A Notional Loss

There's the notion of loss. And there is actual loss. For real, irreversible, permanent. Sometimes I stutter between the two. I threw my glass of chocolate milk in the wash basin. It splattered on the walls, the floor. Lost forever, actual loss. Ain't coming back. And then, sometimes I am frantically looking for my keys in the bag and not getting them. They are still in there, but I am not getting them. Same with looking for my glasses all over the place when they are up on my forehead, or still worse, I am wearing them. When we assume that we have lost something or someone even when we have them right there, is a notional loss. We coax the heart not to get jittery at all. Because, nothing has been lost yet. But then it deteriorates. You wake up dreaming in homes you no longer own, waiting in places you no longer go to, for people who no longer are here now. The immediate moments after you wake up, this appalling sorrow envelopes you, like you can't move. And you cry a pillow. Actual, irrecoverable loss, that.

Requiem

He has his eyes downcast. Staring at his lunch plate. Those are the most beautiful eyes in the world. One of the most beautiful. A beautiful pair of eyes, those. He is sitting amongst a large bunch of loud women. His blush is lost amongst their chatter. But, he doesn't look lost. Not yet. But out of place. Definitely out of place, Yes. He's eating with his hands, elbows quiet on the edge of the table. The set up looks like an experiment. Except his eyes. They look like dollops of love. And a shiver on his face. That hides his age. He has a son back at home, put away in some school. Standing by the road with a huge bag slung from his little shoulders, waiting for the school bus to pick him up. And the wife, who bought the lady fingers on his lunch plate. Who washes, cooks and waits. And loves, probably possibly, with a decent vigor. Like a woman should a man. And here, he is. Sitting alone among known strangers.

He must feel stifled. Does he? I would, if I were him. But I am merely sitting here, reading his story from the lines on his face, from the glint in his eyes, the shiver on his face. Drawing illegal solace from a perfect stranger. Sitting apart. Sitting opposite. Creating a requiem, for each moment that passes. Like, life had no ennui at all.

Penury

Today is a pi day. Pi. Like the number. Twentysecondofjuly. 22/7. Indivisible. Irrational. Infinite. For some reason, I had been waiting for today. To make something special happen. Something worth a memory. Like a handmade card of sun-dried petals and grass, framed beneath a sheet of cellophane. Glassy, dreamy, yet earthy. That's what life should be, right. An exact mixture of illusion and reality. A subtle compromise amongst who you are and who you choose to be. I am taking baby steps. Yes, baby steps. Toward becoming this exact mixture. Being the right blend of strength and frailty. Striking a negotiable trade-off between idiosyncrasy and love. Between brooding and company. A median of richness and penury. 

Homeless

It is an assurance, I carry with myself. That you are home. That no matter what, when, who. If I would, I could leave everything be and run. With my eyes closed, like a child. Run into our enclosure of love. And you would be there, sitting with your legs stretched out of the window, or merely standing by it, looking at the rain. Doing laundry, or cooking, or quietly sitting, or taking a shower, leaving the door unlocked for me. From my footsteps you would know, it was me. Yes, lovers do that. And later act aloof and ask when did I get in. So many little games. Voices and visions. Fights and patches on scratches, balms on wounds. 

Now, I feel as if I haven't kept any memory. It's an honest confession, I don't remember the specifics, the details, the blur as you would say. I carry that time and that love absorbed in myself. Very involuntarily. Because I don't feel the need to create memories. Because, I know you are home. I can run to you any time of the day, and we could recreate our moments, the exact same way. Or give them a random swivel and yet they would be this maddeningly, intoxicatingly, mind-numbingly, fucking beautiful.  

But you know this juncture, honey. That home, we have to let go of. The walls, the roof, the strings, the mosaic. The smells, the sounds and a whole bunch of uncreated memories. Remembered only very faintly, for the decades to come. I wouldn't have that privilege to be with you in a moment, for a moment. You would no longer be in there. The cradle has vanished. I feel deranged, homeless again. And my heart, is skipping so many beats. Oh! Pandora. 

