Summer evening palette at SP Jain

Leaving the creamy whites of 205 is never easy. The cave in which you have just been disconnected from your dreams. The blueviolet garish corridors hit you in the face. Gory indianred tiles shine beneath your feet as you move, almost begging you to rush. Quite like the blood which has also been jolted from its slumber.

You climb down the uninspired dirty orange steps, beaten by time, through the macabre brown of the 1st floor, trading the mediumaquamarine of B29’s basement to the little lifelike limegreen towards your right, through the narrow difficult path sandwiched between the loud canteen and the ignored flowers.

You come out in haste. Your mind fails to register the sad dismissive mediumpurple of B28 sitting atop white neglected tubelights. As you walk alongside neatly lined shiny cars on your right, the inspiring sprawl opens up. For a very long minute, your eyes cannot believe themselves. The harmony in the moment is highlighted by very subtle colors. An almost natural interplay of serenity and awe. The backdrop of the sky is an indigo infused with rebeccapurple, carelessly decked with specs of murky snow. Beneath that starless canopy is the boulevard neatly lined with smoky white lamps.  Careless chatter adorns the focus of these spotlights. The boulevard is in sharp contrast to the din of the ground behind, resting in abandon. On the horizon, through the lens of the smoky snow, a neatly lined shadow sits prettily beneath the dim purple.  You take a turn towards the gate and arrive at the glaring mercury lit streets of Bombay. And you are reminded of how beautiful the streets of this city are at night. As good as anywhere. The sharp turn away from you towards an unknown, golden as your nostalgia running amok like fireflies.

As you turn back you see the glimmer of the white from atop sprinkled on the trees, bathed like a fake moonlight. The yellowish brown of B29 questions you. And you walk back towards the lone tree in the garden standing against the might of the sky. The poignant golden elusive corner bears witness to died laughter lived but moments ago. The mediumslate blue door welcomes you back into your beige dream once again.

Extremely loud & Incredibly Close

If the sun exploded and all went black, it would take 8 mins for us to know that it has. That's the time required by light to travel to us from that far.

For eight minutes we wouldn't be aware of what had happened and continue to receive the light and warmth.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the fourth film by Stephen Daldry. I had the pleasure of admiring two of his previous three films.

The Hours recreates the writing of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and intersperses it with two women who are living Mrs Dalloways years after it has been written.

The Reader is about a Nazi guard who serves a life sentence rather than admitting in open court that she cannot read, which would have helped in proving her innocence.

They are both fine films and melodiously intriguing in what they are trying to say.

While they let you in their world, which is your agonizing world as well, a world which beats you down with questions of Camus' Outsider, Dostoyevsky's Double and Tolstoy's Family Happiness.

The hue and cry of us being a speck in the galaxy- a small consciousness in the middle of a grand mystery.

And how worthless it is to take it all so seriously.

It wasn't untill I saw this third film that i could vaguely decipher what Daldry's cinema is all about. It is about everything and it is about nothing. And I could decipher it because it ringed an achingly familiar tune.

A man is trapped on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. He calls his wife and tells her how much he loves her while she watches the building in smoke from afar.

He calls home to talk to his son but is met by an answering machine. When the son walks in, there are 5 msgs on the answering machine.

The son isn't more than 10-12 years old and has an extremely deep bond with his father who is his whole world. They are explorers together, they invent quizzes and games and the father regularly devises puzzles for him.

They even jokingly refer to the mother as a sleeping parent.

A year after 9/11, after he has built his father's shrine in a corner of his room where he plays the 6 msgs over and over again, yes 6, the son walks in his father's closet for the first time. He accidentally finds a key in a blue vase at the top of a cabinet. They key was in an envelope with Black written on it.

Remembering his father's advice to never stop looking for an earlier impossible puzzle that he gave him, the boy decides to search for the lock of that key.

He decides to track down every person in New York with the name Black and tries to find the lock for that key.

His father had taught him that there was always a reason, always a logic for everything. He wants to find the logic in how someone can fly a plane in a building and can kill his father without even knowing him.

And in this search he hopes to find the 8 minutes with his father, between the explosion in the sun and the time it took for him to know of it.

I have no idea how this film's CD came into my possession. I don't recall either buying it or borrowing it.

Without you

Four months without you,

The songs in your voice, the magic in your laugh.
The warmth of your bosom, the tenderness in your touch.
Your eyes, your moans, your restlessness,
The taste of your mouth, the aroma of your flesh.
Time standing still in your embrace, heart beating against the chest like cymbals.

At any moment, in any hour, helplessness,
With the blink an eyelid, in a sudden flash, trepidation.

