Singularity

Sitting alone in the balcony

Turning thirty five in four years

Fifty, in exactly nineteen

A few years forth, dying, unheard of

Days go by

Nothing changes

Incessant callous waiting fill hours

Erode weeks and fortnights

Suddenly it's two thousand and eighteen

Past July

Seems like only yesterday 

Was new year's, when I sat in the balcony too

No sight of babies

Or the money

Or the glory

Or the awry badass writer of fiction 

I've nothing but this 

Singularity

It's not that I don't talk to folks

But slowly I've burnt the bridges

Bridges that connect me to the outside

Nobody comes in

And I never get out

In spools of dreamy thread, entangled I lay, singular 

Too spoilt to move

Too rigid to break out

Waiting to merely age like your average human

And die out, unseen of 

Deranged

My home is in major disarray. It smells. Of weird smells and squished bananas and leftover chocolate and sweat, perhaps. I can't say what more precisely. It almost has some captured odours of regret that it has mixed with real smells. Regrets that I didn't probe enough, that I didn't try enough, that I got carried away. What it doesn't recall is that there was no space to maneuver. Since the beginning, since the time I was mere stardust, I have never truely felt empowered. It's nobody's fault. Just that I haven't felt real power, over anything or anyone else. I have felt also too ashamed to seek out support. Right since the beginning I have been too weak and hapless. And since I am shy, I have never liked company per se, and people, I have been shrouded in the darkness with myself. I have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, therefore into non existence. It's a quagmire I am trapped in. I have trapped myself. Now it has gone out of my hands. I truly cannot control how I feel, how I think, how I process thoughts and store memories. I am powerless even over myself, so weak I have become, I feel deranged. There is no love. There is not much hope. Just a bottomless hole. And I am shooting into it, into it deeper and hoping to see something, someone to hold on to, but I don't, I cannot. I sit in my smelly house in afternoons through long nights, waiting for sleep that doesn't even show up. And I don't know how to get out of here. 

Caring for Plants

Wherever I go, a tree accompanies. Imagine me, walking with a tree. It's not like that per se. But wherever I have been, a tree has been beside me. In my childhood bedroom, near the window rose a coastal coconut. I saw entire monsoons through it. Near my current bedroom, my neighbors who I have never encountered, have a coconut grow right through their house. It's not a courtyard, but almost. Tonite I see the moon through it. When I was a toddler, at my grandmother's, they had a hibiscus in the courtyard. It shot up to the roof where it mixed with the tendrils of the rangoon creeper. Red velvet hibiscus flowered amongst vines that weren't its own, but almost. Now I keep a potted jade plant at my desk, and water it not more than twice a week. I keep the plant for company, for I am a lonely lonely person. I am a very lonely person. Ironically so because alone is the way I want to be.

I have potted plants too, but they are permanently in convalescence. Never has it been that all of them are happy and fertile and flowering at the same time. Sometimes, one is broken by the wind, one is overwatered, one is yellowing in its leaves, one has forgotten to flower, one is recovering from autumn, so on and forth. They wilt and come back to life, but never at the same time. Clearly, I am not a carer. I have my own moods to handle. Sometimes I get away for weeks without a house sitter. Sometimes I just don't love them enough. But mostly, I keep losing hope. Mostly I am hopeless. That's the reason I have plants accompanying me everywhere, to keep the hope flowing. But I abandon them, they abandon me, it never goes well. It's not the mutually beneficial relationship I would want it to be. Nobody ask the plants, because they can't speak.

A sickle shaped jamun tree stood on the other shore. Of the river. Boughs of it bent on the water, like a lover. With the complicated emotions of a paramour. The boughs remained the same, except for a few leaves that fell off and the new ones that sprouted, but the river constantly changed, the water of it, changed every godamn instant. The boughs tried to remember the lover of last night in today's water and found nothing to connect then and now. Yet, they somehow ended up loving the river everyday, because they had fallen in love with her once. Back in the day. When its water had been an omniscient monsoon green and frothy, and also in spring when the water had been crystal clean and the boughs had seen their own impeccable reflection in it.

