August, ending.

Maybe August is the time for endings. Some of the worst things in my life have happened in August. No, that’s untrue- they just feel like they happened in August.  Endings tend to have a similar quality:  a slowness that’s not the same as a bleak, cold, February. Then your blood seems like it will never be warm again, sluggish through your veins, now, it just feels like it’s gone underground. It’s not the lethargy of a hot, humid, summer, with the sun merciless on your face, turning your skin from brown to burnt, when you can’t make the effort to even reach out to that cool glass of lemonade that your Mom has placed on your table. No, this is the hushed, sticky quality of the air before the rain suddenly falls in a sheet, and you’re drenched head to toe; your umbrella dripping uselessly onto your shoes, as the “road” underneath turns to a muddy river in two minutes flat. What just happened, you ask, even as you sigh and think “August”.

Afterward, you try to pick it apart: loop the past on scratchy rewind, like those tapes you played over and over until they became skippy, static bursts between the snatches of familiar love song. Where is it, you think, that moment, the turning point when it all started coming undone. You’re looking for the sign, the dark cloud in the distance, the flash of lightning- but sometimes all you’re left with is the clear sky and the thickening air.

One morning I wake up to find a baby lizard has crawled into the folds of my fading blue bean bag plonked on the balcony. It had been unexpectedly cold the previous night and the little tyke had probably sought out the warmth of the faux blue leather. I flap my hands at the mottled dark green intruder: unsurprisingly, it moves not an inch. I’m giving you ten minutes while I brew the tea, I tell it solemnly: after that, you’re out.  When I step out again, my hands slowly warmed by my steaming mug of tea, it’s gone. I feel both smug and guilty; like I’ve won a battle and lost a more important war; like I’ve missed the forest for the trees, like I have once again, failed to read the signs.

How are you feeling, N asks me. “Okay”, I say - she accepts it for what it is: a barefaced lie. We are, neither of us, strangers to this; when all the stuff inside is so tangled that the only possible answer is- “Okay”. 

There’s a dissonance that leaves me tongue tied; the inexplicable chasm between what I know I should feel, and what I do feel; akin to letting yourself in with the key and finding yourself in a stranger’s house. This is familiar territory, I remind myself. You’ve been here before, you know how this goes. Endings are not an undiscovered land. And yet. I look up The 5 Steps again; try to see what I’ve missed. Everything, it looks like; no progression, no gradual climb down- I’m just here. But there must be, I think, increasingly desperate for something, anything that feels familiar.  But no, this is the funhouse mirror version of myself, everything in its place and just that bit distorted, rendered unrecognizable.

I imagine what a therapist would ask me: how are you sleeping, are you eating regularly, do you shower, do you make the bed, do you change your clothes, do you exercise? Answer: Well, yes, yes, yes, yes, no, but I never did, it’s not unusual.  I still hate work the usual amount, not more or less. You should date, D tells me, I’m not saying marriage, babe, just, dating. I tell her a long and involved story about how I have the cow next door to keep me company. This is not a euphemism: my neighbours keep a cow, a huge white-and-brown speckled beast. It moos at odd times and reminds me that life goes on; that August, in fact, can be great for some species: plentiful green grass, the air ripe with smells; pleasant, if slightly unpredictable weather, cool nights.

I lie in bed and listen to the night sounds- the creak of the fan, the occasional drunken song from two streets away, a faint honking from a truck, some kind of chirping insect. A moth wanders in, flirts with the dazzling white light and then wanders out. It’s not hard to fall asleep on these days, when my thoughts seem to have no particular direction. When I wake up, I don’t remember my dreams.

Fact: time moves forward.

Fact: August seems to last forever.

It’s sticky-cool, lumbering, everything muted, life travelling to you from a faraway planet, immediate but also a couple of million light years behind, already over before it even began.

How are you feeling, I used to ask, inside-inside; and now I ask myself- how are you feeling, inside-inside.

Like August, I answer, like an ending.   

Badlands

Don't enter the badlands

in the badlands, (they tell you)
tenderness will crawl under your skin
and stay there
pricking from the inside
until you're just one
mass of aching flesh
and then, when it gets
so much, too much
that anything would be better
than this pain,
then (they tell you)

you'll take a knife
and attempt to pare
to the bone
and the blood,
there will be so much,
like a river
like an ocean
like the sky

and is that (they whisper)
what you want

is that
what you want

to let your lifeblood
soak a land
that will never bloom

is that
what you'll do

when you enter
the badlands.

