Je suis...

Le prix d'Amour, c'est seulement Amour

2012-01-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

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

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

2012-01-03T16:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2011-12-29T02:16:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-17T22:37:00.001-08:00

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.

2011-12-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

Why must our lives be so alone? I trace and retrace my steps in time, but here I am-trying to make sense of who I am and what I must do. This is difficult to figure out because I always took for granted that the wretched strains of violins I hear in my head are part of a song. And now that song is not just in my head, it's my life. The vast embracing sky here is always cloudy, and it's so cold here, so cold, that this embrace can kill me if I don't shield myself from it.

There is much happiness around, but this happiness is not for me. When you realize this, you know that your life is gradually losing meaning or perhaps it is gaining greater meaning. Nowadays I take recourse into fantasy and fiction, and this room becomes my universe, my one little room is Everywhere. But there is no lover here to make my macrocosm into a microcosm, all that metaphysical love poetry is left behind in another world- a comfortable cocoon in retrospect. He is no longer all that I survey.

I am shielding myself from the cold, but I cannot shield me from myself. I glimpse you outside sometimes, but not all the time. In little light, and you disappear so soon, in the blink of an eye. I lose you before I can realize what it is- you're like a blazing shooting star, an elusive idea, a trembling idea, a character, a personality, you're my novel gradually developing in my head- and I have to see you more often before I can write you down. I desire lucidity, the erotic texture of lucidity, its endless possibilities...

Fuck it, come back. I have not yearned anything so much, no lover, no man, no woman, no friend has made my heart shake so much, depressed me so much. I can see your story, I can see your distinct narrative spread over time, and my time itself ceases to matter to me, as long as your unreal and false time can be encapsulated by my worthless fingers on a blank white page.

Love, love, love. They say love is something that you need to live the good life. I don't want any love, the men in the canvas of my life are fading out gradually, the colours are running out, and even he who I loved so much-whose heartbeat I still hear occasionally against my lonely pillow-even he has carved out another life on a better fresco. All I have is you, you are my sole source of solace and desire and love and life. Do not let me die another death, here in my ugly and cold room, make my life vibrant and illusive with the colours of fantasy.

Embrace me, fiction.

4 am

2011-12-08T10:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday

When you held me

And I felt your heart

beat,

it was not yesterday-

it was eternal.

And time dissolved,

it was 4 am,

it was not yesterday

it was today.

And the last bus

left

at 4 am

today.

2011-10-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

So I guess you won't, but I wish you would. You look so lovely, I want to weep on you and wash away your unhappiness, misery and sorrow forever.

2011-10-22T20:36:00.001-07:00

If I started writing again, would you read me?

I love writing so much. I love it more than you.

2011-08-01T08:46:00.000-07:00

Get Lost.

This Blog is now closed for Repairs.

2011-07-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

I HATE WAKING UP IN THE MORNING.
I have this utter conviction I might get pneumonia.
This will be my end.
I hate getting up so early. 8:30 am? WHY????

*HATE BUTTON* *HATE BUTTON*

And the worst part is, I couldn't even go to sleep again?

an elegy

2011-07-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

The eternal life awaits me, in front of me lies the vast desert
of a life in anticipation; my eyes look for you. There is no comfort
in solitude, no comfort in myself, only a sort of trembling in the face
of the infinite and the vast. I would give myself willingly to you
if you had a body. Then my love would have been meaningful, a pure
sort of love. Now, the bonds of kinship are disintegrating, and all
that remains is terror.

I have lauded my imagination, my ability to make meaning when confronted
with incoherence. I have thought understanding is the greatest virtue
that one can have. But is that true, is that the most beautiful ability,
or is it the ability to lie, face down, on the earth, and inhale the smell
of fresh earth, and newly sprung grass?

It is a terrible thing to feel affinity. I have felt affinity with you
when your mind was in motion, but no never turbulent, never turbulent
like the river which springs in cruel motion from the mountain, and challenges
you to witness cruelty. The gushing stream annihilates the flowers on
its banks; the sweet flowers which blossom only to be destroyed
by one more powerful than they.

I have felt affinity with you when your arms have held me like the river
holds the flowers in its crushing grasp.
And I have been afraid.

Why do the bonds of kinship break? Where is the tenderness of a mother's
embrace, I want to hold my father's hand again, and hear my grandmother
sing me to sleep, but all I see is a long and endless stretch of sand,
a sun dazzling in its intensity.
And I have felt a strange thirst
which no river can quench.

In the distance, a child dies
but I cannot see it. It died
without being aware of the limitless,
it did not see the grains of sand
in a sand-clock. It did not
hear the minutes ticking by.
I do not know whether it was a girl
or a boy.

My eyes looked for you,
but found the sea instead.
As they gazed at the sea,
a bird flew from the north
to the south.
And I was astonished.
You would say
it is incoherence.

Farewell

2011-07-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate,
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

2011-07-13T03:45:00.000-07:00

You said; You will not be like them.

You will be different: more profound, more thoughtful,

less glitzy, with depth, with understanding.

With the understanding which comes with the late afternoon sun.

I didn't know I could miss you so much.

Your absence my strength.

Your absence my understanding.

Your absence my love.

Your absence my greatest weakness.

You said: We are like two travellers on

two parallel paths who never meet.

We met.

And now your absence is my

Key to memory.

I don't know how exactly to recall you.

I don't know how to tell you

You said there is no need.

We are young

but we are not free.

I am not free

because I miss you.

Your absence is freedom

in a different way.

And to think nobody will understand.

Ne me quitte pas

2011-07-06T00:19:00.000-07:00

I was clearing out the debris of five years from my room. It hurts me to think that time has passed by so soon, and yet I have not changed. Notebook after notebook of hastily scribbled notes: Kafka, Shakespeare, Milton, Beowulf: my eyes turned misty. The back of each notebook had little conversations-some of them were funny, some were romantic in a silly way, and most were profoundly forgettable.

Ne me quitte pas.

It was Jacques Brel or Edith Piaf, I forget which. It was playing when I discovered my old poetry notebooks of 2004 onward. I marvelled at the way my handwriting has changed, and I was surprised at the way my mind worked- then. I seem to have been a pretty sophisticated thinker even then. And I was definitely more honest and transparent. There was no love poetry. A lot of poems on animals. Allegory. There is something so obvious about allegory. I was obvious, yes. But now, it seems as if I have forgotten allegory and embraced deceit. Deceit i.e., love.

Ne me quitte pas.

Have you seen Jacques Brel's face when he sings this?

Don't leave me now
I'll invent for you
Such senseless words
That you'll understand
I'll speak to you
Of those lovers there
Who have seen two times
their hearts all ablaze
I will recount for you
The story of that king
Dead for not having
the chance to meet you
Don't leave me now...

When I see his tearful, perspiring face, his quivering lips, his devastated eyes, the muscles on his face taut and unrelenting- I think that Brel does not sing it to a woman, I think Brel sings it to himself. And with that horrible realization, my passion spent, I turn to my juvenile notebooks, going back seven years...

Don't leave me now
We must forget
All can be forgotten
It escapes already
Forget the time
The misunderstandings
And the moments lost
We must know how
Forget those hours
Which killed at times
With each thrust of why
The heart of happiness
Don't leave me now...

Who can understand the senseless words we invent for ourselves? To understand would be to love, and like fiction, love too is a lie.

Ahona, ne me quitte pas.

2011-06-29T03:33:00.000-07:00

Love, like history, can repeat itself as tragedy and farce. And like history, is both impersonal and trivial. Yet, it has its moments which are sublime (and sublimely disappointing.)

hmph

2011-06-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

I want to write like crazy, but I can't. For me, not being able to write is a disease. So almost five years ago, there was this one day I was very happily stoned, and I said Kamre debo, Kamre debo, my head is on fire. And then I remember how I actually then bit a friend during a bad trip. And I also bit my mother once when I was really angry. And I bit my long suffering boyfriend many times-but really hard and not pleasantly- until he called me Kamroo Debi out of sheer frustration. (You see why I will never have a husband? Who wants a wife who bites?) So well, I am a bitch. And my bite is worse than my bark. I am becoming a sleek greyhound. Not hot but dangerous. Uhhhh. This isn't my writing style, but I can't write like I usually do, as I was telling you it's like a disease. I don't even know why the fuck I write on this blog anymore, because nothing makes sense. I am kind of becoming a drifter against my will, and it's irritating the hell out of me, because it's not me, it's circumstances. I want to be a bohemian in Prague, and that's not possible, I don't want babies or love or Oxford or even NYC (in future). I want peace and Prague or peace and solitude and the sea. It doesn't even have to be a glamorous sea if it has nice waves.

I want to forget that I can cook, that I was once good at research and exegesis, and that I'm a literate person who loves literature and music and art. No marriage, no babies, no lovers, nothing. I want none of these. I could survive on cigarettes, coffee, jazz and peace. And chocolate cake. And please, please- I am NOT writing a novel. I cannot write a novel. Or maybe just one novel, like Sylvia Plath. True poets can never write novels. There was only one exception- Rabindranath Tagore-but I feel

1. He was a novelist who was a poet. That works.

2. He could do everything.

3. He had money to travel and he was astute. Not for him Plath-itudes.

What am I even talking about? I feel like Hans Castorp in his lonely sanatorium. Having taken refuge in my useless mind, space is contracting, time is expanding and everything has become a dialogue between opposing ideas. To write or not to write? To destroy or to create? To die or to live? To eat or to smoke? To smoke or to smoke? Hmph.

goodnight

2011-06-20T11:03:00.000-07:00

Linger in my mind awhile, while the stars are still glittering

and the island of my sorrow is engulfed by the waves

of your love, forever drowning. It is night, beloved,

and this night is a rare night, full of a thousand glittering stars

and a million transient fireflies, and they are silent and eternal

in a way we will never be.

Stars and fireflies cannot kiss and perspire, instead

they light up nights of solitude and are written about

by poets. I would not like to die and become a star

and glimmer on your night of passion

with another. It would break my heart, and a little boy

would run out into the night and tell his

mother that he has

seen a meteor.

On a dewy morning, slightly bitter and cold,

you would watch a lily bloom, and in a way,

it would remind you of the first time we kissed

and your mind opened, not just your heart,

to possibility.

What a counterfactual lily, you would

sigh.

On a wild summer afternoon, when the

scorching sun blazed, blazed red on stone and soil,

when no flowers did bloom

and no rain did fall,

and the earth cracked under the strain

until there was a drop of blood on a white sheet

that was the time of

intercourse.

But of course, bittersweet autumn evening

when the orange and brown sun

fell obliquely, through shadowy leaves

and a gingery aftertaste was left

both mellow and bitter

and everlasting

yes, this was the time we had made love.

And once, yes once,

the earth shook, and parted, there was a crack,

and we fell, plummeted into nothingness,

and arose into air. And we had wings, we were angels,

we could fly, we were one and the same person-

even alas, if it was an illusion

and while our bodies merged

for that momentary earthquake-

our minds wandered

in different countries.

And tonight, tonight is a night of

endless desire and departure, for you see,

we are on different continents and yet

our minds have met. But our bodies

though under the same constellation

cannot find any consolation.

They know these lies

called fireflies.

They want dewy mornings

sad autumn evenings

blazing summer afternoons.

They want

an earthquake-

eternity

this moment.

2011-06-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Somehow I realize that my life itself is a wondrous piece of fiction. Like the inebriated Zamindar, I cannot write it down as no words come to me in my extreme state of intoxication. I am intoxicated by my own suffering and the tragic beauty of the world around me.

I am returning to my favourite books, but they are all so inevitably sad- even when they supposedly end happily.

I am not in love anymore, only in love with fiction. I have grown old.

I am a chain smoker.

I guess I am happy.

I am happy because I do not know what I want.

There is a strange song echoing inside my head. It doesn't have fixed chords, and is a lot like jazz. Except you can't tell when the only person who hears it is me. There aren't any words, or the words are as I make them. And I can't make words anymore.

I have lost the ability to make meaningful words, because they are just that- "Words, words, words"...and if I type "happy, happy, happy" or "love, love, love" it is just the same.

The horizons are receding, and the sunlight is just out of my grasp. And something is pushing me into the ocean and I know that the waves will swallow me up, and nobody will see me again.

Not even he who loves me, nor he who thinks he loves me.

Breathe a kiss into my ear, and tell me that my life isn't academic prose, but raw tactile poetry. And that I can survive alone, even without phantom kisses.

2011-06-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

I miss you. But I don't know who you are.

Hamlet-ing.

2011-05-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

And I- I am Cassandra,

mad, desirable, at times a bit inane-

undeserving, and yet

brought to pain-

by other women.

And I- I am Clytemnestra,

deceiving, adulterous and vile

Gullible, yet capable of guile.

And I- I am Atreus-

Monster, alienated from human

I know not what it is to be

human, only I feel something

strange grow within me-

they called it hatred

and I-anguish.

And I- I am Cassandra-

my prophecies bring to doom.

I tearfully tell you

And I- I too am Electra-

in perpetual wait,

I fear you are late.

And now, I realize,

I am also Hamlet.

I find the

rest is silence.

