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

Helplessness

A more profound winter had set in the late December air. She could feel the specks of an occasional chill on the dark bare of her skin as she stood anticipating at the window. She loved the way the subtleties of the wind broke through her fresh from the bath skin.
The congealed ends of her wet hair pricked her back with a sweet pain, forming small rivulets that threaded southwards in a lazy motion. She wanted to make herself a hot mug of coffee to complement the unusually cold December evening but the butterflies inside her bosom had begun to have a paralyzing effect.
She stood there a little more while, fleeting thoughts of childhood crossing her mind as she drew circles of water with her finger until they vanished in the dry of the chill. Subconsciously, she tried to remember every cold December evening of her life, some stored away for the right reasons, others for the wrong. They kept coming to her like the wind who’s provenance was full of uncertainty. A cold December of heartache, a cold December of triumphs.
It took a sudden eruption of goosebumps for her to realize her nakedness. The limpid half moon proposed an advancing evening. The whiteness of the air becoming evident with each passing batch of chill. The butterflies at the brim of her mouth now.
She loved to daub strawberry milk on her skin in the winters. The smell of strawberries prodded the memory of last winter’s song in her mind. She hummed it, smearing herself lovingly with the essence of bypassed memories. When she was done, she admired her body in the mirror, despite the million flaws she could have otherwise enumerated.
She pried upon the clock again, feeling uneasy this time, but making sure she hid it, like she always did. Like she were watched. She wondered how hard it would be to cry or how easy it would be to love. She always felt inept at both. Maybe that is why she could not contain a wait inside her. The armor she built all these years by meticulously denying her heart all those feelings that she saw in those maudlin movies (which she loved) was beginning to wear off at the sides. She wanted to count those years, but they seemed too many, more than the number of emotions she had successfully (?) deflected until this cold December evening.
She felt more naked now. She thought she will cry but she did’nt. She thought she will love but she did’nt. Maybe she could’nt. She clothed herself quickly in an attempt to cover her incapability, not her nakedness.
She carried on in the solitude of her vacuum, like she always had.

art title - naked woman, expressionism
artiste - Randall
url - http://www.webnetdesign.com/randallartgallery/images/others/woman.jpg

My consorts (part I) - Manolo

This wasn’t the first time when Manolo, my pet dog, had attempted to eat my laptop. Just that this time, the laptop’s adapter had to succumb to it’s final mutilation.. Beyond repair, beyond recognition.
Manolo, for the sake of a concise & precise introduction, is a gold-colored mongrel pup, who in other cultures would be depicted as a demon, a demon that feeds on lithium.
She is a result of what can only be described as a ‘dangerous liaison’ between a Labrador retriever and a Pomeranian.
Manolo, in her 6 months of life, until now i.e, has been the deathbed to several wires, furniture items, shoes of any kinds & sizes or lets just say, anything that exists in spatial dimensions irrespective of the material it is made of. Sundry household objects silently bear testimony to the ravenous repertoire of Manolo's.. Edges of the coffee table mercilessly gnawed, pillows with cotton bleeding out of them, my cell phone looks more like Manolo’s teeth cast and none of the water pipes in the bathroom & the kitchen are tubular anymore.
The kittens lurk reluctantly under the constant threat of getting lodged in between Manolo’s teeth while Glitter (Manolo’s grandma) risks losing her long droopy ears to Manolo’s appetite because Manolo mistakes them (or does she?) for being chapattis.
Manolo’s face is an embodiment of the highest form of deception. Huge blackberry eyes with constantly dilated pupils, droopy ears that she got from her mother, a ceaselessly sniffy wet nose and a mouth that is trying to dismantle a wall unit as we speak. The face that masks all the annihilation that it’s bearer is capable of.
She has a way of sapping even the most formidable reverberation by wagging her tail at such a speed that it probably produces some sort of high frequency waves which render you incapable of any amount of harsh reaction.
I hold the mauled remnants of my laptop’s battery, my nostrils flaring to their rims, ready to charge at her (she is now trying to sink her teeth into the floor marble), but as soon as her droopy ears flap sideways to signal an approaching hostile march, she turns her head around in my direction, fixes those unusually large & unusually black eyes on me, wags her tail like a rocket engine, tilts her misleadingly cherubic face and watches me relinquish my anger...
“If Lucifer were a puppy.......”

Holidays..yay!

That was the most forced ‘yay’ I ever said. It happened when I heard the radio after what seemed like 8 decades while traveling to my college for some official business; just to relive those days when I would religiously listen to the breakfast shows on radio while being invariably late for the first lecture.
After tuning my pod through jarring static and stretching the chord taut in every direction, I started hearing some differentiable sound and settled myself in the plank hard, tattered seat of the musty smelling state transport bus. I took a look around it and wondered to myself in disbelief how exactly I took this ramshackle to college every single day for a good 7 years of my life. Although now the bus has become less spat on, less falling apart and less bumpy too.
The song on the radio stopped to break into advertisements. “Special season’s discount”, “holiday discount”, “festival offer” flooded my ears while my mind was still recovering from the shadows of the past weeks and all that it had played on me. Business as usual, I told myself. The government is doing it’s best to deflect our attentions by providing an ‘economy stimulus package’ like an early (or late?) public Christmas present. The markets have begun to surge back.
And I thought maybe we needed an escape from those calamitous events that each of us were subjected to; the insecurities needed to go back in the closet, the apprehensions needed to bury inside the facade. A gust of wind waiting to sweep us back into patterns of routine. Soon the Christmas tree will be brought down from the terrace, cleaned and decorated. Soon the new years’ eve would be planned out, dinner and drinks.
And it will be the new year. Resolutions & revolutions too. We will make all of them. And we will try to smile. Heck! We WILL smile, no matter what.
The radio now played a holiday song - “Christmas, baby please come home”... and I listened.
Holidays... yay! I said, smiling.