Thus, now they gotta havta love the river in summer too, when it doesn't even exist. 

Dirty Dancing

Won't you come outside with me?
I know, inside is more fun,
Clearly.
The lights are dimmed and disco
And we're dancing

Like there's no tomorrow
Sans any bodily coordination
Clearly
We're too high to dance
Too high to stand, or sit

So, I whisper
Into your eyes,
'Wanna go out in the dark, with me?'
You push back the hair behind my ears
And whisper back, 'in a minute'

Outside, it's 2 AM
No earthly hour this
And the sea's running wild
Tides are high and water's splashing
With delirious intentions

We are squeezed in between,
Land and sea
And standing still,
But no matter how hard we try
We're shaking, shivering and dancing

You keep your distance and ask
'Now we're outside'
'Whaddya wanna do'
I say, 'Nothing'
'Let's go back in, shall we'

Suddenly, I remember
For the briefest moment
When you'd bent down to whisper
Your lip had touched my ears
And then a current passes through me

Nausea

When she was a little girl of nine, her mother gave her a sliced lemon with salt every morning. She was a nauseous girl and the school bus, with its sweaty kids and shut windows and the gas fumes on the road made her want to puke. Her head rolled and her stomach turned. The lemon helped, somewhat in the forty five minute onward bus journey in the morning.

But there was nothing when she returned in the afternoon. No lemon, no salt. Nauseous and with too much saliva under her tongue, she would keep looking at the watch on her wrist and count minutes for the bus to drop her at her stop. There was no respite, but one.

There was a senior girl whose hair stood like a dense tree on her head, and she also wore thick spectacles with black frames. The school bus took somewhat of a detour to drop this senior girl home. And every day before she got down at her stop, the bus moved through a few narrow streets full of snack shops. Any street food her nine year old mind could imagine, was being sold there, undoubtedly. And more. 

Those streets saved her, those smells warded off her nausea and wafted through her nostrils into her stomach. Her mouth salivated and she waited patiently to eat whatever mother would have cooked the moment she stepped into home. She nick named it the street of spices, through which the bus traveled hardly for seven minutes or eight, but she waited and counted minutes to get there. 

Also, there was this friend who saved her some egg rolls from lunch. His mother worked with her mother and hence they were friends. They sat side by side in the library period and hence they were friends. She loved his slimy egg rolls, hence they were friends. She got him a band aid that time he scraped his knee playing kho-kho and hence they were friends. They lived nearby and their bus stops were consecutive, hence they were friends. 

Their friendship bloomed like a concomitant to the chaos of their nine year old lives. Yet she was so nauseous and she imagined, why he was not? 

Girlfriend

I've spent quite a lot of my life in classrooms. A lot of long, very long years in classrooms, let me spare you the details. But I don't remember a single word of what I was taught. Like nothing. Only some deeply embedded basics have stayed with me. But beyond that, nothing could pervade my razor thin attention span. 

And, years after, all I can recall is the Zoology lab. It's funny because I hated Zoology. It was one of the papers of Biology, which itself I had chosen as an optional because, I  like to keep options open, I like to reduce regrets to the minimum. But I had zilch  interest in Biology. Okay, Botany, yes, I have loved plants. But Zoology was the creepiest subject, in like ever. Why would I remember the Zoology laboratory class?

Probably because the lab assistant had a real toothy grin. And her smile stretched  from one end of the mouth to the other. Like Julia Roberts. She looked nothing like Julia Roberts, but just the smile. And she smiled sarcastically, most of the time. Like when she was sure when we didn't know what the correct answer to her question was. I for one, didn't know what the correct question was, most of the time. I have no idea how I passed. 

Or it could be because, in the other laboratories, they made you stand and do the experiments. Chemistry and Physics, I stood in the labs for hours and hours and my feet ached. I literally wouldn't be able to feel my ankles. But in Zoology lab, we would get to sit and dissect a frog. Or look at an octopus or a snake in formaldehyde. But I am not sure, if merely comfort would sustain a memory so long. 

