Breakage

Tonite, um chasing a firefly
in the dark, I see its sparks
but can't figure out what
or where it be

I'm not collapsing
not exactly
I'm breaking, slowly
disintegrating

Cell by cell
Flake after flake
In chunks, may be
Into a grey pile of dust, beside me

I'm reading letters
from the past
pointless letters
and allowing them to get to me

What a debacle
this has been, my darling
what unthrottled waste
of my spirit, this all is proving to be

Homecoming

Stories that we keep telling ourselves. Every day. Day after day. We have become these incessant story tellers, hon, ain't nobody stopping us no more. That going through the motions is doing us good. It isn't. Every day is a disguised failure. Trembling with masked anger. Unspoken, unspoken wrath. Sugarcoated love, that only isn't. In all this rush, when am I myself? Never. I am scared that I am underacting my way through life, not pretending enough. So I overact. I laugh really loudly when I am sad. I joke around when I am angry. I make small talk when I am lost. I overwork to get rid of the omnipresent feeling of disappointment that life has become. Somewhere, a while ago, everything has shed its meaning. I keep masking one thing with another and then that with another. There are so many masks, hon, I forget where I hid the real thing. Life has become folklore's quintessential demoness's soul, stored in a chamber inside seven other chambers. 

Sometimes I recall the hallways in which I became a person. An adult from a child. Tunnel like long endless hallways with rooms on both sides. My memories are trapped in dungeons of the past. And it takes so much effort to uncover them because they have been positively hidden for my benefit. Yet I scratch that wound sometimes, hoping that probably, I would find something I left behind. And that something would help me hold on to the real and slowly unmask myself. But there too, I seem to find only pain. Only sorrow. I have nothing concrete to hold on to in the past. Because I mostly lived in imagination, partly in denial. May be I am still living in denial. Wobbling in knee high denial, you never know. Some truths are so tough to accept and internalize, I would rather choose denial. I am living in denial despite being fully aware of the scores and scores of flaws in my mind and body. Goodness, what else, is even there.

And more often than I would like, I think about the years to come. Will I continue to be this dull. This selfish, even. I ain't crafted for too many challenges, hon. In the face of adversity, I lack the fortitude. I collapse and become a shamble of bones. I wonder if I will even begin to deal with my issues, or will I have the glorious courage to accept oneself as one is. Probably, I will float in the mundane middle, forever and ever. And whatever the potential I deem to have, I shall never achieve. Will I always measure myself and never fucking free myself from the fucking scale. 

Living entangled this way, I have made chaos my home and look forward to going home. Deeper and sooner. 

Now Playing: Nina Simone's You don't know what love is. 

Yeah, hon. I don't. And I never would. Hon. 

House with no mirrors

I took an auto to the market. I had some money. I didn't even bark at the auto wallah over the fare. I paid whatever he demanded. I was there to buy clothes for me. Dusk was dissolving into the air. And I was at the beginning of long and seemingly endless veins and vein lets of streets. Filled with hawkers selling split open raw mango sprinkled with salt and chilly powder, guava the same way, and bangles and wallets and trinkets for your home and you. Of course there were so many well lit stores, filled with stacks and stacks of clothes. Thousands and lakhs of clothes, I couldn't imagine how many there were. For the first time in months, I began to feel overwhelmed.

I randomly walked those streets to regain my breath. Paid for things in cash and hoarded clothes and bangles and bindis and earrings into my bag. It got heavy, but it didn't matter. It began to drizzle and I didn't stop even then. Despite knowing that the rain would wreck havoc over the city traffic and I wouldn't get an Uber to go home. I ran out of cash and started coaxing hawkers to take Paytm. I swiped my cards at so many shops, I don't even remember. And then suddenly, my gusto collapsed. It had enough reason to, alright. But that happens, you don't know why you feel the way you feel. You take yourself by utter surprise. It makes you think if you've been hiding something from yourself. Intimidating thought that.

My mind traveled back to my first apartment. It had a lot of windows but I had the maroon curtains so stretched out end to end that no voyeur would even dare. I lived there for about a year. And entirely by happenstance, that apartment didn't have a mirror. I lived an entire year without looking at myself. Not that there was anything to look at. Life batters the self esteem of a no looker by the time you are thirty. But nevertheless, not even the tiny flagellant remnant of the narcissist in me wanted to see myself for a year. So weird was that. I now come to realize. 

