Wordsworthless

Government Nouns: Signature

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:48:00 +0000

It is a moist night; the kind that wets dry clothes right out of the shower, perfuming them in unwashed mustiness. Heat slaps like an underpaid whore: "I said - handy five; mouthy ten!" There is always an exchange. Dollars for pesos at an untranslatable ATM, pressing buttons that are meaningful and meaningless at the same time. Mom birds vomiting worm offal into chicks that just protest loudly, stupidly, hungrily, in critique. Snails that exchange the first rain for a short crawl, but stop and due while being fried by the concrete when the sun returns angry.

But the best kinds of exchanges come with a 'quid pro quo'; added mundane benefits that should otherwise be free - as harmless, but important but essential as a signature. The weird power of a signature - to build, kill, buy, sell, marry, be born, okay, deny, be dead. Bestow power, strip it away. How does one justify the power of a scribble, scratch, or sometimes ornate and even substituted with a rubber stamp? "I hereby authorize..."; chunk with the inky dunk of an unauthorized authority. But I digress.

This is still a mosquito-hummer of a night in Madras, Tamil Nadu. Surreptitiously, in fear of doing something illegal to do something legal, an elderly couple that owns a small bakery parks in a dark and uriny parking lot by the Ashok Nagar Metro station. In the lady's bag, a secret packet, wrapped in today's newspaper, the headline screaming - "A new India under Modi!". Inside, a ward of Rs. 500 notes - 100 of them, some crisp, some still stinky from sweaty bosoms. A humid package; with the promise of permission to add another electric oven to bake one hundred more loaves. An authority that comes with one signature.

She arrives, blending in the crowd, a seeming no one but someone but everyone. "Here you go; would like anything else? Tea? Dinner?"; as the package exchanges hands. She folds the package, difficult paper and shoves it into her bra. "No".

"Get home safe; I'll sign it all tomorrow! Happy baking!"

Government Nouns: Crematorium

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:01:00 +0000

A sad and drunk bone-breaker clung to the half ajar iron gates of the Nesappakkam Hindu Crematorium with a bloodshot stare at the unrelenting sun. It is still hour 5 of his shift and he has already realigned four stiff cadavers in various states of rigor mortis - three shriveled and decaying octogenarians, but one child. They all broke like peanut brittle like his heart like the bottle of sour and sun-hot beer that shattered in a fizz, as a fifth body rolled in.

The "Amarar Oorthi" - Vehicle for the Immortal was a modified elongated auto-rickshaw, long enough to fit a 6 foot coffin on ice, and up to three mourners. The next dead, a small old woman, draped in a cotton dhothi looked smaller, as she bobbed and rocked, in unchanging sleep, her eyes and jaws shut, and her nostrils stuffed with cotton wool, doused in cheap cologne. Cold to touch, made colder by the ice underneath.

The vehicle and ice and she rocked as gears shifted and turned through the gates to a red-taped office. The secretary walks out, as forms are filled and filed for who gets what and when and why and how.

"Cremation is free" - dangles a sign in size 50 font outside his office, as he dangles his left hand under his iron table with chipped Formica.

"That's for the machine, not the men", he adds, counting a handful of soggy gray Gandhi notes. ₹10,000.

Several things came loose and free that afternoon - bone-breaker labor, symbolic twigs on fire, souls.

Post-mortem gaseous flames weren't one of them, as advertised.

Government Nouns: Dowry

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Mon, 09 May 2022 21:15:00 +0000

Rife anticipation steeps the stairs of 48 Hospital Road, awaiting election week politicians and their musty trail of sycophants that picked this way today, and that way day after. Non-aligned salaried sloganeers are always the first to turn the corner in a rain of newspaper confetti - familiar burned faces and gruffy voices from yesterday’s rally for somebody else. Dancing among them are dirty footed alley children of tomorrow, simple and celebratory, uncaring and unmusical. Behind them, a Jeep of loudspeakers crowding like tics to flesh on makeshift wooden poles, announcing the many promises of popularist gifts in exchange for votes. Inside the Jeep, a villainous bundobust of drunks with clubs, promising unannounced repercussions for non- or different party votes.

MGR follows in another Jeep, with his inexplicably charming slanty smile, hidden hangover shades, fluffy hat, the diamonds in his Rolex shimmering with every wave and thank you. The women swoon starstruck and are dragged away by their armpits. A woman waves and shoves a wailing infant into the arms of his detail, who sniff the infant for poison. But before they finish, he picks the protesting child to his lips, then yells “Nattram” (stink), as he hands the child back, wiping his hands in perfumed paper. The mother mishears the word, and names her child “Naatru” (seedling).

