Thetis' Reprise

Watch as Peleus woos his shape shifter,

Braving all the forms of that free Ocean drifter.

Thetis refused

To be caught,

To be wooed.

But at the end of the tussle

We learn that his muscle

Was much mightier than her feisty refusal.

                        An unlikely Thetis,

                        I tested your will.

                        Tango till morning

                        Circling until—

Lost in the bluster and heat of it all

I stood there and watched that last fortress fall.

            Who thought that mortals could play that sea nymph’s game

            That it would be no God to put King Peleus to shame.

            Yet alas, at this moment when the sea nymph’s adrift,

            She looks back at the moments, her silver laugh shifts—

            It darkens and crumbles in memory by light

            But resumes with a tinkle and sparkles at night.

Let the blush rise to her playful cheeks,

Let her smile, let her thrill, let her knees go weak.

She’ll shift through her shapes and settle at one—

A make-believe predator till the sky lifts the sun.

And then once again, the cycle reruns

Sadness, a flutter, sweet dreaming begun.

            

Caer's Lullaby

          We're not exactly living in the time of fairies and satyrs anymore. But there are times when they traipse across the ages and whisper lullabies in your ear. The soul of a sprite is made of music, i discovered. And the one that hummed itself into my life yesterday is as haunting as the idea of Peter Pan's love for Wendy or some missing shard from the love of Tristan and Isolde. If you heard the way the heart of this one beats, you'd find yourself transported to the rolling meadows perched at the edge of a far-off, rocky shore. The skin of your feet would mingle with the cold earth and as you turned your eyes to the greying sky, this lullaby would possess you. 

Who hums it into your unconscious dreamings? Is it the lover coming ashore on the ship that never made it past the horizon? Is it the woman who whispered her promise to return but still wanders on the moor? Is it the child that you loved and swore to protect who, one day, disappeared leaving the churning sensation that she never existed.

This is not the slow lullaby of nightly comforts. It is not the conjurer of blankets and warmth and star-filled visions. It is, in fact, the other extreme. This is the haunting tune that will show you where the pit of your stomach really is by leaving the gift of a cold, formless fear there. The fear of loss that is imminent. And while the moment for that misfortune is not here yet, as the singing begins; it will be here, as soon as the last note is sung. And yet, you cannot bring yourself to say the words-- or hold them back-- that will make the clockwork stop. The desire to hear the whole song through is more hypnotic than the powerful urge to stop. 

Yet. This has become my favourite song; consuming me like a vampire urge to stalk the joyous parade. It's the fleeting second before panic, that weightless moment that gives you the chance to, maybe, turn back and appraise the situation with more care. But i will not look back. This siren song can call me to the edge of that cliff and beyond and i will follow...

It's not just my troubles, but my earthly trappings that i will leave behind.

Her Royal Cleverness!

            You are nothing like the amorous animals I have encountered all my life. And she is nothing like me.

            It’s an innocuous setting. She’s there, you’re there. I’m invited. Instantly, my Hollywood breeding comes out and bites me in the behind. The build up of the week breaks its fragile dam and the waters of unreasonable and unintended anger surge.

            She’s all that I would like to be. Pleasant and smiling. She’s got a quirky beauty that instantly wraps itself around your senses and all that you’d like to do is listen to her cleverness. Oh, her shining cleverness. She’s at ease with herself and I find myself on yet another trip to the fringes of self exile, a banishment that I imagine for myself.

            You seem so happy. There are no lines on your face; none of the haggard uncertainty that clouds your brow, that comes when you spend all your time wondering why—and not if—I am depressed and moody again. I was building my crookedly inappropriate citadel to hide behind even before I got there. And she had nothing to do with the walls, then.

            All I was shielding myself against was my need to fit the standard of pretty that I was never engineered to fit. To be beautiful like I was never meant to be. Petite and pretty, like her, was never a part of the plan the Universe had for me. Her ready laugh and all that you got along about…

            I killed myself and you.

            I killed us with my Hollywood reflexes and my angry vocabulary.

