Histories of this world

The histories of this world are beyond our comprehension. There are fossils where the river has cut deep and now ripples sedately, her secrets in time, hers to hold and give, not to all those who seek, but those who wait to perceive.

There are forests which breathe, their trees holding grounds strong, their fungi a mesh we cannot fathom. There are rocks which have weathered storms and drizzles, met clouds so ancient that you can only write a number as an age, but you cannot perceive or feel how old that is.

There are silences, between the smell of the sea, the crashing ruckus of a waterfall, the hardness of the reefs, the taste of a tear, everything you see and don’t, and beyond.

In this world, we live as a mere blimp, yet we find a relevance in our own insignificance. Our violence, petulant, unforgiving, and selfishness towards ourselves and others. Those who have been here far before remain unmoved, flowing, breathing, knowing that we shall pass like others before, and the secrets those at the extremes of the universe only know, even as we are now here, stuck in our time, irrecoverably.

If only we can tame the light that does carry who we are to places beyond, if only we can see all those who were before, to know, to remember, to be.

The histories of this world are beyond our comprehension. We do not know time, nor the world. We do not know ourselves, or this place. All we have is a tiny memory deep within our minds, passed on from generation to generation, a yearning that we feel when we see the stars, immortal as stardust.

The light shines the brightest

Lies, and damned lies

It is difficult to know you are living through an event significant enough that the generations after will look back to it and see it as important enough to be analysed and learnt. Also, it is difficult to know which version of our past is true. All the plagues we have known are little nuggets in eight grade history books, and yet as we live through a disaster, a calamity today, the over-arching sense of the movement refuses to leave us.

We may have chuckled at the Monty Python sketch where the dead are piled up and taken away in carts during the plague, but we certainly cannot laugh at what’s happening in India today.

The horror. It refuses to sink in. When did we descend into this chaos, this hell, that lakhs struggle to find a way to breath? But more then when, which can wait future forensics, the most important is how.

There’s a sense of injustice in what’s happening. None of us ever paid attention to the rats perspective as pied-piper lead them away, but maybe today we know how they may have felt. People outside hospitals, families and villages wiped out, queues outside crematorium, panicked messages on all social media platforms requesting for oxygen, medicines, and a chance to save the life of a loved one.

If we as a nation have to hang our heads in shame together, with our pride needled and poked and deflated that we may still swallow and cry our selves to sleep. But when the lies, the damned lies and nothing but the damned lies are what’s plastered, repeated and almost made to feel like the truth, then there’s no we, there’s us the nation, and them, the pied-pipers who dare lead us astray and run over all those who as much as squeak in displeasure.

Into the holy Ganga we were led for a Kumbh Mela. The best way for you to escape this hell is to wash your sins and head to an apparent heaven in after-life. And elections across states with campaigns where into suffocating lorries and vans we were hurdled and lead to listen to one piper after another convince us that everything is fine if you just believed so.

It is damned lies that everything is fine. It is damned lies that there’s enough resources for everyone. It is damned lies that are made-up statistics. It is damned lies that the pipers parrot for all to hear.

But that it isn’t all. There’s more onus on you and me who speak on the internet, who seek help and hope some luck, some force, or a bloody flying saucer in the sky will save us from this mess. Censor your words, dare not question and bow.

Dare question and we shall send you to rat traps that are our jails, where the virus runs free, as if they are lesser humans. Dare speak, and we have the weight of law, the fist of justice all too ready to deal a blow. Courts can try directing oxygen all they want, and reprimand all the secretaries they want, but none dare question the Piper-in-chief.

We are living through a dystopia. Our lives, lively hoods, our existence, and future all can be squashed in an instant. And there won’t be anyone to question it- how can they when they are trying to save their own? Do you think about the ICU bed your parents need or do you think of some lone activist who dares to question?

This isn’t political, it is humanitarian. And if people, we people come first, it is time to question, to make ourselves heard. Someone in the future is looking at us, and it is left to decide how we are seen—do we let the piper lead us to the bottom of the netherworlds, or do we stand up and be heard for ourselves.  

