Saturday, May 24, 2014

A memory

Walking from work this afternoon in the rain reminded me of home. And the two of us, from years ago, when we were fifteen and fourteen, respectively. You, A, used to live on the fifth floor of a pink building by the toll bridge in a neighborhood called Park Circus, surrounded by prayers, conservative Muslims and the delightful aroma of chicken kabobs. Cars and buses would come and go, too ordinary to notice on their usual journeys, belching puffs of soot from old, rusted radiators. And you would sit by the balcony, holding a paint brush, and stare at the clouds walking in the sky, waving at you, calling you names, slipping away into the silence of twilight.

I lived in a house, similarly pink, in a sub-urban district by the degenerate lake, surrounded by retirees, songs of the orchards and mile-long thickets of bamboo trees. The eunuchs would come, at the crack of noon, and dance to the sounds of violent drums and hiss at strangers, standing behind black grille gates counting handfuls of coins, and erupt in peals of joyful laughter when the beats came to an end. The pharmacist next door would return to work after a satisfying lunch of rice and fish, sometimes stopping by to say Hello and inquiring about my father's whereabouts. His father was shot, ten years ago, on a Saturday night by a gang of robbers, dressed as girls, haggling over the cost of a cough syrup bottle. He bled to death in front of my eyes. The ambulance never came, the police didn't report. And that was the end of Ravi K.

When thoughts of home came swarming in, I held my breath and pressed my jaws and widened my lips in a curled semi-circle. And looked at my nails, the uneven white edges, and thought, for a second, about Mother, who I haven't seen in four full years. And then I thought about you and me, in the silent corner of a pastry shop, staring at the ceiling and the wide French windows, discussing Shakespeare, Lord of the Rings and life in America. There was a transience about the moment, like the cusp of traffic lights turning red to green, or orange to red, commanding passengers to go or to stop, and then it was gone, within the blink of an eye, back to 4:30 pm, rush hour traffic and the metallic thrumming of subway cars.

The rain poured down through overhead clouds and wet the sidewalks in a dark, earthy gray. The drops, at first, looked like miniature bubbles; like tiny beads of undissolved gas in a clear, refrigerated liquid. Soft, and bouncy and a little spongy, they rolled off the sleeves of my orange checkered shirt. But then they got larger and larger, taking the shape of transparent pellets, and diffused throughout my poplin weave. It reminded me strongly of the monsoons in the city, when you and I, in painted caravans, would sit on the broken seats towards the back and eat mangoes cut in cubes, our faces and teeth yellow with pulp, and compare who had had more leftovers stuck to the skin. We would go to the temple in the nearby village and I would pray for peace and forgiveness, till tears squeezed out of my wooden brown eyes. You waited outside by the off-white shoe racks, and counted the number of hibiscus buds, and stared at the expressions of traveling devotees who went to the temple, hoping earnestly that God would fix their lives. You and I disagreed on the nature and extent of our religious beliefs, but we were respectful of each other and avoided the topic; fearing that our disagreement would split us in half.

I remember very well, a certain day in the April of 2004, when the floods crashed into the perimeter of the city. People died mercilessly, hungry and homeless, because their mud shacks melted back to the earth. Fish bones floated on the murky waters and twirled, in dance, in the currents. We had no power for days. The buses froze. The flowers cried. Steam from China cups of nearby homes filled the neighborhood air with a dizzying aroma of Darjeeling tea. In the middle of this, you asked me softly, Do you want to go for a walk? I said yes, instantly. And so we went, without rain boots or shoes, walking on water, and stopped in a field, soft as putty in the south side of town. We walked around. The ground felt like cake with unsettled icing, brown and green, alternating with the portraits of grass, brown clay and carcasses of three dead crows. You took out a flash light and projected it upward to see how far the amber bulb would light up the air. And then you said, do you mind holding my jacket for a minute? I didn't say yes, but pushed forward my right arm, my palm facing up to the circus of clouds. You walked to the center of the rectangular field, your footsteps echoing in the silence of the evening, and stood there for a second. After that, you knelt down carefully and tilted to your side, before laying down flat on the ground, on your belly, hands stretched out in a loose empty grip and your hair jet-black, like Pashmina wool. You put your ear against the surface of the field, and said to me, I hear heartbeats of our land. What joy filled me up, I cannot even describe. I ran to the edges of the isolated field and laughed with leaves, and flapped my arms like a wandering magpie, my soul energized with the beauty of a wet, monsoon, evening. 

There is happiness, sometimes, in the tragedy of monsoons. When the dams crack open, and the water gates flood, and the sound of sizzles surround the town. It is a memory of home that I never forgot; you and me, in an empty field, gaping at the sky. 

