The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

From Dostoevsky's, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous man'. After
the musings yesterday sought Dostoevsky desperately and
like always his writings opened up further vents.

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But my companion had already left me. I suddenly, quite
without noticing how, found myself on this other earth, in the
bright light of a sunny day, fair as paradise. I believe I was
standing on one of the islands that make up on our globe the
Greek archipelago, or on the coast of the mainland facing
that archipelago. Oh, everything was exactly as it is with us,
only everything seemed to have a festive radiance, the
splendour of some great, holy triumph attained at last. The
caressing sea, green as emerald, splashed softly upon the
shore and kissed it with manifest, almost conscious love.
The tall, lovely trees stood in all the glory of their blossom,
and their innumerable leaves greeted me, I am certain, with
their soft, caressing rustle and seemed to articulate words of
love. The grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers.
Birds were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly
on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their
darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the
people of this happy land. That came to me of themselves,
they surrounded me, kissed me. The children of the sun, the
children of their sun - oh, how beautiful they were! Never
had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only
perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might
find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of
these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their
faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a
serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces
were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of
childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first
glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth
untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not
sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which,
according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents
lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this
earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing
joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me
home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh,
they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to
know everything without asking, and they wanted to make
haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face.

IV

And do you know what? Well, granted that it was only a
dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and
beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as
though their love is still flowing out to me from over there.
I have seen them myself, have known them and been
convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh,
I understood at once even at the time that in many things I
could not understand them at all; as an up-to-date Russian
progressive and contemptible Petersburger, it struck me as
inexplicable that, knowing so much, they had, for instance,
no science like our. But I soon realised that their knowledge
was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of
us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite
different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did
not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it,
because their lives were full. But their knowledge was
higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain
what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others
how to love, while they without science knew how to live;
and that I understood, but I could not understand their
knowledge. They showed me their trees, and I could not
understand the intense love with which they looked at them;
it was as though they were talking with creatures like
themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that
they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their
language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them.
They looked at all Nature like that - at the animals who lived
in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them,
conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told
me something about them which I could not understand, but
I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the
stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel. Oh,
these people did not persist in trying to make me understand
them, they loved me without that, but I knew that they would
never understand me, and so I hardly spoke to them about
our earth. I only kissed in their presence the earth on which
they lived and mutely worshipped them themselves. And
they saw that and let me worship them without being abashed
at my adoration, for they themselves loved much. They were
not unhappy on my account when at times I kissed their feet
with tears, joyfully conscious of the love with which they
would respond to mine. At times I asked myself with
wonder how it was they were able never to offend a creature
like me, and never once to arouse a feeling of jealousy or
envy in me? Often I wondered how it could be that, boastful
and untruthful as I was, I never talked to them of what I
knew - of which, of course, they had no notion - that I was
never tempted to do so by a desire to astonish or even to
benefit them.

They were as gay and sportive as children. They
wandered about their lovely woods and copses, they sang
their lovely songs; their fair was light - the fruits of their
trees, the honey from their woods, and the milk of the
animals who loved them. The work they did for food and
raiment was brief and not labourious. They loved and begot
children, but I never noticed in them the impulse of that cruel
sensuality which overcomes almost every man on this earth,
all and each, and is the source of almost every sin of mankind
on earth. They rejoiced at the arrival of children as new
beings to share their happiness. There was no quarrelling, no
jealousy among them, and they did not even know what the
words meant. Their children were the children of all, for
they all made up one family. There was scarcely any illness
among them, though there was death; but their old people
died peacefully, as though falling asleep, giving blessings
and smiles to those who surrounded them to take their last
farewell with bright and lovely smiles. I never saw grief or
tears on those occasions, but only love, which reached the
point of ecstasy, but a calm ecstasy, made perfect and
contemplative. One might think that they were still in
contact with the departed after death, and that their earthly
union was not cut short by death. They scarcely understood
me when I questioned them about immortality, but evidently
they were so convinced of it without reasoning that it was not
for them a question at all. They had no temples, but they had
a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the
whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a
certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the
limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for
the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact
with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that
moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but
seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they
talked to one another.

In the evening before going to sleep they liked singing in
musical and harmonious chorus. In those songs they
expressed all the sensations that the parting day had given
them, sang its glories and took leave of it. They sang the
praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked
making songs about one another, and praised each other like
children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from
their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their
songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but
admire one another. It was like being in love with each
other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

Some of their songs, solemn and rapturous, I scarcely
understood at all. Though I understood the words I could
never fathom their full significance. It remained, as it were,
beyond the grasp of my mind, yet my heart unconsciously
absorbed it more and more. I often told them that I had had
a presentiment of it long before, that this joy and glory had
come to me on our earth in the form of a yearning
melancholy that at times approached insufferable sorrow;
that I had had a foreknowledge of them all and of their glory
in the dreams of my heart and the visions of my mind; that
often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without
tears. . . that in my hatred for the men of our earth there was
always a yearning anguish: why could I not hate them
without loving them? why could I not help forgiving them?
and in my love for them there was a yearning grief: why
could I not love them without hating them? They listened to
me, and I saw they could not conceive what I was saying, but
I did not regret that I had spoken to them of it: I knew that
they understood the intensity of my yearning anguish over
those whom I had left. But when they looked at me with
their sweet eyes full of love, when I felt that in their presence
my heart, too, became as innocent and just as theirs, the
feeling of the fullness of life took my breath away, and I
worshipped them in silence.

love letters

This is from the archives of the loves I have been recently visiting. I wrote this for someone, without hope or agenda, a few years back and sent it much after it could ever mean anything. The person in question has shunned me ever since. I haven't questioned the person's motivations but cannot help wondering what it was that was so disturbing. Or disgusting.

