Blitiri

The sound of something falling into place.
Click.

Cymbals inside my head.
Poetry. Break into a sweat.
Smile. The spoken word.
The sky opens up.
Repetition. Repetition.

Buzz. Splash. Beep. Zip. Ping.
Woof. Woof.
Clifford still talks to me. That big red dog. From 1992. [Or was it 1993?]
Onomatopoeia.
How do you forget that word? 16 years [Or is it 15?], I've tried and never failed to fail. Yes, that last phrase isn't mine. It's Kurt's. But does it mean I've stolen it, plagiarised it, in the parlance of the times? I don't know but I'm sure he wouldn't mind. And so neither shall I.

Why are you reading this?
I've always wanted to ask this question, bang in the middle of every one of my serious pieces. I never got around to being so stupid. I tell you, my head is heavy. "With what?!", I can hear many voices exclaim with disdain. **These words between the asterisks are meant to convey that I was silent in response to the question.** I didn't have a witty retort. Maybe Woody Allen might have had one. I'm sorry not to be him. But then, I shake myself violently and ask again, is it really so? Reconsidering it, I don't think I'm sorry not to be him. If I was, it would mean I'd have to be sorry for not being a lot of other things in life that are more important to me than being Woody Allen. I don't think I'm ready for such a drastic restructuring of my life's basic principles and values at this point. [You know how hard it is to get them in the first place. But that's not what I'm going to say.] I'll clear my throat, make a serious face, look into your eyes and say this - "You see, there's only so much a man can be. And being sorry for not being Woody Allen is not one of them."

That is one of the fastest things I've ever written in anything even remotely related to my blog and I have a feeling I'm not done yet. I'm compelled not to look to my left, because it's where my bookshelf is and I'm afraid a peek into the heavy names printed on those curvy spines might bring me back to my senses and break the flow of thought I'm so sure is perfectly in tune with my rapid churning out of words in the ether in front of me. Was that a meaningful sentence? I am getting so good at typing out without breaks, would you believe me if I said I didn't use the 'backspace' key at all during the course of writing this entire entry? Alright, you won't. Especially if you know me well. But it's true. I didn't use it at all. I used 'delete' to correct my typos only so I could finally write this line and end this on a grand note but the effect's all spoilt now. I have to find another grand way of ending this. So you can end reading it on a high and feel that I've written a very good piece and maybe even like me for writing it. Oh, the travesty that writing has become these days. But I assure you I'm not one of those vain, self-possessed, narcissistic writers. I swear. On myself.

I suddenly feel like standing up and delivering one of Alan Shore's wonderfully constructed, wonderfully expressive, wonderfully informative, wonderfully emotional and wonderfully soporific closing arguments. But I'm not Alan Shore. Ohkay, we've already been through this.

Enough for now. You can leave after reading a story. One of my own (wonderful) concoctions. No, no, not a concoction, it's a true story I've been part of. I've always loved how branding a story a true one suddenly makes it all the more interesting and believable. So, yes, it is a true story, a very true one.

I met god once.
He said to me, “Son, there’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. For a long time now, I’ve seen you in pain, waiting for help. Why didn’t you ever try to talk to me? Are you dumb?”

I said, “Maybe, yes... But god, I too have something I’ve always wanted to ask you. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that you might be deaf?”

We've been on very good terms ever since.

My private Oasis

Saturday night.
A sprawling grey road.
Life after life whizzes by past me as I walk alone, overwhelmed by civilization, by concrete and a night brighter than a day.
The sky cloaks itself in black, rendering itself immune to my searching gaze, immune to the suffocating modernity around me.

I just walk on. A headset for company.

All of the stars, are fading away
Just try not to worry, you'll see them someday

Just take what you need
and be on your way...

A smile.
My private oasis.

For Goya

I look in the doorway. Empty.
Closed doors. Blind windows.
It's dark inside. Outside.

The night freezes. The bed is a cold, hard stone.
My heart refuses to close my eyes.
I close them. They open.

Sounds. They seek me out.
Footsteps on gravel.
Applause for a matador.
A paper torn.
Names.
Dying leaves.
Incoherent pleas.
Wailing violins.
Clawing into my mind. Tearing me apart.

