The Distance between Delhi and Kolkata

The distance between Delhi and Kolkata, Falguni writes, is not elastic and you can feel the utter helplessness and homesickness around this time, that always creeps up and grabs the Bengalis hard. CR park cannot fulfill the aspirations of an entire race seeking salvation in duplicity of it's favorite festival. Although, it's a two hour aeroplane journey or an 18 hour long train journey, the Bongs still whine a lot, it's something about their weather. Parminder who cycled all the way from Multan to Delhi did witness radical changes every 5 hours, he wonders if he would see the same from Bengal to Delhi- he would know when the humid marshlands will give up to the ancient plains of Magadha, to the entire old world where people have grown like vermin, because life was too easy- because "ish Desh mein Ganga behti Hain". 

The distance between two cities is never much, by air, by rail, and yet these people are complaining, says Falguni, who took the Sher Shah route herself; and then her life changed. Like Parminder when she decided to cycle all the way from Kolkata to Delhi, she realized how far she was away from home. If one day, all the planes were grounded and all the railway lines were usurped, she would be locked in a strange distant land far, far away from home, and that thought was reason enough to feel the way thousands around her felt- helpless and homeless, a broken being yearning to return to places that were inside them when they were young, places that were them long before they became themselves- places with lush green fields, and rivers and fishes, where you could sweat and swim, where there are forgiving thunderstorms, the blackness of the sky and around this time the greatest festival of all - you know.

Notes from the Tide Country

NOTES FROM THE 

Tide Country

There’s a mangrove tree in my backyard
and like it’s roots, I too spasm out of
this muddy earth- this is my country
my own silted land where your words
will remain eternal (and your love too ),

as the rivers shift, and the seas rise- 

you will still find me here manning that little tree, 

hunched beneath the shades of 

a mud-thatched universe.

I wonder what Gopal was wearing that
day, when he went inside the forest,
names of gods in his lips, skies asunder,
was there a storm in the high seas?
That night Seuli went mad in grief,
the wind changed directions and
everyone on this bank shuddered 

hearing the howl of the beastly gods. 

Early morning next day, prayers were sung

for the departed; I wonder what Gopal
was wearing the day he got lost inside
the forest, only to return three days later,
bare-clothed, emaciated- a five and a half feet
mud figure- the gods had spared him;
they took Seuli to Calcutta and admitted
her in an institution for the broken-hearted;

in the tide country, lovers often get trapped 

inside their own grief vortex- never to move on,
intertwined lives, all for love.

All for love.

For love, Gopal doesn’t speak to me,
it’s his son who does the talking,
‘He doesn’t speak since that day’
a speck of black cloud hangs above our boat,
in some distant imagined darkness, a tiger
swims from one island to another-
in search of a mate- love-struck, lonely,
ravenous with its animal desire
yet stunning in its animal grace
the story of  all the lovers in the world
- rolled into one gentle beast. 

Isn’t it so?

There’s a mangrove tree in my backyard, and

years ago, when the tide had threatened my

home, my life, my love, something came over
me, a dream or  a god you may say, and
he asked me to worship the tree,
‘ Do you see that patch of tree there over the bank?’
I planted them all and the gods smiled at me. 

You lie there in the bow of your boat, painting the
moon. The silence is comforting, far away from the
city and its hulabula, your pulse slows down,

 the GPS lets you know your bearings,
most of the time. When the world was
water many lives ago, you were home at sea. 
You check your phone  sometimes with a smile;
 and there’s a faint signal and sometimes you tell your
stories into the night and the forests witness it all;
the tides let you know that there’s beauty in this monotony,
and in reassurances and simple things;

armed with all this knowledge you store
them for the years ahead; your eyes glitter with
all the dreams you have dreamt everyday,
the sea breeze salts your skin, and you ask
yourself many things- 

who put the moon inside your head? 

When the world was water,
you were home at sea.

And when you will make your
own world- with  a recipe of swollen
rivers, tides, lovers, beasts, gods, and
all the beautiful things you have ever
known- I wonder who you
would turn to.

Indian Circus and The Government

Many years ago, George Orwell wrote,
"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
Most government in power tries to alter history. But no one surpasses the yen and enthusiasm of the present government. In Amartya Sen's book, Argumentative Indian, I had come across an essay where he points out how some artefacts were placed in certain places to Hindu-ize ancient Indian historical places (this was done during Atal Bihari Vajpayee's term and it had later been disproved). Also, this was before the use of rampant social media when the checks and balances were manageable. This morning I was reading about the history of the Indian Circus, and I came across the names of various fledgling circus back during the colonial days- most rising out of Kerala (if I were a Hindutva historian I would lose my shit) which was the cradle of Indian Circus. Altering names and history is something that you can trust your governments with impunity.Here are some of the names, that need immediate government intervention, as attempted by a right winger friend of mine:

Whiteway Circus ~ fair and lovely circus

The Great Lion Circus ~ the gau rakshak circus

The Fairy Circus ~ apsara cricus

The Oriental Circus ~ Bharat Mata ki Jai circus

Ramayana Circus ~ how dare someone use Ramayana and Circus in the same hemisphere; omitted!