I could not finish it then. I still cannot. Maybe it, the loves, defy the deliberations of beginnings, middle, and end.

__________________________

In between the redness of the moon


I reach out to you in honesty with twisted arms that can no longer carry the weight of the shoulders, which carry the world beyond them. And in this, I know, I am being vain. Honesty is the indulgence of the vain, don’t you think? Thin people, fat people, people with no soul, people with million eyes yet no sight use honesty to proclaim their superior position over the lesser mortals. As if to shout and tell everyone of their enlightened state of beings. Of the stars that shine on and for them. I fear that people who lay fanatic claims to honesty are the ones who can clamour the streets to demand the bloods of the outcasts. The liars. And I dread that. Why? Because I think I am one of the outcasts for these fanatics? I don’t know. I don’t know yet.

Yet. When I write to you I proclaim honesty. Am I changing sides? Am I becoming one of the fanatics? No, I dread not. The honesty I profess is the one that fills my soul when I pass a familiar smell. The honesty I believe in is the one that makes me count the endless stars and have a number. The honesty, which makes my bones stiff upright and straight, is the honesty with which I gaze in the eyes of the children who wave out to me or at times curl their toes out of numbness. In the stifling lights of the sun that creeps in through my glass doors I reach out for an overflowing pen and wipe it on my tangled hair. Then. In that moment. I know I am being honest.

I have restrained myself from spilling the lives and loves sought on to the paper with your name engraved on it. When you have sent me a message, I have held it close with open eyes and opened it with close eyes. I have seen you writing to me sitting at borrowed desks cascading through our collective memory. I have wondered and wanted to know the details you remember of the snatched moments we have spent together. You are and will always remain a stranger to me. And why, I have asked myself? Is there no way I could have known you better? There may have been but I do not want to tread on those paths. I relish the surprise with which your memory (the moment) takes me. Walking down the crystal clear paths with reflective surface throwing around many more of me than I can handle, I catch a glance of the singing butterfly in the mirror shop and I swallow your name. I cannot in those moments conjure up skins for you. I can only swallow what I already have of you in me. In each message I have sent to you I have left a secret calling. If you scratch the edges, hold the message uptight and twist it in the moon-shadow walks, you will hear them calling out to you. There is a poem, a song, a yearning, a desire in each of these messages I have departed for you. Have you felt them? Have you? Or did you leave my messages on the kitchen top to have covered coffee conversation stains? Did you lift and drop them mercilessly in conversations when you dreaded being stale? If you did, don’t let me know. From where I feel it, they are nicely tucked in satin and stars under your pillow. For me, my love, let them be over there. Do not take that away from me.

I have known you a decade and a half. Have I known you for so long? A smile crosses my blackened lips and I roll the tobacco in which I will taste you. I still remember the first day, first moment, when you cracked open the wounds in my skin. I was then celebrating a lost love. Yearning and mourning for it not because I felt it but because it was a ritual of discarding the dead skins I had accumulated through the telling touches and the calling out. I saw you walk into a borrowed room where walls were incestuously woven into each other where the lizards where the spectacle for some. Did you walk in? Did you stride in? Once you had entered did you dissolve into the background? Why did it take me so long for you to feel your presence? You, standing in the corner, reticent and reluctant, angry and aggrieved. It was my corner in those borrowed walls that you had occupied and when I tried to slide into it half way through being thrown out of my galaxy having smoked the grasses of the netherworld, I touched you. I did not feel you then. Just my skin felt the sensation of the blood running down your streams. My mind was too numb to acknowledge, the body reacted. The body, in that instance, was beyond the mind and it craved for more. I saw the longing in your blank eyes and deep curls. You looked straight into my eyes and I responded. We both were strangers to one another and were not yet caught in the systems of shame and guilt which knowingness brings. Not yet.

Beyond that moment, I loose recollections. I only remember dreams of dreams of you and I entangled in pleasure in that corner. Soon enough I lost the borrowed walls and with it the corner as well.

When did we meet again? Did you call out or did I reach to you?

I saw you again since then through half broken glass and shattered hearts. Sometimes you were picking up the pieces while I was at my masterpiece. We laughed through drunken conversations and I scratched your hands with my unkempt nails. Did you feel me then? Did the blood make you cry? We shared a many too beds. Broken and bereaved. We slept through the nights the demons wearing out the passion. You never touched me and I never cried out. Maybe I should have. Then, hopefully, we would have eaten the icing off the same chocolate dreams.

The evening has abruptly fallen into the platter from somewhere. One moment I looked out of my glass walls and I saw the cloud scoops laid out for the childish indulgence of dream scattered, clear ice-creams. Now everything lies in the middle of nothingness, there is no day to look forward to and the stars are shinning elsewhere. This time of day makes me nervous and search out for sheets that will curl me in sleeps to wade the day off. How convenient would it be to wear out days, then I would just wear out layers and layers of days that keep me away from you. That stand between us, in-between us, mocking at my plight, seeing me writher and squeal with both pleasure and pain. It reminds me of the state I am in, I was in, I will be in, a suspended reality of temporal being. In nothingness I am defined and in desperation I seek for you. The night we spent together celebrating the long flight of a friend for you and lover for me comes to my mind. The loves I sought then was made of translucent skins and tiny hands. Was it love? Was I in love with the idea of love? Or was I just unable to let go of the anchors that held my sanity? I know not what it was in the moment but when I live the night under your skin, I know that you knew that I was going to slip it away. That world for me will come to an end. The translucent skins will turn blue and black. Why did you not tell me then? Why did you not hold me and shrug off the actors and the acts in the head? Did you want me to suffer the endings as I slipped through the beginnings? For that love I borrowed lines from somewhere and cried out to crowds one night, `nobody, not even the rains, have such small hands’. And that moment has made it impossible for me to borrow, shamelessly, those lines for you. Or the other loves I sought.

