III

Vriksha was sitting in his room, and he was livid. He did not want his life to be the way it was. What did he want to change about it? He did not know. And that was the answer to most of the questions that ANYONE (including himself) asked him- I don't know. But he knew that he wanted to be passionate about something. He knew that he wanted to have something to do in his life- some aim that he could work towards. Or did he? He was not sure. He did not know. May be it was this 'not knowing' that was his problem. But he wasn't sure of this either.

He had sometimes thought that he would know what to do with his life if he was about to die, in say about a year or two. May be that's why he was not afraid of dying- or at least so he thought. Sometimes, he even thought it might be good for him if he got some deadly disease like AIDS or some incurable form of cancer. But he never tried getting them nor prayed to god to do so. It seemed ironic to him that an imminent death should be able to teach a person what to do with his life. If this was indeed true, then how could death be the opposite of life? May be they weren't so different after all. May be it was then possible that what we popularly consider to be death was, in actuality, just another form of life.

That's how Vriksha was- all these thoughts just came to him without any effort. And they made a lot of sense too. And so, one fine day, he had thought that he will write about a boy of his age who was about to die, and he would try to think like that boy, and may be then something would change inside him; may be then he would understand life. And so he had begun writing, and wrote for an hour or two, and then took a break and never returned to it afterwards. Well, that is how he was- he would attach extreme importance to things and then leave them as if there could not have been anything more trivial than them. It sometimes made him think if he actually gave any s**t about his life or not. And the only thing that came back to him in response to this thought was- I do not know.