Self esteem apart, what does a mediocre laggard even get in life. Except crying in gulps sitting on the office toilet. Reading what great writers have written. And how every sentence of them once read pulls a chord real strong and pours out of those fucking tear glands. Because I know I will never write like that and never be cried over like that, at least, not anymore. I would rather go shopping in endless streets and feel overwhelmed. Once in a blue moon. 

Many Mirages

I've seen you for years.
Been seeing you:
Watching over you
And now look
I am stuck with a tonne of memories
Not knowing what to do-

Remember that time
That August evening
When we stopped by a tree
For a quick smoke
And in the dark, lit the cigarette from the other side
Burnt our lips and laughed so much.

Remember the homes,
We have lived in
Middle aged clingy apartments
Our clothes drying on railings
Piled on chairs..
Heaped on the bed

And the getaways
Particularly that one-
When we passed out in the bar;
In mid afternoon
Boy, were we high!
Don't recall puking, but I know we did and a lot

Do you remember,
Conversations and walks
Comparing our tastes
Among authors and makers of cinema
Couldn't have been more divergent
But, we were both alike in being different, for sure

All these years
We have both grown older love..
Ain't nobody gonna deny that
You've grown larger in my eyes
From a boy to a man
And then you've shrunk back

You're many men. Many mirages
Probably, it's just me hallucinating.
And drugging myself unnecessarily
With your bygone memories
To squeeze out sleazy poetry
Yeah, that's how it works

But I clearly recall.
Your grey eyeballs
The li'l bald patch, you were so nightmarishly afraid of
The neat buttons on your shirt and rolled up sleeves
And how you altered conveniently
Between being many men and the One for me.

Fluorescence

Now, the old lady lives in the forgotten mansion by herself. Parts of it they had rented out to teachers who came to teach in the little school they had started. Just for company's sake. Now that the old man is dead and gone, it's just her with her tenants. There's no jungle bounty to take care of. Guard against the wild. Years ago, when the old lady was only middle aged, she would shoo away herds of monkeys from her mango orchard with an air gun the old man no more used for hunting. The horns of the deer killed decades ago still adorns their doorway. But the orchards have vanished. Everything is a shadow of what it was. The clusters of bananas that she used to hide in sacks to keep safe until they ripened, to be sent off to daughters married off in distant cities, no more. The story seeping granddaughters never looked back. The sole singular lone son. Drunkard of a man, womaniser, once discarded by the old man for being a disgrace, must have decayed in some brothel. Or a cheap smokey bar. When the old man sat on the rickety chair, staring at the front door, there was not much conversation. But just one question, who was dying on whom. Which one of the two would last longer, asphyxiate in the dust that the termites ate off the doors. It is usually the diabetes that gets to you, or a cardiac arrest. Sometimes, they imagined passing away in sleep, but mostly it is plain loneliness. Now the old lady, in that ghost of a house cannot move around much. And cooks one meal a day, of rice and vegetables boiled in one black pot and sips as much as she can. Fighting the need to be against the whim to vanish, sitting guard on the decadence. 

8

A few weeks ago, I completed eight years of blogging. And I hadn't paused to notice it. I had forgotten. Neat excuse. But I had. Very few occasions in life call for a celebration. We are all sinking into veritable depths of monotony. And discarding the right to be special. Every day.

Once I had thought, my writing would take me places. Now I think what places, and laugh. Is it even possible to take anyone anyplace, ever. Aren't we all static, merely enjoying the illusion of motion. So much oxygen is getting us high. My writing may not move me a millimeter. My mind is fixed, frozen, glued to its labyrinthine biases, against the act of motion itself.

So yeah, amongst the shiny success of others, I may finish up a reluctant loser, a hopeless mediocre, a screaming for sympathy, self published author. Hah, yes. My glorious future, ladies, the one I had been told and coaxed to believe existed has now perished into oblivion. I am clutching thin air, in my fist.

I am not talking apocalypse. Or glass half empty. All I am saying is that life doesn't always pay off. Mostly never. And we continue to survive, as beings of angst.

Switching between phones, booking tickets, losing breath, consoling, cooking, being consoled, murmuring, driving, buying, stealing, loving, unloving, sleeping, waiting, waking up, catching breath, sighing. Writing, counting years, writing, counting years. 

