Retour

—:{ A Zeinab Story }:—

—:{ to Raphæl }:—

It would not serve, dear reader, if I cut straight to the story and told it. You would glance at it, and, perhaps, if you’re interested in such story you will read it through. You might even enjoy it while doing so. Then you would close it up, and get on with your life.


But I choose to say this the conventional way, as a memoir, as it happened to me. I am the only person to whom it matters. It weighed heavily upon me, like a burden borne too long. And it did not come easily; came by degrees, and, fleeting as it was, stayed on like rust, a festering wound, blanching my skin. It is so for those who are earnest—always.

A revelation is said to be god’s gift. It takes you that much closer to life. Indeed, it took me close, very close. But it left me far away, far away not just from life but from myself. Now I dread revelations. When the signs appear, I tremble and grow weak in the knee. Powerless like a leaf before falling. I recognise the signs, and I tremble because I know I am doomed.

...But I have detained you enough.

♫

She was dressed, all in white, and on a pleasanter occasion I would have called it pretty. She was led in, slender hands held by aunts, hair dishevelled, eyelashes frizzled, and tears congealed in speckles. She was silent, as if muted by mortal fear, and I was sure the tears had dried up a while before. She was a pretty little girl, her eyes red and with an aspect that told you in an instant how she clung to life, how she cherished every moment of it. A lively young girl of ten.

Her dress, as I have indicated, seemed quite at odds with her personality. The dress was definitely not of local manufacture; it betrayed an affluence that placed her in the cream of Karachi society. It was white, and she seemed white like a dove. Everything else about her was homely and fresh. Like a dream, only she didn’t glide, but whimpered from time to time, as if stepping on thorns. Ah, cruel me! These thoughts come unbidden, but how we dream at leisure while they endure!

In those long corridors, hemmed in by relatives, who seemed as distant to her as the mountains to the waves, she began searching. She searched the walls, and she searched the endless trail of notices and displays that were lit up in myriad shades. She narrowed her eyes, as if trying to make out and engaged in something; yet every time her gaze darted back, hounded out, still searching for something to rest upon.

She looked at galloping feet, at the flowing white coats which spat out bars of light as they flocked along, once in one direction, and then the another. Everyone busy, with a purpose, the circle of life, the wheels of occupation. And she alone was sedentary, immobile, as if bottled in formaldehyde, watching life go by. In the maze of light and shadow, eyes never resting, she grew tired. She rested her head on the bench and promptly fell asleep.

From the stairwell, long beyond eyeshot, I stood gazing, motionless, arrested, clipped limbless by a swathe of white resting on a steel bench, head cushioned by a folded arm. And as I recalled her face, I felt a chill in my legs—beyond her folded arm was a white towel stained crimson by an enormous blotch of dried blood.

♫

Her sleep lasted more than twenty-four hours, leading to rumours that it had been administered. It might well have been; for she had to cope with a loss which had rendered into stupefaction. She'd coped poorly, for she'd knocked herself senseless on the harsh marble floor. Her father the well-known surgeon was seen pacing the corridor in a frenzy of indecision.

Imtiaz Chishti was too close to the action to give it a miss; he recollected vividly both the girl’s face as well as her deceased mother’s; at once he was stung into pangs of guilt, which quickly silenced him. Suddenly, he was no more a stranger, but one among the lot, the ones who shared and endured silently. It was their common fate to share a turgid silence. Everyone knew, and everyone kept silent. A powerful man, distant, seemed to look down upon and lord it over them—iron hands, invisible, shadow-like—a presence which instilled fear and awe.

Later on, when she would regain consciousness, head in a bandage and her eyelids slowly cracking open, she would recognise him in silence, and, in a flutter, softly rouse him out of his reverie: ‘Mamoo, sar dukhta hai burra burra sa.’ But she was happy. As he slowly came to, the harsh green of the hospital room solidifying in his dissolving eyes, he saw the same impish grin that had once called to him so fondly, many years ago. It all came back to him in an instant, and he realised that his eyes were full again.

[880, 7 minor edits, final]

Cut Glass

(And Some Fishiness)

Ouverture
One thing I'd like to remind folks hesitating to dip their feet in the water: if you choose not to, then you’d be sorry, and if you choose to, then also you’d be sorry.

You moved mountains to get to the ocean; now’s not the time to have second thoughts and think about the waysides.

The point is to move on with every passing moment, to go with the moment.

But before all that: we all have our crises, we all hit patches, and we all stay low for a long while. While we do, everything passes over our heads, and we are the wretched of the planet. Nothing sinks in. Nothing we do or eat is tasteful, we’re vegetables; worse, we’re vermin. But we have recollection of once being men.

I call to that hoary past and tell you: the time will pass, it will all come back. Like we need memories for commemoration (we never really felt anything when we lived like men in that hoary past, did we), we need this low life, this low fling, because we need to be reminded of our bellies and our lower parts which stick so low.