Instead I write,

`how can I feel so much when you feel so little’

Another borrowed line. Another burrowed text.

In reading texts of inane pleasure and high theory, I have unveiled the sub-text of love and its longings. A line, a word, a phrase (half baked and carelessly thrown away) catches my attention and I latch on to it thinking through the entire text, the whole theory through that cut out glass. I do not have the patience for the whole. I dread the endings to stare at my face and mock my incompetence. Instead I draw an entangled web of ideas and images through my nocturnal pickings. In the morning, I am convinced that I have conquered. While the mirror tells me otherwise. I never remember the names and the references of these texts. I also forget too easily the ones I loved too passionately. The only things you forget are the ones, which you were convinced, you will never. And because of this deep conviction you never bother to remember them. They come back to haunt you uncalled for and unannounced. You, my love, I have never forgotten to remember and loved slowly. At the pace which the rains leaves there mark on un-cleaned windows, seasons after season. I have let you live in me. I have let you alive in my memories and in my makings. In everything I have become, in each flight I undertook, I carried some of you in me. Unlike others whom I have allowed untimely and brutal death I have caressed and cuddled you.

Dearest so, do you remember the night we laid out our fears on the brazen, cold rocks? Amidst the star lit moon, you held me close (my orange-ness seeping through you) and said, `it’s not about sex’; in that moment I wanted to shout out, `only if’. I could not because the closeness made me feel things I never have. It made me look into the beauty of things, which did not exist. And then you left. I connected through you crackling voice and you said you were leaving. Another someone you had touched out to (or not) poured over my soul and said that you both had become star-crossed lovers. I did not understand the exit. I could not claim it as mine exclusively. So I dropped it in between the glowing neon signs and helpless glances. I sought new loves with an animal ferocity while diminishing the ones I already had. I told homespun lies to naïve travelers. Created the stories of demons and devils and the little princess. I let them touch my hands under the dirty table linen and then allowed them to clean themselves with it.

And in middle of all this I spent one night crying on the wet grass staring at the broken street lamp singing, all I really wanted was some love. I did not mean it then. It was a rhetoric I use to wade away the present lovers to tell them that I did not find love in the smells of their underarms. And now, do I mean it? I don’t know.

Of the loves

Neruda did it again. Flipping through the thin volume to distract myself from other pressing commitments, I fell in love with love, all over again. Who cannot, will not, after reading this:

I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,’
XVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’


I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,
or barbed carnations thrown off by the fire.
I love you as certain hidden things are loved,
secretly, between night and soul.

I love you like the flower-less plant
carrying inside itself the light of those flowers,
and, graced by your love, a fierce perfume
risen from earth, is alive, concealed in my flesh.

I love you without knowing how, whence, when.
I love you truly, without doubts, without pride,
I love you so, and know, no other way to love,

none but this mode of neither You nor I,
so close that your hand over my chest is my hand,
so close they are your eyes I shut when I sleep.



If you didn’t, if you don’t every time you read it, don’t tell it to me. To anyone. Just run through the taste of the poem in your mouth and you’ll know what you missed. Or are missing.

After 29 years of hopelessly falling through one maze or other, looking for the love that beckoned me, I have conceded to the realization that it was not ‘love’ in someone or something that I was seeking. It was ‘love’ itself; in its nameless-ephemeral existence. In its long and short, I love the whole ‘love’ deal. In my younger days, I would spend hours at random bus stops, refusing to rush into the ones which promised me to reach me to my destination, waiting for the knight in shinning amour to ride me away to the moon. In my waiting, never did I think that it was a figment of my own wrapped imagination. I genuinely believed in the moment. I genuinely believed in love. Not knowing what I meant by it. Not understanding what I felt with it. Or what I would do with it when it happened. All I knew I wanted to love.

With the growing-up-years, one acquires bitter-sweet skins. The accumulating age makes it difficult to shed these skins with the abandonment that one dances in the rain when is young and the outside world a hyperbolic space-ship reality. In my case, the bitterness of the skins prevailed. Even then, I did not give up on love. Only I lost out on love because the bitterness made it difficult for me to embrace love: love of myself, love of others, love for myself, love for others. In this phase, I loved with a vendetta. I sought the soft corners of love that the others had carefully folded in their satins and stained them. In some situations did not give up till the time I had torn those satins into shreds. No one lost anything except me. These people with the soft folds knew and felt love. And once you know that, you can tie together the loose ends with borrowed strings to spread your wings. I, me, myself in my self-induced reality derived moments of obscene pleasure or intense pain through these acts; both these emotions, I constantly evoked to seduce myself with the idea that I felt/knew/lived with love.

Little did I know then?

I am older. Though I still carry the bitter-sweet skins, they are breaking up. When I let myself cry aloud, I can taste the bitterness, sometimes even the sweetness. I cannot still say that I understand love in all its ways but at this moment, I am eager to learn; to let the loves emerge out of their swarms and take me by the nape and sling through my hair. I pay close attention to love these days. I look out from where I sit and watch a girl with cheap golden hair, melancholic songs and cigarette and imagine her loves. Her lives. Which one of the loves is she suffering? What is love, a question asked so often without ever reaching to an answer that it has almost become rhetorical. I have learnt about loves in many different corners through many half-baked conversations. But still I cannot say what love is. Not authoritatively.