The voices. The visions.
My paltry afflictions.
If only I could wish them away. If only.

There is a stranger in the mirror tonight.
Do I know him? Do I?
I have his eyes.
And he has my face.

Contented with his two-dimensional existence.
Unperturbed by the silences that prowl around him.
Untroubled by the travesties of this world.
Blind to the burdens he knows not.
Silent. Within his lines. Within himself.

If only I could be him.
I am everything he is, yet I am not.
I am more.
More than ink. More than lines.
More than I need to be. More than I want to be.

If only I could subtract myself from him and just be.
If only I could know what not to know.
If only I could be a figure in ink.
If only I could be a paper.
If only I could be him.
If only I could be.
If only I could.
If only I.
If only.

Dirge for a childhood

An archway into a room, imposts darkened by a lifetime of hands brushing it on the way past.
A curtain where a door should have been.
Peach coloured walls.
A TV in the corner, a foldable calendar on top of it, displaying a marriage of a blue sky and a bluer sea. A VCR in the broken shelf beneath, and a box full of incompletely labelled video tapes.

A window grill, worn away by time, rust screeching through.
A black tape player shrouded in a white lace knit cover on the window sill, its 'rewind' button missing. Music cassettes strewn about.

A groove in the wall that is a bookshelf. Brown, wornout books of literature. A pen stand full of sketch pens and pencils. An old, dark grey dressing table. A lavender talc. A stack of folded papers, a red ink pen and a photo frame with a grey picture. A little red diary.

Another groove in the wall that is a bookshelf. Old newspapers, notebooks, school books, comics and ancient stories. A schoolbag flung into the corner. A pair of dusty school shoes, socks neatly tucked into the soles. Curtains drawn across a window, scarlet pimpernels glowing on a fluttering fabric.

A doublecot with a white headboard, the decolam broken at the edges, brown patches showing. A little alcove behind the headboard, storage space for spare beds, bedsheets and pillows.

A taunt, some movement.

Little, chubby fingers on the headboard. A figure concealed in its hiding place, little eyes peering out from behind the sheets. Another figure tiptoeing towards it from the other side of the bed. A hider, a seeker.

A squeal. A triumphant scream.
Peals of laughter.

A threnody from the future. A dirge for a childhood.

Netherland

Where am I?
Not here. Anywhere but here. Nowhere but here.
Here. Nowhere. Everywhere.

A dream that is a life? A life that is a dream?

They say that some reality is born out of dreams and some dreams are born out of reality. But what about something that belongs to neither, the netherland, the nowhere that exists everywhere?

Frozen, beyond expression, beyond emotion, my knees give way to the ground as life steps down from its pedestal and reaches out to me. The sky learns to smile down at me, the land learns to endure me and the air learns to breathe me in as the world finally wakes up to me. It slows down for once and lends me a glimpse into its clandestine intricacies. Beyond days, beyond nights, beyond dreams, beyond reality. The past and the future crumble into a blank as I step out of time and watch it amble along, history in its wake. Free from callous clocks and taunting walls, it is then, in that nowhere, that my thoughts finally find their words, and my silence finds its peace.

Random Notes

Note 1 -
To capture the essence of its time, to imbibe in itself the everything, the ether that pervades the milieu that creates it, that is what all art aspires to. Take a Goya, a Michelangelo, a Kafka, a Tchaikovsky, a Van Gogh, a Mozart, a Goethe, a Turner, a Dostoyevsky, a Cartier-Bresson, a Matisse, a Neruda, or any other great piece of art, it is redolent of the times that created it, like a grave where a handful of the sands of its time have been scooped up, funnelled through the artist's genius and encapsulated for the future by his vision. It is for this precise reason that the artist exists, to immerse himself in and carefully preserve the vicissitudes of his time, to elevate his work to the pantheon of greatness, of art worthy enough to be called the graveyard of time.

Note 2 -
Is touch mutual? If I touch something, does it necessarily mean that it touches me? Or, if I'm touched by something, does it mean that I've also touched it in return?

