She

Lashed shadows slept warm She smiled.

My Sister and me

We're so very different,
can't you see?

Mixed blood and shifting last names,
Stronger and milder bones in between each other,
Running colours in different lights
at different times

We're so very alike.

The Lady of Shallot

Sideswept
windswept
The words pass me by
Hair covers my eyes and
falls into my mouth.

Speeding cars
Tails of light and blur
red and bright
clashing
clanging
A sound that's too far away
and too close for comfort.

My elbows rest on the rubber edge
crossing
bending
as I peer
Searching past the motors and mouths( which in all probabilty,are the same.)
The rear view mirror catches everything and
nothing
A nothingness that falls like glass and feels like falling.

A strange sense of being the Lady of Shallot,cast upon the river of traffic.

My ceiling is the sky tonight.

Wait,
was that you calling out to me?

Yes,you.
The one with the lost eyes, the one who's staring
Staring right up at the sky
Almost as if he's expecting it to hurl a thunderbolt right at him
and burn him to the ground.

It's me.
The one you woke up last night,
with firecrackers of memories
and a torrent of luckless afternoons to boot.

I thought I heard you calling me
and so I awoke.
Heart iced frozen solid
lips cracked and forming
slightly forgotten(now) and fragile words of hope.

Who wouldn't?

Wait,it was a false alarm.
It must have been the wind breathing through the curtains.
The switchboard that bent its spine and brushed against my foot.
Unloved dogs seeking solace under my bed
and instead murmuring funny familiar fanciful and forgotten words
that crept their way into my pillow-case.

I stayed awake for a long time,
perhaps hoping to be on a beach.
The floor looked so smooth,speckled and polished,
stretching like the Chennai bay beneath a landing plane.

Moonlight played sail boat with my slippers
and the ceiling dissolved into a sky
of glue-on florescent stars.

I breathed deeply,until I could smell the salt and the warm dust.

It's funny how you were still standing there,
pale fingered.
With your toes slipping
slipping into the sea
and away from the shores that suddenly clung
clung to my feet with an urgency

"caressing and possessing me.."

Coastward bound.

Im coastward-bound again,next wednesday.
I'll smell the peculiar saltiness of Eliot's Beach again,which reminded me of sweet corn chicken soup when I was a 5 year old on the seaside roller skating rink.
I'll go to Kilpauk and reside there,my first time in twenty years.
I'll gasp and make fisheyes at myself in the auto rear view mirror as usual,because Im two decades old and still consider it twenty years born in that not-so-little burning sandy signboard-cloistered city of Madras.

"I grow old,I grow old ,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

In between,I'll continue to develop on this wanderlust that seeks respite in the passages of my bloodstream and dream of the Orient,cherry cheesecake,blue bath tubs, tirupathi laddoos that I can never have,and that cold crimson-tiled house with one markedly empty,suddenly devoid little upstairs room.

I'll also say to myself:"Sing a song of happiness"

Of loss and love and learning to fly,of writing words that have a life of their own and spring across the page like jackrabbits.

Death is the road to Awe

I am the road to awe,not death.

Awe is too far away for death to reach,though they both had the same beginnings.

The road is just a road,and scuffs the burnt souls of your feet,bruises your lips,clouds your eyes,and cocoons your heart.

But I still walk the road to awe,and death smoothly hushes behind.

The Final Cut

....and you're gone into the night.

Hours spent waiting,and waiting.And waiting some more,with a familiar sinking feeling.
Of loss?Or what else?
Did I already know it,and perhaps prepare myself for a rip in the mesh of my carefully constructed universe?
At first,it was a perturbed sensation.Why you didnt call.Why I feared that Id lose your presence at the worst of moments,when I most wanted you gone. Why,during a presentation on Goya's black paintings in class,that I blinked and saw myself in the artists' deafened world,engulfed with the blackness and sorrow and self-involved madness. My dreams deafened me and kept me from sleeping for many a night.
Worse yet was Bobo's funeral in May. I saw it happening.I felt a linkage,and kept my eyes and mind open for every single little thing,telling myself "you're going to be in this again sometime soon.And you know with whom."
Thats why I didn't go for the cremation today. An oven,blackened smoke,the creaking of gears,the heat and rippling terror of what is about to come. The final cut.

Waiting.

