The Death of Another Piano

They moved in with their equipment and dismantled the piano with perfect dexterity. Each piece was wrapped in crisp brown paper and duct taped. They were exporting the music to another land. To another hand.

Eventually, the pieces of the piano landed in a museum of sorts and all the pieces were assembled with great care.  A small placard announced that it had belonged to the greatest composer of all times Friedrich Hampton. A spotlight shone upon its ornamental carvings announcing its material value. Elite folk wandered in and out of the room. Some of them took pictures of the flawless piano and its grandeur after obtaining permission from the museum curator.

A glass case was constructed around the piano. A persian rug was spread beneath its legs. The whole room was exterminated to prevent termites from creeping into the piano’s wood. Janitors were placed at the entrance to guard the piano all through the day. A close-circuit camera watched the piano at all hours to ensure its safety. The glass case was dusted three times a day. Once a week the glass case was carefully opened and the piano was wiped thoroughly to retain its sheen.

Nobody spoke loud when they entered this room out of solemn respect for the great piano. They gasped and gently murmured to each other about the composer who had died recently and left the piano to be preserved by the museum in his hometown.

The piano stood there for several decades. Students did school projects on the piano. Musicians and scholars walked around it to weigh the kind of music it could produce. Artists and writers were disturbed by the mere story that surrounded the piano’s past. The nouveau riche approached the museum to enquire about its price.

Early one morning, a slight seismic disturbance was observed in the area. Subsequently, an earthquake rocked the whole place and brought down all the buildings. The glass case shattered into a hundred pieces and large chunks of debris fell upon the piano.

Rescue workers toiled day and night to trace corpses and save people who were stuck under huge piles of rubble. Bulldozers were brought in order to help clear out the land. The museum area was inaccessible to people. The government tried to salvage bits and pieces of all that remained of the museum’s exhibits of the glorious past. The piano had been completely wrecked. It was a great loss. It had invited a great deal of tourism into the town.

The last moments of the piano:

The townsfolk had made a zombie out of its soul and a whore out of its body. Everybody thought that the piano stopped existing when it was physically shattered but they had killed it decades ago. It had generously allowed the earth to consume its frame and the rubble to devastate its components. Nobody could have had a happier burial.

This is how I was killed .

Blues and Berries

Whenever I feel down in the dumps I write crazy stuff in my notebooks. My sister found this story from my old diary and I was pretty surprised to read it. I would never write this story if I wrote now. But I just want to publish this eventhough I find it embarassing. I don’t remember when I wrote it.

Warning: It is about a Strawberry that listens to Metallica.

Strawberry’s Day Out

It was early morning in Lemony town. Strawberry was walking down an towards Mr. Eggless’ music shop. Strawberry wanted a violin. It was too early in the morning and all the shops were shut but Strawberry had dreamed of the violin the whole night lying wide awake on her little bed. She had wanted to buy it first thing in the morning. As soon as she woke up she brushed her teeth with Twinklin Toes Tangy Toothpaste, put on her green glitter shoes and began walking to the music shop.

On the way Strawberry met Madame Blueberry, a buxom lady of fifteen days. “Hello” said Madame Blueberry. Strawberry had her i-pod over her ears and did not hear Madame Blueberry. Metallica was loud enough for her. Yet she noticed a rotund blue thing rolling towards her with an orange floral print apron. “Oops!” said Strawberry and removed one earphone off her ear and said “Hello!” to Madame Blueberry. She had forgotten Madame Blueberry’s name. Strawberry was very forgetful. She imagined this was Madame Bumblebee. Sadly, Madame Blueberry had walked past her before Strawberry could strike up a conversation.

Now, Strawberry forgot what she had come out for. She looked at her green glitter shoes in dismay and wondered where she was supposed to go. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried hard to remember. The first word that came to her mind was “Fish!”. “Ah ha!”, thought Strawberry. That was it.  She had come to buy a fish-in-a-bowl for her bedroom corner stand. She walked towards the big, central-lemony-aquarium-for-all-things-fishy-and-otherwise. She loved this place.

