My book, "The Sun In Her Hair (A True Account) and Nine Short Stories", has been released as a paperback in Goan bookshops and online as a Kindle ebook. Kindly review the publication, which is a venture in self-publishing, and reproduce the appended excerpts (below).
I reproduce below the blurb on the back cover which describes the contents: "THE SUN IN HER HAIR is a personal narrative, a true account of the harrowing aftermath of the murder of a beloved daughter. The author wrestles with the dread that we never ever re-unite with loved ones gone, or taken, from our lives, as only nothingness seems assured after life and heaven could be mere fantasy. The author deems this fate intolerable and he proposes a fundamental break with it: destroy our rogue universe, or create, or find, a new one, where "death and unhappiness are no more, and humans have all the superpowers withheld from us now." "The Nine Short Stories draw on the author's experiences in Bombay, the city of his birth, as well as in his native Goa. The stories explore, "among other themes, love, lust and grief, the puzzle of life's strange anomalies, and the inner world of pre-teen boys.... A young man sees the woman he loves in a humiliating situation, with devastating consequences in both their lives. An agnostic unwittingly asks God a question, and gets a direct response. While a young boy attempts murder to avenge an insult to the lion, his favourite animal...!" "Linken Fernandes has worked as a journalist in Goa, Bombay and Hyderabad, and, at present, lives in Chandor, Goa." Monsoon Media Goa, 185, Chandor, Salcete, Goa Telephone: 91-0832-2784784 email: monsoonmedia...@gmail.com (The book is available at Broadway, Panjim, and Golden Heart Emporium, Margao. Or you may contact the publishers through a phone call or email, or a sms to 7038843035, for a copy). Regards and thanks, Linken Three Excerpts 1 It’s true, though, that most cases where they mention the mother end with the life sentence being confirmed. But this could be due to the merits of the case rather than the mother attending the hearings. Our darling’s case, thank God, was too strong, no way can the rogue get out of the lifer. And yet he’s gone in appeal now, because the bloody law allows him an appeal, and not because he has any chance of overturning the sentence. He’s sure to try his luck with the Supreme Court next, hoping to strike it lucky there at least, through some lapse of judicial judgement, or some legal chicanery. But I’ll give you your luck, you filthy scum, if it’s the last thing I do! Before I walked into the courtroom, the additional public prosecutor, M. Sheikh, called out to me in the corridor, “Excuse me! Just a moment, please!” I stopped and turned around, “Yes?” “Has your wife come with you?” I said, “No. Is there a problem?” “No. I just wanted to know.” “Oh! But will it make a difference, her not being here, I mean?” “No, no! Nothing of the sort. It’s just that...you don’t worry about it.” Why the wife couldn’t be present was a story in itself, but her main reason was that she didn't want to see the filthy pig’s face ever again, and that if she ever saw him in the same room as her she would slap him so hard... she didn't know what she would do to the wretched devil from hell! I don't want to go into it. But I wondered why it was only the mother the prosecutor asked for. Didn't the girl’s other parent count as much? I know a mother has a greater emotional appeal, judges being human and susceptible like the rest of us, but I didn't like the implication that a father could feel any the less for his daughter. Anyway, I took my seat in the courtroom, but now those remorseless words began buzzing in my head again. I had been preparing to leave for the train to Bombay yesterday, with my sister telling me not to be too anxious about the case and assuring me that everything would turn out just fine. And then someone shouted out from the TV room, “All the trouble you’ve taken over the case all these years! And all the money you’ve spent! You should pause for a moment and ask if it is worth it at all. No matter what you do now, will you get her back? Just ask yourself, will you get her back?” My sister and I looked towards the door speechless. My sister said, “What are you saying there? Are you gone mad?” I made to dash into the TV room after her, but stopped midway and turned back to concentrate on the bag I was packing. It was important to leave for Bombay in a cool, calm and positive frame of mind. I was also too stunned to reply. What response could anyone make to a dagger thrust of this venomousness? I looked at my hands as they shoved shirts and other items furiously into the airbag. It was amazing how some people could reconcile to tragedy so easily, while others struggled to cope, hoping desperately for a mistake, hoping that it had all been a misunderstanding... As you may expect, the journey was particularly trying, with the woman’s words mercilessly syncing with the iron wheels