INSTEAD OF A MEMOIR

Recollecting my childhood memories, I often wonder why I used to try so hard to get rid of my strange thoughts. My incessant effort to push myself away from those thoughts and to find myself an acceptable position in the real, non-fantastical adult society did finally drift me apart from the “weird world of childhood”. Most of my memories are visuals or emotions which I consciously try to well up in me when I am desperate to reconnect with my past. Sometimes they are snippets of rants, colours, conversations. They come back to me in incoherent pieces, a whirlwind of sensations as if after a long time I was again spinning round and round and round till I would be overwhelmed by the feeling that I was the centre of the universe and when I would finally stop, the world would still be spinning. It created a heady effect and I used to love to see every colour mixing and blending with one another as I would ignore my mother’s voice pleading me to stop. The memories of my childhood , that I’ve often heard from my mother and elders are not necessarily weird. It is happy, carefree, summery days of my life where my father threw me up and caught me mid-air, as I would be falling down and my hair flying up. I can never remember experiencing most of the stories that my mother narrates. All of those sound to me like the videos from the handy cam advertisements. But some that have been told to me again and again from many years have invariably become a part of my thoughts, I cannot remember whether they were real occurances or figment of imagination. Nevertheless, they do evoke sensations and are one of the many pieces of the tornado of my mind.

I remember the feeling of extreme loneliness that would settle in my mind like thick, impenetrable clouds upon seeing people and places disappear into a dot - loneliness due to both, being left behind and leaving people behind. The merry-go-rounds in the fairs used to be my favourite ride because I always knew there was no permanent good-bye. The sadness of waving my parents good bye would be a fleeting thing as I would be re-approaching their happy faces even before I had finished waving to them. Farewell always came with the promise of return. Soon these fleeting farewells became longer and more sorrowful as I was admitted into a play home. I never understood why I had to be left behind, to be separated, which I never really came to terms with. In fact it became worse after I was admitted into a ‘school’. I was revolted by the uniformity in I everything I saw, the dirty yellow walls with peeling paint, the smelly toilets, my teacher who looked the same every day, the ruled notebooks, the benches and most of all my red checkered uniform with a triangle of the hand kerchief pinned to my breast pocket would make me feel like the most unlucky child in the world. I felt doomed by the permanence of these surroundings. The longing for the Sunday when I could just lie between my parents on the bed till the sun was high above our roof was the only idea I feasted on. But I’d become more withdrawn. I couldn’t stand the moral stories in my English text book because all these morals seemed to guide me away from what I always wanted. It loved everything that I was not. I lived in this gap between the moral stories and the fairy tale desires, between the fear of acting immoral and desire to do the same. Confused I grew more silent and resigned when I heard my neighbour appreciating my obedient nature.

One day in school I spotted a girl secretly digging her nose. Too ashamed to admit that she’d been doing the dirty act she could not ask the teacher for the permission to wash her hands. However she cunningly wiped her fingers on the under-surface of the bench. Witnessing this entire secret affair, I was repulsed. I could never sit on that bench again. I mentally noted a small mark on the bench so that even if the benches were shuffled I would be able to identify this discreetly sick bench from the rest. But, how far could I control events since no one else apart from that girl herself and me knew about it. What if some aayah touches the bench unknowingly and then touch mine. I leave my bag and pouch on it. Yuck. The idea crept little by little. I would scrub myself fervently after running home from school. Thinking of it I would rub harder. I had become a cleanliness and control freak. I would avoid taking the short route to school as the algae on smitten buildings, on the way, would slowly attack the edges of my mind, the mouldy green seem to grow on the insides of my yellow cranium, and I knew I could never wash it clean, no matter how hard I rubbed it would decay there, stay there and my every thought felt rotten and smelly. I did not want to think because the thoughts reeked. Nevertheless I thought, I could not stop it, no matter how hard I tried. I stared at black walls to stay empty but I couldn’t. I’d lost control of my own life, my own thoughts.