As soon as she entered the aquarium, she saw a pink, spongy starfish stuck to the glass wall of a fish tank. It slowly slid down and crawled at the bottom of the tank. Then she saw a green bull frog. It is not often that you see a green bull frog. It said “Croak!” and looked very smug. She found it to be extremely funny. She giggled and moved towards the Octopus tank. She saw a big blue Octopus with a hat and a small orange dog next to it. It was a wall poster with Oswald and Weenie.

In the last shelf on that side of the room was a silvery blue baby angel fish swimming in a bowl. Strawberry opened her eyes wide and gazed at this beautiful fish. This was exactly what she wanted for her tiny bedroom with its tiny corner stool. Her bedroom had blue wallpaper and the fish would strikingly match it. She went up to Mrs. Dolphin who was the care taker at the aquarium. She pointed to the angel fish and said, “Me wants fishie blue!”. Mrs. Dolphin asked her to drop three coins into a box next to her and take the bowl. Strawberry did just that.

As she was walking back home, most of the shops had opened. She flaunted her fish bowl to the passers-by and walked with a bounce. Still, she had this strong feeling that she had forgotten something. She looked at the fish and the swirly colors on its body. Blue, silvery, moon-like, shimmering, gliding…just like…just like.. Music! And the whole of last night she had dreamed of a blue, glittery violin with rippling music sleeping on its strings. She would wake all the music up by gently nudging the notes one by one from sleep until they pranced around her room in a frolicking dance.

She stopped in front of the music shop. After looking like a red, copper-like violin and a black, velvet-like violin, she found something that she immediately liked. A bluemoon-like violin…Alas! She did not have enough coins to buy this violin. It cost 19 coins. She had never seen 19 coins before. Just then, Mr. Eggless hobbled up to her and said, “Hello! That is a very interesting violin you are looking at. And a nice fishie you’ve got there too!” Strawberry blushed but she managed to smile. Mr. Eggless was an eccentric, old man who did not look like an egg at all. Actually, his name was Mr. Egg but because everybody thought that he did not look anything like an egg, they started calling him “Mr. Eggless”.

Strawberry said she really liked the violin but she had no money to pay for it. Mr. Eggless laughed out heartily till his frame shook like a bowl of marbles. He gently lifted the violin off the shelf and handed it to Strawberry. “Take it!” he said. Strawberry wondered if he had lost his marbles. Mr. Eggless said, ” The music in this violin has been sleeping in my shop for months. Set it free!” He looked at her pleadingly.

The good things in life are always free. Sunlight, moonshine, stargazing, love and the sea. “Run now!” said Mr. Eggless and Strawberry hopped all the way home with her blue fish swimming like free music racing on happy strings.

P.S: On the way back home, Strawberry saw Madame Blueberry….and remembered her name!

 

 

 

 

Away

End of the day I am just the language I think in and the languages that I don’t understand. All of it put together.

I wrote a story:

It was 2.00 PM in the middle of Mount Road. The odour of burning tar invaded the nostrils of the few pedestrians who had dared to venture out in the heat. Everybody had something to do.

Some hundred people had been ruthlessly stuffed into a bus like ruffled duck feathers. A few of them were sticking out in all directions. The bus obstinately continued its journey shrieking like an asymmetrical banshee.

The pavements were generously blessed with spittles and betelnut stains. They held the crumbs from the feet of a thousand wayfarers and stood unflinching. A wilted banana skin smiled like comic relief. There were odd dogs, sweaty library-goers and cyclists.

There was white noise. And the typical afternoon icecream bell. The mosque harbored plump pigeons that sought respite in its cozy crevices. The signals monotonously influenced butterfly effects, without so much as a sigh. Some truants had escaped school early and were biting into raw mango slivers coated with chilli powder.

The bustle was intimidating. Death lunged forward like a speeding bus or a careening auto. The black and white lines of the pedestrian crossing looked abandoned like violated rules.

Madness. Women heaved huge shopping bags into air-conditioned cars that stood like crazy Greek Gods who had descended to the ghettoes. Young girls giggled by with their dupattahs fluttering in the hot noon breeze. All was neutral like intense lethargy juxtaposed with incredible activity. Everybody was getting somewhere. Really?

In the middle of the mindless drone and chaos, sat a lonely translucent void. It was occupied by a cripple upon a tricycle. He had traveled a hundred miles by hand. From one street to another. Baby steps. Like withering shadows that grow upon nameless walls, his feet dangled in vulnerable suspension. His irrelevance was enormously relevant. Where is everybody running? Away from him.

