Skip to main content

Do I Dare?


Alfred Prufrock was sitting in a dimly lit café when a young boy, who was yet to reach adolescence, walked in. The boy looked as inquisitive as Prufrock looked flurried.

‘Hello,’ the boy said. ‘You look so… lonely. And sad too.’

‘Sad? No, not sad. Just… contemplating. I am, as they say, measuring out my life with coffee spoons.’

‘Aw! That’s strange. On my planet, I measure things by sunsets. I love sunsets. How can you measure life with something so small as a coffee spoon?’

‘Did you say “my planet”?’

‘Well, yes. I come from another planet. I’ve been travelling for quite some time, you know. Went to numerous planets and asteroids and met many strange creatures. Quite a lot of them are cranky.’ The boy laughed gently, almost like an adult.

Prufrock looked at the boy with some scepticism and suspicion. He was already having too many worries of his own like whether he should part his hair in the middle and roll up the bottoms of his trousers.

‘They call me Little Prince,’ the boy said. He liked that name, he said, though he was no prince and he didn’t like the kings he met on certain planets. One king on an asteroid had no subjects but he wanted absolute obedience. “You can only yawn when I command you to,” the king told Little Prince [LP]. When LP told him yawning was beyond his control, the king said, “Okay then, I command you to yawn when you like.” Kings are funny people, LP thought. But princes are okay, he hoped.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Prufrock invited the boy. He liked LP now, perhaps the first person whom he liked. LP sat down on the chair opposite Prufrock. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘My pleasure,’ Prufrock replied with a little unease. He never felt comfortable with other people. He thought they all wore masks. The women whom he saw in the club discussed Michelangelo without ever knowing what the swan was doing between the legs of Leda. And the men said every now and then, “That’s not what I meant, that is not it, at all.”

Prufrock felt quite at ease with LP whose smile looked ethereal, angelic. Like Michelangelo smiling at La Pieta, for example.

LP narrated a few of his encounters with creatures on some of the planets he visited. There was this conceited person who wanted nothing from LP but flattery. On another planet was a drunkard who drank to forget how ashamed he was of drinking. There was a businessman on another planet who believed that all the stars in the cosmos were his private property and his frustration was he couldn’t count them.

‘I have a rose on my planet,’ LP said for a change. The rose grew up when LP was tired of the baobab weeds which could have engulfed his tiny planet had he not been pulling them out regularly. The rose looked different. Single and beautiful though LP didn’t like the thorns. The thorns were meant to protect the rose from the sheep, someone had told LP. But there were no sheep on LP’s planet.

‘Life is absurd,’ mused LP.

‘Indeed,’ agreed Prufrock. ‘I’m afraid of that absurdity. I’m afraid of people especially. Afraid of growing old, of rejection, of never being understood. I wonder… should I have dared more? Asked more of life?’

‘Dare?’ LP looked at Prufrock curiously. ‘You don’t need permission to ask questions, to love things, or to dare. I love my rose, take care of her, even though she’s difficult sometimes. But that’s what makes her special. It’s the time that I waste with my rose that makes her special. Have you dared to waste your time with someone or something?’

‘No… I wonder… People are absurd… I don’t dare to disturb the universe. It’s safer to remain quiet and unnoticed.’

‘You’re funny,’ LP grinned. ‘You remind me of the lamplighter I met on one of the planets. His job was to light a lamp at sunset and put it out at sunrise. But the gap in between was just a minute because he lived on a tiny little planet. He lit the lamp without understanding why. If only he could love what he was doing, that would make much difference. Just do what makes your heart feel warm.’

Prufrock stared at LP with considerable interest.

‘The heart is what matters, you know,’ LP went on. ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye.’

Prufrock got up from his seat and knelt down beside LP. He took the boy’s hand in his own and planted a gentle kiss on it. The kiss had a warmth that rushed to LP’s heart.

‘I think I can leave you now,’ LP said with his angelic smile.

PS. Alfred Prufrock is the protagonist of T S Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Little Prince comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novella by the same title.

PPS. With this my Blogchatter Half-Marathon comes to an end. You can read the previous posts in this series below.

1. Heights of Evil

2. Pip Learns the Essential Lessons

3. Delusions and Ironies of Love

4. Good Old Days without meetings

5. Finding Enlightenment

6. An Oracle Gives up his Goddess

7. The Ruler Matters

8. The Agony of Ivan Karamazov

9. Live Life Fully

Comments

  1. Having two characters of contrasting nature makes it interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is such an illuminating discussion and something which we can all benefit from.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very often do we forget that we have to do what our heart wants and your post is reminder to this. Very well written, Sir!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Chinmayee. People have so little time nowadays to listen to the heart!

      Delete
  4. This was such a beautiful discussion. Especially the last line. The heart is what matters.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Reading Little Prince was eye opening in a way. I always feel sad knowing LP being alone on his planet. But it's so profound.

    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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...

The Impact of Your Deed

Illustration by Copilot Designer Thirteen-year-old Briony makes a terrible mistake. She falsely accuses Robbie of raping Lola. Robbie is arrested. Cecilia is heartbroken. Briony herself regrets her act, but too late. All the painful harms have already been done. Atonement can be meaningless sometimes. Briony, Robbie, Cecilia, all belong to Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). Why did Briony make a false charge against Robbie? First of all, there was a serious misunderstanding. Briony presumed that Robbie’s romantic interest in Cecilia, Briony’s elder sister, was lust with a mask. Secondly, Briony was probably jealous of the relationship between her sister and Robbie. As a little child, Briony had jumped into a river merely to be saved by Robbie. When asked why she did such a dangerous thing, her answer was, “Because I love you.” Robbie is accused of raping Lola, Briony’s cousin. It was Paul Marshall who actually violated Lola, not once but twice. Briony did not see the man who r...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...