The Jeeps inch on, in a billow of diesel fumes, choking the dancers behind, as they shove envelopes with election dowry cash into the hands of bystanders. Tonight, they will line the wine shops with crisp notes in hand. Tomorrow, they will vote if they wake up.

Government Nouns: Antarctica

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 20:53:00 +0000

Black birds in an otherwise white world, flapping warmth around, flightless and surviving in huddles. Fatly swimming penguins in schools of krill, nomming, expertly dodging hungry blubbery mammals and big fish. Camouflaged for months of night, in a howling freezing ear-cracking silence, unwishing, asleep, tucking their littles in the little warmth they can save.

Suddenly, a winch breaks ground and ice, skillfully coring the freeze through history. Inching world wars, footing colonialism and disease, yarding rock-wielding naked cannibal bipedals. The team of polar scientists smiles through their balaclavas - you could tell from the scrunching of their crow's feet, dreaming of the six or more impending publications from these data, fulfilling intended and unintended taxpayer contributions. Ancient creatures, dead, pickled, perhaps dauer. The stories they would tell.

Shivering through the cold nervousness, handling the core like a newborn's neck, they enviously wrap it in warm clothes, as they slowly trudge their slipping truck back to the research ship.

They crack open a can of preserved soup, de-icing their insides. The satellite radio booms that a few latitudes North, there was talk of a mysterious new disease, that could shut down international borders indefinitely. The dark whizzes through their incandescent lights, as they count their remaining cans. Then they count themselves. They huddle like penguins over the radio and wait.

Government Nouns: Electricity

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 21:41:00 +0000

The elders called it a miracle, as a village crowded around a battery-powered transistor radio, with a loud announcer hailing the Prime Minister’s efforts to finally electrify Leisang, Manipur, the last village without electricity in India. In a few weeks, a group of inebriated, and the cheapest-tender workers pushed a steely tower into the ground, broken with prayers, and yellow flowers. Twenty days later, the wires went up, disappearing into the distance, promising to return with the power of light, and sound, and progress.

The locals were ecstatic, cracking their savings into Edison bulbs, and yards of colorfully twirled wire, table-fans, and for the select few, free televisions for election votes.

When the power arrived, buzzing promises into every home, nobody turned their lights off to sleep and dream. The Prime Minister tweeted about it on his electricity powered cellular phone.

Rain-soaked animals could not cover in the darkness and/of human warmth any more. Scorpions died flip-flop deaths. Bed bugs shriveled up anemic. Mice broke skulls in coconut-lured traps, placed conspicuously in the lights. They sat on insulated wires, chewing at the rubber for nourishment.

Brown monsoon puddles, alive with malarial mosquito larvae, twitched stupid. A few clung on to the playful, matching-puddle-brown legs of a child, baked in the sun on labor days. Others barnacled the sides of a blue-ruled notebook-paper boat, filled with dreams in black ink, half-sinking in puddle water, immobile. Like the dreams.

So when a mouse-bitten black wire to power a lightbulb came undone in last night’s storm, it hung ominously snaky, in the neighboring puddle, waiting for revenge.

The Flight

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Thu, 25 May 2017 19:31:00 +0000

Hands folded behind her back in expertly unbeknownst-to-fliers signage, she signals that the child that just stumbled in is afraid to fly. “First flight for the little one?”, she fake-grins at the mother that follows a second after, stumbling. She has no time to stop and listen or return the smile. Instead, she thrusts her three bags of life through the fat first class seats, much to their occupants’ pretend class-based annoyance.

Seated in Row 21, the mother straps her son to his seat, as he snivels nervously. The fear of flying is a shitty nobody, compared to the fear of where they were going, or the fear they just left behind.

Wartime flights. The frictional wheels of the airplane against the bomb-pocked runway, drowning the low-volume screams in the horizon, not so far form the airport. The whizz of the wings in smoky air, filtered through artificially perfumed air-vents. The smells of burning hair and skin – repugnant and throaty, now smelled like Febreeze, with a hint of reality. The pilot’s flight-plan, riddled with do’s and don’ts red contours of no-fly zones, as he blinks stupid and promises a safe flight, albeit long, chugs a shot as he presses on.

The coach stewards botox their smiles on, and offer everyone sympathy cookies, butterscotch. The sweet and crisp meal, sinks its artificial flavors slowly. The cabin, a series of teeth grinding, mastication, and imagination – of their best home-made lunch, nonpareil.

The luck to flee was an opportunity that didn’t offer itself to everyone. Some burned with the bombs. Others had their limbs blown as trophies. Still others yet had other parts atrophy. Children smiled buried.

The lucky flew.

“Are we there yet?”

“Where?”