Like a powerful epiphany he sat, momentously conjuring up tears upon onlookers’ eyes. In him they saw a personification of their own insignificance. A desconstruction of their safe shields of escapism. In him they saw the truth. Stripped to bare circumstances. They could not hide in their heavily-painted dance masks any more. They suffocated under their layers of silks. The air-condition singed their perfect skins. And they had an intense, irresistible urge to run. They wanted to run away from the one who embodied their own handicaps. They wanted to find the use for their efficient yet immobile limbs. They wanted to quickly retreat into their comfortable lives and forget that suffering existed. They were guilty and embarassed about his condition and they knew not why. He mirrored their own poverty of the soul.

Like a symbol in a suppressed deluge of emotions, he wheeled himself away. To encounter another set of hollow humans.

He who has legs let him run. Away from the truth, away from the self, away, away, away.

….vivek

..ulalume
…lapsus lingue
….po-mo pastiche
…..paradise regained
…..prometheus unbound
…..posthumous treatise
……paradise lost
…. faraday’s find
…mutant poem
..andromeda
.arachnid

 

…..canvas
…….madness
………….anguish
…………….languid angst
……………………sulphuric anomaly
………………………..anonymous absinthe
……………………………nebulous unfathomable

………………………………agonizing rain candle flicker
……………………………….. love love love love love love

……. dreary dailyness

….dreamdom
…….liquid constellation

………………………………..

……………………………….

……………………………..

……………………………

……yada yada yada
…nada.

 

 

Myowww…

As I walked on the concrete wall which was fragrantly warm in the afternoon sun, I planned my activities for the evening. I would dig the garbage bin in the fifth alley for fish bones. There lived the old lady Mrs. Su-Shi with a mouth that puckered like she had eaten the sourest of lemons. She cooked fish almost every other day. We all thronged restlessly around her house, trying to keep our dignity by not looking as desperate as we really were. Then she would wrap the fish bones in a piece of newspaper with salt crystals sticking to its sogginess and deftly throw it into the bin. And we would pounce shamelessly into the bin. Sometimes I’d stand precariously on the bin’s rim and snarl at the other fellows, my tail bristling. I’d bare my fangs. We bit each other a number of times and made such a din that the old lady threw cold water on us a couple of times.

I was worried about my whiskers. Some of them seemed to be drooping of late. Since when did such human traits possess me? I do not know. I licked myself lazily, considering a nap under the gray car that had just got parked near the side walk. On second thoughts I decided that it would be better for me to do some climbing. In two leaps I was in Mr. Patel’s balcony. It was usually filled with dry leaves. There were a few withered potted plants hanging there like a joke. Mr. Patel never came into the balcony. His balcony had old newspapers piled high. Pigeon droppings were everywhere. The branches of the gul mohur were right into his bedroom. Yet he seemed to be in some kind of a penance inside his house. One never saw him come outside except when he wanted to buy his diabetic pills. He wore sandals that looked older than I am. I always try running between his legs because I love him. His soles smelled like sleepy mice. And he does not mind me at all.

Did I tell you about fat cat Carla Ferguson? She is the meanest, fattest and loudest cat in all of Sumeet Mazumdar Co-op Housing Society (SMCHS). Till the death of Dr. Don, the fat black cat, she was thin as a clothesline and quiet as a mouse (I’d get severely clawed for that analogy). With the unfortunate expiry of his ninth and last life, she acquired power in leaps and bounds. Dr. Don was called that way for his surgical precision in clawing one’s eye out.

I have forgotten to tell you my name. How so typical of me! I’m the official serenader for all of SMCHS and my name is Romeo Rodriguez. I can alternatively sing in baritone, alto and soprano. Some ladies of the Reshamiah household do not take well to my attempts at imitating one of their own kind. They ungratefully soak me in buckets of cold water. I sit high above their kitchen sun shade singing well into the night trusting the forces of gravity to save me from the Reshamiahn receptacles of water and other liquids.

