(Re)intro

“I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru…I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.”

from “An introduction” by Kamala Das

————

Maybe not all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, Mr. Tolstoy. Perhaps they are left on their own to deal with it, is all.

I’ve worn the same silver flower nose pin for so long , sometimes it just seems to have grown into a part of me. Almost as if it were always there, like some groove or ridge on my skin. Sometimes, my finger brushes against it accidentally and I remember it like an old secret I wear on myself. One that is visible to all but unspoken of, unaddressed. It’s like that secret sigh of relief one feels, finding your own reality hidden in a sentence or a moment in a book.

I dream of penning down biting social satire, or even better, political. Instead, I find myself biting down on my own tongue. Temple built,corona kills,Kashmir razed, delhi burning, feminists rage, workers of the world unite, revolutionaries revolutionize, dalit lives matter. My weary words rest their heavy heads on beaten down pillows at night, blinking back at the sleepless ceiling. Kya farq padta hai? What unfeeling monster have I become…indifferent, apathetic. Floating by each day in an island of isolating self-absorption.

Even this act of writing is selfish, not one of love. Not of creation in a real sense. Not giving as it should be. There’s so much me in it, quite literally. Just as there is scepticism of the personal and subjective, i feel sceptical of my motives. All my ideals have been broken into, a bank robbery in broad daylight. Some blame it on alienation in an advanced capitalist age. Some, depression. I feel like Fitzgerald himself in the short story ‘Crack Up’, a portrait of his psyche unravelling in the roaring ’20s…mine,a desecrated coconut in the 2020s. Waiting for the wall street crash of this century entailing fascism to take over in many of its forms ( which it has anyway lol). Guess this is the point at which we speak on the futility of war.

Instead,I’ll talk about the futility of family. I’ve repressed things that are beyond fixing. The violence of the oppressed is always justified, that of the oppressor is not. Does the shroud of silence ever lift?  Power corrupts and absolute power…I don’t have the will to finish my sentences. I’ll trail off mid-sentence, retracting into my cultured  petri-dish of privilege. The world a festering wound, better left unaddressed. Protect my honour, I will and it will keep me safe so long. My father doesn’t approve of  nose piercings because it is a cheap giveaway for the lack of respectability apparently. Even your grandmothers don’t have pierced noses or tattoos, genteel women don’t. I long to be nobody and nowhere,  just the vast emptiness of words.I still don’t know how to write conclusions, or even beginnings for that matter. 

 

Why is the prosaic not good enough?

Papery pink flowers frame the rock formations characteristic of this city,

they fall,all over the place,isn't that the phrase so many people use to describe their lives.
I stare at the stale air that hovers over empty tables in a cafe,so romanticized like the streets side ones of Paris but these have unlit yellow lamps above them,because it's 2 pm and the sunlight is too bright and a couple of bougainvilleas peek from behind the green cane shutter ,greeted by a clump of bamboos.
I wait for an almost something,nothing at all.It's not the butterfliesinyourstomach kind of anticipation,it's different this time and as I wait for my iced tea to arrive,it's not the voice I was waiting to hear that I'm met with.It's almost as if it doesn't exist,it's just make belief.

Laaltin

One cup of coffee gone cold,

then,a couple more

A forgotten summer,

 and a decade past

Glass walls in muesums 

and glass walls in shopping malls

An urgent desire to dive headlong

into love,

a consistent disinterest swarming around it

From understanding one ideology

to another,to making sense of none at all

People I've forgotten exist,

words I've forgotten exist,

half written poems,

fantasies grown flaccid before climax.

Phallic symbols I need to stop seeing,

all the labels that musn't weigh me down.

Power cuts and kerosene lamps,

musquitoes and string cots on a terrace

the ice candy man's bell in the 

sweltering street,

nostalgia with its memories 

sticking out like old screws

in a wooden bed by a window,

where a silver haired woman

sits,shivering;more with excitement

at winning a card game,than her palsy.

The courtyard well with dead 

magura fish at it's bottom,

they swam exactly for a day.

