The End of A Road

It was one of those early winter evenings, when there are songs in the air for those who still listen in that dark hour and have the courage to bear the cold rush. We decided to go for a cycle ride, a few of us, to explore the labyrinth streets of Old Delhi. We hired some cycles from the metro station and off we went, directionless, to escape the tediousness of North Campus. A gentle drizzle wet the dusty streets clearing our paths towards oblivion.

Like uncertain birds, fresh from their nests, we went around in circles for a while, adjusting to the vehicles that slowly became a part of us. We went around Delhi University, speeding here, slowing there and stopping to have tea at certain dhabas. We led and followed each other, although all of us were purely driven by instincts; but we moved on passing cars and as cars passed us. We moved on even as night slowly began settling down in the streets. Then finally, one of us decided to break out of the circle that we’d been making for a while and off we plunged into the night.

After pedaling for a while, struggling uphill and speeding down slopes, we reached the ISBT station – one of the thresholds of Delhi, where tourists and locals were busy scurrying here and there, with heavy suitcases and rucksacks. Some who looked uncertain and yet alert were clearly fresh arrivals; those who looked hurried and tired were perhaps leaving the city. Yet from their faces, it was impossible to discern what they felt in their moments of arrival and departure. A rather noisy place, with endless buses driven by angry drivers, we quickly rode on from there.

After a heavy dinner by the Jama Masjid, comprising meaty dishes and kheer fit for sultans, we struggled our way out of that busy lane and into quieter parts of Old Delhi. We cycled on and on, with such speed and hurry that anyone who saw us probably thought we were either men of great purpose or, more correctly, a chain of lunatics. But the chances of being self-conscious on a moonlit night spread out on those narrow, archaic alleys were rather dim. So we glided on, as if possessed; now taking a sharp bend at the end of a street, now slowing down on a bumpy road.

A night in Old Delhi is enchanted. The same place that is overcrowded during the day is suffused with a deep somnolence by midnight. We rode on, half-expecting to be confronted by djinns. At the end of an endless alley, squeezed by dilapidating old buildings on either side, we reached a certain chowk and aligned along its pavements were flower-sellers with their baskets overflowing with thousands of marigolds. Trucks laden with the flowers were unloading them.

In the heart of Old Delhi, at that transient hour, the warm, wafting scent of the golden flowers was flooding the dark streets we had ridden on.

A (philosophical?) Rancour

Rug reproached me for asking irrelevant, irreverent and impertinent questions to Bug. How their love for each other had deepened, in not more than ten days! Such passionate dispositions! Anyway, so as I was saying, Rug reproached me, admonished and accused me of being ‘passive-aggressive.’ And perhaps I was (it would be a grievous lie to deny what I had been in my past). Now, his calling me ‘passive-aggressive’ was not irksome in itself; however, what did revolt me was the intention behind his observation/accusation: He wanted to calm me down, forget, forgive so that a harmonious conclusion could be derived. He wanted me to surrender to the changes, surrender to the happening; he wanted me to surrender to his will. He wanted to restore ‘order’, pacify me and deliver us truce and a sacred harmony so that the future would be good, peaceful and in accordance to his order (pun intended).

Perhaps his intention was good, perhaps it was benevolent; perhaps it was even humane but it was terribly misled, naive and insufficient. It was terribly erroneous. He wished to bring about a calm when he himself, perhaps innocently, was in conflict with me. He wished to establish order by going to war! It seems even History has been unable to teach the man the fundamentals: Conflict brings no calm; war brings no peace and/because Order can never be.

It has been a fault with all men, especially those who are either short-sighted or are turning blind (there is no hope for the fully sightless), to suppose and impose the idea that the nature of Nature is order and stability. Man sees order and pattern in things only because he wishes to see them; he constantly projects his own desire for order onto these otherwise indifferent things. It would be more truthful to say that man seeks order and not that he sees it. For without this sense of order (and it is merely a sense as opposed to revelation), there would be no stability for him. His grand structure, laboriously erected, intricately sculpted and ostentatiously embellished would collapse. Man would be quite lost. Man invests faith in Order because he wants to feel safe, sheltered and meaningful. But what man has called ‘Order’ has only been the arbitrariness of his invention, his genius. In essence, if essence can ever be located, Order is an illusion. But then again, one cannot deny man his genius.

