[Fictional excerpt - writing in imitation of Salman Rushdie style]
His entire moorings - home, kinship, identity had been lost to a strange abstracted realm. And whenever he was compelled to shift his mental gear to something more subterranian - a terrestrial reality, the visible hangover of an Other-worldly existence still remained. He walked out of his claustrophobic room in a trance-like automation, his eyes wandering far and beyond the mortal confines of his physical living space, and his mind disappeared into outer domains, crossing walls, barriers - transcending them, transcending family, clan, race, humanity, all of it, fleeting past all images, frontiers and membranes, reaching the edge of the universe, breaking free of the blind certainty of his bounded existence, till it reached a hopelessly far-flung disoriented horizon where every navigator who sails has to lose his bearings and finally, eventually lose himself.
His psychic distance scared them. His life was an unauthorized version of a story with a No Entry sign - painted in black - scrawled all over his face - obscure, distant and far too remote.
They filled his silence with music in the room. With each passing day, the silence got heavier and the music louder. The day he died the music was the loudest, and the glass broke. After that, there was a pregnant pause.
They could hear the struggle of his thoughts in the adjoining bedroom, the screaming anguish in his muteness, his half-madness, roaring wildly at them, mocking them, laughing in their faces at their hollow stillness as he alighted on a stool and tied the flex around his throat where it fell like a noose.
The waltz had reached its final cresendo and broke suddenly when they opened the door to find his naked body rotating slowly, turning in the breeze, hanging from the ceiling fan, screaming at them. Pieces of shattered glass lay on the bare floow outside.
Between the self and a loved one, between a progeny and its genesis, between an image and its reflection,between life and its death, falls a wall that transforms. A distortion that remains.
Time is endless. The Karthamana household is wrapped in memories of the past, which lurk like dustballs in every corner, and roll in on the wheels of a waltz which plays itself in their ears every now and then. A dancing shadow falls at night, devouring the ceiling - the spectre of a faraway astronaut caught in an eternal space-time capsule , trying to transport itself to a different dimension - the Outer World. The Karthamanas watch this mutely while he makes faults appear along the ceiling, traversing its entire length, creating cracks and fractures, crumbling edges as close to home as their swallowed hearts. ........