Stray thoughts ...

Independence Day – I would like to know about it; I mean more than its history I would like to know more about its relevance and significance today! What is Independence? Is it that tri-colour cloth fluttering high at the traffic signal near my house? Or is it those patriotic songs that are going on since early dawn in the by lane? Or maybe it is the usual glory of the parade show and those national awards – which nobody will remember or care who won what even one day after the announcements. Every year when it comes around, I look for a reason to celebrate. Every time, it’s more and more difficult to find one. This time I was only thinking of Nirbhaya, the fearless one, my dearest younger sister – I wanted to reach out to you, I wanted to find out where you are, now. The more I thought of you I was getting so sure that you are the wind beneath our wings and you will surely never die. The poison that you have taken little sister, we all have experienced that in some measure or the other. And it controls our lives. So where is our Independence? We are elephants now – who never forget … we could never forget! 

( Shaista in her blog Lupus In Flight mentioned us being elephants. )

Did you notice 'soil' carefully? To me it looks like a huge antique trunk; with bruises and scratches here and there, its hinges rusted and stained.Footfalls of history are stored in it. River beds are neatly piled in the corners; also minerals, nitrogen and phosphorous are carelessly kept here and there. On top of everything you will find a handful of sobs and sighs with a distant echo of a long lost laughter. There is also a huge colorful garden in it. All these are stacked inside the trunk for years together. And you can also keep dead bodies in it. Many of them!

How do you escape your anguish? 

Do you spread it thin like butter on bread
and keep waiting that someday it would soothe away the sting?
Or do you fling it like a chit of a sun ray under your half willing lover’s door
and keep hoping that it would churn out a rainbow sometime?
I bury them among my half-baked dreams
and in between those half-finished poems.
Among those hidden alleys of rhyme and metaphor
I scream soundlessly
or unleash a ferocious maddening stream.
Do you want to know how to escape grief?

A Writer's Soliloquy ...

The whole kaleidoscope of last year left me with a mixed feeling. I am not sure whether I could call it good or bad. A bouquet of fragrant flowers with a few thorns here and there, a bunch of laughter mixed with some incoherent sobs, some gains, a little losses, deep velvety love with a vivid lining of palpable hatred; everything together engulfed me, leaving me satisfied, pleased, yet wanting a little more, longing for a few more.

The whole year went by, with scripting cursive, sculpting words and chiseling sentences, trying endlessly to rein my storm-wild thoughts and my rainbow-hued dreams that always soar higher and higher, much above, and then keep circling menacingly hovering over like a hunter bird.

Through out the year we kept meeting only in my poems and inside my stories where we were happy despite the oddities of the world. I continued to unload the burden of my psyche in between the fissures and creaks of my writing, in the process, carving a niche, a cozy, loving home for us, silhouetted by the warmth of alliteration and rhetoric prosodies.

At times the day-to-day chores or mundane problems, a vegetable price hike, an angry exchange of words and a lost school note book or a strip of crocin tablet, banality of bills would overpower in the garb of an everyday fiend, challenging the honor of my soul. Yet soon after, just a fresh bout of drizzle or a pale Autumn Moon and a fluttering butterfly or even that bird who visited me on my verandah, the bird who has a green color that resembled a banana leaf, would be enough to put my mind at ease. And then I wrote again; I wrote about you, your love, your anger, your caresses and about the day you left. It is strange how I could never get tired writing about you. It was as if the blank note book in front of me was like a virgin canvas and after I tied it secured on the easel I was ready with my pen to flash and spray all the myriad colors of promises and disappointments, diverse patches and blotches of grief and laughter and once I started, just about anything was possible.

And now at the end of the year, and at the advent of beginning a whole new one, I have decided to stop being perfect. My over anxious nature to put everything in its right place and vacuum cleaned rooms over the years taught me that perfection has nothing to do with happiness. Now the clutter around me along with my open note book and pens and the computer that I so often forget to switch off and fall asleep almost over the key board, my messy room, all together exude a warmth that envelopes me like a soft shawl against the chill winter of the world.

School ...

I could recall my school days;

the 9am morning mass, the blue tunic frock and blue ribbon pony tail, and a forlorn scary never ending corridor. The Sister’s shrill voice defining the ways of the world and how moon travels around the earth, her solid tight knuckled fist moving in frenzy on the black board.

I remember Shumali the tall girl at the last bench; her only fault was she used to love the bright morning outside much more than the gray dull wall paint of the classroom. I can recall her sobs as Mother Superior broke a ruler on her palm for she dared to whisper in the class! Her sobs was still ringing in my ears as I was desperately trying to observe how Sister was pointing the solar system on a stale chart - ‘copy them carefully, any mistakes or smudges you would have to do it 100 times over!’ I remember my careful efforts not to be seen with ‘bad girl’ Shumali!

