We and Them

We read late into the night one day
and discovered all that we needed to know, to get by.
We walked out the next sultry Indian morning, under the unforgiving sun,
to put to test all that we had dug out from within the withered pages
of moth eaten books.
We spoke in several tongues, in every tongue
and every ear heard us, or pretended to.
We were joyous, free finally, of the burden of all the world's lies
written in beautiful words, written in the ink-blood of history.
When they asked us to reveal our identities, when they tried to
discover the truth of our words,
we shot them, slit their smiles from ear to ear and broke their bones.
We killed them.
They were scared, the others,
of the power of pure knowledge, of truth.
Or atleast our version of it.
For truth is but a shimmering illusion, afloat on the waters
of an ancient sacred river.
As for our words, our knowledge,
we put it all, all of it in a book.
And we called it ' The Law'.
In the land of the Free and Enlightened,
words are hard, bloody blows of death.
Our words, never theirs.

Death Ties

The past curled up like a yellow, wrinkled autumn leaf and fell in my dry, lonely lap. The sun shone behind broken bar clouds and reminded me of a future yet to come. I sat erect in the middle of time on a green park bench where we had lived and laughed together. But by now you had left, gone far beyond my reach. I had dreamt of a time without you, of a cliff beyond which you walked on clear, into thin mountain air. I was rooted on rock and broken stone, the silt between my toes. I had felt the solidity of earth, even in the dream, I felt as though my feet were grounded, while yours were free of land and life. You were lucky, you had escaped, but left me behind to deal with the mess your absence spawned. The endless hours of despair, the endless trips to your apartment to see if you had returned to live again. To see if death had been just a festival of life, to see if normalcy returned of grevious drinking.
The leaves were begining to fall again, it had been four years since that night, when we drew a line of death between you and me. We were on either side now, you more alive than me. In the beginning I couldn't remember your face even though we had lived all our life together. But now I remembered every detail, every line that drew your face out. I wished I looked like you, so that the mirror would show you to me, instead of my own dreaded reflection. I wished for a time that wasn't so devoid of you. I saw you sometimes, sitting, or walking around the orchard of blooming wishes, plucking the loveliest flower. How I hated you for leaving, for walking on in thin air, for being so magical and so dead. I still saw that mark on the side of your white forehead, that one mark that you died of, like a bullet wound that went through and through and didn't spill precious blood. I was amazed when I saw you dead, how clean and calm you looked, as though sleep had usurped you and
you were smiling at the idea. I looked at the patterns that the leaves made on your body, swaying in the January wind and watched little tufts of your hair catch the fading light of the west. That is where you went as I watched your footprints disappear in the mud. I don't think you knew I was watching. I watched everything, I carried your head in my lap on my way to save your life. You slept on peacefully, unaware of your life slipping away into the darkness outside the car window. I felt like you were stealing my heart away, clawing at it in your desperation to escape. I wanted to stop you, to tell you that it hurt to watch your own heart bleed. You carried on anyway. The smooth stone of the hospital had no comfort to offer, neither did our parents. They would never know you the way I did, dead, slipping between life and death, sleeping on while I slowly lost my mind. In a while I knew better than anyone that you were dead. I didn't feel the warmth of a human head on my lap. I could feel your head hours later, on my now vacant lap, I felt the warmth again and I watched you die again. Do you know, that I had another dream when you left, of you leaning against the hostel room balcony, smoking against a wild, wild storm. All I saw was your silhouette and the smoke from your pursed lips. I reached out to take the cigarette from you and you walked away, turned the corner. When I got to that corner, I found nothing beyond it, just a lousy yellow wall. And yet you had carried on before all of us, just the way you died. I would stay awake all night, afraid of that dream, if it should happen to return and soak me in the fear of losing you over and over again. Now loss is an old friend whom I call upon for comfort for loss is the only way I can still hold on to you.
Your rooms were washed clean of your signs. Unlike other things we lose, that we think about repeatedly, everyone tried to forget you too quickly and only remembered you more fiercely. I came away because I wanted to mourn your death alone, in empty corners and long walks. When trees began to regain their colours, I walked to your flat to grieve amongst things you had lived in. I lay for hours in your unmade bed, thinking about you, about how cold, foggy January nights were never happy occasions for us again. How your death had been a festival of grief, how hundreds had poured in to help us mourn. Mourn a loss that they possibly could not understand. No one had held your dying frame, or felt the last of your life ebb away through the tiny,bloodless hole. Suddenly I wanted your life and live it through for you. Your life would be lived out better, happier than mine.You should have lived instead of me, I should've been the one to have been killed by tiny bloodless holes. I did think of following you, over a cliff and beyond walls but I always held back thinking what if you really did not want me there, there where you were, beyond life and loss. I could still see you looking over my shoulder when I read the last letter you wrote me, about your new bank job and Krishna, the girl you were going to marry. You had our father's eyes and our mother's beautiful face, you were perfect. There were never any marks of that inherited lineage on me. You took away the last familiar face, the face I recognised as my own. When one day, your old friend called to ask for you, I was made to say again, how you couldn't come to the phone, you were so inaccessible, so dead. They never knew how that bloodless hole had taken your life away. They thought you had a full life, a long healthy fifty year old life, filled with the essentials of wife and family and job and relations. It was strange to think how you may have had that life, and how I may have remembered you differently. You would've been defined by a presence, instead of the perpetual absence. But maybe alive, I would never have been able to absorb you the way I did when you died. Maybe, we would've been ordinary members of a family, joined by the compulsion of blood ties.
There is no compulsion any more, just love. And memory.