2011-04-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Went back to Blue and Beyond. Same breeze, same kind of firangs, same crispy kronjee lamb, same old Calcutta horizon...and same old Ahona with same old powers of digestion. :(

2011-04-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

I can't digest anything-other than insults. :-/

This blog, I realize, is dying a slow and gradual death. Which is interesting. Let us see where it is at the end of this year.

"French Omelette" ist vier Jahre alt.

Und ich lerne Deutsch!

Mein Gott!

I'm so tired, I don't know what I am going to do! Nobody even reads my blog anymore. That's prolly because I have nothing to say. And I don't have any friends left. I'm friendless and sad and stupid and ghyanghyane and weird, and I won't get funding to do the DPhil because nobody loves me :(

2011-03-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

Serious separation anxiety-and I can't bear this city anymore. I'll go mad if I stay here. May will come soon and then I get to know. I don't know what, I just want to go away, and begin a new life. The novel lies unfinished as always. There's nothing novel about writing a novel, but I cannot write it here.

I will miss 2008 all my life.

The year I found love, and turned twenty and the year little Plato was born.

We walked hand in hand, eating chine badam and I pretended I was a good girl and did not smoke.

He broke his alcohol virginity.

I tried to dress up and stopped wearing over-sized clothes.

There must have been many other things, but certain things I remember more than others-and I also realize that these moments made me distracted and deviate from the path I should have taken, but now the moment of reckoning has come. I have messed up a little bit, but a great many things remain. I am still only 22 going on 23, life has just begun.

Somehow, I have realized that nobody can suppress my mind for long. So goodnight and goodluck, my detractors. The mind has just witnessed a glorious morning.

Only, I will always miss 2008.

2011-03-20T11:07:00.001-07:00

My life wasn't supposed to be like this. Really.

I don't know what went wrong. I think it's me. But?

2011-03-06T08:11:00.000-08:00

Will someone please talk to me before it is too late?

a strange dream

2011-03-04T11:37:00.000-08:00

It was an exquisite March evening,

tropical and sad. I think I was mad.

Mad with longing.

I thought of belonging.

I stood outside the harsh gates

of some garden sublime.

I wanted some time.

I wanted to enter

to marvel at colour

and to marvel at range

I wanted that beauty.

I wanted some change.

But the gatekeeper was old

He was an angry old man

saying, "I don't think you can."

And I said, "Please intervene.

I want to go in

It's not really a sin.

Why can't I want beauty?"

He said,

"You're not good enough,

Can you write a poem?

Can you paint a picture?

Can you sing a song?

Just run along."

I begged and I pleaded.

An angel appeared.

He said, "You can go in,

but leave all your memories

behind.

You cannot rewind.

Once you're inside

You'll have nothing to hide."

My memories of mother,

of father, and brother.

Of dog, and of school.

Grandmother, village fool.

Everyone

left behind.

It was a terrible choice.

I made it.

I said, "I shall compromise

I will leave before sunset."

And the angel said,

"Perhaps that is wise.

When the sun is orange

The sands will run dry

You know you must fly."

So I entered,

and I was free.

But

I was not me.

I saw a long stretch of sand

Where castles were built by hand

And once one was complete

a wave came and washed it down.

And that was the end of it.

I moved on,

and I saw little children

cry tears of blood

and they were in terrible pain

and I asked why

They cried "We weep in vain."

And I cried, but my eyes were dry

My punishment; I could not cry.

Where was the garden?

The sun was about to set

I had not found it yet.

But slowly I moved to it.

But the brilliant flowers

had completed their hours

and were wilting.

The roses were turning black from red

The lilies were already dead.

The sky was turning a brilliant pink.

And I who had no memories

Could not think.

The sun was turning into an orange ball

It was time to leave

And I who had given up all memories

I could not grieve.

I had no direction

I could not find my way

Out of that garden

I must perish there today.

And I stood there.

alone,

with dead

and

melting

flowers

against

orange

sun.

Then I awoke from this dream.

I could not understand.

I lay there on my bed.

And I think it was my hand

which shook

when it traced

the silhouette

of an orange ball

on an empty page.

I thought I'd call

it- "Rage."

I would have,

but then,

for three immobile hours

No word

no memory

no emotion

entered my head.

I think I was dead.

Goodbye.

2011-03-03T09:36:00.000-08:00

And the memory of me will be like madness

Schizophrenic sadness

Intrinsic badness.

And yet, perhaps

that is the fantasy of the dying.

Perhaps...

you will

never

remember me

At all.

a love poem inspired by neruda

2011-02-13T08:01:00.000-08:00

Tonight you speak to me some of my saddest thoughts.

Say, for instance,'The world is not large enough
to accommodate your solitude.'"

The sea breeze touches your soul with a balmy kindness.

Tonight you speak to me some of my saddest thoughts
How I hate you, and sometimes you hate me too.

It is on nights like this that we made love
I struggled against the infinite blackness we call the sky.

You hated me sometimes, and I hated you too.
How can one not hate your passionate sneer?

Tonight you speak to me some of my saddest thoughts.
To think I've never known you. To feel that thus, I can never lose you.

And this cruel and endless night, still more cruel without you.
The verse is tortured out of my soul like a last confession.

What does it matter that my intelligence cannot entice you?
The night is endless and my beauty might suffice.

This is all. Somewhere, someone might translate me. Somewhere.
Here we do not speak the same language.

I wish I could reach you.
My mind yearns for you, and you are never with me.

The same night which separates our understanding.
We, of shared knowledge, do not eat the same apple.

I no longer hate you, that's certain, but indeed I have hated you.
My voice tried to find words that could articulate my hatred.

Another's. You will be another's. You will read other poems.
Your silence. Your sharp eyes. Your passionate sneer.

I no longer hate you, that is for sure, but perhaps I hate you.
Hating is so easy, but to remember why is hard.

Because on nights like this you held me in your arms
and my soul revolts on knowing that you have lost me.

Though this is probably the last time you make me suffer
and this is the last time we share a poem.
This is perhaps the last time, that I write
or pretend to write
a poem for you.

a fabulous mermaid

2011-02-11T10:22:00.000-08:00

Fables are not for little children.

The heat oppresses me.

As the air escaped my lips, I caught it

in my fingers. It did not linger.

And it never came back.

A part of my soul left me forever

I suffer from a lack.

And I would never know

how to get it back, and so:

The world is too vast

and my world is too little.

My world is too small

and I cannot hold air

in the palm of my hand.

I do not understand

why I cannot hold it all

Hold all in my heart

Why my eyes smart

at the mention of the universe.

I guess it is a curse.

And I think:

I will hold stars in my eyes

and air in my fist

And my love will be mist.

And I shall sink

Deep into the sea.

At last I will be me.

Oh yes, the heat oppresses me

and fables are not for little children.

And yet I would be

a mermaid.

I would be...

One with the sea.

I would be.

Me.

2011-01-29T22:52:00.001-08:00

Why o why o why can I not really connect?

Like, ever?

Even when I think I can?

I don't get it.

I want lau.

2011-01-26T08:58:00.000-08:00

The problem is, however hard I try, I will always be an afternoon cow.

The how now type.

We can't let go, you are bull(shit).

your head

2011-01-24T07:56:00.000-08:00

look at the

moon

soon

she said

it will

resemble

your head

a lazy lozenge

i suck

muck

make a quick buck

and

wake up

at noon

oh fuck!

(aren't you a

nice cartoon?)

2011-01-21T08:30:00.001-08:00

So I hate you, you know- HATE YOU? I am so glad that YOU(scumbag) are not in my life anymore.

YUCK to YOU

2011-01-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

Really, I think I find life distinctly effingly horribly funny.

In a rather disgusting kind of way.

Apologia

2011-01-15T08:19:00.000-08:00

Of course I am not serious- what do I have to be serious about, what can I do but build castles and imagine myself as King? That's what I have done since childhood, lived in an imaginary world full of stray anecdotes, dastardly stories, dismal breakfasts and books. I always wanted to win the Booker Prize, only I knew I would never get down to writing a novel. I once started writing a novel about a girl called Jane, but somehow I never related to her. I then wrote another novel about a girl called Ahona, and one day I suddenly started believing it was my diary. So I told my friends in 1997 how I had saved a baby from a terrible fire at the Book Fair that year. Only I hadn't been to the Book Fair that year. I was convinced that I had, and I visualized everything about that horrible scene- there was the baby and there was 9 year old Ahona, saving the baby from the jaws of blazing fire. And then of course, they called me a liar- instead of lauding my imagination.

Of course I was never serious! What was there to be serious about? Contemporaries solving mathematical conundrums? What was the resistance of the wire used in your geyser? (I don't know, I hate my geyser.) But you understand my problem- I was faced with an insurmountable problem: fiction. I could not distinguish between fiction and fact. This was painful, I was always looking for something reconciliatory, someone soothing who would whisper sotto voce to me; it's alright. And nobody did, only I thought they did. And then my mother used to say that Darling, your poems are beautiful, but really she doesn't get poems, it must be reading all that Sanskrit. Only today she said reading Kalidasa's Sakuntala is like listening to a waterfall. Now that perhaps is reconciliation.

And of course I have never been serious! Otherwise, would I sit here, patiently counting the hours and minutes but never the seconds, waiting for another joke, a better joke, if only I knew how to laugh. But one tends to forget how to laugh as one grows older, it's something I learnt from Thakurma- you completely forget to laugh until you're 60, and if you're lucky-you learn again. And to her laughter and her capacity to make everyone laugh, I owe a great deal. Her laughter is like champagne being swished in a goblet- effervescent, poetic, and giddy. When I hear her laugh, my heart skips a beat, there's a tangy pang, and I believe you connoisseurs call it love.

And I hope I am never serious, and that I always somehow speak to myself- and if you think I'm crazy and lazy and all those things I am, remember this: I do not provide a defense or an apologia. Know only this much; to love is also to imagine, to worship is only to construct. And thus, I too am your fiction, as much as you are mine.

pervy

2011-01-15T00:08:00.000-08:00

It all started when the Pope got out some rope and wanted to hang his pet Doge i.e., a dog-with-an-e. Now, this was a miraculous event even when cardinals cultivated their cardinal sins. There was a Cardinal who only had clitorises for breakfast. Somewhere nearby, a young half-crazed youth shouted, "They've taken my penis away!" but he was not a member of the exalted club called Sex Sect, which was predominantly religious in tone. A lot of people told him his penis was intact, only they could not verify it as he would not let anybody take off his pants. (His pants were made of satin.) All this was happening in Europe of course, but closer home, a woman who was frenching her third husband was mistaken to be the Goddess Kali and immediately taken out of her humble abode and installed in a temple. Nobody dared to have sex with her after that. Another sly youth from the shadier parts of town wanted to do his dog but the dog bit him very hard indeed on the buttocks. With the prospect of rabies looming large, the boy sobbed until he died. He refused to drink water, claiming that water from the Ganges was pure poison, worse than dog-venom.

I do not know why I narrate imaginary stories of perverts. I have a sneaking suspicion that I am disturbed.

But that's alright. One has to amuse oneself.

Last winter

2011-01-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

Your eyes lied to me three summers ago

when the sun danced in my room

little slivers of light

cut through my heart

Oh the cruel afternoon sun

filtered through cut glass

windows.

Why did they slice through

my heart, my mind, my memories,

forever

eternal slivers of light

forever

the same afternoon sun.

And once I made love,

and the sun bore witness

and now-

as I sit here alone

(my head in my hands)

it shines on me

but its smile is cold

and I am alone,

and that's not my friend-

(and that's not my lover)

that's not my sun.

Lovers come and go,

like winter mornings.

And then this winter will end too.

What will I do?

Summer,

another summer

Perhaps a better summer

Perhaps not.

(Perhaps I will never be warmer.)

Colder.

And older.

2011-01-04T20:15:00.001-08:00

Will things become Dickensian from Dickensonian?

Watch this space.

fable

2010-12-20T08:51:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a girl who was so busy digging her own grave and looking at a fake skull that she called her own that the very city that she loved became an alien citadel, and the songbird that she reared an angry vulture who wished to feed on her not-yet-putrid-flesh. She then asked the vulture, "Why must you eat me?" and the vulture smiled. She then asked her city, "Why do you not love me?"
And the city replied, "Because you had illusions of being cosmopolitan."

Wherein she dove into her own sorry grave which was so shallow that people refused to pile earth on her body (she was not yet dead). So she frowned, munched a wreath, and the vulture waited a long while.

Lexicon of lostness

2010-11-28T02:42:00.000-08:00

Proem: The beginning of the end i.e.,
a very short introduction to ending (not closure.)

Poem: Rampant idiocy often leading to indigestion.

Ending: The sense of which does not always give closure.

Closure: and closer, and closer and closer.

Night: Absence of daylight, dirty twinkling stars.

Coffee: And cigarettes.

Bye: Adieu, mon enfant.

2010-11-27T10:06:00.000-08:00

The nights are becoming endless,

my life and loves are faceless,

and I am tired...

I wish I knew

What I desired.

And the nights are growing longer

and the ennui grows stronger

I am tired

I am tired.

2010-11-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

I used to write poems

Now-

I write proems

2010-11-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

since the stars that twinkle

here

and

there

are the same.

tell me

what is the use of my crying

under the night sky?

--------------

a glass of champagne sits

lonely

its bubbles

fast disappearing

tomorrow night

nothing but

stale vinegar.

