the roof..

2011-07-07T05:40:00.000+05:00

"Hello?"
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, as she tried to recognise him.
"Hello?"
And another, when she did.
"I'm sorry.. I- I couldn't sleep," he said.
"It's alright," she said.

"How've you been?"
"I've been..alright, I think. I don't know. I haven't slept in a few days. I'm sorry, I didn't know who else to call."
"What happened?"
"What ever happens?" he said, smiling. "I can't sleep. It comes, and it goes."
And then, after a pause.
"How're you?"
"Well, I was safely ensconced between my blankets and some vaguely disturbing dreams about butterflies turning into basketcases, so I'm not altogether sure whether I'm happier, having you ring."
"Don't go having nightmares," he said, laughing only slightly. "You know that's my gig."
"Yeah? And how's that working out for you?"
"Well, it's half past three in the morning, I'm halfway through a pack of cigarettes and I'm calling a woman who I'm not at all certain ever wanted to speak to me again," he said. "So I'll tell you in a few minutes."
"Dramatic," she said. "You should put it in the book."
"Would that there were one."
"You know where I stand on that one."
"If I wanted to, I would. I know."
She paused for a moment, and he could hear sheets moving around her.
"What happened?"
"Are you still in that apartment?"
"I- what? No, I moved out of there a few months ago."
"Did you kiss the balcony goodbye from me?"
"a.."
"I'm sorry. That probably gets filed under things I shouldn't say."
"Who knows? Yeah, probably."
He heard a car screech to a stop, a thousand miles away. A moment's silence, a moment's doubt observed, he heard it start again, tyres squealing purposefully.
"I was listening to Buckley."
"Honestly, a? Just write the damn book."
"Just listen. I was listening to Buckley. And, adolescent as it sounds, he reminded me that I was still hurting."
"You realised?"
"Yeah."
"Of course you're still hurting, a. What did you expect? It doesn't..it doesn't go away."
"You just learn to live with it, yeah?"
He imagined that he heard her nodding.
"Yeah," he said, again. "You just learn to live with it."
The stereo whirred, for a moment, throwing him off-balance. Moments later, Cohen came on.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't call to talk about this. I just- I couldn't sleep."
"I know, a," she said, and he imagined the lines against her face softening.
"So tell me about your life."

-all your demons, held at bay-

2010-12-27T23:12:00.002+05:00

the envelope sat on the corner of the table, menacingly.

he sat by the window, writing in the darkness. he always left just the bulb above the cooker on, when he was by the window. outside, the snow began to fall, lightly. he looked through windows, into his neighbours' lives - who loves who, he imagined, as he wrote scripts for their dinner conversation, for passing words at the kitchen counter.
i wonder what would happen if they ever found out how i write, he wondered, fearfully, as he wrote the words to go with the tall, slight, awkward-looking woman's gaze out her own window. is this a sort of theft?

she looked at the snowflakes with empty eyes, clutching her wine glass with clenched fingers - as if she needed, badly, to hold on to something real. the lines on her face traced out puzzles - deep grooves by her thin lips, tiny dimples just visible.

she wasn't smiling.

perhaps she's lost her job, he thought, but immediately dismissed the notion as too banal. but perhaps banal is what they want - life is, after all, a series of banalities, capped off by that most routine of occurances, that inescapable habit we all fall into, sooner or later.

she loved. he could see, in the emptiness, her story: she loved.

*

when she had left that morning, she didnt know if she was going to be coming back. she had said things- terrible things, things that he may not have deserved, but that finally broke the dam, and flooded out of her. where does one go, in the space between what people deserve and what we feel?

she had told herself it was nothing. those moments of nervous fingers at the dining table, of not being able to look at his eyes, of expertly dancing around their lives.

he had suggested they move in together. it had seemed so natural, at the time. they had met, laughed, loved (softly, warmly) and now their lives were intertwined.

and with his fingers between hers, she felt, sometimes, that this was enough. but then he would pull away, and she would gaze out the window.

the night before, she had walked into their room and sat at the edge of the bed. he was reading - Irving, she remembered, bitterly. He'd have liked this.
She had started to cry, and he had looked up from his book. he came to her, and she hung limp as he tried to comfort her.
'what's the matter?' he had asked.
'there, there,' he had said.
i don't think i love you, she had said, in a small voice.
'what?'
i don't think-. she couldn't finish. how does one explain a life that has become laced with ennui, to someone who has done nothing but love. love fully, and well. isn't that how stories are put together - you love well, and all of the other things fall into place.
but what if people aren't pieces?

the next morning, she told him she was leaving. that she needed to be away from him. that she needed time, that she would come back, perhaps, but that what she needed now, more than anything, was to get away.
she didn't know where she would go.

when she came back in the evening, he had already left. his things weren't in the cupboards. his bookshelves were empty. their pictures were gone.
frantically, she looked through the drawers, trying to find something - anything - that he may have left behind. she took apart the bathroom, she ransacked the lounge, leaving magazines strewn all over the floor. there was nothing there. had he been a figment of her imagination? how does one leave, so completely, so as to have almost never been there at all.

he had left a cd in the stereo.

with trembling fingers, she pushed play.

well i heard there was a secret chord, buckley (not cohen) said, and she almost smiled.

it had always, somewhat paradoxically for one so kind, and unfond of trite lyrical encapsulations, been his favourite line:

maybe there's a god above,
but all i've ever learnt from love,
was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew you.

the tiny notes tinkled into silence, as she walked to the window. it was empty, with him. but it was empty, still, without him.

*

carefully, he closed his notebook, and put out his cigarette on the windowpane.

and then he walked over to the table, picked up the envelope, and put it away, with the others.

he had written that letter to her so many times that he had lost count.

outside, the snow grew heavier.

- neon shines -

2010-08-23T02:32:00.000+05:00

d came to see me, a few days later. l was out - at the shops, or perhaps at work.
she wanted to talk about something inconsequential - graduate school, or switching jobs. we sat down in the dining room, its safety witnessing our conversation.
the huge wooden table, covered on that day by a pale blue, embroidered tablecloth (much like the ones that my grandmother used to make, lovingly, to her death), separated us as she started talking.
what she really wanted to talk about, of course, was her writing.
'i hate my writing,' i said. 'how can you expect me to like your's?'
she looked distraught - as if she was suddenly lost, not sure of where the exits are, not sure where she got on.
i took her hand, unthinkingly.
'i didn't mean it like that,' i said, softly.
that was when she kissed me.
i held her hand tighter.

*

'i don't think you realise what happened, back there,' she said, afterwards.
'in the dining room? i think i'm fairly certain.'
'no - i mean before that. before . . . all this,' she said, gesturing to the furniture, the cabinets, the tiny crystal figurines mounted on carefully placed doilies, a menagerie of marriage.
'that,' i said. 'yes. . i'm sure that i don't know what happened, back there.'
'i loved you, you know,' she said, simply.
'you didn't,' i said, just as simply. 'you love ideas, d. you love stories. you love tragic fairy tales and grand gestures, you love telling stories, and you never . . you never saw me.'
'i knew you better than her.'
'noone knows me better than l. you know someone - a ghost, maybe. someone who exists only in between what i said, and what i wrote.'
'isn't that important?'
i kissed her hands, gently, and told her something that i had never told her before. that loving her had been like talking to the voices. they never talked back to who you were - only to what they saw. and between my demons and her ghosts, i was lost. always lost, never quite sure of where i stood, and when the rug would be pulled out from beneath my toes. that if i had kept loving her, i would have ended up caught in between illusions, never quite certain if what i was saying was me, him, or someone else entirely. and never quite sure, when she took my hand, of what it meant.
how can you live like that.

the tear cut across her left cheek, but she seemed quite unconscious of it. i took her hand, again.

l walked in a few minutes later, back from the world outside all this.
'i got you some strawberries,' she said. 'i know how much you love them.'

- sit down with me, and let the time pass away -

2010-07-23T04:01:00.002+05:00

- for blueroses -

Permalink here.

2010-07-22T21:10:00.002+05:00

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2010-05-09T04:52:00.002+05:00

outside, the cars come and go. they stop and start, red and green, like magic, like clockwork (science is magic, magic is relative).
'come back to the table, a,' she said.
'should i?'
she was silent. afraid of my mother, as always.

*

'-so I said to him, don't touch it, it's loaded!'
laughter. the sort that ripples across a table, when you can tell in the higher notes that at least one person, like you, didn't think that was particularly funny.
'its wonderful, out there,' p continued. 'you can feel the sun in your bones - not on your skin. deeper, as if it's worked its way across clear air and inside of you.'
y smiled at him, shyly, while d gazed wide-eyed.
the clink and clatter of cutlery, steel on china; clear, thin glass against wood (the muffled thud, as wood, once living, gives, just a little). and polished spoons on polished lips - that cacophony of eating.
such is punctuation, at a dinner table.
in one ear, i hear the birds singing (to calm us down).
(not real, not real, i have to keep reminding myself. focus on the sounds.)
someone's talking about buying a house. it's time, they say . . to build something, to keep something. for some reason, i think of nathia.
l touches my fingers, under the table. i come back to them.
'has anyone had any strange dreams, lately?' i ask.
p smiles, y looks nervous and d turns away from p.
'i had one, last night,' she says.
my eyes, and a vaguely motioned knife, say 'well?'
'i was running,' she said, 'across an open field, when suddenly i noticed that there were no flowers - only dying buds. i had to keep running, because someone was right behind me, chasing me.'
p looked at her hair, caught.
'i kept running, but i kept worrying about the flowers,' she said. 'so eventually i stopped. i turned around, and there was no-one there. i picked up a dead bud . . . and it turned green, and begun to flower, right in my hand.'
her eyes always opened wider, at this part.
'but then i felt something digging into my skin at my wrist, where my palm begins. the flower was growing into me. inside of me! i could feel myself getting weaker, feel the blood flowing out of me, and into its leaves. the last thing i remember,' she finished, 'was lying in an open field, under a tree.'
as her last syllables hung in the air, she looked happy with herself. that was always d's way, i suppose.
p brushed a strand of hair out of his eyes, and touched d's wrist.
'was it right here?' he asked.
and now d was caught. so it goes.

when i left, p had just begun to tell a story about finding truth on his travels. i mumbled something about needing to check on the dessert (even as a child, i was always plotting escapes. a favourite was glancing at one's watch, and then feigning surprise, as if you've just remembered something. as a ten year old, i think that one amused them - either way, i was gone).
y, i remember thinking, always chooses so unwisely.

*
at night, i stare at cars. it helps me sleep, in cities without seas. that night, i sat down, to write.
"i'll always remember april, because of the tendrils of grass, the sun, and the tree.
when i was young, i would run. sometimes from imaginary friends, other times from imagined fears. i still do, of course. that April night, it had been fear.
across yellowed grass, dying from heat - too exhausted, it seemed, to live.
eventually, my legs slowed (as they always do). i felt as if i was running through thick air, as if all the weight i could imagine was in my hands, my feet, my fingers, my head, my heart - i couldn't run. i had to run.
after my fears consumed me, i lay in the yellow grass. i picked at a dead flower, watching as its petals dried up at my touch, as it turned to dust.
instead, its petals twisted, slowly; pink, and then a deep red. i felt its tendrils, caressing my wrists (and i thought of l). i felt its roots touch my veins, and i cried out (as i do, with l).
the last thing i remember was lying in an open field, under a tree."

i turned to watch l's silhouette in the doorway, and followed her soon after.

the cars come and go.

- animals, or, glass against wood -

2010-04-30T04:27:00.002+05:00

dear a,

the sun shone through white petals, this morning, and i remembered september - by the gardens, in her baking heat. that was the afternoon that i had screamed at you, while you walked away. home, you had said. 'i want to go home.' i have to go home.
as you left, my fingers reached for my silver pendant. i rubbed it, softly, to the sound of the door slamming. that was, i think, when we first broke (like glass, shattering, like waterfalls, like blood) - between footsteps and fingers.
(it's raining here, now. the raindrops are making patterns on my window, and my fingers tell me i've seen something.)

(it is one in the morning, the day has not ended. by two i am scared. sleep will not come.)
such a strange thing, love is. i wonder that i don't go mad, some mornings, and that i don't stay sane on others.
grey skies remind me of karachi's misty mornings. orange neon reminds me of drives by the beach (without you). red brick reminds me of parting, and rain of making love to you.
this morning, still asleep, my fingers touched the hollow of my throat - looking for dull silver.

it's been long enough, i think. i think that i'd like to see you, a. i wonder if you still live by the lake.

always,

l

- between footsteps and fingers -

2010-04-15T00:59:00.003+05:00

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2010-03-27T00:14:00.003+05:00

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2010-03-05T03:50:00.000+05:00

i first saw her in the summer, when she was still warm. between baking skin and the scent of red earth, we explored one another. she let me touch her in unexpected places, and i let her wash over me - we were both, of course, searching for home.
summer was the smell of water cascading over parched dust in a red brick driveway, the gentle crackle of leaves (something is always dying, in a city) as someone passed my window. (Keep walking past the open windows, irving wrote. and Sorrow floats.)
it was walking by canals, touching the tops of the weeds with the palms of one's hands. summer was when we were happiest, dreaming of clouds and better days, of fitnaa, in the red city.
the winds gradually quickened, and the rain came, and went. our autumn was learning people's names, strange dialects, and imagining new ends.
by winter's end, we no longer spoke as often, or as quietly. even so, winter was when we were warmest, to one another - when we leaned.
i left her, in the end, of course. lahore was a beautiful city, but she was never mine.

*

breaking hearts, she thought, quietly to herself, is what i do.
she used to write stories, about people, about cities, about herself. she told them, but only to herself, or when no-one else was listening. they were fiction, but they were not.
we loved each other, but we did not.
we could have loved eac-

i broke his heart, she began again.

- i wonder what you'll say about me, they said -

2010-02-16T21:24:00.001+05:00

- scars in the country, the summer and her -

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2010-01-24T07:50:00.000+05:00

dear l,

things were simpler then, when we loved like children do . . . claiming possession over each other's fingers and toes, blinking in wide-eyed wonder at smiles, sentences and scents.
somewhere in between your fingers and scent, i think, is where home lies. but where does the thinking end, l? when do we stop thinking about living? because between the imagining and the running, it's no wonder that i wake tired and sleep restless, that i chase nightmares and live dreams.
i don't know how long this can go on. i don't know how long we can keep from living.

love,

a.

a,

we were children, then. never innocent, never quite so guilty, as you once said (so wrapped up in your words, love, that i need to travel your pages to make it through).
i don't want to imagine forever. soon, i will be gone, perhaps. you understand, i think. i think.

love, always, and remember september.

l.

- mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. in fact, it's cold as hell. -

2009-12-09T06:14:00.003+05:00

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2009-11-23T04:11:00.002+05:00

dear l,

i wonder how it is that you are, out there between dignitaries, dissertations and dilemmas, somewhere between the sun and the sky.
it has been months since you wrote, and my fingers find that they miss your syllables as much as your skin. do they treat you well, where you are? how's the weather? are you happy?
i wonder about your happiness, in idle moments, between cigarettes, cups of chai, and stories.
then again, i don't suppose i get to ask these questions. it must have been a terrible wrong. was it in geneva?
france. no, it was france. you keep reminding me . . geneva was where we made love by the lake, and it was in france that i broke.
these details escape me . . you were always so good at keeping me together.
i find that i think of you often, even now, years later - waiting for trains, watching lovers by the green, in the smell of crisp mornings, in between nightmares. you'd think my skin would have grown accustomed to your absence by now - it has, of course, been so many years since we touched. somehow, each year rolls by, and i keep seeing you . . your fingers handing me change at the drugstore, in a busker's smile, in a stranger's lips. i wonder why it is that you haven't left, yet . . then again, i wonder what it is that i'd do, if i stopped seeing you, even if it sometimes leaves me empty, in the morning.
i saw a woman die, last night. her lips were flecked with blood, and a man in a shirt stained scarlet kept thumping at where her heart used to beat. i saw her head turn, as the life drained out of her. little droplets of blood fell from her lips, as she tried to squeeze one last breath out of this life. he was crying, by then, and she was staring straight into my eyes.
and then she was gone.
i woke up screaming, again, missing your smell.
i don't suppose that these letters, from your past, do you any good. then again, i can't see what harm they could do, either. you are elsewhere, somewhere, and i don't think you'll hold it against me to try and rid myself of blood-soaked nightmares, of death, and of this terrible fiction that becomes my reality.
hospitals are terrible places to say goodbye. that, i suppose, is also why i keep writing.

love,

a.

- death is the road to awe -

2009-11-16T06:25:00.002+05:00

l,

there was a time when i wanted to die in a lake in geneva, just you, i and the rain, softly on our skin, somewhere by the lake.
do you remember geneva? it was late in the summer, when we went. the air was turning crisp, and you could smell autumn, waiting in the leaves.
you looked beautiful, in the afternoon by the lake; right after we made love, and just before we fought. that is how i will always remember you.
i just wanted to know if you remembered geneva.

-a

a,

you called me to a cafe, and told me to come away with you. i was - we were - younger then, of course. i was enraptured by your fingers, and your fiction. you told me to come closer, as if you were going to tell me a secret. just as i leaned in to your ear, awaiting a whisper, you kissed me.
that is how i will always remember you.

the lake was in france, darling. we went to geneva in the spring; you spent three days locked in the room, smoking incessantly, staring moodily out the window and occasionally writing something, which you refused to show me.

-l

- my manic and i -

2009-10-21T23:17:00.002+06:00

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2009-10-18T04:32:00.002+06:00

el, like all cities, is a city of memories. it comes back to me, in flashes- on the bus, out the window, a doorway, a hospital, a footpath. as if i have lived a life before, here- with a family, my own hopes, dreams, and you.
she is everything familiar, wrapped around my eyes so that i do not know when i am. whether this is all happening here, now, or whether i am merely reliving a life.
did we love each other, el and i? i seem to remember something about warmth, and always; but then i turn the corner, and the streets are altogether unfamiliar. no, i had not been there before . . . it must have been some other park, another face, some other street, a different market altogether.

every moment of confusion, of course, loosens the hold of her, el's, memories on me, and suddenly it seems as if it may well have been fiction after all. and yet i wonder, if there was a life, once, and i think that i would not have minded it, so.