Falling

It hasn't fallen this cold in ten years. It was ten years ago that I wore this woolen jacket. My hands are numb from action and find no comfort in the deep pockets lined with soft wool. I can't seem to keep my hands dry and warm even though there is a heater that's working overtime to make me comfortable. My feet are too cold to touch the icy floor, I'm stuck under a castle of quilts that weigh my heart down. The day outside is dreary and dark, the bare branches of the tree are stark and ugly. They stretch out and rub against the electric cables and both sway in a icy gust of wind. My brain is freezing over, it's making me think of summer in Delhi, equally miserable. It's showing me that atleast weather-wise, I'll never find love and life here. Even though I have had to, till now. My ears are keening silently in pain, the tips have turned a lovely pink. I try and turn, the weight of the blankets, heaped over me, are making it difficult to breathe, let alone move. I can feel myself sinking into the softness of the pillow, the hardness of the mattress, losing a grasp on the cold, miserable world. I think i'm dying, in the coldest winter, in ten long years.
I have waited ten years to die. Ten years to fall asleep under a mountain of blankets. Ten years of cold-less winters. Ten years of patient heat. It is the perfect month to die in, December, when the world dies a natural death, to be born again. The trees die and so do the bacteria. The hapless beggar on the road dies, the bloody victim of a car crash dies. Some die of gun wounds, some die of malignant tumors. Some die for fun, some die for love and hatred. It's the perfect weather to die in. No one can hear you die. In heat, there is a sense of action and haste all the time, every hour of the day. In the cold, there is silence and silence can only aid the death process. It's a subtle change of being, almost imperceptible. Afterall it's only a new form of numbness, an advanced stage of numbness from the world. I have waited ten years for this numbness, this cold to set in. I have waited ten years to die.
I died a long time ago, when they killed me. But I have lived on, under blankets, for ten years. I have come back to life briefly, only to die again. It's one last feeling of life before I lose it altogether. The last time I felt this alive was when I bled from my neck and chest and forehead, where they had stabbed me. The flow of blood, red, thick, luscious, was proof of my existence, that I had lived for twenty years. It was cold then and numb, like it is today, ten years later. I have no memory of pain or medicine or horror. No memory of life ebbing away, no memory of comfort or tranquillizers. I only remember dying, and dying in the cold, on a cold stony road. Its easier to die in the winter. It's more beautiful, more serene, less complicated. The summer is a mad dash to finish everything and move on, move constantly so that the heat can't hold you captive. The cold is a languid emotion, numb yet sparklingly clear. I can feel my weightless life float away, my weightless death float away in the crisp, spiked winter air. In a season when everything dies, I will too. The cold has decorated my body, with wrinkles and dry swathes of skin. My cheeks lie in dry, silvery folds, my chin is registered with little cuts, the blood in them is frozen in the cold. My eyes are watering as the icy blast from the window is caressing the white of the eye, turning it to stone. My lungs are filling with this clear cold air, and expanding in joy. My heart is pumping faster, exhausting itself before it stops completely. My hands and feet are slowly numbing, freezing over, turning into unmelting blocks of ice. My mind is wandering, not over my life, but my death, how I have waited for ten years to die in the stifling cold.
I've looked foward to death since I died. I have waited ten years to die beautifully. The world's pace is negligible. It's not moving because it's too cold to move. It's ironical how everyone is playing dead just before I actually die. Time seems frozen and so does emotion.There is nothing to be sad about. I am a happy casualty, a happy death.