Laburnums

When I first moved to this city,about a year ago,it was a little past peak summer and the laburnums were fading out of sight.

It's peak summer now,and they are in full bloom in the courtyard outside my room when I wake up on an obscure May morning.They're so familiar,so close,unlike the ones I used to look at from behind car windows while we drove through streets whose names I did not know.
I pack my life into a cardboard carton,seal it tight with space just enough for whatever will happen in the year to come.Staring at the dusty duct tape shadows that remain on the wall above my bed ,after I've taken my posters down, fills me with a profound sense of loss for a second.

Like the laburnums,
so much else has blossomed,
blossomed with metaphor,
meaning blooming
like annotations around a poem,
handwritten interpretations unfurling
like petals out of printed verse.
So much has withered,as well,
so many friends,so many dreams,
so many notions that used to be.
Black and white binaries aren't for me,
I understand neither extreme,
I've learnt that to let something grow
you have to inevitably let something go,
a friend once said to me,
"you grew,they withdrew."
if you love,you will love to know that you'll lose,
if you don't lose,how will you ever find anything you
love with that intensity again?

You're the laburnums,
firework,transient spark,
chandelier,crystal clear,
reflective,fragile,sharp.
But poster-less,whitewashed walls
and flower-less green foliage
can only mask
that you've been there,
not that you'll arrive again.

Wonder

What I'm most afraid of is waking up one morning,aged fifty five,having lost all sense of wonder for the day ahead of me or the world that awaits me with all there's left to learn.I'm hardly an adult now and on some mornings,I already wake up having no sense of wonder for what the day could unveil or the people I could meet.I know everyday cannot be exciting and monotony is an inevitable part of life,there's only so far away you can chase it before it creeps back in,in one form or another.

I'm not afraid of ageing or monotony,I'm not even afraid of mediocrity..these are only the limited and limiting constructs of a hypercompetetive society.

I am afraid of losing that phenomena,

where you discover a new word and then you see it everywhere-it pops up on your social media and on television drams or when you notice how fascinating someone is for the first time,and then,they seem to be everywhere you look.Almost serendipitous,like writing a poem about a moth and coming across a poem you wrote about a moth three years ago,based on a memory about moths from when you were three years old and you tried to contemplate the wonder of life and death and all the unanswerable questions fit in between infinity,at the sight of a lifeless moth lying on the floor.Wondering if you should be happy or sad at the sight of the moth.Watching the marching band,with white hats outside the window and car with flowers cello taped all over it,even its windscreen,wondering what the music meant or what the beat of the drums taped glittery blue,meant.Finding old posts of moths on instagram.A chain reaction,butterfly effect from one thing that you are fascinated by.

I want to never forget what it feels like to look at someone and wonder how it would be to kiss them or hold their hands,I never want to stop looking for little whirlwind galaxies of water draining from a bathtub.

It does not matter what this wonder materialises into,that's the best part,it's not about the materiality or even some kind of self-rewarding,self-actualised concept..it's just that

the childlike wonder of finding a pink bead in your shoes,or a shard of broken bangle or teacup in the sand of the playground,pocketing a feather or a dandelion blown by the wind,watching a lime green caterpillar in the corner of the swimming pool or hearing the word "kind" for the first time and imagining what it must mean,something like a kite,one of those things that fly? It must be blue in colour,it sounds like a blue glass window or the sky.

Sometimes,not even a physical treasure to stow away in a box,just a string of thoughts all woven into each other like a intricate lace labyrinth.

Wondering is just as important as knowing and if language is symbolic of how me construct our worlds,we're learning to wonder through words every moment,although we've been wondering from before we had the words,for we've had symbols as thoughts to articulate wonder with.

I'm afraid the more I know,the more I might kill wonder and forget that there's infinite realities I cannot fathom.On some starry nights,I forget to look at stars and feel,not insignificant or inconsequential,but infinitesimal and this worries me.I don't want to swallow yellow paint of being consumed by everything I know,even when it consumes me like an ocean wave I didn't anticipate because there are almond blossoms waiting to be awe struck over and written about with wonder.

