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.

A Better place

Is it in vain
Is it a crime
Is it something I didnt explain?

Maybe I'll come by here again.

Maybe I sang too fast
And tripped over the words|
Getting pulled over for overspeeding|
Clutching the ticket and praying to a light
or something even greater up there|
Hoping I'd do it again.

Maybe I dreamed too bright|
Gulping down memories and
diving into them again|
Opening my eyes underwater
and breathing in till they burned|
Making new futures out of old paper boats
and setting sail again.

Or maybe I held my own hand too tight|
Walking on the edge of the knife
A snail on thin ice
Slipping into old skin
and slipping sliding fighting it
with worn soles
and a heavy rucksack

Preparing myself for the worst
and finding a better place,
After all.



I was listening to La Dispute by Yann Tierson.

Classic December.

If you're from around my campus, you might recognise the title as the theme for this month's Film Club screenings.
It's also apt for my mood of the month.
I was looking through a senior's blog, and discovered what it was like to feel inspired and let-down at the same time. I think to myself:Girl, start working. Forsake the idea that your coursework is draining/de-inspiring, and start imagining the exciting. The nouveau. The ideas you used to have that would have you frantically grope around for a pen, only to scribble a barely decipherible thought for later reference.
It's interesting how my state of mind can affect so much.

This is a classic December, with a wee bit too much of the December doldrums thrown into it.Maybe Im worn out from feeling too much and too little and trying to forget all those little cuts and scratches from a black t-shirt that lies beside my pillow....
I've stopped feeling as enthusiastic and charged up about 'things' like earlier. You know,Things.
Strange feelings, interesting people, new music.
Coming across a book in the KMC about ancient oceanic art.
Shooting the extraordinary Thangka paintings at Bailakuppe.
Sitting at Chai Gate- an official addict- and just looking at people,smiling inside all the while.
Stopping after 3 pages of a book and going back to read a line that suddenly made too much sense.
Laughing when iTunes opens a Portishead song from shared folder, bringing back memories of cackling girls and dim lights and 3am scrambled eggs in 12th std.
Going over and over the thought that Sekhar had put forth in August -"..this will make you a better storyteller.I am sure of it."
And then theres that greenish light filtering through the studio's thick, rippled glass panes.
And going by the brilliantly twinkling rich reds, virulent greens, burnt yellows, rani pinks so fast that they shriek like cloistering,glittering, colourful stars.Your eyes burn. Thats Law Garden, from a speeding auto. A distant roar of hawkers shoppers corn-eaters honking autos.

My plane will touch Bangalores concrete shores on friday evening. And I'll speed down the highway, that long winding road of blur and splattered watercolour trees in twilight.

And the skies will be purple and orange and dying yellows, because thats how the road from Mysore to Bangalore always looks.

And I'll laugh when Ma calls me morbid and hugs me, and my sister grumbles because I always steal the pillow, and the driver Deva grunts because that still-faced daughter is back and will demand the windows to be kept down so she can hang her hand outside to feel the window whip it turbulently.

Didnt you know that your hand could get cut off that way?
I always have.

But they still are glad that Im home, and the sun will set differently every evening for me.

Jamaican jerck chicken-Eliots beach-GuindiSTOP.

Before you
step
into
unconsciousness..

Where in the world is Guindi?
I staggered,rather than hopped,off a crowded Madras local train at that very station into blinding sunlight.Looks like the world still does manage to go on after 12 years living away from it.
Mum thai's musty,dusty and eternally dim-lit cluster of rooms inside corners.Cold maroon tiles,cold creaky door,and endless glasses of cold milky throat-ravaging liquid that I was gratified to refer to as 'moere'and not chaas.
What are inheritances.
And how ethical is it-in whatever context you may place it-to help tabulate your own?Lets eradicate,for a moment,the rare-case scenarios. I find that classifying every other scenario ends up in insulting the idea of 'once in a blue moon'. The question still buzzes.
Sorry reminders,overexposed photographs.
'Oops,I spilt rum on your mattress.'
Burden me,burden yourself. Burden the whole world by unburdening yourself upon an ungrateful multitude. Even better,stop thinking and start living a well-baked life.
Quite like the Jamaican jerk chicken I ate at something called an 'American Diner'.The sauce tasted like lemoney rasam,and the rice like puliogarre.It was divinely exotic,I might add.
Tamilian waiters can sound like Americans(Oh my GAAD!),and Malayalees like the English.(Oh my GOAWD!)That was the most edibly enlightening bit of conversation Ive had in quite a few months. Sorry National Institute of Dejine. My heart lies in south after all.