School was discipline, regularity, stiff upper lipped Sisters, everything so different from home, everything so much away from a warm smile. My math teacher’s face kept hovering in my head like a nightmare all through. Among all the girls' cheerful shout and running around, how I used to sit alone in front of the huge Peepal tree at the small ground and create my own fantasy world along with those crows and other birds and a lonely black faced monkey.

I remember the efforts learning to dance and sing and my never ending tears as I was chosen to be a coachman for the annual function and how much I wanted to be the fairy!

I remember sitting on the first bench trying to concentrate but all through remembering the mint scent of my mom’s sari and how cozy it felt when I used to tuck my head in her bosom.

During monsoon I would quietly go to the backyard just to watch the frogs and the centipedes minutely and in no time I would be lost in their world, imagining me as one of them, while the others would be busy in kho kho or kabaddi or any other sports.

I had never loved being at school, yet later, when I left it to take a plunge into the big bad world, I knew the young light that used to kiss the skirting of the school building would never be the same. The walls around would never be as protective again. The world I am into, will never be so safe again.

And to my dismay, I lost my little friend innocence in the twisted bent of that long scary prison-like corridor when I left school.

self - identity ...

The morning had a bad start. Everything around was bearing a gloomy upsetting tinge like small tragedies in life or those hair line cracks in a relationship. Even the weather matched my mood. As I looked at the overcast sulking sky I could feel the plight of the staggering Sun peeping now and then through broken clouds. I clasped the coffee mug even tighter in my palm as if to feel that I did have someone as my own in this world. Even my facial muscles started hurting with loneliness. My mind whipped about in a mad spinning, fluctuating from fantasy to reality.

At times like this I start visualizing myself as a beautiful princess who lived in the palace of snakes. This is the way I love to see myself; a woman radiant with laughter, with her burnished curls creating a halo around her face, waiting for a promising future, too excited and eager to start afresh. Perhaps, this is how I should have looked if the world had been more kind! And then I remember those stray grey strands that started showing up for the past few months and I smile. I realize, this is the time when you begin to think of lying about something very basic as your age, this is the time when you keep thanking God profusely for giving you a satin smooth skin and a vibrant infectious smile even if you so much as dream of starting afresh! My smile broadens into a grin. Forty long years on this Earth; forty long years of compromises, adjustments, bargain and survival! Each single moment is bathed and nurtured by tears, patience, sweat and persistence. Each pulsating second is myself! I glance back and stay mesmerized and amazed at my own strength and power! I understand how I wouldn't let go of any minute tick of the past, beacuse that's who I am! Suddenly, I see myself in an existence honest, iridescent and shimmering as my frosted white nail polish. My chin goes up automatically. There is a tindery smell of stubbornness around me. A parrot green and purple mixed obstinacy and doggedness begin to run firm in my veins. I look up. it has started raining!

Velvete touch ...

It is 6 am now and I have been waiting for last one hour in front of my open window yet morning hasn't come. It is drizzling and there is a strange gloomy darkness all around. I know how the sun rays have tried to pierce the thick dense black cloud but fail, almost like my dreams; an aborted and discarded effort. I desperately try to shake off this feeling but the rain has fetched a strange subtle stench of betrayal and it is persisting. I also hear sounds. A weird humming resonance of the falling rain and it is peculiarly getting mixed with a jingling shattering sound of glass breaking; as if my hopes and my dreams are cracking and the splinters have fallen on the ground. Broken glasses have always reminded me of broken relationships. The more you try to collect and arrange the fragments the more you bleed and hurt yourself.

I am smiling now. For, I know that today it would be the day of my poetry. Those verses will keep drifting in my breath, run in my blood and get stuck in my throat like a fish bone and I would neither be able to swallow or throw it out. But I am thankful to them. All those verses with green sparkling eyes and a promising smile, sometimes blinding me with their glitter like a flash of sun on a silver mirror, and at times like a soothing shine of rainwater on banana leaves, will save me always. They don’t allow me to shed tears incoherently or laugh too much as before. They drive away depression that used to shroud me in the past so easily, sticking to my psyche like a bubble gum. Now my poetry helps me live. They have made me human. They help me breathe. I am not alone anymore, till I merge.

A piece of my poem helps me breathe.
It floats in my blood the whole day;
It hovers in my thoughts
It hangs from my eyelash
It hides in my smile
It cuts me, bruises me, injures me at times
It loves me, kisses me, spoils me at times
A piece of my poem kindles me live.
A piece of my poem helps me breathe.

another letter to YOU ...

