Echo

Perched on a rock on a windy hill,

Under a clouded sky,

I over look a deserted foot path

And continue gazing at the grass,

Swaying in the light summer wind.

The trees dance, the birds rise

Singing a symphony, waking the wild.

A bush rustles, 

And the wild reverberates

Grunts and chirps of beings non human.

A voice pierces through the air,

I hear my name echoing from a distance

I turn around in awe, to find myself alone

Was I imagining the call, I ask myself

There was no answer there either.

I scan again, and see the wild undisturbed

And unconcerned with the echo of the voice.

It was your voice, I couldn't be more sure

I stand in doubt unable to move or leave.

And, it has been echoing, ever since.

From the Heavens

Staring into the dark,
Star-less night, under the apparent heavens
I imagine a star, shining.
Growing,
Turning into a familiar semblance.

Haunting dreams; fashion
Not blood-curdling, but calming.
Singing to my urchin self, sleeping in the dream
Lullabies,
Soothing me to an oblivious existence.

Waking to the crack,
Of white light, under the stated heavens
I rush to her, hurrying
Never,
Tiring on my journey over the usual distance.

Ordaining myself, not to,
I fall, like an angel from the heavens
Desire and lust, burning
And,
Liaising a need in my intrigued conscience.

A Process Too Complicated To Explain

This story begins somewhere between 18^th July and mid August 2011; well the accuracy of the date is neither a matter of importance or significance. The protagonist and the fact that she has no clue of being the lead in this really short story, (if one can call it a story) is what matters more. When this story began I was living in a tiny one room apartment, in a crowded suburb in South Delhi, hoping to shift to a better place soon.

The summer heat mixed with a hangover and my inevitable process of perspiration made me lose my slumber sooner than I had expected, and what I have left of that morning are vague memories. It was one of the first few days of Freshman Year at the university, when I had arrived early like my usual self in those freedom filled, hung over mornings, when I saw her shimmering in ethnic Indian attire. It could have been, a red ‘kurta’ with white prints or a white ‘kurta’ with red prints. I am not sure. This could be the result of not wearing my dorky spectacles or maybe because I was not paying enough attention. It was a fresh face that I had noticed and it was different, I looked at a friend of mine and we exclaimed in unison, “Russian”! “Idiots,” we exclaimed again when we realized that she was completely Indian, but lived somewhere in the Middle East.

Days passed, and I found my head turning towards her often, frequency increasing gradually, along with it the time period too. Confidence kept building as moments passed and turned to months.

Soon the year came to a close. Winter had set in and it was vacation time already. I was sitting uselessly on my desk at home, and i found my finger guiding the mouse on my computer to the tab, which had her mane on it, click-tap-tap-tap..., these noises resulted in Hello Arabian friend being typed on the chat window

Enter.

Thus began a short conversation over the internet, which ended on a casual note.

I did not pay enough attention to her existence, then.

Few months after the winter vacation, the exam fever gripped itself on most of us, and there she was, sitting, behind me in the examination rooms. Three hours of pain through every exam would have been impossible to bear without her presence, as I stole quick glances at what she was writing and her manicured fingers holding the pen at its throat choking the life out it, and the strands of dark hair falling over her visage. The number of facial glances per examination exceeded the number of glances at her answer sheets. She made a few quick glances at my answers too. Soon her presence in the exam hall took shape not only become what I looked forward to, as it was the nearest that I could be to her. It was after this exchange of glances, that a process too complicated to explain, began.

The new academic year 2012-2013 took off at such a slow pace that it crashed our flights instantly. This was difficult to cope with; our young minds were hit with a feeling of boredom and irritation at this crash. It was the announcement of a Literary Festival that saved me from succumbing to the boredom posed by the year. She was an active member in the organizing team, of which I was a part too. Work progressed and so did the process too complicated to explain. We talked more often; we skipped classes often, together. When we attended class, we did together too. This time I spent around her took me close to understanding her beauty, external and internal, and yes I am not talking about her inner anatomy, that would gross the fuck out of me, and I’d probably expel my lung in an act of vomit. I love my lungs, though I soak it in smoke periodically, but that is not the only reason why I am not talking about her anatomy.

The nervousness I feel around her is a better subject to deal in this story: at times my knees tremble and my feet intertwine; I picture myself with a knot instead of a pair of legs.

There was a day when I was trying to enjoy a tasteless meal in one of the cafeterias on campus, when she gracefully walked up to my table with a bunch of her friends, and alienated me from their conversation as I was again paying zero attention to sounds, transported to my silent vacuum with her in front of me, lips moving noiselessly, curving into smiles, laughs, frowns, I felt extra terrestrial. I kept chewing like a cow, but on the food that I had stuffed my mouth with. Three, four, five minutes, I can’t be sure, I had lost all sense of time and space, she was there for; before she stormed out in a random search for ice-cream when I realized that my feet were busy in their process of intertwining. I felt miserable as i swallowed ‘the cud’ that i had been chewing on.

The day before I transformed momentarily into a cow, I had gathered enough motivation and balls to ask her if I could take her to lunch during the weekend, the plan flopped and resulted into a breakfast which was shoved into darkness post the incident at the cafeteria where I turned extra terrestrial.

“There are storms, then darkness. But there is spring and light. And moving on through it makes life!”

She says.

Beside Her

Dark sharp hair,

Brown eyes tempt the living consciousness of mine;

To swim across the rivers of their flowing emotions.

In a drunken haze, in partial darkness that charm catches

My eyes, and I sat beside her with my feet intertwined.

Soft low voice,

A slight touch of our fingers, for a toke on the spiff

Left me longing, for an embrace, through the night.

Darkness grew on, and we danced further till we had lost it all

I tucked her in, and I sat beside her wishing it was winter time.