- if you see her, say hello -

2009-09-02T01:14:00.003+06:00

they left each other notes, in the strangest of places.
'i'll be late,' on the front door.
'your mother needs you,' in between pages.
'don't leave without breakfast,' by the bedside.

ultimately, it was a sort of conversation, between absences and miles.

he remembered the first time he left her at the airport. as they kissed in the car, he felt his skin burn for her; and then, briefly, relief.
on the way home, that early morning, he had stopped by a roadside stall, to pick up some cigarettes. he felt vaguely guilty, as he saw the edge glow orange while the trees passed by.
she hated the smoke. so, for that matter, did he.
as the door clicked shut, he felt the dust on his fingertips. and as the warm water flowed onto his skin, his hands, his hair, he caught a glimpse of the mirror.
'miss me,' it said, in faint outlines, on the fogged glass.

he was glad when she returned. he didn't like to be left alone with himself, for too long.

somewhere, behind the last bag of sugar in the kitchen, is a piece of yellowing, now parched, notebook paper.
'i will leave you,' it says.

- write to me -

2009-08-26T03:08:00.002+06:00

he remembered the first time he had undressed her. so carefully, as if he was afraid he would break her, somehow. his fingers tracing her porcelain shoulders, nails digging ever so slightly into her skin as one hand crept, slowly, up the back of her neck, and the other found her spine.

she fell easily into his silences, and he enveloped her, intensely; and things were good, for a while, as such things are.
she once told him that he wrote like he made love. he only nodded his head slowly, flicked the end of his cigarette, and told her she was wrong. he made love like he wrote.

it was the dancing, in the end, that always got them into trouble, of course.

*

still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he turned to her one morning, and asked why.
she arched her eyebrows, in that particular way of hers, meaning etched in every crease, and asked him what on earth he was talking about.
why, he repeated. why us, why now? why like this?
why anything, she asked, shrugging her shoulders ever so slightly.
i haven't written anything, he said, suddenly. not since i first touched you. why.
should i know?
well, i don't know, he said, slipping another cigarette out. empty, now, almost. what i do know is- my silences refuse to turn back into sentences.
when there was anguish, there were always her arms, wrapped around him.
i don't know, baba, she said, abandoning her two-step. i don't know where your syllables are hiding.
and he may have believed her, if they hadn't circled around and around each other, so often. the same old ground, the same old fears.
you act, he said.
you act, and i'm supposed to write. but all we do . . . all we do is dance.

- its so erotic when your makeup runs -

2009-08-11T02:08:00.000+06:00

half dressed and pacing, the scent of sweat rising ever so gently off his body, he asked her if this was what became of life.
he didn't like the cool air, in these moods. sometimes she thought he wanted to swallow the world, to consume it so that there could be none left.
he liked the heat his body generated, it's temperature rising rhythmically as he circled his room once, twice, a hundred times.
it is a sort of life, he said, out loud, to no-one, recalling Greene, and then Fanon, Maugham and Heller, Chesterton and Irving, Updike and Plath.
There were times when the words drowned him. they were too much.

- the scent of his sweat -

2009-08-04T03:23:00.000+06:00

the walks didn't help.
more and more often, these days, she found herself haunting the streets and paths around her home, late at night, searching, perhaps, for the answers to her compulsions.
she didn't know if it was his violence which drove her away, or his great love for her. they were, ultimately, the same thing. but her appetite for violence had waned, over the years, and now she had, more frequently, only silence for his words.
there is no feeling more startlingly empty than not hate, nor loneliness, but indifference. she had become, quite suddenly it appeared to her (though she knew, of course, that it had taken years of careful progress) irrelevant. she lived on the edges of her children's existences, patiently tidying the borders of their lives.
and, somehow, after walking for miles around the twisting alleys and safe streets of her organised, neat, little housing colony, she always found herself at the steps of her own driveway. and always with the same, inexplicable, question.
'what if,' he had whispered into her ear.

*
he had told her so many stories, once, and she, being young and fond of the violence inherent in the telling, had loved him. and they had made love, in the moonlight, madly, her skin being pushed into the cold, red earth, her fingers clutching at the night as he made her scream.
she still remembered feeling the cold air on his warm skin, the taste of his syllables as she carressed them out of his mouth and into her own. the-

*

and, every night, she took that question, and placed it, neatly, in the back of her mind, for another night. for a night when she felt, perhaps, a little stronger.

- auntie em's story -

2009-07-31T04:26:00.000+06:00

her screams woke them all, that night.

'good god,' mother said, gathering the folds of her nightie around her, defensively, as she opened her door. 'is she at it again?'
uncle q burst out of his bedroom, as if propelled by the weight of his own paranoia. 'who is it?' he asked, breathless. 'what's happened?'
baba, long gone, may well have woken up, too.
'it's k,' i said. 'she won't want you all inside. please, let me talk to her.'
'are you sure?' said uncle q, never quite sure of words.
'yes. please.'
mother had already shut her own door, with a not altogether quiet slam.

i opened her door, gently, and asked if i could enter. i only saw her shadow move, but entered anyway. even terror has patterns.
'kya huwa, jaan,' i said, touching a shadow's hand in the darkness.
she just rocked, back, and forth.
'arey baba,' i whispered, careful not to jar the cobwebs of her dreams from her eyes.
'what makes you scream so,' i didn't say.

in hindsight, that was the night the summer really ended. ever after, she accused me of hiding behind fiction. i told her she only really believed in fiction.

'you've got to get out of here,' she said, as i left the room, watching the sunlight stream in.

- keep me in your heart for a while -

2009-07-23T03:46:00.002+06:00

'hm,' he said, thoughtfully. he had never really liked children.
there was nothing, of course, to be done about that now.
ali, his youngest, came trotting out to him, in the garden. they knew they weren't supposed to disturb their father when he was sitting out, in the evenings, having his cup of tea. this did not, however, stop them.
'tell me a story, baba,' said the little one, plaintively.
that was the problem, in the end. they always wanted a story.
'not today,' he said, gently. 'go play with your brother.'
'but that's what you said yesterday,' little ali said, suddenly a keen keeper of records. 'and the day before . .', he added, reproachfully.
'what if i don't have a story to tell you today?' he asked, hoping for a reprieve.
that did it. suddenly, ali went from smiling expectantly, to wide-eyed grimace #34, an expression which required particular muscular dexterity, and was almost always a precursor to tears.
so he told him a story, one so filled with colour, so twisting and intricate that, while it completely captured little ali, also distracted him from the fact that it meant nothing at all.
and, so satisfied, little ali trotted back to the house, to play with his brother. not before, of course, he had given his father's leg an adoring hug.
'tell your mother i'll be a little while longer,' he called out after his son, as the front door clicked closed.

what he needed, he realised, more than anything, was to be someplace a little colder.

- someplace a little colder -

2009-07-23T02:42:00.001+06:00

- more new pictures -

click here.

2009-07-20T22:41:00.002+06:00

- new pictures on flickr -

click here.

2009-07-14T04:10:00.001+06:00

need to leave this city, he said, it's making me old.
breathing the same old air, seeing the same old deal. got to get out to the sea, baby, he said, got to get out to where I can breathe.
somewhere colder, this time. i've got to get out of this city, to somewhere where the shadows aren't quite so dark, the silences not so deep.
got to leave this city, this city doesn't get me. got to go somewhere I can see.

*

in the shadow of a palace, you once whispered quietly, many years ago, that you'd wait for me. I didn't understand then, quite what you meant. we were younger, of course, and we loved. god, we loved.

*

somewhere darker, this time, where the chill gets into your bones. somewhere quieter, where the shadows stop speaking. somewhere far away, where your hands stop enveloping mine, in every silent moment, where i can finally bring myself to speak, again.
i love you, he said, so softly that it was only the shadows that heard.

*

departures always came so much more naturally. staying, ultimately, was always the problem.

- get miles -

2009-07-10T05:10:00.000+06:00

they said that we'd find each other again, somewhere beyond the end of the epilogue.
i searched for you, that night, in the darkness, amongst the yellow-orange clouds that enveloped this city, our city, but you had flown by then (i wasn't to know till later; till it was, perhaps, much too late). so many miles, we said - just so many words.
and now, there is only silence. lamplight and silence, silence and lamplight, just as there was before (everything seems so much longer ago). and somewhere between that lamplight, the darkness, and the clouds that hang lowest in an impossibly bright night sky, you'll find someone searching, desperately, for something that he thought he lost, once. fingers clawing at the dirt, eyes burning through the deep, deep darkness, palms sweating and legs giving way.

what would zevon do, he found himself asking no-one in particular.

i could call her tonight, he thought.

- humour me -

2008-10-20T00:58:00.003+06:00

- a new beginning -

I keep a picture of my ex hidden away, right next to my cigarettes. Old habits die hard, I guess. She told me I broke her heart. Said I should never have made her believe – in good, in love, in us. Well, she broke my heart first. Fair’s fair.

I never thought it could work. Call it a defence mechanism, if you must. Got severe abandonment issues, you see. Something about seeing people you love die does that to you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I warned her. Told her to stay away, that I was a mess, that I’d break everything before I let her get too close.

That’s when she kissed me.

Again, and again.

The first time we made love, I had tears in my eyes (I admit this, freely). She traced my spine with her fingers, I danced my tongue around her waist, that cut just above the pelvis. She sighed, and I moved lower, my fingernails digging a faint pattern into her back. When she screamed out loud, her voice joined mine.

We were animals, then.

“Will you ever let me go?” she asked, one night, after dinner, her hands enclosed in mine.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to,” I said. Never could lie outright. Who’s to say what happens five minutes from now, let alone five years. (There I go again, covering my bases.)
“But you will, won’t you?”
“I never said that. Besides, if my luck holds, you’ll leave first,” I said, smiling. I don’t fear abandonment anymore. It’s part of the course. I expect it.
Seriously, she took my hands and moved them to her heart. Looking deep into my eyes, she said “I will always be with you. Always.”

Liar.

“Thief!”
Accusations fly around this house easy. They bounce right off the walls, keep bouncing till they hit something, or, more often, someone.
“What’d I do?” I am bewildered. Some say it comes naturally to me, but they also think I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. Me? I know better.
She thinks I took money out of her purse to pay for the drugs in my back pocket. It’s a new tactic she’s trying. She knows she can’t get me to stop by telling me it’s bad for me, so she’s going to try and guilt me out of the habit.

Fair enough, I suppose.

How do you explain to someone you think you love that they’re just not enough?

Yeah, you don’t. You say you’re sorry, instead. You hope that makes up for something, and you hope you two are strong enough to survive. But deep down, you know better. You know that once something’s broken, it doesn’t matter how much you try to fix it, how much you want to fix it, you can’t. Nothing is forever, and nothing changes. Either you live with what you’ve got, or you chase shadows.

“I’m sorry,” I hear myself saying. “I didn’t mean to. I’ll be better . . I . . I promise.”

*
It seems like she drags the storm in with her when she comes back.
“Where’ve you been?” I ask her, knowing I don’t want to know.
“Out,” she says, knowing the same.

I take another drag. She snatches the cigarette out of my mouth. Tells me it’s bad for me, that I should take better care of myself.

Takes a drag, and then stubs it out.

Looks like we’ve both had a rough night. I offer her my hand. She takes it, almost unconsciously. Wraps her fingers in mine, like we used to, and pulls me closer to her. I’ve never felt as at home as in that moment – the moment after I just took a hit of acid, and she came back from her ‘friends’ place. Yeah, it’s a fucked up life, isn’t it?

As I look back, I keep telling myself it was the drugs. But we both know better. For people like us, that’s the only home we have to look forward to.

2008-03-22T01:48:00.003+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -
click here

new prose soon, perhaps.

2008-01-12T15:24:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -
click here

2007-05-23T23:01:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -

click here

2007-04-30T08:35:00.001+05:00

long ago, when i was young, i knew a woman named uzeh. she was old (to us), but, in truth, not so old as to have tasted her fifth decade. she always wore a black shawl, which she kept wrapped around her shoulders and, in the winter, her head. we often debated what it was that uzeh did, because we only ever saw her at night, under the frail light of a gas lantern that the local council officer insisted be mounted at the entrance to our street. uzeh would tell us stories of the world beyond our village, of dragons and lovers - and sometimes both. we called her a gypsy, but we knew better - gypsies do not have a home. her deep brown skin declared her origins as lying somewhere far south, within the plains, but we had no other way of telling. questions she always answered with a short, sad laugh, saying 'i am from here now, children. does it matter where i have been?' and so we were left with only speculation.

uzeh had a tattoo of three identical symbols in a triangle, just above her right eye. when we asked her about it, she told us that once, many centuries ago, there was a race of people called the khalaak, who spoke an ancient tongue of threes. the khalaak believed that everything in this world was linked in threes, and so it was only natural for their language to consist of sets of ideas, set in threes, all represented by the same symbol, set three times. the orientation of the three-symbol designated which concept it was that was most relevant to the text in question. thus, for example, table, chair and stool were set together, as were angel, demon and human. ofcourse some ideas linked to more than one set, so while you had the three-symbol for god-love-chaos, you also had one for love-desire-fire, desire-life-power, and so on. thus the khalaak believed that all the ideas in the world would form a chain, and that it was in the pattern of this chain that one could find the true meaning of life. many khalaak philosopher-linguists spent centuries trying to decipher the code of their own language, re-arranging symbols, forming new networks and links, but none were ever able to discover the true power hidden deep in the khalaak language. it was thus that the khalaak language came to die, as more and more people from the outside began to mix with the khalaaks, and the khalaak ruler, influenced by jewish, pagan and islamic missionaries, finally decreed that their language was too perfect for man.
we asked uzeh what it was that her symbol meant, but she would only smile. 'it is a dead language', she said, 'let it die.' when she saw the dissatisfaction on our faces, she would unravel her shawl and invite us into the cave of darkness she created thus - we would immediately follow, because we knew that this was uzeh's way of preparing us for a story.
i remember that it was in these moments that i would sometimes wonder how many years it had been since uzeh had been born. it was a question whose answer i would not discover till much later, long after i had seen her deep brown skin for the last time.

The Story of the City in Love
once upon a time there was a city which loved. these words are easy to say, but who can say that they truly know the love of a city, as they know the touch of their lover, or the caress of a soul against their breast? this city was once part of an ancient kingdom, but a series of wars had left it further and further away from the main seat of the kingdom, until it was all but forgotten. the people of the city never left, and only the occasional lost traveler would find his or her way into its streets, by accident.
every time a child was born, there would spring from the ground a hundred yellow flowers, almost instantly, as if the ground itself felt joy at being introduced to a new soul. this did not happen much, these days, as children were slowly being born less and less often. it is said that during the early years of this city, its people grew suspicious of these flowers, and considered them an invitation to the new child from shaitan. later, they began to believe that the city only nourished the new soul because it fed upon it. it was only after many years that the people of the city loved her as she loved them, without apologies or expectations.
whenever a man died in the city, there was a soft, mist-like rain, regardless of the season. when a woman died, a rain of a thousand deep golden flowers would fall across the city, as the sky wept sunlight. it was thus that many years passed, and flowers grew from the ground, were nourished by rain and fell from the cloudless blue sky.
one morning a screaming boy-child was brought into this world, and the people of the city were suddenly apprehensive, for they had never heard a child scream during birth - in this city, the pain of creating life was shared by the mother and father of the new soul, but was not felt by its own body. the people left their houses in search of the field of flowers, but were surprised to find a thin carpet of golden petals underneath their feet. the petals were already turning brown at their edges, and it was at this moment that the people first realized that something was painfully wrong with their city.
the cycle of rain and flowers never returned, after the birth of the child named ku-khra-sha (which was the name of the fire-love-skin three-symbol). the people slowly began to realize that their city was dying, as even the seasonal rains began to become fewer, and further between. the summers became hotter, and the winters harsher than they had ever been before. life in the city became hard, and some people began, once again, to question their city's motives in making them believe in a love that can be felt in the flowers. some blamed ku-khra-sha, and called for him to be killed, but the very night of the meeting to decide his fate there was a fierce gale, and the people were unable to leave their houses. others blamed the ways of their rulers, still others called for a ritualistic cleansing of the spirits of everyone in the city. most people, however, were simply worried - without their city, they did not know how to live.
no answer was in sight, and the nights grew colder. every so often people said that they could feel the old warmth between their toes as they walked the streets, but it was very faint, like the calling of a very, very old voice, from far away. there were good days and bad days, but sometimes a single golden yellow flower would bloom, overnight, and the people would gather around it to pray for their lover.

early one morning, ten years later, someone broke into ku-khra-sha's house and plunged a dagger through his heart, while he slept. it was the first crime to have occurred in the city for as long as anyone could remember, and it was not without its supporters. the city, they said, was dying, and any city was bigger than a boy. as the first blood red rays of the sun began to filter through the greyblue haze of that morning, however, people were not so sure. a chill wind began to gather the dust in the streets, but the people were unafraid of their city. ku-khra-sha's killer was brought forward, and told to lead the procession which carried the still warm body of the boy on its shoulders. as they reached the main street, a fine mist began to gather around them, causing the dust to stick to the backs of their ankles and in between their toes. they marched onwards, towards the fields, carrying their burden without a word towards the customary burial location for children - a large field which contained only a gnarled and old oak tree, that had been there for as long as the oldest mother could remember, and was all but dead itself. as they began to get closer, they saw their oak burst into a bloom of unfamiliar red flowers. almost as soon as the lowest branches turned crimson, however, the flowers from the upper branches began to fall. the procession was almost to the child's burial spot, now, and as they lowered him into the earth the oak's leaves fell to earth in a dull, steady rain that crackled like far off lightning cutting the night sky.

it is said that after the death of ku-khra-sha, the gates to the city were shut forever, and the souls within lived on, even after their bodies had withered away.

