Peace Orchestra - Who Am I?

Light stains mark the face of this night. It is a night made of monochrome. A night with flashes of neon. A night with a hint of copper. A night with the grace of a whisper. This is a darkness that drives us, a darkness of the damned.

The road leans forward with a longing for distant places. It urges me to taste the excitement of emptiness. A pristine ribbon of black illuminated in alternate bands of yellow. The beast under me purrs with delight. A wicked laughter erupts in its depths and passes into me as a shiver down my spine.

The clouds rush to cover the face of the moon. It is cold. A bracing cold that is refreshing. I grin behind my mask of metal. It is time.

First gear. The beast growls with an undercurrent of a whine behind the baritone. It grips the road with its black claws and hurtles forward. The white lines rush forward and disappear beneath me. There is the wind picking up. I embrace the night with my gloved hands.

Second gear. The road becomes a continuous streak of black. The sound of the beast echoes off the buildings bordering the road. We hold the darkness between our throbbing hearts. I snake past hulking wagons and shivering cars.

Third gear. Acceleration is the key to annihilation of the senses. A mad need for speed cripples caution. Gears grip, mesh and release.

Fourth gear. There is a roar in my ears. The roar of blood and wind. Surroundings dissolve into a rapid blur beyond my narrow zone of focus. The road is a black hole on the edge of the universe. The beast has settled into a steady drone that rumbles through my body. I whip past silent intersections and flash past sudden bends in a graceful curve. It is an exhilaration of speed and sensation. The neon washes over my mask in an intense shade of yellow.

The world is an empty road egging me on. I’m drenched in a curling wave of adrenaline. The numbers on the console mean nothing. Lights blink in the faint hope of arresting this mad dash. But it is too late. The beast has taken control. I give in without wondering where it is leading me. It is the journey that counts, not the destination. We are united. In one insane instant we pass into the darkness past the shadows cast by the pylons into a world where raw speed is the only answer left.

The wind whispered my name today as I was walking with my lonely melancholy. The air was crisp, filled with the fragrance of some far away song. The trees were like old men stooped over their chairs to keep track of life walking on by. My eyes strayed up to the sky where clouds collapsed into words of polite wonder. The path led on without a bend or a rent. My senses were filled with the desire for life. I took off my spectacles to look at the world around me through a blurred inspiration.

Sometimes one sees the door but not the distance up to it. The silent signals of another world wheeling away on the outskirts of a solitary society.

There were many holes. Too many that needed to be plugged to staunch the flow. In some ways it was a lost cause as new leaks sprang up as soon as an old one was fixed. Where did those holes come from? Why did they cause so much torment?

I touched her cheek to seek reassurance from the warm blood flowing beneath. She was beside me, wrapped in dry dreams. The distance between our minds separated our hands. But the words that existed in our hearts somehow slipped out from between us into the cold around like marbles from a child’s hand and formed footsteps in the endless snow.

Mazzy Star - Into Dust

Things do not make much sense these days. Some days pass by without leaving any mark whatsoever on the calendar. It is as if they cannot fill the hole at the center. The need and the want. Nights come and go like an orgasm, a sudden instant of darkness before the overwhelming onrush of light.

The pages flutter across the water’s edge. White sheets carried along by the whims of an impulsive wind. Nothing is as it seems. A half broken sand castle lies forlorn and a sheet lodges itself on the last turret wall. Why do things keep breaking down? Why does age play catch up at the wrong time? The nature of things is to deteriorate, isn’t it? Like these wrinkled sheets clinging to my legs as if imploring me to spare them from the oblivion of decay. Smudged words drift into focus. Did I write them? Did you? Who wrote them? Did we all?

I hear laughter carried by the wind recede an instant later. Hearts continue to beat to the music of different lives. The waves swallow some of the sheets. A history in letters erased forever. The sand under my feet is the weight of the past. I can feel the million little granules resolve into the fine detail of nostalgia.

All that remains in the end are words. The obscene everyday profusion of words. Words that remain trapped on paper like memories in the mind.

Call - Kaash

How long will this continue he wonders? This unbelievable torture of wasted time and never ending misery that seems to run unbroken to the horizon. The same thoughts go round and round. The over-confident decisions taken based on false data. The inability to break away. The pointlessness of it all, self-induced and seemingly without a solution.

He hasn’t seen what outside looks like in the past fourteen days. For all he knows the world has stopped existing outside his door. Inside, he sits in the same corner and sinks ever deeper into a morass of his own making. He knows the problems. He even has the solutions but somehow cannot find the mental strength to implement those solutions. Constantly, the past swirls up like a fog, blinding and binding him. Is it a question of genes? Is it a lack of courage to stand up and effect change? Perhaps it is both?

There was some hope. Some hope of redemption that briefly flowered but that too slowly seems to be resolving into a mirage. People are too far away to matter. Relationships are in tatters. Everyone is the same. Over thinking things to the point of no return.

If only he could let go. Let go and free fall, free of all the insane expectations, free of all those who never came through when it mattered and free of all the desperate need to connect and talk. To live on a plane of existence independent of the whole world.

If only life was that easy and simple.

Pink Floyd - Eclipse

My heart beat in tandem to their music. I was drunk on a curious mixture of 2 parts medium-dry sherry, 1 part white rum, 1 part French brandy and 1 part banana juice, which turned out to be surprisingly good. PF played on in the background. Their lyrics slid down a page of my autobiography. Pompeii, Earl’s Court and Hyde Park. Different locations. Different eras. Different moods. An influence of the past spilled over into the present. Writhing lasers pierced the smoky ambience. Multiple hands clasped together. Shadows ran together. Lights pooled in the center. I was part of the huge crowd. One with everyone. Drums and bass. The guitar solo pushed through the dense light, thrilled the heart and stilled the mind. I learnt to fly and came back to life.