To the Lady at Sea

This afternoon paints a torrid affair
My dog sniffs and barks in lugubrious ardor
The skies are hell bent on a thunderous endeavor
As I am headed to the forests of Sundar

Who unpacks my heart at such a lonely hour
Her tattered top windsails with tidal power
She plods in the yachts of otherworldly sire
Reminiscing a time when the world was fire.

Flash poem two

When we will grow bleak and senile,
broken backs and a toothless smile-
with all the portents long behind us,
and all the possibilities doused with time;

(in that time)

windless hopes will hover around,
regrets will kiss our deepest wound
but tears will be few and far flung
as memories wear quicker than a sad song.

Darjeeling 2018

The cold room where
we have put up
in the basement of
this old hotel,

where fires don't
light because
there's not enough
oxygen in the air-

where we breathe on
noxious metaphors
and stories we
told ourselves
as children

where my friend speaks
in the language
of his violin and
sometimes I
see tears between his
performances;

where I mostly strike
the wrong chords on my guitar;

where we make music,
troubadours from the plains;

where it's too cold and
we sleep on
separate beds,
deciding not to hug
because its gay, they say;

breathless and frozen
the nimble moonfull
night awaits- we miss
our wayward lovers,

jerking off to the
silence of the next
door couple. This
was the dream life.

Salvation Poem- from coal country series

One moment we are planning
trepid little movements, that
would trump the version
of a nightingale's love song;
and the next moment we say
farewell and goodbyes- because
we want what we want!

Somewhere closer to your home
that summer, I had just wanted
time to stand still- I had wished to
to move as fast as the speed of light,
to whiz past Universes and head right
into the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy;

to stand at the edge of visibility and
look at my future and everything
I know recede into a big black hole,
so that I could see every thing that would
and should happen in front of me,
and may be then I would do it right.

The end of an affair

The place where you grew up smells of everything good, the dust stifles the morning air, a little goat next to your window bleats away in search of her mother.
I thought of calling my mother; your mother checked my temperature when I shivered last night, it would pass.
The countless vehicles whoosing past the highway gave me an illusion of constancy, a comforting noise, something you have grown up to , something about comings and goings- in the bowels of this earthly place I understand something about letting go, it's where you came back when I hurt you over and over. 

My salvation begins here. May be this is a part of our story too, the birth of something beautiful. 

I will just hope.

Justice for Asifa and a family story

In the light of everything bizarre and disgusting that's happening in the country, I remember a story that I feel like sharing. My father is a Pediatric Surgeon, we don't talk much other than football results; he forwards motivational videos over whatsapp and sometimes I forward articles that I feel he should read. It was from a friend, who used to be his intern , that I got to know a story that had moved me.

I am aware of my father's brilliance in his field of expertise, I hear it from acquaintances and sometimes from his colleagues and classmates, we had a very modest childhood so it was hard to understand that he was a well known figure, perhaps that's what public service is all about in this country; that was an India just after liberalisation of the economy. A Bengal marred with pseudo commies and their bourgeois terror. 

There was this surgery that he performed a few years ago, may be it's not a big deal, I don't know the exact timeline either. It was on a 3 year old girl. She was raped and when she came in there was no difference between her vagina and her anus, a 3 year old girl. It was a successful operation. A reconstruction surgery. She now leads a normal life, without an inkling of what may have happened to her. May be she still gets nightmares, but in her waking life she is a bright young girl with no memory of monsters that tread this world. 

I felt like sharing this because with everything that's happening, sometimes it's important to carry on with our jobs and restore some sense of normalcy in an otherwise ugly and nefarious place this country of ours is turning into. May be it always was, the more we shy away from the system, from politics, from being opinionated about how things should be, everything that we hold dear can just vanish in the wink of an eye - just like that 8 year old nomad girl and countless before her. 

That's all.

Nexito fun

Its always nice to have resident doctors, the kind of drugs they will throw at you will make you re-evaluate yourself (who am I kiddning); so I went to my father after I realized my personal arsenal of cetrizine tablets had all expired and told him I can't sleep- thanks to the flu I caught a few days ago; and after siphoning through his medicine box he couldn't locate any either, so he hands me a strip of this drug named 'Nexito' and asks me to have one, and i asked him if it's an anti-allergic or something, he just said, 'you will sleep well'.

Now that I have googled it and the entire strip is in my possession, its going to be a long long week in 'la la land'.