2007-04-24T08:16:00.000+05:00

i have already felt the heat from your long, graceful fingers burn symbols into the canvas of my back, though we are yet miles, and lives, apart. i wonder if i do not already, perhaps, know the smell of your love - of burning, of the earth breathing, of steam and the sharp, salty taste of rain on red skin.

but there are no pretenses between us. you are just another lover, and i am less (for you were, always, more). i will know you, as we dance around each other, within each other, and you will know of one who loves. there is a sort of freedom in this, too, of knowing that you are walking into a room with a stranger, to know them in ways that sometimes even their own do not, and that you will leave that room, as pink fingers chase the night across disappearing stars, as strangers.

one night stands take longer when you're living them, with each movement of air, dust and scent on skin. my fingers will be crackling lightning while i walk through your streets, late at night. i hope you don't mind, my lover lives inside of me.

- fitnaa in the red city -

2007-04-09T05:06:00.001+05:00

it was clear that he didn't have much time left, she realized. the skin at his cheeks was stretched, the soft creases in his face harder now, not pulled in a smile, but in hollowness. he smiled, in spite of it, but she knew that he had decided long ago that he would one day die in a state of flux, in a place where there are no meanings. human beings, he had once said, are fascinated with boundary conditions. roofs, beaches, edges, the deepest, darkest places on this earth are where we find ourselves faced with the simplest questions; we are, ofcourse, obsessed with simplification - our lives are one big experiment in definition. i will die, he said, one day, without it.

she should have known, back then, when he had insisted that she bring him here, despite his illness. he was sitting in the rocking chair, as old as he had once (long ago) predicted he would be, on the other end of a life so full of words, staring out over the green and yellow fields, past the barbed wire fence and a hundred imaginary meridians.
my parents, he said, came from just over that hill.
i know, she said, softly.
i wish i could see the house that dadi used to talk about, late at night.
i know, she said, holding his hands. im so sorry...we can't.
he smiled. i'm just being melodramatic, ofcourse. don't worry, it's alright. they've been fighting for all of our lives, i suppose we've no right to expect them to stop for the sake of an old, dying man.
it will be harvesting season, soon, he said, absently, staring at the hundreds of yellow flowers that had appeared, suddenly, overnight.
she was staring at the horizon, trying to tear the early morning fog apart, to see, if only for a moment, the red-brown house with its steep, narrow staircase which dadi spoke of, so late at night. to see, if only for a moment, a piece of history, to give the tiny part of an old soul that she carried within her a way home.

he coughed a little, and she immediately offered to go get his medicine. he held her hand, first violently but then with more grace, slowly wrapping his fingers in hers as she crouched on the floor, next to his chair.
ji, jaan?
we loved well, you and i. no two souls- ah. melodrama, again. i love you, he said, simply. thank you.
he began to cough again, and she squeezed his hands before she rose to go to the front door. she closed the door, quietly, behind her as she went to find some water.

*
he left a note, ofcourse.
some say that we live our lives in reflection. you are a mother, fighter, sister, daughter, god, lover, Diya. you are incredible, and it is in your eyes that i will (always) be reflected. be well.

2007-03-25T11:04:00.001+05:00

this story begins on a roof, with two people, and ends with death (of a sort). it is often the way.

there was the longest silence, the kind of silence where the slightest movement might sound like something beautiful shattering. m was lying on his back, his feet dangling off the edge of the water tank, swaying gently back and forth, like laundry in the cool, summer breeze. he was staring at the stars, as s stood over him, bathed in the orange neon glow of that pulsating city. she took a long drag from her cigarette, and let it fall to the ground, three storeys below, it's still glowing tip arching end over end before it hit the cold, hard concrete. they told each other that they came here to think, but it was only one lie.

'it's 4.30am, on a tuesday. how do we end up here, again and again?' he asked her.
'we've got nowhere else to go,' she said, and sat down next to him, roughly. she dusted her hands over the edge.
'this is no way to live,' he whispered, still staring at infinity, 'you know that.'
'and what would you propose we do, then?' she said, her words edged electric.
'that,' he sighed,'i do not know.'
she leaned backward, so that her palms were spread open on the floor behind her back and her arms were taking her weight. her eyes searched for the edge of the sky, for a pocket of deep darkness.
'perhaps we're only searching for oblivion,' he said, suddenly.
'how do you mean?' she asked, startled at how close his words were to her eyes.
'you realize that we're pushing ourselves further away, each night?'
silence.
'you do. we're constantly pushing - because we don't care about anything. you and i, we're not content until we break something,' he continued. 'i wonder which night it will be that i find this roof empty, again. i doubt i'll be surprised, but who knows? we're capable of anything.'
she turned her head, slowly, the streetlights setting her long, brown hair aflame.
'i don't believe that. i don't want to break you,' she said, her voice softening.
'no, i don't think you do. but you will. or i you,'he said,'i don't think you and i know how to love any other way.'
'is honesty that brutal?'
'we're on fire.'
she nodded, and took his hand in hers, gently rubbing between his fingers. he looked away from the sky, then, and watched s, hair aflame and eyes laced with tears. and they held each other, gently rocking in the breeze, for a time almost as dark as the sky.

'i won't leave,' he whispered in her ear, his voice suddenly stronger than the damp circle that had appeared on her shoulder would suggest.
'it'll kill you,'she sobbed.
'i won't go.'
'then i will,' she said, quietly. and she moved her hands from his back, turned her head and moved back.

and he let her go, until she was standing on the edge of that water tank, ready to let herself down. he brushed the hair from his eyes and looked at two brown irises, quivering, on a body that was glowing slightly at the edges, filled in with darkness.
'why?'
'because this is going to kill you.'
he didn't move. 'you're lying.'
'i-,' her resolve faltered. 'i'm sorry. i-,' she paused,'i don't know what to do.'
'what do you want to do?'
'i want this to stop.'
he smiled. 'what? just when we're getting to the fun bit, where we end up hating each other?'
'don't be flippant,'she said, but she smiled in spite of herself. 'what do we do?'
he leaned back, again, and contemplated the dark, dark sky.
'we live,' he said.
she sat down again, on that edge, and stared at the streets below, that intricate maze of houses, dreams and neon that made her city at night.
'there's a city down there, you know?'
'i know. and yet you and I, lovers, trace the same circles, night after night.'
'then maybe we really do have nothing to lose.' she took his hand, squeezed, and pulled him up. they stood there, regarding that city asleep, hand in hand, breathing in the texture of its dreams, watching its electric claws sparkling in the distance, and wondering if they should step down from that tiny water tank into a big, big world.

*

sometimes, late at night, when there's no-one for miles, i can still make out the dim outline of a shadow touching a shadow's hand.

2007-03-02T21:33:00.000+05:00

i sense the scent of your skin,
(insideout), in between syllables
and concrete.
your dark, sweet taste lives in the space
between my teeth,
tongues probing, searching
blindly, constantly.
(i hunt for your soul
in the spaces)

your eyes met mine,
somewhere, long ago,
and we chased each other, furiously,
in endless circles, until your nails were white-hot,
and my skin smoldered, silently.
i wonder,
if, perhaps, life is not simply one
elongated
moment of intensity,
rather than a series of images,
if, perhaps, we are not
god.
(i write to you
in my sleep)

i do not know what it is about you,
that sinks beneath this flesh, bone and soul,
tattooing itself, powerfully, underneath my skin,
only that i, no poet, can not live
but with the scent of your skin
on the tip of my tongue,
always.

2007-02-22T11:15:00.001+05:00

[when i was a child]

god is not a white haired and bearded old man. god does not live within the spaces between words, leaves, the wind - god does not listen to us when we are at our worst, breaking down in showers, buses, in classrooms, wide open spaces, it does not live as close to you as your aorta, it does not forgive you, or forsake you.
god, like death, is not.

do you believe in god? he asked.

no, i believe in life.

-

it's all existential, post modern, modernist, enlightened, positivist, apologist, structuralist, linguistic bullshit anyway - deconstructed and reconstructed, in seven different flavours, sold to you the citizen/consumer/human being, built by you the angeldemon, burnt up to a deadly crisp by you, the collection of senses and organs that is called (in this symbolic system of signs and concepts) a human. hu-man. namuh. huwoman? wohuman?

it is so very, very easy to destroy something beautiful. all i know for sure is that i am the only one in this orange neon room, watching the yellow lamplight spill itself all over the carpet. we're all just spilling ourselves out, after all; again, and again, and again. and again.

2007-02-16T20:09:00.000+05:00

[of cold floors]

not every man has gentians in his house,
in soft september, at slow, sad michaelmas.

bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of pluto's
gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as demeter's pale lamp gives off
light,
lead me then, lead the way.

reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself within the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where persephone goes, just now, from the frosted september
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness
on the lost bride and her groom.

- bavarian gentians -
d.h. lawrence

2007-02-09T04:48:00.000+05:00

it was only as the sun was slowly swallowed by the waves, extinguishing itself in the hazy blue-orange horizon, that it dawned on him that he would never again be surrounded by her scent. his fingers turned ashen, wrapped around the railing, white as gravestones, as this realization made its way through his body, traveling up his strong, brown arms and pausing, for a moment, at his chest, where she had marked out a place with her fingertips to denote his heart.
he stood there, for a long time, remembering how those self-same fingers would travel up, and down, her arms, each fingertip lingering, in turn, for just that single moment longer than desire would allow for. he thought of how he had never believed that people of this earth could turn to smoke, be breathed in by one another, twist around each other like the thin tendrils of a quiet fire - as if human beings were, really, only flame and ash. and as he stood there, his body stuck rigid against that railing, he realized that he could not, and would not, leave.

an old man played a sad, soulful tune on his guitar as this young man looked out over the horizon, finally realizing that he had known all along what it was that love smelled like.

some say that it is roses, the wet earth and thunder; but they do not realize that even curiosity has a taste, and some are not quite as feline as others. perhaps all that we were put on this earth to do was to smell our scents, to discover the tastes of our lives.

2007-01-29T09:27:00.000+05:00

as i look back on it now, that was the summer that i finally realized that love was not a weapon, and that sorrow could never be a crutch. we all grew up a little, then, even mother, who still stands on the landing, leaning against the railing, saying 'it was better before.' - but its only a whisper now, as if she's still trying to shake the cobwebs of the weight of those years away from her eyes, and she stands there and says, softly, 'it was better before,' as if she might one day, finally, wring all of the truth out of those words.

days turned into months, and as the golden yellow rain fell on the parched earth, forming glassy puddles across the city, the leaves, too, decided to finally let it go; they fell in a soft, muted rain, soundlessly, until what wasn't wet was covered by dry, parched leaves that crunched satisfyingly when you walked through them, despite the weight of the rain. bhai never quite recovered from the summer - he was quiet before, but it was as if the leaves that fell that night took with them his last remaining syllables. nothing was the same again, ofcourse, but i realize that we all, somehow, expected it to be - minus that great negative. we didn't realize that leaves, too, have weight - even dead ones.

my sister left, ofcourse. that was inevitable, but what we didn't expect was that she would leave so completely, as if her presence had only ever been a figment of our imaginations, a childhood entirely imagined, an invisible friend who held our fingers when we were cold and told us, quietly, 'close your eyes and think of home.' i never conjectured as to her reasons - i realized that her departure was reason enough. we would only ever hear from her from a distance, after that. she would never step foot in that house again - and i don't think anyone could blame her. for a while i thought that mother would add another ghost to her cane, but i think she, too, saw through it. bhai took it as he took everything, quietly and solemnly - as if yet another great truth had been confirmed and his suspicions about the leaves had been the truth all along.

and i - i never quite left that summer, i realize. a part of me will live there, always, in the place where things are born. my fascinations with power and skin were, for the first time, satisfied, and i saw no reason to move, even as i saw the soft, muted rain fall and knew that i already had. but the summer of cobwebs was about moving, in the end, and not settling.

*

'i'm going out,' she said.

and i, remembering a soft, muted rain, followed her. because love, i realize, is not a weapon.

2007-01-08T12:48:00.000+05:00

- my monster -

2007-01-06T11:11:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -
click here

2006-11-18T06:17:00.000+05:00

'why would you do that?' she asked.
'its beautiful. it's a picture, can't you see it? the lights perfect, with the salt and the napkin, the lines between the shaker and the tablecloth,' he said.
'no, but you can't just knock things over because you think it looks better,' she said, pushing her plate to the side and wiping an errant crumb from her dark, creased lips, the simple silver ring she always wore glistening for only a second as it caught the lamplight, like fire and the night.
'why not? simple, little things. a salt shaker overturned, a step missed, a note skipped, a t left uncrossed,' he said. 'would you take even that?' he added, bitterly.
'so what if it's beautiful? you don't understand - beauty won't make your bed, pay the phone bill. and beauty certainly won't take care of you, a. you're so spoilt - you don't even realize how bad it is, how terrible it's been. all you care about is this beauty, a photograph, a paragraph. it's like you folded in on yourself, that day (so many years ago, now), and you've never seen another person again. they're all just actors, props, pieces, and you're always constructing something. but you don't see anymore.'
he was quiet, then. outside the window he saw a black bicycle being wheeled, it's tires flat and its rider staring at the ground. he followed the man's progress across the street, pausing every few seconds to look up and see where the cars were, but never changing his pace or his step. a held his breath until he had finally, magically, reached the other side.
'i think that underneath the surface of every action, every moment, there is something incredible. and i think that if we ever want to live our lives as anything approaching extraordinary, we have to..have to look for that seam in reality, every moment, every day. and sometimes it's tiring and exhilirating all at the same time, and at others it is simply draining, to look for that colour.
'take that woman, there. you're right, am. i can't even see her. it's like she's blended into that ever so intricate woodwork behind her, and i'm trying so hard to see the colour in her eyes but i just can't. is it judgemental to look at someone and say that you think they're unhappy? because i think you're unhappy. incredibly, tragically unhappy on a level which twists your skin inside out, and won't let you escape. and i'm so sorry, i don't know what else i can do or say, because maybe i am selfish, but i will not twist and turn in on myself in order to get you to smile. because..and understand, it is not a smile i am after. not for myself, and not for you.
'i think that life is an incredibly complicated process that incredibly simple people excel at. i think that if people stopped for a moment and breathed, they wouldn't necessarily be happier, but they could sleep. and i think that we are all someone, and so often we forget that. you forgot it, am. i promise you, i remember you as being so colourful, so incredibly vibrant. but since then, it's like you forgot how to paint, the same way i forgot how to speak. and i'm sorry for that, i am. but not half as sorry as i am to see you, today, like this. the truth is, i will not make you happy, am. i'm sorry, i won't do it. and not because i can't, but because i refuse to paint on you, as if you're just raw, white pulp.
'you said that beauty won't take care of me, but i think you're wrong,' he said, as he held her hands, like a child's, within his own. 'i think you're beautiful. and i want you to believe that, because there is nothing i can do or say that will ever approach the beauty of people. it's not about a word, a phrase - it is not about what hands do or lips say, it is what people feel, inside them, underneath skin and flesh. and i feel like i've never spoken to your soul, but i'm doing it today. i'm sorry...maybe i'm not what you need me to be, but i will never let you be anything less than everything you are.'
she started to cry, but stopped herself, because it was if he was suddenly a stranger. someone who had come into her house dressed as someone familiar, who had broken all the chairs and glasses, the tables and doorways. and she didn't want him to see her cry, because she realized that she didn't want him. she wanted someone else, and the man in front of her would never be less than a stranger again, on some level, because he never spoke, before this day. he never even introduced himself.
she took her hands from his, and began to get up.

