Rings Of Smoke

Untitled Poem

2026-05-10T23:58:31.567+05:30

I am not a morning person, anymore,

Really, not looking forward to

Going on long walks with the rising light, no-

I do not drink anymore, there is

No reason to welcome the morning not

Having slept all night. The riverbed

Does not call, soft sand, round pebbles,

A gentle blanket of leaves. No, since

I stopped loving you-

The river is full of embers, silted, hot

The stones are jagged, and the leaves

Rotten. A perpetual autumn has come, and

Since I am never angry or sad or drunk

Only ennui keeps me company. I

Do things, just because I have always done. Like

Old men take walks. Or obsessively align the edges

Of books to the corners of tables. I

Do things because then my body tells me

I am alive. Even when the

Heart says I am no longer living.

Since you left, I live...

This is a poem...

2014-07-14T21:31:00.003+05:30

This is a poem of regret, for
imaginary futures. A letter torn to
pieces in anger, and the apathy of
drifting apart. This is a poem
of disaffection.

And inventory taking- sorting stuff
into piles- this one useful, this one
to throw away. Neatly categorized. Setting
myself free, as the bright blue sky winks at me
from beyond the bars on my window.

Pens that somehow still write, moisture-wrecked
photo albums, bills, business cards, key rings,
corrupted memory sticks (what should they be called,
really?), and that scrap from that torn letter.
Mostly what is left is the drifting apart.

You are long gone, of course. Torn letters
are burnt bridges, and pieces saved are embers eternal.
And I have moved on, too- I write a bit (heartbreak is
good for you there, they say), drink a bit. I live
now, like then. Mostly, there is the drifting.

Tomorrow, I will throw away all this. The stuff is sorted,
there is space now and a metaphor somewhere. But this
is not a poem of closure; alienation is not the quick, sharp
stab of heartbreak. Nothing changes tomorrow.
This is a poem about a mundane sadness.

Somehow, when I sniff at that photo album,
it reeks of defeat.

Indifference

2014-06-22T23:36:00.000+05:30

There will always be time
to scribble a few lines
about you
there will be time to
wonder about you and you and you
and to think about you and you and you and...

I miss you, already. You are not gone
from my life. But when we speak, we
are different people. We have different
concerns.

I do not see myself burning in your concerns, anymore. I
do not see you lying sleepless at nights, when I say
I want to quit my job. I go for morning walks and come back
empty handed; when I tell you about them, I hear your mental shrug.

You and I are not the same.

I still face my sunsets with a bravado born of
knowing that it does not matter if I am right or wrong, that most
people do not know. That you will not call me an hour after sunset
is an added burden I will carry. I can do it. I have lived on after lost loves, before.

Tomorrow, we will not make love before I go to work,
we will not
hold each other before you go to sleep, we will
sit and stare through our windows, watching the rain
and drinking coffee or whiskey. In the night there will be no moon,
only clouds.
But we will survive. Both you and me.

This will pass.

Disengaged

2014-05-29T00:13:00.003+05:30

Black words form on the screen
I am trying to write something, but I
am angry and I do not want to
write my anger. I do not want to
write my sadness, either- it is raining
outside, this is easy weather for sadness.

I am just filling up white spaces in
my life- words, sometimes worth something-or
not. Black squiggles-love, life, loss
and just plain boredom.

I feel the same way about you as I do about life.
You both go on for too long.

Angry. Sad. Lonely. Irritated.
The absolute center of my known universe. I am.
Disengaged.

Think about it.

Everything that begins...

2014-05-05T21:01:00.003+05:30

Three years ago, in Bombay. Café Ideal, five in the evening of a balmy day, sitting by the window listening to the waves and watching the traffic go by. Put ten bucks in the jukebox and then another ten and then another and then another till there is half an hour’s worth of Kishore-RD magic lined up. Order a beer. The place is still half empty and so you can play RD comfortably. In another hour or so, it will move to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, and in another hour, devolve to Kumar Sanu. Sit by the window, watch the waves splash, watch the easy traffic flow.

I was just out of college, a young English literature graduate head full to bursting with the Great Indian Novel I was destined to write in the coming years; meanwhile earning my beer by taking on freelance reporting jobs with whichever newspaper would commission one or whichever newspaper Professor Gupta could get to give me one. Jeans, khaadi kurtas, long hair parted in the center, beard. I was so entranced with myself that I was not merely creating characters, I was living one. As the great comedian once said, I did not just brood, I brooded at the world. The melancholy of Kishore and RD (aided a lot by Gulzar) was a perfect fit. And so I would come to Ideal around 5 in the evening, get a beer, play Kishore, read some and listen to the waves splash. And then I would just drink as the café slowly drifted into Morrison and then Sanu territory. Except, this evening it doesn’t. Not till six, not till seven, not till seven thirty. RD plays, Kishore sings, the jukebox keeps going. And so I call the waiter, and ask. And he says that she is the one playing. And as I turn to look at her, she stands up from her table and turns and all I see is a mop of shoulder-length, wavy black hair. She leaves.