We were together in the night. Yellow was our color. On the road we lay, counting the craters on the dark side of the moon. Vehicles rushed past us in the background. It was in the middle of the night. The culvert was dry, filled with dead leaves. She laughed at my silly jokes and naiveté. The brightest moon in a century shone in her eyes.

Towards dawn we walked to the lake. The trees shook as if with laughter. The ripples on the water talked in concentric circles. The peacocks were out in full force. The air was laced with the wet smell of rain. A sudden breeze sprang up and rushed through our hair. We stood on the bank. We were lost for words.

(Note: Most of the posts on this blog are written with some music playing in the background. So to put you in the same mood (hopefully) I was in while writing a particular post, from now on, whenever possible, I’ll put up the music that either was playing in the background while the post was being written or directly influenced the post itself. It will be available at the top of every such post. Please click on the play button to start the song.)

Red Eye - The Album Leaf

It is a land without boundaries. I do not matter. Nor do you. Nor does our love. Everything is new, touched by something that cared. Not like there where everything lies in a state of decay. The wind speaks of sunshine and ocean currents. The streams sing songs of faraway hills and overhanging branches. There are bright blue flowers that smile at the sky.

People come and go, never to stay. They do not care for the unspoken words that a tree contains. They lack the patience to listen to a forest whisper ancient secrets. But how does that matter? The world exists for its own happiness. They take but do not give.

Some stranger ordered, get out of the chair and mark Sabbath. The land slopes away gently below me. There are rivers. There are meadows. There are hopes. To hope is to ignore the truth.

Another dawn without sleep in its wake. It is cold inside and outside. The grass died under the frost. The crackling of special paper strewn around the dustbin. Somebody taps on the window and writes a name on the condensed mist. Ah, the past placing a bookmark for the future. People to avoid. Exit is on the left to the wilderness for a spell of tears.

Life as a doctoral student sucks. It doesn’t suck in the ordinary nobody loves me suckiness (does that word even exist?) level. No, it takes sucking (pardon my vulgar language) to a different level, a level where you are the lowest form of life in the world. I mean even bacteria have more fun. They are practically immortal. They have sex almost every 20 minutes. They can live on almost anything. And they have the coolest of names. Chlamydia. Nocardia. Vibrio. Contrast that with an average doctoral student. He is a mouse (although even a mouse would be offended to be compared to such a lowly being) like creature, most often with spectacles and irritating habits like trailing off in the middle of a sentence into vague silences. Their only sex appeal lies in their detailed knowledge about how two proteins fold exactly around each other. You get the picture.

What do such specimens of the human species do when a beautiful woman goes up to them and talks? To digress a little, such events do not happen in the real world. The probability of such an event happening, according to knowledgeable sources in the Mathematics department across the road, is 0.00. In fact, apparently, this is the only known event in the world that has such a perfect probability of not happening! So let me add the rider, in a hypothetical world, to the above scenario.

Continuing with the hypothetical situation, the said graduate student will first start perspiring. His pulse will be racing because hormones are being dumped into his blood, leading to rapid changes in his metabolic profile. He starts blushing. When he opens his mouth, either no sound comes out or else mumbled and garbled words pour out, which of course do not make any sense. If that beautiful woman still has any sense she would leave. However, if she is one of those rare beings, who for some insane reason either enjoy tormenting such innocent geeks, feel pity for such lowly life forms or genuinely like disheveled and bespectacled nerds, she will stay and talk further.

The psychedelic underbelly of the world had erupted and all I saw was a huge helicopter making endless loops. Its rotors were the color of candy. Roses were falling through its open doors. It was a different world. A world of color and corruption. Shit…shit…shit. This was not the dream I had bought. I wanted fear in my fist and happiness in my heart. This was giving me a bad vibe man. Topsy turvy, round and round my head swam in the air. It was heavy stuff. People were throwing things at me. Or were they words? diCONNected, diORIENted and diBELITiZed. I moved away.

I ventured into a diner. It was full of men munching on something green. Nothing made sense. Where was I? Wasn’t I supposed to be in a concert? Toothpicks between my teeth. Fuck! The hospital yellow of the lights was getting to me. Man alive, I had to get out of the diner! There was too much sickly green and muted yellow. Eaaaghhhh!

I floated out on a carpet made of newspapers. Bush screamed at me in broken sentences. Some beauty queen had bled to death when her vibrator exploded. A guru was caught having sex near Gangotri. This was…this…was…this was the news of the world on recycled paper. I inhaled the musty smell of disintegrating paper.

I had the power in my mind. Wild power you could put on your tongue like a stamp of mind detergent. Hooting and cheering in the distance. People crying or singing. I could not make out the difference. Wait…wait…perhaps that was the concert? Where? Where had the cheering come from? East? West? North? South? Or was it midnight on the clock?

We met at one of those dark places. The silence between us had stretched. She was inhaling the new liquid. I was on the one with three letters. Twice our lips touched across the divide. A bridge of tongues. A stream of saliva. The mixture of lips.

“Do you believe in coincidence?”

“Do you believe in chance?”

The music swirled and swooned. Through our levitating bodies. Our fingers touched forbidden places. A moist sensation. A fluid emotion. Sudden laughter behind our eyes. Tears carved new pathways on her cheeks. I leaned forward and licked them off.

