Globally warm, locally frozen

It is 3.15pm soaked mercilessly in a blazing sun and all that the stretch of my parched capacities allow me to think is whether it was the sun that’s gotten bizarrely hotter than ever or the ozone that's drilled irreparable.
Whatever the case, I have just attended to my compulsive shopping urge and I am comforted by the sight of shopping bags strewn across every appendage of my body. I watch my shopping bags.
Patent leather shoes - A carcass of a cow, probably named Laxmi, reared & revered, to be skinned after or before she died, slaughtered either way - Rs2500; Lycra jeans - Manufactured in a communistically dilapidating factory in Argentina amidst an impending insurgency - Rs2000; A B&W shirt - Printed in a dark, constrictive room by pre-adolescent children, particles of cotton settling inside their lungs with playful levity, something they should rather be chasing - Rs1800; Marc Jacobs perfume - CFCs suspend like helium balloons and explode like atomic bombs - Rs2500.
And like a habitual ingrate, I complain about the cruel summer, the endless traffic jam, the choking smoke and recessive consumerism and I watch a beggar-child sneak around my cab. I expect an imploring, shabby hand but I see a bunch of 5 carnations there instead. Strikingly natural (because they were somewhat wilted?). Their serrated petals curling away from the heat. Rs15, she tells me, extravagantly.
I look away like I am taught to. While she stands there endorsing those 5 carnations, all of them a greenish hue of a disobeying yellow. Taking a chance on insensitivity. On insecurity. (Flowers??? They are embarrassing!)
While the sun keeps scorching outside, the exhaust of my cab keeps emanating fumes and frustrated faces keep spitting their spites, I sit with my trinkets of abnegations, looking away from those orbs of birth. I sit there in defiance holding on to my shopping bags.
And she stands there taking a chance on hope.

Art title – glicee/lithograph depicting carnations

Artiste – Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS

url - here

Afloat in stillness

He stared at the picture frame next to his bed with a blank assessment. The long of his smile felt like an achievement to him now. Now that it felt like it had been an eon since the last his lips curled in a rapturous suggestion. He has woken up from a sleep painfully induced by blinders. It was the subliminal kind of a sleep. The kind of sleep that keeps you still attached to the transpirations of your surroundings so much that you can tell the moon’s reflection ebbing on your face. He could see the toilet seat from where he lay detached to the vigor of a new day and remembered how he had flushed his pet fish last week. Her mouth permanently gaped with what must have been hours of battlement. Fins billowing in the water with a pseudo-life. Her color a moribund yellow, her eyes wide open and accusatory.

He wondered over the ease of the concept of the ‘flush’. A lever pulled down, a whirlpool of water swirling you downwards, pouring you into the purgatory until you get deposited into a scum of remains, only to be propelled towards the ocean where you eventually disintegrate. Maybe that’s what eventually does happen to all of us, he thought. How much he longed for that flush now. Ease. The kind of ease he felt when he had that synthetic tasting chinese directly from the foil every night for dinner.

He felt so unable to set himself in motion, to join the glorious madness on the street outside that once you become a part of is strangely soothing. He always had difficulty getting past this inability. It was like a clasp-knife, once the initial resistance was gone, it just flings out. At work, in that cubicle with out-dated, moribund yellow post-its and the keyboard with dusty crevices, it felt nice. The self-inflicted, self-proclaimed and self-defined kind of nice.

He played operatic music every night, loudly, to sap the million thoughts running through his head when all his enforced industries seem to run out. This baroque was the only ostentatious feature of his day, otherwise marred with trite monstrosities. When Giovanni’s motet surged to its highest crescendo, there emerged an ethereal numbness inside his head, disconnecting and disentangling him from the discordant orchestra he always heard around him. He tried memorizing and replaying it now, to fight the non-buoyancy of the bed that he was sitting, staring at that bafflingly cheerful picture. Awake but not really. The kind of awake that is more detached than being dead.

Flush, he thought.

art title - Floating In Blue, oil on canvas
artiste - Peter Arnold
url - http://www.artofpeterarnold.com/img/s/s-005.jpg