How clichéd.

***

Sunday through Thursday I wait there everyday and listen to Dylan and Morrison and nothing happens. And then, Friday evening, just as I am about to take the first sip on my beer, she slips onto the bench in front of me.

‘Waiting for someone?’

I just stare. I don’t know that she is her at this point, but I am already captivated.

‘He told me’, she says, pointing to the waiter who has answered my question every evening with a polite ‘No, Sir’, ‘What are you drinking?’

‘Budweiser.’

‘That is donkey piss’, she says and orders a Kingfisher for me. She has taken charge of the evening.

She speaks to me, I imagine we speak of music and writing and our shared love of RD and Kishore and the Mangeshkar sisters. I say I imagine we spoke of them because she agreed to meet me again, and then again and again, and those things, I imagine, do not work out because you have stared at her for three and a half hours straight, evening after evening, too enthralled by her smile, her eyes, the curl of her lips as she twisted them ironically in response to some stupid comment I might or might not have made, her laughter…ohh her laughter! Her laughter, like they said in the clichés, like the gurgling of brooks, like the chimes of the wind chime you put in your doorway, like that magical, melodious sound you hear so often in literature but never in movies; because no human person in front of a camera can ever pretend to having that kind of laughter; she just laughed with me that night and a hundred more nights and we listened to Kishore and Lata and Asha and RD and Gulzar and we created a world in a place aptly called Café Ideal with the waves listening to us and us listening to the waves and we both believed the world was, and would be beautiful…

On reading books new and old

2014-04-05T21:47:00.004+05:30

So, I was having a chat with a friend about a non-fiction book I am reading. And as I paraphrased some interesting bits from the book for her, she got interested into the book, and while chatting with me, searched for the book on Amazon. It turns out that the book (which, by the way, is a history of one of the most important corporate and one of the biggest brands in the world today) was available in unused/new edition at around a $20 price point, a few used books were available for around $1. This was where things got interesting.

My first response, of course, was to ask her to buy the used book, as it was not a historically significant or important book or a rare edition. It was a mass market paperback. Then she told me about the book’s description: dog-ears, class notes, margin-notes and so on. I immediately almost demanded that she buy a new, unmarked copy of the book.

And this, of course, turned the discussion to why we buy books and how we read them. My stance (any friend agrees) is this: I would never buy a pre-read/annotated non-fiction work, while I would always prefer a read/secondhand/used fiction classic. As we reflected on this seemingly odd choice, we realized it had nothing to do with how we see the aesthetics of the books or how we receive books as physical objects, but deeper implications on how we read books.

When we read non-fiction, we are primarily dealing with facts and the author’s opinion/interpretation of them. In that case, if I don’t agree with the author, there are already two voices speaking in my head even as I try to digest the author’s theses- her and mine. Reading an annotated/highlighted/margin-noted copy of the book just throws a third voice in the mix. And this causes complications, especially in situations where both the annotator and I disagree with the author. Troubling questions arise: Is it just me disagreeing with the author and the annotator an interested party who also happens to disagree? Is his disagreeing with the author affecting my opinion? What if the author is right but I don’t see it because it is a 2:1 opinion poll? The same thing applies where the author, the annotator and I agree. How much of my agreement is due to the annotator agreeing with the author? Is my opinion being pre-shaped? Reading used/previously owned non-fiction books can cause problems.

Contrastingly, when it comes to fiction, I tend to prefer used books. There is nothing which matches the joy that I feel when I come across a particularly moving passage and find that someone else has also read it and loved it with the same fervor that I do. It is a sort of sharing that any day beats quoting my favorite lines on twitter or facebook and seeing 30 people respond to them as they identify with those lines. There is a very simple reason. The person who highlighted those lines in the book I am now reading had the context, the bigger picture of the lines, which the people who like the shared lines on social media might be lacking. That makes for a singular feeling of a deeper, richer joy of finding something discovered commonly which is simply, in my opinion, not possible with social media or ebooks.

Anyway, that is my take on reading new or old books. I would love to have your views on this subject so close to my heart.

Nights Like These

2014-03-19T00:44:00.000+05:30

Nights like these, I

worry about what I chase, or think I do-

something unknown, or known- something that

turns me into a monster or a dog. What do I work for? What

do I stand for? Where do I stand in relation to

any one other person? Is there any one other person?

