Rooftop

Fog like dots of dull incessant pain
sharpen in the night, like stars,
like lights framing those little windows that
must surely mean something
mean people around a table twisting
their guts in laughter.
But for now it doesn’t matter what it means.
What I felt on that cold roof with the
menace of gravel underfoot meant something.
It surely meant finding meaning in everyday
actions becoming a chore.
The task of being itself becoming a chore
so arm yourself with everything worthwhile
and liberating. arm yourself
an icepick through sleets of mundane
with dew-drenched blades of thought
that tug you along long nights;
and memories of the future
-if some such thing ever existed-
then you must must see them through.

Boston, cafe

When a woman his grandmother’s age entered the café, the boy saw a man’s head, with its dwindling foliage of grey and white, turn as if on cue. From the corner of his own eyes the boy noticed the man’s eyes sparkle. How long had they been together, the boy wondered, as the lady found her way to the man’s table and kissed him lightly on the lip. While they sat across one other, each with a book in a hand, the boy speculated if it was their first marriage or had they both been married once before. Or an adulterous affair, perhaps. Illicit passions acted upon. And every once in a while one of them turned the book over on the table and leaned forward to say something and they talked long and soft, laughing lightly and clamorously at different moments, before returning to their books gleaming below the cafe light. The boy wished for them to have been together since the time they first discovered love half a century ago, and how they must’ve trembled at the threshold of this labyrinth, only to venture ahead hand-in-hand, to learn that it was green and deep and endlessly satisfying.

Mumbai

I should be happier. At long last there are things of to be genuinely happy about. Mumbai, for instance, has been sort of a surprise. The city though did live up to its promise of being miserable for a while. During my first week here, what surprised me was how a teeming, sweltering city of more than ten million- where bodies churn together quite regularly- could be this lonely. Of course, I’m talking first and foremost about the miracle of the Mumbai suburban railway: so many bodies, so many touches marked by resentment- a place where everyone wishes every second for there to be less people.

Life has been better since. I’ve grown accustomed to the overcrowded trains the overwhelming downpour the dismissive autowallas the pain-in-the-ass traffic, among other things. Work is great; partly due to the ridiculously low expectations I had of it, and in part because of the wonderful people I’ve met there, who’ve been, on the whole, very kind. I’ve discovered new friendships here. Old friends and family live in Mumbai too, and I now sense it’s a place where I can probably drop anchor.

Despite this, I become very pensive at times. There are some reasons I know of: I’ve been slacking off on my ‘speech’ of late, resorting to avoidance behavior. Love- or the lack of it- is a perpetual reason. I was discussing this particular subject with a friend today, of elevating love as some sort of panacea, a cure-all, and maybe setting myself up for a major disappointment in the process. I told him we should stop philosophizing about love, stop plucking the idea apart with our conversations about its nature, its meaning and rest of those lofty discussions that make its absence bearable. We should try and stop thinking about it entirely for at least six months, I suggested. He gestured to the sea, and said: when you sit here on your own, how could you not think about it. Who are we kidding.

I write this guilty; as if I’m wallowing in something that might not even exist. Worse still: I am a whiny little prick with a high sense of entitlement. But sometimes I do feel detached from the world. What can I do? I feel like a boat unmoored, drifting through the night. And I ask myself: is loneliness just a state of mind? Then another question: why don’t I tell somebody, anybody, how I feel? And why do writers write things that they might not tell another soul?
I don’t know.

Sunday

This is not about
honing your heart’s survival instincts.

Not about brimstone, lip-numbing kisses
or sheets constantly shifting shape.

This is about the eyes of a wife
watch the twilight door open and
see a husband and not a lover.

This is about that compromise.

About practiced devotion.
The urge to domesticate passion.

Eyes of the wife falls from
the door to the fingers of her hand.
It’s been a lonely day.

In throes of sleeplessness

In moments of helplessness, no amount of intelligence or talent or courage can rescue you. After a hard day, an even more difficult night awaits you in bed. Your mind is a minefield of anxieties, and your thoughts tread carelessly all over.

Tonight you want desperately to believe in God. Believe what so many others adhere to and experience solace in. Somebody that doesn't grow estranged, doesn't abandon or die. A solid certainty forever. There’s a fine line between optimism and delusion and you desire more than anything to spring across it. And yet, the embrace of this particular delusion has failed you so often that you give up after a while. There’s so much reason stacked against it, all the hundreds of pages of well-reasoned data, which you’ve tucked into your brain, which is irrefutable. You hate science. Nothing makes sense. Life’s uncertain, illogical, and irrational and it irks you to think why you reason at all in the first place.

