a sideway glance

A gesture not meant to be seen by you, from a person that you though you knew,

and suddenly you realise. Its all about the animals

that the society keeps under wraps.  The ferocious,

naked animals in all of us.

Unspeak

When will we learn to be comfortable with our individual silences?

When will we begin to hear the silent echo of our unspoken songs?

Maybe then, wedged between a decade of urgent whispers, and angry embraces,

we will find, all the conversations, we thought we never had.

ffffound 2

A Two Tint Nailpaint

Remember the shimmering butterfly wings,
that you put in your pocket?

Remember my joy when I found them,
lying there by themselves;
as if wanting to be resurrected,
in someone’s chick lit?

Remember the gossamer crumple that became,
of them, forgotten in the depths
of your indifference?

Remember the look on my face,
when in between coins and other tchotchke
I saw crumpled, the remains of my figments?

You wanted to hold me, you never told me then
not until much later, one night at ten.

Much later, under the brilliant midnight stars,

did you notice I didn’t speak very much that day?
Did you even realize, when, the moment became paint in a rueful way
when the stars, the words, the skies,
and all that was to be
ceased to be ?

Since then, holding my hands, have you never noticed the unusual butterfly color on me ?

Rancid thought

For even a second, I would not have anticipated

a day so devoid of all context,

all drama and all the death.

It is now that I recollect, that glee

by its mere syllable, can drive out

much of cares and context.

Look what happens..

Hows that for you?

Vacant key slots,

Uncurious, vacant eyes

 

Is it me that you see in the beyond,

or is it the beyond that you see in me?

 

During those conversations with empty spaces,

did you imagine a fly, a woodpecker in me?

 

If there is something on your mind, tell me,

I don’t do telepathy.

 

“You do, but perhaps I don’t,

since you can’t see without the speak.”

Crowds

No matter how bold a print she wears, she is bound to get lost in the crowd at point. No one waits, when they are running late.

snippet

Yes, Lets twist words, dry them out in the sun to evaporate. That’ll make it all better, that’ll make the ghosts go away.

सपनों का सौदागर

उलझी हुई पलकों से मैं पूछती हूँ
जिन सपनों को अपने कन्धों पर ढोती हो,

उन में से कितने पूरे हुए हैं?
गुमसुम आँखों से मुझे देखकर बोलती हैं वो,

इन सपनों को अपने आंसुओं से सीच कर देखा है,
इन्हें तो सच होना ही होगा….

” ओ काफिर, इतना गुरूर अपने सपनों पे न कर,
न पूरे किये मैंने, तो इन आँखों में कुछ भी नहीं रह जाएगा,
इन्ही आँसुओं के सिवा…”

Shayad..

Dil dhoonde ek tukda khushi, lambi, chaudi si zindagi,

khushaal tu, har haal mein, salaamat rahe teri har khushi;

 Phir dil ko kyun shikayat… shayad….

 

( from a random tv jingle )

‘This may sound like gibberish to you, but I think I’m in a tragedy’

For a the past few days, a voice that I have begun to accept as mine,
has been festering questions in my mind..

a question that no doubt would seem visceral to most philosophers and writers who have read
the two genres of writings in equal degree… most even hold favorites, for as humans it is impossible not to. I, as evident find a pull towards the melancholy.. the tragic..

But there was a time or perhaps there are times when I tire of it, and turn towards the lighter more enjoyable texts, and find myself thoroughly enjoying it… but soon I begin to feel nauseous at the thought of being shallow and indiscriminate.

Last night when i was about to sleep, I turned over and with that turn a thought hit me…..
how come all stories that I come across these days seem to be happy endings,
whatever happens to the people and the characters that don’t get their personal happy endings?
Does it mean that they feel like there is an imminent happy ending for one and all? Or feel dejected at the thought of not deserving one? or perhaps of being left out in the fair where everyone got theirs.

It hit me, that well, some stories are not meant to….they would absolutely lose all their beauty and romance if they had a happy ending..
Won’t you then agree that tragedies are more devoured, more deeply felt and moped and sobbed and smiled upon than their happier counterparts??

Holding that thought I went to sleep…. and in the morning as if to show me that my thoughts of last night were not as inchoate. A movie buzzed on my television set. ‘Stranger than Fiction’ directed by Mark Forster
I believe was made just to justify this thought… the protagonist in the movie had to die, it was being written in the plot at that very moment by a famous author, he was distraught, and after trying very hard managed to find the author and tried to convince her that what she was writing was actually happening in his life… that she had made his life a tragedy.. He didnt want to die.

As an author famous for killing her heroes, she had to kill him( in the story which would also kill him in real ) and so she wrote… in despair of how many she had killed already… and gave him the untyped copy, so he knows how its going to happen…..

Well, he read it…. and loved the beautiful and poetic ending, surrendered to the beauty of the moment, how many of us get poetic endings of our own anyway??….to make that story a masterpiece he had to die…. he told her to go ahead and write the story, just the way she intended it..