My whiskers continued to worry me as I sat on Mr. Patel’s balcony. I leaped into the next balcony hoping to find some respite in the smell of Surf Excel in Sivarama Iyer’s sun-drying dhoti. He detested me. He had once seen me with a squirrel’s tail in my mouth. He did not investigate into the situation deeply. Had he done it he would have found that I never ate the squirrel. It was the rowdy squirrel that had jumped on my head and left his tail behind as souvenir for his daredevil act. Yet, Sivarama Iyer’s wife with her shining diamond ear rings would always give me some left-overs. She called me Chuppuni. I did not mind her as long as her culinary treats descended down my esophagus. Sometimes I wished she did not call me that in front of Pamela Snow. But she always did. “Chuppuneeeee!”, she would call out loud just when I tried to present some passionately-twitching whiskers to Pam. When I started an ancient crooning in my soprano voice her shrill voice would cry, “Chuppunee” in front of the several thousand admirers jostling around me. Then I would sigh, meow ever-so gently and walk slowly to balcony number 128, to eat yesterday’s idlis. Such is life!

All of a sudden, I remembered the party in C Block. It was Anjali’s birthday. Oh how could I forget! I thought it is not appropriate for someone of my stature to run in front of everyone and therefore I began to walk swiftly. Anjali was 6 years old. She had never once forgotten to give me a huge piece of cake on her birthday. However, I was never sure where it would land when she threw it at me. Sometimes it landed on my forehead making it impossible to eat it with dignity. At other times it was painfully far away daubed between my left shin and my tail. Today I got a fairly large piece of strawberry cake. The only issue was that I had to share it with Carla Ferguson. I waited hoping she would generously be indifferent to insignificant things like strawberry cake pieces at 6-year old birthday parties, but I was terribly wrong as usual. She confronted me with a when-was-the-last-time-you-were-clawed-in-the-eye look. She was huge and seemed to have manicured her claws for the purpose. And I slinked mournfully into the darkness, eyeing the cake glumly. The shin-and-tail predicament was way better than this. I hope Pam Snow was not around to see what had just happened. I once looked back to see Carla licking the cake off her nose.

I sometimes considered a career as a rogue. With a name like mine I could easily get away with it. I already had enough scratches and scars to assist me in my climb to glory as a mean, rough and dont-mess-with-me don. Surely my friends Surly Sriraman, Potty and Wrinkle Tail would support me in this endeavor. Yet this was just a dream. I am of a gentlemanly temparement as I euphemistically put it.

I sadly remembered that the harrowing experience with Carla Ferguson had made me forget to visit the garbage bin. Still I went there for I had nothing else to do. I saw Trinket around the corner. He was the hungriest in all of SMCHS. He would n’t have left a scrap behind. I peered into the garbage bin knowing fully well it had nothing. I purred mournfully as I sat at Mrs. Su-shi’s doorstep. The evening descended like a veil of tantalizing fish scents.

The Sea

As I leave my house today, I know I’d be entering the fiery evening. I had already seen the redness in the slanted rays of the sun that fell into my room. This evening has been bequeathed to madness. I have forgotten to bind my hair. I have forgotten to paint my lips. I have forgotten to empty my nakedness into a bowl of shame.

I know the glowering evening sun makes my skin seem a mustard orange. The people around me in their ordinary trousers and shirts are quietly considering my eyes. The sun has entered the windows of my eyes. My hair longs to be lifted up in a wild spree of mad uninhibition.

As if it were a dream a sea breeze lifts my hair up in its own madness to kiss everything in a hurry. Suddenly everything falls silent. I find myself still walking down my staircase in a hurry to reach the next landing. Every landing is deja vu. In the darkness of the staircase and the grilles that weave little webs of spidery light, I feel like I’m in an infinite whirling road winding downwards.

Now I’m on the road the sun enviously wiping my colour off me and replacing it with its own. The treetops shimmer like torches. A breeze disturbs the vehicle sounds without a warning. Birds are returning home. They too believe. Mad world.

The sea shore eats my soul up with every step into its nudeness. I find myself singing a song. Another madness wants me to quit singing. The approved madness. The accepted madness. The madness of the silent. The madness of the spectator. The madness of the passive hermit. I peel this madness off me with deliberate defiance. The former madness is easy to remember. We are trained for it from childhood. The latter madness is difficult yet is permanent.