Government Nouns - River

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 22:16:00 +0000

Picking up her spade, she eyeballs left to right in a ruse of privacy, and shoves it with might into the moist and welling bund. The Kaveri bleeds silently and brown into her dried puddle of a yard. She cups a few handfuls to her face, dunks her two unkempt children in. They squeal and splash about.

Image courtesy: Flickr https://flic.kr/p/8hmBga

Growing up along the border was often a confusion of this’s and that’s or this’s or that’s. You took the bus far north and you aren’t a Kannadiga any more. Or you slather your face yellow with turmeric and vermilion and traipse too south into Kongu Naadu and you’re no longer a Tamil. You either picked a side, or settle in the middle – a strange limbo of cultures in a disarray of border politics, not-my-job’s, and associated freedoms.

As a little girl, she often wondered how maps worked – did a cartographer really walk the courses, and dig his drafting pen deep into the soil with an invisible ink? How did he cross the rivers and seas?

Did the water taste better on the other side of the bund?

Her youngest smiles evil, as a warm gush of urine makes its way up the little pond, now large enough for her little plot of tomatoes and spinach. She tugs at his right ear.

Government Nouns

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:14:00 +0000

Needles

The mellow smells of blood, tangy, in boiling water, two needles audibly clanging and stinging the sides of the saucepan. The neighbors in a friendly huddle of comfortingly shared bread, fleas, sex, and needles. The dog blending with the shaggy dust on the beer-sticky floorboards. A jenga-burst of half empty soda cans in untaken-out tins.

“The heat kills the virus,” – Thea’s voice is reassuring. Her grandfather was in Korea, vaccinating troops against the pox with his stainless steel syringe. She dropped out of school to help him at the shop, her medical degree earned through his stories of war, blown digits, and eyepatches.

A pair of gloves lie dead on the kitchen counter, which she flaps and then blows into balloons with alien fingers, yellowed, and expertly slips them on.

“Who’s next?”

Reed draws the shortest straw, as he sinks into the dusty barcalounger, raises the sleeve of his Sunday church shirt, and Thea tips the needle, expertly spattering the bubbles out. He exhales painless hope, as his wife kisses his chapped lips, then cringes a little at his breath.

“Remember – take the test,” says Thea. “It’s the one thing that you can get over the counter. The irony.”

“Oh and pray. Like our Governor.”

“Who’s next?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/mike-pence-needle-exchanges-indiana.html?_r=0

Government Nouns

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 15:58:00 +0000

Rice

A muddy bund breaks two small pieces of backyard land in two, leached in soapy pesticidal discard, boiling its way down with water gushing out the nearby pump-set. Sad weevil families shriek and fall and drown, on their backs, legs in the air, poison awash. On the left, the happy Norman Borlaug paddies, tossed with indigenous genes stick up straight, whooshing handsomely with the little breeze. The right, a sorry excuse, sags with the weight of every surviving grain, stippled with weevil worms, inbred, dying, and organic. She bends over a small plot, sinking her feet into the muddy soil that gobbles them up hungrily. Expertly, she swings a sickle underhand, flinging the plant into an old sari made into a pouch around her neck. Her mother works the healthy plot, leveling every square inch. By noon, the harvest is complete, the two plots equaled by sickles, shorn, stumpy, stubbly.

Harvest days were always a struggle between choosing the rewards of a healthy meal, versus reserving grains for buyers. She decides to cook two pots today – one with a handful of the sweet, long-grained hybrid rice for her daughter, and they take turns in picking the insects out of the government rice on the sifting pan, tossing it expertly up and down, to separate the husk. Tomorrow, the insects and ugly rice will travel to a godown in the town, to be sold at a discount to welfare card-holders. The GM rice will feed the wealthy in a stew of GM chicken, fat with bright white eggs, slathered in GM butter from GM cows. The ironies of bipartite rice economy in the East – organic for the poor, and GM for the rich.

As the starchy steam wallops their one room and roof, their mouths water. Missed, and now boiled weevils float in the froth. She strains the rice into a pungent mix of watery buttermilk, asafoetida, green chili peppers, and mustard, and saves the water. Lunch is served.

Part 14 Popcorn Man

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 16:53:00 +0000

He digs his right arm into the bag and shovels it into his face, as most of the corn flies half-crunch-munched to the floor. The little birds fly little, temporary flights, dodging, and landing around his swaying Parkinson legs, catching jettisoning popcorn kernels, mid-air bombs. He refuses, or takes and tosses any other food from passers-by – donuts lay rotting and trodden around him, he affirms a “No”, to the bananas I offer. In a second of personal affront, I wish that he shits bloody kernels tonight. And then I take it back. Arguably, the dynamics of choice aren’t differential – perhaps he is allergic to bananas. Nothing personal, bro. But I strain my eyes to adjudge if he were wearing any of the clothes that I had given him a month ago, or shoes. The same dirty rain-or-shine bomber hides the same dirty red and black hoodie. Nothing. He had chosen popcorn over bananas. He had chosen a favorite bomber over a new coat.

