Miss.

The boy who could talk only in reverse.

The girl who could write only upside down.

Skirts fluttering by the seaside.

Ties buried in sand.

Papers secretly folded up in notebooks. Coloured shapes.

Ice cream dripping down fingers.

Pencils in bubbles. Tall trees.

Words once written, thrice swallowed.

Discreet mumbles. Whispered chuckles.

Shapes hidden beneath blankets.

The pinafore by the curtain.

The muddy shoes behind the door.

Hands inside hearts.

Nothing ever goes.

The smiles always come back.

Always.

Enfin.

Diderot. Barthes. Rhone. Descartes. Corsica. Camus. Morisot. Cocteau. Bordeaux. Balzac. Duchamp. Hermes. Citroen. Proust. Asterix. Curie. Gauguin. Les. Chanel. Tzara. Voltaire. Pyrenees. De Gaulle. Musee d'orsay. Rousseau. Mandelbrot. Versailles. Poincare. Dior. Tiersen. Louvre. Satie. Mersenne. Derrida. Niepce. Mousse. Lamarck. Bardot. Bonjour. Lyon. Gericault. Napoleon. Vuitton. Cezanne. Eiffel. Champagne. Degas. Godard. Jeanne d'Arc. Daft punk. Sartre. Casta. Manet. Normandy. Dumas. Cousteau. Hennessy. Renoir. Pasteur. Oui. Jeunet. Cannes. Seurat. Besson. Becquerel. Matisse. Cartier-Bresson. Hugo. Crepe. Merci. Le Corbusier. Rabelais. Flaubert. Seine. Rimbaud. Debussy. Louboutin. Foucault. Amour. Croissant. Daguerre. Arles.

At last. At long last.

Your eyes.

Parchment.

The soul of all things unsaid.

Silences.

Voyages into serenity.

Dreams.

Shapes in a starry twilight.

Echoes.

Glimpses into an alternate reality.

Promises.

Words for a heartbeat.

Infinities.

Symmetries of an eternal embrace.

Remembrances.

Songs of a memory's music.

Absolution.

My beginning. My end.

For a man called David.

He is a footballer, first. Everything else flowed from that.

On that one, I could agree with Paul Hayward for once. For a man who was probably the most eponymous David of his generation, one who remained eternally grateful to a hard-earned gift that had gifted him all else he acquired in his life, battling constantly to be recognised for what he was first and foremost, a footballer, in a country that chose to devour him for all that he chose to pursue off the green pitch, that is indeed exorbitantly heartful praise.

His Achilles tendon may not be as critical to his country's sporting fates as a particular metatarsal once was, but then sport has an essence that transcends the triviality of victory and the tempestuousness of glory. It thrives on desire and the certitude of skill, the exaltation of the passing moment and the promise of eternity, piqued by the very lure of its impossibility. Sport is an art, if only for the unflinching passion it demands of its ardent practitioners and the diabolical heartbreaks it ever so enduringly alleviates, feeding on the fiery dreams it bestows its delicate wings upon, even for the hearts it so heartlessly tramples with the rigorous exactitude of the spiked imprints of its boots.

The world can, after all, be quite cruel to its conquerors merely for being what they are, its conquerors. Sport is not any different. To break a man so, life could be forgiven for giving in to its wily pettiness, its schadenfreude. The dream may not get another life but then maybe that's acceptable, for there's always memory to be turned to. For that's the glorious undeniability of sport, the immortality it confers on its everyday past, the spangled webs and the illuminated evening skies that constitute its history.

So long, David. You are, and always will be, a footballer in my heart.

On a dream of waking up by a view of the sea

Bleary eyes taken in by the distant din of wakefulness,

molten words, earlybird thoughts for a nascent day,

treading on the soft acquiescence of an ivory bedspread.

Dreams scribbled in formless feather,

fluid languages of a tranquil netherland

finding their feet in a morning's blue patience.

Rolling waves parleying with an open sky,

exchanging silent notes on a hard day's night.

Airy shapes drawn up by a bright blue breeze,

sliding through the slenderness of a balustrade.

A pair of half-open eyes

lost to the minty breath of morning's memory,

framed in the foamy evanescence of a wide blue sea.

[9:14 am | 10th Mar, 2010]

Labyrinth

A muddy road absent-mindedly snakes away into the distance. Beside it, a tree desolately crouches over its own weight, dripping the rain's excrement. The sun is nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by a ravenous sky. There are patches of abrupt greenery all around, like swathes dressing up a brown earth's moist wounds. My heartbeat sounds feeble and distant, almost as if from another body.

You're there, a trembling shape in lavender forcefully thrust into the brown callousness of the evening. On your knees, elbows bruised, stained with mud all over, wordlessly staring into the morphing shapes on the wet ground, delicate pain streaming down your eyes.

Time turns painfully slow, as if it already knew what it was coming to even before coming to it. I try to move towards you, call out to you, but somehow I know without knowing that none of it will work. I know my limbs will be nothing more than mere casts in hardened concrete, I know my words will turn heavier than my tongue, and I know the impenetrable vacuum that separates our shivering shapes. Your pearly pain pecks away at me like a searing scar inescapably burnt into the insides of my eyelids, as I helplessly watch the rain pour down, washing away your tears into the barren mud beneath.