I ran into the lab assistant teacher lady a few months ago. Somewhere. At a wedding, at an exhibition, at the mall, at a sports tournament, at the theatre. Doesn't matter. I might have just dreamed her up. But it brought back memories of my Girlfriend. My girlfriend when I was seventeen and she was seventeen, we sat side by side in the Zoology lab. She was the one, oh she was so beautiful.

And I don't mean your conventional beautiful when I say she was beautiful. She had a bony face, and was rather thin (some men like to hold on to some flesh), and she always talked as if she had a mouth full of saliva. The mind remembers the most pathetic of things, but the mind is right. One day I saw her wearing a long sleeved dress and the entire sleeve, right from her shoulder to her wrist was embroidered to reveal her skin through the holes. 

Not that I hadn't seen skin before. I had seen skin before. I had seen her bare arms, probably. But I cannot say what that dress did to me, I fell in love. Even today, I can see her thin wrist with a coppery bracelet with her initials dangling from it. And  her bony hands, with the veins showing, and the mild blue nail paint on evenly filed nails. What a view it was for parched eyes, from having seen mummified reptiles for too long. And since that day, till the end of college, I was deeply in love with her and held on to every meagre idea that gave me the hope of loving her a little longer. I decided to take a deep interest in Zoology because that was her favourite subject. There wasn't much success there. 

But I helped her with her Physics experiments which I was relatively better at. Helped her solve a Math problem here and there. But in no other class, did I have the access to her, the way I did in that Zoology class. Man, those hands. 

Omelette

They weren't lovers. Definitely not lovers. They worked together. In an old building that looked out through yellowed old translucent glass windows. Their seats were a couple of aisles apart. They weren't introduced. They met when a bunch of their colleagues were having lunch in the cafeteria one afternoon. And they got talking. Not so much to begin with. But one day later when both of them accidentally showed up for lunch late. They shared a meal. It was an intimate experience, sort of, sharing home cooked food always is. His mother packed his lunch. She packed her own. She stuffed rotis and curries and pickles and salads into her box. Biscuits for the afternoon, oranges in winter, mangoes in summer. Sometimes a spare banana. He got rice and at least three kinds of dals, she teased him. He teased her right back, about her small portions and if she was on a diet. She teased him back about something. And then right back again. And that's how they became acquaintances. After that they got talking slightly more, but not that much that people would talk, you know. Not that many cared that much, nevertheless.

Sometimes they would ping each other on the office chat messenger and synchronize their lunch times. It was good to see a familiar face. The cafeteria felt like an untamed place, with many many strange faces. They would often choose a table at the distance, in the corner and eat staring out the muffled glass windows, staring out at birds and trees and traffic and sharing tit-bits of their day so far. 

Then one day he asked her to make him an omelette. 

His family was vegetarian. He sometimes had eggs back in college. But now that he stayed at home, he hadn't had a good greasy omelette in a long time. He mentioned something about an omelette seller on his college campus who sold  good stuff in their hostel corridors and was the only thing to  look forward to while they crammed notebook after notebook on the night before exams. He sounded nostalgic. 

So she said she would make him a nice omelette and he could have it for breakfast the next day. She gave it her best though, but back then she didn't know how exactly they flipped those things over without breaking them into pieces. She googled the tactics and after a few failures, finally succeeded in bringing him an omelette. She actually learned this skill only for him. Because she never liked omelettes. Fried eggs were more her kind.

They met for breakfast and she eyed him tear into her omelette with such excitement. Though he commented she could have managed with lesser green chillies. Yet she could say what a good time he was having.

Many such mornings came by and went past. Slowly, they kind of fell apart though. He wanted someone hotter. Hot girls lived in big cities, so he transferred and moved out. She stayed back and met someone there. Right at home.

But every time she flipped an omelette, he quietly tip-toed back into her memories. 

