Nearness of departure

He was a happy man. The kind of happy a man is when he pitches the tent right. He mowed the lawn at just the right time; he did not prioritize an afternoon nap and he had a timetable for emptying the dustbin. He did not quite complain when it rained on a picnic as long as he felt accomplished about the directions; he made his bed everyday right after he woke up and closed all the jars after he cooked, closed them all the way. He was an assured man. The kind of assured a man is whose life isn’t the sum of his anger or his failures.

But tonight a brand new feeling was about to temporarily fracture his orderliness. Especially the orderliness of his interior. A ceremonious dinner among the oligarchs called for a crisp suit he had neatly picked out earlier in the day. The flightiness of his cuff -links kept slightly bothering him but he let it not distract him much.

He had come to find comfort in his wife’s unstructured demeanour. He had acquiesced to the occasional ruffle of her pasty blue dress (a colour he was not particularly fond of). She barely combed her hair, she just threw them together. It mildly perturbed him; he measured his daily salt intake even. She used the word “love” way too oft; sometimes he hated when she ran the water a little too fast for his comfort (splashing droplets on the edges of the basin) and insisted on rolling the windows down while driving on the highway.

He watched her from a certain distance, her hair still wondrously held together by a flimsy clip. The tiny rivulets streaming along her champagne glass (he would have killed them with a coaster). And a closeness she exuded he had never seen before, as she talked to that stranger. Her eyes sparkled with the blissful longing like that of a postcard's. He liked to think she knew the stranger from her past, but his emotional arrangements stopped him from delving into possibilities. There was such careful aberrance to her body language, a musical irregularity in the bounce of her lashes and her fingers gently squashed the rivulets every now and then.

Krall’s Departure Bay played faintly in the back. The song had an entire season contained in it. An entire season of departure, detachment, disentanglement. He righted his cuff-links and quickly hid the doubtful looking water-circle with a coaster.

art - Diana Krall, Jazz Portriats, oil on canvas

artiste - Merryl Jaye

image url - here

The hitchhiker's guide to Faces.

To walk aimlessly in a city is one of the hardest things to do. There are heady pockets of people everywhere trying to recruit you into their march. You don’t want to come across as a gypsy indulging in a whim of wanderlust. The urban nation tends to outcast anything that is slow and desultory. I have submitted myself into believing that my little saunter must have a purpose too: Watching Faces. It is like launching yourself into the galaxy of faces looking for a hitchhike. A gamut of countenances; some engrossed in their occupation, some into their coffee and some astray. Hitchhiking through each other. Looking for a flitting shelter for that floating moment into each other’s visages.. some hostile, some unbolted.
I believe my countenance can be rather rigid. It is a testimony of all the years lived in the battlefield of an alpha city. Like the lover who learnt living through times of hatred. Like the façade of a quaint little café built to serve the soldiers of the war. Inside it is much too interpretable if not so from the outside. I believe I miss out on many the attempts of breezy pleasantries. I tend to be on a mission and perhaps I lose out on the finery of requests like an absorbed street musician. The carefully construed exterior renders me myopic. Maybe there is a soldier stranded out in the tempest waiting to be let in. I can use a small pit stop in my peregrination too. So next time when there is a cushy little knock on my façade; I am letting the stranger in with a welcoming smile like that brisk cream streaking across the surface of a warm cappuccino.

art title - Holocaust Faces, Jewish Museum, Berlin. artiste - Polaroids image url - here


P.S. when I fall in love, I will stop the frame, play this song and then continue in slow motion.

The compelling

She sat at the blurry end of the bar; sipping her dry Gin, dry as her ability to love, in tiny, erratically spaced intervals between her perfectly timed drags. She hid her face into the obliterating light away from the cheerful levity around her. She watched beams of fluorescent light merge and diverge, and converge back again. It was timed. Timed like her trysts with comforting strangers. A pattern to everything, planned and postulated, rehearsed and rerun. She takes a gander at her watch, 12.30am. “Here we go” she tells herself, addressing that irresolute part of her, which needed attendance.

She sometimes wished she was wholly consumed in industry, in a hobby or even the daily humdrum. She sometimes liked to bake (unremarkable tasting pumpkin muffins) and hated herself for constantly tasting the batter as she beat it. She washed dishes to cleanse herself off the crud of a recent unrequited romance and sometimes rested her head on the cabinet in front, closing her eyes in a blank reverie, while holding a dish as the water ran. She wondered if she looked clumsily distracted while she picked up the wrong cereal from the endless cereal aisle at the store (she loathed being clumsy). But the palm of mundane always failed to accommodate the sand of her waywardness.

Now here, in this dive, a conundrum of perfumes fills the already chaotic air with contemplation. Strangers stare at her and she stares back into their strangeness. The blaring noise helps her drown the concerns she usually battles with staring at the ceiling, lying in her big empty bed, which seems to get bigger and emptier at nights. She watches her legs, imperfect because they stopped short of the ground a little too soon, but she loves them, at least tonight, glistening and full of grace. She requests the night to be kind, in company or in idleness. If not calming, then numbing at the least. If not fulfilling, then terse at the least. Neon throws a smoke ball into a colored cloud and she watches it float and crash into a big man’s back. Crash and splatter into pieces, never to be put back together. She tries to ignore it; tonight she wants to be put together. Or be attempted at, at the least.

Soon someday she will be ready to learn of the power of  love but tonight she needs just the illusion of love. 

art title - Neon

artiste - The Abstract Art Store

url - here

The technicolour coat of passive optimism

The air these days is impregnated with anticipation and crispness. Hope floats, not just in corporeal hearts, but even those hibernating barks and boughs, heavenly dormant and silently breathing all winter, bundling up sustenance for a vernal celebration. I wake up to the twitter of an obscure songbird and not the hissing of congealed air. The windows clatter with the mirth of being released from locks, doors to the patio begin to get ready for the opening act of the season. The dreary yellow has started to hue a welcoming shade of green. Parks have begun to look more affable (the way squirrels have begun to look less timid).

When you open your palms and close them back, a fistful of air crumbles inside them. When you sigh a deep sigh, the essence of an impending bloom traps inside your nostrils. When you look towards the sky, clarity is strewn between the occasional cloud and the newly gathered sun. Orchestrated happiness befalls you. As much as you detest it, resist it, desist it, it wraps around the casket of your misery and penetrates so virulently, so helplessly, leaving you weak, at the hands of imposed, almost inflicted joy. Seasonal merriment dictates your pessimism. All you can do is lay back and slump inside your quilt of woven feelings and let this season of serendipity replace the scratchy cynicism that you have long been wearing to keep warm from the cold.

art title - Hope

artiste - Heidi Daley

image url - here