The Artisan and Other Stories

By kaleeM rajA

Foreword This isn’t so much a collection of short stories as a rag bag of

eccentric curiosities. Most of my short story telling is a stream of consciousness

written to explain a deeper self to myself.

Some of the stories here are experiments, others are word play surreal reveries, others

are serious but esoteric. Despite the obscure and unconventional nature of the prose

here, hopefully the reader will something they like.

kaleeM rajA was born in Luton, England in 1974. He is a British Asian

artist, writer and educator and poetry editor of The View From Here literary

magazine, founder of reVerse View poetry group and founder of the ARTSscape

website.

He has had work published in magazines like Ink, Insite, Open City 360, Best New

Poems, The View From Here, Humanimalz, Bitchin’ Kitsch, local newspapers and

magazines, various online sites (Hub, Glogster, Watpad, Writinghood, Write Out

Aloud, Poetry.com, Forward Poetry, Soundcloud) and work featured on social

websites (Blogger, Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo). He has e-published 2 books;

‘Medication Nation’ and ‘A Short Book of Short Poems’.

kaleeM is a member of the Luton Poetry Society, Irish Forum Literary Society,

London Poetry Society and Luton Writers’ Group. He has performed in London,

Bedford, Leicester, Dunstable, Harpenden, St Albans and at 33 Arts Centre,

Toddington Poetry Society and Luton Poetry Society. He has featured on Radiolab

and Tropical FM.

kaleeM holds a bachelor degree in English linguistics and literature from the

University of Bedfordshire and is currently studying for a masters degree in

Educational Studies and Management. He is the deputy head of a private school and

has been teaching for 15 years.

Kaleem’s website is ARTSscape http://artsscape.webs.com

Cold Tea

A job would be nice I said. He just looked at me as though I had two heads. Only a

question of time I thought. Far lesser men. The jukebox was blaring. People think I

look like Roger Moore he said. I hadn’t followed his conversation – he was waffling

because I had not said anything for a while and he seized the opportunity and when

my eyes turned away from the jukebox and fell on his leathery mouth, he was saying

how his friends said he resembled Roger Moore. I didn’t feel he had flattered himself,

on the contrary, he had insulted himself – Roger Moore was a pompous arse.

I looked at him, cold tea, dry conversation and wondered why I had bothered dragging

my corpse of a body out of bed this autumn day to see this man. I measured him

against the things he had said about himself in his letter. He was wide off the mark,

the toad. At any rate, it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be seeing him again

(thankgodididntgivehimmypersonaldetails). So tell me about your mother’s

association with the Duke of Edinburgh I managed to say. He listened carefully as if I

was confessing some life long secret on my deathbed before he began his drone of a

reply. The first time he touched me, the arousal was overwhelming. I felt as if I would

be sick with excitement, the sexual feeling, thick, dark, black bile churning in the

breast. He was rubbery in the mouth, I hadn’t minded the wrinkles then. I minded the

wrinkles now. He looked like a scowling lizard. Bathos. It was a foggy morning. I

could walk out without so much as a word while he’s in mid-sentence. Cinematic,

dramatic. I used to go out with this guy, you’ll never guess what I did. It didn’t matter

since I wouldn’t be seeing him again. I looked at him droning on oblivious, relentless.

What a bore you are, a complete arse, I must be out of my mind to waste the precious

moments of my youth sitting thinking how much better I can do than you. Pipped to

the post by lesser men. Sick to the back teeth. You soldier on of course but the sense

of flogging a dead horse does creep in at some point. I can do better than this, this

man old enough to be my grandfather, that sodding office job dictated to by spotty

oiks with no manners and no morals and barely two brain cells to rub together. All

this learning and not a jot to show for it. Pipped to the post. Good time Charlies and

no-hopers going and coming and going. I saw a couple through the smoke furtively

arguing, uttering poisoned somethings through clenched teeth. I wonder what they’re

arguing about. I wonder if it’s worth arguing about. She was wearing a pullover, sans

bra. Cheap. Where was Vicky when you needed her? She would be in bed now,

zonked out of her mind on valium. Hapless, hopeless Vicky. She was another one-

much too far out all her life, not waving but drowning. She lost her virginity to a

different man every week. She showed me it once, it was loose as a goose, all her

innards seemed to be hanging out of it. I wonder what Vicky would make of John. I

often talked about him when we first met. He sounds really nice she said. Do you

want to meet him? Yeah that’d be really nice. Dear Vicky, why wouldn’t go right for

her? Perhaps there is something in past lives lived, virtue rewarded, vice punished

until Nirvana. I made to move. The jukebox played out the track it was playing. A

man in dirty jeans took a drag on his fag and blew the smoke out ceremoniously as I

passed him. I held the door open behind me for the quarrelling couple stomping out.

