Pink Flamingo
Ever since my spiritual awakening I had been trying to piece my life together, which now swung around me in tantalizing fragments, wisps of smoke and ether, dreams so real one day and absolutely ridiculous the next. There were cockroaches in the sink, under the unwashed dishes, and food that had been barely touched. Fruit flies buzzed above them, settling on them now and then. I shooed them away ferociously, projecting my uncontainable pain onto them. I walked out of my rented ‘studio’ space and started screaming into an innocent street, without warning. A strap of my spaghetti top had fallen off my shoulder and my hair, which was already quite curly, was in even greater disarray. “Is this why wolves howl like that, and dogs too at 4 am?” I wondered. I had been feeling a kinship with them lately.
I wonder why they call it an awakening, Christ! It was an unbecoming, an unravelling, an undoing of everything you wanted for yourself, everything you had carefully constructed and built up, delicately stringing together days filled with headaches to get the job done and feel a lift from it. That American entrepreneurial spirit, a good day’s work makes a man, it had truth to it, I thought. And yet I sat like a ragged doll in my bed, feeling numb and overcome in turns, experiencing the churning of so many sensations, uncontrollable. I wanted to destroy things, I wanted everyone to feel like I did, because there was so much wrong with the world. I wanted to leave the world.
A giant grey-striped stray had started giving me company. He would eat a quarter of my egg fried rice, which was my most commonly ordered item after the fish thali. In Goa, food wasn’t a priority, rather sleep was. Shop keepers dozily opened their stores at 5 in the evenings, and wouldn’t miss their siestas for nothing. Money wasn’t a priority either, rather a sort of peace of mind was. Susegad they called it in Konkani, the local language, “take it easy” said their lazy poses, their slow responses, their round bellies. With all those coconut palms and sprawling green fields, I’d lose my sense of time too. The tabby had been afraid of me at first, but food had solidified our transactional relationship.
“Which relationship is not transactional” I mused. I’d go around telling everyone I wanted deep and faithful connections, then turn around and lose interest in people after a few days. Other times I saw clearly that even the deepest of connections were transactional, that what we give each other emotionally is peculiar and soothing to the other and that’s the only reason we keep them up.
That’s why I started losing friends after my awakening- I had nothing to give, and was pretty blunt about it. I wanted to know why this was happening to me, and how everyone else I knew seemed the luckier. Even though I knew the answers in my heart I decided to go with the self-pity card. Life was pain and this was my little girl tantrum against it. Upon the wings of an idealized Ramachandra Paramahansaesque ecstacy I’d go on Activa rides in Goan rains, which are more beautiful than any city rain, and drink with the trees. I wanted to melt into them because they were my only remaining hope. That is, apart from the faeries.
There was Isabella. She was sprightly, nosy and twirly. There was Jasmine, she was nice, too nice in fact, and I had a feeling she was hiding a darker side from me. There was Ariel, and he was kind of practical for a fae. Ariel always told me to eat my meals on time, and get more sunshine. He was always at my ear about things like sleep cycles and meditation and rebuilding a community among the spiritually empowered. “Hah! Yeah. Sure I feel empowered!” I would telepathically tell him, voice drenched in sarcasm. “You have to take responsibility for yourself, and take care of you, even if it hurts,” he’d cajole. “Not in the mood” I would say and reach for another cigarette from my cheap Wills ten-pack. “You know what smoking does to you right?” he’d continue softly and then I’d zone him out and go on with it.
So it wasn’t like I had no friends, I did, but none of them were human anymore. I’d opt out of party invitations and call in sick on my job as a receptionist at an art gallery. One time I called in sick for five days, hoping the manager would ask me to leave for good, but he didn’t. He seemed to oddly understand. I wondered if he wanted more from me, but I made sure to never take it there. He had a steeliness to him that came through his art which was full of railings and cages and breathed a barely subdued violence. His eyes were deep and penetrating, which made me uncomfortable. I myself felt a little caged in that office but it paid good money, and the work was interesting enough. Once he told me that a lot of people in Goa suffer from depression and loneliness, and that most of it boiled down to poor eating habits. And then he went on to tell me intimate details about his ex-wife, who he could basically not stand. I think he understood my preference for gentler things and wanted to make it easier for me, but nobody could, not back then.
I was miserable, miserable, miserable. All meaning had left me. Youtube videos told me this was a good thing, a great thing, a rare opportunity for exponential evolution. I couldn’t help doubting them. I’d try to convince myself it was good for me in the long run, but I didn’t have the strength in me to reach out to a community of like-minded people online. I was suspicious of so-called spiritual people. Yet I made sure to watch any and every video relating to my condition, sometimes adding comments out of sheer loneliness that I would later regret.
But things would get interesting, and weirder, soon. One morning I woke to Isabella booping me repeated on my nose with her miniscule butt. “Geet up, geet up,” she said in her thin, high-pitched voice. “Nooo” I grumbled surlily. “Yu hv to see this, it’s importnt fr yur sprichuaal evlushun,” she said in her strange accent. “Okay, this better be good,” I complained, throwing the sheets off me and sitting up. “Yees yees, wait and wach,” she said, and started twirling around me, lifting her butt up at every turn, signalling me to follow.
We made our way through the little garden patch trail that led into a much wilder jungle like setting- a vast abandoned property, now overgrown with curling fern, green moss, palms and weed. The aesthetically decaying building with Portuguese awning was half covered by the green. “What’s so special here?” I murmured, shaking off scratchy weed plants that swung across my legs and swatting mosquitoes away, “most houses in Goa look like this.” “Wait and wach,” she repeated.
