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.

i am called death...part-1

I am about to die. Its not that I’ve been waiting for death. I mean everybody dies. I am 93 years old. I just got operated. I fell from a chair and broke a bone below my hip. I don’t know what it’s called. Imagine just falling from a chair and breaking your bone. They tell me I’ll walk again. Do I want to? Yes, why? I don’t know. What is it that is making me even try?
I’m sick and tired of these green walls. At times I just want to walk again so that I could paint them in a different color, even the divine ones. I look at myself in the mirror. I clean it, twice, thrice and then look again. It seems the same all the while. I can’t afford to look at my reflection. The reflection tells me that I have a face covered with black dots, some small and one very large. But even the dots aren’t able to hide my layered and withering skin. It’s as if somebody stretched it and it hasn’t been able to regain its shape. It’s soft, very soft and layered as if the volume has increased over the years. I look at my fingers. They shake all the time, even when I try to pick a pen.
It’s been two hours since I feel like peeing. But I haven’t asked anybody. Do you want to know how I pee? Two men lift me up with the help of a cloth which lies below my back. Like a large sack full of potatoes. They lift me and keep me on a chair while one man holds on to my operated leg. It’s a chair with a hole created for the purpose while a bucket waits for my shit below it. My operated leg rests on another bucket which sits in an upside down fashion. It’s actually better than my former way of shitting. I used to do it on a pan which was slid under me in the similar sack-lifting manner. My buttocks rest on an air filled tube. This has been done because my skin has wearied so much just below my back that I can’t put it back on the bed. They tell me I’ll walk one day. For whom?
My wife died six months ago I cannot recall how she died. My medication stops me from remembering. But there are a few prints on your imagination which no medicine can wash. I remember her face. The one which I saw on my wedding bed, glowing in the fading light of that lamp in my village. I fell in love with it the moment I saw her. Or the one which I saw right after she gave birth to my first son who is 61 years old now and sits next to me every night and responds to my calls almost in a servant like fashion. I don’t like calling him. I don’t like calling anybody. Just about a year ago I used to wash my own undergarments. I never asked anyone to put eye drops in my eyes. I did it all on my own. They ask me to eat.
How am I to tell them that I can’t feel taste anymore? That it’s all just the same. I don’t feel hungry. I don’t even feel weak for that matter. It’s just like a new state for me. A routine in which I don’t feel hungry.
It’s been two years since sounds started to fade on me, as if coming from a distant source and I can only hear the words pronounced with greater emphasis. I use a hearing aid but haven’t been able to make friends with it. So more than being an aid, it makes me feel more disabled.
It’s been a long time since I heard my voice. When I try to speak it takes me longer than usual to utter a word and I practice it for it for hours before actually saying it. It’s the inability to say it at the time I want to, that I am calling practice. And whenever a few alphabets said by me reach my ears through the hearing aid, I can’t recognize my voice. It’s not mine. I don’t remember how I used to sound but it certainly wasn’t like this.
My daughter just asked whether I would like my hair oiled. What difference does it make? But I said yes. Partly to make her happy, and partly to see whether I could recall any sense of feeling. It eludes.
I sleep for 12 to 15 hours of the day. I know this because I had a clock hung just above my head.

I always liked clocks. Time was always an important specimen for me since I was in the administrative service. I was a deputy collector. My life was spent in small towns of UP. Muzzafarnagar, Mirzapur, I can’t recall anymore. I remember these names because I spent a lot of time there.
That is my grandson standing at my left side trying to pick me up. His eyes tell me that he doesn’t like it but is trying everything to look otherwise.
He lifts me with the sincerest of efforts and tries to look away from my watery eyes. I think he sees to much pity in them and way too much fear. I think he can’t understand that fear. He takes it as fear of death. I want to tell him that I am not alive. I am just clinging on to a situation, like I’ve always done in all situations without feeling much about them, acting like a puppet at the hands of a pseudo- force from which I was never able to break free.
My son asks me whether I am ok. I nod twice to give him the answer he wishes to hear. With age you actually start answering questions in an expected manner. Since neither the question nor the answer means anything to you, you reply in an ambiguous manner and the questioner can interpret it to his liking.
I have lived too much to regret actually. For me it’s all the same. For me the time stopped 30 years ago when I retired. Since then I’ve tried to extract drives out of inane day to day problems living in my village. I miss that view though. An entire landscape covered with green vegetation as far as you could look; infinite-it ran parallel to the sky. And I looked at it for hours. Trying to search for some faces, some lost bursts of joy, try to search what happiness was like and whether I ever witnessed it. I felt like tracking all those ecstatic-lifts and somehow fuse it with my view which has grown boring.
I sometimes wonder why scientists never worked on a moment capturing machine. I know they have the camera. But the camera is a single dimension soundless recording instrument which leaves too much to memory. And at this age memory is the hardest to recall. I guess of all the disabilities, cracks in memory are the most profound loss. It’s harder to look for a drive without memory.

the irony called "fuck"

A girl came over to him and said “Can I have a cup of coffee with you”?

He looked at her askance and gave a positive nod. They went to a nearby coffee shop, Café Coffee Day, and the girl led him to a corner which overlooked the sea and was in a kind of elusiveness from the rest of the café. He kept staring at her as she looked out the window; a sense of calm over her face mystified him as he tried to gulp the whole episode down in one shot. But it kept producing a lump in his throat, which either the girl guessed or he suspected that she guessed.