Prose

The sinking of afternoon into the air. Mild mellow yellow sunshine. That reflects from the little bumps on your skin. The giggle in our voices. Juices of watermelon and pineapple. Their seeds seived. In tall translucent glasses. Red, the color of love. Yellow, the color of friendship. Mingling into the smells of siesta. Into the humm of honeybees. Static beads of sweat on your temples. The simmering smile on my face. The afternoon becomes you. Then She becomes me. Therefore the faint intoxication in the air. And a distant calling, to just be.

Do we have to grow into anything else? Can't we stay lovers forever.

Cannabis

Plum like fruit bunches hung from the tree. Orange dots against boughs of green. Big old tree this. With its poison fruit. Passion fruit. Which could kill, hides venom in its pulp. Squirrels know that, wouldn't even smell it. They would stay clear of fruit laden arms. Migrating birds that would perch and catch breath, if ensnared by the poison fruit, would drop dead in a moment. Dead birds. Dead meat. No perspiring traveler would rest in its shade. Only scavengers built their nests on it. Only they found worth in coming back to it after picking from bones. The poison tree, apart from this, was a beauty. It bred orange flowers, of the size of grapes, with tiny petals spread all around. And filaments from the central pod, sprouting, ending with drop full of pollens, the seed that would regenerate. They said, the flower was not poisonous, flowers never are. Petals shrank in the sun and the flowers died, falling down slow dancing in the air, forgetting about gravity. They formed a bed beneath the tree, a bed of flowers, this one. A man and woman, lay there, making love.

Dominatrix

She wore her kohl lining the upper flap of the eye, the lower flap nude. Always on top, she was a dominatrix. She had a small face, fluid with vital emotions, her chin being their epicenter. You couldn't say, if she was thirty-seven or forty-five or older. She had stopped aging, because she had never married, never given birth. That way, you don't grow. You stay static in the minds of some strangers as a cynical spinster, and in the minds of the rest as an accessible mistress. 

So, she had stopped aging. As if, she was standing still in time and you were younger than her, then you would get to her age and then after gradually age and go senile. Though she would stay the same, preserved like a specimen, with a mere few creases of skin under the eyes, hair carnally dishevelled, that true smile pasted on her brown lips, and the smooth flow of words from between them. Peace had become her.

But it got lonely though. Sometimes. For her. When she fixed dinner for her old father every afternoon, all by herself in the kitchen. Did the ghosts of her married sisters come by, or the laughter of her nephews. For company? No. So, she looked for it everywhere, for people, to know, hear, listen to, spend time with. All that. She had thousands of people in her phonebook, you could never fall out of touch with her, she would call you. Text you, mail you. Over just about anything. Late in sleepless nights, she went to those dangerous websites where she met psychotic men, who would utter the weirdest of things, things that were disgusting and pleasing in the same breath. 

The tone of her skin got darker with each summer, her mind seasoned like wine, retaining bits of bygone youth. Retaining the hush in her voice, the polish on her nails, the crystal between her legs. Holding on, as the rest of us, abandoned. 

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. 

Flame

I haven't stalked him for such lonng. I feel weird. When I now do, look at the old pictures. Seems like an era ago. Like a very long period of time, has elapsed, and  I was in a coma. Life doesn't add up. Love doesn't beget love. Never, infact I am personal opposer of that. Fact. Word. So, we aren't where I had propositioned we would be. But mere, old flames. We are the two comical characters in any middle aged woman's memoirs of love. Affairs that failed to work. Calls that weren't answered. Answers that didn't have questions. Dates remind me of him. Not the exact ones, my crammed memory doesn't allow me that liberty. Nada. I remember him in rough approximations of those. The second week of June, the first of November. On the thirtyfirst of December. You know. All that. Like the lost stanzas of a love song. The miffed strums of guitar. Like unrequited love. When I loved him, and then when he loved me back. But not just in the adequate amount. He was inadequate, grossly in that regard. A man's ability to give love, is a wee bit more important than his amorous prowess. We both failed actually. Hah. That is why, sometimes I feel a hole in my soul. And a lot of couldbe's surround me. Like float around my head, revolving in circumferences of ellipses. This and that. It's not regret. Nada. Something much inferior in degrees of human emotion. In severity. There is no heartache. It's a mere wave of mild hopelessness. It will pass.  

*Nada: Spanish for nothing. Nothing for Spanish.