And so, one is led to ask the obvious question: What is Nature? And the obvious answer is Conflict. Hence, it is natural for man to be in conflict, or rather he is born into conflict, for Nature allows it, endorses it. Societal rules and regulations, political agreements and pacts, moral and religious commandments are thus quite unnatural. But then again, they too, I realise, adhere to the same principle; they too are in conflict with Nature and thus they too are natural.

Thus, here I would like to tell my dear friend, Rug, that his reproach and accusation were more natural than his intentions. His intentions were pious, commendable but far removed from the truth. They had their origins in his beliefs, the beliefs that make his life worthy in his own eyes. But they are beliefs nonetheless and to a pursuer of truth, beliefs are merely obstacles.

Hair

A Serious Problem

This is a serious problem: I no longer know what I am doing!

What chain of events led me to do the thing I did? Why? I seem to hold the answers in my mouth and all I have been doing is chewing them into tiny particles to distort them into concealing things even to myself. The thing churning in the hollow of my mouth seems to have some kind of dehydrating agency and I am slowly losing consciousness.

But the human mouth is a remarkable organ; it secretes saliva before I shrivel up!

All I have been repeatedly saying is that my actions are ‘meta-acts’. They are acts (or mistakes?) Man is entitled to commit. It is Man’s nature to do so. From the epoch of time, he has been doing so, unnoticed by neither his wife nor his furtive lover(s) although the prodding Philosopher was aware of it (because he did it too). So it is of no harmful consequence if I indulge in the same acts.

Such vague ontological assumptions are valid as long as one is writing a great philosophical doctrine potent enough to change the very course of man, when the author of that doctrine takes up the responsibility for the whole of mankind. But what changes will my acts cause in the grand design of Man; how do they affect his evolution? And when I cannot take the responsibility for my own ‘commitments’, how can I afford to bear the weight of an entire civilization? To hold him responsible for whatever I do (or do not do) – is it not a kind of escapism? To blame Man for my shortcomings is to not blame myself for my own weaknesses. It is as if my actions are no longer mine (of course when the results of an act are favorable, I take full credit for the enterprise); and if action is what defines Man’s identity, then what is my identity?

I have been disintegrating inside the hollow of my mouth, being chewed politely into millions of particles that cling on to each other. An amoebic existence. And as everyone with decent table manners dining at a social gathering would know, it is quite impolite to open your mouth wide, stick your tongue out and reveal its contents. ‘‘Quite rude!’’, the one across the table would think. (He too must have bitten himself into pieces).

So you see my case is utterly hopeless. I do not remember my natural shape nor am I aware of what size I was. I am slowly churning inside my mouth, protected in its black shelter, gently moisturized by its unctuous saliva. But before long, the organ begins to tire of holding my weight and soon I must swallow myself to be digested inside my depths. What after digestion?

This is a more serious problem: Am I to be flushed down the toilet?

Of Aphelion

I am travelling alone, in the darkest corner of the universe. I am a floating piece of mass; it does not matter who I am, what I am. My thoughts are not mine but someone else’s and that someone – he is a stranger. I am not mine. I never was; perhaps a desert-gypsy’s imagination, swirling in the sandstorm. Perhaps nothing.

I am travelling on a meteor, merely the size of a raft; and on my raft I am floating aimlessly, driven by the current the universe is. Enveloped by this dark infinite sea, I am merely a tiny dust particle in a great storm. Where am I to settle in the immense blank? I hear great fires born, unite, part and die. But they are all so far away; their warmth never reaches me. Cold fires, consumed in themselves. The silence between them and me is a vast abyss, unbridgeable. My senses have been my curse. If only I did not hear those distant worlds I would not know solitude. But I just cannot abandon this empty burden. Silence and I have been companions since that someone conceived me, and to forsake that silence is unimaginable. How could I go on if I was devoid of even emptiness? What would I mean if I was stripped of that emptiness too? And so, to exist I need the silence.