2010-11-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to do with my heart. I would like to take it out, dip it in essential oils and spices, and then after admiring its fleshy nothingness, take it for a ride on the Ganges, and finally shove it out- out into the depths of the gurgling Ganges when nobody is looking.

When N. is not looking.

2010-10-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

The heart hurts, despite the lights.

Amsterdam Dadu

2010-10-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

OK. I have been morose, morbid, emo and maudlin and I have been tolerated by my followers and readers (who are mostly Undead). Erm. So. Time for funny stories.

I went to Oxford a few months back. For a conference. And I had some funny experiences like usual, you know, because these things happen to Ahona Panda. I am like an unfortunate iron nail stuck to a magnet of idiosyncrasy. So, to proceed (I am in a bit of a hurry, absolutely no digressions today, dearies.)

Chapter I: Meeting Amsterdam Dadu.

I am travelling on Emirates so I must travel via Dubai where I change aeroplanes, yes? I meet Amsterdam Dadu on the first flight itself.

A.D.: Hello, little girl. Are you flying alone? (Tee hee.)
Me: *stern silence*
A.D.: I am flying alone too. This is my first major flight outside the country. My wife refused to come, she said long flights make her head ache, so I had to come alone.
Me: Where are you going?
A.D.: Amostaardaam.
Air Hostess: Excuse me, sir. Would you like a drink?
A.D.: A what?
A.H.: *pleasantly* what would you like to drink
A.D.: *berserk* I WANT HARD DRINKS.
A.H.: Indeed. Wine, sir?
A.H.: I said HARD DRINKS, NOT SOFT DRINKS.

Amostaardaam Dadu falls asleep soon, lulled into sleep by his favoured whisky. Then what happens? I'm telling you toh.

Amostaardaam Dadu and I get off at Dubai.
A.D.: Little girl, don't leave me, I will get lost. Where do I go? I will miss my flight. Dubai Airport is huge, they sell gold here. And diamonds.
Me: *sotto voce* and camels and oil?
Don't worry. I'm here. We'll check the itinerary. Once you know your gate number, you can be led there. Plus you have 10 hours to find it, I have only 2 hours to find mine.
A.D. I am feeling a strange goor goor in my stomach. I am having panic, I think.
I will go ask.

Me: Uhhh. OK.

Amsterdam Dadu picks on the nearest white man.
A.D: Excuse me, which way to Amostaardaam, please?
White man: Uhhh?
*runs away*

Amsterdam Dadu picks on the 2nd white man in uniform. This officer looks genial and ruddy, with a hearty complexion and a twinkle in his eye.

A.D.: Excuse me, which way to Amostaardam, please?
Kind white man: This is Dubai airport.
A.D: I know. So which way to Amostaardaam?
K.W.M.: You take erm, an aeroplane?
A.D.: AH! YES.
K.W.M.: You rise up in the sky like so....*hand gesture of an eagle soaring into the sky and then swooping*
Then down you go, down to Amsterdam.
A.D.: I see. But which way to Amostaardaam?
K.W.M.: Sorry?
Maybe you want to see the board which announces your departure and gate?

A.D.: I will ask. Thank you. Ahonaaaa?

I was trying to slink away, but he caught me, so I led him to the board and found his gate, departure time, everything. But as ancient proverbs go, you cannot make a man who does not wish to understand ever understand. You can bring the horse to the water trough but you cannot make it drink, especially if it desires streams of whisky. He told me he would return to ask someone who knows...

"Wait for me" he said.
And taking a magisterial bend disappeared from my life forever.

Chapter 2- next installment. For sure!

2010-10-02T02:16:00.001-07:00

"I am going to write a self help book.

For YOU."

I can't figure out the inherent contradiction.

Also, I crapped peanut butter-like crap and puked dal-like puke for 2 days. I need to dedicate my life to the Lord.

moonlight

2010-09-20T12:21:00.001-07:00

When I was very young (a mere child) I would often wonder at moonlight. Moonlight was a cold and tangible thing, a painful thing, it would remind me of lands I had never visited, of dreams I had not yet seen, of people I had not yet met. The proleptic rays of the moon would engulf me in a wave of nauseous nostalgia, a nostalgia that I had not yet felt. I would close my eyes and crouch in front of the large French windows which looked out on a meadow. I would feel alone. And I was only five.

I am sorry I was ever born. The secret enchanted woodlands of my childhood, sad yet enticing, is called by another name now. Love. The pain dries my throat and leaves me incoherent as I realize that love is nothing but a dream I cannot see, a land just out of my reach, a person I will never know.

Then I gaze at the moon and the moon sings a soft dirge.

Beethoven heard it so many years ago.

Why am I no longer five? Why did I have to grow up so much? The solitude then was of a different kind, an awareness that some benevolence exists, a mother will sing me to sleep, a father will hold my hand as my feet softly trace the contours of dewy grass. Such days leave us by- and we are only left with the memory, the mere silhouette, the shadow

of a bitter moon.

2010-09-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

How long can one pretend?

despair

2010-09-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

You smell foul like a night of wretched desperation, like

the sorrows of sin, the joys of horror. You stun like

the pleasures of paradox, you ferment like wine into

vinegar-and I do not understand why I loved you.

You trouble me on nights of solitude when the darkness

black night punctuated by my solitary presence

when your presence fades like morning star into daylight

and you cry like an orphan or a dog

and I think- I loved this demon.

You wished to steal my patience, until nights of

endless perspiration rendered me insane, and I

feverishly gathered the sweat off your brow like

dew and I drank it like nectar

But now it tastes like the sea.

You had eyes like pools of water, black as the ocean

that reflects the nights. Endless nights of fruitless

waiting-when you slumbered in the depths of another's

love

While I stayed awake and paced the shore.

You do not exist, for my mind is that of a mad girl.

You called her a bad girl, did you ever see a sad

pearl? Shining white and lonely in the middle of

the ocean bed-clammed shut from the eyes of the world.

I thought you were my diver,

would wear me across your neck

in a calm caress but

You sold me to a shop.

2010-08-31T11:20:00.000-07:00

Things have stopped making sense now

and I am going with the flow

I hope you get the drift?

(I'd rather you did not go.)

Nothing makes sense now.

Not me and not you. I want to talk in French.

And write French poetry in symbols.

Now go away. Otherwise I'll hit you with cymbals.

last poem

2010-08-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

last night

i had a strange dream

disconnected, dreary, dismal,

and dull

you think i remember it

(i don't)

the dream was almost in parenthesis

it had no punctuation

it had nothing

but yes, i thought it had meaning

but i woke up

and it ceased to be

like love

an eternal joke and farce

i saw you gone

and that was enough

anarchy------> freedom

love-------> indifference

death-------> absurd

recognition------->reversal

give me universal darkness

and rid me of my technicolour dreams

and my sepia life. fuck you

pissoffs. fuck you.

i hate you i hate you i don't care

why too? mama tambien? why too?

i say (i fart) a humongous moo

and my turd is like glue

it sticks to me (i must not stick to you)

-------------

Liberty is not merely a statue in America.

------------

they will build my bust

because they must

though all else be dust

------------

sex is a nightmare

when you have no love

and love is boring

when you have no sex

and drugs are dangerous

when you have no life

and life is meaningless

when not punctuated

so my dreams, you pissoff

you must punctuate my dreams

and i will fight

to my dying breath

buying death

buying time too.

pissoffs pissoffs

i hate you.

hate your games

hate your names

this is my epic

and you are less

than my toothpick

you think pathos

i end in bathos

-------------

Freedom is when you hold your head high

from spondylosis.

Keep it up.

memory qua memory

2010-08-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

I could see us, more than four years ago, standing and waiting for our place in the sun. Nervous, wary, fresh- we wanted to meet and mingle, I didn't know any one of us who wanted to be single. We laughed the precious and beautiful laughter of innocence- many of us weighed a few kilos less, the curves of her face were not yet put into place, for example. S. had more hair and more smiles, in fact he was even shy at times. S&S were young and all over each other wanting to make babies like crazy, at random places and at odd hours- who could stop the frenzy of early youth?

There were so many of us, A liked B and B liked C and C didn't like D ad infinitum. A and N were best friends until N never spoke to A again. The little petty intrigues and the bitter fallouts- the winter morning coffee and the endless semester exams, the smoke rising in sepia clouds, who can arrest the motion of time?

The old Milonda's/Ashirbad/jheelpaar. I fed the kaatla who fancied themselves to be dolphins. Bloody fish loved fish chops...what could one say to these performing animals? I remember going there with my first "crush" and moodily chewing the bread myself while he dusted a crumb off my nose. I bet he didn't know how excited that made an 18 year old feel, and how does it even matter, now that the contours of the faces have receded into the abysses of memory- who is he, and she, and they? Only certain friendships stand out- the ones which transcend the minutes, hours, days, months, years- and you forget everything about a span of three months other than your glorious drunk moment- garlanding Herbie Hancock. Yes THE Herbie!

Then one fell in love and it was beautiful, that first surrender of the self to something greater than the self- who would ever know or explain what that felt like? Language stops short, language cannot hope to contend with love or express it- i.e., the language that we are used to and who can claim to know a greater universal language than love? That first, imbecile love is madness- it happens without cause or effect, it is. It is a great moment of being, there is nothing to surpass this first step to self knowledge. So it happened to us. And we learnt.

It has been more than four years since we've been growing in this place and sometimes a dislocated moment can come and dislodge one from one's state of ease and tranquility. That is not to say that most memories are uncomfortable or exciting things. But two things happen simultaneously. Firstly, this is a bubble world. The real world is not like this, will never be like this. And the memories created in this world are even more unreal. They are fragments nay angles of a crystal, each is assimilated into a composite whole, we remember some, we associate others, but we cannot remember every detail- that is humanly impossible. Our bubble world is one that must sustain us through the most difficult and darkest hours of our hitherto adult life.

As the sun set over a glorious football field, as erstwhile friends and acquaintances and closest friends huddled over yet another bubble victory, one had a tipsy and giddy champagne moment. This then is life, the gradual accumulation of memory over memory, memory qua memory, and this insane need for that unreal and transient happiness. This is why we need love and appreciation- time is unkind, my friends. Time is a bitch. It kills you, and yet teaches you to love.

birthday :)

2010-08-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

I miss writing on pen and paper. I think it's because I can't think creatively on pen&paper anymore, it's almost a disease now. I had blue cheese today, it was stinking and tasted overwhelmingly of cheese, there was only this singular omnipotent taste of cheese, it was frightening. But I don't think I understand this friend of mine, he's turning into something very strange and thoroughly inexplicable, watching him descend into madness is filling me with this almost surreal sadness- and he won't help me at all, he won't help, and how can he when he can hardly help himself?

So this blue cheese reminded me of some of our weakest moments; this gush of overwhelming (dis)taste, so refined that you cannot even say you dislike it, it's so sophisticated (like Henry James) that nobody can actually mention that they rather hate it. I ate it with a pinched expression implying martyrdom while really, nobody forced me to eat it-in fact I bought it myself. ("When's your first major novel going to be published?" asked the man who sold me the cheese and I smiled and said "Thank you, that would be all, I've quit smoking.") So help me God, all who descend into madness do it not out of choice, but out of utmost necessity.

Then he made me read a strange poem, a surreal birthday gift, and it struck me how unreal our birthdays really were, this birthday being decisive and signalling some sort of both ending and closure, but really how unreal are most of our expectations and desires? He made me read it-so fervent and illusory, I closed my eyes for there was this stab of sudden, strange pain. Mother would have called it dyspepsia but I knew better.

It was the pain of growing old.

2010-08-09T04:19:00.000-07:00

I should really start writing again. I was thinking of whether to write on England trip but realized that it was more pathetic than funny at times (other than the conference, which was great.) The problem is absolutely NOBODY reads this blog anymore and I can't write for NOBODY, that wouldn't be any fun.

P.S. - I'm turning 22 soon. This is going to be even less fun. I started this blog 4 years ago. And nobody absolutely NOBODY reads it anymore.

Chair.

2010-07-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

I sat on you, felt the mahogany

wrap me in its antique embrace until

I remembered days no longer there

when the wood was new and polished

by an old deft hand. My grandfather sat on you

so proud, patriarch and head.

He is dead.

His father too sat on you, tall as a

sahib, friend of the sahib

but actually a secret enemy.

His busy mind hatched a thousand plans

and his exquisite learning made him quote

a thousand shlokas- he gripped your arm

like one does an old comrade,

for you were his friend.

Those days too

are at an end.

Mahogany, your smell arose at midnight,

like a secret lover. Often I would creep

down and stroke you lovingly.

Generations past, yours was the

smell of time.

I smelt you, and loved.

I could have had you in my arms

but you had me in your arms

instead.

All the rest are dead.

I gave birth to a child and she nestled

in your lap. Sometimes she would see the world

an insignificant speck on you

large, magnificent, antique.

And her eyes would fill with

unshed tears

wonderment, bewilderment,

attachment.

But now they have taken you from me

Into the patrilineal possession

My feminine heart craves sympathy

and the erotic yet soothing smell

of old mahogany. My father, my lover, my

child, my friend.

You were the symbol

of all that I cared for.

Though a chair

you stood for time.

I forgot me

You taught me

What it was to be human.

