Forgiven wisdom

There is this eternal restlessness of spirit
A sudden sinking of heart
The door is ajar, but quick closing on me
Boxes, bags, rubbish have been emptied out...

"I am leaving...
soon!"

Brand Ho!

Clarity distills, as does a meeting with a self-confessed, honest hyprocrite. Amidst a vacant week and another week to exceeding work load, I found one person who told me whether I like it or not, I too am a brand seeking positioning. Just another pea in a pod, but one with a rim called Z or S.
Or just another window in cyberspace, but one with format that reeks of a 'third dimension to me.'
Anna Bredmeyer, this 'some bits' space I tell the world who you are, not just my city..... Anna's story.

I'm entering contests

So I'm not one to write stories. Heck, never could really carve one out, except for Sounds perhaps and all you readers made me feel encouraged...

So taking a cue from Nothingman, I got myself into the The Moon Topples story contest....

This one was on growth and I wrote something on autumn leaves. Entry #7 check it out.....at moonless to comment on what you guys think, or you could just simply vote :-)

see ya on a writing trip.......

Sounds

There was a silence left from the resonance of a supersonic whistle.
A gap in the cosmic of sound, which lingers till it deafens you to its mere presence.

In the deep, narrow gashes left in the road of freshly laid tar, that fissured with the pressure of a heavy vehicle radial, words spewed out like silent echoes deafening into sound waves.

No one knew how long those whispers had been rising from the deep gash. Just that the gash whispered a constant cosmos of sound and no one heard now. Almost certain, some passers by paused and would swear they heard a sharp twang of painful cry. But it lasted for perhaps a fifth of a second before dissolving into an inaudible decibel. Some even lent their ear to the road. Like I said, no one knew.

And no one told me about it either, when I walked that little street. “Ssss…” I heard, like a passing train. I was almost sure I heard someone pass by, a breath on the nape of my neck. It was the gash. I bent to cover the gash with my hand and felt this surge of sudden heat. I drew back to inspect a burn I was certain would be there. “It must be my mind again,” I thought to myself. The teacher at the institute was always telling me that. I was having one of those psychic moments. Only there was nothing. Odd, I bent again. “Sssaaveeeee…” I felt an eerie tingle of syllables vibrating across my ear. The gash had a crack line above that lead to the end of the street and fell into the man hole.

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe humanity or curiosity. It just made me tumble to the man hole and lift the cover. A geyser of water slushed out and emptied into the green. And suddenly, silence broke like a blimp of a blank TV screen that has been left on and now is suddenly shut. Audio waves crumpled down. I fell and woke up in a sanitised, blue room with doctors wording sentences. And all I could hear was, “ssssssss…” It had been two days since I was out. I frowned and someone held out the newspaper.

Headline: “The mystery in the gash was water trapped in the under belly of the road.” Lead: Movement made the water ripple and the sound was made due to pressure interpreted as hissing. Reports say, a girl opened the cover and let the stream out. The ghost has been set free.

That afternoon I was ready to go home. But first I had to go to school. I’d missed out on two days. The teacher asked me if I was ok. “Sure I said,” in sign language and a cosmic sound. “It helps being deaf. We can hear things no one can,” I smiled and went into my class of ‘Hearing Disability Students.’ I almost heard her hiss out, ‘psychic,’ behind my back. We’re studying Earthquakes and ocean currents these days.

Can-sure

To lose someone is never easy
and to be reminded of the loss is even more distressing.

But...
all the tears
all the pain
all the grief
all the disdain
all the grey
all the decayed butteflies
all the wilted roses
all the santised corridors of blue death

This one photo feature of Pulitzer prize winner, Renee C for her work on a mother and her son battling with cancer speaks to me, whispers shadows in my ear. How can I not listen and tell..... Sure you can hear. Right here.

Things we do

I don't mean to be lovesick
But for S ...

