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.

A Whirling Dance of Nostalgia

It was way back in 2003 and I was going to watch India’s first sci-fi movie-Koi Mil Gaya
with my non-cinematic best friend, F. Both of us reached the cinema hall quite late and the balcony was booked. I guess it was the first and the last time in Allahabad for me when the balcony was booked for a 9-12 show. So we bought the stall tickets and amidst extreme temperatures took our seats with drunkards, rickshaw pullers, goons and other not so friendly cinema lovers. Later in the movie when Hrithik gets all fixed up by the alien, the man sitting next to me got up and started speaking to the screen-“ab aawaa, toka bataii, ab aawaa”…he was talking to the villains and tempting them to come and risk their lives with Hrithik now. His seizures grew more intense with every testosterone-raging action sequence as we concentrated sans any shirts (we had taken them off a long time back.i was wearing a vest and F was bare chest) more on him rather than the movie.
This is how I’ve seen films. Even the slightest mention of the non-acceptable social terms receive loud applauds and whistles. I remember paying Rs 80 for a Rs38 ticket for Lagaan and many others (once I’m at the theatre no price is big enough to scare me).
I had come out of cinema halls with people going nuts about a movie like Yaadein.
I’ve danced with people and shilpa shetty for “dilwalon ke dil ka qaraar lootne”.
A movie released meant I’m going to see it. Even the ones like Mast, Main Prem Ki Deewani Hun, etc etc. Every time a romantic scene appeared on screen I felt like watching it with my first girl friend because that is how I know romance.(ishq mein jalte hue saans tezaabi lage,raaz khulta hi nahin koi to chaabhi lage)
But over the past few years I sensed an alienation of my movie-going crowd from films. I thought it was due to the bad condition of cinema halls and the crowd became more and more temperate with every passing day. Few whistles, fewer shouts and a dented chaos. And that drew me away from cinema halls, actually more than the fall in the standard of films being made (meri aarzoo kamini,mere khwaab bhi kaminey)
Yesterday at the screening of Kaminey, it all came back. The same sense of acute helplessness on knowing that it’s houseful, return to the same ticket blacker who has sold me umpteen tickets, debate with friends that a Rs 40 ticket for Rs 80 is a fair deal, going into his small hut to get the tickets in order to dodge the policeman who is standing on the road and finally telling my friends euphorically that I got them. I always get them-vanity.
The movie rolled on and the shouts kept going louder and I joined them. Whistles for the kiss between Shahid and Priyanka, a loud shout at Priyanka’s mention of rape.
It also saw the return of that odd neighbor who sits next to me and it appears that he’s watching a film for the first time-giggling every time Shahid pronounced pha ko pha…
And she also knocked at the door of my memory when Shahid and Priyanka were arms interlocked, sight trapped (aji pehli baar mohobbat kit hi ahaan, aakhri baar mohobbat kit hi ahaan)
And the movie is just awefome!!
Vishal has blended all that I used to watch earlier and most of what I watch now with his own inimitable style. He entered the locked room of archetypical Indian cinema and stirred the motionless time inside it with his genius.
Every cliché of our cinema was given new wings and it all flew above my head while all his puppets were controlled with new threads (chikne chikne lach-che hain reshmi se phande hain)…
Shahid playing both roles to perfection as if played by different people, Priyanka’s totally in sync with her Marathi portrayal and every other character is a new face.
Mikhail is the new psyched chota-gangster; Bhope is your old local con cum politician blended with the new political upheaval in Maharashtra, Tashi is the latest drug lord signifying the drug mafia in Goa and all of them have their own identity, all are unique. You can write an entire 2 hour movie on any one of them individually and yet they all have been used like the finest ingredients are put in the exact amount to make the best Kadhai Chicken cooked by mom.
The best songs of the movie haven’t been used in the film because they’ll dent the pace, the look is as grim as can be because the title of the movie is Kaminey, and the camera is very close to the subjects because it’ll heighten the frenzy and the pace.
I would love to know the budget of the film because the shooting takes place either on the roads of Bombay or a few dilapidated rooms and the costumes appears to belong to the actors. Not a single thing is superfluous and it’s so rich without any gloss.

Thank you Vishal Bhardwaj for sending me back in time and for being able to say that I’m an Indian audience and we kick some serious ass with our cinema.
The best Independence Day gift ever.

Riders on the Storm

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A phantasmagoric expedition of a volatile and incomprehensible juxtaposition of two people’s lives.

Riding in a Vikram (a three wheeled uncomfortable vehicle used for mass transportation in smaller cities) she’s sitting right next to me. It’s around 2 am on an intoxicating February morning and we are returning from one village to another. Though it is only a 10kms ride, it seems a journey from the orient to the occident, or such is the nature of my belief. The periodic jerks of our ride notwithstanding, I’m drenched from tip to toe in a perpetual high. So elevated are my senses that I’m unable to see the quarter of a dozen folks sitting right in front of us, noticing my agitation or the electricity in the air, I’m not sure.

