"Pero como el amor
los saeteros
estan ciegos."
unlike the archer, we, as a rule, with a few exceptions scattered here and there and everywhere, are half blind.
but i, do see. i can see in my thousand kaleidoscopic visions.needless to say i love them. each one brighter than the one before. like each string i have left behind, weaker and thinner. each one grows dimmer while walking backwards.
I have lost myself in those colours.
Many times....
i wish to be lost again.
Like now, under a blood red sky, when the thin film of red tries with success, to blind an already obtuse vision, I sit and mesh with the colour.Or I try to.
Now when my palms are red, a brilliant, gory, magenta red, I sit..I sit on those muddy banks as the water washes away those tiny specks of sand-blurred knowledge across the panorama.
Now when I look at it, the setting sun, the branches, the twigs of the imposing structure of the Eucalyptus, the sylvan beauty of it,now when they make a complete framed impressionist's painting, I wonder if I am a part of it, or if I ever could be one.
I sigh, I wonder as I look into the sepia tinted mirror on the sky.Floating moments and a contour of aberrant times from the days of Achilles' journey stare back at me. The red gets redder.
Queer and warm, it hugs me tight.
And only when I woke up on the streets to the sounds of the distant drums beating in my morphed and marshalled psyche, that I was cold again.
The shortest distance between two points could also be a shuttle cork.
The feathered ones though.
there is an illicit charm of being lifeless.like this.there is a flaming red fire just across that Savannah where my feet dragged me. and did i say i was drugged?or i felt like it.
the salty tangy taste crawls and creeps in..and into the mouth straight it goes.
and then there were days.days when she used to be in frocks and the enid blytons nicely tucked inside the maths hard bound copy.this girl will never learn.no boi mela this year for you.i tell you.yet there were book fairs.the quintessential short term human memory.there were benfish and deb sahityo kutir books which always smelled so good. so irresistibly good.and she carried that smell forward even when she graduated from her sepia tinted days.
pujo was more fun,the goddess came on a lion.she loathed them at the alipore zoo however.but she liked it, this particular one here, in pandals.flowers, so many of them, a dash of vermilion and dhoop, dhuno always made it easier for her to like it here.and last week only she had watched joy baba felunath on chhuti chhuti. and then there were also packets of tiny screechy warm heart aches.
melancholy afternoons. she was cycling on the roof and she fell. it hurt. but not as much as it hurts now.
does it hurt?where does it hurt?give her some painkiller boudi.
it does.it also hurts now.right here.and painkillers?one lost forever.and a few more scattered here and there.she wished she wasn't blind.or worse--blindfolded.it always made her feel awkward and clumsy.
i walked past that rain forest once.breathing and inhaling the scent of this stupor was synonymous to walking to the nucleus of the forest. the more you walk, the more difficult it is to find the way out.and oh!no sunshine and no breeze.
she somehow preferred the sea.always.it gave back everything it took.
take away your crimson dusks.take them away.pack them nicely and gift them to the twilight zones.this is so calm.i could sleep and forget all about 'em.
can they see where it hurts?now?she wanted it nicely bandaged.she had the sedative once.she was drowsy.and she let herself go with the breeze..into the rain forest, amidst the deciduous trees.
This is how I distribute the shadows into an ongoing eternity. Hundred years have made me younger by the seconds. Now when I look back at the picturesque years growing along the past borders of evolution and metamorphosis, I smile a lot, the only concrete palpable feeling which I allow myself to express.
Down the crisscrossing lanes, there were books, to be read and gulped and a few to be digested and assimilated, music in colourful varying entrants, paint brushes, watercolours, acrylic and fevicol, which could fix almost everything except broken hearts and manhandled pride, a fairy tale castle of house with a garden which reminded one of camps and caravan and famous five and treasure hunt. The only treasure worth finding was a handful of memories tucked safely in the bushes and the neem tree. The rest was nourishment.
The reason why I am still breathing.
every day is somewhat new. the day unfolds before her eyes. she takes a curious look and then with a toss of her thick straw coloured plaits, decides, there was nothing new in the day or the way it had unfolded before her eyes...her mossy green eyes. then she is bored. and life moves on in diurnal motion.
there were green valleys and a flaming red sun, many many days ago. she was thirsty like a nomad in the kalahari. it was then that she had made up her mind to own a fountain once she grew up. and eventually when she did, she was the owner of a few springs. and sadly, there was no winter.
fulfilled and satisfied, she approached the oasis. a lush green and a sparkling crystal clean water; water everywhere but where it should have been. the eyes were dry. her lips quivered. the mirage raped a few sunshine moments. she thought about it. and then her reflection evaporated from her crystal clear mind like the mirage.
she never felt. she never thought. she never spoke. she just carelessly travelled through thoughts and words. that was what was and that was what was to be.
little girls can be that stupid.
Sometimes I wonder, ‘Is this the only way?’ The only way, the only route to vent? Packed up, bottled up and then all cracked up. No pun intended. Only naked truth.
Poetry doesn’t come to me. Nor did it ever come. What came was lunacy dancing and frolicking in saber toothed edges. They cut me. I bled. Without you watching of course. Oh I do have a pride!
I left home, left love, left peace and the necessary byproducts. I came back in circles. I came back in waves. I washed you out when it rained. I gave you nourishment. I gave you peace, comfort and insanity. And all the time you pointed your fingers at me. You held me responsible. I held you in my gaze. I watched as I had watched alone many times before you.
I wish to annihilate you, wipe out your traces and siphon you out from my system. I can live. Thank you very much. And I can live alone.
Goodbye morbid. I am even tired of you.
i will give you my little diary. i will let you write there, too.write nice things, august afternoons and cold december nights.write stuff about how you spent your days in mussoori and days of the british raj.and tell me about the room on the roof and the cherry tree and how rakesh planted it and watered it and felt like God.we planted it ourselves.that's why it is special.
i shall also listen to silent nights near the clock tower.i shall trace your footprints and walk down the mall road and stop near hampton court school. and please do bring rusty along.oh please? we shall waltz with our bohemian nostalgia.weren't you surprised to find me a little like sita?
i still crave for sepia.i do.and did you know that you, almost always,help me find my way through shamli.time stops there, you said.i will tell you my secret.shall i,now?time also hugs me.tight and close.she smells a lot like ponds,dhoop, rannaghor,boimela and bhaiphnota.
so now,ruskin, i am giving you my diary.encapsulate more sepia.and feed them to me.delhi is not far.we shall meet again...we shall meet again.....down the way from the mall road, when the sky shall be a brilliant azure, when the zephyr stirs sinking memory, i shall walk past postman chacha, i shall cross the dew drenched ivy cottage, and just where the cherry tree lived, we shall meet again...we shall meet again.
but i can't even flee, you see?schoolboys are almost always caught.they run away.and they are caught.they get as far as the railway station in dehra.there is a beam of sunshine hope for me though.
ain't i like sita?i shall sail through.