Something tells me it is not true, that it is not happening, that it is just a bad dream, that these thoughts are mere phantoms of my imagination, curled up in the wet night's chilly existence but I refuse to believe it. Maybe it is, maybe it is indeed just a bad dream, maybe you are not there, maybe the pain is not there, maybe it will all disappear the moment I open my eyes, but what if, what if it was your dream and not mine? What if it was the reality my dream was supposed to wash away? What if it was your nightmare and I was an intruder, just an outsider, forever looking in?

And so it is then that I confess to my faint heart it is a picture I cannot escape, for it is my inextricable labyrinth, my kryptonite, the scorched eternity I have known all along and shall forever know until the moment the icy vacuum cracks open and the bleary tenderness of that lavender shape rests in the humble inadequacy of my arms. Until then, I know I shall be the unbreakable dream orphaned in the frantic nebulousness of oblivion, watching unblinkingly as my love eats into my heart like a slow sunset burning up an evening sky.

[3:07 am | 11th Feb, 2010]

Hello.

How elegantly life lives on,

Escaping lines, listening outside harmonies,

Lingering like oblivion, humbling everythings,

Learning on habit, enduring luck,

Orbiting heartfelt edges, loving love.

A tale of three balloons

Tiny hands grasping a thin, wrapped up memory

Unwritten words whispering to a turquoise childhood.

Squared stairways, lonely tables

Breaking habits, rolling tongues

Grins bridging hill stations and valleys

A glowing filament entombed in shapely glass

Green billboards in a directionless maze

Clicks for a canvas, alphabet on gravel

Colours on glass, half-baked words in neon

Diaries for dreams, footsteps slithering up walls

Fishy somethings, kids playing truant at work

Headlights snaking through a canopied darkness

Starry shapes by a fog-kissed lake

Russian farewells, Spanish boxes

A bubbly red heart peeping out from behind a dark wall

Blind ends and brown bags, envelopes with names

Passengers in a collective dream.

Silence painted into a rocky hillock,

floating silhouettes scribbling shapes on a perfect moon,

blue hearts escaping into the endlessness of memory.

[2:13 am | 31st January, 2010]

Désarroi

I have been you, just as you have been me,

I have been we, just as you too have been,

things have been themselves, just as we wanted them to be,

but here we are now, silently drifting into a word.

Nouns no more,

mere verbs now,

we're just shadows drawn up in boxes,

despondent waves mumbling to the stars.

Like lifetimes wasted just learning to breathe,

everything has to end, or begin, sometime

and before the world starts to squirm,

uncomfortable in its dark vacuum groove,

I shall be done. Soon enough, perhaps.

For a green package

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse [The Penguin Modern Classics, 1977 Reprint]

The Great Artists: Constable [A Marshall Cavendish Weekly Collection, Part 2]

The Great Artists: Goya [A Marshall Cavendish Weekly Collection, Part 10]

That handwriting inside.

That lingering aftertaste of a used-book store.

If only distances were measured in smiles, you wouldn't be so far away now, dear.

[6:54 pm | 6th Jan, 2010]

Notes from a week gone by

* An aching red sun melting into a cloudless twilight, a sky lost in conversation with a ship the size of a fingernail, an eager moon peering down into tiny puddles of salinity, a lighthouse screaming into emptiness, another heart lost, and found, in the sinewy crevices of an unnamed rock. [6:14 pm | 30-12-2009]

* Why do we love being tourists? Because we can be out of place in places we want to be, a nobody the world around doesn't know or care about, and hence leaves us to be all that we want to be? That uninhibited state we all crave for, gifted in childhood, destroyed in maturity? Is that what wanderlust is, the simplistic allure of being a nobody everywhere? [5:41 pm | 02-01-2010]

* Sunrise by the sea, the last of the greatest year of my life. I want to hold the morning between my sandy palms and give it a big wet kiss. [7:13 am | 31-12-2009]

* A flourescent frisbee's tossed about in the distance in a pentagon with figures for corners, a lonely streetlamp shines on in unending anticipation, a calm sea diligently carries out the sun's last wishes in orange, and a stranger silently drags his feet across the moist sand in shapes of memory. [6:39 pm | 30-12-2009]

* People are to be loved for what they can be, dear, not for what they are. Otherwise the endeavour fails by its own definition, constrained by the tiny pieces of active consciousness it takes under its purview, instead of all that the rest of the infinite heart could have been, or will ever come to be. [1:29 pm | 03-01-2010]

* I am a ray of sunlight stopped abruptly by the yellow ball thrown up in the air. I am that little red bird on the ledge, twitching its head like a breeze. I am the black ink escaping into the sinuous stitches of a shirt. I am a straight line endlessly wrapped around a blue cylinder. I am the air fizzing out of an open green balloon. I am that word teetering at the edge of the brown page, stuck in italics. [3:01 pm | 01-01-2010]

The art of memory making: The Diu-Gir-Chunagarh episodes

* Dinner at the end of an exhausting day, muscles aching with unresponsiveness. Order whatever's easier to gobble up, (tomato soup+idly sambhar+vanilla icecream, if you may) and slink back deep into the chair with just the head visible over the table. Play Chopin's etudes and watch the place turn mute, your own personal pantomime. Figures dressed in black and white moving around as if in rectangular grooves, trays being carted about with the precision of weighing balances, an outside world's moving traffic trapped in framed glass, alphabet being scribbled into little notepads, mirrors on the walls reflecting brown light off the wavy woodwork above, a kid in the corner smiling with his grandfather... The edge of the table is your own personal piano and your fingers start rendering Chopin's compositions along the crispy white cloth.

