Coma

I think a writer is as good as his words, within those words he exists and ceases in their silence. I think I have been silent for awhile now, longer than a while actually. I think, had I been you (and I am indulging in the assumption that you who used to read, are still reading me), I would have safely assumed that these pages will see no more words.

But sometimes the life-support does manage to coerce life into an otherwise comatose existence. Sometimes nerves fire up in an atrophied system, fingers twitch - first a little and then a bit more , finally getting up to do an unsure jig on a forgotten keyboard.

I have been lost in excel sheets, and powerpoints and a tad bit more on the parallel life. I have been left without stories in a city that spoilt me, always with choice, rather than paucity. I have been lazy, and I have been blind.

Now, I choose not to. Instead, I open my eyes.

Hoping that this isn't like one of those new year resolutions that I never take, knowing that they wont last. And that these rains will still inspire and seep into the dried mud of my mind, blooming into lines that carry some finite meaning. Like yesterday when I saw a big rainbow stretch itself along the rainwashed Rajkot-Ahmedabad highway. Each of its ends resting on the bare brown soil, and yet taking nothing away from its blatant beauty.

When I have nothing more, I fall back to songs. Today this is apt.

TIME -Pink Floyd

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say.

Like they say here in Gujarat, Bhale Padharya. (WELCOME!)

The Best Love Story

The best love stories have the biggest complications, and that is what makes them so endearing. They are made bigger by the fact that true love survives it all. That they are not just the inheritance of the Chopra's or Miramax Films. but more common, more everyday, more just-around-the-corner and yet elusive.

They haunt you even after the music has passed its crescendo and died, when you are scuttling out of the darkness, your fingers unconsciously hugging yourself, while the sweeper-boys wait in the aisles to clean up the litter you leave behind - popcorns, paper cups, some loose change, maybe more. What they cant collect are your bum-impressions on the velvet seats and the dark marks on the armrests where hushed tears were wiped. What you will overlook is the greatness of love, when it comes to facing its hurdles.

They linger after you have turned over the last page, exhaled that long drawn breath, run your fingers over the back cover and warmly pressed the spine in your palms. When the fresh smell of the print has faded, and the pages show edges roughened by passages read more than once. What those words can't articulate are the goosebumps on your skin, and the slight spilt second smiles that play truant on your lips while you live the saga within. What you can't collect is the pain that has to be paid as a price for every letter of the word romance.

They replay in your head after that story telling session is over and your friends then-excited voice has segued into the colorless hum of silence. When you can just close your eyes and recall every word as it was said, painting each vignette of the story in a different shade of love. What that evening will not contain are your sighs of yearned vicariousness, where you wanted to be the protagonist and just possess that story. What you will not remember is that those who lived to tell the tale sometimes do have a different version of their own.

Every story can be great, one has to be willing to pay the price, of living it for oneself, of facing the encumbrances and yet having the courage to hold on, while others will let go. To risk it all for one, the one that you are saving should be worth your everything. You can have that great love story. My question is, do you want one for yourself?

Practically...

I decided.
Decided what?
I am leaving you?
WHAT? What was that?
I AM leaving you.
For who? That, that stupid pin-doll colleague of yours?
Yes, her.
Are you crazy??? What do you see in her, what does she have that I don't?
Its not about what she has, it’s about what she does.
Does? What does she do with you? What does she do that I don't, or that I can’t?
She laughs at my jokes.

CUT! PACKUP.

*fade in*

It's weird. The way the thought develops, builds layer by layer, in subconscious surfaces, and finally snowballs into dimensions that surprise you. I had picked up the paper knife to cut open a manila envelope. The subtle sound of the blade as it ripped apart the paper fibers, gliding its way across like a prize surfer on waters coupled with the liquid vision of the postcard yellow paper that sliced letting the mosaic on the floor to seep through, created a strange concoction in the mind.

This bloomed into the idea of the suave steel taking a lazy walk along the skin of my inner wrist, of letting its feet sink into the greenish blue footpaths of my veins and painting it in red tentacles that spread in liquid fractals across the criss-cross wrinkles. My thumb voluntarily skimmed the edge of the sharp blade in rapt admiration of its edge, like one touches the skin of the beloved to confirm that she is really there, like when you suddenly find your fingers caressing the cold wetness of the lake as your boat glides through. I did not know when it was done. All the while I wondered, why doesn't the pain register?

I never got the answer.

*fade out*

Stone

This sculptor fell madly in love with a princess. For six years he carved her statue out of the marble summit. When presented, she exclaimed, 'Oh! But it has only one expression'. Hearing that he jumped into the valley.

Then when the clangs of the chisel had died, he too was left with one expression.

Offerings...

My heart was like the emptiness of the 7:10 local to VT on a summer saturday eve. That day there was not much of a crowd and I managed to get a seat by the window on the far side of the platform. He sat facing me with his back leaning on the walls of the bogey. His head rested on the edge of the window. Wind brushed his unkempt hair as the train crossed the Vashi border and sped up towards the creek. It was a windy day, the waves crashed against the pillars, dying in white foam.

