Loneli

I was lonely, so lonely that the electronic relay of your disembodied voice, from your distant body, and apparent non-existence of your fire was so painful. I couldn't pick up your call. I was so deep in loneliness, that my chill breath was enough to freeze any vestiges of warmth that you might have puffed through the plastic earpiece.

I was a rock in my lonely need. But had it been a mood with the differentiation of a few degrees, I would have thought of running to you.
And then I would have thought of how. And the walk. And the train. And the long, long time, the waiting and sitting in a compartment so full of cross-purposes; noisy with the silence of too many preoccupied heads, trying to reassert their intentions in their own domains… i would have drifted. The currents would have pulled me away from the burning piece of flotsam in the oil-slick sea of that different, imagined loneliness.

And all in all, my offer of a distant, wispy smile, after you sliced your loveful way through strange humanity… Would have made you wish it was an electronic laugh drained through a plastic earpiece.

Tummy Ache

Sunlight glinting off the clear glass jug of lemonade pierces my eyes. My father waves at me, but I’ve already turned back to the shade. For a few seconds, I'm light-blind. I squint and slide my hand across the cool, deep grass. Fingertips touch the hem of Purvi’s skirt; I get up on all fours and shift closer to her. Her school uniform is crumpled and grass-stained – she’s always been such a slob. 

I start sticking dry ochre leaves into her baby fine wavy hair. She’s probably an elf with her pointy little ears, skin like cool, damp mud, and delicate birdlike bones. Or simply a bird. When we were younger, I used to tell my mother that Purvi turned into a sparrow and flew away every evening. Look at her now – her high cheekbones glistening with sweat, small thin hands fluttering on the grass, and her growing, ridiculous, adorable belly. 

She whispers something I can’t catch. I tilt her chin so that she’s facing me. She screams – long, and shrill. Her parents and mine rush at us from the veranda. Someone topples the jug of lemonade, and for a moment, the wet grass sparkles like broken glass. 

***

She’s still screaming as we sit huddled in the back seat. She’s squeezing my hand, and I'm so glad she wants me. A few minutes from the hospital the little bird has exhausted herself. This is how she is, she suddenly builds up to an explosion and falls back, utterly drained.

***

The white hospital corridor turns into a tube of speculation as we wait for the doctor to return. Food poisoning? Amoebiosis? At one point, Purvi’s father asks me if she’d swallowed a G.I. Joe, and I tell him she stopped doing that 9 years ago. Anyway, she would only gobble the heads. I think of how the toy heads are only a little smaller than a sparrow’s eggs.

The doctor returns, his face blank and frozen. We all look at the offering in his outstretched hands. My father faints, and so does Purvi’s mother. I take the ugly, wriggling red monster into my arms. I wonder if girls are called daddy, too.

Writers are crazy

(Old post)

If you think you’re a writer, the most dangerous thing you can do is a necessity. You must read others. Read the greats that have gone before, and read the goods you would look in the eye if they weren’t racing so far ahead.

A little reading leaves you feeling pleasantly buzzed, like a couple of beers on warm afternoon over light banter with a non-judgemental friend. It’s something you can go home and write about in your journal, and add a smiley face at the end of the entry even. The whole activity feels really healthy.

A moderate amount of reading can prop you up. Like that cheap coffee table with a short leg, that’s balanced on top of two second hand paperbacks. It makes you critical. It makes you imagine your mirror image looking back at you with great brown wings, a golden beak and a mad swiveling beady bird eye. You feel like you can tower about all those lowbrow peers of yours, when you’re actually standing tip-toe on your brains to achieve an illusion of height. You know enough words by now to be able to call yourself descriptive. Grammar and editors don’t scare you shitless, words don’t make you neurotic. Creation doesn’t make you euphoric. It makes you smart.

A lot of reading… OK, hold on because this is where you begin to go crazy. The roller coaster’s seat belts snap and you find the damn machines roaring down a convoluted rail, definitely not the same, sane one you espied while shifting from foot to foot on solid ground. The Books are all over your room now. You can hear them crawling around at night. In your head, of course. Words take on the dimension of a fragile glass with some very, very combustible substance inside. They’re pretty, and really fascinating too. But spooky as hell. So, it’s like you’re possessed. You must have more of these strange things, because you’re addicted to them by now. But they’re of so many bloody kinds, they make you feel really inadequate. You spend hours in your own head, frantically making more of these glass bombshells, trying to arrange them in the most explosive way possible, and running out in the middle of it all to see what others have done/are doing, how close are they to exploding in your face, oh hell, you need to get back.. make More More More!

