Jingle Bells

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Atnas. Count Atnas. You really should pay attention.”

“I was. That’s a weird name. Never heard something like it before.”

“Well, I didn’t choose it. Like my lean frame, I inherited it.”

“How is it that I’ve never heard of you before?”

“Well, what can I say? Not many have. They direct their diatribes at the unknown. But that makes me better at what I do.”
“And what do you do?”

“To put it simply, in a manner you would understand, I take away things from people.”

“Omg! You’re a thief!”

“That’s one of the ways of putting it. Although, I’d go easy on me if I were you. I only take things away from grownups.”

“Oh, so we should consider you merciful because you restrict your thievery to adults?”

“See, to begin with, let’s stop with calling it “thievery”. That’s a tad too harsh. What I render is a service, something that benefits humanity as a whole. The fact that I often get cursed for it should be considered in my favour and bring me sympathy. Unfortunately, it never does.”

“Why should we sympathise with a... a...”

“No. Not a thief. Let me explain it to you. Remember the time when you lost your headphones and then spent the next week or so looking for them?”

“Yes, of course I remember. Those were my favourite Sennheiser HD 650s. I did plenty of research before I get them. The best musical experience I had ever had.”

“So you spent a week looking for them after they went missing.”

“Yes. But how do you know? Wait a minute, you stole them from me, didn’t you?”

“Calm down. We’ll get to that in a bit. But think about it. What happened after the one week? Did you find them?”

“No. I looked everywhere I could think of. But I couldn’t find them. It was close to the end of the month. So I did not have the money to go buy another one of the same model.”

“So?”
“So, I went and got a pair of headphones for 300 rupees. See? These.”

“This happened three months ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’ve had two months of salary, but didn’t spend it on headphones again. Why?”

“Well, you know… I started using these. I was quite upset initially. The quality was no match for the Sennheisers. There was too much background noise and the bass wasn’t precise. At higher volumes, the music sounded tinny.”

“Uh huh.”

“But then, you know, I went on this road trip. Used these throughout the trip. They kinda grew on me, I guess. They were lighter and easy to carry around. I realized that the earmuffs on the Sennheisers packed my ears into a nylon box. The itchiness I felt after using them was gone. These are great. So I never went back to the Sennheisers.”

“So, now you know that you never needed them in the first place.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say that the Sennheisers had to be taken away from you for you to realize that you never needed them. And also that there were other options which you may not have chosen at first sight, but once they became the only choice you had, you ended up liking them.”

“Err…. You mean…”

“Yes. But don’t worry. You’re not alone. A lot of us are like that. We carry around stuff we don’t need, simply because it appealed to us at one point of time and we thought it was the best there was. We also keep with us things that we don’t want, but tell ourselves that it will come in handy some day. But when the day comes, we don’t even remember that this was with us all along. Let me ask you something. How many times have you carefully placed articles in your browser tabs, Twitter favorites or Pocket?”

“Several times. My browser still has over 20 tabs, mostly articles that I will read soon.”

“Take a random guess. When was the first tab in the window saved there?”

“Hmm, I don’t know. A few months, I guess.”

“Eight to be precise. It was a news item that you wanted to read that night. But you couldn’t and saved it for that weekend. But by the weekend, you had found newer, more interesting items that you told yourself that you’ll read. Three more tabs were added and the first one, like an ignored puppy, slowly moved to the left corner of your screen. You still have it there, opening it every time your browser opens, but newer items catch your attention and you keep piling on tabs, promising yourself every time your browser window looks like the roofs of a semi-detached housing unit, that you’ll clear the tabs out. But it never happens.”

“But those are interesting links. When I see them, I think I’ll like reading them. I think it’s important to know what they’re talking about. Like see this thing on the new mobile processor that I ran into…”

“Yes, you opened it and left it there. That “new” mobile processor has a successor in the market already. Your tab has already become the previous generation. Do you think it is still important to read that?”

“Well, no.”

“A few months ago, your laptop crashed.”

“Yes, I got my documents from the hard drive.”

“What happened to the 40 tabs you had on your browser window?”

“I lost them.”

“That knowledge you never received, has it affected your life majorly?”

“Erm… no. But where are you going with this?”

“When someone like you behaves in this manner, Count Atnas gets into the picture. I take away from you, what you think you can’t live without, but actually don’t need. I take it from me so that you may understand that you never needed it in the first place.”

“But, isn’t that bad? You ruin people’s lives.”

“No, I don’t. I actually make it better for them. You see, as a man realizes with time, that his life isn’t majorly affected by material possessions that he accumulated on a whim, he learns to live with much less. He learns to move on and makes little fuss when something like this happens. It’s a thankless job, that I do, but it’s an essential one. It may be a cliché, but I actually make the world a better place. Now, if it weren’t for guys like that fat old man on his sleigh…”

“Wait a minute. Are you talking about Santa Claus?”

“Yes, him. Him deceiving kids with a bag full of flashy, new gifts.”

“But he makes them happy. They wait eagerly for Christmas tonight to see what gifts he brings them.”

“Don’t be naïve. Do you want a 6-year old kid to look forward to the visit of an old man because he’s going to bring a brand new toy train? Now what if you were the old man? You want to talk to your grandson, play with him, tell him stories about the time you went fishing, and want to see the joy in his eyes. But when you go, he watches your right hand to see how big the box is that you’ve brought him. The box is seized and is unwrapped between jumps of joy. The train comes out, and poof, the boy’s gone. How would you feel about that?”