Reprise

The point, as I’ve said before, is to move on. This is not very difficult. It just means you act, and not think about what you’ve only just done. You have to follow action with action, not with a covering thought or an afterthought. You follow action with another action and keep at it.

Of course, you will achieve nothing except a well-deserved rest for your overworked brain. Perhaps, as a side-effect, you will chance upon that rhythm, that rhythm of heart and soul.

You made certain unworthy surmises about your future as a writer. First of all I’d like to ask you what you think about a writer like Mr G, or a writer like Heidegger. (The choice is deliberate.) Writing is just another profession. I want to know if you want to write for business (more like my style) or as a professional.

Prose contra Poesie

If you choose the latter path, then obviously you’d be a poet. My knowledge of poetry is rather scant. But my idea goes something like this right now: what we get on the paper is a transcription made under duress. It is done for the publisher, with an immediate intention of some remuneration (a needy family, perhaps) or fame, and obviously it will have to be either totally new as a genre or fall neatly into a niche (in which case you’d have to have published something earlier). And so on. Of course, it will have a subject or many subjects and it will be personal. Since we sit on top of an every-rising mountain of shit (composed of the decomposing excrement of previous generations as well as that of those in office), our nostrils have to be suitably electroplated, with increasing thickness of noble metal, to provide a suitable environment to thrive. But our brains can be no heavier than 1.5 kg, and it has remained so for the past 10,000 years with no respite in sight. As a poet, your contribution to this shit-mountain would be negligible and you can rest easy. (I would like to bring to your attention two novels, situated oppositely in terms of quality but co-sited in terms of length: Avakaasikal and Jean Christophe, each of which would be around 4500 printed pages). Your sin would be slight. (But there is a possibility of a few lines doing lasting damage, like ‘Thou shalt not steal...’ than whole tomes like those of the aforesaid Christophe which remain secure, unread.)

Health Mix

You and I represent two specific issues facing the writer. I write fantastic things and groan about having nothing to write about (really, I haven’t anything to write about, as I have to manufacture literally every miserable particle of my shitload). The whole thing is conjecture with nothing to connect it to real incidents or reality. It’s truly fantastic in which I place my current dilemmas. You read it and make the connection (perhaps others would, too). Nobody reads me like you do and gets such a wonderful thrill out of it. My writing is so closely tuned to your antennae, and your reading sensibility always reveals possibilities of which I’d never thought of. To tell you the truth, you find “depth” precisely in those ‘natural’ passages, passages where I let myself go, those flowing passages which I write in spite of me. These come to me while I am writing; these are not the passages which I set out to write. They just happen. In those sequences I’ve run away completely from my existence, from my real life, and am just spending time with those characters, as those characters. I act out both and all the parts. It is a complete displacement—spatial and temporal. This happens seldom, but it does happen. This is the crux of storytelling. Sometimes I get it; but since I don’t have a grand design for a big novel or story, since I have no agenda, my stories seldom tell stories. I am quite happy with the little patches that stand out. And sometimes, if I’m sufficiently deep in the water, I go ahead and stretch the episode (‘Bangalore’). This pattern you are familiar with, and this has become my style. I’m not entirely responsible for this style; it evolved constantly with a lot of factors, of which one significant was you, the reader.

I think this has come by degrees. You read me first at least twelve years ago. You picked it up fast, because, somehow, my style attracted you and actually got you interested in reading (I’d like to think I was one of those factors which got you really interested in reading—not that I was up to much, but rather the good vibes for a fellow sufferer who found the words). But what you saw in 1997 was the tip of an accidental monument I've been carving since 1986. I'm an old man, been a writer these 21 years.

Calling

When I first saw you, you were a painter. I think C had a few commissions for you, painting stuff on T-shirts and flags and so on. My recollections of you, for a long time, were those of a painter. I think you’re a first-class painter (I really don’t care about technique), you really did have a fine balance of technique and imagery (N was 90% technique and 10% imagery). I also noted your deep, serene, brown eyes (your eyes are a very mellow tea-brown, my eyes look like trash). I also noted your serene eyebrows, the repository of your great calm.

Les procès

If you ask me, everything else—music, poetry, literature—is an acquired taste, in your case. I think, from my first impression, you are closer to a painter in sensibility. (I never saw myself as writer; I was always a philosopher and will be. I will also make the claim that I am a first-class philosopher in any company, a claim that I can substantiate anywhere as long as I understand the language being used.) We all relate to things in that basic frame of mind. That ‘basic’ frame is actually not a simple. It depends on all our propensities. For me it is philosophical, logical, linguistic, scientific, rational, political, and a lot many other things suggested by the ‘trace’ of the thing in question. My comprehension of that ‘word’ (allow me) would be based on these, and other, more practical, considerations which are in turn tempered by my awareness. It’s a gut feeling; only, when we express it in words, it becomes such a monstrous complex. ‘Comprehension’ happens in a jiffy, and is connected with all these aromas.