Those bandy words within our locked arms
And lean your restlessness against mine
We go unknotting the web they bestow
As you lay down your history against mine

When they take your name in your absence
Their awed caesura thrown asunder against mine
How you allay your ditzy, dancing moths
To cross your salmon flame against mine

It is in our little battles in the dark
While you lie lost in the moonlight
That I trace ephemeral drops of your displeasure
Slaying them with kisses, their life against mine

You take my hand and touch my face
You’re the only one I notice in the expansive space
We’re now dancing in shadows of flickering light
Holding each other close, holding each other tight
You kiss my neck and then touch my face
Then kiss my lips in a loving embrace
Time stands still whilst we are together
Feels so good, it seems like forever

He was here and now he's gone . . .

Being Indian

or, The truth about why the 21st Century will be India's. This book, published by Penguin, cost me just Rs 250 and the back cover says that it is for sale in the Indian Subcontinent and Singapore only. How odd. Btw, I have not finished this either - I've been distracted by The Argumentative Indian and my rediscovery of my 500+ book collection from which I've extracted a few old favourites.

I'm also still digesting much of what it means to be Indian, something I rejected being, quite honestly, for most of my rebellious life.

Pavan Varma is a diplomat, his biography seems to imply an erudite, well read and well travelled gentleman who evokes a subtle sense of Pico Iyer in his approach and writing. I'm not comparing the two, no one comes close to Iyer in his distinctly global style, but the faint whiff perhaps of mixing Indian with British with a touch of the world feels familiar. I've only completed the first chapter on the relationship that Indians have with power - political or fiscal - rather than charismatic or physical, and it's been a learning exercise for me. I purchased this book for myself, to satisfy my desire to understand what it means to be Indian.

Being Indian - the title itself is so evocative of the complexity of any nationality, race and culture. I carry an Indian passport, of this I am sure, and my skin is brown, my hair black (let's ignore that occasional colours, shall we?) and my eyes brown. Yes, that means I'm Indian. Ethnically. But what about culturally?

What has changed ? Is it the author's perception of things or is it a more fundamental change in ground realities? Or is Varma saying that the take-off stage has been achieved not because of the middle classes he censured earlier but in spite of them? Varma's book makes for good reading.

But should it also make the Indian in you feel good? It depends. Depends on whether you believe ends justify the means. Depends on whether you accept hypocrisy as a way of life. For Varma's evaluation of the forces that fuel India's launch into the new century makes it clear that there is a lot that is unscrupulous and hypocritical in the Indian's way of life that has served him well. This, a friend, has echoed to me time and again. The one, who has grown up in a literal global village.

But while Varma does draw our attention to the gross inequities and prejudices that are still prevalent in every walk of Indian life, the fire in the belly seems to have burnt out somewhere along the way, the sense of outrage dimmed. The result: the Indian middle class that he urged to introspect or perish may actually feel great on reading his new book.

As the book suggests, India is bigger than the sum of its parts. But the "big thing" that emerges is neither scary nor unstable.

And best of all, I found the book listed on this wonderful website online called Khazana (Treasure trove) - that calls itself a source for hard to get books from India and South East Asia. Just $27 - smiles - only a few dollars more than my Rs 250.

Criminal Intentions

I refuse to be a victim
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To all those who've been victims of abuse of any kind, remember your offender i some, scared little kid. Never show fear and play safe!

Story so far

Things that can’t be mine.

I tell I do not want.

That which is not meant,

I reckon I did not hear.

Those who don’t see me,

I never saw in the first place.

I keep myself pleased and stupid,

As though all one needs is - to believe.

Almost there is not enough.

Fallen Angel

Some days I wake up in a daze.

A view from a window, which is still misty with cold breath. I was watched all night? Is that a form I steal? Or was it the air conditioner? I prefer the former. More mystery, more intrigue.

Today is one of those days, the one when I float on air two inches above the ground. The one that holds me in suspended animation. I walk more slowly, almost gliding. I hear less, as if catching whispers from a distance. Voices seem heavier, as if spoken through a static delusion. My frame of vision is blurry on the edges, as if my producer added noise to the bitmap in adobe. I am there. It is me, walking there. But I watch me from an arms length behind my shadow that trails my walk.