Now I’m holding onto the sides of an anchored ship, now I’m sailing on the sea blue yacht, now I’m the boat with the dark-skinned fisherman, now I’m the writhing fish in his net, now I’m the lights that wake up like dragon eyes at twilight, now I’m twilight with its thousand children feet running, now I’m the smell of salt and sea, now I’m wild hair, now a beholder, next the beholded, now a breath and then a single abandoned bird hurriedly flying after its clan racing ahead.

This evening has been bequeathed to madness. I hear the conversations of a thousand men. Money worries, mother-in-law worries, exams, exultation, kites, kisses, crabs, catamarans… I stand inane, unblinking like a fish eye. Into the sea lies my destiny. Like one of Chekhov’s heroines I have considered dying by lightning. It does not fascinate me. Nor do I wear red like that woman and speak of dying seasons with blushing cheeks. I’m another creature at the infinite sea shore. At the sea that orgasms with several white bones and churns out the of flavour of life  by tonnes. The sea does not see if I’m Shelley. It swallows like an organism. Like the whale that puked Jonah, the sea regurgitates bleached bodies of young lovers, bad swimmers, boys who failed exams and poets.

The sea is insomniac. Such passion overcomes its being that it cannot let go of anything. It chews and ruminates and only sea shells survive its restlessness. Such a sea stretched before me like a huge conundrum. Its only foil was the sky. A counterpart spitting stars. A sudden madness overtook me and I began walking. Away from the sea. Away from the kite illusions and the bird illusions. I walked away from the sand that swallowed my toes. I walked away from the roads, from the breeze, from my wildness, from the need to escape. I ran away from prospective death. I walked back into the madness called life. I walked back into the incorrigible madness called life. I declare myself incapable of death as much as I’m incapable of life. I could not… could not walk away from the sea within myself.

Ethics

“Appa…”

“Hmm!” said appa, without looking up from his newspaper.

She was about to go back into her room. He did not seem to be noticing that either. She stood there hesitating for a minute. A sneeze startled appa’s attention. And a bout of sneezes continued to rock his constitution.

At the end of it, he was too shaken up to go back to his newspaper. And she kept standing there.

He looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time in his house. He said “Yeah?” “Are you waiting to talk to me?”

She nodded.

“What?” said appa. She was quiet.

There was a very amused, curious expression on appa’s face. He started biting his nails.

She said, “I have fever..”

Appa said, “Oh!” He had been too distanced from her to feel her forehead and check if she was running a temperature.

“I have no idea what to do.” said appa. He sounded genuinely confused and mildly distressed at his own inability to help.

She said, “No! Anyways I take two antibiotics everyday. I’ll just go to sleep now.”

Appa was slightly alarmed. It showed in his dilating pupils. Now he was thinking.

“What about office?” “Have you informed them?” Now he began thinking she is feigning a fever to escape work.

“Yeah I just text messaged my colleague. The air conditioner at work is too strong and directly over my head. I don’t want to go there and aggravate my fever”

“I see!” Appa was thinking hard. “Why don’t you take a scarf with you? Or a sweater?”

“No, pa” she said, “It is neither so cold you should wear a sweater, nor so warm you can go there with a fever. It is damp there..”

“What is happening with your current project at work?” asked appa.

“Umm.. we are still in the initial phase..” She cleared her throat because something seemed to be choking there. She coughed now.

“Will they be ok with it if you don’t go.. I mean, you’ve just started off with your new project and everything” Appa was trying really hard to sound concerned, polite and persuasive at once.

“Is your fever so significant that you can’t go to work?” appa asked.

She was quiet. Her throat felt dry and irritated. Some germs must be having a rock show running in there, she imagined.

“I’m going to sleep, pa” she said. “I’ve body ache”

“Fine.” said appa curtly. “I have some interesting stuff to read in this newspaper.” He went back to his paper.

She went into her room and shut the door. She called her best friend who was never there when she wanted him.

“Hello” she said.

“Hi” said he.

“Can I talk to you for a few minutes?” she asked cautiously. Time with her best friend was always rationed out according to his needs.

Surprisingly, he said, “Yes!”

“What would you say if I said I have fever and I’m not going to work?”

“Go to sleep and take rest. Take care of yourself”

“What about somebody who says, ‘Is your fever so significant, you can’t go to work?’”

“That person is really concerned.”

“About what? My work?”

“Yeah!”

