What rubbish. *facepalm*

রাজহাঁসের রাজকাহিনী

ওই রাজপ্রাসাদে একলা ছিল নেতা--

তার বড্ড ছিল কেতা |

চুল গুলো হচ্ছিল সব সাদা

প্রাসাদের চারিদিকে যে কাদা |

রাজহাঁস খেলা করে নাকি পাঁকে

তার কি আর ঘৃণা বলে কিছু থাকে?

তাকে দেখে হিংসেতে সব জ্বলে

পোকামাকড় কত কথা যে বলে!

কাক কোকিল দেখে কাঁদে

সুর কি আর কাকের মনে বাধে?

কাকের বিশ্রী কলরবে

পৃথিবীর উন্নতি যে হবে |

তবে যদি হও ভালো পাখি অন্তরে

উড়বে নীল আকাশের শেষ প্রান্তরে |

A bit from my novel

Sneak peek:

From tomorrow, he thought, he would write. That endless tomorrow which refused to come, which refused to form contours in the present, like an obscene totality that encroached upon the now, the present, that horrible thing in the future. They called it kal. Kal meant both tomorrow, and the end. And this is how things end, by promising to happen—tomorrow.

Le prix d'Amour, c'est seulement Amour

Just as beautifully as I find it

I shall lay out my heart

in its fragments-jigsaw puzzles,

hoping to reconstruct

and in it finding, New York City,

a city I had never been to-

Bombay,

the city where I learnt to dream

and also where I built

a funeral pyre for my dreams

puked beer

smoked in my hotel room

as I watched a blue green sea

And London,

where I lost myself

found a father in a stranger

saw my friends in love,

where a man held me

against his heart

whispering no promises

where I began a novel

which I was not meant to write.

And in the mythical contours of

my fevered imagination

lie other cities

Paris, Cairo, Amsterdam,

Roma

Buenos Aires

Cities I may never see.

Paris,

just across the channel,

shall we not always have Paris? I

who can weave words

and melodies

out of thin air

I

with

dyed red hair

and patience wearing thin

Shall I never know

Paris?

And all I recall

Not the blue green

of my vanished adolescent sea

Not the provincial

education

that I tried so hard

to escape

Nor the endless cheap

smokes, and the

over-boiled milky tea.

And all I recall

the first time he smiled

at me,

and his slightly sweating

hand. We talked

about ethics,

and peanuts,

but contours fade not,

though horizons dim.

But even that's not

what I should remember.

Perhaps the hashish

which made me smile

and drift

away into other

counterfactual worlds.

Perhaps not.

Mid-2006. Drizzling rain. A

cigarette and coffee

and a few lavish, too easily shed

tears on a page

of ...Matthew Arnold?

Because he spelled

Margaret wrong.

Because he called her

Marguerite. By making her

French.

For the greatest French man

of all time,

Camus-he said-

that to love is to give

everything away

and to expect

nothing

nothing at all

in return.

Hot tears burn

my eyelids,

Cities

matter no more,

what good are cities

without expectations?

And because

I have never learnt

not to expect,

I have never loved.

g'nite

I'm just so tired. If things go wrong, Morpheus will show me the way.

But contemplating this just makes me more tired. I don't approve of drugs. I don't approve of death, clinical or spiritual.

Yet, this poverty is draining me. And I feel so old. The lonely, only, ugly nights-spent with faceless and nameless strangers in duffel coats, smoking cigarettes outside seedy nightclubs. No, I don't have a spare fag.

Regrets, I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention. And now I have fewer fags.

I'm sorry for being so tired. If things get better, I'll send you a postcard. I'll sign it off with love.

Morpheus? He came by earlier this evening, I wasn't at home. He left his card with a hastily scribbled note. I'm supposed to call him when I'm free.

Goodnight and goodluck.

This strange, cutting solitude is slicing through me. It's killing me. I got up at 5 again today, made coffee, had a smoke, and came back to write. Last night I was so sleepy and sad and mildly inebriated that I had fallen asleep as I was dressed in the pub, when I woke up I had raccoon eyes and an aching stomach; not having dinner is becoming a habit. However, early morning was really nice-until I fell asleep again-somewhere around 7:30. Sleep is the brother of death.

