and when it stops pouring,

the wind evaporates
between buildings,

stealing the traffic
to suburbia.

wet socks and dripping

umbrella, you find yourself

square in the middle
of a bombay puddle,

with no ride back home.

He looks at at the labels on the drawers.

"NEEDED REGULARLY"

The words cleanly snipped out from a print-out.

"NEEDED BUT NOT REGULARLY"

Tacked onto the laminated wood with a stretch of cellophane tape.

"WANTED BUT NOT NEEDED"

He wonders which one he falls into.

I want to write. I want words from lands full of lush-white silence and bleeding-green language.

I want to disappear and not have to explain why.

I want to know that there is some meaning to the pursuit of truth, to wanting to do the right thing the right way with the right intention.

I want to be left alone with my contradictions.

I want my spirit burned clean by a pure blue flame from the skies.

I want love.

I want all the pleasures of music.

I want the warmth of memory to flood my insides and ooze out the pores of my skin.

I want to be reassured that intelligence can be gentle and uplifting; that wisdom is not boring, that it's worth all the delight and the pain of experiencing experience at its minutest; that ignorance of the heart's voice is the most vicious and vulgar of crimes.

I want a solitude that will chant life into my ears.

I want conversation that will make me want to come down from the mountains.

I want a consciousness that will rise clean above the surface and see what we all need to see, feel what can't be felt.

I want to be able to walk and breathe and run on and on and on and on.

I want to live.

Age is a quiet shutting of doors as day deserts.

Turn your back, knot your robe, shuffle around the house, lock the windows, draw the curtains, turn on the light and wait for the lizards to come out of hiding.

Age is renewing the newspaper subscription, feeding the cat when it isn't hungry, watering the cactuses shrubbing the porch.

Plumber fixes leaks for free. Neighbours make excuses to check if you're still alive. Careful : don't bore the kids.

Age is valium, bed sores, wispy hair, sagging breasts, oatmeal memories, cataract evenings, cancer lurking around the prostrate.

Fall asleep in the arm-chair. Drool on your shoulder. Forget dreaming. Forget worrying.

Age is a phone call nobody makes.

Watch the world shrink. To the street. To the door. To the puddle of urine around your feet. To the hardened lines on your nails. To your thoughts. Feel it shrivel inside your pajamas. Feel it warp into the furrows on your forehead and trickle down the wrinkles around your eyes.

Age is a dusty calendar two years old.

Slice a vein. Inject an air-bubble. Slip in the shower. Drown in the bath-tub. Easy does it.

Age is an ache for life that refuses to go away.

today, in the afternoon, i saw someone walking. just like you. with those same free-swinging arms and small, tightly clenched fists.

i resumed reading but my head whirled around to see if it was indeed you. all along knowing there was not a chance on earth, or mars, that it could be.

and it was, of course, not you.

it's not the first time something like this has happened. a couple of weeks ago i thought i heard your voice and it turned out to be someone else. apparently, i've assimilated you more than i realize.

i seem to know the exact length of your stride, the point to which your hair tapers down your back, the slight narrowing of eyes when you walk, the way you wear your clothes, the rhythm of your footfall, the sound of your breathing, even the weight of your shadow. i don't know if you remember me in this way too. maybe. maybe not. does it matter? maybe. maybe not. i don't know. perhaps, i don't want to know.

thinking about the way you walk, the memories come tumbling down. like leaves shaken free by a gentle breeze. vivaldi's hopping violins in 'autumn' start to play inside my head. the air seems lighter, clearer, crisper. a sigh slips out from in between my lips. my heartbeat steps up a few notches. i feel as if i'm standing on the edge of the world, inside a small chalk-drawn circle; blue, blue sky all around me, not a cloud in sight. that is what you feel like: the edge of the world on a glorious sunny day. with no vertigo to throw me into a free fall.

it's strange how memory works its magic even when we aren't looking, how we end up in the strangest of places without trying, how two people can condense the world between them; it's stranger how clinical memory can be when it cleans up, how we've chosen to live amidst the mundane despite knowing the beautiful, how two people can drift apart, like ghosts, into separate universes.

i look down at my phone wondering if i should call you. and tell you what? that i saw someone who walks just like you? and what would you say in return? what would we talk about after that? breakfast? will we still argue about who should cut the call? i shrug and put the phone back in my pocket.

but then something's not letting me sleep tonight. yes, hindsight is where we all want to be sooner than later and wisdom sometimes can't wait till tomorrow. but right now there are memories pleading to be pickled. so here i am, writing this.

to let you know that i saw someone walking today.

just like you.

