Prophesy

Time stood still, three centuries away in silent jungle glade in Northern Xhindavia and a gutted white war horse thrashed in dying agony and the Princess Sufra gasped for breath and turned to look into the eyes of her killer. Here as she looked death in the face, instead of the world around her paling in comparison, suddenly it throbbed in more vivid lustful waves, in tune with her thumping heart. The sky seemed impossibly blue, her dying horse was a screaming pattern of crimson on white and around her the jungle bulged and thrummed in a thousand shades of emerald. The air around her was thick with sweet fruity smells almost too rich to bear mixing to an evil cocktail with the smell of fresh blood. She was pinned under this beast, he seemed to weigh at least three logs and his breath was hot and alcoholic against her throat. He had ridden her horse to exhaustion, over stones and through brambles, for miles without giving in, killed it with one vicious arc of his greatblade and thrown her to the ground in grip that sent the very breath out of her. Like a henacanda , the giant constrictor of yore he seemed to be intent on killing her by simply pressing the air out of her body. Sufra needed to stare at the light merciless eyes of this lione and curse him with the last breath she had. Yet as she stared and their eyes locked, and slowly imperceptibly, a shift began in the veins of time.

It was what happened to men when they looked at her. She knew about this thing she caused.

The terrible lione of Tambrapane was not an exception, he was flesh and bone like the rest of them, blood, heat and lust. Almost in a trance Sufra felt the monster shift and change and slowly grow different on top of her , its powerful grip letting go of her throat as the tawny light eyes with pin point pupils raked her with questioning which turned to fascination and then seemed entranced. Was he merely reaching for a better weapon?. Sufra moved slightly and found that she could, found that he had allowed her to breath, although their eyes were locked he was moving away slowly. Sufra did not want to die, she came forward with him now clutching softly to his clothes, slowly cunningly caressing remaining pressed against him and feeling Tambrapanas carnivore until she found that hot secret part of him she needed to feel. She knew it was there on men this part, knew it made men do strange things and made women suffer and scream, and she wanted to feel its sinful fascination. She would die anyway so the secret shame didn’t matter. She would caress this beautiful hard male creature if it were the last thing she did. She would take control of his lust and play it in her tiny cool hands, kiss it and lick it, if he let her before he savaged her - She heard rather than saw , his breath leave him in a heavy gasp. … he could not move to defend himself from this sly sensuous female attack . He groaned in surrender and this time it was his unmoving cats eyes that knew their fate. In that glade under the blazing equatorial sun of Tambrapane , Sufra knew she had found a beast as wild as she was, a creature who could tame her inner torments , a lione she would ride.

a series of inexplicable events..

it was a weird Saturday. It started being weird when I passed the dustbins at the top of my road, swinging some old bread and chicken hodi at the couple of stray dogs which habitually sat starving there.
I was more than ten feet away when I saw things were different today, and instead of the craven spotted curs that normally hung about sheepishly, there were two black animals who were staring at me with pricked ears and hackles raised from far away. they still looked pathetic but they also looked as if they were staring death in the face. Skin bones and puffed up fur, where they had fur anyway, and instead of running after the food i was offering, they yelped in unison and scrabbled pell mell along an interconnecting lane whining and whimpering in terror, tripping over their knobby legs in an unholy haste to get away from me.
I stood around looking foolish holding this polythene bag with bread ends and chicken bones.
what had I dont different this morning ?
Had some human tried to cull them?
Or was it the new shampoo from Natures Secrets?
I look foolish anyway when i feed neighborhood strays and people have become used to treating me with some condescension, and tongue in cheek tolerance, Im the local journalist after all and the natives usually have a soft spot for journalists...but this was beyond silly.
Well, i couldnt take the chicken bones to office, so I tossed them into the nearest bin and ran to catch the bus.

a moment without control.

Those of you on a diet to stay slim, I think, can relate easily to feeling hollow inside. Its not that you are hungry per se. Your diet allows you various things. Oatmeal with non fat milk, for example. Or green tea. And leafy vegetables. Without oil. But lets face it, once you eat these things, which theoretically should hold some space in your stomach, and down them with about 2 large glasses of good old fashioned drinking water which should also fill your stomach, how do you feel? In a word “ hollow” am I correct?