Seemed to me like tragedy had finally won over …
it is difficult to find beauty in tragedy, but when one does find it, it is even more difficult to ignore it.

but, yea, the writer of the movie fell into the rut of happy endings again…. and the protagonist didn’t die… the author had changed the ending (duh! )

To say the least… it broke my heart ….

Unglued Apathetic Millions

When does one come to a point,

when they don’t even realise that in the pursuit of bigger responsibilies,

they are letting the narrow lanes of everyday life purloin something more precious,

something that lies at the pith and core of living.

The Spirit, that

is no longer in the view, it has been scrubbed, kneaded, trampled on, and left dehydrated

It saddens me to think, that somewhere down the line,

I will too, turn a traitor to the spirited side,

but for as long as i can resist it… I will…

even if it means having to find new beginnings every so often…

 

Of An Unknown Origin

In the inconsequence of nothingness,who would’ve thought,

there’d be questions waiting patiently in the basement, where all the old and used furniture is stashed…

Is it that when you have nothing to distract yourself, do the unnecessary thoughts enter?

If so, then why is it that, this empty mind of mine, has begun hosting anything but the devil.

maybe its the gentle push of the new mother, or the malarkey of the old one?

that I finally find myself bending towards, a faith, that I had long ago forsaken,

on behalf of a two third of my generation.

my mind plays games again…

how many other ways are there to escape the unbearable torment of reality?

spiderish chronicles

transfigured into a lump of gossamer

glimmering strands,

blonde, foolish, sticky and brittle.

Of Pungent Agarbattis

Of certain smells that remind me of you,

arise a whorehouse of disenchantments,

the whorehouse smells of green leaves, mosquitoes, musk and pungent agarbattis,

just the way my favorite country does, but somehow the proportions of the ingredients differ,

by a slight margin of uncovered teeth and covered pupils.

Is it then to hard to justify, this pestilence in my veins?

steel branches,

why do i feel a pang,
when i realise that my mind is now conditioned to find beauty
even in the sun reflecting off the steel bars of street lamps

where are the branches through which I used to find bliss catching the same sun?

peeping tom

I’ll wait for the day, where i will turn back,
and not find you peeking from dark alleys, half lit windows
and cobblestoned roads of my fancy.

FFFound this…

Is it strange that I feel powerful when I don’t listen to my heart?

underground

like an ostrich

i have my head underground

i’m happy

i think its gone

i look up

the coast is clear

i turn around smiling, relieved

and it chars a hole in the back

so which one of us is actually the coward?

Clumsy fingers

Disconnected, in a way, dismembered

one part from another, one thought from another.

One love from another.

Teach me how easy it is to see the rim where one runs into another, teach me how to spot that difference.

and make it more pronounced. spell it out for me.

I’ll reach it with my clumsy fingers and rip it apart.

So that from then on,

Only the edges are sore.

and ?

The lure of a vast body of water,

of invisible shores draw,

count till ten, before the impulse sets in,

Can you hear the sirens, the malarkey

all the unnecessary essentials of existence?

Can you hear me shout out, a jumble of words,

that I did not think of ?

Just recited off the ocean surface and resounding off it.

Can you blame me then for what happened or what will?

When you disturb someone mentally, you can always give yourself a little relief by the mere fact that you can never know exactly how much you have hurt them,

but how do you forgive yourself when you cause someone physical harm?

spread-eagled

Spread-eagled, i watch,

as the tantrums of this mind, make a person,

who is but an image; i watch it act out, obdurate, yet i am not sure

if this is just a hallucinatory projection,

or if the light beams on the concrete have been so resilient,

that a permanent fallacy has formed on its surface.

A fallacy that has nothing beyond it.

Just mortar and habit.

“The vast empty spaces of a plank page apall,

and everyone walks into the maze blindfolded.”

Margaret Atwood from Negotiating with the Dead.

pugnacious : effrontery

a room with a view

The bed seemed to rotate all the time,

all the things kept rolling around across the floor,

this constantly revolving building was not such a good idea after all,

four times the money, four times dizziness.

 

As he got up and walked to the balcony,

she walked out of her room,

seeing her, felt like a thousand ruthless pinches on his already bruised body.

just when the tears sprang up in his eyes,

 

the building rotated to a different direction….

and he remembered why he had taken a house here.

Accrusting

She awoke to a paucity of softness,

turning into a crustacean is not that easy, she thought

The carapace still had traces of sensitive human skin-ness,

but she could see it disappear and morph in a thick water resistant shell,

 

she didn’t like it so much…

Crows Feet

As i stumble across a stack of woebegone scribbles,

i find crows feet, at the corners of my eyes,

and each distended toe, tells a different story.

Water clots

A damp spot that finds its origins much deeper, a vitriolic droplet escapes silently

An overcast day hides the sun and clouds burst and it drizzles and the signs of dampness are everywhere,

had it rained?

no one knew?

The faint smell of dust and the besmirched vagabond days and the  mourning descended

and left

had it rained?

no one knew.

1208 minutes apart

They  lived miles apart,

The distance was in their mothers, their village,

their english literature, and their mathematics.

 

The distance was between that one habit,

and the memory of it that which he conveniently left in pages of a calender, relegated 

and that which she rescued and enshrined in courtesies.