Love in its most basic, primal sense evokes an intense physical sensation. This sensation makes one feel light-headed to weightless, sometimes when one is mourning the love it is an immense heaviness. But love when shared, consciously and deliberately, varies in its manifestations. It is the matter of how much you let yourself love and fear which decides whether you let your love your die an untimely death, whether you live with it as one lives with the routine of daily breakfast or whether one practices it. The practice of love is an entirely different universe than living with love. Loving, itself, another constellation.

I have lived with love and practice it religiously. I have stabbed loves even before they developed their fangs. But at this moment, in these white nights of my life, I have been propelled into that another constellation of just loving. Loving, revering, celebrating, Love, as it has never been done before. My love is no longer directed towards an end, a consequence, a name, some soul and flesh. In doing so, I am aware, I am isolating the constellation. I am the only one who counts the stars and wanders the way on dark nights. Or the mornings. But in doing so, I am allowing myself to love in ways I thought wasn’t possible. With these loves, come the fears, the anxieties, the loneliness, the desires, not for anything/anyone but for allowing all the pores in your self/your soul to receive the nectar of the loves. I am excavating myself from the depths of the dead seas in which I had let it languish. It is by no means an easy task. I am constantly confounded by me in its many avatars. I have the power to exercise the excuse that ‘it wasn’t myself at that moment’ but with no audience, no patient rum-soaked hearings, these sound jaded to me and on a closer look and feel, I can pull out the me standing behind the closet. There are times even when I don’t recognize myself but that is not so much because it’s not me but because I would like it to not be me. Such is the loves that have overtaken me at the moment that I even love that me. I am ready to forgive, myself. I cannot still contain others. But I have allowed myself to love the ones who hated me, hurt me, and hid me.

While driving down the streets or staring from up above, an odd sound, a strange name, a familiar sight makes me fall hopelessly in love. In moments as such either I walk the ways with the loves of the past or create new ones. With the loves of the past, I do not try to mend things, I don’t cry and plead, I just walk behind, swallow the taste of it in my mouth and let the sensation take over me. When the time comes, I let go of it. Not without a tear or a heaviness in the heart.

With the new ones, I begin at the beginning. I let myself be absorbed in the depths of contemplation and speculation that comes with it. I let myself smile incessantly and then, immediately, breakdown in inconsolable sobs. I let the love that holds me in that moment live beyond it’s life. Like an idea, I stretch the love to its extreme, to allow for it to have a life of its own. Sometimes it wavers off, attaches itself to a passing boy, on other occasions it stays with me, refusing to let go, announcing itself suddenly and demanding the whole of what I have to offer.

All in all, I just have a sensation, a sense to cherish to smoke with my cigarettes and sip with my rum on stark white nights. And the daylights.

comfort zones

After spending long hours contemplating on the last post, I hastingly sent mails to friends, ex-friends, lovers, ex-lovers, acquaintances hoping that they all were safe and sound, that all of them had found their comfort zones in the chaos that prevails. My sentiments are genuine and concern heartfelt. However, having written those mails I was struck by the indifferent annonymity I treat the 'casualities' with. Constantly thrown at my face as numbers, they become numbers, just numbers.

Here I am trying to move beyond the counting. I sincerly put forth my hopes, empathies and prayers for anyone and everyone who was involved, directly or indirectly, in the casualties.

the city under attack: new geographies.

This is one of the longish posts I have written for the list, multiplicity (http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/multiplicity_listcultures.org), which Jinna, Sean and I run together.
_________________

11 July 2006: a rather inconsequential day. Another day in another month of another year. However, in one city, for the extended families of ‘146’ deceased, this day will be marked as history. It will also make the histories for the concerned to come. For the city of ‘mumbai’ or ‘bombay’, depending on which nomenclature one prefers, this ‘date’ will set marker for being under, yet another, ‘siege’ and coming out of it heroically.

What does it do to a ‘city’ when it is ‘bombed’? When lives, connections and intersections are put at temporary halt? Jo Tacchi’s evocation of talking about ‘as though the city itself was attacked’ is an interesting entry to try and understand what happens to the ‘city’, the ‘cities within the cities’, the ‘lives in the city’ when something as such happens. It also refers to the problematic of dealing with the ‘city’ as a monolithic, sonorous entity; as a fog horn on whose back we all ride our destines. The images, cut-copied-pasted, of a ‘monolithic’ city do not go far from representing the city in it’s hyperbolic imagination as a giant which will wake up one of these days to claim all our dreams. Maybe the nightmares. Neil Gaman in one of the Sandman series dealt with the issue, ‘if the city-dwellers can dream about the city, then it is possible that the city can dream as well’. The journeys a protagonist caught in the web of city-dreams jolted me out of my senses like no other ‘horror’ or ‘science-flick’ had done. And that was because, it all seemed real. It was a possibility that the depilated buildings that I sought for my illicit sojourns could be one of the mazes to move in (or out) of the city-dreams. Or the city dreaming.

While most of the people engaged with the ‘city’ discourse attempt at finding the ‘multiplicities’ and ‘polarities’ of the cities within the cities, consciously or subconsciously, everyone gives into the imagination of the cities within the cities as a City. I am struggling to develop vocabularies through which this binary of City vs. cities within city can be dealt with it all its polarities and possibilities. The media reportage and representations of the bombings in a city, whether it be London, Delhi or Bombay (Mumbai) open still further contours in this discussion. I will use a personal anecdote to explore these contours further.