I have understood why I love to write so much. Guess, it is because I find it easy. Until now I have conversed about many things – my education, college professors, a new movie, the rising price, an alarming decay of human values, kids, spirituality, hilsa fish – but I do not talk about what I think or what I feel, especially words that describe pain and tears never taste good on my tongue. So I bury all my hurts deep down inside my body. May be that’s why my silences always weigh so heavy. That is why I could never relate to another human being and pain, melancholy had become most faithful of my friends till I met you.

And this is exactly what I was trying to tell you the other day. I feel normal now, like every other girl around me. I feel I don’t have to bottle up and be tensed anymore. You know, I used to feel like an envelope! I can even imagine the familiar amused indulgence twinkling in your eyes as you read this. But honestly, it was as if I am an envelope, glued and fixed. And if I let anyone come close to me they would become those paper knives and would slip through a gap innocuously only to slit me open and then I wouldn’t be able to stop or collect all those blood tinged words that will pour and spill out and get scattered all around. Hence I was guarded. So when you goaded and coaxed me to write I started living. Now I feel free. My poetry, my writings have given me wings. Do you understand that it is you who set me free? Do you want to know how I see us together here? It is as if I am running with a spool, yelling and screaming in excitement like a small girl, my hair unruly in the mountain breeze, as you release the kite and soon it unfurls above us, going higher, in a vibrant shape of clear, genuine human joy. Perhaps now you would know that my virtual communication was more because of the extent of expressing myself in terms of writing and was not so much connected with my loneliness or boredom. People did not matter so much but talking to strangers, in a way, helped in being my natural self.

But it all has changed now. You have suddenly yet firmly rooted me to the ground and among reality. And when I see you turning and reaching for me in your sleep or tucking your hand neatly under your chin, bending your knees and sleeping in peace like a baby I realize that there’s no more need for me to be celestial, to be away from the earth. A similar line of Robert Frost starts ringing into my ear and I feel earth is the place to live and love. Now my life is all about a pair of deep magnetic eyes and an unsuspected dimple. I do not need to look beyond or bygone anymore.

I know there will be other fights, other hurtful words, perhaps even tonight. Yet everything, even my ordinary kitchen utensils glitter like hope and promises. And in every nooks and corners of our house there’s so much love that oozes in intensity. I know it would guard us like a protective bubble, always.

I lost my paradise!

for the only man who has loved me real and true .......


I can not see the same glitter and twinkling in your eyes when you look at me these days. I do not feel the urgent warmth in your arms when you embrace me. Sometimes you forget my presence; at times you ignore my love. With a fear of yet another world, perhaps the only one that I can call as my own, closing down on me I become frantic in my efforts to tighten my clasp, trying to hold the only love and belongingness that I had in life. It is as if someone is trying to pull me apart limb by limb. In a peculiar panic that resembles a dying soul’s last effort and gasp for breath, I rush to your room and try to smell your crayons and touch your pokemons or just sit and watch the tiny bill board, my hands unconsciously trying to play a rhyming number on your little synthesizer. My lips twitch in a sudden smile recalling how you grumble that I had made your room look like a junk yard as I don’t allow you to throw them away. When you go out to play cricket I would quietly sit to watch your favorite cartoon only to feel that unconditional bond, as if I am blindly groping for something tangible in a pitch empty darkness.

 I think our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. I have no idea if I have failed you somewhere while trying to build a life for myself. I do not know if by mistake I have built walls instead of building bridges! Or perhaps you have just grown up and I am unable to accept that! I do not know. I realize that whatever my struggles and triumphs may be, all too soon would bleed away just like a watery ink on a piece of paper.

May be some day, very soon I will tell you sories; the good and the bad; stories of my errors and imperfect life. Perhaps then we would be able to strike the same old chord of love and happiness in between us. I am hopeful.

Once upon a time ....

There is this little girl who sits at a river bank and keeps looking at the vast azure sky. A familiar stubborn tilt on her chin is captivating. Amazed she finds out one day, the sky with a bleeding pink hue, staring down at her with a pair of caring eyes that sparkles in loving amusement! With wide eyed wonder she falls in love with the rose-sky. The orange–indigo tinge of the sky brightens up her ocean deep eyes and flower petal lips. Now she comes and sits there everyday, many a times! And the sky never forgets to flush her face with the same red pink blush.
 
She has always been afraid of silence that rises from furniture in an empty room. So she tries to grasp the sky with all her being. And then she realizes that she is afraid of one more thing too and that is – love. She is afraid of its frailty as she holds it in her heart. She understands that everyone is ready to do anything to keep it from breaking. But then it breaks anyways!

