Another New Year, bebe.

Sadness in lovers is telepathic. Like human consciousness, it transcends mysteriously through the ether of space-time, at times twitching like a caterpillar glued in amber. Sadness is telepathic and when the year draws open with the scent of a new day, always look back for memory is telephonic- sweet or sour.

Happy New Year.

Rectal.

The benefits of growing up in a house full of mad people is your memories are battered with interesting stories. Although I should mention that this story involves a man who wasn't remotely connected with my family-the reason could be that he was from Bangladesh and he spoke a language that I normally make fun of, all in good humor.

Long before "Saradha" made the headlines, the dacoits of Bengal have had a prominent place in literature and elsewhere (as here in Bengal it governs life and ideologies.) Also, one mustn't mistake communists as Robin Hood. Personally, I feel Robin Hood was much better, but then to each his own- and please let's not list down the accolades, such listing is really juvenile when it comes to debating.

I remember a time in Calcutta when it was advised not to take the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass at night, this was before we owned a car, only a few buses would ply through the wetlands of the eastern corridor and there was a scare of dacoits. Dacoits, dacoits here and there- a real threat.

The malaise of this Bangladeshi man stemmed out from this sole fact. He was paranoid about the dacoits and his paranoia could be justified- a man doesn't like losing what he has earned. I remember my father mentioning a very young me how he had help unearth this man's almost lost treasure. You see, my dad is a surgeon and cuts open people for fun, he was more than happy to do a rectal treasure hunt of an honest man who out of fear had hid it there. The asshole indeed is a wicked place. It's only function is spewing out shit. It also has the ability to suck in what it finds interesting, so you can never trust it, not with anything that's dear to you. Never with your feelings or money. The Bangladeshi man learnt it the hard way.

In times like ours, where honesty is a treatise of the past, where empty materialism addresses every decision, where misguided and principally evil people loot us in broad daylight, where being sentimental is a tragedy, where progressive thinking comes at the cost of your four walls, where love is a religious agenda, where caste is important to some patriarchs, where a civil servant still opts for dowry and a beautiful bride, one must wonder what's next, whom to trust, whom to bestow our hopes with?
What now?

Oh, by the way, since I am a 'Bhadralok' and all, next time I will use a more scientific and esoteric word for an asshole. But one can't deny the truth that assholes are assholes and for long our politicians have resembled them.

Photographs, memories and an idea

A gush of wind blew in through my rectangular window. I kept an ink jar on my table to make myself feel blue in the mornings and sometimes when the pigeons came and sat on my balcony I tried taking their photographs. It wasn’t hard to capture these calm birds, they were camera friendly. Often it so happened that they would look me straight into the eye,through the 18mm lens. I wondered what they were thinking, although I always made sure that I catch them unaware, as beauty is most exaggerated in the moment when the beautiful is elsewhere, her spirit is not aware of trapping itself-it’s careless pulchritude captured through someone else’s aesthetic sensibilities.Sometimes when a thing like that happens without coercion and with optimal timing, a photograph is made and it can move worlds. Perhaps the first requisite for being a good photographer is not being a good observer; it requires you to be a good stalker, but then I don’t want to pique other sensibilities.

I once took a photograph of a girl who could move the world with a wink. It was the very last picture of her I had ever taken. I asked myself, what of beauty? Why her? The answers were never easy.

Her short stories were written in the sands of the shore. She was aware of the wavelets that could run over their fragile existence. In a way that’s why she wrote them in the sands of the shore. Her stories breathe life; they existed and they didn’t want much to be. All those stories including her ever wanted was being read by the right eyes, being read with the right heart, just in time when the stars would slant across the southern sky. I wish I had read them in time. As far as the wavelets were concerned they weren’t tumultuous or wicked-they were just systematic and they were just following the natural cause of things. They flew wherever the wind took them. They washed away life and they washed away her stories.
You see, nine out of the ten problems in the world were because none dared to disobey the wind. What to do, Addie?

 Let’s just follow the wind. Let’s drink to that.