With you, without you, a war rages;
Loosely held by the flimsiest thread of sanity.

Painfully swinging in the moments of our togetherness,
With arms open wide trying to snatch you from lost time.

Each passing day, reality slitting the throat of innocence,
A sharp razor cutting through the flesh of life.
A sad scary primitive song,
Wildly composing itself in the din of this loveless night.

Let's call this Love

The voices in my head are insanely loud these days. So loud that I can’t hear myself. This inability to hear myself at times are the best of times and the worst of times. I like it because I am able to fool myself and believe almost anything I want. I am able to dream. I am able to see her.
She first appeared after I had passed out from drinking too much. I had just won a prize for a poem in the local newspaper. The poem was about a boy who wanted to commit suicide. He walked everyday to a cliff nearby, stood at the edge of the cliff, but could never take the last step to an eternal fall. One day while coming back from the cliff a truck hit him and he died.

*
I was standing at the same cliff of my poem. I saw her on the other edge of that horizon. At the actual suicide point. Her gaze was fixed into the infinite expanse of that awakening flora. The morning breeze played with her hair and curled below her ear. Her figure stirred and rocked back and forth.
“Beautiful view. No wonder people want to jump the moment they see this.” She didn’t move. “It has the reputation of being a suicide point. It has taken the lives of more than a dozen people. I guess they are right. Beauty can kill you.” She looked at me for the first time after several minutes.
“It’s not true. If you are really looking at this, with all the heart in you, you can’t kill yourself. You won’t be able to see it again then.”
“You come here often? What place is this?
“I don’t know. It looks familiar.”
“Do you know you have a very incendiary aura?” Smiles. “It’s like a spark runs rapidly through my blood every time you look at me. You know the kind when you click the kitchen lighter on your finger.”

*
“And then what?”
“Then I woke up.”
“Was he good looking?”
“I don’t remember. I just have that feeling of being possessed by some whispers in my head that keep repeating themselves over and over. Incendiary. I clearly remember that word. I have never seen a dream in which I’m conversing. Dreams are almost always without any sound. Isn’t it? You remember colors, maybe a face more clearly, a déjà vu at some situation, but not a sound.”

*
“So you told him about our kiss?”
“Of course.”
“And how did you describe it?”
“I told him that you kiss like an adolescent.”
“Breaks my heart.” She started laughing.
I kissed her on her laughing lips. She laughed more. The car raced in the dark. There was no light. Only her laughter echoed on that empty highway. She was wearing something black.. Again. Something shone on her finger.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it before. I can hardly feel its weight. It’s like inside the skin. Your eyes look bluer. What’s happening to us?”

*
“What’s wrong?”
“Why do you think anything is wrong?”
“You are singing. There is a spring in your step. You have stopped whining about not being able to write.”
“Oh come on. I sing all the time.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve met someone. And I’m not going to say anymore than that.”
“So typical.”
“No, you won’t understand.”

*
“Why didn’t you tell her? She was wearing a very blazing blue.
“She would’ve laughed like crazy and asked me to take some medication. And I was afraid.”
“Why?”
“What if this spell breaks?”
“You cannot control it. It’ll last as long as it has to last.”
“I don’t want this to end. Hey, your wrist is shinier than the last time.”
“Yeah I saw it. And your eyes are almost like they had been painted.”
“This is a very nice place.”
“This reminds me of a painting from childhood. It had this exact similar setting. A road amongst tall trees lined on both sides.”
“There are dozens of paintings like that.”
“Can you recall when you arrived here?”
“No. You?” I shook my head.

*
“I like his agitation within. I can feel it in almost everything he does.”
“And you guys did it?”
“I think we did. I don’t remember the details but I remember us running trying to find a proper place and then his eyes trying to take me all in one go. He doesn’t looks away for even once. Even when I’m not looking at him I can fee his eyes on me.”
“I’m so jealous of you. Happens every time you go to sleep?”
“Somewhere in the last hours of sleep. Around dawn. I think he is a writer. He talks like a poet.”

*
…And they ran for six days and nights and slept on all fours at the crack of dawn in that vast jungle.
“It’s a beautiful story. You write beautifully.”
“I think I’m one dimensional. Limited.”
We had water all around us today. A fog was settling in. She was wrapped in a white satin gown.
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know. I thought I did.”
“You are probably sleeping with him right now?”
“I think so. Why do you look upset?”
“I’m not upset. I don’t understand you.”
“You are also in a relationship?”
“Not anymore.”
“When?”
“Last night. I called her by your name.” Laughs.
“I’m not in a laughing kind of mood.” Laughs more.

