When the insides of my being ache for your touch;
I hold you close…
To keep you safe, off and away;
I hold you close…
My arms, they give you wings.

Feet aching of the untrodden moonscape,
Fingers burning with the walls I move…
My eyes searching for open doors,
How they tire of gaping at the lonely wolds…
The wind playing on the harp of my dreams,
Numbing the pain,
Breaking my wont to let go, let be.
So I walk…for a mile more…I walk.

oh happy day!

Pree loped around the magnolia today…following that tiny grubby boy catching bright aubergine butterflies, under the creamy winter sun. So I stood on guard for a while...as they played along in the warm November breeze, chasing dirt and mirth and all things tingly. I stood their long…long, until the sun poked fun at my drowsy eyelids and burnt the tiny hair on my neck, golden with the glow of its crimson softness (surkh lal...ya surkh,sirf lal). Sometimes,it’s just about chasing the butterflies…

papa..

Come tell a story...Say something nice...Inspire me!

-

--- This thing’s gonna kill us.
--- No it’s not.
--- …Rephrasing… this thing’s gonna kill me.
--- No it’s not.
--- I might not die…but its still gonna kill me.
--- No it’s not.
--- How do you know…
--- Because it told me so…ok
--- (Laughter)…promise?
--- You think too much…



--- See you don’t know…they’re dumb…all of em (you say guns’n’roses…they’ll say violets are blue).
--- Then how come you wrote em all those things?
--- Because…I love them.
--- No you don’t…. you wanna…but you don’t.
--- Yes I do.
--- No you don’t.
--- How do you know?
--- Because they told me so.



--- So what I think...is that life really is about
--- mmmm…da ra di mmmm..
--- All it needs is courage…to take it to that other…
--- da ra di mmmm…
--- And to ask yourself if….
--- da ra di mmmm di hmmmm.



--- so…do you believe in god?
--- why... you don’t
--- (laugter) no I don’t.
--- well…good for you.
--- (pause)… see I don’t get the whole…
--- yup…I don’t get it either.
--- so how do you know he’s there.
--- it’s a he…you sure.
--- (laughter) seriously… how do you know he’s there.
--- how do you know he’s not.
--- well I just…
--- yeah… I think I gotta pee…



---so why were you chasing him
--- who
--- the kid with the butterflies
--- because he was chasing butterflies
--- why were you chasing him
--- because I can’t chase butterflies
--- so
--- so I thought…maybe…maybe he’d share.



--- Achilles heel.
--- yeah…so?
--- so the woman drowns the kid.
--- and he’s dead.
--- no he turns into this eternal greek god…
---geek god.
--- greek god.
--- so what’s with the heel??
--- no the heel’s left out.
--- you mean its not in the movie.
--- no the woman leaves out the heel.
--- she chops it off.
--- no no… that’s what she’s holding him with.
--- with the heel.
--- yes and so that gets left out.
--- out of the movie.
--- no out of the whole immortality thing.
--- there’s a whole immortality thing.
--- are you even listening…(stop thinking, start listening).



--- So what does your father do?
--- excuse me…
--- what does your father do?
--- is this thing over.
--- yes it is…what does your father do.
--- he takes his tea without sugar and ties his shoes bunny style…can I go now.



--- k then goodnight.
--- goodnight
--- I love you.
--- …



--- religion
--- you can’t generalize…can you
--- sure I can
--- and that’s is because…
--- because all religions…old or new… have very productively achieved the exact same height of imbecility that there is.
---so that gives you the right to generalize
--- who needs a right.



--- so I’ll do that tommorow.
---yup…me too.
--- gdnight.
--- gdnight.
--- love ya.
--- love ya too.



--- Am still scared.
--- What’s the big deal?
--- Its like am walking…and I can fall to either side.
--- What side.
--- There’s a good…and then there’s a bad.
--- What’s across?
--- What.
--- What if you don’t fall…what if you walk across.
--- Oh fuck me tender…there’s an “across”.



