The Residence

Underneath a common roof
Held by corroding white pillars
The fragile existence
Of us who dwell here,
A delicate secret
Buried underneath
This part of the world
Characterised by books, pens,
Posters, convoluted ideas,
Left, right and things in between
Noisy conversations,
Whispers.
Underwear flailing in the gaze
Of a wanton sun.

A brotherhood
Sharpened to a poignant intensity
By hardened desire
Finding release
In some of the chambers
Of this great organ.
A world of mist
As smoke rises from the tip
Of cigarettes
Like some wraith
Haunting an abandoned tomb;
An almost insignificant dream
Before being sucked into a vortex
Of a terrible reality.

In this rite of passage
Between dark and light
Or perhaps light and eternal darkness
When we are neither egg nor bird,
Not flower, not fruit,
We are boiling in fraternal love
Within white-washed walls
As we share that last cigarette.
____

For a cup of tea

It starts within one of us – that thirst. It proceeds onto a proposal and then a tacit agreement. It is as if we plan it all along. Then we clothe ourselves in our woolens, to protect ourselves from the cold of the night; to keep from exposing our nakedness from night’s wanton gaze. We push the gate; how the metals clash as they fight each other; and off we shoot ourselves, spurting onto the night’s cool skin. Our shadows dissolve into the dark.

It is a long, winding road to PC; where remnants of life still chatter, fuss, trade in the night. The road is empty, desolate. We walk – usually the three of us; sometimes a forth joins us, and sometimes it is a human chain, hissing, as it pulls itself forward. We walk on into the night with that great sense of purpose, with a need to satiate our thirst that gnaws our insides. That thirst is a void that absorbs everything that comes in its way; so we and our voids march forward absorbing every fibre of dark that we brush against. Sometimes, a conversation about something startles us and it accompanies us till our destination; sometimes, nothing.

The lamps that illuminate the road to PC hum in that low note, singing to the insects that collect around them. How those insects swirl around each glow creating a universe oblivious to another. Each insect battles another for a touch of that divine fire; that dispassionate flame that evokes all desires; and after a fierce fight where each one is for oneself, an insect finally touches it - it burns, shrivels and falls from the heavens to the earth, from whence it had once sprung – a closure to its exquisite dance of death – a declaration of its limitations.

We walk on, unaffected as we pass these lamps; unaffected even as we see the carcasses lying around the lamp-posts. We search for our own spotlights – to touch the source of that illumination and to be scorched by the mere brilliance of it. But mostly, it is through the dark that we travel; it is in that dark where we imagine ourselves significant; it is there in that unknown, where we suddenly and fully know our purpose; it is there, where night is most blind, fragments of forgotten dreams converge into a point of concentration; it is in that dark we reign, we survive; for there, we are secret.

Life fades in as we near PC. There are men of different kinds, caricatures mostly; in a pathetic display of light and shadow. Whispers of women ooze out of cracks, in the barred windows, only to be stifled by the loud grunts and abuses outside. Sometimes, a car flashes past, tearing everything apart, followed by a gust of wind; but PC has a peculiar habit of stitching itself together again. It has stood witness to fights, rapes, perhaps a murder; it has been bruised, wounded, scarred and yet, it is there still, firm, throbbing, a vein – a passage for life.

We collect around the tea-stall, for a cup of tea. The burning flame moans as the priest prepares the golden liquid that must quench the thirst that keeps ghosts from their sleeps. Hundreds gather around to see the sacred event, to be united with each other, in their desires. When the tea is finally ready the man who has practiced the great power of keeping everyone in suspension, pours it in small plastic cups. Each man sells his life, concealed in a few coins, for a cup. After he gulps down the burning liquid, the ceremony is over. He must return.

We, are among those, who witness that eternal fire that warms the cold night in the deepest of winter; we are among those few, who travel great lengths for a sip of that elixir that flows endlessly in the rivers of that nocturnal civilization. We are among those restless pilgrims, who journey the unknown, in search of that god to be redeemed from the sins of the ignorant world. With that realization, we must all go back from whence we came; we must all submit to night’s calming powers. The road back is the same and its shadows too. More insects are stricken dead by the towering lamps and we must all return to our beds as sleep finally beckons us. Returning is a happy burden and numbed, we walk back, forgetting all that we had desired, all that we had been.

Then, in that last minute of wakefulness, as we finally settle ourselves in our confines, we suddenly come to realize: Night purloins our dreams and dissolves it in a cup of tea.