 Soon she begins to wonder if her rose - sky would drift away! But that stubborn tilt of her chin doesn’t let her say her doubts and worries to her sky. She only knows that the day he is gone she wouldn’t be able to love the stars or the sun or the moon anymore! Without him even the breeze and the birds and the rainfall would appear distant. If only she could whisper all these into his ear. May be, then her rose-sky would have taken her into his vast arms. But to save herself from this pain of loss, one day, she stops coming to the bank. She goes away, never to come back, to cry alone. But she forgets to ask the sky if he weeps for her too! If he becomes lonely without her too!

 In her haste to save herself from pain she  mishandles loss; the loss of her childhood that has already occurred and the loss of love that has begun to occur. Yet she stays stanch.

Now I see her in a garden watering her mysterious plant and wondering about a sparkling blue silver sky with pin prick red tint, the same color as that of her empty computer screen!

A woman and a swing ......

The following is my reminiscences of an innocent, fragile woman whom I met a few days ago ... the tired slouch of whose shoulders would speak volumes of the injustice, the fret and fever of the world that she had to undergo. Her quick inebrieted glances would reflect the fear and insecurity of a caged bird whose wings are long cut mercilessly. Groping through the despair and drudgery of her path uncertainly she proceeds ..... yet she hopes .... yet she longs to live and love! .......
The musings of my soul, a song unheard ---

I have always felt that life has been unfair to me! I have so often complained that life is passing and I deserve more! My thoughts are so much occupied with the unkind ways that life has dished out towards my direction! I am aware how the river of my life is flowing in frenzy towards abyss, only to be perished with all my half baked dreams and half fulfilled promises!

Then my eyes fall on this girl on the swing at the park. She is making the swing go way past safety. I keep observing her mesmerised. I realise she is a grown up woman! Her black hair streams out in rage as the swing sweeps forward. She kicks out her naked feet, her toenails shimmering and there is a peculiar carefree nonchalance in her gait that makes me envy her!

Up and down and up into the sky she swings. There is this arrogant wild abondon in her movements. I become one with her. When she is reaching the highest point of the arc, I remain poised in that weightless moment. A point higher and above the death and decay of the banal and the mundane. A place close to divine sublimity. A total quiet and serenity in my soul along with a parrot -green smell of my childhood. The woman and I stay tranfixed in the moment.

The woman is now looking sky ward, wrinkling her eyes, focussing on the ebb and flow of the horizon. She loves every minute of her momentary freedom and risk. Her eyes and her trinkling laughter is challenging the world to take it away from her and suddenly there is this peculiar confidence that otherwise is so rare in her! For she knows that this moment of living life with abundant joy and fervour is all her own, the only time she comes a winner.

I lean my body into the air along with her. My memories are now like some faded old black and white photographs. I hold them all tightly in my clasp -- my childhood friend's mother eloping and her helpless pain and uncontrollable sobs, that neighbor boy's love letter filled with filthy words that I failed to comprehend yet the taste of bitter goud in my mouth, Mom's anger towards Aunt, an widow staying with us and my helpless desparate urge to protect her, that forceful first kiss by an elderly uncle that made me puke literally, my best friend's dad - cancer - the morbid smell of that hospital room, my 17 yrs - chemistry teacher's lustful hand and Mom's ever busy schedule, -Goa Ramada - never ending misunderstandings, emotional abuse, my baby that I was forced to abort --- I clutch them all in my palm.

Suddenly, I come back to the woman and the yanking lift of her body into the air. And then I was airborne. Along with those memories since childhood I am gliding and soaring high. Now the wind carries me higher and I feel my life is just beginning! A realisation shocks me. I open my fist and let go of all those photographs into the wide. I see them falling like dead man's ashes one after the other.

For the first time the Earth's curvature appears like a smile to me. The woman on the swing teaches me this is what we do with grief. we lean into the air, swing up, be one with the divinity and open our grasp into the wide! And we live all over again with new dreams and new hopes.

