1984

No, not because of George Orwell's classic

Which I've not yet read, by the way;

But the year is significant to me

As this was the year when

I was born (or so I am told)

On the seventh of June

At exactly twelve twenty seven p.m.

Yes, on the most sweltering of occasions

In an Army Hospital in violence stricken north India (of which more later)

I had weighed four kilograms (average is two plus three quarters)

And was fair,

Had hair

That was more brown than black (straight from Dr. Ganguly's official report)

Twenty five years since,

I've often wondered

When my mother (presumably) and I (naturally) were crying;

What was the rest of the world up to?

And I've actually found some answers....

For example, I know now, that somewhere in the hills in Mussourie

A girl had written to Ruskin Bond

After reading one of his short stories

And inquired if he really was the same little boy of Dehradun's Aubrey Bond

She had been Rusty's first crush....

Back in Cleveland, Ohio

A then unknown Jim Jarmusch was finishing up his first film

About two self-styled hipsters, one immigrant girl and no plot

It was made with donated film stock, borrowed money and amateur actors

Of course, the film would go on to win at Cannes that year....

Just seven days ago, Indira Gandhi had been shot dead

By her own bodyguards

And this had led to a twentieth century witch-hunt,

Nation wide curfews, four thousand unnecessary deaths

Up to a couple of miles from my cradle....

In another part of the country,

While I was still to open my eyes;

Winnie was on the verge of walking.

She was exactly ten months and six days old

Even today, after a quarter of a century

She's learned to move on

Much before me

S & M

Scorching nights

Diffused lights

Slender fingers

Forensic fingerprints

Morbid inquisitiveness

Careless carnality

Breathless knees

Buckled ecstasy

You're so sexy, S

M says

Sex is overrated

Even though

She's just as bored as me

She writes as well

Scintillating, limpid prose with unsettling undercurrents

I love

The economy of expression

The mental masturbation

Abound in her words

And face

Losing self

Embracing breath

Ardent tongues

Avid caress

Aching thighs

Waterfall nuisance

Eerie silhouettes

Wall substance

Slow blue love of delphinium days

S in my head and my head in S

I like reading M

And her

Sorrow- scribbled eyes

Curling up with her on cold, winter afternoons

Laughing at the unexpected humor past midnight

Crying copious tears, when no one's looking; into her

Blood-shedding revelations

Reverentially staring at her

Typically devastating endings

Wishing they'd go on

Just a bit longer

And re-reading the abrupt, last paragraph

Again

And again

Distant thuds

Reflecting skin

Awful stabs

Parted lips

Soul curries

Open mouth

Brimmed senses

Last sobs

I met S in Vienna nine months ago

….

With her chic hair and upturned nose

She was too much

Even today, I'm bewildered by how much she looks

Has always looked

Like a Botticelli angel

The same smudged surreality

As though

Created by the artist in recollection.

I say so what if she's also a bimbo

M, I've known since the time I used to think

That sharpened pencil residues

Turned into erasers if kept overnight in a bowlful of milk under the bed

After an eleven hour bed-in that novel morning

S and I had woken up

Imbibing and assimilating
Every molecule of each other

Apart from that we had

Nothing in common

But she was so sexy that morning too,

All fu**ing, functioning parts of her

You know M,

Onceuponatime

There was something dangerous in writing alone

Not having anyone to share the absurdity with

Not anymore

Now, I want to tattoo my prose on

Your torso

Your clothes

Your face

Your prose

That I read

In graffiti- written subway walls

In my forgotten diary entries

In the new slang of born again Christians

In my mother's scrawled recipes

In rediscovered Shesher Kobita

In Japanese calligraphy and me

In the thin, tin, florescent bookmark

Inside the warm, satin covers

Looking a bit like the small, flaring birthmark

On your upper lip

Pages folded like your arms

Unputdownable like you in mine

It astonishes me that you're so much like

Your writing

Even now I wonder if

Beneath your staccato words,

Lay a mistress of kink

Yes, the evening before, S had called me inside and...

I still remember the scandalous, thin cushioned bed

And the mismatching bedsheets in lime- green checks

As though silent, testimonial witnesses

To our clumsy, clandestine, intercourses

While in Vienna, I looked forward to them

M, you revealed to me that day that you didn't like my writing

You said you found it too sentimental

I said, angrily then, that you too could've been beautiful

But for the faint, ugly, creases under your eyes

That seemed to have marked their journey

From one page to another

And that was when you had started crying

And I had left you right there

But when today I see you, M

In black and white, jacket- cover photos

I want to tell you

That I was lying that day

That you are beautiful

That you always

Were

REVOLVER

Bobby pantomimed, “What're you listening to?”.