Well that was great, I’m so glad we meet like this, same time next week? Yes, same

time, same place…

Bleak Mid-Saturday

A difficult week at work had put me out of action. I had let Friday evening slip by

foraging for junk food in the greasy kitchen cupboards and watching whatever they

cared to broadcast.

When Saturday morning awoke, I was in a daze. Everything was a mess. The

bookshelf over the bed that had fallen in the summer holidays was still resting up in a

darkened corner of the room and the books it had so usefully held up were stacked up

in molehills about the room. The bed linen stank of smoke.

I use to take care to ensure the family did not find out about my smoking, sparking up

only after everyone had retired to bed and even then bolting the door and opening the

window aghast and lighting incense sticks to mask the pungent smell and then

thoroughly fumigating the room with lavender air refresher once the air had cleared.

But by that point, I was passed the point of caring and simply bolted the room and

smoked at all hours of the day. Defiance replaced guilt. So I smoked, there are bigger

crimes of our time.

It seemed a particularly gloomy Saturday morning. The sky was an endless grey

fleece. But the gloom wasn’t about atmospheric conditions. Father and I had

squabbled again some weeks ago.

It was the usual monthly ritual but usually the door-slamming, raging arguments were

followed by playful mutual ridicule and ribaldry and that dissolved the tension, and

although the arguments climaxed without a conclusive resolution, all seemed resolved

and right again.

So we argued; we’re family; it’s what families do.

Our paternal-filial spats became the stuff of long-running family jokes and clocks

were set by them. The other members of the family even envied our ability to be

dagger-wielding enemies one evening and bonhomie bosom buddies the next

morning.

But it wasn’t like that this time. We had argued and we had skulked away from each

other for several weeks. There was no epilogue of jocular humour to conclude the

clash and restore normal functioning father-son dialogue. It was a stale-mate. Both of

us broken by one fight too many. A graveness, to which the whole family was alien,

descended upon the house and nothing seemed to shake it. And so the gloom.

I remember looking in the mirror and feeling slovenly and zombie like. Work was a

mean, the family a mess. I looked and felt a mess. There was nothing to escape to.

When family tension reared its ugly head, it hammered the superficiality of most

things in life – job satisfaction, sitting in darkened cinemas with friends, pigging out

in front of the telly, indulging in cultural pretensions – the latest novels, music, shows,

films, social soirees. What was the point of it all? Leisurely pursuits only got in the

way of a good suicidal brood. This seemed to me a more human state than most.

How the Camel Got its Hump

The beetle beauty pageant bought joy to the animals of Doddering Wood. The badgers

wore their Sunday best, the hedgehogs polished their beaks and the frogs took a day

off from scaring the gays.

And what is this we see at the edge of the forest? It is the seventy-seven dwarves of

Dunstable Desserts in alphabetical order. Apple Crumble. Banoffie Pie. Chocolate

Gateaux. Fruit Cake. Lemon Tart. And Victoria Sponge.

Then calmly, the volcano erupted and the dinosaurs hid in a cardboard box. No one

spoke for a hundred years because in those days, language was a rare commodity.

They wailed for a messiah, a saviour to bring them manna from heaven. His name

was Cheesus. Cheesus came but the volcano was still quite hot so he melted.

The mafia harvested the melted cheese and used it to make Italian food.

“Now that we have invented Italian food”, said Al Capone Penne Carleone, “We’ll

have to create Italy to put all the food in”. So they did.

Italy was done.

Pacino, De Nero and Cappuccino all cried,”Bella! Bella!”

When the Mediterranean Sea came back from its summer holiday, he played with the

sky and they got married and gave birth to toasters, washing machines and most other

electrical appliances beginning with I (except i-pods).