Note 3 -
Poetry is like a solitary streetlamp raging on in the depths of a night. It illuminates only the trifles that lie within its reach, leaving the rest of the prodigious night to your imagination.

Note 4 -
One of the harshest realisations you could have in life is when you realise for the first time that time is not a continuum, that you've been lied to when you were led to believe that it flows in a straight line which, of course, it does not. It might seem only just - some might even go so far as calling it poetic - that man's most complex invention, time, should be represented by his simplest, the straight line. But life isn't poetic, nor is nature. And it would be a mistake to expect time to be. After the realisation, your first feelings would be those of fear (as, doubtlessly, many of the first-timers reading this would be experiencing right now), then panic, then (in some cases) relief and finally (in all cases) indifference.

Note 5 -
Life is like an escalator. Once you get on it, there's no getting back. It takes you where it wants to, whether you want it to or not, and delivers you at the end, whether you want it to or not.

Extended Note 5.1 -
Trying to go back in life and time is like trying to go down an escalator which is going up. It's irritatingly painful, and even if you succeed in moving back a little, you never get to stay there for long. And above all that, the harder you try, the stupider you look.

For a little girl

She walked up to me and said, 'Popcorn, sir?'

I said, 'No, thanks', and continued walking towards my car. But I could hear her walking behind me, requesting me to buy because she hadn't finished her quota for the day and the night was already done. I thought about all I'd just spent just before walking there and took out a ten from my wallet and turned around to face her. She seemed to misconstrue that as a donation and said, sternly, 'I don't take charity, sir. If you want to, you can buy the popcorn, it's twenty a pack.' I smiled at her and took out another ten, took the pack and walked away to my car.

And, after our little meeting, here's what our respective lives choose to do with us. I get to get into my car, switch on the AC, pop in a CD of my choice and enjoy a marvellous drive under a velvety bright, starry sky. And what does she get to do? Roam around parking lots pursuing strangers and requesting them to buy something they know very well they don't want. Telling them the sad story that is her life, hoping, praying, pleading. Crushing her own spirit, one word at a time. Fair?

I'm just the fortunate one, and she isn't? Life isn't just? And she's supposed to lap up these philosophical treatises and just carry on with her simply 'unfortunate' life? Is that all there is to it? I live with a little girl who is of a similar age yet knows nothing of that. That life isn't about luxuriously decorated duplex homes, ready-to-be-beckoned housemaids, timely arranged meals, chauffeured sedans and designer accessories. Many of us don't. We've lived life, but we don't know how we'd feel if life lived us. We don't know how it would feel to haggle for a single rupee, how it would feel to never know where your next meal would come from, how it would feel to beg somebody for a trifle and get pushed away, how it would feel to be at the mercy of the whims of a cruel life. We don't. Because we choose not to. Fate, we tell ourselves. That word, that impotent word that life teaches us to fall back on when confronted with a question we don't care enough to answer.

We live in an alternate reality, insulated from the truth, looking at it through tinted windows that glorify us and eliminate everything else unpleasant to our sight. How we remove those melancholic sidewalks from our life, how we neglect the ground realities that permeate the consciousness of the country we live in, how we choose not to know that three-quarters of the country we live in survives on less that twenty rupees a day, the same amount I paid for that pack of popcorn. Do we even care that we live in a country which, at the root of it all, irrespective of what overpaid, Armani-clad executives in air conditioned boardrooms may proclaim, still remains a poor old woman, with an ailing heart? Are we doing all we can? When will we realise that placing a few good apples in a basket full of rotten ones cannot hide the stench?

But let's leave it there. I don't want to digress, and I'm not here to judge. I want this to be just about the little girl, nothing else. What should I have done? Maybe I should have bought her whole bag and helped out her quota, maybe I should have written down my number and given it to her to contact me in case she ever needed any help. I don't know what I could or couldn't have done to alleviate her pain but I can't shake the image off my mind. Burnt into my memory, that look in her eyes. Innocence tainted with anguish. Tears prowling at the edges, sick of life, sick of herself, sick of me, sick of you.