Sometimes, I would really want to write, write these stories that I lived and  that wouldn’t be like my textbook stories. But I just did not. Perhaps I was too scared to discover that I could be untalented and incapable of one more thing. Perhaps more than discovering about my incapability was the fear of ruling out the possibility of being able to write. More uptight and less expressive, I continued to be, until a couple of years back when I met a friend.

Roderick was a talented, talkative and a fully grown adult when I first saw him. A German boy, he was specializing in sculpting. He’d landed in India to travel and experience the sculptures. For the amount of control he had in chiselling life out of rocks his ways and manners seemed funnily uncontrolled and carefree. He ruled his own life and always claimed to believe in choice. He read a lot and wrote a lot more. It was on one of the most mundane days of college that he said he had an activity planned for me. Wondering what the activity could be I followed him to the play ground. What I saw made no sense to me. There was a folded sheet of white paper and bottles and bottles of ink. I started acting as he was instructing. I spread the sheet of paper on the ground, it was a very large sheet, infact made by joining four chart papers. Then I opened an ink bottle as he said, next he asked me to pour it on the sheet. I was too stunned, not sure if it was a joke or it was an instruction, I gave a confused look. Opening one ink bottle himself, he poured all the ink on the sheet. I followed his actions. One by one I started emptying every bottle on the paper as tears streamed out. I didn’t want to waste the ink, I wanted to make something on the sheet, I remembered the school incident and how frustrated I had become with not being able to control. Uneasiness flooded me as I saw I had no control over the ink, it kept flowing in thick and thin streams in all directions, I was desperate to control the patterns, but I could only let it go, let it take any form and grow into any shape. That would be what it is, without me doing anything. I felt empty now, as I let go and let be.

I AM NO POETRY

I am no poetry,

For I am clear, too clear,

Unlike words read in between lines,

Securely discreet,

Moist whispers,

Couched between  black words,

That are shadows of the known world,

While the rest of the world,

Lurks between shadows.

I am no poetry.

BUT

I am no poetry,

For this time, I am,

But too vague, too strange,

A cluster of words,

Spat out cathartically,

By my maker,

In her climax of teomented emotions.

If she was abandoned by a lover,

She does not inform,

Yet she made me,

I am no poetry.

A CIGARETTE BURNT MOMENT

Moonshine terrace and mattress rolled out, techno light hangs in loose effect around our phones as our pale lit faces nod and bob to the music in the beat scented air. Boys and girls are forlorn theories in this moment when our torsos sway back and forth as we watch the sound of our laughter escape in circling wheezes from our lips. Moment slips, cigarette burnt. Ashes and embers in memory.

DEPARTURE

Many, too many humans snaked along. Trudge-trudge- in a pathological slowness of undetectable movement. Little, too little we crept over lands and dawns and dusks of time. Our feet dragged heavy, raising a thick cloud of dust - a cloud of homogenous gloom, obscuring faces, obscuring vision-vision of destination and of future. We became bodies skinned into crooked lines as flesh disappeared into beady dew forever dotted on the brown - the brown of skin of the land browned by the temperate sun (that knew neither of equality nor of differences) that basked the fused roots of their simple past of the confused now. ‘Now’ that was partition, partition that was the connection between lands and between time. We were in the ‘now’, that seemed to exist but autonomously, between nostalgia and anxiety of future. Stuck, stuck, stuck endlessly on the line that was a rational scribble by a rational man who was not so brown. But some men, brown men whose names we heard from those rectangular radios and spotted in black and white, were supposed to be divine intervention and Ah! Yes! they did intervene! They did draw a line! A line on a paper, that became a scar on land and in the minds of people. It is a dirty, uneraseable scar and everyone has to live with the mark on the forehead.