Obituary

From time to time,
I've wanted
Beautiful things for myself
As a treat, for going on

Tonite, I want one of those
Big transparent umbrellas
For when it rains on foggy days
And a cold sun doesn't show

I would hide under
My big transparent umbrella
To be only seen,
What paradox

But paradoxes can't stop me
Not tonite
Honey, because
Today, Donald Hall died

A gentle soul
With massive pools of eyes
Senile, yet lovable
Brimming with sorrow, overflowing, almost

Donald Hall has passed
What a day, oh
June 23, from old age
From a life, so satiatingly lived, perhaps

I kept googling him,
From time time
Just to check that he was okay
Breathing, alive, writing

It's like one of those things
Which I indulge in
As a treat for going on
But I forgot for a while

And he died
Quietly, oh
What will happen to words now
Who shall write them, like he did

As my worthless little tribute
To my hero,
Tonite I shall indulge
Want more things and umbrellas

Go easy, treat myself
Just for going on
Despite, in spite
All the sorrow he caged in his eyes

Your Wife

Your wife, she, looks a little bit like me. Not exactly like me. That would mean you married her out of your spite for me. But I know, she has some of my traits. The way her hair falls, or how her eyes are cute, lips are thin. Or how she ties a sari. Or how's she's just so plain. No unreal sheen comes along with her. The kind of sheen that often attracts men, she desperately lacks it. Although, there is this thing that she is so completely ladled in her innocence, that it makes up for all dearth of sheen and undoes other lacunae, if any. She's much like me. I am not like her. She's like me, however. Corollaries aren't gonna hold, you know. 

When we were, you know, together, I always thought if I was your original kind of female. I mean if released in a jungle of women of all kinds, would you pursue me? Probably not. I must be bonkers to assume that. But with time, I began believing either one of the the following facts could be true.

Either, you actually like nerdy lost women. Who had an air of awkwardness about them. Who weren't entirely fluent in their thoughts, fluid in their motion. You kind of felt drawn to that, imperfection. Staggering aberration of perfection. That you liked women as they came, for real, flawed, loving, with a mist of sorrow, with a heart full of love. Or, that I had changed you. Metamorphosed you from the skirt chaser that many men come as, to someone more genuine. Who could see through clothes, and even a little bit of skin. That I had made you the man you are. And then left you. 

Quietly, on your own, you didn't pause to give a fuck. And went ahead to find someone like me. 

Goin Home to Hide

Goin home after several months
Since November,
Yeah, it's been December,
And the rest of this year

Has been this long,
Precisely cuz
I wouldn't know
What I would do there

Breaking this routine could be
Harsh on my peace
But I can't be here nomore
So I've booked my tickets

I am going home to hide
Ain't gonna meet nobody
Just stay in my room
Draw the curtains shut

Nobody shall enter
Nobody shall leave
And I will stay as shielded,
As could be, and camouflaged

So much so that
My mother won't know
That I am home and hiding
Seven days

Living in mild brown daylight
Sipping teas and swiveling in my head
Goin home to hide
And regather myself, but mostly to hide

Girl.

A strange thing happened. Years ago, I met a girl on the train. I was travelling cross country, it was a longish journey. Over forty hours. I don't remember where I was headed or where she was headed. Usually I won't talk to people on a train. On general principle, I wouldn't talk to you. I wouldn't talk to anyone. I do not like talking. Or listening. Only listening sometimes a tiny bit, but never talking. That must be why I don't know any people. Like you know, the world. I think I know about twelve people, in the world. I never wonder why that is.

So my train journeys used to be extremely lonesome, and hence delicious. I would read, watch, observe. It was a natural caccoon. If trains didn't smell as much as they did, I would live on a train. But I met someone I knew on the station, not directly though, I knew someone who knew him. And he happened to be seeing her off. The girl. This girl. Our berths were adjacent and it was understood we were going to take this journey together, given we had our destinations in common.

The girl, she turned out to be quite vivacious. She was so lean and so young and so garrulous, she grew on me. Throughout the forty hours she talked, except when we slept. She guarded my luggage when I went to pee and vice versa. Somebody had told us that thieves would inject sedatives into water bottles of naive folks on train and later when they passed out, they would loot them inside out. Life is so precarious, so on the edge of the razor, like literally anything could happen. She said she had an eye on both our bottles and that that precariousness made everything so special, any sip, any morsel, any breath could be our last. Yet she didn't stop talking.