Approaching Equinox

There wasn't a winter this year-

seasons out of whack-
surely a portent-

but the birds come to the lake yet-

long necks bent, or wings spread,

one or two look contemplative,

perched in the distance:

what do birds think about, anyway?

Mold on my walls-

and other things-

other wonderful, weird things

that deserve investigation-

or fixing (says my father's voice

careful, pragmatic)-

I have no time to fix

anything

these fissures will remain

while I learn to take

the easiest routes

leap over, walk around,

walk along-

there's a darkness in you

she says, one evening-

not a presence, 

but an absence,

I think, but do not say-

and so it goes-

the sickle moon grows full once more

and winter shows up then-

briefly, a last hopeless stand

against a destiny

made for tilting toward the sun. 

Funeral

I watch you
laid in the ground
your skin mottled
and your cheeks
hollowed
and I remember your
intelligence
(and your anger)
fierce, sharp,
your obscure humour-
a difficult man
says your eldest,
while the younger
hides her eyes;
you are no longer
suffering
or perhaps you are
but we no longer
have to bear it
with you
and that is a
kind of freedom
too.

The Opposite Of

I watch you forget me
give me away in tiny pieces
how I like my tea,
whether I've read this book-
the opposite of
how we started
collecting each other,
careful hands and greedy eyes.

Now, the opened fist,
the perfunctory nod
the distracted eyes-

so forgive me then,
my own cruelties-
the withheld word,
the hand not taken,
the silent ending. 

The dark deepens quicker these days-
fall is finally here- tendrils of wind
through the whoosh of leaves-
the trees seem reluctant
to shed summer yet-

Yesterday, I walked a million miles
just to stay still-
tonight: the world rushes by
in this, the amber moment-
through the window of leaves
the moon, cradled gold,
betwixt the satellite dish
and wide open sky.

Afterward

There was what came after:
the unraveling of each thread,
the anger, the guilt, the sorrow-
kite strings let go
into the sky and wind and water-
my hands felt-
lighter.

And then the hardest:
the remaking,
choosing new threads,
finding the eye of the needle,
with shaking hands
and blinded eyes:
you don't get to choose a pattern
you have to go where
the threads take you-
the ones left still,
because, despite,
love and memory and
the hardest words:
not sorry, or it's ok,
but look at me,
and looking, stay,
and this isn't what you thought
you'd get, this wasn't how
it was supposed to be,
but something emerges,
through warp and weft,
woven now, renewed,free.


-> For N, who loves quilts, and who keeps my heart. 

और बता

Sometimes I think
that all I've learnt
in these thirty years
is different ways of saying
goodbye.

Great catching up,
or good to see you
how's the wife
or the boss
are you still in-
ah, yes, of course,
you mentioned that, I think,
but I forgot-

or the ones that require
a heart pressed by stone,
the clean break, the reset bone-
what didn't kill you
made you stronger
and you survived,
just a little older-


and then that other-
in silence left,
but there's the space
that speaks instead
the outstretched hand,
the empty bed.

-> For S, who gave me a title (and a poem).

Some days, my problem is: I'm unconvinced that life is a better option. 

Birthdays

There's a day in Fall
that belongs to you.
If I wake up
on the wrong side of the Himalayas
or the wind from the Baltic
is freezing my fingers
and I'm far from home
or not, I'm a ball while
dawn stretches its tendrils-
no fall here, just a dimming;
any place:
I know it's your day.
In my head
we're eleven or fourteen
or twenty one
we're rushing to class
or to a movie
together,
away
from us.
Your memory
tethers.


There's a day in Winter
that belongs to you.
I think of you-
keep you in a safe place
tuck your sleepy morning face
with my hand
under a pillow
and I wait.
Outside it's snowing slightly,
and the trees are stripped bare.
In the night, the bright neon
outside my window
reflects your silences.
I remember how you liked
that video- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds-
I forget to call one year.
Maybe two.
But there's a day in winter
that always belongs to you.


Silence isn't forgetting-

(Mis)Interpretation

They say if you wait
things come to you-
as though the gravity
of your desire
could make things hurtle
toward you, toward you.
That the unstoppable force of your want
Could defeat the immutable fact of your mortality.
That between you and Time,
You could win.
Be patient.

