Juni

I was missing Juno today.

Her babies had more babies a month ago, 

and the house is filled with a veritable army of mini fur-blobs, 

racing toward the fish and rice mix 

as if their lives depended upon it.

 Mum keeps them safe and warm and loved in that

 not-so-empty-now-renovated 

household.

Juno came to us when we were in between flats and farmhouses (as usual; it feels like we've just made a home and it's time to shift again for all the wrong right reasons). Her first month was in our tiny cottage, before it's walls and floors split, broke down and slicked up to became a fancy paneled house. She was a funny reddish-tabby-striped one, with these yellow eyes that went hard and cold when she wanted her alone time. 


Typical, sniff the dog-lovers in all their superiority.
The apartment, in 2010, was all white shiny tiles and make-shift settled-in. You know, with tapestries making do for curtains and all our paintings strung unto the odd hook in the wall. Landlords have a deal with the damaging relationship between hammers and nails. Juni made it a home; she cuddled into every crevice and fallen tapestry-curtain and cried to be cuddled. We two sisters and mother would watch re-runs of Lie to Me as cups of strong filter coffee, cheese-encrusted knives and bakery bread spread around us.


Juni missed the fresh air and open space of our farmland. One fine evening, she hopped into the car with Mum to see the renovation site of the cottage. Ran about sniffing and prancing up from among cables and wood panels. Even in the apartment, she was this unchanelled little wild sprite. Hunted down pigeons, rats and everything else that moved. Her hunger to prey was insatiable; it was as if she had a one-woman mission to conquer the mini-jungle of shrubs and palms between flat blocks.


She disappeared one night. A hunting expedition gone wrong, perhaps. I was in Ahmedabad, as usual, and the news came over the phone. 


I transferred my energy to coddling the bigger of a teenage pair of cats that haunted the library corridors. It was soothing to run fingers through the shallow field of short fur and hear that reassuring purr.

Magic without a T.

Image from somewhere in the internet's depths.

I have an archive of beautiful images from around the place.
Photographs, posters, fashion and artwork which is exciting, inspiring, technically emulative or simply something I'd love to keep around me.

The above image popped up and reminded me that today is

The Day I Gained Purpose in Life! 
The Day I registered my grad film, my final year project!

that I don't write much save Tweets or the teensy blog/ DA posts.
Which is sad, really. 
There's just so much less to think about when I write. It's easier to put words together in text, than have face-to-face conversations or participate in stilted Facebook chat sessions.
(I should just post on my Blog. And tell people to read the daily RSS before we meet.Simple aforementioned problems solved.)

Coming back to the point,
Words are powerful. Radical Self Love from my favourite blogger in the world confirms that.

The more I realise that the only thing constant in life is change, I love life a little bit more. The minority of happy people on the planet can subscribe to that notion.

The Now is:

The unbeatable roasted lush of Coorg coffee, made in a steel filter every Ahmedabadi morning
September weather spells of warm wakings up in the cold morning
The unavoidable,hilarious and exasperating daily updates of the neighbour dogs,brought to you by your lunch buddy 


Skinny lizards skating over  the peppery ceiling searching for roaches
The new forevers of rediscovering Neruda on a tattoo quest
The old forevers of Radiohead,Jefferson Airplane,T.S Eliot and
the blazing nows of the Xx, HerSpaceHoliday, Vampire Weekend and all the indie music in the world made for you and only you


Ego-tickles and skin-tickles and goosebumps,
Beer and perfectly made eggs in honey-teriyaki sauce to share,
Letters from never-lost long-ago-still-here girls in penguin swimsuits who
made houses out of orange tang, dinosaur baths and magazine covers FYVP  when
the roof tiles were unguarded and  comfort came years, years later in a car-ride


Sister cats waiting in Mysore town with babies that are sprouting like acrobats
Photograph sleeping in folder not awake not  yet not again
Insomnia over  coffee dates and dirty drawings of furtive couples in stretchy pants and brown sugar

spells now in not so many words,

none at all.

  
  

Sailboat

Kittens bones sink in and
out of
flesh like funny little masts
billowing out vast, white
sails of health and promise.

They curl within themselves in sleep
yawning in mid-unfurl
sleekly rowing against a larger version of
themselves
that purrs, exhausted
encompassing them in all that's good and safe about this world.

Happy Diwali.

Buy me a productive life for 10 rupess

Please,please do!
I heard you can get one for really really cheap on Ebay,
and it comes with free health assurance.
(I didn't say insurance.)

I'm going to make a film by the end of this year.
There,I said it!

Now I really have to do it.
I really really have to do it.

So this life I'm talking about.This is the one I want you to buy me:

-Incredible skills of intuition.
I want to avoid burning myself for the third time with ma's unraveling rusty yellow iron, and also know when it's time to take my medicines.

-Amazing powers of Boservation.
It's like observation, but the boring kind. The kind that gets your backside off the laziness-stained mattress and onto the dashboard of forever-fruitful-work. It's so mind-numbingly amazing that you don't even realise how boring you're getting, and then time passes by and HEY, you've suddenly become productive and the storyboard's done.

-Excruciating blobs of self-confidence
I am the greatest animator in the world. I make Len Lye and W.Wrake wish they were as experimentadely awesome as Kaveri Gopalakrishnan. Her name's not catchy but it'll catch on. I have full knowledge of my own capacities and I can drink wheatgrass juice faster than vodka in order to pull all-nighters that end with The Greatest Plan In The CapLocksAdjective World To Create An Animation Film That Will Ice This Century.
*soundtrack of World Hold On plays on free laptop earphones*

-Writers Flock and Artists Glock
GIGANTIC mounds of creativity that get drawn toward me like soil to an earth-bender.(If you think Im talking about The Last Airbender,I suggest a good dose of 3 seasons of Avatar. The very distractingly waow TV Series.Ok, I can't go on to a hopeless audience.)

All right.
No one's buying this ten rupess life, clearly.

Does this mean what I think it does?

Oh fruitcakes.
It means drawing more with pencil and less with hypothetical constructions of blebleble.
Also, earning that ten rupess. At some point. Sigh.

Why can't Ebay just get more useful already, and send me a hundred cats to draw?

whiskey and wired

strung on a line of soft cotton linings
of yellow and fluff,
he lay curled up,
his ears folded back.

burnt sepia fur,
an eye turned blind to the world.

when he was happy,
he sang the song of gargles
in a hot water shower
after a friday night of whiskey and lemons in water.

his tail twitched like the jagged barb
at the middle gates when life reared back on its hind legs.

fickle love dusted the corners
of the scruffy soul,
warm palms swept him away.

it was cold on the court
and he chewed up a battilion large,black ants which smelt of a strange juice.

"malignant fate with looks intent"
tossed him into room 304
and hence i lift my heels
to pay him a token visit.

whiskey purrs.

it happens

WHY
why
and whYYYYY
sang the cat to the bumblebee on her window.
why now,
when now isnt now but in the month of february
when everything seems to be a perfectly baked cake
alll sugared and toasted with bittersweet cinnamon and iced just the right amount.
why did bugs that smell of coconuts enter the lives of kavebess that pondered over mighty mites?
its a strange story with a happy middle.it deserves a happy ending,durst it not?
this cat feels lonely and meows pitifully when her cellphone doesnt beep,or the post office room door is locked,or her inbox is empty despite pile of orkut/facebook scraps.
its the littler things which matter,and she washes her paws.
outside,its raining.
inside,the city of walls stays put.it holds much within and still she looks out.

dedication to one,with iris by the googoodolls playing in the background.