Destiny

So another day has passed. Did it have any meaning? Perhaps not. Is it necessary to make each moment count? Not at all. Whether it makes any sense or not, time continues to tick on. It has no respect for your feelings. All that it does is crawl relentlessly at the same even pace. It doesn’t care to temper it’s speed to suit your fancy.

Of course, you can choose what to make of it. Go on, humour yourself. Think you are the mistress of your own destiny. You know, it’s like all those ‘chase’ sequences in films. You’re pursuing your destiny and she’s always just two steps ahead of you. You ignore the sweat and the heat and focus on the uneven distance between you and her, which always keeps you interested in the chase. You think you are closing in. You are inching ahead valiantly and she’s almost within your grasp. There, you lunge as you imagine you’ve caught her. All your hand has in its empty clasp is air. Destiny, she’s still just a couple of inches ahead. You pull out all your reserve energy and make a final dash in the vain hope that this time you might just out-run her. You trip on a stone and take a horribly unelegant fall, while she glides over a speeding car and disappears into the crowd.

Your humiliation is multifold. You know you’ve lost yet another opportunity. You’ve run out of breath, tripped and scraped your knee, soiled your clothes and your throat is crying itself hoarse with thirst. Your heart is running away without you and the effort to keep it pounding might just suck the life out of you. But you can’t stop. Won’t stop. You just keep drinking in the air greedily and give yourself just enough time to let it settle down to its ‘normal’ rhythm, regain your outward composure to face a crowd of curious onlookers, unsuccessfully wipe the dirt off your clothes (it spreads around instead, and even soils your hands) and brush the sweat from your burning face.

Then you hobble on with a weak smile, camouflage your inner rage with childish defiance. You pretend to have regained your composure. Because there really is nothing else to do. There’s a sea of people surrounding you. The honking of cars, the din of a busy life closes in and suddenly, it’s all that matters. Working your way through this suffocating human mass, you get on to the same familiar road you take every day to the place where your presence is anticipated – mostly out of mere habit.

There will be no more questions for some time to come. At least not till you work yourself into another bout of bilious bravado. Destiny can wait.

‘Tower of Song’ by Leonard Cohen

Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day
Oh in the Tower of Song
I said to Hank Williams: how lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song

So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I’m very sorry, baby, doesn’t look like me at all
I’m standing by the window where the light is strong
Ah they don’t let a woman kill you
Not in the Tower of Song

Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices
In the Tower of Song

I see you standing on the other side
I don’t know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
Now all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We’ll never have to lose it again

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I’m gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the Tower of Song

Yeah my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on
I’m just paying my rent every day
In the Tower of Song

Who Am I?

Ah! That niggling question again. It would be more appropriate to begin with ‘who was i’? Before the confusion set in, before fear got a terrifying grip on the nerves, before the world turned into a dark cloud that heaved itself on me like an ogre. I was young, I was free, I was happy. I had a mind and could speak it, I had a heart that pounded fervently with excitement at the joy of a new discovery, I had the promise of a life spent pursuing my dreams, of allowing myself to set my imagination off on tantalising sojourns into unseen worlds. I wasn’t bound by the laws of man, at least in my head. Till I decided to tie myself down to a structure I had little conviction in, a bondage of the kind that, instead of liberating the soul, could potentially destroy it, stifle it beyond recognition, pepper it with the bitter dressing of conventional wisdom and propriety.

Ah, but where are the simple pleasures of sitting back and staring at the sky (or the ceiling even) without purpose, of soaking in the rain and running on sand and watching a bird soar and listening to the leaves. Of not having life divided into terse words of everyday worries. And what if I were to set off on that journey all over again? To refresh the page and undo the human bondage that doesn’t allow room for simple intimacies, to get out of this mindless race to nowhere, to abandon the empty shell and jump into the choppy waters all over again. To swim towards the horizon, against the tide, and catch the morning sun in my arms!

You and I

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” says Eliot’s Prufrock. His words weigh heavy this stormy night, in another sleepless city covering itself with smog. Spoonfuls of love. An ounce of affection. A pound of flesh. First yours, then mine. “I have measured them all,” he says. “The evenings and mornings and afternoons.” And the nights? The nights, when, after a day sheltered in the mundane, we retreat like two frogs to our own private well?

The faithful air-conditioner batters the silence with its rhythmic drone. We line up at opposite ends of the circular well like two brawny boxers baying for each other’s blood. It’s a familiar sport. Like everything else, it recurs every season. We play different games at different times to break the monotony. Above all, the mind games. He does not understand me anymore, I think. But wait a second. Why should he? When my fickle eyes cannot capture but a fraction of the million thoughts that must float in his head every breathing moment. I have tried to reach out to the depth of his heart, I proclaim. But all I’ve done is scratched the surface of that tiny little corner of his throbbing spirit he has generously let me touch.

