strain at gnats and swallow camels

Quiet!

Why have you brought here,
this tambourine mouth?
To wreck the afternoon—

A peep shall awake the devil,
if he flinches.
A drop, below the eddy of his ear,
will lurch and skate
down the rings on his neck, and
the auburn chest hair.
That he will scratch in a sour rankle

Who will be responsible then?
Your tambourine mouth?

Togetherness

How can I promise the best of me?
Every day is a gamble.
Who I am is hinged to
everyday indiscretions of strangers:
how many mind the signal, who honks how much, if the order comes on time, how the service is…

I’ve forgotten
what it used to be like
to not mind.
My tongue slurs like wheels
moments before a collision,
the stew
only a breath away, always.
If I make any promise
it’ll have to be in another world,
for this one I go to sleep in
strains at every gnat,
makes even velvet chafe.

the perfect new world

In the perfect new world, we all will accept that we're whores. And then the playing field will be level. There'll be war on an equal footing. Self-denial will be the only evil. Rest all will be the truth.

At the risk of immolation

When you break a bulbous drop perches itself in the corner of your eye
waiting to chart the path of unleashed emotions

Those eyes become shimmering sheets at the mercy of,
reflecting the pain of old bedroom mirrors

No dewdrop is wholly new
fed as each is by smidgens from previous nights

growing in pennies strained from
the inequitable taxes of a shared life

Then you let it trickle or gush
and fetid things run down your puffy cheeks

He twitches, shifts, mouths half-eaten mumblings
Leave me alone, says your voice wadded with grief and phlegm

and he says what doctors say when they can’t save a life:
I’m sorry.

Enough to wipe clean, start afresh
give another chance to that incorrigible demon of habit

It is forbidden: like toadstools, or candy from strangers
yet you do it

What flames you let singe your heart
what burning you endure

Just to feel what it is to have loved
at the risk of immolation

Baby are you down down down down

In the eleventh, N and I went to Calcutta. It was our first trip on our own. The next few days we roamed around the falling city, stayed here and there, got our pockets picked, watched movies at practically every theater we passed by.

After we returned, things started falling apart for N. Or that’s the way I put it because my imagination is stunted. His dad was out of a job, disinherited from ancestral property, they had to move out, his brother was an incapacitated recluse—getting by became this angry, insistent visitor who sat at your threshold every morning, waiting for you before you even woke up. The business of the house fell squarely on N’s shoulders. He dropped out of college, started giving tuitions, counting every penny.

More than ten years have passed since. N finished his twelfth somewhere along the line, a few years belated. He couldn’t do his graduation, hasn’t yet. Between then and now, he has taught tens of school kids, been in Amway, taught spoken English/personality development/all sorts of things to BPO aspirants, aspiring MBAs, all and sundry.

I don’t take stock of N when I meet him, which is every year and a half or so. I mean I ask him what’s up and he tells me animatedly—non-perfunctorily—and I listen interestedly. But that’s only what it appears to be. What I do instead is listen to the story of dignity. And it’s a tale that grips me ever tighter because everything he does is a metaphor. He doesn’t slog to pay the rent or take his family to Esselworld. He’s giving dignity a story to be remembered by. How else could we even begin to teach our kids about it? Without people like N, we would sound so vain and pretentious mouthing words we have no business bandying.

And the life-reassuring thing is that there are others like N. I know a few myself. What each of them inadvertently says is that it is never too late to pick a dropped stitch. It’s never wise to throw our fabric away, thinking there’s nothing more we can do with it. Because if we do—if we let ourselves believe that it will unravel to shreds—we just choose to exclude ourselves from the story of dignity. And that would be a pity.

I wish Gujja the very best for his first performance at Zero G, Residency Road, Bangalore, this Friday the 21st. Who would have thought.

The Cleansing

I wake up at five am
before the ghosts have been buried,
sudden, to a sticky back on a marble grid
and
to birdsong on the western coast before
it is mowed by revving engines
in this place they call the metropolis in weather reports
how long has it been?

Yester night’s remnants in system ridden of
beer mouth rinsed, beer smell scrubbed
clothes dumped
huddled in red bucket in shame
a roundabout way of undertaking
project ‘I’m going to clean myself’

Fridge checked for happy surprises
water gulped down parched throat,
some cake bitten into
through the window I can see
clumpy wet hair draped over
ironed polyester salwar

Stray thought: fifth standard, picnic day
killed before it began
by pop and mom
playing ‘I blame you’
why did we go then?
something bigger than happiness
showed up at the door
mr. and mrs. neighbors were ready to leave
lunch packed, extra tissue taken, ambassador purring at the turn

Old blood swirling in my veins
thickened with self-pity
a caul of disgust enveloping
no illusions harbored,
i have been riffled the same cards
will be singed too, to the roots if i don’t

Call, find those numbers
and call
‘hi! sorry i can’t come to your party
i’m not sure i want to, actually something came up’
you social rat, still wriggling the old leathery tongue?
no, brace and say: the truth
then call after call
no, i don’t care anymore; it doesn’t matter what you think
voices thick with sleep soothe
awww! it’s just a meltdown
don’t worry, it’s only the stress, nothing really
relax, we still love you

By then I have hung up.

