As he soared skywards, strains of his mother’s voice surrounded him, her sonorous voice echoed in every unit of his physical being and he for the first time felt safe, safe in the cradle of her voice.
His heart, which had drummed ceaselessly inside him ever since the attack was announced, was allayed now.
His mother was there, with him, right by his side, as he, gripping the throttle, pushed it forward.
As his battle chariot took to the skies, he briefly shut his eyes.
“Ma, shed not your tears? Rejoice, as I shall soon return to you, as the bright rays of the sun that shine on your beautiful face every dawn when you rise, as the young flower that you tend to in the garden, in the sweet waft of your puja incense, I shall visit you as heaven’s drops that sweeten the wet earth, you shall find me in the cool morning air, ma, you shall find me in your arms every time you think of me, crying, bundled in white, you shall find me sitting by your bedside every night as you shut your eyes, you shall, find me in the eyes of my brothers who fly today with me.”
As he fell, fell from an alien sky far away, his mother arose and smelled the morning air as golden rays from the sun washed her beautiful face.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Monday, January 31, 2011
I felt what an explosion, what a bomb blowing up on my face would feel like. It’s fucking painful!
Now there’s peace, there’s music playing at the back of my head and my feet are rising up in the air, whatever I am thinking, is all in singsong, first the thought then the same, very same words in singsong…fucking singsong.
And then you appear, a drop of the Sun, a radiant drop of the Sun (fucking singsong!) and a faint but haunting pain burns my stomach and chokes my throat (fucking singsong!) and I wish God hadn’t given me the heart (fucking singsong!) and you, those eyes.
Now there’s peace, there’s music playing at the back of my head and my feet are rising up in the air, whatever I am thinking, is all in singsong, first the thought then the same, very same words in singsong…fucking singsong.
And then you appear, a drop of the Sun, a radiant drop of the Sun (fucking singsong!) and a faint but haunting pain burns my stomach and chokes my throat (fucking singsong!) and I wish God hadn’t given me the heart (fucking singsong!) and you, those eyes.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Open your doors, oh home of mine
A wandering bird always returns to its nest.
As the long, hard day meanders towards a conclusion the bird seeks refuge. No matter where he flutters off to when there is light in the sky, no matter how far he wanders, no matter how long it takes him to find food, he always manages to return where he belongs, home, warmly ensconced in his comforting nest. Snug and safe.
My decision to shake off all apprehensions and lethargy and return to the refuge of writing again, makes me such a bird. I am trying to find my way back home again. Neither the aestivating forces of a broken heart nor the painful ravages at the wake of a prolonged phase of ill fortune could restrain me for very long.
He who said that first love always remains the first; no matter how many times your heart opens its doors for others, couldn’t have been more correct. I am coming back.
As the long, hard day meanders towards a conclusion the bird seeks refuge. No matter where he flutters off to when there is light in the sky, no matter how far he wanders, no matter how long it takes him to find food, he always manages to return where he belongs, home, warmly ensconced in his comforting nest. Snug and safe.
My decision to shake off all apprehensions and lethargy and return to the refuge of writing again, makes me such a bird. I am trying to find my way back home again. Neither the aestivating forces of a broken heart nor the painful ravages at the wake of a prolonged phase of ill fortune could restrain me for very long.
He who said that first love always remains the first; no matter how many times your heart opens its doors for others, couldn’t have been more correct. I am coming back.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
I
I am my best friend, my biggest might I am
I am my lone savior, my trusted confidant
I am my own hero, my handsome champion
A stranger lives in my mirror all day, my biggest fear I am
I am my lone savior, my trusted confidant
I am my own hero, my handsome champion
A stranger lives in my mirror all day, my biggest fear I am
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
My hiccups with hook ups
A few days ago a friend commented on one of my blog-posts, saying that it seemed to him as though I had hit a purple patch with writing! A dazzling compliment, although I sincerely doubt my worthiness of it, what with the annoyingly juvenile approach towards most of my subjects, the whiny-ness and the rather knotty manner of my writing, I thank him for his kindness. It’s true, last week saw a sudden spate of short posts covering a range of issues that was becoming too irksome for endurance and I needed to get the load off my chest. You can find the posts below.
My point is, I go through these fleeting phases of eventfulness before its time again to plunge into the horizontalness of everyday existence and I feel a dire need, an almost incontrollable push to record these events, scribble these happenings down and share them with everybody. That’s what spurs me to shoot off post after post. It’s a need. It’s addictive, and I don’t have problems writing them down in between work. It’s an old habit.
