underground

There are so many stories being told about the underground. Two lovers meeting in a particular station platform; an umbrella being left in a carriage and its owner tried her very best to have it back, it is her favourite; a lost soul wandering and looping itself in a circle line, it likes it that way, with no beginning and no end.

Such a mystical place, never stationary. People comes and goes, every morning rushes themselves into a train and squeeze like sardines. And the horror exists here too, when there are just too many of us, and suddenly something out of ordinary happened, how are we supposed to react to it.

And then sarin gas being released in several Tokyo metro lines, on 20^th March 1995. 

It was so long ago, and I was so young when it happened. The vague memory was only how we, kids used to make fun of the name of the cult master, Shoko Asahara. I still remember, since he shares a similar name with a primary school classmate, that kid was bullied by some fat chubby boys. His serious and emotionless face, with a beard. You try to look into his eyes, and there you find, nothing but emptiness, like the soul being sucked out of the body.

I have no intention of going to into the philosophy or doings of Aum, it is still there, just less high-profile. The 5 executors, punctured bags of sarin with their sharpened umbrella tips on an early morning, and there went the silent slaughter. Some of them were declared death penalties and there seemed to have an answer to the event. But 12 lives taken, and thousands of those who survived still suffer from its consequences, health problems or post-traumatic disorder. It is hard to imagine, when Aum started as a new ‘religion’ that pursue reason, science and logic, its followers (who mostly are elites from scientific fields) would at the end, obey an order without doubting its nature.

‘How on earth did this happen to me…?’ Some sufferers asked. It sounds very pessimistic but understandable too. And I am sure we all raised this question, for once at least, when it hurts too bad. A serious knee fracture on a keen sportsman or when one is deeply disappointed.

And as I read through the collection of interviews of the survivors and ex-Aum members, I paused in perplexity. When Hong Kong still have its June 4^th gathering every year, there doesn’t seem to have anything going on in Tokyo, to commemorate those who sacrificed in vain.

What is worthy of remembering and what is not.

The psyche of a nation, or of one individual, is a derivative of history; the sequence of events that we choose to participate in or being put into. Yet history has always existed without an identity, the interpretation from ‘The History Boys’ is exactly true, ‘history is just one fucking thing following another fucking thing’. Arguments go on and we move on with the briefest idea of what had actually happened. Even if we are in history itself.

What is what? I could no longer tell, and I start to get angry at myself.

If we are meant to suffer in sanity, is it better to be sane, or, insane.

Or maybe this is not about ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, ‘sanity’ vs ‘madness’, ‘health’ vs ‘disease’. It is a narrative, that does not come from the insertion of ego but the giving up of it, to a master storyteller. Just like what everybody says, we are attracted to what we believe. A hero, a seemingly foreseeable future, dived ourselves into it, regardless.

Have we offered partly our Self to someone or something, and in return taken on a ‘narrative’, ‘a way forward’? When we entrusted this greater system, have it at some point demanded our ‘insanity’? Is the narrative we now possess really and truly our own? Are our dreams really our own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares.

Shoko Asahara was sentenced to death, because honestly, how could we believe murder as an aid of self-salvation, a way to reach nirvana.

There is not ‘fast-path’ to liberation, that ‘enormous change at the last minute’ that we are always imagining, how often it came. If it had, it should be that those bags of sarin did not get poked, I would have the gut to fight against the custom stuff in Delhi international airport, and those words as ones’ defensive narrative but someone else’s nightmare were not uttered.

You never know, there might just be enough time to make things back on track.

That enormous change at the last minute, and finally we do it right at the moment of truth.

So once and for all, I have to do it for myself, and say it out loud: you should never have done what you did. And there’s no way you can truly know what I feel. You would have to agree. End of story.

What is next? We are all eager to find out, in the underground, just as we turn that corner and ascend ourselves back on land, we will have to run, for better or for worse. To brightness, the freshness of air and there might be a stranger standing waiting, to walk you. Even in rain, with an umbrella and on it a little scribbly writing, ‘you will never walk alone’.

You will never walk alone.