Skip to main content

The Vampire Within



There was a period in my life when I regarded myself as the personification of perfection.  When I grew out of it I realised that the pretension was a subconscious ploy to conceal the painful conflicts within.  It took years and a lot of people’s relentless jabs and prods for me to come to terms with the insecurity feelings that haunted my inner being like a bloodsucking vampire. 

When I exorcised the vampire from my being, I found myself withdrawing from society altogether.  I realised with some horror how unfit I was in the society: incapable of understanding people’s underlying motives and meanings and hence incapable of dealing with them without hurting myself. 

Solitude becomes a soothing balm when you learn to accept it as your co-traveller.  There’s a young friend, however, who draws out words from me occasionally.  During one of the long conversations I had with this friend, I asked, “What is there in common between you and me that holds us together?”  Pat came the reply, “Insanity.”

I was both amused and consoled.  The young friend is aware of the vampire within us.  I realised with much amusement that exorcism does not drive out the inner vampire.  The vampire is me.  I’m sucking my own blood.  I have no escape from it.  I cannot escape from myself.  I can only keep the vampire on leashes made of such diaphanous things as thoughts and words. 




PS. Written for Indispire Edition 196: #theperfectme

Note on the pictures: The top one is from my backyard and the bottom one is from Nisargadhama forest in Kodagu.

Comments

  1. Sreedhar BhattaramNovember 19, 2017 at 10:22 AM

    An interesting Write-up on the Prompt, Tomichan Matheikal..Loved reading it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 19, 2017 at 10:34 AM

      Thank you for the prompt as well as this appreciation.

      Delete
  2. Anita SabatNovember 19, 2017 at 7:21 PM

    Hope we control ourselves & we don't become vampires for others or the society...
    Perfection may be tough, but insanity is achievable :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jyotirmoy SarkarNovember 19, 2017 at 10:24 PM

    Very nice take on the prompt and presented very nicely.

    ReplyDelete
  4. yatrasblogNovember 23, 2017 at 1:37 PM

    hope for self control from every individual

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownNovember 23, 2017 at 3:05 PM

    so beautiful... Vampire and evil resides within us all.. and its upon us to take charge not let it win..

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alka SaklaniDecember 28, 2017 at 2:18 PM

    That was deep...I could relate to it instantly.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
13 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more