And Again

The world around her had slowed down, its movement negligible to what was happening in her life. A week ago, she had shot past twenty-one without a permanent address and a bank account. She had felt like she was pushing against a wall with all her might, without managing to move a single brick. She had run for miles to escape that feeling, running away from the wall. She had written pages, reverting to the traditional ink and paper routine, abandoning the plasticity of the black keyboard. She wrote and smeared, hoping it would bring her some peace of mind. She wrote about mothers and marriages and death in different countries, spaces, time periods. She wrote of how politics and sport were both banal, about the world becoming one giant county with a lot of barriers. She wrote of her neighbour’s non-existent affair and made up other such stuff. She copied passages from books she loved, and had read five times over. She tried to imitate the styles of different authors, realizing very soon how futile that was, how quickly it sapped her off the last bit of originality. One by one, all her avenues of escape, of release failed her. She felt holed up in a corner of the universe reserved for losers mired in insignificance. She was never looking for fame and aplomb. Or even applause. Just an assertion of life.

And then one day, it happened. It happened far away from her impermanent address and her sordid routine. It happened in the mountains, in fresh mountain air. In the early morning rain, she washed away all the pretence and the feel of the wall against her frame. The swirls of smoke found a clear passage to her brain, filled it with images of her past and her present. She looked hard at them as they surrounded her, whizzed past her like in a movie. She held her hand out, tried to grasp them. She only caught rain. But it was magical, magical the way the smoke transcended its sorry stick of origin, the way it passed from the lip to the nostril and then back, from her lips to others. She found comfort in this sharing, this collective knowledge of feeling alive. She felt the imprint of their lips on hers, through sharing. They sat huddled in a dark room, cramped because of lack of space, their bodies pushing, adjusting. Yet she felt far away from the human mass surrounding her, from her own body. It was like looking at herself from outside her mind. She felt irresponsible, completely free like it wasn’t her body at all. Her mind was focussed on the tip of the snow capped peak that played hide-and-seek behind a fluttering curtain. The deep blue dark, turning slowly to light, was capturing her mind. She had never seen anything so beautiful, anything so clear and unadulterated. She felt like crying and laughing at the scene, at her own estranged body. At what it was doing. She could feel herself breathing for the first time, breathing outside the compulsion of existing. She had only read about such moments in other people’s stories, envying their ability to run away from daily existence, transcend the banal and create an ever present past. Now she had one of her own, like her own child. She did not need another person’s outlet to find her own. One by one, every peak was lit. In the mountains, dawn was hidden and yet palpable. Everywhere she looked there was calm. There was no flutter, no sound that disturbed her, no face that smudged the perfection of the moment. The smoke continued to swirl long after. It became a part of the room, the walls, the little night stand, the ugly blue blanket that she was sprawled out on.

During the course of the night, she had found her way to the blanket, put her head down and lost her sense of time and place in its downy comfort. She was aware of people pushing past one another, returning to their rooms. But she wasn’t going anywhere, not leaving the space she occupied even for a moment. She loved it right there; the blanket was her room, her space. She felt a hand go around her, a face closing in on her, brushing its nose against her cheek. She wanted to cry, hold on to the hand for longer and make it her own. She couldn’t feel her own body, she could only feel the one next to her, with its lips grazing her neck. Her mind kept playing a song, an apt one, about oddness. A song she never listened to, something she knew she would never listen to again. She turned her head away from the mountains and looked into eyes that she did not know. Would never know completely. She didn’t care, didn’t bother. It was her moment and there was no need for specifications, no need for details that would ruin everything. She drew in the air between their lips, the air they had shared for so long. For once there was no smoke, only clarity. A whisper passed from one earlobe to the other and quietly, her world changed. It expanded in her head, outgrew its contours, multiplied with abandon. In her mind, she was little again running up a downward sloping slide, slipping in the mud, dirtying her white dress. In her mind she was fourteen again and in love. In her mind, every moment she had been happy, collided with this one and for a fraction, she attained a kind of perfection people try to lunge at throughout their lives. She kept her eyes closed for a very long time, in hope of holding on to the moment for longer, in hope of preserving and reproducing it later, when her life once more was caught by the banal. She opened her eyes again and before her were the mountains she had fallen truly in love with. She turned away and stared at them till the snow caught the glare of the morning sun and she had to look away.

An hour later, she walked to the balcony, sat on the cane chair and began rocking it to and fro profusely. She cried bitterly as the tears finally came. Her mind was not clouded anymore, not sad anymore. She found happiness in crying. The more she cried, the better, the lighter she felt. She cried till she felt weightless, like a body bobbing around in the clear mountain air. Hours later, while walking down a narrow stretch of road, she caught sight of her face in a mirror. She smiled at her eyes and the thin line that divided her chin into two unequal halves.