Neon-glow

Mary met Max in a little pub on the downtown alley, where rats could clean you off your squalor.

Max said it would be safe. 

Mary had passed on the 100 dollar note for 2 grams of powder. 

When the bullets had kissed her everywhere Mary had slumped down gracefully, flushing it all out at once. 

In that dingy little pub called ‘neon-glow’, the police found her eyes gouged, and when they looked carefully, they could see the word dreamer painted all over her brain. 

This Time Next Year

I believe all my inspiration comes from insomnia, in case you belong to an earlier time, you must not be aware of this term.

So, one of these mornings, after a dead-pan sleepless night of maximum brain activity, I had called up a friend to ask him, if it were ever possible for me to become a writer. He had answered with all positivity, he had faith in my talent, but first you have to make sure your book sells, how do you do that? I did ask. You need to write a love story, anything, you have to make sure it’s got ‘love’ in it, don’t make it intellectual. No body digs that.  

So basically he would tell me to maturely ape some of the keen writers of our generations who talk about their bruised broken dreams and breaking up and patching up and doing it on a SUV.

Hush, I would tell myself. Me who has a big opinion of himself couldn’t possibly abase his sacred hobby, to write something like that. If I weren’t a hypocrite I would have let it go, but where would I be without opinions, so I should call such books degrading. I had my own opinions of love, not very platonic though, but nevertheless a moderate dose of literature does make you a little insane, in the rain.

But I always had faith in my friend’s acuity. Well what are friends for anyway, if you do not have faith in their senses?

So I had to write a love story, if I had any chance of being a writer, I had to move people, with the single most abstract feeling in the world, the feeling of love, conveyed through words. But how do a layman who had never felt the kind of love that moved our generation, write about love?

And there in lay my challenge, everything that I would write about love, would be a lie, not a true story, so why would my story sell? But aren't stories about such imaginary lies?  

Do lies sell? But I have to listen to my friend.

So how do I feel about love? Well, I don’t know. But I think after I write down the story, I might know how I feel about it, so cometh the next paragraph a love story shall begin. I don’t know if it would come out right though.  

I hope it does.

I hope my friend likes it.

I met her on the stairs, I slipped two steps, and stumbled in front of her, she had a pale brown face, and brown little eyes, and she could carry her long hair in perfect synchrony with her austere self.

I thought she was beautiful, like many other men had thought at different times. Yes, physical beauty moved me.

Pulchritude. Abundant Pulchritude.

Her funny collar-bones. Like oars in a boat.

What if, what we think as beautiful were ugly in another planet? One mustn’t intellectualize love stories.

So there we had met, on the stairs, as if life could only go up or down from there, like life would never be standstill, like there could be fall. There should be fall.

She had smiled at me. Mannerisms had followed. Mannerisms of our generation.

Exchanging cell-phone numbers.Smooth.

Small talk.Smooth.

It should be followed by a first unofficial date, on the way back home, signifying nothing. The prospect of love is always god-damn easy for the romantics. It’s the real-love that they miss out at times. But then again, one mustn’t philosophize love stories.

You leave it for the sad stories.

So it had continued, a coy love-affair, one could suspect, of un-uttered sentiments, burning gently in the glory of rainy days. Oh the beautiful cloudy sky, the humid gentle breeze, the company of a beautiful woman, and the prospect of love, amorous days they were, right?

 In the world of fleeting moments every second is your present, and a second ago your immediate past. The whim of ‘time’-our great healer is that, it often spoils what it heals. It heals you by spoiling your memories.

Yes. That’s what it does.

So I do not remember how the dynamics changed or what was it that changed it all one day, or how she got lost, and how I couldn’t find her, or if she ever loved me, or if it were growing up games that we played, if it were fun?

I wish I had kissed her though one of those fine days.

But how often do life turns out how we imagine it? But since I am imagining it on the first place, I may have kissed her alright.  

Not then though, she had gone too far away, but years later, after we had lost our lovers, sons, and daughters, and had found each other on the bookshelves of our imagination.  

So I guess; I feel strongly about a weird kind of love after all. I guess I am too sappy and needy, spoilt in a world of abundant suffering. And I whine because I have never had a real shot at love, the kind of love that exists in this world between men and women, that I have to imagine some human equivalence through words to overcome my innate loneliness, but it’s alright I tell myself.

I would repeat, it’s alright.

My friend would read my story and he would say that I am awkwardly mushy, that it won’t sell, that it’s full of pseudo-intellectual generalisations, and no break-ups and patch-ups, but speculations.

I would know then that I wouldn’t have any chance at being a writer, but at least I will be happy knowing that if I have to live in this world, it would be for a kind of love that I would believe in, I think, the one like those great surges that engulfs you and takes you on the other side in a flash and you really don’t understand what it was all about.

Like one could always smile and utter,

‘what the fuck was that?’

And that’s why I will conform to this world for the time being.

Because, I know you live in this world and you will always understand this much.

For you.

The Habit

He has an ugly face. God was at fault.

His thoughts are a little distant, like carnivals in a foreign land, his nights are lonely, very lonely and sleep always evades him, mostly in summer.

Mostly in summer.

He is sleepless tonight and very lonely, sleep is evading him yet again.  So he invents a habit, his ugly hands throws tantrums beneath his abdomen, and after a while he is soporific. Like an infant patted to sleep.