Woman

It is past midnight now, may be 2 am. The woman, in her lazy steps, comes and stands in her balcony. She isn’t really beautiful in an ideal sense yet her unkempt tussled hair and the careless way she has donned her gown, that occasional biting of her lower lip and mostly, that drunken love in her eyes make her look quite irresistible. But she is oblivious of herself. She can see only a part of the sky from where she stands and a half peeping moon to keep her company.
She enters a private world of her own. Now she lovingly looks at her foreign splendorous Star. It is drawing her like a magnet. How terribly strong its pull is! She long desperately to be one with it. She yearns to touch it; to make it her own. She meets her splendorous Star and then it is a strange strong bond! It comes to her when it shouldn’t have, yet it comes firmly and steadily. She questions the sky why it has come now, when she is finally at peace with her losses? When she has opened her fists and let the things she longed for slip away?
And then the usual pangs of harsh reality; reality that keeps her feet shackled on the ground so hard that her feet bleeds. A strange fear grips her whole being; the fear of losing her Star. What if someday she comes and gazes at the sky and fails to find her Star? There is a fear in her voice, in the clutch of her perfect nails on the railing.
Her splendorous foreign Star …. It plays a song to her just before twilight and she keeps following that tune. Everything else seems meaningless. She knows if she keeps feeling this way she will break more rules. A storm begins and for the first time she doesn’t get scared of it. She gets prepared to follow the Star wherever its destiny would lead.
She doesn’t want to hope too much, but she can feel the blood swirling in her head. And she knows that love after all is a strange thing; love that weapon can not pierce, fire can not burn! And she knows that her endless waiting has already begun! Yet she is not afraid. She gets prepared in her mind. She feels her Star, her nexus of energy, and its tender gaze on her like a soothing breeze, like a mother’s hand, like a sleep on her eyes in her lonely nights.

...........The Word Love ....................

I search for my lost love, every night, tiptoeing around the house. They think I sleep walk! Every night I would roam around in the dark. The darkness would press against me, wave after wave, like a colossal black sea. Sudden fear parches my throat. I desperately want to go back to the warm comfort of the bed. Yet I know that I would have to go on. I would have to keep searching till I find that lost love. The darkness thick and vicious persists.

I search everywhere; inside the bedroom, the cupboards, the stack of dishes in the kitchen, the shoe rack, among clothes and toys, refrigerator, closet, I would keep searching in every nook and corner. And at the end of it, tired and depressed when I would come back to bed it is already the orange dawn knocking at my window. I stare outside at the share of my bluish orange sky and wonder if I had by mistake let that love get merged into the wide! I should have been more cautious and I know tonight I would have to search for it all over again.

He tells me to consult a doctor, gives me sleeping pills. I can sense the irritation on his stiff shoulders. I promise not to disturb his sleep again yet quietly throw away those pills into the dust bin, for I know that I have to continue my search. I have got to find out those lost love words and those forgotten caresses.

I am not sure exactly when they were lost! Was it the day when he came back from office and wanted me to go to the pub and I refused? Or was it when he asked me to move away as I was blocking his view in my childlike enthusiasm when he wanted to watch his favorite news channel? Or was it the day when he pushed aside the meal I cooked in anger? May be it was the day when the doctor told me that I am pregnant again and I dared to argue with him to keep the baby! I am not sure. All I know is that I have got to find out my lost love! Not for anyone else but for me. So that I can smile again like the passionate lightning, so that my laughter sounds like the tinkling stream one more time.

There are no people in my search; neither him nor anyone else. It is just about that word ‘love’, a word that I have never understood before, a melting, sighing warm word. Someday I will find it out and it would be like rain. I would lift my face up to it and like rain it would wash away all those frowns and creases, leaving me fresh and ready to begin.

My last letter

a letter to a friend .....

you asked me if I am happy! I can not answer your question as I am no longer sure I know what happiness is! All I realise is, it isn't what I thought it to be! Perhaps it has something to do with love but I am not sure anymore! And the funny thing is even 'love' seems to be something different than what I thought it is! May be we could have figured it out while drinking tea together, had you waited for me! I feel like telling you so many things, stories of my known and unknown errors and tales of all my half baked dreams and half hearted efforts. I could have told them as fairy tales are being told, without any guilt or blame but out of sorrow and hope. But now you are too far away to listen to me, aren't you?
you have asked me to love him! I do find it very strange when you ask me to give him another chance, to start afresh! Dont you know that a dead love is just like a dead body? It starts rotting even as you try to hold on to it, crying. and after that you are only left with fetor and nothing else!
Guess I didn't tell you about this peculiar sensation in my chest. it is like my ribs are being sawed away and strangely it started after you left! I keep feeling as if my life has closed even before its end. I still cant stop blaming you for going away. I am still in the process of 'moving ahead' and hope some day it would be possible.
And yes, do not write to me anymore. Each time I hear from you, it is kind of a set-back. If you really want to help me then please learn to leave me alone. Believe me, soon I am going to rise like a phoenix bird and some day among these hatred and sorrow and soot and rubble I will manage to perceive my paradise on earth. May be on that day I will smile and write to you one more time. :)

[the above is an attempt towards my creative writing, my efforts to free my soul! someday i would write a novel and would add up these straythoughts into a bigger scheme... wish me luck! ]