That your hope
unformed, unspoken,
unclear, really
like a zygote-
before it becomes a foetus
with nails and hair
and heart
when it's just a possibility
nesting.
They say, wait:
as though if you waited
nine months
or five years
or a lifetime
this thing would Become.

I don't know.
Maybe it does,
maybe it doesn't.

The arctic moth,
waits fourteen seasons
of winter
for one brief, beautiful
spring.
Imagine that:
freezing, unfreezing,
and thinking
surely this must be the year
but it's not
just more cold, cold,
blood and guts frozen,
and then, then, then- flight.

One year I did nothing but watch
movies on my parents' 21"
and if my dreams and hopes
were nesting or being built in a cocoon,
they sure as hell didn't take flight
in a burst of radiance at the end of that year.
No sir, they did not.

Which is to say:
Sometimes I feel
I misinterpret life
That the things I think are
Maybe something else altogether.

And now I'm in a white room
with a hole in the wall
Missing the grammar
that would make sense of this all:
playing at chinese whispers
having to fake everything,
even the game.

The Daily Report

I don't have the language for this.
To bridge this distance;
instead, there's the usual inventory-
Things I did today.
Things you did today.

I want to say:
Today I finished a book,
and as I re-shelved it,
the thought came,
unbidden, like the sun:

I want to eat nothing but words
swallowing entire libraries
of them whole
nothing but that
for a year or a decade
or the rest of my life.

Instead, I tell you
about the price of daal
and tell you to stop
making excuses for your
lack of restraint
when it comes to carbohydrates
my voice self righteous
and unforgiving
as only a daughter's can be.


I don't want this kind
of inventory:
let us instead count
my life in teaspoonfuls
as the poet so cannily advises
and because if there's anything
I've inherited from you,
it's the full appreciation
of the word hesitant
today: shallots crackle rose
and pepper blooms on my lips
like a bruise, sharp, purple.

Blink

Sometimes, sometimes,
in that twilight
between awake
and asleep
I turn and say-
yes or I do or-
Nothing changes
around us-
the night-pressed
silence,the distant lights,
our shoes scuffing on the gravel,
our fingers sweaty,
still entwined
your face all shadows and angles
under the tree
the summer heat rising
clinging to my shirt-

Marginalia

Last evening, N gifted me a book.

It isn’t the one she wants to get me, but later she sits staring at the flyleaf for a long time because she feels the needs for words, and then finds she has none, at that moment.

I picked that book- Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing- because when I flipped it open to a random page, it was to find words jumping at me through fading yellow-green highlights.

That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom.

told her about the baby;

pictures of it

                                                it doesn’t exist

                                    was taken away from me, exported, deported.

                                                                                    Lapse, relapse, I have to forget.

I flip to another page.

                                                                        Her artificial face is her natural one.

And facing that

                       

            Dead people’s clothes should be buried with them.

“I’m trying to find a pattern” I say aloud. Although the truth is, I’ve already jumped to conclusions, there’s already a story, and I can see her wrist, slashing through these words.

“Sometimes it’s difficult to tell” says N, and she probably means- not everything is a story. But she’s the one who said last week, every gesture has meaning.

A hand moves across a page leaving trails of ink.

This is not fiction.

Message in a bottle.

SOS in fluorescent yellow instead of Morse.

I want this book.

Later, in the sanctuary of my home, I open it again, this time starting from the beginning. She -I see her wrist, the shell of her ear, the tilt of her foot as she sits with her leg on a windowsill while snow falls softly outside, covering everything over, covering everything up- she’s marked random phrases, sometimes just page numbers, sometimes both the words and the page numbers. I wonder why the page numbers. Did she come back to them? Did she recite the numbers to herself when picking up the paper towels in the supermarket?

50, she says to herself, and that can allow her to make it to the checkout counter.

81, she whispers and she can sign her name on the credit card receipt.

125, and the laundry is neatly folded piles of his and hers.

Everything doesn’t have meaning, everything doesn’t need meaning.

Why do I suspect that if you cut me I’ll bleed blood and alphabets?

I think we’re all just stories we tell ourselves.

Stories that begin with I.

Stories that involve you, we, they, us.

Sometimes we let other people tell those stories for us, because we don’t have the vocabulary.

Maybe that’s what she was doing, watching the bare branches dripping, twisted, as quiet, quiet, winter melts around her into the noise of spring.

 Margaret, be my voice,

sister ,mother, friend, ally ,lover.

This is what Margaret says to her, for her.

