You Dancing in The Rain

That afternoon, the smell of rain hang in the air. It was like the damp smell of soil, as if already wet from anticipation. Soon enough it rained; drizzle at first, but quickly gaining momentum, racing down to the ground. The splatters were getting louder.
I peered through the narrow window while in front the continuous beads of water trickled down, forming a kind of screen. I was in a daze. The downpour never failed to amaze. Like sheets of some strange fabric being rolled down from the sky. Every droplet is different, but somehow they are connected, united in purpose.
Then you appeared. Running in the middle of the incessant watery air strike, arms flailing, head held up high. You were also in another kind of race. If the droplets' goal is the ground, what was yours? I wanted to ask you that. To capture as many droplets as possible? To savour the sensations of the pricks on and trickles of the droplets on your skin?
You tossed the beads of water up with your hands. In mysterious gestures, the beads danced, shone like pearls, bobbing up and down around you. No, you were the dancer, the beads merely followed along, as if enthralled by the beauty of your movement, defying gravity, coming under your bidding.
You suddenly stopped. Arms stretched out, head facing up the sky. You let the shower come upon you, trickling down your bodily nooks and crannies. Your eyes were closed, as if meditating, tracing the trail of water, the lingering sensation of the vestiges, quickly renewed, the coolness seeped again, soaking you with ever-continuing freshness.
Such performance, such grace. You started running again. Going out of view. The rain still struck with the same ferocity. Suddenly the wind was blowing gentler. The curtains of water were closing off. Curtain call.

To My Unborn Brother/Sister

Hi.
First of all, sorry that I've been oblivious to your existence for 20-odd years. You, you always exist in our parents' mind. Of course your existence is independent of my awareness of it. It's not like: "I am thought, therefore I am", isn't it? Still, somehow I feel the need to apologise. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is ignorance.
You who didn't have a face, you who might have only been a clump of cells beating with life and were never beyond,
You know, eyes are formed before the brain is. Then slowly the complex optic nerves grow, visual cortex and the rest of the brain follow. Did you have your eyes? Even when all you could see was darkness all around. Even when you didn't have the synapses and neural network to comprehend that darkness. No, you didn't have a chance to; you were fumbling in that darkness, only to be abruptly cast away in another kind of darkness: the abyss of non-existence.
Our parents told me that when mother was aware of my intrusion to the world, they had planned to wash me away. Well you can always see a baby as a threat or otherwise. But then I was a little beyond a clump of cells, too big to remove without risk. So here I am. But when I am pondering about you, my little brother/sister, the short period you spent on Earth, I am wistful about my own. I just live a little beyond, that's all. Eventually I will be cast away into that same darkness, the path you had treaded.
No, I am not angry with our parents. It is something they had to do, given the circumstances. And I beg of you, don't resent them for it. Parenting must be one of the most difficult jobs on Earth. You are supposed to be responsible to shape another human being's life -- not only morally or educationally like what teachers do, but in every literal sense, genetically, financially -- think about it. The word 'responsibility' is bloated, forced to take on every meaning available to it. It's big, it's heavy -- conjure the image of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulder. This burden is so great that one may be understood, if not forgiven, for choosing not to bear it.
Potential. That is what you were. Seed that didn't grow, even though it has the potential to. Potent, but not yet. Possible to be. The power is hidden, latent. Usually I would remark that there is no use talking about possibility of becoming something if in the end it doesn't become something. But here I am willing to dwell in the realm of the hypothetical for a while. In you, there are possibilities sprucing up like branches of an overgrown tree. It's not only in you, but in everyone else, in the surroundings. Imagine how complex this system is when everything comes into contact. Had you been around a little longer, you will tread your tree, choosing which branch to climb next, and the same with others. You may end up high up there, you may fall -- I don't know because I myself am still struggling making my way up. Now, when you ceased to be, well, the branches got cut off. There's no way up; there's no tree to climb; there's no you to climb.
As I said, even though you ceased to exist in this world, you live in our memories, you live in my writing, even if it merely a shadow of your existence. But don't forget that you came into contact with this world; with your own set of possibilities, rippling, affecting others, even until now.

Love.

