"Mortified, Petrified, Stupefied!"

The wound is ripe

To be sliced and consumed

Before it consumes her.

Pardon me for the grotesque imagery

It slipped out

Of my grotesque contemplation

With a deliberate ease and arrogance

Of utmost feminine frailty.

(Can you please compare this

With a Sylvia Plath gloom

Dipped in “black shoe daddy” memories

And battered by a “red heart biting Ted Hughes”?)

My heroine in the poem

Demanded some drama-

Like ”plucked out Oedipus’s eye balls”

Staring at the wound on the empty sockets.

But that would be-

Too “rationally cartoonish”, lively and manly.

The wound is really really ripe,

Yellowish and yellower

And eternally yellow

When the cart wheeled and wheels

Quietly over centuries

With one Sylvia to another

“Mortified, petrified, stupefied”-

And mutely brewing inside!

Can it be consumed 
Before it consumes further?

Finite

I kept on counting him

Like number of birds

Perching perilously on a branch

Or like syllables

In a piece of poetry

…………………………….

But then

I regret

For all the wasted moments

As one day

He whispered of his “infinity”!

I felt betrayed

Disillusioned

Desperate

Something “finite” would be more comforting

For I can feel the infinite

Only through the finite

I am too “finite” to be the other way!

Strangers

Most of the time it didn’t matter at all!

When you blabber to me

I would smile at you

And would dream of beautiful thoughts unspoken

By strangers.

But this time

You uttered something  beautiful

And I felt frustrated,

By the thought of possibility of fantasizing

 Strangers no more!

And then I got pacified

When it occurred that

Things have that lingering enchantment

Only in the hands of strangers

Distant, unknown and less familiar!

They would start “blabber”

Just like “you”

When they are no more strangers!  

It's for Its Own Sake!

 The day is empty. A typical Saturday idleness. I play with the pillows and try to hold on to one after another- Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Whitman or Poe, Sylvia Plath or Frost- anything which can mask this emptiness. Anything which can give life to this very day. And I try to cover half of The Glass Menagerie.The house is acting as if I am an uninvited stranger sitting in some corner and reading a magazine. There is clatter from the kitchen, slushing of water from the shower, sounds so familiar and air so seen yet unseen. Laura Wingfield and her glass menagerie. Her crippleness and her shyness. Her fragility and her fantasies. Laura….and her glass menagerie! I wish it was I who could dance with Laura. I wish it was I who would call her Blue Rose. (Please give undue stress to the single diphthong in the one letter word “I”)  She would have had a wonderful time with me.  And I am tired of this victimization of characters. They crash and burn all alone in American dramas. Too much of expressionism for expressing negativity and its dimensions in life. Their incapacity to be in reality overwhelms my capacity to be realistic and practical. Tom, Amanda and Laura- their inability for connectivity is so transparent that I am forced to think over it disturbingly after every narration Tom make from his memory.  And the text is not moving steadily, I am in stagnation. It seems everything is flowing back too much to Amanda’s past or flowing out too much to Tom’s future or hanging loosely so high in Laura’s other world! And I didn’t want to touch the critical appreciation part since it’ll remind me that it is of the syllabus and I am not suppose to “read” the text,  but just to know the summary and have a superficial study to jot down some points!  Superficial study! How shameful for these characters! I wish they would come out of these printed papers and slap us!

Every day she calls and says of things missing and things lost. How she is not in ease with the recent dislocations and how she is paying for her lack of culinary skills! Everyday she talks about the need for change and her blurring ability for conversations and her “useless” withdrawals. And the last time she kept the phone it was with a bang, with a shaken voice from the other end- “I thought at least YOU would understand!” (Her “you” was drawled but sounded beautiful) And I was thinking about how useless is her drawl in the YOU there, same as that of her useless withdrawals! I wanted it to connect it with a Gautier quote (though I wouldn’t dare to do it in her presence!) “Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.” Human beings of poor and infirm nature…are not aware that useful is ugly and beautiful is useless. Always there is this unconscious inner craving for beauty. Someone can’t tolerate a misplacement of things on the table, a stain on the carpet, a bend of the furniture- we scream at ugliness and throb and throb for beauty! Beautiful faces, beautiful places, beautiful words, beautiful world! Everything should be beautiful! And useful! How paradoxical! Can “beautifully useful” be an oxymoron?

Gautier wanted to defend the “art for art's sake” by the useful and beautiful dilemma! And so words here are for their own sake. There is no purpose. Non- utilitarian. How comfortable!  This gives a justification for my incoherent, dissipated, disconnected writing here. It gives a justification for my decision to post it here. (The secret behind the decision is actually to avoid the dormancy of this blog). And it’s much effortless if the head is an "unweeded garden" full of “things rank and gross in nature possessing it merely".  If someone asks me what am I writing I would say “words words words”. And if someone asks you, what are you reading? , just say “words, words, words”. (That’s what Hamlet said, but he was mad or pretended to be mad. But often there is very little difference between the two). I always misunderstand that there are certain things vital to my survival. And it will take me sometime to realize that they are not. Not at all vital, not even the last thing needed for my survival. The mind rejects the idea first and there will be vehement argumentation and trails to show that it’s not the case. And before the final surrender a sense of “nothing to lose” put out my exhaustion. This “nothing to lose” comes from “nothing to gain”- it was for its own sake :)

"I don’t know them any more!"