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

hanging in there

Every time you say, I'm hanging in there, I have this image of you swinging from a bean stalk, elevated seventy feet above ground. Below is a wide, ocean-viewed, butterfly garden covered to the north in hyacinth clusters and to the left, along the trim diameter, is a patch of marigold. Your arms are in a loop,  like the Olympics ring, through which sunshine and insects float in streams. And the tips of your hair, brown and pointy, crackling like chestnuts or splintered pistachios in the heat of a summer swig, when buffalos and bees, caked in oil, hum in the waters of the Yangzong sea. The color of your cheeks is an embarrassed red, and you are surrounded in a scent of mulled camphor. Your words project like film onto the flat of a farm, where unpaved roads and irrigation puddles intersect in perfect geometry. It is like a reflection of your mind; a mirror held to the convexity of your pale eye ball, your cratered mahogany iris, and the hollow silence of your deaf pupils. 

You seem to be suffering a lot lately. You seem to be stalled in a transparent cabinet, frozen and blued in an umbrella of air. You try to move, to walk and smile, but your muscles lay fixed in one dimension. As if pinned along the perimeter of myofibrils, to a point where you asphyxiate with the warmth of your own body heat. Circumstance, I say, and shake my head; the mother of travelogues and plaintive progress. 

I see you from a distance, electric at best, stuck in a mountain of iodine crystals. Your head jutting out, your arms wiggling, and the cage of your upper body trapped in the slant, you speak mathematics and the couture of bubbles. And then you become a leaf, green with veins, bent along your back at thirty five degrees, plucked, forcefully, by a child of six. Placed in a vase of burnt metalloids, you have a new home. You have a new dream. You bring forth a ratio of renewed happiness. And like you said, you blush a green, as the cups of your kidneys swoosh and clutter the candy globes in your blood. You are an oriole with canary filoplumes, embracing your inner diabetic, gurgling away depression, and starting afresh, in cottons of rain, along the periphery of the monsoons. 

The waves of summer are popping in the air. Awake, awake and run to the mills, and climb the beeches on Forest Lane, and shriek out the voice simmering in you. Lola B, Lela B, it is about time, I say. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014

the back of the bus

Looking at you, sitting in the back of the bus with your Mexican nanny and off-white pants, reminded me of a time of my own childhood. 

You are probably 9, with sky blue eyes and a short blond crop. You have a small triangulated nose, a chiseled cheek and a short, stubbed chin. Your face is partially square, a little rounded at the jaws and arched around the forehead. You look like a Cole, or may be a Colin -I cannot quite tell. And in the 20 minutes of our bus ride, with very different purposes and eventual destinations, you never smiled. At all. You looked out of the window, and looked at the green of Central Park giggle at the top of your curled eye lashes. You looked at the stones of the narrow passageways, hugging against moss and pearls of rain. You looked at people, and shoes and a salad of paper scraps strewn on the bus floor. But your lips didn't sink an inch. Your eyes rarely blinked. And your face looked frozen in a pocket of the hour. It was 4 pm on a Wednesday, buried in the midst of a bustling afternoon. You were going home. With a non-mother mother. Azalea print backpack. And a non-ironed tie. 

You are a beautiful child. Whoever you are. And innocent, and reminiscent of a past self that I beckon only with memories. Memories of a conundrum, memories of a hallucinogen, memories of acoustic dreams, resonating like laser beams along the edges of my body. You are lost now, in the ocean of faces, in the bowl of clouds of Manhattan boys, in the lungs and vapor balls of the Upper West Side. You are a memory, a negative on my camera film, bottled with sulfides and lathered with peels of Washington cherries -your cheeks are ablaze, your hair in a lilt, your consciousness sparked in the origami of purpose. 

I am the face of aging time. I am the clock of pencil chandeliers. I am the surface of pregnant clocks. And I think about your face with a sparrow in my heart, with a volcano of tears from calcific depression, from the yowls of anguish disguised as smiles -everyday, every night, paddling in the sea of the backwater ripples. Obsession with boys that never came, that pushed away at the gentlest touch, that kissed and drank bottles of wine, and ran away to the tip of the estuary saying call me when you reach home. And then there was silence. The disguised ignoring, the painted facade of the germinating actor, standing as if in a Venetian court and hailing at the ruins of a diseased soul. The double life, the double pronged wretchedness of your poisonous self -throw away your face of pretended truths, slice away your veins and shed your layers and layers of invisible make-up. When you walk on that ward and take care of people, of dying psychiatrics and breast-missing hoodlums, you say that you believe. What do you have, to be able to believe? What do you say, feeding them injury, that they are about to lose this life? Because, nursing was your only other option, DB. Switching from real estate, to a meaningful path, you didn't lose your decorative lies.

