MY SHORT STORY : THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF INSTANT KARMA

                                          

The Epistemology of Instant Karma

Derek, an emblem of contemporary professional rationality, was deputed to Chicago for official engagement. He was accommodated in a four star hotel whose composure invited a suspension of ordinary judgement. The silence, the immaculate linen, the city refracted through glass, engendered a sense of elevation. He recalled his friend Paul, who had valorised the collection of minute hotel luxuries, soaps and grooming ephemera, as evidence of entitlement.

In the marbled bathroom the proposition materialised. Upon the vanity lay a miniature shaving assemblage, two perfumed soaps and diminutive phials of shampoo and bodywash, designated complimentary. In a gesture both trivial and revealing, Derek reserved his own toiletries and transferred the hotel provisions into his luggage. He mistook appropriation for prudence.

Upon return to Dallas the denouement unfolded with unembellished logic. He arranged his acquisitions with curatorial pride and then sought his own leather case containing three new razors, shaving gel and after shave lotion. It was absent. Memory restored the image instantly. He had abandoned it upon the same marble ledge that he had denuded.

What transfixed him was not loss but immediacy. Consequence had not been deferred to a metaphysical future. It had been synchronous. The world had not adjudicated, it had responded. Existence functions as a reciprocal field returning precisely the intentionality invested in it. To grasp is to be rendered graspable. Freedom persists not in accumulation but in conscious participation within a pattern that never bargains.

Contemporaneously arose within him an older metaphysic articulated upon a battlefield discourse between the charioteer and the confused warrior , that action must be discharged without attachment to its fruit. Desire driven action enchains, action performed in equanimity liberates. Derek preserved the pilfered soaps thereafter untouched. They became not commodities but axioms.

( Avtar Mota )

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