Inebriation

I lift my lashes
carrying the weight of a hundred dreams,
loaded with unspeakable fantasies,
adorned with flowers of desire
laced with luscious little plans
I lift my lashes, to look at you

oh! What I see in your eyes
is a look to match mine
the eyes of a loving opponent
challenging, luring, warning
dark secrets and darker promises
lurking in the shadow of your lashes
an unsaid confession
brimming in the twin seas of love

soon, our eyes get locked in an embrace
hooked in a dizzying stare
the world around us spins
flowing between our eyes
is a river of love

the eyes start talking
love talk
nude, hungry, passionate
intoxicating
a fire glazes our eyes
as the rest of us melts in the heat
and dissolves in the kernel of our eyes

a sinking heart
an unhinged head
a wobbly knee
and drunk eyes

…call out to you

In a land far away from our reach
beyond space and time
our eyes are seeing, and doing
wild acts of love…

militant eyes

Unannounced
Unexpected
and
totally unwarranted

your earthy eyes flash before my face
stunned,
I hold my heart from breaking
and my throat hurts
and a knife slices my back

Flashes merge in a film
your eyes first
pure as a stream
the color of earth
love longing and loyalty
mixed in the sphere of your eyes
my then world

then your laughter
child-like but bold
loud and ringing
often breathless
in which we’d swim through life
in perfect sync

your speech, aah those words!
of rebel and truth
jagged, serrated, hitting.
as you mercilessly
and thankfully
opened the gates of wisdom
of searching and quest
to my ignorant mind

and made me me.

As I sit today
Looking back on life
I laugh
Inadvertently, meaninglessly
The paths we choose
The roads we dismiss
The persons we become
The ideals we aspire
I laugh at them all
At myself

For I know nothing.

Dance

I do not know how I came to love it. What I know is that it is life to me.

It’s an escape. It’s a quick route to trance. It’s oxygen when I’m breathless. It’s love when I’m lonely. It’s laughter when I’m torn. Food when I’m famished. Silence in crowd. Stillness in motion. Magic in madness.
I could say a hundred things that it is, but not a single thing it is not. It is THAT close to my life. Someone said it’s a silent poetry. So damn right. And so damn incomplete.

Try dancing. I don’t know if that happens with you, but I can vouch for myself. See me dancing if you doubt my claim. So, try dancing. It can start from the tap of your thinking feet or the electric spasms in your fingers. Give it a chance, let it flow. Let it flood your veins. Feel it in your gut. Hear the music reverberate in your brain. Experience the gush of energy. Don’t stop it, don’t disturb it. You don’t even need to mould it. Stupid, bold, shy, uncouth, free, loud, slow…just anything. All you have to do, is let it be. And before you know, you will be dancing in full blood. You will feel your body sway with the melody, rock with the drums, and flirt with the strings. You will forget the last bad thing that happened with you. Sour relationships will fade away in the realm of forgiveness. Happiness will overwhelm you…and you will want to treat the world and its people in an all new way – sweet and loving. You will cherish yourself, and everything around you, more valuably than you generally do.

Life comes up brimming when you dance.

It’s not about public appreciation. It’s not about an audience. Definitely not about exercise. It’s about the spark in your eye. It’s about the ride of your senses. The jump of your spirit. The thrill in your veins.

Dance. The speech of my body.
Dance. The love of my life.
Dance. The prayer of my soul.

you brought me me

You brought me books
of poets and lovers
of wind earth and sky
and all that it covers

you brought me thoughts
from the lands of war
stories of love and loss
from territories within and far

your brought me wonders
as simple thoughtful gifts
how easily you understood me
an old book as one sifts

you brought me expressions
of what love can endure
of longing's heartfelt cry
of tears deep and pure

you brought me a person
unbiased and true
love, romance and friendship
unexpected, out-of-blue

above all you brought me
love - full and free
your acceptance of me complete
you brought me me.

Quco!

There’s a new product in the market. Quco.
It makes your hair smell good enough to make men consider you f$*ckable.
The advertisement doing rounds for Quco is incredibly insane. A diffident young girl walks down the corridors of her college with diminishing confidence as boys (and girls) remark disdainfully on her face: ‘Isko pata nahin hai’. Moved to the point of tears, the near-harassed girl beg...ins to wonder what’s so monstrously wrong with her. She hesitantly begins her own inspection by smelling her armpits, when suddenly, the crusader-of-solutions, the harbinger-of-hope, the seller-of-love, the buyer-of-freedom…the super advertisor asks her to STOP! “The smell is not there baby”, he reassures her. It’s your hair – he points out.
Once the girl gets to know the secret of lubricating male gonads, she is seen happily (and guess what, even confidently) strolling arms in arms with a guy.
The mission of her life accomplished.
In normal circumstances, and not in a marketing/ advertising warped time of ours:
1. The girl would have shot back at her snickering colleagues asking them to go home, and smell their socks.
2. She would have known that her worth was to be determined by the depth of her character, the width of her knowledge, the quest of her soul…and not by some perfume/ dress/ make-up that anyone can buy off the counter.
3. She would continue to live her life happily and confidently even it meant a little grime and some dust here and there, if that be the cost of her freedom.
4. She’d know that any man who intends to ‘customise’ her or doll her up is anyway not worth having.
5. She would spit in the eye of the marketer of this entire farce of de-odorised, hairless Barbie version of women; for she knows too well that the bugger is trying to manipulate people’s preferences rather than merely responding to them – all at her physical and emotional cost.
6. She’d throw the notion of conventional ‘beauty’ down the drain, knowing well that if she acquiesces silently to this dangerous ploy, one of these days…they will come to her selling pills to perfume her shit and magic potions to colour her urine.
Quco – The new level to which our marketers have stooped.
Oh! Ayn Rand! Is this the kind of capitalism you fought for?
Tell me not.

