Letter 17

Hey Sec,

Felt nice to receive your mail after so long. My examinations have ended as well and so I can write to you elaborately about things happening on this side of the solar system (for I have realized sometime back that the World in not Enough).
From a very young age I have been fond of other worldly creatures. That explains my intimacy with most HST-ans. I was not quite shocked to read about Nike because whatever Cos says, fact remains, I am an expert on HST-ans and you can count on that. So I kind of guessed how Nike would turn out to be in the end, even when Cos was insisting that he is far saner than some other HST-ans and better looking that Rehan.
Rohan from HST-Fire has been consistently failing in his exams. He first fails in tests, then in retests and then in tests on retests. And I guess he has after all found a replacement for Pichku which also adds to his failure since no HST-an can ever be happy with a nice, sane girl- take it from me.
Meanwhile I have a wonderful tale to tell about the “kid” as you put it- Renoy from HST-space. In fact there is some foresight in his choice of the HST-Space over other HSTs, especially when ethnically he was more suited to HST-Water (albeit he also volunteers for don’t-take-bath movement.)
Renoy had found me from god knows where and I responded to him god knows why. However, he turned out to be an atheist and I a believer. That’s how it ends (or does it?).
Renoy looks like an amalgamation of a squirrel sans the furry coat and has instantly recognizable hollow cheeks. His junior at HST-Space, Argh tells me now that Renoy looks like every other HST-an of his species. The species we are talking of here is the species that lacks happiness- not literally but metaphorically. Of course you and I would not understand that but let’s leave it that way.
Renoy used to buzz me every other day asking about the daily weather and we also discussed things which vaguely sounded akin to a discipline of social science but now I relate it more with the Water cycle- for that’s the area of specialization of Renoy.
He spends his days, like Blake’s Thel, ruminating on impermanence of things. What he does not realize is that things are impermanent because people like him move around in the world making it imperfect.
He also uses a special sort of license to get through the world called ‘Lunatic license’. This license comes in handy in any situation where he has messed up and is basically waiting behind the bush to prowl on the latest soft target. To me he was quite nice in the beginning because at that time he was in a mood to bug someone and most of his conversations would eventually work around massive questions. These questions being massive did not have any relevance to our real situations, which I understood later. The questions ranged from “Why do human beings talk?” (He is no human though) to much more…
He is very fond of Xerox copies- as in when he gets something in the original, he isn’t satisfied. So he goes to the Xerox centre (that’s the only time he moves out of his room at HST) and gets the original thing Xeroxed for his perusal. He throws away the original after that. Also he likes to imagine things- he is in love with ghosts and hates those ghosts if they turn out to be congenial.
He has been to Greenland once and that is the high point of his otherwise bleak life. In Greenland he fancied a redhead who of course was nice to him but he had to mess it. He messed it wonderfully well and now he is looking for a blonde I suppose.
Anyways, more about him in the next mail. J

Cheers,
Tan