On Your Home Coming

We sit on the veranda this late evening,
Your face half-lit by the region’s Gulmohar,
Halved by shadows.

The east blurs as the west burns.
We are caught between
This fire and shadow.

You’ve turned towards the dimming landscape
Whilst I sit behind you.
I am not in your sight.

I only see your silhouette really,
But I can perceive more
In this blinding darkness.

There is no wind in the sky.
The tree wilts in its own heaviness.
We are locked in this stillness.

Far away, we made shameless love,
Our bodies intertwined; your words were mine
As my lips ended on yours.

We are far away from everything
We know together. Here you know everything
Alone. I am a stranger.

Sundered from you
By your love for your people,
This love is a chasm between ours.

This is your home-coming
And I cannot join you in your joy.
I suddenly am a voyeur.

You notice old faces changed, older now;
The smell of mangoes is sour.
What else has changed?

Perhaps your eyes have changed too.
But I am not of this land,
Your memories are not mine.

I see that your eyes stare at a nothing
Yet they search for all you have lost.
Once you had everything.

I am nothing here,
Only a faint memory of a foreign love
At the back of your mind.

And yet I feel I am the cause
For this heavy stillness this evening.
Our love must be a burden.
__

Autumn. An Ode.

Autumn visits me.
My door is open.
She enters.
Dust on the shelf rises insolently
To glimpse her.
The room heaves, ashamed at its own nudity.
She bathes it in gold.

The summer sun shadowed my walls;
He would not look my way.
Spring perched on boughs of fair gardens
To love flowers, scent and song.
Mine lay strangled with briars, weeds and thorn.

But she comes - Amorphous Autumn.
Each year she visits when all is frail.
She sits near - a companion strange and pale.
Clad in gold and pallid gray,
Her hair swirling - an avenging fire.
She has Midas' touch and desire;
All turns to gold, then withers in despair.

She breathes the winter wind,
And lights the western sky,
And burns it with her resplendence.
She bereaves the earth of all life.

But she never forgets me.
She remembers me by name.
When she breathes I hear her call.
She howls at night as she cleans my wounds.
No tears but frost in those colourless eyes.

She rises - a queen at war -
With wind in hair and vengence in sword.
She brings me hope, she brings me fear;
She brings me life and death
Temptingly near.

A white stillness gathers 'round a white funeral
While she escapes into her white wonderland.

Of Narcissus

Anything that is unconventional and alien to one is wrong and hence frightening. Hence to overcome those fears one tends to tame things outside oneself, like the circus-man who must tame the carnivorous lion. Of course that man is never truly rid of that fear which makes him ‘tame’ it in the first place. He must always carry a whip and lash it whenever need arises. An absolute reconciliation is impossible for he is a man and it is a lion, and in their differences only a pact between them is possible, between two powers, one scared of the whip and the other scared of the whipped. Well, I am not as much interested in the lion as I am in that circus-man, probably dressed like a clown, a painted mask to hide his fear and misery. Why he must tame the lion in the first place might seem ludicrous, but to tame is essentially his nature and his purpose. Without taming the lion, or rather without the lion, his existence becomes meaningless.



Only by ‘teaching’ the other can one overcome one’s fears. Man finds himself alone amidst variety, change; amidst things he cannot make sense of. Hence, his immediate reaction to such an unknown environment is to spread himself, his ideas, force them down the other’s throat if need be, to overcome that variety, to understand that change, so that everything becomes familiar again, so that he is not ‘outdated’. He is reaffirmed. This is why knowledge is ‘light’, missionaries must bring charities and the words of their gods must be spread.



Man needs to see himself reflected. He is a narcissist and hence man will essentially 'die' in his own self absorption. He collapses into himself. He is not seeking relationship in others, but mirrors so that he is reflected. So that he knows who he is, his desires, his fears, his strengths, his achievements. So that he can value and validate himself. For this reason man devised religion, customs, traditions, love in order to find himself in the other; so that he sees himself reflected. But what he fails to learn is that even the other seeks the same. Hence an interesting and a pathetic situation occurs: two mirrors reflect each other in futile for infinity.



The lion and the circus man are at continuous strife with each other. The circus man wishes for a puppet; the lion wishes to devour the ‘puppeteer’. What is common to both is that desire for victory. Both are engaged in that unending game because there will be no victory. It is a game between equals. It is to be a continuous struggle essentially because one needs the other for meaningfulness. The circus man, our subject, must engage himself as long as he desires to live. The moment he gives up his end is determined. The lion, the other, of course never rests.



