Monday, May 23, 2005
The lights shone everywhere. Twinkle lights. It was hard to tell twinkle lights from the twinkling stars. Darkness. With lights thrown in sparsely. Makes one think of a moon covered by a thin sheet of clouds. So thin, it might as well be that a non-existent spider wove a fine web around our very own satellite. Nef had been sailing for 4months 22days. She was tired of so much water all around, but yet today was different. She looked up at Antares with pure ecstasy as she heard the tapping of a pair of shoes approaching her. Funny, even the tapping sounded lovely. As she turned around, a delicious pair of tuna sandwich lay on a tray with a glass of tamarind drink. She felt contentment like never before…‘No, no not tamarind juice in the middle of the night’, she said.‘I couldn’t think of anything else today’, said Void from void.‘But did I ever tell you I love tamarind juice?’‘I thought I know…’‘So you do…Void, do you ever sleep?’‘I don’t need to. I never get tired. Do you want some kind of a food drink?’‘It’s ok. I am happy with these.’‘I’ll be back in a moment with a dish of lobster’, said Void and left.
She wondered if Void ever ate. Or drank, for that matter. Oracle never talked to her about it. She only told her that on one twinkling night, Void would appear with a pair of sandwiches. And tamarind drink. She didn’t even talk about the tapping of shoes, but only that Nef would hear or feel a sign when Void would emerge from the land of the void. The Oracle didn’t give her any further piece of information. She was at her deathbed. After that, Nef didn’t waste a second. She ordered a ship to be made out of Belgium glass with silver framework for support. And now here she was 4 months 22days…
Void never came back with the lobster dish. She knew it. But the tamarind had made her imbecile and the sandwich made her wiser, all at the same time. Since then, it’s not clear if Void appeared again, but a strange thing happened every dawn. A pile of fish, crab, squid, shrimps and lobsters hopped on the deck every dawn and got themselves fried by the Sun of the noon and Nef didn’t have to bother to sail on for eternity.
She never found any land ever again. Once she had read about Xanadu, the never never land of imagination. She never found that either. Or may be if she did, it was largely unnecessary. Antares always shone upon her.