The reality sieves through my pensive mesh of loneliness. For sometime it would roam on my mindscape, looking up and putting its hands together for an ugly clap to pull my feet downwards. Carpe Diem! It evokes embarrassment in me, a kind of abashment which scolds the lack of self-abnegation. To drink a day to the lees without leaving a dreg would sounds like moments circumscribed within one’s own vicinity of interests and nothing else. And where are the other “ME-s”? Wonderful are the people who can do it. People who are selfless even to a small extend, to sacrifice their interests, to outflow, to be for others, to live for them, to be unconcerned what one to oneself is. To feel salvation by others’ smiling faces. It’s simply noble!  

Predictability! There is secureness in it. Calmness and certainty. For me it was always wearisome. People unpredictable propels a kind of excitement. I long for them. A wilderness that can give you space for guessing and re-guessing only to be fooled and surprised. “Family…” is so tender, their eyes make you haste away your rotten longings, like a bird combing back its ruffled feathers. It’s the only place for which I can leave the “carpe diem” to starve and wilt. There are laughs, hugs and affections bestowed in plenty from all sides. Love and regards mellifluously sung. But somewhere it’s so "Puritan". There is suffocation brimming, “throbbing waiting”, “I shall be rush out as I am” (Never thought that I would fall in love with Eliot’s Waste Land. Tiresias came with me at several reads. But then Love is unpredictable isn’t it?) Close those windows or my soul may fly out!  

Loneliness- it rustles behind the curtain waiting to be pulled back its silken fabric, to be viewed and acknowledged. Loneliness- Sssshhh…hold your tongue and sit still- I know you long to be stroked, cared, nursed and respected. You grow despicable because you’re always orphaned at the beginning of your existence. I would come to you when sleep buries all. Come along. Together we can interpret the ambiguities of silence- Silence which builds frontiers before us- silence chopped off and detached from us- silence embraced and melted with in us- silence immaculately pleasing. Come along. We shall rush out as we are. I long for my feet to be steeped in wet sand, waves to swish over my skin, trailing back with its white froth. The blackened moon is shifting its place in the blue infinity. We can tilt our heads and see the stars emerged and sprinkled in shapes awaiting to be sort out. I have got my tears- evapourating the bleeding soul. Hold my hand; we can build castles in this shore, only to be tampered by some sporting wind. Do you hear those words thundering? "As flies to the wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport!" What’s our little love in this galaxy? You cannot pluck the stars and collect it on your basket, can you? Still hope rejuvenates the desires. Do you see those worms emptying their belly to get fed on us? Let’s gaze at each other and have a straight smile, to be sanctified before they shame us on our graves!

Words once written seem to loosen their feel from the heart, packing up their aroma and taste, they look back with a blunt stare and leave me without waving goodbyes. They go away as quietly as a scribbled paper drifting towards someone’s doorstep, like a fading whistle in an empty street……..And then…"I don’t know them any more!”

And why do we meet such people?

Sometimes I feel that my life is just a flash back, that I am out there in that future with these memories twirling me back to this space, that I have already known you! Do you remember that cold night? We were sitting outside, my toes pressed in the soft grass, fingers twitching against its coldness; rifting water drops in between the green blades. I was narrating Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona. You said you adored that man with that thick black frame, his raw talent and egotism. You said you have fascination for someone “different”, just because they are “different”. Our families’ subdued noise of laughter, loosened conversations and undulating arguments after the hangover of a typical friendly dinner oozing out from the house just felt like an uninteresting movie playing in the background. We didn’t see the stars. We didn’t see the moon. The breeze was not emotional enough to move the leaves. You told me to narrate the story in every detail, that you love detailing so much. You said I am a good story teller. I said you are a good listener. We complimented each other. So special to each other. Vivacious smiles, laughter, wonder, never pausing for what to say next, never disrupted by silence. Words slipping, stretching themselves, and slithering out of our mouths, it rolled and sparked and ablazed the air around us. It’s as if I have watched that movie in a lonely feverish afternoon, lying in my couch only to narrate it to you. I shook your hand and doubted if you were something illusionary. You said how you enjoy non-entities and abstractions. I said how I long to concretize those abstractions. You said you won’t usually put the lights on until the sun completely sinks into the ocean because you want the last of the rays to be fallen on your floor. You said you loved gloomy tree tops with their distant fragile looking branches and dreamt of painting one with a naked woman lying on it, with her flowing frizzy hair tightly entangled with the top boughs. There will be tinctures of orange, grey and blue, colors spilled and smeared in profusion in the sky, with some whiteness of the paper eying out. You talked about your crush with Vermeer and his interior lightning and Girl with the Pearl Earring. It was all too much for me to take in together. I told you to gulp down your words since it’s snatching away all that I want to say.