            I won’t apologise. I was happy to finally have met her, to have seen this most worthy queen of your life.

            But I was terrified of how much better she was than me, to me, in my eyes.

Come Find Me

Come find me.

Come find me in the labyrinth of my mind,

Look for me in the empire of my dreams.

I suggest you call out with all your heart,

With your teeth gritted against the shattering silence

That answers every bellow that you beat out to me.

Come find me as I twist through light and shade,

As my form bends like a young branch

In a midnight gale,

In a summer storm,

In an afternoon breath of sunshine soaked breeze.

This strange valley lightens when I finally hear your voice

The brightness creeps in

And I look past the dancing boughs,

The creeping vines, fresh and festive;

The veil of fragrance shifts—

You rescue me from thought.

Just beyond my precipice

A sheer drop awaits.

But you pull me back before

My weight shifts,

My mind slips

And I fall.

Come find me.

Come rescue me.

Come,

Elevate me.

F-o-x.

            In the ‘90s, f-o-x* spelled evil. It’s been over a decade since the reinvention of the concept of the bookstore’s arch nemesis. It was once the big, bad mega-bookstore. But that was in the era of the book. And it lasted for a while. For quite some many decades the book was the guest of honour in many homes; the attraction in the living room, the thrill hiding in the bedroom and the lure of the bathroom.  

            It’s now the time of the pad, pod and touch. Things that we can’t feel like the spine of a book; can’t smell like the eau-de-book-glue and most definitely cannot romance like a book in the light of a night lamp.

This brings me to the nub of this rant: the imminent closing down of my shrine. The one place that I learned that the best way to buy a book is with your eyes, then with the tips of your fingers and then finally your wallet. It is at Book World that I learned to anticipate the rush of adrenaline that comes with the first view of a wall of books—correction, walls of books—all around. The many coloured spines stacked up like snatches into different worlds. Fonts waltzed and authors jousted for attention. It’s my one place of true and complete abandon.

But the e-Book has taken us willing prisoner. And we’d rather read on the luminous screens before us than with the grain of a page against our skin. And then there is that part of the whole that does not read at all; save for the obligatory text book/summary of notes/question paper/text message/etc.

            So here I am: at the end of an epoch of belief; on the other side of a river of faith in the invincibility of the book store. But the going gets tough when the money gets going. And all I can do is shed a tear and hope that someday the age of the printed word returns. A book is my dream cased in a dust jacket, my tears wrapped in clean lines of text. A book is my happiness spun of coarse, thick paper and offered to me at the hands of that tall man of immense wisdom in the lore of books and happy memories.

*See You've Got Mail. 

Wandering Home

I've been robbed.
I haven't the confidence to hit the post button about anything. And so i return with very little to say but the determination to say it nonetheless.


What robbed me? What do you think it was? 
Complacence? Couldn't be. I'm not feeling complacent. Just content.
Then that must be it. 
Contentment robbed me of my will to write. 
So when i do finally get to making words the way i used to; tucking them in at the waist line and fluffing out their sleeves; i seem to land myself in a tangled mess of threads and no frills and flounces. Maybe that's what i was robbed off. The flourish was stolen from me. 
All that i find myself left with are the blunt bits that used to once be dressed up for the races, or a ball or something pretty like that. Like the dowager duchess in her nightgown. Or the queen in the overalls from her nightmares. 


Then again i might only have been robbed of a few concepts here and there. I find myself wandering off the idyllic roads of my imagination and onto the battered countryside paths of India.
No more phrases and dreams from Anne of Green Gables or wild ideas snatched greedily from the platters of Hollywood love potions. None of that.
I've found myself infatuated with the idea of India more than i have ever been. Sure, i've always loved this place. It's home. But now i find myself craving more and more knowledge, facts when once it was only about a clannish and reflexive defence of my countrymen. It's becoming more and more cerebral. I want to wander into the labyrinths and columned halls of the ancient literature. I want to wrap my mind in the folds of Draupadi's endless sari and look at the evolution (or glorious lack of it) of the people through the restless eyes of Sita as she scanned the earth from Ravan's chariot. 