Then I dreamed of beaches-it was a lovely beach, but also a backwater beach, with dolphins and little boats and mosquitoes, and the water was greenish and slightly murky, and the beach was just outside this very window. Here where this ugly backyard is. But in this dream I knew I was not only not loved, but that my family and loved ones were receding further and further away into the horizons of that infinite sea, and that I was alone. Alone. This winter is very long. Sometimes, like now, I am convinced I will not survive it.

Margaret, Margaret, or Rosebud- do you know them? Could you tell me where they live? So that on one such winter morning as this, I could creep out of my lonely house, and go walking in the bleak sunshine-looking for addresses and pretty strangers, who give me tea and scones and a little bit of kindness? Margaret is not a woman, you persuasively argue, she is a girl and she is a cruel girl. What of that? I must try my luck. What am I? A young halfwit? In my dream, I also saw I was trying to convince you, but you kept changing the topic.

The dream about the beach was hardest of all. It was not at all like Goa, which is my favourite beach. This was like a pond, except my dream told me it was a beach. I stared at it from this very window, like a stupefied dog asked not to bark by the master.

I have no master, and no slave either.

Perhaps if you are reading this, you will be kind enough to understand. You cannot break a woman's heart by dismissing her as slightly mad. Either you denounce her as a witch, a completely insane genius-or you embrace her as the love of your life. In this either-or plan of things, the middle path of Buddha has no relevance. Come, be my eros and thanatos, let us rediscover how to live.

These days I practise how to die like sophisticated English gentry; sheer boredom and bottled frenzy. I am dying, Oxford, dying. I am dying, my dearest, dying. But you don't care, you timeless and significant proper nouns. There in the rarefied grammar of your existence, madness is typographical error.

While I compose this wretched metaphor, the backyard outside behaves like a chameleon sea-lagoon. This is going to be a long winter.

Homeless

I have been living in England for a while now, albeit in rather straitened circumstances, as my friends would know. While it is not exactly what I had hoped it to be, and I have received three marriage proposals from very old men of questionable sanity, and it isn't even cold yet, the thing that has struck me the most is the large number of people without homes. England has always had poverty in a rather maudlin way; what Americans would once have called "cute", and I remember reading about tramps and err people in caravans in Enid Blytons and Richmal Cromptons. Unquestionably cute in childhood, now I see people without homes on the street in the cold, and some of them definitely die in winter. On park benches, curled up on stairs, some of them puffing away on cigarettes-given-as-alms, some of them selling newspapers, they stare nonchalantly and vacantly at the cold grey skies. I wonder how they feel, sometimes as I sit and contemplate England on lonely park benches, I must have the same cold vacuity on my face-which is why I have spoken to many homeless people by now. Some of my newly made friends think I am insane and "funny" which, of course I am, but I plea a healthy insanity, and am now trying to structure some kind of method into the madness.

Therefore, in my little way, I shall chronicle the stories of some homeless people. It is a little project that I have vowed to undertake, and this not a pretentious Down and Out etc project. You see, most intelligent people take success for granted, but though I know I am intelligent enough to string some beautifully poetic sentences after drinking tequila that somebody else has paid for, I am not successful. This is largely my own fault because I have an ugly naivete that prevents me from doing things with force and conviction. I am dazzling but only in my own mind, and to my own self. This can be a problem when you appear for interviews and suchlike; because you cannot convey your, as the Americans so succinctly put it, awesomeness.

So yes, I think everyone loves me like my grandmother does, loving benevolence that bestows and compliments- and a lot of homeless people are like that. They have trusted people-spouses, children, relatives, friends, the government-and their trust has been betrayed. They have been stripped of money, dignity, friends, everything that we-trained as good liberals-take for granted. Many of them have dogs. Big dogs keep them warm in winter. They love their dogs very much. They love their dogs far more than we love them. Some of my friends give homeless people a pound or so. The kindness of strangers can be overwhelming. Some of my friends (and that includes myself) spare a cigarette. For me, that's a tremendous sacrifice. Every time I part with a fag, my hand shakes, my brow sweats, and my heart feels dizzy. There is nothing in life called a free lunch, but THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING CALLED A SPARE FAG. Therefore, I feel like a Christian martyr when I part with one, and hasten a homeless man to a speedier death. I am a very kind girl.