2010-07-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

Every breath I take here may remind me I'm young
and the people I meet delight me. I must write
and for that I observe. Observe the passage of time
the similarity in people, the kind glint in their eyes.
My heart overflows with spontaneous love-
This then is what it is to not be an atheist.

You have tried to reach me many a time
We tried to build memories together...
But now as I move into a different realm
I realize the majesty of what we had
the simplicity of love.

Bandh ka Basanti.

2010-07-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

In my short life, I have seen several useless days, but today is especially futile.

9:45 am- I wake up. 10:20 class! How to get ready?

10:15- I am ready somewhat. I ask my father to give me a lift to college. Parents unanimously agree that today I don't have class. I argue convincingly that I do.

10:25- I am in JU. Horror, the gates are closed. When I turn around, father has left. Guards look at me with an expression of vague surprise and mild bemusement. I walk to 8B. All is empty, like a beautiful wasteland.

10:45- I am in 8B for some cha. Surprise, there is no cha! Except this stinky little place where the girl who makes the tea is snotty. Like really snotty. I had already learnt my lesson when the salty (hee!) tea I drank here once gave me acute stomach cramps. I give the tea here a miss.

10:55- Wow. Basanti is performing at 8B.

~Basanti's performance~

Two elderly men are entertaining their bandh-struck brethren. The hairier and heftier man is not Basanti, he is the manager. He is arranging the audience and exhorting Basanti to display her magical charms or jadoo. Basanti, dikha dey teraa jadoo! Basanti meanwhile is an elderly but agile man who is turning somersault/cartwheels on and with a bicycle. Applause! Applause! Basanti then takes a tea glass and balances it on his head. He then rides the bicycle like an incorrigible daredevil. Cha glass does not break. Crowd erupts into thunderous applause. Manager shouts, Basanti re, phatiye dili!

I slowly and reluctantly go home. Show over. Bandh resumed.

happy endings

2010-06-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

If you want a happy ending, that depends of course, on where you stop your story.

Orson Welles.

Evening walk.

2010-06-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

Some days are marked out for solitude, today was one of them. I was sulking in the evening, sulking my life away. I could feel my life ebbing out like a distinct and painful song. You know how there are some songs which just fade away after the first four minutes or so? Well, today it was like that- I could feel my vital force whispering mean things to my evil and idle mind at 5 pm so around 6:30 I finally decided to go for a walk.

But this walk was already predetermined to be peculiar. I knew that the transport strike would mean that I would not meet a face I would recognize and such was the idle antagonism of my wicked soul that even if I did, I would refuse to recognize any familiar face. So out I went, wearing a grey tee shirt and pajamas of an indeterminate hue. I looked hideous and I felt hideous. There are days when you cultivate ugliness and bleh-ness. Of course today was such a day. Had I not heard Stairway to Heaven in a loop ad infinitum and mourned the death of rock and all that rock stands for (stood for in my life, at least) all evening? Oh when did I grow up so much that all I all I ever did and do is to jazz up my existence or mourn the fact that I am not professionally trained to appreciate Classical?

"So you're going for a walk?" asked my mother and I nodded assent. "And what about money? Do you have enough for the weekend?" I carefully explained that I do not need money today, I wasn't going to do anything but walk. No coffee/drink/appendages, just walk. I laughed at her incredulity and set off. It wasn't true that I had no money left, enough for some smokes and cha. And I walked.

I could see the restfulness of the evening and it shocked me. Myself so restless, the streets were deserted, those who were walking had no desperation, no need for anything but that careless relaxation, I envied their self assurance. They would never know what it is to be compelled to walk for nothing, for the sake of nothing, for the sake of nothing but some self assurance- perhaps the next morning. I tried to analyse where my deep anxiety springs from, why I cannot control my most irrational fears. I drank some rather pathetic roadside cha and smoked a couple of hasty cigarettes that tasted rather nasty. I cursed them for their transience, for their harmful nature, and despised myself for needing/wanting them at all. Had I been 18-19 I would have read a bit of French existentialism, nothing phenomenological though and no Heidegger, thank you very much. But perhaps some Sartre and Camus. At this point of time, I have not yet grown up- just settled for some compromise. I read Rilke.

I read nothing at all today, nothing at all. How could I, when my entire existence revolved around that solitary walk and what it stood for? (What did it stand for, you might quiz, and I would still be trying to articulate my position.) I often glanced with great distaste at the chipped scarlet nail varnish that adorned my fingernails and I hated myself. I often overheard lovers conversing amongst themselves, something about The Godfather and marriage. But I paid no attention, for I had no curiosity left. Only a strange sort of distaste for a person who has no apparent problems but creates problems in her mind, almost as a mathematical conundrum is created by a great philosophical brain. But mistake her not, I must point out, her problems are not intellectual, they are very real, they apply to her life. Oh hideous momentary pleasure, how much you make us suffer all our lives....so transient, so fleeting, in fact, no pleasure at all.

I was walking past a strange building. Deserted and shady, deserted for more than two decades, left wholesale at a moment's notice. The office-goers never returned, and the building remains. If you believe in ghosts, then surely there are ghosts there- nobody passes that building without the customary shudder. It is the revulsion that one feels for something that is obsolete and no longer in use. Which can no longer remain beautiful, is ugly out of necessity and compulsion. The Romantics amongst us will find a stranger beauty in such ugliness, will savour the eerie and the uncanny, will perhaps go home and write a poem. But I alas, I had today forgotten my love for the grotesque, all that I remembered was that this building with its grounds is soon overtaken by another no less sordid reality; a police station. Overflowing with lights and bustle, harbouring elements rejected by society and who have in turn rejected society. What must they be feeling behind those bars? Have they forgotten the women they have married, the children they have borne, the parents who in turn must have borne them?

I don't think I could think much more after that, because I realized that the projapoti biscuit I had bought with Re. 1 /- at the chawallah's was mouldy and altogether inedible. In the life of the absurd man, as Camus so beautifully pointed out, bathos is often stronger than pathos.

I've been waiting too long

2010-06-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting too long under the cypress

breathing death, sucking the honey out of

the maze of the honey-makers, the bees making

a buzzing sound, the monotonous drone of

everyday plebeian existence. I've been

waiting too long, and it drizzles intermittently

the bittersweet odour of incense and

sandalwood, overpowering the senses.

They say it is autumn.

I've been thinking too much, savouring the oak

and pine, the evergreen survives the winter.

Then of course the dryness

of snow-it hasn't yet been established

what causes blindness. I had seen the swallow

fly to warmer climes. But like Thumbelina

I married a mole.

Languished in darkness.

I've been breathing your smell, and you

smell like what's lost, which has a smell of

its own. Neither incense nor sandalwood

nor cypress nor pine could ever divine

the smell of loss. Lavender and myrtle

sweet and horrid potpourri.

Fading leaves, pressed to remind.

Frozen flowers in embalmed hours.

Dried to remain.

(Nothing remains.)

What is the smell of loss?

What is the taste of death?

What is the sound of thought?

I knew, I knew

The swallow flew

And I forgot.

die-astole.

2010-06-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

Oh stupid trembling heart

What an ass you are

Instead of a wholesome beat

you give a resounding fart.

zoo.

2010-06-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

His eyes pierced through to the depths of my soul. How many people have I seen with that expression in their eyes? Tamed nobility, always waiting to strike back at the servile oppressors gazing as inane voyeurs. I felt ashamed and awed and knew that the tiger roars and knows that this is a mock roar, mock roar at himself.

I could see his eyes and these were the eyes that shone with a curious mixture of outrage and boredom. His body itself was poetry, but the body was tamed and curbed, the spirit crushed and restricted. Human beings are such a sickening race, my pulse increased and my heart beat fast, I wondered what it would be to meet him in a forest....

And then the wilderness of the Calcutta streets beckoned and I went home in a taxi.

To tackle the forests of night in my own mind. Or lack thereof.

This is for you.

2010-06-12T07:03:00.001-07:00

You

are the nameless friend

I miss. When I see art

and hear music. My heart

is with you. End

is also you, and I

am merely the beginning.

You

Must I name you?

I am alone

But should I blame you?

On my own

But always. Like a song-

a song in my mind

elusive and taunting

forever haunting

I knew you all along.

(Must you be unkind?)

This is my final verse.

Brilliance I have none.

You?

You have fun.

I am your curse.

And I look for you

In the smiles of children

In the eyes of sin

In the dreams of strangers

In the lies of kin

And I look for you

And I write.

(Goodnight?)

But no. I look again

I call you my intimate other

Sensual is my love

and yet I'd call you brother.

Are you my self?

Are you art?

And my heart

grows cold.

Horror makes me old.

Youth

is repulsive. Its transience

makes no sense

yet on its altar

I daily burn incense.

My nameless friend

says there are no friends

Only desire

(Means-who looks for ends?)

and lack is the fire.

This lack and then desire

I fear your sorry ire.

And yet I know

you

You are not

true.

2010-06-11T10:57:00.000-07:00

The days are shrinking despite the solstice.

bougainvillea

2010-06-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

I lost you. I lost you that night I got wet in the rain

and the sheer wetness made me think. I can never write again.

Pink. Pink bougainvillea grew out of my ears

in tender tendrils. I could never write again.

Sometimes they said, you rhyme so well. Your love is

the love of a beautiful woman, your language the most

surreal, that of a beautiful woman. Afternoons in your company

are dreams. I want to live with you.

Together, we shall create fiction.

(And what better compliment?)

I wrote parodies. When something is about to end, crisis

brings forth reinvention. Forever we reconstruct,

forever we rewrite. I had realized

That night. I would never write again.

Or perhaps I would, but only differently-

And I would love again, but also differently

Oleanders are red too, like blood.

We were wet too

In mud.

Dirt and slush cannot crush the human spirit.

Fiction can also be written with invisible pens

on an intangible parchment-

human minds, and children's tears

old women's stories and their babies' ears

fiction is therefore woven like spider webs

like the Ganges; it flows and ebbs.

That night I knew I would never write again

but would count infinite polaash flowers

and count the minutes, never the hours

and knew that till the end of time

I could never find anything to rhyme

with Bougainvillea. I see you sigh

and whisper, "How strange you are

beautiful witch of the endless night

madhuchhanda

rajanigandha

e ki sandhya"

This evening recedes into universal pain

I knew I would never write again.

(This is sort of a translation of a Bangla poem I wrote, hence it sounds like this.)

crisis

2010-05-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to explain this crisis, if I said that I wanted to end it all-it would be a lie, and I can't lie well nowadays, for they're letting sleeping dogs lie BUT
1. I'm not a dog
2. I never sleep
3. so how can I lie?
But therefore things are becoming so intolerably intolerable, I feel like gargling warm Dead Sea water and I wonder whether that would just kill me and end it all, or whether my throat would float?

See, at times, I'm all flowers, and then suddenly it's all weed, and it is then that I miss you Aldous Huxley, what Brave New World of many perceptions have you unfolded for me. But you-you ingrate infidel #1 (Mr. Bheeet-gone-swine)-why must you be so bothered about nothing at all? You think you are Ze Alpha and Ze Omega, but I am Mega, Mega, Megahertz and I will drown in you in my endless sea of decibels. I will shout out your existence since this is the week of politicians.

And the marble cracks and the stone topples, a child's laughter rings in my ears, he is so infinitely beautiful and yet never mine....tomorrow I go to the Passport Office, tell me what flight can take me away from here? It is impossible, I am bound here like a little errant marijuana leaf stuck to the last rolling paper. You cannot smoke me, nor can you throw me away...and yet adulterated with nicotine, I shall vaporize soon, away into the ether, along with your difficult, troubled, adolescent dreams.

Lamp.

2010-05-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

Moments of colour, these are moments of colour, as orange runs into green
and red runs into blue, and then yellow merges into a startling shade
of spleen. Colour is true, and I love colour, the universe is so splendid
and I am so happy.

How can I explain it? A lamp of coloured glass, broken bits of coloured glass
stuck to each other, stuck to one another, and forming a coagulated mass
and inside a bulb glows, tungsten and fine-
This lamp is mine.

I was thinking of metaphysics. I was thinking of being.
My epistemological ennui *yawn* made me unseeing
and then the lethargy drops, I feel less damp
My eyes turn on their own
Toward my beautiful lamp.

Words fail me when I see red green blue and words fail me when I think
of the true. Questions and answers that sophists have sought
Everything is so unimportant and the rest I forgot
Green was my friend's parrot who was forced to fly away
Red were the chillies that were fed him by day
Yellow was the sunshine that blinded my love
and blue is the ocean that awaits me above
and pink is the sky of my evening pain
and black is the absence
I search for in vain.

All these colours meet in my lamp. They burst into riot, they cry out my name
and they make my universe, oh who would ever be the same-
after they have seen this epiphany of light?
Colours so lovely, you laugh and you cry
you sparkle and sigh
The constellations twinkle in agreement polite
The lamp is the true star,what a beautiful night. :)

Look at the sky. Can it be true?

2010-05-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

From twilight to darkness
Horizons must shrink
Solitude's starkness-
The evening so pink.

*****

The pinkness of the evening
is almost a joke.
Look at the sky. Can it be true?
And think about it.
I waited for you.

*******

Pastorals are written
By men in the town
Who sleep with whores
When the sun comes down.
My grief is flimsy
My language is bad
But will you believe me
When I say that I'm sad?