Mustang

The loneliness of being young is often forgotten,

left behind by adults who change in ways usually
not noticed until the change is concrete.
We become better at deluding ourselves
into believing we aren't as lonely
and we buy into the romantic notions
of youth,promised to us by pop culture,
the market capitalizing on the glory days
of coming of age.
Mustang means stray animals
in Spanish,I suppose
and that's what being in college is like.
I realise that home is a construct,
well,everything is,
but it's the only construct where
clothes smell of comfort (the fabric conditioner,you know?)
and potatoes and drumsticks are cooked in ground mustard,
rooms smell like dogs have been around the place,
it's never too late to catch a sunset in solitude
and it's never problematic to take a nap without worrying
about the wasted hours,
Home,with always enough,endless supply
of green tea and coffee stocked up in the larder.
I once read somewhere that home is a person
but that was young adult fiction,idealistic,
read owl-eyed at 4 in the morning,
(In my defence,I still really like YA)
I'd stayed up all night to chase away the mystery of teenage romance,
struggled to stay awake for school the next morning.
I'm twenty now and home is not a person to,me,
it is people,yes,but not always the same people
that I go back to.
When I first moved out of a place I'd lived in
almost
literally my entire life,my friend said
Home is creature comforts,
he was right,but I felt it was more,
it was nostalgia,it's a permanent abode
in imagination,
Memory
and more.
Maybe I'm just as destitute as the hostel cats
and campus dogs,
living on the leftover mercies of human beings,
getting by on the affection they anticipate.
 I watched people blur into each other's
movements,from the distance,on a grassy slope,
next to an oversized Labrador,Ash,
he recognised me even on days
I hid a sob fest behind a bathroom stall,
he soothed me with his presence,
 making the telltale red nose from crying ,vanish.
Does that mean I'm trying to be stronger?
I'm better at hiding my weaknesses now?
I don't know.
I wanted to be alone,get some fresh air,
clear my head,breathe,
go on a walk.
That's the recipe to feel better,
everyone says,
but it's in these moments
when you realise
how illusive totality is,
how impermanent home
or anything wholesome is.
Maybe being older is lonely too,
just being lonely around more people,
a far cry from going home to somewhere
you belong.
For now,I'll just roll down this grassy slope
and watch the sky become the grass become the
sky again,
till I'm dizzy and the blood rushes to my head
and I'm laughing so hard,I can't breathe.
I will try not to think about how itchy the grass is
and the bath that will entail as a result of this
spontaneous exercise in the spectacular now,
There are only moments in a day,
nothing more,nothing less.

Walled City

Within the walls of a walled city,

my thoughts grow invisible wings ,
born inside a closet sized,shoebox like room.
They struggle to take flight,
stumble and fall,some taste the dirt forever.
A cat we called Tilly Kettle,
as the namesake of a modern artist,
often purrs in front of my door,
I don't know what it is that she's been asking for,
it seems a lot like all the things I struggle to
say.
Labyrinthine is the structure
of most things I've understood
 cannot be fought.
I'm not yet sure it's impossible
to transcend these concentric circles
of creation,perpetuated
through walls we've build
because humans love
to categorize,classify,stick people and objects
into glass jars as specimens,alike.
Ideas might be just as futile in their ambitions
as Icarus,
or the renaissance man,
their waxen wings might not endure
the sun's strength,
or the ocean's might,
within walls born,within walls
predestined to crash and burn
like stars,
just as distant
and alluring.
We spend our entire lives
moving from one room to another,
walls within walls,
familiar we make them,
the ones we sit on,some we even cross
over,
only to realise we'd have to leave
 them behind anyway
to meet new walls.
Within the walls of the walled city,
I've come to learn to let go,too
not only to look beyond walls
but to make peace with living
within some of them,
as long as I can paint them in shades
of grey,
grey is not just monotony,it's comfort,
it's not just uncertainty,it's exploration.
Some of us might never break down
walls in this lifetime,
but it's enough,sometimes,
to see them as more
than mere walls,
paint them in shades other than the
standard off white
and black.