I want to bathe myself in the wonderful Sanskrit culture that ebulliently emerged with the Vedic writings and then wandered down the ages, sagely and wise.
I want to meander like history; over the pools of quicksilver tradition and wading through the forever tumultuous currents of belief and religion, agitating them further with each step. The children still born into the gilt beliefs of warrior pride mystify me. I find my self drawn to the armed hills that have stood through the sieges and the charges. I want to be lost in the ageless relief in the temples.


Let me think.
I have not been robbed. 
I have been lost. Lost and left to find my own way.
And now the glimmering lights of home are calling to me.

Sticking with you

it's shimmering outside. in great sticky slaps the sun slathers sweat over the earth.

inside there appear to be a few choices as to how to pass the time.

will it entertain me to wiggle and jump around like a chihuahua having fits and be Luigi on the Wii? 

will it thrill me to my toes to read the very proper yet somewhat breathless observations of Mlle Austen?

or maybe the intellectual meanderings of a political magazine will really rock my boat.

ah i think i'll just vegetate online.

summer makes everything seem like it's infinitely cooler when done indoors or under water. and since under water is quite out of my depth, i thought the indoors would have to do.

and so i settled into the cool drowsiness of an empty living room with nothing to do, realised that where i was afforded me precious access to the ever elusive internet and thereupon began to manoeuvre myself deftly through the verbose thickets of political journals and the sunlit halls of old Hollywood talk.

and that was when it hit me. 

i'd rather look through the glossies about ol' blue eyes and grace kelly and that darling porcelain wonder audrey hepburn. i'd rather do that than use the information that people hand to me to form an informed opinion on the matters that i speak so vociferously about and be right by fluke so often. a million times i give up. sometimes halfway on skipping from one hyperlink to the next in that accursed game of leapfrog we must play to stay on top of a world of fast sinking stories and headlines that disappear.

it's the ultimate nightmare to be the expert, the maven. you're on the skidding of a rolling drum, constantly shifting under the weight of it's own mortality.

ah well.

we'd much rather talk about the continuous issues of which gender has the more immortal follies. we'd much rather scan the patterns in food cravings and gossip cravings and cravings of a more fickle sort, for transient as they seem, they are the ones that endure. they stick through generations of fasting old men and tidal calamities and by god! i will stick with them.

Batty Fruitcakes

I like boxes. closed. neat. placed against a wall, not free standing.

everything has to be connected to something else. in lines. and systematic patterns.

neuroses, i have a bunch of.

Just like my boxes, i need my mind to be working in a closed form. my room has to be a closed circuit, working and not splitting somewhere, waiting to be fixed. it's not about the distraction. it's not about outside noise at all. i work fine with all the bustle and giggling wafting into my space. i just need my walls to flow, one into the next, without having to frog jump over some annoying open doorway.

And that is what you call my tantrum. fine, it is. it is my tantrum and it is an integral part of my theatrics. it really does not bite me that you have an issue with it so much as when you ask me to change it, to stop it and to make it fit your definition of 'not tantrum, not pampered'. it cannot just happen that my mind will gloss over the break in the block of space that i am perfectly adjusted to.

It's like a breach in the walls of a fortress that needs to be watched, and guarded and surveyed at every second moment. and if you think that there's something fishy with what i'm up to in here, then sit with me. come be a part of my box. but i must warn you that it will still be closed and being closed is not guarding me from the outside looking in. it is not even guarding me from inside looking out. it is just there so that the continuity of my space is unharmed.

*whispering audience*

'Loopy fruitcake, this one. completely batty.'

Yes, i hear you.

Yes, i am. 

Technicolour Impossible Dream

            TV trauma.

            Who really cares about the real world?

            I'd rather worry about people whose perfection lies in the fact that they were created to be the perfect versions of their flaws. I'd rather watch a coloured satire on a family far away than have to wait to see the black and white richness of my own. Why? Because waiting is uncertainty and because there's too much at risk without a script.