Nights like these, I scribble bad poetry, without rhyme, without

thought, just a morose, pitiful angst against what I am- dark nights that

call on me to stay awake, dark

nights that offer no answers. A soul, love, comradeship, acquired

luxuries, all-so who am I? I ask the question of silent nights and

they have no answers. Nor to noisy fans in seedy hotel rooms, nor do

the swishing tires of the ever moving car or the blazing lights of

my laptop monitor.

I am nobody. I have no one.

(Interesting hypothesis, sneers my logical self).

Reading books on beaches

2013-11-01T14:29:00.000+05:30

Walking on loose sand in flip-flops builds character as opposed to walking on tightly packed sand still being lashed at by the tide. Have you ever noticed that the last and most successful incursion of the tide leaves slight, wavy outlines drawn in slightly more grainy sand over other finer sand, wavy much in the same way as the curves of the lines a child draws clouds in. And that the sea when it goes back leaves a fine meshwork of lines in the sand forming grids shaped like spindles or crescents or what have you, occasionally pockmarked with the tiny burrow holes of the very small sand crabs which scuttle around. As you walk around sometimes the tide will wash across your ankles and calves and when you turn back you see that the footprints you had left in the sand have been washed away which is absolutely fine with me, not being much of a footprint leaver/follower anyway.

The first time I take the 30 minutes’ walk on this beach looking for a quiet place where I can just sit down and read it is eleven in the afternoon and the sun beats down heating the sand under my feet and the air around me and boils all the snark filled up inside of me so that I feel a strange, selfish, and I am sure far from unique sense of antipathy towards these people frolicking around, cooling themselves in the water or tanning themselves on the beach. Those young men throwing balls at each other and laughing their joy as the sand flies in sprays where their feet hit the ground, the mother with their children standing at the very edge of the surf and letting out Kilgorish whoops of joy as the sea laps at their ankles or sometimes going as far up as their calves, the middle aged, the other children who are running everywhere, occasionally bursting into sounds like firecrackers set loose randomly, balding men who lie on deck chairs amid their rolling layers of fat, like beached whales, their pale bellies generously slopped with suntan oils/creams with spare bottles lying around just in case more is needed, their mouths open, gaping at the world as if they are inhaling the sound of the surf through their mouths- in that instant I hate them all. I hate them for enjoying themselves so much, I blame them for the fact that their vacations seem to be going just according to plan while I want just one simple thing from my vacation and that is to read a book in a quiet beach side bar with a bottle of beer at my elbow and for having walked for thirty minutes in this heat without having found one quiet place to do so. At that moment I blame them for everything that is wrong with the world. And a minute after that I realize how mean and petty and cheap and selfish I am being and something that is very much like shame seems to wash down on me. A few minutes after that I find my quiet place.

Just for the record, the novel I am reading is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and as I dive into it, Stephenson’s gleeful snark at pop culture while ironically writing a novel about major factions of that pop culture seems to perfectly complement my snark from a few minutes ago- right from the moment where he introduces his main protagonist as The Deliverator to his descriptions of the pizza delivery industry as the most intensely competitive one in the world to the moment where we come to know that the protagonist is called just that: Hiro Protagonist.

But I started off writing this not intending to make this an essay on what I feel about beach vacations or Snow Crash. I like reading on beaches and do so whenever I get the chance to just plop myself on the beach. My favourite adventure sport while on vacations is plonk myself right there on a chair or just a towel, listen to the sea and immerse myself into whatever book I am reading at that moment. The sounds of the sea soothe me and mostly I don't mind even if there are people around, though it is better if they are not.

I have always had an intense fascination for the sea, having always found some sort of awful majesty even in the dirty waters of Juhu- I have written awful poems about it, essays that do not express ten percent of what I feel when there, I have read stories and novels which have attempted to tell me what their authors feel about being there, but in the end listening to the sea is something which cannot be done with someone else's ear- that is like trying to have a spontaneous conversation with the services of a translator. Or like listening to someone else read a book. The best way to know what it is like, you have to go there and listen to it just like to really read a book, you have to really read it. The sea tells you things, I imagine it tells all of us of different things. The only way to know what it tells you is to go to it, close your eyes for a moment and listen.

Somehow, I have always thought it is the same with books. Someone (I think DFW) once said that every writer begins with writing in someone else's voice, then slowly she finds her feet and her voice becomes her own. I have always felt much the same about reading. When we first begin reading, we read with someone else's eyes: either taking the author literally as she has written it, or reading in the words of the author the validation or condemnation of the critic whose review we read before reading the book and then, finally, when we are really reading, we read the book in its own words, with our own eyes and then the books begin to tell us things. They begin to sing to us, their voices telling us stories which might be found in the pages of the books but which are as much inside our head. Much like the sea. And that is the secret of all things in this world, isn't it? The secret of all things holy and what makes reading or going to the sea or writing or living a holy experience? That going to a beach or reading a book or living a life is not about going to the beach or the story of the book or the legacy of our life at all. It is about the stories that form- what the sea tells us, what stories that book leaves in our head, what we take in as we live our lives.

