The Weather of Memory

 Moved to: https://sonfinso.blogspot.com

                             - By Jamyang Drolkar Phuntsho (Year 5) One fine morning, our hero stared through the window, thinking "Maths is so boring.." But just as he was thinking he was called to the blackboard to write the answer to a question. He had no clue what the question was. Our hero started to panic. He thought "I can't do this! I'm no match for a question I didn't hear!" Everyone in class was watching, he couldn’t think straight with all the thoughts of failure swirling through his mind. So he guessed the answer. Not with one number. Not with two. Not with three. Not with four. Not with five. SIX whole numbers. Others thought he was stupid to put six numbers into one answer. Some thought he was certain to have the wrong answer. Our hero just had to have hope. The teacher stepped forward. As quiet as a mouse. She took one look. Another one. And looked so surprised she could hold a surpr...

above a nest a whisper of promise down below the gurgling of river somewhere, along infinite time a speck of knowledge where've all the wisdom gone?

One cold wintry morning, exactly at 8:50 AM, Chayphee drove his car inches behind a Toyota Land Cruiser. On such a cold morning, for neither was he a prophet nor an astrologer, it was hard for him to predict the moves and whims of the driver in front.  To add to that, at breathing intervals, he let out thick vapors from his mouth that he could literally count the water droplets at two thousand. Every droplet from these two thousand at every breath settled on the windshield that he had to defog it. Defogging poses a serious issue when the engine refuses to warm up during winter. But then, we will forget this for now. For the better part of his morning drive to the office, he completely lay at the mercy of his driving skills and humanlike non-prophetic travel of the machine ahead.  His blood pressure didn’t agree well with someone who drove in front, having neither the decency nor the respect to use the indicator lights. So, there he was, his right foot on t...

The glacial lakes far north in the country had all burst and the rivers across the Himalayas had turned pitch brown, and the atmosphere was adorned with the most powerful smells of soil and nature. Plant debris floated on the angry rivers as they knocked against each other producing the most hideous thuds.  Two large fishes had been washed ashore along the banks of Punatsang-chu right on to the grounds of Khuruthang after a flash flood.  The sky was cast with a depressing family of clouds. Lightning struck and thunders clapped, rolling loud into the gills of the fishes on the bank. Shortly, it was followed by rain. As the droplets severely fell on the leaves of the trees, they cut through them like knives and cooked the eyes of the two large fishes on Khuruthang ground.  One of the fishes had the strength and thus the wisdom to shout, “Cop15”, followed by the second fish’s, “Failure” and died painfully of acid rain. The year was 2080 the fishes had spoken for the f...

In   monsoon, the raindrops In rhythm And your feelings Flow Down the wayside puddle Straight into my thoughts At once wet And then, warm Feelings rhyme In raindrops You, me and This poetry in music Dissolve Down the wayside puddle…

It was an autumn’s Tuesday afternoon, dry and brown. The leaves had started falling in great numbers. The chirping birds had moved south. And the graduates of 2005 were moving their base to lunch, served outside the building, where the Graduate Orientation Program was being held. Our half hero, half loser noticed a creature, one among many, most unlikely and charming in the crowd: She was compared, but nothing that could be described by this pen, can define her beauty; On such a dry day, our hero had fallen in love for the first time, and there was not a soul undisturbed- everyone was hungry and bored from the graduate orientation program in progress. In a way of feeling great love, he blushed silently to those degrees that the effect of doma he was eating took charge of his pale counter without any delay, and he succumbed to one of those common diseases termed lovesickness. He ate little at lunch but talked at great lengths about the beauty he had then discovered, previously. One ...