For Friday night to end and the rambling conversations,unnecessary packs of chips and cake("you must eat!")and abrupt,fearfully tight hugs to stop.
For sleep to evade me on the flight;it never did.
For the 11am call in Chennai-to resolve the confusion.My grandmother says-'say your final goodbyes.' The doctor says-'Hes gone.'
I say let it be,and sing a sad song to make it better.

Waiting.

To tell myself that that waxy yellowskinned man is not my father, that when I kissed his cheek it wasnt the stark,soiled bandages that were dead and cold to my lips.I pressed my lips to his face once again to make sure.
Those eyes didnt move under the film of tape when I spoke,clutching the now bony,fuzzy hand.
Thats not my father, he moved on a long time ago.
This is but a body,whose chest is being artificially pumped with a ventilator.
Exactly what kind of life support,I asked myself.Waiting for an answer and stiffening my features to look into my sisters eyes.

"A face to meet the faces that you meet".(TS Eliot)

I masked it well,perhaps to the point of seeming heartless.In response to the emotional irrationals of those around me,in response to that little voice that sang "no I wont break down.."

Why do we sing these ridiculous songs in our heads at times like these??

Waiting. To hear family friends say "you're too young" when someone had to sign the permit to take him off life support.

Technically holding that power in my palms,if you call it that. So i went into that blindingly white room all over again,where men strapped into faded white beds thrashed and moaned and frantically fastened their eyes onto anything around.Or simply lay still.Alive. Until I reached a corner with a lone red sign-'Handle With Care'.
I thought my first glimpse would be my last,but its inevitable that we have no choice when we want one most.
Thats not he,and so I signed.A mere formality.

Waiting till I fell asleep in a strange,impeccably cleaned apartment with neutral toned furniture. Knowing that we were all waiting for that blue zigzag to become a clean pure line,so that smoke would be all that was left.

I waited no more,and we caught the next flight at 3 the next day. Not before going to the house,and gathering some of the last remnants of a man who left no trace,wherever he went. We're alike in that way.
Numbly,eyes stretched wide open and polite nods of the head mark my departure.
Ambling in the Mysore house,crickets chirp and foods a mockery.

I dream of campus, and otherwise feel as detached as ever.

Years ago,Jazz told me-" We all face obstacles we think we cant face,at some points in our lives.Yours are just earlier."

A silent,rustling undercurrent at the belly of the sleeping monster.

jam jar

Im caught in the jam jar.
That would have been the title for this illustration/painting,nearly 2 years ago now.
how the years have flown!
I remember I had fallen so low,sunken into my own head,all because of a little bit of paper Id received from someone.I felt utterly rejected and everything that goes with it,you know...
then an hour past that feeling,a friend of mine,lets call her gaycat(is neither and both of the two words)took me on a walk.

Small hands firmly grasped my own,and we walked furthur off campus.Past rusty gates meant to be opened,and past groves of trees which held the wind-cackling voices of the minions of witches,to be sure,at night.We kept walking.
Then the land dipped,and dry golden grasses scratched our arms and hid us.Then the land split,and rocks emerged like beached sea creatures.We lay on our backs,and the heat seeped through cloth and skin.
We talked of cabbages(the wilted ones) and kings(the many downfalls and triumphs).What we wanted and simply how we didnt know what we wanted.We were disappointed and happy and glad to be lying on bare stone in a bare land talking to the skies.
During an exercise at the study centre,with the commerce and humanities batches mixed,we had to speak of our happiest and saddest moments.I spoke of that day.
And then,one hour late,we strolled into art class.They were there,the friends and the mixed feelings ones and the small talkers.I swallowed in my disilliusionment and spread it out onto paper with crayon and ink.

"dare i disturb the universe?"

fingers dusted with yesterdays words
they traced your name and mine
in a hundred patterned cuts.
skin on skin,
eyes devouring a universe.

the times i said "this will not do"
and for all the years i wish it hadn't.

a smile stretched too wide at all the wrong hours
when notes struck a jarring discord
the goblet shatters.
breaks.
shimmers.
a million different pieces,each split in half
your words and mine.
my face today and the one ill wear tomorrow.

"and i have seen them all...."
the cats that drank their own blood on speckled floors.
the painting i broke with the other echoes in my head.
the whispers that strung a washing line between the high towers.
the screams,
the sighs,
the silences,
the black darkness inside the tightly capped bottle of ink.

these words go out to the unnamed few.
perhaps one or two.