I still take notes

Everytime I closed my eyes,
The reverberations that clouded
Yesterday's supine moments harried
Nervously into my bones; 

When the world would end, she
would jostle into the estates of Lombardy;
a cloud of Volcano would take her over the stratosphere; 

we saw a faint smile in the corner
of her mouth and our imagination about her
ends in that place, in that monent, 

because he would fly across the earth,
in an ungainly spaceship to watch that
sight. Great loves, great sacrifices,
great spectacles , and everything with
great expectations - unbirdled by
this feverous tallow that covers a
citizens life- could be theater.

Who is he in paper, she asks?

Unhinged by the cordial hellos' and I love yous',
- I still take notes, uncordially.

Mothers Day

In the beginning
The mother was everything
The mitochondrial mother
The cellular mother
The mothers didn't have any mother-
efficient automatons, replicas,
replicats. 

And then one day my mother made
Me read Maxim Gorky's Mother, human
Mother, you know
And I wondered who these mothers were,
Good mothers, was mine one too?
Do we have bad mothers?
Bush had a mother, Escobar had a mother,
Bad childrens' equates bad mothers'?
And you have one too, good or bad, but
The question is who was the original
mother, the algal mother,
the prometheal giver,
the astral figure,
the life originator? 

Nowadays,
The mother is a ship, the mother is a board
The mother is a river, the mother is a land.

But if you ask me about the original mother,
I would say,
The Big Bang is the mother. 

(In the beginning the mother was everything,
and we had no word for her, but we knew who
she was, we still do, albeit we forget at times,
hence these days are important. )

World Cup, England

I think the Argentine press should get all reference of 'golden' censored from their reports and op-eds, because a nation whose name is derived from 'silver'/argentum', would surely suffer an existential crisis in the football field when referred to as the "golden generation". The Silver boy of Argentina- Lionel Messi, now that sounds cool. 

England's 'media backed' golden generation fails everytime because their "gold" was never theirs to begin with. It seems the English media has learned that finally, but only time will tell. 

To choose sleep or the English battling Carthage?
I think I will go with the former.

Flash Poetry

The ice melts in the
planets refrigerators-
birds die
Humans argue over
Human Rights,
the Left hand smells
like yesterday's stale dish,
the right hand is Iron.
The head rests,
snug between the two
Alive and hoping
The summer heat
Is malediction-

Here in Arebpat
we sleep
In the shadows
embracing somnolence
Of a lost world.

All alone in Chanakyapuri

As it is, my dreams have always been like feature films, now that I have been living in a hotel for the past nine days with zero human interaction, I knew at some point it would all come back, not the dreams but the old insecurities posing as dreams, all those years of living alone and the silence, the silence - and it's always about people, the ones who left, the ones who stayed, the ones who will leave, and the ones who will stay on...it fades away in this part though. 

It's a lovely morning, and my eyes are wet from all the strain that I had to live through last night- but here we are again, old foes and friends, springing towards a perfect day, looking to find the motif of purpose that will repeat in space-time before all that memory disappears. I stood up and addressed my jawline to an imperfect smile, the one I put out when I meet kind women, a smile neverthless, a smile without an audience- the mirror catching it all, two minutes of vertical toothbrush movements, and it's all gone now, the dreams, an unreal carnival of suffering, uncalled for, always uncalled for- they are easy to forget in my waking life.

When you were young you were like a bird that darted for the blue sky, and you slammed against a glass wall and hurt yourself, you are still that bird. Aren't you?

The English Patient and Man Booker

A few days ago, while I was still hiking in a little hamlet of Himachal far from the daily dose of information avalanche, I missed a news that doesn't have much relevance to my present life- Michael Ondantje's 'The English Patient' won the Golden Man Booker Prize.

It's a book I had picked up during my days of solitude, and I feel I lack words to describe how I felt reading it - but my heart did race while browsing through the underlined paragraphs again, for "the heart is anorgan of fire."

This book was made into a movie (Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, William Defoe, Colin Firth), which is beautiful in it's own right, and I wouldn't criticize it for ignoring a main character who turned out to be a Sikh. It's not upto Hollywood to capture the intricacies of a Sikh soldier fighting in a World War, falling in love with an English woman, so I guess cultural imperialism aside, it was smart in ignoring it. For those who haven't read it, I whole heartedly recommend this not so fat book that teaches you about loss and love, and more - its set during the second world war, a war that was the product of a rabid nationalism- it's another treatise on what war does to the human psyche, how love transcends customs , reasons and boundaries, how it consumes one, how time heals the spirit, how despite being unique we are all too similar - 

"We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste and experience."

Thank you Michael Ondaatje for writing this book.

Writing poetry on a rain soaked morning

If you are writing poetry on a
Rain soked morning -
You are aware of the exigencies
Of a soggy weather

Unfortunately to your surprise,
here and there pools of muddy
water vanishes into thin air,
like in the Middle East

Leaving salt, but
No dead seas, and the
Municipal workers warn
Of a Diarrhoea outbreak.