           

            I'd rather know the end vaguely than have to see the reality of innocence staring at me. Waking up knowing nothing and going to bed with a smaller portion of it. Comfort comes to me in small doses when you're happy, when there's nothing hurting your heart or nothing makes you cry. It's a mercy when I don't have to see you battling your age or when you're not disappointed with what you have.

 

            You're my unbending reality. You make it ok. Sparring and rebellion holds more risk for you than for me. But somehow I cannot stop thinking you're unbreakable, invincible and the one force I need to prove to that I know. And it really doesn't matter much so long as you believe in me at some point.

 

            You sniff out the moments that are crowding around my windpipe and there's no way my happiness could soar by your radars.

            You're precious. You're too precious.

            But you cannot make me not want my own version of the technicolour impossible dream.

Just for a day

Just for a day

I'd like to be 

small enough that a bear hug can lift me clean off my feet,

lithe enough to dance and have the world watch in wonder,

petite, with porcelain skin and soft, flowing ringlets.

Just a moment, 

I'd like to spend

as a wealthy, vain brat that dresses like barbie,

as a woman in charge, responsible and competent,

not keeping jagged elbows and knees to myself, lest my corners hurt someone.

Just one evening,

I'd like to live

knowing that i can work magic in clay or paint or cloth,
having the knowledge that i will be remembered for the lives i touched,
in the cocoon of disco lights without any inhibitions.

But forever, 

I want to be

me.

Colors

So colour me happy, I survived another one.

Oh! And what needs a mention is that I survived it my way.

It's been many a year since I mastered the technique of staying in bed, all communication lines frozen while the world outside bathes itself in an obscene amount of colour, water and bizarrely, eggs. Over the progressing years, the usual suspects have discovered that there's no point in standing anywhere; whether under my window, or balcony or for that matter a 100 feet away from the gate to my building; and hollering their colour stained vocal chords at me. I retreat deeper into my armour of blankets and turn up the volume on the elevator music that plays in my head.

There is no way that I can do the Holi routine without fear and trepidation and even the time that I did enjoy it in a whole new city with completely new people, still started with anxiety and a fair amount of shitting bricks that Mumbai city has happily agreed to use in extensive construction work.

It is, possibly, my prissiness that keeps me indoors ('you think?!' the crowd says in unison) while the sun happily bakes my friends into an army of colourful confections. But no amount of chiding or cajoling will lure me out from under the covers. Sure, I delight in the stories and laugh when people crack colourful (in vocabulary) jokes at my expense, but there's no way that you'll get me dripping water the colour of alien snort mixed with what would have made a variety of very interesting cocktails or smacking through the powdery clouds of dust that make breathing feel like rubbing a paper bag down my insides.

My mother says, 'tu tujhya Dadajinchi naat shobhte' (basically being just like my grand-dad), as she tsks around the place. I guess she's hoping all the counterviews are going to bulldoze me out of home and onto the streets (which is, surprisingly, the exact reverse of what she's usually trying to do).

So another year passes. The streets look like a many coloured battlefield with signs of scrimmage all over the place. Erie blue splatters on the walls could very well have been the last remaining signs falle… and my morbidity could very well ruin the reality for some so I'll wind up by saying this,

I see knees of green,

Red noses too,

I see them zoom,

To hot showers and loos

And I look at myself;

What a prissy, clean girl!

I hope all of you had a wonderful Holi,

See you next year?!

Or not.

The How

Bucket-lovest.

It's so wonderful!

I can send my blog letters. Love letters and hate mail and Dear-Abby-letters.

And the letters will be turned into leaves. And hung up on an endless tree of thoughts.

Sometimes people wander under that tree. Some gaze up at the filigree of thoughts and wonder at what they see. Some see beauty. Some others see ordinary. I see a million coloured reflections of me.

Each thought, as it tinkles in the summer breeze takes on a different hue. There are greys among the vibrant mauves and mango yellows. There is black behind the crimson and making the forget-me-not blue darker. But there is always a thought for every moment of my passing across the landscape of a life I can't wait to experience.