We got down at obscure stations and ate choiciest of snacks, filled our bottles from filters on the platform, chatted with random people, almost missed the train a couple of times. We stood at the door, felt the wind. Stared down bridges. Back on our berth, we imagined what the world looked like through the almost opaque glass window in the AC compartment. She told me about the doctorate thesis she was working on. Something in marine biology, I recall. How she wanted to study molluscs and snails and the like.

In the last four hours, I opened up too. Started talking. Like really talking. When I don't assess the impact of my words on my audience, I really talk. I talked for a few minutes perhaps. Then silence took over. Her station was two stops before mine. We bid an awkward goodbye. I would never know where that awkwardness stemmed from, we liked each other of course as co passengers, there was nothing else there. We exchanged numbers. But we were not going to stay in touch; perhaps we both were aware of the impending loss of touch; gradual falling away of an infatuation that wasn't even here, in whole. 

Impact Winter

The asteroid hit a couple dozen miles east of Japan. The stupid thing could have hit anywhere; in Siberia; in the Sahara; Himalayas; I don't know - Antarctica, for all I care. But it hit the sea, off the coast of Japan; in the shallow North Pacific. Where many wars had been fought, by brave men; mere decades ago. Where ships had been sunk, where many still stood guard. I am not saying had it hit Antarctica, we would have been saved. We were doomed anyway. If it hit anywhere on land, anything combustible would catch fire and vanish into ash in seconds or start a fire burning for half a year. If it hit the water, deep water bodies, covering three fourths of the surface, a tsunami would be inevitable. Either way, the atmosphere would be filled with dust, or particles larger than that; particles of all shapes and sizes, particles that aren't particles at all. We, the living, would breathe that dust and asphyxiate. It would take minutes to travel to all parts of the planet, this apocalyptic dust. But more than that, they would freeze out the sun, you know, the sun light would would be refracted back into space because the atmosphere would become so much thicker and opaque. So we would all freeze to death. Probably before, we could even begin the asphyxiate. Mass extinction in seconds. Everyone freezing, holding hands, breathing in ice air and jamming our lungs, blood vessels bursting, eyes popping out, strands of hair standing up in universal goosebumps and not thawing. Nothing would thaw; ever again. Within a few more minutes, most of all this, most of this all, would be under tides and tides of deep blue-green, deep turquoise water. The North Pacific, the Atlantic, very own Bay of Bengal and Arabian, who have been shyly touching beaches for decades, would rise together in a giant upheaval and take back the earth. Some would say, the water would recede. Some would say, let it stay. Either way, we, the dead and gone us, would be shrouded in Impact Winter for longer than an afternoon. 

As you know I

As you know me
Quaint woman I be,
Slightly aloof
Always hungry, perhaps
But mostly aloof, very

Lost, in a world within a world
Handicapped,
With the fear of everyday
Every hour
Paralysed with mere shame, of being herself

Sometimes
When you focus on me
For a moment or half, inadvertently
You wonder
Why she be the way she be

She could be alright
Afterall
What could be so massively wrong
With this woman
Why ain't she normal, just

Then you try to
Figure me out
One night when I am drunk
Or, when I am quipping literature, or
When I'm blurting about my favourite TV character

You lose interest
Look away
Find other things,
More engaging
Less outrightly taxing, unrewarding

Just about then
I look at you again
Return the look that is
It's not my first time
You know; I be who I be

The Egg-seller & other stories

When I was a child, and this I write from honest memory, my world was much smaller. Not that now, I live in a larger world. My world remains the same size, or perhaps, it has even shrunk to convenience me. But I know that there is something huger beyond my sight. Something vast and intractable. As a child, I had no idea.

