He had heard this music somewhere. May not be in this incarnation but in previous incarnations or some other dimensions which he often visited during his marijuana trips. He followed that music in the daze and didn’t care where it was leading him to. There was no road, just the forest and he made his way through the bushes and shrubs. Then, something fell on his head. He fell unconscious. Last thing he remembered was the rain-drenched smell of the vegetation and soil of the forest.
When he regained the senses, he found himself stripped of clothes and saw four monkeys tearing his clothes apart. And two who didn’t have the piece of cloth, had the trumpets in their hands and they had been playing them. It was the noise of the trumpets that lured him in this forest. Now, these trumpets sounded the cloth being torn even when the monkeys had been chewing the cloth. Their expressions told me that the way they had surrounded me, they weren’t going to leave me alone.
This is going to be my end. I just felt that. Because now the trumpets had been emitting the voice of cry that resembled mine. In between, the trumpets had been melodious: reminding me the memories of my childhood and then the dirge it played, where I realized that how I helped my mother to kill herself; she was just miserable. The villagers had thrown me out of the village. I survived on the dumpster and throwaway food items.
Everywhere I went, people identified me: the real me, the killer. “How do you know?” I asked.
“The look in your eyes,” they said, and added, “We don’t feed the killer here.”
I went to a new place, hoping for a change.
“No killer allowed here.”
“I’m not.”
“You are the worst of the killer: mother killer.”
There was no point hiding the truth now.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The smell on your hands, you know.”
“You know I didn’t kill my mother; I liberated her.”
“You blaspheme here. Only god liberates; you killed her.”
“Please feed me or I’ll die from hunger.”
“We don’t want to anger the god here; we’re mere mortals.”
Now people even stopped throwing leftover feed in dumpsters. There was a discussion or meeting among the villagers about me and about let’s just say about ‘my liberation.’ Drinking water actually worsened my appetite; my stomach started to eat itself.
I ate the leaves for survival. It’s then, I came across those serrated tiny aromatic leaves and I ate them. I lay there. I slept and woke up. I ate some more and slept again. I don’t know how long I did that. It’s when people poked me with sticks and goaded me with the pointy objects, I got up. “Don’t just die on us. This village hasn’t had any rain in the past. Please, please we implore you, you leave from here and die elsewhere.”
“Where?” I beseeched them.
An elderly lady with white beard and soft voice told me, “Listen to the sound that belongs to you. You go there. Therein you’re your salvation.”
The monkeys had already nibbled my feet and now they are pulling out the thigh muscles. The music had been continuously playing, maybe that’s why I didn’t feel the pain or was this the effect of marijuana, I don’t know. Or because I had experienced so much pain in my life that my pain threshold had gone up. Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel pain.
Strangely the monkeys stopped, when they ate my lower half. I lay in the pool of my own blood. Two of the monkeys pulled out my thighbones and marked them distinctly with their teeth. Then, they dug the ground underneath, put their bones into the ground, left a few leaves on it and left me. Two of them, who got the bones, seemed most happy. Maybe two of them are going to get their own trumpets. Two parts of me are going to live as an organ of music. And parts of me will once again call me for my liberation. I stayed there thinking, how long it will take for me to die.