Gabriel Garcia Marquez has always fascinated me to no ends.
I have always had the opportunity to read quite a few number of his novels. His unique style of writing is just magical - he follows reality on tiptoe later to transcend it in an uproarious manner which he uses to enthral his readers in many phalanxes of caustic reality bordering on surrealism a la Latin American genre as envisaged by legendary film director Luis Bunnuel.

Very recently one of my friends showed the courtesy by passing me his copy of Marquez's OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS proved to be simply irresistible to be. The story is set in the slave market of a Columbian seaport where the Marquis family lived with their godforsaken twelve-year-old daughter Sierva Maria. The story begins when she was bitten by a rabid dog. Cases of rabies were neither limited nor insignificant in the history of the city. But nobody cared too much about the bite. The wily and wise physician Abrenuncio professed in his soothsaying, "No medicine cures what happiness cannot." Then what happened to her?

At long last the Marquis sent her packing to the nearby convent of Santa Clara to lead lead a ghetto-like life there. Tortured and quarantined, she became more and violent and behaved in an uncouth manner. The convent people thought that she had been possessed by the evil spirit of a Black Witch and as such they decided forcibly to exorcise her of the virulent demons of her sickness. The young priest Cayetano Delaura was entrusted with that job.

Delaura took charge of her with his heart out. Most compassionately he delved deep into her tender psyche and eventually he surreptitiously fell for her in love. But all his solemn and sober designs to win her heart and favour came to a sombre end. And she died a tragic death as if to be cured in full bloom of happiness bereft of worldly pains and cursed superstitions. And the unrequited young lover of her vanished into the with bated breath of shame and self-indulgence.

To me, Abrenuncio's soothsaying is the moot point of this passionate love story and that revolves about the enchantment and disenchantment that Marquez is so apt to deliver and display his satiric characters in wigwagging shades of hope and despair. Like his all other novels, he profusely uses mythical and biblical allusions in many splendours to leave his readers in a world of phantasmagoria. He weaves the pattern in a web of his inimitable style and his all too familiar magic realism carries his readers to a far flung world of myth, mystery in a seemingly supernatural ambience.

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Zero, sub-zero
Whispering in perjury
Around anthrax evils at good eventide
Parting days
- skulled in bones and blood
- abandoned and spread
In litany of godly prayers
That caress the human huts
In bellowing smokes
As nothing fights and nothing embosses
The mosaics of pains
In romance of bohemian eyes

To overthrow a reign of perjury
In false myths - the eyes
That see nothing in nothingness
Of parting days and nights...

The eyes that stare
At the wilting savannas
To redeem
The vascular territory
Of nothingness

Children arrive, not shyly
To test the trial of tribal comforts
And convenience
But to chain - a beloved long time
And see in the salamander pogrom
A drop of ether that falls
By the old colonial brook
As melody stops here in chirping malice
Of war lengthening
As usual like - crooning saliva droppings
In dead sweats on their tears

Their eyes that see darkness
In humble light, the eyes
That are verily poised to overcome
Hopes and lies
Magnified thousand times more, so...

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Wretched as she is
She flummoxes me in threnody
Of silence as the birds
Tweet in her darkness - to kiss
- the wilting kindness,
As death leaves her, always

As always I see her
Leaving the wilting kindness, so hurriedly
- from a human colony
To a sudden halt, the breads crumble
Like the face of bowl moon
And laugh at her, so dizzy with envy, but -
She recoils back
To her own shadows of jungle violence, entrenched
And entwined as ever
For ever in not so longings...

The human colony
Seems to be withering in stateless diaspora
Amidst million years' anarchy
As if in a long foray into the deep depth
Of the wretched earth

She does little
And she does no good
To trespass
- her omniscient world
Of no excuse
Only her eyes burn
- not in anger
But only to see more light
In god's armageddon

The very world
- a semblance of human colony -
As if to shed - a few tears
Abandons her, abandoned as she always is,
- never looks back to trace
The pugmarks of her recoiling back
To her dingy feelings
Omniscient and overthrown - as always
And forever wretched as she is...

I see her no more, never ever
As she highrises her brows and blows
Into the blues
Of birds' tweetings in no anger
But in human soil - abandoned
Abandoned in anger of no such anger.

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Are you home, Jesus?

Alone in the graying darkness
Are you home swelling merry in welling eyes
Just to bless the purple feathers
Not spelling more doom for the all fluttering souls?

Out of the window
Into the unwatching darkness
I see you, your very face
Not more than a just straight human life
Strangled and crucified, unarmed
In booming light of the last supper in the Holy Grail
The crossbone faces of Judas
Grimacing you and all in lethal wizardry
Undoing the light left undone by you

Let me give you words
I will sing merry in welling eyes, too
I will wear my demasked faces
In dashing light, yet unborn to measure you
To unburn the unholy marble embers
Of graying darkness, thickening through the winds
In macabre peace of violence, oh my Jesus

Let there be light, Jesus
Let there be true light in darkness
Are you listening, oh my Jesus
Are you home? Are you listening?

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Stop beating
Oh, the bell, stop beating
The trees are sleeping
The streams running into the river
And the river into the sea
Frogs no more leap like village urchins
The village urchins
Thumping their breasts in shame.

Oh, the bugle,
Beat, beat your siren
The war planes
Flapping their wings
On my mother’s lazy lap
Just to eat into her blind eyes
In the very dark old alley.

Oh, the birds,
Beat your flying wings
To fly off the deadly ghosts
My mother will pray
For to-night wiping off her tears
The village urchins will play
Hide and seek and quarrel for nothing
And the frogs will sing
The clouds will rain now for to-night
Who will stop them from beloving the rains
Who will to-night?

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In the beginning, there was no end
There was no light but a long worm of darkness
And they were happily coupled in love in their castle of wind
They were smitten by the forbidden snake
And they chose to leave the perfumed garden over the pall of darkness

But there was end of the beginning
He fell short of words for his nomadic rhymes
And she spewed the fragrance of his sweet nothings
Never to spread their wings in the silver lining
As they did not know how to compromise on their ending.

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