Land of Lilliputians

We saw a car stuffed with children...singing, and waving PTI flags “Have you ever been to a jalsa,” Saif asks me. “No, I am claustrophobic, crowds suffocate me.” Saif only listens to half of my comment because he is busy chanting a PTI song. “But you have to go to his one. There will be a huge crowd, the like of which you have never seen before,” Saif informs me. “So, you are a PTI supporter. Why?” “Because Imran Khan is going to change everything. Nawaz Sharif goes to America and stays in the most expensive hotels. And we don’t need metros, we need more schools and hospitals. Why should his daughter handle that project which Imran Khan says she does?” Saif is a regular listener of Imran Khan’s daily tirades Saif and all the other Lilliputians daily watch news channels and discuss politics. They are now so into politics. Should I accompany them to the jalsa? I have a green shirt. And this decides for me. Masked As our car inches along ...

  Can pyromania surface as a fascination for candlelight? A kind of sublimation of the fierce urge to set fire to things and then watch them burn, and burn. Perhaps. Who knows. And Freud is no longer here to enlighten us. “I love watching it quiver ever so lightly, it almost seems to be smiling and nodding at something,” this is what I had told Omar once. It must have happened when I was in one of my candle-light-roof-top party moods.  Omar had looked at me askance, as he tends to do when he seems to be having second thoughts about my credentials as a learned-wise-adult. But in spite of his doubts, my sublimated pyromania must have appealed to Omar’s equally wayward imagination. I am not prepared, not in this hot sauna-like evening, for an invitation to a candlelight tea party.     “Look! Thirty candles. I have brought thirty candles, and they are scented. I have bought a  colourful dinner set for our parties. You will light the candle...