Arshid Malik
Who could possibly want Arshid Malik dead? Well, there is a whole lot of conspiracies going around to bring me down, dead, whether you believe it or not. Theories are being hatched all over the world to marauder me and a good lot of grey matter of a good lot of living things is employed in this venture; dare I call it that. Now, you must be wondering as to who would want me dead; me a seemingly “nobody” kind of a person who proverbially has not even “hurt a fly in his entire life’; who would want me in the grave at this age (though the quantity of phlegm accumulated inside my chest sometimes gives me the impression that I am thousands of years old); who would want to put a fine gentleman (that I am, I believe) to eternal rest; who would be conspiring to even “hurt” me when I have sluggishly not even thought of hurting someone? Let me be cool on this one. I am being hunted down and one day or the other they would catch my soft spot and leave me slithering in my own pool of accumulated blood.
Who am I referring to when I refer to all those who want me to die? Who are these people and why at all do they want me dead? There my friend lays the prejudice and confusion of it all. It is not people (real bones and flesh kind) who want me dead, but the tiniest creatures you could possibly imagine. Insects, especially arachnoids and some “eight legged freaks” are conspiring to kill me. They have gotten together, the whole lot of them and they are doing everything possible to kill me.
Have I gone insane? No, I am not even paranoid. Now, see” the thing is that when I was a kid I used to take great pleasure in killing insects, all sorts, especially the “eight legged ones” and I would at times pour kerosene over them and set them ablaze, reducing them to carbon and nothing else. I still do not know what motivated to kill these insects who had nothing against me and were never actually bothering me, but I was “crazed”, “dazed” and “amazed” by the particular limb activity of insects that would cross my path and I did everything possible to marauder them, mutilate them and in most of the cases reduce them to mere carbon atoms.
Now, the story has turned around and the 007 factor has crept in. The culprit has to be punished and since I am the “culprit” I am being punished.
One day, some two years ago, while I was watching television (the actual couch potato that I was) something bit me in the thigh. There was some irritation at first and then my entire thigh went fire – it was all red and swollen. Before hitting on advice from a medic, I made it a point to find out who or what had unleashed that agony on me – intrinsically, who had bit me in the first place. After a full day of search and cordon operations in my room and after having found nothing “injurious”, I zeroed in on my “king sized” book rack, for I was led to believe (out of sheer contempt) that my most fierce enemy had to be hiding among my most cherished friends and my “most cherished friends” happened to be my books, thus and forth the book rack. After “bringing down” all my books one by one, I moved the rack and found a pesky, dark brown spider with small black dots on what looked like a dome kind of torso, all lifeless. I was, let me admit, not brave enough to fight my enemy in the face and had sprayed around two dozen cans of all kinds of insecticides available in the market on the said date to make sure that my enemy was dead when I eventually looked it in the eye.
So, it was a spider after all and I swept it cautiously into a half liter PET bottle of orange soda and then sought medical opinion. I was laid in bed for almost a month and I eventually managed to save my very precious limb. That day I learnt that it was vengeance and let me tell you that is the day I leant that “life eventually comes full circle”. After that it has been a series of assassination attempts, and I am not joking. Some spiders carry so much venom inside them that they can really paralyze and kill you, even though such spiders are found in the deepest Amazonian rain forests and Sub Saharan deserts but that doesn’t rule out the fact that I am not the butt of conspiracy.
Right now, while I am writing this piece, I am suffering. A few nights ago, an espionage arachnid got to the nape of my neck and bit me so severely that I am not even able to drink water properly. I am on for a ten-day course of heavy antibiotics and antiarrhythmic medications and suffering while I believe I will die fighting. I love my life and all of you do. So be careful about what you do unto others (it actually comes back to you).