This one though, concerns a slightly different issue but an equally nudging one;
Like some of my more recent posts, this concerns an admission and yes there is no shame in this one either. It’s just another crumb of truth and I suffer little indignity in declaring that I have been single forever, yes, that I have been for merely one date, maybe two thus far. I only remember one of them as being a textbook ‘date’ as the other was conveniently christened a ‘meet-up’ (not by me). At 25 I have never had a girlfriend and neither have I been in any sort of relationship. So there!
My equation with singlehood can be best expressed as a love-hate one. I love it and hate it and sometimes both at the same time! Akin to most things that constitute my life, both are twisted with each other, mixed so inextricably that I sometimes find it difficult to evaluate if I am better off singled or mingled. My mother attributes it to my dressing sense, left to her she'd make sure I go to bed every night in a Tuxedo and wear a Sherwani at home on holidays. My little sister thinks I am too aloof and often proodish and dad thankfully never comments on such things.
Over these years many of my well meaning friends, and I say so without the slightest uncertainty or suspicion of their benevolence and well meaning-ness, have taken the trouble and attempted to hook me up with someone or the other they knew. Now to be very honest here I have never exactly seen the Devil in this. Never, really!
I mean, if you are someone, apparently, so thoroughly incapable of finding a woman for himself that his friends finally decide to take charge of things, it’s supposed to be a nice thing, right? Why then does this spoon-feeding tweak, twirl, poke and prod my conscience?
Something about it doesn’t feel right, something I can’t put a finger on…but I’ll try nonetheless.
Although, I have the audacity in claiming that my charms, if any, are perfectly functional and no matter how feeble and ineffective they may have proven on women over these years, even so much as an answered SMS or a returned smile is a tiny personal triumph. Call it what you may, I am content with it. Even though, clearly inadequate, it is what I can do with what I have been given and I hope to get better eventually.
Introducing two people with the deliberate intention of getting them to date each other is beyond embarrassing and I refuse to endorse the ‘last resort’ theory.
So, with no offence at all to anybody, I am not in favor of being hooked to someone with the purpose of getting hitched.
Even though I don’t know what it is, I have my own game going.
My point is, I go through these fleeting phases of eventfulness before its time again to plunge into the horizontalness of everyday existence and I feel a dire need, an almost incontrollable push to record these events, scribble these happenings down and share them with everybody. That’s what spurs me to shoot off post after post. It’s a need. It’s addictive, and I don’t have problems writing them down in between work. It’s an old habit.
This one though, concerns a slightly different issue but an equally nudging one;
Like some of my more recent posts, this concerns an admission and yes there is no shame in this one either. It’s just another crumb of truth and I suffer little indignity in declaring that I have been single forever, yes, that I have been for merely one date, maybe two thus far. I only remember one of them as being a textbook ‘date’ as the other was conveniently christened a ‘meet-up’ (not by me). At 25 I have never had a girlfriend and neither have I been in any sort of relationship. So there!
My equation with singlehood can be best expressed as a love-hate one. I love it and hate it and sometimes both at the same time! Akin to most things that constitute my life, both are twisted with each other, mixed so inextricably that I sometimes find it difficult to evaluate if I am better off singled or mingled. My mother attributes it to my dressing sense, left to her she'd make sure I go to bed every night in a Tuxedo and wear a Sherwani at home on holidays. My little sister thinks I am too aloof and often proodish and dad thankfully never comments on such things.
Over these years many of my well meaning friends, and I say so without the slightest uncertainty or suspicion of their benevolence and well meaning-ness, have taken the trouble and attempted to hook me up with someone or the other they knew. Now to be very honest here I have never exactly seen the Devil in this. Never, really!
I mean, if you are someone, apparently, so thoroughly incapable of finding a woman for himself that his friends finally decide to take charge of things, it’s supposed to be a nice thing, right? Why then does this spoon-feeding tweak, twirl, poke and prod my conscience?
Something about it doesn’t feel right, something I can’t put a finger on…but I’ll try nonetheless.
Although, I have the audacity in claiming that my charms, if any, are perfectly functional and no matter how feeble and ineffective they may have proven on women over these years, even so much as an answered SMS or a returned smile is a tiny personal triumph. Call it what you may, I am content with it. Even though, clearly inadequate, it is what I can do with what I have been given and I hope to get better eventually.
Introducing two people with the deliberate intention of getting them to date each other is beyond embarrassing and I refuse to endorse the ‘last resort’ theory.