Copy-write

So much for the ‘sensing’. It’s when we describe (transcribe) that we run into problems. This is where we have to explicitly make a choice as to how we want it to look. I choose prose because it’s best suited for showing-off my multifaceted brilliance (heh!); also you can easily drop off a lot of shit (‘it’s only prose’) at a later date without breaking into a sweat. And, more importantly, it’s the easiest thing, and easily what most literate people find easy to assimilate. I was lucky in that I built my expertise in a thing which was both easy and popular. (And remember those 21 years.) I read prose exclusively, and wrote; one thing added to another and the other was crowned by the glory of vanity and ego.

I guess, with poetry, exactly the opposite applies. You think up a lot of things or you register a lot of things on a field trip or out on a walk; you somehow “shorthand it” or mentally-type-it. Somehow you retain a trace of it. At your leisure you transcribe it, voluminous, trying to recall. And then, you reduce, condense, clarify. You go through several iterations of this, and explore uncharted territory because in the harmony of sound, idea and feeling, your individual production will give rise to poetic insight and poetic opportunity that are never present in a real, tactile reality.

The Cut and the Draw

The stage between ‘registering’ and transcribing—that big yawn—is what determines the final form of the poem—symbolist, surreal, experimental, typographic. Every poet is an individual. The different nooks and corners he has explored will always matter. As he seldom has the luxury of ‘other voices,’ poetry is seldom secular or neutral. You will have to take a stance. Every poem aligns you with something or somebody, you cannot hide behind different identities because modern poetry is essentially a monologue—no more illusions. By necessity a poet has to be honest to his self and true. By definition, this excludes me because I change so often. To me, the most expendable thing is the opinion I hold. And I have nothing but opinions; nothing is really hard and fast with me unless I have paid for it.

And this, by definition, includes you—you are true and you never really change. You always come back to the same ‘fundamental truths.’

For me, the truth does not exist. If anything, this fact simplifies things. Without truth, there is nothing permanent, and all we have are conveniences which can—and will—change.

And we are both right—unfortunately.

General Mongering, As Usual

I see truth as external; our ‘internal truths’ do not matter, as we communicate to the world exclusively through our actions (as anyone knows, this itself is an assumption, which hinges upon our definition of ‘action’). So it is the external truth that I always speak about (whatever ‘external truth’ means—maybe, truth or ‘human nature’ for other people, or absolute scientific truth, which is another absurdity). It is a fictitious constant, and so, by definition, illusory. It is the infinity in my logical firmament.

You see truth as internal, as representing your own contradictions and moral confusion. This is an inclusive view of truth: you are defined by your honesty, your truth, and the ‘you’ is enclosed completely. To survive meaningfully, ‘you’ have to define and substantiate, and constantly corroborate, the ‘truth.’ It is an absolute, all-encompassing, godlike truth.

In other words: truth does not matter to me, whereas it is all that matters to you. For me, it will always be an ideal, and I wouldn't insist upon it. For you, it's a living presence, and it should pervade your being otherwise you'll be miserable.

It’s often a question of which mask suits you best at any one time. But for some, it’s not a question of changing masks; for you, it’s not a mask at all. Which is why you paint, and I draw (—there's always the eraser).

[2100]

Leavings

A baby cried in the dead of night. Insistent, in waves, as if repeatedly waking from nightmares. His thoughts turned to the poor lot of the dwellers of the houses right below his. Thatched houses covered with tin and iron sheets, almost every labourer’s house in the neighbourhood similarly shielded from the elements. Canopy of brotherhood, mark of decrepitude. Progress. Progress, and television. It had started a long while back; maybe fifteen years back, when he’d started not to notice these things. But then he noticed that the sound came from the side, and not from the back of his house. This was probably the same baby who’d cried two hours before, only now it was more desperate, and it did not stop for the next fifteen minutes. Perhaps the baby was ill.

He’d been reading for a while and it was the second time he’d been relieving himself. He felt good afterward, and he wondered what he’d eaten to deserve such a wonderful release. He could only recall the hot spicy food he had almost close to midnight. And then it jolted him to reality; his arse was hurting, it was now the turn of the hotness to find painful release. Yet he was happy.

And then he recalled the equanimity with which she went about her daily rounds. She was among the locals, but she was not a local. She’d come here a while back, five years back, and she was very young then. Young, and highly qualified, with possibly more qualifications than anyone would care to even remember—and she’d grown old among them, living a solitary life. And, after a while, no one even bothered to inquire about what she was doing. She went about the business quietly, and all was well.

But he knew at least some of the reasons. It didn’t change anything, no. The same things he had spelt out in his long corpus of literary leavings, she had silently acted out, not to the letter but certainly true to the spirit. And it was this: this here is the world, and the best we can do in it is to live—live consciously. She was doing exactly that. He knew that she loved her work but not to distraction, it was not an absolute, she could keep away from it for long stretches. But she never gave cause for alarm, when her juniors needed her most she was always there. He knew also that this sort of attachment—at times amounting to brinkmanship—came from an immense sense of detachment. It was as if she was listening to the background noise for the telltale cry of a baby.