Do you have a twin?

                                               

                                                Now we are on my home ground, foreign territory. My throat constricts, as it learned to do when I discovered people could say words that would go into my ears meaning nothing,

Anesthesia; that’s one technique: if it hurts, invent a new pain. I’m all right.

That won’t work, I can’t call them “they” as if they were someone else’s family:

                                    But they’ve cheated, we’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.

Has he come back yet?

I thought there might be something about me

But this isn’t where I live.

  What impressed him at that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took off my clothes and put them on again later very smoothly as if I was feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.

                                                            If he’s safe I don’t want to see him. There’s no point, they never forgave me, they didn’t understand the divorce

                                               

                                                which wasn’t surprising, since I didn’t understand it myself.

                                                my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing.

why it wasn’t really mine.

My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for year and the others wouldn’t notice.

                                    The feeling I expected before but failed to have comes now, homesickness, for a place where I never lived, I’m far enough away;

The fence is a reproach, it points to my failure.

                                    I never identified it as mine;

It was my husband’s, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator.

                        I couldn’t prove it though; he was clever: he kept saying he loved me.

            It’s turned grayer in nine years too, like hair.

                                    When she died, I was disappointed in her.

                                    It’s unusual for him to ask me anything about myself:

I’d turn into a part of a couple, two people linked together and balancing each other, like the wooden man and woman in the barometer house at Paul’s.

                                                                                                here everything echoes.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I love him.

                                    It wasn’t even a real decision, it was more like buying a goldfish or a potted cactus plant, not because you want one in advance but because you happen to be in the store and you’ve seen them lined up on the counter.

                                                nice if he meant something more to me.

                                               

                                                Impossible to be like my mother.

I can imitate anything.

Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable, or ridiculous.

“Did you believe that stuff when you were little?” she says. “I did, I thought I was really a princess and I’d end up living in a castle. They shouldn’t let kids have stuff like that.”

                                                            later I became an escape artist of sorts, expert at undoing knots.

Perhaps I’m growing old at last, can that be possible?

I stand there shivering

                                                                        push myself reluctantly into the lake.

I needed

 a different version.

Night Ride Home

The first guy, he said, I need to fill up some gas.
So I said ok, but then the line looked like it stretched from Jayanagar to Jabalpur, so I said,I'll take another, and he shrugged and said ok.Then he took ten rupees.
The second guy, man, he was crazy. Bulldozing his way through traffic, maintaining almost a straight line through it; we're flying over the speed-breakers and swinging around Jaguars, and it's like he's a bat out of hell, or a very determined man, and I think, maybe this is his life, full tilt, without pause, without fear of consequence,perhaps too tired to care.
Yeah, I'm sentimental like that, but that seems to be my response to fear- I could die, I think, right now, this little steel bucket could overturn, I'd be thrown on the kerb, my skull cracking open and all my stupid poetry and anger and loss oozing onto the pavement until someone cleans it up tomorrow and throws it in the trash.
I told V a story about being lost in Jayanagar, and she gave me a look and told me it was a pointless story. I love her because she listens to my pointless stories and then tells me they're pointless and forgets about them.
So anyways, that could be the highlight of the last conversation I have on this earth.
A pointless story.
Or I'll live to tell another.
Because Batman has just decided to stop outside the petrol bunk near Forum, and mumbles something about a wire and gears and basically tells me that the ride is over. 

I'm looking for another, but I'm distracted by pale pink carnations.

I'm always being thrown off course by things like that, it's stupid.

Now, this guy, this guy is young, and he twitches, but there's a hazy look in his eyes, like he might actually be someplace else. No, I don't think he was high,just young.
He drives sedately.

K wants to live in a house with a mango tree outside the kitchen.
He thinks freedom will make him happy.
I think happiness will set him free.**

There's a list of things undone in my life, but there's also this- the softness of the pink under my fingertips, and the hardness of the green. 

Across town, N is waging war, but then she always is, and sometimes she wins, and sometimes she loses, but she always fights.

I want to sit an empty movie hall and sing "mere khwabon mein jo aaye" like I believe it.

I want to be sixteen again.

But I was infinitely bored at sixteen, so it's just as well we don't get what we wish for.