A narrative in past tense, you might think that we managed to break free, that the ‘now’ has become ‘then’ and seek comfort in it. But I refuse to give you the choice of comfort and so I clearly tell you that we are still stuck. This might very well be my grandmother’s story but since it became a part of my consciousness, it is a part of my ‘I’ and hence a part of me. So it’s her story, my story, your story, anyone’s story, every one’s story. They might not be facts or fiction or could be both.

We might have tumbled into one of the either sides of the scar but it’s as strongly etched as ever. It pricked raw and fresh when we tried to scratch it with wars. It hurt when drenched in crimson. It reeks of our stupidity and reminds us of our fused roots, when we lived without a mark, a mark in our mind. Perhaps the scar doesn’t even exist. Perhaps it’s not even the Radcliff line. How could we blame one, few or many people for the scar, hold anyone responsible? Perhaps it just exists because we allowed it to exist in our mind. Perhaps that is why we are still stuck. 

Interview with Mohsin Hamid.

http://www.harcourtbooks.com/reluctant_fundamentalist/

HIS SATURDAYS

Her butt was sore and pressed flat against the hard wooden bench from sitting for long hours. A hollow sound had filled her head and droned into a drone that carried neither meaning nor meaninglessness, it made neither it’s presence nor it’s absence felt- just a bland sound beyond the realm of recognition, more numb than nothing, dumber than anything. She wafted in and out of thoughts. She noticed her telephone-wire like hair finishing in coiled tips over her breasts. Pulling her strands and holding them straight for a while she wondered what the real length of her hair is. It’s always longer or shorter depending on whether she pulls it straight or leaves it curled. The length always depended on something...but by itself...she didn’t know. Anyway why should she care? That boy she met last Saturday had seen her and smiled..it meant she is all good at least not bad..didn’t it? Or did it?......

The sonorous electric bell screamed cutting time and space into two, disturbing her thoughtful reverie, resounding, running round and round against the dome of her yellow cranium. As the sound faded she thought her head is a temple bell. She did not think about how dazed she felt. She took her things and walked out of the place into some other place. On the road-in the outside. She was walking, pushing spaces and structures behind, she climbed a rather fragile and rickety flight of spiral stairs in one of them. It was like climbing inside a round belly or a huge black-brown ball, there were no obvious landings. This belly was jostling with secret lives, she saw people with very dreamy eyes, very crazy eyes, very angry eyes, very sad eyes, very tearful eyes, very happy eyes......whoever she saw, the person was very something as if they had become their thoughts they would never want to articulate outside this belly. But there were some men who only cleared and arranged things. She arrived at the opening and stopped. Finally she saw the boy, he smiled and she was pleased with herself. She left the place.

Next  Saturday, she magnetically resumed what had become her weekly routine, went to the same place, saw similar faces, activities, postures, things and clatter. But it wasn’t the same, she had sensed the change. Only she didn’t comprehend if it was good or bad..she did not even want to think about it’s goodness or badness. She weaved through the place. She stopped at the opening, she did not see him. She stepped into the opening, he was there- naked, legs wound around another woman, together looking like a scary creature with four limbs and two heads. She stood there, trying to understand. Now it all came back, she remembered- feeling of his legs entwined around her and a confused pair of eyes that had watched them. May be that was herself or maybe the woman knotted around him now is herself. It didn’t matter, she wanted to scream, save her from that thing, that disgusting thing that no more had that face- the face that had smiled at her... then she understood something, something she desperately didn’t want to know and she lowered her head and walked away.   

Summer colors

BEACHED!

Down and deeper my legs sink,

 Tight-toes sow into the sand,

Ploughing and cutting into the womb.

Sow-plough-cut and ooze,

Shells, crabs, frogs,

Life bleeding out of the sand.

A sudden wave is a rude slap,

Rushing gathering the life and all,

In a twirl, a swirl and whirl,

Sucked it all,

Like air sucked into a black dot.

My toes untighten and loosened clench,

Empty I am a hole,

And the city dwells in the sea.

