Starry starry night

There is no hope left tonight. Its raining outside and there’s a candle on the table that threatens to burn itself out in a few more minutes. I will be left with nothing. Hope is the one human emotion that is our biggest strength and our greatest weakness. Don’t we always yearn for; hope that everything that burns intense as desire within us, spills over and paints reality just the way we recognize it to be?

Love is the greatest delusion we live by. Hiding behind it, believing that out fears won’t be seen and our cries will not be heard, having faith that there is always safety in numbers. Looking out for someone to promise us a lifetime of togetherness, to make us complete. Hoping for someone to adore us, for who we are, or who we could never be.

Separation and Venus nights

Gathering oblivion and butterflies
The Venus night glowed outside
The windowpane;

While youth and memories
Rested in my hair.

The air is thick with the familiarity
Of knowing you were never apart

Yet I tumble over pebbles
And separation tonight

My fortitude goes planting flags
In the hidden corners of love for you

I love you like a clumsy girl in spring
You are everywhere

In the golden wheat
In the blazing war

In the delicate sound of a guitar
In the thick weeks that make a lifetime

While my mad heart
Gathers oblivion and butterflies
With the Venus night tonight.

Moist doorways
Wearing silver light.

Green leaves
That now rustle in their yellow age.

The sweet river waters
That will turn to salt when they make love to the ocean.

Footprints in the sand
My solitary inheritance;

Grew roots that rose to you
Laden with dew and dreams

The sweet fragrance of jasmine
Invaded the heart with a raw pain

In this space between death and dream
I love you

And between pride and living
I am bound to your memory

I am tied into you
Like the sheath of the earth

You may not love me
And the stillness may die without survivors

But even in the death of silence
The smoke remains, to meet its fire.

Yearning...

Desire, a word that is in today’s day and age, used to define the yearning for a car or a need to shed weight. Somewhere the word has lost what it perhaps really means. Desire is such mad joy, something that burns within, that possesses and yet liberates in its own longing. But why is the longing no more for love for the eternal quest of the other half of the being?
Maybe Shakespeare knew it better in his Sonnet # 129 when he wrote these lines:

Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The silence

So today is one of those days in my life when all I really want from life is the liberty to excuse myself from it as I know it and head north into the cosseted, reassuring refuge of the hills.

It is uncanny when you open your eyes to days which remind you that you have forgotten most things that make you and you end up feeling like a shell that stands at the shore, waiting to be swept off but you find that you adorn a hushed window pane and that is where perhaps you will remain till the time the perception of space and eternity dissolves itself for you.

Which brings me to the excerpt from a poem written by Pablo Neruda called ‘Pido Silencio’ translated by Alastair Reid, which reads something like this:

“ Now leave me alone.
Now learn to do without me.

I’m going to close my eyes.

And I want five things only,
Five favorite roots.

One is endless love.

The second is to see autumn.
I cannot be if the leaves
Don’t fly and fall to earth.

The third is the solemn winter,
The rain I loved, the caress
Of fire in the rough cold.

My fourth is the summer,
Plump as a watermelon.

And fifthly, your eyes.
Matilde, my dear love,
I will not sleep without your eyes,
I will not exist but in your gaze.
I adjust the spring
For you to follow me with your eyes.

That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothng, close to everything.

Now they can go if they wish.

I have lived so much that someday
They will have to forget me forcibly,
Rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.

But because I ask for silence,
Don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
It happens I’m going to live.

To be, and go on being.

I will not be, however, if, inside me
The crop does not keep sprouting,
The shoots first, breaking through the earth
To reach the light;
But the mothering earth is dark,
And, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
The night leaves stars behind
And goes on alone across fields.

It’s a question of having lived so much
That I want to live that much more.

I never felt my voice so clear,
Never have been so rich in kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
The light is a swarm of bees.

Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.”

I love defenseless animals, especially in a good gravy

If it wasn’t for the chicken pox I am currently suffering from and if I wasn’t the well meaning philanthropist that I am, it being a Sunday, I would’ve made my way to Ego Thai, infecting all the hordes of hungry connoisseurs of Thai food present there tonight with my delicate bout of the pox.