Waiting

On the long road to somewhere, I wait for this bus to reach its destination, all the while searching for that bit of meaning in the vast empty fields, the still windmills, and lonely cottages.

I wait for the boarding to begin, queueing behind those who can’t wait to get wherever, double-checking if this is the right flight, and if this is where I want to go.

I wait at the level crossing, camera in hand, hoping to catch the express train pant past us into the nearby almost abandoned station—maybe this could be home, a real address to reach me through post, with no mobile towers in sight, and internet a luxury which you don’t really need.

I wait for the signals to turn green, at the tollgates, easing past wreckages and road kills, hurrying past lives that always wanted to be elsewhere, but here.

I wait for the next turn on the mountain road to show the view of the plains, the next hairpin bend to reveal the temple everyone seems to seek, the next deep curve to show me dreams of forgotten forests and mythical creatures that roamed these lands free.

I wait outside locked doors, for people to turn up at 10:30 for a 10am meeting.

I wait for guests who never turned up, and all these desserts are mine.

I wait for life to move on, to take me to the next the project, to the next book, to the next movie, to the next day, to the next moonrise, dawn, daylight, oru maalaipozhudhu, nenjil yenkangal, mandahil kanavugal.

I wait, I wait.

I wait for the large wave to reach the shore,

and then another,

and then another.

I wait for my watch to tick away the minutes,

for the calenders to tear past the dates,

for Arsenal to win another title.

I wait.

Joy

Our joy is a thousand years, born yesterday from the spirits which refuse to die, nor be bottled as wine.

It is as light as ether, and moves as it pleases, and the dark recesses and dreams of torments stand little chance against its sunshine and rain.

There’s no window which can stop its smell from entering. Like freshly baked bread, like the smell of sand from across a field of wild grass and flowers, it belongs to everyone, even to those who wish they never were.

Our joy filters through trees, as the evening sun slants and trails away to bring the day to far off lands and countries born of rivers and capricious lines on maps.

It rests a while like a lonely afternoon siesta with songs of birds and raags, of sumptuous lunches, only to be woken by the waft of fresh coffee and a light of hope through the gaps in the blinds.

Our joy is forever in my mind, an image carved out of wants and dreams from stories old, of princes and palaces, of bijou homes with kettles on boil, and gardens of roses, prickly red and white, and a bunch of bluebells that nod their heads to the voice of little children.

Our joy is the parijatham I see every day, and smell at night, wonderfully white, blushing at secrets only they know. Our joy, I hope to know and fly with, if only for a little, for it is a thousand years old, and I can last but a short while.

Time is up

For long the silence was considered as consent, but it never was. No matter, now we have words, and more. They are written, they are said with calm and quiet, and they are yelled. We have all of it, to imagine, to see, to feel enraged, and now we must act.

We are at a moment when no one can stop us from speaking, and so they hope to discredit what you say, who you are and what you do. There are doubts, there are questions and there is blatant gaslighting, but your voice holds truth, and time might take lives, it might heal, but it cannot erase what happened.

Maybe we will not be afraid any more to speak and let abusers get away with being open secrets whispered to one another. There is no shame in having faced abuse- there are scars, and memories we wish to bury, but there’s no more a need to be afraid to speak up if we choose to speak up. The abusers fear their names being mentioned and tagged, live in dread of being a bad headline, years and years of careful constructed and curated image can now crumble in a matter of seconds.

Religion and politics have long been entwined with abuse. Power allows abuse, and uses it as a tool to enforce itself and claim humans as property and territory. And those who have enjoyed the benefits of power will refuse to speak out and condemn. To deny a person their rights, it first requires you to rob them of their humanity, and if you are one of those who do, your time is up.

If you believe every person is entitled to their right, to their body and consent to what happens to them or what they wish to engage, then you need to speak up. If the identity you are born into comes with power, as mine does, then it is even more imperative you speak up, else you are complicit with those who abuse. If I cannot speak up and question the basis for the discrimination and abuse, then I am complicit with the abusers of power.

So, I ask, which God do you worship(or what’s in your consciousness) that allows you to see another human as any lesser than you? On what basis do you claim to be superior or better than anyone? What is it have done to deserve the privileges and use it to hurt others more?  What is that makes you think that abuse—sexual, physical, mental—is your right and you should get away with it?