The McDonalds' Window Diorama

Discovering a surprise holiday at work is something that isn’t too well received by the part of me that loves the inertia of routine. Disappointed with the sudden jolt in the scheme of things I needed a place to go where I can stay still and get over this breach of continuity (read, sulk). Another not-so-pleasant discovery I made was that McDonald’s was the only place I could do this at 9.30am of a half-holiday. Making a quick promise to myself of not indulging my strenuously suppressed appetite, I ordered only an espresso black, double shot (it was McDonald’s, so I gave up on the idea of asking for a de-caffe after quietly reflecting on the poster of a Big Mac). I carried my morning sulk-accompaniment to the seat facing the window and placed my field of vision comfortably between the stickers of Happy Meals. Show began.
34 lazy yet brisk marches per view. 34 projectiles dragging through a sluggish morning. 34 lives waiting to be intercepted.
Having more time at hands transfigured into stirring the coffee without any reason. A fruit fly momentarily obstructing my scope, cheerful from the draught of precociously ripened late-February grapes. A soiled piece of paper on the mosaic pavement which for some reason I imagined to be the religious pamphlet from a church saying something as clichéd as “God loves ye all”. The lazy yet brisk marches trampling it with their unsure mission. I decided not to watch the big garbage bin to my right because of it’s gloomy shade of green. The shops beyond it had the “open-close” sign dangling with non-certitude. The jig-saw puzzle shaped part of the sky didn’t specifically look of any season. Props strategically cluttered across the landscape. Faces talking with the sound muted. I stared with discomfort at a girl wearing a scratchy looking cardigan. I watched a fruit vendor try to swat at the stubborn fly. I wondered how many of these faces do I or will I know. How many times have I passed them, looking at them but not really looking at them? All of us connected at that connection-fertile junction of the train station, every morning. The coffee was unpalatably cold with all the aimless stirring. I tried to drink it for it was like my ticket to this little museum trip. Through this window, I mused over an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the eternal process of evolution. Like a dorky anthropology student, I decided to buy another ticket. 20 more minutes of human nature for 20 bucks.


art title - Museum, web art gallery
artiste - David Camp
url - http://www.dantesworld.net/Museum2.jpg

Circus of love (Valentine’s Parody)

The clock ticks in a sinister motion. There will be a chain reaction that will create a cess-pool of singles. Interrupted, violated and disrespected. The excreta of human intolerance at its mushy worst. Corny with bigotry. Pink stained and heart-shaped balloon filled. Putrid with the annoyance of a misconstrued faith. The alarm of anti-singlehood. Deafeningly loud and lingering. The energies of the proposals will float hauntingly in the air. Swollen with blighting joy. Daydreams realized in the fraction of that heavy second. Hopes, dreams, smiles, memories, visions, hallucinations, delusions and perceptions, all paraded. The cupids over-timing. Gliding over the mangled flesh of the singles. Discarding and de-allotting single souls. The appetites of lovers whetted somewhere, satiated somewhere.
The singles will disperse flapping their wings uncontrollably. Some will get caught in the cloud of holocaust and char to death. The dust will be impregnated with floral remains. It will not settle in a long time. Footprints of the single-life will TRY to run across the dust again. The singles will pray for revenges and retributions. Archies & Hallmark will carry that eerie aftermath. Love stories will profuse the underbelly. Cycles of Kama will resume. The bitch will stop menstruating.
Each face and each cake will recount a story. Stories of flesh torn apart and eaten with romantic lust. The independence suspended in the air cracks with a piercing scream. Romances linger like the stench of decaying carrion. Eerie trails lead to the end of stag creations. Zombies would be made out of couples. Love, love, love, love. All mummified in the heart-shaped sarcophagus of St.Valentine's. Doom’s day for the singles.
Daba Dooooooom.

"If you see Cupid, bitch-slap that little punk for me, will ya?"
- Valentine's Victim, single and alive.

Circle of life, Circus of death

The clock ticks in a sinister motion. There will be a chain reaction that will create a cess-pool of lives. Interrupted, violated and disrespected. The excreta of human intolerance at its copious worst. Gritty with bigotry. Blood stained and mucus filled. Putrid with the decadence of a misconstrued faith. The alarm of anti-climax. Deafeningly loud and lingering. The energies of the echoes will float hauntingly in the air. Swollen with blighting grief. Nightmares realized in the fraction of that heavy second. Hopes, dreams, smiles, memories, visions, hallucinations, delusions and perceptions, all breached. The dark messiahs over-timing. Gliding over the singed, mangled flesh. Collecting and allotting souls. The appetites of vultures whetted somewhere, satiated somewhere.

The pigeons will disperse flapping their wings uncontrollably. Some will get caught in the cloud of holocaust and char to death. The dust will be impregnated with corporeal remains. It will settle in time. Not too long. Footprints of life will run across the dust again. The kin will pray for revenges and retributions. Places will carry that eerie aftermath. Legends will profuse the underbelly. Cycles of karma will resume. The bitch will start menstruating again.

Broken ghosts will haunt broken terrains. White lights so elusive. At night the street lamps will illuminate a morose spot of debris. A monument will stand in ashes of decrepitude, waiting to be resurrected like the phoenix. The winds will stay put, or so it may seem (only the pollen can tell). Each face and each flake will recount a story. Stories of flesh torn apart and eaten with mythical lust. Dreams half chewed and spat out. Dreams switched off and shut out. Unsaddled horses of the night gallop every now and then. 