It was raining outside, and the raindrops trickled down the windowpanes. She stared into the glass and her image looked back at her, piteously. “Far away”, she thought. And deep into her thoughts, she flew away, away to a land where everything was blissful. Colorful. There, she dreamt of a life of unhindered joy, where everyone was gentle and kind, where everyone did their business without poking each other’s noses. She had been staring into the glass for more than an hour when she came to reality, with a start. She checked the rooms. He was still not home. It was 10 PM already. Where in the world would he be at this hour, she wondered. Dead into the night, he was with his friends, drinking and making merry. Time to time, he took out a lump of dark matter nicely covered in plastic. He took a portion from it, pierced a needle into it, took a match, lighted it, and burned the portion to some degree. After that, he mixed the roasted matter with tobacco, rolled it up in a paper neatly, and...

It was when I was in class four that the year was 1992, and krackjack biscuits were all the rage that I fell in love with a girl. At the age of 12, one’s heart is still tender with your brain still knitting its lobes that you discover an extraordinary taste for biscuits. In 1992, krackjack biscuits went very well with our class four taste buds. Students with rich parents would buy krackjack biscuits and send them over to their best girls. And the best girls, in turn, would give them their best smiles that made the boys think they owned a fraction of the world, which was hardly true. Boy, that was some age! For the rich little guys, though… On a Tuesday afternoon with the sun high up in the sky, class four students were out in the open with the Dzongkha teacher telling tales of pancakes and old folks. I, for one, didn’t agree so well with the sun and the heat. I would go all red in the face and sweat to some acceptable degrees that I almost hated my Dzongkha teacher. A girl ...

In a room, where only silence prevails, is a man standing on the floor? In good time he looks up at the ceiling and sees a lizard equally staring at him. The same thoughts resonate through the room breaking the silence… The man thinks “a lizard hanging on to the ceiling”. Slowly, as you move up to the lizard’s standpoint you hear it think “a man hanging on to the ceiling”. Moral of the story: Point of view and choices of perspectives are what make even lizards right in this bamboozling world! 

Lethargy.  The last time he suffered this disease was when he was fifteen. Ever since the disease had put up so well with him.  Lying down in his bed alone, a prickly fear crept over his person that he decided to drink some beer. No sooner had the beer flowed down to his liking, he had a strong desire to smoke. He lit himself a smoke and looked at the side of the wall where portraits of his parents and siblings were put on.   His dad seemed to look at him with those stern eyes, as though, he was lashing him hard with those looks.  But, there were days when his dad lashed him even though he didn’t smoke or drink.  He let those thoughts linger on for some time. All the same, he went strong with beer and smokes. By the time, the beer was gone, it was already time for his bed. He slept like a log for a very long time.  No one knows if he got up after that.... ever!

Agent P from the intelligence department flew his car inches apart from the seawater-pump tank, and got into a building, which was, initialed “Cultural Productions” that was also floating in the stratosphere… Agent P, from the intelligence department, was also a superstar in the adult film industry, an occupation he took up as a cover-up to his core profession. In 2052, the only culture that survived of human originality was pornography. It was one-thing human beings valued, and the only thing that survived through the test of time. And adult movies were made in the original and human techniques. Other than that, even human reproduction happened through artificial methods. Human beings languished in an easy life of luxury. And all odd jobs were carried out by humanoids. But there were people like agent P who followed in the unrest of their spirits and sought after improving themselves and the people around them. As agent P got out of his car, he touched his little finger on his ...

There was excitement in the room. Our hero, in his acts of utmost love, was full of expectations: Expectations that spoke of something undone, that something that hints of perpetual waiting. And, at this moment in time, he was expecting a call, or even a short message text that we do prefer to call SMS, from the one he loved. And thus, time passed on, with a glass of whiskey by his study table. Well, if I have forgotten to brief my worthy readers of our hero who was a mild drinker that a few glasses of whiskey would have made him feel he had conquered the world, then I would have not done our hero justice. He sat there, our hero, with his ripened tomato eyes fixated at something he sought to find meaning and semblance to. His reason failed him as it always did. But those were strong gaze but the object didn’t budge a bit. The mobile phone just sat there with no life of its own. He took another sip from the glass of whiskey, his second glass for the evening. No extraordinary thou...