“How weird is that?”

“Yes, a midget and a transvestite having sex on the dance floor.”

“I saw you yesterday, in my last dream before I woke up.”

People swayed around us, drunk on this and that. There was something in the air. A flash? A streak? A swoosh? I inhaled her smell. Pheromones called out in a primitive language. Glasses tinkled beside us. Multi-colored liquids sloshed in perfectly shaped receptacles.

“I see you in my eyes.”

“Perhaps we should dance in our minds?”

The light faded. Conversation muted suddenly like a TV heard across a hotel wall. Where were we? Did you recognize us? Inside all was bright and innocent light. Outside was a kaleidoscope of sensation.

“I want to kiss your eyelids.”

“I’m telling you it was her man!”

“Boy, you must have been dreaming. How can it be her? She is thousands of miles away.”

“No, dude, I’m pretty sure it was her. I even followed her a little just to make sure. She is here. I’m willing to bet on that.”

We were on our way to a party neither of us wanted to go to when he dropped this bombshell. The thought that she was right here, in this city, made my heart race without my realizing it. It had been what, five years I think. We had said our goodbyes under difficult circumstances. I had never expected to hear from or about her again. But the world is small and in this era of connectedness any person from the past can pop up anywhere.

“So are you going to meet her?”

That question had been hanging in the air between us ever since he had said that she was here.

“I don’t know. Too much baggage still to be cleared on that front. So where did you see her?”

“At that hotel you guys used to frequent, you know.”

Yes, I knew the place. It was our adda so to speak. We were there practically everyday, so much so that the people working there knew us by our first names. In fact, we could get a room at a moments notice, a convenience which we often availed of frequently.

The street lights flashed by outside. The traffic lights blinked like owls. Traffic was sparse in this part of the town. It was a beautiful night. The wind flowing in through the window was cool on the skin. It was like drinking a glass of fresh water from a matka on a hot summer day.

The silence between us had stretched into a comfortable vacuum. Any thought was possible.

“Do you think she will look you up, you know, for old times sake?”

When lines converge life looks different. Ideas of fate take on an entirely different meaning. Yeah, that was indeed a million dollar question.

“I doubt it. If I know her she won’t. She is much stronger than me in that way.”

“What will you do if she called?”

“I’ll say hello.”

“Very funny. Seriously man, what will you do if she called up and said she wanted to meet you?”

The world is a green blur. Streamers float on glassy surfaces. Images unroll in slow motion. White noise expands dreamlike. A bird sings it’s song of unrequited love. Black holes explode in the darkness of my shining eyes. Laughter floats on smooth currents of ecstasy. Time beats the slow drum of eternity.

Somewhere a siren awakens. Lights blink on and off in the far distance following an irregular rhythm. Insistent and gravelly sounds hang in the background, drowning the music of life with their clanging intensity. Solitude and stereo death.

Can you see the sound of your name? Can you whisper in the middle of a storm? Confrontation is happiness.

I touch the soft white petals of a beautiful silence. I know that I’m not the conscience of the crowd. I hold her hand and watch her smile.

I know three ways to kill a mouse. Squeamish already? Then stop reading right now, the going will get even worse. Reading on? Then don’t bitch later that I didn’t warn you! So let me start again. I know three ways to kill a mouse.

1. Hold the mouse down by pressing the first three fingers of your left hand on its neck and with your right hand pull on its tail until you hear the crunchy sound of a bone snapping. This is called cervical dislocation.

2. Take dry ice in a tall jar. Put a cloth on top of the dry ice. Then drop the mice, one after the other, into the beaker and cover it with a lid. If you are of the perverse kind you can take immense pleasure in watching them twist and jump, suffocating inside the death jar. I’ve seen some mice jump 10 times their height. Teach them pole vault and Sergei Bubka will develop an inferiority complex. Dry ice is frozen carbon-dioxide, all of minus twenty degrees cold. The mice die for lack of oxygen. The CO2 fills up their brain and starves it of oxygen. The cloth is to collect the involuntary discharge of pee and poo.

3. Inject Avertin, twice the body weight of the mouse. It goes into a coma. Now comes the moment of truth. Open it up and have a bloody ball. Cut out its liver, dissect the muscle and take out fat. You can have the brain for free, only, you will have to cut the head off and open the skull up. Avertin is a muscle relaxant sending the mouse on a ride to rodent heaven or hell. I don’t know.

Once upon a time
In a land faraway
There was a man that time forgot

He aged but backwards
The wisdom of age giving way
To the passionate anger of youth

He fought with gods and fairies
To reverse the flow of time
To set right all that was wrong

But alas! destiny denied him
His just victory
He is but a faint memory now
In the eye of his beholder

Get up groaning and cursing even before the alarm has rung and think again for the umpteenth time what the hell am I doing in *** of all places and why I’ve to work to earn a living. These mental cogitations, general checking of mail and how much more of that really obscure film is still left to download help overcome the sleep in my eyes but at the end of it I realize it is already 8:15 and I’ve to be in the lab by at least 9:15. So I rush through my ablutions and get dressed by which time the toast is done. Hurriedly, spread some delicious nutella on it, eat, rush out and walk towards the bus/train station when along the way I see, first the train leave and then the bus too. Curse myself again for my ingrained laziness and wait for the next bus/train. By the time I catch the next one and make it to the lab (having just made my connection tram in between) it is 9:30. I try to sneak in hoping that my boss doesn’t see me coming late yet again.

