Keeping it Ajar

But for how long???

Mumbai times

Some people, places, faces need to be written about. And this has been a week of discovery. I finally found my music back. The parasitical beast seems to have spit me out, my back seems a lot freer than it felt. So this is my version of Maximum City, with all apologies to the vastly talented Suketu Mehta.

The week got off to a brilliant start. Monday morning blues took a paling beating. I met a fellow city gal, one who smiles down from one of those massive Mumbai hoardings and is treading deeper in tinsel town. Gul Panag met me with concerned verve and smiled warmly. Abhay Deol for tuesday lunch got me deeper into finding my way back home, as the Punjabi affluent actor spoke to a lost me as a reminder of allgood things back home. Wednesday saw work get crazier, but Thursday morning had me driving around town looking for my Mumbai. And the evening spent with a visitor from home sprucing up streets of Mumbai for me. The weekend that followed brought the music back. I attended I-Rock, met friends, new rock junkies and an ol' someone who rekindered a flame, the same that almost led to fire last night. But a cab drive to Lonavala at 4am in the morning to meet Pardeep Sarkar, made it a lost cause.

Now at work thriteen hours hence, I am getting my lost harmony back

________________

Paper? burnt

Pen? broken

Ink? vanishing

Words? lost

It's been said

The worst is already over

waiting for the rising

I Feel

“Sometimes the emotions becomes too powerful for the mind to control, the unimaginable pain takes over the heart and the body weeps,” Seth, the angel.

And suddenly there is this tremendous patience. The hand pauses, the restlessness is interrupted, there are long shadows pressing to stay, the hours are gliding slower and the only sound I can hear is this vast expanse of silence intermittent with my episodic pulse, my heat beat, my throbbing temples and the jitter in my teeth…

The numbness is being washed away and I spy a heaviness in my throat. Am I going to weep? Are the glands going to overreact? Is there going to be a lost tear resting on my cheek, falling on my dry lip, cascading three inches below my collar bone?...

I don’t need an answer. I’m content with this reassurance that I’m not dead inside. There is life in these veins and this blood rushing through to my brain and flushing down to my toes. There is a tingle…

I’m tied in my freedom. I’m bound to myself from liberation of spirit. I’m in knots and I’m relieved I’m for it.

Wim Wenders always works wonders on a sleeping heart. It did on mine. Thankful for that Utopian City of Angels. There is never a leaving. I feel empowered. I can feel...

Top of a Porcupine Tree

A bubble floating in aimless space
amiss on a grapevine of desire
a guttral broke into a riff of bass
ever wondered the sound of crackling fire?

Broken verses stitch together words
random musings wither away sanity
wash them off like slipping soap suds
the drain - a resting place of vanity

This new city of dreams
promises to set free
but what about silent screams
that inhibits the verb - being from me

All forces must retreat in the still of the night
the unwritten law proclaims full to abide
for a wind and string propel even a liberated kite
it is to break, fall and be brisked to the side...

Post Script

Now that Mumbai local has opened the door, just...

Happy Feet

I finally have things to say and stories to tell. Prompted by K to talk. Maybe I'm finding my music back or probably the melody is sifting back to me. But I'm finally home.

The city of butterflies and big waves has let me sink in one feet under. The tarmac and the rail track has been running smooth and offering me a seat. The unbrella is staying erect and not letting the rain soak me through, well manybe just a little. I have a school of fish that swim with me in the same express aquarium. The waters turn murky sometimes. But they are to, I suppose. For how will the red settle and grapes mature, if they wont turn murky and decay. The wine cellar is open wide, seven days a week.

The toes tap dance too and the sand is escaping beneath.

My feet are firmly planted and now not waving in the wind for now they have company...

Homeless

And it beigns...the period of self loathing.

When all else feels like a dismal dream
the mind refuses to acknowledge
the pen's wielded, but the ink has flown out

and I've lost my music too. There no home.

Warped & Twisted - VI

I picked up my 1100, browsed my contacts, yearning for a cup of coffee...and then I kept browsing. ...
Looking for my window of hope.
Felt loneliness in this big, friendly town.
Have a feeling its a first of many more to come

I hope it pours soon

Just a thought...

There is nothing more tragic than the forced chains, we bind ourselves into. Our - the community's version of contorted realities....
Rules...
Regulations...
Norms...
Traditions...
Will there be no living????

Death in a bowl of sugar - II

She comes again. Only this time it’s a distilled image of a dear friend inched in torment and anguish. It’s a word called pain, the oh so familiar deviant friend that visits us often - the one that lurks behind shut doors, slings onto our backs along clustrophobic corridors, is a constant gardener who mans our seeds of growth. And she comes dressed in finesse whispering th chants of decay and pulling soul hearts all along.

She visited again today at 15.30 and took away someone.

Will we walk again tomorrow - like we day each day closer to the valley of death!!!!

Train of thought

It's been long... since the last and the first.
The last scribble and the first workplace.

Finally have it. My contract letter came in today. I'm now bound. No more freewheelin', no more trips on the wings of fancy to the ends of the World. A legitimate employee of some firm, with some designation and a credited journalist. Press(ed) for all things that were and will follow now on. So what should I write first. About the move? The first day at work? The first byline (again!) The first trainspotting ride (again!) The first gaylord orgy (a definite first view).

This'll read more like a journal, a record of everyday affair. Of course random ramblings including (can't separate the S or the Z from that. The cult of nothingness, a wisdom passed on from a fellow blogger who weaves great tales in dreams :-p)

So the wisdom of dreams culminates into reality and I find myself on a bustling lifeline trasport of Mumbai (the city where I now work in) - the train. The whole of last week, I travelled from M to C and got off the station to walk down to L, where my office resides. The walk takes me a good 30 minutes. The return was in the caring confines of my Uncles Opel Swing for Mum was still around. She left yesterday and today I attempted to take the train thing back home too, a first. The problem with the firsts in Mumbai is that though you may have done the routine many times before, it feels new each time you do it again - for new landmarks formulate as quick as they dissolve. Great transitions, no wonder the film industry resides here. Anyway, the train back home. The routine 30 minute walk after a cancelled coffee plan in the midst of humid sweat breaks, smells of fowl foal that will be someone's meal soon and the maddening traffic...all to the station where I shall finally board my ride home. The only thing separating me from the tarmac is the platform ticket. But where is the darned ticket counter? Where is it? Where is it? Out east? West? No? 'Oh no! It's on the North side Maam. Can't cross the platform. They'll catch you,' a stranger guides. 'And where is the Northern side,' a trying look. 'Near L, on the birdge of course,' guide points. Geography comes back to my head. Northern end of the platform is on the bridge that runs out onto the street adjacent to my workplace. And I walked each day last week to work in pearls of sweat, triumphant in spirit, when in fact it is just a 2 minute sprint across office. 'Brilliant!' I thought to myself. And I smiled, turned back and walked back to work, laughing and smiling all the way to the north end of the station, got myself the Rs4 ticket that would take me home. Got on with the rush hour wave and got off with the same wave
Reached home to David Gray, Garbage and Bridget Jones. And now sinful temptations of course. How I missed thee!!!

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!