You remember all those moments when you sought God and failed miserably. You sampled Sufi music (it might nudge some spiritual core, you thought), searched for signs and symbols, flung your mind open to every argument on the other side of the fence, but all in vain. Once you thought you almost got it. Your first time in that Russian Church across the street- stained glass, vaulted ceiling, and a thick fragrance of incense that reminded you of something familiar, yet retained a peculiarity. The ceremony uplifted you for while; as you let those strange words, comforting in an odd way, pour into your head. (The newly faithful say they’ve had moments like this one, when something awakens within them, something so wonderfully mysterious and profound, that it converts them.)

You sense a force swell within you and carry it delicately back home. You nurture it for a day, and wake up the next morning magically invigorated. You arrive at church the next afternoon, a needle point away from converting to Russian Orthodox, when disappointment strikes you. It’s as profound as the inspiration that swept you yesterday. All you see are rituals and prayers and institutions and priests and extravagances, all the consequences of God that you so deeply resent and hate. You realize you’re a traveler who has ventured too far into the bleak dominion of rationality.

This might turn out to be the most vaguely annoying gibberish I blog in a while, yet perhaps the most satisfying.

Poetry Returns

An itch, the blooming of an invisible swell.
Rebel veins.

To ask alphabets, patience-
nothing but mutiny.

Better then sit down gather it all
zero in on where it all began
that’s where those words are begging
to be shepherded to,
this waterhole
in the middle of nowhere of myself
the heart of whatever pain that carried
them to the edge until
they had to let go.

There it is:

To know for certain the possibility
of never finding perfect love.

Break(ing) on through to the other side

Due to the widely excepted confessional nature of blogging, I offer one myself: I’ve been battling my snobbery, and have embarked on a self- help program to cure this ailment, to partake a regular dose of pop-culture, but my body still rejects it. It’s an ailment reinforced through years of me being secretly entertained by popular media, yet living in complete denial or simply banishing them from my world view in preservation of a precious self-image. (A note: there definitely is a substantial amount of garbage to sift through though, and certain artifacts of this world that are outright dangerous- “300” and “The Legend of Bhagat Singh” for their misappropriation of history; the later “Golmaal” movies for their distasteful portrayal of the disabled and the much-parodied, much-mocked “Twilight”, for its surprising ability to intellectually cripple a generation of young women.)


My eventual rehab might still take months to accomplish, but I’ve gathered a couple of insights in the process- a respect for the market, for one. I believe this respect stems from my marwari upbringing. To make my point, I cite two gentlemen, for whom I’d nurtured a peculiar disdain: Karan Johar and Chetan Bhagat.


Quiet recently, I’ve marched on from pure contempt to tolerance to a quiet admiration of these two. Chetan Bhagat, for instance: where Indian writing in English devoured caste/poverty, religion, post-colonialism, immigrant experience as its daily fodder, Bhagat recognized a potential market often ignored (and slightly ridiculed) by the English elite. Bhagat’s entertaining novels and lucid prose struck a cord with an audience who wished to read in English, but English was still a tentative second tongue. The English novels available to them in the market often came with westernized characters they couldn’t quite identify with, or novels with “literary” aspirations, difficult to read in a tongue not quite their own. I might not write a novel similar to Bhagat’s, or worship his work, yet to dismiss his writing entirely would be arrogance that “intellectuals” are sometimes (rightly) accused of. (Another note: “serious” writers, too, play to the market. Pick up almost any successful Indian novel in English from the past 20 years, and you’re sure to encounter at least one of the themes I just mentioned above.)


As for Karan Johar- firstly, I grew to respect the scale of his projects, the pressure somebody in his position goes through, often collaborating with dozens of technicians and artists in a year-long process. I also secretly enjoyed Kuch Kuch Hota Hai when it'd just come out (it's true, something something does happen) and later, liked Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham. Moreover, his movies developed and groomed a profitable market that Aditya Chopra first broke open. Having a clear sense of your market and then delivering a product successfully, and profitably, is also an art. (Though, I might begrudge his privileged clique, people who inherited their opportunities. Still, scoring those opportunities is a tough task, too, and Karan Johar did it commendably.)


Lesson learned: everything doesn’t need to be high art, high wisdom, to be valued or respected.