The Twins of Theseus

The Twins of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus returned battered to the harbour,

It was therefore, repaired - each of its plank replaced.

Is it yet the same?

If another ship is made out of the battered planks,

Which then, is the real Ship of the Theseus? 

‘Aahooo,’ Shalimar gurgled in the water, choking himself in his own futile aims to shout out loud to all the wide world as if everyone cared to hear him, of course it’s your backyard Kashmir, he screamed in the water, opening his mouth to all the churlish and nearly audacious saltiness that unabashedly dwelled without any let-go. The flourishing brainless jelly-fish derided him rather scornfully, but he was now unfettered from his will. He swam, kicking his legs without purpose or conviction like anarchic, indolent foot-slaps to the water, yes Shalimar no one will say anything…it’s only your call hear darling, like face it man you have never been able to do it lately, it has all gone to the dogs, but he snapped himself out of that rutty-rut that he kept getting into, he needed to focus on doing more, doing better, getting out. He arbitrarily just turned over to look behind, also above his head just to see how deep he had got, how far the wreck was, how much more time it would take. He waved his arms, sometimes just to dance and sometimes genuinely to put-on-the-table his insolent greetings, salaam shab, but mostly to swim and tumble and somersault in the water – backstroke, breast-stroke, butterfly, he even dared to go underwater-freestyle, at times his impudence led him to inventing absurdity – strokes and styles of his own. He explored the ocean, trying to shout more, shout louder and express himself, ‘Haha bitches, let me tell you something, something that none of you know, the lower the bloody hell you’re willing to go, the higher you land up.’ He flailed and thrashed against the water, ‘Hello fellas, you think I’m going up? No jackasses, sorry honey, I’m going down. You all stay high and I’m diving below, I’m faster than you slow-pos, much quicker. Boom-boom-boom and I’m done.’ Like a strutting peacock he swaggered around the seas pirouetting the glory of his fall, ‘What a way to enter man, we’ll go fast and hard, the bastards won’t even get to know,’ battling the menacing blue-and-grey waters, the source of the highly precipitous cumulonimbus clouds that were swerving high above the waters, determined to break free and rain down completely – once and for all, finishitoff. He surveyed the depths of the seas and looked around at the baffling water-cut rock formations, the shiny settlements and cities that had shown themselves to be, oh their patina – shiny shiny – showing unmatched prosperous, mendacious brilliance – the Mesopotamian, Harappan, Mohenjo-daran, Babylonian, too-brilliant-and-just-too-good-for-one Atlantis. After some time, he was almost wading, speaking to the sea-horses, bouncing along the water with the jelly fish, leaving himself with the drift, doing long-time nonsense until he tragically realised he wasn’t the only one.

On the fourth of June, on an unsurprisingly tempestuous, grey-skied day without the chirps of birds or the drift of clouds in the murk of the moment among the terrifyingly unsteady fearful clouds the Kanna ship sailing across the Pacific seas sank to a catastrophic wreck with all of its crew and of course its passengers, only two worthy of my particular mention – Shalimar Farishta and Babar Shaitan.       

Babar walloped his arms and legs relentlessly in the ocean, lying next to Shalimar flailing similarly in alternation, speaking in a completely different language to the jelly fish and the sea-horses, possibly that in lingos and dialects that he didn’t know as if his throat had been placed in shackles and filters of indigenous language and familiarity. He would swear that the language was foreign, possibly inhuman, and without doubt that he had never spoken it, having dwindling degrees of indecision in believing that it was him who spoke. The funny thing was that his language, although humanly unheard of, wasn’t in any means related to the affection of animals but swaying indifferently to being diabolical and noisome. All the animals which he tried to entice in his specific ways shot far away from him, it seemed unadventurously peculiar that the creatures of habit flocked to the man who seemed less familiar and more injuriously uncomfortable – Shalimar Farishta. Something about Farishta had changed inside the water – people ran away from him on land, then what was it with this part? Something was either wrong or everything had become completely right, both however were very not-in-place, justnotright, somethingthere maybe, somethingmissing. Both the men with and without a flock of marine animals respectively were nose diving into the water hands by their side like water-supermen bobbing and twitching their head like Christopher Reeve, sophisticated as Marlon Brando, with offers for each other that none of them could refuse. They did back-flips swirling like the fish one of them kept fond company with, ‘What up my very own loser? Ha! Shaitan. What have you got? Oh, let’s remember and look back in reflection, look now, look into the future – nothing. And look at me, just look at me baba, I have all the world hustling about me back and forth, swishing lefts to rights old Shaitan, stupid boy, you give it all away so easily in the name. You haven’t changed one bit yaar. Stupid. Old Shaitan.’ Shaitan spoke in his language, hurling back at all the tirades, foolishly, as his victorious counterpart only farcically laughed back at all his fury, all his shame. The fury and the insinuative shame metamorphose the victim and his pair into the uncharted unimaginable, possible the only two single rivals the world had ever known, changing both profoundly, or maybe not, maybe both deep down were so intrinsically the same, it was possibly only a case of surfacing, resurfacing or revelation.