Notes from an Incompetent Stalker

Looking around him, it was clear that he was never going to make any progress from sitting behind his desk at a distance of some 6423 kilometers (give or take).

He had spent an inordinate amount of time in trying to best use the technological assets he had available – searching for her under the only code name which he knew, the city, the surroundings. Without jumping on a plane for the sub-continent, he had come to abutment of the arched vault which described his imprisonment. And what if they opened the door?

What if he did?

He slumped back onto the chair behind the desk once again. The familiar objects strewn over it seemed somehow strange and unfamiliar to him. The pen he had just used felt foreign now between his fingers. The clock set to another dimension’s notion of linear time. Not his. Closing his eyes, he expelled a deep sigh.

And she did not even know him. If she did, she certainly would hand him his walking papers in favor of a much younger specimen – one who did not have to resort to stalking. The thought made him feel immensely old. It was not simple a matter of feeling the creaking aches of his chronic middle age, but a weariness which made him feel as old as the Ganges. I suppose the Ganges feels old, he mused…

The walls which confined him, which felt to be closing in around him, were of his own construction. This much he knew. There was no convenient external force to blame, to lighten the burden which weighted against his shoulders. I am in this because I placed myself here. I am boxed in only as much as I hold the doors closed from the inside. Bold thoughts. Bolder than he?

He had only one bag with him. On the way to the airport, on the eve of his fool’s pilgrimage, he pledged that he would not return to these walls again.


The first steps of the adventure were taken in fear, yet were the nevertheless taken.