2006-10-29T05:56:00.000+05:00

the hotel ruthe used to be a dormitory for a jewish school in vienna in the early 20th century. i could see why, the rooms were depressing as all hell. the beds were all bunked and pushed together against the far wall, next to the single tiny window that let in almost no light. through the window you could see the back alley where the hotel's front entrance was. some hotels like to have a fancy lobby and uniforms, but the hotel ruthe wasn't like that at all. it was cheap, and it was exactly the sort of place my father always booked for us.
we were on 'a family vacation', which made no sense to me. we never did anything together when we were at home, why should putting us in some old city where a bunch of people ruled a bunch of other people from make any difference? apparently we were supposed to bond over seeing new things together, but we never wanted to do the same things. my mother wanted to go to every single museum she could find, my father was only interested in old buildings and my sister just wanted to shop. all i wanted to do was sit somewhere quiet, but that never happened
either.
that keeps happening, somehow, with my family. everyone wants to do something else, and no-one ever gets to do what they want, because we're always 'compromising'. that's a really strange word - its supposed to mean that everyone gets to do a little of what they want and a little of what other people want, but i've learnt that it just means that no-one gets to leave the hotel.
so anyway, we're in vienna and we're arguing (as usual) as to where we want to go today. my mother says we should go to some cruddy museum about the hapsburgs, my dad just wants to spend all day at some cathedral. my sister was sitting, poised at the edge of the conversation, waiting to ask where the nearest mall was. i wandered off from the lobby into the breakfast area. there was this really old guy there, he must have been atleast seventy years old...i mean really, really old. he had white hair and brown spots on his face, near his eyes. he was wearing an old grey coat. i always remember that coat, for some reason. anyway - he called me over and gave me a big toothy smile.
'so how old are you, young man?'
i hate that. i hate it when people start off a conversation with asking how old i am. i'm goddamn fifteen, does it matter? he doesn't really care...he just wants to talk to someone. stuff like that really gets to me, when people start off a conversation with something stupid and mundane that they don't really want to talk about. i mean, if he'd asked me what i dreamt about at night, maybe i would've been interested, but he just asked me my goddamn age. guess..i guessed yours. anyway. my point is that its not important.
'fifteen. how was your life?' i asked him.
he looked at me sort of funny, like he was taken aback. i get that alot. 'that's a very strange question,'he said, and turned to finish his toast.
'only as strange as asking a random kid his age,' i said. and i walked away. just like that. i do that, alot, i realize.

anyway, i don't even know why i'm talking about vienna. that was years ago. we're sitting at the kitchen table - my mother and father are fighting (again). i drift off like that, whenever they start off. usually i'll let myself go into some memory or other. it doesn't even have to be particularly happy, or really good. i just like to go somewhere else, you know? the funny thing is that wherever i go, they're always fighting. i mean..it's true. nothing changes. most of the time i just think about leaving whenever their voices start getting louder, and then suddenly im in this other place, some memory or other. yesterday i started reliving this time my mom bought me a cricket bat, when i was a kid. it wasn't what i wanted at all - she just picked up the first bat she saw, without even thinking about it. i mean..fine..so she got me something, but she could have atleast goddamned thought about it.
don't get me wrong, i love my parents. they're always there, and i know they really care about me and stuff. i just wish sometimes they'd think more. i wish everyone would think more. sometimes i think they know me about as well as that guy in the grey coat, you know? they just want to know that i've got food and water and all that stuff. i can't remember the last time i sat down and talked to my parents about anything. they're always fighting, for one, so you can't really sit down with them..you've got to do it separately, when one of them is gone. and i don't know..i don't want to make that effort. i just kinda wish they would sometimes. i mean, they're parents.
you see? i did it again. they've stopped fighting now, and everyone at the table is looking at me funny. that's usually how i know a fight's over, when everyone looks at me drifting off and starts yelling my name. i'm not crazy, even though i did go to a psychologist once. she said that i just had a particular kind of coping mechanism, and told my parents to try and get me more involved with other kids. that didn't really work, though, because other kids and i don't really get along. i mean don't get me wrong, i've got friends and stuff, but i don't really talk to people that much. turns out most of them don't have that much to say, and sooner or later i get tired of asking them stupid questions like 'how old are you, young man?', and then they start looking at me funny, too.
anyway. i'm going to go up to my room and stare at the stars for a while. i've got a telescope (they bought it for me last year, for my birthday) and everything, and i really like staring at random galaxies. i don't know why, it makes me feel ok. even if people are looking at me funny, i feel ok when i look at the stars. i guess its got something to do with how big they are and how small we are, or something. i just get this really connected feeling, you know? like i can feel every single particle of dust in the room, and see how it connects to the air, to the sky, to the clouds, to the trees, leaves, earth, house, bed and me. that usually makes me feel really good, and then i can sleep.
i can't ever get to sleep, normally. it takes a really long time, because i'm always staring at things. and i don't like closing my eyes. it's not like i'm afraid of the dark or anything, i just don't like closing my eyes. i mean, if i'm awake, then i want to have my eyes open. so i end up staring at the ceiling of my room alot, at night. it usually takes a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the light, but after awhile i can start tracing the cracks in the ceiling. i like doing that - making patterns and connecting the cracks. this one time i remember doing that, and then the next thing i remembered was being outside in the lawn, and my dad was shaking me. he kept asking me if i was alright. i didn't know what was going on..i asked them how i got there, and they said they didn't know. i must've sleepwalked from my room.
i guess freud was right about the subconscious, then. i always liked being outside better than being inside. that time in vienna, i actually went back to the lobby where my parents were arguing just in time to hear my sister's interjection about the mall. i just suddenly didn't want to be there anymore, so i left. i went straight out the front door of the hotel into the street, and just started walking. to nowhere in particular, just walking around. i like doing that, looking at people and places as i walk around. i didn't really speak german, but i could make out what some of the signs said, and so i found my way to the subway. i just took the first train that was coming. the system in vienna's really different from anywhere else - they don't really check you for a ticket or anything, it's all sort of on an honour system. i just got a train, just like that, and headed off. there was this older guy sitting next to me, must've been forty or fifty. he had a paper bag in his hands, and kept taking swigs from it. he smelt of alcohol, so i just kind of got off at the next stop. then i took the escalator back up to the street, and starting walking back in the direction the train came from. i walked for a while, and then i saw all these buildings that looked sort of familiar, and then i realized that i was back near the hotel ruthe. so i went in, and my mom and dad and sister were all sitting at the lobby, looking dead worried. they hugged me and kissed me and then they started yelling at me, asking me where i had gone, why i hadn't asked them, how i could be so irresponsible, all that. but they were crying, too, because they were glad to see me, i guess. i didn't really respond or anything, i was still trying to figure out where it was we were going, that morning.

2006-10-24T11:45:00.000+05:00

[for you]

we forgot to leave
breadcrumbs,
i can't trace
your start, your end
(you are
a non-issue)

[driving back from
the beach, your hand
in mine
in yours.]

do you want to go
a little
crazy, tonight?
ill lose my mind,
and move,
like you've never seen before.

all this,
and i only ever mean to say
the one thing.
between my letters is a place
you know how to get to.
is it lonely where you are?

i'll take
this dance, if you
will.

-february 12th, 2006

2006-10-09T10:37:00.000+05:00

when i was a child, with little hands and big fingers, i believed in god. life, however, made no sense. money plants, for example, did not have paper leaves. rocks fell at the same speed, but petals never fell the same way twice.
as i grew older, i started hearing god in the rain. it was very soft, at first. like white noise and grey skies meeting, you had to strain to hear her, push your ear right up to the glass, let your breath form patches of condensation before your eyes that came and went, rhthymically, with each breath you took and gave back. not everyone has the luxury of being soaked, allowing him to wash over you.
like most whispers, god (contrary to popular belief) is very easy to block out. you simply have to ignore her. he doesn't go away, she only breathes. between this drop and the next one. and the next, and the next, and the next, until your skin is covered with it, until it forms streams on your bare back, finding its way through rivers down your arms and off your fingers, jumping off to join the next drop. and the next, and the next.

you can drown out whispers, with drops. but next time it rains, listen for the silences.

wrappedupandtwisted. like tongues and lips, like hearts and skin. follow the silences.

self-portrait 2

2006-09-12T05:13:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -

2006-09-04T11:25:00.000+05:00

i dare you to look out of your window and see something beautiful. they promised you the rain, the power (in your small hands) to change the world, if you just watch and wait, and take over when you hear your beat (getting faster). but that never happened, did it? they never did whisper the last bit into your ear, about how whenever a generation makes a promise, whenever a collective gets together to tell a someone a truth, it's inevitably a lie - because there is no collective truth, justice..no morals and no soul to sink into. there is only the you and i. and when you kill someone, there is no judge and jury, no god in heaven and no devil in hell - there is just you and a corpse.
because whenever you see a them, they're never actually looking at you - they're looking at each other, because someone is bound to be somebody. but there're so many thems, so few somebody's, in a world where we don't rise, listen, see, hear, speak, taste, feel.
do you think love is just an emotion in your mind? do you think that joy doesn't have a taste, that hatred doesn't smell of something? if for one moment in your life you can say that your skin didn't define your boundaries, that you were able to fly, would that be enough? no - it is not enough to just live. because life is significant, every action is a war, and everything has a side. it is not enough to simply go - you've got to take it all..you've got to fly, every moment. you've got to sink, let the mud ooze between your toes, let it choke you, let it fill your nostrils, let the stench of it drive you mad - because that's as significant as the wind, as the sea, as the birds, mountains, oceans and the sky.

i dare you. to look out your window and taste something beautiful.

2006-08-21T06:49:00.000+05:00

beginnings.

two little children, with four little hands and twenty little fingers (eight and eight and two and two), of which they use only the two. bent around each other, possesively, as if all it takes to protect a soul is a tiny turn of flesh, creased at the edges.

*

i would never want to take that away from you, you realize, she said, turning to him. there is a particular honesty in eyes, where you can see souls and words aligning.
i know, he nodded. his eyes were closed - he hadn't opened them for hours, now. he was looking at the sky, as lovers do.
good, and her hands squeezed his.

his, that were so stretched, so taut. his hands, which had seen for his eyes, when they were closed. the creases where his life lived, where she had found him, where he had -

there is a point at which only hands can tell what hands have done, what hands have seen. it lives near the soft pouch of skin created between thumb and forefinger, where we become webbed. feel it, now. touch it, with the thumb and forefinger of the other, caress it, breathe it in. see it.

*

feel the words. taste them, roll your tongue around them (gently, violently). they're yours. they'll ask you what they mean, but you know where they live. close your eyes, and see.

2006-08-19T00:33:00.000+05:00

he saw orange, as the afternoon spilt itself onto the grass, the trees, enveloping the red brick and caressing the leaves it filtered through to touch the ground.
it's as if one day the words just stopped flowing, like a river taking another path, choosing another valley; so that every time he opens his mouth, as if to speak, all his sentences are silences, and his thoughts turn in on them selves, folded and unfolding. the truth is that there is nothing worse than being mute, unable to open your mouth, unable to form the words that want nothing more than to be said. which is what words do.
yet everytime he turns around, there is another silence. every time there is a pen, there is an empty page, as he realizes that it is not that the words have left him, it is that he has never had the words for this, he has never had the hands to envelope this, so while he may be inside it, he was never given the actual words to describe it.

there is nothing more cruel, for a writer.

*

except his eyes. they burn.

*

2006-07-28T12:08:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -
More here

2006-06-26T20:26:00.000+05:00

Act I
Sc i

The Scene: Two young men in an (almost) square grey room. The door is on the far wall, is closed and has a slit in it at eye level. They are dressed in jeans and full sleeved button downed shirts. That is to say that they are decently, but not formally, dressed.

a: perhaps we should go check on them?
b: to what end?
a: (pause) finding out where they are?
b: (walks upstage, sits on the edge) yes..but what’s the point?
a: action!
b: lights?
The lights dim, a spotlight appears on b…he shakes his head, disconsolately
b: no no…it’s all wrong.
The lights return to their previous state.
a: well I’m going to check on them.
b: i hope you drown.
a: (hurt) come now – (consolingly) they said they would call for us.
b: yes, they said that.
a: they will.
b: will they?
a: (simply) ofcourse.
b: (pauses, then in fear more than anger, but with both) what if they don’t?
a: they will.
b: you’re sure?
a: yes.
b: how?
a: because.
b: (exasperated) that’s no answer! look at the facts –
a: what facts?
b: the facts of our confinement. we have two young men, a small room painted in a dull and tasteless grey, an unlocked door leading to an unlit corridor which shows every likelihood of leading to another one exactly like it, and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Further, they have little recollection of how they came to be in the aforementioned room in the first place. there was….a party. do you remember the party?
a: not very much of it. I remember…no.
b: must have been a good one. where was i?
a: isn’t that the problem?
b: “came to be in the aforementioned room in the first place.” As a means of linking their indeterminate present and their uncertain future they find a note on the ground, near the door. read me the note again, a.
a: (taking a white piece of paper out of his pocket, neatly unfolding it) “You will be sent for.”
b: is that all?
a: that’s all.
b: no signature?
a: no.
b: no ‘Dear Sirs’?
a: no.
b: (hopefully) a return address?
a: no.
b: (unashamedly hopeless. He is deflated) philistines. uncivilized ruffians.
a: I’m going to go out there. will you come?
b: what if we’re sent for?
a: I hadn’t thought of that. why don’t you stay? in the meantime I will hunt for whoever it is that is sending for us, and remind them of our existence.
b: you’ll get lost.
a: how can you be sure?
b: because you spent four hours in the supermarket yesterday, hopelessly circling around aisles eight through seventeen inclusive, and then somehow ended up at aisle twenty five, with no recollection of eighteen through twenty-four. I am sure of very little in my life, particularly with regards to strange notes in strange rooms, but I am certain you will get lost.
a: it’s a possibility.
b: certainly.
a: very well. we’ll just sit here & rot, then?
b: it seems to boil down to that, doesn’t it?
(a pause)
a: (brightly) why don’t you go?
b: no.
a: whyy? [there are two y’s there for a reason]
b: (giving a bitter smile) because.

Lights Fade.

Sc ii
Still the room. a is walking it’s perimeter, carefully placing one foot after another, as if walking a tight rope. he takes a few more steps till he reaches the corner. b is sitting with his back against one of the walls (the far one, probably). he has rolled up his sleeves, as has a.

a: (triumphantly) twelve feet by thirteen.
b: it is extraordinary.
a: that it is not a square?
b: that this is the fourth time you’ve measured it out and given me your results, and each time you show no signs of having any memory of having done it before.
a: eh?
b: never mind. perhaps I only think I’ve seen you walk around this room and meticulously measure it’s dimensions with your size ten shoes three times in the past…how long have we been here?
a: since we woke up.
b: no…time…(confused, he is looking for his watch but it is not on his wrist, or in his pockets.) where is my watch?
a: (absently…he has started measuring the room again) not on your wrist?
b: yes. my watch is on my wrist, precisely where it is meant to be. that’s why I’m asking you where it is, because it is where it should be.
a: (he has reached the second wall) ah, good.
b: (getting up) stop it!
a: (startled…stops) stop what?
b: tiptoeing around the room as if you’re on a high wire!
a: (matter-of-factly) I’m measuring it.
b: yes..but didn’t you just do that?
a: me? this room?
b: yes.
a: no…ofcourse not. why would I do it again? (resumes measuring)
b: (sighs, sits down again, stares at a wall) there must be a reason.
a: …
b: there are reasons for everything. even if they’re not very good, even if they make no sense, there must be some justification. it’s the pointlessness I can’t stand. give me something to rebel against, and its all suddenly beautiful. but you can’t fight against nothing. there’s too much of it –
a: twelve feet by
b: thirteen. (a is shocked, b continues). I mean we’re not even confined, technically. the door’s open, we’re free to leave.
a: how did you….?
b: (waving him aside) let’s go.
a: what if we’re sent for?
b: hang it.
a: where will we go?
b: outside. somewhere…we’ll find something.
a: (seriously) what’s the difference?
b: we’ll find a way out.
a: we might be sent for.
(a pause, and they busy themselves – a starts counting bricks, b stares into space.)
a: I’ve got it!
b: really?
a: each horizontal row of bricks is merely shifted right (or left) by half a brick from the row above and below it. therefore each row has the exact same number of bricks (disappointment is creeping into his face and tone as he realizes what this means)….therefore counting them one by one is incredibly…stupid.
b: oh. yes, that.
a: it’s ok..(he puts an arm around b’s shoulder)
b: oh I know. we’ll figure something out, eventually.
a: I’m sure we’ll find something else to count.
b: (giving a a stern look) I need to get away from you, for your own good.
b exits, through the door. he looks left, then right, then goes left.
a: oh well, air’ll do him good. (sitting down, staring at opposite wall with look of intensity, suddenly revelation and a smile)
101…102…103…104..105

Lights fade.

Sc iii
The door is still open, as b left it. a is in the exact same position.

a: 534…535…536…
Enter c, who peeks in the door stealthily before coming in, obviously not considering a much of a threat.
a: 537…538…539…oh, hello…540…
c: could you stop?
a: 541…sure.
c: were you counting the bricks?
a: yes, actually.
c: Save yourself the trouble…if your cell is like mine, then there are-
a: 577 bricks.
c: (looking at a suspiciously) how many times have you counted these bricks?
a: why would I count them more than once? that would be silly.
c: but you were just…I mean, I heard you…
a: (sighing) if b were here he’d say it was extraordinary.
c: that there are 577 bricks?
a: that I’d counted them eighteen times. you called it a cell, right now.
c: well yes. that’s what it is.
a: you don’t think the unlocked door defeats the purpose a little bit? it couldn’t, for example, just be a room?
c: A square-
a: -almost square-
c: -almost square grey, plain brick room with no amenities save for a door with a slit in it such that a jailor, to pick a profession at random, could easily peek through to keep an eye on those inside it is called a cell. that the door is unlocked is obviously an oversight on the part of whichever fascist runs this place.
a: and the note?
c: adds insult to injury.
a: I quite like it, actually. gives one hope for the future.
c: what?
a: hope, you know…something to look forward to (taking the piece of paper out of his pocket with a grand gesture and in a grander voice saying:) “You will be sent for.” it’s practically an invitation!
c: is that what yours says? show me that (she snatches it from his hands). so it does.
a: (puzzled) why? what does yours say?
c: (taking an identical piece of paper out of her own pocket) here…read for yourself.
a: (reading, his eyebrows and astonishment rising with each line) oh dear. that’s a little…crude.
c: I especially love the bit about my mother.
a: yes….um….they certainly seem to have done their research. she must be very…err…flexible.
c: it isn’t true!!
a: oh…ah…of course not. that is to say, I would never even consider it for a moment.
c: it suddenly occurs to me that we haven’t actually met. my name is c.
(she sticks out her hand. they shake (hands, not…nevermind))
a: a, pleased to meet you.
c: how long have you been here?
a: (brightly) since I woke up.
c: you’re not terribly bright, are you?
a: no, I chose to be happy instead.
c: good choice.
a: (positively beaming) thank you. so what’s your plan?
c: my plan?
a: oh…I’m sorry, I assumed you had one. you seem like the sort of person who’d have a plan.
c: I did. unfortunately it began and ended with getting the sound of that infernal counting to stop.
a: ah…sorry. I didn’t know anyone else was here. except Them, ofcourse. and b. you’re not one of Them, are you?
c: Them?
a: (coaxingly) perhaps you’re here to send for us?
c: (flatly) no.
a: pity.
c: yes. sorry.
a: it’s ok. b will be back soon. I’m sure he’ll have news.
c: who’s b?
a: a friend of mine…he went out a little while ago to get some air.
c: oh. (pauses) does he have a plan?
a: no, I don’t think so.
c: pity.

