Short Story: Managing the Pieces

Kannan Baskar narrates a powerful story on the pieces of life we are always surrounded with and are trying to put together for survival.

The Voice

However pointless it might seem, this tangled pursuit of mine through a maze of intersecting walkways happens to be sanctified. It will culminate at the funerary temple’s central shrine, as promised. Some will eventually realize there is more to me than this maze and compulsive journey. A mythical object, they call me, a distribution between the corporeal and the ethereal; therefore, overlaps shall be the rule in my retelling that is to follow, while perspectives—like experimenting lovers in springtime—will behave as functions dependent on n possible personal states.

Projected onto the shapely unevenness of a bas-relief sculpture and my eternal locomotion paused, I find myself, now, in a battle scene from the Bhagavata Purana—a thousand-armed king and his Asura army are no match to a flute-wielding Krishna. The sculpture is not just stone and posture; from my entrapped self’s viewpoint, smoke suffuses the wafer-thick atmosphere. In the haze, amid Iron-age mustiness, I hear a voice:

“In these chiseled confines of volcanic reality, you’ll discover the finite set of patterns that’ll enliven all lies.” Then, it continues with another twisted prophecy, “in between the notes of Raga Desh and its ornamentations, you’ll sense her.”