A bride walking to her aisle, I hold onto her trailing veil. Only this is no wedding, there is no veil, there is no aisle, there is no man.

He shows, I watch myself, detached from my own self. I fall and jerk back into my body. I feel pain and I cry.

I cried for all those times I should’ve but didn’t.

I cried because I was no longer viewing from where he stood. But watching through the globes of my own iris.

I cried because I had plunged and was now walking, not floating in space.

I cried because I had fallen.

Wounded

"To be in love," he says, "is to be a constant state of anasthesia."

Explains it all... explains me...

But I love to be hungover and drousy...

The numbness with the alive...

I might be falling again!

Grief and love

I too know power deep in the limbo of dreams.
I too watch a ship and want, an eagle and want.
I'll never be a princess feeding swans.
No golden bird is singing in my fingers.

My joy, like yours, is snatched from tenement mornings
and wrung till it cracks in my hands,
a pitiful rejoicing in a sand box, a sun-patch more.
Yes, I stand in hallways gathering valleys in my apron,
yet, scarcely daring another spring.

O honey, I hoped to be a butterfly fluttering in your pocket,
but now you flood just one cell of my mind,
still hating your walls, still half-dreaming
of my bringing you a brother, a young son.

Yesterday I passed your stoop.
I saw an old woman tousling children's hair
with a drifting, mechanical hand.
An old woman already dreading the final apples,
the last rain.

and while we work on the dissertation...some stolen winks

You'll understand this better if you have
felt how it is, waking from a dream
certain you can fly or that someone dear
lost long ago, has returned (to you).
When you wake up, no one will believe
that you can shut gravity off, that you
owned a tomahawk in your past-life and it's buried
and still calling for you. You dive to reach the bottom;
rock by wet rock, piecemeal, collecting the dream.
At the window, moon rests her elbows,
watching the snow on your bed. Outside, jaundiced streetlamps
struggle against the dawn. Loose dogs, crickets, whose sad voices
fill the plains with longing,
(of which), for a brief moment, you are filled with your own.
Next to you, your lover, in his restless sleep,
jerks his arms and legs.
You smile, not knowing he was flying north chasing the moon to Alaska.
When up, he'll never tell you. You won't believe. You don't want to.
Perhaps one day, brushing your teeth, hair or writing his name
on the fog of your bath, you'll realise
how much of your life you've spent, doing this and
trying not to believe in what you do, when asleep.
In this in-between hour, this suspended limbo, solitary, just for a brief moment
you'll feel the stab of truth: It is real.
but before it singes your mind forever, your thoughts will disperse
and go the way your breath does, when you walk out into the snow.
The day will begin, and the world will crack open
gradually reappearing phlegmatically car by mocking car.

Marching times

Historically, March has been the month of obsession all my life. Through school, college and now in its final circle in my student life, exams have been thrashing the daylights out of me. Now the March when all I wanted to do is to complete- my-darned- dissertation. Mercifully, this one is being intermediated by a jolly March spent obsessing over too much wine, cheese and good things.

This time is no less eventful. I am alternating between ecstasy and sorrow with tiring frequency. I have never explained myself as much as I am doing now. I almost gave in to the tyranny of tradition yet again. I am close to leaving the city where I grew up. I've declined job offers after pursuing them to the end. I have cried in the department washroom. I have walked on the wrong side of protocol. I have counted my money two thousand times. No cell phone this month as well. Almost ended. Almost started again.

All nags, by way of time, reach their fitting conclusion. Or fade. I held my camera this afternoon, and saw it to its end. I go to a park every morning. I’ve been wanting to write about it for sometime, but that should be another post. As one enters from the gate that I take, theres a semi-largish tree which burst into soft pink blossoms a month back. It is an ice-pack for burning eyes. It has a smaller cousin on another street in the neighbourhood and one near my department.

Basically, I have been wanting to know what its called. So spent an hour this afternoon at the Oxford bookstore, reading Pradip Krishen’s immense labour of love - Trees. What a treat!