The silence suspended in the air cracks with a piercing scream. Sorrows linger like the stench of decaying carrion. Eerie trails lead to the end of sundry creations. Zombies would be made out of memories. Thirst, quest, longing, unbelonging. All mummified in the sarcophagus of that fission. Doom box.
Bada boom. Bada bam.

art title – explosion
artiste – Peeter Allik
url - http://www.art.ee/gallery2/d/1570-1/explosion.jpg

Conclusions, by the sea

There is a thing about the white sands. They are so supple that even when you walk through them, the grains just rearrange themselves back into nothingness.  
So there is never a way of telling how many footprints these sands bear. The wet ones eventually get washed by each crashing wave. The dry ones, well, they just rattle a little and fall back again, just like an upturned hour glass. You just can’t tell. 
There is a thing about the green waves. You can’t tell how big or how small the next one will be. Neither how mellow nor how strident she will be. How much sand will she slip from beneath your feet, or how many shells will she pour into the sand. Which coast wins a green wave and when, you can never tell. Which rock gets how much weathered by how many waves, you can never tell. 
You dip yourself into the cyan waters up to your neck, facing the vastness of the ocean and try to define the smudgy ends of the horizon. Where does the sun drown, or go down. They say the sun does neither. Then why does it look like it does? When you stay there, languishing amidst the green waves, the saltiness of the sea inciting your mouth and the skies bottling you up, you want to believe what you see. You can never tell why. 
Your shadow casts, consonant with the sun’s alignment. You can only guess the time. You can’t tell the minutes, you can’t tell the hours. You don’t want to. There is recalibration of time. Maybe this was how time was standardized. A glass bottle shaped like the wave, filled with lissome sand. And time was designed. Did someone sit by the sea and used the elements he saw to conceptualize it? Can’t tell. 
There is a thing about the sea. You can never tell how blue or how salty will she be today. How many conches or how many creatures does she engulf? You can never tell how many drops of amorphousness she carries in her, loses to the shore and derives from the river. On a chilly night heavy with the raging wind, underneath the umbrella of the countless constellations, why is she so warm when the sand is so cool? Maybe the sun really drowns into her. 
She won’t tell.

"As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness!" 
 - Albert Camus, French novelist.

P.S . I am really thankful to all my friends for making Goa happen. And Rupie, hope you had a time of your life because it was dedicated to you. Happy birthday again.

image courtesy - Mandar Mallapanavar

Treasures of courage

He sat on the toilet seat and watched his feet. Callous, thickened at the pulps, reflecting all those years of walking barefoot over rustic, red soil. His big toe nails on both feet had turned into a mossy green color with signs of brittleness on their edges. ‘Ugly’, his aversion concluded and he got up to cover them.
He always avoided exposing his feet in presence of others. His ugly feet took refuge inside the loyalties of his socks. When he was by himself, his toes would always be flexed in a curvy diffidence, forming an arch with the ground they touched. The feet had stiffened over the years in an unseemly manner which further required the closet of the socks.
And to make matters worse for his undermined feet-ego, his wife happened to have a pair of remarkably beautiful feet. Supple, even, flail at times, graceful and somehow always looked clean despite being busy and bare-naked all day at home.
While making love to her, he avoided touching her feet with his. He felt some strange sense of taint every time he even looked at them. He would keep his feet hidden securely under the sheets until she left the bed in the morning to take a bath.
One such morning, he lay half awake staring into the mist in his lawn that refused to evaporate into the damp and saturated Calcutta fog. When his wife came out of the bathroom, wet haired with a towel wrapped into them, he watched her (she looked different without her huge red bindi), her feet still wet from the bath, making perfect spiral stamps on the carpet, as she walked into the lawn.
He wanted to sink inside the thick warm creases of his quilt but he stayed awhile watching her feet plant effortlessly and unconsciously on the grey-looking grass. He momentarily wondered why she looked so languid while walking barefoot on the grass. He thought about the fresh dew drops that must have been borne on the grass wombs. He wanted to jut out of the bed and accompany his wife in splattering the dews across the lawn but he felt conscious about his toad feet.
An uncertain sun came about and he imagined a few of the dews decimating into the heavy air. He lay there contemplating, rubbing the flats of his coarse feet against each other, while a a few more dews vanished.
And then a sudden rush of remorse took over him, reaching all the way to the tips of his deformed toes. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for the dew drops, for their ephemeral existences. He wanted to save them, collect them and stow them away in safety. And in his reverie, he got down on his two ugly feet and carried them to the lawn, where now his wife stood watching a freshly blossomed and glistening lily.
His feet felt numb at first. A virginal numbness. Each crevice of his feet felt tingly with the sudden contact with that gravid grass. He felt the dews roll across his feet. He felt loved. With each brave stance he took, he felt loved. He wanted more. He spread his toes and pressed his feet further into the ground. He even pranced across the lawn, gathering all the dew he can, as his wife witnesses something else open up other than the lily.
That hazy morning and every such hazy morning, for the rest of his life, he saved all those dews with his bare feet and stored them in the cache between his toes and at night he even shared a few with his wife’s flawless feet...

art title - Julia’s foot, acrylic on canvas
artiste - Kelly Borsheim
url - http://www.borsheimarts.com/painting/2004/julias_foot_th.jpg