But the real brilliance is that there are others that want to traverse through my life, under the canopy of my thoughts with me. And they are the ones that pass through my letters, wading through the words that I dress my tree with. They look up into the tinkling sky and figure me out and underfoot, the beads of thought that dripped from my letters to the ground give them a summer street to be comfortable strolling along.

Wanderers through my growing forest of thoughts,

this letter is for you.

Summer swishes of plans and memories await me.

Rain will bring puddles and streams of ideas

and with the 

Winter comes my steed of many dreams.
And they will all become letters. 

To you.

From me.

VP/Prefect

You know that feeling that it was so easy to develop at school?

The one that started out like a little curl in your hair that you thought was alright as long as it didn't tickle you in the ear. But then slowly started to wind up into a permanent little wiggle and didn't straighten even under duress, under the powerful coercion of a wet comb.

And then it becomes you.

I think i have digressed.

But yes, the feeling.

When they call you out into the big hall and seat you all in neat lines. And you're not allowed to pick your nose or even breathe. Yes, that's the time i'm talking about. The grand appointment of the council of school deities for a year-- the prefects, the mortal gods.

That feeling comes to but a few and passes quickly for the hopefuls that lost.

And you think there's never going to be another shot.

But there are those phenomenal places that let you feel like the one that got picked, the one that made it, the one that wasn't a loser.

I found one of them. And there's not a shred of me that wants to revisit school and take all the glory for myself. There's not a bit of me that wants to snatch away what once belonged to a dear friend, or a fortunate cousin. I found my own responsibility 'cause someone believed in me.

Thank you, Make A Difference. I will not let you down.

A Lot of Nothing

He said it was nothing.

And all of a sudden the suspense was systematically killing me.

'Nothing'. It is possibly the most enticing word. The sort that conjures up a buffet of possibilities that you can just mix and match and make into a juicy lunch with some dressing left over to garnish the dinner salad with nicely. Nothing is that much of a perma-meal for thought.

And it was working on me.

It really does not matter whether that box in my cupboard has 'nothing' or whether it's the pink envelope under your pillow. It really matters not that the 'nothing' is accompanied with a shrug or that you make a little snorting sound at me while you say it. The more you are nonchalant, the less I will believe the emptiness of your 'nothing'.

That marriage of convenient syllables will keep me walking with you or looking at you when real conversation is long over.

But worry not.

I am not always at the receiving end of the bayonet of denial.

I wield it too. And a lot of times, I add that irresistible flourish of a grin; just a slight lift at the corner of my mouth while you imagine the delicious secret I'm rolling around in my mind.

Sometimes, I'll go back to what I'm doing, looking intently into a blank book (well, it's not necessarily blank, literally) and see you with the eyes in the top of my head looking very confused and verging on the apoplectic when I will look up and change the topic and you will have to follow the lead.

Do you know why you will?

Because when I ask you, what's on your mind...you want to say, "oh! (surprised pause) Nothing!"

Strength

I hate being called weak. Or anything that might come close to the truth. As a fact, I would collapse entirely in the face of a struggle and there are people that have guessed that. But I would never let anyone vocalise that sentiment. And definitely not to my face. People might see me strong if they catch me in a moment of passion. Sometimes in an opinionated sort of stance or if they see me striding down the road. But that is how I want to look when I want to look strong.

The only people who have seen me curled up in the pose that comic strips take endless jibes at—the foetal position—are parents and family. They are the ones that see me in the throes of a temper tantrum and I wonder, do they see me as strong? I doubt it. To them, I am a spoilt, whiny brat with demands and no way of fulfilling them myself. I seem to be the one constantly storming in and out of rooms. Throwing about a nasty attitude with the smell of a battlefield of rotting carrion.

They are the ones who see me for being rather arrogant and very intolerant; the perfectionist with a broom up her arse.