trundling over the track all the way: "No matter what you do now, will you get her back?" "No matter what you do now, will you get her back?" Other people had said similar things over the years, but none had struck as hard as this thunderbolt just before a crucial hearing. What was the interest and motive impelling the woman? Who really was she and what was her connection with the family, and more crucially, with our darling? How could anyone with the littlest human love inside them accept the unacceptable, lose hope and faith so soon, not even seven years since the disaster? Only a stranger could. Only a stranger like that other miserable acquaintance who had told us, even before the very first court hearing, that “you really don’t get anything from these murder cases. They are a waste of time and precious money. Why don't you just forget about it?” A stranger had gone to the trouble of telling us to get real and forget our murdered daughter. But I had been polite, “We don't look at it that way, ma’am, so can you please drop the subject?” My wife had chipped in, “I think she’s still there in Bombay and will come home soon, or that we will go and join her there one of these days, like we used to.” It was possible that I had simply hallucinated, had actually imagined the whole thing as I packed my bag, an echo playing in my ears from all the times I had heard the words earlier. Or could it have been someone on TV, which was as usual playing louder than necessary, who had made the pitiless reality check rather than anyone else in the room? But, come to think of it, can you really blame anyone for mouthing what is actually an universal truth, something uttered with clock-like regularity the world over every single second, every single day? I remember police sub-inspector Mushtaq saying, on the very first day of the trial, “I’m glad you are taking an interest in the case. Most relatives don’t pursue murder cases at all. They say, ‘What’s the point? We won’t get her back, no matter what we do now. Let the government do what they want, we don’t care!’” People can be such faithless cynics, such cold-blooded pragmatists, that you can’t but shake your head! Imagine expecting the courts to restore the status quo ante even in murder cases! Ha, ha! They will attend the murder trial only if their loved one is returned to them unscathed and unharmed, and as good as before the catastrophe! What good is a justice system without the little power to tinker with physics, that is, the power to travel back in time and undo the murder, right? This expectation, it strikes me, is reasonable, even if I had laughed at the idea at first. I admit it took me some time to come around, but I now accept, unreservedly, that the inability to bring back a loved one so violently taken from us is, indeed, the biggest flaw of the justice system, not to mention, of life as a whole. Which naturally begs the question: if this is what you really think, why have you been attending the court hearings all these years, my friend? 2 I have this hunch (actually, a huge revelation!) about immortality too, which is that it must come embedded in life. Consider the fact that any talk about things in the cosmos involves what are described as astronomical or cosmic distances and time spans, expressed in numbers like billions, trillions, sextillions, zillions or in shorthand notions like light years. (Contrast this with the mere tens of years we humans must stay content with!). What do we do with these humongous distances, these gigantic time-spans, these infinities of universes and their varying and perhaps disparate physical laws, and all their intricate and convoluted dimensions, if they are to be experienced only in theory? Who are they for, and why are they around? It stands to reason, then, that a life span of a million times more than just three score and ten would be appropriate to match the distances and time-spans involved in the universe, and a similar magnitude of upgrade in human abilities as well. (Unless, of course, life continues beyond earth, and all the upgrades we wish for happen there all at once. That would be a game-changer, no question about it!). Next is the fact that death usually takes most of us by surprise. It is as though even if three score and ten may be the generally accepted maximum now, the hope is that we’ll get more, as many more as we can get. It’s as though human yearning won’t square with hard unyielding reality! The urge to immortality hasn't been socialised out of us completely because we know instinctively that any kind of life anywhere, even, sadly, in an evil, insensitive universe, is better than the state of being dead; any life seems better than the nothing we dread could ensue after death. And, going by the absence of news from the other side, this life really could be all there is! (The one consolation of nothingness, though, would be immediate relief from any and every thing that’s bothering you. You don’t exist, nothing exists, so any