*******

And all around me
Softly falls night
The city then wakes up
Puts on the light-
Or should it be plural? So many lights
Dispelling the grief of so many nights.

But night alone stands, Night.
Never to be lightened.
Around me, nausea tightened
its hold. Its hold, like sticky glue.
Look at the sky. Can it be true?

On reading.

2010-05-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

What is literature? Where does its unique appeal lie? Human beings constantly struggle to overcome the reality (call it truth if you will) of death. So they tell stories. We enjoy tea, alcohol, nicotine, chocolate, marijuana-each to his/her own- and we build relationships. We read philosophy, we read tabloids, we read palms even. All a futile search for meaning, for constructing ourselves and others. Then one day, someone realizes the bare minimum. He questions the very nature of our paltry existences, and this questioning is often termed "modern", we learn to see ourselves and the world differently.

And then you read one book of 110 pages, and realize that there is something just beyond our grasp, and one hasn't changed the slightest bit after a period of many years. Still, questioning, thinking, fable-making, as one did at the age of 10 after reading The Little Prince.

Why? Because at the end of the day, what else is there to confront (even if one does not fly as a pilot in the 1930s) other than the wind, sand and stars? We're all building stories, futile sandcastles on an endless beach or an eternal desert, until the moment of death. We are our own living, pulsating, laughing, crying, throbbing, dying literatures. Fiction-in-endless-making. Then Kaput!

moving on

2010-04-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

Constantly away, away, outwardly moving, building up an absurd and impossible identity, often pausing to think who/what one is, until what/who one is slips out of one's grasp, moving out-moving away from the people one claimed one's own...until nothing remains, and the ashes float away, settling in some remote corner of a dusty field, and then coming back for the last drag from somebody else's fag, why does life have to be an endless loop, an endless search for a coherence that does not exist?

Met and befriended four years ago, we bid adieu, to be bid adieu a year later, who/what am I, and who/what are you, perhaps we will spend many more years trying to figure this out, perhaps not, who cares, this is the age of virtual reality, if reality eludes one, one can always try to connect in a way hitherto unheard of, and now is the moment, now is the moment then, to create a reality that does not exist, never has, and perhaps never will.

Because I sat in that corner, was 17 years old, met her/him when he/she was 18-19 and we became friends, the friends of early adulthood, and these are the friends one gradually grows up with, finally to realize that one is young no longer. What reality is this then, a sultry drizzling summer's day, shall I compare him/her to that summer's day, but he/she is going, and I soon too will be gone, perhaps to another summer, perhaps to a better summer, perhaps not. All that will remain, until the final moment of death, is that horrible, familiar process-going, going, gone. And moving on.

dog's life

2010-04-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

There's a dog that lives on my street. It runs away when it sees me and is scared of me and everybody else. It refuses food, I don't know what it eats. I don't know why it is scared. I tried to go up and talk to him today (it's a him) and it was so scared. But the proximity allowed me to make a horrible discovery. Some fucker has tied a string or rope around his lower body and this fucking rope/string bites into its body and drives it mad with irritation and pain. All day long he nibbles at it, trying to get it off his back. He is largely unsuccessful.

If I try to untie it, he will bite me. And the worst part is, he has grown used to that fucking rope. Maybe he will miss it if someone unties it, and nibble at the disfigured flesh and skin instead. That horrifies me most of all- how most creatures get used to their misery until they are unable to conceive an existence without the presence of great physical or spiritual anguish.

The creation of light.

2010-04-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

" ....Lives there who loves his pain?
Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,
Though thither doomed?"

Satan, Paradise Lost.

On reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

2010-04-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

When the moonlight becomes unbearable

Dazzling with its uncanny brilliance, this moon

is the moon which torments Pontius Pilate

Who hopes to meet Yeshua soon.

Sometimes when the moon looks at the world just so

You know that Pontius Pilate thinks of Yeshua for

eternity without respite. Night engulfs the earth

and silence is overwhelming, interspersed with mirth.

Satan and his minions enjoy their dominions

And somewhere Death dies, followed by a birth.

Where does goodness lie? Does it lie within?

Is reason no treason and irrationality a sin?

Revolution is just a word. As is imagination.

Born out of necessity, born for the nation.

Nation? asked the Master, what dirty word is that?

I have seen Satan and his servant-jester cat.

Yet they ask for stories and the triumph of good

Life has no moral, why question whether it should?

So many young homeless poets have met

Satan, gone mad, and yet

dream of Pontius in their sedated sleep

Sleep that is disturbed and yet so deep

That in the morning when they awaken

They do not remember, though they are shaken.

Revolution. Where does that happen? Who will

take the burden of it? In the deathly still

Pontius dreams of Yeshua at night

For two thousand years, always out of sight.

Who will take the burden of revolution? He who writes

Can be ensured some peace, despite the disturbed nights.

For every Master has a devoted Margarita, evil witch in disguise

wracked with devotion, a nameless guilt and wretched surprise

Who witnesses havoc and the guilt of sin

Who knows guilt lies wherein?

The price that one has to pay for one's conviction

Can only be paid through some lies called fiction.

**************

Revolution. Is a word. Sometimes it becomes a mere laugh.

At first perhaps soothing and mild.

Then it gains momentum

It becomes wild.

It cares not for any privilege, nor any earthly prize

It has no Margarita in thin and subtle disguise.

This then becomes a real revolution

The positing of a new, not ethical solution.

***************

I promise I shall not write any more poems! cried Ivan Nikaloyevich

I am a bad poet. The Master said, manuscripts don't burn.

In the asylum, the dispossessed poets who have seen Satan

sleep after sedation. Sometimes learn

that at times Margarita returns, Yeshua permits, Satan

escorts one to one's final place of rest

Mastering no art but the heart

For what art can one know best?

****************

Imagination, shrieked Behemoth, the tom cat

who smoked cigars and rode street cars

Imagination helps us transcend

And reach, reach some sort of end.

Or did he not say it at all?

Yet it is true that Pontius dreams

of Yeshua for two thousand years.

Where there is conviction

Where there are tears

And laughter. Where there is death and life.

In short, where there is contradiction

There there is imagination

fantasy, and love.

It is there we build fiction.

Post-Colonial Poetry.

2010-04-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

Often I have this great feeling of displacement and dislocation, especially when we do classes on the Augustans. Unlike Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o I have no issues with not being able to relate to Romantic poetry viz, 'Ode to the Nightingale'. I could relate to anyone who feels lazy or indolent. I could relate to this entire hazy rigmarole about truth and beauty, they sound so grand and convincing. "Truth" orre baba...beauty! From a very early age I thought Keats was the cat's whiskers, my grandfather would often (suddenly) quote from Keats and Shelley. For some reason that generation loved the Romantics, but that is another story.

I have written some PoCo poetry. It is neither profound nor brilliant. I hope it captures my angst sufficiently well. I feel terrible when I read Pepys, or Garrick's memoirs or other things of that sort. And when I read about Brummel and the bluestockings and Drury Lane and Sarah Siddons and muslin and....I love it and I can never fully visualize myself in that world. Young women from India who have read Georgette Heyer, unite!

Now for my poetry. Applaud it.

Some Tories wore wigs

Some Whigs wore out Tories

Had I been British

I would have known more such stories.

*sob*

(a)musing.

2010-04-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

Some moments never die, some moments refuse to be recalled, and some moments just are.

I am amazed at how time and again certain moments come back like so and then it was just a few years ago that M got married and then he had a baby and now that baby can speak, recall my name, call me both didiya and doggie. When one sees new life grow up and be capable not only of cognition but recognition that moments become something else.

The ability to realize that one is growing old.

How little one knows about these things. How little I knew you. All we have are moments therefore, moments that fade uneasily. Only on sultry evenings with a slight breeze(like today) I remember(and dismember) many other evenings. Was the breeze same or different? Neither of us care. Who are you but a figment of my nostalgic imagination, sometimes I wistfully and horribly wonder whether you exist at all. What did you think? What do you think? I do not know. And while this hurts me most, while everything hurts me most, I think I have forgotten how to sleep because I am not at rest. This constant state of flux has tired me beyond everything else, I need to get out and go away. I need to breathe in a breeze that is fresh and does not stink of the acrid and bitter smell of memory. I need to make newer moments and realize that I do want to grow old. Like Benjamin Button, I must grow young.

schooldays

2010-04-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

I had a few friends with whom I'd walk to assembly in school. I wasn't really very keen on the Morning Prayers. Two bells would be rung to call the little good girls- the 1st bell and the 2nd with a gap of a few minutes. 2nd bell would mean everyone trying to neatly and hopelessly file into the Big Hall. Mrs. Baruah's bus, on which I travelled from Class VI onwards always managed to reach just a few seconds before the 2nd bell, and everyone would rush out of the bus (I mean matador, calling it a bus is an insult to the very institution of a bus) and rush helter skelter towards the Big Hall. Anyone who is familiar with Loreto House and the two gates would know that the back gate i.e., the entrance from Middleton Street, and the Big Hall is considerable distance apart. Therefore this brisk run was not a pleasant task, not by any means. I would plague my friends, notably Ramona, muchly when we embarked on this brisk run....

for I would never run. It was a matter of principle. I would still trot gently at my own pace and often stare at the sky, or do something meaningless, and scrape through at the end. I would always be the last one to enter the auditorium. Sometimes I would even be barred and made to stand in the "Late Line" but by gad, I'd never run. Some people thought it was because I had a heavy bottom which looked ridiculous when I forced it to accompany me every time I broke into a brisk run. Some thought it was my chest, I would often grasp it and gasp for breath. Some even thought that I was plain lazy. Perhaps, conjectured a few who remembered their Radiant Reader poetry, it was those immortal lines by William Henry Davies- What is this life is full of care, we have no time to etc etc....I am yet to ascertain the true reason why I never cared for any of those goddamned bells. I never managed to get a hymn-book, and always had to sing from memory, and even then my memory sucked. Basically, what I did was-

1. I'd trot, I'd amble, I'd meander, in short I drove Ramona et al crazy.

2.Will you walk a little faster???!!! they would thunder at me. I would then warble in angelic tones Will you walk a little faster? said the whiting to the snail. There's a porpoise close behind us and he's treading on my....*2nd bell*

3. I would grumble and grumble and grumble, until even I was ashamed of myself. Then I would shake my hips-i.e., my buttocks would jiggle, i.e., my bum would move 5 inches behind the rest of my body, i.e, I would run.

I still run, but hey, in my mind!

-life update-

2010-03-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Insomnia is the worst disease in the world, next to immortality. Imagine never being able to die, never being able to sleep is just a little less bad. I hate my insomnia, it was never this serious. My psychoanalyst could not help me at all. Today a psychiatrist prescribed me medicines, and advised me to stop intake of tea/coffee. This is my death knell, I can't imagine a life without tea and coffee. I don't want any kind of stress anymore, but you should have seen her face when I said that. She looked incredulous and amused(bemused?) and gave me the sort of looks that people give you when they think that being a graduate in English Literature has made you slightly retarded.

It's not all that, it's not. "What is it then?" she asked. If I could even begin to answer her question she would have shown me some respect but I gave her a dull nod and said "I don't know." I am sick of pleading ignorance these days. I want to know. I want to know. And I want to know more than the things I study, read, write or think. I want to fucking know.

Literature really does you in, if you take it seriously. The world does you in if you take it seriously. Why didn't I realize it before? I never took it seriously and I was fine, then I lost half my friends, I mean not just drifting away but actively antagonizing them, I am such a wretched bitch. Fuck this world!Fuck it all. I want to stop being endearing to a handful, I want to be enduring instead.

And now-after a really pathetic day- I came home and discovered that a didi of mine has sent me a parcel of books, choglet and clothes from Montreal. This made me cry out of sheer happiness. Isn't there this strange thrill that permeates one's body and mind when one discovers that one is loved unconditionally by someone at least? I was so happy with everything until I discovered that she had also sent me a piece of putty. Amazing putty that tears like paper, bounces like rubber and shatters like ceramic! It's s'posed to be for stress relief and is manufactured by a company called Copernicus Toys. (Irony, huh?) It has made one li'l retard sister very very very very happy :)

I don't know what to gloat over more-Michael Chabon, endless gourmet choglet or my piece of yellow putty nothingness (and putty sounds like potty, I am exhilarated!)

Silver linings etc etc outshining them dirty grey clouds, huh!

Thank you and I love you Buba didi!

A Short Story on Love.

2010-03-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

Dearest,

I am trying to remember where we first met, I think it was an attic. You know how metaphorical an attic is, it is almost always a lie. Therefore my attic might need never have existed and yet I claim we met in an attic. I am sure you remember it as well. If you don't- ah well, does it even matter? I wonder whether you remember the dirt. The dirt has increased over the years for I am quite sure that the sweepers always forget to sweep out that one particular attic. It lies there in a curious liminal zone, beyond memory and nostalgia, an attic where we once made love.

You stood there looking at the dusty shelves trying to figure out whether it was the old copy of Beowulf you wanted or a book of transcendental old vernacular poetry. You had money for one book and you chose the Krishna-leela over heroic lores of monsters who existed in old Anglo Saxon England. Or was it England then? Who cares, my beautiful glorious one, who cares? I know you as I have seen you glow in the tropical summers of my old, forgotten, and fading colonial city, glow with perspiration, dust and poverty. I have seen you glow with love and inspiration and I have seen you fade too. Fade away, fade out, you drifted into the ether, the vast ether of humanity, away from this country and this city uniquely ours.