P.S.: I might have forgotten to mention that the female protagonist of Snow Crash is a girl called Y.T. which stands for Yours' Truly.

Residuals

2013-10-15T21:01:00.001+05:30

Scary thought: there are words, sentences even. But no stories can be found.

Lack of coherence and purpose. A litany of activity that is reduced to mere chores. Colours fading independently and into each other, dull, rusty, helpless, themselves tainted with age. Loneliness masquerading as solitude. Scary thought: somewhere in all the words, conversation was lost.

Ersatz memories substituting for desires, second string players moving incoherently in a ballpark. Where did everyone go, when did we lose everything? Cold comfort for change-

What is left? Inside is a great cold hard ball which refuses to melt.

Nothing?

One day, all this heartbreak will erupt as a sharp, shooting pain in the chest, a blinding fireball of horror made of all the unbearableness of life and for a moment everything will be black and then he will be back in his greatgrandpa’s village, lying on a cot by the edge of a mango orchard and the sun will be a painted crimson disc in the far sky framed by inky clouds and a gentle breeze will caress his lined face and a single songbird will trill into the dusk. And then, there will be peace.

Morning walks

2013-09-26T20:08:00.002+05:30

I do not go for walks in the morning, anymore-

an inky sky turning crimson, and the wind caressing

my hair, lifting yesterday’s leaves into tiny eddies, trees

waking up, shaking off last night’s silver-

these leave me cold.

Morning walks

are conversations with oneself- feet meeting ground

soundlessly, causing echoes in the heart, asking

questions not understood, offering answers

not quite asked for.

Mornings now are cacophonies of abjurement- glossy

magazine stories interspersed with food wrappers and old

newspapers, plastic cups, cigarette stubs, the odd computer disk,

a purple Frisbee chewed on by a dog: a loneliness hidden in bright

colours, and discarded. All these stories;

a terminal sadness, flaunted in

bold renunciations- new things, new lives, new paths, accreted

over the desiderata of previous lives. There is no peace in this.

Morning walks

are painful self-examinations.

Distance

2013-08-04T19:31:00.001+05:30

Your hair fly and brush my face
gentle wings of dreams unrealized
as I see your face like this is the last time I am seeing you.

Everytime I see you
it is an end of a world, there will
never be a time when I will meet you again,
Why do you change so?

Or, is it you who stay the same, and I
keep changing, inconstant. We are different / not one,
nor the same.

And when it all does not matter
what distance away from yourself
are you?

Of childhoods, and story shops

2013-06-17T23:03:00.000+05:30

I would have been around six or seven when my father bought me my first book of stories. It was an issue of Nandan, a children’s magazine I think still comes out. While not my first story, or my first story book by any means, it was, in ways I am still realizing, a watershed moment in a lifetime full of reading and books.

Not that I had not had stories before Nandan. I was born in the early eighties in a village in Bihar (which, to this date, is the only place I can definitively call home), and when born, I inherited a gaggle of grandmas, aunties, uncles, brothers (never cousins), and sisters. And they inherited me. That was the time a child was not a child, (s)he was a communal responsibility, and seeing a crying kid meant you had to make it smile. My nostalgia colors my memories somewhat, but only somewhat.

And so there was the concept of ‘katha’. In winters, there would be campfire like affairs and all the old guys (grandfathers) and the kids (grandchildren) would sit together, muffled in sweaters and shawls and monkeycaps against the cold Bihar winters and the old’uns would tell stories. In the nights, you would sleep with your gramma and she would tell you stories till you slept. They were not pretty stories, always; not always ending happily, or proceeding happily…a lot of them had enough bloodshed and destruction to give pause to Michael Bay and enough retributive justice to cause a fire and brimstone preacher to go mute. But they were always told in a just right way. Anyway, the point was that that Nandan was not the first introduction to stories. And since I did not buy it, it was not my first visit to a bookshop either.

Children often crave forbidden things, things they cannot reach. When I was a child, the spare bedroom in our house had one of those attic-type racks hanging from the ceiling, full of odds and ends. It was forbidden, naturally. Three feet children can suffer serious harm if they fall from nine feet ledges. But we managed to find chairs and tables and to put chairs over tables and, well…mischief managed. The unreliable memory says a dholak (from my father’s college days, probably); a few cartonful of old shoes (again my father’s probably, kept against all reason by a thrifty mother); some out of use receipt books (most likely from a series of failed business ventures my uncle tried to get into at that time); and a half-attic full of books and magazines from when my father was graduating. That was my first real introduction to fiction. And, a real book shop. For a bookshop is not a place where you go to find what you want to buy…it is all those real places you go to to find what you want to read.