Well, mutiply that feeling about a hundred and stay in that region for about a thousand years and then you know what a prit feels like.
They are called the hungry ghosts of eastern legend and they are drawn with huge pot bellies, and tiny reed like necks, with good reason. As punishment for various crimes of greed and jealousy , they committed, they live incarnations of thousands of years continuously hideously hungrily hollow. And I don’t know how I know this, for as far as I know I’m certainly not a prit.
Im a restless earthbound spirit of a more elite nature as befitting my human incarnation of princess; I certainly don’t have a huge pot belly on any visual dimension- on the contrary I look a bit like slightly more voluptuous darker Eastern Megan Fox with longer wilder thicker ringlet hair…just as I did when I was the Princess Sufra of legend.
But hollow I definitely had been for a long time, perhaps simply because it was thousands of years since I had actually eaten. Or been able to eat. Im sure you know the feeling, in a more low key way …

This may explain the embarrassing incident with the half a kilo of shrimp, and after it was all over I was actually sorry, because her throat was lacerated, and she was nauseated and since I was sitting near the nerve centres, I had to share some of that feeling. I resigned myself to more self control in future or at least to first ensure that what ever I made her eat didn’t have a calciferous exoskeleton…

Something Fishy

Talking to ourselves is a common trait in the Perera family, in fact sometimes we get so carried away we have entire arguments in monologue. Its one of those traits of creative super bright people, like all my genius uncles who were heart surgeons, and brilliant at chess, not to mention dedicated philanderers and fans of the outdoor life and funny hats. And marrying women with names like Gertrude and Harriet. Not to even remotely hint that any of that genius would have rubbed off on my siblings or me. Anyway to cut a long monologue short hearing voices in our head is generally standard operating procedure at our place, its when you actually start hearing them curse in ancient Sanskrit that you know you messed up somewhere. But wait, Im coming to that…

Saturday the 14th was a bad day too. There was the fish episode which I will write about later and then, the Office politics, same as you get in any workplace around the world, but these were drunken media people so it could get really ugly and articulate. Some of them fought like women, as they say.. even the women!
However- for sheer catty asexual workplace harassment there was always the Big Guys top lapdog Shito as we called him in private. The Big Guy was good at many things from analysing the stock market, to philosophical discourse to ballroom dancing but anything computer tech was unfortunately able to throw him. Enter a good old Shitzter. Shito was a short tubby fellow with stubby fingers. Good looking, in a sort of unhealthy looking way. Good at public speaking and making powerful presentations. Lots of IQ but zero EQ. Ton loads of bullshit. Shito was our Chief IT Officer (hence the abbreviation of the tag) which meant he had access to all our email accounts, and mind you he sure made use of the access, and seemed to know everything to the constant surprise and wonder of the Big Guy. Here was practically an oracle. Big Guy hung on his words with awe, and agreed to anything he said. Pretty soon staff became wise to his hacking and did their proper correspondence through personal gmails while simply sending to and fro well zipped password protected folders with cryptic names like ShitoNUdepics.zip …we actually found it took any tedium out of the workplace to engage Shito in his own games. This morning he had copied an email to all staff bringing up the subject of an online application my unit had made to the International Federation of War Correspondents, which apparently only he had the authority to initiate. Who the hell knew that? And what could I do about it now? Apologise cravenly and beg for pardon from the senior Team?
GAHH DON’T TAKE SHIT FROM HIM, YOU STUPID BITCH STAND UP -QUIT BEING SUCH A PUSSY
Ok , there it was again, that voice in my head. And I was actually calling myself rude names.
I sat wondering exactly how I could do that
ASK HIM IF CEREMONIAL SEPPUKKU IN THE BOARDROOM WOULD SUFFICE
Suggested the sarcastic voice and my hand hovered over the COMPOSE MESSAGE button while I wondered what the hell “seppuku” was anyway. How come I could talk to myself words I did not know the meaning off? Was that what you called an overactive subconscious, I wondered idly as I googled the word and landed at Wikipedia which helpfully stated that “Seppuku (切腹?, "stomach-cutting") is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment.”
Nasty