“What does the sea looks like to you”, she asked.

He says “it looks just like my own self in the mirror, tossing up and down at a frantic pace without any knowledge of its existence or its course of motion in the next second. And in spite of all this uneasiness around it a strange sense of happiness prevails in its disco-dance”

“Are you a writer or something”, she said skeptically.

“I’m a whore of the most third rate sort” and said it with such an assured voice that he himself believed it for a very long duration.

“We are all whores in one way or the other. It’s just the kind of fucks and its frequencies which distinguishes one from the other or how much pride one takes in being one”, was her reply with the usual serenity with which she has been watching the sea.

“Kind of fucks!! Gives me the idea that you have been a regular at destiny’s bed”.

“At one point of time I almost thought as if I was its certified mistress” with a sort of élan that he almost felt weak in his knees.

“So how does one rate as the best and one as the worst”.

“Aah!! The evading question, you are a motherfucking writer, aren’t you”, she says with her most intimidating face.

“My question still stands”.

“Your question made me realize the irony in the usage of the word, fuck. When life fucks you, you say that it has been harsh and you have been bulldozed by its never ending cock, penetrating you with all its vigor, long after even when you have dazed off into a hallucinating world where you cannot imagine any traces of life except a sense of longing for it.”

“But the only thing you desire while on bed with a person is exactly that kind of fuck”, he completed her sentence as if reading her mind under spell.
“So how would you answer it”, she asks as if his would be Americas answer to Sputnik.

“It depends on how you view a fuck!! As a dogmatic activity proposed by many clerics, a routine activity which you have to perform in order to keep a marriage working, something you crave for day and night, or a subject blown out of proportion.
In the first case your usage of the term in the negative sense is justified, in the second case it just makes the cut because life is itself engulfed in an oceanic routine, if you crave for something by the night so much and the same word embodies all the illhappenings of life for you during the day time is nonsensical, and in the last case it doesn’t matter where or how you use any term because you don’t probably care as to what stands you keep in your life”, slightly twitching in his chair more worried whether she would buy what he said rather than his usual insecurity towards making sense.

“Suppose you are standing on one of those rocks out there and a wave splashes all over you soaking you from tip to toe, would you say that you have been fucked because you felt elated by the water’s intimacy or you would say you have been fucked since now you have drenched clothes and all and need to change”, she goes the extra mile.

“So you want to stand on the frontiers of something with such a natural force and command it at your disposal”.

“You just quoted my ambition in life with the simplest phrase”, she says without the slightest bit of vulnerability.

“One shouldn’t spill out her secrets just because someone struck the right note out of the blue”.

“Well you deserved to know that one and I couldn’t think of an answer to fake your revelation”.

For the first time he was able to find her attractive with a strange sense of belonging. Her eyes were filed with sense and she was trying to look through her head. Her hair betrayed her because it was not as straight as her look and not as twisted as her thoughts.

“Checking me out! Wondering how would I be in bed!”

“Oh you are well out of taste for my bed but the blues of your eyes match the ones of my sheets”.

“So your bed is this giant ocean where you need to be a swimmer of the extraordinary sort”.

“No it’s the sky which you can see while standing on this earth but need a rocket to discover”, he says in an amusing tone.

“And what is your place like?”

“The Milky Way!”

“Is it really that good or you are saying so to make me see it?”

“Who said the Milky Way was good?”

“Well it certainly is a heroic example to give”, she says with a pinch of excitement.

“Wanna see it”?

“I thought you would never ask, since I don’t have a rocket”.

“Well you don’t need a rocket to see my place, that’s just for the bed”.

As she walked into his apartment with careful steps so that she doesn’t steps on the papers lying carelessly on the floor, she could see the Milky Way as it was in fact cloudy which can be seen on the wall to the right which was filled with questions without any question marks and all colors possible, mostly with the black pencil. Two racks carved out of wood brimming with books lying against the wall in front with a couch in between and a table in front with an ashtray crisscrossed with pencil sitting on top of a few newspapers. A couch was lying adjacent to it and it was evident from its neatness that it was more recent than the used one. A gadda was lying in front of the hand printed wall with the blue bed sheet he talked about. To her right were two doors leading to the same balcony and a television set hanging in between the doors right in front of the bed with a movie player lying below it.

She went to the bathroom opened the tap over the tub took off her sleepers and lay fully clothed.
“Do you have a good story that can turn me on? I haven’t been turned on in ages”, she was lying in the tub with her face protruding just from the surface and her ears were inside, eyes closed.

He was sitting right next to the tub with a cigarette in his hand and reading from his diary, a narration about a similar incident that took place in his world.
“….At one point of time I wished that her lips could stay with me. They were quite unlike anything I had seen before. Emoting desire and manufacturing desire, in me. I felt like playing with them, with fingers, toes, toys. I wondered if I could see mine touching hers. I wanted to see how they react when I touch them. I wanted to see the teamplay of as an egoistic species as that.”

She takes her face out and without opening her eyes asks “So were they all you think they were”.

“I was so in love with them that I decided never to find out”.

“A love scene without kissing!”

“Yeah I tried everything in the book to make her remain connected without the kiss, but she didn’t like it. It was the hardest punch a girl ever gave me but what else can you expect after three failed attempts from her side”.

“You are a selfish bastard, continue”, looking in a way that made the comment her most believable one all night.

Riders on the Storm

-->

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.