Not for the first time in all those years,

Roop seemed to be far away.

Roop paused the CD player with a smile

And replied,

As though revealing a secret, “The Beatles”.

“Never heard of 'em”, Bobby said;

Half out of contempt

“Oh, then you've got to hear this song. It'll change your life”.

Bobby put the earphones on,

As though it were a beauty crown.

And then everything happened.

Within the space of a pop song....

Toggle on

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I want to tell you___________Singer___________________I never say but I so want to

My head is filled with____George Harrison___________touch your hair, kiss your neck,

Things to say________Album- Revolver(1966)_______undo your two top collar buttons

When you're near_______THE BEATLES_____It's one pm and I'm imagining you naked

All those words___________Roop asked_______Something in the way you infuriate me

They seem to slip away____”Isn't it cool?”_____________________________I love that

When I get near you_______Bobby said___________________________And your gaze

My head begins to_____”What're you saying?________That burns my face occasionally

Drag me down_________I don't understand”____I've never met anybody as basic as you

It's all right_____________”It's all right”____________But do you also have a secret life

I'll tell you maybe______Roop used to think_________That you go back to every night?

Next time around________that 'Revolver'_________________________I'm embarrassed

Sometimes I wish_____was the Beatles' best_____Bobby, you probably didn't even know

I knew you well__________And I agree_______That I followed you home last Thursday

Then I could____________Track Length:______________________________I shot you

Speak my mind____________02m:27s__________With my concealed camera for a year

And tell you________________Bass:_________________I saved your white paper cups

Maybe you'd understand___Paul McCartney______________With smeared crimson rims

I want to tell you___________Guitar:______________I love it that you let me touch you

I feel hung up____________John Lennon______________Somehow that also scares me

And I don't know why_______Drums:____________________Wet dreams I don't reveal

I don't mind______________Ringo Starr_____In my deliberate brushes against your arm

I could wait forever_____Track succeeded by:_____________________I want to tell you

I've got time___________'She said, she said'______________________Maybe tomorrow

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Then just like that,

Roop walked out of the room

And Bobby's right index finger

Approached the 'play' button

THOSE WHO FADED IN THE RAIN

So, as time braces the body and cleanses the soul,

One sits and reflects, over cups of tea,

(Clove tea with Threptin biscuits on Susan's porch)

That all is not lost

And yet, the heart still yearns

For those days, when rains brought unexpected holidays

When recklessness of the mind was the important thing

And you tell me

“Why do you always get so philosophical during sunsets and rains?”

And then it comes

In beautiful fragments of frightful dreams

Her face comes back

In swollen wounds and cries

And Reveries and yawns and sighs

“Whose face?”, you ask, “Winnie?”

No

But the one that I never told you about

The girl who didn't look beautiful until she smiled

Gold teeth and a tune for this town

Were all in her mouth

What whispers passed

Beneath spiraled fingers

And stockinged feet

Of all my disintegrating memories,

Hers is the most vivid

She comes to me with the clarity of a painter

In Elysian fields

Like an invisible madness

Even in my room

She wore her rose tinted, heart shaped sunglasses

Lest someone should recognize her

And the strains of “Sound of Silence”, still echoing in my ears

Room no. 1883

We almost eloped

Why didn't we?

We were seventeen.

Are you kidding me?

There are nights Susan, when I want to talk to her

I want to wake her up and tell her

That I grew up and became a writer

That I'm now six feet one inch tall

That my hair is no longer brown

That I have finally found a place I can call home

I hope, she has too

I'm here

But

Even today, there is a wind that blows from the north

From Mussourie of seven years ago

Her face in the pouring window

I remember that afternoon better than I remember whole years

I never saw her again in my life

That had been my first encounter with loss and pain

There's a pool here

As if the sea wasn't enough

And yet Susan,

One sits and reflects, over cups of tea, that

The world is very big

Our sorrows too small

And we have to think of this life

That this-

This is

An adventure

TO GET OVER YOU

1 I ride in trains for whole nights trying to find myself

2. I call you from incognito pay-phones

Because I love to hear your silences

3. I look out at the ocean

But forget to notice how beautiful it is

Only that it is as inscrutably blue and silent and cold and tempestuous as your eyes

4. I drink myself insensible every night

I wake up in sweats every morning

But you keep on going by in my dreams

And I can't ever sleep

5. I behave stoically in the face of grief,

Knowing that the clouds above me,

The ground beneath my feet

And the air in my lungs

Are totally disinterested in how I feel

6. I destroy as much evidence of your existence as I could find

Until in the end,

All I am left with,

Are the red and white carnations of 2003.