The House

There is a huge House (read organisation).

Different people in the House are responsible for different functions. Someone takes care of cleaning and hygiene, another person looks after all the purchases, a third is responsible for maintaining the kitchen and taking care of the nourishment of its residents, another one tends to the garden and sells its produce, someone for upkeep of library…and so on and so forth.

There are way too many people in the House. To accommodate them, apparently gainfully, each person is headed by a series of bosses. The work is still done by the same person to who the job is assigned, but added to her burden of work, is the pain of reporting to and acquiescing with the whims of her seniors. More often than not, it involves writing lengthy reports, making powerpoint presentations, and creating complicated excel charts for most commonsensical things. After all, the seniors and the seniors of seniors need to do something!

Alienated with the real taste of field work, seniors of the House have no idea about executing the work they head. Sequitir, the super seniors know even less. Fancy reports, loaded jargons, petty egos and pastime politics make way into their heads, bloating them up like hot-air balloons, flying high and full of gas, prone to shrink and fall at the slightest prick.
All in all, it’s a perfectly systematic (if not efficient) House that runs on dint of tradition.

All is well until change happens.

The person responsible for cleaning, Ms X, informs her bosses that the existing maid’s term of one year has come to an end and she needs to hire a new one. Ms X is happy at the prospect of getting a new maid, since the current one barely does the needful. She swans around all day spitting on the same floor that she is supposed to clean. Ms X can’t fire her because Rules of the House are painfully stringent. In the time and energy Ms X will invest in firing her unruly maid, she will herself clean the House ten times over day after day for decades to come. Ms X puts up with the old maid, doing all the cleaning herself, waiting for the D day to happen.

By now, Ms X knows the contours of the House like the back of her hand. Having dirtied her hand in cleaning, she understands what it takes to be a good maid. She researches about the work of maids in other Houses, talks to scores of maids and their employers to understand best practices, discusses the needs of other working people in the House and spends days toiling to raise the bar to such a grilling level that only the best can fit her bill. With all her energy, love and passion, she floats an advertisement for a new maid.

Guess what?! The impossible happens! A maid with flawless credentials turns up for the job. Ms X can’t stop beaming! She is sure that the new maid will take care of the cleaning and leave her with enough time for other Household chores.

The story begins here.

The fact that Ms X has done something good and important for the House leaves a few of her seniors feeling emasculated. Though she has consulted her line of seniors, at least ten of them, the seniors of OTHER work areas aren’t too happy. They are angry. They want to talk. For that is all they do. How could Ms X not take my opinion in this job? Is the question that affronts them. They know that they know nothing about cleaning. They also know that Ms X knows that they know nothing. But then, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.

Dying to find a topic to ventilate on, the seniors catch hold of the advertisement floated by Ms X for the new maid. Slavering at this new found opportunity, they talk to their gut’s satisfaction. They talk till their constipation is cured and insomnia subsides. They shout on top of each others voices setting benchmarks in one-upmanship. They tear apart the old advertisement to pieces, and float their own improvised (read preposterous) version of the ad. Based on that, they choose a maid. They sigh with relief. The same kind of relief that people get from breaking wind. Content with their doing, they drink and dine their way back to their secluded air conditioned balloons.

One month later:

Ms X is now a haggardly woman, no longer an enthusiastic young lady. She is bent over all day over the floor, sweeping and swabbing it. The new maid comfortably sits on a sofa, sometimes also on Ms X’s back, and hogs bananas. For fun, the new maid often stands on a table and aims to piss at the farthest corner of the House. At this, Ms X sobs, but can’t do anything more than clean. Much to Ms X’s consternation, the new maid often plants a kick on her ass when she tries to remind her of her job. Gulping tears of frustration, Ms X goes about cleaning the House with the same efficiency as the new maid craps all over it.

Seniors in the House are too busy to care. They are busy breaking wind over the gardener’s job these days.

Fear

It was the second time I felt it of late. That four letter word. Fear.
I was reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee. All I knew that it was well past 11. I know this because I was quite sleepy, but determined nevertheless, to finish off the last few pages. Absorbed in the scene where Lurie is injecting deadly needles in the veins of hapless animals…I first felt it was some sort of a stir within my mind. That’s when I heard the bed (on which I was sitting) thudder against the floor. Damn it. It was an earthquake. I immediately stood up, a little unsteady. Sounds from kitchen, clink-clank of steel utensils shifting to find a new balance, corroborated my fear.