So, with no offence at all to anybody, I am not in favor of being hooked to someone with the purpose of getting hitched.
Even though I don’t know what it is, I have my own game going.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
The Khudiram Boses of the streets of Kolkata …
It’s queer. If it’s the same everywhere else, I do not know or whether it is, as I think, just another idiosyncrasy of Kolkatans, I don’t know either. But leaving aside the fact that it’s dangerous, it’s also extremely annoying and more often than never I get an overpowering urge to ask my driver to pull over, get out of the car and give the bloke a smack on his head. It’s a different thing that I do not actually do it.
It’s an established fact, more like an aphorism that the people’s traffic sense in Kolkata is less than nil, but I am talking about the way roads are crossed here. It’s appalling.
Contrary to the general idea, displays of near suicidal attempts to cross roads can be witnessed when the streets have rather sparse traffic. Our subject waits for the nearest speeding car to get dangerously close and then dashes across suddenly, leaping, bounding and lolloping across the road, barely missing the mudguard of the passing car by mere inches he managing to keep his balance precariously, his toes just about touch the banks of the pavement on the other side and he salvages himself as the car whizzes past him missing him by centimeters. Clothes fluttering in the strong draft of the vehicle just passed, he leaves the driver shocked and often disoriented. He prefers to risk his life and that of the car driver’s rather than wait for it to pass and then comfortably walk across. No, where’s the fun, where’s the rush in that, where’s the challenge?
Would it be fanciful to assume for a moment that such impulsive actions have something to do with ambitions of martyrdom engendering from deep rooted frustrations, that these spurt from, a burning realization of failure seething in some hidden corner of the blood pumping appendage of this city’s inhabitant’s? Do such brash and irresponsible heroic acts help allaying, by some unknown palliative, the agony inside? A badly mistaken and decontextualized idea of martyrdom we have then. If you have a yen for Adrenalin-pumping action, the streets are not your playground.
On the other hand, there are drunks, the handicapped and unfortunate imbeciles who are incapacitated inherently from employing good judgement. Sadly, not much can be done about them.
It’s an established fact, more like an aphorism that the people’s traffic sense in Kolkata is less than nil, but I am talking about the way roads are crossed here. It’s appalling.
Contrary to the general idea, displays of near suicidal attempts to cross roads can be witnessed when the streets have rather sparse traffic. Our subject waits for the nearest speeding car to get dangerously close and then dashes across suddenly, leaping, bounding and lolloping across the road, barely missing the mudguard of the passing car by mere inches he managing to keep his balance precariously, his toes just about touch the banks of the pavement on the other side and he salvages himself as the car whizzes past him missing him by centimeters. Clothes fluttering in the strong draft of the vehicle just passed, he leaves the driver shocked and often disoriented. He prefers to risk his life and that of the car driver’s rather than wait for it to pass and then comfortably walk across. No, where’s the fun, where’s the rush in that, where’s the challenge?
Would it be fanciful to assume for a moment that such impulsive actions have something to do with ambitions of martyrdom engendering from deep rooted frustrations, that these spurt from, a burning realization of failure seething in some hidden corner of the blood pumping appendage of this city’s inhabitant’s? Do such brash and irresponsible heroic acts help allaying, by some unknown palliative, the agony inside? A badly mistaken and decontextualized idea of martyrdom we have then. If you have a yen for Adrenalin-pumping action, the streets are not your playground.
On the other hand, there are drunks, the handicapped and unfortunate imbeciles who are incapacitated inherently from employing good judgement. Sadly, not much can be done about them.
The Scorpioid curse…
About three months back something happened. Something terrible. Although we were expecting it, people spoke of it in hushed tones, but the day it came, it wreaked an overwhelming assault on everybody and left in me a deep, throbbing gash in its wake. All of us who knew him struggled to come to terms with what had happened. I for one, did not want to accept it although I stood outside his room in the hospital looking at his face, still and cold while the paper work was being finished. Fate leaves no survivors.
A boy of eighteen, the son of an acquaintance, someone we had seen growing up over the years into a rather nice, amiable young boy, Guddu had started falling ill very frequently. He was shown to a doctor who naively dismissed his ailment as mere bouts of influenza and one day when things went out of hand, prescribed him a day or two in the nursing home and a barriage of tests for the poor boy to be put through.