I walked a few hundred meters to my aunt's place where my school bus picked me up. Spent the whole entire day at school, picking which battles to fight, and which to let go. Was dropped off exactly where I had been picked up. I stayed at the aunt's till my mother got back from work. In the evening, I sure ate some noodles and watched some cartoons. Did my homework and went to bed. I remember the orange grey light that filled the rooms. The papaya trees that grew just outside the window, beside the ones laden with drumstick, always tempted me to stretch my hand out and pluck one. We lived on the first floor. There was a thorny tree full of sweet berries just outside my parents' bedroom. I could stand on the bed and clutch a fistful of berries.

But the egg-seller broke the routine. I am not saying, there were no other sellers. There was the little girl, my age then, selling balloons and flutes and loudly playing them in the streets. There were mobile snack sellers in the afternoons, candyfloss, fruit cakes, ice-creams. There was a quiet grocery store man to whom I was sent with money to buy noodles.

On my trips to the grocery store, I noticed the egg seller next door. He sat in a cabin with an asbestos roof, with a face that gave away nothing. He looked neither happy, nor sad, neither content, nor dissatisfied, neither angry nor impatient. He looked like nothing. Just a middle aged man who sat at the edge of his cabin selling eggs in paper pouches to whoever came by. People said he was a wholesaler and had bought much land and property just by selling eggs. Perhaps, they were just stories, we would never know now, would we.

But what attracted me was the pungent smell of boiled eggs, emanating from his shop every evening. He had a helper of his own, who chopped onions and chillies back stage. The egg-seller neatly pealed the boiled eggs and split them into two with a thread strung out. Then he would place the egg on a small piece cut out of newspaper, sprinkle the onions and chillies and most importantly black salt. I think the black salt was the ingredient that made the customers come back.

Whenever I had extra money, I would go there and chomp a couple of eggs. Whenever guests came to our place and asked me to show them around, I took them to the egg seller. I would take my new acquaintances and introduce them to the egg-seller. His cabin became the cynosure of my tiny little word. The center of everything. 

Equilibrium

I spent the weekend by myself. All by myself. I came home on Saturday morning, in the wee hours. I had been drinking till midnight, wherever I had been. After having passed out, suddenly my eyes split open in the sunrise. I made my way home. People were hardly up, though. Except for dogs in the street, some flower sellers, perhaps, with an early mound of chrysanthemums.

I got in and shut the door. I spent the entire day trying to get past my hangover. For some reason(s), I hadn't been sleeping well the past week. Like four to five hours a night. Usually, I would like to get at least six. Even having a glass of wine wasn't helping. The alcohol, coupled with insomnia, made me worse. Towards the afternoon, I got some broken sleep. I slept more in the evening and woke up at night. Ate something and slept again. Overate actually. Needed my body to cool down.

After so much sleep, my mind felt at rest. I didn't wake up until eight thirty on Sunday. When I woke up, I thought it was like five. And that I should go back to sleep some more. But then it was eight thirty already. My head wasn't hung over anymore. It felt light like a bird.

I changed into nicer clothes. I had been wearing my six year old torn frock since Saturday morning. I ate some poached eggs and ran out to get some plants. I surprised myself with how much I chatted with the man in the nursery. I asked about weird plants and ended up poking my fingertip in a dangerously disguised thorny flower. The nursery was by the lake. So I intermittently gazed at its black waters. A part of me wanted to take leap and never resurface. Then I distracted myself with the plants.

I bought a shrub of cream hydrangea. I had read a story with hydrangeas in it, when I was a child. Those hydrangeas were red. Mine were just cream. Such a mysterious little plant, I thought. The nursery man warned me that too much sun would kill it, it grew well in the shade. Also I got the pink small button rose. Back home, I rearranged my plants in the balcony, as per shape and proclivity for the sun. The soil got under my fingernails. I tied my creepers to sticks with threads. I also tried to contain my wildly outstretched bougainvillea tree with a string. I thought, this would give it some shape.

I ate lunch. Quietly, alone. Sometimes, I imagined I had a baby in my arms. But mostly, it was me alone. There was no space for hallucination. No time for spirits. Just us, mundane, loner human bodies. Loitering around on Sunday afternoons, binge-watching TV.

