clinical interest. Why would anyone want to seek peace in an unknown realm, than find a way in the known? How would life be, if one knew what comes after death?
After-life or After-death has been the mirage over which the religions of the world have rooted their foundations. From the cyclic theory of the oriental religions and the tangential moksha, the linear ideology of the occident culminating in the pearly gates to heaven or the pit below, to the zany experiment born in the mind of Douglas Adams, this ambiguity has given rise to it all.

The circumstances that had me wondering on such lines, were quite uncanny. I was totally sleep-deprived, and had read the papers before going to sleep. Had glanced upon the crime section, which I don’t usually dwell much upon. Had a weird dream, and woke up to listen to a suicide case of a woman, and her husband’s role in it, being read out by the unemotional mechanical voice of a regional channel news reader.

I walked through the day pre-occupied, with such questions in mind, wondering for the first time without any emotion, even detachment.(And yes, detachment, too is an emotion.)

Before I went to bed that day, I had mentioned my weird morning to one new friend, that I had stumbled upon in orkut. That night I had a weirder dream. A barren village, parched mud tenements. The houses grow and multiply, but the inhabitants perish. People wonder about some curse, seeing healthy ones perish. A lone man, an outcast whose tobacco-stained teeth and cracked feet are my only impressions left of him, keeps muttering to himself. “All will be well, when the good people will come” is what he keeps repeating to himself. When the village folk finally heed to his words, and exasperatedly ask “Who will send the good peole you keep mumbling about?” “GOD”, someone yells, and it all comes reeling into wake-fulness. The clock showed 2 am. I was so sleepy, but too confused to sleep, that the room started spinning. I called out to my father, who was sleeping beside me. He just patted my head and I don’t know when I fell back to sleep.

I don’t know if it’s a premonition of sorts. My mom just says it’s the novels I read. Or perhaps the impressions I form of my observations. Or that I was merely stressed.
I don’t know what it was. But it was mighty strange.

Read some book, some time back, not able to recollect, where some character says that aliens keep tab of us by stealing our consciousness during our sleep. If it is H2G2, I shall be pretty much convinced they have done a rush job with mine yesterday night…