Ilwala Neelakantu's name was as malleable as his disposition and was unduly abused ever so often. Closer quarters called him Illa (nothing, in the regional Kannada language), colleagues called him 'Nil' and at times 'Kantu'-which unfortunately sounded like 'Can't -Do'! Yet the man innocently signed himself off legibly as I. Neelakantu, only the period -instead of a comma- following the initial, undermining the conceit in such a signature!

At five feet five and fifty kilograms, I.Neelakantu often wished he were taller and more muscular. His wife wished he were less putty. He invariably thawed at the first sight of brimming eyes, choked in the midst of a moving speech, albeit being rendered by another person and embarrassed her coming out red, puffy eyed from the movie theatres. He avoided funerals and giving-away-the-bride ceremonies. It was rumored that at his wedding too, the in-laws had to console him after giving away their daughter! Absenting from the funerals of the dearest and nearest naturally bracketed him as an unfeeling, aloof relative. This was miles away from the fact that he was very waxy-thawed by the warm breath of strife, turned to jelly in a hot atmosphere and melted by hot tears, much to the chagrin of his wife. He was a wax man and the shrewd woman hit upon the idea of a wick, but not before he had almost completely melted.

It began on an ordinary day. I.Neelakantu was hurrying off to his office on his battered scooter, whose tantrums he uncomplainingly endured for the pure love of the contraption. Nostalgia and sentiments were at play. It was the first two wheeler he had purchased in his life and he was faithfully determined that it should persist to be the only; un-heedful of the fact that it could also end as his last (taking him along, of course) if he still ignored its brow-beating behavior. A frail old man was crossing the road, when the reckless driver of a lorry hit the poor fellow. The old man was knocked down and of course, the lorry sped off.

Now this is an incident which is so mundane on any of our roads that the matter would have been left to itself like the bleeding old man by the road side, if it were not for the already overflowing eyes of Neelakantu. The sudden mishap and his misty eyes almost blinded him and the wicked scooter connived, throwing him off balance too. Picking himself up, he was dismayed to see that the world around was going about its activities as if nothing had happened. The old man was too weak to even call for help and lay there helplessly, his bulbous, beseeching eyes hoping to catch the attention of anybody-somebody. Thus it was that Neelakantu hobbled into the foyer of the nearby hospital, dragging his own injured leg and half carrying the old man. His ordeal had just opened doors to defining experiences of his life.

The medical personnel in the emergency promptly attended to the old man as first aid was given to Neelakantu too.

"What's your father's name? How old is he?"

"Ilwala Annayyappa. He died when he was fifty."

"But you just brought him in." The clerk had already finished the entries.

"Oh! No, no no! HE's isn't my fath-" The attending doctor barged into the room just then.

"You are with the old man, aren't you? He is in quite a bad shape and needs admission, X-rays and ECG. Sister….will you ask this man here to sign the necessary consent forms?" Before Neelakantu could register his denial the doctor was gone and so was the clerk.

"My god, that was close! Invoking the name of my dead father at such an inauspicious time and place!" Neelakantu thought to himself as he readied to leave.

"Hey, mister! Where are you going? You have a few forms to sign, not to overlook the advance payment that you have to make for the old man's admission and treatment." The receptionist was now hounding him. It took a flabbergasted Neelakantu another half an hour of animated avowal that the man was NOT his father. When they asked him, "If he is not, why did you have to bring him in?" it bewildered him further. He had presumed that bringing an injured person to the hospital was the duty of any caring, conscientious citizen...and now he discovered his presumptions were a bit faulty.

And finally when they declared, "Say, you are hurt too...were you the one who knocked him down?" he was so indignant and vexed that he took it upon himself to find the relatives of this man...which cost him two weeks of ineffectual hunting. It seemed that the old man was a tramp, probably not even from the same city- unwanted by his family, neighbors and certainly by the hospital if his medical bills were not paid up. He was a living harmony of  multiple disorders and to worsen the matters, he would slip into long hours of dementia, making recalling exercises more difficult. By the end of the nineteenth day, he had resigned to his fate- Neelakantu, I mean, to the old man's fate. Fate finally chaperoned an ailing old man into the modest house of the easily movable I. Neelakantu. His wife of course did not spare him. She nagged him, dissected the economics of their meager budget, threatened desertion, stopped speaking and finally gave up. I.Neelakantu was helpless for only pain and difficulties mollified him whereas disinterest, iciness and cornering only hardened his wax. And so the wick took birth, in the mind of his wife and was finally, cleverly, impregnated into the body of the wax man.