Now, close your eyes and enter the perspective of somebody else sitting opposite you, look at yourself for a good minute or two and see your own sheepish smile gradually unfurl as you realise what's happening, where you are and what you're doing.

* The sea under a full moon night. The yellow ball in the sky keeps smiling at you until you smile back at it, the occasional star reminds you of its lonely existence, the sand's moisture melts beneath your feet, there's a silent conversation writing itself on the palm, Radiohead's on in your ears... Your throat's drying up, the falsetto's too hard to even imitate, there don't even seem to be words there in the song to be sung, just shapeless voices, but you still sing, sing as loudly as you can into the sea, into the endless folds of foamy darkness.

* Sunset at 5 40 pm. There's an abandoned room on the rocks, and you slip inside. The window's half open, peering out into the wide evening sea. There's a beautiful stranger on the ledge, reflecting into the sunset. Some feet play football, some hands throw a frisbee around trying to catch it, some heads just stay still listening to themselves think. Kishore Kumar's alive in your ears, and there's an orange dog posing on a cement plinth, hiding in the guise of a dustbin, lolling its tongue out and rolling its eyes towards you. The old man at the edge of the shore walks along slowly, as if on water, his silhouette burnt into the sun's dying rays.

* 9950 steps to the hilltop, they say. You patiently take a few at a time, knowing you're not going the distance anyway, memorising the rocky greenery around with random music. Blur's Song 2 comes on, and you decide to take the stairs at a sprint, not to stop till the song ends. The valleys by the side get more menacing, the trees start waving around like flags, companions fall behind, monkeys by the side stop and stare, your feet seem to have a mind of their own that disagrees with yours, there are little spots before your eyes, images fade in and fade out in your vision like a worn-out videotape, there are rocks in your lungs drumming on your diaphragm... Then the song ends. You rest by the rocks, spinning for breath. After a while, you throw up.

But you have a story to tell.

* A 60 km drive through the country in an autorickshaw. You sit at the back, legs dangling out of the back door looking down on the road. Cars approach you, smile and disappear to your right, fields and villages pass you by amid rocks stacked up into dusty walls, trees grow up in lines as if disciplined by a headmaster. You stick your head out and grin into the heavy breeze with foamy clouds in the sky, straight at the afternoon sun. Sing out into the disappearing road, the perforated white lines extending forever into the vanishing trees and the cornered hills. Suggestions include U2's With or without you, Nirvana's The Man who sold the world, One Republic's All fall down, Oasis's The importance of being idle, Blue Man Group's Sing along, Keane's Spiralling, Ana's We are, Lifehouse's Hanging by a moment, Nada Surf's See these bones, Darren Hayes's Like it or not, R.E.M.'s The great beyond and oh, oh, U2's A beautiful day.

* Just past the stroke of a new year, fireworks and wishes done with, you walk away from the crowd in the beach to the end until the shore ends, climb up the hilly rocks in the moonlight until the point where it juts out into the sea, find a rock shaped like a pear, sit down facing the dark dark sea. Listen to the waves crash into the rocks down below, the occasional burst of foam rising up into the air, and watch the pale white crests of silent waves in the distance calmly approaching their inevitable destiny. Let Pink Floyd play Coming Back to Life. Do not sing. I repeat: Do not sing. Do not talk. Do not write. Be. Just be.

[Purely for the sheer intensity of emotion felt, the following two moments need to be mentioned in a different league from the others, so here's an invisible line separating them from the others]

* Earphones where they belong, hands dug deep into denim, the Amelie soundtrack playing, you walk down a sloping road in the midst of a crowd, letting go of yourself, dissolving your identity in the sea of faces around you, taking in the view of the hills by the side, the green trees winking in the distance and the town below squinting its eyes to look up, you hop along, swaying your head freely to the accordion and carving shapes in the air to the piano with your moving feet on the stony road... There are no words to describe the feeling, none.

* Parasailing at 5 pm. The guy's getting you ready, strapping on the harness, setting the parasail right, mumbling instructions in your ears. There's red movement in the distance, the ropes start to tighten and a few steps later you see your feet lift themselves off the ground, the air gushing into your face. Radiohead's Go Slowly is playing in your ears, that falsetto you shall forever associate with this moment, gradually sinking into your heart and taking you higher, higher than you've ever gone, the sand is fast weaving itself into brown paper under your floating feet, the green hills in the distance are waiting with their arms open as if you were a bird, the sea is expanding endlessly into the blue confines of the sky's blurring edges... There's a way out of this world, and you've just taken it.