Zeus helped to supply the electric bolts. Hanuman the monkey god gave everyone

bananas to commemorate this day and had he not left a banana skin lying around, God

wouldn’t have slipped on it and had to create the health and safety policy on the 8th

day which we all now have to adhere to.

To this day, in Doddering Wood, during the beetle beauty pageant, everyone has to

wear safety goggles.

And that’s how the camel got its hump.

The Artisan

You can have sight and yet be blind.

There was once such a man.

He wore robes of fine silk and suits that were seamlessly bespoke. His house glowed

with warm peace and was furnished with sparkling things and his kitchen cupboards

were heaving with fresh food. All about him was resplendent beauty. There were

tropical lagoons, exotic trees and startlingly colourful flowers draped around his little

mansion of sanctity. Every morning the glorious sun roared through his world and the

sky that canopied it was blazing azure blue. He was an artisan by trade and laboured

to produce beautiful chairs of gleaming mahogany, cushions of silk and chenille,

marble ornaments encrusted with sapphires and lapis lazuli, delicate jewellery forged

out of glass and mother-of-pearl. He offered the world the goods to adorn itself with

elegant finesse.

The artisan was a self proclaimed man of dignity ennobled by good deeds and a gentle

heart.

However, he had, as all men have, some substantial flaw of character.

In the land in which he abided, the juice of the jinna berries was outlawed on the

grounds that they rotted the gut and disintegrated the mind and robbed it of reason.

Under its influence, good men ceased to be good.

The artisan took of this nectar occasionally for pleasure, for pain and some wild

escape.

At the end of the road upon which he lived, there was the grim Dungeon of Doom

where wretched men and wicked souls were sent to suffer for their sins.

Sitting under a palm tree one night, the artisan gulped down a canter of jinna juice and

keeled over intoxicated. The town’s law enforcers came and swept him off the street,

placed shackles upon him and dragged him away to the dreaded Dungeon of Doom

for the night.

The night paled into day, day turned into days, days into weeks and weeks into

months.

His face turned sallow and bristled with unkempt wiry whiskers. His abode was grimy

and crept with things that crawled out of crevices. His meals were meagre with

morsels of insipid meat, stale bread and dusty mugs of plain water.

Brick walls shut the blue sky and choked the fresh air. The sun far from sight beyond

the dungeon cells was just a memory. All that was beautiful was killed and buried in

the barbed and barred fortress grounds.

As he lie there cold and dark with despair, the artisan remembered the words a wise

man once said to him: There is only a hand span between heaven and hell.

How right he was.

And he thought to himself, “Fate can be very exacting. I was once king and now I am

a wretch in beggar’s rags. One short moment and one big transgression has rendered

me from riches to rags, peace to turmoil, joy to squalid hopelessness. It seems many

good deeds can not excuse a flagrant sin; even if it is just the one”...

Crouching humbly on bended knees, he prayed:

“My dear beloved Maker. Forgive me the sins of my past. Please don’t forsake me.

Let this be a lesson for my learning and not my fate forevermore. Tarnished soul be

cleansed. Most merciful Maker, let me return home to your hearth where all good

souls reside...

The Boy of a Hundred Hats

Once upon a time the Boy of a Hundred Hats came to be forged from a subversive

maverick and the Afghani rocks, laced with slivers of a woman’s heart. The days

passed and the land of kite fliers and rickshaws sent him away. Like the flight from

Krypton, it was inevitable. A new land came to the fore of witches and pink Mohawks

and strange folk who spoke in tongues. The silence of the great masters was a

comfort; a man of snow that broke the heart and sparked the imagination. There were

fabled tales of other Others – a man of steel alone in his fortress of ice, a moored

creature dislocated from his home, a patchwork man made, monster created,

Prometheus bound. As the years drifted past like specs of dust in shafts of light, the