By nightfall, I knew I would tear apart. So I baked a cake. To gradually steam off my inner volcano. The cake was substandard. But the sugar did me good. At night, I reheated some of the leftover curd chicken. I didn't let anything clutch me. I stayed free.

Unencumbered, hence I slept at eleven.

Monday morning, I went to work. It stormed like crazy in the evening, because this day couldn't contain the summer anymore. I came home to see, my bougainvillea was broken in the wind. Perhaps because, I had tied it. Had it been free, it would have swayed and saved itself.

Ridden with shallow guilt, I untied it immediately. My heart bubbled  inside though, I had always loved its scarce white flowers. So I sat on the floor and waited. 

Cost of a Poem

How much is the cost of a poem
I wonder
But wondering not allowed, I know
It's Zero
Z-E-R-O

It costs nothing. It values nothing
Ain't nobody gonna buy your poem hon
For there are thousands of others
And no one's gonna wanna read this shit

But I could approximate
It costs fifteen bucks.
Cost of the cigarette that induces it
Plus the taxes

Sitting on your ageing ass
Staring into semi lit April night
Alone in the balcony
Of a suburban one bedroom

Smoking and thinking of the
Many many thoughts you missed
Living an ordinary life like this
You decide to not deny yourself, from being who you truly be

And write a poem at the end of the day
But does it matter
When there are thousands like you
Poetry ain't ever gonna get you a buck

You're gonna be sitting on your ageing ass
Watching the fifteen bucks go up in smoke
Alone and denying yourself further
Don't know from what exactly though

So S-T-O-P
Already
Cease this relentless embarrassment
Quit. Leave it. White out

Sunglasses

Can't remember where I kept my sunglasses
Last I recall seeing them in the sun in the sand
Sun and sand, glorious, golden
After that, I don't know where they went
Think I borrowed my brother's
Maroon brown tinted aviators
For us, big and wide faced progeny
And the sand had scratched the glass minutely
Through which I saw lines in the sky
But after that, not a clue
Also I had my own very own, bluish one, perhaps
Bought with first salaries
Alibis for virile getaways with girlfriends
To cloudy resorts, filled with wild Jacaranda

Now I think,
At my semi ripe age of thirty and one
That I should wear my sunglasses, only all the time
While chasing cabs
On walks replacing siesta
In evenings, while walking out a store
They won't complement me, for I am ordinary
Dangerously ordinary and pale
Further, I wear flats and loose clothes to hide flab
But still, if I wear them sunglasses, all the time,
Would appear that at least,
I tried to be a cross between myself
And something posh
For now, for me, this is enough, just about 

History

Erosion of memory is an indispensable part of healing. One forgets, one gets past, one heals. When she was younger, she didn't believe she would one day be able to comfortably forget. In the angst of young and unrequited love, she strongly believed that one actually never forgot anything, only with time learned compulsively to get by. But as she grew older, it got real. It was actually possible to forget. And it wasn't necessarily an active activity. Memories faded quite automatically, passively, quietly. And before she consciously took note, many chapters of  her life had been lost. Suddenly she felt possessive about her past, however lackluster that had been. She felt unfairly dealt with, after all.

It felt so recent anyway. Once she started scraping off the surface, she counted with her fingers the number of years that had past, since. Not many. At least, not that many. But her slight wrinkles told her a different story, that she's older now. With a totally different set of  priorities. But then again, when did this happen? When did she get so old? She felt as if she would undo the Venetian blinds in her cubicle and see him on the other side. Through the glass, he felt immediate. He suddenly erupted from the past and felt so so so damn close in time and in space. Like he had jumped out of that continuum into this.

But the truth was far from this midday hallucination. He was nowhere around. You know how actual physical raw time space work. Once someone has passed, someone had passed. They ain't coming back for good. That said, how can memories be unfair. How can they self destruct? And so easily. Feeble recollections of events haunted her, grazed on her mind and taunted her. And she couldn't remember any further, any deeper. They had been so particularly staunch about keeping no memorabilia, there was nothing to cling to. How sometimes she jumped into the traps she herself had built.