I’ll always have those

Dried up in old, yellowing, dusty diaries

7. I suddenly remember your face and it flashes before me:

Your tiny, microscopic cut, just above your right eyebrow.

Then, I remember that I never asked you about it

I looked into your eyes so many times and yet I never asked you

Is it possible, that I just didn’t see you?

For I took your gaze for granted

But now, I miss it like hell

8. I feel the past clinging on to my fingers like gum

Yesterday stretches, yawns and is awake.
Here I am, again in the waiting room.

It’s going to rain

Things fall down

People look up

And when it rains,

It pours

9. I make plans to go to the Himalayas and become a recluse.

I wonder in Romanov nights,‘Whatever happened to you?’

I become constitutionally incapable of making eye contact

I fall in love with every woman I meet

I try to commit suicide by holding my breath

I cry occasionally

I lose eight and a half kilograms

I stop making movies

I keep believing everything will be all right

10. I write mechanically, without feeling

Page after page in silence

My poems; very scholarly, very droll

I wet my finger to turn the page

Giving myself enough time between pages,

To reach down to hold and stroke myself

While thinking of you,

Out of boredom, not titillation;

And also, to delude myself into believing

That it was just lust

THE 6 FEET 1 INCH GIRL

KANYAKUMARI, Monday, 7:44 am

Oyster shells, pen caps; memories, edible crabs,
Salt, silt and sand....
The sea brings these to the shore from time to time
But I look
At the sails of the vanishing ship
And I think of the time that has long since passed
Each ripple in the ocean now,
A moment gone by...

I think
There must be so many unfinished love stories in the world
Like mine
Lying at the bottom of the sea
As a pirate's treasure chest, long lost
Wanting to be found....

I see
Sea as a metaphor
Surrounding us with undrinkable pain
Bringing disasters occasionally
Leaving everyone an Island
And then storming through our eyes....


Will the breath that blew her paper boat across the sea-
One day send her sailing back to me?
Because there's something I should have said
But I didn't
And in the time we had,
My love for you
Somehow got
Lost in translation....

KOCHI, Sunday, 5:53 am

The ocean stretches out, yawns and is awake
Going ashore
Seven guys
One of them writes
On Foolscap
Six girls aboard
One of them beautiful
More than the Landscape....

I lie here
You remain there
I look forward to
Sleeping with you
In dreams
And in here
Somewhere
In God’s own country

CHERTHALA, Sunday, 1:27 pm

The September sky paints a thousand colors
It looks like the sea
And the sea looks like the sky
It is trippy and beautiful
Like Sgt Pepper’s

I remember how she'd looked at me with her eyes
That I could hear them speak,
Along with the raindrops,
Like they had a life of their own

They were the strangest eyes,
A little blue, a little green-
Shining beneath the sunset in her hair
She is too much

PERIYAR, Monday 1:30 am

Outside my window, a little while back I could see the elephants
The mothers teaching the young ones how to swim
I got some great pictures today
We are staying in a tree-house
Together

Salt lips touching
Each other
Your gown hung from the ceiling fan
Like a song strung on fugitive rhymes
It's wonderful
That lust gnaws have no language, race or religion
And I can skip the foreplay conversation

Because anyway my words, to her,
Like the color of my eyes
And the midsummer night's skies
Are black, warm and unfathomable

But what the hell
She's great in bed
You know how some girls have all the stuff
The Portmanteau complexion
And the 'come hither' looks


Her look says
“Ok, figure me out...
What am I going to say?”
And I say, “Girl-
Keep your hands off my groin”

KUMARAKOM, Sunday, 4:35 pm
Words, words, everywhere,
Not a drop to drink
She doesn't speak English
And she doesn't understand a word I say
So much for my poetry

And hers:

“R szgv blf

Uli rg'h blf R'n uzoormt rm olev drgs

Yfg R xzm'g gvoo blf

Zmw blf droo mvevi pmld”

Like a secret code

So we pretend to be deaf and mute all the time
We talk like mime artists
Silence can be so therapeutic
We can comfortably share
Our silences
That's usually when one feels that they've met someone special

But the hard and fast of it
Is that I'm
In love
And I can't handle it....

ERNAKULAM, Saturday, 6:44 pm

It was a beautiful sight at twilight
Vikram and Polly and I,
We were sitting in the porch of the boathouse
Sipping red wine from the light of little oil lamps
Unless of course it was a full moon
I don't remember exactly
For this is where she came in the poem....

Rose her color is
And white
Brown hair
Aquamarine eyes
Six feet one inch tall
Looks Lebanese
But maybe not

I WANT TO TELL YOU

Maybe Tomorrow