Then I think about the experiments that need to be done. I also plan quite seriously if I can put away some stuff for the next day/week and then feeling immensely satisfied at having postponed everything I surf the net happily. But sometimes, I’ve put everything off for so long that it is imperative that I get them done. Then, if needed, I go to the animal facility and spend some quality time with my mice, either torturing them by punching holes in their ears or by squeezing blood from their tails or, the worst of the lot, anesthetize them, inject stuff into their veins and take out organs while they are still technically alive. In between it is time for lunch. So I go over to the student’s mess and treat myself to some very exciting *** (and the occasional International) cuisine and wonder how many kilos of fat I’ll put on with the amount of meat I seem to be ingesting. I can assure you that the irony of me working in the field of diabetes and obesity doesn’t escape me.

Time to go back to the lab again and waste more time on the altar of science in the hope of curing those members of humanity who cannot help gorging on big macs, chocolate sundaes and other assorted fat-laden delicacies of the culinary world. I sprinkle the time in between light work with liberal doses of mail-checking and the occasional blog-surfing and plot ways to make my highly imaginative, improbable and complex day-dreams more concrete.

Then depending on the day, it is either 17:30 or 19:30 by now and it is time to go back to my idiosyncratic duplex. I get home, jack in to the net again and happily start downloading my 9998th movie, watching with silent glee the number of gigs finished and the number of gigs still left, displayed as a nice bar, occasionally marveling at the way I seem to be finding solace only in either gadgets or in the worlds in my head. Reality, for me, has become like a TV show that one can glimpse as a blue haze though a neighbor’s window.

But time flies super fast when you are doing such important stuff as aimless link hopping, munching on unhealthy snacks and reading electronic graphic novels. So before I know it is 1:00 am and it is time to give in to the angel of sleep creeping in under my eyelids. Switch off the lights. Goodnight. Sweet dreams.

She came into the room I was in sometime after midnight. I was still awake, tossing around under the weight of all the shared memories that had reared their head. Hard to think that what had happened was a decade before. The remnants of that passionate affair still echoed in my heart from time to time. But here they were unstoppable. The gentle heat of the night was also not making things easy. My body was consumed by desire and that was the main reason behind the lack of sleep. How can one sleep when every cell of your body is craving for that which cannot be had in the present circumstances? But her entry changed the equation a bit. Her roommate was in the other room, only a thin wall separating us. She stood at the foot of the bed. The soft moonlight gave shape to her beautiful outlines. It was obvious she was not wearing anything under her thin nightdress. Even in the dim light I could see that her nipples were rigid. My tongue craved to taste them in my mouth and hear her sigh from the depths of her soul. I was sure that her eyes would be half-closed, intimating that she too was in the grip of our shared past.

Without a word she slipped beneath the sheets beside me. Her flesh was warm to the touch. She snuggled up to me, her body turning me on like one turns on a light bulb in a dark room, a sudden rush of extreme passion. It was one of those rigid, painful yet sensuous erections. Chucking the burden of the past into lust’s dustbin, I embraced her fiercely; my hands tried to envelop every little inch of her. We moved to the edge of the bed, interlocked thus.

Slowly, we slid down the bed and onto the floor, still wrapped around each other. Our mouths dissolved into each other as my tongue undid the soft tension in hers. The languid kiss one dreams of was a reality lived only by our lips. A gentle exploration of each other while tasting the love written on our tongues. My nose touched hers, a pleasant friction of two disparate senses. The long kiss continued, uniting sense and skin in a low wave of rising erotica.

I loved the silky smell of her mouth. I committed to memory the mellow taste of her tongue. I savored the feel of her lips interlocked with mine. I anticipated the sensual delights hiding behind her naughty smile that I could only taste. Her hand traveled down my body in one graceful arc sending shivers along my shy nakedness as her fingers awakened sleeping rivers of desire along their wake.

After a billion years our mouths separated, the aftertaste of her tongue still echoing in my mouth.

We rose together
Bed sheets crumpled beneath
The morning sun kissed our fingertips

—–

Waves of fresh sorrows crashed
Between our tangled arms
A fellowship of lost dreams

—–

Your skin, blazing like a furnace
My lips singed and seared
Tongues licking melting ice cubes

—–

Heated thoughts race each other
Along highways of the heart
Your mouth on mine is the green light

—–

My love shaped
By your silken smooth thighs
A sudden shower of snow outside

—–

Winter rules your eyes
Tears hardened into ice
Love blinded by distance

—–

Water lining your belly button
Like an oasis on a thirsty horizon
My mouth is dry

—–

We snuggle on the couch
My mouth around your nipple
Heaven is not in the sky

—–

You stand by the window
A silhouette of curves and corners
The camera clicks

—–

I probe your depths
And lick my fingers
Honey, mountain spring, warm breath

——

Love is like a thunderstorm
A sudden fury of sound, light and wind
Followed by a deafening silence

I first noticed him when he sat down in the opposite seat vacated by an old woman. Actually, that’s not right. I saw him only when he made a gesture, immersed in a newspaper. There was something vaguely familiar about it. It was an odd one for sure. Roughly every two minutes he would tweak his left ear with his left hand. In all other ways he appeared normal. Even his face did not seem to ring a bell for usually I’m pretty good with faces. And then the circuit closed. But of course, I should have recognized him faster!

I had last seen him about ten years back; on the day he left our lives under a bad cloud. He was the first and last person to rent the extra room to the side of our house. Somehow, after him, we never got around to renting the room to another person. He was about thirty years old then. A very mysterious age you know. It lends the person a certain aura. The aura of being on the threshold of middle-aged cynicism and shedding the last remnants of youthful idealism. Or perhaps I was too young and saw him through the prism of awe. It was the literary air he had. I always had this thing for even vaguely literary people. They were like gods, infallible and distant, talking in fabulous language of things and people I could only dream about. And he was not completely a fraud. He had actually got some of his writings published. For me then that was equivalent to winning the Booker.

