Contributed By Revati Laul

“You are so natural when you’re naked.

What happens to you when you put your clothes on huh?”

I’m Sasha and what you just heard is what I decided to play out for you from my head. I re-wound to the time when
I was fucking Pooh Bear. I was desperately in love with him.I was 22 and I thought then, as I do now, that love meant giving yourself entirely to someone. And two fucks in, Pooh said – “I’m so glad we are friends who have this great understanding. That we can have sex sometimes.”

And I felt like the floor had given way from under me, melted and landed on top of my head.
Now, at 73, as I speak to you from inside the hard disk of this computer, I’m typing away, completely naked! My grand kids - Motu and Golu are used to me like this by now.

“There’s naked nani…let’s press her boobs.”

“Chee! No that’s so stupid? I don’t want to be a lesbian.”

“Well I do. My best friend’s mother is a lesbian and she is really cool.” That voice is my little Golu.

Such a lovely child. She’ll probably learn to be mad much faster than me. If she asks, I’ll teach her.

“Whoa…Golu, not so hard. Press gently, see? Nani doesn’t want her nipples to hurt darling!”

There’s her stupid mother. My daughter Malti. Nowshe’s going to take her to the other room and explain to her how Nani is mad. And mad people don’t know what they’re doing. But the rest of us shouldn’t copy them.

Because it’s silly.

What she misses out, the poor dear, is that it’s now, at 73 that I’ve finally got it. I really KNOW what it’s like to let go. To cross whatever boundaries I want to inside the mangled, bright red membranes inside my head. Everyday I uncross a few and mate them with a few others.

Like the electrician who came to fix this comp. today. As he put the red, black and blue wires into the socket, sweat forming at his temples, his face was twisted into such a vicious ball of concentration, I just Had to play with it. So I did a Sharon Stone on him! Dropped my sad white lungi under the table and said – “arre bhaiya, zara woh lungi to uthaiye please.” *

Poor chap, he had to keep his ball of concentration in the middle of his forehead as he saw my shrivelled up fanny and it’s purple pubic hair. Yeah. I keep trying different hair dyes. I flick them from my daughter’s toilet cupboard.

I’ve always been a bit mad you know. But I never really understood what it was to truly embrace that feeling. What I’ve said to you now, I used to say to people when I was twenty and thirty just to shock them.

It’s only now that I’ve understood that mad people are often very intelligent and alive and are making activechoices to jump acrobatically inside their head. I’m now quite a practiced gymnast you know. I can do the uneven bars…that’s my favourite move. When I really trace the strands of voices and consciousness inside my head mid way…I stop their travel midway through their conversations and can repeat verbatim those halfsentences. All quite deliberate.

Like this:

Zis sol buda buda jump kos raaaaaaaaaaaal teet.

And I can even trace where they’re coming from.

Zis sol buda buda is from the front of my brain.

From the spot right behind my furrow lines. I don’t know what signal it is yet, but when I try and see it separately, it’s a funny signal. It makes me laugh without feeling the tickle if you know what I mean. If I press it harder, I can laugh uncontrollably. On andon and on, until I push the button off. Pretty goodna? I won’t tell you what each of those other strands are because I think you’re smart enough to have got the drift of my babble and I won’t bore you any further with the same.

But you know, if I had known the secret code of the inside of my head earlier, I may have still chosen to ignore those signs until now, because it’s a very lonely life – this self awareness. The over dramatic child in me uses the alienation like a toy. Sometimes I scare people with it. At other times I use it to arouse myself by dropping my clothes in front of unsuspecting strangers. It’s become my only interaction with the sane world.

And I often feel the need to retreat into conversations with people from my past. At least they see the real me. They are in my memory bank, so I can control them. Switch them on and off, and have deep, meaningful conversations with them.

You know, when books like Madness and Civilization were written by philosophers like Foucault, people presumed that madness was an uncontrolled unraveling, like drool from a child’s innocent chin. How wrong they all are! Jez! I justwrote how wrong all they are!

I must really be losing it. Ok nani, hold on till you finish this conversation with the world! Your last attempt to tell the world about your grand experiment with truth and everything out there. As I was saying, madness is an art form. It’s the ultimate form of control. To be able to slide in and out – of consciousness, to semi consciousness, the ability to press the pause/still button on the videotape of your life and stop midway, see half frames. It’s the ability to choose to live in half frames instead of whole ones. To be Mendel and cross one half frame with two others in any order you desire. Instead of the order your mind organizes them into, you have the random access code cracked wide open.

But all the rest of the world sees of it are two separate words.

Random. And Access. And they think you’ve unspooled.

This half world between life and death, between living and non-living is magic. It’s also suicidal of course.

But what a death when it will come! To have seen a life slowly phase out and catch it’s last few random strands as they happen! It’s like seeing how the first young leaf steps out of a young stem and unfolds it’s soft, green tongue to taste dew. You can feel the point when the drop is on your green tongue but you haven’t tasted it yet. Between wet and dry is a half moment of complete madness.

The moment, if you’ve pushed yourself to see it’s spliced up, no-sense, garbled form, will ultimately drive to you a point of no-return. It’s suicide for sure. When your brain, having been spied upon and it’s insides exposed, finally gives way and you short circuit.

But for those of you out there who think you know or want to know what life is really like. Try the madness art once before you die.

De golo doo doo boo na fo. De golu de

golo golo o o o o o o.

“Mama. Come quick, I think dirty nani’s died.”

---Revati Laul