Deadlines and Midnights

It's midnight. Or rather midnight has passed on and the first phase of the day has already started. Its is rather funny to say day when the view outside consists of darkness and more darkness punctuated by pinpoints of flickering light; the last bastions of humanity in a world going slowly but surely insane. This is reminiscent of a scene from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand where Galt stops the motor of the world and all that lights go out except for one constant flame that is Wyatt's torch waving in the distance. There is a curious mix of anticipation and dread that courses through me at this point in time. I have never stayed awake this late. It feels strange and not a little bit exciting; a bit like sneaking out of hostel to take a walk to Cave rock just so that you can slip past the watchman. Except here there is no one to outwit and no one to cock a snook at. That does make the entire exercise a little disappointing. Funny how the mind seems to insist on reasoning out the consequences of such adventures. I have class tomorrow...So what? It isn't as if I will be doing much there anyway. The year has come to an end and which self respecting student will want to study when you know holidays are just around the corner. I am a self respecting student and no, I don't want to go to college tomorrow i.e. today.
I also detest having to stick to deadlines as a friend of mine would cheerfully attest to. I wonder what my journalist pal has to say about this. Maybe he hates deadlines too...Who knows! Deadlines are the punctuations that liberally checker my student career and have always spelt doom for me.I have either lost my drafts or placed them somewhere so carefully that i have forgotten where exactly i kept them in the first place. Or else I just take the easy way out and not to do it at all.

Sunset-1

Another day, another sun-
-settting

Oil spilt diamonds
refracting rainbow slicks
across shallow shoals
of patchy cloud

Sisters and their wives...

My sister is a strange creature. She alternates between calling me "tublet" and pulling my cheeks to actually getting pissy when I can't spend enough time with her. (The latter I don't quite blame her for since it has been a while). She gets highly buzzed on a single sip of coffee while I invariably end up snoozing after a nice, tall, steaming cup of my Mom's filter nectar. She giggles when she uses what she calls "big" words like 'nuanced' and then goes on to critique the cut, colour and fabric of a particularly nice jacket I want to acquire in terms that even the most hardened fashion critic would be hard pressed to follow. She drives like a seasoned F1 driver when drunk and manages to keep falling off stairs when sober. Once she pulled me down with her on of these sober sojourns up her stairs and we both ended up in a tumbled heap on the floor below laughing our collective behinds off at her mom's amusedly shocked expression. She and my mother talk about my sex life when my mom doesn't even ask ME about it (imagine that!) and she has a decidedly uncanny knack of knowing when the men in my life are utter idiots.  She also has the ability to make me lose all sense of perspective which has resulted in life changing experiences such as contemplating strawberry tart and upending a half bottle of a really beautiful full bodied Chianti into pasta sauce. (The recipe said one or two tablespoons, I said, "what the hell...")

She has a wife, who calls her Wifelet.. (now I know where she gets the tublet idea from!!!) who is as different from her as she can be. My sisters wife (also my best friend by the way) doesn't wear any other colour other than indigo, shades of black, duller shades of brown and white and carries around a gorgeous deep purple hued leather bag that her wife gifted her. She survives on tea and her 2 kg (brand new!!) weights and an everpresent book ( a trait I share with her). She also has the most beautiful sense of aesthetics when it comes to poetry and a most acerbic tongue which completely disappears when she's with us, and makes quite a seminal appearance in public interaction. She and I discuss Lacan and his definitely misplaced sense of jouissance while my sister bops to Susheela Raman while cutting my hair. (My sister has a great affinity for cutting people's hair.. She's quite good at it too.. Look at me:))

Together they are the most dissonantly perfect people I have ever met, together or separately. And they make life worth living. I love them dearly even when they threaten to dump their children on me so that I can raise them with some 'discipline' *Muttersgrumblessnarls: "Discipline my ass!!muttermuttermutter* To my sister and her wife... what strange beautiful people. 

Love

life
go cage others
do not bother me

death
i’ll follow you
till eternity

An old man
at gloaming
face turned towards
the dimming sun

unabashedly weeps
-pain twisted wrinkles
play hide and seek
in rayed shadows-

speaking of love,
loss
death.

Dangling conversations...

I haven't written a prose piece in a very long time. It seems strange to be writing in full sentences instead of the truncated verse line that I prefer. But there's a completeness to the form that poetry cannot have. To live and breathe and be re-born again, poetry must be open, flowing like the desert winds that unexpectedly bring the ocean to your lips. A touch of salt moisture and its gone- dust in your eyes and flies in your mouth. Prose is simple, straight. Some would say blunt but I'm not quite sure.

For the past month I have been working with poetry in endless iterations.First it was incomprehensible Sindhi, then slightly (a word or two) more comprehensible, intelligible Hindi, followed by (to me) completely unintelligible English and it just goes on. I thought the English would be easy. Its the language I think,write and speak in. Hell i even dream in it. But that turned out to be the most difficult language of all. The translations were messy, incomplete, lacking any semblance of rhythm and read like a 2 year old putting together a sentence for the first time.

I was appalled. I thought I had completely lost touch with my writing but then I discovered something fascinating.I discovered that, I was thinking and writing far more comfortably in Hindi than in English. Which is nothing short of a miracle considering the fact that my grammar was equivalent to a firang's interpretation of Hindi all through school to 2 years of Hindi during my BA, and that all I was taught during said 2 years was how to write "tippaniyan" or notes. Not just any notes mind you, but notes in strict adherence to governmental standards of Hindi note making. I have nightmares still about that book and those lists of Hindi words for banking terms, aforementioned, above, aforesaid and nautical terms. (Nautical terms!!! Why on earth... ?) That aside, it got me thinking as to how much we take our language skills for granted. Leaving them rusting in some forgotten doorways of our mind, not even bothering to check for rats, mice and other sundry forms of life that tend to chew great big holes in our memories. And I also realised that if not for this particular assignment, I would never have bothered to check these alleyways out and never to discover how much one had actually learnt all those seemingly futile lessons ago.

That being said, the conversation with Bhitai is still happening. It doesn't seem like it's going to end anytime soon.. So thanks Latif for our very own dangling conversation...

Reminders

He wasn't you.

No.
Definitely not.

Flashes though,
a turn of phrase,
an expression,
that half admiring half quizzical
not quite sure glance.

He wasn't you.

No. Absolutely not.

Burn

Watch the fire
burn through the rain
turn to smoke
concentrate
pool and dip
cover my ankles
swathe me in wool
Block the flames
I burn.

Leave Taking

There is
Nothing left to say
Do, die for.

Tears have been
Shed, dried, and stored
For future use.

The commiseration,
Smiles not quite sure
Of where they belong
Hanging fire, and then some.

Its all done.
Over with

Whats left is
Curiously inconspicuously
Lurking
Alleycat that doesn’t yet
Want to come and play
Catch.