The Obfuscator

It was becoming increasingly harder to write every new word.

In the last three hours the white screen had been populated by patterns of ant like figures in various dancing poses. For the same number of times a blinking demon had eaten up all those dancers.

It seemed to him that the cursor must have been growing in size now, flashing with a frenzied fury, laughing now in its own mad dance like a hundred mouthed tribal. The merry dancers were scared off now, few and fewer were coming on to the screen. And yet the screen was growing black.

It was not like that strange salt and pepper newspaper mosaic. That was beautiful. And reassuring. Like one's invention is. At least to a child. For then he was a child.

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He would keep spying the newspaper till his father was done with it and not around. To him - just like to the elders - the old ones would not do. They had already served their purpose.
His favorites were the pages with a lot of text. A lot of text into which were embedded small brightly colored pictures.

"It is 'very' important", he would explain to himself, "that the pictures be small preferably the size of large stamps." Only then could one see the bright small colonies like a smattering of variously colored sea-shells on a salt and pepper shore.

It was obviously difficult to find such pages. invariably the pages with a lot of text were also the ones with a lot of pictures because they were the ones that contained the news. The ones with pictures were primarily the ones for advertisements. "Damn," he would curse "these bloody fools don't even understand what an obfuscator needs in his newspaper."

Painstakingly he would find out the page that worked best. Some days he would decide theoretically on the winner, on others he would just quickly obfuscate all of them and choose the best.

The act was simple, you held the newspaper close to your face and unfocussed your eyes. "It is a technique you have to develop with utmost care and through consistent practice," he would talk to himself addressing the "child" who knew not much.

Then one day he graduated to books. In his father's library he sat obfuscating page after page of innumerable books. While the father was working, his summer days observed this hours-long ritual in the library.

Books were an instant hit with him. They were dry, yes. There were hardly any colored pictures on the inside pages except for those biology ones and some others.

They looked like a lonely seashore. But there was a lot of potential.

Books did not have to have big pictures or those icky advertisements. One could choose the pictures, the size, the visual texture. What with so many pages to a book, one could flip the pages while obfuscating them and voila! a movie.

He tried to do it to a biology book that he particularly liked. It had to be amongst the most beautiful things the world possessed.

Sure they did not publish such books and made such movies as of now. But he could become a writer too. He had read a lot of them and felt he could do it. He would write books. Ones that were fit for obfuscation and then he could teach others.

The idea was immense. His pleasure orgasmic.
The reality was dense. The defeat paralytic.

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His books did not publish. They were "frivolous," "amateurish," "ill-conceived and badly written." Last evening an editor had explained to him, "We are not exactly publishing fucking comic books. Pictures!"

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The machine was now stinking. His vomit on the keyboard had dried into little granules gluing it to his fingers. He was staring at that little seed of half-digested rice for long idly wondering if it could now grow into anything.

He turned the machine off. Brushed his hair back soiling them with vomit. In the cupboard sat
the manuscript of his last book. Just yesterday he had crayoned into the pockets he had kept for the pictures.

He fingered the stacked leaves. Was it the texture made him feel hungry?

Leaning back he brought the pad close and thumbed to the first typed page but then changed his mind.

His eyes retruned to that grain of rice.

It almost took him the effort of ripping his skin off the chair to stand up. To pluck the grain off the screen felt harder. He had to employ the whole length of his consciousness to flex his fingers and peck at it.

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Later that evening he sowed that seed in the backyard. Just to see if it would grow. Just something to do with his time.