Crazy morning hair,

I found my mouth turning into a smile

Trying not to turn my gaze toward her, hopelessly

I continued to smile, and soon, we had to say goodbye

Until then, I sat beside her hoping it will all turn out fine.

The Wasp

A yellow, dull, buzzing wasp

Trapped between, a pair of window panes

Tries, harder, longer and increasingly

To make its way through the glass.

I feel like helping the creature

But the fact, the wasp is weak

Makes me seem wise and powerful

Yet I don’t care to help it pass!

My amusement stopped

The moment I moved the window pane

That yellow bastard stung my thumb

I cursed and thought, how dumb that was!

I saved its life

But in vain, for the idiot

Took its own, under my wrath

Assuming it would stop my trespass!

Ugliness

Our heads are bound to be twisted

Look at the human brain and its convolutions

What do you expect?

Ugliness in our thought processes are but inevitable

Not only because of the twisted structure

But also because of what we are fed,

Pre-conceived notions,

Lies, negativity, bribes.

All it does is enlarge appetite.

We transcend lower than the lowest beast

Continually, and when dead, 

We leave behind a history of nothingness.

I Bid Thee Goodbye

No, i don't want to leave
This town,
These streets covered in the canopy.
Of pine n fir
And the breeze so cold which carries stories untold
Water so clear, which to all is dear.
I must leave behind in the fear of another calamity,
Until i come back from the City.
O' Lord of the Monastery I prithee
Look over mother,
Keep her and them safe and happy,
The town still shakes constantly
Due to under terrain seismic activity.

No, i don't want to leave
This town,
These streets full of old memories
Of childhood, boyhood and youth.
And the spots where we cracked,
Where we laughed our hearts out,
Where we fell and ripped our jeans, and bruised our knees
All seem like yesterday

But no, its today
O' Lord of the Monastery I prithee
To bring back the moments to me
Let me relive them on this last day,
Before i return from the City.

I bid thee Goodbye
Mother,
I love you, you know
I bid thee Goodbye
I bid thee...






(Originally written on 27 December 2011, 3 months after the Earthquake at my home town, in Sikkim)

That Fair Maiden

That fair maiden
Stole my heart with nothing but her existance
Yes that look on her face, in her photographs
Oh, so serene yet so seductive
Tripped me off my feet
And i fell face first on the floral forest floor

How, i had known her
For twelve years while in the hill town
Another two years in the other hill town
And an additional two years in this metro-city
Never had I felt this need, this want, this desire, this lust, and this warmth

That fair maiden
Knows not how I wait for her to give me a buzz
And how different I feel for her
Whilst I was near her, for more than a decade
I never noticed her, her beauty, her aura, her sense, and her body

How i wish i could hold her
Till I felt her heart beating with the intensity as mine
Till I fell asleep on her breasts
Yes that pair, which holds the heart I want to steal,
Till i could whisper into her ears,
"Darling, let me take you on the path i tread with you in my dreams"

That fair maiden
I wish was here
And that fair maiden
I wish is always here

Random

(As the title suggests, this is a random short piece that has no reason, moral or even a story)

There is a really beautiful woman in a white kurta standing with an ugly old hag, perpendicular to my line of vision, wuhu… they are talking some non sense about some money transfer, I wonder why they are discussing money so formally. Is money that formal an entity, can one not do anything without money? I have a 20 buck note in my wallet today and I am content, it promises me a bus ride home and hardly anything else. That shitty one room apartment perched between the ground floor, which hosts a crappy restaurant run by the landlord’s loser son, and the upper floor where the loser lives with his drunken father, innocent mother and an abusive sister. Having travelled home, mentally, I am now back in the same conscious state that I was in when I started typing on my tiny keyboard, and I now see that woman sitting on the couch across the room fiddling with the locks falling around her face. I wonder again, has she taken a note of my eyes turning and relishing what it sees.

The old woman has lured her into her trap and brought her closer to herself. Her phone has been ringing for the past few seconds; it felt closer to a couple of minutes or more. She glides out of the room and I take quite some time to realize…

OH GOD, SPARE ME!!!

The devil himself would be a lesser trouble to handle than this.

Behold! The Slouch King, the Lazy Lord, of the realm of boredom has walked into the room and is now sitting beside me shamelessly with his clothes falling off his butter hands. His bag, a disaster, and he proclaims he has been everywhere and done everything damn thing, right from banging 60 women over a period of two months to teaching Europeans “How Indians Drink!” (he shouts at times, I am not really Indian I was born in Austria). Yet he is a nice person, who shares his lunch with wankers like me!

Four hours later

Swallowing lunch like a glutton, oily choley-bhature, on a flimsy paper plate, fighting for the laptops to be positioned away from the food, I tried to let the laptops remain where they were, but I failed with no remorse. We were a few minutes off schedule. Wafia ran down the ramp for no reason, and it still is a process too complicated to explain. She passed me a mint gum before we left for the appointment we were running late on. The mint gum drove away the odour of the spices in the choley, it seemed like spearmint but it was not really spearmint, it was a gum too complicated to explain too. She seemed Russian to me and a certain friend of mine when we had joined the university, our observatory (and, or physiognomy)skills weren’t strong enough probably. She told me that the office that we were sitting in has two air conditioners which is enough to cover an area twice the size of the area of the room. This is how random she gets usually, as a matter of fact one of the most random people I know.

Such a wonderful time we had with the “big guy” in his office, under the roof that harbours the administrative section of the university. His interview seemed in no way formal, perfect for the blog, that I am sharing the work of with Wafia. “HE” also made the group photo seem like a family portrait.

A meeting was scheduled at 3 pm, and when it commenced it looked like a random mob meeting under compulsion, everyone seemed to be busy, but I really couldn’t see the work that they were apparently doing. Time now to put an end to this nonsense.