But really, my kindness is overwhelming when I actually sit and speak to homeless people. There was a woman who openly confessed she was going to get some stuff, ya kno, stuff with the two pounds I gave her. So what does the err stuff do to you, I asked her. The stuff kinda makes me feel at home with myself, she said. Her endearing honesty brought tears to my eyes. I would almost have given her another quid, except I needed it for a mocha. Besides, why would I help her have drugs that would make her feel at home, when I-like the other quintessential Western homeless heroine Antigone- was perpetually without one? Nothing doing.

That night I read Heidegger. It helped me, I felt better. Heidegger's prose cannot make anyone feel better, you argue. You are obviously foolish and not an Oxonian. You might even come from Cambridge. At this point my sarcasm is sickening me, so I will proceed to the next paragraph.

One day, as I adorned the bench in front of Balliol. as majestic Broad Street bustled in front of me, a man with droopy eyes came and sat next to me and salivated at the sight of my Gauloises. Camus smoked Gauloises. So you can see how very l'etranger I was, how well suited to the scene, how the poor bugger was dying to talk to me. So he asked me for a spare cigarette, and I was about to tell him that there is nothing in life called a spare cigarette, when I noticed he looked a bit like my favourite writer Borges (without the glasses, in his prime.) A remarkably handsome man- so I gladly gave him one. I thought he was a nice man, a bit of a junkie, and then he said, "I just lost my job." "Oh no" I sympathized. "Yes, I feel sad. Where are you from?""India."
"Are you rich?"
"Not remotely."
"Hmm. Would you happen to have 20 quid?"
"No?"
"That's alright. Could I have another cigarette?"
*smoke break*
"So, do you know I don't have a home?"
"Errr?"
"I stay on the street now. I want books to read. And food to eat."
I suspect the books bit was to impress me. Alas, poor Droopy Eyes.
"India is a poor country, isn't it?"
Indignant me: "Strange you should be saying that."
Startled Homeless Man: "Hey, no offence. Hey, you're pretty. Do you want to go out with me? Tomorrow, 4 pm, here?"Startled Me:"Hey but where will we go to?"
Sad Homeless Man with Droopier Eyes: "OK, you have a point there. Hehe."
Exit l'etranger.

I brooded on this. Why would a man without a home want to date a girl? How could he? I mean, how dare he? I mean, what do I look like, a Dater of Homeless Men?
Me, Antigone? Me, Hamlet? Me, Mersault?
No.

And then, I realized, we are so used to seeing people without jobs, without homes, without love, without success, we whose fathers have money, or something close to money, we sans merit, but with classical liberalism flowing through our veins- we suck. We're ugly. Our flirtations with the Left, with Marxism, with history and the Hegelian dialectic, with life and art, with authenticity and resistance, with our black, white, yellow and brown skins(and masques)- we stink.

As Baudelaire so nicely put, and Eliot so beautifully quoted, and I- in a show of dashing originality will replicate-

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

Of course the monster is delicate, you fool. Facebook is a very fragile thing too, isn't it? Sometimes the monstrosity of the changeling called social networking astonishes me. It is so utterly pointless, except we find an illusive home in it- a home within a home.And then there are some people out there, just outside this cozy English house, who cannot afford a laptop with an internet connection and they, unlike my poor third world brethren, even know what information technology is. Hell, they even know how to spell it.

La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.

(Now for the non French speaking people, this is from the same Baudelaire poem that Eliot did not quote,translated it means something like

Folly and error, avarice and vice,
Employ our souls and waste our bodies' force.
As mangey beggars incubate their lice,
We nourish our innocuous remorse.)

And now my French has run its course, let me bid you a teary adieu, my neighbour, my reader, my brethren. I go to smoke a cigarette and contemplate the perils of being bored.