And that was my place. Bundles upon bundles of Maya and Ravivar and the initial issues of India Today in Hindi and (gasp!) Mayapuri. They were responsible for my subsequent interest in the Phantom, Mandrake, Hindi sports novels (Shobhabazaar, I think, by don’t know who (please tell me if you know…if I remember correctly, it was a Hindi translation of a Bangla novel, ironically published in the Hindi translation of an English magazine); they were responsible for teaching much of the history of my country that I know; and it being the early eighties, much of the revulsion I have for some of the leading political leaders of that time. They gave me (though I did not realize it then), a political ideology or what remains of it, a social sensibility, a sense of humanity and imagination and adventure and the never-endingness of the sensuality of the world, and a love for the written word. That place, a 2X4 attic in the spare room of my home was the place I learnt to read.

Of course, by the early nineties, the parents shooed me off to a boarding, and I found a library which was like that attic, only on a gigantic scale; and I took to it with a sense of mischief that once prompted the librarian to threaten to write to my parents, as the gentleman felt I was devoting all my time to Enid Blyton and Noddy et al. Trust me, I had to show my reportcard to get out of that one. And then I moved to Patna, and the best bookstores I have seen in my life.

It all starts with why you read, and moves on to what you read. When you are 58 inches and 40-some kgs and unaware of the latest bollywood shenanigans and specialize in hurling hard wooded stuff and your only redeeming social skill is a bloodymindedness with a cricket ball in hand, sinking yourself in the printed page is a good option. Of course, the bloodymindedness and the cricket ball and short temper allow you to not be written off entirely; and so you survive on your knowledge of cricket and useless trivia you have accumulated for so many years reading so much stuff, and your skill at twenty-nine. And when you hate it all, you bunk lectures, and while the other kids slink into the morning show of that movie with the poster of the blonde with unnatural looking body parts and a yellow vest too small for her, you go and sit at a bookstall in Danapur and read comics, one rupee each, describing the adventures of Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruva and Doga and the ever hilarious Bankelal; mostly with female characters with even more unnatural attributes than the ones in the movies your friends have gone to watch, and with even skimpier clothes. Long live Raj Comics.

But, of course, the real joy of Patna was Gandhi Maidan, and the booksellers near Regent. While they made a living selling ‘competition books’, those were the guys who would buy anything and everything for a price ranging from five bucks to five thousand bucks and sell it for similar prices. That was the first real Amazon, the first real Flipkart of my life; the first real place where I could find everything I wanted, and a lot of the stuff I did not know I wanted. With the options of returning the books after reading, and taking other books back. In truth, it was the first Blossoms of my life.

I owe four years of my life to those roadside bookstalls from whom I purchased mostly Frederick Forsyths and Jeffery Archers and Hardy Boys, but the occasional Shakespeare and Voltaire too (what bores!). And, that 4 years coincided with the years of my life when I was required to read Shakespeare and Dickens and Shelly and Keats and Bronte and Shaw. And that was the times I learned that hindi pulp fiction was fun too, that Surendra Mohan Pathak and Ved Prakash Sharma et al could be tremendous fun and could stop the world for two hours and 200 pages. That was the time I learned to enjoy Hindi literature (reading Kamaleshwar’s Kitne Pakistan serialized in Hindustan- the only great novel I have read in a serial fashion), my first few episodes of Hans and Kathadesh…that was the time I vaguely began to realize what made great literature great. Then I moved to Guwahati, which was a very nice place except for the lack of any really good bookstores and then to Jamshedpur, which was the same, and that one lack in both places makes them cities with a hole in the place where there heart would be. Except in Jamshedpur, in the term before I was due to leave, a Spencer’s opened, and one of my close friends got a PhD grant, and he treated us to a book-fest, some of which I still haven’t finished reading.

The point of all this nostalging being, bookstores. They are not always places you find physically, or virtually. They are places you find mentally…something goes twang, and there you are…standing in that small hovel, holding in your hand the little, yellowed, falling apart copy of the book you never knew you wanted, but would pay a year’s salary for at that moment. Till reality hits. That place in your mind is the bookstore, the story shop…because the story in your hands is your own, and that moment of your time is all you live for. Your bookstore is in your mind.

Road

2013-06-03T20:51:00.001+05:30

Dark clouds cover one half of a crayon blue sky like a menacing army. Through the windscreen a road curls in the unforgiving dusk and eucalyptus trees frame themselves in the purple rays of the evening sun. They are assassins in greatcoats. A peacock tries to fly. The evening gives way to night in Barabanki.