If you are not careful, on
this lonely morning- you
Might fall in love with the
First person you start talking with

(Unless she's a trophy wife, your
Affairs aside, you hate that type)

And end up fighting your whole lives
On who goes first in case of a
Diarrhoea outbreak. 

(Or together?)

Ethical animal food

The time I went to Japan I had visited a sushi bar. I hated it, except for the salmon eggs. The Bengali in me liked my fish cooked with an array of spices. I am not a food aficionado, if someday they discover a pill for hunger I would be it's first customer- perhaps I am missing out on the basic joys of being a social animal with a taste bud, but I have never cared much about food or it's taste. But still I couldn't understand the fascination in having uncooked fish- we discovered fire years ago didn't we? 

A few days before leaving Japan I went to a local fish market. It was a fascinating case study in the family of fishes and marine animals. Someday I will put up the pictures. 

Japan being an island nation has a long history of fishing and whaling. Life was difficult in that island, and even today a lot of intensive work and investment goes in growing crops. The Japanese government once tried to defend their whaling activities (and also the slaughter of dolphins, around the infamous town of Taiji) by saying that they were eating up too many fishes (which was a joke but governments everywhere sound like that to lobby their vested interests.) On being bullied and affronted by the selectively moral western media, if they would stop whaling in case their activity was fully subsidised, the fishermen was said to have riposted, 'its not about money, it's about pest control.' 

Ric O' Barry who had a major role in the Oscar winning documentary, The Cove, says: "There is no other animal, on sea or land, like the dolphin. We have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to communicate with them, but they are always trying to communicate directly with us. They are the only wild animal I know who have saved human lives — not a few times, but repeatedly through history. They are superbly adapted to the ocean, and make even the best human swimmer look clumsy."

In a world ruled by Sapiens, its important to have a few close friends though, and it's important to treat them justly. Milan Kundera, had rightly pointed out in his philosophical treatise “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.” 

Although, the bigger question that humans must address when it comes to their food choices, and it doesn't dwell in the seemingly easy dichotomy of vegan-nonvegan beings (a hilarious yardstick of measuring morality in case of foods, but the compass is obviously tilted towards the vegans), is how to solve the dilemma that is pertinent to every conscious omnivore - What is ethical animal food?

Mens Rea, Independence Day

For sometime now I have been appalled by how Victorian morality is often passed off as Indian culture by middle aged men and women and their unhappy and uneducated offsprings (they are all around us by the way and I mean no disrespect to any of them)- the colonial legacy is so infectious that it almost makes me squirm with disgust every time someone speaks of who should have sex and with whom ( and when, shaadi nai hui mere) in a country of 1.2 billion people, Kama-sutra, Khajuraho and other deciduous erotic temples. The courts are still debating about whether to reform the adultery law (why not scrap it ), and some scared patriarch is already losing sleep over a change in the status quo of the sexes. All in all, it was a Happy Independence Day, with old friends and acquaintances and a solid afternoon nap (full of insecure and comic nightmares). Here's one for the record:

It's the year 1893, and the Viceroy Lansdowne hires a spokesperson for the erstwhile colonial government in lieu of the Malthusian scare of a burgeoning native population. He is a very talented young man who resembles a Modi (Nirav is a deshdrohi, so I am safe in this reference) predecessor, a man who can cook up dreams just like you and I and this one being educated comes up with a line that is broadcasted all over the subcontinent, even the princely fiefdoms. 

"If you have a mens rea- you will have gonorrhoea"

India was never the same again.

Into the Island

I

If you have ever been on an island

that had a volcano, spewing up 

noxious gases, I am sure you would

know what it means to grow up in

my kind of a family, except its not true.

I was born in Old Atlantis, or that's what I was told,

before it went down to the sea. Whose blood did they

spill? All the lonely animals in the abattoir-

whose birth and death were forecasted,

whose existence was a daily act of violence-

in whose name we drifted melancholy prayers.

To the wind and to the sea we are all equal.

II

Where I grew up, there were mayflowers, 

and meandering rivers.  

I sometimes wonder if you 

and I would make an island,

one where we would raise grey 

wolves and teach them

to eat the living beasts out 

of people; where a volcano

would lie dormant and Prometheus 

would hide his fire; 

we would sleep beneath  

starry skies and the tropical 

palms will reflect moonlight far into the

 window of an apollo astronaut.

this life that we would share will not 

amount to an ounce of rice, bread and wine-

but all the things that we are 

too little to comprehend. 

There would be no war here, no justice, 

no heroes or villains, 

we would just be, won't we? 

Two mandolin bound

dreamers painting hieroglyphics 

for the new world.