Every evening, the sunset fills up my room.

No, make that: Every evening, I let the sunset fill my room up. It's a very deliberate act, delusive, egocentric and narcissistic.

Tchaikovsky starts to play on my Nokia at 3 'o' clock. I switch off the fan, reach for my mobile phone -- a little amused at the thought of the eternal inside a box, switch it off, reset the alarm from 1500 to 0700. I walk over to the windows on the western wall, pull aside the curtains thereby diluting the darkness, unlatch the panes, swing them open and stand back.

I watch how sunlight instantly floods the room, how its fingers seem to intimately know every nook and corner of my room. Like the caresses of an old lover. Well, almost.

I then plod back to mulling over information asymmetry and the marriage market; or plunge right back into a conversation about Chitrangda Singh on GTalk; or come back to a high-pitched argument with Mr. Schopenhauer about women ... sometimes I just listen to Atif Aslam and sit in my chair, doing nothing.

Self-improvement is masturbation.

Sometimes I talk with a certain Tyler Durden.

Self-destruction is the answer.

Presently, the superstar in the sky dips below the sunshade, swinging down his chosen longitude for the day.

Sometimes I wonder how it must feel to stand somewhere on that precise geographical minute, in the full glare of the setting sun, at that confabulation of space and time.

Sometimes I think about a ball of sunlight, bursting out of the sun's core, unravelling untrammelled through millions and millions of miles of nothing, the photons then tumbling through the atmosphere and a convenient hole in the ozone, thrashing through all that smog, past the grill on my window, all that distance, only to be stopped flat by a puny plank of wardrobe wood. Sometimes I think about how it's happening all the time and I'm depressed. Sometimes I think it must be lousy being a sun. Who'd want to be a sun? Not me. A meteor shower -- now that would be cool.

Dad comes in to ask me something and starts clamouring about how hot it is in here. I tell him I'm meditating and silence his protests. Sometimes I think parental salvation lies in being outsmarted by one's kids.

The room is turning a shade of ripe summer yellow. The marble flooring starts to heat up. My skin feels like a flame has been drawn across its surface. Naturally enough, I'm sweating now. Trickles start to crawl down my forehead and my temples.

Sometimes, I think of sweat and the travesty of its colourlessness. Would sweat be any precious if it was the colour of blood? Or would blood be any trivial if it looked and smelt like sweat? Sometimes I remember asking my sister if sweat evaporated and became rain. Sometimes I can recall the look of disgust she shot me across the dining table.

The window panes gradually blush a flaming orange, and I think of the rasna kid. Sometimes I wonder what happened to her. Sometimes I wonder if executives at Coke and Pepsi are involved in efforts to accelerate global warming. Sometimes I think of frisbees on the beach, of budding biceps and capri calves. Sometimes I think of our dog, Tiger. Sometimes I think of coming back home after kindergarten and tumbling with him in the yard. Sometimes I think of how he died in a pool of his own blood. Sometimes I don't think at all.

A twilight purple on the walls announces the arrival of a violet dusk. I'm drenched now. Hair roots, arm-pits, t-shirt, shorts ... I get up, shut the windows, flick on the compact fluorescent lamp, grab a towel and head for a shower, gently closing the door behind me, a little satisfied at having boxed the eternal. For today.

This.

And this.

I never knew a search to better understand Bayes' Theorem could be so rewarding :-)

Untitled

Bing!

He wakes up. Looks down at his watch. Ten thirty. "ETA 15 minutes" says the monitor up front. He reaches sideways for the seat-belt, breathes in and buckles himself up.

