Burgundy

The night is well-fed. It has gorged itself on half-a-dozen Kashmiri dishes, and it’s now lying back like a stuffed bear in an enveloping armchair, soundtracked by Jagjit Singh’s paper-boat-flowing-in-a-rainwatery-stream-of-gravel-mixed-with-amber-honey voice. The Indian Mark Knopfler, in terms of sheer amatory power. Mum changes the CD, puts on ‘Old Hindi Evening’. I’ll have two tablespoons of schmaltz with my post-dinner tea, please.

…

Aur tujhse haseen, tera pyaar.

...

It’s a wet night. Outside, the moon is crying in satin sheets and the clouds are murmuring in sympathy. It’s a low rumble. Lovers. It reminds me of you. Everything does, these days. The sound of running water down the walls of this beautiful red brick house. A smell which could have been yours, which you could have worn like a maroon coat one day, if I’d known you for long enough. A movie which you would have liked. A poem. Oh, a poem. A burgundy poem. Maybe one about the stars and the birds and the clouds and the ghostly galleon of a moon and crimson love underneath the humid trees on such a blankety, cold night.

I want to write for you. I want to create for you. The only thing I can create is poetry (though it seems a fancy word for what I write), and I shall praise my private, banging-off-the-walls-of-my-skull love with my words. My affection is the fountainhead of my poetry. I shall build you up in a dozen sentences and screaming syntax, make you out to be something you can never be. It shall be but a reflection of that is within my mind; what the shivery gossamer membrane of my aesthete-brain foolishly dreams you to be. It is a falsehood, and it exists only within my head; it is all the more real for it. I shall praise your hipster shirts and your burgundy pants (‘burgundy’ tastes like a treacly pudding), the subtle ornamentation and oversized glasses to the heavens, and it shall all pour down upon me in clanging brass pots and pans.

I’ve met you so many times in my sleep. Maybe that’s why you seem so familiar. I’m in love with the emotion that drenches me when I catch a glimpse of your illuminated face in the muddy marshes of my mindscape.

You are, sometimes, a set of geometric straight lines, black on white, crisscrossing. And sometimes, you are a honeyed flower, a freckled ruby in Nature’s trousseau, a harmonic in an amber-toothed symphony. Or maybe you’re none of this, and these are all fruits of my mind. Maybe you’re a fruit of my mind. A passionfruit.

Words. Such lying, traitorous, fickle instruments. Beautiful, in the way choreographed violence is. Lord Shiva is beautiful. Poison is beautiful. I am Shiva. And you are a collection of syllables.

Your name is too fragile for the external. Too unattached, too free, too dreamy. It comes to me in my sleep, floating on a visual four-note allegro of your eyes and your nose and your hands and your frowning lips. So let’s drink your name in. Let’s wrap it up in rolling paper and inhale the burning sounds, singe our lungs with your incorporeal beauty, defile their friable pinkness with the soot of the distance between us. We won’t use a filter.

…

Tu, jaane na.

Ah, self-pitying beauty. The lakes of my eyes shall overflow at the corners and shall run down like twin drains – they carry the refuse of the past – and shall stain my shirt, leave sallow puddles. Shall stagnate, and stink.

…

But the ashes of the night are smoldering, now. It’s time to go to bed.

…

Goodbye. I’m sorry. Goodnight.