There is no need for a new coat when there is nowhere to hang it up, but at the corner of Walnut and Broad, no want for a new pair of shoes when your feet are now walking calluses.

I wonder if he had ever asked anything from anyone. Always wanting little, he enjoyed the convenience of little wants. Is he happy when he takes what’s given? Is he sad when he refuses?

Government Nouns

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 16:00:00 +0000

Job - The Wheel Seat

Slopped in hot pleather-sweat, dribbling into the starch of her sari to make a paste, she wishes she didn’t have to answer the phone that was hidden in the third zipper from the left in her handbag. Plonked on the wheel seat, the van’s dunce chair, the pariah of all seats, she lets it be, the muffled rings going relatively unnoticed as the van inches and brakes through office traffic. At every jerk, the sudden spills of somebody’s lunch heave into the air in old-oniony throngs. Morning smells in the privately owned van that plied middle-class Government working women. From counting notes in home economics envelopes to counting notes for the Officers they worked for, in mysterious packages handed under tables, in boxes of sweets, or beneath the flowers in a bouquet. The irresistible temptation to swipe a note or two for a kilo of tamarind, or malt.

The van grumbles to a halt at a traffic light, as her phone rings again, ungiving, interrupting the usual chit-chat over yesternight’s soaps. She senses the angry stares around in the trickles of mustache sweat that creep into the sides of her lips. She digs into the bag and fetches the phone out, flipping it open.

In what feels like a slap to her face, moments later, she is talking to her empty left palm. Gone.

The women begin screaming and yelling at the two miscreants on a motorcycle that zuzz-zzuzz through the vehicular gaps, past the lights and into the turning traffic. The driver hears the commotion and offers to chase the thieves down, but he is shot down by blaring horns against his effort to pulse his way through the traffic. Helpless, he scratches his oily hair, then sniffs his finger nails.

“What should I do?”

Government Nouns

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Tue, 23 Sep 2014 21:55:00 +0000

Housing

The seepage in the ceiling hangs full like a bladder. In a godless world, it would burst in the mornings when a neighbor flushed.
Buckets set out for rainy day harvesting. Window to window, door to door, clotheslines slide and sink to the middle. The sick of moldy wet laundry clings for sudden surprises outside.
A cockroach surfs the trickles of rain along the walls in unexpected convenience, onto the floor, and scatters away seeking some dark corner, hissed with poison the previous night, never to father little skittering children again.
A window brings fear and relief. The glass pokes like bloody teeth from corners. “Just stained glass”, he had promised, as a chicken fried breeze chatters in, elusive. The little one swallows her spit.
Huddled by the cracked window, they imagine the words to the images on one of three TV’s next door and wait for an uncertain meal.
A murky bladder bursts in the ceiling in a godless world.

Television

When the Government decided to prioritize wholesome entertainment over necessities, it urged the cynics to posit existential crises, once again. What is the purpose of life? Do we just eat and shit? But when there’s nothing to eat, or nowhere to shit, why do we need a television? The poverty line grazers echoed in a Beckettsian silence – to pass the time.
To the middle and upper classes, they were free. That demanded possession regardless of the LCD television already rapping to Sun TV, muffled by the unwrapped and yellowing packaging around it in their living rooms. They made excellent wedding presents to the despicable. Or excellent charity.
To the wishful and homeless, it was a luxurious burden, sold in corners for meals.
In a stroke of luck, Sivan stood in a sweaty line for hours to claim his free television. But lineless, his wife was given one out of the generosity of the middle aged madam she worked odd jobs for. And his son had claimed another for ten Rupees.
So he sat two on top of each other on the floor, the third above a spare LPG canister, and prayed to Muruga for more rooms than one, and multi-tasked crying, and laughing with prime time soaps.

Government Nouns

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Sun, 14 Sep 2014 19:10:00 +0000

Hunger

He chewed chopsticks and broke into a dream of faraway fields of healthy cows, ducks burping forced fat in new wave quacks, hiding their little amid their clipped wings for temporary protection. The chickens were eggy and shat eggs, while running from freeze storage future. Seventy little plots of herbs and bees, stringing honey into webs from flower to flower. Fat tomatoes, boasting modified genes. Health smiled green. In a distant gossipy corner, sat three women on a wooden chest, incubating. “Will you sing me a song about me?” In unison, they rise and break into a plenty chirp and scare the birds that flutter and burst.