THE ANATOMY MUSEUM

Dolls and dolls of bodies ripped,

Fussy cotton poured out in a nest,

Dead, cold and white stare,

Anatomies frozen in time,

Suspended in chloroform,

Ever depressed faces,

 Of little copulated ghosts,

Small heads, large heads,

Chopped limbs, stitched limbs,

In rows and rows they run,

Shelved - an icy process

Of nomenclature, of arrangement,

Twisted, convoluted, distorted contortions,

Entwined masses of flesh-forms,

Fused into each other,

In confused mass,

Beautifully ugly gargoyles,

Grown within and without self,

Dead before life began.

FISH TEARS

In a hollow hum of motion,
Constantly cutting the oceans,
She swims.
Her being is movement,
Uncontrolled and free,
Silent-strong lines of strokes,
Of movement.
Images cutting the wet sight,
She moves through the immense waters,
She moves through the immense time.
When suddenly,
She knows not what,
She can't move-she can't move,
The hard struck in her gills,
Speared and nailed in pain.
Left high and dry,
She writhes, fights the world,
Reaching the gism heights of life,
Now she knows,
On this dry surface,
She had cried tears in water,
Tears that are now the sea.
Surrendering,
She sees black through her lidless eyes.

THERE!

There!

Yes here. A few fingers point, few faces stare. I realize a formation lump inside me, which grows bigger and heavier and I grow bigger and heavier with it. More fingers point and more faces stare and more reasons they give, plastering me tighter and tighter, to those, to which “one must glue,” to which the arrow in my head hunts down to be the source of this lump- lump in my throat, a lumpy knot in my belly, a round cosmos of creation and inception. Lying here, dots and dots of fingers, featureless faces crowd my vision. Surrounded, the heaving mountains heave faster, rising and falling in gasps and breaths, the lump is heavier, swollen like a water balloon, tempted to burst with the slightest prick, placidity before the epic moment - desperate chaos, in the matrix of this franctic experience, the lump locates it’s moment, bursts and noise, events follow- wet cascading down my blurry vision into ears, trailing moist bands on my face, the clench release in a scream, a scream that screams that scream that pleads to stop. Creation with the knowledge of it.

But as if only inside the cranium because still the flooding fingers point and faces stare.

ATTEMPT TO DECONSTRUCT 'V'

This is a part of literary theory assignment, found it interesting.. so here goes my first non-poem post..

DECONSTRUCTING V

The word anarchy literally means an-archon i.e. no leader. It implies a system where no one is ruled by any one. Often, anarchy is associated to lawlessness with an assumption that it would lead to the dictatorship of the most powerful (either in number or might). Most people would say that anarchy is a bad idea because the biggest gang will take over. That is precisely what is happening in a state which claims to have law and order. The ones who create law and order are the members of this mighty gang. Hence any other system of law is only an outgrowth of anarchy, but is misunderstood to be diametrically opposite of it. Anarchy is hence the only political position that is possible. The question here is how balanced could a democratic or a capitalist system or a communist system claim to be? Alan Moore and David Lloyd ask this through their graphic novel “V for Vendetta.”  The story is on the enigmatic revolutionary anarchist, who systematically destroys the leaders of fascist dictatorship (called Norsefire), the story is placed in the setting of a near future Britain after the nuclear war.

V embodies their belief in the idea of anarchy. “V” is a masked (mask of Guy Fawkes) anti-hero who makes an attempt to convince British people to rule themselves. This process of convincing, requires to bring the ruling government down, which ruled Britain as Police state, by resuming extreme stands of murder and bloodshed. To break a structure of hard headed hegemony is a hard task.

