more questions on this…coming soon…

what you and i collect over our lips and whisper with our tears remains the way it is – all for the sake of love.

I typed this in a hurried sms as my eyes felt wet.

——

A fruit salad is not when pieces of/in it are mingled in a disorderly continuity ­– one over the other like a stampede. It needs discontinuity. Some powdered black pepper and rock salt bring regional conflict in taste. And that’s the true idea of flavour – contemplating what went last down the tongue, while the saliva adjusts to the changing residues of taste.

While remembering a past of unrequited love, words suddenly gathered at the tip of the nib. Then the ink flowed with meaning, so much meaning that a fruit salad gained more respect and attention than a cocktail in a bar. Like a perfume-maker, who contains the scent of even a nightmare, I tried to keep my thoughts from running down my cheeks with some alcohol and a grateful fruit salad that accompanied shamefully in pain. In remembrance of pain.

One needs money to borrow happiness and cause pain, I mean warm wounds. Sigh. I went to the ATM. I sobbed stupidly before the machine even as I wanted to urinate badly.

——

I had chewed on a makka chola (corn) just before meeting him at the magazine launch and the masala was so overwhelming that I ran over to a shop close by and bought a water bottle.

I gulped down the water as I saw him through the glass door of the bookshop. He had grown so well-fit into sophistry that the brown jacket fell so evenly over his pot belly – much more lucidly than the mundu that used to go round his buttocks.

The first time I noticed the lucidity of his mundu was when he came riding on his Hero Honda and halted with a bewildered look of a child with a stolen lollipop. The blue and black lines crisscrossed his mundu with the familiarity of folding inside his thighs, as the fabric got pushed under his crotch that rested on the hood of the bike. Those days, in college, in the backdrop of moss-ridden walls and, in the smelly, humid air of the rain and heat of Dakshin Kannada, his face was still young and bare, impoverished with the longing of a great love. He always kept dreams planned in style. Even in love, there was a sense of waiting and waiting ­– that things needed their timing to achieve their grandeur. And I too kept waiting and looking, as the moist hair peeped through his mundu and descended down his knees, flapping slightly with the vibration of the halting engine of his bike.

I bent my head slightly, sideways and smiled through my nostrils as I pushed my breath down my neck, then the shoulders, then the breasts.

That was the premature idea of taking to someone. It lacked the foresight that loving usually does to people ­– analyse their emotions. How I wish we had never taken the next step.

————

That’s what cities do. They undo the spirit of living by wrapping you in colourless ambition. Even a cigarette faces the wrath; it wags furiously between the teeth as conversations take a rush, in explaining serious issues.

So why wouldn’t we end up weeping while making love?

Except for that night in the room in the building in the corner of that street, that bore the hollowness of every sound… It was again a December night – because Decembers are full of nights – when we sweated like bears, with viscosity. Between spasms of orgasm, the blanket would lift leaving a crevice between our skins and a thin stream of cold air would rush in to horde into our warmth. We would chuckle softly as our noses brushed off the cold air, licking the chin and neck.

Evening prayers in the mosque ringed in the sky – the incantation rose from a parched, earnest voice – its cadence slicing through the tinkle of the chatwallah’s cart and streaming in through the walls of the room. The hot, smoky smell of roasted Afghani chicken lapped up with the faint, soapy, warm vapours of Hamam from his chest. The tip of the cross from his chain tossed over my breasts, tickling me, easing my face sideways. I let out a hazy breath and raised my knee. He gently descended, the snaky appendage twirling and moving about my vagina.

During the course of the loosely arranged pattern of rhythm, he let out a strange whisper in a tearful hum. “Love…I swear, love…how do I love you…”

—————

I had somehow not got to say bye to him before leaving the city. And so farewell handshakes and hugs remained like cobwebs in my head.

In his tireless chronicling of the lives of others (can’t help borrowing the film’s name), he didn’t want to try loving. He felt defeated in this trial, when he said a month before I was to leave. “Finally, I’ll get married in a church. I’ll have a nice wife, but… I think I won’t be able to share my wits (intellectual blah blah, he said) with her…Yeah…what can I do.”

And suddenly on a note with his characteristic discontinuity, he said, raising his chin over his lips, “But then… I’ll start my magazine again when people would have forgotten about it. Someday, for sure…”

He shook his head and pressed his willowy fingers over the cutting of his magazine’s logo on the wall and swallowed something in his throat. I held his shirt at its helm and pursed his ears between my lips. I wanted to say that sometimes, understanding the futility of words is the best kind of wisdom a journalist must earn. But I thought he would be furious and softly say mockingly, something like, “This is the problem with your class. You never engage enough, because you don’t know its worth, you’ve not seen poverty, or oppression except for your gender…”

So I just whispered, his ear still at the ebb of my lips, “You will…”

And he turned and gave a glistening smile that ran across his forehead that made him look like a naked child in the sun. “Ah, that was lovely, you never kissed me like that before! Why, now… you are starting all this and leaving me here…”

He came forward to hug but just put his hand in a comrade-like style around my shoulders.