Whenever she was around I suspected I knew where the term “manic pixie” came from. She fluttered almost anxiously in a way that mostly annoyed me to bits. “Stay still,” I told her, “there’s nothing to be scared about.” “I’m not scaared,” she replied, her nose high up in the air, big sparky eyes opened wide, “I’m excitd.”
And then I saw it. Like a video-game opening up right before my eyes. A holographic image stretching about 20 feet by 40 feet, so tall that my neck craning up all the way still couldn’t take in the full picture. A giant anthropomorphized flamingo gazed pertly from the very hot pink screen, that could have looked real if it wasn’t contrasted by the natural flora. Its effect was now jarring, like a punch to the retinas. Squinting my eyes I tried to speak to the flamingo but before I could say anything, she opened her beak and said, “You humans are late, always” and gave a big yawn. “Did they have to make the image so that it hurts my face!” I thought to myself, but instead yelled up at it, “For what?” “Your initiation,” the bird said, looking arrogantly bored. Isabella who was a little calmer than normal, owing to the spectacularly neon screen perhaps, or from awe, whispered in my ear “Thaat’s whut all your awakning was fur”.
“Welcome to the lighter realms,” said the pink bird cockily. “You are now eligible to receive 9 free telepathic flamingo champagnes, right off the bat. You went through hell and came out of it, you deserve it.” she said airily.
“Um,” I said more to myself than anyone else. I noticed in the far distance, the trees had all started dancing as though hypnotised by this new holographic interception. “They’re enjoying it.” I thought in bewilderment.
“After the first free mental gifts, you’ll have to work for more of course, just like in the real world. But it’s much smoother, comparatively. Welcome,” she repeated, waiting for my gratitude perhaps.
“I didn’t ask for this. I have no idea who you are, I never said I wanted to be part of your realm or anything, so why don’t you leave me alone.” I shouted up at her.
“You do not have to yell, I can hear you perfectly well” said the flamingo. “We get folks like you too, it’s rare though. For the most part people are really excited, begging to be part of our glorious magick.” She said the words ‘glorious magick’ as if in giant fancy italics.
“Well, I am not,” I retorted, though I lowered my voice. “You still have me lost.”
“Alright, if we must,” she said, “do you remember one night, precisely speaking it was August the 29th 2019, 1:11 am, you were in really bad shape. You’d called for help. Your words were-” and she glanced quickly down at her desk as though she had a transcript of my entire soppy monologue, “help me, anyone, I don’t care who. Just help me! I’m asking you for the thousandth time!”, and here she noted, “it wasn’t really the thousandth time. Anyway, you asked for help, and when these kinds of questions are presented into the air, which really is simply ether- you might’ve heard it referred to as the 5th element or Akasha- you are inviting responses from several air dwellers. At the moment, the archangels had been terribly busy and couldn’t heed your call. So, our federation came to your psychic rescue.”
“What’s your federation called, and whom does it consist of?” I asked, voice still laced in suspicion and defensiveness.
“We are eponymously The Federation of Pink Flamingos. We are about 20–30 feet tall, have the most brilliantly crimsonated plumage, belong in the 13th quantum imagining, and enable lighter transactions and transitions for earth beings. Often, we assist in helping humans pass away, in an easy and fluid manner. Our energy is- how can I put it- rather delicious.”
“Is this a joke,” I thought to myself. But instead asked “How do you know the faeries?”
“Well, the faeries are helpers of the federation. Our tasks are incredibly different though, and faeries belong only in the 4th quantum imagining, many loops below us. Faeries are hired, or sometimes called upon to bring jest and laughter into people’s lives. This is surprisingly common among older people, who often encounter them but are misunderstood as senile. We however have somewhat loftier tasks. Cleansing, sorting and getting things in their right place. Kind of like meticulous spa day? Ah yes, and we are all Virgos.”
“Ahh that’s why she has those damn glasses on and looks at me in that way,” I thought, completely biasedly. I glanced at Isabella, who should’ve taken offense at this feathered being’s elaborations but she seemed absolutely hypnotized, and her twirling and twisting had turned into a dazed sideways lull.
“By the way you should try our champagne already, you’ll understand better. More information on our contract will be unfurled across your mind in times to come,” the bird continued.
Slightly less defensive and growing increasingly curious I agreed. “Remember, you have only 8 free drinks left. For refills, you will have certain tasks that you must complete.”
“And if I don’t want to?” I asked
“Nobody’s ever said no to more drinks,” she said with a warming wink. “Now here goes.”
And then it happened. The most sublime sensation I have ever experienced. My mind, which had previously felt narrow and angry opened into a vast arena as big as a football field. And then this huge space was filled with warm, gushing lightest of light golden liquid that felt like butter and gloss at the same time. This was no usual champagne. This was total mind-cleanse manna from the very godlets. As the champagne filled my brain every particle of the bubbly fizzled and sizzled in bliss. My perception separated into a million fizz particles, each blissing out like nobody’s business. I was nowhere and everywhere at the same time. But where was time? I felt the same ecstasy over and over and over like ten million tiny orgasms.
After what seemed like a second or a century I opened my eyes, which had automatically closed to take in the sensation. A tear slowly ran down from my left eye. The flamingo looked exactly as she had before, pert yet altitudinous.
“Is that what it feels like to be God?” I asked slowly, in awe.
“Nope.” she said casually, “that’s what it feels like to be a flamingo of the Federation of Pink Flamingos.”
