Scribble

Perhaps in that time when shards of broken stars did not hurt the eyes, and every dusk, with the downing sun, something did not drown in the heart; in that age of unclaimed innocence, in some odd undefined moment, I started to believe in you. 


Ages and hazes away, now, I wonder; if you ever existed.

Of Cotton Candies And Marshmallows

‎"The special thing about a sizzler dish is that it appeals to all your senses, including the sense of hearing. You hear the sizzle and it arouses all other senses, and all you want to do is devour it."

"I'd prefer a mute dish. Something like marshmallow. Something that soothes my senses with its texture, like a serene, quiet scenery. Something that moves your heart with its ignorance of its own effect, with the almost humility with which it melts instantly in your mouth, giving itself up, entirely. There's an innocence about marshmallows and cotton candies, may be that is why children like them so much."

"Innocence? I always thought they were quite pompous with their bright pink, almost gorgeous exterior."

"Yes. Gorgeous AND innocent."

To be a book

You need more than creativity to write a book. You need experiences. Deep, rich experiences when your mind has already started working on the book. When it translates the wind into a metaphor, the sand into time. It requires surrender of ego. It requires the ability to step outside of your comfortable self and be like another. It requires the acceptance that there can be bigger, greater inspirations outside of you, inside the heads of others, even the people you dislike. An author can not be judgemental. She can not like or dislike people or things, because she is seeking to learn, because she is begging for inspiration, from all people and things. And when you achieve that, that level of submission, you find all inspirations within you. When the wandering is done, all the experiences, the vices, the idiosyncrasies, the characters are you. And so you can make love to the sun every dawn and dusk while it grazes gently on your skin, and you can both go about your business during the day. You would knead the moonlight in the bread you eat and dissolve a few drops of it in your evening wine, and then lie freely under the stars. And then, just before dawn, you would wait for the sun to gently peel the stardust off your skin. You would live many lives, slow, promiscuous identities, until the day the book is done. And you'd never be the same person again. You need a lot to write a book. You need to be a book. You need to be opened, and you need to give.

14.04.'12

There are phases in your life when you can perceive changes in yourself, when you can look at yourself objectively like an onlooker and see the flaws you never knew you had. I disappointed myself with my silence, with my lack of courage. At least I know I need to work on it.


These are crucial times, times when there will be moments of truth, and a plunge will be taken into the unknown. 


I have changed in my beliefs. I have gone from struggling to fit in, to a rebellion, to a very new and strange understanding and acceptance of how things are. I feel a strong and urgent need for simplification, everywhere. I need a world where people are not commoditized, where feelings are not hidden, where there is freedom but it is not misused, and I need to create it around me if it isn't already there. I now believe, more than anything, in transience; in the fact that people and things change. And therefore, I believe permanence is worth striving for.

I thought you'd never come

"She doesn't like that word." I explain hurriedly to the bewildered man.


She is still standing there, breathing fast, the rage has subsided, giving way to tears. I still remember the first time I saw this happen. The first time I saw those eyes that seemed unaware of the stream flowing out of them, the nothingness in them had struck me as something completely unknown. In that moment, she was never the woman whose soul I had made my own in the village church, whose eyes I had drunk to and then broken the glass.


She is still holding the broken glass in her hand. I take it from her and keep it on the bar. My instinct is to hold her in my arms, but I know she doesn't need that. I hold her hand and take her away. She lets me lead her through the rows of uncomfortable, sarcastic and sympathetic glances like an obedient child. Her eyes are still elsewhere. She is not yet my wife, someone I can hug and stroke on the head and assure that everything will be ok. Even when she is back to being that person though, I can not tell her that with much conviction. Not anymore.


She has been sleeping for hours now. I like it when she sleeps, but it makes me feel guilty. I like her sleeping because it is a relief, because she sleeps for the most part of the day, even though the doctors say it might not be good for her. I don't think she knows it now when she is awake. I mean, I don't know if she is able to differentiate anymore. Sometimes, she picks up a conversation we had when we were young and met surreptitiously amidst the rye in the fields, and she continues it. I treasure that. Although I shouldn't. I am supposed to discourage that. But those are the only moments when I have her back. She looks at me as though she knows me as that boy I once was. I almost want to climb into her dreams and stay there. In the rye field. As two pairs of eyes that laughed and dreamed.


She is awake now, and shivering. The moonlight shines on her bare back. Her thick hair flies slightly in the soft breeze as she looks at something imaginary on the tree outside the window. I touch her spine warily. She turns and looks at me. Her eyes smile a soft smile. I had almost forgotten that soft dimple.


"I thought you'd never come." she says, gleaming.


I smile back. I don't know what she means. Or may be, I do.

Us

For my brother :)


I don't know if you remember, you talked of silly things. You told me once that the universe records every sound that is ever made, and that some day, it will play it all, at once. I took note and decided to watch what I speak, so when the playback happens, I am not ashamed. That theory seemed so believable, I would keep wondering how all these different sounds from different places in different languages would be distinguishable when they are played together, and I would end up explaining to myself that the universe would not make an effort so futile and that it would make sure to make us hear only what made sense to us.


I believed you, because for a long part of my childhood, I did not know where I ended and you started. You said silly things that always made so much sense. Why, for example, would I doubt that pencil shavings kept in milk and frozen would turn into rubber? It was all so clever, freezing would solidify the milk, and the milk would obviously explain the white colour of the erasers we used. So, when Shilpi's mom found out about that experiment I did with her and laughed, I still explained to her that we probably added too much milk, or didn't allow the freezing to happen long enough. 