Give. Take. Take. Give. We have worked out the business of togetherness with mathematical precision. And presume we can reinvent the wheel with words. As if we could weave a neat pattern that looks just like everyone else’s and yet believe our fabric would be prettier than the rest. Reminds me of a film I saw. Two puppet dolls thrown together into a washing machine. All dressed up and nowhere to go – except round and round in circles. Their painted faces and blank eyes insulating them from the jolts and the grind. Should we come up for some fresh air? Knock down the walls of this well? No, no. These are forbidden doors. Once opened, you don’t know who may come in or walk out. Instead, let’s jump right back into the well and throw a party. Take my word, that’s what everyone else does.

But this is not what they told us in that fairy tale, did they? The frog prince found his pretty princess and they lived happily ever after…. Did we ever wonder what lay between those cryptic dots at the end of that line? How did we foolishly assume there wouldn’t be a rainy day in Paradise? Now we have nowhere to run for cover. Except within the recesses of our own minds. It’s a minefield in there. While the universe goes about its trade nonchalantly – making ends meet, conquering nations, discovering newer planets — we struggle to re-negotiate this vast space between us. Should we quickly fill it up with small talk? Or dig in our heels and let the chasm get wider with each passing moment? You tread warily lest my indifference explode in your face. I trudge hesitantly under the weight of your expectations.

I so wanted to believe Shakespeare who wouldn’t admit impediments to a marriage of true minds. But that was when I was younger. When I didn’t know that nothing stands still like “an ever-fixed mark”, not even time. That the more you try to stay still, the more you change. I have changed. So have you. We walk different paths at an uneven pace. We don’t march perfectly in step as we had vainly declared while exchanging vows. I no longer measure love by the spoonfuls. One less today, two more tomorrow. But somewhere down this road, together we will travel – sometimes hand in hand, a few feet apart at others. For that was really what we set out to do, isn’t it? Walk into the same sunset, gathering a lifetime of reminiscences along the way? “Let us go then, you and I.”

……………

A lonely old lady sits in an empty house. Her wrinkled fingers flip the pages of a family album. She looks at the face staring back at her – one much younger than herself. That was the day he called her his own, some 50 years ago. There is an unexpected calmness in her eyes as she refashions the past into a picture of her liking. There isn’t a hint of bitterness even in the face of the ultimate betrayal. She lost her husband yesterday. Today, she’s picked up her fragile frame, rolled her pain into a hesitant smile and busied herself with emptying his memories into a suitcase.

Begum

She sat down in front of her giant dressing table mirror and picked up the large brown brush to start combing down her hair. It was a nightly ritual. One that gave her immeasurable pleasure – the smooth, toothed hair of the wooden brush softening her thick black tresses. It was also an activity that had irritated her husband to the point of distraction. “Why do you need to spend so much time staring at yourself in the mirror and combing your hair? Who’re you going to meet at this time of the night?” he’d asked over and over again. Till finally, her silence, punctuated by the rhythm of the languid brush strokes, aggravated his frustration to the point where he stopped reading his files in bed and moved base to his study next door. Kamini leaned forward and smiled at her reflection with satisfaction. She tried raising an eyebrow, shaped her mouth into a luscious pout, ran her fingers across the length of her face, blew a kiss at her glowing face and leaned back to admire herself from a distance. Just then the gramophone crackled to life and Begum Akhtar launched into her morose lament – “Ye na thi hamaari kismet…”. Kamini smiled. There was a time when those deep, depressing notes would make her quiver with insurmountable rage. She’d started back angrily at her likeness and fumed in vain. Once, she’d even stormed out of the room to demand that he stop blaring this ridiculous, morose music in the dead of the night. He tore himself away from the file at hand in slow motion, paused for added effect, and then calmly told her that he couldn’t work without listening to Begum’s soothing voice. After a momentary glare to follow up the punch, he’d gone back to the ‘urgent’ government dossier, occasionally giving the ghazal an appreciative nod. Kamini had stood in the doorway till the song ended and Sumit got up to flip the record over and went back to his rocking chair. Kamini ran back to the bedroom and threw herself on the bed sobbing tenaciously. Till she couldn’t find the strength to go on. She’d quietly got up, washed her face and gone back to the mirror to attend to her hair. Only this time, she tried not to look at the figure that sat before her. She stole furtive glances, but couldn’t bear to face the red-eyed, discontent staring back at her. 

away from her

it’s a bitch. loneliness. i can see it in your eyes. and in the circles gnawing under them. the fidgeting and the twitching and the sighing. despair seeping through every word. longing for another version of reality – what if life could tumble out of our mind instead. memories keep hitting at the brain senselessly. you cannot harness them. nor bear the emptiness of the pitch-dark, free-falling void that streches all the way into the gut. and gets trapped there forever. so much pain cannot, must not be borne.