“If you are going to put it that way, well… I’ll feel miserable, I guess.”

“And that’s what this Santa Claus does. He brings gifts to kids and then leaves secretly, giving them the idea that the grandfather is a gift provider and nothing else. They write long letters every year to Santa, saying they want this and that, never-ending lists, I tell you. Those kids grow up to become adults, like you, filling their life with things they don’t need. When they don’t get what they want, they go about breaking everything they have. I find that most funny. How will destroying what you need and have, get you what you don’t need? But it’s a mentality built upon impressionable minds. Santa has been majorly responsible for this.”

“So, you’re saying Santa pampers kids to the point that they can’t handle rejection. As in, he makes kids feel that they can get anything they want as long as they can throw bad enough a tantrum. And when they grow up, they become like…”

“Yes, like you.”

“But, by the time they, we, become adults, the mentality gets too strongly implemented, right? How do we change after that?”
“Now, that’s where I save the day. I take things away from you, your Sennheiser headphones, your browser tabs, things you will never need but have been accumulating, because you wanted it and won’t take no for an answer. Ideas that Santa has given you.”

“Hahaha! Nice explanation, Atnas, very nice. What a way to justify your thievery! What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, you take things from everyone, right?”

“Only grownups.”

“Yeah, yeah. Do you need all those things you take? Why do you want them? I’m sure you too would simply accumulate them and never look back, because you’re too busy stealing, sorry, taking newer things.”

“Haha. You see this rucksack I’m carrying?”

“Yes, this is where you keep all the loot, is it?”

“Something like that. Now look closely. This rucksack has a large hole. Not large enough to make it unusable, but quite large. There is a short wall that separates the hole from the compartment I put things into. As that compartment fills up, things fall over the wall into the compartment with the hole and out of the rucksack. They find their way to people to whom they will be a novelty and therefore, usable. I never carry too much at any time. Once the novelty wears off, I take it from them and put into the rucksack, so they may once again go to those who would need them.”

“Hmmm… I don’t know, man, Atnas. You seem to be making sense. But I don’t know. Do you think people can change? Do you think we can get rid of our dependency on things?”

“Haven’t you already? Are you going to buy those Sennheisers again?”

“Hmm, I’m not sure, I mean, I guess not. I need to think about it. Not about the headphones, of course. About what you said.”

“Good. I’ll leave you to your thoughts. See you around then.”

“Hey, something fell out of your rucksack. I guess you’re carrying too many things in there, Atnas. Wait, are these my Sennheisers?”

“Atnas, stop. Where are you going? I don’t need these. You can keep them.”

“They’ve found their way to you. If you don’t need them, you’ll find someone who will. I leave them to you. Goodbye.”

Conversations with the Other Side

“So, you died.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like? I mean dying.”

“Well it depends.”

“On what? On how you die?”

“More on how you lived.”

“As in?”

“It doesn’t matter how you die, stabbed, shot, drowned, kidney failure, liver failure, cardiac arrest, brain hemorrhage, car crash, third degree burns, none of it matters. How you feel death depends on how you lived.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You begin to feel it in your extremes. Not just the tips of your toes and fingers. In the thin end of each hair that sprouts from your skin, you feel it coming. It approaches you like an army of ants, joined leg to leg, moving up on you as a blanket that creeps in. You begin to sweat, because you know it’s happening. How do you know? You’ve never died before. How do you recognize the feeling? From a previous birth? I don’t know. But I knew it was happening. I started to sweat. My blood was rushing farther away, abandoning the parts that the blanket of death had already covered. My joints put up a valiant fight, twitching and trying to shake it off. But they got tired too, and the blanket covered them. My eyes wanted to stay open, but the fatigue of an entire lifetime was pulling them shut. The heart slows down knowing that it no longer has to pump blood to the ends of the body that the blanket had already taken over.”

“And this is irrespective of how you die, you say? I mean this is what would happen, whether I’m stabbed with a knife, or if cancer is eating me from the inside.”

“Yes. You won’t know all of it though. Not everyone would. And that’s where it’s important to know how you lived.”

“Go on.”

“The blanket covers more and more of you and the eyes begin to blink slower and slower, staying shut more than open. The turbulence that had been raging inside you spirals inward and begins to settle. You may even feel calmer, the breathing is slower now, deeper perhaps. There is no more sound to hear, nothing more to see, nothing from the outside world will now disturb you. For all it cares, you have been cut off, for lightening the burden. “Dead” weight, you see. And when the bonds of the present are no longer part of your future, your past swims in to fill the void.”

“And…”

“Yes, this is where it matters how you lived. You know every time they portray death in art, you never see its face, it’s always shrouded in darkness, under a hood or something like that?”

“Mostly, yes. But not always. Sometimes, it’s…”

“Yes, sometimes it has a skull for a face. A skull over which you could wrap the skin of your strongest memories, place your fondest eyes, or the moving lips of the voice you hated to hear. That is your choice. The face, the face of your death, is shaped by your own hands. When you look up at Death, the shroud falls, the darkness is driven away, and the skull is filled with flesh. The bony hands stretch to reach you. Your legs are no longer twitching. No use. Your breathing is still, except for occasional gasps, the cough of a dead engine that doesn’t know yet that it’s dead.”

“And then what happens? How does it matter how I lived?”

“Well, when Death reaches out for you, how you lived, decides whether it takes your hand and walks with you, or grabs you by the neck and drags you with it. That depends on how you lived. That’s the only thing that matters.”