h.o.l.d

Death blooms
in my veins
quietly.

You touched
my fingers
and scraped my soul.

I slit my eyes
open
yet dreams
are unforgiving

Fever burns
weird alphabets
in my memory.
Please tell me my name.

Whisky
etches a song
in my head
but I forget the tune.

I am fading out
frame by frame
Just. Hold. Me. 

The heart's blank verse

The city is painted in the hue of your memories
sounds echo still, every note intact.
The only thing alas, not synchronized with time
is my weary, pallid, broken heart.

The autumn of the evening dissolves
into melodies the sleepy bird sings.
The leaves are waiting to turn to amber
from dead tree trunks the winter springs.

I see a young girl puff a cigarette
and I trace my fingers for traces of you.
My eyes turn mellow like shriveling cinders
the smoke doesn't let any dream through.

The sun recedes to the hollow of your palm
it's last ray kisses the shore goodbye.
Sea waves run like madness on a high tide
a lonely moon utters a lonely sigh.

Do footsteps actually sound like cymbals
or mind plays tricks with the trickling rain?
That world is tangentially apart from ours
in which you said, you'll come again.

I can't put together the mosaic of your face
nor recreate the way you call my name.
Just wait and in waiting pet these words
the wildest ones just love can tame.

The city paint peels and memories fade
in the blank vacuum, all echos depart.
The only thing still, not synchronized with time
is my hoping, dreaming, waiting heart.

My rusty heart...

Loneliness is a very private type of sorrow. It grows in your heart, shaded from the smiles of the people who love you most. It quietly seeps in your days, dimming the  light of your eyes. It hangs like a leech from your tear-ducts, nourishing itself from a steady supply of tears till the point it becomes immune even to the salt dissolved in them.

You become an island with no docks for a boat to be tied on, you create sea-storms to prevent ships from dropping anchor near your shores. You create a world in which no people exist. You steel yourself against any warmth received from fellow human beings.

You become quiet and you let go of words in your vocabulary till the time you can't converse even with yourself. There is a huge difference between peace and quiet. The same as between loneliness and solitude. Solitude has a direction, a purpose while loneliness is the absence of either of these.

You purposefully erase all traces of your being. You lose all hope of being rescued. There is something particularly melancholic about being there on a bridge alone. It's the closest you come to being non-existent...being a passive observer of the world going around doing its business. Sure you do come a little closer to the moon, but that cannot warm your heart up.

And then one day you burn all bridges.
---
I open the book of my life and wonder through the pages that have burned through cigarette...I look at the coins I collected on my trips to countries I can no longer remember. The more I write, the more I forget, it's like a blackboard I never read again. Every time I erase the stuff I had written and start afresh, knowing very well that the writing is only going to be there for a short while of my life.

Some days back as I was in another one of my lost moods, I came across a faded, rusty postbox..there was no lock to it, the door was open...I checked to see if there are any letters in it. The last one that the postman forgot to take out but I could find none. Imagine days of being full of envelopes containing several emotions and then being abandoned. Left empty...with no secrets yet with memories that are so obstinate that they kill you but don't leave you in peace. Remember that tree in In the mood for love...the one on top of the mountain...where people would go leave a secret...this is one of the last ones of those trees.

Not with blood, soul or emotions...we are all made of memories...I dissolve in air...one memory at a time...

Winter soul-stice

A blank Tuesday

wakes up to a misty morning

shakes off the previous night's cloak

the baggage of ex-relationships

and walks into the Sulphur pools of Rajgir

A dying October

saunters amidst the falling walls of Nalanda

imbibes the wisdom of sages from ages

looks for books in the nooks

and walks away chanting the mantra of silence

A ten year old 2012

feels helpless at Kosi's madness

gets strength from the gram devta

finishes his ablutions at Gaya 

and finds nirvana beneath a Christmas tree

A confused me

hears their stories

wondering and wandering in between

noting down what should have been lost

and getting lost where I should have been found. 