She had her share of everything, and she had lovers. But the joke wears thin in a few years, and as long as one kept it out of the news and gossip, it was not going to hurt. She knew. It was easy for her because the little town needed a healer, and minded its business otherwise. To make things a little easier, she had no interests in that town at all. From eight to six, she was there, body and soul. She needed a little rest, and she slept only five hours. She occasionally watched a film, but liked to spend her time with interesting people. And she loved driving—and often went out for no particular reason.

Nothing was really missing from this picture if you followed her around daily. From eight to six she was at the Sanatorium; in between her work and rounds and refreshments, she also read for a few hours, researched a bit, and talked a bit with her colleagues. She lived ten miles away, a safe distance from the town. And then she met up with her friend, with whom she’d put up for the night, and often spend a long night just talking or watching a movie or listening to music. She never gave much thought to cooking, which wasn’t a problem because she was single.

**

‘And I’m just living. I could be pompous and assume that I am reinventing it all, the first man to do so. But I could also be humble and recognise that billions have felt the same way before, and probably billions will, in future. Whatever work I leave behind, will be subjected to scrutiny, and will merely become (if they are worth enough to be well-known in my day or become fashionable enough some time in the future) the tools for criticism. These will become fodder for new industries or solo efforts meant to embellish an otherwise dull career. But the fact remains—once dead, I will either be forgotten (which doesn’t terrify me) or severely used. I’ll more likely be forgotten or be used rather than otherwise. But all of these possibilities mean nothing to me, as it does not change the way I live each of my days. These are the merely theoretical, theological, textual considerations which a common man doesn’t get himself entangled in. In short—these are ideas which are better termed luxurious.

‘The alternative, of course, is to simply realise that you’re living. It’s like the obsession to take photographs. You do it for some purpose. You can do it for personal ends, and mostly it is for personal ends. But if you really love the subject of your photograph, you wouldn’t care much about turning him or her or it or that into a fossil. You’d watch it thrive, watch her smile, watch the life, and watch it flowing, unbroken, unspoilt.

‘I loved to take photographs. Or rather, I thought I did. But I didn’t have very good equipment. I made up for it by taking a lot many, most of them irrelevant, some even irreverent. And then, I got this wonderful gift, which really made all my excuses look shameful. And I started taking beautiful photographs for a while. As my technique improved, as it inevitably must, I started realising an immense emptiness within the body of my work, growing like a silent tumour, unseen, hollow, as if burrowing from within, bloating it. Interestingly, I started getting better and better responses for my ‘work,’ most of which used to cause me much shame.

‘I knew the reason very well. Only a few of my patrons were regulars; the others were merely being introduced to my style and they liked it. But at every new place there were so many! It was designed to be impressive, to have the maximum impact. It was much like the logic of the one-off bestseller. I knew it well but I also knew well not to recall it often to my detriment. I thus became an established name. With all my limitations, knowing my limitations, perpetrating a heinous crime on humanity and human dignity, I sold myself out. In other words, even within the locus I had set myself, it was possible for me to be lavish about myself, be arrogant, and browbeat people.

‘Yet, it inevitably comes to this. I knew. And the instant she looked at me I knew that she knew. Our masks were torn in an instant, yet she smiled an innocent smile. We had each our independent ways. I wondered then how it was possible. Her attire, her bearing, and that halting smile which suddenly broke out like moonshine. And when she first talked to me, her voice was cracked, and she cleared a lump in her throat. But it was to no avail; he eyes occasionally shone and her cover was blown.

‘Yet I knew how she’d done it; it was so easy. Like a face-meter, spotting a face and prompting for recognition, her eyes flitted here and there for an instant before gauging the depth of my pepper-coloured hair which revealed both my ancestry as well as my main bad habit. But how did I recognise her? To this day it is a mystery to me and I have not forced it. By an invisible submission, she seemed to agree to my conclusion that we were similarly placed on the boat of sinners.

‘And, like stones dropped in the mud, we both sank forthwith, to the bottom.’

**

Perhaps it was not by chance that I came across his note. I knew him to be a collector of all sorts of things—books, magazines, CDs, everything. His dwelling was like a big portmanteau—and he had a huge collection of different suitcases and bags. But that was perhaps what I really liked; it was all so different, and he was trapped like a fish in its bowl. And then, like an eighth wonder, I chanced upon this book placed under a lot many others in a house full of books.

From the tone of it, a personal note, perhaps to commemorate what had been a rather pleasant acquaintance. Of course, it was about me. He was easy to maintain, I guess, but so am I. The first evening was like an immense teenage visual rubdown in a decrepit coffee house over nothing but a pot of coffee. But what coffee! I felt, stuck in an immensely dreary interlude, that he’d sprinkled schnapps into it. He had relapsed into one of those moods so essential after mush idealism. (—Men!) But somehow he’d got wind of what was coming, so he fixed up the coffee real strong. It stung at that precise moment I felt almost detached from the company of his words. And it saved the day.

