At noon I left a note on the desk for all who might be concerned about my pending return at one pm… Sashic and Carina with their children were at our one-but-spacious-room flat, having lunch. I presented Sahtik with the paper issue containing three voluminous renderings of mine. Sashic promptly toasted the event but, not wanting to be back to work with vodka on my breath, I abstained.
I wolfed down my lunch and went to the Underground to fetch our heater. Yesterday, down there they forked out a brand new, mighty looking, heater per a compartment. I planned to take our old one to my work place but changed my mind when Sahtik reminded of the blackout we had been having since midnight.
At a stone throw off the Editorial House, I met Arcadic strolling away with an unknown youth. Arcadic told me to go home as there was no work that day. I nodded most humbly and slowed down as if pondering about alternative things to do, which maneuver was followed by stealthy penetration the Editorial House smuggling THE BHAGAVAT-GITA under my coat breast.
In the Renderers' I found my note on the desk turned over and used for the unsigned communication dashed off across the backside —'We are not working today'.
What a smart thing this BHAGAVAT-GITA is! And so mightily moving! It cut the anchorage and put to motion the very corner stones in my concept of the origins of modern civilization sending them to much more eastern quarters.
Now, I know where the Greeks ferreted out the ideas about innumerability of universes and tininess of atoms from.
And the digits that I was taught to think of as Arabic turned out to be born millennia before any of Arab mathematicians came to existence.
And would not the Fathers of Church be delighted by the definition of Trinity as exposed in the GITA? They could only dream of so refined subtleties!
Yet as usual, after my initial admiration there pops up one or another bitchy bitter word of 'but'… At being told for the first time that the human soul is an immeasurably wee spark residing in the heart of each and every individual, I just shrug my shoulders and say 'Okay, maybe'. (I can trust anything when I am not hungry.) I wince at the brow-beating reiteration of the same suggestion. However, when the idea is blared out for the third time, I feel I'd like to know how it conforms to the organ transplantation, eh?
Suppose, a saint's heart is inserted into a sinner's body (or vice versa), where should the migrant soul be sent after the receiver's death? To hell or higher planets?
Still and yet, the supplementary discourse on impossibility to kill one's soul is an awesomely rewarding stuff in the present situation… At this point, I looked out of the window to the right from my desk to behold this here current situation and saw:
a provincial hotel in ages-long need of repair;
an elderly squat woman idling on the steep porch stairs;
a girl of ten piggybacking her thrice younger brat of a brotherlet;
a fuzzy cur limping across the lane that separates the hotel from the Editorial House.
All in all, a classical backwater town landscape in the frame of a rambling clip-long rounds by AKs.
At half past three pm, the vet, warmly sent home two days ago to enjoy his wrongly deserved rest, came back on a visit. Of all the doors in the Editorial House, only mine happened to be open. Surprised, he asked if I had nothing to lock it up with. I proudly had… At half past four, I went home.