The sky was abuzz and filled with flying automobiles, buildings, and factories. The automobiles in the sky left a trail of water vapor behind them since they were running on seawater. In the year 2052, the concern was not carbon dioxide but water vapor. The little land left on earth after the greenhouse effect was in another great peril. Due to advanced technology, the automobiles started operating on seawater, producing gallons of water vapor, filling the troposphere with clouds. The clouds in turn produced lightning, thunder and rain in plenty that it rendered the surface of the earth inhospitable for human settlement.  The combined team of scientists, philosophers, engineers, and politicians of the world came to an agreement that the future of the earth was in the stratosphere. Accordingly, the earthlings shifted 11 km above the earth's surface and into the atmosphere. The mission to Mars had failed a long time back. The cities existed floating in the sky now, made poss...

My alarm clock beeps at 7 AM on a fine Sunday morning. A touch of expert snooze puts it back to sleep. It comes alive at 7.15 again. Another touch of expert snooze… When it beeps at 7.30, I can’t take it anymore and decide to reset the alarm at 8.30, which I calculate, gives me another good hour for sleep. Silence, only broken by random snores and conceited farts, ensues for the rest of the morning until the blasted alarm clock wakes me up at 8.30 again, and I feel too lazy to snooze or reset it. In bed, I challenge my limited reasons for why we are designed to sleep and then wake up. And wake up, and then sleep. Useless, I feel. I could sleep on forever, I tell myself. Half asleep. Before I get to the tail of the matter, it is already 8.55 AM. I challenge myself a little longer. It’s totally useless; I have to get up, anyway. But I let myself trail a little longer; sleep looks more convincing. Even promising, to me. I grunt under my breath “Only if I hadn’t borrowe...

This is how a boy went crazy in his head. Before long he was done writing the following piece, he had gone bonkers in his head: Impossible! Most men said, ¨I am crazy in my head¨. ¨We ought to ship him off to Spain¨. I say he's seen a housefly's brain. I say the water that we drink is full of bugs! He is mad, we think! ¨They called me dumpkopf, which means a dolt¨. That's how we got the microscope!

It was a gloomy Monday afternoon. The sky was overcast with thick clouds as black and diabolic as hell. Chayphee got out of his bed, lighted a cigarette, and ran his tongue along the back of his teeth. It was thick and unclean. And it tasted funny too. As he smoked from the cigarette, he blew ringlets into the air and observed them disappear. Finally, he got out of his bed and decided to wash up. He surveyed around to witness large heaps of clothes strewn carelessly across the room. Nothing seemed right. Nothing was right. But, it was not the best of times to judge, let alone clean the room. Once inside the toilet, as he sat on the pot, lazy thoughts ran but one caught his mind: what next? He had stayed this way for the past two months. Doing nothing. Just sleeping nights and days away, interrupted only by those few moments for quick meals. Somewhere, along time, he had lost purpose in his life. Where did I go wrong, he would ask himself. What is the purpose of livi...

Please, do not come To find me This way Along the passage of wisdom You and I Are drunk And senseless To embarrassing beats But, this life... At once sweet Then, bitter Recklessly we live

when life is easy you become lazy no other reason why you stay lazy because it is easy

"Wait!" called out Tashi, tugging at his young companion, attired in jeans and woolen jacket. "Did you see her?" "I did, what a beauty, a full moon to a cloudless sky." "Which one are you talking about?" "I am talking about that one, the one with the dark hair. And those eyes! My God, what eyes! The entire bearing and the contours! The cast of the face- amazing!" "Actually, I am talking about the dyed blonde who was walking behind her, in that direction. Why don't you go for the dark one if she so took your fancy?" "What an idea!" exclaimed the young man in jeans, flushing, "As if she is one of those women who flaunt themselves in Thimphu streets at night; She must be an extremely distinguished lady", he continued with a sigh, "Her necklace alone must have cost her 15,000 ngultrums!" "You dolt!" shouted Tashi, pushing him in the direction taken by her billowing necklace: "...