The last time I took a picture of this beautiful girl, she looked away, her long hair graciously teasing the monochrome which I intended to portray- and then she gleefully accepted her fate when I weaved her beauty and beamed it all over the world, when I sold a part of her spirit for audiences to wallow in it,to appreciate it, to be moved by it, to discuss it over supper tables, unaware of the stories that made her- the ones she wrote in the sands of yesterday. Like her forgotten stories this too was fleeting, and as the deluge of the new washed away the memory of the photograph, she too withered away from my life.The wavelets of time never justifies regrets, that’s why when I am lonely I often think that I should have not loved her through a photograph, I should have read her stories when it existed- as for people like me love is not a photograph rendered from memory there’s nothing visual in it, not now, after all these years. Love, I know now, is a pleasure felt in the heart- aloof from everyone else’s spectacle, true only to the self. I was young, and what could I have known back then.

Like I said, these days I only photograph pigeons and party goers, and all that love and beauty I was talking about is locked away somewhere in a safe.
The key is lost. 

Calcutta, where he was born

Calcutta, where he was born,
remains torn between the
Kabuliwala’s song and the Mukherji’s
forgetfulness.

It vacillates with the strange countenance of
culture, counter-culture, ideas and enigmas,
modernity and the antiquity, and
of things that sometimes are as distant as the aurora
itself.

The sky remains blue, dappled with her
white siblings. By the scent of autumnal hue,
the minds often takes a gladdening pew
of contentment
but fresh excuses crop up- of revolution and
making love, as trees droop their leaves in humid
merriment.

Here, as Mukherji often says,
love you see, can be found in the tree tops and
in grassy parks, in the dark skins of young men,
in the concrete seraphim hanging out with an
invisible friend making the noise of a thousand
civilization. What is that word-cosmopolitan?

 For the mothers in love
feeding an infant dog, for trams that run over poets,
for yellow romantic cabs, for the kid with the dress
dancing in a discotheque, for the drunkard with the
white brainy pill, for I who burn in love, for bearded
patriarchs with impotent minds, for the peasants and the
sufferers, for matchbox like slums, for the careless ones,
for story tellers with the tales of a crazy tiger in the zoo
whose howls of love have turned into a moo, for artists
driven into politics and politics turned into poly-tricks,
 for the partition of an old country, for the drying of blood,
 for the other side of the Padma, from Chittagong to  Darbhanga,
for me, for us, for you, for me, for I, for this,
 she remains.

Love she says, must hang out of
us, and not hang us,

and a young poet dies
in his words.
 

Three words and two seasons

I buy her for three words.
She is my lackey?
(Lovers are lackeys.)

Summer.
She does my chores.
She feeds me food.
And ego.

She knocks my door.
I reveal my room.
She lies down.She is warm.
Like summer.
We make love.
Peacocks in rain.  


Winter.
She does my chores.
She feeds me milk.
She is cold. Her breath is
strong. She catches a fever.
I do not care. I drink my
milk.

She sleeps for long.
She is dead.
I grieve for her,
When I grieve.




This is life.
Two seasons long.
All else is play,
where three words that
wrong.

Wake up and the world is yours.

Our apartment was just like any other old apartment in those erstwhile refugee colonies of New Delhi. There was no water related problem. We belonged from riparian places. The only thing that concerned us while looking for an apartment in the capital was water. I liked it. Gourav liked it too. We were high functional drug users. At the end of the day, when we came back from our easy going jobs we would inject ourselves with serums that could help us catch nightmares in our sleep. It was charming at first- we had been doing that for quite a while promising to stop every other weekday. When we changed apartments we decided we would change our habits too, but it diffused into us from that place to here. Somehow I think we loved our nightmares. It was routine for us to to wake up to our own screams. So one fine morning when I was dreaming Indira Gandhi’s assassination scene, I wasn’t befuddled at all when I heard Gourav’s scream.

‘Aaaaaaaannn’

It sounded sharper than the notes of a man’s voice. I let it pass and went back to 1984. Soon, I heard a knock on my door and had to get up. Gourav was standing outside with his bare body and glowing red eyes. He made a face like he had seen a ghost. I asked him if something was wrong. He told me that there was a pigeon in the room. I was still delirious from last night’s dose, so I took some time to think. Now before I continue with this story- I must mention something about the pigeons of New Delhi.

The pigeons of New Delhi were once the pigeons of Old Delhi, they used to carry letters in the time of those old cruel Kings and were trained to unite restless and patient lovers through words. I had read this long ago in some history book- while preparing for the fraudulent IAS examinations. But alas, such lessons are deemed unimportant by our modern kings. But as far as legends go, I still fondly remember the story of the pigeon Princess.

