A Super-Hero is an ordinary man half the day!

Not very rarely and not very frequently either, when things around you, everyone and everything, stops to matter anymore, I picture myself in this greeny green valley lush with fresh grass all around a small wood house, which of course is mine.

There is some part of me, deep down buried inside, still in touch with the caveman –at least through Morse code! How else can I explain the moments of ruthlessness or the heightened perversity that would leer upon me almost everyday. Maybe something is wrong with me. Maybe something is wrong with people around me or the society I am in. The caveman never had guilt pleasures. He took what he wanted and left when he wished. I love him and he is my secret god to whom I sacrifice my guilt pangs to.

This is in times like this, when the heart and mind seek deliverance or a much simpler solution – sleep, I dream of my wood villa in the valley where I am just alone, watching a sunset or a sunrise, listening to the distant rumbling of thunder, inhaling the smell of pre-rain earth, feeling the Zen-like calmness while waiting for the inevitable apocalypse. Nothing bothers me there. I see my caveman walk out of me, by my side, smirking at me while shedding his shackles, stiffening at the first rustle of neighboring leaves, aiming the weapon looking for the prey with that odd, crazy glint in his eyes.

I can never be him in my world back here where it takes more than courage and will to be the original version of me. People get offended when they don’t hear what they want me to say and funny part is most of times I am aware of this and also that the choice to hurt or not to lies with me.

My childhood heroes have mostly been skillfully scheming ship captains and wicked Casanovas who all were reckless nights and restless days personified. And maybe that’s why when Conrad’s narrator-hero steers his battered ship amidst the thick Congo jungles in Heart of Darkness, I was there with him, right beside his shadow, weeping for his sorrow and wallowing in his loneliness. During all this I hear the cruel chuckle of my caveman resonating like an empty echo of a derelict church bell and the low murmur – “you know you had the choice; you have the choice and you always will!”

When all the self pretensions of the day fade away washed by the loneliness of the night I wish it were the Stone Age once again.