The conversation has effectively drifted to a halt. c sits down where b was sitting, in the exact position, staring at the same piece of wall. a does the same vis a vis his old position, and starts counting bricks again.

Lights fade.

Sc iv
a is sitting in the staring-into-space spot, c is measuring the room.

Enter b.

a: b!!
b: I don’t want to talk about it.
a: I haven’t even asked you anything yet….don’t be so grumpy. how was your trip?
b: I don’t want to talk about it. who’s the girl?
a: oh, that’s just c…she doesn’t like numbers and doesn’t have a plan.
b: sounds like someone I once knew. hello, I’, b.
c: thirteen feet by-
b: twelve. (sighs). yes. square one. pleased to meet you.
a: did you find anything?
b: more grey corridors than you can shake a stick at. and I did.
a: shake a stick? where’d you find one?
b: it was a metaphorical stick.
a: cool…can I have it?
b: (sighing) yes, a. here. (hands a an imaginary stick, turns to c) we’re not completely crazy, I promise. well I’m not , at any rate…though miles of grey have a habit of making one question one’s sanity after a while.
c: it’s ok…atleast now there are three of us. well, two and a half.
b: yes..right…err…so?
c: we can stage a rebellion!
b: ah. be my guest. and just what/who are we rebelling against?
c: whoever it is that is imprisoning us!
b: ah, right. them.
a: (aside to b) she’s been very excited about this rebellion thing.
b: well I’ll tell you what I’m going to do for you, c. I’m going to do you a huge favour and let you go on without me.
c: what?! why?
b: you see, its very simple. if I walk down one more grey corridor, turn one more grey corner and see one more endless grey corridor disappearing into the distance, I will, most likely, wring the neck of whosoever should be within arms reach.
c: oh…that’s easy. we’ll put a in between you and me.
a: what? no..
c: (coaxingly, as if to a child) c’mon, it’ll be fun…we’ll play with sticks and find loads of fun things to hurt Them with. It’ll be an adventure.
b: (sternly) he’s not stupid.
c: oh come on…
b: maybe you’d better go lead your rebellion, c. good luck, god speed and all that jazz. let us know how it turns out, won’t you?
c: fine. atleast I’m not just sitting here, waiting for a miracle.

Exit c.

a: (shouting behind her) hey! you’ll need the stick you’re going to fight Them! (waves imaginary stick at her, and then looks disappointedly at b) I don’t think she wants it.

b settles down to his old spot, against the wall, staring at the opposite wall.

a: b…
b: (looking up from his stare) yes?
a: thank you. you defended me!
b: don’t read too much into it. I’ll still wring your neck if you start measuring this room again.
a: I wouldn’t dream of it. err…b?
b: mm?
a: why did she say we’re waiting for a miracle? we’ve got a note. we’re going to be sent for.
b: (sighs) yes, a. we will be sent for.

b stares into space, a begins measuring the room.

a: 1…2….3…

Lights fade.

2006-06-08T20:20:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -
www.flickr.com/photos/anarchy/

2006-05-24T16:57:00.000+05:00

- kitty & the UA -

Asad R. says:
one thing WarCraft teaches you is the balance between micromanagement and letting the damn unit do it's job
Asad R. says:
my parents need to learn Warcraft.
anarchy [take me for a little while] says:
hahahahAHAHAHAHA
anarchy [take me for a little while] says:
thats possibly the greatest thing i've ever heard you say
Asad R. says:
dude, i've blogged about it
Asad R. says:
Warcraft teaches you a lot of things
anarchy [take me for a little while] says:
(forca barca...rallying cry for FC Barcalona
anarchy [take me for a little while] says:
*Barcelona
Asad R. says:
the most important of which is multitasking.. not the immediate multitasking, but the slightly longer than instant multitasking)
Asad R. says:
why the fuck and HOW did i close your parenthesis

2006-05-11T03:31:00.000+05:00

- karachi -

slip in, why don't you
between the commas and punctuation
and tell me a little story about
you and i
that i've never heard.
c'mon baby, take a chance with us..
(jim can come, but he'll have to sit in the back)

she kissed the wind,
i chased the sunrise.

2006-04-03T10:18:00.000+05:00

Originally uploaded by the roof anarchist.

and we chase our addictions..

2006-03-29T06:10:00.000+05:00

it was the kind of day when the world should end. should meet itself coming backwards and turn itself into the kind of thing we only dream about in stolen moments, dreams we snatch from the ethereal. the trees were crying, laying a carpet of white on the ground (that's how damn beautiful it was), and i sat down for a while and listened to them sighing.
the kind of day when the world should end.

h came by. he smiled at me, lying on the grass, and asked 'what happened? trouble in paradise?' i just glared at him, and turned back to the sky. the sky never lies to you, you'll realize, on a day like today. sometimes i go as far as to think she chooses her colours with her children in mind, that she cries when i cry, and not the other way around. we all aspire to be..something. but we don't realize that that something is already there. h taught me that lesson, actually. it's a story, but not for now. h stared. i stared. we both lay there, for hours, it seemed, before he finally got up, dusted himself off (something's changing).
'im leaving town,' he said. i asked him why. he said it was his time. he had been meaning to, for a long time, and the only reason he hadn't was me, actually. he thought i'd needed someone around. he was probably right, we've had some strange days. but h was always bigger than this town, and i couldn't stop him. he said f and l would take care of me, if i needed anything. that i didn't need his kind of conversation anymore. i laughed. i always did, at him, somehow. i don't remember our last words, because everything that led to that point was so much more significant than any 'take care', 'be good', or goodbye.

it must have been late by the time i got back. l had gone to bed, only f stayed up to meet me at the door. she was so beautiful, framed in that doorway, yellow lamplight lighting that red dress. always the red dress. the kind of red that was almost on fire, but stopped short. it'd burn you if you looked too long. i stared. must have looked terrible, because she took pity on me. turned around, went back inside. i made myself some chai, turned on the radio. the news. another rally, another protest. another hundred people dead, another thousand gone unreported. thing's don't change when i come home. i've heard that radio kill millions, over the years.

i went to h's room. it was bare as the day we moved in. i've lived here so long i don't remember ever not having this place. he wasn't the first to live in that room. j had it for a while, and Q before him. things come, things go. if there's one thing i've gotten used to, in time, it's been goodbyes and hellos. i'll put an ad out in the paper for it tomorrow. let's see what i get. maybe i'll get lucky. haha, haha.

i don't remember falling asleep, but i must have, because it's morning now. i had another nightmare last night. i won't give it to you, but i woke up dying. l came inside. she held me, in a way that i think only she knows how. i dissolved into her, because i'd got nothing left in me. we stayed like that, for a long time. she made me breakfast, looked me in the eye, and told me that it was going to be alright. just like that. i told her that h had left. she said she knew. i smiled. she never did like him..they never got along, and she never understood why i spent so much time with him. i couldn't explain to her that i needed to live both sides. she..accepted, but she never understood. which, i suppose, is all one can expect from love. i hope he finds someone else, as he found me. or, rather, the other way around.

the light's streaming in, through the windows. l must have done that. she loves doing little things like that, she know's i'll notice. f is sitting by me. she's got a hand on my shoulder, as i write. i can feel her seeping into me. i need to breathe. cut loose, somehow, you know? where's my exit, where's the turn off? did i miss it already? i'm waiting, here, for something. f's whispering in my ear, now. she's telling me that she loved h, but never understood him. she thought he was too obscure, came from too many angles. she's says she's pure. and she is, too.
i've removed her hand. i can't ever bear her touch for too long. she burns me. she's still talking, but i'm trying to drown her out. i'm staring out the window, at the light.

i think i'm going to go. i think it's time, i think it might be good. i don't know, but k moved out a long, long time ago. haven't known it for so long that certainty's drained out of any pore that belongs to me. but i can take a chance, i've always been able to do that. that one's mine, lives in my room. i'll take her with me, let her lead me.

i don't know why it is that i've chosen you, but please, don't forget me. i want someone to know that there was once a boy named z, and he believed in everything. that he let things live in his house and eat his food, because in a sense he would use them to understand who he was. that this boy needed to leave, because life is more than what you feel.

i love you.

signed,

-z

2006-03-25T22:58:00.000+05:00

-new pictures on flickr-

Originally uploaded by the roof anarchist.

2006-02-23T07:17:00.000+05:00

im not accustomed to standing here
telling my piece of the truth
that piece
that truth
that can't keep pace
with the thought
the lie
the death
in each of us
you
me
its never about us
the you and i
and the him & her
the it of it all is that we never
need
to see the
things we know
to believe
in a river, that flows.

down, down
to that place
im going
down
where the devil doesn't bother to hide
and where an angel won't tap
tap
tap me
on the shoulder asking me to be brand A
and not C.

to a city where the day isn't day
night doesn't mean the moon,
its a frame of mind,
a point of view,
a perspective
directive
im being constructive
defective.

and im standing
here
tell
tell
telling my piece,
of the truth
whether or not it suits
your passion
your place
your faith,
your
indefinable
quantities of yes and no.

im not a hero
no
hell
no.
don't look at me
that way
that look
that face
im not
the end of the world.
the death of the soul
the fall of control.

im not going to be
your bulletproof
baby.
your heartstopping
deathdefying
unrelenting
runner
im going to be mine
because,
well
because im here.

take my hand
ill take you
down to that place
you want to come?
that city
that light
that dark
you probably won't see it
at
all
stop following me.

and im going to take over the world
and give it to you
on a silver platter
not because i want
it
but because its something to do.

flowing
down,
drown in my words
mine
im going down
and when the winds rushing
and the pace is hurting
and the fall is coming
and the end
is
there
im going to turn around
and do it again.

gushing
lying
dying. you talk to me
as if
i were leaving
but im already gone
left through the back door
all you've got now
is the words
in a place where you can visit
them
if you want
to see the truth
the lies
the death
and the little bit of the end of the world
that i carry around with me
in my back pocket.

- write your own damn disclaimer -

2006-02-09T00:25:00.000+05:00

winter's child was
always
discontent.
wrapped in fingers
and words (s)he
never let be
hers.

don't want
them,
to go away
(tell them)

2006-02-01T08:41:00.000+05:00

- the most romantic song of the decade -

gotta leave town
got another appointment
spent all my rent
girl you know i enjoyed it

ain't gonna hang around till there's nobody dancing
i don't wanna hold hands and talk about our little plans,
alright

cold hard bitch
just a kiss on the lips
and i was on my knees
i'm waiting, give me
cold hard bitch
she was shakin' her hips
that's all that I need

gonna check her out
she's my latest attraction
gonna hang around
wanna get a reaction

gonna take her home cause she's over romancing
don't wanna hold hands and talk about our little plans
alright

cold hard bitch
just a kiss on the lips
and i was on my knees
i'm waiting give me
cold hard bitch
she was shakin' her hips
and i that was all that I need

cold hard bitch
jet

[dedicated to all the beautiful people]

2006-01-31T02:50:00.000+05:00

our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. it is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. we ask ourselves, who am i to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? actually, who are you not to be? you are a child of god. your playing small does not serve the world. there is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. we are all meant to shine, as children do. we are born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us. it is not in just some of us; it is in everyone. and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. as we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-Marianne Williamson

(now if you insert a few nuances about god into the spoken word, and if you take out that rubbish about being enlightened (some of us are not striving to be enlightened, we are simply trying to live), you may have something. never take anything at face value, just because it reads well. because it's beautiful. you have a truth. find it.)

2006-01-28T05:21:00.000+05:00

- morning -

2006-01-21T23:42:00.000+05:00

it's almost impossible,
like the rain,
or daisies
(do you remember?),
like our hands (tracing
invisible lines on each other).
i know your secrets
(they are mine),
and there is fear,
in our voices,
when we touch,
but we will not stop,
(because it is like the rain).

there are times (i admit
everything),
when i want to keep you in a little box,
with me,
but then i realize,
that i already do.

2006-01-19T03:35:00.000+05:00

- revised, but only slightly. it's older than you think. -

He carefully placed (not dropped) two cubes of sugar in the coffee, and stirred it until the swirls of white disappeared into monotonous, deep brown. Presently, he allowed a laugh to escape him.
"What's so funny?" Kamil asked.
"Oh nothing. Nothing terribly interesting, anyway."
"Enlighten me - I was always interested by the mundane, remember?"
"It's just funny. You, me, us - I haven't seen you for years, but here we are. And I can't help but thinking: what's the protocol?"
"Protocol?"
And Kamil laughed, too, because he realized the ridiculousness that distances create.
"You see what I mean? I don't get it. Everywhere we go, everything we do, there's some sort of order, some sort of prescribed rubric to fall back on. But where do we begin?"
"The issue here is your apparent dependence on what society thinks you should say, Ali. It isn't society's fault that it didn't equip you for this conversation."
"Oh come on, it can equip me on how to deal with the highly unlikely scenario of a sinking ship with only one more berth on it's lifeboats, and myself and a pregnant lady the only ones still on board, but it can't tell me how to talk to someone I was great friends with once upon a time?"
"You give the woman the place on the lifeboat, and wait for the water to swallow you. Ofcourse."
"What if I don't want to die?"
"Completely besides the point. The rubric you so seem to desire demands it. Now shut up and die with some grace, damn it."
A smile arched across Ali's face, again.
"Always with the grace, Ka - always with the grace."
"Ofcourse 'Always with the grace.' Take that away, and what've we left?"
"On the one hand its extraordinary how much you've changed, and on the other its incredible how much you remain the same below your skin."
"I'll take that as a compliment," Kamil said, his own smile widening.

*

"Give it back!"
"No..calm down. I just want to look at it!"
"I don't care, it's mine! You'll break it!!"
"I will not, for Gods sake."
"ALI!!"
"Oops..."

*

"I have a cunning plan."
"Do you really?"
"Ok, so it's not very cunning, but it's a start."
"Let's hear it, then."
"You desire a rubric. Here it is: tell me a story."
"A story? Will any story do, or does it have to have a certain number of dragons and maidens in it?"
"Your story - the number of dragons and maidens is wholly dependent on your experience," Kamil said,"Though I warn you that I'm not apt to believe them if they do make an appearance. Based on my experience."
"My story? You know me, dude - no story. Very uninteresting life. We went to college, I got a degree, got a job, a fucking big television and lived the trainspotting dream," said Ali, laughing.
"You're telling me we've got nothing at all to catch up on? Yes, that makes perfect sense.."
"Nothing significant."
"You didn't get married, did you?"
"Shakal dekhi he meri?"
"That not withstanding. What happened between you and Sana?"
"We broke up."
"Ha! So we do have something to catch up on. I didn't know that, and therefore there is a discrepancy between who you were and who you are."
"No...Really? You expected us to be trapped in stasis, perhaps."
"You know what I mean..get on with it."
"With what?"
"With what we've been talking about....you. Your story."
"What is it with your insistence on my 'story'? I don't know - I lived, I worked, I studied, I partied. I partied alot, actually. Drank a bit, smoked alot, and then not at all. Got a job, lost a job, got another job, and now I'm here. Happy?"
"Point taken. It just seems that it would be...simpler."
"What? To have stories?"
"Yes."
"Yes..I suppose it would. But I'm afraid I've got nothing for you - you'll have to worm it out of me," he said, eyes twinkling.

*

"Are you crazy?!"
"Are you crazy?! Saeed Anwar is ten thousand times better than Tendulkar!!"
"No man...have you seen Tendulkar play? That guy is amazing."
"You're just an indian-lover, that's your problem."
"What?! Don't you dare.."
"Indian-lover, Indian-lover!!"

*

They stared at the table for a good bit. It was getting to be dinner time, and Kamil broke the silence.
"You want to grab a bite to eat?"
"What time is it?"
Glancing at the clock above Ali's shoulder, "About ten."
"Shit..yea, no wonder I was getting so hungry. Kidhar jaana he?"
"I don't know. Does it matter?"
"Ofcourse it matters. Everything matters."
"Really?"
"Not really. But it should."
"Yea. Probably."
"Kamil..we are desperate need of sustenance, and I vote rolls."
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"My mind is nowhere near that filthy, Ka.."
"Abey ulloo ke pathe. Jafri's chalein?"
"Jafri's? Is that place even still open?"
"I have no idea, but there's just one way to find out."
"Man, that's on the other side of town. Tumhe pata he kitni der lagge gi?"
"Have you no sense of history? No sense of occasion? Look at us...the great Ali and Kamil reunited, and you're quibbling about distance to get to eat the food of the Gods."
"I don't recall ever seeing any Gods eating there."
"It was a figure of speech."
"Must have been rather dirty, unemployed type Gods.." he muttered, as they made their way to the car.

*

"Ka, uth."
"Kyun? Kya masla he?"
"Dinner scene. Get some clothes on."
"Raat ke do baj rahe hein, yeh koi waqt he dinner scene ka?"
He shrugged, "Call it spontaneous. Asif ne call kiya, abhi. Kapre pehno, we're leaving in five."
"Is my mother asleep?"
"Yea."
"Acha. Get the car, mein aata hoon."

*

"Atif Aslam?! Man Ali, I'm disowning you. Tumhe ho kya gaya he?"
"Oh shut up - you still haven't lost your sound snobbishness?"
"Sound snobbishness nothing. This is Atif, for God's sake..what happened to the days of knowing keh Ali ki gari mein Doors sunein ge?"
Ali shrugged, "Times change."
"Apparently."
"Acha don't sulk."
"Sulk? I never sulked a day in my life."
"Right..right. Not even that time when I beat you on Sports Day?"
"Man.."
"You didn't talk to me for a week...I couldn't believe it," Ali said, not bothering to control his laughter.
"Yea well..it was important to me, for some reason."
"Yea."

Silence for a while, as the lights flew by and familiar roads swept into distances known once.
They turned left.