He was a master of words. He could weave the most amazing and fantastic conversations. I used to spend hours listening to him. Instead of playing street-cricket or flying kites, almost everyday after school, I’d knock on his door and spend the evenings with him until mother called. Oh what things he would talk about! I’d be carried along by his words to the most exotic places and meet the most colorful and irreverent characters that ever lived; the narrowest house of Amsterdam, the lost streets of Tasmania, Mad-Eye Pillai, Sunset Madhavi, Boston Barney, Willowy Waterson. Each of their stories would be spread over three to four evenings. Later, the words would evaporate like early morning dew, leaving only a vague taste of melancholic sweetness. Like a drug almost and perhaps that’s why I used to hunger for more. Conversation was not needed. It was a monologue. I just had to nod at the right time, make appropriate noises and insert the right words at the right places. When I look back now, even with the burden of hindsight, they seem such beautiful evenings.

But that sudden departure of his ended those mellow evening monologues abruptly. Even now, I do not know what really happened. Mother and father refuse to talk about it. I only have vague rumors and overheard words to fashion a theory. It involved women and abortions. What role he played in that and whether he was really involved is still an open question. It was so sudden that I couldn’t even pester my parents to let him stay. At the time of his departure I was in a state of limbo, confused and curious. Not the best of states to be in. But I can still recall his farewell look. He did not say a thing. He just looked at me. A look full of sadness. The sadness of being misunderstood. A look also of faith perhaps. A faith in me. As if he had the confidence that I’d understand him and not judge him like others had done. That was also the first time I cried in public. But I was careful not to let him see the tears. I just stood there and looked back, a confused kid looking up at his disgraced idol leaving. We did not shake hands or wave. He did not even look back once as he walked away down the street.

And there he was in the seat opposite me after so many years. He had aged badly. No wonder it took me so much time to recognize him. The interweaning years had apparently not been kind to him. There was a certain hardness about his mouth. As if the world had kicked him from one pothole to another. His hairline had receded a lot and the hair was mostly grey in color. His eyes lacked the special crinkly quality they had before. They seemed to have lost the ability to smile. I wondered about what might have happened to him. Had the dark cloud followed him everywhere? Had it not allowed him to rest anywhere? Or was he happily married with two kids and just showing the normal signs of aging?

It would have been a simple matter to talk to him. To remind him perhaps, if needed, who I was, and get into his life again. But something stopped me from doing that. I wanted to remember him as a child’s idol, flawed but real, and not temper that image with the hard reality in between, good or bad. To be frank, my reasons were perhaps more selfish. Deep down, I did not want to change his image of mine as a curious but shy child, always dreaming and in awe of people. Even he would have been disappointed at what I had turned out to be, a lazy fantasist full of broken dreams and unrealistic plans. So I just sat there, surreptitiously glancing at him over the top of a book until my destination arrived. I got down and went home with another reminder from the past to be buried in my garden of memories.

(Note: Final part in a trilogy of fictional portraits. Please keep in mind that the image preceding the text has nothing to do with the text, the words were not inspired by the photo. It is only meant to complement them.)

He is a voracious reader to put it simply. He reads everything, literally everything. It would be wrong to term him as a book worm as that would be falling into the cliché trap. An odd comparison perhaps but he is like Casanova, someone who wants to experience different women. He likes reading everything he can lay his hands on, from trashy romances to deep philosophical tomes and everything in between.

His house is a book lover’s dream and an organized person’s nightmare. As expected books take up every square inch of available space and more if that’s possible. You have to eat with them, sleep with them and even shit with them. Not that you would experience this yourself. It might not come as a surprise to you that he does not socialize. Compared to the excitement, exoticness and mental fantasy he finds in books real people seem to him like those sad characters in a poorly written detective story, utterly predictable and eminently boring.

He has specific types of books at strategic places for particular times of the day. Like, for example, a racy thriller at the dinner table, a word-of-mouth book on the sofa or that deep philosophical tome on the toilet. The last ‘choice’ perhaps needs a sentence of explanation. He feels that the weight of the language in such books makes him crap easier and avoid constipation!

His dreams contain scrolls filled with words from multiple languages. On rare occasions the words take on a human form. A noun looks like a tourist on his first trip abroad. An adjective morphs into that ‘tall dark handsome’ specimen of maledom women invariably seem or at least want to fall for. A verb takes on the shape of a blond woman about to lose her virginity. An adverb forms the outlines of an old man watching pornographic cartoons. He is not repelled by these ignoble images. On the contrary, he has a Freudian fascination for them. Each time they condense in his sleep he takes time out on awakening to try and decipher their panoptical persistence.

These days he is engaged in the study of personal politics. The ways in which we twist and turn situations, emotions, and people to suit our ego-cravings. The subtle study amuses him and also serves as a pleasant break from his eternal intimates. Now, let me shut this window of frozen time I’ve opened onto a slice of his life. Let us leave him to his private projects and textual panoply.

(Note: Second in a trilogy of fictional portraits. Please keep in mind that the image preceding the text has nothing to do with the text, the words were not inspired by the photo. It is only meant to complement them.)

