1

Rafael was definitely eccentric. Every morning, he would spend a long, languid hour counting the new leaves of green that had appeared on the time scarred bark of the Shimul tree outside his house. There had been a raging thunderstorm yesterday, but you would never have guessed at the chaos and anger of the night before standing here, in the lazy winter sunshine with Rafael, counting the fallen orchids from the faraway night before.

The leaves of green on the tree would always outnumber the orchids lying unkempt and dead on the ground. On the bark of the tree itself, new drops of red and heaven pink would soon appear, spending the day looking up at the sky, and soaking in the intermittent drops of mist and fallen rain like the zillions who had already spun the slow cyclical JapYantra of being, and the many hued brilliance of those whose time was still to come. It usually rained throughout the day in Cherapunji. Rafael would sometimes sit near the fireplace at night, listening first to the crickets sing their elaborate orchestral song, and then wait for an hour in the echoing silence before the inevitably gentle patter of rain began. Initially, the asbestos of the roof would only respond in a scarcely audible whisper, but the music of the rain would steadily grow in confidence and ambient staccato aura as the night wore on, as the diffident beginnings of the evening gave way to the raging lightning and thunder of the midnight storm. Soon, the storm would burn itself out in a crescendo of hail and window smashing fury, and the genteel patter of the evening rain would now return, coloured this time by the rakish company of an unkempt bandit wind.

At this stage, Rafael would usually carefully light a cigarette and stand on the verandah, idly dreaming of imaginary flashes of light and life in the darkness of the valley beyond. These visions, as Rafael endlessly told himself, would always remain illusory, and nothing but the soon forgotten memory of the dream would survive in the afterburn acrylic glow of the morning to come. The geometric concept of functionality and usefulness had never held any great attractions for someone as languidly unconcerned about the material essentials of life as Mr.Dinjohn, and before you could blink, the moment of delusionary insecurity had passed, the cigarette had been smoked, only leaving behind the empty echo of the starless winter sky, and the gentle patter of the falling rain.

Through a peculiar natural quirk, the Cherapunji mist would always lose its air of opaque incomprehensibility at night. Sometimes during the day, Rafael would walk out of his house and find that the Shimul tree was cloaked in a mantle of grey, and this illusion of invisiblity would last until you walked right up to it, and even then, the red flowers blooming in idle profusion overhead would be just about invisible, cloaked within the mystery of the slowly rising fog. But the mist's Sun defying bravado yielded before its absence, and often at night, even a carelessly pointed flashlight would be visible across the valley for many a mile.
Rafael, standing on his verandah, would wait eyes peeled for these blink-and-you-miss-it signs of life, and thus reassure himself of the being of a world from which he had lately so resolutely cut himself off.


2


Rafael also harboured a strange affection for objects abandoned or discarded by unknown strangers, often with a view to their apparent uselessness. Every morning, after he had counted the new leaves of green and the fallen orchids invisible in the mist, Rafael would go for a long, meandering walk in the mountains. The paths there would often be strewn with things no one else loved or looked to preserve. Empty crystal bottles of honey, the Sunday classifieds from a forgotten fifty year old newspaper, a Chinese fountain pen with a broken nib, empty Egyptian matchboxes, and sometimes even an unsent postcard with amor scrawled across it in faded green ink. The possibilities were endless.

A long time ago, Rafael remembered, he had once been to the sea. Standing on the beach and scanning the roaring emptiness before him, he had longed with all his heart for all that had been forgotten and left behind. But now, even that memory of the sea had faded to an old greyscale glow, and only the myriad seashells Rafael had collected on the beach all day long remained to remind him of that which once was. There was one seashell for instance, which had a specially reserved pride of place on Rafael's afternoon desk. It was around fifteen millimetres tall, and looked impossibly frail, as if it would disintegrate into a myriad fragments of wind blown dust at the slightest imagined touch. But then when you kept it inside your palm, you would find that it was actually tougher than alloyed titanium, sharpened by the weight of a hundred miles of water and unrelenting salt.


3


And then one fine day, Rafael was found in his bedroom, stone dead. Everyone grieved long and hard except for Rafael himself, who was now a ghost.he now floated over the multitude in sublime quasi-spiritual glory. Finally free of the need to speak and be spoken to, Rafael felt a strange calm pervade his senses. Death had also given Rafael a
freedom from the oft-felt claustrophobia of gravity, and now, as he
sat aimlessly on the topmost branch of the Shimul tree outside his
house, dangling his aethereal ghostly feet in space, Rafael felt that
he knew at last what being free as a bird really meant.



4


Just as he had began dozing off, overwhelmed by the sheer languor of the moment, and also perhaps the unexpected lack of gravity, Rafael heard a strange music in the air. It was the wandering magician Alif, sitting below the Shimul tree and playing her antique Stradivarius.
To Rafael's ghostly imagination, it seemed as if the music was creating a slow, subtle design of great complexity in the air. He could see every note from Alif's violin curl up to its exact predetermined position in the elaborate geometry which was progressively creating itself in space.The afternoon sun now decided to shine down on the scene, and the insistent fog cleared away in amusing, almost athletic haste. As Alif played on, Rafael felt himself slowly becoming a part of the unfolding arithmetic of harmonic order, as if the magician's spell had made the entranced a part of the spell itself.

The sky now shone pale and blue, free of the grey screen of cloud which had begun the day. Rafael, who could now fly, felt that wherever he flew to, to whichever land of rain and silver snow, the magician's spell would now forever be a part of him, and he would forever be a part of the magician's spell. This thought made Rafael feel happy and sad at the same time. He felt happy because he knew that the spell was there, and it would never be broken, and yet sadness, because he knew that the time would soon come, and the magician would get up, put the Stradivarius away, and walk away down the path strewn with our old friends, the fallen orchid and the dead leaf.

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