Autumn evenings

It's a very strange pain
that blossoms in my heart
like a three and a quarter petal orchid

A faint scent of violet, indeed
Oh...the fragrance of a colour
changes the way my evenings feel

The walls bleed music
of a thousand years past
stories of a lute and a trombone and you

I see you humming to yourself
and the stage of the world burns
ashes clog the flow of time for eternity

You paint my thoughts
the hue of your lips
I become a muddy pool of blue

You have ink in your veins
the moon is a blank sheet of paper
Love...an inevitable piece of poetry

You won't know those evenings...

And ever since
the river flowed
wordlessly
across the gentle plains,
in her heart
a lilting lullaby
silenced forever.
---
The evenings
forgot the melody
of homecoming.
Migratory birds
died en-route
thirsty, lonely and loveless
---
Some grave
was razed to nothingness
to ease my soul's
breaking the repertoire
of past births.
---
To create
nothingness
from chaos
is insanity.
---
Mute the pain.
Nurture a desert
within an oasis.
---
Salvation is deafening.
Each teardrop plays a note
Let it rain...let it rain...let it rain. 

Impulses...physical...chemical...some nerve!

Gone are the pangs of words unspoken and just a void remains...in the abstract desert of imagination...nothing blooms...Clouds loom large over the placid lake that are my eyes now and the sun goes down for more than several months. I have drifted away to the farthest end of the earth. 

I try the hardest to find a glimpse of hope...a ray of lost sunshine when I realize...its not that the world has gone quiet...I have turned deaf...it's not that there is no sunshine...I have gone blind...the grief that is holding my savage heart a hostage is not of the world but a Frankenstine I've created...my own personal nemesis.

In each of us, a world gets created by the choices we make and I was doomed to have my destruction brought upon by none else but me. I don't know why I was born with the spirit of a fighter...I have never quit...when everything goes down I still have hopes of constructing everything over again...even on lost grounds. I don't know how but somehow I don't ever know when to realize it's a battle lost...and somewhere because I always believe there is a comeback...I make it happen...almost all by the fierceness of that desire...that belief in myself...that unflinching resolve to create a world I want to live in. 

Destruction is not always incidental...sometimes it is planned well in advance for complete annihilation is perhaps the first requirement to create something that never existed before. There has to be no 'before'. Things have to start from the beginning of time. Sometimes it actually is better to have no memories. Now, if only, it was possible to completely erase them from the deepest trenches of our consciousness. 

So, here I am...unwinding time, making it run backwards and wiping away every fragment I have created ever. The air carries with it the whiff of autumn, it's high time I let the yellowed, dying leaves disintegrate. HCN...played a big role in the life coming to the form it currently is...I guess it's high time to take it out of the textbooks and taste it...for real!

Murderous glances...

If someone is murdering me...I would like this song to be played...somewhere in faraway memories. It comes back to me like a forlorn echo...like a withering Gulmohar bud in spring...like a semi-dried Sheesham tree.

Did you know that when temperature falls to sub-zero, waterfalls freeze?

While questioning...did you really believe that I was in love with you...ever...even for a moment? I think my love is like this song that I keep listening to like my life depends on it...I don't understand a word yet I understand the song...its like knowing someone inside out without even looking into their eyes once.

What kind of eyes does a murderer have...are they cold, calculating, fearsome or are they just like everyone else's eyes...like yours or mine?

When you say...I have the eyes of a murderer...aren't you afraid? What makes you believe I'll spare you...just because I am in love with you...a love you don't even have belief on? Don't trust me...not with your life...not with your heart...not with your emotions...not with your fears...smiles...sorrows...not with your laughter...poetry...silences.

I am learning the art of goodbye...be wary...someday I'll really gather enough courage to just quietly collect myself and leave without a trace...I promise it will be like I never existed...I will wipe out every memory...even the ones tattooed on the walls of your heart...the ones intertwined in your dreams...the ones dissolved in the ink you use.