What would be real nasty would be the email flaming that would start up if I did send such a message out, with reference to such abstracts as staff commitment, lack of understanding of the true complexity of the situation, lack of professionalism evidenced by flippant attitude in external communications of a nature crucial to the sustainability of the organisation and that other gem the clear availability of too much free time to certain staff members who engaged in compulsive email flame wars ( us not him, since email was apparently his job) ad nauseum.
..and yet I really wanted to hear what he had to say about it, my fingers itched!
JUST DO IT
Not likely, I never send this sort of email without queuing it and looking at it sometime later and I even have UNDO settings which can recall a sent email …that’s how prudent I usually am.
I hit the button, and watched idly as the undo period countdown began, there were twenty seconds in which to recall this email – here I was, I had sinned in the corporate eyes of all the Senior Team and I was being cocky and uncaring- this was clearly the beginning of the end, they would surely fire me for crossing swords with Shito the Great…OUR MESSAGE HAS BEEN SENT.

I sat forward and stared at my screen closer for confirmation –
Your message has been sent – said the comfortable gmail font. That was better.
Then I got back to work, only remembering the weird fish episode when I accidentally got a whiff of my own breath on the phone receiver. To make a short story complicated- heres what happened.

Ive recently decided to eat only seafood.
This comes from many months of exposure to the FaceBook profile of a very interesting friend of mine, a miss Raabia Hawa from Nairobi, a beloved media personality, ardent animal rights activist, passionate rebel with an environmental cause, tree hugger and general sweetheart, who consistently starts the FB day with some harrowing report of cats being skinned alive in China, seals being bayonnetted in Finland, or dolphins being kept in very small circular pools of water which they feel uncomfortable in.
But mostly its all about factory farming. I had read to the giddy limit about the beating, burning, incarceration, castrating and generally inhumane treatment of cattle for beef and dairy, and decided that from now on I would satiate my carnivorous urges only upon fish and such cold scaly life forms;
My logic here was that they generally at least lived a nice free life till netted, and furthermore they were not chock full of tetracycline, banned steroids and other carcinogenic chemicals caused by stressed living…all very noble you will agree, but basically this is how I found myself buying and cooking a lot of shrimp for myself that Saturday morning.
Im an average cook, mind you. Whilst I cannot make full 4 course dinners to entertain ambassadors, or even drunk journalists, nor do I ever get caramel to bake properly, however to survive I can make myself (and the long suffering family)a fairly presentable lunch or dinner if I set my mind to it.
Shrimps apart from the fact that they carry their shit in their heads (and seriously I know a lot of humans who do that too) are not really much of a challenge to me. You rinse them to get the sand off, de-shit them, broil them gently in spices and vinegar and then use them in better and more elaborate cooking.
Something kind of went wrong in this plan , that Saturday morning, in that point somewhere after the rinsing and a little while into the broiling while I was waiting for them to start smelling really good, I actually put a hand into the clay pot took one out and popped it in my mouth. It was fresh and good, and the water was not boiling yet, just extra warmish. The spices were good too.
I took out another. And ate it
And another
Then …and im not sure exactly what happened after than, except that there was eating and both my hands were warm and wet. There was a little choking too. It was good, there was also a kind of consciousness black out. A sense of time lost.
Then there was my mother standing in front of me with the flask she usually brings up for bed tea.
“ hello dear, did you get some fish?” she said conversationally , but I could see she was staring at me.
She had not brought her daughter up to be caught at private moments, eating with her cheeks full of food and both her hands slimy up to the wrist. But she never liked to be accused of being interfering either. I turned quickly to back her and face the sink where I spat out about 100 grams of half munched raw shrimp and looked back in some confusion at the clay pot which was now really heating up at last.
Of the half kilo I had brought there were only a few survivors hiding at the bottom of the dish, and my throat was scraped raw with the shells.
I cant for the life of me imagine what had happened in the interim, between putting the fish to the water and spitting it out into the sink, except that I knew that at least ten minutes had passed, for the water to heat up and I had missed two urgent calls from office- and man, I was going in for a terrible sore throat …not to mention that my stomach was uncomfortably, gaseously, nauseatingly, full.

its dark in here...