You talked of the universe one moment, and pencil shavings the next. But you always tried to explain. To ask questions and have answers. Sometimes, I wonder, what you did in those evenings when I sewed garlands with those wild yellow and pink flowers in the garden, because you were never around. Perhaps that is when you observed the earthworms, and took my curiosity to the highest peaks later when you spoke about the cycle of the universe, about how, there is a bit of the earthworm in us, and a bit of us in the earthworm. 


I remember watching the ants with you in the verandah; we would try to distrupt their line, and observe how they struggled to find their way. Sometimes, we would blow an ant off its path, and that would sadden me, because I thought it impossible that the ant would find its way back to its family, considering its size, and considering that the displacement would probably be like another end of the city for it.


We cared about ants then. And about pencil shavings and the one-ness of the universe. Together, we had deciphered everything they tried to teach us in textbooks all our lives. 

Love

Let me write it down and put it in words. Because that will solemnize it. It will make it sacrosanct, until I touch it again and violate it, only to make it more surreal. Isn't that what words do? They immortalize things, places, people, smells, laughters, the ochre of an ordinary evening, the emptiness of the heart, pride, prejudice(I have to use these two together), and love. I've known the deepest form of love ever since I was a kid. Of course, we all do, you'd say. But I am talking about that passionate love, that hungry, fervent love that most people know in their teenage or adulthood. But I knew it. Ever since I wrote that first rhyme. Ever since I read those first poems that rhymed so beautifully, they made my heart flutter. I would always perfect the way I held the pen, the way I curled up the alphabets. I have had so many different handwritings till I settled for the classic cursive one that I have now. It defines me. Yes it does. In the roundness of that a, in the curve of the f, the swirl of the t, I slip in a little bit of me. I haven't been much of a reader till very late, and I have always been conscious that it shows in my writing. But I have been a writer, always. Ever since I had ideas, I wrote. And to write, I had ideas. I've always had ideas.


I am a bit of a hypocrite, in the sense that I hate when someone messes up with grammar. But I take all possible liberties with it when I write. It annoys me if you ask me to give you a line break or a paragraph change. I need words to flow. Sometimes neatly, but sometimes, in a downhill stream, unrestricted, forceful. And to see them flow is the biggest joy you could ask for. Do you know that feeling? Of being lost and feeling small amidst the rows of a bookstore, and of that immersive smell that inundates your senses, that makes everything beautiful and sacred? That smell of yellow pages? Have you ever bought a book only because it looks old and used and it has on the cover a beautiful, regular handwriting of someone called Nafeesa who read it in 1965? Have you ever had that craving to spend all your weekend dug under piles in an innocuous corner of a large, old library that smells of stories and wars and travel and love and life? Do you know what it is to love? To read a book and then dream about it for nights together? To read a book and then have an urge to share, and to preserve and to just hold it close to your chest for a while and smell it? Do you write your name on the cover in cursive after you've read it? Not to ensure it comes back to you if it's lost, but to make sure it retains a bit of you wherever it goes? Do you?


Right now, I do not write for a purpose, I write for the sake of love, for words, for the sounds and images they will create in your head when you read them. For the sounds and images and smells and ebbs that they cause in my heart as I type them. I write this because I need to. I could carry on with why I need this, but that would defy the point. It's a need, a pulsating ache that will calm me down when I type that final full stop.

Perception-wise

"Have you ever wondered how strange this is? This basic assumption that you see the world in the same way as I do?"


"Like perspective-wise? Yeah..I don't think any two people can ever have the same set of beliefs or preferences."



"Yeah. But I meant it in the more literal sense. Not about preferences, but about perceptions. Like, what if you and I perceive color differently? What if everyone perceives colors differently? I mean when you were young, your teacher showed you a color and made you and everyone else identify it as yellow, and so you and all the other kids learnt that the color they saw was yellow; may be all of them saw it differently. And all your life when you look at a dress and called up your friend and said, "Oh! That was a very pretty yellow", she pictures a completely, or may be slightly, different pretty yellow."

"Umm...okay. Let's clear this. What color is that car?"

"It's a dirty yellow. But you miss the point."

"May be I want to miss it." *smiles*

Language

I feel so crippled at times, with language. There is so much that language can not express. Like that moment under water, when a beam of sunlight fell on us and the marine life, when I had held the stranger trainer's hand, and rested my life on him; it was a dive of faith, a dip of calm and beauty that cleansed me of something, and I do not know what. I was aware of my existence, and of all that I do not know, all that I haven't seen and will never see. And now, when I think of that moment and try to capture it in words, I realize my inefficiency again, as a human being, as part of an inaccurate, subjective civilization which can not express even a minute fraction of all that it experiences. How vain of us to forget this truth and go on living like the center of the universe. How inadequate of us to even classify and generalize every unique tangible and intangible experience. I like the feeling of smallness, of being a tiny insignificant speck in the thread of the universe, as small or as big as the golden striped fish that slid through my toes and altered something inside me forever.

The Artist's Burden

When is it that we really start to mess up? There is this thing with creative people. They have this very high taste for beauty, and that ends up ruining them sometimes. If you're creative, you got to have courage. You got to go out and explore. You got to search for that experience of beauty that you aspire for in your life. And you need to be practical. You can not expect the people around you to give you that experience. You got to find that on your own - by stepping out, by keeping awake, by obliterating your soul of all the inertia that holds you back. We are born with this itch in our heels. We got to live this way. Because there is no other way. 
When you feel dissatisfied, lonely, lost, confused, it is this itch, waiting to be satisfied. The process of growing up seasons all that is ordinary in us and blinds our senses to our own needs. Do not let this happen to you. Do not forget to express your needs to yourself. Do not chain your soul. You're born with the burden of a thousand worlds waiting to be explored.