A powerful scowl, gargled rocks into the bends of his waist. The chilled air, tasted like urine, and he counted the food stamps in his sewed in pocket. Not enough. It’s never enough. He looks left to right for wandering eyes, steals a stamp, and sneaks it into his dry jaw, tonguing its papery promise of fulfillment.

Love

She fixed her wig with a scratch, and sniffed her finger, and doused it in free sample hand sanitizer. She felt dirty. When the streets weren't safe anymore, they had pulled her away from disease, size surprises, black eyes, skipped rag cycles, baby pills, and the occasional promise of love, family, a home, and a dog. Beth, moaned beside her, in response to a street mouthed caller on the other line. He sounded so familiar, as did Beth. She had scripted Beth and May’s responses after all.

That was her job. When he calls you a bitch, you call him your master. When he grunts, agree. When he wants to meet, hang up.

The phone lines seldom rang these days. She wished for a webcam for Christmas. And then the world will know!

In a city-wide effort to quell loneliness, depression, and suicide, you dialed L for love.

Part 13 Forever boner

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 20:25:00 +0000

I am old. As is my bicycle. We fight over maturity in friendly stomps and menacing creaks in return. But since I am the younger, I tend to win by default. Oh wait.

Mornings along resplendent streets of Philadelphia, pocked, or blocked, are rhymeless and sweaty. Boasting tramlines of a once foregone era of seamless public transportation for a dime a ride, as I had learned previously from an elderly gentleman on a train once, toothless, friendless, and merry. Now they just killed careful bicyclists that chanced their tires up onto their midst. The careless ones were taken by the careful car drivers anyway.

But a journey along a tramline caught tire brought me to its end one fine morning. Shaky and miserable. The edge of the old Philly. Where all the tramlines take you. To get away from the roars of the twenties in Center City. In the affluence of hanging quartz chandeliers, gassy. Where you went with family on a getaway. Or without. Sharing walls. Prayers and whores. Greasy bellmen, unbeknownst freshly shipped home-cooks spitting in their marinara and calling it a family recipe, smoke, and a warless penchant for expense of new money, minted or made. Lights announced The Divine Lorraine Hotel. In a curvy font, singing.

But who knew that there would be a bomb and a cloud? That the men and women and children would go? And the chandelier quartz would end up on Ebay? That the trams would no longer bring you to happiness?

On one face, today, a big green hand, with painted nails - “You go gurl!”

On another, a wishful and deviant “Forever Boner”.

Ten stories of stories flipped over like broken chairs, unsettling.

Part 12 Bra Return

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:47:00 +0000

There ought to be a reason why the good city folks look straight up ahead, and never down. The deplorable constancy in chunks of fake human hair that stick to the sole of your shoes like unwanted ghosts, streams of warm piss, monthly uteruses on cloth like unwanted children, greasy tar, tarry grease, is better unseen than not. The more taboo, the more mundane. But I digress.

A box is irresistibly sexual on central campus, a big gray one. For come the dewy morning, as a sleepy boxy librarian’s assistant’s assistant unlocks the contents of the book return box, snaked amid the many books, a colorful collection of brassiere as bookmarks, in every size. He wishes he could be a book in the box. He envisions a happier life. One where he swims amid the mighty many bosoms of the women who found the box. That of the security personnel that scours through hours of footage in a discrete, fantastic voyeur dream. He shuts the box, stuffs his pockets with the biggest size D he can find, and rushes back into the library. He runs to the security office, where the security officer’s assistant’s assistant waits with last night’s footage, a throbbing fear of a lost job, looming. But that can wait. He sneaks his roommate into the office, into his teenage dream. He would pay him later with stuffed lingerie.

Dim, and grainy, two women stand by the box and hold up a placard to the video camera – “Dear Librarian. Thank you for standing up for our movement.”

Behind them, a wheelbarrow full of bras.

In sexy disappointment, the librarian’s assistant’s assistant keeps his souvenir and refuses to pay. He will but keep his imaginations.

He walks back to the box with a permanent marker, curses the vandals, and completes the 'Library'.

Part 11 Monday Vandal

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 19:32:00 +0000

Weekends bring the doodles out of school workbooks and onto walls and inner streets of the subway system, like dancers caged Monday through Friday. Cans of paint to describe love, love lost, and the lost in squiggly, often curiously misspelled rants. There’s something so sexy about the thrill of being a miscreant, a sudden lawlessness. Suited and bow-tied otherwise, selling insurance on the weekdays, hurrying art, watching out for the transit cops on Saturday nights. Scrunching cheap beer cans, pissing on the tracks. Like games from a lost and loved childhood. Cops and robbers, disguised codes with added syllables for imaginary secret societies and haunted houses.