We are at crossroads where those who have known an old familiar world where cis-het-men were on top of the food chain now find themselves in a world where people can be themselves and speak up for their rights and what is theirs. And they speak out loud and clear. In the street, on social media, anywhere where they can be heard, and heard they will be.

It is a bad time to be an abuser of any sort. Fear and run, but you cannot hide, for we see you for what you are. We may have admired your work and praised you and loved you, but no more. A mind that doesn’t recognise consent lacks the aesthetic to paint our eutopia, to write our liberation or create a movie with our hopes and dreams.

We owe our future a world of consent and equality. This doesn’t mean teaching our children just about good touch-bad touch, and rush through the chapter on reproduction in school, but to talk about consent. Consent cannot be coerced, consent cannot be implicit, and consent cannot be extracted with power.

No means no.

Time is up.

To someone, to no one

Our lives are a bunch of emails never written, letters never posted, love never misunderstood because it was never said aloud.

Someday we will find our drafts and a pile of letters, and learn of what could have been, but never was.

I lived us a million times in my dreams, here and there, in countries cold and wet, in beaches bright and hot, beer in summer, whiskey in winter, mountains so high that the mid-morning light causes a glare if you don’t wear shades; our hands held together across valleys and candlelit nights, the moon a bright crescent over a never been reality; there is nowhere else to be, no other life to live, but ours in this silence, in this beauty.

Maybe you thought of us in your little nook, you scribbling away in your dairy, me reading books which I thought I understood; you watching me sleep late at night, and waking up to me making a brunch for two, while sipping fresh coffee; there’s nowhere else to be, no other life to live, but ours in this stillness, nothing but your verses, with rhyme and mystery.

How long is a lifetime? If our memories are put together will it ever be more than a day? I remember us, and nothing else. Maybe this was the lifetime I lived, and if it all was a dream, then was there ever a life, in reality?

Do words buried come back alive to reach those who they are meant for? What words do I bury, and what do I say to the emptiness, so they spread all over the universe and can never be put together again to mean anything.

There’s a blank paper, to you it shall be addressed, and it will tell you all that I ever wanted to say but left unsaid to watch you fiddle with your noodles, to hear you speak of monsters and science as adjust your hair and determine the worth of the latest innovation. Maybe you saw me in my silence and tried to guess the words I held, maybe you dreamed of all that I could be but instead chose to bore you with bi-lingual puns.

I am not gone, but here, in person and spirit, and maybe I am the letter which could tell you what you mean to me— but will you ever open me, and read?

I lay around, and stay still, maybe I will be left behind when you go far away to chase your dreams, and crumble away like a house long forgotten, memories left to rot like old furniture with only the hope of being stolen.

Maybe I am the drafts never sent, hundred of them all at the mercy of a company’s policy, to be destroyed as a point of code, indents bent and broken, the metaphorical paper shredder a button to make years disappear and leave an inbox clean and dry, for new beginning and dreams.

There are dreams, and a lifetime measured by a clock forever stuck at seven thirty. My life is a bunch of emails never written, letters never posted, love never misunderstood because it was never said aloud.

 

 

I don’t move

My roots grow so deep that I can no more move. I shake, I stretch, but I don’t move. It feels like I will be here forever, long after everything is gone. But I know the world moves, and so do the galaxies. And the universe stretches, and yawns and scratches-but it doesn’t move either. At least relatively to itself. Am I the universe?

My mind runs away on its own, but I don’t move. When it is called to reality, it reminds me that I haven’t moved. When you don’t move, things that do move settle down on you. Sediments and old trees that turn into rocks and oil. Will America invade me? I don’t know, but I would like to visit it someday but without standing in a queue outside their embassy. What do they even protect? They seem to have nothing to call their own and so will claim everything as theirs, every sweat that ever was perspired is a patent.

I don’t move, I am here. The heart, as we put it remains stoic and pumps blood like it should. There are no dams here, or deluges, maybe someday there will be, but for now, it is a mechanical being without emotions, without a feeling. Maybe there will be a pain someday, maybe it will stop for a moment, and then I will move, if only for that moment. And then be everywhere forever, scattered ashes, fed to the seas, along with trash cans and sewage.