There are no such illusions in Faizabad. The road is meant to make cars behave like trainee yogis around pincushions or beds of nails or other such stuff and the landscape is grit and grime in the best postmodern apocalyptic fiction fashion. The trees seem tired and there are no animals alive except dead dogs. Somehow, dead dogs never die. Evening curls over the remains of the day like dirty, prickly blanket.

Midnight meals at highway-side dhabas. Skies that might or might not be portending rain. Cold egg curry and rotis that are either rubbery or hard enough to peel your palate like a potato-skin. Morning breakfasts in sickly sweet smelling hotels that begin their day tired, and work their way into exhaustion. The world might be ending, but it is not ending soon enough.

Somewhere, kids play a cricket match. A spin bowler chucks a quicker one and the middle stump does acrobatics. There is a whoop of joy which bounces silently off the closed glass window of the car. Scene change.

Thirty years ago, or maybe thirteen. How long has it been since you played cricket, ran a mile to deliver a ball supposed to travel twenty two yards; a small red object targeted at a stick with a vicious inaccuracy that would shame the arguments made in a political debate; how long since the last scrape on your knee which did not come hitting a wooden object during a powercut?

Boiling skies are beautiful. And somehow, from somewhere, a pale sun climbs out, heaving his bedraggled majesty into view to send one beam your way, flashing into your eyes for that one moment as the road moves on into a copse of trees. An 8-light minutes long beam of silence.

What the road takes from you cannot be described. What the road gives you is always dubious; the road whispers the words of your bright future as your sign over your life to the grand scam. Listen to the swishing of the tires and the slight crackle of tiny pebbles hitting the car’s frame. The road has no today, tomorrow or yesterday. There is only now, and now is forever. Listen to the swishing of the tires on the tarmac. You have lost the hand you were never even dealt, and the game is rigged.

Mornings. See the sun haul itself into the harness with the weariness that is your sole bond with it. It is either too hot, or too lazy. Somewhere in Azamgadh, a dust cloud follows you as you try to run away from it; it is not bound by the laws of physics, it will chase you to the end of time. And then one day, you will stand in front of a nondescript door of a nondescript house with your finger on the bell and the evening will start changing your mind in the hour of the witches and your fingers will acquire brains of their own and you will turn your back on everything. Listen to the swishing of the tires; they are music from the past and prophecies of the future.

Soon, it will rain and everything will be washed away.

This is about as close or far as you will ever get.

Morning Sun

2013-05-23T02:22:00.003+05:30

This evening, I realized something crucial about

us. There is no us. You and I, there is

only that. And memories, and thousand year long

silences

that sprawl between our words. Silences

like a lazy pillow fight, drifting down on us gently, like

feathers torn from their companions, torn silk staring at us

like the gaping hole in togetherness. You and I, not

us. Every morning I make coffee and the tinkle

of steel spoon against china blends perfectly

with the evidence of the night’s desperate alcoholism- our bid

to push each other further apart, merging, with

our desperate urge to not forget. But, I think, that

must be only me. Or is it?

Do you also somewhere wish the coffee

was stronger in the morning, because the sun, at 6am, makes

the eyes water when stared at directly?

Details

2013-05-15T20:50:00.002+05:30

I watch out the window because

there is not much else, I can do this night. Outside

it is dark, and not much else. There

is not much to speak of, not much to

forget. The road outside this café window is

slow moving traffic. Start and stop. Like

life. Windows.

It is raining. Somewhere in some universe

these droplets are falling on you as you

straighten your hand and pull that

notebook

over your forehead. Four hundred years of

history versus four minutes of rain. That book

of poems. The library would not take it back. But

better it sick with a fever than you.

Something is amiss in I

remembering you. There is no coherent structure, no

beautiful whole. Too many details, which

perhaps, I remember too well.

Incoherent

2013-05-05T22:08:00.003+05:30

I am almost always angry these days, a

failed whatever it was that I was. I wake up early

in the mornings, before the sun, and

go collecting pebbles. Desiderata, of grand lives

stuff left over while constructing roads.

You know, it is difficult to keep track of

things when you are drunk, an alcoholic. Disintegration

is a beautiful word. Do you see

your idols crumbling in front of your eyes? So many

truths turning into lies? I will be

There for you.

When did you last see me? Was it before or after

they pronounced my soul dead? I cannot

remember, so they must have been right, but I

still collect pebbles, desiderata of grand lifes. What you and I

could have been.

Such an attractive phrase. So much disappointment there.

Like a road that leads nowhere. You. I.

Bracketed by unfulfilled promises.

Instapoem

2013-04-24T22:36:00.003+05:30

The loss of your love has crippled me.

I remember those moonlit walks, those

tragically brilliantly lit evenings when the sky was

a tapestry of colours I did not know the names of, those

silent nights when all that could be heard

were our sighs. I miss you and so, every night

I try to forget myself, getting drunk

with a grim determination.