The Flyover

Is it true that everything comes a full circle? That one is indeed adequately punished for each of their misdeeds as is rewarded for the good ones. It did feel so, some years ago. Not anymore. It doesn't feel like. Bad karma bites you in the ass, alrite. But the good one, never begets glory. May be I am greedy. Or, could also be that people paint rather a hunky dory picture of their lives, more than it is. And I am only a shabby mirror of the truth, not its empowered alterer.

I was thinking on such lines, and walking on the flyover. This one was old one, much older than those which have now been built. Its footpath is made of adjoining slabs of concrete. On which an insane beggar sits on all day. He has a mess of hair and is constantly drooling. Though you would never stop by while driving on the flyover and drop a coin in his bowl. There was nothing for him there, not even shade, yet he wouln't budge. And at nights, you would never see him. Probably he went down to the railway platform to sleep on.

I wanted to see the sunset from above there, since forever. An orange ball falling into a crucked skyline of broken buildings. All I wanted was to take a walk on it in the evening and let my mad thoughts consume me, that's the best way to go. But in the many years that I have lived, and the many more years that I have been alive, I have never had the time. Yeah.

About two years ago, I stopped writing that string of stories on lovers walking and talking. If you know what I mean. A few months after that, I found love. Thank Gods for that. And after that charm passed, I forgot to write. Me and the written word. Ladies and gentlemen, forgot each other. If you know what I mean. Now suddenly, instead of thought, it's a sea of incoherence that's consuming me. And I am thinking about that beggar again.

The Pursuit of Depression

I

I owe my existence partly to Chuck Lorre. I wanted to write this sentence for a long time on this blog. One, because I quite like the way his name sounds, like his surname itself was a story. And two, because I do. From the bottom of my stomach, I am thankful to you, Chuck Lorre. For being there, throughout. Whenever I have needed to unscrew my life, watching an episode or two of his or his kind, has seen me through. Even when there was nothing else to hold on to, he was.

So, recently I read this somewhere that dear Chuck has this tendency to fish out the singular point of contention even from a paradise. As in, he looks out for things that worry him even in the most hunky dory of situations. Far more than being a tendency, it becomes a habit, then an obsession, when you just can't stop worrying. You be constantly perturbed by phantoms you can't see and then, life screws itself irreversibly up. 

I suffer from that, yes. That's the one governing pivot about which I revolve and lose my way numerous times every day. We, Chuck and I pursue Depression. You know unlike Will Smith, who pursues quite the opposite. He is the antithesis of us.

II

On the other hand, there is the nitty gritties of love. Time bound phases in an hour when you need nothing else. When he pins your head down onto is lap, but only mildly. By shutting close the lids of your eyes with his two fingers. So that, you being the little girl you sometimes are, aren't overcome by the whim to open your eyes wide and just see. Him, his face right above yours. Holding you down that way, he drifts closer to you. You can feel the warmth of his breath growing lukewarm. The whiff of air leaving his nostrils, you can now feel on your upper lip and then he plays a bit of it upon your other lip, chin. You can feel him, milimeters away, teasing the air between your faces, but he isn't there yet. He's playing it slow, real slow. Testing your patience. Which apparently is the key to a lot of things. And you can't see a damn thing, his fingertips keep you in perfect pitch black darkness. You go crazy and part your lips to sigh. Then, exactly then. He. Seizes. You. 

The wait before that, feeling his hot exhaled air, was the Pursuit of Happyness. Yes. 

Ladies Tailor

Many rains come and go, the anguish of existence drags on. Unlike the unforeseen shower of today though. It's such a relief when you forget for a while, everything. The infinite pleasures of amnesia.

Years ago, when I was younger, there was this woman at the bent of the street. She ran a Ladies Tailor. By the name such places go. It was hell of a similar rain. The one that was never to be. The smell of dry earth rose and I waited on one of those benches they put out for girls. To sit and wait on, go through repulsive design booklets. For neck designs, for sleeve sutures on dresses you wanted manicured to fit you. Because you were only seventeen and there was an entire life ahead of you. Your skin dimpled and glowed in the summery sun. Those days, I sat on one of those benches waiting for my turn, for the queue ahead of me to dwindle and finish. It thundered and splashed outside and there was no electricity, and yet I waited for her to measure me up.