Last year in October (29th), Delhi was bombed at several places. I was recently married and desperately trying to settle the familial abode. Acquainting myself with the ‘obligations and duties’ that come with the social-cultural construct of marriage. Part of this obligation was to have one of my husband’s distant cousin stay with us. I can’t say I liked him. I can’t even say I didn’t. He was one of the nicer guests one could wish for. Quiet. Reserved. Undemanding. Accommodating. He worked in one of the factories as the labour managers. Owing to the lack of interest and conversations, when he informed me about where he worked he set very vague directional references. I think I said almost arrogantly that I had never been to that side of the city. He did not offer any more information. I did not seek any. With the initial jolt of a guest coming and staying with you settling into a pattern, we conveniently continued in our silenced acquaintance. However. On the day (actually evening) of the blast, I was sitting reading something or lamenting on my ‘married’ status, when my husband rather frantically called me to switch on the television. At that time I was making very strong pleas to have the television banished from our familiar abode so this request raised a few frowns. The frantic plea in his voice, however, made me wait till later to subject him of my wrath. I asked, ‘what is the issue?’. ‘Delhi has been bombed’. Quite ashamedly, I have to admit that even this did not bring me out of my reverie. In today’s age of saturated, blown images and ideas, I thought it was yet another ploy by the various media agencies to increase their TRP’s; that the situation was not as critical as the frantic plea in my husband’s voice. I informed me about the places where the bombings had taken place, this, that, and yes, that one too. He then said, X, his cousin, works in this place and his colleagues have informed him that he has boarded the bus (one of the blasts took place on a bus) minutes before the blast took place. This did shake me out of my reverie. The place, Govindpuri, is well known to me or at least I thought. The images on the various new channels referring to Govindpuri did not seem familiar to me at all. As hard as I tried, I could conjure up references to the ‘site’. For the next few hours, my husband and I sat glued to television, reaching out to the phones to get any information about X. We called up as many people we knew to get any information about the coordinates of the ‘place’. From where, where to, etc. Nearest police station, hospital? Acquaintances who lived in the area, friends who would have friends in ‘influential’ positions in this area. We were populating our knowledge about this ‘new found’ place. It’s importance heightened because we were looking for something, probably, gone missing in this new place. In short, we were charting out new geographies into the city, into the cities of the cities, where we both have lived for more than a decade. Along with charting new geographies we were also marking new memories with this new-found place. We were not mere spectators to the ‘sensationalized’ news items about the bombings; we were active participants and producers of new associations, histories, memories based on the probable loss of X to this calamity. Fortunately, X strolled into the house and in our lives again unscathed and smiling unable to fathom our anxious looks or anger outbursts.

Through this one brief incident of ‘inactively’ being involved in the calamity brought forth a series of emotions and inquiries. How much of the city do I know of? How does one react in situations of crisis? Never again was I ever able to look at the city or the calamities it goes through with a beatific de-attachment. I was violently thrown out of my comfortable-middle-class-suburban-guarded by ‘private’ watchmen’s existence and this was when I was looking for someone whom I did not ‘feel’ much about. What about the loved one? I could (can) not even think about the possibility.

The point I am driving at using so much of space for personal introspection is that through incidents like this, the City is suddenly desecrated into categories; the site of incident and those that were spared, safe and unsafe places. New geographies are mapped out and newer histories charted. This is not only the case at the ‘local’ city level, even global new geographies of terror are marked out in red. In the case of yesterday’s Bombay blasts, it is linked to the London blasts, the Srinagar massacare (which the international audience may or may not be aware of). I am not a political theorist. I do not understand very well how the economy of terror and repression works. However, I have an idea about how ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ are circulated at an everyday level. Through their constant reiterations, ‘things’, ‘people’, ‘places’ become dangerous. Everyone, till proven otherwise, is a suspect.

However, amidst all of this fear psychosis, there are images and incidents that sustain one’s faith in humanity. In the humanness of everyone. In the goodness. In Bombay, people went out of their ways to help each other. Strangers, the prime suspects, were embraced and offered everything from material to moral support. The media coverage kept repeating in awe and shock, admiration as well, about the good deeds of the Mumbai-wallahs. The tone in which it was said did not hide their disbelief. It almost came across as if in such times of crisis, one is supposed to hole up in their sanctums and wait for the crisis to walk away. It, however, doesn’t happen so.

And while I reach the endings of this post, sitting in Delhi almost 1300 kilometers, a few million cities away, I notice a pretty girl at a distance standing on her balcony, playing a typically melancholic song, smoking her cigarette. Mourning a lost love? On the other end is an old man in a floral printed shirt jumping up and down to the tunes of the rains, which have finally appeared to provide some solace from the persistent heat, to scare away a few untamed dogs. Or is he playing with them? What are their cities? Where do they belong? Where do I?

Till then, to the spirit of the City, the sites of the cities and the new geographies being sustained.

The First Story

Now that I have started blogging, I am going to use this space to take everything I have ever written out of my system. Through this I am hoping that I will be able to look my work in a different perspective. The following is my first attempt at 'writing'. I was 21 and being 25 was the biggest melodramatic concern hovering around my life. When I read it again and again, I realized how naive (don't mean it in a patronizing manner) but in an almost nostalgic tone of having 'lost' that. It also makes me think about what I was then, with whom and how. Ah, well, so much for the trip down the memory lane.

I don't even know what to call it. So, well, The first story it is then.

