Precious Pearl

Nirakar. Formless.

“You have beautiful eyes”, said the woman as she gazed into Alina’s face. Alina had big, brown, watery eyes. They were deep and drew you in swiftly. Humans say eyes are the windows to your soul. Alina’s eyes were the gateway to an old soul, who had a million stories to tell – only we don’t have souls like humans do. We also don’t have hearts – and our chest sounds like a human heart skipping beats. We run on what the humans called music. The formless introduced music to humans before we left the Earth. Alina knew she didn’t belong to Earth. And so she hid her blue eyelids and shimmering body under human mud – makeup they called it. Funny that a formless would use expensive mud to “make her up”.

“Thank you”, said Alina to the woman who complemented her eyes. Alina had recently found herself in a country called Vietnam. Alina had accepted her fate as the only formless on the Earth. We had left years ago, when we realized humans were going to destroy the Earth. Humans are silly. It took them years to figure out what was destroying Earth, and when they finally did, they accelerated their own destruction! They’ve written stories about how “we create the weapons of our own destruction”. For a species that can understand so much, they always fumble around and mess things up awfully easy.

Alina was a formless and therefore logical, which also made it hard for her to understand human beings. Formless are like historians. But we have to earn the right to be storytellers. We can only become a storyteller when we complete our consciousness. It’s easy to complete one's consciousness - it is like a giant puzzle with millions of pieces. Our "hosts" hide these pieces in a region they choose, sometimes they hide in many different regions. Every new formless has a host who helps us complete our consciousness. The hosts are storytellers who’ve written the requisite number of stories – 195 to be exact. When we write 195 stories, we get the right to host a new formless and then eventually disappear into the ether. Sometimes other formless carry vital links to our puzzles and our hosts connect us to them. When the formless left the Earth, there was a bit of a frenzy and Alina was left behind with an incomplete set of clues. Alina knew the best way to piece her consciousness was to find the places that stimulated it. Hoi An, the lantern city, was just the place – only it took Alina many years to understand that Alina meant light. Her host was creative in the clues they had left her with!

“So, what colour do you want the dress to be? I have pink, green, blue, grey…too  boring for you…hmmm….red! Oh yes! This suits your face! You must get this dress in red.” Alina agreed and spent the next 45 minutes defining the wide boat neck of the dress. She didn’t want a revealing neck line – it would just add to the amount of mud she would have to apply below her neck everyday. She chose a shimmering red fabric that would distract from her shimmering chest – an area where humans generally have a heart.

“Ok, this looks good. You come back tonight to try it on. I will fit it to your body. Many boys will follow you!”. Alina didn’t really care for human men. As humans would describe them, they tended to be “cry babies” – always needy and wanting something. Alina didn’t like human women either. It might have been because she was programmed to feel attracted to the formless that carried missing links to her puzzle. She left the tailor to finish the red dress and wandered around the city – lounged in cafés serving iced Vietnamese coffee, spent hours with a street artist getting a wedding present made for one of her few human friends, watched a water puppet show – my, these humans sure are a creative bunch! – and then went back to the tailor in the evening. As Alina was trying on one of the many dresses, she felt a jolt! A connection was made, a piece of the puzzle completed. She looked around, and saw a human looking man. But Alina knew he had blue eyelids and a shimmering chest where a heart should have been. Deep brown eyes. A mature, kind and polite voice. That surely cannot be a human! And then she felt another jolt and knew that he was a formless too! It had to be – there was no way her puzzle was becoming more complete! Her consciousness was coming together. He knew too. As did the tailor. She was human, but apparently humans are good at sensing connections – even if they are cosmic in nature. She saw how he snuck looks at this girl as she tried on her dresses, stood in front of the mirror, twirled and let the fabric flare up, let her hair down and flicked her head.

They made some human talk around the tailor – where did you go to school, what brings you to Vietnam, and then made plans to “catch up for drinks” after. Such a human thing, catch up for drinks – humans always dance around the fact that you have a connection,. They’re always coy and ask, ‘do you want to come back to mine to listen to some music?’. That’s something they learned from the formless, because when we share music, we share the very thing that sustains us. They started mimicking us to feel the same passion we felt, but humans will never truly feel the power of music the way a formless can. The tailor quickly wrapped up her red dress and his green coat. And then Alina and the other formless left, to “catch up” with each other.

They went to a bar with drunk humans, but with very soulful music. It had been a while since Alina had recharged! They walked over the old bridge to Alina’s hideout. As they walked under the million lanterns Hoi Ann is known for, Alina and the formless were careful to ensure the brightness of their shimmering chests didn’t give them away! They locked hands. In this, they were like humans, formless needed to hold hands to express their bond. As his warmth flowed into hers, the mechanical sound of the skipping beats in her chest got louder and more rapid. As they got to her hideout, he held her and kissed her. Alina could feel the mechanical sounds of his skipping beats get louder and begin matching hers. Alina ran her hands through his long, soft braid. She felt his chest become warm as his generator skipped more beats, more rapidly. He kissed and caressed her, and her chest shimmered brighter than it ever had before. They both pieced another part of their consciousness that night and it was the most powerful piece of the puzzle Alina had found. But Alina still had 183 stories to write. He never told her how many more he had to go. But the next day he left to complete his stories. She went to Malaysia to look for the rest of the pieces of her consciousness, with her mechanical heart skipping more beats than usual and her chest shimmering more brightly when she thought of him.  

posted by Pearl @ 5:29 AM