The jangles of the underground subway light up and scatter nightly bats and other mammals on a Monday, bottlenecking a third of each species on any good bloody morning, only to be replaced by more incestuous fucking in under a week. Scurrying, picking. From a distance, it seems like the already fluid graffiti could move in an oxycodone sluggishness.

But soon, the South Eastern Pennsylvania Transport Authority brings out another type of vandal – to reverse engineer weekend art. Armed with chunky one-size belts, jiggling with cans of paint remover and cleaning supplies, and pressure cleaners in tail. Scrubbing expertly, reducing potential treasure maps, odes, rants, and love songs to formless color on cloth. No one will ever know. No one will ever miss.

Like washed smashed track-kill animals.

Part 10 Hey Man

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:14:00 +0000

The fast life of switching from the local to a subway, from forty minutes to ten. Of mixed sleep in time saved and bed hair, and adapting to the smells of drugs and coffee in the morning on the Broad Street Line, or wet dog and feet on the Market-Frankford Line. Fast enough to reduce wait times and friendly, meaningless banter to a “Hey!” in the passing, forgotten almost immediately. A people watcher’s nightmare, a one second stand.

But with habit comes patterns. Habit patterns. The familiar, not necessarily the same, become one. I categorize. Stereotype, if you may, or might as well.

He blends with the morning smells. Nondescript faux leather motorist jacket, like fake riding a Harley down the aisles of a subway. It’s never sunny in the train, but he hides beneath his dark fakes. Blood shot from yesterday night? Lazy, and unsightly? Unsighted? Madras-eye? Lurking, skinning, tasting, wishfully? Riding.

The platforms at Girard are colorfully tackily teenage-girly. Mirrors and colored glass everywhere, glued to the walls, the stairs, and the people. They look at you and they see themselves. Or they see right through you. His friend waits patiently.

The subway brakes banshee and the doors crunch open. He steps out as he steps in.

“Hey Man!” they shake hands.

In an expert second, a friendly barter. A quick twenty for a quick stash for a quick trip and a quick ice cream lollipop for a daughter with the Child Services, somewhere in the system along the Broad Street Line. Everything is so quick on the Subway.

Part 9 Nineteen Black Cadillacs

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:08:00 +0000

The roads run snaky along the train tracks. On Tuesday mornings, they are usually full of cars full of anger and burning gas. When you always take the 8:22 to work, it’s not just the same faces on the train, but the same cars and rage off of it. Or maybe they just look and feel the same, coffee smelling, with the occasional whiff of bacon grease, with donut glazing mustaches, and an uncanny loathing for the morning commute. The lipstuck lady in the severe office black frowns at me and wishes she were on the train instead. Every day, as I look back at her and smile, and wish that I owned a car.

A different today. The roads silently echo the grating train wheels. There are birds on the road, pecking at one of their own, fallen. The train is uneasy, for work days are usually incomplete without your morning glance of your car driving counterparts - what you could or couldn’t be or become.

In the distance, the red and white cop flashes sober up the hung-over commuters, like unwritten rules. One of them blows into her palm and smells back her rummy breath.

And then the cavalcade, swings by, drowning Ms. Lipstick’s “hurry-the-fuck-up-and-get-outta-my-way” car-horn protests, and sends the birds scattering, flying, in a V.

When you are somebody important, you race trains for the fun of it. When you are very important, you do that covertly hidden in one of nineteen black cadillacs. And you buy an hour of Matt Damon’s time and put him in car number 12, so everyone on the train believes that it’s him that their off to work Elwyn line is going to race. On your marks.

Rumor catches fire, and suddenly everybody’s usually worthless caffeine kicks in, as they cheer the train driver on.

The driver is sweaty. He watches the blinking lights and signals on his dash, and jolts forth the train’s joystick. We will win!

Part 8 Menopause

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 18:17:00 +0000

The first train out of the city is full of sleep straggles in smoggy winters. After all, it’s still night outside. The homeless men are still in a penguin huddle. Moving in a slow, musty circle, extending an unknown arm outward for a flying by quarter, once in a benevolent while. I jaywalk sleepwalk to avoid being nice and struggle into the hot uriny air gushing out of Market East upon pulling the door open. The PA system squawks a test message in a dry baritone. Icy iron chairs, half conscious anticipatory stares at the distant dark tunnel for a hint of train lights.

And the five women hitting fifty around the same time, magically syncing their bloody cycles, and their sudden and awkward conclusion.

“It’s like somebody pulled my uterus out, not in entirety, and just left it hanging and flopping there. For five fucking months”, says the matronly one with almost white hair roots but a deep luscious Santa red rest of the bob.