Oh! And the maid. Yes. They seem to see me in my moods all the time. And the neighbours, doubtless, hear me. Because I shout. And scream, and wail and yell. And the rest of the family has a vague idea that I am the shrew…and not in the style of Elizabeth Taylor. And I’m betting my friends have a decent idea. And then there are all the people that these people talk to. And the gossip spreads. Some people look at me warily. Like a cousin I have.

And none of this is a statement of pride. Just a statement of ‘me’. And that I know all these things about me. And that there are days when my attempts at change are earnest, and there are days where I revel in my spiny, thorny demeanour and wallow in the most delicious sense of being the dragon. But none of it is pride. Just acknowledgement that my immediate family fears me. I disappoint me.

I have received nothing but the best from them and they have been nothing short of poetic. But there are those times when the freaks are awarded to the best in the gross injustice that the good suffer. And so, someday, I hope to do them some paltry credit; become an academic luminary for one thing.

But all those hopes are just that. I might finally end up being one of the notoriously ungrateful because that is what they think I am. And, I guess, that is how I appear.

C’est la vie.

Climbing

Fort. Hill. Cornerstone of the Empire. And we were going to take a trip to the top. In a single file of snaking cars we made our way to the summit, or as close to that fortified summit of Sinhagad or the Lion’s Fort. Fascianting tales of this great silent timekeeper had regaled us through school. Although as we grew older we became more and more cynical about how much truth those tales could possibly contain. Some of us, at least.

Understanding history more thoroughly than we had ever was the reason why we had gotten together, this motely collection of people from across the age spectrum. As far apart as we were in age, was the measure of how close we had all become.

I was the only other young person (and I mean not yet 21) in the group. And it was me, of all people who was feeling like an elephant dying of the wheezes. No. That is what I was, I think.

It put into stark relief how so many people so much older than me were in better health than I was! Terrific. I made a mental note, the other night, that I would buy myself a cycle. The resolve is getting stronger with each pacycheck on the horizon. They’re all little dots, far from sigh at the moment, yet soon I see them coming to me and nestling in the warm embrace of my very small bank account. I will have a cycle. I will have one soon.

Names

Names hold us in like boundaries. They are the extent of our aspirations. We know there are at least a thousand others with the same name as us. And we know that if we don’t fight it, we’ll be lost in the multitudes. The names we were given become our boundaries and our maps into the outside world.

Some names were lost to the world even as they carved out places for themselves, to rest for all eternity. They battled against the earth and birthed some of the most steadfast wonders of the world. But all we remember are the names of the gods that they wrested from the grip of the stone of mountains. All we see are the forms of divinity scored into the rough and unyielding rock; rock that now smiles and dances for eyes through centuries in it’s perfect stillness. Stories unfold time and time again without so much as the slightest quiver on the surface.

The rhythmic violence with which we meet life is a beautiful testament to the fact that the human mind needs a reason to lash out and chafe against something, anything. It needn’t be a concrete foe or a tangible dilemma. We will try and score our names into the memories of something. Some succeed and others only make the feeblest swipe into the stone of time. And that is a strange stone, for sometimes it is like the peat in a bog, filling in scars made in its face with a merciless regularity. And yet, there are those extraordinary human beings that survive the ebb and surge of the way mankind goes from one wonder to the next atrocity.

So my name might fade away into the night of ages. And it may never be remembered, recanted or quoted in reverent terms. But I know that I tried to scratch myself into the unyielding memory of neighbourhood of my time.

Bird Picking

When the question of choosing a bird arose, the Japanese chose the crane. They said that a thousand paper cranes would set your wishes free.

*  *  *

A different day is a different flyer.

It shines out of the folds of a newspaper. The glossy tones will, forever, scream out their offers to all those who care. But that does not include me! :)

When i look at a flyer, i see a paper crane. I see a brood of them.

So here begin the chronicles of my thousand paper cranes.
Let it be known that this is not a story. It is a telling of the things that float through my mind as my fingers pinch and crimp and lovingly fold out a swarm of new sets of multicoloured paper crane wings.