The stars are everywhere, above, right, left, below. But there is no need for directions here, for there are none. The only ones that exist are my own conceptions; but what do they mean to the universe? Anyway, I create them, drawing them on this vast blank. I am free to create anything here. And there is no need to follow the rules. Rules mean nothing in emptiness. But I do make some at times. They are games I play; games that never last long. I do not let them or else each game would become life.

When did you make me, my Maker?
Am I made of earth and clay too?
What are they made of?

At times, other meteors pass by; other souls inhabit them. They too are quite lost and without direction. Purposeless. But these occasions are so rare and fleeting, that I am utterly confused when they take place. I look at them and they look at me, with expressions as blank as the dark around us. We know that we are to do something then, immediately, but it is a moment of complete paralysis. We fail to act even though we are burning with inexplicable passions within. If only one of us could decipher what the passions meant. Who are they? Why did we meet? Or are they merely reflections of me; rather am I the reflection? Who then am I?

After such moments, when the meteors move far away to be consumed once again by the dark, remorse lingers, like smoke after a devastating fire. But with time, even that remorse evaporates. Once again, the emptiness.

And so on and on, my journey is endless. I cannot remember if it was yesterday I started or has it been a thousand years already? Or perhaps I always was here; or perhaps never. I cannot remember anything. I do not even remember who I am; I have no name to begin with. I am not even ‘I’. I am completely nameless for I am alone, imprisoned within this black womb of a mother who denies me birth. What lies outside her impenetrable walls? But it is not that I am curious. How can I, who has never known anything, desire knowledge?

I am travelling alone in this anaesthetic dark, in this eternal sleep. I am merely a dream lost amongst a thousand dreams. Or maybe not even that. Perhaps I am only the void in between. But I see I am trying to explain things when I myself am hopelessly ignorant and I have been doing so since the beginning.

Of Dusk

The pallid sun turns icy grey as it slowly burns itself in the western sky. Everything comes to a standstill, waiting. The sky is a starless blank, stretched like the dead skin of an animal, over a hollow. It resounds. Down there in the streets, the growing dark perpetrates a silence lulling everyone to surrender, to confront that certain future. Only the blue wind moans as it roams the landscape in its futile search for something, it knows not what itself. The grey pine trees dance in slow movements in the heavens, whistling an old song. It is familiar.

A raven watches over from the branches of a pine tree. Its occasional shrieks shatter every surviving vestige of desire, easing the burden of ambition, the burden of life. A decrepit man stands at the brink of a vast abyss unable to turn away as he gazes into its depths. Behind him, the echoes of life are still lingering, still calling onto him. It is futile. Slowly, they too surrender to the quiet. Even the raven song is slowly silence.

Now as the sky, suffused with a quiet darkness glides over the head of this man, he sees the truth. It had always been there, obscured yet impaling him. But the love of lies had kept it out of sight; had made its presence feeble. That murky love was poison, flooding his heart with desires and purposes that grew violent with time but then with time it slowly quietened into a whisper and then it faded into the firmament. That murky love was deception. And yes it had given him pleasure and it had given him purpose for in those days he had been sheltered and he had had companions who shared such pleasures, such purposes. Life had been grand, both in misery and in happiness. He was the centre of everything; the universe churned around him, the stars and the sun revolved around him and in them all were embedded divine powers that were for him, that were him. They spun around him with such great speed and such grandeur; he lost himself in them and then in himself, never once realising that there could be something else at the end of his universe. But then all grandeur is ephemeral; his universe grew out of control; soon it had no place for its own centre. He was banished from that which was his.