Revolutionary Whiskey

Just finished reading Revolutionary Road again. Took a rather long time even by my standards. I can’t finish a book in a few sittings. I don’t try either, makes me feel like a sieve when I want to be a sponge. There’s some collusion between my reading and whisky-drinking habits. I also just happened to use up a Jack Daniels a friend had gifted last December. I’ve been sipping at it for as long as I can remember (ok I might’ve tempered my greed because it was scotch) and last night was the last of the swigs I took. And there haven’t been any conscious periods of whisky abstinence much the same way the story of Frank and April Wheeler has never really left me. I’ve kept going back: a page here, a small there. They’ve always been around the bend, just a few steps and I bump into them.

So, the book, yes: the writing is sublime, Yates is unforgiving. Harsh or unforgiving is not the word actually; I don’t think it’s any one thing at all. It’s definitely not a style unless you think holding a mirror to the deepest recesses and the darkest motives is. It’s just relentless dissection of what appears to be the truth. There’s a line where Yates could as well have been explaining how he wrote that book. If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone. The book’s embarrassingly beautiful, really. To think that some of those who have read it will draw on the experience to merely engage in social conversations, fill out silences with their grasp of things, (‘Have you read it? It’s so depressing but so nice.’ and then in the same breath, ‘You should also read Three States. It's unputdownable.’) is pretty deflating (and very cynical of me).

What does having read the book mean but? I’m in circles. Reading about the Wheelers doesn’t bring me closer to any realization. (Self-deception is no realization, I think I know it well enough after years of trying to fit in.) Writing something as singularly honest wouldn’t change a thing either. Yates picked up some numbers in his time: two marriages, two divorces, nervous breakdowns, drinking binges. Writing is a release, I guess; a simple but excruciating business: going to a dark place, pouring your heart out, hoping to be understood.

Awareness is not a gift, in fact it can be rather unsettling. At least when the take-home is that you are not the only one to have fucked up, people have messed up in eerily similar ways. It’s a fairly non-usable purport, you know. Like when facing an incomprehensible problem, you suddenly have a private Eureka moment: you have finally managed to figure out what the problem is. That gives you a kick, even if you are still as clueless about how to fix it. Living is the same beast. Taming it is as slippery.

desultory prose, desultory living

The security guards in my building seem to be on a rotating employment roll, they keep changing. From the heartland, they come tumbling like humpty dumpties. The yadavs, the ojhas, the kumars. There are never any south indians, they seem to be opening udupi joints. What remains uniform among these guards, like symptoms of a disease, is how they greet building tenants. Like bound by some feudal custom, they rise from their chairs and stand up when you pass by. It’s an act of obeisance, this relinquishing of the comfort of the chairs, though they are inexpensive PVC ones. Anyway, the point being the show of deference and, to a certain extent a corollary, the dignity of labor.

I keep telling them not to bother, to remain seated, what I don’t say is that they make me uncomfortable more than anything else. I also don’t dare utter that I’m scared, sometimes morbidly, that a civil war might erupt. That this subservience will turn into vandalism. They’ll steal your Nokias, your Dells when you’re sleeping.

But they keep doing it, as if programmed genetically. Their spines are coiled springs, ready to be straightened at your look.

Class—there are unwritten codes everywhere. You may or may not have quotas but how do you remove this vermin from the minds of thousands. Why can’t they—and we must allow them to—do their jobs with quiet dignity? Is it too much to expect respect if you are working class?

This shouldn’t disturb me, it’s none of my business. But I don’t know what’s my business. We live in our small worlds, connected but estranged. We choose things, little things, make them our life, and slip into disaffection like a second skin. All the information—this ocean, this tide after tide—washes our doorsteps unable to touch a single molecule in our hearts. We have become animals already, alive only to survival, numb to living. But then by some cruel irony, a little bit of the human lingers like fish smell on hands. It reminds you of what the hands had once touched, what they have since dropped. And this hardens you a little more, puts a little dead weight in your heart so that at least it is not empty. The truth is what doesn’t kill you kills a little bit in you.