But if I have little access to the outside world, it by no means stops me from reminiscing about the oriental smells that one is greeted with, each time you decide to step into Ego Thai. The entire restaurant is in a way, like a bit of an experience, including the darned boat that hangs high from the ceiling, holding a cascading bouquet of flowers, only that I always think it is biding its time before it recognizes the head it is karmically designed to fall upon.

But really, other than the boat, there are other memorabilia, which add to the ambience, and more so the books strewn across the first floor on shelves of different sizes, they just add a hint of an extra bit of pleasure; reading and eating, its much like sex, drugs and rock and roll, all rolled into one.

About the food, I am sucker for their fantastic Iced tea with either cucumber or cinnamon, both making for the ideal refresher. And that is just the perfect mild seduction to prepare one for the wonderful noodle soup, Tom Kha Kai, and the green and red curries. It is simply put-decadent.

It’s for times like these that I refer to my newfound Chinese diet – put all the food you want to eat on your plate, but eat with just one chopstick. Try it. It works!

In praise of music

It was a few years ago that my brother decided that the only three-letter word starting with ‘S’ in his life would be the Sax. Hours, days and weeks were spent looking for that perfect saxophone, the instrument that would allow my brother to find himself.
Finally Gia (the saxophone is human too, I was told) made her way across the family threshold and my brother thus began his first tryst at lovemaking with the saxophone. It is then that I realized that the only difference between a saxophone and a chainsaw was the grip.

Then there was a time in my life when it was surrounded with musicians and a friend would often say about his band that when called on stage it would be announced thus ‘would the musicians and the drummer please come up on stage’. This particular drummer of the band could always be detected at the door, his knocking would always speed up, but he would constantly have trouble entering the room because a drummer that he was, he would never know when to come in. And the poor thing, each time he’d get depressed over being the butt of all jokes, he’d be cheered by saying that he’s better than a vacuum cleaner, at least he doesn’t need to be plugged in to suck!

But I have never understood why drummers have always been the brunt of jokes; I have come to realize that even clarinet players have hordes behind them, out to kill them. A master chef pointed out to me the other day in the course of a conversation that the difference between an onion and a clarinet is that nobody cries when you chop a clarinet into little pieces.

But then again, I have yet another mad musician friend who traded his wife’s piano for a clarinet, thankful that one cannot sing while playing the clarinet. He was of course the same person who would stand out in the garden, no matter what the season, each time his wife would play the piano before it was traded, he didn’t want any of the neighbors to think he was beating her.

To cut a long story short, I still think music is underrated, imagine what a beautiful world it would be, if life had some background music…

To be continued…

where sweet love found its forgotten wings...

The sky was laden with twilight
And the night fluttered in your deep eyes
The moon, glowing on the traveling waters
Vagrant, as silence always is

Somewhere in the vastness
The mountains glimmered, alight with snow
And my heart searched to find its home
In you, around you, with eternal thirst

And then I found you
Made you mine
Amongst the sound of the trees
Orchestral and celestial

The intricate fabric of love turned
Black, red, smoldering and glacial
Till the night became a soliloquy
And life, a latticework of fragrance.