 

It was in the insipid realization,  

that geography is a play-thing,

but there are some distances that are most often left to time and weather’s vagaries.

The West Indies

In order to be sane,

we should stay on different continents.

 

As the distance decreases,

sanity lifts up her skirt, and exits, as though escaping

to more pliable dwellings.

 

And so, for further references

if you find me delirious,

go away to Europe, Africa,

or better still fly away to the West Indies.

…

…

Those who expect absolute goodness out of themselves, 

are the ones that falter the most.

It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples,

extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels,

which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

As You Like It

Frillless

Sometimes, do people hang onto the concept of simplicity and practicality,

just to avoid too much work, and save themselves the trouble,

of generating brilliant ideas.

or just to avoid getting out of their working eiderdowns.

Pahasu House

An eyelash, drifts through the stripes of dust and gold that 

a window, fourteen feet high, once threw on my old bed.

The arches of my ancestral home, still bent low with mourning,

and the loss of ninety three or so years of service to a pearl bearded man.

The room now lies bare, and dusty,

that eyelash has settled in the clockwork of that old winding table clock, with a radium dial.

Someday perhaps, in a sunday antique market,

the eyelash, will be released again,

lumbering with it, an outdated wish.

The Obligation to be Happy by Linda Pastan

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

Why does death endear instantly,
a person, that my entire childhood has run away from?
Why do i now think of a billions things i could have learned from him,
and a million stories he could’ve told?
just when he has gone?

The person who made my father from his being,

Did i do justice to his story, by never even giving it a chance?
was it the 70 odd years that stood monolithic?
or that one impulse of a remark?

Acrid yesterday

Having thought myself a good person always, 

i am dumbfounded when someone points out the contrary

when the ghost of the one thing I have disliked in people, has emerged from within me,

and made a permanent residence in my nerves and sinews,

I wonder now, how could i not know when this absolute possession happened?

and how is it now that i should throw this tiresome and acrid tenant out?

Of sepia moments

When i make friends with a person, i like to keep discovering newness in them, the same people i have grown to know so well;

A couple of years ago, a batch mate with much command, ordered everyone to get their baby pictures while coming back from vacation, and in that whole process of oooh and aaahhs and pictures being circulated and flicked by random admirers, some were as it seemed lost forever in the banter and confusion. 

With no negatives to make copies from, it seemed like a part of some peoples past was taken away. 

Now that everyone has packed for the last time and sent trunks and trunks home, many have found some pictures of unknown babies.

I got a chance to look at pictures of two such people recently,

both good friends. Having always wondered where a certain personality trait came from, this seemed like a possible answer to many musings, a kid in the class photograph grinning with his front teeth missing, another little one hiding while others burst crackers;

What if these were some moments which made them a certain character, and slyly i feel like an illegal entrant to past of the people who don’t know that I know.

Pictures have a way of throwing an entirely different age and time on you, little does it matter, if it is some one i know in the picture or someone i don’t.

Did the fact that your mother made you wear your sisters frock, make you the fiery individualist that you are? Why do you stand apart from the group, so rigid and lonesome in all your pictures? Did i just take a peek into a part of you that is obscured by years of reading P.G Wodehouse?

Corrode

Now there is a ruin in sight,

one can smell, the decay, the hope

forming an overwhelming odor which now clings

in to sun-bleached clothes, is woven with the weave,

settles as grime in hair

Irrespective of personal hygiene

some traces will remain

and craft themselves as anonymous stories

to be told to one time acquaintances,

and little children who cannot comprehend.

Soneto V

Escrito está en mi alma vuestro gesto
y cuanto yo escribir de vos deseo:
vos sola lo escribistes; yo lo leo
tan solo que aun de vos me guardo en esto.

En esto estoy y estaré siempre puesto,
que aunque no cabe en mí cuanto en vos veo,
de tanto bien lo que no entiendo creo,
tomando ya la fe por presupuesto.

Yo no nací sino para quereros;
mi alma os ha cortado a su medida;
por hábito del alma misma os quiero;

cuanto tengo confieso yo deberos;
por vos nací, por vos tengo la vida,
por vos he de morir, y por vos muero.

Garcilaso de la Vega, Spain 1503-1536

“Not all those who wander are lost.”  

J. R. R. Tolkien

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

M. Scott Peck

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

Henry David Thoreau

The most important things are the hardest things to say. 

they are the things you get ashamed of , because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out…

the most important things lie too close to whereever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

and you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.

that’s the worst…

when the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.

From Stephen King’s ‘The Body’

october monsoon

The air heavy with moisture, stands still in its place,

while i try to speak, it stands in the way,

last night something went missing,

the air is now toying with the idea of it,

what will happen to the shapeless hole that is left behind,

will it get filled with the water that rains later?

When we two are parted

When we two are parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted,

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning

Sank chill on my brow

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken,

And light is thy fame:

I hear thy name spoken,

And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,

A knell to mine ear;

A shudder comes o’er me

Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well:

Long, long shall I rue thee

Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met

In silence I grieve

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?

With silence and tears

Lord Byron