There are many emotions stirring inside me at this moment but I admit, above all of them, I'm scared. Scared for her. Scared beyond everything that has ever scared me. Life takes the best of us and breaks us down, what chance does a little girl have?

Astitva

To exist and yet be unable to do,
To do and yet be unable to see,
To see and yet be unable to feel,
To feel and yet be unable to touch,
To touch and yet be unable to understand,
To understand and yet be unable to know,
To know and yet be unable to say,
To say and yet be unable to mean,
To mean and yet be unable to be,
To be and yet be unable to exist.

That is the semantics of life.

New Year's Eve

Every once a year, a night would turn into a day.
None of the rules would apply to that night, no ultimatums to get to bed, no study hours to be adhered to, no 'lights out'.
There would even be a cake to be cut, to be eaten.
And toffees.
There would be music, friends, and an inviolable licence to stay awake all night. Even to play.
Then there would be the greeting cards. The new diaries. The new almanacs.
The special shows on TV. Maybe even some movies late in the night.
Maybe even a new dress.
Everybody would be there, smiling, jumping around as if life had just begun.

Once every year, I reminisce on those days as a little kid, and try to relive the feeling. The allure of that night and the bubbly elation without even knowing what it is we are supposed to be so happy about. The innocence that pervades memory before you understand time, before you understand life.

It's that time of the year again.

No matter how much we would like ourselves to believe otherwise, it's hope we live on. And this is the one night that, more than any other, exemplifies our amorosity with hope. We all know tomorrow's just another day, we know our lives won't suddenly liven up in the morning, our secret wishes won't promptly manifest themselves on our world, our jobs won't miraculously get exciting the next time we go to office, our worries won't just fade away just as a number fades away across our calendars, but just the same, we wish ourselves a happier and more prosperous year than the one we just had. And believe we will. No matter how young you are or how old you are, however much you might have seen in life to negate this hope, you just can't stop a little bubble from rising inside your heart at the prospect of facing the new year, at the prospect of the unexplored, at the prospect of the new. It's just who we are.

There will be a moment tonight which will belong to nothingness in time, one neither a part of this year nor the next, a tiny void that carries my hopes for everything that lies beyond. I am not dancing, I'm not singing, I'm not even smiling, but I am hoping. So I can slip into it. And live forever.

My December

Decembers come, Decembers go,
As if they never knew me

Never to come back to me again,
Never to know me again

Stranded where they've always left me
I'm left wondering where they're off to

Whether they found me interesting,
If I made a difference

If they would ever cease to leave me behind,
If I would ever get my own December

Little knowing that
As I deliberate its secrets,
Time deliberates on me.

Metaphors

Memory
is like an eye forced to stay awake,
unforgetting, unforgiving.

Truth
is like a conjurer's trick,
unconceivable, undeniable.

Pain
is like the silence of the night,
undying, unliving.

Reason
is like a voice in the distance,
unperceivable, unignorable.

Time
is like a mad man hurtling towards his destruction,
unrestrainable, unsalvageable.

Life
is like a promise to nobody,
unmade, unbroken.

Love
is like eternity squeezed out of a moment,
unending, unbeginning.

Somebody else

I've come a long way, only to realise I'm not myself anymore. Haggling for perfection among conversations with unspoken words, unending waits and unfinished windows, I've forgotten myself somewhere along the way. I've fallen behind trying to keep up, observing life from a distance and living memory's dreams in lieu of reality. I've grown weary of myself, of these unclaimed emotions, these obsessions with reason and understanding, these vain lives inside lives, of all that ties me down to myself. This isn't what I wish to be, nor is it what I ought to be. I'm done confining myself to the question mark.

I want not what I know, I know not what I want. I wish to escape myself, to let myself go. I wish to lose myself so someday I'll be able to find myself again. Big words. Maybe, maybe not. The world won't change for me but I can for it. And maybe I will. Maybe give the heart precedence over the mind, for once. Maybe give in to the otherness of life. Be all I never was. Be all I never knew. All you never knew.

I want to be somebody else. Maybe I can, maybe I can't. I wouldn't know. But then again, weren't we all somebody else once?