"There, that's the city," the girl to his side gestures at her grandmother. The old lady sits up to look out the window. He leans back so that she can get a better view.

The plane turns to port, homing in on the airport, breaking through the last of the clouds. The city looms up slowly. All is quiet inside the aircraft. No banter. No calling out to the airhostesses. No watching tv. No talking into cell phones. Even the babies have stopped crying. If silence is prayer, then they were all believers now. Very soon, they will be back to being people, back to their quotidian lives, back to the numbers and words that populate daily existence. But for a little while longer, they will remain passengers, deprived of their egos and the security of their bounded imagination, forced to exchange faith for convenience, rebellion for conformity, time for thought.

He reaches into his jacket and starts his ritual.

Passport. Check.

Did Icarus have a checklist? Did it have a bullet point saying 'Beware the sun at all times'? Was it just testosterone, a fatal transgression committed in the fever of youth? Was it because he wanted to go to heaven without dying that the Gods sent him back? Or was it just disguised suicide? Pity. Someone should have told him. The sun never lets you near. Maybe that's why we glorify him. Flaws shine in intimacy.

He takes his passport out, flips to the visa, looks at the immigration stamp.

That's when they take your identity away, don't they? That's when you take a break from existing, don't you? That's when you become a position on the plane, a statistic curled up inside a spreadsheet, that's when your life remains suspended in this aluminium coccoon where hope is neither absurd nor a refuge, but a compulsive state of mind. Suspended until you land. Suspended until they stamp you back into the assembly line of existence, returning your self to you whereupon you drive away into the welcoming morass of your life.

Wallet. Check. Ipod. Check. Paperback. Check. Ipod. Check.

He smiles when he catches himself double-checking the primary source of music in his life. Music removes him from the mundane, heightens every moment, shades his life with colours he would otherwise not perceive. Music is what he uses to negotiate with the world.

Terms of negotiation. Give and Take. Give, give, give, or take, take, take. At times slave, at times master ... every moment you trade with the world, but then you like to play games on the planes of your consciousness, you don't like to believe that you don't barter, that you are above and beyond human need. But then you need. All of us need. Love, hate, solitude, communion, power, submission ... it pays to adopt an attitude to help you get through your days. As long as it helps you trade.

"Pretty excited huh?" the girl asks him. He smiles at her and nods his head. "Yes."

He'd helped her board her grandmother. They'd got talking. She was touring the continent with the old lady. He was on business. Strangers thrown together for the duration of the flight. And like it happens sometimes in such situations, a common chord had been struck ... You get on this plane or bus or train. You meet people. You strike a conversation. Sometimes you like the other person. At other times, you keep politely skirting the fence of personal contact and decline to venture further. Sometimes you bid goodbye and remove these people from the vicinities of your memory. Sometimes you exchange phone numbers, fall in love, marry, beget children, die. Where is the excitement in all this? Excitement exists in those shadows where the light of consciousness cannot penetrate, in the deluded mind which thinks but does not realize it thinks.

And yet, when people ask him if he's excited, he almost always says yes. He cannot understand why. Maybe it's wonder, a sense of intirgue, a need for confirmation that he feels, but he cannot bring himself to accept that since these, in turn, would spawn excitement. Or maybe he realizes that the glaring light of awareness is too much to bear and that people are better off living in darkness.

So, either way, he says yes. Because he's undecided.

The plane starts dropping. His ears pop. Another reminder of the imminent confrontation with reality. He can feel the plane tense, the metal plates pull together as the aircraft plunges through the stratosphere. All pretense is up now. Anything could happen. The earth zooms up rapidly, streets and houses whiz by in a blur of urban colour. The overhead cabins get rickety as the plane picks up speed. Faster and faster.

And then the feel of rubber on tarmac, the bumpiness of the earth below them.

Touchdown. Deliverance.

Relief in the air inside the cabin as the passengers let out a collective sigh. The plane taxis down the runway to the gates. If it were not for propriety and seat-belts, he believes they would all get up and let out a cheer and pat each other on the back. It brought to his mind a conversation from the past.

So did you like flying?

Depends. I don't like to fly for long. I like the earth too much.