And now, to answer the enigma: what was it that made him realise I was a fellow-sinner. He speaks of having noted the glint in my eye as a mark of my tacit approval of his identification of our position. And he is right about what I noted him from the first which gave him away. But I am betting my last penny on my getup as the giveaway. (He must also have noted the impeccable shade of my hair. He must also have noticed, I’m sure, that I was out of the sanatorium and in my ‘free time.’ So he must have immediately placed my black-and-white ethnic chic with a smattering of tribal jewellery—crappy silverware if worn otherwise—as due to a rather ancient expertise in the profession.

To his credit, it must be said that his survey—which I’m forced, noting the enormity of the accusations he levels against people and their motives as also against himself—his survey must have been pretty thorough, and immensely swift. Whatever the reason, whatever it was that ‘gave me away’ (I for one don’t consider it as a gift of anything), he came to that conclusion pretty soon and was knocking with his back turned to the clock. It had never happened that way in my life. Most of the time I met up with folks that wanted to flog their stuff or peddle their stories and they were interesting in a way. But this time around, it was a felon, same as me, and he came with nothing, and declared nothing except a blind and mad profession of the depths to which he had sunk. For once, it felt happy to be down there in the depths with him—especially as he did almost all the talking, and we did all the eating and drinking from casseroles and carafes.

As he’s a stickler for details, I’m afraid I must excuse myself from furthering my little explanation (which will hopefully go unread). This is only a provisional explanation that should serve its purpose, and also mark the fact that his accidental personal note, perhaps meant never to be read by anyone else, was read, digested, and carefully forgotten with this similarly accidental reply note which should similarly go unread.

[To Raphael, the story; & to Edmund Leach, the themes]

[1952; 77’, three sittings]

[Written 0158 – 0315, Oct 14, 2009, after a telephonic conversation. This is merely a fictionalized transcript of what we talked, leaving out the details. I hope you can recognise the threads, but of course it’s all there in order in my head, and perhaps only in my head, which is why you’d probably find this not too boring.]

[2046]

A Gift and Acrobat® Kludges

Tracing an Article

(The publication of this article in a blog would cause difficulties to the dear friend referenced herein.)

Or

The Trace of an Electronic Document

Chennai: Sun Oct 14 15:35:36 2007
[Origin]: Sun Oct 14 05:05:34 2007

Dramatis Personæ__________________________________________________

Interlocutor
Respondent
Friend/Benefactor
Recipient/Renamer

[Towards the end, it is revealed that personæ 1, 2, and 4 are the same person. But this advance revelation isn't much of a revelation, it is a retrospective postface, because you, the reader, don't know anything until you’ve actually read it.]

Context_________________________________________________________

We talk about two persons, using first, second, and third person narrative interchangeably.

Recipient has received an electronic gift from the friend (who is thus his benefactor). Out of love and out of boredom, Recipient answers some questions about the gift.

Argument________________________________________________________

I: Ahem... it is said you came by a lot of stuff recently.

R: Oh, quite. It was in yesterday's paper, I got it today.

I: Stuff, you say?

R: (Disinterested, as if what he is saying is too technical for the interlocutor to comprehend.) Articles by famous philosophers. It was a sweet surprise. but there's a story behind it...

[We break off and resume quite abruptly where the respondent is answering questions about the sudden acquisition.]

(This is possibly uttered by Respondent.)...The article is named, simply, a2.pdf. This would mean

The article is really called "a2.pdf".

The creator of the article had named it so, this being one in a series, the series starting a1.pdf, and continuing with the current file, in a3.pdf, a4.pdf and so on.

If this is indeed the case, then the author was in a hurry to finish it.

That being so, there would be a number of such articles to be separately named
and saved to disk.

The motive of such an operation is obviously deep friendship, love, and the sense of giving.

The nature of such an operation seems to be covert.

(This indeed seems to be the case.)

I: From the resplendent simplicity of the naming convention, what can be inferred about the friend in question?

R: The friend, as you may observe, has used a simple naming convention: the alphabet is the first letter of the Christian name of the author—or any such identifying name that would qualify. The number represents, as we have seen, the order in which he has saved these documents. The naming method, though simple, is utilitarian, and in addition possesses the qualities of being logical, straightforward, and easily extensible. It can be scaled up to a hundred or more files, with the added advantage of speed. It concentrates the process, it expedites it, and above all it focuses the attention of Recipient to the content of the file, not the form of the file (which is bland enough and uniform for all the files). It asks to be cut open and read. No matter how long Recipient stays away from it, no matter how urgent and legitimate his excuse for being negligent, the day he comes back to it he must open it, and when he opens it the content bursts upon him, shakes awake his familiarity, and he drops down in a chair, exclaiming simply, 'Ah! This was just what I was looking for!'

I: How true is the final interjection? —I mean, did he really ejaculate on all 40 occasions?
(The interlocutor seems remarkably prescient, don't I?)