Evidently so, I had a problem with endings even then.
________
The First Story

Prologue:
“I am not drunk,” I said in a slurred manner well aware of the fact that I had transcend the boundaries of being sober long ago, “just please hold me once, just once. You don’t even have to pretend to love me. Just let me feel you and sleep. I swear I will sleep. Trust me. Please, do just this little bit for me.”

“You are fucking drunk and fucking crazy. Why did I ever get involved with you?” he shouted pacing hastily around the small room, his legs arms and hands all wandering in different directions. He looked very sexy to me then puffing onto to his cigarette in a nonchalant manner. I wanted to feel his warm tobacco-beer laden breath puffing on my being. My neck. My mouth. My hair. And did I not desire that, now and always? Suddenly realizing that the situations demanded much more serious and insightful thought than these, I closed my eyes and rubbed them hard in disgust and searching for my stars. I had lost both, my stars and my capacity to feel disgusted. To feel anything at all. I opened my eyes as instantly as I had closed them scared by the realization and desperate to feel just anything. What was it for me, a power game? What was it then and what was it now?

“Will you fucking go off to sleep or simply walk out that door,” he shouted getting perturbed by the eerie silence I had fallen into. I know it now and I knew it then, he was restless. He was feeling awkward and uncomfortable in his own body, he wanted to burst open and spill all over the floor. I could feel it and deep within felt satiated. Why? Because, for me relevance of anything existent is the reaction it provokes. And at that moment, his reaction told me I existed and that I was real. “Hurraah,” I thought to myself. So much for the existential angst! “Why, why,” I said as I usually did when I am restless, in that tone of fluctuating monotony moving my hands in wayward directions which usually had very disturbing effect on the other, “if I ask for a bit of love, affection, care and appreciation. Why can’t you give it to me, when you promised you would?” I shouted at the top of my actually attempting to sound helpless.

“Love you, love an alcoholic, a psychotic and a liar. You don’t deserve it. At least not from me. Go and ask for that from one of your boys, who would give it to you,” he said in a flat-icy cold¬-nerve-shattering manner.

Yes, yes, I said to myself a million times, I would go to one of my boys. I had many of them and knew exactly how to keep them there at bay, where I could reach them any time I wanted, use them and abandon them as and when I wanted and desired. I was the puppeteer who knew exactly how to hold the strings; not too tight, not too loose. In spite of knowing all this, I said in a very impotent manner, “I have no one, you know it. I don’t have a family, friends, nothing. I have you and only you. Please, please, do not deny me like that. Please hold me and sleep if only for the last time.” I concluded my speech with intermittent sobbing and howling. I think it was out of sheer tiredness that he lifted his hands in the air, those sexy hands in that rhythmic motion of conducting an opera.

“Okay. Fine. Done. You want to hold me and sleep. Here you are, come we will do exactly that, hold each and sleep,” and hurriedly proceeded towards the bed which lay on the floor and on which we lay together few minutes, centuries or lifetimes ago entangled in each other’s grip culminating the act of passionate, horrendous love making. Or was it? Graphic images of the event, which had happened moments ago, flashed in to my mind and for a while I forgot where I was. I stood there he laid over there and in between was the screen, my screen on which I saw it, the two of us together completely consummated by passion and pretensions. The most primitive of the acts being re-enacted in exactly the same manner. But I enjoyed it, the way it was the act of devouring each other completely without any shame, any fears, any commitments or any conservation’s. At one point of time I thought it would be nice if we conversed, muttering those restlessness into each other’s ears, but then it had to be only till the foreplay after that any words spoken diluted the passion. And that was the way we were when in the act, oblivious to even each other’s presence. All of those nights and days of restrained passion had perfected us in the art. Now we did not have to tell each other what we wanted, how we wanted, both of us knew exactly what we wanted. The act was always abruptly ended as if both of us did not want to be caught unaware of exposing ourselves completely and totally.

I think all this introspection took a very long time as he suddenly burst out deafened by the blaring silence, “you wanted to sleep? What happened now? Are you going to stand over there with that sick look on your face”. Too tired to counter the rhetoric, I slid into the bed next to him my hands finding it difficult to be contended at feeling only a part of him, so I moved them restlessly all over him attempting to arouse him, I think!

Whisky, my liquor, does this to me, makes me delirious yet very perceptive. I was not drunk at the moment I was simply free of any sorts of inhibitions, the shackles of ego self respect and agony bundled and kept carefully in a corner. He lay next to me breathing itself an arduous task for him. That moment I thought was the apt for my long one hour monologue, which I had given before to myself and others and had successfully aroused the kind of emotions I wanted to so I started in that pre-empted and premeditated tone with tears trickling down my cheeks and breathing controlled for the pauses and effects, “I have seen everything and been everything. Done everything and rejected everything. I can quantify for all the emotions there are to be spoken about. Nothing and nothing would scare and shatter me. You know, you know, how it feels? No, you don’t, you never will because you haven’t gone through it. I have and I will tell you how it is. I will tell you now because I am drunk and not bothered about my ego. The ego is going to take over me the first thing in the morning and then I will be something I am not. So, please let me tell you, please let me talk. I am not being pretentious at the moment. No, this is me, with a battered and blistered soul. I don’t like my body and my soul. I detest and hate it. It has been violated so many times by everyone I know and everyone who knows me. My father’s molested me, my brother shagged on my thigh, my sister made me give her a blow job, my mother slept with other men in front of me, I saw my father mounted and well placed between the thighs of an unknown woman, I was raped by my uncle and I have lost my stars. How bad can things get? Do you now understand what I am going through? Now, you know why I have no regard for my body and soul. Because it is no longer mine. What is mine is well embedded and lost in the fuzzy logic I have developed to comprehend the world around me. What is the world around me, I wonder? Is it a fabrication of my own imagination or is it real as it should be? In either situation it is grotesque. You don’t believe, do you? No, I will tell you what I see. I don’t people, I don’t see things; the people are reptiles gross and horrendous all charging towards me with full speed eating into my body brain and soul. They are like maggots, which have grown into my body, and there is no way I can get rid of them. There is always a pair of eyes staring into me, No, they are not mine. I don’t know whose is it. But it is there always. I dread being alone because then things take their shape and haunt me. I close my eyes and eyes glow into me. There is no solace for me. I have no directions and ambitions in life. I cannot feel anything, nothing at all, I mean it. About feeling. I want my independence, I want my mother and father and brother and sister and life. I want my love, anger, passion, I want myself. Can you help me get it?”