Love, is a process of self-realisation and then the affirmation of that realisation. The lover seeks to see himself reflected in the ‘beloved’. Perfect love is love where one finds complete reflection in the other. One loves, to seek a validation of oneself; a validation of one’s imagined, constructed self. However, since an individual is always different from the other, love is a process with no end; there is no complete fulfillment, no complete reflection; hence there is no perfect love. The narcissistic lover is in a continuous process of ‘finding’ himself in the other. The other is reduced to a pond in which he sees himself, to appraise himself, to love himself. The murkiness of the water allows him the liberty to obscure and imagine various aspects of himself. But occasionally, the water clears to reveal the truth. Because of their (the lover’s and the beloved’s) inherent and acquired differences, a complete reflection (desired image) is unattainable. Thus love is an incessant and an unending process of ‘teaching’ the other. To ‘learn’ (from the other) is however unacceptable to Narcissus; for that would mean that he is lesser and more importantly, invalid. Hence, to reaffirm himself, he feels the need to tame, mould, ‘teach’ the beloved/the other into his idea of himself; the manifestation of his delusions. The other’s differences are understood as a threat to his identity. So the other is either held in contempt or is made to unlearn what she (in this case) is and in a way, mutilate herself into the lover’s notion of himself, so that he can overcome the fear of solitude. The lover needs to feel a ‘validity’ of and for himself in the social fabric.



Thus, love boils down to the desire to assert oneself upon the other; to control the other. It is only a more cordial and agreeable method of exercising unwarranted power.

Fall

A stream
Laden with the memory
Of two seasons,
Of an emerald love,
Adorned with blossoms
Tremulously
Runs in its veins.
The memories have turned
A translucent yellow.

It is time for farewell,
To bid the world adieu,
Now that it is weary
Of all the suns
Charioting sapphire skies,
Of the night
With its pearl heart
Stringed together
With nocturnal jewels.

The bough will be lighter
This sacred evening.
The wind already
Teases its sail.
It is to be a happy journey.
It heaves a sigh;
The veins burst
And suffuse the quiet
With the quietness of memory.

It makes no haste
And yet must hurry
Before the first flake
Of approaching winter.
Quietly,
It breaks its clasp
To drown
Into a distant sea
In a dazzling slowness.
___

...

What happens after it (beauty) perishes...one clings on to memory that can never fully re-awaken what was and thereby also becomes incapable of fully realising what is, now. Death is inevitable and therein lies the truth; the memory of life can never fully resurrect what was. The past becomes merely an illusion, and in understanding that, there is wisdom. What good is the smoke after the fire is out? One needs to open one's windows so that one doesnt choke in its fumes.
And when finally all fire, all smoke is out, what remains?
What do you remember after death?

Of Patience

The following might be the most erroneous writing of all, but then again writing is always such an arduous task always susceptible to mistakes, hypothesis, errors, lack of knowledge and miscommunication. It is in constant need of revision and change. Whoever said one must write in order to organize and calm the restless emotions that trouble the heart, when in fact writing often leads to dissatisfaction when one realizes that what one writes is always to be incomplete or perhaps even incorrect. However I write this in the spur of a moment, painfully ignorant of all the hardships that are entailed in the process of writing. But in my very doing so, I believe that I have already contradicted myself in what I have to say:

If there is anything so immutable and solid to fill that hollow, which we all otherwise so carelessly call 'virtue', then the only quality or concept to fit into it would be patience. All other 'virtues' are secondary or are branches of this main stem. It is patience that gives birth to compassion, honesty, love, philanthropy. They are all fruits of this eternal tree. And although this tree is ever breathing, unchanging, living, its fruits grow from its blossoms and ripen from sour to sweetness and then fall from their mother and decay. But the tree stands firm against summer, spring, winter, fall, storms, gales and pleasant weather. The other lesser virtues quiver, grow, ripen, fall and then decay; their places are filled by others. But the unchanging patience stands rooted, unaffected, strewing man's unending garland of the ways of things, selecting this from that and that from this, according to the needs of time.

Patience does not merely exist and observe; it understands. It reasons and questions and then sieves the crude gravel of chaos to attain that fine, flowing answer.
________________________________________________

white lily

what if the white lily grew between the blades
and the damsel sings and breaks its gentle neck
to crown her brow with its meek beauty -
a white star in that immense blackness?
will the flower with her slit throat
feel loved in that black heaven?
or will she wilt in its shadows
her juices gushing out
to flow into her earthy half
rooted amongst the grass?