Some bitches even elbowed you to get in front of you in the line, such species that. Their menagerie continues to exist. And for their long lives, it felt like decades before the Ladies Tailor even looked at you. She was such a poker face. God knows, she had that Robert de Niro face of pitiful disgust. She would ask you to step out of your shoes and then treat you like a lifeless doll as she turned you around and strung her tape all over you. Like some wild animal she would grunt if you didn't keep your hand straight or bent your neck even a little bit. 

Inside, it felt like she ran her own slave army of tailors. Young girls and middle aged unemployed men sewing and sewing till blindness, both physical and metaphysical. Like bonded labor under her iron hand. She wore her sari like a man would, the pleats would run right in the middle across her chest. Exposing whatever was to the sides. Yet you never dared to point that out to a friend. Her deliveries were always way beyond the promised date on the receipt. And the work only about average. Nevertheless I never stopped going to her, those days. 

The delay never messed up with my life as I pondered it would. Nothing ever does, until of course it does. 

Paro

They lived in one of those dungeon like apartments. Hidden in a corner was the mattress which she unfolded in the night and slept upon. Along with her other flatmates, several women living alone together, sharing home cooked dinners of foreign vegetables. Low on fat. Paro was used to staying home all day, all afternoon as the others left for work. She had been laid off, it was 2009. Some said she had been fired, there had been a drunken affair at work. But people say such things, the whispers of the wind shan't be trusted. She was on a semi solid diet those days, to shed some belly fat. Some slurpy wheatish soup she drank two times a day and that was that. In the evenings, she left for the market an hour away, wearing the slippers and capris she had gotten from the weekend flea market and came back with bag full of beans and climbers and creepers of all kind. To be chopped and boiled and eaten with pickle as she sat beside with her bowl of soup. Her boyfriend lived in another town, they had met online. He was younger, still studying. Paro would say, since she wasn't making rent for the last few months, she would move in with her boyfriend as soon as he graduated, with a job and everything. Paro was the eldest of three daughters. Not necessarily pretty, this one. Her face was large with features defined good enough. Sleepy eyes and a nice pair of black lips. Her hair, fell till her waist. Curled in their own insane uneven manner. She would often knot them to have them in place as her heart fluttered each time she imagined the future looking at the night sky through the iron grille ringing their dungeon like balcony, and smoking. 

Apostrophe

Human beings, sometimes have this thing. They know for certain that is. Instead of swimming in the black pool of chaos. When introduced for the first time, to each other, they knew they were going straight to bed. There was no doubt about that, no negotiation. It was something that was being forced upon either, neither had any upper or lower hand. They were sitting on the exact same plane, knowing the one truth that there was. A compulsive force drawing them to each other. An understanding had notoriously crept up, where there was none. This was years ago.

It's rare, this kind of love. Without its baggage. The usual baggage you know. The whim for a marriage or the craving for a baby. All of this was absent. I praise it so, because, it was love in the most well-contained sense. Love exactly within the definition of love. No extrapolations. Or deductions and suppositions.

It's made to believe, that it was amicable. The separation. Not as messy, neither was torn apart, so it seems from the surface. No howling or smashing of phones. They both, were old enough to break free. Young enough to start afresh again. To a bystander though, it caught him by surprise. The bystander gazed on, unable to understand the chemistry, the union and the decomposition. An involved bystander, that is.

Today, they live in the city by the sea. He probably is seein' another woman. They are still friends. They must go out for coffee for the lack of better company, on some days. They must relive and feel the friction between their hearts. But there would be absolutely no will to turn back. Are they afraid, that it might be messy this time around? Or have they really fallen apart this well.

Z

Inspite of the more than a couple of times for which you have broken my heart, and for the one gigantic time, I broke yours in the end. I don't know what I would do if you suddenly walked in through that door. On the edge opposite, I sit talking to a stranger. Would I turn to face you? I would dammit. But would I freeze? Like a mummified doll. In awe of the man I had learnt to love. One can never predict, can she. Would you still have that humor, and make me ripple, the way you did, then, when we had a horizon. A time, a corner, one wish. Unlike the futility of the present. What would I do if you walked in. With your gaunt cheek bone, the ash grey sweatshirt. What would I do? Will my legs obey and stand up. Or should my eyes ignore and look away. My heart with all her fossilized pain, what would keep her put in the thoracic cavity. Would I drop her on the floor, accidentally and scream. Will I rush to the toilet and cry. Would I say hi. Or faint, yeah that would be good. I have always imagined fainting. Should you walk in through that door. 