And writing instant poetry, seventeen lines

that describe my grief, three outlining the joy we never had, two

longing for what could have been; eleven the tragic

after effects and one reserved for the future. Your love

made me into a poet. And now, all I have is

characterless poems.

On Happiness

2013-04-21T21:56:00.003+05:30

Do you hear me, sometime? When I

cry out in the middle of the night, somewhere

do you also wake up with cold sweat on your palms? Do you

remember me, and have your sleep disturbed with

dreams of me?

It is not a happy state, I have a crowd of bottles, each

clamoring to testify in favor of my love, there is

an alcohol-sodden revolution waiting in my kitchen, waiting

to erupt in my support, a whole nation suppurating with

guilt and too much drink.

Tomorrow, you will probably not know me and there will be

shadows

who will ask you what to make of us. You will

probably say nothing, maintain that dignified silence which

is another way of admitting defeat. I will not. I will

wait in the silent café by the seaside, willing

you to come inside, unburdened by my loss, complete

with a radiant smile, that tells the world

that there are different kinds of happiness. And

one is more than most people get.

All Things Remaining The Same

2013-04-14T22:43:00.004+05:30

From the window of the café, I can

see the airplanes taking off, hanging there

in the air, almost as if they are going to fall, before

turning, and flying away. And the sea. The waves

that break into nothingness, and my face

in the slowly darkening windowpanes as the airplanes

slowly turn into winking lights-here now, and gone;

so much like love.

Hunched over my beer, I am waiting

for someone, anyone to arrive- enter through that

door which faces me six tables away, someone

who does not look like he is wrapped in failure, someone

who enters this den of vice with a smile. The jukebox

plays a song from the nineties, some hyperemotional

thing I would never relate to when sober. Someone

to walk through the door who is not carrying

all of my defeats and theirs’ and those of

the rest of this world

on their shoulders.

Someone is playing seventies rock on the jukebox now. Part

of me wants to tell them to shut up: we were the generation

who drank ‘On The Road is evil’ with our bournvita. But I cannot

help it. There is a promise of rebellion and a new future. And I

know now, five beers in, that there will be no one entering those doors

who will be worth the waiting. I watch some more lights, as they

hang in the sky, promise to fall, and turn away. And then I order

my sixth beer. Tonight’s dinner, I will eat alone.

Ambiguity

2013-04-06T02:16:00.003+05:30

I feel ashamed, sometimes, that I

have loved. I feel ashamed that I have been

an intemperate fool, when speaking or silent, I

realize now that all those hours I spent

silently looking at your were just folly, now. I

now know I was perhaps wrong.

I wasted my life, chasing the

things I, perhaps, did not want; or, perhaps; I

did and am lying to myself. There is no answer. I saw

you in my arms in a dream and was lost

for ever. Was that a lie? That is a question you

answer. And lie, or truth, how much of

it?

Carpe-diem

2013-03-31T23:02:00.003+05:30

I think you like it, that you

have so much of my time. Every evening

from work to sleep, my every night of despair, you

keep me; happy, unhappy, lost, tired, in the morning

you are just a tinkle of glass on my frontdoor. But

you run my life. Not anymore.

I am not giving up, I

am finding control, tomorrow I will

forget you; and there will be a silence in the morning,

and you will

no longer be

part of my life. Soon, I will spend my spare time

reading, or writing about things I feel, not

those you want me to feel about. I will

not write about the night

you said goodbye, anymore. There will be no more

descriptions of the Acacia tree whose thorns

were blunter than your words that night, or the cop

I hit as I drove home. That TV whose screen I kicked in

Is anyway gone, what I miss is the carefully underlined

collection of poetry- Yeats, no less. Can you

courier it back to me? Tomorrow on, I take control of my

life, and there will no more be the tinkle of beer bottles every

morning. And that book was part of my life

before this was. Please return, if you can

those evenings I drove you home. Please

return my alone-ness.

Ever blue

2013-03-24T21:10:00.003+05:30

There is a song playing

somewhere,

a background music of soothing, lost

desire. All around me, there is a mess, half-unpacked

bags, a forest of beer bottles, an ashtray

full of half smoked cigarettes, remnants of

a life slowly, desperately clinging

to hopes of death.

I do not know you, anymore. Nor

myself. A strange sadness this is, one that

begins in the mornings, and melds with alcohol fumes

every night. How alive am I? How much will I live

when I am dead? I do not know your face, your smile,

when I look in the mirror

I do not see you anymore.

The skies turn colours I cannot name, in the evening

seen from the windows of my cube.

This mundane life is killing me. But until you come

I will damn well die whichever way I want to.