I remember you in that bookstore-in-the-attic, and I knew you were a mad woman, a woman who would throw the copy of Beowulf onto the floor and without epilogue or prologue bat your eyelids at me, and I would trace the contours of your eyelashes-what could be more erotic? But you adjusted your spectacles and almost in reflex the sari that you so carelessly and wonderfully wore stiffened. I believe it was my presence that alerted you. You looked up at me and looked past me. You paid for the Beowulf and you walked out, alone. I was so hurt then, so very hurt, almost surreally I saw the blood flow through my flimsy white shirt, it dripped on to the floor, the floor of red cement. Red camouflages red all the time, doesn't it? So it was with my blood which coagulated shortly until I realized that it was not blood at all, it was something else altogether. Don't shout "metaphor, you lousy lunatic!" at me, I don't think I can take it. I wanted to marry you then and there. I knew you felt it too. So I followed you. I followed you outside without paying for the books that I picked up. You see how I must go back eventually, go back to the old attic? I did not pay for my books, I must return.

To however go back to reminding you of that one mad day of love. I followed you and convinced you with my frantic gestures to accompany me to Prinsep Ghat, the banks of the river Hooghly. I wondered at your superb nonchalance in calling it Ganges, it is not the River Ganges, it is not I tell you. This little disagreement we have obviously livens things up a bit (although your utter ignorance makes me mad and very very angry.) We stare at the Greco-Roman pillars, not decrepit but not stunning either, somehow they seem so integral to the mood. We hope for something eternal you know, something lasting, even if it is only for the moment. You smile and tell me, "Let us take a boat for an hour, why don't we?" and in my enthusiasm I take a boat for two hours. You sat at one end and I sat at another and we were so scared that this little rickety boat would be overburdened with two strange hearts that would find little common ground that we stared at the swirling water instead of at ourselves. That eternal swirling water, what did it care for our transient and fleeting differences? The boatman asked us for a cigarette taking advantage of the uncanny silence. I grimaced but you laughed and handed him one of your expensive ones. He gave an ugly grin (what horrible teeth!) and lit it with your pink lighter. I could have died of jealousy at that moment, it is engraved in my mind-the image of his toothy grin and sly wink, he smoking your expensive tobacco and I staring moodily at the water, staring sans courage. But how could I protest? You would have laughed at me, and that would have been mortifying. So I kept my silence and you your tobacco but my mind was not silent, it was screaming screaming at the sky and at the water and there yonder at the distant silhouette of land. The river meandered like our moody minds; what did it care for how we think? These thoughts eluded the muddy water, the boatman asked for a cigarette, the glowing embers swayed and flickered out in the water. We had only that eternal passing moment.

Then you laughed again and I looked up. "Why is your forehead creased?" you asked. "I am thinking..." "Oh?!" and that strange smile reserved not for fellow human beings but for something less human, something we feel pity for and yet empathy too. "Our lives are taut and relaxing at the same time," you said," and that is why I find ice cream so delightful. The cold tingles my teeth (I have cavities that tingle) and yet the ice cream melts into the tongue...not always an explosion of taste but almost always an explosion of feeling." And then-because you were a poet-"Do I always write in the same way?" I was truthful before I was a lover so I said-"Never same but always similar." Then you got terribly angry and slapped me so I sat chastened like a little obedient sulking boy. Finally you smiled. "Exactly. Writing is like love then, eh?" I was impressed, impressed so much as to have an orgasm, but controlled myself in time for there was also this slight resentment. Love is never similar! Never! But the boatman had rowed for a couple of hours already, the hours of paid glamour and suspect danger were over. Death by drowning would not happen, not at least this evening.

That night I had a dream. I dreamed that we were married and were on our honeymoon. I wanted to go to Paris but you chose the mountains. There in a remote spot in the Greater Himalayas we fought absurd snow fights. You stuffed snow down my woollies, you bitch! I however was the winner (or loser) of this unequal match and carried you across to the little wooden cottage. We lit a fire. We cozied up. Shadows danced in front of us and outside everything was white. That dazzling wretched blinding whiteness symptomatic of snow. I hated it. I hated it too much. You said you loved it. You changed your mind the very next second. Then even you said you hated it. I said this was a dream and we would wake up very soon. You looked sad and you said it was my dream and not yours. So what would you do? You were condemned to linger there forever alone, you cried. "You will return soon?" I assured you that I would. But I knew that I hated this whiteness so much that I pledged I would never ever dream of it again. I wanted to prolong the loving(hating?) as long as I could however, so I stroked your cheeks. Your cheeks looked like red green-veined apples. One could ferment them and make cider and get intoxicated, I was already intoxicated with your smell. You had no ordinary smell, it was pungent and sweet like autumnal things. "You will return soon?" I assured you that I was yet to come or even reach my destination, returning comes later. My answer was "Cognition comes before recognition." You turned your slender stiffened back at me and wept. "I hate the way you speak. I hate the way you refuse to acknowledge poetry. I hate it when you descend into philosophy!" But I hadn't, I told you repeatedly I hadn't, I hadn't done anything. I tried to reach out to your fading silhouette and found myself awake. I was awake and alone and perspiring.

****************

It is only at moments like these when you realize that solitude is not worth so much poetry or philosophy or even banal speculation. Solitude is the one curse that you do not ever need. I did not need it either so without further ado we had the most glorious summer in the world. So what if temperature shot up to 45 degrees celsius. I was mad, mad with the concept of dialectic, I understood it as I had never understood it before. We bought lozenges which we bit into asymmetrical twos thanks to superbly manoeuvred kisses, two sets of sharp teeth and the feverish love that new lovers acquire. I witnessed her perspiring in the most glorious cotton saris but we never went back to the attic. Nor even to the banks of the river. Gradually her cruel laugh became a distant memory and she would smile differently now, smiles of pleasant contentment. We explored new places and spaces and faces. Hand held in hand we discovered Calcutta as it was then. We ate greasy food that she could never digest and watched superbly political plays that she surely did not understand. I was often afraid to tell her how little she understood anything, stupid girl as she was she thought feeling was understanding. Yet who was I to aim to give her conceptual clarity? She was more beautiful than I was and she had breasts and she thought she could deal in language and for me, for the time being, it was enough.

Two summers went by. It was time to understand time. Not this eternal passing moment but the future. I had saved up some money. I bought a ring. I planned to meet her there where my brow had been creased in hateful thought two summers ago.

"Dearest," I said with my hand in my pocket, "We are done with this chapter in our lives. To increase our horizons and to aid that infinite progression of knowledge we must escape these narrow confines and travel, travel to a country and a university that with ample funds will sustain us for the next many years. Will you join me? Will you go?"

She stared straight ahead as if she hadn't heard me and muttered, "I hate the syntactical structures of your sentences, you freak."

A summer previous to that I would have felt a mild annoyance and infinite affection but all I felt was blank as if something had struck me suddenly. A faint idea trying to articulate itself. Perhaps it would be better not to? Perhaps there was something...? Her cruelty, her utter arrogance, her blind irrational hatred for everything that stood in her way. Why was she so irrational? How could I ever live with her? It was impossible! It was impossible! She was a stupid unseeing child who had flashes of brilliance but whose sense of self importance would make it absolutely impossible for her to achieve greatness. She claimed humility but modesty she had none. A snob, an intellectual snob with no insight into my interests and my needs. She said the same things of me.Yet I loved her.

****************

I loved you so much that it was impossible to be with you. I don't think you will ever understand. I have heard that you were married and divorced and that you are working as a journalist. I didn't think you would ever go back to the city where we grew up either, but return you did. Something that I could never do. I often dream those old familiar dreams and wake up crying alone but of late it has been decreasing, I do it only once a year, midsummer. I daresay you think I am mad, I have always been. There is something so wrong about being in love, so intrinsically wrong. It has made me work harder and harder and I have produced some of my best work in the process. I bought your book of poetry recently. I never thought you could write such pleasant things not remotely sad. The Funny Book of Short Giraffes from a morbid self-obsessed girl like you? I'm sure you're going to say that I haven't understood it, that there are layers and layers and layers like onions that I need to peel- and cry in the process.

I am yet to return to the attic bookstore. I know you wait for me there endlessly, wait for me to return. I am sorry, I am sorry, I have lately started writing poetry-would you say it is a small step? This is how I end today-

"In the universe of our many delusions only one thing do I know with certainty that I have loved and my love was true and so did you and we wait for eternity to end so that we can reunite for this bitter joy is what sustains us this never being together this eternal anticipation and constricted feeling at the same time liberating…Thus ends the saga and thus begins it for in our end lies our beginning and we shall meet in those sepia attics and the whiteness until universal darkness shall engulf us in a different understanding
and still may we love…"

I know that I have failed us and yet succeeded. You fool, you utterly beautiful fool who exists like the attic in that curious liminal zone between memory and nostalgia, you made a mistake. You didn't understand. Or did you? I finally have.

The one thing that a poet and a philosopher can have in common is paradox.

like-blah?!

2010-03-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

I thought I saw glittering fireflies instead of sodium lamps, and I thought I saw funny clowns instead of people. P's cycle became a unicorn and I was so happy. I was going fast, very fast, being double-carried into the ether. And all of this because of some puny beer in a bottle?

Oh no no. Obviously not.

Where did I keep my spectacles? :O

growing up

2010-03-20T09:19:00.001-07:00

With the knowledge that one is getting older comes another more difficult realization-that people see you as an adult. This is terrible, because I feel like a child all the time. I want to be adored and cuddled and made much of and mostly I have a terrible desire to be understood. My friends often point out the inevitability of the complexities that characterize human existence, but it hurts me most when even my mother treats me as grownup at times.

B especially tells me that my irrational habit of disliking someone who doesn't like me much or make much of me is pathetic and childish. N said appearances need not necessarily correspond to reality and to expect this is pathetic and perhaps a piece of philosophical idiocy. S is in many ways like me, the need to be loved comes from so deep within that both of us often end up looking foolish and absurd. But trying to grow up has been a physically exhausting process for me these last few years and I think at times that everything I write will end up being a replay of that old and familiar nostalgia.

I miss people terribly, I miss my old attachments without wanting them back, I replay them in my mind and I love and hate the old times. I miss the innocence and I miss my snootiness and snottiness. There have been instances when I have been hurt terribly and when I have hurt people terribly. I want to ask for forgiveness and I want to distribute it too. I go over these times and try to figure out where and how and what I should have done differently. And then I remember that I am an adult and an adult doesn't treat time like this. An adult looks forward and doesn't dwell in the past and the what-might-have-beens.

I set a lot of store on human attachment- as if being attached to people is the mark of humanity. I would question attachment and at the same time accept it unquestioningly. Why does he/she like me? What do they see in me as a person? How far would they care about me? What if I am in trouble? What if I die? D taught me that one doesn't question attachment when it comes, one is just attached. One is a friend. One cares. Memories don't fade but gradually you get detached from these memories, the good times, the love. You look back but you don't obsess. That is growing up.

Sometimes you become friends with people and get attached to those who can never feel as you do. They might not reciprocate the love and concern you have for them or they might not have the same intellectual and social concerns. You think about different issues, you gradually fall out.

I have had several intense friendships with men and women and strangely enough I seem to have had immense difficulty in preserving these over time. But I am learning, as N may testify.

It is one of my closest friends-N.B.- who unconsciously made me understand in her beautiful dimly lit drowsy afternoon room- the friends who stay are those whom you love and appreciate with detachment, who you see as central to your life in a peripheral way, with whom you have fun but mild enjoyment and not paroxysms of delight. Even looking back at lost time is an art-maintain an aesthetic and intellectual distance-otherwise life could become unbearable, unlivable, and repetitive.

When I have such moments of realization I wonder how these will enrich my art. In my teenage years I believed that moments of agony mingled euphoria- ecstasy and epiphany- characterize the greatest works of art. That might be only partially true. In my twenties I have reached a different understanding. Life is composed of calmer moments-moments when one realizes that one has no enemies and no "best friends" either. It is then that the consciousness feels happy curled up with an interesting book, a cup of good tea and the promise of a phone call a couple of hours later. Accompanying this feeling of almost contentment is the happy realization that nobody in this world will probably "understand" me, myself included. This is when one is in urgent need of chocolate.

-in devotion-

2010-03-16T07:38:00.001-07:00

The seconds are ticking by, and they become minutes and hours

and days and months. Years have passed and I met you

too late. Too late to call you my own. How we have grown

and it is true. Red and purple are the flowers

that grow every season of crisis.

Tell me, have you met the goddess Isis?

I am no Isis, no miraculous woman, and know no magic

Charmed by my absurdity, you forget that I am tragic.

Overhead in this evening sky the eternal awaits-

Closed is my perception and thus forbidden are the gates.

Seconds melt into minutes and hours pass me by

When I look into your face which alone gazes at the sky.

Yet every moment reminds me of my human imperfections, my defects are many-

broken are the strings of my lyre, missing the intensity of

desire. I wish I could emit

a stream of perpetual knowledge

or fascinating wit.

But all I see and you see are the imprints of my flaws.

Slender are the hands of Isis, grubby are my paws.

