Au revoir

As I sailed off-shore, I waved good bye to them.
I saw them in tears, and drank mine too.
Our oceans different, we would never connect

Inside the veil, I was drifting with them,

The illusionary figures in the vicinity,

pulling me farther away from the reality.

They swam with me for a distance,

those angels seemed in transition,

we needed resistance,

Proximity was against my volition.

With each stroke, the figures became vivid

The masterpiece created, the untimely art,

gifting so much sorrow to the heart.

The figures were so surreal,

To escape from the art was a demand so unreal.

The Unwanted Capital

Indians rely on their social capital. We take pride in remembering our family history, father, forefather etc and thus we have this multiple branches of first cousins, second cousins and nth cousins. Well to me it sounds like some river dividing into distributaries. If one comes from a small town in India, it’s the family first you trust and then friends. Family in this context would encapsulate all those distant cousins and relatives, who you get as your social capital in legacy. If you don’t maintain these relations, you fall. These are the people who are there with you in your thick and thin. All that is good until, it strikes you where it hurts the most. What I intend to discuss here is incest, the forced incest.

 For a girl it’s not during the onset of menstrual cycle that she comes to know for the first time that she is a woman which would probably mean following certain rules related to her sexuality. In some cases the ‘stronger’ sex makes them realize the fact at the tender age of five or six. Avuncular love costs them their childhood. Especially in the case of joint families where kids don’t get enough attention due to paucity of time and children grow up in a small community of uncle, aunts, grandparents and cousins. A pedophile might be one of them, living as a parasite in your household without you having inkling of what all damages he is capable of inflicting on your little baby.

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Pic source:http://www.newjustice.net/blog/2012/03/09/international-online-pedophile-network-busted-by-authorities/

I still remember going for a wedding where a ten year old happy girl would suddenly become lifeless when she would see her forty year old maternal uncle. To my surprise, she would come to me and ask me to take my dupatta properly so that my cleavage remains unshown. I was taken aback. I just giggled and asked her where did she learn all that from? I could not sense the fear in the child’s behavior then. Years later the girl as an adult revealed that the maternal uncle tried to feel her 'non-existent' breast. I was furious. I wanted to behead that man right away. Thankfully, he was dead by then. When I saw Monsoon Wedding for the first time, it echoed the same emotion. I feel thankful to Mira Nair for bringing out this issue so upfront

The Demise of God

The death of Krishna is disturbing. Krishna, who had been my reason to believe in Hinduism, dies too at the end. As I finished another interpretation of Mahabharata for the third time, my heart is filled with agony. My belief in Krishna made me feel that I can have a niche in the religion. I can be somewhere between a staunch fundamentalist and intolerant secularist. I cannot be atheist. Somehow, I always managed to escape the death of the super hero in the earlier versions but this time my heart is filled with grief after reading about his death in detail. Krishna, the strategist dies the meanest death possible in the history. He dies like a commoner when the arrow of the hunter hits him. Unlike Duryodhana’s and Karna’s death, when petals fell from the sky on their bodies, Krishna dies an unknown death; his offence being breaching dharma at various points and here I was illusioned to believe that Krishna is the super hero of the history. As a ritual of my life, I visited the Krishna today; I looked into his eyes and asked him, ‘Are you here?’ I am deeply hurt to know that Krishna was mortal too. There is a sense of emptiness, too personal to explain in words. At Krishna’s death it’s Karna’ lines which give me some sense of relief, I see it now: this world is swiftly passing. Ironically, I know deep down that when I would be reading Mahabharata for the nth time, I would still be asking Krishna for all the support to read about his death. Such is the illusion created by Krishna.

Maddu-The Oblivion

A pleasant reflection,

Shining and sheening,

the divine mirror, giving life a meaning

the ramble began.

The deepening eyes, the inviting soul,

Drowned in them, I forget my role,

The beautiful 'soul', with an angel’s role,

Flashes the smile, and I am speechless for a while,

and the soul was at inflection.

From coarser and hoarser, the 'sorcerer'

flew with it to the wonderland

The asymmetrical curves,

The serpentine journey,

Travelling for a distance

I reach the brewery to begin the 'poetry'.

Poem on 'poem'? I am perplexed.

Dipped and soaked,

Here I am, in the invisibility cloak,

The delirium begins, away from them,

Away from the sane, who pushed me here.

here I am with the insane who loves me here,

I wish to die in the oblivion, Oblivion to the obvious,

I wish to end with the ‘oblivion’.

P.S. The poem is dedicated to my Friend, Philospher and Guide -Madhushree Munsi

Destruction...

The deceptive smile, and my receptive smile, one blow And I die again. I have always enjoyed the consequences of death, the macabre ghastly death which just washes away all acquired in one blow; the imperfections, the negativities and the unsolved. It takes away all, the unwanted and the wanted, and I am left to create again. There is a catch in this. I thought that I was born to acquire again, afresh, the better acquisitions this time. The vicious cycle continued till the time I understood the futility of the process. Acquisition was the byproduct. Understanding futility was something in which I should have been interested in.

The Power of First

It is that old stone I have preserved when I have thrown several of those precious gems in the lake. My leanings in this expedition always ask me to preserve it, the power of first as they say. That optimum perfection which is attained when the mind shuts it’s door and the bond is built up through a single channel. The one stone which my mind says is worthless yet I am stuck to the one, clear the dirt hoping hopelessly that it would turned to one of those gems I threw the other day. What perplexes me is this strange fixation for such a long time and the gems haunt me sometimes making me realize what a fool I have been for all this while. The realization also has a discovery of inner strength which says stone or gem; it’s the first that matter.

Stress!!

The other day I was reading an article on growing stress and anxiety amongst today’s youth. The article defined stress as a situation when all the questions related to different aspects of mind converge together. Pardon me for the trivia but it reminded me of my physics classes in standard 9th when they taught me focus-the point of convergence of all the light rays from an object; the point which made the visibility of object possible. I am discussing it here because I am writing this piece in a stressed state of mind and all the experiences of my life have converged in to bring negative connotation to the word ‘focus’ in my life. For instance, I am stressed because my supervisor has refused to give me the reference letter for my doctoral candidature and I have no clue what to do about it. To escape the stress, I call up a friend, who says when are you getting married? You are already on the wrong side of 20s. To escape this, I disconnect the call.Sinding the possible solution of this answer, I call up the guy who I am in one sided love from quite sometime thinking that subtle romance might help me in coming out of situation. He asks me for my postal address to send his wedding invitation. I get a mild heart attack after managing to congratulate him. My maid calls me up saying that she has broken her leg and she would not come for days. This is a last straw and I completely lose my head. So the point of convergence include stress factors arising due to failure to seek admission in any good university, fear of losing friends in absence of a married relationship status, losing a possible source of emotional security in a month’s time, absence of romance in life for innumerable years, fear of physical stress because of doing all the house hold tasks. I think all of them together and they appear like entangled pieces of thread. I do not know which one to solve first. I am just incapable. I see DARK and close my eyes and tell myself ‘let it go’ but my mind says how you could put your admission in peril? How could you never think of marriage by this age? Why did not you tell him that you liked him? Why the hell you kept the maid at the first place? Why are not you hardy enough to solve all the problems yourself? I am bashed continuously by this force for another fifteen minutes. I take the knife, cut the entangled pieces into millions of pieces. They included my dream too and I destroyed them all in one go.