It was a rainy evening when Gautam Kaku called. Interestingly enough, I was again the one to answer the call. Its strange that, in the past, everytime my family has received bad news over the phone, I was the one who received it first and had to suffer the ordeal of breaking it to everybody else. Once again I had to walk up to dad and mom and tell them that someone else was either gravely ill or dead.
Guddu had been detected with throat cancer. My head reeled.
The following years saw a desperate battle during which the boy had to be flown between Bombay, Delhi, Ahmedabad and back to Kolkata sometimes for as little as a single injection. It left his gradually weakening body ravaged and endless sessions of Chaemotherapy turned him into another person altogether, someone whom we didnt know, someone who looked totally different from the healthy, plump boy we had known. He started losing hair rapidly and became a bag of bones in some six short months. In between he showed signs of improvement which gave birth to a renewed zeal in his father who had a bone marrow transplantation or some such thing done on him. Then followed pujas and visits to numerous places for divine propitiation. But about three months before it all ended, Guddu started sliding back to the same darkness that his family fought so hard to keep at bay.
The day he passed away he expressed a desire to taste some ice cream. As his mother, frail from the years of mental agony, put the last spoon full of ice cream in his mouth, he held both his parents hands close to him and shut his eyes. Our Guddu was on his way to the other side. I still see the boy's face sometimes when I shut my eyes. As a kid he once told me how much he loved Bruce Lee and wanted to take up Karate classes but his mother wouldnt let him, she was scared he'd get hurt.
The curse took both my grandparents, a few friends and quite a few relatives and surprisingly most of them never smoked or drank in their lives.
What inspired me to write this was, last evening I came to know that an old neighbour of ours was dying of the disease and was in her final stages, the only available cure to which is prayer.
About a century back people used to die of diseases like Tuberculosis and Cholera. Over the years the former became a treatable malady while the latter, eradicated in many countries.
The thought that peeves me is that, about fifty years from now if and when the cure to this scorpioid curse is finally found, a lot of people will wish it had surfaced a few years earlier.
I still remember my grandma lamenting the loss of her best friend who had died of TB many years back. How she wished they had come up with the cure a little earlier.
A boy of eighteen, the son of an acquaintance, someone we had seen growing up over the years into a rather nice, amiable young boy, Guddu had started falling ill very frequently. He was shown to a doctor who naively dismissed his ailment as mere bouts of influenza and one day when things went out of hand, prescribed him a day or two in the nursing home and a barriage of tests for the poor boy to be put through.
It was a rainy evening when Gautam Kaku called. Interestingly enough, I was again the one to answer the call. Its strange that, in the past, everytime my family has received bad news over the phone, I was the one who received it first and had to suffer the ordeal of breaking it to everybody else. Once again I had to walk up to dad and mom and tell them that someone else was either gravely ill or dead.
Guddu had been detected with throat cancer. My head reeled.
The following years saw a desperate battle during which the boy had to be flown between Bombay, Delhi, Ahmedabad and back to Kolkata sometimes for as little as a single injection. It left his gradually weakening body ravaged and endless sessions of Chaemotherapy turned him into another person altogether, someone whom we didnt know, someone who looked totally different from the healthy, plump boy we had known. He started losing hair rapidly and became a bag of bones in some six short months. In between he showed signs of improvement which gave birth to a renewed zeal in his father who had a bone marrow transplantation or some such thing done on him. Then followed pujas and visits to numerous places for divine propitiation. But about three months before it all ended, Guddu started sliding back to the same darkness that his family fought so hard to keep at bay.
The day he passed away he expressed a desire to taste some ice cream. As his mother, frail from the years of mental agony, put the last spoon full of ice cream in his mouth, he held both his parents hands close to him and shut his eyes. Our Guddu was on his way to the other side. I still see the boy's face sometimes when I shut my eyes. As a kid he once told me how much he loved Bruce Lee and wanted to take up Karate classes but his mother wouldnt let him, she was scared he'd get hurt.
The curse took both my grandparents, a few friends and quite a few relatives and surprisingly most of them never smoked or drank in their lives.
What inspired me to write this was, last evening I came to know that an old neighbour of ours was dying of the disease and was in her final stages, the only available cure to which is prayer.
About a century back people used to die of diseases like Tuberculosis and Cholera. Over the years the former became a treatable malady while the latter, eradicated in many countries.
The thought that peeves me is that, about fifty years from now if and when the cure to this scorpioid curse is finally found, a lot of people will wish it had surfaced a few years earlier.
I still remember my grandma lamenting the loss of her best friend who had died of TB many years back. How she wished they had come up with the cure a little earlier.
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