Boy of a Hundred Hats grew weaker and each strand of hair filled with blood and

nerve. There was the winterland age when the nights drew in and remained. The Year

of Blue came and went, the chrysalis stirred and as soon it purged its gooey new life,

the offspring was swallowed by the forgotten and unforgettable Chicken Hawk of

Chittagong. In the years that followed the garret was lined with paintings and books

were voraciously consumed. There was a waiting and then love arrived. New heaven,

new earth. But this genesis was an apocalypse. Russian, Croatian and Polish women

of character came and went. A decade of jazz followed sunk as it was in its own

cocaine flurry and doused in alcohol and blinded by the lights and addled with pills of

every colour. Every passion and every perversion were exhausted. Overkill and from

chaos came strange, skewed, edleritch order. There was a pilgrimage back to the lady

with trolley and the 50/50 chef. An opening in the mirror led to a passage. The

passage was followed in blindness. A portal. And then an ancient land unfolded filled

with the people of sheltered hearts and anorexic pineapples. And here away from the

madding crowd, the Boy of the Hundred Hats rested opening new boxes of delights

and Pandora’s boxes. A voice in the dark calls. A frail crone with unspoken wisdom

traces the lines of your hands and speaks truths which bring new hope, new alarm.

Tomorrow never comes and everything becomes meaningless once it slips into the

past.

The Prince and the Teeth

Once upon a time there lived a pretty prince in a vast kingdom called Kettering. The

prince was very fond of his mother, and the mother was very fond of her prince.

The Queen of Kettering was known by her subjects as Ed, after the talking horse Ed,

on account of her unfeasibly large teeth. Legend has it, that she could eat an apple

through a tennis racket. At any rate, the prince was fond of his mother.

But the peasants were less fond their queen, for she had a voracious appetite. The

Queen of Kettering ate Kettering out of house and home. She scoffed bread faster

than all the bakers in Kettering could bake. She drank the cows of Kettering dry. And

with her sweet tooth for honey, the bees of Kettering were over worked and

threatening industrial action.

One winter, the people of Kettering, tortured by cold and hunger revolted against the

queen. The stormed the palace corridors, took her by the hair and dragged her to the

town square. The sound of his mother’s cries was so terrible, that the prince on

hearing them became deaf thereafter.

At the village square, the people told their queen, ‘You eat more than all of us put

together. So now we will eat you. But before we do, we will remove your teeth, so

that when we die, we do not find that you have eaten all the food in the afterlife’.

When the people of Kettering devoured the Queen of Kettering down to the very last

fingernail and the very last strand of hair, they transformed the palace into a prison

and locked up the prince for eternity, along with his mother’s unfeasibly large teeth,

which they had ripped out of the queen’s mouth as they had promised.

For the first year, the prince lived on the food in the pantry. After that, he acquired a

taste for furniture. When he felt hungry, he would bite a chunk out of a teak table or

nibble on a velvet cushion. When he felt thirsty, he would collect his tears of grief in a

cup and drink these.

And the prince grieved for a long time, for he missed his mother, irrespective of her

epic appetite. Every night, he slept with her teeth under his pillow, and every winter

he dreamt dreams of his mother.

After many years, the prince was out of furniture and out of tears. He eventually grew

so thin that he was able to slip through the prison bars and make his escape.

He took with him his mother’s teeth and climbed up the tallest hill in Kettering. When

he reached the crest, he looked down upon Kettering kingdom, and fixing his

mother’s teeth in his mouth, he vowed to avenge his mother’s death by eating every

man, animal, vegetable and mineral in Kettering. When he reached the bottom of the

hill, he heard his mother’s distant call echoing from beyond the hill, and he ate

himself instead.

The Thorn Snakes’ Tail

Long ago, long before God’s comb had furrowed the land into mountscapes, the Hairy

Backs lived in peace with the People of the Small Feet.

Together they toiled in the mines and filled their caskets with burnished Russian

silver. In the markets they bartered with mischievous determination and at the table,

the Hairy Backs exchanged their slabs of cured meat and blocks of smoked cheese for

the People of the Small Feet’s boxes of trinkets and poached fish.

Just as the air worked with the sun to pull new life out of the soil, so the two folks

lived and worked.

In the first epoch, the Age of Pennies and Pounds, co-dependence reigned. They

contently passed the generations in the First Summer and the Second. Even in the first

few Times of Hard and Rime, they lived in relative harmony.

But then into the land came the Thorn Snakes. As they slithered through the

mountain, the plates of the Earth shifted and entire nations plunged to their deaths

through the gaps. The rivers sloshed and drowned the fish. The stench of the Thorn

Snakes and their acrid faeces clouded over the sun as if the sky had been smothered

with tar.