I see her everyday from my window, climbing the ladders of life with the steady rhythm of her brown hair, the careful placement of her nimble feet, the sensuous swaying of her wide hips, the appraising length of her nubile neck, and the glistening wetness of her natural lips. She goes the same way twice, like my watch on its daily constitution. I observe and record, on the other side, passive and undisturbed in my spatial frame of reference.

In her hands is a bag brimming with the white and fluffy stuff which we discover in dreams. The bag is large yet stylish, devoid of any sign, any logo of ownership or corporate corpulence. Its color is indeterminate, aged by the weather of want. She wears the same dress day in day out, neatly pressed and unruffled, a faded olive green short top just coming to a stop over her elegant belly button. A pair of intentionally worn out dark blue jeans, an extreme example of brand hate cover her lower half.

My day does not begin without her habitual appearance and my day does not end without her delicate disappearance. She is like a daily alarm, a common routine of surprised comfort. On her second oscillation she always gives me the feeling that she is humming something, something subsonic yet full of tragic charm, a wise song about the failures of fate. There have been times when I’ve wanted to open my window and call out to her; ask her for the time of the day or some such mundane nonsense. But that would mean breaking my vow of passive observation, entering the chaotic world of quantum karma. I cannot break my personal promise.

Can you tell me the why she fills me with such profound passion? Does she remind me of some forgotten fragment from my past? Not that I know of. In any case, I delve into my ignored memories and look under the stones of aged nostalgia. Here and there, I seem to catch the granite glint of sudden understanding but in a flash it is revealed to be just another smile from the past. Each day I renew my patient vows. I await my hidden signal. The day I get it, I will go out and lift her in my careless arms and live (with her) in the land beyond your blind horizons, forever.

(Note: First in an eventual trilogy of fictional portraits. Please keep in mind that the image preceding the text has nothing to do with the text, the words were not inspired by the photo. It is only meant to complement them.)

I want to write. I want to write until the stars stop exhaling light. I want to write so as to embrace myself with the cuddly comfort of words well formed. I want to write like a Homer or a Valmiki, a vessel for words flowing out from my deepest wellsprings. I want to write until dust begins to settle on the tips of my toes. I want to write until the emotion wringing my heart is sated and put to sleep. I want to write till the tears behind my eyes translate into beautiful words. I want to write till I can feel no more. I want to write until all that is there ceases to exist and all that is to come is taking birth between my words. I want to write like God breathing life into mud and fire.

I want to write about languorous love, about lingering dew, about an orange dawn and a melancholic dusk, about wise whispers of the old, about sweet nothings of new lovers, about wintry mornings and rainy afternoons, about fresh air flowing through my lungs, about glorious feelings and wistful youth, about adolescent heartbreaks and everlasting love. I want to write about all the feelings that travel, tremble and tumble inside and around us.

I want to write about the many loves I found, about the sadness I learnt, about the warmth I gained and the memories I cherish. I want to write about you, me and everyone. I want to write about a bright tomorrow, a rosy yesterday and an unnoticed today. I want to write about moments we do not remember, like flowers smiling outside the window, like sunshine warming our hardened skin, like words we hear but do not listen to.

Oh, I want to write until I’m drowning in the thousand different voices of my words. I want to write until my fingers ache with a sweet pain. I want to write until the song in my heart fades into a distant echo.

I want to write until verbs weep, adjectives inspire and nouns conspire with the help of mischievous adverbs. I want to soar on the wings of ecstatic adjectives, joyous verbs keeping me company while I taste the lilting sound of nouns rolling around my smiling mouth. Words, words, words, I want to swim in their glittering midst, forgetting the mundane life outside their limpid depths.

I want to learn with my words, as they arrange themselves in perfect order, conjuring meaning out of chaos. I want to grow old in their nostalgic company, leaning on them for support in a lonely and loveless life. I want to be laid to rest with a wreath made of my words and a couplet carved in stone as my headrest. And if there is an afterlife or a heaven, I wish I’ll still have my words to sing me eternal songs of all that is wise and wonderful, of all that is a pure and divine joy.

Inside him there is a hole, a black hole. Enter and it will take you to an alternate world. A world populated by corporeal characters from the soft underside of his inquisitive imagination.

A world which you will never encounter on this side of the sun in your lifetime. A world in which facts fly and words wither. A place where he is the twisted king and the rest of the world is just a boring blip on the pulsing radar of his abnormal senses.

In its valleys you will discover sleeping unicorns dreaming about virgin vitality. On its tallest mountain peaks you will find vaudeville shows of mad scientists and psychotic lawyers. But walk for a little while in its melancholic woods and you will see the fruits of his feverish imagination strung out like electric eyes on the overhead branches. Step into the heavy metal glades and you will hear the metallic clang of wicked guitar lines, the wild throbbing of double bass and the motionless rage implicit in a moody love song. You can spend years in that balmy boarding house and not scratch the subtle surface.

It so transpired that he was not born with this creative hole. But that did not stop him. He carefully imploded his shy social sunshine to manufacture it and then poured into it the fires of his repressed personality. An easy recipe isn’t it? Try it at your own risk!

One last thing. Imagine and illustrate. Think and talk. Enjoy and eviscerate. Act and announce. Only then you might visualize the coursing center of his hole’s holy altar. And now sing with him…

A drop of doped inanity
A cup of cultivated answers
Shower
This land of pleasant left-overs
Seeding
New wombs with maternal maturity, and
Old wells with cubist cunts

They walked towards the setting sun, hand in hand. One of them struggled with the drooping bushes, coating her dress with their seeds of future. The other led her on as best as he could through the thickened shrub. It was sepia everywhere, the rocks, the trees and even the soft down on her hands. He kept looking back at her to see if she felt what he was feeling, the many memories, and the many personal secrets. It looked as if she was at least trying to. The slant of her golden head, the questioning look in her mysterious eyes, and the steady pressure of her faithful hands spoke a million tongues.