The wick was sagacity. "Rather he burn slowly than melt within seconds," was his wife's rationale. They hoped that the pliable wax would realize that the selfish world molded it, only casting into its desired shape. The shape, colors, scents and allure of a candle was more important than knowing if it was a darkness-friendly or day-only candle! Many such melting but teaching experiences later, Neelakantu was thankful for his wife's wit for the wick.

After the next few months, he no longer had over grown lachrymal glands and as a corollary, his heart shrunk proportionally. He could now walk past beggars without going through mental turmoil or visualization of the way they lived, learned to trapeze between truth and non-truths and went to funerals boldly. It was during one such ceremony that he noticed it for the first time. There appeared to be some granularity on his body. He put it down to the dryness of winter, but the thing increased over the next few days. Tiny flecks of grey began to appear, fast coalescing with each other to form sheets of grey. He sensed the sheets growing underneath his skin too for his limbs got heavier. One day as his elbow grazed a nearby wall, the reality of the situation dawned on him.

There was a long chalk mark drawn across the wall and his bare elbow had done it.....I. Neelakantu had metamorphosed into sandstone! No longer was there that pliable, jelly wax. Shortly, the sandstone's mettle came in for testing and confirmation. Again I.Neelakantu was witness to a hit and run accident. But he was relieved to discover that the sandstone permitted him to behave as per the predictable norms. Not only was he able to pass the bleeding being with absolute disinterest but he was also able to study the situation in the most clinical fashion. He discovered an urge to write because the sandstone was very writey! He was eager to harness his newfound capacity. He was no longer content to be confined within the dreary walls of an office for a fixed, meager income.

And so he became a self-styled writer. The wick of his wax-man days transformed into a powerful stylus. He wrote from dawn to dusk. He detailed a small incident of children fighting in a nearby street, embellishing it, inflating it until it took on a communal hue, abating only after riots and loss of seven lives. He celebrated the lives and deeds of the rich and notorious in his writings, ensuring that people instantly absolved them as being incapable of any bad doings. He helped many an unscrupulous researcher prepare results of ground breaking studies, working only within the confines of his home, which incidentally was a four storied mansion now. He even graduated to incensing, fabricated, 'sting' operations.  The sandstone afforded him immunity in moving situations, steeled him to face tears without crying, listen without feeling and achieve without being straddled with liabilities.  It was unimpressionable and of course, not pliable like wax. When at times a string tugged at his now small heart, he attributed it to a crack in the sandstone, hastening to remedy it with a generous cement of need-of-the-hour reasoning.

He now signed as INK, elated that I.Neelakantu so magically transformed into such an apt acronym.

Years of success later, his sandstone was quite. Someone else wrote for him. He relaxed, twiddling his podgy, rings-laden fingers as someone else's hands and sinews toiled for him. He raked in the profits of his vast empire, as he amassed physical weight too, doing absolutely no work. Yet another accident graduated him further. One tranquil night, in a fit of drunken vanity, he ran one of his swanky cars over a huddled row of pavement sleepers. Before the waking world could come to its senses, the case was closed and the hapless bodies done away with. After all, what use does a preoccupied world have for bodies too emaciated to even bleed? Thus I.Neelakantu, who had once rescued a bleeding man, had eventually jumped onto the other side of the fence! He was ripe for the next metamorphosis.

  His activities had diversified and he was now a professional miner. He mined ores, stones, jewels, cultures, beliefs, people’s fortunes and feelings. He was getting heavier and the sandstone's hue was getting lighter. All the granite he had mined began to settle on him until one fine rock-blasting day the sandstone had fully converted into granite.  His signature now was a mere large I carrying with it a world of flourish and achievement.

The granite was hard, cold, immovable and most unexpectedly had a fist sized hollow in its core. I. Neelakantu never paused in his granite strides to look into that miserable hollow. He had by-passed that check point years ago. His once large heart had shrunk and finally popped off its shelf into a hillock of orphaned hearts in the waste dumps of an uncaring metropolis.

A collective litany emanated from the pulsating dump. Soft, unheard, they sang-             “Here we are, here we are;

            The living dead of this unfeeling city.

            No longer fancied, no longer dear,

            Long humbled by the swindlers and the petty.

            Growing in counts, counting the days,

            As another jumps off from a material face.

            Here we are, here we are;

            The static flesh of a pulsating city,

            Fossils of progressive humanity!”