R: Yes, nearly so. His surprise gradually gave way to the physical expression of wonder, as evidenced by a visible dropping of the jaw, at which unnatural position he contemplated the possibility, immanent, of his investment in a print copy of the Culture Industry being made a mockery of, by the serial exposition of the articles contained therein, such as in the two essays that immediately caught his attention as he himself set upon renaming the files in a fashion more appropriate and conducive to archiving and quick perusal.

I: Renaming the files? Wherefore?

R: Because, otherwise, in the cryptic beauty of the received files and the perceived identity afforded by filesize were hidden the titles of the articles. As such it was but a trivial exercise (unskilled labour).

I: How come?

R: It was done as follows: —

Open file

Observe title (to quench curiosity, and before it kills you:)

Copy title (Ctrl-C)

Press F2 (the file being already highlighted if you'd just closed the Acrobat window using Ctrl-W)

Rename (Ctrl-V)

Press enter to effect the change

I: Bamf! So it was unskilled labour, as we can see. Were the possibility of error discounted, or were they...?

R: …Were accounted for, you see. In case of error,

On renaming and you needed to retain the original cipher, you just pressed Ctrl-Z

Of course, that being the only valid possibility for error (all other possibilities for error being benign with the file not getting renamed), we could conclude that the method was foolproof. Since the possibility for error had been accounted for, we could say a fail-safe was in place.

I: To what end...?

R: Renaming, consequent to the 40 cases of gleeful discovery accompanied by two-score tip-to-toe thrills, led to an even richer sense of wealth. Subsequently, to suitably deploy his treasures, he created the following folders:

Derrida

Wittgenstein

Foucault

Adorno

Reichenbach

Though it must be noted in passing that he made these files as he opened and renamed the files. It may also be noted that the sense of order was already present in the friend's gifts: these were simply a 'trace' from the originary communication (the zipped files). The friend had enforced order so:

1. The Reichenbach files were to be found in a zipped file Recipient had downloaded to his disk as simply, '[the name of the friend].zip'

2. The second and third groups of files were all downloaded "as a single file" into two other, similarly named zip files.

Thus had order been established and maintained across the electronic communication, which is really subversion at the speed of light. (Forgive the well-known and slight error in the appropriation of the speed.)

I: And what did Recipient do?

R: Nothing. He did nothing, instead, he was done upon. He received a long distance phone call from Chennai on his mobile phone, from the said friend who, only a few hours ago, had been engaged in sending these files electronically (using simple mail transfer protocol) with the aid of a Web browser. Then he noted the number before answering, when his friend's name had shown up. His face brightened, there was a tension of facial musculature, a sort of expectancy—there is always the element of the unknown in a much desired phone call.

A few short sentences were intoned, to the effect that the friend had sent mail with and quite a few attachments. Which immediately sets Recipient excited, but mail has to wait until eleven at night, when everything is quiet and the line (as in telephone line) clear. He connected using dialup, but connection to the mail server is mysteriously refused. He takes heart in the fact that it is probably very busy for the network (daily dump time). He tries again after ten minutes avoiding the proxy. Same mysterious misbehaviour.

Full two hours later, he tries again and connects and downloads from one of his mail accounts a 1 MB zipped file containing the writings of Hans Reichenbach. He does not unpack it. It is saved to a folder in his desktop which bears the name of the friend, his benefactor (and who would later be described as his wonderwall, out of gratitude).

He replies to the mail, and says something about the friend's comments about his latest writings. The mail is moderately long.

___________________________[INTERLUDE]_________________________

(In the third person) As we have seen, Recipient opened one of his mail accounts, found a few attachments, and concluded—with no hope for retrospective anticipation—that this was to be all. Of course, knowing no other alternative, he was unaware that this was not to be the end of it. (As I am trying to say again and again, this possibility does not exist for Recipient, happy at the time of having laid hands on his first Reichenbach. At that point of time he is simple gleeful as a child with a new toy. And, as I always say in my formal philosopher vein: The possibility... does not exist.)

So yesterday—that is, on Oct 20, Recipient is awakened to the notification of new mail in his regular mailbox. He opens the mailbox and is delighted to find the second and third parts. (The third part, he must add, had been sent thrice by the friend just to make sure it got across—though for what particular reason escaped him at that moment). This communication had the following salient features.

1. The first mail had 13 attachments. Utter delight, coupled with admiration (well, he made full use of all the allowed number of attachments, didn't he).

2. The second mail had—hold your breath—23 attachments. Recipient is stupefied, and glee is discoloured by doubt—how come so many? Perhaps Google did allow so many attachments provided the size did not exceed the limit. He looked at the size—yeah, the single zipped download was around 6 Mbytes. Fair enough. Yea, maybe that was the explanation.

And then began the renaming and arrangement.

And thus finally he obtained the following grand deployment: ~

Fig 1 The Grand Scheme of Things________________________________________

[Figure cut for brevity]

(Conversation continues, in dubious person)

I: His subsequent actions, after being obsequious to the benefactor?