With a menace in the world the likes of which the world had never seen, a chasm

grew between the Hairy Backs and the People of the Small Feet. Silence brooded and

bristled into resentment. The markets closed and fights broke out at the mines over

territory and possession.

With stocks in short supply, amongst the feuds, was a famine.

The streets of the Hairy Back strongholds were caked with Thorn Snake faeces which

spread strange, new plagues. These the Hairy Backs spread into the valleys and banks

where the People of the Small Feet resided.

The Gods of the Pink People peered down through purple clouds, and muttered under

the wind, “You people of the world with empty hands you pray, for we your makers,

ourselves, believe in nothing, and so cannot rescue you from your fates. Pray no more.

Pray no more…

Years passed. And then came the meeting. Angered by their plight, the Hairy Backs

brought to the table brute force born of anger. The People of the Small Feet, ravished

by the years of pestilence and famine, took the hues of berries and the scent of flowers

and painted upon their person, a masque of beauty to conceal their grief. This they

bought to the table. They parleyed and debated what would be done to banish the evil

tyranny of the Thorn Snakes.

Finally, answers appeared and a master plan arose.

The Dance. The drums. The hypnotic lure of the lutes, brought the Snakes hissing,

bemused at first at this unexpected cynosure.

Unable to resist the trance of the tribal beats and the scent of honeysuckles and

jasmine blooms, the People of the Small Feet wore in their hair, the Snakes sluggishly

slowed down into a catatonic state.

Then suddenly, as if to wake them from their comas, the Hairy Backs bellowed at the

Snakes and thundered their drum skins. The noise rumbled across the land, knocking

the mountain goats off their footholds.

Shocked and awed, and angered by the noise, the great Thorn Snakes inhaled deeply

and twisted themselves tightly into a coil ready to spring and swallow the Hairy Backs

one and all.

And in so doing, the Thorn Snakes fatally forgot the deadly power of their own

weaponry. Having coiled themselves, the snakes impaled themselves upon the

hundreds of poisoned thorns that lined their sides and died

.

Wild at Heart

Cavil. Sybil, do be civil to the Nazis. Ghastly, this weather

we’re having. Mad dogs and Arab men. What exciting lives we

lead...Nine lives to do itself. But you’ve only got the one... to

expunge the flecks of vermillion. Your borrowed robes are in

the wash. Limpid dream and in that execrable land an ebony

snake under the chaparral. Stony eyes strained. Elderitch skin.

The flurry of movement to avoid the strike. The ladders have

sprouted scales. There's that hissssss again... The rogues dart

about in the shadows silently and furtively raiding the temple as

the trusting sleep on sheepishly. Doleful fate for the libertine.

Time, gentlemen! And in his deadness, he offers everything. A

butterfly emblazened with i love you's, which were really i-love-

you-nots. Meanwhile he sits in Scandinavia, doing what? Nix

the irrelevant. Cane was not his brother's keeper after all.

After the fall, belligerent bilious Buddhist, we do of you make

horns and hooves. Bahrain cumeth. Other treacheries in

breeches and powdered wigs afoot. A killing. A fine day for it

indeed. Alarm. Azzan. Azam where the hell are you? Another

quisling to contend with. Contentment, your revenge was most

condign. Lady of lightness has been put out. My darts of

poisoned cynicism and cyanide are unswervingly accurate.

Thunder storm swirling, Frankenstein was born a man, died a

monster. I recant nothing; would it help if i did? My weekly

sabbatical. Naked and away from the madding crowd. The

watchers are never watched and so behave with impunity.

Driven to distraction and riven by impropriety fool though that i

am. Only pigs wrestle. Mother laughed. Old hat and bee, your

work is never done. Smile. A cloud of vapour plumes as a head

shakes with smudged blur. A cry and then a scream. The

elephant in the room. My memory serves me only too well. I

listened without prejudice. Loyalty never wasted. And you sit

upon laurels and groggy on the fat of this land, preaching about

propriety. Temerity. Dear Kettle, you're terribly black - yours

sincerely, Pot. And back again to the coil. And embroiled in the

pettifogging treacheries of baser folk, a tramp shuffles through

the snow. Then, put out the lights and then put out the lights.

Black ram you have tupped your last. No more the catamite. The

king in beggar’s rags abdicated his throne long before you came

along.

The end.