A thousand apologies

I haven't been posting for a while. And it isn't that I've been inordinately busy. It's much worse. I'm missing my muse. If you find her, please return.

India - I

This new series of posts catalogues a recent trip to India. The agenda was simple - I was going to take a wife.

Mine own, preferably. Oh, i keed, i keed.

The backstory is like my bank account, eerily void. There's no pressure on me to marry, not from family, nor from my peers, nor is it vedic (no grihastha ashram ideas in my head). I live in a foreign country, which used to be a plus, now it's just a hiatus. I work in a recession-afflicted industry, and my job's as insecure as a kid with a new baby brother. My world-view is limited to tv, postcards and advertisements for vacation deals, but it's itching to be let out of its confines.

So, the real driver for this urge to wive is circumstance. Minimal savings and wanderlust make a heady cocktail and I'm drunk on it. The economics of the situation drive me to where my $ will squeeze out a life. That I haven't explored India's oli-golis (english: alley-galleys...) yet, makes her an attractive destination.

And I want to breathe in India. I want her smell to permeate every pore of my skin, and her lifewater to drench me from the inside out. And I can't afford the luxury of spending my time and money, and coming out unaffected.

So I think to myself, I'd like to marry in India. In the span of a few weeks, I will meet the salt of India's earth, woo her, grow to love her, her to love me, and marry her. In so doing, I'll have made sweet love to this country.

Goodbye Blue Sky

*It's my fault. I turned the other cheek one time too many...

Last night, as I stood naked before you, proud that I could,
you speared me and spared none.
Worse still, you cut me from behind,
you cut me down, even as I smiled, even as I shined

You've scared me before, but I've gathered myself and ploughed ahead.
You've killed mine own before, and I've forgiven.
Today, fool that I am, I thought your bloodlust was over
I'm so much to blame. I hadn't realised how different your blood from mine

This past night, when you shot me through the heart,
grinned maniacally,
did you not stop to think what next?
When you killed innocents, did you not kill innocence?
When you went down for the last time, I hope you didn't smile to yourself
I hope you didn't really think your own would have a better tomorrow.

If you did, I suppose that's my fault too.
When I forgave, you'd thought I'd forgotten
When I ploughed ahead, you thought I'd left the bodies behind
When I shone, you thought luck had polished my dullness.
I didn't warn you that the shine outside was really a fire inside

Tomorrow, when my spittle turns to venom,
It's going to remain my fault, because I still won't know how you did it -
how you cast me so far away from you
and yet made me so much like you,
all in one moment

Now that you're drunk on my blood, go ask mother if we're still both her children.
She might say yes, but my bloodhaze says no.
Pray it lifts, pray it lifts quick so you may live.

*And I'll pray we still eat from the same plate tomorrow

Portraits - II

It's well past midnight, and the skyscrapers in the city's downtown financial district have their lights on, pretending as though there are bankers and brokers still at work on each floor, balancing the world's markets. Personally, I think they leave the lights on so that TIME and Google Earth can take satellite shots of how vibrant the city is, and then recycle the notion that this city is among the world's best places to live. All noble endeavours.

I'd miss it if I didn't know to look for it, but the lights on the topmost floor of one of these buildings are off, and I can feel myself being summoned. I fly through the night, undecided if I want to enter the floor through the glass windows, or through the stone walls. That feeling of passing through glass is decidedly weird, but it'd only last a second. On the other hand, the stone walls are cold and comfortable mostly, but there's something about opacity that scares me even after all these millenia.

Once in, I'm surprised to find that the entire floor is one continuous unpillared space. It's dark, and the air feels stormy, even within the building. I'm being pulled towards the farthest corner of the floor, where I can hazily make out a light glow around a seated figure. As I draw closer, I'm able to make out a tapasvin seated on the floor, back to me. The light aura around him tells me he's been at it for at least three weeks now, if not longer.

A tapasvin is one who performs tapasya, i.e. one who channels unrest and anger (tapa) into meditation. This tapa, directed well, obligates higher powers to douse the flames of the tapa by quenching that which gave birth to the tapa in the first place, i.e. the cause for the tapasvin's unrest

I'm floating in front of the jiva now, and am studying his face. He sits erect, eyes closed, ash smeared across his forehead, arms and chest. His face betrays no malintent, which is unusual. Tapasvins, for all their discipline, can't hide the ill they want to inflict. The jiva looks young. 60 man-years, I'd say. The veins on his forehead are throbbing now, a natural consequence of my proximity. I expect he'll wake momentarily. I wonder what he wants me to destroy.