I don’t move.

Madras and Silence

The only way to embrace a warm comfort in Madras is to turn down the air conditioning to 20 and wrap yourself in a blanket. The city burns you- the heat get under your skin, seeping deeper and deeper till it possesses you in full, a hyperparasite which makes you forget yourself. You are sticky with sweat, and feel like a bamboo broom coming undone- strewn all around, every part wondering what’s left of it.

The nights are more tolerable. You could stand a lonely vigil to the waves and hear them crash, wave after wave, clinical, mechanical, yet somehow wonderfully musical. You can feel the breeze blow, and feel the sands shift between your toes. There’s a vast nothingness ahead, dotted with distant lights that seek a port to deposit their loads- customed and contraband. It all seems wonderful, but the memory of the day lingers, and you know it will dawn like those flights which seem like a speck in the distance and then suddenly appear like a falling star and land at 25 at MAA.

There’s hope, like looking down the runway, looking at the city from a 100 feet, a 1000, till suddenly all that’s left are tiny matchbox like houses and panting lakes which may soon lie to rest under a tombstone of matchboxes, lit like a fireflies hoping to attract someone, not in hope, but as creatures do, to push life forward, till we all crash, drown, or are eaten away by those singing waves who keep time as if there’s a god with watch.

There is silence. It lives within, you under a warm blanket, or walking down the shore. There’s chaos, and there’s war, and you wonder how we got here, bloody long way from silly little invisible things suddenly deciding to stick together. You can’t breathe the air, you cannot drink the water, unless you are ready to pay them. You pollute anyway, and your mind is a beast being fed, in need, in want, in things it doesn’t quite get, but is suddenly addicted to- there’s coffee to savour, and sugary highs to suddenly believe that anything is possible. You don’t get life, you don’t know why, you yearn for things, you want love.

You want this walk not to be lonely, but then remember that within you are just alone, with or without, for you cannot hold on to love. It belongs to no one, not to the sands being eaten away, not to the sands that are stolen and sold to line the pockets of men in white and white, not to the sands you will be scattered when long gone, not even to you, not to those whom you love. This silence, it is you, for if there is none else, it can only be you.

There’s the pain, it nags you, it eats you, it become a part of you. At times you may stab a toe, and it hurts a little less. You grow to know it like a limb, just below your heart, at times grasping it, as if it can crush you, mince you, grind you to make cutlets for a 4 o’ clock snack.

I am cynical. I am happy. I am sad. I am whatever. It doesn’t matter. That’s all there’s to life. And then you can imagine.

Life.

We cannot measure our skies, we don’t know our histories, but we peer into the past in hope of find something. We probe, we poke, we dream. We breathe, and in our breaths carry the urge to know, more and more. We scratch the sands, turn the earth inside out. We stare at the worst of ourselves and still believe there is more.

We can write, we can make those scratches mean something and ring in our heads and sudden we know more. And we write more. We can sing, and suddenly there were no wars, no deaths and no greed. We crave this, this nothingness, this silence to grow. Yet we don’t.

There are as many gods as we want to believe, but no god needs to believe in us for us to be.

I am my silence, and I walk alone.

Love

Maybe I can never love anyone the same ever again. Maybe I will never let go of my pretences, and just lie silently holding hands. Maybe I will never be the same again, but a part of me has, and it always will be.

There’s no love like love unrequited. Hands held, a rueful smile, and a knowing that it will never be. Those who believe in other lifetimes hope for a someday, while others like me are left with dreams, and yearning for realities in worlds other, unlike here, much like ours.

And then there is love, that which has been ours forever, lived and left, and broken as loud as a shattering glass, as cursed as a shattering glass—a million pieces, a mess—never to be put together again, seven years or hundred, lifetimes or forevers.

I don’t know what you crave, but I crave those moments where our silences was all that is heard, where our heartbeats, never quite matching strides, in a grace of their own marched into a future unknown—never bleak, but happy, not a loud firework display at a riverfront, but the breeze at a top of a mountain peak.