You look at me in recognition and often think you know

the conception of woman, the appearance that I show

is mistaken for reality. You who can penetrate

into the depth of things, must realize it is too late.

You see the illusion of wings and the mirage of flight

My broken strains of music reverberate through the night.

The seconds are ticking by and we had erupted into song

where the purple flowers grow and the birds

sing along. You knew my voice was harsh though

tender was my heart. We would soon grow apart-

and knowledge of this crisis

Made you call me songstress, a beautiful Isis.

Streets to the Unknown

2010-03-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

Or, hast thou experienced love, my poet?

We do not know.

What do you not know, my poet?

Those hidden alleys of love?

Bylanes to destiny, crisscrossed with misfortune?

Misfortune of not being known, but discovered?

Of being discovered but remaining unrecognized?

(Is it in your smile that the answer lies?)

They remain questions.

He toils at his task, so extremely literate,

but his grimy and sweaty countenance frowns.

Always these dark cul-de-sacs leading to more questions...

Why doesn't he laugh when the treacherous evening descends

and the leaves rustle and the stars burst into tears?

(Why does he search for answers in my smile?)

He does not know.

We should have gone for an unnatural play together

Beaumont and Fletcher, or maybe a movie- Chinatown-

He would have been horrified with the incest

Jack Nicholson would have satisfied me, we would soon

part ways. He would walk away, and the moon

would shine on my fading silhouette. Farewell.

The Unknown can only ask questions-

Have you...you...experienced love, my poet?

When the sweat dripped from your weary brow-

and you thought, "This is the time, then

and now, now she will come-" and I came

But the weight of legacies, questions and quandaries...

Burdens. You sought deliverance, that too in a smile.

I go back to what I know best, my

final inheritance. You, my poet,

unlettered and not illiterate,

honest but untrue.

Perhaps no poet at all.

What is a smile?

A street to the Unknown?

We do not know.

poetry

2010-03-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Oh my kind young narcissus,

I have loved you, until your love directed inwards,

killed me.

And I wrote to you, commemorating that love-

this very draft here replaced the old one-

a beautifully composed pack of lies.

Perhaps that sort of love is meant to be

written over and over again.

Some sort of ecstasy in pain

Out of my skin, in yours, must we begin

to recount the old story of obsession?

Shall I be content with the old sin?

Or can it wane?

But here I am at the old site of commemoration

Rewriting myself, and perhaps

this love is important. For all love

is subjective to the point of

pure selfhood.

So I shall come back again.

Tonight. Every night.

This poem shall change every night.

Watch this chameleon space.

It is your face.

A terribly thwarted textual construct.

Nothing more, nothing less.

A simulacrum of real love

Forever- changing, hyperreal mess.

My Dilli trip funny post.

2010-03-05T06:34:00.000-08:00

Do not pretend, my loyal readers, that you have not been waiting for this post. This is going to be one of those posts that make you laugh so much that you inevitably fart in your seats and pretend that the chair moved, making that awkward noise.

The seminar that I went for was- in a nutshell- funny. Now I shall explicate why it was funny. The options that you have-

1. The author of this blog is strange.

2. Seminars organized without a specific purpose and agenda and without adequate screening of paper-readers are strange.

3. Delhi, as an alien city, and the large sprawling campus of JNU with a million canteens all with fantastic food, and Arse Poetica let loose with too much loose cash alone, alone in this evil large metropolis= trouble.

There are many things that my curious, observant and inquisitive mind has to say. Like; do not use a boarding pass as a bookmark. Do not leave your most precious and intensely private notebooks lying about in the house of the people that you are staying with and then call them up and ask them to peruse the same looking for aforementioned bookmark. Do not contemplate their horror when they see sexy potty sexy potty sexy potty written ad infinitum all over your intensely private notebook. The evening conversation went something like this.

A. uncle: I didn't know you have a potty fixation

A.P: I do?

A.uncle: Indeed. Your boarding pass was not in the Camus as you had claimed, so I chanced upon your notebook.

A.P: The notebook that had "potty" written all over it?

A.uncle: No, the notebook that had sexy potty written all over it.

Arse Poetica cringes.

Little kid: Ahona didi, tum kitni gandhee cheezein likhti ho!

Attempt at recovery of lost reputation:

Potty gandhee kyun hogee? Sab log karte hain!

Actually the term "sexy potty" is one that I have coined. It encapsulates the ennui of everyday academics-standing for the banality of our inane existences. For example, who can tolerate two hours of nonstop lit-shit, eh? Thus etc. In fact, one of our professors established the famous blog on fantastic(not) loos and where to find them! Scatology I like better than other more mundane epistemology, and so...

M. Auntie (nursing her 3rd vodka and looking stonily at me) : It's OK.

For the first time in my life, I introspected on my fondness for potty. I mean, it's not that I like looking at my shit or anything. I am just as normal at shitting as any of you. Then what is it? Why am I like this? Am I disturbed? Am I weird? Am I- oh horror horror- dirty?

Anyway this story ends here. Moving to the seminar which I attended- truly cosmopolitan and exciting. I befriended people of various nationalities- Czech, Polish, Japanese. But one race I could not stand during the course of the international conference on bengal and bengalis by gad were the bangalis...

I will now tell you about the weirdest of the lot. He was a man with a physical deformity which would at first instance lead you to feel some sympathy for him. There is a tendency to sentimentalize hunchbacks after reading Victor Hugo. But sympathy for this particular creature was shortlived. After a hugely disappointing plenary session this man arose to ask a question. With a flourish he ascended the podium. Meanwhile the plenary had become a heated catfight between two elderly largely un-intellectual ladies who were screaming at each other. This man goes up like a breath of stale air and looks serious. We expect something calmer, but in a split moment of delightful horror, we understand that he is enunciating an obscene chant instead of a question-

joy bangla!joy bangla! joy bangla!!!!!

Never has victory ever been further from Bengal. Gone were the memories of the pointless plenary and the cantankerous catfight. Here was the new apostle; a man with a stoop and a relentless opinion. A Vaishnavite whose sole claim to academic fame was life membership of the Asiatic Society. After the performance which was his paper, I was led to believe that they take auditions before you get admission to the hallowed portals of that orientalist institution.

his performance.

Some acts leave you speechless and incoherent, incapable of representation. You become acutely aware that what you write is not the real thing, that you can never convey the real thing. But nevermind. Let us try. I shall merely quote him and leave the rest to your imagination and delicacy of mind, dear reader.

Quote #1- regarding the validity of a date in the life of Chaitanyadeb-

"Gurudeb Sukumar Sen bole gechhen 1583 aar Ramakanta,(hnyaa, mane paasher barite thaake), bolechhe 1610. Amar mot e 1583 keno na(kapaal chhulen pronaam er bhongima te) paramguru bole gechhen!"

my translation- "My mentor Sukumar Seb has said the date is 1583 and Ramakanta"( yes, for sure he lives next door...) "has said that it's 1610. In my opinion it is 1583 because (touches forehead as a mark of respect and reverence) my paramguru has said so!"

Quote #2-

"Paramguru bole gechhen-shokkole sanskrit poro, poro, poro!

Quote #3-

"Salute to all those jaaraa amar paper mon diye shunechhen- jara shonen ni...(looks very very angry and in the mood to kill)...no salute!"

I have never seen anybody so clear in the head about what he wants from his audience at any seminar. To salute all those who have listened to a merciless invective breathtaking in its irrelevance and low academic merit, and to deny the salute to those who switched off....*speechlessness*He also interrupted every speaker in every session that he attended with irrelevant comments, mostly concerning his Bengali and Vaishnavite jingoism.

Also a Czech academic who befriended me asked me this question most seriously:

apni aponar paper kokhon poribeshon koriben? (When will you serve your paper?)

I did not answer this seriously:

Aagami kaal, mohashoy. Shonge kintu kancha lonka, shorsher tel ebong lobon aniben! (Tomorrow, good sir, do not forget to get the green chillies, mustard oil and essential salt!)

There are of course a million other stories, and one that includes the good Opaline, and plenty more on JNU and their "tutes"- which is a lewd abbreviation that they have come up with for tutorials- but for antichrissakes, not today, not today.

trippy trip trippy

2010-02-23T05:57:00.000-08:00

Going to Delhi and staying in a university where my father studied in the 70s. This is going to be odd, I always have a problem with history. Which is perhaps why he didn't encourage me to study it in the first place. To think this is where Baba did his thing when he was my age is bound to be a bit strange, especially because everyone thinks I look like a young him in jeans and sweater. The kaalo choshma, the short crop of unruly curls and the rather hostile smirk at people who oppose us.

Not to mention the total lack of regard for order, sobriety and reason. There is absolutely no method in our madness. Except he's lots cleverer than I am. And he is married to my mother- an achievement I can never hope to emulate. She is the most beautiful and clever and sensitive Leo that I have ever seen. Which reminds me- she got his goat, that rather wretched Capricorn that he is.

So I'm going to Delhi tomorrow and staying where he stayed 35 years back and wondering whether the quirkiness of time will kill me when I go to England in summer, for that will remind me of the summer 22 and more years back when I was conceived. The product of the marriage between two earnest young scholars who had to wait 7 years before bringing me into it without the hope of a sibling-before or after.

I don't think I want to do a serious PhD after all.

love.

2010-02-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

I looked at my room today and thanked God that I have been given a home. My lamp, made of bits and pieces of coloured glass, looks like fragments of divine feeling. I know that sounds absurd but is not, if you knew my lamp. I am happy to be alive and in a pretty room. Therefore I am not an atheist, never was and never will be.

waaaaaah!

2010-02-19T06:03:00.000-08:00

I have often wondered whether one lives in this world when one is extremely fatigued. It almost feels like a parallel universe, this world of infinite weariness. At such times I wish to be 10 again and feel that certain nonchalance. I remember Turner Classic Movies (or TNT as it was known then) and extended dinner and extended dessert and then finally a cozy bed with a cozy lamp and a shrug of the shoulders before a dreamless and relaxing sleep.

Yet- I forget to mention the bedtime book- that haven of endless peace in which one immersed oneself before that dreamless sleep. Such comfort, such beauty. Where do they go, I wonder, these innocent days? Slowly disappearing into a sepia past, the contours fading into a web of relentless time... Time, our eternal enemy, bites into our black and white photographs leaving a trail of red. Our blood that slowly coagulates into rust and disappears into the ether altogether.

When extreme fatigue strikes me, I look into my fridge for chocolate. Such it has always been. Such it will always be. But today my fridge seems to be containing only the humble pumpkin, that hideous bumpkin. Seldom have I hated kumro so much, as today.

No chocolate. I am so tired.

loco

2010-02-15T10:08:00.000-08:00

Maybe this is what constitutes happiness.
That's it.Or

"I shall take the world by storm.
And make myself the norm."

~Almost-idea; in search of finis~

2010-02-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

1.Nobody reads my stories anymore, possibly because I don't write stories anymore. Stories cannot be incoherent and disconnected fragments. Neither can people be reduced to merely story or anecdote. I am not trying to be profound here, it's just that something is puzzling me. Something elusive and intangible...let's call it the almost-idea. Now that brings us to question of what an idea is in the first place- that which is in the mind at the moment of conception maybe, a fundamental ontological category of being? So is there something in the mind before conception?For that (even though we shall inevitably resort to reductio ad absurdum) I shall use....

2.Hypothesis. Every hypothesis is ultimately not-quite-true and resides in this horrid liminal zone, caught between truth and untruth. That devastating word perhaps qualifies a hypothesis just as it colours every poem that a poet writes. This "perhaps"-the whiff of the counterfactual-is what makes life worth living, whether you choose a scientific method or a poetic path.

3.Poets are charming idiots. Every poet is a charming idiot, except Rabindranath, Shakespeare, Chaucer and I don't know enough about Milton. Eliot is an idiot because I think he should have written at least one novel. Don't ask me why, just. And don't call me presumptuous/audacious. I will give you a turd made from curdled uhhhh...curd?

4. And since we speak of Eliot, is it time to speak of time? Or do we not have time?

Q: Why are you reading this?

Likely A: To kill time.

So it is obvious that you have some time to spare if you are killing it so mercilessly in the first place. (This entire section is an allusion to our dear friend Alice who once dreamed an entire book and then her author turned it into a complex mathematical conundrum, but why do we digress? Suppose you ate her cat Dinah for dinner....actually let's not suppose this horrible pun. Let's not suppose anything at all...let's start tabula rasa...)

5. Memory. Which always succeeds time. And again. Our minds are never a clean slate. The earliest memory I have is jumbled up with a couple of other memories and any one might have preceded the other. This is where I return to the idea of hypothesis. ὑπόθεσις- an explanation that you may propose for a phenomenon you observe. You shriek in horror; do not get Socratic! You ask in curiosity; you have the semblance of a scientific method? And then you wonder; is she true?

And since your memory(memories) are entangled and enmeshed with mine until there is a complex web of truth untruth reality fiction freedom anarchy love hatred compassion cruelty revulsion attraction good evil relevant redundant anticipation certainty there can be nothing but a semblance and a mirror....each reflecting the other...why do you reduce? Why is the entire canon so reductive? Especially the Western world which divides and subdivides ideas ad infinitum. But what about our almost-ideas? What happens to those? What are we going to do?