The thin path, almost erased led them on, sometimes meandering, sometimes straight, led them on under overhanging branches weighted with thick thorns. The leaves caught them both as if wanting to leave their temporal stamp on their special moment together. Birds cooed distantly, the wind spoke through the gaps between their souls, and the sky embraced the land in all directions. Perhaps, she was wondering. What is this place? Where is he taking me? But before she could find her voice again, there it was, finally.

The place of his past. The place in which he shared a billion little things with people lost with the rain of time. The place which seemed to exist outside of existence. An enigma of loneliness, a symbol of solitude and a menhir of love lost and found.

The horizon stretched around them like wet linen, only spoilt in the north by the concreteness of reality. He pointed out to her the little landmarks out on the edge of vision. A quiet slowly descended on them both. The quiet of an evening putting to sleep the day’s many noisy novelties. He sat himself down into the groove, fitting him perfectly as always. She too sat down and looked into his eyes deeply as if searching for something. She was trying to find something important. She had given up a lot for this very moment. She had endured hard words, cruel taunts, and self-doubt to be there with him at that very instant. But would she find what she was looking for? It would be such a huge disappointment if she could not. She would not be able to rewrite her choices or restate her opinions. She would not be able to forgive herself or castigate his vacillation.

But his eyes spoke up. There were the answers finally, swirling in the liquid brownness of his elegant eyes. There were the symbols of trust and belief. She smiled, a smile of confirmed content, a smile of open love.

However, he still held himself distant, nervous and wary of high expectations. She tried, tried to come halfway and meet him there. He did see that but still could not make himself travel that tiny distance. Too many past hang-ups, too many high hopes. Her smile faded a little, the questions started throwing their tilted shadows again on her fragile face. But…

The final movement fell into place. Her head turned upwards and his head bent down. Their lips touched and love exchanged places.

Thrust into this dark well of despair I begin to imagine your beautiful body in my hands. The way your hair cascades down your neck and always smells fresh, a faint perfume lingering in its depths. Your forehead hiding heavy thoughts behind its broad expanse as I give it a fond kiss. Your ears with their rubbery taste, teased by my tongue, making you squirm with erotic delight. Your eyes, mirrors of desire, and gazing at me with that naked look of love that sends a thrill of joy down my spine. I kiss your eye-lids, leaving gentle imprints of my love on the windows to your soul. I rub my nose against yours, uniting our breath for an instant that lasts an eternity. I shift a little and gently trace my tongue over your lips, waiting for the faint quiver. They glisten with raw want. I kiss your mouth, hungrily, my tongue shooting in and searching for yours. There…I found it. And our tongues begin their sensual dance around and over each other, rubbing, rolling, caressing, and squeezing every ounce of emotion. You take my lower lip into your mouth and suck on it, trying to drink in my desire and I reciprocate by taking your lip and tasting the love waiting to explode behind it.

I kiss you again and again, full on your mouth, hungry for you and your body. My hands move all over your soft body wanting to greedily touch everything at once. You pull my head back and latch on to my mouth, thrusting your tongue in, wanting to pour what you feel into me. Like meteors shooting across the sky we burn with fire and desire.

My lips travel down your neck, breathing in deeply your basic smell, kissing it lightly, blowing my warm breath along its sinuous curve. I find your breasts, my fountains of desire. They glow with an inner light, the light of passion wanting to be touched and felt. My mouth envelops them one after the other. My tongue hungrily sucks on your nipples and feels them going taut. You squirm and moan, your eyes watching my mouth work magic with your body. I go on, wanting more and more, rolling your erect nipples over my tongue, kneading your other breast with my free hand. I travel down your body, tracing my tongue along the long highway between your breasts and your darkest depths, I linger along your belly-button, exploring its shallows, and I examine with the edge of my tongue the contours of your stomach and the twisting curves of your pelvis. Your sighs increase in momentum as I near my destination. The pressure of your fingers on my hair increases by that small amount. And I reach home.

The well spring of your desire and the playground of my dreams. I run my tongue along the outlines, gauging the wet heat emanating from your center. I prolong it, to tease you. I linger and linger along the outer edges while you stare down at me with a fierce hunger in your eyes, wanting to urge me on but failing to find the words for it. I take pleasure in watching your frustration grow and just when you are about to shout I thrust my tongue in. Instantly, I’m enveloped in your basic smells, in the searing heat, and the raw raw taste of you. I lick and suck to all my hearts content. I search for the spots which will melt you like butter and concentrate on them, the thick mound of flesh just on the outer edge, and the upper part on the inside edge. Your voice is high-pitched now, your eyes are closed and your hands are holding on tight to my head as if you are afraid that you will take off into the air. A hot flush runs through your body and normal senses desert you. You are on the threshold of another world, a world where lust and desire are your masters.

Suddenly, I stop. You are slow to notice it, your eyes open up reluctantly and look at me, confused. I smirk with the happiness of the one in control and return a look of disarming innocence. You realize that I’m up to my old games again. Without further ado you plead with your eyes and pull on my hair with mounting frustration. I would like to extend this little game but today I’ll indulge you. So I go back to what I was doing. I kiss your mound and suck on that little overhang. It is time now to go into the highest gear. Faster and faster I thrust my tongue, in and out. In and out. Your legs are thrashing around me. I hold them with my hands but my tongue does not stop. I go deeper if it was possible to go any deeper. You flail your hands and try to pull me off. But I cannot be stopped now. I go mad with my own desire and try to plumb your depths with my shooting softness.