In that abyss, he sees with blank eyes, perplexed, the truth behind those youthful imaginings. That truth is one and the same for all and yet no one knows it truly till the time comes. What that truth holds is unfathomable to all regions of the mind, for it is beyond the mind’s grasp; the heart is but a hindrance as long as it beats. The truth never did reside in its chambers. The mind is a vast terrain, enclosed by the highest mountains that no individual dares to climb in his lifetime. Thus as long as breath visits his breast, he will not know what lies beyond these walls. It is only in the end when he sheds everything but himself, can he rise unburdened above the tyranny of his own mind, amplified in the emptiness of the heart. Only then will he see what he must see.

This is the aphelion of the world. This is where all that we know begins to end; where hope and despair erode into mere words. Here, the powerful and the weak are the same - mortals in the mouth of a reigning oblivion. The light is most faint and it grows weaker. The old man stares into the bottomless dark; unthinking, he merely is. He is living, yet no hollow heart beats in him; no breath trespasses what is his. He is living, and yet without desire, without what we all call life. He is content merely staring into a vast nothingness, where there is neither ecstasy nor agony, there is no triumph and there is no defeat; no hope, no fear. Nothingness is beyond space and time; soon it envelops him and he becomes what he sees. This nothingness is a stillness that is certain after the turbulence of life. It is a rest and no one gets tired of true rest.

Espresso

A rendezvous
At the local cafe.
So ordinary, petite,
I can cup your porcelain frame
In my hands
To feel your amnesic warmth
This winter evening.

And in some earnest need
Your brimming lips meet mine
In public display
And the auburn taste of your seed
Lingers as we part
Melting the hardened cold
This winter evening.

In quiet dialogues
We kiss and part to kiss again.
Strange poison, you poison me
My hardened frame, now liquid
Is tributary
Gushing forth into your sea
This winter evening.

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?

[untitled]

I boarded the train at the metro
at around 9:00
or 9:15
or perhaps, 9:30, 9:35
but time is of no consequence
here;
I had to go somewhere
I remember
from here to there,
there to here;
what does it matter?

I sat
the Alchemist, my sole companion
held my hands
and we were
falling
in love
perhaps.
But now I can’t really remember him
or her
what does it matter?

There were others too in our compartment
with us
and without;
we were together
oh yes
we were together;
they had eyes,
no irises,
no flowers
ever grew below the earth;
so there was nothing to see anyway
but I saw shadows of them
each penetrating another
to give birth to
monsters,

we were journeying together
endlessly,
here to there,
there to here
from darkness to darkness
although there were electric lights within
to illuminate
floor, furniture, faces,
advertisements;
I looked out of the window
and saw
Narcissus
drowning in a black pool
but no promise
of a flower.

A phone rang in a corner,
that farthest corner,
a voice,
it was mad,
it was selfish,
it spoke alone,
perhaps
it was lonely,
merely sound and
Echo
lost and drowning in its own waves,
insignificant;
my neck,
a serpent,
twisted, turned,
meandered,
in search
of what?
I never remember

We had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
and behind was the same;
we traveled
from darkness to darkness
contained in a tin box,
sardines
marketed
here and there,
there and here,
rotting in between
the sky and the fires

But what does it matter?
what does it matter?

The Shirt

When you sat down
To sew my torn shirt
With needle, thread and
A forgotten love song,
You pricked a finger and
I realised,
You bleed too.

On days,
When I wear that shirt
I wear my gray coat to hide
A red secret.
__________

On Grandmother's birthday.

Amidst the party hats and presents
Wrapped in garish colors
From the remains of family and friends
She cut the lovely chocolate cake
She wasn’t allowed to eat.
Yet nothing was left
For the fridge.

They sat her in the corner
So she’d have a view
Of all the song and dance,
And when it was all over
Wished her goodnight and a long life
In one breath
And left her to clean up the mess.
__________________________

Th Jacaranda Tree

It grew in a purple madness
Perhaps at the joy of having him
Close enough to hide him in its shade.
He was just a guest, a tourist
And he also made a remark about
"The pallid splendor of this savage beauty"
And how he’d love to
Plant it in his backyard.
The tree sighed,
And shook its branches to bathe him
In blossoms.