The Hurt Locker

What can make a man unafraid of death? If his life is not worth living—irredeemable—and the end of it is a decidedly better alternative to its continuation. What then if it is the irreverence that injects the sublime into living? The utter disregard for the most primal fear frees him in a way nothing else can. Because his mind is unfettered, his actions are not crippled by the (potential) fatality of consequences. They are compulsively reckless; they release the being from the cage of fear and foreboding. Two sides of the same coin?

This is my single most important takeaway from “The Hurt Locker.” I will skip the chance to analyze and rate it (though I think I have said more here than I could have through a review). It is a movie unlike most others on war. It simply tells you, War is a drug. And let me add, for people like Staff Sergeant William James.

Toward the end of the movie, you realize that the choice for James is between love and fear. And he chooses both, in a way. His fear of ordinary, grounded existence pushes him as much as his pure love for what he does best drives him. To him, the life most others lead is probably even more terrifying than death. Surely, he is an escapist then. Yet, you see he’s anything but one. Both judgments are deserved, for both crimes are committed.

Everything I say about James seems insipidly worded, pablum. For he is that kind of a mystery. You can only watch the movie and then maybe you’ll get what I’m trying to say. Long after you’ve seen it, as you’re sitting by the window, wondering, things will fall into place.

excerpt

Her body fights and extricates her mind from those bubbleheaded years. Memory is a living thing, she thinks. Where it is amputated, severed, it swiftly grows itself into a whole again. The completeness in her memory makes up for the void in her present. The laws of compensation. It is a game, she believes, where the conscious and subconscious are at play. The objective of the game is to salvage the self, to not let it lose respect for itself. Now she understands self-respect. That’s what her life has become: a pursuit to earn her self back. She is returned to her world now. To enterprises undertaken in another bubble. A space of reason and practicality that she has to furnish with the living furniture of honest toil and reparation. She feels ready.

PS: It's an excerpt from what I'm working on. Just wrote this bit and felt like putting it up.

i’m so sorry!

I don’t know—maybe I know but don’t quite get it—why Tiger Woods has to apologize to everyone and anyone. What possible crimes could he have committed? His public apology would have been fitting in magnitude had he mortgaged the world’s oil fields to Martians for a romp with nubile, supple aliens.

International sportsmen seem to have made Faustian bargains with their sponsors, their media managers, and the general public. The “with great power comes great responsibility” dictum has been twisted beyond context. How can it be that people are stupid enough to look up to public figures as perfectly moral archetypes?

What a pity Tiger Woods is such a wimp! If his only “problem” is that he likes sex with multiple women, he should just never have married and spared himself the effort of doing it on the sly—given his list, it must’ve been like hiding an elephant in a cupboard.

How wonderful it would’ve been had Tiger Woods just carried on with his business, unapologetic and unperturbed. He would’ve lost the sponsors, half his wealth in divorce settlements, his media-created public image—basically everything extraneous to his actual talent. With a media wave of derision behind him, he would have returned and won a major just like old times. But that was not to be. This world is warped. Here we have to issue apologies and publicly atone to be deemed cured.

to cut a long story short

I was ready to resign
To the fury of indifference, convinced
That inaction will (at least)
Shelter me from the heart of feral hatred

The immediate aftermath—
I wanted to grow my usual carapace that
Saner days and weeks had worn down
Like water sheets ploughing soft earth
Leave me alone!

But you stood. Rooted.
In the corner of my eye
Refusing to budge: “I’ll be here”

I shrank and withdrew
Indignant and stubborn
Hurt and accusing,
Burning bridges to the island

Oh what hubris, how selfish!
Reading of the balance statement
Actually, it’s quite clear
He’s wrong and you’re wronged. Pronounced.
Advice to you: Don’t you bother looking out.
Tch tch…not worth you

But you stood. Rooted.
In the corner of my eye
Refusing to budge: “I’ll be here”
Even when

Shadows grew long
Night after night
And wildflowers became weeds

What happened then?

While I was doused
By apathy’s anesthetic
You (must have)
Cut open my empty chest
And like a helping to the famished
Left a warm heart inside
For when I woke up that morn
It throbbed

Epilogue: to cut a long story short

A firefly blinking
I relayed my signal to
Where you stood rooted, refusing to budge
Saying “I’m here”

intellect and cleverness

Being intellectual versus being clever. There’s a difference she apprehensively explores. Cleverness works in a tightly packed arrangement; she uses some very common form of it, which she finds in abundance in engineers and programmers, to make moves in her life (like a videogame with made-up rules). It’s a quickness she discovered and exhibited in school, where the brightest always answered first. It’s a sharpness she finds comforting, yet wants to grow out of. It hangs on to her—reminding her of the many occasions when it has propelled her from the contrails of competition.