The Piano

There was a grand piano at an abandoned old building near the place where he lived. An old Steinway -- slightly out of tune but playable nonetheless. He would go there sometimes -- the doors were all locked but there are other openings. He would play songs. Simple songs, or tunes that he made up, or melodies that he figured out after repeated listening.
He liked how the sound echoed throughout the empty building; how it bounced off the walls and amplified the original sound in slightly out-of-phase manner. Because it indicated the emptiness. He liked the emptiness, the absence of people -- just the piano and he, together. It didn't matter that the dance of the melodies in the air, the beauty of it was never seen by others. If a tree falls in the woods with nobody around, does it make a sound? No. To others the piano and he didn't exist. He liked it. The idea of isolation, the separation, the privacy of his very own world.
The piano was a faithful companion. Every musician knows that an instrument can reflect the musician. He felt that way, too. He was naked when he played; his soul, his emotions, his thoughts are laid bare -- they are dancing in the air, out from his fingertips to the keys to the hammer to the vibrating strings then choreographed in the air, performing complicated dance, bobbing up and down, bouncing off the walls, filling the empty space. Narcissus saw his reflection on the lake, the lake saw its reflection in Narcissus' eyes. The piano was as vast as the lake, it is large enough to accommodate the most detailed of reflections. The piano, too, feeds on its pianist. The lake can see its own beauty from Narcissus' eyes, the hollow piano consumed the overwhelming being of the pianist, filling up its hollowness and transformed it into choreographed movements of melodies gliding in the air.
The piano knows him well. When he was sad, when he was overjoyed, when he was aggravated. The numerous and complex ingredients of emotion were there in the air. The room was a vat, a cauldron and inside the cacophonic potion is bubbling, frothing. Troubles of the heart sometimes surfaced, or were they bubbles of happiness? Stirring up, stirring up, the ingredients reshuffled like a pack of cards. One could pick up the subtlest emotion here, although with all the cards flying you need the luck of a poker player.
When he was running out of songs and energy, the noise died down. The dance ended without encore, the potion is ready. Then the mirror of the soul was closed, ready to be reopened.

If there was ever anything excluded from Aristotelian "Everything in moderation", that would be temperature of my morning coffee.

Metaphors in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately thus makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale, I arrive at the unspeakable part; and, undaunted, press on.
pp.71-72

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate...implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; to solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent...it is a also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake.
pp.179-180

It won't do any justice to judge a book by its cover; nor does it do any better to judge a book by its metaphors alone. However my purpose here is not to judge, but to remark on the extraordinary complexity these metaphors display.
Let me begin with a disclaimer: by metaphors I mean metaphors and company; analogy, parable, metonymy, synaecdoche -- all those that compare, parrallelise. Such is the power of good literary authorship, in this case Rushdie's, that the technique refuses to be pigeon-holed into a category. I can only safely say it is a comparison. However it is not a simple one- or two-way comparison; it is beyond that.
Take a look at the two bulky quotes above. They do not employ the same complexity. The complexities arise from different aspects of a metaphor. Let's try to unravel them.
The first parallel: "family history" and food in the context of Islamic "dietary laws".
The ultimate purpose of comparing a thing to another is to invoke aspects not immediately apparent, but are obvious in juxtaposition.
The simplest, and most commonly encountered, effect is to make concrete. Suppose you have an abstract concept -- compare it to a physical body, then suddenly the abstractness disappears, the concept becomes possible to be sensed. In essence, rather than having the concept high in the clouds, a make-concrete metaphor transforms it to be a part of empirical experience. In literary works, it is not uncommon to see Death and Nature, initials of both capitalised. Why? The only category of nouns whose initials are capitalised even when they do not begin a sentence is the proper nouns. People's names, cities', countries'. There are physical entities behind those names; the names are just labels, for convenience of reference. Likewise, if you are talking about Death and Nature, you are not talking about bodiless concepts. Rather it suggests that there are physical entities who embody those names. Usually the more anthropomorphic the 'bodies' are, the metaphors are even more powerful. Imagine an Angel of Death or Mother Nature, for example.
The first quote: there is no difference here. Family history is quite abstract while food is concrete. To swallow the food is to understand the history. To complicate matter, Rushdie inserts the halal law here so that the food can only be consumed in certain manners conforming to the law. Certain parts are not supposed to be swallowed, to be understood: the "redness", the "blood". Following this, the halal law on the metaphorical plane must also have a parallel on the reality plane: the taboo of uncovering family's shameful, painful past. It is no easy matter to formulate an allegory, an extended metaphor like this, in which several aspects of body A are parallelised to several those of body B. It is of course much easier to just compare an aspect of body A to another in body B. Then move on, another aspect of body A to another in body C, and so on. Of course the impact will be diminished because the metaphors become disjointed instead of interlinked. Consistency and coherence give more than the sum of the separate metaphors. This coherent collection of metaphors is termed an allegory. Depending on the author, how far a metaphor can be extended varies -- but the extent is his imagination alone.
Second quote: I will skip the bring explanation as it is quite clear that ups and downs in life can be compared to snakes and ladders. The extraordinary thing that is impossible to capture by quotes is that this metaphor will be invoked several more times. Not only as mere metaphors but there are episodes involving real snakes and ladders. For example, Saleem was cured by snake venom when he was about to die of his illness -- "climbing up the snake". In this way the metaphor transcends the separation between metaphorical and literal planes. Rushdie switches between the two with ease.
There are other good examples in this book, but let me choose one that befits the title of the best. It is becoming so clear as you progress through the pages that the book itself is one helluva big allegory. The birth of Saleem at midnight of Independence ties him with India the nation. Saleem, the protagonist, himself parallels India.
If a book can be so astounding by one aspect alone, imagine about the others. It is really no wonder that it won a Booker Prize (1981), then Booker of Bookers Prize (1993), and most recently Best of the Bookers (2008). A standard text in university syllabus, it is really a highly recommended read.