The chill allows me to slip my hand underneath the common bed sheet that we’ve wrapped around ourselves. Her warm right thigh is cutting against my left one, which I’m shaking inconspicuously to fell just a bit more in that temperate explosion which is taking shape inside me , piercing the ligaments of my muscles. Powered by an insurmountable vertigo my hand reached her bosom, via her belly. Placed between the two cotton clothes, I can feel her heartbeat racing with the blood, faster at times, mellowed at others.

The caresses mutate into something deeper as my palm turns warmer with every passing second and the top surface was still fighting the cold. Audacity gave way to intimacy and intimacy gave way to a strange desire that is not exactly lust.

The ride did end eventually and we reached our destination. My hand came back to its equilibrium though somewhere inside me, the warmth was still trying to escape but something kept holding it back.

It has been two hours since the ride and everybody is fast asleep except the two of us. We are lying in a room that is filled with eyes and thoughts. Though the eyes are closed but I am not sure about the thoughts. Of course, they are not asleep. Thoughts never sleep. Are they asleep or just pretending, waiting for me to make a move. When I start galloping on intimacy I loose track of every other feeling, activity, or the situation around me.

“Is she awake and thinking the same as me?” is the only question in my mind.

After about half an hour of this tussle within me and conquering all the vulnerability inside me, I move my hand across an unconscious lady over to her side. My index finger makes way to her palm and her index finger responds to it. I bend over her side while my frame rests over the lady in between us and my lips touch her cheek. After being tilted for about 3-4 minutes I decide to move on her side but the space between her and the lady is not sufficient enough to accommodate me. She moves slightly against the wall and I move over her with the upper part of my structure swinging over hers, and the lower one on the floor. My mouth instantly moves over hers as I feel her lips below mine. My lower lip tearing in between hers and my left hand pressed against her cheek. I can smell my breath on her lips fused with some of hers. Within a few seconds we feel out of breath and start panting over each others mouth. Warm, inviting, pursuant air blown out in acknowledgement of our artlessness.

That exhaustion makes way with the most slackly used phrase in the world “I love you so much” said at the weirdest moment one can imagine and a prolonged liaison is born. A liaison that will last till the two of them will remain within each other’s vicinity. Or more effective when they are away from each other contemplating about moments like these which was transcendence for more reasons than can rhyme.

Still we are able to make it into the same room without the slightest bit of apprehension as far as the rest of the gentry are concerned while a storm of anxiety rages within us. Sometimes it’s the storm of the same perpetual high that I felt sitting next to her more than eight years back, or a more mellowed down sweet ardor combined with my usual clumsiness around her, or a forced repulsion due to a feigned abstinence.

Therein lay the upheaval inside ourselves always clad with a silk sheath of unasked questions which we ask ourselves rather than each other creating our own conspiracy theories on the slightest drop of a hat. Vehemently poised are the moments that still trespass on the shoulders of a lost Rendezvous in the slickest of situations and times. Our timings still remain top notch, high pitched drills of a faulty rhapsody, clinically doctored surrogacy of a child neither of us can claim. Equally clandestine are our actions following the suit of our thoughts, in my dreams or her eyes, in my audacity or her trepidation, her fidgeting or my inconspicuous raised heart beats.

Like a sinusoidal pulse we move up and down, down and up, to and fro, in arms or in thoughts, full swing, over to moon in a flash, dancing from one planet to the other, witnessing all in one go, mach 1 2 3, lightening quick, and suddenly we start falling apart at twice the terminal velocity of a mass less being filtering through dozens of layers, with our body parts taking off one by one, flip flop, bang bang.

And that’s the eternal fall I have been experiencing over the past few years. But somewhere down the line I started believing that it wasn’t a fall but my usual being which has taken the shape of a fall. Just like this memoir which I started a few days back and which is hard to let go, like nostalgia or my most recent disappointing intimacy.

a pair of ass and a tinch of nostalgia

My ass has just been thrust in between two large pair of buttocks, as seen through the searching eyes of a timid five year old boy whose head is slightly out of proportion than the rest of his body. Back in those days of my childhood, or anyone’s childhood, the classification of objects was primarily done in terms of its size, completely ignoring its beauty, texture, or any other trait that it seem to have. The smell of fresh female flesh coming from each body on my either side, piercing my nostrils, making me twitch in that virtual stillness.
Both girls start giggling in their respective harmonics, partly at the arrangement of our respective selves and partly because of my apprehension it seems.
“So how many brothers and sisters do u have?” asks one of them in Hindi. I didn’t quite Understood the question. Is she talking about just me and my sister or my cousins too? “Nau (nine)”. I replied counting the cousins from my father’s side. The cousins from my mother’s side were too much for me to count and I’d just one real sister which seemed too less a number to tell them at that time. “Bus Nau!!” exclaims one of them. They giggle some more and then their voice fades in my memory as it has been coming from some distant source.
It’s hard to believe that I still remember the exact nature of the incident that took place some seventeen years ago. I’ve just been admitted into a new school in class prep and this was just one of my earliest memories.