“But that person has nothing to do with my office or my work”

“Who was it? Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“He has good work ethics.”

She talked to him for a few more minutes and for some unknown reason he hung up on her abruptly. He did not answer the two calls she made after that.

She had nowhere to go. So she wrote everything down.

Redness Imposed

I’m a chair. I don’t exactly remember when or how I was born. I had been too young then to begin the drudgery of assimilating ideas or accumulating memories. However, I’ve been a chair for as long as I can remember.

I sit here day and night. I know you’d have never imagined a chair, sitting. Some chairs that I’ve known, stand. They live in the houses of rich men who spend their days surrounded by flatterers. Those chairs wait. “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Luckily, I’ve sat all my life in this garden. I watch the red earth brimming in the flower pots and cobwebs growing and disappearing in the stalks of the overgrowth. I’m a chair in the garden under the sunshine and the rain.

Sometimes, the old lady of the house spends her time in the garden. She places her walking stick against me and sits down. She religiously places both her hands upon mine. I hold her. I’ve seen her cry at times. She is alone. Alone and old. Alone, old and doddering. Clumsy and alone.

Some children came once. They preferred the swing to me. A small child chose me. The child imagined I was the safest place to be. He was tender and I wished I was cushiony for once. I held my cast-iron frame and legs firmly to the ground so as to not fall. The child began all his antics on me. He tried sitting on my head. Scratched my hands and rocked me back and forth. I almost fell over a couple of times. I was very frightened. Then he got off and ran away for want of better mischief to do. I heaved a sigh of relief.

Twice a day, severe sunlight beat down upon me. Every part of me turned hot, fiery and unfriendly. I only wished the shade would come over me soon. Then, when shade came back, the tendril patterns on my frame cooled down and I once again became contented being a chair.

Rain is pouring down on me. Sometimes it feels salty and smells exotic. My feet get buried in the red soil. I watch the grass and mushrooms sprout around my legs. There is green moss spreading over me. Some black ants scuttle over me while the rain clouds take a short nap. I love the fragrance of rain. For days on end, I listen to the pitter patter. I watch the rain trickle down in small rivulets all over the ground. The leaves endlessly drip. It becomes silent and sad. A puddle forms on me and under my legs. I get chilled to the bones. Sometimes I contemplate over rain but without too many answers. A chair can only think so much.

When at last sunlight comes around, there is red dust in my crevices. Life bustles in the garden and bird droppings are generously shed on me. Of late I’ve noticed I’m turning orange. How does it feel when you’re turning orange when all your life you’ve been a harmless green? Ask me! It feels cold and sour. It smells pungent. And as time passes, it feels awkwardly warm, like you’re some new wood with caterpillars tingling on your twigs. And embarassingly enough, the sun keeps shining on you. Till grandmother comes back to me, I’ll remain orange, dusty and beautifully ugly.

A catastrophe. Nobody listens to the complaints of a chair. I vehemently disapprove of what happened to me in the recent past. They have dug up myu legs from out of the ground, massaged me with slimy oil and painted me red. I smell horrible and and feel sticky. The ants avoid me. The birds are worried if I am some new animal. I really wish I could go where the broken swing and grandmother went, than sit here painted and shiny.

Painted, shiny and red I was hauled to a strange room beyond the garden. Some old lamps sit here, dry, dusty and solemn. They try to look their once-immaculate selves but fail miserably. A red carpet is rolled up and parked against the wall. Some sunlight enters this room through tiny holes in the wall. The wind also trespasses through these holes with a lot of dust. There are a hundred barrels sleeping quietly. Occasionally someone enters, fumbling in the dark, lights a match, and collects trickling old memories from the barrels. It is moistly cold in here. I miss the pigeon smells. I smell dampness instead. I miss the swing, orangeness and the mushrooms.

And here I sit awkwardly amidst solemn old lamps, a rolled red carpet and barrels of intoxication fermenting in the cold. Here I sit painted, red, and smelling intolerably perfect.