Paperback writer,write me a song and I'll sing along.
I go,I go,in search of peace and a happy means to an unpredictable and inconsequential end.
And I end my 2-week sabbatical with inky eyes,eyes ready to spill out your story and mine.

Speedy Gonzalez and I

I am the cat on the moon.
I am the sea that bordered my neighbourhood when I was young,that clamoured with ship-lights and spilt harsh grey into the blue horizon.
I am a hundred years and a thousand unspoken words all into one.
I am the deepest trenches of a split,quartered and seamed heart,rustling with dry leaves and strumming the wind.
I am a small,inobtrusive bundle of letters in a rain-chewed notebook with a picture of a cat in a fishbowl on it.
I am an armful of glass,bone,silver and plastic bangles that spell a lullaby for every godforsaken morning I wake up to.
I am a believer in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.The ideology of a million spot reduced to nothingness.
I am the song that flew into my window this morning,and settled in a cloud of dust.
I am that layer of brown which paints the inside of a bone-white china tea-cup.
I am the Mean Green Amrikan Switt Corn eating machine.
I am constantly put off by battalions of che gueveras asking me "Why so serious?" when the Dark Knight released a few meaningless centuries ago.

I am here and you are there,and my words go into nowhere with the rush of Speedy Gonzalez....

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.

the fountain and the light

for every shadow,no matter how deep,is threatened by the morning light".
Izzy(the fountain)

I kept telling myself to watch it,and so did he,so far away in various scattered lands.

worth every single second.

and all exaggerations can fly away with the wind.

what was it about?

the meaning of life *tantararaah!*
spirituality?
and there was this kinda pure love inscribed into the whole movie,about she and he and they and their world through three ages. ancient spain with blood gore and the mayan jungles.present day(or maybe 10 years ahead) with a dying woman blinding snow and an unfinished tale.
like a poem,like something you and i and no one else in this universe could ever conceive and portray.
it was so beautiful.so incredibly made,i fell in love with love all over again.
and i never thought itd happen so suddenly,like that gigantic bubble racing through Xibaba.
Xibaba,the dying star wrapped in a nebulis....the death-world of the mayans.its all a part of the tale of the fountain,the tree of life.
ordinarily,im your average scarred feminist cynic.the one who fell in love once upon a sunshine valley ouch* ago and afterward,after the ward,couldnt see it any more.
thank god for this.else id be a senseless moron.
and haha isnt that easy these days?especially here.(oops,here comes the cynical side..)
a random outburst at the insensitivity heard in the auditorium today.
this girls breaking down onscreen,real pain(koel puris just killer in everybody says its fine,methinks).shes been repeatedly molested by her father.since childhood.u see her unravelling,the confusion,the lovehatred i feel myself ouch* and people LAUGH.imitate her moans while the movie pauses. this reminds me of the time when one of the faculty in the 1st course was gay..reactions to him were so STUPID.honestly.like 5th std kids,who laugh at their teacher who wears strange shoes or something.
this place isnt liberal,for all it claims. sure its liberal,say the few wise voices...we can party smoke up in class bunk a week....gee whiz,id like to dunk you down the loos in the insti.(hehehehehe sadistic laugh)
random unrelated thoughts after sudden love rush i felt during the fountain.
oh well.
toodles.
yeah and its funny how this has gone from being a private blog to...
well more people i unexpectedly gave this site name to.
eeshes and feeshes.:O

sing me a song

...said the little girl with the inky eyes.
and so the pool of water lying in front of her sang.
it opened up and swallowed her whole,as she flew in a long-drawn,gurgly and high pitched sound floated out.
it was dark with long streaks of light filtering through.she couldnt see much but her ears were twitching.and then the song began again.
its colours were a dark,vaguely shimmering red and an a shade of yellow she could only describe as misty.
it didnt make much sense to her,this wasnt what shed asked for.
she tried to fly up and push through the ceiling.but she didnt land up on the other side,in the world where she asked for a song and didnt hear it.
it didnt make much sense and so she tipped her head down,looking into another pool of water.