Tentative answer: Even an infinity mirror, a mirror that contains a strand of lights that appears to repeat forever, a mirror that has an apparent infinity of images, is nothing but an optical illusion.

~I rest my case~

- finis-

2010-02-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

What are these nights-
slightly sedated, musical, mad, throbbing with horror...
buy me beauty, make me beauty, take me away.
What are these nights?
Nocturnes, preludes to the hopelessness of living forever?
Tell me; if the night faded not into tomorrow night
and I could remember the morning

Would I forgive you?

2010-02-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

For then one night fades into another fades into another and into another...
And then life is over,
And one is dead.
And nothing is left, not even these preludes to death
These fucking insane nights, would I value them
if the end was closer?

a song for mercy.

2010-01-30T11:45:00.000-08:00

It was a beautiful night, the sort of night when the moon is larger and more luminous than the eyes that stare back at you from the mirror called hope&fervent desire. On such a night, beauty itself could be overlooked for something more profound and hopeful. It was a spring night, strange music wafted by. The night was like a sigh.

The night was like a teardrop on the cheek of Venus. It was beauty that made it both sad and desirable. She wanted to freeze the night and store it as stardust and hope that the jar that would contain this night as immortal&sparkling stardust would never get lost. It is the custom of jars like this to get lost because you can never label them. You stand risk of exposure and ridicule if you dare to do such a thing.

She, observer of this night, of the rare&curious blue moon, of an impossible depth of horrified emotion. This night, the night of depraved&delicious lust, the night of a terrified love, the night of a thousand moans and a single tear. This night is the night to be broken and powdered into glistening memory, a single jar of promise. Promise that would sustain several lifetimes.

Standing alone at the edge of a lonely pool, staring at a distorted reflection, knowing only the simulacrum of this night. So much more desirable than the real, so much more necessary than the ideal. Forever Narcissus, forever young, forever sad, forever in anticipation. Such is the necessity of desire&knowledge.

Overhead the stars exploded into a million constellations of ever-expanding proportions. The universe cannot be contemplated. She is nothing, what she feels may perhaps be something, who can be sure? Stardust is merely another idea, the jar is a fancy, the poem is a whimsy. There is no truth, there is only the horror of realization.

Play for me a Nocturne for Violin and Piano.

IIT KGP springfest trip.

2010-01-27T08:25:00.000-08:00

Part 1: The Plan and Its Pitfalls.

Never go on a trip with three men if you're a woman. And a woman whose digestion is not quite decent and regular. Do not guzzle rum throughout the evening with milky tea. Do not go running towards a makeshift stage after hastily pulling on mismatched socks hoping for a Monte Carlo shirt.

Prayag goes rock climbing.

Sanjukta goes tight rope walking.

Arnab goes about pleasantly smiling and looking pleasant.

Sion grumpily glares.

Sanjukta has a legion of IIT-ian friends of friends.

Panda has acidity.

Accommodation- is 65 bucks a day in a seedy hotel called Hotel Decent. Well, actually not. It's called Tourist Lodge and has a stinky communal loo. People vomit out their innards while brushing at communal basin and fart all the bloody time. They knock on your door, you open it and find a trail of aromatic yesterday's dinner leading up to the loo. The common loo.

The Manager is called Grouchy and Prayag Ray is my brother. Of course we sign "Ray" and "Panda", having recently met at the Kumbh Mela where we had 21 years of catching up to do. Grouchy likes son papdi (I was carrying 1 kg fortification) and so I bribe him to not do his grouchiness with me.

Part 2: Stains.

I gawk at the bedsheet provided to me. "Manager kaku, ei bedsheet ta toh cholbe na! Eitaar opore yaa bodo bodo daag!" Manager Kaku to Prayag: Go to a better place if you want fancy bedsheets!

Manager kaku to Carrier-of-son-papdi: OK, I'll change it, but these stains are nothing but hair dye. (Ahona Panda was not pointing to murky black stains but dry whitish horridly suspicious stains.)

Sanju's mommy to Sanju: "You will not go to their hotel in Golbazar!"

Ahona's mommy to Ahona: "You stayed in a room that cost 65 bucks a day?! How seedy can you get? How could you do this to us?!"

Ahona while crapping alcohol+curd crap: "Why am I shitting in this loo? I want a clean commode where I can flush! I hate this! I hate this!"

Prayag: I am such a fart bomb! I was perhaps a sex bomb, but I am mostly a fart bomb now.

Sion: I am kipte first and then a hygiene-freak. I can also digest everything because I am a teetotaller.

Arnab: Life is such fun if your mindset is simple. Oh look, Sion's got a darling dimple.

Sanjukta: Poor, poor Ahona. Hmmm- now how do I manage to fit in that group of friends?

Part 3: Digestion.

Thousands of children floating through the night

Walking on Scholars Avenue, passing out of sight.

I want to be a scholar though I cannot solve a sum.

I am such a loser that I cannot digest rum.

I meet scholars who can solve all the sums ever known to man

And then make their own sums because only they can

My tummy rumbles because there is poetry in my tum

I think it is poetry though people call it rum.

i am linguistically enabled because I am made just so

But IIT makes me cry, it's the rum don't you know?

And when I drink good whisky

I appreciate the artist Kandinsky

But shit man mathematics I so neglected

And the more I reflected

I realized the levels to which I had sunk.

I was completely drunk.

P.S.- If you want to make a good turd, don't trust them when they say: trust curd.

Part 3: Money, honey and the funny bunny.

The room in which we stayed had graffiti on the walls.

Mr. Arjun Pandit- (in Hindi which I translate)- I want a girl who will understand me and whom I will understand. This is very important. She must love me and I must love her. If you are that girl, please call me- (number). The number was unavailable. Alas.

Another chant: Mmmmm Hari

95432112345

Mmmmm Hari

95432112345

Mmmmm Hari

and so on. (this number is not the number exact, but you get the drift.)

There was also a picture of a bus with passengers who (thankfully) had their clothes on.

Sanjukta and I won two thousand rupees. The event was midfuckingly banal and inane. IIT wanted us to write creatively in 8 minutes and 5 minutes. Alas, a short story is never a mathematical problem, but then we poor people with limited access to Scholars Avenue, who would listen to our lame laments?

Conclusion: memorable, exciting, and absolutely smashing! I learnt a lot. I also crapped in loos which would make JUDE ladies' seem like 5 star hotel stuff. All in all, the moral of the story: you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you don't need to be gifted to walk down Scholars Avenue. You just have to be sloshed, stoned and sozzled.

---with love---

2010-01-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the sudden gust

of wind carrying sparkling dust

is akin to some savage lust

and the sun eclipses-

because it must.

Sometimes the sudden sigh

of the protracted long goodbye

might even be a little lie

and the leaves go flying-

because they die.

Sometimes the trees flower again

flower in beautiful scarlet pain

and blood is the colour of the evening rain

and the bees go berserk-

driven insane.

Sometimes impossible is loving and a kiss

may be the cruellest possible bliss

and then you think, what did i miss?

and the world smiles-

it is this.

saturday rant

2010-01-16T01:28:00.000-08:00

The cold is drifting away and this season reminds me of chhotobela and how I used to go to the chhaad of that other house and have oranges and read gopper boi and sleep on the toshok that I would carefully carry up and down with me. I wonder whether ma ever knew really, thakurma would go with me sometimes and curl up in the sun, next to me, like the smallest kitten in the world. She would sleep gracefully and I would fiddle with her snow-white hair and feel great despair and love. I wanted her to always be with me and the fact that she was growing old hurt me.

Dadu had died that year, 2001, I was reading N orM(Agatha Christie) and wondering why I would never enjoy the taste of food again. No chocolate, no orange seemed to taste palatable, edible even. Didn't realize it was grief, didn't understand what grief was. Tried to shut off things through that goddamned thriller, it was a Tommy&Tuppence book. It wasn't bad.

My other dadu died the next year, and then Arko jethu died, and then B jethu died and then S' jethima died this November. Again utter blank grief and despair struck me, food became unnecessary, clothes seemed a burden. Stopped wearing kajol. Then I started wearing kajol again, then things became OK. Now I can think of her without crying. I can survey her many gifts to me with a sense of detachment. Time does so much. I don't understand time. When I think of time, or the passage of years, (young as I am, only 21) I feel uneasy with the process called life. I cannot take the flux, the constant moving on and on, I hate not being able to remember, and I hate the idea of memory.

I want to live every moment that I have lived over and over again. I want to be able to recollect every month, week, day, minute, second. I want to freeze that eternal passing moment and extract its essence and I want to be able to talk with my dadus again. There was so much left unsaid and so much left undone. I definitely want to tell jethima that I loved her very much-I never actually did that.

Thakurma's diabetes is giving her a lot of trouble. She is the most active 81 year old in the world. She is witty, nasty, sarcy and warm. I love her so much it hurts. This house is lots larger and older and everything but the sun doesn't stay till 4pm on the chhaad. Otherwise I'd drag her and the toshok and get some oranges and run upstairs. She usually sleeps on the sofa and pretends she's actually watching TV. Sometimes she mutters my dadu's name under her breath, and I gently take the remote away from her hand, and tuck the chaador around her.

I hate time.

kittens,winter, etc

2010-01-12T06:33:00.000-08:00

In winter one can see corpses of dead animals lying on the road. I used to think the Calcutta winter can never take life, but now I see that some animals are more vulnerable than others. So the winter that Foxy or I can cheat, a crow or a stupider puppy may not. This disturbs me. Some time back I saw a beautiful kitten on my way to university and I stopped to admire it. Then I saw it was not curled up in the comfort of the midday sun, but in death. It looked fragile and sad, and curiously alive. The only manifestation of death was a long train of ants that crawled into the mouth. I was late, and horrified, and ran away. But the image lingered. I hoped the corpse would be soon taken care of, my para is a reasonably nice one. The next morning the little kitten lay, stiffened and ugly, neglected and forgotten. I resolved that I would be back by the evening, and when I came back, I saw it was gone.

Can the mind be in rigor mortis?

The winter sunshine is slowly becoming warmer. Seasons change, kittens die and are born, and the world forgets these kittens and us. We drink tea, smoke, and discuss and write. Some clever people solve sums, and some people become immortal. Some very clever people make money. Some cleverer people do not make money.

And everyone wails, laments, laughs and condemns.

Life is so delightfully irrelevant, nest-ce-pas? To relieve oneself of this tedium one must smoke, drink alcohol and caffeine in copious quantities, see Paris, Prague and Kashmir, learn to speak francaise, and then emulate my little kitten.

Not waving, but drowning meanwhile! ;)

miaow.

2010-01-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

one day you you who look at me now

with slinky smiles of self deception

will hate me beyond

recognition

for when cognition

repeats

catastrophe happens

the cat atrophies

and the sadness beyond human understanding

human misunderstanding

human do-they-call-it-love?

strange are the ways of strangers

strange are the ways of friends

stranger this world than strange

always this eternal change

aristotle; o friend, there are no friends!

one day, you who look at me now

and feel feel so much

may forget to feel.

may never remember

may never resurrect

may never recollect

but one day we

collected

pebbles by the shore

though now we do so no more.

so now you smile your smiles of slinky self-deception

and i think;

the cat atrophies.

miaow.

noir et blanche

2010-01-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I would dream that I was very very independent. It was a beautiful dream. It would be a cold winter's day and I would wear a black trench coat and lovely heels and I would walk smartly and alone, with a long cigarette in my hands. I would wear a beautiful scarf and look suitably mysterious. I would go into a dashing building. It would be this most enigmatic noir cinematic moment, this splendid dream of mine.

Today I was wearing this holey polo neck and a frayed and black kashmiri coat. With a stole, not a beautiful scarf. And the most horrible rexine shoes with heels. I carried a cigarette and a cup of cha that tasted like horlicks, and I was also wearing golden hoops. Was my noir moment coming true? I don't know.

Winter is rather cold in more ways than one. But winter sunshine is so much better! I get more curves through overeating and my nerves improve tremendously. All due to a spot of the sun. Strange how people equate that with insanity; touch of the sun, eh? Language makes me feel uneasy about the world. Terribly. I will no longer brood.

Except of course on why I cannot plead insanity and ask people to go away when I snort snot at them. Will they go away on their own? Must my absurdism have a deeper meaning so that your academic intellects may interpret my misery or the lack of it thereof? Do I confuse you? Do I need the horror of the rouge, blanche et noir of our sordid everyday existences?

Are these questions that keep me awake at night?

I am afraid not. I have sedatives.

But actually I stopped. With sedatives, you may sleep but you stop dreaming. And for noir but not noir addicts, what a pity that would be!

Happy New Year.

2010-01-01T09:36:00.005-08:00

Somewhere, somehow, through that infinitesimal and infinite

distance between you and you and me

there is...

There is.

Suddenly I fail to perceive that there is a difference-

That what was is now not, and that

the new year or what temporal novelty they call this:

I know not. All I know is

that there is no hope

and only hope

that there is no pain

but only pain

there is no change

but then again

There is only change.

And I know that this soul is a wretched gift.

And I know that this body is my only reality.

So;

I dig my nails hard into my flesh. There is a slow trickle

of fickle blood. Soon it shall congeal. The sudden sharp burst of pain

Fading pain, now so real

now so mine-oh you will never know

what it feels like.

Called love.