Skip to main content

Motion without Displacement

Fiction

His life was an incessant motion, upward and downward, without any real destination.  He was a liftman in the forty-five storey Narayana Apartment.

“Narayana!”  Each day of his began with an invocation to his God.  “Give me the patience to endure this purposeless motion.”

“If I move up to the 43rd floor by this lift and return to the ground floor from where I started, what is my displacement, assuming that each floor is 4 metres in height?”  The young boy asked the girl the other day.  They were students who lived on the 43rd floor.

It was that day that he learnt the tragic truth about his life.  He lived a life with zero displacement.  In spite of being in motion for over eight hours a day seven days a week, zero displacement!  Motion without displacement, that was his life.

“Narayana!”  He invoked his God again.  Habitually.

It was a painful realisation.  That he would live an entire life of motion without achieving any displacement.  His pain was aggravated by what the boy and the girl discussed another day.

“Does the progress of the civilisation depend on great people?”  The boy asked the girl.  It seemed to him that they were discussing some book titled Lighthouse written by some Virgin Woolf.  “What difference has Shakespeare made to the world?  Would the world have been any different had Bait-ho-one never existed?  The world exists for the average human being.”

“Some people have changed the world,” protested the girl.

“Instance?”  Demanded the boy.

“The Buddha.  Jesus.”

“Oh,” said the boy trying to conceal his contempt. “The world got some more gods.  Or new religions.  What difference!”

“Narayana!”  A gasp struggled to escape his throat but it died prematurely. One of the skills of his profession is to pretend not to hear anything, not even see anybody, in the lift.  People come and go.  Up and down.  His job was only to press the right buttons in the motion without displacement.

Somebody died on the 43rd floor.  The lift could not contain the coffin in its horizontal position.  So they placed it vertically against a wall of the lift.  The dead person stood inside his cage and peeped through the glass square of the coffin.  The dead man’s eyes were slightly open.  Two narrow slits.  Dark slits like deep holes.  Was there a grin struggling to wriggle out through those slits?

Was he a great man before his death?  Or an ordinary man to whom the world belonged?

When the lift reached the ground floor and the coffin was carried out, the boy and the girl entered.

“What is the death rate in our apartment?” asked the boy apparently mischievously.

“One per person, I guess.”  The girl said.  Was she serious?  He couldn’t say.

“No,” said the boy apparently seriously.  “It’s an indefinite number. Almost like infinity in maths.”

Soon the lift started its downward motion from the 43rd floor.  Motion without displacement.  Infinite motions.


Note: Shakespeare and the contributions of people like him to human civilisation belong to Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse.  Beethoven is my addition but not the average man.


For copies click here
or here



Comments

  1. sunaina sharmaNovember 9, 2015 at 8:14 PM

    What a narration!.....I could see myself standing there and could feel the anxiety of the lift-man....his restlessness, his hopelessness, his repetitive motion in the same place.....almost Godot-like absurdity, I guess.

    ReplyDelete
  2. wingsNovember 13, 2015 at 3:15 PM

    I can't resist appreciating Sunaina's quick sense of metaphor. Because I see a lift woman everyday at work who may not accompany us but leading a similar kind of life without displacement. That actually blinded my sense of Godot like absurdity which I choose to remember most of the time in my life.
    Another ingenious creation, sir.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 13, 2015 at 7:38 PM

      Thanks, Wings.

      Dark humour is gaining ground in my writing. Something has changed drastically within me. Can't help it, I guess.

      Delete
  3. UnknownNovember 20, 2015 at 2:09 PM

    It is an interesting topic. I have read this article with great enthusiasm. For a long time, I hadn’t read this kind of quality write-up. Waiting for more interesting articles from you! Keep sharing!
    cheap essay writing service

    ReplyDelete
  4. UnknownApril 28, 2016 at 8:40 PM

    Good article.If you have problems with education I can recimmend you this http://essays-shark.net writing service.There you can find many useful things

    ReplyDelete
  5. kitty23May 24, 2016 at 3:39 PM

    hello! Thank you for this post! very useful information provided and to get more info on this topic you should definitely visit this page http://best-custom-essays.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. UnknownSeptember 1, 2016 at 4:00 PM

    It's very hard to be a great writer. One has to be very talented and creative. If you don't have inspiration for academic writing this is http://www.grand-essays.com/ the high-quality source to get professional help.

    ReplyDelete
  7. UnknownMarch 6, 2017 at 7:12 PM

    I likewise often speak with individuals that contact us to plead for gold codes from assistance with different unfortunate tales or a qualified rampage regarding for how long they have actually formerly spent for live, when codes are not given from one person to another to individual each time they hang up as well as attempt once again, they question why they discover their account put on hold for misuse of the solution.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
7 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more