*
“I don’t believe this. You are telling me that you dream about the same girl every night in your dreams. You guys go on drives, kiss, and talk like forever.”
“Why is this so hard to believe? Isn't every relationship a dream before you say "I love you"? And what happens to that dream after that? Have you seen such calm on my face before. I noticed it this morning in the mirror.”
“And what about us?”

*
“And then?”
“She said I was impossible”.
“And?”
“And that I’m the biggest fool to be in love with a dream.”
“And what did you say?”
“Aren’t we all. She didn’t know that.”
“What?”
“That I wasn’t in love with her.”
“So how will this end?”
“I’m thinking about having one last sleep.”

*
“So he’ll kill himself?”
“That’s what he said.”
“And you’ll kill yourself too?”
“He said I don’t have to if I don’t want to. He’s the one choosing a dream. I might have second thoughts about it. And that’s alright with him.”
“So you are not going to.”
“I cannot decide.”
“Why is the idea so appealing? I mean think about it. We have been together for three years. I know it’s not an out of the world thing but we are good together. And even if you don’t want to live with me anymore, that’s fine. But this is madness.”

*
The breeze was never more perfect. Each gust filled me with new flavors of life. What does one call it? The setting was like a movie set. I was standing at the end of the world. With all the heart in me, I was here. I had emptied the entire bottle of my sleeping pills. There was not a trace of any weight left in me. This was not a dream. This was something else. And then I saw her walking towards me. And the life after life was about to begin. But she didn’t look happy. She was wearing red today. My favorite color.

*
“Where am I?”
“You were in a coma for 45 minutes.” A doctor said to me.
“Who brought me here?”
“Your landlord saw your body through the window.” My landlord was standing right next to the doc smiling.
I slept again. And again. And again. But there was no dream. There was no her.
And then one day I saw her. It was someone who could’ve been her. She was sitting in a park. It was not her face. It was her hand. She was playing with something. It was a ring in her finger. The one that was so indecipherable in my dreams.

A short note on Existence-the unlife

The greatest beauty about life is that it is perishable. What once was will never be. And I guess that is the reason why we are more concerned about self-destruction than living.
There is nothing masochistic about it. That’s the way it is supposed to be.
Think hard and try to remember what you wanted from life. Is there a thing that you really wanted and never got? No I’m not saying that there is a choice. Oh sorry to burst the bubble on you, but yes you don’t have a choice. Did you choose to live? Or can you choose to die? What was it that gave you happiness? What is it that makes you sad? Aren’t they all really the same? What are you really attracted to? What or who is your kick? Why are we all who we are? Who are we? Did you really decide the clothes you are wearing right now? Are you happy with it? Or does it make you sad that your t-shirt is not Nike? Or how happy will you really be if it was? You picked the clothes you are wearing right now because the other ones were not looking as good.
Not that you really liked it.
We are all chasing ourselves. A life we once lived. We are witnessing that exact same repetition day in and day out. I guess that is why this déjà vu is so prevalent.
There is some liquid in our nerve that wants us to go back and forth to each and every moment lived. That’s the real kick. To pile on moments. And since we cannot remember a great deal, due to a shitty memory, we are unhappy.
You already know what you can have and your mind tricks you into believing that that’s what you really wanted.
I hate to say this but I’m no sage. And if I’m writing about it, it exists.
The real door that you can open, the only door available, is the one to memory. You cannot see the future. You can only see the past. And that is why you keep living. That is why you want this moment to be grand. That is what all that “live this moment” crap comes from. But what is so livable about it?
The idea that one day you’ll open that door and find something that you always wanted to do and did.
A careless comment in the past makes you believe that you are intelligent. A couple of lines scribbled at the back of some book make you believe yourself to be a poet. A character in a movie jerking off after looking at the picture of the writer he’s reading makes you feel grand because its part of you. Everybody does that. Everyone, who is someone now, was or is, as stupid and as sad, as you are now or will be.
However stupid or bane your childhood was, it appears a novelty. The slightest reproduction of those images brings a smile on your face.
But can you really reproduce those images? What can you remember vividly? Now, come on. Think hard. Can you recall your face from two years back without looking at a photograph? Your own bloody face that you’ve lived with every single day of your life.
Let’s take the example of your most treasured moment in life. Can you recall that? Now, be specific. Which is that moment that really sticks out? That recalls every detail. Every hue and odor. That tinkling of the laughter. That stench of guilt. You can’t remember it, can you? See, perishable.
But don’t worry too much. I wouldn’t if I was you. Just sit back and take a deep breadth. It’ll all be over before you know it. All that trouble, all the heaviness and the lightness, all these insecurities will flush down the drain in a dream’s notice.
And that my friend, will be the end of you.