Infinite Guilt

2013-02-26T23:27:00.001+05:30

Well, that’s it then. All that is left is to pay the rickshaw off, and then I have to go inside the house. Which I do, and I ring the bell and I walk in and she opens the door, and she knows that I would be coming sometime around now, something still makes her freeze in the doorframe, and then she clasps me to herself in that way I hate, that way which always makes me feel I am still thirteen and not thirty. I disengage myself and let the bags plunk to the floor.

In the middle distance beyond her, he stands watching both of us, a half-smile on his face that does not quite reach his eyes. He stands there watching half-mockingly as if this was a little comedy being played out for his benefit. I say nothing to him; nothing seems to be adequate, not sufficient.

I change, and she leaves us to the TV and goes off to mind dinner. The evening news is moderated by the clinks and rattles of steel against steel, as we sit side by side and do not converse.

Dinner is to be served; he and I sit on opposite sides of a small table, much like two gladiators sizing each other up: the table is the warzone, place mats defensive positions, and spoons are swords which will be waved during the conversation. She is the arbitrator neither side is willing to listen to.

Predictably, she serves the chapattis, he serves the guilt.

‘I hear you have quit this job too.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I did not like it.’

‘You did not like it? What is there to like about a job? You do it, you earn a salary and you live a life. Did not like it!’

That puts me on the defensive.

‘I cannot spend the rest of my life filling forms in triplicate and covering up other people’s errors in whitener.’

That stings. I can see it in his eyes, even though his face is neutral.

‘I did not spend my life just filling forms in triplicate. There was a purpose to whatever I did something larger than what you are ever going to understand.’

I do not reply to this obvious mistruth. She serves me another chapatti, and a conversation restarter.

‘But this time you will stay for a few days, no? Go to the village, spend some quiet time, and figure out what you want to do.’

‘Figure out what you want to do’, he mimics her, ‘what has not happened in thirty years will happen in three days. What do you want to do, after all?’

I am not hungry any longer.

‘I have told you a hundred times. I want to write. And I will make a living doing that. I will be going back tomorrow morning.’

And I leave them, him to his unfinished dinner, and her to a hungry night. In wars between two people who love each other, the one who arbitrates should be prepared for a lot of injury.

_____

It is morning, now. The not unpacked bags are slung on my shoulders again as she clasps me to herself as if she wants the very essence our beings to meld together. Her eyes are sad like dusk in the mountains, and tired like a long day’s end. I can tell she has not slept, her hair is tangled, and her face tells the story of all her years, all the battles she has been spectator to, the crow’s feet around her eyes the silent scars gifted her by our egos. I hold her tight, as if I am not going to see her again. There have been too few of these embraces, I realize, and now, there will never be enough.

He stands in the middle distance, watching us. The half-smile is nowhere in evidence. I notice for the first time that in the half-light he looks very, very frail; almost all his hair are silver now, and his eyes promise stories of valiant defeats that I will never share. As I release mother from my embrace and move towards him, I notice the peculiar way he is holding his left arm, the hurt from the accident must still be there. I stand before him, and we say nothing to each other. And then I turn and walk out of the door.

‘Goodbye mom. Goodbye dad.’

Remembering you

2013-02-19T00:32:00.003+05:30

I forget the last time I saw your face, was

it under an acacia tree I last saw you? Was it

just drizzling, or was it, like in memory,

a relentless torrent, the ones poets say they walk in

so no one sees them crying? (As an aside, was I crying, did

you think so, too?). So many details, colours now faded, I

have grown older, and my grief is now more

narcissism, really- self centered, and monotonous. What

would you make of me, now?

I still complain, you know- carry some regrets, some

residual (speaking scientifically) effects of having known

happiness, for once- (remember that time we went to that

restaurant- authentic Chinese, was that a hungry lunch or

what!) – and the hundred laughs that came from one ruined

afternoon. And then, one bright evening,

one sudden decision, one character’s change of

act- and the whole play moves to tragedy.

I think of you, now (only when peaceful), on

sunny afternoons, I see your smile- in the cold silence

interrupted only by birds, I still hear you going

on and on about the cold winter, the newspaper, the

ad that was on TV. Some afternoons, I can

feel your smile on my face. And those days,

there is not a cloud to be seen.

Revenge

2013-02-17T23:16:00.003+05:30

How very difficult it is to understand

other people. For example, I know

six hours from now, you will wake up and fire up

the stove- that you need that coffee even before

you have brushed your teeth. I know

that you will find you favorite shirt

has an ink-stain, and is unwearable now, but

you will give it one more shot.

You remember, that one time we

went atop that ferris wheel, how

I loved the ups and downs; how you hated

it all. I can imagine your screams of fear

mingled with the tinkling of steel

on porcelain. Every morning

I wake up to a cold bed, and

hope six hours from now

you will be on a ferris wheel. Because

You tell me what do you think I am doing right now.