Distractions

Everything in the room looked dislocated and chaotic due to my days of negligence. Dust to be wiped off, things to be replaced and trashes to be thrown out. When was the last time I had stuck something on my walls? There are no more hangings, faces and childish sketches to décor my fantasies and distract the solidities. Stop searching for the colours, certain combinations won’t work out! Roots and Shadows was sitting precariously on a pile of other junks with its frayed edges brownish and shabby. “Mini” stepped into my memory somedays back, at the day before her marriage, my cousin sister’s. The bride was taking in that air of acceptance just like any other girl, persistently smiling smiling smiling until her cheeks getting that dirty tweak. She seemed to have plunged herself into that image of Mini in these pages. “Behind the façade of romanticism, sentiment, and tradition, what was marriage after all, but two people brought together after cold blooded bargaining to meet, mate and reproduce so that generation might continue”. I don’t know how the jewels, garish bangles and flashy dhuppattas becomes the center of focus, excitement and sole sensation for a girl to make over the dry dry agreements and conditions behind it.  “It was the marriage that mattered not the man.” It was the marriage that mattered! For her? “We like our women not to think”. We would probably wish for a fresh delicate blossom, delicately looking, ever sustaining that delicacy, seldom swayed with all its delicateness, indelicate to wither its beauty so soon. And it’s not so difficult to prune and domesticate even the wildest ones which have the tradition and legacy of submissiveness in their gene. I wish all blossoms had some thorns in their very petals;)

 I have my leaking nose and aching throat with their seasonal conspiracy with each other motivated by the windy rain being battered right over my face. I should divert my attention to some willing distractions to avoid the pain. I chose The Boy in Striped Pyjamas to content me enough. The midnight quietness across the hall was shuffled and waggled by the boys’ slow pitch exchanges between the thorny fence. “They smell worse when they burn, don’t they? They smell worse when they burn don’t they? They smell…” One line glued to one end of my conscience, swallowing the subsequent scenes. I have this occasional premonition of being in that moment just before when you are going to get burnt alive! Alive with so many others packed together, getting nauseated by their sweat, being claustrophobic, hungry for a bit of air. A fear added to man's primal fear of snake, height and darkness. I promised myself to stop the watch right before Bruno finally getting burnt with the boy in striped pyjamas. The mother’s wailing would call for other distractions to appease myself. I didn't keep my promise. Hence this distraction of wrestling with the keyboard to stack out some thoughts, helter- skelter, like clothes spread out in “drying-combination” to get some sunlight! I really don't know why am I posting this. I got used to posting so much that not to post something is a distraction. Now Pardon me for this deliberate distraction here:)

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant!"

The private lady had “selected her own society”, closed her “valves”, and peeped through the lattice at the strange faces, unmoved like a stone. It’s Emily Dickinson. The most peculiar woman. An eccentric being of “finest secrets”. Was she arrogantly sure of the durability of her art even while having a word with her sister to annihilate them all? I wonder how so much of that reclusion hasn’t hampered her insight. I am so comfortable with her except the fact that the rope of "death" recurrently squeezes her lines. Our reservations nullify each other with a laxity which gives enough spaces for the words alone to hang in the air. And I would have get caught for stealing away all her purposefully shuffled manuscripts crammed in her drawers if I was allowed into her privacy. I fell in love with you the moment I heard you saying "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant!"

 My soul gets wet, my soul gets burnt when I am with him. It's Neruda. Teach me your language in that green ink. I heave sighs and sighs and pine and pine for that piquancy of unrequited love, loss, passion and cravings. Have you been a woman at somewhere at sometime? You urge me to transform myself into a man who wants to entwine with several women and uncover all their furtiveness. Such a gentle torture, so rudely polite.You seem like an alien descended here, first to objectify and then to subjectify and then again to objectify this “love”. You inflict so much of pain in me that I would remain freakish and insatiable all my life. I wish I would have never met you. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant!

My Hamlet is waiting out there with his pale forehead and “leaden eye despair”. I have left him with his contempt for “incestuous sheets” and “pernicious women”.  How would I pacify his melancholy? You are too young and too old. Come out of your shell and don’t argue that “I could be bound in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”. You and I think too much. I have your future with me. I feel like a God, helpless to inform you of it. I suffer with you. I am delaying myself so that you won't take my face in your arms and condemn “God has given you one face and you make yourself another”. It's not meant to be uttered like that.Tell all the Truth but tell it slant! 

I know you have that secret wish never to see my face again since it will demolish all the unpleasantness we had the last time we met. It may bring back all the dusted love. But “what I wouldn’t do to see your face again”? You made me apprehend that love is not that easy to find, that deception will wag its tail every time I search for something more tender, more pristine. Purity should not be demanded beyond a limit. It no longer exist in its nudest form. Have a look at me now so that I would get one more chance to make you laugh when I stumble and fall and bleed. I would doubt the pleasure behind that pricking joy. Aren’t you sad? Tell all the truth but tell it slant. Lest I may not survive!

There is so much beauty in you...

The mundane indolent air is wafting across the open window. Why the night  reminds me of day as some distant past? So distant that only streaks of some moments were lived in a day. All the other bits like a blurred picture, mute and shapeless, faint splashes visible in some nooks of the canvas. Does a procrastinated smothered event waiting at the other end of the bridge, to be unfurled? 

I lay in my bed with an imagined tiredness. There is no sorrow, no love, no desire- like my body reluctantly dragged in here from the day -only some thoughts, thoughts, thoughts- mixed and dimmed -so much of clatter coming out of my memory satchel. How the memories scream like an abandoned child at the end of a day- wooden benches-resounding classroom walls- deviating talks. It passes like it never happened- the perceptions. Thousands of it! Perceptions! Few registered ,lot indifferent. 

She said she wants to go long walks with me, to hold my hands, to lock her fingers with mine, to soak herself up in our talks, to count the waves, to fly kites, to get wet in the rain, hot coffee, films and window shopping.  She said she wants to take me in her palm, like a bluish butterfly grappled in between, to enclose me in a translucent glass so that I won’t slip out of her clutch! “Sounds so filmy as usual. You fictionalize too much”. She looked away with her beaming smile.  There is so much love and beauty in her.  Love which injures me, beauty which scares me. It contrasts with my distortions and contradictions. Leave me. Let me wallow in this filth, let me wallow in my relentless guesses and infatuations. This plainness dwindles my narcissism.

I wonder what he thinks in his long lonely drives back and forth. There will be city lights, horns and buzzing crowd. Do you hear the songs dad? Or do you retrospect?  Do you retreat into that fidgeting child of yours…my little toes darting towards you, pestering you to yield to my puerile longings?  We would have played with that silence in between our seats if I were beside you. Have you had a glimpse of me in my mom’s eyes even when I was unborn? Because there is so much beauty in your vision which stretches so long and so incisive.  The spangles of its glare injure me. Leave me. Let me wallow in this filth so that I would be a feeble ray in this darkness rather than be something grotesque in that spot light.

I thought I stopped playing with my shadows sometime back. But I am not. Not yet. There is so much beauty in you which makes me toss my mirror away and merge with you...but you are always one step ahead...;)