Act I Scene I

In the room lit by bright halogen lamps, it was very difficult not see things but I did not. I did not see anything, I just felt it. I clenched my eyes hard so as to see something after the concentrated effort but saw my stars. My stars, they are mine, and only mine. At that moment, my stars came to me like the way they did all the time, charging with great speed, velocity and momentum and for a brief moment of time transpose me to a totally different world, my world. Then suddenly as if somebody had cut the electric power everything darkened and though I should have kept my eyes close so as to find them there, the sudden jolt of losing them made me open my eyes and brought me back to where I was. He was sprawled over the floor, too drunk to even be shameful, exposing everything, himself and his organ. For a brief moment, I was awe struck by the sight of it, the organ. It hung on to one side of his thigh lifeless and limp. Shrivelled and shrunk. Dead, I thought! Realizing the audacity of my thoughts, I lifted my gaze from the ground and saw her standing tall and erect, like the way she always did. She was short, very short but when she stood it had an intimidating effect. Just imaging what he might be seeing of her lying down on the floor, I got jittery. I wanted it to come to an end and soon. But I knew I was the protagonist there, I had to act and react. I had to take stands and soon. They both from their angles of vision stared at me; she with hope and he with difficulty. “For heaven’s sake,” I thought, “is one supposed to take stands like this in a flat two seconds. Give me a break over here, I am having severe performance pressure.”

Suddenly disrupting the placid monotony, she shouted at him looking at me, “You have ruined my life, my career, my family and everything that was mine. Why can’t you just get away from my life, from our life? Just walk out that door. No one will stop you. No one will plead and no will bother. Just go! Make it easier for me and for others. Go wandering about the streets but please let us live in peace. See, can you see, what you come down to? You are drunk and helpless. You love your bottle. You love yourself. You love no one. Do you even love yourself? If you do, then what are doing with our lives and your life? Who will pay for the next car instalment? Who will take the car for servicing? What will you have for desert?”

He lay over there with his eyes twitching, still trying to adjust to the light or attempting to comprehend what she said. Then he turned towards me with his eyes wide open and absolutely clear and said, “I did everything for you, whatever I could and what did you do? You went and slept with another man”. His tone was shrieking and shattering but he was not loud.
He said that and slid back into his slumber, as if going back into hibernation after brief interruption. I stood over and I knew I had to react. But react to what and how? She looked at me with hope and he slept snoring in a very comfortable manner. The picture wasn’t perfect; the action was not over yet.

“Why is he sleeping yet? It is not the two of us but the three of which complete the frame. How can he sleep? He should not”.

I thought to myself and realized that here is where I was needed. They needed me desperately for their own selfish reasons I stretched my hands to the table near me, not looking for anything specific and not sure if in the suspended state of mind and body, I would be able to get a hold over anything. I managed to pick up the water jug. I was not sure what I am going to do with it. I looked into my sea, the waves were hitting on to the walls, desperate to be let loose, to flow and feel. I knew then what I had to do. I have never had such clear insight on any matter. I had to free my sea, the sea, I had to unleash the energy. I picked the jug, while staring into it all the time walked towards the door and as a matter of fact splashed the water of the jug on his face, while going out of the room. He got up with a jerk sat upright and straight, she looked at me with gratitude and my sea which I had released from it confines lay scattered not able to adjust to the new confines or lack of it. I did not turn to look back, I did not even bother to pretend but while transcending into a different world I felt their eyes piercing my soul attempting to stop me. That day when I walked away I left a part of me behind, never to find it again. The world which had created my universe ceased to exist in that instance.

Act I Scene II

The ceiling was moving at full speed and the fan was still. I was lying nude on the bed with a battered blistered soul and a numb body. My body was no longer mine as every part of it had risen in revolt against me. My hands wanted to walk away, my legs wanted to swim and the eyes were fervently trying to jump out and get stuck to the ceiling and mock at me from that height. I could not open my eyes for the fear of losing them. I could not move my body for the fear of dismantling it. I felt him there standing nude at the edge of the bed with a battered hanger in his hands supporting an erection. My mind was operating as an independent entity then, defying all the limits of comprehension, perception and intelligence I had set for myself. I could feel the weight of it compared to weightlessness of my dismantling body. My eyes still closed, my mind refusing to comply with my wishes I was trying very hard to look for my world, my stars. I saw my stars faintly at the horizon moving towards me. I was almost beginning to forget where I was till the time I saw him. I did not feel him, I saw him. His image was blurred because he was too close to my face and was moving his hands on something, which was no longer, mine, my body.