They all nod in understanding agreement, surreptitiously stowing their imaginary floppy uterus away in the confines of L sized depends. And sigh, fuming into the cold air.

“My sixteen year old got his left nipples pierced yesterday. And I had to wash the bloody sheets.”

“You must mean nipple?”

She nods her head side to side, and exhales again, smoky.

“Oh. You should have just burned them. There’re probably things and beings on there that you don’t even want to know about.”

They all smirk

“I lost my sleep at 3 in the morning. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling and mentally counting the minutes till my alarm would go off and I would have to get up and get ready.”

“Thank goodness you’re only losing sleep. I’m losing my virginity all over again” grunts Santa, and they all share a share-a-bed uncomfortable laugh.

The sleepless one with sleepily drawn on new lips catches me staring and smiles at me. She wishes she could go to sleep and wake up with pierced nipples, sixteen, virgin, and with a functional biological clock.

The train.

Part 7 Clearance Flowers

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 14:54:00 +0000

Swishy from three stemmed glasses of rosé, I grinned myself onto a crowded Friday night ride, the thumping beats and fake smoke blasts still ringing artificially in my head. The wondrously obnoxious things a few drinks and anticipatory two day weekends can do to people on a train ride home. The conductor smirks and wishes a reversal of roles, and glances at the nearly immobile hands of his watch, every two seats. He rushes back to take control of somebody’s twenty first gone awry in the third coach in retches and reflex fellow groans.
I turn to look as a small Indian man smiles back at me. His seat and lap are lined with scraggly bouquets of day old flowers from distant gardens, strung together in chokes. Heads of roses, marigolds, petunias, chrysanthemums, sunflowers, struggling for the sun, wishfully out the windows. He resists the want to bury his face in the inflorescence, despite the good many beery belches around. I remember my grandmother that insisted that all flowers belonged to the gods, and weren’t for people to smell or admire. She would slap me if I asked why or which one. He wishes me a very happy Diwali. I wish him back and feel validated in my Friday night happy hour celebrations. Tonight, there were no firecrackers, no nervous animals under beds, no deathly clouds of flash powder. Just vomits, sheepish grins, and imminent hangovers. I busy myself on a website that live streams satellite images of India on Diwali, and slide my legs, sighing, as the map sparkles a little bit, every few seconds. I sense him over my shoulders. I hand him my phone, and watch the longing flashes in his eyes.
“These are for our Diwali pooja tomorrow. You should come”, he says, as he hands my phone back, with a card to a Hindu society in Jenkintown, and a little turmeric stained mystery pouch of folded newspaper.
Clearance flowers from the Market East florist for gods on a budget in faraway lands.
I put the card and my phone away, as I prepare to exit boozily. “Thanks.” I feel strangely warm and embarrassed, as I fail several sobriety tests on my jaunt home.

Part 6 Ivy Gourd Games

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 21:47:00 +0000

She was a breadwinning mother that usually won bread at triple jobs, at work and outside of work. Teacher, volunteer, graduate student? Mother, wife, daughter in-law? So with little time to be herself, or anything else, she did chores on commutes. One day, it was plucking a silenced chicken, hidden in two polythene black bags. I could tell, as an occasional feather would fluff out in a muffled yanked cluck. On another, it was writing Christmas cards in drawly cursive, pulled and pushed by the train.

On this occasion, she had brought her grubby kid, a coloring book, a grocery bag full of what seemed like penises, a serrated knife, and a murderous scowl. Seating herself, and her son, she pulled a chopping board from her bag to her lap.

Ivy gourds! My favorite game!

The insides of each gourd range from a peacefully raw green, to an angry bloody red. The rules were simple or non-existent. You were a simple little boy, and you guessed if the ivy gourd was angry or not, as your mother hacked each gourd on a seated sickle. You still had to eat the chewy gourds for dinner. A win-win for mom.

While I smiled back at their displaced chore, he darted off his seat to pick up a fallen gourd. It rolled down the aisle, dirty. He brought it back to his mother, and then everybody inhaled. It was a bullet.

Unfazed, she asked him to guess if the bullet was angry or peaceful.

“Depends on who’s holding it,” he said.

She took the bullet from him and pocketed it.

“I taught you well”, she whispered, as they proceeded to make bets on more ivy gourds. Just a couple of pounds, and a couple of stops to go, before dinner.

Part 5 Cat Pop

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:25:00 +0000

An everyday backpack, harmless but smelly, he lugs amid suspicious stares from shifty fellow commuters. My face contorts this way and that, poopy, as I walk by to fish a seat far far away, gasping for a breath of unavailable fresh air. I imagine him, laying in bed, his nostrils muffed in multicolor fur balls, dangling out and in arrhythmic snores. I count a good eleven cats in and around his bed. Calicos, gingers, uncles, nephews, clawed, snoring, fixed, hungry, lazy, loud, feisty. Adjectivally/adverbially named for convenience and storage. His carpets, crunchy with flyaway cat litter. A distant scratch on an expensive couch, rendered inexpensive.