He's nice, this young man with the faraway eyes, and he's very precise about the change he gives me, down to the 50 paisa, and I tell him "It's ok" but he shakes his head and insists I take it.


often a sweetness  
   has come  
and changed nothing in the world  

except the way I stumbled through it, 

- Stephen Dunn:  "Sweetness"



**Update: It's not freedom, just food at regular intervals. Clearly, I don't know everything.

Specificity

Sometimes I ask myself why I don't just chuck it all and go back to school.
Study the Romantics, or Homer. Read. Draw lines. Deconstruct.
And then, today as I walk back from lunch I know.
Because all that's on my mind is the precise warmth of the sun on my left temple, while my right remains cooler as I walk under fledgling trees, and the difference between those two feelings. The slap of my slippers against my soles, and the feel of the road that seeps through to my feet.The soft whoosh-whoosh in my ears that's the breeze. The pale pale pink of the hibiscus across the road.Voices. The weight of my spectacles on the bridge of my nose, the dent of it.

Some days ago, my friend said: you don't see the big picture. Everything is personal.
It's true.

All that interests me in that five minute walk are the things that I can sense. The ping of my id at the card reader. The force of my hands as they pull the cold door handle.I'd be an utter failure at philosophy because I'd be distracted by the sensation of cooling sweat against the nape of my neck as the artificially cooled air comes up against my sun warmed self.

I suppose this is why I like poetry.
Because I suspect that when she said hope is the thing with feathers, she meant that literally.
I may be wrong, but I don't think so.
Perhaps doubt is the way my brow crinkles right now.
She held the little bird and felt its heart thudding, thrumming,felt it slide beneath her skin and through her veins like nothing else in existence, beyond words really, but those are her only refuge and she said hope is the thing with feathers.

Letters

(Part 1)

This will reach before you, I write.

I miss you already-but this I will not write.

Instead, I say-

Today a butterfly sat on my shoulder

When I was out buying groceries,

Isn’t that strange? 

And then I say

I’d forgotten what afternoons are like

But this Saturday, the city reminds me

of a village afternoon.

This keyboard is awful, I say, and the place stinks.

I hope there will be bhindi for dinner.

I write like this because I cannot believe that you are gone.  

I cannot comprehend distance.

Now I write- because I’m incurably honest, after all –

I write- I miss you already,

Isn’t that strange?

I like dragonflies, you replied.

They are magnificent lords of the sky.

I travelled in a crowded chariot of dirty silver

With a girl who had beautiful eyes

And let me look into her soul for a minute.

I am writing this from an old city

Where the people are stern, and unaccepting of Fate.

You are a child of destiny-

But I, I’m just broke.

Where were you, you said,

Why couldn’t you have come by earlier?

(Part 2)

I’ll confess: a decade later,

I googled your name.

Oh Google, God of Possibility.

At thy altar, I whisper

A name.

And get about 238,000 possibilities.

Your fault:

You have a common name.

I made it special,

To me.

I hit delete

on a folder

the absence

of your presence

a permanent mark.

Sometimes I dream

We’ll meet:

In an airport

Or a train station

Or a bus station.

We are always in transit.

That cannot change. 

I read a poem

It said:

The one who loved your pilgrim soul.

You have a common name.

God of Possibility:

Pray me home.

Pied Piper

Ragged jeans and a fading shirt that may have been black once. He's got a whole bag of flutes slung over his shoulder. Like the snake charming ones, you know?
He's playing a familiar tune.
The one that practically resurrected a sunk ship.
Yes, that one.
I wonder where he picked that one up.
Did he sit in a theatre and watch wide eyed, with the rest of us?
Did he just hear it one too many times on Channel V?
Or radio?
Is there a Bollywood copy I don't know about?
Will someone buy that flute because the song reminds them of their first kiss?
Would a snake sink into his spell?
Will his heart go on?

Occupy the Grey

It feels so good
that sense of right
throbbing in your veins
burning in your chest.
The River of Truth
Wears everything down:
eventually.

When it's over
when the job is
done
when the drumbeat
of power
fades into something
normal
like the beat of a heart
you look around
and notice the ashes.
Grey wisps
flutter in a faint
breeze
away, away.

Kin

His country
is not mine,
His hands
are not mine
Our skin is
not the same
colour
His child
is not mine
His wife
needs no comforting
when her daughter
(not mine)
is brought broken
bruised
for having spoken
up
out.
His eyes
are not mine
His hunger
not mine.
His anger,
not mine.
His need,
not mine.
He knows
the trees
the rivers
he names birds-
beasts
roam his land
not mine.
I do not
claim
him
kin.