You beautiful child. Asleep in my mind. You reminded me of a time when all I worried about was good food, shelter and statues of Lego. And sat at the back of a bus, yellow and blue, and smiled at the stars, asleep in the sky, ringing and turning to melodies of love. Thinking to myself -I love people, they must all be good. 

Monday, May 5, 2014

investing in you

I know I tell you a lot of things now about my lover, ex-crushes, current crushes and infatuations, but I can't help but continue to have a faint sense of guilt, lingering in my mind; a feeling, wispy in a way, that I led you on. We were meant to be professional, under the aegis of circumstance, but both of us know that we became friends quickly. Like somewhere down the line, the water broke, the sac of dutiful role assignments stretched open, and we embarked on what we like to call an adventure -a journey without an ending. I wonder what it was about me that broke the shell, that sprayed your mind with a sense of awakening. That drove you to a literal frenzy where, I remember, you said that you'd be okay with quitting your job. I let all of this glide by, not commenting and choosing to avoid topics, because I developed a fear of losing you. And I didn't want to at any cost. So silence became an answer, a lot of the time. Facades became common, more often than you will ever realize, and deep within the cave of my belonging, I was rotting with a seed of hidden identity -unclear, shattered and terribly lost.

A lot of people out there chatter constantly about investment; time-stamping and cataloging every step of every move. Choose your friends carefully, is the mantra I hear everywhere all the time, or maybe it has been for a while now but surfaced to human civilization in different shapes and forms throughout the tunnels of history. So the natural outcome of living in this counter-culture results in the investment in the right set of friends, I suppose, in which we live together in a zoo -taking, only, and not giving back. The economic nature of it all makes me think that I live in somewhat of a dealership, that every hour is a transaction of a visionary enterprise and that every step I take should have some positive outcome. But it forces me to think of a question I have shied away from for a long long time. What was going on between you and me?

I keep going back to that one night at the bar, in the crummy basement with blue lights and a flashing sign of Heineken entrapped along the hallway. I was drunk, after 8 shots of liquor, and so were you. Your frames were bent along the ridge of your nose, and you were sitting at the bar, in a trim black dress, staring at the television screen, laughing with your friends and looking at me from time to time. I saw you giggle through the corner of my eye, and a misty mold of your body hunched around the outer edge of my strained peripheral vision. My friends were around, dancing to the music. Swaying their hips, snapping their fingers and shouting in song when the choruses came along. People chugged their beers like buckets of rainwater, and flirted with strangers in the bisected corners. Some held hands, or sucked on nipples while others tiptoed to the backyard to bellow out smoke. I knew it was you, but I didn't care to talk or even go up and say Hello. Why? Because it may have made both parties uncomfortable and in a small town like ours, ignite a spark littered with rumors. What also crossed my mind was the fact that if I had said hello, it may have demonstrated a personal interest. What if you thought, let's take it to the next step? What if you thought, oh may be this is going somewhere? And in all my cold nonchalance, and box of untruths, what good would it do to egg you on?

And so began the skirting around. Touching topics, leaving questions unanswered, and addressing issues selectively. I believe yours was an escalation of emotions, on the swing of a sharp, angular spiral with shaky balusters and lubricated hand rails. You climbed up in your petticoat-ed whims, not lying, not in a pretense, but in unsubtle innuendos. I wasn't sure at first what was going on; what a sudden influx of pleasure puffs, food, wine, books and smiles! You took to discussing the sex couture of your thongs and the lace curlicues of your bras. You took to an explosion of divulging your desires, your convolutions, the softness of your breasts. You opened your arms, and the partition of your lips, and the curtain across your trimmed vagina. And broiled within me a patchwork of complexities; layers and layers of fishing across, detached and unhooked and eventually recoiled. Extended to me a tongue dripping with beads of your secrets. And pulled me ashore to the beach of your inner self, the human B, the desiring B, the B beyond a cage of professionalism. And I went adrift, waddling on waves, wallowing in foam and tart-colored make-up, swimming away, gulping carcasses of crabs from droplets of the sea's devastating glands. Like cancer dispersed within my capsule of reasoning. Like I glossed over reality to reflect on you a segmented, modular guide to living. Of which I have tired, over and over again. Muted by misgivings, and blinded by a thicket of prickly, devastating lies. But you have been patient. Knowingly ignorant. And a part of my fragmented family.

I have a lot to say. And will speak another day. But this is my muse for a Monday evening. When the winds outside, in turnip cloaks, play civil auctioneers of Spring.