Poor Icarus, he thinks and reaches up for his bag.

***

In Hannover, Germany on work. Expect posting to be sporadic (as if it already wasn't).

Untitled - 4

Dead skin and instant coffee
that grows quietly cold.
Bare branches and undried clothes
with traces of mould.
Winter's fingerprints linger,
her crimes untold.

Sour cynicism; a discoloured soul
that grows quickly cold.
Charred dreams; a shrivelled sensitivity
now layered with mould.
Love's fingerprints linger,
her crimes untold.

Untitled - 3

an apple on the table.
round, and not too much;
red, and then not too much;
half-eaten
and left to rot.

a puddle of muddy rain water.
devoid of velocity,
smug in its pothole.
'Careful'. Step in - slosh! -
with pants pulled up.

a story in the sunday paper.
sad and short,
in black and white.
to be continued
next week.

a window over a cerulean ocean.
an empty home inside,
pictures afloat on the alabaster walls.
a curious breeze,
and the drapes billow.

a million images
play merry-go-round
inside the chamber of my heart.

their wispy fingers
teasing emotions from
the veins in the walls,

their little feet testing the floors
for strength,

and I know I am
apple, puddle, short story and window.

Untitled - 2

You always know when it happens.

That morning had a greater need for sacrifice than most others in his life. Mornings always blaze into life, he felt. Ebullient, aggressive, purposeful. But today, as he stood looking from the balcony out onto the park, the light seemed to hesitate as it found its way through the trees. Slowing down before it fell on earth, pondering before it lay itself on wet grass.

There are times when you find you have no room. You look hard, but no, there's not an extra inch of space. Not on that sagging bookshelf for your dog-eared comics. Not on the swanky mobile phone for saving any more smses. Maybe you're keeping something you don't want but can't bring yourself to throw it away. Everything comes with a pre-defined size.

He threw his scarf around his shoulders and strode out into the morning, the hard heels of his boots crunching on the sidewalk. He liked walks. They gave his imagination the respite of motion.

You always know when you hit rock-bottom. You're plunging and suddenly there's this distinctive shudder while everything around you goes still. You open your eyes and find yourself at the bottom of this huge ocean, finding it difficult to breathe. You wonder how you got here, but then vaguely remember how you'd tied the lead-weight around your legs and thrown yourself into the water. You struggle to move, thrashing about in the water, entangled in the weeds. And as it gets more and more difficult to breathe, you realize you really should take that key from your pocket, unlock the weight, and swim up for air.

He waited for his turn at the ticket counter. He liked the patience of queues, the quiet shuffling of feet towards a common destiny, the empty acknowledging stares and the discipline in waiting. A ticket in his pocket, he planted himself on a vacant bench under a bare tree. He liked autumn. If you listen carefully, you will hear the leaves whisper tales as they fall, his grandmother had once told him. He believed her.

There are times when you can't look in the mirror. What for? becomes difficult to answer. Why not? tempts you with its truth. Understanding becomes betrayal. Promises become compromises.

He checked his step as he climbed into the compartment. He always did that. He found seat 31. As he unfurled the morning paper, his thoughts turned towards her involuntarily, wondering if she had found his note.

Sometimes, there simply is no room in the heart. And you always know when that happens.

Untitled - 1

Where will this end? And pray, at what price?
Of what use incessant progress and inhuman might,
When we can't realize a life can't be taken twice?

Smoke from our fires spirals towards the skies
While we burn and rape everything in sight.
When will this end? And pray, at what price?

A tattered woman weeps alone; untended, a child cries.
Their dreams carpet-bombed; their nation, in blight.
Why don't we realize a life can't be taken twice?

We wallow in greed; our lives, complicated lies.
Our pens dripping blood, a crimson history we write.
How will this end? And pray, at what price?

Souls muted, we spectate as humanity dies.
We war over the petty; for the meagre, we fight.
Do we even realize a life can't be taken twice?

Beauty lies dead, her corpse swarming with flies.
The pall bearers come to carry her away into the night.
Where will this end? And pray, at what price?
When will we realize a life can't be taken twice?

***

My first attempt at a Villanelle.