That Was It!

Lean and lanky, he sat at his badly lit study table. He had spent most part of his youth and his entire old age in the same place, in front of the same bundle of papers, which would have once been blank, but now were a confused mess of mathematical symbols and philosophical meanderings. The batteries of his table lamp had long ago given up, but too busy to change them, he chose to carry on, letting the lamp shade accumulate dirt and his spectacles, a higher power. The cushion of his chair had sunk deep inside by the unmoving weight of his body.

His fatigued mind could not remember the date of when it all started but his objective was still as crystal clear to him, as it had been then. He had embarked on the search for a separate identity, trying to defy the mathematical theorem of “Uniqueness of Identity”. “There is only one identity which is unique”. There has to be a way to finding another identity, a separate identity. Or so he thought.

The Indo- Pak war, the Canadian War, the never-ending conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics, the religious wars across the globe and many other such incidences served to be his data, based on which he made his calculations. He had read every piece of information he could find on these issues. He closely followed the Caste conflicts in various countries, the struggle of the homo-sexual community, the innumerable feminist movements and the likes. His study of the past had been so thorough that his mathematical mind had been able to identify similar sequencing in the way events took turns. Given the brilliance, he had often been able to systematically calculate how the present events would lead from one occurrence to another.

He would often think to himself how his quest for a separate identity was not just his, but the entire worlds’. His database was magnanimous enough to fill a library. And yet, he was far from reaching a conclusion. His aim of actually finding a separate Identity seemed to be a distant dream. He was able to correct human errors such as calculation mistakes and wrong hypothesis. But, what he could not control was how all his data depicted one thing – the constant fall of humanity. He could not, using any integration techniques, integrate the disintegrated human beings.

Tonight, there was something about the silence that he had always loved. It told him to stop. It was almost as if in frenzy he had been calculating, but tonight he must stop. His pen had scribbled a word, beyond which it would no longer write. Human- that was it. He had not been able to find a separate identity, plainly because it doesn't exist. But, his obstinate mind was now forced to accept the truth of the Unique Identity of being Human. He spent his entire life, searching, fighting for that separate identity which never even existed. And, there he was, unsure if his old, haggard eyes would see the light of the new day, he had been able to find what the rest of the humanity still needed to.

Finally he rose from the desk which had been his companion for so many years, dusted his clothes, opened the door that had been ajar for so long, climbed down the staircase, slowly and steadily, and sat with the woman who was waiting for him by the fire and sipped the coffee that he had so often missed.