Gifts from God

Krishna and I

The story I am going to tell you is one of a kind because the night after World Mental Health Day was too coarse to sleep through. So I did what I knew- I lay on the bed, going into a hollow darkness where I received a bunch of light from Krishna.

He offered voraciously, with so much mercy that it overwhelmed me enough not to sleep. My body was aching from yesterday's survival and my mind was almost shut. But, he poured in ideas and lines as if raindrops pouring from the sky; too much to contain for a single soul.

This was not too much for me though, because this was just another miraculous night for me where what I wanted came to me directly. This had happened to me so many times that now I got used to it, like one's routine.

I lay there under the blanket, too hot to stay inside but too cold to uncover; a cold. At this point, the clothes I had borne had aged more than forty-eight hours by now, but I was lucky this night; my nostrils were blocked. The smell of my dirty armpit hair and the repulsive smell of too much-worn cloth could not touch me; a lucky tragedy.

When the notes app was filled and there were too many ideas to contain in separate places, I chose this place. A home I could return to any day, thinking it was a night worth remembering and yet a night too long. The next day I was going to fast on the eighth day of Navratri and sleep was going to be just as important as breath to a weakling like me. My mom had warned me at only ten, but who knew the rain wouldn't stop even at my disapproval?

Whom to blame, Krishna, you or my mind?

You have been playing with me all through the night.

You played, Krishna, you played a game,

Where I find it hard to blame,

Because I sometimes think "Don't you feel shame,

Giving gifts to a beggar being loyal to the night, again?"

I thought of all this during my talks with Krishna. He didn't answer though. I had called him when I had gone to bed, but I didn't bathe today. I think he also didn't come because I said "When do Gods come and sleep with beggars?" I think he was pissed. He didn't pay me a visit, but I paid him a lot of things to blame for.

I got out of bed, with a flat stomach even though it was full when I slept, to eat a banana hoping I'd get sleep. Sitting on the chair in my dining room which is just two steps away from our bedroom, I wondered would this night have been satiated with my existence if all I had done was eat a banana. I don't think so, and the answer came when I started writing this story. God had come.

"Drink hot milk, it might help." My grandmother said when she came out of the washroom at her usual time: four am. "No, why hot milk? I just ate two bananas." I thought of googling later whether it was okay to drink hot milk after bananas or not, but there was something more important than my health that night.

As I was going to open my laptop, my younger brother came out of the room, directly looking at me. He is always curious, and I would say peeking in the matter of others. He wants to know what they're doing just to repeat it enough times for others to even forget what he intended to do by exaggerating it.

I suddenly shut the laptop and went for my only refuge- hot milk. What worse thing could happen to an already sick person? Death? Nah. God was not so merciless, he wouldn't kill me just because I blamed him for all the things he created./ God wasn't so merciless, he wouldn't kill me for blaming him for the wonderful gifts I was too weak to accept.

I put the milk on low flame so that it would be boiled until my brother finished his job in the washroom. As I watched the surface of the milk weirdly dancing as if some drunk person was subtly walking on the road, I thought of what I'd do next. I knew what I wanted to do after my brother had gone into his dreams of video games and football, but I also knew what I didn't want to do; must not do for that matter— step into the washroom.

I poured the boiling milk into the cup which was a graduation gift I'd gotten from my school. I flooded the building with boiling milk; granting the most cherished wish of my thirteen-year-old self. Eight hundred words into this and yet the building is too hot to touch.

I took my cup while my brother was busy peeking into the kitchen, curious as to what type of animal would do this at four in the morning, I looked at him calmly, realizing the existence of the hot milk's support who was the only company this animal had.

I opened the laptop, feeling satisfied with the work that I had only executed in my mind. But as soon as I sat on the chair to do so, I felt a type of wetness. I thought it would be the carelessness of my bladder, so I went into the washroom, sat on the toilet seat, and watched my two-day-old underwear drenched— bloody red; exhausting boldness.

I was too lethargic to wake someone up and find a pad, so I neglected the fact that I just saw blood. My nose was blocked, so it didn't matter much. I opened my laptop with as much excitement and as much pressure as I had the night before.

Writing lines, in the dark where I couldn't see where the coma was and where the semicolon was, I forgot that my keypad had lights. I forgot f11 and now that it's shining bright into my eyes, I see that all I bore was worth bearing. If this was how God chose to visit me, it was fair, even though it was unsolicited. I kept my eye on the prize and after finishing my draft all that was left was the hot milk— the loner amidst Krishna and me.

Calling Krishna the ultimate makes me feel so distant from him that I feel small enough not to hold his name in my peripheral mouth. So I call him by his name, and he comes and sits beside me, or to be more particular— inside me. He's the only imagination I would find to be closest to the truth. And I lay in peace knowing that whatever the human mind has ever imagined, might somewhere at some time, have happened, might be happening, or might happen in the future. Perhaps, not to me but to someone else. And in all this mystery I find the truth, and it sets me free. Today I chose the gift Krishna gave me while I was boiling some thoughts up while boiling the milk— "Don't force words, force truth."

Yet I remain perplexed at this gift of his which I find hard to believe. Even though he knows how interrogating my mind is, he spoke to me about this. Or Perhaps, my nature was his reason.

If we should force truth, why can't I force God? He came even though I didn't know about it. How can I force someone I can't feel? His presence sometimes feels just as imaginative as the illusions he created are. And even though I'm one of them, he comes. He plays, but he comes, and I keep writing until it feels safe enough to put the dot; a gift he gave.