heart-wrenching absence troubling you ends immediately. The eternal grief is over, and it turns out life was one big joke, a joke on you, because it isn’t you who are laughing and — the clincher — you don’t know it’s you who’s been pranked!). Some people, though, are totally indifferent to the matter of what comes next, even if it is the big void. Imagine daring the cosmic rogues to do their worst: “See you in hell, thugs!” Ha, ha! Real cool people these, what? Come to think of it, it is a bit un-hep, actually, to worry so much about the hereafter. So we burn in hellfire, or turn to nothing, so what’s the big deal? Just live it up, man, don't bother about something no one has a clue about. Let it come when it comes. Deal with it then! To be honest, the indifference actually makes sense if there is, indeed, nothing at the end of it all! (A worrying thought: is this why the world is the way it is? Is this why some people don’t give a damn about the consequences and just go ahead and do whatever the hell they want to?). However, let’s consider the possibility that there is indeed something beyond, and that we may be spared the extinction that we, the cognoscenti, agree is our most probable fate. This because, if information is not lost even inside a black hole, and matter cannot be destroyed but only changes form, why should only the experience of existence be exempt from these laws? What’s so great about matter that it should alone be privileged over my mind and my memories and get to stay on in one form or the other to eternity? There’s too glaring a mismatch between our powers (the lack of them, that is), our life-spans, our desires and our dreams, on the one hand, and the universe, or time and space as a whole, on the other. If life is all that big a deal, a gift we are expected to forever be grateful for, shouldn’t it come with all the so-called superhuman powers we can’t even begin to visualise in our earthly incarnations? My guess is we are actually supposed to come equipped with the ability to move faster than light and to experience all the dimensions and universes hidden from us now if we are to really fulfil our destiny as living beings! Our superheroes are, therefore, actually quite normal and average for the universe we are in! In other words, when we wish to be superhuman we are actually merely asking to become normal. It’s because we lack the so-called superpowers we are actually supposed to have that we fantasise about them: we make do! We have been ripped off, there’s no other way to put it! You wouldn’t think this, though, if you heard some fans of reality as it is! You’ll have some bozo/bozette contemplating the star-filled night sky, or the sand dunes stretching far out into the undulating desert, or the ocean reaching way into the distance, or contemplating the icy wastes of the polar regions, or lost amidst the towering Himalayan ranges, or looking down on our cute, little blue dot from outer space. They look at the vista spread out before them as far as their limited vision allows them, and, with their eyes all glazed and dewy, what do you imagine said bozo or bozette experience? A gigantic orgasm of awe, a paroxysm of poetry and philosophy, at the ineffable beauty and the terrifying immensity of this our beloved universe, and their own insignificant puniness in comparison, and yet — the inevitable clincher! — the deep connectedness they feel, despite everything, with everything in said beloved universe! In other words, we may be nothing, we may be a speck of invisible dust in the middle of this terrific immensity, yeah, we may be just mud and slime here, but, hey, we are an inseparable part of this universe! This is our universe. It loves us, lets us live here! Thank you, Lord! Praise you Lord! Yippee! Hooray! Hosanna, hosanna! Hail to the Earth, the Sun, the Cosmos! The fools just don’t get it! To praise the universe and what passes for your pathetic life is your default setting, you idiots! Get it into your thick, addled coconuts: the universe doesn't give a damn for your petty poetry, all that smelly butter you keep applying to it! Get it into your duffer heads that you are all alone and rejected, as alone, despised and doomed as all the hapless — children, women, men, animals, ants — killed right, left and centre every second and nanosecond. That is, if anyone notices you at all, you clueless clowns! Oh, how the cosmic controllers play us! 3 The question is, how does one go about it, getting rid of the universe, that is? Where would the pressure point to puncturing the whole balloon of the cosmos be? How would one completely finish off Everything, Reality, Existence, or whatever name you apply to all that there is? (When I say universe or cosmos, I mean all of the reality there is, the multiverse, the omniverse, the whole works, or whatever else the fuck there is in this sorry place). The entire edifice needs obliteration if all it guarantees at the end of it is sadness and nothingness. If, for the everything