"Oye, isn't that Basit's old house?"
"Yea..I think it might be."
"Kya huwa uss bunde ka?"
"I don't know...last I heard his family shifted to the States."
"You remember that night of double-sarri?"
"What night?"
"Man, how can you forget? The night we played from six in the evening till six in the morning. Yaad aaya?"
"Arey haan - kitni chai pi thi humne? There was supposed to be dinner, at some point..we just kept playing till the sun was suddenly, inexplicably, in the sky."
"Yea man...what a night. What I wouldn't give to be back, sometimes," Kamil said.
"Back?"
"Yea. Young...free and reckless. Those were the days, man..we were dreamers. This city was our canvas, and we painted our stories on it. Everywhere. People see schon circle, and they think of directions, but I think of the time we hid in the fountain from the tullas."
"Correction, people do not see schon circle any longer."
"That's right...bastards..how could they tear it down? The thing's a landmark, its a part of my life. Yet, with the flourish of some civil planner's pen, it now has ceased to exist. Everything's changing."

Silence at a traffic light, another mangled soul clawing at the window.

"Have you ever felt disconnected, Ali?"
"How do you mean?"
"I'm not sure - but life is so fluid, so fleeting. You and I, we're just here for a blink of an eye in the cosmic scale of things, our place here is really rather insignficant."
"And your point is..?"
"My point, Ali, is that all of this manifests itself in a distinct disconnection of the soul with life."
"Hum khaane keh liyay ja rahe the, aur tum 'soul' aur 'life' pe aa gayay ho.."
"Don't you see?" Kamil said, turning from the passenger seat, his voice more vehement, almost violent with meaning. "None of this matters...I mean we're just here for a short, short time and we make what we can of it before everything moves on, cleans up, shifts forward, and some of us are left sitting back here in a city that does not exist any longer, trying to live a fools life. It doesn't matter."
"Tumne kya socha tha keh yeh shehr humara intezaar karre ga, Ka?"
"Mein sirf shehr ki baat nahin kar raha."
"Tou phir?"
"Zindagi - have you ever felt lost in memory? It's harder and harder to come back, each time, until you find that you're returning to a present you don't even belong in. "
"Is this about coming back home?"
"Partly. But partly it's just about home being a state of mind."

*

"So."
"Yea."
"Here we are."
"Yea."
"If you say 'yea' again, I'm going to smack you."
"Yea."
*smack*
"I'm a man of my word."
"Yea," Kamil said, grinning.
"This is wonderful. You're leaving in the morning, and we're going to sit here saying 'yea' to each other all night."
"You expected something more dramatic? A speech, a heart-rending sonnet, perhaps?"
"Indeed."
"Time's up. Got to go. You take care of yourself. And always remember: Don't Inhale."
"Yea. When do I see you next?"
"I don't know..let's say never."
"Never it is."

*

"Don't you think it's time you got over that, Ka? I mean all night we've been talking about the past. Which is great..was great, whatever. We had some great times, and I'm not taking away from that - but you've got to live the life you've got, right?"
"Yeah, I know..its nothing serious, just leave it."
"No, somehow I get the feeling that it really is."
"I don't know man...sometimes I just get the feeling that we've lived the greatest moments of our lives already, that it's all downhill from here. What's the point of going gently into that good night?"
"The whole 'live-fast-die-young' thing..you're not serious? I mean yea..we've got lives now, we've got stuff to do, and hell..yea, it isn't as much fun as it used to be, but it's still life, right?"
"Life in a box-"
"-is better than no life at all."
"Sometimes I think that without Stoppard your conversation would wither away."
"Perhaps."
"I'm just...not all here, anymore. I mean, I came back here...I made a conscious effort to come back, because I love this. But I get the distinct feeling that it isn't even love, anymore. You can't love something that's forgotten your name. Everything's...just memories. Tainted. The people have moved on, the lights have moved on, and I'm standing here thinking whether the life I'd come back for never really existed in the first place."
"Nothing stops, Ka. Nothing."
"Yea. It's a shame."
"Oh well."
"Yea."
"Yea."
"Yea."
"So what now?"
"Dinner."
"Sounds like a plan. Next left."
"I remember! I'm not that old. Yet."

The road was just as crowded and the sign said Jafri's, just the same way as in memories of late nights and unauthorized escapades. They drove right by - the unlit neon and dusty, fallen shutter shaking lightly in the wind.

2006-01-08T19:41:00.000+05:00

- new pictures on flickr -

2006-01-03T13:01:00.002+05:00

- tell me, when will the river run green? -

a, exasperated: who are these people?
b: ordinary people under extraordinary pressure, a. what the hell do you expect? Grace and Consistency?

the insider

notes, the second

young writers face a particularly nasty predicament - they can neither afford to sound jaded and staid, for there they lose their 'edge' (as if we're all somehow hewn from rough rock. which we may be, if it comes to that), nor can they ever slip into childishness. and the trick is in finding your own niche without caring a damn whether some other young writer somewhere thinks 'what is that? he sounds fifty..', or if some old hand throws the paper away muttering 'kids...they haven't seen anything, don't know anything.'

the tragedy is that they are both right. we've seen just enough to begin our sentences, but not enough to end them - and there we lose ourselves in the space between letters.

there is no period at the end of this sentence

to those who look to the stars, and find salvation in their enormity and the self's own minute-ness in the 'general scheme of things', to those who fly at night when no-one is watching, and who fall only when the sun rises, i have words. they tell stories of daring, and they speak of not falling back on the sky as an excuse, but holding yourself to it's standard. there is so much beauty.

you're beautiful.

even broken glass shines.

sometimes it's alright to test yourself by fire - but there'll always be someone waiting on the crest of the hill, wishing you didn't have to. love is when they let you hurt yourself a little bit, if only so you can trust yourself a little bit more.

we're all in a cycle. hold yourself to the sky.

2005-11-29T01:35:00.000+05:00

i have trouble believing that i exist for others when i'm not in their immediate universe. when i am not speaking to them or standing in front of them, i can not believe that they think about me. i am in denial about my own existence - i don't think you have a mental picture of me. i can't picture it. i wouldn't have one. not of me. i can't imagine i exist for anyone who i'm not conversing with.i am skeptical when people tell me they were thinking about me. 'really?', i ask. my eyebrow lifts, slightly. i couldn't always do that. but i can, now. i can do many things, but really nothing that amounts to very much. never could, never will. turned around words are sometimes more meaningful than what we say. celebrate opposite day. assume everything is backwards, down to up. see where it gets you.
you see the words, they form a train that flows through your brain, a river of thought that is either a trickle or a rage, but never nothing. everything is something. Crash.
i am worried. about many things. do you know that? did you know the number of the house was written in white? did you notice the red? probably not. i did. i always do. the inconsequential fascinates me. it is so forgotten, so pushed aside that i can't help but believe that there is a secret hidden within it somewhere where no-one bothers to look. in my universe the unexpected carries salvation, and the real punch line is that it's not even hiding, you just don't know how to look. they say that seeing is an instinct, you cannot explain sight to the blind. but it isn't - because you see only those things that you're used to seeing. the challenge is seeing things that you would not.

is that so difficult to believe? that we're wrong? we're young, or so they say. isn't everyone old?

it's quiet. i love you. but you're always quiet when the world comes crashing down, again.

when you close your eyes, what do you see?

2005-11-11T06:36:00.000+05:00

they say its a nervous breakdown, but whats a breakdown? i mean, how do you tell? is there a line crossed, an i left undotted? as we walk, to and from, this way, there, and here - how do you tell? can you magnify my soul, because i think im getting smaller as we get bigger. can you see through my clothes, skin, flesh and bone? and when you do, do you feel, or do you merely see?

everyone's breaking down. we are in a constant state of death. so really, when i say that everytime i talk to you i die a little inside, i'm not lying. is that not comforting? sad. it seems it should be. they always said the truth was important. somehow.

they also insisted on transparency. but can you really make your skin see-through? are you able? i can't move. i am unable. or perhaps just un.

walk, talk, breathe. can't hum, don't have it in me. can't tap because i lost you. can't sing - got no soul. no soul. nosoul. luoson. the words still carry no meaning, even if you twist them and turn them, love them and lose them.

tell me, do your fingers know what it is to have memories? instinctively searching for that hollow, for that sensation. we are all sense-based creatures. we are drawn to things. hot, cold, touch. feel.

somehow from one moment to the next we never seem to realize how much things remain in flux. everything becomes - tainted.

everyone's got a little death inside them.

2005-11-05T03:39:00.000+05:00

for psnob.

anarchy says:
for some sonrea
wheres says:
hah, all good things come in disconnected packages?
wheres says:
hah, thats not even backwards
anarchy says:
backwards is cliche
anarchy says:
im not backwards, im broken. not same.
wheres says:
and oddly looks like a cross between that disease and sonic of the supersonic fame

2005-10-31T07:00:00.000+05:00

[remember, its all in your head.]

backspace. there were some letters and some words, some spaces and some stops, but they don't live here anymore.
prerogative has always been a word laden with harsh tones, meanings and the unexpected. the unexpected, on the other hand, happens with monotonous regularity so that this and that are almost never what one sees in the here and now, rather one finds oneself quite without words. without denoting absence, but not loss. loss is deeper, more infiltrating into one's insides, when you feel all the cliches about a broken heart actually physically tearing through flesh. which is fallible, really - wounds always heal, but scars leave behind a mental note: don't do that again. is it unwise to find oneself in the same places with different people, to do the same things with different utensils? knives are pointy, but forks will tear you up inside. like cloth, ripped and shred to pieces so that its useless to anyone. why would anyone ever do that?
anyone - you could be anyone.

2005-10-03T05:34:00.000+05:00

[its time for a classic..]

f c d b

it must be your skin that i’m sinking in,
must be for real 'cos now i can feel.
and i didn’t mind,
it’s not my kind,
not my time to wonder why.
everything’s gone white,
and everything’s grey.
now you’re here,
now you’re away.
i don’t want this,
remember that.
i’ll never forget where you’re at.

don’t let the days go by
glycerine.

f c b

i’m never alone,
i’m alone all the time.
are you at one,
or do you lie?
we live in a wheel,
where everyone steals,
but when we rise it’s like strwaberry fields.

i treated you bad,
you bruise my face.
couldn’t love you more,
you got a beautiful taste.

don’t let the days go by,
could have been easier on you.
i couldn’t change though i wanted to,
should have been easier by three,
our old friend fear and you and me.
glycerine
glycerine
don’t let the days go by
glycerine
don't let the days go by..

glycerine.
bad moon wine again.

i needed you more
when we wanted us less.
i could not kiss just regress.
it might just be,
clear simple and plain,
that’s just fine,
that’s just one of my names.
don’t let the days go by.
could’ve been easier on you,
glycerine.

Glycerine
Bush

2005-10-01T03:38:00.000+05:00

september was when the clouds finally gathered, when the rains finally came. it was when it all hit you, suddenly, like a brick wall, pulling itself up despite your always trying to dislodge each individual piece. september was when we dove off rooftops, dared the sky, lived in the space between the clouds, and let the rain wash us clean.
we were purer, cleaner, more faithful, then. we were never innocent, but have never been quite so guilty.
milk dissolves in slow, twisting spirals, and you suddenly find yourself sinking to the bottom of another mug, another time, another day. things become so much simpler when you reduce them to the you and i, but in the here and now we don't always remember where we've been, where we want to go.

the slow hand quickens..

treetops will watch over you as you argue, as you pull this way and then that. do you realize? do you see? do you even remember september?

2005-09-25T05:07:00.000+05:00

[your heroes failed]

it was cold. not the way a chill wind is cold, but the way steel is cold. up your spine, fear crystallizing your nerves to the point where you can feel the world breathe.

but that was years ago. today the sun shines, the colours make poets out of pagans, and saints out of us all. underneath pure light, we can all be good. if only for a few moments, even you can be a child, again. warmth, somehow, suffuses everything. spread, like so much butter, over us all, your warmth will free you.
or atleast that's what they tell you in the movies.

fear, somehow, had never been a problem. you lose it, eventually, when it's been around for so long. like pure white noise, it blends into the background until it doesn't even elevate your heartbeat anymore. it lives behind your scenes, it breathes out through your pores.
it was cold, that night, but i wasn't afraid. or i was too afraid, because opposites inevitably blend together when you live on extremes of some arbitrarily determined scale, trying to make your life fit some rubric the writers, poets, musicians and artists of your time have written, composed, painted for you. when the music catches up with your life, when the words cease echoing with truth, what do you do then? who listens?

cold, warmth. warmth, cold. it breaks down. when you're warm, you're safe. that's what they told me. they taught me to fear the cold. and it was cold. what was i supposed to do, i'm just a product of forces outside of my control, right? i exist as a representation of everyone i've seen or known, everyone i've heard and talked to. your life ceases to be yours the moment you're taken from the womb. you had nine months. it's all over.

to stop is to break. the cycles are far too easy to fall into, and if our spontaneity is merely a part of their order (thank you, stoppard), then you may as well quit now. i can repeat words to you till the day we both end up on a road to nowhere, till the moment you turn to me and tell me you didn't want to fall. again. it's all a shambles.
one of these days i'll tell you a story.

2005-09-23T04:21:00.000+05:00

[part ii]

through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes,
i can barely define the shape of this moment in time.
and far from flying high in clear blue skies,
i'm spiralling down to the hole in the ground where i hide.

if you negotiate the minefield in the drive,
and beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eyes.
and if you make it past the shotguns in the hall,
dial the combination. open the priesthole.
and if i'm in, i'll tell you what's behind the wall.

there's a kid who had a big hallucination,
making love to girls in magazines.
he wonders if you're sleeping with your new found faith.
could anybody love him,
or is it just a crazy dream?

and if i show you my dark side,
will you still hold me tonight?
and if i open my heart to you,
and show you my weak side,
what would you do?

would you sell your story to rolling stone?
would you take the children away,
and leave me alone,
and smile in reassurance,
as you whisper down the phone.
would you send me packing?
or would you take me home?

thought i oughta bare my naked feelings.
thought i oughta tear the curtain down.
i held the blade in trembling hands,
prepared to make it, but just then the phone rang.
i never had the nerve to make the final cut.

The Final Cut
Pink Floyd

2005-09-20T09:37:00.000+05:00

'lets go somewhere,' i said, 'we never go anywhere.'
he just sat there, took a deep pull from his cigarette and then let his arm drop to his side.
'is that all you have to say?', i asked.
'what would you like me to say, kid? go. you've only home to come back to, why bother leaving the house at all?'
'rubbish. you're apathetic to everything. that's another one of your problems.'
'my problems? don't put psychoses in my mind - i've got no troubles, kid. i'm doing just fine.'
'you're lying,' i said. And then, after a pause 'you have to be.'
'why?'
'because i don't want to believe you.'
'that, my child, is your problem.'
'i suppose it is.' then he picked up the guitar from his side and played a few notes. dissatisfied, he put it down again.
'the trouble is,' he said, 'that in the end it all collapses to a single point.'
'what does?'
'life. the universe. everything.'
'explain.'
He just smiled at me, and said 'I don't have to explain it to you. You go out there, roam around for a while,'
'pick up some biscuits for me on your way back,' he added, that smile never leaving his face.

*

'you were wrong,' i said.
'was i?'
'take your damn biscuits and wipe that smug look off your face,' i replied, throwing the bag at his feet.
'tell me.'
'forget it, i don't want to talk about it.'
'oh you don't want to talk? all you ever want to do is talk - this is excellent progress.'
'shut up.'
'foul. no profanity - it's against the rules.'
'what rules? it's all a shambles anyway.'
'oh so you think so too, then?'
'yes. i mean no. this..all of this is a shambles. why do you even live here anymore?'
'you never asked me to leave.'
'leave.'
'really?'
'yes.'

He rose and walked to the door. black silhoette, white sunlight streaming in, i swear it looked like a scene from a movie. i'd have let him go, if only he wasn't so perfectly dramatic. you can't live without that. life's grey enough as it is without your shooting yourself in the foot.

*

'you're back.'
'yes, i am'
'well, what do you want now, kid?'
'must i want something? could i not have come for company, words, someone to share a silence with?'
'in my experience, you've only ever come here to get something.'
half of me wanted to prove him wrong, and just talk about the rain for an hour. but he could always see through me. it really was a shambles.
'i can't do this.'
'do what, exactly?'
'be there. i can't do it. i need to go, a..don't you understand, i need to run.'
'oh i understand perfectly. you want to stay, but you've got to run. simple.'
'its not that simple.'
'isn't it?'
'no, damnit.'
the smoke rose in circles around him. it was as if the world was waiting for him to breathe.
'why don't you ever do anything?!' i yelled, as i grabbed his collar with both hands and picked him from his chair. 'all you ever do is just..sit there. you have no answers, no questions, you are..not. if you disappeared today, nobody would ever know, and fewer would care. what kind of pleasure do you derive out of this? tell me, please..i want to know. i need to know - why are you here?'
'put me down.'
'no.'
'put..me..down.'
i put him down. i could never stand up under his gaze.
'that's it, a. i'm leaving. i've had it..you've always been saying its time to take the plunge, and this is it. i'm not going to dance for them anymore.'
'looking for your exit?'
'it's funny. for as long as i can remember, you've been pushing me off.'
'it's the easiest way to go, kid.'
'yes, but what do you get out of it?'
'nothing. it's all a shambles, remember?' he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
'you're hopeless. this is hopeless.' i walked over to the corner of the room, looked down.
'don't bother getting up,' i added.

