Eyesores and nosebleeds.

He removes the helmet slowly, and looks around himself tardily, like a victorious general would inspect the spoils of war. It is cold, so he wraps his riding jacket tighter around himself, and listens to the ululating roar silently, tilting his head to one side. Nine times out of ten he had thought about visiting this place, but the Timetable thought otherwise. Relentless in its pursuit of his attention, it would snap playfully at his heels and start climbing up his knees, with a dagger held between its clenched teeth, teasing him, making quiet advances on his patient gratitude. He abandons the distracting thought-motif and removes the leather riding-gloves with his teeth. They are damp, so he leaves them out to dry on the tank. He feels around in the pocket of his jacket for cigarettes and matches, finds a particularly damp cigarette, puts it between his lips and lights it. He waits.

Pathetic tunnel-vision, he tells himself. There is no limit to human de-linearity. One second you're lecturing a rather squalid boardroom about the importance of having weekly cultural debates in the seminar hall, and the next second you're donning a leather jacket and singing to the wind. That's the range of the human emotional projectile.

He checks his face in the flyblown mirror of the motorcycle, and notices that his face is grimier and more weatherbeaten than usual. He adjusts his hair, slaps his trouser pockets for a comb and doesn't find one. None of this makes sense. What kind of temporality does this buy him? None, whatsoever. He''ll ride back to his hostel and fall to his bed, in a heap, exhausted by the day's work. So much of the human emotional is a pupil to subjectivity. He could immerse himself in epistemology or ontology, and yet the next day would find him groggy and unable to pay attention. What is this all-encompassing Purpose these pundits and god-men keep talking about? It is as elusive and as abstract as finding a furry mint in his shirt pocket. Waking up the next day with another reason to pontificate, another reason to lie. In this never-ending wave of belligerence. It may look pictorial and worth dying for one day, and totally unnecessary the other. It confuses him. He looks at the clouds as they move away from him, and it leaves him in a daze.

This morning he had woken up beside a nice girl he had been dating for a month now. 'Oh, lookee, lookee', the voice in his head had told him, without humour. Not much space to roll over, he had looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and not quite known what to make of this. He had confided in no one that lately, he had been feeling strange, an approaching mental breakdown would rear its ugly head soon. Not the noisy, Prozac-fueled ones. The wordless ones, that left his limbs numb and without comfort, and then he would lose all track of time as he sat by the bedstead and looked at his reflection in the mirror, without moving a muscle. Then, his stockbroker would call him and tell him animatedly that his portfolio had outperformed the market. And he would get to his feet and start rummaging around the room for a mechanical pencil, striking off one hedge fund from his laundry-list of market strategies. He tried to find a way around the mundane, and make sure that his days danced about colourfully around the same, but he would lose all interest when some professor with a shiny bald pate would tell him that he could have done better in the mid-term exam. And then he would take to the cigarettes, berating himself for allowing the butt to settle in snugly between his fingers and take another drag.

As he smokes, he hears another Ayan tell him, in another time, in a gin-soaked evening - Uncompromised is what uncompromised was. And he smiles as this Ayan start to fade around the edges. He nods perfunctorily.

Evening, commissioner.

Tonight, I spent an hour looking down the barrel of a Wesson-Magnum. Too bad it drew blanks.

Möbius Trip.

In school, I was always proud of myself for not being particularly mathematically challenged. I mean, the world knows that us brown people have conquered the numbered universe heuristically. It was an epiphany to the West whose only recourse to analytics three centuries earlier were the physiologically-suited mathematicians at Göttingen. I remember when we were shown scribbles on the blackboard and asked to differentiate such-and-such w.r.t. such-and-such or calculate the number of permutations estimated when a monkey is dismembered (okay, maybe, that last was absurd), and I remember me not scribbling the said scribbles into my spiral-bound pad because I was solving the telltale equations in my head, and declaring the answers dismissively, looking at a female classmate out of the corner of my eye, to see if she so much as twitched or showed a hint of approval. The teachers wanted to slap me because, to them, my existence was as gross and incomprehensible as the 'praying' of a praying-mantis.

So, two years later, when a rather irritable feminist supervisor in her twenties, asks me to 'do the math' over a handful of lattes and macaroons, all I can think of are Leibnitz' integrals, Cantor set theory and dyscalculia. Veritable fallacy, uh huh.