In the evening, he left
Without a word.
The violet, bloody now, in the sunset,
Stood nude, perplexed,
Its garments stretched out on the floor –
A royal carpet for him to walk on,
Not to walk away!

That early morning, we found
It moist from last night’s weeping
And all around us,
Purple tears.

***********
*******

A balloon boy.

Go visit this little street,
Squeezed by grey buildings;
It slithers like a worm.
It has muddy puddles
Which reflect your face
In ripples.

There will you see him:
A young boy thinly clad,
A floating cloud dancing above his head
Attached to strings.
He sells red hearts to lovers and their child
For a few coins.

He sells them to strangers,
Who burst them open
To reveal a nothingness.
And at times, a stranger's grip is loose.
Then they drift up and far away,
Searching.

They walk away into the grey -
The lovers and their child - happy now
With the purchase of an inflated rubber balloon!
Such was their want of a heart!
The giggles get stifled by the dark,
When suddenly, it breaks, with a loud burst!

When he presses his gaze
Into a restaurant,
Saliva leaks like a faulty tin roof.
The man in uniform,
With dirty words, chases him away.
He and the balloons dance to their rhythm.

If you ask him,
Of his dreams,
They are ridiculous!
You'd look at him with such disbelief.
Why you'd break his heart
With your laugh.

At night a man hurries through the lane;
Another sits here, another there.
They all have daggers, to stab you open.
The buildings shut their yellow eyes
And turn away.
They'd rather avoid the scene.

And yet he sits there till late,
With his red hearts,
Vulnerable to those steely lusts.
For he too desires
In that sameness, that is theirs and his.
After all, he has hearts to give away.

Will you stay on then?
To witness, a spectacle, so...so strange;
To see those strings get cut in a dance of blades,
To see the balloons drift up to reach the moon,
Spread like stars across a secret night;
Those same balloons filled with air.

Nausea

It was one of those days, when there are songs in the air and rain to keep beat. We decided to go for a cycle ride, all of us, to unburden ourselves from ourselves, to run away into the dark, to get lost. The rain chatted on tin roofs, and on the streets, noisily. It had secrets to tell, but we had more to tell each other. I left the whole world in my room, except my wallet. It was the heaviest thing ever, even though it was empty and yes, the emptier, the heavier.
Anyway, we were on the road that goes around in circles, and we cycled in circles. We didn’t have anywhere to go. Yet, we were in such speed and hurry to reach that end now, and then that end. Well, you can say we were searching for endings, but we didn’t really find any. It was alright though – We had each other to search with. So we cycled here and there, there and here, leaving trails for each other. No one else besides us would have wanted to follow. So we led and followed each other into the dark, passing cars and cars passed us. And we saw so many faces on the roads, all of them were the same to us. They were all nameless. I wouldn’t recognize a single one tomorrow.
So we cycled, and then came night – Night – not the ascent of dark but rather the feeling that stirs inside you telling you to rest, to sleep, to quit; it told us to leave our vehicles behind, and we, slaves, obeyed. And it was over.
Do we go around in circles again tomorrow?

an evening run

i run in the dark,
in the wake of cold fears,
half-aware of where my next step will be,
to feel the black wet mesh
brush against the warmth of my skin
as i devour it,
to feel my flesh wanton
in sweat - drops of me
penetrating out through a thousand pores,
to see the view
with that tourist's interest, indifference,
the one i had a chat with, sipping tea,
to meet that end of the route,
glance behind,
and see where i was then,
to listen to the grass
crumble - yellowed memories -
beneath my feet,
my body pounding my heart
in that heavy aching rhythm,
while i litter a thousand thoughts
here and there
in that discolored dark;
then i move on to something familiar.