Now is too late to escape. Her constitution has been altered. She doesn’t have a core that is worth an honest investigation. There’s nothing unknown in her, so there’s nothing unknown in her world. Convenience has turned out to be lastingly seductive; she cannot, is powerless, to leave her arms. What lies ahead?

Will she outwardly ridicule art and abstractness and intellect and the spirit of exploration to quell her inner dissatisfaction with herself? Will she marry self-mockingly? Will she deny her inner misery and dreams and undertake a normal existence? Will she never pursue the intellect and challenge the verdict of fate? Will her life be a series of limp undertakings and therefore protected from the depths and darkness of true exploration?

I choose to

You choose who comes into your life. You choose what becomes of it. If you get yourself in a mess, you better get yourself out of it. Forget the past; you can’t improve history. No matter what, you can choose to start afresh. If you believe in this, you’re ready to take the blows without looking for excuses.

Where the spirit falls short

My voice slumps
In conversations with you
What do I talk about?
My tongue hangs dry like tinder
Ready to catch fire at petty provocation
Then, as you say, I keep the phone

The new sun beams cold rays
On either side of the peninsula
Where we lie, at the mercy of geography
Chained to the remains of last night’s dreams
Distance is a poor excuse for what separates us

I bank on memories
To offer you some vestige of lingering affection
Being apart breeds new images
It stiffens the soft cotton of your sari
I somehow forget: Of the nine yards you draped
You kept the longest to shield me
From His harsh gaze

Now, I think of you as the Past
A temporal truth
The Present has saddled me with a different version of it
Teaching me the composition of silence,
And the war that wages when human beings retreat into themselves
This is a more lasting truth, I tell myself

You and I
Travellers of different landscapes
Cannot concede
That we are separated by a wilderness called human nature
Intermittently, we make cripples of ourselves
In trying to reach out

The boundaries between are not physical
They rise where the spirit falls short
There’s little place for largesse
In hearts that have shrunk with time

Yet, like all cruel/blessed things in life
You dare to believe in your notion of me
And allow selective ignorance
To eke out pounds off irrational happiness
Preserved even in a deluge of ready evidence
Against a son
Who is frugal with love

a solution/problem

A solution is composed of words
Them strung together in an order
With pauses and gestures—wafting, floating,
And agreeing to your mien
A solution is an inching closer
To delightful experiences of living and learning
Of distant music in familial gatherings
A solution is an arrangement

A problem is an arrangement
(1) Of phrases and their turns
That travel determinedly to reduce you
(2) Of silence and empty vocabulary
That crush hopeful will like a sombre second opinion
Once they reach, overcoming space
They create fissures anew
Of anxiety, dependence, and life

moving around in circles

It was in the 1980s that some popular Hollywood movies began offering consolation, by way of jingoism, for America’s losses during the Vietnam War. It’s hard to imagine Rambo and Uncommon Valor being made between ’64 and ’74. In the late 60s and early 70s, the public mood was more of snowballing rebellion against a war that didn’t stand up for anything that the American people valued. There were Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

Was there any one point when the public realized that the war had gone wrong? The answer, in all probability, is no. The war continued for more than 6 years after the My Lai massacre in 1968. In fact, Nixon started a new war—by ordering an invasion into Cambodia—in 1970. The so-called Christmas bombings happened in 1972. The war moved around in circles.

The US won every battle, yet as the majority believes it lost the war. Or did it? Either way, it’s hard not to be a cynic. The US entered the war to contain communism. It was the height of the Cold War. Maybe US involvement was justified. Yet, if you trace back steps, you find giant Pandora’s boxes strewn along the way. These boxes lock ugly, enervating truths that make you echo Tommy Lee Jones’ words in No Country for Old Men: “I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand.” That’s the overriding feeling I have.

Sometimes, it pays to be a spectator. There’s more room for solace. Ignorance, while probably not being bliss, is definitely a good sedative.

----------------------------------------------

I visited my friend’s dad in INHS Asvini, a reputed naval hospital, this weekend. Asvini is located in Navy Nagar in Colaba, south Bombay. Not often you see a yawning ocean through hospital windows. The place doesn’t quite exude sickly gloom, or maybe it’s just me imagining things. Uncle has been an eccentric man all his life. I was wrong-footed by his second question—a deep backhand volley when I was at the net, exchanging pleasantries: “So how is life? How much do you earn? 25,000?”