In my bag I had her pictures and the idols from the little temple she'd set up back in the small shelf of our living room. You don't keep the things of the dead they say, but offer them to water which somehow carries them to their yonderland of rest. I gave her pictures a last look and surrendered them to gravity. An unknown tear tore its way through my reserve and slid down the eyes. As I rushed to wipe away the trail of its existence, I found his jaded brown eyes looking at me, with a question marked in the matted dust of his gaze. ‘My wife, she's...’, I said. He said nothing, no words escaped his mouth, no contour of his face changed, but his eyes sank back in resigned recognition.

The idols were sticky out of years of basking in the vapors of her oil lamp, the same lamp that burnt beside her pyre. For the last time I raised the small plaster-of-paris figurines in my hands, touched them with my forehead before putting them to rest in the waiting waves. Outside the window, on the other side of the bridge, I could see the land rise up from the claiming waters.

That's when he got up to walk towards the exit. He must have been at the door when I felt his hand gently squeeze my shoulder; his grasp said ‘I know’ without uttering a word. Then he jumped. As the bogey pulled itself out of the bridge, I could see the soggy pictures bobbing on the surface of the water in the shroud of a white foam. The dust of his weary eyes would have been washed by the sea. Then everything was still.

Christmas Blanc...

His eyes caught her as she walked nimbly like a stray cat through the crowded main market street of McLeodganj. In the land of the lamas, amongst the saffron and maroon robes and the five color prayer flags that dispersed the silent chants of Om Mani Padme Hum into the breeze, her dirty black sweatshirt with muddy canvas shoes provided a natural contrast. So much so that her feline gait, her messy tousled hair, and the serpent of bluish white smoke that crawled about her into the clear mountain air were all reduced to accessories of attention. Remove all of them and even then she'd catch your eye. She, the odd one out.

He was on his way to the café that overlooked the valley, from where you can sit in the clear Christmas air with a steaming cup of cinnamon sprinkled cappuccino and gaze below at the small town of Dharamshala, and the Bhakhra Reservoir in the distance. Having finished his orange-rind muffin and 2 cups of coffee, he moved to the bottle-green benches that lined the road to the Monastery where the Lama stayed. Sitting there in idle abandon he watched the people in flux. It was only when the sun had decided to scatter itself on the snowy rocks of the Dhauladhar that he saw her again. Sipping the steaming soup of Goats Hoof that they suffuse with generous dollops of green coriander and black pepper along with a dying cigarette in her left hand, she was a picture of irony. A group of monks in their sandal incensed robes and their hands rotating the small prayer wheels passed, when he looked again she was not there.

He walked back to his room in the hotel. After the altercation with the hotel manager when he refused to provide a heater in the room, his ego resigned himself to make do with the blankets. To fight the cold night till sleep took over he huddled himself and ran through the day within his mind. And every time his thoughts came back to the girl in the dirty black sweatshirt emblazoned with the initials of his school. He was thinking of what she would be doing at that very moment, perhaps sitting out in the night staring at the three quarters of moon with another cigarette in her smokey fingers, but then sleep took over.

The next day he set off on a 20km trek to Triund; a place above the timberline, still covered with pristine white snow. He had a bus to catch that same evening to return to his cubicle the next morning, and so he didn't want to delay. Once on an earlier trip he was forced to return after having been almost there. This time he decided to reach the top. After 3 hours of walking through the crawling trail that made its way across stone, mud, slush and melting snow; he saw her again.

Just outside the en route cafe MidWay, she sat on the grass at the slope of this mountain that fell straight into a valley below. Her back resting against a rock, a thick glass tumbler of extra sweet milky chai to her right, blowing smoke rings at the landscape ahead that made McLeodganj a piece of elaborate miniature painting, she looked at him looking at her. He smiled and waved his hand, she raised her eyebrows in a symbol of recognition. He walked up to her and recognised the sweet smokey smell of grass that surrounded her like the mists covered these rocky hills. Bending down he asked if he could have a drag.

Two plates of noodles, 6 cups of chai, and 3 joints later he realised that it was time to return and he did not even know her name, or what she did, or where did she come from. But he had told her about how he had to run away every few months to come here, just to be with himself. And she had looked at him with empathetic eyes, and a smile that let out little clouds of smoke while the dry twigs of grass danced with the breeze in her disheveled hair. He wanted to find out about her. He wanted to know her story. About what brought her here? About why she wanders alone in these streets, with her head filled with the numbness of a sweet smelling smoke? Yet, he knew he would not ask, and that she would not tell.

It was time to leave. He got up and looked at the peak which was still left behind. Untouched. She sat at the same place, letting the sun bathe her as it started its descent from the skies. He thanked her for her company, to which she didn't pay any attention. And so he asked when did she graduate from the school. She turned around and looked at him, her wide dark and tired eyes questioning his question. He pointed at the sweatshirt, she looked at the once white letters and let out a dismissive laughter.

'Got it for 50 bucks off the footpath from CP'.

He shrugged his shoulders as an amused chuckle slipped out of his mouth and rolled down without a sound into the valley below. He started to walk back to the bus-stand in McLeodganj. There was a long journey ahead.

The last that he remembers of her, is not her face or her voice, but the sun streaming down on her sallow cheeks as she rolled another joint.

Note: Started this on 26 Dec 2007, completed only today.