DAMn! The DAMe LOST ITS e!

Chapter 1:

June 15, 1999
5.15 pm

68, Albany Avenue
The Annex, Toronto,
Canada.

REM… Rapid Eye Movement. RREM… Really Rapid Eye Movement.
Behind the closed eyelids, the eyeballs rapidly dart from side to side like goldfish struggling out of its natural habitat, water.

Then, he sees exactly what he had so badly wanted to embrace for quite a while now. The eyeballs tense a bit, and once again, set into a relaxed pace of shifting from side to side, across the median of the sclera. The exquisite vista ahead of him defiantly gazes at him with a breathtaking, if slightly overbearing intensity. His mind swallows in the queen of the glens, a gushing waterfall that is set against moist rocks, ruggedly mounting the mainland of Labrador, Canada. On the rocks, sit two precariously perched beasts; a caribou and a more progressive beast, a human Innu aboriginal.

The view has so much of a pulsating vibrancy lashing out that he quickly gets lured into a crouching position behind his UV filter-protected Canon camera, which is seated as comfortably on the tripod as a gleeful child would be seated on its favorite merry-go-round pony. At a shutter speed of 1/8000, he feels like the child’s amazing daddy, after having frozen an image that probably belonged more to his camera than the Earth.

Like a bolt out of the bluish-white waterfall, the Innu loses his balance and falls into the frighteningly rapid torrent, but not before sending our man behind the Canon a look of stark terror. Now, our man swoops down the water in pursuit of the drowning Innu. The waterfall suddenly and quite illogically opens out into a huge lake of muddy water. Strangely, he finds himself glide into an old motorized boat; one that is powered by a noisy, turpentine smelling diesel engine.

The muddy waters lie still; they breathe neither life nor energy like the waterfall did. Quiet, murky water, a grainy, salmon coloured sunset and the noisy motor greet our man. Something comfortably odd and familiar caresses him. Before any coherent association could materialize, he sees the Innu swimming away. It dawns on him. The Innu has baited him into this mind-numbing pursuit.

Beauty is truly controversial. “The old world, panoramic charm embedded in the ethereal presence of the motionless, muddy waters,” he thought, “is as beautiful as the zing of the Labrador waterfall.” He then sees a half-immersed tree that opens old stitches in his stomach. He mechanically takes out his digital camera, employs a combination of Warm-up, UV and polarization filters, and sets it on a tripod. He then uses long Shutter Speed and Aperture Value of 16 or 22 in order to perfectly frame that moment that had in some form already been etched somewhere deep in his right temporal lobe long ago.

Meanwhile, the tribal man swims with stronger strokes towards unchartered territories. Our Canon man follows the Innu faster by revving up the engine in tune with his revved-up heart beat. Suddenly, he spots a hazy mass of what seems to be a group of chanting people partly submerged in water. As he moves closer, he wheedles his eyes into thin slits in order to train his eyes on the growing mass of people by the bank of the lake. He strains his eye to make out the position co-ordinates of the Innu, but the man had somehow merged into the growing pool of humans.

It seems all too amusing. “Am I a sailor on a trip to Treasure Island?” he muses loudly. He could hear them chanting: “Bachao. Bachao. Narmada Bachao. Bhag Jao. Bhag Jao. Police waalé bhah Jao!” The past strikes in him a chord more powerful than the most resounding ancient church gong. He carries forward mesmerized. Suddenly, he doesn’t care about the people or the voices.
He frantically looks for the one and only lifeline that coursed through his arteries and veins.
Everyone and everything becomes a blur. He single-mindedly looks for the light that inevitably shines at the end of the tunnel. His mind drowns out the voices.

And then he sees ‘her’. As though she were the main motif being zoomed into, everyone around has automatically become fuzzy. She needs no camera; she neither belonged to his camera nor this earth, like all his other images. She belonged, belongs, and would always belong to him.
He sees her eyes; only the eyes. The rest of her is under water. Those angelic, soulful and vivacious green eyes have always been the cynosure of every aching bone in his body. However, today they speak a different language. They beg him to come save them. He gets off the boat and runs towards her. Jus before he gets to her, they drown.

He savagely searches for her but in vain.

DAMn! And just like the dam when released opens a flood of water, a floodgate of tears washes down his soul.