The jolt Frederica felt was me taking the reins so to speak, in her head . It was all very odd considering I had only had the guts to do this once or twice in the last 2500 years. Bad things can happen to the possessor too, do you know ? I know people are petrified by the possibility of being possessed but have you ever considered it can be quite creepy the other-way about too? Having to sit inside someone? Among all that raw flesh and blood and slimly sinews. And be with that person 24/7, including when it eats shits and does other odd embarrassing personal things, not to mention the constant internal monologue you have to listen to from dawn till dusk?? At first it was a terribly uncomfortable fit. The girl’s brain, besides being muddled with serious media overload, was unusually compact, leaving my being a tiny sliver of space to cram into. I had that uncomfortable claustrophobic feeling I often get when in a dark crowded space with too much carbon dioxide. Very much like the days when I used to run to the horse stables at night as a child and try to hide behind the sweaty bodies of the royal horses and troughs of hay. Hiding in desperation from…but enough of that..I will not dwell on things past. Let’s not forget that I’m beyond pain at this point…HA!..Immortal and impenetrable…that’s my catchphrase… Why I picked this particular girl, I don’t know. But there was something about her spunky uncaring gait as she sauntered along munching those dreadful crackers at that time of the day, at that time of the month, that just told me, she was the one I had been waiting for all these centuries. Her eyes had that wild spark, her walk that lilt, and her bata slippers had that uncharacteristic slipslap sound betraying a fiery soul trapped in a sloth body. She seemed to be that modern woman I had always dreamed of being from centuries ago. For a moment I worried- was this happening or was I again hallucinating in some limbo of my own imagination? Anyway, I knew she and I were kindred spirits, and I was determined-now that I was in her head-to stay there. Besides she seemed so delightfully preoccupied, with dark brooding thoughts and greasy prawn crackers, that I was seized by this irresistible urge to dwell deep into her mind and discover in that dark abyss what exactly was making her tick. I also realised that the iron content of her laptop was generally low, too low to bother a powerful entity like me and she wore no silver jewellery. Excellent! There was really nothing to stop me hopping in. How did I hop in so easily you may ask? Well, it’s easy. As she opened her mouth to engulf yet another prawn cracker in her Constance-Carol-coated lips, I slithered in through the wide gulf between upper palette and tongue, past the epiglottis, down the wat-ever-u-call-it that connects gut-to mouth, crawled at lightening speed (9) all through a very tangled small intestine, and then realizing I was heading in the wrong direction, made a sharp and barely legal U turn for her liver…lazered my way through her appendix, and sped past her lungs, up her nervous system, right into her cranium. After critical examination of that spongy grey mass that constituted her brain, I decided to settle down in a corner. I was physically in her head, sitting , squished between skull and parietal lobe somewhere near that rather primal, less sophisticated little thing, humans have which is sometimes called the reptilian brain . That’s where I had some kind of purchase. Oh I can tell you I was a very desperate undead entity to even consider trying this after what happened to me in India in 1465! This is simply a last resort and one which I have never seriously considered but for the opportunity suddenly cropping up. Trust me I was just as unpleasantly jolted as she!

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9 as seen in the spiderwalk scene in the Exorcist, but not backwards…

demons from the east...