Once upon a time, in that forgotten city of Delhi, there was a lost princess who kept pigeons. She used to scribble poetry and tuck them in their legs and lonely peasants would wake up in the morning to find their life moved by words. The king was aware of his daughter’s power over the masses and he encouraged his daughter to nurture her passion. He summoned poets from all over the world- and under their tutelage the princess got better. Words sometimes could be used to deceive people too, and one of the poets who had once arrived in the king’s court much to the ignorance of the nobles was the great trickster from Babylon. He was a man who had been instrumental in the downfall of kingdoms. He looked like someone who never aged. No one knew his power, but his words were just viciously sweet and subtly harmful. Under his tutelage the princess learnt the art of metaphors and how to lace poison in words. It wasn’t surprising the Princess fell in love with him, for who can resist the charm of being deceived in love? So one fine day, while beguiling over being in love the Princess wrote three words thousand times over and they were all made to be delivered into each and every home. If only the pigeons could read they would know what those words meant. There was a general unrest among the peasants after this. Due to the years of good governance it was easily appeased by the noble king. The wise men of the state who by this time were aware of what had happened ordered that the charmer of Babylon be put to trial. By virtue of the state laws- both he and the Princess were tried for treason against the King. This was punishable by beheading. The trickster deceived everyone and escaped. He was nowhere to be found. It was now only the Princess’s fate to be put to death. The noble king couldn’t put his own daughter to death so he let her go, and demanded a kingdom wide search for the trickster. The Princess was heartbroken in love, so she didn’t leave her bedchamber for the next eighteen days and at the end of the nineteenth day she couldn’t be found and it was said that she had turned into a pigeon herself- the bearer of words, which were mostly deceitful. Centuries had passed since that day and Delhi had shed so much blood, that even its history was written in the red ink of passion. Delhi had transformed into a modern metropolis of hubris and speed. There were pigeons everywhere and sometimes you could see them fly up and down in the roads, while sometimes you would find them beheaded by your exhaust fan, as if no one could escape fate in a city besotted with the King’s rule.   

I asked Gourav whether he switched off the ceiling fan because nothing was worse than seeing a decimated carcass when you are high. He replied in the affirmative. I wish I was romantic enough to expect poetry from a frightened pigeon that was trapped inside his room. Wings were meant to be a blessing, and look at that sad pigeon stuck, alright. I never asked how it got in his room on the first place, and why it couldn’t get out, because Gourav provided me with all the answers. We always told this to ourselves- hey, we are drug users not abusers. So I went straight into the room with a stick and tried to realign the curtain so that the bird can go out, but alas, I couldn’t manage it in that state. The door lay ajar for a while and the pigeon sat quietly on his table, tilting its head in agony. Afternoon set in, while we slowly fell out of our inebriations as more blood flowed into our brain. Another weekend had begun with an unwelcome guest, there was no office today. I remembered texting a friend who suggested that we should cook it, for pigeons taste good. Man is the only animal who kills for no reason at all, and I decided not to kill it for a reason. The next time we ventured into the room, we couldn’t find the pigeon. We looked here and there, and examined all the nooks and corners with our big eyes, but there was no birdie.

 The Bird has Flown.

 We looked under the bed like children who look for coffers, and still there was no trace of any remotely winged creature except for some dead mosquitoes. We sighed and looked at each other wondering if we had imagined the entire episode, for the windows were closed and the curtains were drawn. Helplessly we tried looking for our serum collection to delete this day from our memory and it was here that we discovered a paper lying with words scripted in the language of poets.

                              جاگو اور دنیا تمہاری ہے

The Princess had come to us,
perhaps to deceive us into
life.

Counting aeroplanes.

I sit here in my room counting aeroplanes
as they vanish in the sky, but birds never
say goodbye. The sound of metallic vibrations
slowly fades in the migrant atmosphere,
leaving behind a thin trail of white dust
and here in my old villa some hearts’ wither
and rust.  

Monsoon clouds, humid air, stale city traffic,
a beggar’s wink- like pale stains of memory
they clink and blink. I remember them in
parts, and I name them in Her name- solitude,
my lady. The affable fly comes singing poetry
in my ear and I slap myself, the lizard keeps on
chewing last night’s moth, the ceiling fan plays
the circular songs of monotony and like them I keep
coming back where I count aeroplanes as they
vanish in the sky, hoping I will catch them waving a 

goodbye.

Up in the azure sky, as
the world gently moves by
and some lonely travelers forgetfully sigh
I tell myself: Hey, I am a traveler too-
‘In my head’ when it’s held high,
and we are all travelers when
we die.