I still hadn’t learnt to love him after all these years.

—————

I had wanted to tell him this, over the mike. Rejected writers have far more faith in words.

I raised my hand for the mike. I was not really interested in asking a question in a magazine launch. Launches are like having a regular shower before routine sex. I wanted to see his clean bald head, the classy after-Columbia look unlike the bald guy (look) in the street corner who looks casually sexy smoking his joint. I asked an intemperate, futile, casual question for which I knew I would get his usual, temperate, (by now) studied response.

I asked the august panel, “How do you perceive rejected writers?”

The mike was passed on cluelessly from one person to the other till it predictably reached his hands. He tried looking through me but instead left intermediary glances that went past my cheek. He talked about reading and how reading influenced writing and about reading Granta, the New Yorker, and about how people couldn’t complain about lack of “foreign” journals (as if they mattered) and that they must go online – that all information was freely available there, about learning to write again and again and again, in neat sentences, neat paragraphs, with flow…

He was the same and had reorganised his thoughts fashionably. Men and matter don’t require a change of context to see themselves in the mirror. The mirror comes closer to them and the lines on their faces remain the same.

I rushed out of the bookshop soon after the launch, with my bladder heavy with urine, my eyes glistening with past and my humour contracted in my lungs.

I wanted to contain the scent of the moment. Only over a high, could I collect the residue of the remembrance of loving…

———

After the drink, heavy with words and wine, I crossed a street and looked up at a tall building. Lights were still on. Ah, my pal there, one touch point with him could help me from falling. He has this tint of presence in my life that its hues appear bright now and then, only to tickle me in a sleep. And what to talk of a hue at a time, when the night is young and is walking sober halfway into its adulthood.

He came down the steps briskly. His light movements kept the shallow light of the street form a limping silhouette around his dusky face.

I liked seeing him when darkness fell. His smile would hit his chin and spread over the stub in the dim light and he looked like a bald baby. Ready for a kiss.

I always felt like kissing him. But he would always come on when I’m lost; then I would miss the skin. But today was close. I met his ears when he swung his arms around my shoulders.

I told him I had burst into tears after I left the book shop. That my past came to me quicker than I could grasp it.

“It’s been months and months since I wept endlessly like that,” I said, choking on my words, again.

“Why did you cry?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

It was only in that unknown flood of memory, I realised I had still been in love after all these years.

Belonging is an implicit act of dispossession. Only illusions of belonging exist — in pleasure and pain, purely existential and antidotal to existence.

I’m dismembered and will leave the world just like that, like dust.

This marriage is over, this going to a place is over. Where does one go after all? When one goes to inhabit, there is only a toilet to shit, a bathroom to bathe, fuel to cook, and sleep or not sleep with a man.

Everything else is in my eyes, hardly falling over the skin beneath it. This is what experience can give. And loving can be only this much.

You are lovely, disparate, dissolving  like a silhoutte. You’ll remain a lovely memorabilia on the wall. Like a shadow in the morning. Horny, is n’t it?

But what to do with this mad guy, who is mad, mad and mad…where will I find a needle like him that pricks and hems edges like a crisp horizon? Oh, the crevice of falling into decision-making!

That the guzzling wind pipe is inflated

With vaporous ambivalence.

– so much can I take for falling in love 

Only that my puncturous obesity

Has descended on the mount

Clasping the chasm of masculine virility –

A hip bone

In the threshold of continuity

Holds my twitching shoulders and feet

In hours of seizure

And fatigue

Like a whisper

Clouding and gagging my shadow

Where a silhoutte

Shrinks in despair

In humiliation

Which only the benevolence

Of the mount

Can tranquilise

And put me to sleep

I don’t know what I’m getting into by bringing another person into the scheme of running my life. Is separateness so important to choosing the dilations of existence or will mingling — so much mingling — stir the wax of imbalance in my ears and weigh down the inertia of a rotting ship in the docks?

Some ship-breaking exercise, this, it seems like. I’ll move more wayward like splinters of cast-away metal in potty workshops. A lot of dishevelling for industry — body and mind.

Perhaps the craftman is deft and has a nimble approach to scratch at flakes of scrap, so that there will be some buoyancy added to the stuff that I’m made of.

Will this set me adrift like a postmodern metal of patchwork craft on some cryptic shaft?

There’s good folklore that beckons the making of self. Perhaps, it needs the dichotomy, where the ‘twain’ works — where the present will accommodate the past, where a fish can be reborn in the same old vessel of regeneration — a timid sea. And some scrap in the dock will tease its shallow waters.

The wall crumbles as you fall, with me weighing over you.

Breasts are titillating and change the gyration in a whirlpooling madness of decision-making.

Like how!