I did not feel anything except his weight, his immense weight. He was humping on me, in me with very controlled movements as if attempting to revive me from my comatose state. He stopped then just like that and slid next to me on the bed and murmured in my ear, “but…but, I still love you”. I heard it and saw it but did not feel it. I wanted to get up and sit up with a jerk up the body was up against me. I reached for myself I was fluid and transparent. I used the tissue lying on the bed for that purpose only to clean the white, vicious fluid flowing down the curvatures of my inner thighs. He used it to clean his sweat. Eventually, I got up not with a jerk but with slow carefully manoeuvred motions careful so as to not leave anything, any part of me behind. I stood in the middle of the room not sure where or what I was supposed to do. He got disturbed by the sound of my heavy breathing and opened his eyes. He was watching me from the corner of his eyes and I could feel the physical reactions I evoked in him. He stirred and shifted. He slid silently from his end of the bed to the corner where I was standing. He stretched his hands and as his hands infringed on my domain, whatever was left of it, I threw up. Standing there, standing nude, and standing erect I threw up without any effort or interruptions. My grime was all over him and me. I saw the reaction in his eyes, those beautiful big brown eyes, it was like suddenly they lost their focus, I could not see his pupil anymore it had faded somewhere within my grime on his face. He opened his mouth to speak but as he did so he tasted me. My grime sealed his lips.

With the resigned disposition of a Queen, I picked up my clothes each one at a time and went to cleanse myself of the layers of grime, which had accumulated. It took time and when I came out he stood there, still nude and still supporting his erection as his permanent appendage, tears trickling down his porcelain face.

“Trust me, you deserved it. Don’t leave me. I know your worth, nobody else does and I give you what you deserve. Love me please and don’t leave me. I will never hit you ever again, never again with the hanger at least”.

I briefly stopped turned back and looked and walked away still carrying the burden of his weight.

Epilogue:

“No, I can’t fucking get it. I can get anything for you. Just go, just leave, why don’t you?” he said in a hasty manner lifted his body and stood vertical to my existence. “You know, what your problem is. You are too fucking dumb and too fucking stupid. If you just did away with your attitude, everything would be fine”.

I lay over there not ready for this reaction, what went wrong. I knew I had not rehearsed the speech well. It had been a long time. But this is not the reaction I expected. My king lay bare and naked in front of his pawn. I did not know where to move and how. I lifted my weight but did not stand rather crawled towards him curled myself around his legs and pleaded, “what have I done? Why don’t you love me? Why don’t you desire me? You used to, we had magic between the two of us, what went wrong? I just want to relive the magic once again. Just once, I want my stars back”.

“What are you talking about? What is this shit about stars and magic? With you, there is no magic and no stars anymore. Can you keep this idealist-philosophical bullshit in your bag when you came over here. Listen, I will tell you what I want. I want my space and I want my life. I don not understand this bullshit and I do not even want to try. I want to make money. I want to be rich and I want to do well in my field. I want to come and watch the 9:30 movie on star or hbo. That is what I want. And if you want stars go to the terrace and look up”.

“But …but, that is not life. That is not love. Love is madness and love is stupid. I want you to see my stars. I want you to be you, I want you to be me. I want it to be pure, passionate unadulterated love. I want magic. I want music. I want to live”. I said still placed on the floor pulling my hair in a melodramatic manner, tears flowing uncontrollably without any effort.

“Look at your self. You are simply disgusting. The way you talk, the way you are sitting there pissed drunk. And trust me, take my word for it, you will never find what you are looking for in me or anyone else. Who will love you? Someone has to be crazy to love you and spend the rest of the life with you. I am sorry, please spare me. I cannot take it. Leave me or better still, I leave you”. He said and moved in to another room.

His voice echoed from the next room came to me in waves hitting me one at a time, “Learn to respect others – learn to respect things around you. Respect me. You have no respect for me. You think you can get away with anything, don’t you? Not this time-go and learn to respect me and then come, we will think about it-yes, the goddamn fucking relationship. If nothing else, go respect yourself.”

what's in a name?

For years, I have been planning to have a blog. To have this space where I would unwind all my brilliance, real and imagined. However, in doing so, I was constantly stuck by the name I ought to give to the blog. What will it be called? Somehow I put much more importance on the name than it was required. To me, the name of my blog would be this thing which become associated with me, about me. Which would be me. So year after year, I have contemplated about the 'name' and I came up with some really corny ones as well. They never sounded right and I was always too lazy to think about it beyond that or actually do something about it. So, I let it be. However. I am soon going to touch 30. The dreaded three decades slipping though the palms. And I have been very preoccupied with my being 30. There are times when I wake up with a jolt in my own bed, in my own house, with my husband and think 'when did all of this happen'? 'when did i grow up'? There is a sense of relief as well as dread in that waking up with a jolt. All said and done, with all the excitment and exasperations, I must say I am much more relaxed being 30 than I ever was being 15, 25 or 28. I had my share of breakdowns being any of these, 15, 25 or 28. And though I am sure I am going to sweat a bit about turning 30, I will not crack down when I am 35. I am actually looking forward to it. Growing up (growing old) has its benefitts. I am a much more relaxed and comfortable person. I am not that tensed. I am not that scared. I find it easier to love. I am able to say No. I don't reach out to people with crumbling nails to leave them cold-blinded. In short, I am not afraid.

And all this growing up/growing old business has a lot to do with the fact that I am actually doing something about my blog. It is a very small thing. Almost inconsequential. However, my being able to do it without actually thinking what others would think is, for me, a significant step in climbing up the ladder.

So, here it is, the summer-afternoon-stillness.

Hibernate!