Premonition...everyone who is to die young feels it...feels it with every passing moment as the grain of sand falls in a sand-clock. It's a small life...beautiful though...heartbreakingly beautiful...but then...if only...if only...

Sunshine and a little rain

Hey Sunshine!
It's been long since anyone had called me by that name...I still turn to that...involuntarily...and always want to see him there...just him...just the way he was when we broke off...standing exactly there...wearing the exact same colour of clothes...that half smile and that rainbow in his misty eyes.

Well...it wasn't all the same...but it was him and so I wasn't complaining...he just came around and hugged me...ya...right there...in front of all those stupid on lookers...my feet were dangling a feet above the ground...did I forget how tall he was...and he would always need me at his height...so he would lift me up from ground...twirl me around like I am still a 16 year old girl and make me feel like being in love for the first time...all over again.

And in love I was...had always been...I don't know how to get over people...move on...blah blah...I haven't given a damn...ever. So there I was basking in a warm sunlit cafe as only Bangalore can have and smiling at him like I had just won a lottery or something...he used to call me sunshine...but in reality...he was my sunshine...the warmth that engulfed my heart every-time I thought of him and all the smiles we shared. All that laughter and chasing around and playing bompasting and god knows what...he was my best friend...boyfriend...agony aunt...mentor...jukebox...captain...poetry-listener all rolled into one. God, how I loved him!

To bump into him on the busy streets of Bangalore...well that was something...and to hear him calling not my real name but a name he used to call me long ago...that was something too...and me still turning back at that name...gosh! that really is too much to take in...my head is still reeling at the effect...and his hug still lingers with the same fragrance in my memories...pine and cedar and open mountain crisp air. The only thing that has changed over the years is...I have learned to let go...so this time when he said goodbye...I smiled...and waved him goodbye and said a quiet prayer in my heart for his happiness...and for sunshine...and for myself...as I thanked god for being able to love someone so deeply and being loved equally in return.

And I am still stuck at this quote from the movie...2046...
---
That day, six years ago, a rainbow appeared in my heart. It's still there, like a flame burning inside me. But what are your real feelings for me? Are they like a rainbow after the rain? Or did that rainbow fade away long ago?...
---
Will I ever stop loving you?

Lost and found

I have been missing him for quite a while...I have actually grown up with him...a major part of my week was spent thinking of what he would write on this Sunday. Karan Thapar's Sunday Sentiments in Hindustan Times has been one of the first things I loved to read ever since I picked up a newspaper to read. It continued untill 2005 in IIMC when I subscribed to the Indian Express...being utterly fed up of the severely non-real stories in Hindustan Times...being a student of Advertising I normally used to find out the real motive behind writing a real article or coverage of news. One of our favorite pass-times in the hostel was taking out any newspaper and tearing it apart with arguments on who has paid for what article and if actually the editor was biased.

It wasn't as much a time of change but in that age I was perhaps looking for something better...Indian Express had a survey conducted in IIMC and a simple message was conveyed...of sunshine stories...everyday in the newspaper there would be one positive news on the front page. I realise that's what I was sold out on...the one positive story. It made me shift from my newspaper of childhood...my comfort...my favorite columnists...turned over all. While in IIMC I normally always read the sunday paper in the library...but then projects caught up...and then exams and then the hunt for a job...and then the actual job...then a boyfriend who did not read hindustan times...et al.

I could never get my hands on Hindustan Times again...I hate Times of India so much that for the 6 months after  my marriage that I was in my joint family sasural I stopped reading the newspaper altogether. I shifted to Bangalore and the first thing I did in my home was ask the paperwala to get two newspapers...TOI for kunal and IE for myself. I still was missing Karan Thapar.

And after a long period of missing him...I had almost forgot his name...day before yesterday it started to haunt me again...all I remembered was his white haired photo that came along with his article and that hint of a smile...the nice good natured gentleman I loved to read about. This time I keeled in...I looked it up on the internet and after years of procrastinating about not reading my favorite writers on the internet and only on real paper...I finally read an article by Karan Thapar today.