PS - Happy Holidays to all.

The Gateway of revolution

Thanks to the cancellation of some errands that were otherwise determined to squeeze me back into the routine, I could make it to the Gateway Of India for the protest for peace rally. We had been receiving the invitation to this event since the terror at the Taj was surmounted, through various media outlets. I reached there with a friend just before 6pm via VT station, crossing which, we both took a pregnant look around it, trying to imbibe and recreate the horror that unfolded there a week back (a chill rushed down the spine)
The traffic jam that our cab got stuck in on our way to The Gateway gave us a fair idea how large the scale of this event was. After waiting for some excruciatingly anticipatory minutes, we decided to leave the cab and walk it out till the Gateway. As we walked towards the venue, we saw many young folk walking in the same direction. The way only lead to The Gateway, the place where in Mumbai the land begins.
And then we reached the circle at Regal movie hall. The traffic was a standstill which I later realized were only hundreds of parked cars. The amber street lights watched a current pass by, coursing it's way to the Gateway.
This current was made of the youth of this city, whetted and charged, to voice their anger against terror. This current looked unstoppable, it could have walked on the Arabian waters. Aggregation of minds that wanted a change, that wanted to BE that change. Minds that wanted an answer, minds that said "Enough is enough".
Like fish on a mission, we joined the current. we held up our placards amidst a sea of placards and banners; some cursing, some questioning, some stating and some revolting. Not a single one pleading. A deja vu of the war of Independence.
It took us a good hour and half to traverse a distance of some 200m; a U-shaped cirtuit around the Gateway. With every step came slogans and chants, our rebellion leading us. The tricolor waved across the current while it moved towards the Gateway to witness the monument that bore the brunt of terror.
Over 1,00,000 Mumbaikars came to comfort The Taj.
The vigor of being a part of such an unprecedented activism has infected all of us. There were rallies across the country today. The war against terrorism was taken to it's apogee tonight and it will go on until peace prevails. This is our promise. A promise of a wronged Mumbaikar. A wronged Indian.
Jai Hind.

A Candle in the wind

The one word - Overwhelming. It sums up the gamut of feelings that I am filled with, after the candle march that I was a part of at Marine Drive, the stretch of sea-adjunct land that starts from the Oberoi hotel and marks the shoreline of south Mumbai. No amount of TV images, living room debates and discussions or even the morose emotions that brew in my heart past days, could compare to that one moment when we lit up candles right in front of the Oberoi Trident in the memory of all that Mumbai has lost in her mayhem.
The March commenced at 7pm dot. A proud moment for the citizens of Mumbai, who despite their wry sense of punctuality, gathered and initiated a moment, so defining, at the time when it was supposed to be initiated. Glum faces incandescent with candle lights, some carrying placards that voiced their opinions (including me). Energies, rebellious and revolutionary, colliding with each other, charging the atmosphere with a sense of extreme passion.
Candles endured the wrath of the Arabian wind, probably suggesting a reflection of the hearts that carried them. Even if one blew out, a neighboring candle would come to the rescue, probably suggesting the (much abused but yet affable) spirit of the city. The march went on.
Slogans eulogizing the heroes of the horror - the cops, the soldiers, the hotel staff, the hostages - resonating across the air. “Jain Hind” ...“Bharat Mata Ki Jai”... “Vande Mataram”... leading us to the doomed Trident. There were occasional anathemas launched against the politicians and the terrorists. All aglow with a thousand flickers of light. The light paving way for insurgency of citizens' might. A citizens' movement about to begin. You could feel it in the air.
It had stopped being about mundane issues anymore. Approaching the Trident with every step gave the emotions a whole new crescendo. The shattered glasses were visible now, one can only imagine the ugliness that unfolded inside. It stood there dilapidated, forsaken, abandoned but certainly not decimated. It looked aglow, somehow (or was it a reflection?)
And a sudden rush of feelings took over. Flashes from the images seen on TV overlapping this monument that stood in front of me in flesh. Flames emerging out of that window, a hostage waving out from that window, a commando examining that window. Like it was still happening now.
A strong unison of voices and I was brought back to the present. The national anthem had started. “Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak Jaya Hai.. Bharat Bhagya Vidhata....”
Everyone stood still. Not because they were required to, but because they wanted to. The candles held up high in the air now, faces wistful, wishful even. A distant gaze at a future devoid of terror. A thousand lit minds. Hopes, optimism, drive, execution. A new found ability to question, to confront, to revolt too. To change. A congregation of minds that wanted change, that wanted to be the change. A cohesive force between us. A revolution underway. A movement as begun.
India’s own renaissance.
Birth place - Mumbai , 30th Nov’ 2008


image courtesy - yahoo/Assoc. Press
url - click here