There used to be a certain thrill to this. Back in the good old days, fighting men decimated their enemies on the battlefield, plundered their villages and carried off their women. The commies get shafted in elections, our lads pretty much managed to kick seven flavours of living shit out of the filth at Jamia and JNU. All that remains logically, is to gorilla-fuck a ‘progressive’ after a night of binge drinking, and by the gods, to say that such pleasures have been partaken in in the past would be an understatement of no small magnitude. There’s something about that long haired, twenty-something AISA ‘womyn’ firebrand with PHD dreams, in a cheap OYO room gazing at you, eyes wide open, all tamed and mewling a ‘you own me’ in absolute surrender while you look through her, all manic glint and steel . Something for a twisted tamasik bastard with nothing productive to do anyway. You don’t finish. You wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. You get up after she’s ‘done over’ a few times, moving to the window, the darkness of the room hiding you,as you catch her out of the corner of the eye, clutching the sheets up to her bosom, looking longingly at you walking off, while lightly fingering the marks you left on her. You stare out to the city lights and coolly thumb out a cigarette and pour yourself a Cuba libre,not failing to appreciate the irony of it all. ‘Good hunting, old chap! ‘
Time catches up though. When you’ve just been to college, you’re green. Aside from the plethora of raging hormones making you want to shag anything with a skirt on, you’re ‘restless’. You have something to prove to yourself after all. There is no great war to fight, no great voyages of discovery, no new lands on the seven seas to conquer and enslave for the glory of God and King, and certainly no woolly mammoths to spear down on the icy tundra with your trusty band of hunters.
Hello, civilisation! You probably won’t have to live in fear of a gruesome death at every waking moment, but something’s off, isn’t it? Something vapid in the world around you, in the very air you breathe right down to the black pit at the centre of your chest, eating away at you for all eternity. Never ceasing, never resting. Always tugging away at you. An unrelenting craving for blood in the cut, for the frantic whine of a Jap two-stroke at high rev, for the scent of a maiden’s curls mixed with the stench of that dragon you had to slay to get up the tower. That raging thirst for conquest, period. Sexual, material, physical… Same difference.
A some point or the other, in their moments of solitude, all men shall hear the call of Ares ring their ears, in greater or lesser measure. All men who wish to remain so, must one day answer, or be broken and lost to the abyss, as indeterminate parodies of virility in the world of nothing that surrounds them.
Those found worthy, shall return to drink from his chalice time and time again. And the God of War does get real chatty after a while. Whispers now forming commands yelled out with authority, forming being. Code and belligerence and all. Virtus.
The game consumes you. You can never rest. You’re a predator now. A weapon in every sense. The tip of the Lance, a rattling sabre, a glock at low ready waiting for a target to be pointed at. Always hungry for bigger and faster prey. Never content. Never stopping. There is a sense of Nietzchean nobility to it all.
First crush and first heartbreak done , a child looked teary eyed toward his mentor and protector. ” Teach me to never feel like this again. “
“All things come at a cost,young paduwan..”
“where do I sign over my fucking soul?”
And then, the game begins.
But maybe one day, you grow up a little. One can only get into so many wet holes before the damn balance sheet stops tallying up.
What the fuck are you doing this for anyway?
The Charminar Chronicles 