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.