Dragonberry

Nobody knew, where she was. At work, they assumed she was home. At home they thought she was at work. Some friend thought she was with the other. The other thought, that she was with another. Some didn't even think anything. Their heads empty, thoughtless in her regard. While she spent a thankless afternoon in deep sleep on a mat on the floor. Under the influence of dragonberry. Sleeping off the insomnia of a lifetime. All bridges snapped. Phones thrown away. All constraint abandoned, with her elbow like a pillow, beneath the chin. The dragonberry was a hallucinogen. Bringing about an acceptance of loss to when it doesn't feel like a loss no more. Alcohol traded for sorrow. Tears dripped from the corner of her one eye and dried up. The coagulated salt in that and the pinch in her heart. Both stayed though, but gradually got inconsequential. The stitched straw of the mat printed an impression on her cheeks. When she woke up suddenly, fear clutched her heart. Had she overestimated her freedom. Nothing could steal her away from the truth afterall. 

He, crouching in the opposite corner of the room, looked at the print on her cheeks and laughed. Aloud. It wasn't funny. And she didn't even fathom why. She was with him. And nobody knew that. Just about nobody. Nobody knowing where you are is as good as death. Or as bad as. They were as good as a couple of dead lovers in a thankless afternoon. It was then, precisely then, that she realized that everything was imaginary. The salt in her tears, the phones she had thrown away, the constraint that held her, the people she put off by knitting one complicated mesh of lies. All of it was afterall, imaginary. Only s/he was the real one. And probably, the dragonberry. 

See

It's a ridiculous wish I had. To see Khushwant Singh in person. He's the one who taught me how to live without shame. Now he is dead and gone. That's one item struck off like that. Sooner more than later, I am sure I will forget who I am. It's like losing sight of oneself. And it's a horrible thing to say. To become someone with no identity, wishes and aspirations. My autobiography could be named the autobiography of a corpse. Because my life is pretty much a list of things to be done, things to constantly worry about, work wise, life wise. I feel I have made too many unwise decisions and now there is no getting away from those. Like a vicious circle, the aftermath leads to the cause itself. And can't look out, look within. I am entangled such, I can't see. My biases are such, I don't think I even understand my environment very well. It's like being really stupid, immune to the obviousness of the world. I am so serious when I say I can't see, I can't see a damn thing. 

I need a filter, something that tells me what I should see, what I should ignore. Because there is so much fucked up stuff happening around, they all merge into a haze, I can't differenciate one from another. There is nothing definitive, it's all infinite and irrational. I feel small, incapable. And stupid. Like a failure.

A friend recently halted at a guest house by a lagoon on a rainy night because their car broke down on the way. In the morning when she woke up, the lagoon and the sea it merged into and the sky, everything looked like one grey screen of nothing. She stood on her feet and stared, unable to figure where the sea ended, where the sky began, they were all so homogenous. No sight of the horizon, of the distances we could go, of the persons we could become. Nada, nothing. Then, minutes later an orange sun punctured that grey screen. It rose slowly up the sky, shooting out rays, drawing out a horizon in front of her eyes. Separating the sea and the sky. Differentiating the closer from the distant. Showing her what exactly to see.

I want to see. Just like that. 

Breaking Out

Stout diabetic man. Staring at a lunch of boiled vegetables. In the corner. The smile in his voice. His nonchalance. His apparent lack of fear, wants me to break out. The strings of gerberas hanging from the walls. In bunches, between leaves they don't belong to. In dim lit wedding days of previous besties. The angst in their voice when we understand. How bad time is tricking us. Into believing that it's running slow. When it's not. When we are losing so much and so fast of our quintessential past that seemed like nothing more than average. Until now, when suddenly we are beginning to feel that we are growing up faster than we can handle. So we pause. 

For a while, hold our wrists between our thumb and the index finger. Merely to feel the pulse. To realise the restlessness of all that blood, flowing for no purpose. Chasing something that may in the end not be. Like running toward a mirage. Wasting our destiny, erasing scratched fate lines on our palms only by worrying. Worrying that we are getting nowhere. 

When that pause ends, we decide to make our deal more peaceful. Our thoughts more legible. With more foresight. Such that we chase things that only matter. Matter more. Such that the blood through our wrists slows down. Our temples don't sweat. We sit under trees of silent thought, holding love close to our chest. Like real tight. With a respect for our own self, that we don't shy away from the mirror every time we try to look at it. 

