The Twilight Man

K. Beechka stared blankly into open space. He was confused as ever. As his head meandered through events in his short life, he looked for that one thread that linked all these events together. All events, including the day he chose to jump through that hole in the Sea of Khas.

Beechka had had a fairly fulfilling life. He grew up in a good family, and while the going was tough sometimes, things had never really unravelled for him. He studied in a good school, went to a great college, and made many friends and then lost some of them. He was, at the end of the day, the usual guy, who lived his usual life with all the hits and misses. All through his shortlived life, however, he felt this distinct sense of a mission he must complete. Much the same, he was rather disenchanted with something in life. Something that never crystallized enough to be completely visible to him, but was grainy enough to hurt his insides when his mind unknowingly strayed upon it.

He thought about the island of Tiid in the Sea of Khas. The island and its inhabitants were treated with an ambivalent eye by people who lived outside it. They called themselves The People of the Mainland. While they respected its inhabitants and turned to them when in doubt, their behaviour was hardly cordial when need found itself absent from proceedings. The people of Tiid, amused at first, then bewildered, and then hurt found solace in each other. The fact that it was difficult to access the island made it much easier for them to shun the outside world and behave in a manner (in the absence of external contact), peculiar to them. They developed their own codes of social conduct, governing bodies, even their own ideas of what they were. The few residents who had seen the Mainland before the separation began, ensured that everything in Tiid was in antagonism to the Mainland. To conform with the outside world was a heinous crime. To not conform with the inside world was even worse.

Every year, Tiid would conduct a scouting operation, where it would call residents of the Mainland, who found themselves at a loss with their world to migrate to Tiid. Of course, Tiid being an island, there wasn't enough space to accomodate everyone. Only those beyond a threshold level of disenchantment with their surroundings (barring those with political connections) were taken in; to live and to conform. Society within Tiid wasn't utopic, as it's founders had (day)dreamed it would be. The heirarchy was almost unbreakable. The cycle of exploitation, endless. All new entrants were subjected to heavy handed behaviour by their superiors, and they grew up to do the same to their inferiors. There were defections, thousands of them. Inhabitants who were disillusioned with isolation on the island, found their way back to the Mainland every year. The authorities in Tiid, tried to clamp down on this defection, but the stronger they clamped down, the harder it got. There were loyalists, of course, who would close their eyes to promises of a better life on the Mainland (on the compromise of conformation of course) and stay with their bretheren on the island.

Then Beechka arrived. He materialized out of nowhere. The story of that man with immense talent, that outsider who fell through the Sea of Khas spread like wildfire amongst the inhabitants of the island. The unknown usually invokes fear and respect. And this was the case with Beechka. He was showered with praise and respect, for no one knew who he was outside the island. Beechka absorbed all the respect with a hunger that knew no bounds. He had never received such adulation prior to the fateful day he fell through that hole in the sea. What Beechka realised soon after, was that this process was not irreversible. Unlike other inhabitants of the island, he could have a double life. One on the Mainland, another on the island.

One would be tempted to think that Beechka's life was now all peaches and cream. Best of both worlds, as one might put it. But Beechka wasn't happy. That something had still not crystallized.

The wildfire amongst the inhabitants of Tiid had died. Beechka himself had fallen into that twilight zone where he wasn't different enough to be considered unique, but was different enough to be cast aside. In the midst of all the angst eating up his insides, and the heat of Tiid eating up his outsides, Beechka was sent to the cooler climes of the city of B. Something inside Beechka told him that he was on the cusp of something. He was to be a part of an international congregation, where he would meet people from around the world, each representing a section of society that had been sidelined by the majority, and sought an alliance with islands such as Tiid. Over the two weeks, that he spent there, the storm inside Beechka grew more and more turbulent. Things always seemed like they were coming to a head, but they never did. And here he was, on the last day, looking over the city of B. and reflecting on his life, confused as ever.

And then, in that moment, he had an epiphany. All questions became answers, and all answers, questions. The face of every person he had met over the last two weeks flashed in front of his eyes. Then, every inhabitant of the island followed by every Mainland dweller made an appearance. He had suddenly found that missing link. Every person he had met in the last two weeks had only one thing on their mind. Everyone wanted to isolate themselves from the majority. This was precisely what had happened to Tiid when it began. Everyone had run in the opposite direction to begin with, and then as time wore on, everyone (except the miserable defectors) forgot about the existence of the Mainland. No one knew of the existence of a faster and easier life. Everyone was so happily ignorant in the mess of their own lives, that they never sought anything beyond it. Not seeking anything meant not losing anything. Work was life, and life was work. There existed no Mainland for them. Beechka, however, was not one of them. He had never been one of 'Them'. Whether growing up in the Mainland, or lost at Tiid, apathy was something he had never cultivated. 'Cultivated', he thought. Not 'succumbed to'. Because it was this lack of apathy that had landed him where he was. That 'something'. He had known both sides of the coin. And because of that, he could never get himself to conform at Tiid, and was never one of them. To the people of the Mainland, he was always the outsider who didn't belong.

Questions became answers, and answers became questions. It had started raining. He got up, and began his quest for that third land, that El Dorado where he would belong.

Was there such a land? Or was he the only one who belonged nowhere?