Theres an alleyway running up to my home which I hate. If I describe it, this hatred will seem quite understandable. There is a pile of garbage which gets stinker by the day, a lot of stray animals cats, dogs and other indeterminate dusk scuttling things which live, fight and die in this garbage, and there is often the stray homeless drunkard pissing against the walls, and cussing the government. And yet this alleyway is a shortcut which makes the trip home five minutes shorter and this to someone who is bone tired and very late, is undeniably tempting in spite of how unsavoury it is.
It had been a terrible day. At noon we had had to stand picketing on Lipton Circus about yet another journalist disappearance. Why oh why did Deshappy always chose blinding midday to stage political protests?? And then he grumbled about the lack of civil society participation. Heck did he not understand the mentality of women, let alone civil society women, we don’t really want years of wrinkles added to our visages in the blazing equatorial sun, due to some poor disappeared sod somewhere who was probably long past it and at peace by now. Its all very well for him he had a large mop of activist hair, white and fashionably unruly and anyway what do men care about their faces getting corrugated….
I was not only late, and migraned this evening,I had missed my lunch and was almost dizzy with hunger so I had gotton myself these prawn wada in a paper bag, from the start of the road, and now could not wait the walk to start munching. This was not good, youre not supposed to eat fried stuff on the road as this makes it possible for pretas to invade your body, according to every old wife in the island. The result of this is you presumably get weak, incoherent and start wasting away, which those ancient days when women had to be fat and fertile, was a fate worse than death. Considering how many of my colleagues would give just about anything to be able to waste fashionably away this has never really been a worry of mine.
So there was I trotting past the intersection with a mouth full of wade, when it happened. I cant begin to describe it to you. My head was blitzing me from the midday sunbath- And now to top it all of, I suddenly felt a hard sore lump in my throat, which moved all the way down into my stomach like an electric shock, and then seemed to race right up to my head..I wondered if it’s all that street food that’s making me feel so queasy today. Or could it be that awful Evening Primrose oil they made me take for my skin? Makes me feel ancient, decrepit…bah…an utter relic..almost menopausal. But this was…this was actually like the first day that I drank too much arrack – first I was singing and feeling light in the head and very frisky and then suddenly I was clawing at the floor contorting into shapes and retching hollowly in a voice that didn’t seem to be mine, but more like some east European demonic entity that you hear on weird YouTube tapings . Fortunately I did not fall to grovelling on the filthy road leading home, but I did pass through a seriously giddy moment when the world seemed to swing around me. This can be pleasant, if you are slightly tipsy but in this case it was very unsettling, the kind of feeling when you get when as they say someone walks over your grave…a genuine cold sweat, if you will.

And the next moment the feeling was gone.
That’s precisely the day the voice started, I do believe.

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4 Demons from the east and the west are curiously allergic to iron and certain other metals. But the Eastern ones don’t care about garlic, they think it just improves flavour. Try and remember that.
5 That’s a blob of fried flavoured dough with a large juicy prawn on the top, very tempting indeed.

One evening, at dusk, near an alley...

Possession is two thirds of ownership , they do say. And the young ladies of now adays just don’t listen to what the old wives say, “don’t walk about in lonely places, don’t eat fried stuff and go on the road, don’t walk about alone at dusk, don’t walk about alone when you have your periods, and avoid junctions”(1). You’d think a girl would, no matter how modern and cynical, avoid doing all these things at once , would you ? but no, these modern Colombo hussies , PARTICULARLY the ones who call themselves “journalists” are darned stupid in their belief that they know it all and here was little Ms Fredrica doing all five at once!
To be honest in the last 2500 years I have not seen a woman going to this extent to flaunt her availability to demonic possession, she was walking jauntily through an unhygienic alley way(2) , at the bewitching hour of 6.45pm, at an intersection, alone, eating fried prawn crackers out of a paperbag and I could tell, because demons know this sort of thing (3) , that she had her periods. Gahhh. If that didn’t beg the attention of every passing ghoul, prit and general undead entity for miles, nothing would. And there were lots staring at her, but a bit too worried about the iron content of her laptop, to approach. I couldn’t be bothered. I was desperate. I got into her head, and it was good. I had a body, at last. Well, kind of. Its just that she was a really stubborn woman would not accept that she was being possessed.





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1 They think these were made up by patriarchal society to enforce unjust restrictions on female advancement. Well, probably, but then there is no smoke without fire, just remember that !!
2 not difficult to find, this was after all Colombo
3 It’s a skill a bit like thermal vision, for which we have special sensors like the Lorenzini ampoules that sharks have, only meaner.