Bear

So I told him he is a bear. A grizzly bear. A chimpanzee. A moment metamorphosing into a memory. The mark on the wall. The you have made me happy but you still cannot save me. And he cried. Like confused urban rain in summer. Then he laughed. Like the waves hitting the rocks on the shore. A hearty laugh. A full laugh. A quietude which screamed. A very big toe and beautiful hands. Two tufts of hair sticking out awkwardly from the top of the temples.  

He crouched in a corner under the bookshelf. You will get a bump on your head, I said. He did not move. Put his arms around his knees. And then he said he was old, old and dying. Old but full of wonder. Wonder which was always stumbling into befuddlement. The wonder of a chimpanzee still adapting to human ways - unable to distinguish between glass and air. Hurting a nose he loves. Learning, still, to open a door. 

He sleeps under the stars and speaks poetry like a rhapsode. In the nightmares, they will break him. Turn him into a minotaur. But he will still crouch under the bookshelf. That is what minotaurs do when they fall in love. 

why do we write when we can scream?

I try to write but sometimes I cannot. When I can I feel myself locked up in a sense of language. What is sense and what is language I do not know. Why do I to write? There is no need to think of this as an exercise in my thoughts this song ended very abruptly but all that I know all that I feel sometimes is a need to go out of language and try to feel the way my perceptions turn into words or cannot. She tells me I should see patterns in things. I lie. She does not tell me so. Nobody tells me to see patterns in things in walls in the sweat I put on the walls of my little bathroom. I do not put sweat it is only water. But yesterday I saw a duck and a boy on the wall. I threw the water that ran down from the tap to my fingertips and then I saw them. The duck was behind the boy. Was it a boy? I cannot begin to look at this. Sometimes I try to read the way the fan moves above my head. And then I try looking at lizards. Lizards never scream they watch and they eat and sometimes they grow fat. She told me that she does not like homosexual hulos. But I do not know enough about them to comment. I look at cats and dogs and lizards and I try to see what they mean. I talk to dogs but then it frustrates me when they do not talk balk back. But when they do I know they are connected to me more than others. The pink elephant tries very hard to fit behind the sofa but it cannot. It is a balloon but it is still an elephant. And the sofa can never let anything hide behind. I still remember the day when he tried to kick her through the net. i wanted to kick him harm him tear his eyes out. I remember. But then I served him one fish and asked if he wanted more. I took my foot away I refused to kick I refused to put my stitched foot anywhere I refuse I refuse. She is still fat and she still calls me but I cannot forget the day she locked me out. Now she wants to be locked in but I do not want. I run. But even after she locked me out and locked that diary in I put my head on her shoulders when I was coming home. That night he put his hand under my head I do not remember very clearly how. I did not love him I cannot love him but I still love him. Sometimes I need to remember sometimes I force myself to remember sometimes I only nod and smile civil when I cannot remember but I try so hard to remember. I remember only one day when he took her out but they did not take me because I would ask for toys. i stood beside the door but I could not cry so I spit on my hand and rubbed that on my eyes I wanted to tell them that I was crying I wanted to and I was really crying but the tears refused they refused so much I used saliva. They saw me crying standing behind that door but still they would not take me but when they came back they had that toy I wanted for sometime. there was a girl she was thin and older and she told me that I must play cards with her. I told her a nasty thing to say but I do not remember anymore so she went away. She came back all the time. It was my birthday I gave him two cubes of the chocolate I had and at night he gave me something wrapped I knew it was a gift a very nice gift but not what. It was so well wrapped I started peeling it off peeling it off peeling it off till I saw two pieces. It was not broken but still it was two. I never felt sad when he died. But I rubbed talcum on his back and learnt stories. I sat beside the window and looked at them playing football I leaped on to the bed and leaped again to the chair and then it hurt so bad I was dying. Hospital but when I saw the doctor everything was fine no pain no pain anymore. That little room the size of a mattress and that woman who kept groaning cancer was eating her up and the man who reminded me of the hunchback of notre dame and how he looked at her when she took a bath she could not take her clothes off. One day I punched his back he said that he loves me so we walked in the rain we were soaking and we had some food and ran ran ran till we came home he was wet and he put out his wallet to dry all the money I looked and saw so much money but wet money. One day she came back home with many chocolates and a shirt I wore for many days till she took it away. When she wore my shirt the dog he barked and he was telling her to take off my shirt but nobody understood the dog and he kept barking and crying he wanted to see the shirt off her back but nothing happened. Finally she said that maybe it is the shirt she took it off and wore another shirt and he slept like an angel on the floor I patted him good dog but not so good he bit off some flesh he was sick and his intestines were coming out I cried under the shower. I cried under the shower. I cried under the shower. 

