Of Mosquitoes and Men                                                                                                                                                                                      Mar 25





Both, separate winter squash by Edward Weston

As time passes, my passion subsumes into something of a lower form, of captive inaction. For a month now, it seems I have not received any thoughts; more accurately, actually, I perhaps have been possessed by so very many thoughts that nothing substantive can find its way out of me. I have been in constant conversation with myself, in my bed, at my desk, in buses, in trains, on hilltops, by the beach, in the presence and absence of others. My mind feels like a squash court in which I am both player and wall. The ball has chipped the wall away and brought the strings of the racket to near tear. When examining for myself, the inside of my skull, its walls feel about as weighted as an elephant’s jaw, while inside seems to sit hot, meaningless matter. My hair has now grown down to reach my neck, and in the front, it goes beyond my lower lashes. That is about as much of a personal update, on the writing front. There have been a pile of projects within my periphery since my last piece of writing, but none I have really felt passionate about. Or, passion fazes me, but only until the moment I must actually act on it. 

A personal metaphor and putrid symbol in my life for some time has been the wretched mosquito, a terrible thing whose buzzing goes beyond being a mere omen. In old pages of other books, I am sure to find polemics I have written against them, in maddening haze from that wretched creature's wretched buzzing. It is, always, the mosquitoes brought on by summer’s onset. They come bellicose as armies that burrow into my home and consciousness, respawning threefold each time I manage to kill one. A bulwark of chemicals, of closed doors, guarded windows, none can seem to keep them away. We have become inveterate companions, all I can say now, especially the ones who miss my hands’ clap and burrow themselves until next day. Often enough, I achieve sanguine victory, evident in the smallest splotches of blood left on my palms.



Men find mosquito breeding in stagnant water; crop

The fan is defensively on every night and all day long to stimulate aerial turbulence. Hunger calls at me hours after what was apparently an unsubstantive dinner. The headache from my afternoon coffee has finally, a half hour before midnight, subsided. I go to the kitchen with as much silence as I can administer and make myself a midnight sandwich too disgusting to describe: multigrain sourdough fried in mustard oil, chilli-garlic and Domino’s cheese sauce on either slice, slabs of raw paneer on-top the chilli garlic slice, seasoned with allspice, and finally, before closing the sandwich, a slice of cheese. All I was doing was making use of whatever was inside my fridge, but this turned out so beyond delicious; one of life’s miracles. I wish I had made another one.


The fan is defensively on every night and all day long to stimulate aerial turbulence; that, for the most part, works out. At least there is the secondary purpose of coolkeeping to this activity. Each buzz of these torrential mosquitoes feels sneering, like nature’s congenital mode to poke fun. A power so truly annoying that my only response can be utmost rage and certainly never, not once, insouciance, already a hard state to pull from me. So then it becomes twice so a metaphor, now seen of my ability to be able to kill this incessant thing and bring silence back into my life. I always say that my two skills are cooking perfect rice and killing mosquitoes; usually, it takes me about one clap to get one. That is fine, that is great, that calms me down. Two other routes: one, where I kill one mosquito and another one spawns and two, some wretched mosquitoes who just seem to keep getting away from me. The first stands in my head of the perpetuity of life’s problems, and the second for incompetence. What reason is there for this to be so deep? Really, none at all. The mosquitoes just simply never stop, and neither does my mind from running.