--- namaste bhaiya.
--- namaste didi…good luck didi…good day didi.

post script: Conversations…these days the voices in my head centrifuge their way around, long after am through with them…trying to spew all the madness out I think…trying.

thankful

For fingers that rested unwearyingly, in the hollow of my palm. For eyes that didn’t gnaw on the silence of my being. For the smiles that intended nothing more…nothing less. For the hands that never rested on my shoulders, without having me to ask for them. For making it easy…if not better. For walking alongside…and nowhere else. For knowing that soon I’d walk past and never look back again…but being an unspoken part of those days that brought with them the insufferable predicaments of existing with my wings chopped off. For being around. For being close by. For smiling and laughing and teaching me how too. And most of all, for being there…thank you.

To the man, and to the might of his royal contempt…

ya rab!! woh na samjhe hain na samjhenge meri baat;
de aur dil unko, jo na de mujhko juban aur...

hai bus ke har ek unke ishare mein nishan aur;
karte hain mohabbat, to guzarta hai guman aur...

himachal: part-1

Almost all of my previous visits were with my father, back when I was still a toddler, so unfortunately my memory doesn’t yield much of them except visiting hoards of far off relatives that he found almost obligatory to catch up with (him being the elder most and all that). The last one however, about a year and a half back had much more to it. It was the first actual village wedding that I attended, something i had always wanted to see. And so it is for some pleasantly obvious reasons etched out pretty darn well with me. Am not putting up all of it together, but yes the following is an excerpt from one of my last few nights spent at the bridegroom’s (my father’s, cousin uncle’s boy’s) house:


…I was a little apprehensive about staying up on the roof as the belching booze party was already well in action, but soon both the aforementioned girls climbed up to keep me company. I found it a tad bit strange, being followed by them in the wedding all through and so had to pluck up my gut and inquire as to why they saw it fit to stalk on me. One of them giggled at my apologies for this rather dim-witted query and went on to tell me that her mother (one of my door ki buas) had asked both of them to see to it that I was both well fed and nicely taken care of. I, as more a reflex than a gesture, squeezed her hand, (something I had never bothered to do for any of my cousins here in Delhi) and let her know how I couldn’t help but feel like a complete zit at barging in on their already stuffed wedding schedules.
Seemu, (which I later came to know was her nickname, Seema being the long for it) to my utter wonder giggled again at my city-bred idiosyncrasies, which I unfortunately hadn’t bothered to leave back home. “Oh that’s alright, am sure we can make some room for you” I remember the other one chirping along (Sushma, if I rightly remember…sumi to her mother…suusmaa to her father, and a rather plain susuu to her bratty little brother). They pulled out a couple of old charpoys from under the muddy little baud (a term given to the makeshift attic, usually on the roof of the houses there), and a pair of the most feather-soft hand woven himachali quilts, something that you’d have to pay through your nose to get elsewhere. And arranged for me to sleep outside in the open letting me know that a few of the others from downstairs were going to join us soon.
Sonu, Sushma’s younger brother brought up some of the leftover seera, (again, sent up by the ever-motherly kitchen ladies) and climbed down the back to let the handful of dogs out (for the night I guess). Seemu, while I gaped at the pooches, took my limp little pony in her hand and scorned at the sight of it. “You don’t oil your hair, do you,” she said. “Ummm…no I don’t” I whimpered. “Remind me tomorrow…I’ll do it for you”. Hah…even though I don’t think I have ever let anybody do that to me again, I did let her do whatever she pleased with my hair the very next morning. A couple of minutes later both the girls's mothers came up with some other ladies that I for the time being didn’t bother to introduce myself to. And before crashing down beside us, walked around to the other side of the baud to brake up the merry-uncle-booze-party and also to make each one of the slightly drunk men climb down to the two rooms below us. I asked suusu the reason for their not joining us upstairs where it was relatively cooler, to which she calmly explained of how they would be by now anyway too drunk to bother with the heat down in the rooms and that making them sleep up here would only mean one of them tripping over while trying to climb down in the dark for peeing or for something of that sorts. And oh yes, for some extra brownies we wouldn’t, this way, be subjected to their irksome snores and drunken moans.
Soon thereafter everybody around us pulled up their covers, and to another of my many pleasant surprises that day, one of the ladies sleeping on the other end of the row began singing…humming almost, I think to the infant next to her. It was an old local lullaby that I had come across once before and so had absolutely no trouble enjoying. She kept up the humming for a while as I sunk low in my charpoy, under the soft quilt, gazing at the clear moonlit sky above us with the humming becoming fainter only to fade away slowly. I was still at my sky gazing when Seemu turned towards me from the adjoining charpoy and whispered… “You know, that sky is still gonna be around when you wake up…would be much better if you close your eyes and try sleeping instead…early morning tommorow…goodnight.