Four years later

October 2012

Joe, plumber

"Mornin' sir, I'm here to fix that faucet you called about."
"No it's okay, I'm used to people looking at me all funny. You remember me from TV three years ago."
"Yep, my own show, 'Leaky bastard'. I flew all over the country solving people's problems, all far outside my own domain of expertise, faulty faucets."

A discussion with a friend
Me? Run for President? Saar, I pale in comparison to the red candidate.
*Yes, choke and splutter. I'm bad with homophones but glad I'm out of arm-swipe reach from you.

Bradley's sorrows
"Perhaps this time they'll vote like they said they would. I wish Obama'd try again. "


*Update - Nov 5, 2008: I've obviously reverse-psyched the zeitgeist to steer it back towards Obama. You and he are both welcome.

Seasoning

This winter's going to be a rough one. And I don't need weathernetwork's long-term forecasts to know. It's not yet November and I've had to bring out the big guns - woollen socks, mufflers, toques, etc. I leave home all wrapped up, looking very teddy like (more bear, less roosevelt) and with all the dexterity of a deaf bat... So I really have to ask: Why do we put up with winter?

There was this one year when I collected signatures to petition the weatherman for a milder winter. It didn't work. I shoulda got more signatures.

But winter's just part of the seasonality. Four seasons, each very different from the other, changes things up when you're bored of the view outside. It gives me a sense of the passage of time*. In Bangalore, when each day felt just like the one before or the one after, I had to rely on the newspapers to know how far into the year we were. Here, in Toronto, the colour (or the absence) of leaves helps me find my bearings.

And it makes us appreciate each season that much more, knowing it's going to be a good while before similar conditions visit us again. I suspect this is why sunburns happen. When the sun comes out, I feel like a grad student at an expensive AYCE, stuffing myself silly because it's going to be a while before I can afford the extravagance again.

The other plus about winter is that you can resort to the evergreen conversation fallback - "Man, some weather, eh?" - without it seeming wholly unintelligent.

In Bangalore though, this'd be a little silly *any* time of year - "Wow, it's crazy out there, again in the 27-32 range, eh?"

*Update - Nov 2, 2008 - I wrapped this one up prematurely. I meant to hold forth on the nature of time, and how, even within the context of its inevitable march (day-night and the seasons themselves, i.e. rotation and revolution), there's concepts that we as a species append to it.

Because of our mortality, we feel the need to divide time into past, present and future. We use the concept of a calendar, where though the days and months continue to recycle themselves, we can't extend that luxury to the year. And that's a good thing. Imagine if our hypothetical immortal selves had decided on a binary year calendar, one that reset itself when four seasons passed. The concept of history would get addled..Our schools might have had to do away with the subject entirely..and in some part then, the concept of memory..then, that of nostalgia..and so, a large part of emotion.

Portraits - I

They'd run out of orange wedges and fortune cookies at this rundown restaurant in chinatown thirty years ago, and Lourdes wouldn't leave until they'd given her something to wash down the chopsuey with. They asked her if she'd take a baby. How the baby got there, I don't know. Lourdes agreed, and a few minutes later, boarded the bus with a box of General Tao/sticky rice in one hand, this chinese baby cradled in the other.

It was past midnight by the time she got off the bus and walked the remaining three blocks. Her apartment building was boarded up from the outside, except for a retractable metal gate at the north-eastern corner. All three tenants had their own keys to this gate. She set the baby and the chopsuey down on the pavement as she jiggled the key to the gate. A cone of orange light from a buzzing street-lamp lit the area. The gate opened noiselessly. The tenants took turns keeping the gate oiled. You couldn't have it jam when there was trouble on the street. Oiling the gate was also a mirror of how they lived in that neighbourhood - smoothening edges, beating the rust.

That was thirty years ago. This past week, when Lourdes died, her son couldn't afford to bury her. His skin itched, flies swarming about the dried blood on his body where the skin had cracked open. The desert heat sizzled off the concrete roads where he lay, his mother's body beside him, under a cover of tattered cardboard boxes. She probably died of old age, though she couldn't have been more than sixty. When the mind gives in, the body soon follows.

On Holiday

For those of you that have stopped by over the last couple of weeks and seen nothing new, my apologies. I've been soaking my feet in the mothersoil, will be posting starting next week (week of Oct 20).