When you’re told you look like a peach, maybe they mean, all yellow and fuzzy

So after a gruesome ride all through the countryside, all thanks to an auto rickshaw dude who was high on cheap booze and life, I tumbled out of that green monster looking like I needed a morgue more than a doctor. My limp hair was now departed in the middle, clothes clung to me as if out of fright and my rash had gone berserk, I now looked like a plump tomato on sale at the grocery store next to my house.
I trotted to the doctor’s chamber and stood there motionlessly, waiting for something to happen. I was hoping she would ask me my name, that would help us break the ice but instead she too looked back inertly, the kind of look someone would have on their face if they forgot the ‘recipe’ to make ice-cubes.
And then suddenly I felt like Indiana Jones’ female version, out to save both our lives by resuscitation through conversation and I began in my radio practiced voice about how a common friend who happened to be a doctor and a host with us, referred me to this wonderful little doctor who was seemingly down to earth but definitely not enough.
Suddenly my speech got interrupted with the doctor’s wish to check the rash all over my body. It was an almost pornographic moment, standing in attention, stripping at the orders of the doctor, only that the lighting was too fluorescent and the room smelt of antiseptic. Also, one little glitch was that the doctor seemed least interested in anything but the fluid deposits in the blisters on my body. My moment of pornography died a premature, ugly and dreadful death.
I was marched off to the blood sample collection unit on the first floor and as vial after vial of my blood was being siphoned off, the dark almost intense red of my blood was causing me to have morbid thoughts. ‘It is fatal, whatever it is’, I thought to myself.
Blood sample collected, I was on my way back home. Surprisingly, I was in good spirits thinking about the time that I’d managed to get off from work, even if at the cost of what most probably was chicken pox. As I smiled to myself and hummed a faint Frank Sinatra tune in my head, I bumped into a rather handsome doctor who must’ve thought that I was on the wrong floor. By his reaction to me, I am presuming he would’ve personally delivered me to the fourth floor where the famed psychiatry section of the hospital is.
I finished the rendition in my head and went looking for an auto that would help me get back home in one piece. If a half-wit could work part-time for NASA then this was it, the man who drove me to madness and then my house. This auto rickshaw trip was even more ghastly than the previous. This one was driven by a man drunk on stupidity. He made me realize that talk is cheap. The supply surely exceeds demand and in this case, I was hoping we’d run out of stock forever.
By the time I reached home, I knew that auto’s in Delhi were shared by two or more drivers, that this particular gentleman disliked people who kept their feet up on the rods and that he learned how to dance in his childhood when he and three brothers would wait in line for the bathroom.
As I reached my house, I wished with all my heart that Id have chicken pox and that I’d be put under quarantine for a lifetime at least!

Life in the time of Chicken Pox

If you can smile when everything around you is going wrong, you’re probably in the repair business

It is sometime in the late afternoon and I recollect how just yesterday I was scurrying to reach work at that hour in the morning when most people are still snuggled in bed dreaming of an excuse not to go to work that day. My damp hair was just how it always was on most mornings, limp and facing extinction but at 7:30 in the morning, my only prayer was to be able to find that crazy access card that would allow me the key to the castle of radio madness.

As I entered I saw the ‘On Air’ sign, lit boldly up on the wall next to the studio and I knew that Seema ‘ji’ was singing sweet nothings to the listeners coaxing them to wake up. When she (Seema) had first walked in to work, my immediate reaction was to add the suffix of ‘ji’ to her name, not in an endeavor to make her sound elderly and worthy of the suffix, just out of sheer respect. Little did I know then, that it would become the proverbial albatross around her neck. Excess baggage. That is what I handed to her as she became a permanent resident of the hallowed halls of Radio Today.

The clock struck eight and my co-host was found bellowing from the insides of the washroom for me to scurry and that she would follow. The morning washroom visit; It has become a ritual for Jaishree (my co-host). No matter what time we arrive n the studio, she almost feels compelled to fulfill that rite before she takes on another kind of pressure starting eight o’ clock.

That is the time when the breakfast show comes in to play. The show we proudly call Meow Zindagi, which has been our playground, haven and sometimes even the squabble-zone. As we both rambled on and finally played a song at quarter past eight, I found myself rather itchy, as if I had accidentally rubbed myself against poison ivy. As the show proceeded, so did my itching. By the end of it, I resembled a raspberry cheesecake (not that delectable though). As we stepped out of the studio and exposed my cheesecake self to everybody, like a truly democratic society that we are, everyone used their fundamental right of free speech to mull over what the rash on my skin might be. Some jumped right to questions about who I was dating and if that person was hygienic. I was reminded of how sex is like air. Its really not important till you aren’t getting any. But of course, sympathy on that count from anyone was ruled out. Then of course I was told that I could be suffering from measles and not have known it (I was told even Aishwarya Rai has them, so its quite proper in that fashion to have measles and if it’s the German variety then better still, at least Id exhibit being a bit status conscious) or perhaps it was a rash from the thermal shock of being out in the sun and then coming back into a temperature controlled environment or as my Programming Head pointed out, it would probably be my desire for a vacation and her constant refusal to give it to me that had manifested in a fabricated disease to facilitate the much awaited holiday. As speculation of my rash subsided with greater matters like the ‘viagra computer virus’, which threatened to turn the 3 ½, inch floppy into a hard disc, at hand, I was finally asked to hurry along to a doctor’s office and get a final opinion (I am sure people back at work laid bets about whose version the doctor would side with)