A muffled bubbling of cat pee. An ammoniacal breeze that sits like a stain on everything owned and disowned.

I hear an old black lady complaining about the smell on the train. “Y’all babies need a bath!”

Fated, we exit the train at the same stop. He scurries ahead of me, rushes to the little gated nook by the stairs to the station. Carefully, he unlids three cans of cat food and pushes them under the gate. Three flavors of mushy offal meat, that churn my insides. This followed by a few scoops of animal shaped dry nibbles into a blue bowl. He squeezes the life of his water bottle into a third bowl and slides it under. A three course meal, fit for a neighborhood of strays.

He stands up and smiles, content, and licks off a bit of spilled meat juice from his fingers.

Part 4 Jailbirds

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 14:01:00 +0000

Staring down at an empty ruled notebook, and staring up through the grilled iron bars of the North Philadelphia detention center, seemed eerily similar. Translucent onto another empty page, or lives going by in a white and red train. He had been on that train before. With his daughter on his lap, riding South, breathing condensation onto the grimy windows, and tracing a temporary matchstick family and dog, disappearing with time. He twirled a stray curl on her head, and she smiled back in little heartstring twangs.

And then somebody smashed the guitar. Or burned it.

A group of children waved at him from the 10 am, goodbye flashes in pink palms. His eyes moved right to left and back again, in seconds of futile search and minimalist acquaintances. He didn't know what he was looking for any more. His daughter lived in Maine. Or was it Chicago? There was nobody he knew outside any more. Brothers, sisters, ex-husbands were all winning charge sheet lotteries. One by one they trickled in. Sometimes arm in arm in suspicious shackles and purple eyes and clipped lips, vomiting undigested teeth.

Insurance fraud. Parole violation. 7th DUI. Possession of controlled substances. Possession with the intent to sell. Homicide.

He took his front row seat behind bars and watched train movies and swore to never set another thing on fire again. Ever. Chug chug. And then he lit a cigarette.

The gates clanged behind him and the stocky officer led a handcuffed woman into the yard.

Part 3 Bag Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 16:32:00 +0000

He buried his pasty head in the comfort of his what was once blue backpack. Now it boasted spots and stains like his pox survivor grandfather. Bleeding tales, stories, irony, now dry. I worried for his dirty fungal right index nail, ripe and hungry, as he slept. Was he fake-insured with his fakes? Did his kids go to school?

The heat, persistent, and sweaty demanding, boiled the oily windows. The train moves and gives up in irregular barks, like it just had one of its wheels amputated.

That was him in his grandfather's sweat-lined backpack in a truckload of Guajillos and next town neighbors. Tucked away like a forbidden banana. Past the border. Past the policemen with X-ray goggles that were busy sizing small town lady bras instead. The capsaicins burned away his grandfather's arms and pain, spotty and white. But he was fine in the confines of the blue bag. Spicy, but fine.

He hugged the bag like his baby. He hides his illegality in everyone else at Market East, drops a message in a postcard at a nearby postbox, and walks away to cook motherly meals from other countries.

"Seguro"

Safe.

Part 2 Make-up

noreply@blogger.com (Arun Sethuraman) — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:28:00 +0000

Twenty five minutes of billowing farts isn't exactly flowery. Attempting a trace is impossible unless you are the taken for granted other.
Fartners in crime, as my Dad would call it. But undetected she fluffs her blush on, careful, a rush of fake blood to her face. Like an embarrassment. Caught in the act, stealing a cookie. Or condoms. Wisps of little pink dust. She drops the brush that rolls three seats down and somebody catches it with their right shoe, and relays it up the aisle into the safety of her bag.
I knew she was happy, as she carefully scribbles on a pair of lashes and lips in expert swoops. She fish-breathes her mouth and bites into a folded up piece of toilet roll and kisses it till it bleeds red in the shape of her broken lips, unkissed.
She pulls a mirror out of her bag that seems to carry everything she owns. A hamster, perhaps? A blue cheese chicken salad? Rent money in sweaty rolls and rubberbands?
The mirror's silver had flaked like crusty cuticles on a winter morning.
She winces as she stares into it. I couldn't tell why.
The train bobs this way and that to a stop, as she throws her mirror, her pride, and all yesterdays and before into her bag and walks out.
I catch her eyes as she goes. She looks the same as she had when she got on the train, twenty five minutes back.