Probably this doesn't make much sense. But she couldn't understand how she could totally completely absolutely forget a man who had loved her and who she had almost loved? Subconsciously she thought of the others like him in her life, and had nightmares about them. But never anything on him. How strange. How quietly he exited, never to reappear again. So much history gradually decayed in her mind and she didn't even realize except for now.

If she undid the blinds, just now, would he still be there though. She pondered.

a

In a, the man hid within the child and the child took refuge in the man. Things came to an abrupt end six years ago for them because she couldn't take the ignorant child that showed up when he was trying hard to be her man. Back then, a had been striving for real, he did all the right things. But she couldn't do justice to his efforts because she was young. Twenty-five can be a flimsy age. And she was not as mature as she thought she was, thinking back from the current day that is. Time is a simple scale, keeping a decent record of the events in her life, but at the same time, it is immensely illusory. Time gives her ideas, and can concoct chimeras. Though she could have been a truer version of her self at that age, but she hadn't fructified that much back then. a imagined her to be as innocent as she seemed, but in her mind, she was much smarter. Sometimes when a put her in her place, she was mortified. But a leaned on her, despite all his gathered cynicism and practicality of a thirty (something) year old man. He resigned to loving her because he couldn't believe even after having lived through broken relationships for so many years, he could land someone so naive and juvenile and beautiful. a immediately grabbed her with both hands (metaphorically) and asked her to be his, in the not so subtle language of flirtation cum mild anger cum frustration cum i-am-smarter-than-thou innuendo. At twenty-five however, she thought that she was like forty-five and had no time for a. Because after shitty over geek-ed teenage years and dull college life and terrible work life, she was so done with all this. Blinded by her magnified self image, she couldn't completely understand and appreciate when a told her that she was so young, almost like a sapling and all this would fall in its place when she was a's age. Really, it would. He even held her hand and consoled her. That now what looks unbearable would feel like child's play later down the line. And that there were newer chapters of life, they could explore together, if she gave him a little space in her heart. A tiny space, is what a had asked for her. Ironical, as it may sound, her heart was empty then, except for the erogenous ideas that filled it thanks to her heavy social conditioning. And yet she wouldn't give him that tiny space. And repeatedly put him in his place. And that's when the man in a would take backstage and the child would show up. Irritated for he found no reciprocation for his feelings from her, flabbergasted at how she could let such an opportunity of love just pass her by, a thought was she that dumb after-all, contrary to his ideas of her. And she would assume that a was just flirting because he wanted to get laid. It all melted down to sex, after-all, didn't it.

But, if you can fall in love with someone post-facto, that is, a very long and abstracted post-facto, with six years between that and now, today, when she ran her fingers down those old conversations of theirs, refreshing them in her exhausted memory, she understood a from the perspective of a thirty (something) year old woman that she now is. And a makes tremendous sense. Bless him. She fell for him, post-facto. And if apologies work this late, she's sorry too. 

Mother of Pearl

I live in perfectly good weather;
Yet on April afternoons, I'm sure
I will yearn for rain torrential
Whirlwinds and broken boughs
Of middle aged drumstick trees.
And roads laden with layers and layers
Of leaves, of all colors, brown, yellow
And black. Tremendous clouds in the sky
Colored like the Mother of Pearl
Impending and grey premonsoon.
Gusts of sea breeze, blowing apart
Our calmly gathered selves.

In May, the summers that bake you
That turn the house into an oven
And start distant forest fires
The floor that burns your feet
Eyes see the chimeras at noon
In Forty Eight degrees of Celsius
Dust and more apocalyptic dust
Thirst and buttermilk, and sugarcane juice
And endless bike rides to nowhere
Except an orangish red hot sky
Mangoes in full bloom, almost rotting
Everything so hot that it skins your soul
Feels like retribution for being merely human

I live in perfectly good weather.
But I miss the heat and the rain.
Call me crazy, yeah