Why do we meet such people? Like two similar fishes colliding in an upsurging wave, being grabbed by an unknown hand, to be out in the air, amused, wriggled, only to dive backward to swim their own ways.  

I used to draw only blood dripping bird wings, broken glass pieces and barren trees when I was small. What did you draw when you were small? Did you have too much colours, vibrant and variegated? Do you have some bright shades with you so that I can mix it with my dark ones? Do you have silence? Do you have sorrow? My sorrow left my body, to make me “drab and destitute” and lurks somewhere in the dark, just to be back when you leave me. My silence lost its path, dejected, crestfallen and weeping; it’s no longer “a silence”.  I didn’t want to play hide and seek because the moments you are in hiding would be the longest ones to me. I didn’t want to seek because I would hurt something by my “intentional indifference” to the things hidden by intentions. My heart would get lacerated. I have to pretend that it’s not my heart at all. And it’s hard to pretend that something is not mine when it’s undeniably and pathetically mine, mine and only mine!

There is an idea of Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gave, and you can shake my hand and feel the flesh gripping yours and may be even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable…I simply am not there.

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...;)

That's How He Redefined It!

It's the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge - Albert Einstein 

Chilled evening rain with its patter sneaking in my ears, scattering the audio bits of Wuthering Heights. My ears spiced up by the voice of Juliet Stevenson with the intonations and stress patterns flaring up the weight of the words, the weight of the semantics, the weight of the literariness! The language lab window across my chair was ajar allowing the short whispers of breeze to horn in. But I could hear, conjure up, feel, the white husky whispers of the scorching dew fall to which the benumbed "fixed" Heathcliff must have remained unmoved, leaning against the old ash tree, growing ferocious by Catherine's death news - savagely howling - chapter sixteen- I repeat it till my tongue stiffens - Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living;...I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!


He was on his chair, up the small platform at the far end of the lab completely enwrapped in some book, most probably some science-fiction, his favourite genre. "Do not rely only on film adaptations. Images and visual impact disperse the essence of linguistic aspects, it will only help you to know the story". Where as the audio is a different experience, you can savour the enticing charm of the syntax, evincing the raw beauty of the dialogues, the fairness of the narration... Yes he is right. How can he be ever wrong in here! Many evenings I have spent here, in this lab, the "Beyond the syllabus Program" as he named it. An initiative in which he was the sole sustainer from its very commencement to the close. A good student always goes "beyond the syllabus", new pastures waiting to be grazed! Language lovers from all departments came. Some appreciated it and highly benefited from it. Some doubted its use (madly in love with ignorance!). Some became "regular users", some "occasional visitors". He never compelled anyone. Compulsion was a displeasing word in his "word collection". It was completely voluntary. It was for the pupils who seek improvement, who have the zest for knowledge, for refinement, who have the genuine likeness for this subject, not for the ones- the girls who see it as a pretty option before entering into the marriage market. Numerous world class audio lectures, audio books, a plethora of knowledge, of information, an audio treat, a literary feast! He was incredible for me. Charismatic! The passion he has for teaching! The clarity and depth of his knowledge! The focused lectures ("talks" to be precise than "lectures"), focused yet vast- one hour- a journey from age to age- from Romantic to Victorian -right back to Elizabethan- sliding down to Medieval. Spontaneous sly puns embedded in satire, sarcasm, yet tender! "Knavish speeches which sleep in foolish ears"! And the Audio Clubs! How can I ever forget those Friday afternoons in my life! How he could elicit the rapture of language learning by songs! Took an idea, a theme- subtle ideas which usually fail to poke our attention...related it to a bunch of songs- then it to the realities around us. Vocabulary building! Another venture. Taught us that words have stories to tell, the "etymology" which otherwise would have bored us. 


I would go on pages and pages on his activities. He showed me how much a teacher can do! For me it became a path for "discovering" myself. He was never an influence. The aura of inspiration he has formed cannot be encompassed or be confined to an "influence". He showed us the lands to toil in it, made us understand how fertile it is, made us greedy for its fruition, how the saltiness of sweat in our brows would taste! And when he "retired" the very word would have shriveled and felt the shame, it would have wanted to drown itself somewhere for ever from the dictionary. Retirement? For him? Busier than ever before with his "extra readings" (as he calls it) and social activities. Inventing and contributing efficient methods of language learning for the dumb and deaf. What's more noble than that? A true teacher, who disliked to be photographed, who abhorred the showy and the braggarts...!


It is said that the best teacher is the one who can inspire. And when I copy pasted that Einstein quote at the beginning I have done it with such a gratification and blessed feeling. I am sure there would be a teacher who must have swept your feet off in every one of your lives. A teacher who illuminated some corner of our soul, leaving a part of them, ever enkindling our growing sensibilities. Who have "awakened joy in learning". And what we have towards them is not mere admiration and respect. The word "gratitude" can bear no corruption to a limit. Let's remember them and be grateful to them with all its purity and faithfulness in this corrupt world!