WHEN THE MARTIANS COME CALLING!

Continued from last week’s Invasion…The “F” Factor…

“Stop!” Shouted an enraged conductor at the top of his voice, his eyes fixed at the concertmaster. The audience was heavily pregnant with expectation as the auditorium went gravely silent.

“That was F-Minor, not F-Major!” Remember you have to keep it at F-Major no matter what happens. You knew that, didn’t you?! Now see what disaster you’ve caused. Your crucial instrument is from now on muted. What are we going to do?!”

The senior woke up with a start, clutching at his imaginary violin as if fighting to rescue it from the savage grip of a monster. He was just about to realize some privileges come at a cost and the tragedy that could arise when the office and function run on parallel domains.

***

He leaned on the board of his king size ebony bed, breathing heavily, seemingly caught up somewhere between F-Major and F-Minor. The fast pace of his panting made it all the more intensity laden. He glanced at his tightly clenched right hand fist and the frown on his forehead eased at the realization there were no violins anywhere around him after all. He heaved a generous sigh of relief and blankly stared at the ceiling with a tilted neck as if awaiting an explanation from the heavens.

“What was that?!” He sat up stupefied.

The violent shaking of his head was something akin to a blend of a purposeful gesture to sober up and an involuntary action. It was all happening too fast. Just when he was beginning to congratulate himself for escaping the dream scare, it seemed a relentless invisible realm was pursuing him right into the visible world. Whatever happened to boundaries! The scenario unfolding before him was not exactly his preferred fashion of making history. He felt like one cornered as he defenselessly dissolved into the dazzling light now submerging the interior of his room with such an awesome presence.

The two questions curiously occupying his mind were how the large orchestra would fit in his meager bedroom and exactly how the numerous device bearing beings planned to penetrate the concrete ceiling above him! He held his breath momentarily in puzzled reflection. Then there was the mother of all headaches: He had never been 5-meters close to a violin, leave alone contemplating the lofty place of a concertmaster.

He had been in a cardinal sense repulsive to fiction his entire life. Somehow his life-course had conditioned and steered him more on a logical world view, one that seemed to have served him pretty well till this fateful moment. He stared fixedly at the breathtaking sight before him; a reflection of nothing short of a daunting initiation rite to what he had until then spent his entire life running away from: Fiction, vividly and ironically so depicted in two present realities that had him baffled beyond word: His spouse soundly asleep next to him, with no care in the whole world, shielded from the confounding second reality of the glistening Martian stalwartly standing before him, eclipsed in an aura of astounding glamour, with eyes like a blazing fire, his outstretched hands loaded!

What a moment…when reality and fiction meet at the inevitable momentous arena of decision…more amazingly when office and function clash on impact before the priority trail of the spectacle of the Nations. You neither want to be caught in the cross fire, nor appear on the wrong side of the equation. It is the ultimate litmus test, when fine-tuned distinctions must be made within the scale, such as exists between Fear and Faith…when The Blazing Trail returns, for the culmination!