Mending storms.

Some nights are empty. Like a bottle that’s been wasting away at a bookshelf for far too long, gathering dust, watching silently to be filled up. With anything, anything at all, it can be that rather sweet pink syrup for all it cares; just not this space, this space representing everything that’s not, everything that it could be.  My dog sleeps on my blanket, dreaming. He twitches his face from time to time, jumping in a dreamy garden, chasing cars, fetching frisbees. The fish seem to be holding an intervention in their little corner. Diving around the bubble man in their aquarium, they are going to get through the night just fine.

But my mind is cooking up a storm. It’s heading towards this nice little cottage, with a rather plaid windmill accompanying it. Imagine a photograph if you may, a swirling hurricane in a wide meadow, filled with wooden desks and ties and bills, all going round and round in circles, heading towards the cottage. If the rule of fifths is to be considered, I might be standing at the crosshairs on the bottom-left of the photograph, looking straight ahead. There’s a face peeking out of the only window in the cottage. A face that looks violently familiar, but I can’t remember who it belongs to. Every once in a while she looks at the approaching hurricane with the same, calm expression and looks away. I imagine she’s brewing her last cup of coffee- a good cup was to die for. But looking at the spinning windmill was making me feel queasy. Although it would make a good mixer about right now, the way it was chopping up everything that flew into it, branches, beds, books.  Soon, that beast of a storm is going to hit the tiny cottage and break it like a pack of cards. Already, the tin roof has started to slide away. She comes out of the door now, munching on a little cracker and looks at the roof with quenched eyes. I imagine the dust particles are hitting her like needles. Our eyes meet when she turns. She’s got angry eyes. I turn away.

Yes, I had no right to be taking up my storm everywhere. So I took off my tie and wore it around my head. As the night grew colder, I burned the college grade sheets to keep myself warm. And sometime around midnight, I planted some flowers in that bottle.

( A painting by the famous American landscape painter, George Innesse)

~Memories of a sunflower

I remember that little girl from my first school. I remember how happy I felt around her, how she tied her hair in a twirled ponytail, how her voice quivered when she sang. But as hard as I try, I can’t remember her face. She comes to me only as a feeling, something which only a boy aged six years could understand. So I began writing a collection of short stories on memories..

~Memories of a sunflower

I noticed you on the roof, watering the lilies. You seemed worried and started whispering to me, so I told you to move around in circles. But then you started going inwards and your circles turned to whirlpools, and I tucked in my life, packed some plans and dived right in with you. I wished we would emerge outside the Ursa Major, the big bear, and ride him into carpets of celestial amnesia. I hoped to remember my dreams, but some things I needed to forget- like the monsoon you abandoned me.

Those cloudy afternoons, I swam and swam until everything I remembered had turned into a song of your whispers. I could hear it resonate across all stardust, it was right there with chuck berry, in the voyager. Some obscure being in a lonely, exploding meteor would fall in love hearing it. It would cock it’s ears to the spacecraft, eyes to the sun and see it’s blinding, furious fire. Like me, it would know crippling love for the first time. The kinds that would make it grow a heart, and orbit around the sun till the end of time. It’s your love that would make planets, nurturing little islands of dreams and oceans of being.

And today, as I face away from that sun, to watch your face, I pray that it’s sunflowers you prefer to lilies. I pray that my god is an animal. I pray that your whirlpools turn to cartwheels, and that you find happiness.

You did. Happiness came in a bunch of purple orchids delivered to your doorstep.And you marked it by plucking me off and setting me in your bun. I didn’t complain in those last hours, I would get a better view than the poor orchids on the fridge.

But I did wonder, Why my story titles were always better than my stories. And where did my stories take me? Into some paragraph in a page I barely remember, strung together in a line, stripped down to a word -Obscure.

 

(The above painting is Room in Brooklyn By Edward Hopper)

February shivers.

It was just a subway ride. Really. But this year around, february seems as lost as me, sometimes rainy, sometimes angry, but mostly lost. Did it lose it’s way between the crushing winter and the promised spring? February, rattling up my heart. February, my wandering lover. February, don’t you see? This is how we’re meant to be. Wandering, wandering, shivering, shivering, till summer comes around and we realize. Oh it was better, so much better, when we were drifting, wandering, shivering in february.

