Almanac Of Darkness: An Essay On Life And Love

I am rewriting the story. The nth time. A story about me and the horse with a bro­ken foot, a story about the lizard on my walls, a story about a professor in a film who was wri­t­ing a curriculum of darkness, a story about me and arrivals and departures. This is my apo­calypse story. In the beginning, there was a horse with a broken foot under a flyover. At night, the cold white light installed as part of the city’s scheme to light up the str­e­ets made the horse more pronounced. In that concrete dystopian landscape, the horse stood motionless.

This was in Lockdown 1.0, April 2020. The beg­inning of what everyone called the “end of the world”. But endings are an illusion. The horse didn’t turn to look at me looking at it. The horse could have been abandoned. The sharper edges of his body—shoulders, jaw, knees—poked through the blackness of the night. It had a broken foot. I could see this from the car. A press card allows for many such encounters. There was nobody else around. The Prime Minister of the country had asked everyone to stay at home. He, I think, forgot the homeless. The horse also had no home.