My first instinct was to run and wake up my parents. Save them. The blood in my legs curdled. They felt like trunks too heavy to move…no longer a voluntary body part…oppressingly adamant.

In the few seconds that the quake lasted, I imagined waking up my parents and rushing them downstairs to the open park in our society. As if I was their parent. Curious, how crisis brings out the parent in us. But wait, what was I supposed to do with my 92 years old grandmother? Someone who barely walks. Who can only manage a doddering few steps to the washroom leaning on her walker. Images of I and papa mounting her on a chair and struggling to carry her downstairs crossed my mind. Thinking all that, in split seconds, my body had stiffened and my heart was drumming so hard I could feel every tremor…both inside and out.

Seconds later, the quake died, but the feeling remained. An overpowering sense of helplessness. A question looming large: What if?

-------------------------------

Another incident. Far greater in severity. Nauseating in effect.
I came back home around fifteen minutes from 8. Excited to see the kids. Didi was home with her two little devils, and I couldn’t wait to mess with them! Too bad, they were out to the market. Later, I was to thank life for not keeping them around in that hour.

Washed clothes, took bath, and got ready for dinner chores. Began serving dinner. Seated in the drawing room, as usual, were papa, bhaiya and aaji (my grandmother). Glued to Discovery channel. I was getting back to the kitchen when papa and I started chit chatting about something…as always, he was making some witty remarks (he has the best sense of humor in the world!), and I was laughing away like a neurotic when the disaster fell.

With no prior indication, no sign at all, with a crudeness and suddenness ranging between outrageous and tragic…the huge glass chandelier of the drawing room fell. Since I was the only one standing behind it, I saw it falling. An earth-stopping grand sight it was. The shiny glass structure, with multiple ornate lamps, coming down in its full shape. More like descending than falling. As if on will. Call it reflex action, I stepped back in horror. Till date, I don’t know whether to be guilty or feel fine, because if I had not stepped back, one of the arms would have hit me. Cut me. I know I could not have averted what happened…two seconds are not enough to strategise a reaction…but if I had dared to change the path of that mammoth structure, it might have landed on my skull.

This is the justification I give myself for not being able to help Aaji. When the darned thing came down (I swear I had vehemently argued against buying one, just like I had argued against getting tiles laid – both to no avail), so when the chandelier fell, one of its five designer fangs hit my aaji’s shoulder. Barely escaping her head. Time froze. We froze. When the structure hit the floor, it shrieked in a most indescribable way. The floor turned into a sea of shimmering mess.

Aaji let out a brief yelp. That’s when we realized that she’d been hit. Dodging glass pieces, we rushed to her. We saw no cuts. And then, in a perfectly synchronized manner, blood started streaming from places all at once. Her neck, her shoulder and her middle finger. All on her right. In no time, drops of squeamish red started painting her tunic. The rusty smell of blood filled the room.

Without exchanging words, action began. I ran to find dettol and cotton…first went to the bedroom, then bathroom, then bedroom, then bathroom…dammit…I was losing my head. I went to the bathroom for a third time and picked up the kit with trembling fingers. Got cotton from ma’s almirah. An unusual calm started dawning on my head. I wanted to cry. I wanted to act. I wanted to move faster by my body betrayed me. My stomach was a knot and my heart was all lump. I remember how my head was spinning and how I thought I will faint. ‘Be brave…be brave…it’s time to act and not cry’ is what some alive part of my subconscious kept telling me.

I kept my balance holding aaji’s chair, staunching the blood on her neck and shoulder while bhaiya worked on her finger, the nastiest of all. All the cuts were bad. Puffs after puffs were getting drenched in blood. I thought I will puke and pass out. I sat down on my knees, while still holding on to the wound. Thinking of rushing her to the hospital, I called a doctor cousin. Explained to him as best as I could, in a cracking voice and dizzying sense. He explained me the course of action in clinical clarity.

Clean the wound with dettol. Staunch the blood. If the cut is deeper than some millimeters (he specified a number I cant remember), then rush her to a hospital. If she gets unconscious with pain, hospital again. But if she is talking and blood gets staunched within half and hour (half an hour? she could bleed herself to death I felt like saying…but he knew better) then treat her at home. Apply some cream after that. Wash with some solutions. A few more instructions along with all that. My memory of that day is an ugly blur. I don’t remember the specifics, but I remember every turn of my innards.

Over with the call, I sat down holding my head, on the brink of an implosion. Then got back to business as usual. Tried inspecting the ‘depth’ of her cut. Thought I will faint again. But I guess we are more resilient than we think we are. Within twenty minutes, blood had stopped. Aaji was going to live. A glow of relief swept our house. A strange mix of fear and euphoria. I observed, ma, papa, bhai and i…had our eyebrows knit in the same way.

Later, we collected shards of glass from unreachable corners of the drawing room. It took me days to collect my own pieces though.

Fear of death. The worst, maybe the worst, of all fears.