Anyhow, my tree goes by the name ‘Sandan’. Botanically and rather sensously, ‘Desmodium Oojeinense’. Other local names are ‘Asainda’, ‘Tinsa’ and ‘Tiwas’. It comes from the lower Himalayan ranges. And is undeservedly rare in Chandigarh.

As are the boys with silly walks. Oh dear!

I will - will...

I am the sun and moon.
I am the air and sea.
I am the glory of God,
and the decadence of Satan.
I am the power of the universe,
and the fragility of life.
I am the flesh that gives form,
and the thought that gives substance.
I am the beauty of love eternal,
and the filth of hatred everlasting.
I am the divinity of birth,
and the repugnance of death.
I am the embodiment of pleasure,
and the exquisiteness of pain.
I am all that has been,
and all that will ever be.
I am deity
I am humanity
I am...

I am a final year Mass Comm student, about to walk out of school for the first time in 24 years.
And being the vain being that I am...I will walk with my nose in the air and muck at my feet...

There'll be 38 others joining me and no one wants to leave!!!!

Such is the paradox of the 'I',
Freud do I hear you barfing in the corner there???

of the sort

What comes but poesies

for all the drinks refused

for the holes made in pretty heads

for over-baked bodies in bakeries

for almond-eyes bought by terror

for planting holy bombs by the river

for the arms' alms in the name of salwa judum

what grows but poesies

for today you can only wear cotton

for today you can only eat wheat

for today you can only sleep on earth

for after you get tired of gunning

(which you will)

you will come home

to my gossamer love lines
we all have battles to go to

what will remain but poesies?

Some rain, some shine...

What does it take to want again?

To want a pedicure, an inhale, a good day, a friend, an appetite, a workout, a holiday, a pay cheque, an audience.

What does it take to be happy?

A tree every window, a desk, a computer, a new song, a first line, a remembered word, a water bottle, free telephone, box of crayons, loose sheets.

What does it take to be addicted?
Cluelessness.
And of course, some pretending.

Some notes of mine I took down while I attending presentations, saw movie clips, shared mind conspiracies, read some writing on the wall...all between 3to 5 on all weekdays.

And today as it hailed outside and me trying to hold on to all those little ones who contained that space in Mass Comm department room...I addressed an exhausted lot.

It dawned! It's been two years and it'll be time to say bye soon. I've waited for the moment, but today I want it to pause a bit.

Maybe, could be, possibly...the place has grown on me.

Dreaming about that tree every window, a desk, a computer, a new song, a first line, a remembered word, a water bottle, free telephone, box of crayons, loose sheets...

Photo Bucket

It's simple really...We are the stories we tell!!!

Meanwhile

A most joyous event. Mehndi, dholki, sangeet, friends, relatives, mithai, wine, lots of prayers, lots of wishes and a whole lot of goodness for the high-school sweethearts finally uniting after eight long years. She is very happy. So am I. And yet something clutched inside when I saw her dressed in bridal orange and red on a winter morning taking deep breaths, saying silent prayers, waiting for him. She looked like an angel - so serene, so beautiful, so lovable. Her Mum caught my cloudy eyes, as I casually strolled outside taking deep breaths myself. We hugged and cried. Just a little. Tears fell inside. For the little girls who fought over Barissta coffee and cheese toast not so long ago. Really, not such a long time ago.God bless her.
A day later and yet another bridal blush down, was dying for a whisper, a hiss from Gudia and the netizens of connectivity saw my browsing her profile on orkut. And queer, how you never look for the online counterparts, but found a picture with a footnote, "Blessed are those who have friends like these." It hit home then, she might have gone forever. Taking stock on some gigabytes and microchips away, I hope she reads this someday.
Love you babe........
For my Harpriya...

Confession

Shh... I have a new muse

Inspiration? yes, maybe

Lasting? how can it. It's but a fleeting sensation

The stars had warned about this one, the coming that is

Will I go hysterical? Hell yeah!

Sharin always does.