In that instant you explode. Like an underwater volcano your raging depths release their contents and drench my mouth with nature’s purest juices. You shudder and thrash. You shake and pant. Your moans reach a crescendo which no soprano can ever match. You are in that world now where words do not exist. You experience the purest pleasure possible, untrammeled by any physical boundary. You are one with the elements.

I watch all of this silently, taking pleasure in having given you such sublime joy. You return to your senses, slowly. We disengage gently and stare at each other. We share the unparalleled bliss of fulfilled desire, reveling in the warm glow of our bodies entwined like thread in cloth.

Yesterday, or to be accurate in the wee hours of this morning, for the first time in his life he experienced gaps in his memory. Huge chunks just went missing. No idea what he had done or how he had got to a particular place. It all started at a lab mate’s house warming party with mixing beer and vodka. About two measures of vodka gulped straight. The process was to first put this horrible orange powder in your mouth and then take a swig of the vodka, allow it to mix with the powder and then swallow it. After about an hour of this insane gulping he started reeling from the effects of so much alcohol in his system.

What followed then was purely surreal. Surreal as he looked back now. Not then. For then he was in a zone. For in the next instant he found himself on the stairs going down. He couldn’t remember when he took the conscious decision to leave the party. He did not even say bye to anyone. Later, he remembered that he had even left behind his jacket and umbrella. Much later he was told that he had puked all over the stairs.

The next thing he remembers is walking on a road. He knows not how he got there. He knows not what road it was. All he remembers is walking, walking in the general direction of his home wherever that was. He remembers crossing the road once. He knows not for what reason. He remembers puking a little into the bushes once or twice along the way. He remembers thinking about flagging down a taxi even though he had no money in his wallet. But for some unknown reason he did not follow up that thought. All he did was walk. He does not know for how long he walked. He did not even know the time even though he had a watch. Then suddenly he was in a road tunnel. Cars were zooming past him doing 80 kmph or so. He can’t recall how he got into that tunnel. Perhaps he did not know where he was walking, although it was in the general direction of his home. He was on a narrow pavement-sort-of-thing to the side of the road. After a few minutes the tunnel ended. He saw that he was walking on a thin strip of clear pavement not encroached by the road side shrubs. And the cars were still whizzing past. Not many but at regular intervals.

Suddenly, a car pulled up by his side. It was a police car. Was he doing something wrong? Walking on highways is illegal there. But until one of the police officers told him it had not even registered in his zonked brain that he was on a highway. They asked what he was doing there at such a wee hour. He told them that he had kinda lost his way. One of them asked him if he was drunk. He said no. They asked him to get into the car. They asked for his passport. He did not have it. It was at home. So he gave them his student id card instead. Was he scared? Not really. He was in a place where emotions did not register at all. After driving for what seemed like a short while they stopped the car and asked him to get out. One of them wanted to administer a breathalyzer test. He actually took out the instrument and was in the process of opening what looked like the plug you keep in your mouth and blow into. He then remembers feeling some vague sort of trepidation. What if the test results were off the charts? What would they do then? He remembers one of the officer’s laughing at him too as he went about this process. That police officer kept repeating that he wanted him to “blow for freedom�?. But again he did not feel anything. Feelings were still far away. Perhaps still at the party place he had left. They would need some time to catch up. Fortunately, the officer driving was not interested in the test. They asked him to go home and left. He looked around. He recognized the place where he was. He was about one or two kms from home. He did not notice how they had got him there. The route they had taken had not registered at all. And there was light. It was dawn. He looked at his watch for the first time in hours. It was 5 am. He had been walking for at least three hours. To his side above perhaps the first tram of the day passed on the fly-over. As if echoing the slowly brightening day the mists covering his brain also started lifting. He started walking and reached home in about 20 mins.

He crashed on the bed and slept for about 7 hours. He awoke to the slow tempo of a jackhammer performing a solo in his head. The symphony had not started yet. This was only the entrée. He discovered that he had slept half-naked. Another first in a longtime. The rest of the day was pure agony. The agony of a woozy head and screwed up stomach. He ate some cornflakes with milk hoping that it would settle his stomach. But things got worse. The food gave him a high. Must have been the glucose. He felt even sicker. His stomach wanted to throw all its contents out but the mind was stopping it. He promised himself that he would not touch alcohol ever again, although he knew that he would be drinking by the end of the following week. He closed his eyes and cursed life, the universe and everything.

The auditorium is huge. It is an ocean of space built in three levels. Diffused lighting lights the whole place. The light makes the space expand further, pushing the corners in and masking the details. The light lacks quality but makes up with its evocative display of vast space. The stage is the focus of the brightest lights. It shimmers like a mirage. The curtains hide in the corners like nervous stagehands, streaked with fine dust. And it is quiet. Quieter than even an empty house. The silence covers everything like cold dew. It drips from the dangling microphones, it fills the chairs flowing in like waves and it gives shape to the shallow shadows hiding under the seats.

I’m lying in the center of the stage, stomach ripped open. My fingers clutch the intestines crawling out of the jagged hole. I want to scream but the silence is on me too. It covers my mouth with a dry kiss and the screams struggle at the back of my throat. I do not want to fight it. I want it to engulf me. I squeeze my intestines harder.

Everything explodes.

Space expands and then contracts into a thin but intensely white line. I close my eyes and embrace Death.

(final part in a trilogy of short pieces loosely based on the themes of light and death)