R: ...Were those of studied observation of the acquired treasures, followed by cold, calculated perusal and beautification.

I: Beautification?

R: (Somewhere during this conversation, the narrative jumps into the first person) Some of the pages, being all of them carefully scanned and OCRed from master documents and rare books (manuscripts), were slightly tilted out of the plumb, resulting in a 2 or 3˚ tilt of the page. The tilt—

I: How in blazes is that important—

R: —Allow me to continue! Allow me to ingratiate you with an ample dose of explanation! The tilt… is significant. If you take the printout of a tilted page, with the black scanner background showing, it immediately gives the game away.

I: How so?

R: Well, since there are a lot many pages to print, you economise, and naturally you go for legal size paper, with two pages to a side, four pages to the sheet, and thus end up with the full Monty for much less than a third the cost. That being so, you also take the printout in booklet form (Acrobat Reader 8 gives you that provision, though it hasn't got anything else to recommend it). You end up with tell-tale rectangles framing in the felon pages, which would not be there if the pages were proper.

I: So—?

R: So, Recipient opened the suspect PDF in Acrobat Professional and did the following: ~

1. Removed the first page after transferring essential data (Title, Author, Keywords) into metadata, as well as adding the value for Subject (how own values) and also some custom values (such as Base URL and Created (time)). The first page was removed because it was letter-size, and would not fit in with the rest of the document (which was book-size).

2. Opened the Pages view in Acrobat Professional.

3. Selected each page one by one to see if the page was skewed. If skewed, the following steps were executed.

3.1 Alt-O to enter the value for top crop margin (usually in the range 0.02 to 0.04")

3.2 Tab to enter the value for bottom crop margin (usually in the range 0.02 to 0.05")

3.3 Tab to enter the value for left crop margin (usually in the range 0.02 to 0.05")

3.4 Tab to enter the value for right crop margin (usually in the range 0.03 to 0.07")

3.5 Tab again to see the crop mark on the right margin (just to ensure. The crop marks signify that the page has been placed under erasure.)

4. To correctly view if the cropping was adequate to remove the black edges, Recipient would move the options dialog box to slightly to the bottom right position.

5. After ensuring that an adequate crop box had been provided for, the cropping operation was effected by pressing Enter. Errors were corrected in the manner described above and also by editing the values of the crop margins.

(It is notable that though the offending borders are removed, the text will remain tilted at 2 or 3˚, thus preserving the arche-trace, or a trace of the arche-trace.)

I: Seems to have been a smooth operation. The unskilled labour, I mean.

R: Twice or thrice Recipient, after doing all the dirty work, nearly ruined things by optimizing the pdf. It resulted in the filesize shooting up to over five times the original. However, being conversant with such disasters, Recipient always had his fingers on the ready with the Ctrl-Z keys, and when this was not possible, he made sure to make a copy of the file being modified (using right-click + drag of the file's icon on the folder window, of course). This resulted in the almost hassle-free possibility of just deleting the optimized file and renaming the copy.

I: It must have been exhausting for Recipient. So much unskilled labour to speak of. His neck must be longing for detachment.

R: Oh but surely! His back is aching like a sore bag. But, in between, I had done the following

1. Consumed 1½ plates of mutton omelette (that is: three eggs and minced mutton garnished with pepper powder and some salt, consumed raw, with no fluid intake)

2. Made a dash to the microwave oven, where, after a long stint which is superfluous and much painful to describe in any detail, he emerged beaten and foiled with a flask half-full of instant coffee (Nescafé Sunrise), which he held aloft in his hands towards the ceiling (where the electric fan was furiously circumvolving) only to impatiently retract a minute later to draw the cup towards his lift, take a gulp or two, and immediately feel flat by its taste which fell way below his expectations. (He would, later on, fall tolerably in love with it, as would cause him to go out and fetch two dozen Britannia biscuit-buttons which went well with good coffee.)

3. Consumed the said coffee and biscuits.

All this hard work took their toll on his poor back.

I: But the total feeling has been one of success...?

R: The same. Pure triumph. When he keeled over for the day (night?) he felt like an emperor hemmed in by kludge. He felt kingly, to be sure, with all the aches and hurts of a torpedo.

I: But we haven't broached the subject. The trace, I mean.

R: Oh yes, the arche-trace, or a trace of time-zones. Or, a trace of how McLuhan's prophecy is disseminated through the Web. The promise...

I: Come now. How did the trace originate.

R: It was quite accidental. Recipient was merely copying out the characteristics into the metadata and custom document tags when he noticed that the file creation date as proclaimed in the auto-generated title page was different from the file creation date as reported by an invocation of Ctrl-D (Document Properties). This fact went uncorrelated for some time, but then it hit Recipient that he was banging his head against...

I: Banged your head against what? You torture me!