Because, in the end, we all become the stout diabetic man staring at a pale lunch alone in the corner. And then, all that would matter is did we have courage in our soul, that absolute lack of fear. Did we stand up when we should have. 

Perfume

My world of unhindered glee begins from under his nostrils. There is the half day old stubble, invisible but still there, brushes rough against my fingertips. A remnant aftershave under the chin, around the neck. 

Faint wriggling odor of deodorant off his arms. Last night's dish-wash mildly, mildly oozing out the pores of his palms. That faint lemon fragrance and our vague month old romance. 

His third shirt in one day. Sometimes that one shirt for three days. There is an odor of love that lives locked among those threads of fabric. In those checks and in those colors. There is that faded intimacy growing stronger by the moment. The blinded rush of passion. The dissolving taste of mouths. Leaving behind, thoughtful aftertastes. 

That last for days, sometimes for even weeks before they are written down about. Explicitly. Sans inhibition, like in the act of love itself. 

Life, lazy, languid. Time, we believe must be moving. Watches tied around tens of thousands of tiny wrists in the world must be ticking, because we believe they must. But we can't see that happen. 

Where we are, temporarily, in this exact fucking spot in time and space, our interlocked co-ordinates, I do not want to care. Whether it does or does not.

I am only lost. Only lost. I have even forgotten myself. Usurping the un-bottled perfume that exudes when our souls cuddle. Momentarily. Or so.

Ca·dence

Our pumpkin colored cheeks, mild orange cum pink. Where the flesh shallows into tiny dimples. The glory on our white faces. Enchanted with stolen smooches. We, instantaneously are closer to the skies. If we jump and raise our ankles an inch above the gravel roof, we would gather a bit of the grey clouds under our fingernails. A bit of those unbounded water bearing uncut giants that hung low, undifferentiated from one another. One bit of them in our fingernails. And then we would stand facing the other and shine. With the aura of the future and the rust of the past both lost. Locked in one precise moment. Our gargantuan shadows crisscrossing each other on the wall. Like our true demons within. Unshackled, unsoiled and beautiful. Unafraid of being seen. Or indulging in the forbidden. 

Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon

We don't do reviews. Because we firmly believe we can never judge another man's work of art. We could never be equipped well enough for that. Things are subjective, we know. One cannot generate a score and draw that dirty line between good and bad. And say. This is that and that ain't this. 

I may be cheap to impress, more often than not, I love what I see than not-love. Though I might pretend the strength of sarcasm because love makes my knees weak, but I keep the margins wide, to err is beautiful. I am forgetting the point I was trying to make. 

Works of art change the way I see. Breathe in and out. And if you know me, you should know that I talk like a maniac for a book that I have adored, more than adored, a movie that don't let me sleep. And this is an understatement. The effect is sometimes toxic, repeatedly addictive, I can't unhook me from what I love, from who I love. The latter is, another story. Anyway

I am in awe of mad geniuses. They rock my world, more, much more than perfectionists. 

Getting back to the point, hold on. I found a movie, another movie, that I am gonna keep coming back to for a long time. It's nothing short of a treasure. Pulp fiction. Every time I watch it, I want to smooch John Travolta right out of the screen. 

Work of art, joy forever. 

PS: Not to be understood otherwise, title is a song from the movie. Google, at your own risk. Disclaimer. yeah, life's full of them. 

Debaucherie

I am gonna have to quit my job.

'Silence.' He's surprised that I don't feature my quintessential longish awe.

I am gonna figure things out.

'Figure what out?'

Like, what is it that I want. For now, I am gonna travel. Hands me over a map.

'This is like zigzag across the country!'

Yeah, at least this trip is something I've figured out. Laughs. Pauses. Looks at me. The traffic from down here felt coy. There was a mild breeze. I looked at him back.

'Are we taking the Revolutionary Road?'

May be, only if it doesn't end that sad. 

'Okay' Not once did I utter my favorite and oft-repeated-over-used-to-death punchline-Are you kidding me? That I have picked up from my compulsive binging of American sitcoms over the years. Nobody in my land used it yet, that much. The land that he was so set to criss-cross.

I looked up at what was in front of me. It wasn't the horizon. Just some half-built-left-alone-concrete-skeletons, that someone thought would be buildings someday. But got stuck in litigation, I guess.

Come along, be my side-kick.

At that point, I laughed uncontrollably. For no such reason. And got up to leave.