A habit is born.

A good habit?

It stays with him, the habit, and ends rather abruptly when he turns

Thirty three years, three months and three days,

the very day his darling mother brings him

A wife.

Being Funny(One) :/

When I was a young boy, I did not have leash on my feelings. My heart, like they say in novels was an organ of fire.
I was so much in love with a girl that I wanted to see the whole world with her, that was my idea of romance, seeing the caves and caverns of a bucolic Crete, never accounting to the fact that she didn’t want to see so much of the world on the first place. Not with me, never with me.
It was like those passions of unrequited love, you know, the kind mentioned in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, except you get no points for being ‘ugly and sad.’ 

So I decided to put her in my heart, and travelled the entire world hoping she would see them.
If I put her in my heart, she would peek through my ribcage and see the world every time I ripped off my shirt, for say in the glacial moonshine of northern Norway, or beneath the midday sun of oasis-lined Sahara.
A very romantic logic.
That was my idea of obsessive-romance, you know, poor me.

Years later my grandson did the same for someone else’s grandson, except that he was ‘whatsapping’ every sunset over the Danube, or every moonshine over the Taj Mahal , thus cosseting a technologically advanced obsessive-romance of their time, a more practical one, with more shirt ripping.

Apple.

You
Are an apple 
That grows
In Summer
Feeding moribund
Birds
Whose
Wings are painted
Red
From yesterday's
Shower
In the land
Of Gore
Where apples grow
No more. 

A Man of The Rats

Chang was the Man of the Rats.

 He lived in a docile Beijing street corner where the walls bore the holes of the past, bullet holes, the strayed ones, from the days when they would line up those old boys along the wall and address a firing squad. 

He lived among those rats, inhabiting these holes, that bore the souls of the dead martyrs, who would feed on Chang alive, little by little, every day, until his bones had obliterated and his memory had receded into a vanquished settlement.

Once upon a Time, Colonel Chang was a man of the people.

A Man Of the State.

An Artsy Kite

Tonight I had seen a kite in my plaintive dreams. A kite made of newspaper cuttings, very artsy you know, like the ones they make to design a cultural fiesta-the kind of kites that do not fly.

I call them the sad kites, for a kite should fly and flutter, up and away in the blue sky. How limited are those artsy kites in their fashion school!

In my child hood we had made a similar kite, me and my brother you know.But secretly we had desired it to fly, so we had whispered the magic words of our secret book for it- so that it would fly and flutter, up and away in the blue sky.  Our life revolved around magic. There was so much magic everywhere.

 So in the pursuit of our artsy kite, I had gathered our neighbours’ newspaper cuttings. Our neighbour was a far-right politician, who collected only his party approved newspapers and was always gifting it to everyone to read. Since my mind was fresh and young as he boastfully mentioned, I was given many to read and from there my brother had cut out equal lengths of rectangular pieces, later only to be reshape it into an oblong fashion. He was the architect you see. I also gathered, withered broom-sticks to map out the backbone, and my withered memory does not remember much else, but the swift hand movements of my kid-brother who I swear could make Rome in a day, if he ever wanted to.

But I remember the kite, it was the same I saw tonight, two-feet by three-feet, braving the newspaper cuttings of a party news, and the cliched gold-promises for a bulletproof future. 

An artsy kite, you know. 

A kite that even after so much magic words and magic winds would get stuck in the single gigantic Pine tree-that had grown in our tropical city. 

A kite that was so dear to my brother-that he had climbed seven floors just to reach the top of the tree, and who in the helm of his adventure had stepped on a dead branch, and encountered a fatal fall.

This was the kite I saw tonight you know. An artsy kite- my brother made and died for.

While his funeral had passed and been forgotten in an instant, the kite had remained stuck in that pine tree. Soon there were critics that had blamed the mischievous kid himself who had dared to climb the cursed tree, and there were television-programs on how to tackle rowdy kids, others had blamed me, for being his comrade and letting him carry on with this meticulous suicidal act, my mother had blamed my father for not buying us regular kites, and there were all the ensuing bitterness and blame game that one associates with an un-natural death.

‘There is no magic left in this world’, in a state of utter shock and bitterness, I had declared. So I had decided to burn the magic book.  

But it won’t burn proving to me that magic did exist then, so why did not the kite fly? Why did kid brother have to die?

The religious activists were my sympathizers and with my help they had started the anti-pine movement so as to cut down the pine tree which was a bad omen, in a tropical city, according to the chief. After a long-lasting battle with the biologists they were successful in getting the permission to cut it down, but a pine tree in a tropical city is no ordinary tree, it had trembled its roots and had drove anyone who had tried to accost it.It had made me think again that magic was everywhere around me, then why did not the kite fly? Why did the branches not swing and rescue my kid brother? They had tried to burn it too afterwards but it had rained every-time, and so the pine had stood still darkened through time, flaunting our artsy kite, nurturing the ancient memory of my dead brother.

 Years later while attending a University lecture of an eminent philosophy professor I had come to realize that while the charm of magic laid in hiding the truth, never revealing it, lie corrupted magic. And then I remembered our kite was made of newspaper cuttings. 

An artsy kite.