Nightwalkers

There was nothing left to do but laugh. It was the final coughing up of life from within the body. We laughed uncontrollably. Yet we did not know why. We could not stop either. Tears streamed down our faces. A small interval to catch our breath led to another bout of giggles that built itself into eventual laughter. Our bodies felt helplessly paralyzed in laughter. We were coughing now. I always cough when I laugh too much. Your gummy laughter was irresistible. I laughed like a retard. As usual. Just the way you hated it. Hahahahaha…

I saw you there as a stereotype. I myself was one. We were lovers. Individually. Your woman had given up trying to decipher your hidden metaphors. My man did not even try. So at the sea shore, because we were not frightened of the huge, flamboyant sea and because her melodramatic heaving was expressionistically our inner turbulence, we had decided to seek refuge in her.

We wanted to do a final giving up. We wanted to try and give up. Giving up had been an impossibility for us. We wanted to give up in the arms of the sea because she convinced us enough. We knew the sea would not give up on us long after we were gone. We would probably be fish feed or human pickle marinated in brine. This disease called love kept bringing us back to the shore like a discarded slipper that came traveling back on a wave chariot.

We walked into the night. Nightwalkers. Our rapid feet repeatedly got caught in the chill, dry-as-a-bone, sand. At every step, we had wanted to surrender to the sand. Bury ourselves neck-deep in its cold indifference. I slipped my hand into my lover’s. You had my hand in yours… because we chose to fall in love for an hour. An hour before we died we chose to walk into the night that was our lives, together. I would shamelessly express. You too would. We would pour out all the things that they could not decipher or did not listen to. Yet we did not want to construct meaning. We did not seek to understand.

Why did you kill my love? Did I not show to you every castle I built – crimson, viridian, aquamarine, ochre and burnt sienna? I hated you for ignoring the colours in them or rather the colourlessness in them. Inside your hermit crab shell, you ate my love in fragments. While I presented you with a feast, you went for the crumbs, like a penurious ant. That is why I am here. To kill myself. Because my love went unheeded.

You hated me for killing your love. I had, with great determination, pushed your love under the earth, alive and afire. While I flaunted my albatross-winged love, your sparrow love, I had secretly mocked. I was a better lover than you. Haha.. I still am. Is n’t that why you’re here to kill yourself? Because your love is inferior.

We are still mistakes. Unaccepted by each other. In an hour, we are not going to become accepting of each other. We shall accept ourselves as mistakes incapable of understanding others. I shall accept that you’re a mistake but I shall not accept you. You shall, in your usual indifferent manner, sweep me under the carpet. We shall remain as misunderstood mistakes.

The lighthouse beam was unerringly upon us, time and again. I did not want the floodlights to reveal my final moments to a world of publicly copulating mongrels on the seashore. I hide inside your palm. As a word, a memory and a forgotten fragrance. Then we kiss. We kiss into the night. For a minute, timelessly, we wish. Yet we are aware. We are not timeless. We are ordinary. We hear the sea, the vehicle horns and the children. An awkward kiss. Yet the last kiss.

And we used to talk about endless, immortal love. The movies had spoilt us. Are you not happy that we made a transient, dying, love? That we are only real and stuck to the earth. Is this not acceptance? We never published our books, nor did we ever learn to play the guitar. We are about to die incomplete as halved ideals.

Your woman has left you for another man. Face it. My man never was mine. We are incomplete old fools. Amusing! I did not know you before an hour. Yet I am in love with you because you are me. I just asked for an ear and you have it. To listen. You just asked for lips and I have them. To kiss.

I am not afraid of the crablets that scuttle over my feet. I am not hysterical or in need of your masculinity. I am in need of that fragment of me in you, which is about to walk into the sea with me. And we walk into the sea. A fear of being rescued makes us break into a run. The salty water is in my mouth. Sand is inside my clothes. For some reason, I am worried about sand entering my undergarments. I am worried I am still alive and worrying. I cannot see you. I feel complete in the cold embrace of the sea. I need it. I need the waves to thrash the pain out of me. I need us to come together inside the mouth of the sea, wet and embracing. We drown and breathlessly wish we had just enough strength to fight the sea, back to earth. Live. And we drown, laughing at our helpless asphyxiation. Just like love.

The following morning, the tabloids wantonly proclaim us as young lovers.

Thoughts of a Lost Youth

While she sat contemplating over the thoughts of a lost youth the sea billowed like the manifestation of a million sighs. A broken vase, scattered feathers, spilled ink and a torn rainbow – thoughts of a lost youth. She remembered she had wanted a child. An unshaped mound of wet clay. An arbitrariness that laughed with dimples. A tenderness that emoted without prejudices. She had wanted a child.