2005-08-11T21:43:00.000+05:00

i remember seeing you, sitting there on the other side of the room, that grin on your face, when you caught me and never let go. the truth was that i had to swim through a sea of people to get to you, but you made me feel like we were the only two people in a mad, mad world that night.

i remember the morning after, and i remember the way you smell. i'll always remember the way you smell..it's like your fingerprints all over me, i could pick you out of a crowded room if you gave me nothing but a nose to press against everyones skin (not that i'd want to, but i would have. for you). i remember how your hair would come down in strands in front of your eyes, and you'd shake your head to make it swing back and away.

i remember the night we sat out and watched the moon rise. i remember leaning my head backwards and thinking of nothing at all but how warm your lap felt, how soft your hands were against my face. i remember the sunrise, the saturdays, the moonshine and the good days.

i remember the late nights and the cigarettes, the long talks and the pointlessness, i remember walking down the road to nowhere with your hand in mine, and neither of us wanted to go anywhere else. i remember kneeling down on my knees and just sitting there, and i remember the look on your face when you told me i should be in the movies.

i remember dying, lying flat on my back, listening to the grass grow around me, and i remember the day the world came to a standstill in between dancing spots of dust in the wind. i remember the taste of your skin the day you taught me how to breathe, and i remember the touch of your fingers against my face when you taught me how to sing.

i remember how graceful your step was, how beautiful your smile was, how telling your eyes were, the day you said you had to fly.

2005-07-20T21:51:00.000+05:00

You scored as Paganism. Your beliefs are most closely aligned with those of paganism, Wicca, or a similar earth-based religion. You may also follow a Native American religion.

Paganism

71%

Islam

71%

Satanism

71%

agnosticism

71%

atheism

54%

Hinduism

50%

Buddhism

50%

Judaism

29%

Christianity

25%

created with QuizFarm.com

2005-07-19T20:10:00.000+05:00

[this one's a little longer, and not very good]

That, according to the piece of paper I held in my hand, was the house. It was one of those two or three bedroom affairs, from the looks of it, with the tiny garden by the entrance, just to give you that sense of luxury. As the evening drew in it looked almost intimate, and I rang the bell.

Mrs.Ahmed came out to greet me, dressed in a neat plain green shalwar kameez, her hair tied tightly in a modest bun behind her head. Her nails were painted a particularly haunting shade of crimson, and her lips a deeper, fuller red. They were curled upwards, now, in an earnest smile as she showed me inside her house.

We sat in the veranda, a smallish room, decorated in that style of so many houses you'll find in the subcontinent: full to the brim with knick-knacks, with every available surface covered by a decorative object of some kind. The walls were a tasteful subdued off white, and the fluorescent tube light flickered incessantly for microseconds at a time. I was so involved in memorizing the little details of the room, a habit I picked up when I was a boy, that I almost missed that she was talking to me - inviting me to sit down, as it would happen.

Presently she left the room for a moment, and re-entered followed by two young children, the real reason I was there on this balmy, sweltering July evening. She introduced me to them. Adil could not have been more than thirteen, but his eyes shone with that particular light that only the young possess. You lose it earlier and earlier in this age, it would seem, but I could tell the boy was not the kind to waste too much of his childhood sitting in one place. He had straight, jet black hair, which fell on eyes in a way which forced him to constantly flick it with an airy, almost confident wave of his right hand. He wore corduroy pants and a plain, blue shirt which made him look older than he really was. His sister Aaliyah was younger, eight or nine perhaps, and was dressed in the kind of frilly white dress mothers seem to dress their children in solely for the sake of taking photographs and blackmailing them with at some later date.

When she introduced me as a friend of their fathers, the boy's eyes almost visibly lit up. Aaliyah, for some reason, had not stopped staring at me since she entered the room, and she continued to do so now, though there was now almost a quizical look to her features. It's not surprising. She hardly knew her father.

After exchanging the usual 'And how old are you?', 'Which class are you in?', 'What do you enjoy doing?' question-answer pairs that have almost become a part of our cultural subconscious, we entered the dining room for dinner.

Over karahi and bhujia we discussed the politics of the day, the weather, the need we felt for social change, the price of tomatoes, and, of course, the cricket team's current form. Conversation stretched well past the end of the meal, and Adil showed every sign that he was capable of coming up with at least twelve different better ways he could be spending his time. His sister, too, appeared to be nodding off every now and then. That was when Mrs. Ahmed, "Sharmeen...call me Sharmeen.", she kept saying, suggested we move back to the veranda and have some tea.

The children sat down together on an old weatherbeaten brown couch, while I was given the seat of honour: a white sofa chair, covered in plastic to preserve it's colour. I heard the kettle begin to shriek, and a few moments later Mrs.Ahmed returned to join us with the tea and some biscuits on a plain wooden tray, with engraved handles. After serving me, she sat down with her children, and we lapsed into the silence which follows any good meal.

"Would you children like to hear a story?" I asked. Adil nodded noncommittally, but Aaliyah's face seemed to brighten at the prospect. "It's about your father," I added, hoping to get engage Adil's enthusiasm. It seemed to work, for he immediately flicked the hair out of his eyes, and looked at me with those bright shining eyes.

"Did you know Abu well?" he asked, his voice eager.

"Oh, very well. We served in the same company in the war. Actually," and here I raised my hand to shield my lips from Mrs.Ahmed's view, as if telling the boy a secret, "that's the reason your mother called me here this evening. To help you children to better get to know your father."

He nodded, knowingly.

"Alright, then. Are you kids ready for a story, then?"

They both nodded eagerly, leaning forward. Even Mrs.Ahmed seemed taken in the moment, smiling a quiet little smile to herself.

"I first met him when he joined our company, it must have been two years ago. He had short, straight brown hair. Alot like yours, actually, Adil. Back then he perpetually had this innocent look on his face, as if he'd just gotten out of school. Come to think of it, he never really lost it, even after all the things we had seen.

"Anyhow, he joined us just before we were due to move out of another temporary HQ, on the front. At the time I didn't give him a second look, for we were all busy getting ready to go into battle and, understandably, had other things on our mind. He made it a point to introduce himself to everyone, though. He just smiled and went up to each one of us, thrust forward his hand and said 'Hello, my name is Ahmed Talal.', as if he was going to try and sell them something. You just couldn't say no to that smile. He was so serene, even with all the destruction around us.

"That was the first time I saw him, and I remember thinking that that smile wouldn't last. That it couldn't, not with everything that I had already seen, and was sure that he would see. I was wrong though. Your father - he was an amazing man. No matter where we were, no matter how bad things got, you always knew you could turn to Ahmed, and he'd flash you a smile and tell you a joke, he'd give you faith. There were times when I was sure I was going to die. I had certainty, and I had lost hope. But every time that happened, Ahmed would notice that particular look in my eye, and he'd crawl up to me (we were in foxholes most of the time) and tell me that everything was going to be alright. He'd tell me about you children, alot. He'd tell me how he had to get back, just to see your faces again. And he told me that he wasn't going to go back without me, so I'd

just have stay alive. Then he'd crack a joke about our C/O, a swarthy drunken old colonel from the cavalary days, who insisted we march into battle in single file, rifles raised vertically. He kept saying it was the way war was supposed to be conducted. Conducted! As if this was some sort of chess game.

"Come to think of it, it was. To the generals, anyway. Your father and I would spend long nights awake in the trenches, cursing the names of every general we knew. We'd swear that we'd go back to HQ and slaughter them all: Tanvir, Khalil, Arbab - the whole lot. We came up with amazing plans to do it, too. He was always one for the complicated plan. Tanvir, we knew, never missed his nightly drink. He'd get his orderly to mix it in the kitchen of the Mess hall, after everyone else had left, and bring it to his tent. We decided that one day we'd grab the orderly, stuff a sock in his mouth and tie him up. Then he'd wear his uniform (I was too big), and go straight into General Tanvir's tent and hold a gun to his head until he signed our discharge papers.

"He never did it, though. His sense of duty to his country was too great. Fighting the war, to him, was a trust. It was a trust given to him by the people of his country, and by his children. Often he'd say 'If I don't fight to protect them, then who will?'. And that was that, really. It was simple enough: he wasn't fighting to save his own life.

"He kept a picture of the two of you with him all the time. He had it in his front left pocket, and he'd stare at you kids for hours when we were supposed to be sleeping, recharging for our next assualt. I caught him crying while he stared, one day. I asked him why.

" 'Who'll take care of them if I don't make it, Ali? I'm too scared to fight, but I'm too scared not to. I have to protect them, but I have to be there for them when they call.' I put my arm around him, then, and consoled him, telling him that he would make it. And I believed it, I really did. He was a fine soldier, but more than that, I had faith that God wouldn't let a man as good as that die in vain."

Here I paused, and took a sip of my tea. I dipped a biscuit in, and then continued.

"He was a fine man. You may not believe it, but I grieve for him everyday. People like him are few, and far between. I lost count of the number of times he saved my life. In trenches you entrust your life to man beside you, and there was no-one I would rather have with me in those muddy, wet, bug-infested trenches than Ahmed."

I had to pause there, and take another sip of my tea. Going over the war was never my cup of tea (pun unintended), and this was taking alot out of me. To tell you the truth the only reason I agreed to meet with Mrs.Ahmed was when she told me that her children knew too little of their father. This was as much a duty as reporting to the base the next morning at 0630.

"I remember one time, we had been in a particular trench, up near the front line, for a week straight. Our orders were to hold the line until the tank division which was supposed to back us up arrived. We were running low on food, supplies, and more importantly ammo. The enemy had us more or less surrounded, and the only way any of us thought we were getting out alive was to retreat. Our orders stood, though. So we sat there, sitting ducks, waiting for the enemy's patience to run out and to storm us.

"It was awful. I'm not going to get into the details about how we had no place to goto the bathroom, how the trenches began to stink, and the dead began to smell.

"In the midst of all of that, I can still see your father's face, sitting there smiling his little smile. One day my patience ran out, and I snapped at him to wipe that smirk off his face, before I wiped it off for him. He didn't reply. I went right up to his face and yelled at him 'Why in the hell are you smiling like that?!'. He just looked at me, and said 'What else is there to do?' And it was true...it was perfectly true. Your father saw life like no other man I know: to him there was never any conceivable reason to allow it to get to you, because he never saw the point of getting himself down."

I laughed.

"I can still see his mud-spattered face, calmly telling me that there really was not point getting myself down, no matter how bad things were, so why didn't I just lighten up and play some cards with him.

"Later that same day, one of our friends got shot in the chest trying to make his way across a stretch of no-mans-land getting from one trench to another. He lay there, in the mud, bleeding all over himself. We daren't go retrieve his body, for we knew we'd get shot to pieces before we ever got to him.

"Ahmed, though - Ahmed was different. He got that look in his eyes, smiled, said 'Oh what the hell, you only live once,' and bounded off to go get him. To this day I have no idea how he got out alive. God must have been watching over him that day, because he came back with not a scratch on him, scrambling like a madman with a body on his back. And do you know what he said when he got back to the safety of the trench?"

Adil and Aaliyah both nodded their heads from side to side, as one.

"He just shrugged, and said 'Piece of cake.'"

They all laughed, all three of them. It was worth it, that whole story, just to see that family laugh as one. I got the feeling they hadn't done that for a long, long time.

"And now, my dears, I believe it's time to sleep. Your mother knows how to find me if you ever want any more stories about your father."

They each looked to their mother, who nodded her agreement, and got up off the couch. Slowly, hesitantly, they came up to me. I bent down, and they both gave me a hug, patted their heads and turned to Mrs. Ahmed. Thanking her for a wonderful evening, I made my way to the door.

The door clanging shut echoed down the street, as night drew in. They looked happy, I was glad I was able to do that for them. The truth was that their father was a gambler, an alcoholic and an incurable womanizer. He hadn't had many friends in the company, and he'd died when he disobeyed orders and broke the line to flee from a particularly hairy firefight. His story was mine.

2005-07-11T18:39:00.000+05:00

[in a city that's only home when two people are there together]

it's a city of light, but not the kind you'd think. it's the sun setting on the beach, seen over the rim of a steaming cup of chai. its the baking heat, inside of your car, parked out in the sun all day. you want to melt into the synthetic leather, to just boil away until you're free, finally, from the banality of concrete form.

sunday bazaar, halwa puri, driving to nowhere in particular, in a car no-one else would love, with people who'd think they're incapable.

remove yourself, if you will, from your clock-in-clock-out routine, from your eight in the morning stare at a dishevelled stranger in the mirror, from your last few seconds of breath drawn while standing on a trapdoor you're so sure is going to be pulled out from beneath you, from your lonely silent stare across the rooftops, from your alone-in-a-crowded-room selfcondemned sentence, from your breathless run to the end of escape, and see the light.

2005-06-24T15:40:00.000+05:00

alright. after much yelling, screaming, and general threats to my well-being, i've finally developed and scanned some pictures so they're on the web.

go use www.flickr.com and search for 'the roof anarchist'.
if you don't have an account, get one. even the paraplegic monkey down the street has one.

alternately, go here.

oh. before i forget..yes, i said 'developed'. yes, that means they were originally prints. yes, that means the quality on them isnt wonderful after scanning, but that's just something you and i are going to have to learn how to deal with.

PS: one of you needs to fill me in on how to get those little flickr things on the blog.

thank you, and have a nice day.

2005-06-20T19:31:00.000+05:00

between brief flickers of faith,
between the moments of yes,
and no.
between each blink,
step,
shake,
and silent nod,
you will find-

hang on.

2005-06-15T12:22:00.000+05:00

sha-la-la-la-la-lala.

i was down at the new amsterdam,
staring at this yellow-haired girl.
mr. jones strikes up a conversation with this black-haired

flamenco dancer.

she dances while his father plays

guitar

she's suddenly beautiful.
we all want something beautiful.
i wish i was beautiful.

so come dance this silence down through the morning

sha-la-la-la-la-la...yea.

cut maria! show me some of them spanish dances,
pass me a bottle, mr. jones.

believe in me

help me believe in anything
i want to be someone who

believes.

mr. jones and me,
tell each other fairy tales
stare at the beautiful women
"she's looking at you. ah, no, no, she's looking at me."
smiling in the bright lights
coming through in

stereo

when everybody loves you,
you can never be lonely.

i will paint my picture
paint myself in blue and red and black and grey
all of the beautiful colors are very very meaningful
grey is my favorite color
i felt so

symbolic

yesterday
if i knew Picasso
i would buy myself a grey guitar and play.

mr. jones and me look into the future
stare at the beautiful women
"she's looking at you.
uh, i don't think so. she's looking at me."
standing in the spotlight
i bought myself a grey guitar
when everybody loves me,
i will never be

lonely.

i want to be a lion
everybody wants to pass as cats
we all want to be big big stars, but we got different reasons for that
believe in me because i don't believe in anything
and i want to be someone to believe.

mr. jones and me stumbling through the barrio
yeah we stare at the beautiful women
"she's perfect for you, man, there's got to be somebody for me."
i want to be Bob Dylan
mr. jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky
when everybody loves you, son, that's just about as funky as you can be

mr. jones and me staring at the video
when i look at the television, i want to see me staring right back at me
we all want to be big stars, but we don't know why and we don't know how
but when everybody loves me, i'm going to be just about as happy as can be

mr. jones and me, we're gonna be big stars..

Mr. Jones
Counting Crows

small people in a small town, a small world with a small mouth...and if you repeat the words to yourself till they lose meaning you actually move backwards rather than forwards, sometimes never realizing that backwards, too, is a direction, and one direction is just as good as another.

2005-05-01T05:45:00.000+05:00

[rage. vitriolic, venomous, eating through skin and into your soul.]

no.
this is a rejection. of you.
you, you with your middle class no-deposit-no-return throwaway morals, your salvation at the end of a nicotine sticks, your escape made by turning off your mind, your eyes open yet veiled, your senses dulled by pay-as-you-go relationships made in the here and now for times you'll never remember again because you were in too deep to even realize there was something to see.
you with your liberation found in the drivers seat of a humvee, your eyes hungry with lust at the sight of each new opportunity to simultaneously be here but look there, you with your fucking washing machines and full range of appliances, your home loans, your shiny new cars, your new shades hiding your eyes because you can't even look me in the eye anymore. what are you hiding? are you hiding from the man who died across that stretch of water when someones patience ran out and they exploded? are you hiding from the ghosts of people who you looked at through closed, tinted windows when you drove through their homes?
you. you with your filtered water flowing straight into your homes, your hot tub-baths with a range of fifteen different bath and shower gels transporting you to new heights of raspberry ecstacy, your strawberry cheesecake adventures into a sky you have the gall to claim to own on nights when you deign to sit out on rocks and gaze at the sight that belongs to everyone, even the homeless.
your delivery pizzas and your disposable razors, your nike running shoes and your black leather suitcases, your feet poised half-in-half-out sideways, tensed for action, your use-it-once-and-throw-it-away-convenience life.
you with your rebellious i-dont-give-a-fuck attitude, your individualistic, self-centred, sickening spiral into a world you create to inhabit solely on your own, not simply content with veiling your eyes but insistent on going through life blindfolded. your bandanas and your guitar riffs, your 200W amp and your brand new shiny guitar you play all along the watchtower on all day and all night.
your illiterate reading of words, your deaf ears to crying children, your utter, absolute inability to see past your fingers and toes.
your creativity borne of hiding behind rocks and reading things before anyone else has heard of them and quoting at length from Nietzche, Marx, Lenin, Bacon, Descarte, Rousseau until the words run circles in your head and you have perfect recall of everything except what they meant. you and your eyes skipping to the author before the title, the source before the material, the geographical location before the point.

but more than that, more than any of that this is a rejection of the idea that to simply be here is enough. this is a rejection of us.

this is where the burning kicks in. this is where you nail yourself to a board when you realize you are who you always suspected, you've become what you'd always closed your eyes to. this is what a burnt-to-a-crisp soul smells like. would you like to taste it?

2005-04-12T02:37:00.000+05:00

it's a cold, and it's a broken hallelujah.

that is a terrible, terrible song to lazily rub sleep out of your eyes to.
C Am C Am F G C G....it's just a song, really. it goes on.

and i've grown older, and perhaps i've grown colder. the sun rose on today so very long ago, it almost feels like i've lived a hundred lives in each moment, but it's only afternoon, yet. only afternoon - why did we always have this fascination with the night?
dream is destiny. believe. do you day-dream, anymore?

drift towards the door - unconsciously counting the number of ways you can remove yourself from yourself, and be the person in your dreams, finally. i dream that i can fly. some nights i hover outside your window and watch you sleep.
oh sinner man, where you going to run to?

but i don't day-dream anymore. i forgot how to stare, meaningfully stare into space. i fear that now i merely see.

and anytime tomorrow i will lie and say i'm fine,
i'll say yes when i mean no,
and anytime tomorrow the sun will cease to shine.

there's a cookie for someone who can name that song.