Emergence of the powerful is inevitable and is the natural design of a social unit. A family, a small social unit is most often patriarchal. But patriarchal power is also only a position, which is neither superior nor inferior or equal with the others but only different from the rest. A family might get as dysfunctional in the absence of a mother as it would in the absence of a father (in terms of degree) but dysfunctional in different ways, hence implying that a  mother holds a different power position which is as important. The point here is that anarchy is a natural system. Setting a system of law and order is worse hegemony, where it is given that ruling power is the superior and the “right”. This way the power of the other positions goes unrealized. The idea of the ‘leader’ is artificial. Ideally, anarchy means absence of a government, a self rule, where every individual enjoys space and respects the space of the other. But today, people are so conditioned to be ruled, to be governed by an outside source that the sudden absence or bringing down the government would leave them clueless as to how to act. To bring into existence mature anarchy would require education in great amounts and to an extreme degree of precision, which is practically impossible to achieve in a huge population. A population is always in a state of flux - people are ageing, dying and taking birth. Hence, education needs to be continually imparted and every individual should be educated to make sure that one is self governed enough, not to invade the space of the other. Could it be justified that in order to create an ideal leaderless self governed situation, one should wipe a chunk of population out? Here one needs to look into the possibility of  anarchy being achieved by killing people, because killing would defeat the essential purpose of anarchy, to be self governed and letting others govern themselves. It holds diversity to be it’s strength. This is where the rationality of “V” is questioned. In the process of making Britain a people governed state, he evolves as a ruler himself. He bombs populated buildings and refuses to accept any other point of view, fanatically believing his view should be the only way of looking at everything. He brainwashes Evey (a prostitute who he rescues from a gang of police officers), till she sees his point of view. Also, V gives Delia Surridge (the doctor who works for the government) a milder death when compared to others because she happens to “realise” her mistakes.  

He could be fascist in the sense that he compelled people to believe in anarchy, thereby perhaps unconsciously, shifting his belief from people’s freedom to his rule. Hence, there have been many thoughts as to why we tend to like “V” inspite of all the above.  The reason would be that he appears to be acting for the cause of self rule of people, which again appears to be noble because we live in a society which believes in the philosophy that falls along the lines of that of “V’s”. But, what makes V a valid anarchist is his death in the end and his belief in his end. He does evolve as a ruler in the process of bringing an end to rule, which is why he believes in his death-to remain true to the cause of leaderless-ness. By dying he also kills the possibility of a hegemonic structure, his life could have brought upon.

NIGHT NOISE

Discs of light are specks of neon,
Floating in the black.
I walk on patterns,
And patterns, same pattern,
More patterns crowding, accumulating, becoming
As I push them behind.
Hollow iron hemispheres sit, meditating on the flames,
Are wombs producing shapes of hot-hot yellow-brown,
Substances which tore my tongue till throat,
Till it felt like that of snake's.
Space between buildings,
Buildings between space,
Suffocate each other,
To reach the grey that blurred above into beyond.
The white figures staring through the glass,
Mock at my mind,
Mock at eye,
Mock at 'I',
Mockati..mockati..mockati- stacatto.
Snip-snap of rants and colors,
Mix and grow,
In designs and combinations,
Louder and greater,
Into conundrum,
To which I listen and listen,
And I screamed "You Listen,"
But all ignore.
As it continues to swell and roar.

THOUGHT BEES

Think,

You are aware that you think,

Aware that you are aware that you think,

Aware of your awareness,

Awareness of the thought,

The thought that you think,

Of thinking of awareness,

To think that you are thinking of awareness,

Think of awareness,

Awareness of thought.

Till the last thought is awareness,

The last awareness of thought.

From Chennai..

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UNBECOME

Scrapes her like from scrub,
Rub Rub,
See, she is pink,
She is lesser,
Scrub Scrub,
Loose shreds of flesh,
Or does is look like sinews plucked?
Grind Grind,
She is red,
Scrape and peal,
Wall plaster in her finger nails.

She is on the floor,
Uncurled pipe like snake,
Some pink shattered stuff too,
Ooo! two eyes in the red pool too,
There are some hard and sharp things lying too,
Careful, 'cause they might poke you.

Rubbing, scrubbing, scraping, grinding,
Was thorny pineapple in her chest.