Are you going crazy, yet?

Resuscitating the Writer

When I write my autobiography several decades later, or maybe next week, I'll make sure to add a few pages on how to reclaim youth wasted by delusions and dreams. Right after the chapter on my rude awakening.
So Yes, I was immature. And Yes, I was being a coward. And YES, I'm lazy. But I'm willing to cut myself some slack, because look - I'm suffering for it now, okay?

Now let me paint you a portrait of the artist as an uninspired, sadly regular young woman -

Things were not going as expected. She had completely side-stepped the trial by fire, the stormy lunches with her parents, and suicidal tendencies. It was disappointing, because she was getting good at those, and had come prepared for them. Posterity would blame it on Murphy, and woe how utterly uninteresting the next chapter in her life promised to be. Its working title was 'The Time of No Shenanigans or The Advent of the Good Girl'. She was afraid even her word processor would breakdown from sheer boredom. But purgatory wasn't even a smidgen of mud on the horizon.


Alright, enough. Any more and I'll cry. So here's the quick and dirty - I've screwed up, and after watching me give stellar screw-up performances, my parents have decided to intervene. The Reformation has begun. And the beginning lies in trying to figure out what the hell I want in life (apart from a lot of money, and coffee). Something must also be said of the the Reclamation bit, because that's the bit that'll be hitting you in small, smelly, gooey bits. Unexpectedly. It has wings. I'm talking about reclaiming the writer-persona, and picking up wordcraft with a vengeance. Weapons of choice are my blog, and Tyrannosaurusy word doc that'll be my NaNoWriMo novel's nanny.Yep, I'm taking part in NaNo third year in a row, and this time it's to win, baby!

I will also be plotting secret shenanigans, and adopt a secret identity to give these nefarious plots life, so you can stop crying now.

Alchemy of Desire

A very desirous read. I reached the half mark in the 500+ pages book last night, forcing a sleepy, weary, and guilty me into the wee'st hours of the night. Guilty, why - my end of term exams start tomorrow.

If there's one thing I love about exams, it's how I always manage to dig out a riveting serial, an addictive series of books, or even a single unputdownable book just before they're about to start. And then I make it/them last right until I have the freedom to study anything but course material.

This time, it's Tarun J Tejpal's Alchemy of Desire. The book's less of a tome, and more of a siren call I tells ya. When I casually dumped it into my shopping basket a week ago, I didn't even find the blurb very interesting (I'm a blurbaholic). Someone had been raving about the book sometime back and I decided to give it a shot since my mum was being extra generous with my book budget. What followed since can be hinted at by distorting an age old Bangalorean auto adage - trust a snake and a woman, but never Alchemy of Desire.

I won't get too much into the plot, because I haven't finished the book yet (and unfortunately, this is one of those books that you never want to finish but end up devouring in a primal bookwormy frenzy anyway) but its sensuality is seriously addictive. The narrator is this perfectly faceless being, and I'm happy to leave him at that. It is the worlds that he talks of being embedded in, leaving behind, immersing in, emerging from, and the people that populate it that really catch my attention. It's the narrator's story for sure, but the other characters, particularly his wife Fiza, are never relegated to the background. I keep waiting for the little tidbits he feeds the reader about her, and am happy remaining netted in the barely controlled but exquisitely articulate description of the erotica of love and companionship.

Even the seemingly external narratives he threads in are made tolerable by the inevitable, and constant friction of desire between him and Fizz. Only when he begins to talk longwindedly about politics in a half-baked veteran journalistic way does the prose get tiresome. It almost begins to seem like he is yammering in a hallucinatory state, and I found myself skipping first sentences, then entire paragraphs.

Some way past the half mark, another story begins to creep into his seemingly aimless narrative, and things he'd only hinted at earlier now show promise of being slowly disrobed. Some 300 pages into the book, he finally begins cluing the reader in about himself, and even as my dislike for him grows, I can't pass the room I've kept the book in without literally having to tear my thoughts away from the witchy, luring book.

On a different note, a part of my wants to rush at his journalistic rambles because the Indian decades he speaks of seem so unreal. History that was made just before I was born seems irrelevant, someone else's imagination playing havoc in unwritten history texts. Someday, the generation after mine will read it and I'll still be wondering who those people are, where did they come from, and why I never noticed they were there..?

Hypodermic Needle

ED: A reminder to read, and be read, because I live by my word and that of others'.