I burst out laughing. It hit me that he hadn’t really changed. Don’t know why I had assumed that he would have mellowed. He pulled me closer to him and held my hand for a long time. Very unlike him. Later, I realized why. Diabetes has eaten his retina. It has also fucked his kidneys and weakened his heart. We had a regular conversation. I didn’t ask him anything about his health, how he felt, etc. He asked me if I had visited Siddhivinayak, Haji Ali, or the Mahalakshmi Temple. And then chided me for being a nastik (atheist). I said I was too scared to visit Siddhivinayak because a friend—a deeply religious guy—had had his pocket picked there. He looked at me and then we both burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the answer. He showed how swollen his legs had become, pressed the skin near his ankles to show the depressions that would form. When we were about to leave, he asked my friend to level the bed. It was one of those beds with a handle you can use to lift the bed. As he raised his head, I saw tufts of hair on the pillow, like a puppy had slept on it. I felt the saddest then, don’t know why.

Old age is not inevitable, not depressing. If you were to ask him, he would shout back at you, “It’s just ridiculous.” He’s that kind of a man.

My plan

I plan to take myself
by the scruff of the neck
turn myself upside down
shake myself
until the last drop of poison
spills on to paper
and soaks it

And after that
who cares.
There’s absolutely nothing beyond that.

Time

My hands—brothers in arms—keep adding bogeys to this toy train called continuum. The hands are three: the long and short, and the frenzied. Together, they keep ticking. They keep everything running.

When early resplendence slides in through doors ajar, I am there to witness musty corners shrug off their wimpy edginess and mingle with the smooth whole. The world as a brave whole…aah…where does it begin?

When the silence of after-lunch siestas eats the day’s vigor, and activity gives in to abeyance, I stand moved. I continue my merry-go-round. Lending substance to naps and dreams that appear and vanish like meteors. When lurky servants pinch off sleazy magazines from under mattresses and spill themselves on Persian carpets, I am there. When they remember the spots of spillage and smile at having stained a rich master’s possession, I am there too.

When shadows make two of each, I am there. When old memories return with long shadows on deserted walks, I walk too. When aggrieved patriarchs rant endlessly in after-dinner outbursts, I do not pause to stop them. When the socially respected take off their contraptions and defenses for others like them before retiring, I bear testimony.

When my hands meet—seduced by coterie—I egg them on. And they start all over again. And they make you start all over again.

Mine is just a job. I don’t know why you do it.

witness to life

I read somewhere that one of the reasons people marry is that they want a witness to their lives. Like much later after things have happened, a married man will have someone to testify what had happened. In conversations, he will not be the only one rambling; there’ll be someone to finish his sentences, to furnish details of the past, to lend credence to his claims.

Which is partly why long-distance relationships are difficult to sustain. Because there’s no constant witness. Witnesses change, and more importantly the ones that are there don’t pay much attention. Or else your work friends would be your best friends.

Solely as proof, the “marriage” kind of a permanent association isn’t worth it. Photographs and home videos should suffice. That marriage rewards you with a guaranteed history is a given. But exactly what sort of history?

I dislike the kind of history that paints pictures in broad, sweeping strokes. I find it irrelevant. There’s just very little detail. It follows then that I don’t particularly like to know about what couples have to say when they sum up their lives together in a few pithy sentences. Such remarks are more like comments fit into a small box in a report card. Like you had to deliver a judgement, so you did it. The judgement is not the truth. Truth is in the details. And at different points in time, truth is different. And part of the truth is that when you do choose to marry, you’re offering yourself as a witness to your partner’s whims and fancies, his vices, his unacceptable traits, his irritating habits. And also his absolutely adorable qualities.

The question I ask myself is whether the virtues redeem the vices. Whether it’s only the sum that counts—not what goes into the final figure.

X

It’s that time of the day when the chutzpah starts to melt. When you realize the fight Obama needs to put up is gargantuan. That all the mayhem around you is not your life, yet is maybe not something that you can extricate yourself out of. That you have no obligation, yet you somehow can’t let things be. It’s that time when every minute is a new thought connected to the previous. When truth is close at hand, but only as a nightly visitor who shall leave your bedside in the morn, is.

Is there a burden of truth? Should truth just be left on its own? Should you not carry it on your shoulders, listen to where it wants to go, help it get there? There’s a waking life in these questions. Yet there’s too much to be lived beyond them. Beyond them, in the territory of farcical democracies, dysfunctional societies, staged performances.

Life is the bubbles you chase behind closed eyelids. It’s ever elusive, yet you know it’s so bloody easy to see those bubbles. It’s a fucking tease, like a little show of naked skin. A possible indulgence.