I want love, and I want to love unafraid, of consequences, of reason, of action, but most of all myself. I wish to be that me when I with you, when I could look up ahead know you were there beside me, know that no fear is too great to be overcome, that my mind is mine, and the love will outlive my arrogance, outlive my anger, outlive all that I felt it wasn’t, outlive you, outlive me, outlive us.

Maybe I miss us more than I miss you, or me. I hate good morning messages ever since—I can’t get myself to type it the first moment after waking up to someone who isn’t you. I miss knowing you are at the other end of the call, seeing you as you are on a computer screen—I watch you sleep, like a child who believes innately that all the world is there to be.

I wish I could love another. No love can be the same as another, but love is far too needy. I can’t close my eyes and jump, I can’t hold on to a hug longer and believe the warmth will forever live.

We meet as strangers, and part as people who know all too well. I don’t trust words as much as I used to trust, though I love them all the same. I want our silences, and I want them to be broken by your whispers and murmurs. I want you to call me only what you did, and hold on…

A word is all that it takes to set free, a word is all that is needed to imprison yourself in misery. I may have chosen the latter, but now I know the other is better.

Love.

 

Starting a book store

Starting a bookstore is one of those utterly pointless dreams you have as a book lover. There they are, lining the walls of your shelf, scattered all over your desk, lolling on your side table, and anywhere else where they can squeeze in and lie awhile muttering to themselves. You have lent them to your friends, who may or may not have borrowed them permanently, so why not start a store? Quit your job, find a nice well-lit room in some corner of town and stack shelves upon shelves of books of all sorts, and you are in the books business, surely?

Of course, unlike other bookstores, yours will be unique. There shall be no Boggarts or 50 ways to become a damned millionaire. It will all be hardbacks with words crafted by wordsmiths and paperbacks for those who may not want to pay so much. There will be comfortable bean bags and reading nooks for those who just want to read from your shelf- let’s not be so prude as to want to sell all the books. No food would be allowed, though a glass of wine or whiskey will be welcomed as long as it shared with the owner, and anyone who dares to fold a page will be summarily sentenced to banishment from the known universe- dogs maybe cute if you get past all that drooling and licking, but dogears never will be.

A bookstore cannot be profitable, if you think about it. How can one make money by just selling books, especially when you don’t want to get rid of them in the first place. Remember the time when you excitedly shoved a book into your friend’s hand from your shelf which you thought the person will love to bits(metaphorically)? Well, when was the last time you saw it, in bits or otherwise? You grew wiser and decided your bookshelf shall have better security than the queen of an empire that ever slept.

And then there are the kindle, ebooks and torrents- you tell yourself it’s okay if the book is too expensive- maybe five thousand and above? Or a 30 page graphic novel which costs two thousand rupees? Well, your scruples are yours, and amazon is the God of e-things anyway. Your costumers will be those old folks who maybe a bit too shy to ask their grandchildren to load books on their kindle, fellow bibliophiles who will go after your rarest of rare books(because duh, amazon and discounts for everything else), and that stray Orangutan who has decided that his library could do with a couple of more books.

Quitting your job is another matter. Your bank account is as balanced as a thulabaram carrying a generous king on one side and peanuts for the temple elephants on another, who by the way, are busy eating the peanuts as they are being added- who let in the elephants anyway? It’s so romantic, but by virtue of having read all those books, some of which you didn’t like, you have acquired apparent skill in doing those things which pass of as survival of the fittest. Let’s face it– you can dream all you want but you aren’t going turn into a beetle and loll about without catching a train or driving yourself to work — the chances of getting a heart-attack (0.01?) or heartburns(0.6?) are higher.

Let’s say you work enough to own a nice nest- nothing fancy, maybe a crow’s next, and have decided that every minute in a day will mean something, find a place whose rent doesn’t require you to be a Prince of Barbaria(or Bay Area), strike deals with those notorious distributiors(35% madam, and no less), have a loyal coustmer base(you got to be some sort of prince after all)…and then you go to a not so fancy restaurant, have a hearty meal to celebrate. A waiter brings you the bill. You look at it, do the math, close the store and go back to whatever you were doing.