 

You know they say
memories are strange things
I think they’re like metro stations,
disappearing one after another,
blocks of steel railings and hazy tress,
pushing you to where you ought to be
But I wish I could get off on my favorite station,
and stay there forever
Right when the door opens at age sixteen,
I realize this is it,
I want to be in school forever,
the world full of possibilities,
my veins full of life,
looking forward to football every week,
and the prom every year.
when all the books are still new,
and women haven’t lost their novelty.
With the MJ cassettes & a superman cape
You don’t really need anything, or anybody
floating around in that crystal ball
of four chord songs & afternoon dates.
Every little morning sends your body to shivers.
everything is exciting, everything is magic.
But well you know, you didn’t get out.
Your station is here, age twenty two.
Stepping out,the cold city chill does make you shiver
But not every shiver is the good kind;
So you head for a smoke.

The University.

I usually like to write in stolen moments- while waiting for my coffee in a cafe’ or when travelling in the metro, right before I go to sleep or right after I take a shower. But there are moments, more urgent than moments,when overflowed with emotions I have to turn them into words as if keeping them inside would result in a catastrophic explosion, turning my heart into stardust. This is one such piece. Very irregular, very jarring, very noisy. I suppose nothing else would do justice to the last five years. Amen.

The University

On the walls of a desolate bookshelf,
mostly dust & cigarette ash.
my name conquers
crossed hearts & spiderwebs
but not the pale whitewash.

In between the rickety bed
the steel cupboard
my guitar rests,
stuffed with marksheets and angry letters
home-bound, silent.

I started wearing a tie
till it caged my heart in a box,
answered the crows in the classes,
till my voice died and shrank
to a caw.

The owls heading the university,
I shot in my head, everyday
Then burned the place to ashes,
lit a cigarette from the flames
(Hoot Whoot Whoo Who)
is laughing now?

I’d rather have been a self righteous,
god fearing taxi driver father,
Moonshining my way through red lights,
never failed, never lost.
But as the voice says,
Five years in a hole to a life imprisoned;
What do you know about redemption, son?

Sarojini Nagar Blues.

Does this sadness have a name?
Seeping through your lavender curls,
disappearing between the crevasses
when our fingers lock,
humming in the background in
a song of memories,
shimmering on the edges
when we spin under our
chandelier of dreamcatchers,
slowly leading the waltz of promises,
to a leap of faith,
smiling through the contrails,
when I’m freefalling in an ocean of solitude,
embracing me with the intimacy
of a buried romance,
and then finally settling in
the whirlpool where,
gin meets ice.
Does this sadness have a name?

 

Image credits- Leonid Afremov. See more of his work at http://afremov.com/index.php?

Of infidelity and betrayal.

So I’ve been dreaming these strange dreams lately. Injured eagles. Erupting volcanoes. Aging queens. Dancing snakes. Talking cigarettes. Laughing dogs.  Sometimes, I’m flying, other times I’m fighting. The strange thing is, I can control the outcomes of these dreams most of the times. The only way I know that this is not a dream, is because I”m writing. I could never write, not for a dream.

Morning in a city- Edward Hopper (Image credits)

I was smoking cigarettes all night.
And haggling to buy a sarangi.
I was making love to a beautiful woman.
eyes of an ocean,
lips like moonshine,
Legs, never ending legs and moans,
But she turned into a man.
So long, love, so long.
Her wounded eagle wrote me a sonnet.
My german showed me what it meant.
Of love and lovers.
My heart sinks.
My heart laughed.
It has played it’s part.
I am thinking of leaving,
Of infidelity and betrayal.

Salogra (सलोगड़ा )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I passed sunlight through my window,
warm and brilliant,
on my face.
then darkness in a tunnel,
short but everlasting,
under my eyes.
Above, planets and mountains,
stretching with delight,
failed.
So barefoot,
I trudged forward,
on a road of seasoned leaves,
through the trail of insolent quietness.
only to find boundaries and fences,
defeated by momentum.
Up ahead,
Twenty two long years
And a tree of thorns awaited,
blooming in isolation.
I stood still,
when it finally rained,
And noticed the wilderness,
saddened by discipline.
I walked on,
to men and women,
and their umbrellas,
sneering, always sneering.