R: …Against time-zones. Vremya-zona. Or something like what the Russians used to say. It suddenly dawned on Recipient. Everything came in a flash: the file repository tucked away several time zones away, while, a few seconds later, a few time zones and fifteen thousand kilometers away, our magnanimous friend receives his communication which he stores in his disk for five days and then passes on electronically, before invoking his friend's attention with another electronic contrivance, the mobile phone.

I: But the trace—

R: All right. Here it is:

[Origin]: Sun Oct 14 05:05:34 2007
Chennai: Sun Oct 14 15:35:36 2007

(It goes without saying that this is the trace for a particular file; all files having similar trace.)

I observe that you are not quite amused. did you expect something more? Anything different? Did you expect a pack of cigarettes? A matchbox of RDX perhaps? A trace is a trace. Or do you by any chance (sweet sound of birds twittering in the background) fail to see it?

I: Well, it seems pretty dubious to me. Pretty ordinary. Well, those are two times for the same day.

R: My oh my! 'Two times for the same day!' Strike me dead, Injun. Can't you see the trace?

I: Well—

R: The difference. The time difference, you dolt. It is exactly two seconds.

I: What? There's a difference of over ten hours, whichever way you look at it.

R: Ten hours, my foot! Separated by 10.5 time zones, which happens because India uses a non-standard time for its time-zone. It is exactly the same time! (Of course, if I tell you that the "origin" is a core router in Denver, Colorado, separated from us by more than 15 Internet hops, you would be writing me off as a charlatan. But that indeed seems to be the case.)

I: So—?

R: This is the trace. Electronic file generated upon the friend's request in Denver, in less than two seconds the friend receives it over a fast connection (hence the two seconds), so your friend has the creation date inscribed as "Oct 14 15:35:36 2007". If your friend were God, receiving the communication simultaneously with another God situated in Denver, he would have had the Creation date inscribed "Oct 14 15:35:34 2007". The trace also makes it clear that the two computer systems are synchronized by possibly the very same cæsium atomic clock maintained by NIST. In any case, the two machines are very accurately synchronized and in tune with Web time, which is the most accurate propagation of time you get to live with (if you cannot allow yourself the luxury of being God). As we always say, God is dead but not Internet Time...

Post-face

Dear Raphael, this I dedicate to you. Especially, your gifts. You gift has been magnificent. Hoping that I could hope for repeat performances.

I got the idea for this... thing in about five seconds. As I have said in it, it was quite sudden, the trace revealed itself to me quite suddenly. I suddenly felt like I had prised the wisdom of the electronic communication. (What comes in the communication—the message—is quite secondary, and it may not entirely establish its content even after repeated readings, musing, and subsequent alterations.) So we can quite simply replace the communication with its form. This is the de(con)struction of the form. I could perhaps go on a bit, but this is basically it.

Derrida's technique (whatever he chooses to call it), in a sentence: To discover (uncover) how the writer has written the article (text). This means uncovering each trace, each construction line. (You are doubtless familiar with my idea that a work of art must hide its construction lines no matter what. This is because the artistic creation is not an advertisement; not a business proposition per se.) I had anticipated the very technique independently of him. What he says is different of course, but what I understand of him I understand perfectly. The details he delves in are excruciating but it's nothing to write a lot about, actually. You may be right in saying that the things I write sometimes have that 'Derridean' touch. It's unintentional, it's just me, and I haven't read him much (he is exasperating, much like most continental philosophers).

In retrospect, I also humbly realize that this is my first critique of Derrida, without ever having read even a chapter written by him in full, which is a very shameful thing indeed. But I am against naming of all sorts, so this stands justified.

Essentially a single sitting.

Postscript v2

I’d written this way back in 2007 October, a fact which is attested to by the numerous dates scattered throughout. The article stems from a genuine sense of wonderment which comes only occasionally (perhaps a dozen times in ones life) to habitual users of the computer. It was indeed thrilling (the exact sequence being now quite inaccessible; irretrievably lost) to note that the trace was only two seconds in the making. Occasionally, only occasionally, do I feel surprised by technology. And when it does surprise you, it doesn’t require a CLK or a Sukhoi Flanker to do that; a simple PDF will do.

The original postscript applied only to my friend to whom this was originally addressed. This was not meant for public consumption. I have however posted this taking into consideration the very considerable fact that my readership is rather limited (I should rather say readerboat) in number, so I’m not unduly worried that my friend (who else but—) would come breathing down my back. The dedication (to Deleuze and Derrida) are afterthoughts, because this article was inspired by them.

I’m not so sure about how this post would be taken but I rather enjoy it as a writerly reader. I enjoyed immensely as I wrote it; I hope you appreciate it as a rather technical piece. There are some subtle (if forceful) kludges I’ve described in some detail which would make rather interesting reading, if not complete sense, to those who are acquainted with Acrobat merely as the software used to read PDF. In my opinion, Acrobat is an incredible of software which produces print-ready output (something which UNIX packages like roff still do admirably). I single it out as the software which made the online dissemination of books possible and attractive; hypertext has its place but I don’t think people would prefer to read online. And to me at least, the ultimate electronic gift is a good PDF.

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