2005-04-01T01:03:00.000+05:00

found this while exploring through the older reaches of the hard-drive. can't even remember when i wrote it, really.

when you call the modern philanthropist an idealist who is denying reality, you are, in fact, correct. this is because the reality we live in is a bourgeoise-centric reality, and as such suffering of the many is necessary for the wealth of the few. to be a true philanthropist you must be a revolutionary.
the humanitarian merely wants to 'raise' the prole from his suffering to become a member of the bourgeoise...thus perpetuating the way of things as they stand, merely removing an 'undesireable' component. what (s)he does not realize is that its the existence of that undesireable state that puts him or her in a position to begin to formulate these thoughts of 'saving' the proles.

the circumstances are not the problem, the reality is.

2005-03-13T14:33:00.000+05:00

Unspoken

why don't you love me, she asked.
i do, he said.
no. you don't, she said, simply.
i - maybe i don't. i'm sorry. i can't help it.
don't be sorry. don't patronize me with apologies. some things just are. you don't control them, and neither do i. you said that to me, once, a long time ago.
do you believe that?
i believed in you.
don't say that. why is everything so dramatic?
because real life seldom unfolds according to the script.

they sat there, together, for a long time after. finally, after the sunset, he spoke.

so where do we go now?
i don't know. what do you see in your dreams?
i see the stars.
so do i. must be a different sky.

story of my life. Unspoken.

2005-03-02T10:51:00.000+05:00

suddenly that knife's looking really nice. cosy. 2am, i'm drunk again, heavy on my mind.
its heavy on my mind.

some things, it seems, werent meant to be forgotten. can't seem to let you go, despite the fact that we were never anywhere in the first place. you see that's what gets to me, really -- in the end it just turned out to be figment, but a figment i've found myself bound to for the longest time, in want...need...of something more..concrete?

you'll never hear the stories i have to tell, because we became different people the moment you made your choice and i made mine. we live with the consequences, with each breath.
melodramatic? hardly -- that's life, hon. that's just the way each day passes, and it's more dramatic than anything you'll ever read in one of my stories.

Have a nice day.

2005-03-01T01:08:00.000+05:00

she grew up in an indiana town
had a good lookin’ momma who never was around
but she grew up tall and she grew up right
with them indiana boys on an indiana night.

well she moved down here at the age of eighteen
she blew the boys away, it was more than they’d seen
i was introduced and we both started groovin’
she said, i dig you baby but i got to keep movin’
...on, keep movin’ on

last dance with mary jane
one more time to kill the pain
i feel summer creepin’ in and i’m
tired of this town again.

well i don’t know but i’ve been told
you never slow down, you never grow old
i’m tired of screwing up, i’m tired of goin’ down
i’m tired of myself, i’m tired of this town.

oh my my, oh hell yes
honey put on that party dress
buy me a drink, sing me a song,
take me as i come ’cause i can’t stay long.

there’s pigeons down in market square
she’s standin’ in her underwear
lookin’ down from a hotel room
nightfall will be comin’ soon.

oh my my, oh hell yes
you’ve got to put on that party dress
it was too cold to cry when i woke up alone
i hit the last number, i walked to the road

last dance with mary jane
one more time to kill the pain
i feel summer creepin’ in and i’m
tired of this town again.

Last Dance with Mary Jane
Tom Petty

(to room cricket with a tennis racquet, to cycling to friends places because its raining (!!) and you've got to get out of the house..., to grey skies, to causing 2pacs fall from grace, to chai, to walking across roads with your eyes closed, to aiming for jordan, to letting it burn.)

2005-02-22T04:13:00.000+05:00

my preciousss

2005-02-19T03:14:00.000+05:00

closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world,
closing time, turn all of the lights on over every boy and every girl,
closing time, one last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or beer,
closing time, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

closing time, time for you to go out to the places you will be from
closing time, this room won't be open till your brothers or your sisters come
so gather up your jackets, move it to the exits

i hope you have found a friend.

closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.

Closing Time
Semisonic

always found this song comfortable, something to slip into at the end of the day. it's funny how music will do that for you when you think you've just cut the last thread that was holding you up, you suddenly find you're being held up by...nothing at all.

*blinks twice, slowly*

i've been threatening to tell you all a story, someday. but that day isn't today.

2005-02-03T09:43:00.000+05:00

you call me a dog,
well that’s fair enough.
’cause it ain’t no use to pretend,
you’re wrong.
when you call me out i can’t hide anymore,
i have no disguise you can’t see through.

well you say it’s bad luck,
to have fallen for me.
well what can i do to make it good for you?
you wore me out like an old winter coat
trying to be safe from the cold.

but when it’s my time,
to throw the next stone,
i’ll call you

beautiful,

if I call at all.

you call me a dog, and
you tell me i’m low ’cause i’ve slept on the floor,
and out in the woods with the badgers & wolves,
you threw me out ’cause i went digging for gold,
i came home with a handful of coal.

but when it’s my time,
to throw the next stone,
i’ll call you

beautiful,

if i call at all.

and when it’s my time,
to call your bluff.
i’ll call you beautiful,
or leave it alone.

you call me a dog,
well that’s fair enough.
it doesn’t bother me as long as you know,
bad luck will follow you,
if you keep me on a leash and
you drag me along.

Call me a Dog
Temple of the Dog

2005-02-01T20:46:00.000+05:00

and this world's a play of sinners & saints,
i chose my part long ago, never knowing it's the blood that taints..

idly staring out the window, decadence seeping from each pore, he sits and ponders his designs of flesh. children of a thousand vices us all, encompassed in the warm embrace of shed responsibility, another layer added to our cocoon with each new sin.

is this me, or am i dreaming?

crush me, hold me, love me - i can't go on my own...please..why won't you..i'm only human.

in a world where we limit the parts we play even before the curtains go up, caught in the harsh glare of the spotlight twisting lines to encompassing spirals, i dare you to be proud to be good.

2005-01-31T11:16:00.000+05:00

mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
mother, do you think they’ll like this song?
mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
ooooowaa mother, should i build a wall?

mother, should i run for president?
mother, should i trust the government?
mother, will they put me in the firing line?
ooooowaa is it just a waste of time?

hush, my baby. baby, don’t you cry.
momma’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true.
momma’s gonna put all of her fears into you.
momma’s gonna keep you right here under her wing.
she won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing.
momma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
oooo babe.
oooo babe.
ooo babe, of course momma’s gonna help build a wall.

mother, do you think she’s good enough,
for me?
mother, do you think she’s dangerous,
to me?
mother will she tear your little boy apart?
ooooowaa mother, will she break my heart?

hush, my baby. baby, don’t you cry.
momma’s gonna check out all your girlfriends for you.
momma won’t let anyone dirty get through.
momma’s gonna wait up until you get in.
momma will always find out where you’ve been.
momma’s gonna keep baby healthy and clean.
oooo babe.
oooo babe.

ooo babe, you’ll always be baby to me.

Mother, did it need to be so high?

Mother
Pink Floyd

2005-01-07T19:08:00.000+05:00

hey there little girl, whats that you've got in your pocket?
is it a shiny shooting star?
and will it show me where we are?
are you going to show me, honey,
or are you just giving it away for free..

hey there little girl, whyve you turned to the side?
are you pushing or pulling away?
when did we become the wall?
did we become the wall,
or am i just dreaming and drifting away..

hey there little girl, where'd that smile come from?
is it sunny where you are?
and will you share some of that sky with me?
will you share, honey,
or was it never yours to give away..

hey there little girl, what's that you've got in your pocket?
would you like to share that box?
and can you keep a secret?
i think i've got a secret you can keep,
or maybe it was never mine to tell.

2005-01-05T19:07:00.000+05:00

we may never again be who we were, but even lost in that memory we'll never lose faith in who we may become..and there's a moment when who you are in the here & now becomes the same 'who' in whom you hold so much faith. so breathe, sometimes...because sometimes that's all you can do.

oh sinner man, where you going to run to?

2004-12-25T16:20:00.000+05:00

here's something that's been doing the rounds...things in bold are one's you've done.

01. Bought everyone in the pub a drink
02. Swam with dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said 'I love you' and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Done a striptease
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Stayed up all night long, and watched the sunrise
15. Seen the Northern Lights (its on the list of things to do..)
16. Gone to a huge sports game
17. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
18. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
19. Touched an iceberg
20. Slept under the stars (not all night)
21. Changed a baby's diaper
22. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
23. Watched a meteor shower
24. Gotten drunk on champagne
25. Given more than you can afford to charity
26. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
27. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
28. Had a food fight
29. Bet on a winning horse
30. Taken a sick day when you're not ill
31. Asked out a stranger
32. Had a snowball fight
33. Photocopied your bottom on the office photocopier3
34. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
35. Held a lamb
36. Enacted a favorite fantasy
37. Taken a midnight skinny dip
38. Taken an ice cold bath/shower
39. Had a meaningful conversation with a beggar
40. Seen a total eclipse
41. Ridden a roller coaster
42. Hit a home run
43. Fit three weeks miraculously into three days
44. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
45. Adopted an accent for an entire day
46. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
47. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
48. Had two hard drives for your computer
49. Visited all 50 states
50. Loved your job for all accounts
51. Taken care of someone who was shit faced (or incredibly whiny)
52. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
53. Had amazing friends
54. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country (hehe)
55. Watched wild whales
56. Stolen a sign
57. Backpacked in Europe
58. Taken a road-trip
59. Rock climbing
60. Lied to foreign government's official in that country to avoid notice
61. Midnight walk on the beach
62. Sky diving
63. Visited Ireland
64. Been heartbroken longer then you were actually in love
65. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger's table and had a meal with them
66. Visited Japan
67. Bench-pressed your own weight
68. Milked a cow
69. Alphabetized your records
70. Pretended to be a superhero
71. Sung karaoke
72. Lounged around in bed all day
73. Posed nude in front of strangers
74. Scuba diving
75. Got it on to "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye
76. Kissed in the rain
77. Played in the mud
78. Played in the rain
79. Gone to a drive-in theatre
80. Done something you should regret, but don't regret it
81. Visited the Great Wall of China
82. Discovered that someone who's not supposed to know about your blog has discovered your blog
83. Dropped Windows in favor of something better
84. Started a business
85. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken (so far, so good)
86. Toured ancient sites
87. Taken a martial arts class
88. Sword fought for the honor of a woman.
89. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
90. Gotten married (i was 6 yrs old :P)
91. Been in a movie
92. Crashed a party
93. Loved someone you shouldn't have
94. Kissed someone so passionately it made them dizzy
95. Gotten divorced
96. Had sex at the office
97. Lied
97. (the real 97) Gone without food for 5 days
98. Made cookies from scratch (from salman: cake.... well... we TRIED to :P)
99. Won first prize in a costume contest
100. Ridden a gondola in Venice
101. Gotten a tattoo (do bubblegum wrapper ones count?)
102. Found that the texture of some materials can turn you on
103. Rafted the Snake River
104. Been on television news programs as an "expert"
105. Got flowers for no reason (yeah, i bought them for myself :P)
107. Got so drunk you don't remember anything
108. Been addicted to some form of illegal drug
109. Performed on stage
110. Been to Las Vegas.
111. Recorded music
112. Eaten shark
113. Had a one night stand
114. Gone to Thailand
115. Seen Moulin Rouge
116. Bought a house
117. Been in a combat zone
118. Buried one/both of your parents
120. Been on a cruise ship
121. Spoken more than one language fluently
122. Gotten into a fight while attempting to defend someone
123. Bounced a check
124. Performed in Rocky Horror
125. Read - and understood - your credit report
126. Raised children
127. Recently bought and played with a favorite childhood toy
128. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
129. Created and named your own constellation of stars
130. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
131. Found out something significant that your ancestors did
132. Called or written your Congressperson
133. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
134. ...more than once?
135. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge (does drive count?)
136. Sang loudly in the car, and didn't stop when you knew someone was looking
137. Had an abortion, or your female partner did
138. Had plastic surgery
139. Survived an accident that you shouldn't have survived (does it have to be just an accident?)
140. Wrote articles for a large publication
141. Lost over 100 pounds
142. Held someone while they were having a flashback
143. Piloted an airplane
144. Petted a stingray
145.Broken someones heart
146. Helped an animal give birth
147. Been fired or laid off from a job
148. Won money on a T.V. game show
149. Broken a bone
150. Killed a human being
151. Gone on an African photo safari
152. Ridden a motorcycle (not driven)
153. Driven any land vehicle at a speed of 100mph or faster?
154. Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced (does stapling your thumb twice count?)
155. Fired a rifle, shotgun or pistol
156. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
157. Ridden a horse
158. Had major surgery.
159. Had sex on a moving train
160. Had a snake as a pet
161. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
162. Slept through an entire flight: take-off, landing, during
163. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours (jet lag zindabad)
164. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
165. Visited all 7 continents
166. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
167. Eaten kangaroo meat
168. Fallen in love at an ancient Mayan burial ground
170. Eaten sushi
171. Had your picture in the newspaper
172. Had 2 (or more) healthy romantic relationships for over a year in your lifetime
173. Changed someone's mind about something you care deeply about
174. Gotten someone fired for his or her actions
175. Gone back to school (visiting, yeah)
176. Parasailed
177. Changed your name
178. Petted a cockroach
179. Eaten fried green tomatoes
180. Read The Iliad (and the aenid....and metamorphases...and ovid...gotta do all that!)
181. Selected one "important" author whom you missed in school, and read him/ her (pah! i read everything in school!)
182. Dined in a restaurant and stolen silverware, plates, cups because your apartment needed them (why is this even a question?)
183. ...and gotten 86'ed from the restaurant because you did it so many times, they figured out it was you
184. Taught yourself an art from scratch (of course, it didn't work too well)
185. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
186. Apologized to someone years after inflicting the hurt
187. Skipped all your school reunions
188. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
189. Been elected to public office
190. Written your own computer language
191. Thought to yourself that you're living your dream
192. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
193. Built your own PC from parts
194. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn't know you.
195. Had a booth at a street fair
196. Dyed your hair
197: Been a DJ
198: Found out someone was going to dump you via LiveJournal
199: Written your own role playing game
200: Lost your Best Friend for reasons of death
201: Fallen in love over the internet
202: Sung in a Barbers' Shop Quartet (how about an octuplet in the superstore?)
203: Eaten a live animal
204: Been able to communicate in a language you barely learnt barely three days earlier.
205: Gate-crashed a wedding and went up to get your pictures taken with the happy couple

these ones are mine!!! (i.e. mina's) :

205: Been so caught up in a book that you kept reading it, even in the shower
206: Run a lap-without stopping- inside the original Olympics stadium in Athens
207: Had recurring dreams
208: Fallen asleep underneath a tree
209: Eaten lollipops every day for weeks
210: Been inside a bombed-out building
211: Ridden a camel
212: Had a book you loved signed by the author

and these are mine:
213: been mugged
214: almost been mugged......if not for the fact that you ran as fast as you could.
215: been shot at.
216: seen a bomb explode.
217: been a plane when it lost cabin pressure.
218: been stranded at an airport with no idea how you were going to get home.
219: gone through an extended period where you didn't know where each evening's dinner was coming from.
220: pretended to be asleep to get out of something you really should have done.
221: spent hours in the shower because you didn't want to go outside.
222: smiled..not out of happiness, but at the sheer ridiculous-ness of something that's got fairly serious consequences.

2004-12-23T11:57:00.000+05:00

have you ever lost your faith?

the first time he did, it was in a concrete maze high above the world, talking to the tops of palm trees, making friends with the wind. then it was anger, resentment at a world which refused to yield to what he felt was his insurmountable will. how dare it refuse to bend? if only a little..just an inch, to reassure him that it was there. it did, ofcourse, not.
one of the greatest tragedies you'll experience is seeing a child with empty eyes.

the second moment was more mundane, more run-of-the-mill, completely in tune with the way life had progressed from so long ago. in a shower, warm water massaging his scalp and forming a dozen little waterfalls on its way to the deep blue floor. he sat there for hours, so afraid to move, to shatter the world of hope,faith,expectations,love he'd so gently crafted all around himself in a web so tight there's only way to go when you are where you've been. in that moment between who you were and who you are, you make the choice to either face up to the consequences of what you've done, or to silently fade away.
it isn't easy. it never is.

2004-12-20T10:17:00.000+05:00

wrapped in these fingers, somewhere, is a story. and in that story is a place, a place where all of this comes together, for a moment, before shooting off in different directions again, and it's that place i'll always escape to when i close my eyes.

it's a great story. normally complementary themes, thrown into conflict. five, ten different paths converging and then diverging once more in the only true meaning of 'parallel' when it comes to telling a story. it's a love story, it'll bring a smile to your lips, it'll renew your faith.

maybe i'll tell you, someday.

2004-12-17T06:34:00.000+05:00

sunrise walking songs:

bon jovi - dead or alive
bon jovi - blaze of glory
audioslave - gasoline
allison krauss - you will be my ain true love
the beatles - let it be
eric clapton - layla (acoustic)
call - kash (acoustic)
aamir zaki - mera pyaar
matchbox twenty - 3am (acoustic)
powderfinger - my kinda scene
third eye blind - jumper
joe satriani - always with me, always with you
foo fighters - times like these
the eagles - hotel california
goo goo dolls - iris
white snake - love ain't no stranger (acoustic)
the verve - lucky man
guns 'n roses - don't cry (alt. lyrics)
bob dylan - things have changed