of their life that people gave they get a big zero in return, then let’s bring on cosmic annihilation right away, let’s not delay it any longer! To get down to brass tacks, then, how would one go about destroying this chaos that we are trapped in? Shall we count the ways, with not a little help from the internet? To start with, one sure way would be to bring forward the Big Crunch, that is, ratchet gravity up several notches so all matter contracts into itself and is completely swallowed up back into the initial zero, the shunya it all started out from. If nothingness is inevitable, if total extinction is indeed our sure-fire fate, why not fast forward and have done with it right away, right? Let’s make sure, though, that the big zero is where it all ends up at or, if it resumes with another Big Bang to restart the whole cycle again, we need to ensure we come back with a clean slate and a more user-friendly set of rules. Another way could be to ease the vacuum the universe is lodged in into what is called a low energy state, thus leading to the rogue’s instantaneous destruction (no time even for final prayers!). Another ploy could be to set off a ‘phase change’ of the universe (look it up!), or create a big, friendly black hole in another universe to swallow us. Yet another destroyer could be to fast-forward the Big Rip or the heat death (though their time scales, involving billions and billions of years in what seem like entire, never-ending aeons, are not exactly suited to our minuscule human time scale). Most of these modes of universe extinction, though, involve too many variables and long shots, like the calculations in the standard model of physics being correct or quantum physics agreeing to join the party. Even if the desired outcome is achieved, there is the danger of the many-worlds hypothesis riding up and creating another version of our all too stupid universe even as we are destroying it. On the whole, though, the prospects for ending this vale of tears, this epitome of mismanaged reality, are good to very good. Universe-wrecking is a huge undertaking, of course, and will need a whole army to execute (what a bon mot that, man, execute!). I’m looking for allies, any and everywhere, and shall we say, weapons and techniques of cosmic destruction. These need to be really smart weapons, say even on the scale of mere words, like the ones that, in some mythologies, created the world from nothing in some seven days, even if said world has since gone to pot. Real powerful words these will have to be, of course! Or the smart weapon could be just the size of a pin, a mere prick from one sufficing to take the air out of the whole balloon. Q: But just a moment, why destroy everything only because you’ve got a beef with the way things are and because you dread total extinction? If (and this is a big IF) it is, indeed, an empty void into which we move after our lives here, then, all you need do is leave earth all by yourself and no one else, that is, no innocent, is hurt. It seems rather extreme, isn’t it, wanting to destroy all of existence, all of reality, in the way you so happily visualise it without considering the feelings of the rest of humanity and other life forms as a whole? Moreover, it is not as if nothingness is fixed and given, you know. It can even, if the stories are to be believed, be countered by a leap in the dark, by an act of spiritual or religious faith. The way one can see it is, the combination of words of a religious faith somehow help adherents dodge nothingness, or hellfire, or whatever else is a source of dread on the other side, and lead them to the universe of their choice. Laden words these, words full of cosmic (in the good sense) significance. Why not take this leap, right? A: You seem to have a point there. Why snuff out zillions of innocent living creatures all over reality over a single personal grievance, right? I realise this isn’t a mere game, that there are real people and living beings involved here, actual living, breathing beings. I also know, to disagree fundamentally with the cosmic rogues, life isn’t cheap. Q: Now you’re talking! While you are in this mood, can I suggest that in ranting against the universe you could actually be attacking the wrong target? Perhaps there was something you yourself could have done to prevent the atrocity that’s now threatening the very existence of our universe? Be fair and objective, okay? like a good journalist. Don’t be so negative about everything. A: I am being objective. It’s because I am objective that we need to put an end to everything in toto. I know existence does have its points, I won’t deny that. But I know what I am doing. One crime can cancel everything else out, just one tiny little act of unfairness. I know we are programmed to see good in everything, but that’s a design fault, get that into your thick head, you idiot! Don’t be fooled by your internal wiring; get past and stand over it, will you! Whose side are you on, the murderer’s?