Scattered Soul

I left my soul at the mouth of the river. In my old room, standing aloft on the third floor beside pines. I left a chunk of it on the balcony of his new home. Also a bit of it in the wilderness I never could go to. A piece of it, on the scattered skies above the earth I slept on, gazing up. I left my soul inside the God of Small Things. In the diary made of pure bamboo pulp and on it as a spot of blotched ink. I left my soul in the wind at Lovers' Point. I abandoned a slice of it, back in the darkness which I smoked. Bit by bit in the curls of fume that escaped my mouth. In the sweat and breath of strangers. In the eyes of the men who stared. At breasts, at legs. I lost a bit of her in the minds of men who read my poems. And a few compassionate women, it would be unfair not to say. On the edges of my broken nails, and upon the roofs I wanted to leap down from. Last, on the chair I drank coffee on alone, and thought of writing this poem. Each of these places, keep a piece of my soul, frozen, un-agile. In comatose. In original specimen, undiluted, unashamed, described by other similar adjectives. But most of all, I left my soul, the last time I saw her, on his bed. On his bed. Yeah.

#NowPlaying - Shakira, after a long long time. 

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. 

Litmus

1

They stood like the stagnant rain of late August. Against the moist afternoon breeze rushing through their hair, giving them an occasional totter. Away from town, its buses and the smoke. They would quite religiously meet in the valley. Well not exactly, if you could call it that. It was a huge ditch washed clean by the monsoon. Sometimes flooded, it looked like a lake. Filled with brown water, of the color of tea. Only the beverage in the cup they shared standing on top of the ridge looked less watery. The color of that was for the thick boiled buffalo milk. Not a day went without he making a comment on the goodness of that milk, and she not laughing to it. At it. Forgetting the day, at ease, an hour at a time. As the orange sun set and the porous skies gave in, again. To another lash of night long rain. 

2

Each morning, her huge dog, that monstrous canine, demanded comforting by the pedestrians crossing the street by barking out loud from the first floor balcony and craning its neck out like it would take a leap now. It never did, but the children stopped taking that street. The ones who would earlier sneak into her garden to steal shrubs of pink table rose and pineapple from the bushes. Or a raw jackfruit or two. The canine put an end to that for good. But after that, there was no one. The barking would stop once her hoarse scream scared the animal off to a mid morning snooze. And then she would emanate from the rickety house in her off white maxi dress for summers. With a cup of tea in her hands, chewing one of her own sun dried coconut cookies. To tend to her rose bushes and to cut off the weed. Weed, you know.

-x-

Last Name

Now I'm sitting in a corner, hidden
And sulking
Again, I am laughing at the memory of that moment
Suddenly, it is years ago

Here is a sunrise by a pond
Then the bare branches of autumn
Colors of April
Waves of the sea, and my toes

Do you realise,
How swiftly,
Our existence merges and emerges from Illusion
And vice versa

A bunch of memories
Will soon become a collectable
The dearth of words for a poem
A distant feeling to recall.

Amongst the scores and scores of days
We live through and worry endlessly about
Only few will make it to the album of life,
When we die and move on

Something which was so heartbreaking then
Doesn't mean a dime anymore.
Come to think of it,
What was his last name again?

Wasn't Frost right,
When he said that.
'It goes on'
Wasn't he now

So, live in love
Die with your eyes closed
And heart open.
Also, write a dozen insane poetry.

Condiment

Don't blame me, honey
If I don't keep no memory
Because there's dark concentric circles
'Round my eyes, of worry
The one time I am glee
Is when you with me;

Swivelling about our plum backs
To your music & mine
Tip-toeing on zig zag marble floors
Tugging to strums of guitar

Talking of places, far off
And their peoples
Colors, black blue red & grey

Talking still, entwined on the kitchen slab
Windows shut,
Breathing in unlocked airs of 
Summer winter and rain

Exchanging stories of our mothers
Names of our fading past lovers
Chopping tomatoes & potatoes
Spices & flavors

You're the condiment, baby
The one that adds flavor over me.

So, don't blame me 
If I complain amnesia
'Coz I am so busy living, suddenly. 
I ain't keeping no memory.