I hate it, hate the fact that all my ooh-I-cant-believe-I-wrote-that posts are gonna sit and rot in those good for nothing archives, having an almost zilch-like chance of ever being read again. Not fair…naheeeeeeen!!!

and i think to myself...

We’ve been sketching out for the past half hour. Gory inside-out replicas of the who’s and what’s of some regular human dangly dongs. (Sigh)…those were the days when anatomy classes were fun (nd by fun I mean girlish, giggly, hush hush, ha ha fun). But nope…not anymore. The whole CBSE crap’s ruined it.
I try and look around to wink at someone, but every damn person is deep at work. Phaa…not that I care bout em, really, but then again. We begin with the male reprodu…oh wht the hell, a PENUS (see I can say the word out loud), for the obvious reason that it takes more work. You’re damn right it does. A couple o minutes into it nd I realize that there is way too much stuff piled in for me to be done with it as of today. So I give up on mine with a testicle missing, the scrotum unattached, and the rest of it still somewhat maldrawn.
I like the female bit though (those of you thinking of the ‘P’ word shud go stick your head in a toilet bowl). It’s all nice and easy. Looks pretty too…like a small frilly goblet. And am not being biased when I say that it represents more to me, compared to its male counterpart.
Funny how the prominent, more vital part to it is the small bowl shaped uterus. The tiny space where the embryo dwells. Yup…the vagina however (the center of all hawjee-pawjee activity) shares very limited limelight in our anatomical diagrams. Symbolism…I think yes.
Anyhoo…comin back to the class, the dude next to me still seems stuck on his winkie (lolls)!! I wonder who he’s trying to impress making it that big, taking it out of the margin on to the next page. And some of the other geeks around are fussing way too much over why and what they are’nt getting right. Uh..does it even matter, I mean come to think of it, all of us in here (me nd the rest of the groin drawin bunch) would still at the end of the day be the ones who drew some and got none (GOT NONE). And I guess that pisses me off more than anything else. Wait…so the point of the post…I HAVE NO LIFE…

beneath the blinding darkness!!

In the dark hours of my night, I give up. In the dark hours of my night, I succumb. Succumb…yes I do…to the hazy binds of its pungent nothingness. Why, I’ve stopped asking myself that. Why…because sometimes you’re not supposed to.
The far off paradise blurs with each gaze I cast. It slips away as I try and grope it in . It falls apart as I look for it in the filthy remains of my incessant ruminations. Deep into the empty carcasses of my disheveled prose.
I hold up all through…all through laughing, at the meek deep within. Laughing because it is below all rest, to want and mourn out loud. But it is in these intimate darks that I let go…and let it seep in. Into my veins…to rest just beneath my skin. Making it tingly…making it go alive for once. Making me forget everything that needs to be forgotten…making me remember that which I really need to.
They asked me to look around. Then, when I had lost my all. And so I did. Yes I did…to find it (back). Well I did for most of it. But my eyes still search for the missing crumbs that I fortuitously let fall. My heart still wanders for the pleasant woefulness that I let slip away. My fingers begin to burn…itch from the sensation of stretching out. They will not quit until I ask them to. My fear is that I wont.
But tomorrow I will stand up again. Hah…that’s my gift. You see I always do…without a petite little trace of it. Without the tiniest hint of these sparse moments when I allow myself to trip over(and fall down), just to see sometimes, of exactly how it feels to not be perfect for once.
And then I stand up again, to fight another day. Why…because I like it…just like “pa” does…to keep at it. Continually…until you cant anymore. You know, with things like these…you’re not supposed to wear them (on your sleeve or someplace else) but stitch em deep inside. So you can never take em off. Never never!!!