On the table, and in it.

So after experimenting with a whole range of new templates, I have settled for this basic black one. I am growing old, I think. In literature, music and art I am beginning to appreciate minimalism more and more. 


Now with all that gah is this reluctance to write. Maybe it is because nobody reads this blog anymore. I seldom come back to it. When I started this blog, it was about writing what I felt like and suchlike. But somewhere down the line, this blog, too, has become a performance. I think I always look for an audience. No matter how much I value inwardness. One part of me longs to creep into myself and never look out. The other part wants to be looked at while creeping in. And to admit this has taken some time and a lot of hibernation. 


But this rusty green iron table is not to be discarded, yet. 

2010. 2010. diabetes. no symptoms. something else?
everything sucks. i am singularly unfortunate. depression.

When all this ends.

I return to the rusty green table whenever I am clueless. It is like the old ignored piece of soon-to-be junk that you are too fond of to throw away. The last week has been absolutely crazy. One birthday, one suicide and one exam. This highly incongruous combination kept me busy.

The birthday was very nice and how much. The suicide was unnecessary and disturbing. The exam was difficult and absurd.

Then sleep deprivation. Five nights straight very little sleep, bad throat and complete mind-fuck was unbearable. And then I got 14 hours of sleep which made things so much better. As I write, I am searching for a snazzy new template for my blog. Something that looks impressive and serious etc. :P

In other news, I think I am finally out of a love. And it must do me good. But life is not so easy. I was thinking about one thing the other day. It seemed kind of crooked and freaked me out, but it made sense. Why do people end their lives when they are miserable? I think it is a better bet to kill yourself when everything is perfect. I, for one, always feel this anxiety about whatever happiness I have. I fear that one day the people who love me will stop caring about me. I fear mortality. Not my own, but of those I love. So I was thinking that it is actually a good idea to end your life when everything is fine. You can die happy, knowing that people love you, that the little illusion of a perfect universe that you have created around your head is still there.

Let us face it, all of us know that happiness is some kind of an illusion. Our romances, our friendships, our witticisms, our fixations, our principles... all these build up a nice happy universe which is so fragile that it can go POOF! with one blow. I fear that Poof more than anything else.

I know that my world is fragile. I don't know about your one, I don't know whether you have these anxieties or not, but I feel a sense of desolation each time I am very happy. I learnt my lesson the hard way when I was a kid. But I don't want my bubble to burst so bad again. So I want to go away when I am still cared for as a child, when my romance hasn't lost its glow, when my friends still find my jokes funny, when I am still important in my puny little world.

But then again, I can't be so selfish. And of course, I need to check out what life has in store. And right now it has a snazzy new template. So there.

Every time you say that you are scared, I feel a terrible, empty sadness and a sense of futility. You make a stranger of me. Would you do the same if I were your own?

ivory bridges.

Hemen died yesterday. And with him died a generation, an institution and a kind of life that I can never relive again. Hemen was important in ways that most of the people today do not even know. In his little shop in Deshapriyo Park, he quietly practiced a craft that was perhaps destined to die.

It was his suggestion that made me include an extra string on my instruments for better resonance. He carried with him the aura of the lost world of sage musicians and winter evenings.

His ear for music was a famous one, yes. The first time I went to his shop was when I threw a fit for a Sarod. I wanted to play the instrument when I was three years old (that was when I started going to my Guruji’s place). I was too young to even hold a Sarod, so Hemen made me a little one. It is probably lying in some corner of a house. Instruments need regular playing to mature. I know it has lost its voice by now. I played that one for five or six years, until it became too small for me. Still, my toy sarod, which did not even have ivory bridges, I remember its characteristic sound. It was what I will now call ‘chapa’. I smile when I remember the mock serious tone of that instrument. Not being a full sized one, it did not have the characteristic ‘gambhirjyo’ of a Sarod. But it was my first instrument. With whose touch I learnt sa re ga ma pa.

And now, old Hemen is no more. And that world is no more.

The only world to which I feel I belong. That old world where people play Sarod for hours. Where music and whiskey flow with the ease of a maestro's meend. Where life is a celebration of sorrow. Where music is instilled within the nerves of people and bricks of houses. Where the sun rises only to the strains of Bhairav. That world where we do not run. Where people understand, from within, the true meaning of ‘thehrav’. Where mindless speed is considered to be as immature as the anxious expenditure of the nouveau riche. My obscene, elitist, decadent world. My delicate, inebriated, exquisite world.

I languish in this unreal space instead. Marveling at my mediocrity. I split into two.

But Hemen is dead. Ali Akbar is dead. That world is dead. My past is dead.

And I have a lute of wood at a corner of my room that sings no more.