A child meant a little warm breathing kiss. A nimble nakedness. A meaninglessness with wide eyes, waiting to be loved and bathed. A canvas. She had always wanted a child.

A house with terracotta horses and a bronze vessel with floating lotuses. Like the ones in the pseudo designer boutiques where you can only laugh at the reeking opulence. Yet she had wanted those in her home where she would give them meaning. She had wanted a long wooden swing with brass chains and a sleeping man in it. She had wanted to be the woman with a nose ring and anklets peeping from the dark interiors of a dim-lit room; the open roof throwing selected rays of the sun onto the courtyard. She had wanted to brew coffee from roasted beans, the aroma permeating the kitchen. She had wanted to be in that house of a past birth near the well and the karivepilai waving its leaves in the breeze. Near the washing stone and the few shoots of sesame that sprouted from the fertile earth. Near the murungai tree and the baby vaazhai offspring. She wanted to pick tomatoes and pumpkins from the garden and watch the coconut trees sway their heads to the sounds of an ancient veena. Thoughts of a lost youth.

A small boy came her way. He wanted her to buy some sundal. He carried a tin drum indifferently. It resembled the biscuit tins her dad brought back from foreign trips. Those biscuit tins were filled with biscuits shaped like many animals. As a child, she used to imagine she was a carnivore when she ate those biscuits. Now they were available in excess at a certain departmental store with fifteen branches. The boy called her “akka”. What was she to him? What was her father to his? She laughed at this connection.

She remembered that there was a certain contagious epidemic in the city and eating anything at the beach was not a safe proposition. The boy was a child. He placed the tin drum next to her and began digging the sand with bare hands. She said “Yaay! Don’t do that!” The boy grinned sheepishly but continued to pick the sand and rain it through his fingers. She said, “Do you give out sundal with these same hands? It will give everyone a tummy ache.” He continued to grin sheepishly.

His hair was dry as a shrub. His face had patches of grime. His shirt looked like his father’s, oversized and awkward. His hands were thin and nimble. He wore a black amulet around his neck. His fingers were tiny. She asked him if he went to school. He said he went to school in the mornings. She knew he was lying. She knew he built sand castles, ran errands for his master, sold fish at the auctions, swam in the sea and teased the dogs and chicken all morning. He did not go to school. In fact, he feigned a tummy ache, conjunctivitis, a bruise and a throat ache to not go to school. He was only a child like all other children. She smiled at him.

She suddenly wanted to take this child to the garden where she sat all alone the previous day. To the park where all the children fought for their turn to be on the swing. To the ice cream parlor where the children smeared ice cream on their noses and threw a hundred tantrums. To the big book shop with tiny colorful books for children his age. She wanted to pick him up and cuddle up with him. She wanted to tell him of the years she spent waiting for him. She wanted to plant a kiss on his grimy forehead. She wanted to bathe him in pink bubbly soap and scrub him till he screamed. She wanted to wipe his wet hair with a fluffy towel and powder him with an expensive baby powder. She wanted to make hot paruppu rice and roast potatoes and feed him while they watched Oswald on TV.

She asked him if he would come away with her. “Will you come with me?” she asked. He was worldly wise. Though he was not so old, he knew the pain of disappointments, the laughter of the wicked, the shrewdness of businessmen and the smiles of the cunning. He looked at her and once again flashed the same grin. She could not gauge much out of it.

He was far away from her world. All he could think of was to sell all the sundal and go home with the day’s earnings. All he could think of was the game of street cricket he would play in the lamp light, with his friends. Who he would beat up that evening, how many scars he would have in comparison to Raju, how he would buy a big ship, how he would sell prawns the next day, how his baby sister would tug at his shirt back at home – His head was a jumble of thoughts and sleeplessness. He asked her if she would take some sundal. He seemed to have a refrain, “Akka! Please, ka! I have not sold anything from the morning..” He kept saying this almost involuntarily.

He was bored now. He scratched his head and picked up his tin drum, its contents intact. He spotted some potential customer at a distance and ambled away, leaving her to her thoughts of a lost youth. The sea billowed like the manifestation of a million sighs.