Paper

All these people.

So much love. So much subconscious fear, that I might die without having shared enough of my thoughts with the external, that this unique experience of having been ME, that all the words that swim frantically through my thoughtstream, would curl and wisp away in the fire of my pyre.

This irrepressible need to express. To live. To love.

So I share with people I love. Pour myself into them. And urge them to pour into me, and bind, and be bound. I spread myself in all these pretty, pretty people, who I call friends.

...

And you. I wanted a partner, one person I could do all my pourings into, optimize this process of exhibition. I started defining the experience of reality through sentences that I constructed in the smithy of my mind, and gift-wrapped them for you; I occasionally sent them to you in summer night conversations, and texts sent in the dead of night under the influence of exhaustion.

But this exclusivity is dangerous. If only you were a boy...

And we fell. 

...

And now we dance again, slightly older, slightly wiser. And the old smithy of the mind is whirring up its machinery again, softly humming your name in interstices between family and friends and work.

...

I am so exhausted from this pouring. I don't have time, I'm ruining myself, I'm spreading myself too thin.

But you're all so interesting. I love you all.

So do I pour myself in all of you? I would die from the effort. Oh, if only there was one who could be a placeholder for my experience of reality. If I had one, I wouldn't need all.

...

Or perhaps this whole idea is flawed. Why should I define my life in sentences wrought for someone?
But then who do I talk to?

A piece of paper.

But paper doesn't talk back. I cannot love cellulose pulp. And it cannot love me back.

...

Go lightly.

Perhaps I should not want to love so much. Perhaps I should stop thinking about this process. Perhaps I need to learn detachment. Happiness surely has something to do with !thinking.

...

I need to learn detachment.

...

Hello paper my old friend. I've come to talk with you again.

The Old And The New

दुनियाँ जो प्यासा रखे, तो मदिरा प्यास बुझाये 
मदिरा जो प्यास लगाये, उसे कौन बुझाये?

This Shirazi wine, quenches the thirst that the world ignites, but
the thirst that this wine ignites, who will quench that?

...

हम हैं कि हम नहीं?

Are we, or are we not?
You told me once, but I forgot.

...

Ah, Bollywood. Imparting poetry to the emotions of a billion hearts.

Patterns (#personal)

Everyone out.

Raqs

"Dance so that all of me dances with you
See, by experience, who gets tired first, I or you
You and I are a boat just facing a storm, dance
Imagine I am drowning and the ocean is you
What happening sweeter than this?

For me, who has no escape, except for you
You'll become blue and calm tomorrow
And the island is so beautiful, and tomorrow you
You being moored besides the quay and I
Ask you what you did, what did you do
That I, who didn't dance to the song of destiny
How danced without withholding with you, only you."

- Amineh Daryanavard (translated by Niloofar)

Doost

"I'm back."

And just like that my structures and my heart go out of the window.

...

Go gentle into that good night.

We need to learn, doost-e-aziz.
We need to learn patience.
I need to learn to temper my greed for you.

We need to learn of lightness.

I want to consume you whole, fuse the pulsing energy that burns in our cores, be a scream ripped from my teeth by the ferocity of my affection, that you can hang, bloody, on your bedroom wall...

We need to learn of lightness.

...

Amar shonar maturity.

...

"I've missed you."
I've missed you.

Young

At what point did we become young?

When did we start
Meeting in cafés and restaurants
And bedrooms and for brunches
With mutual friends?

When did we outgrow our mothers
And our fathers, and start
Having our own silences?

The young all suffer
From a generational
Imposter's syndrome.

And we pretend to maturity
And adulthood, with
Our poetry and apartments,
And we cry when our hearts
Are incapable of feeling any much more.

What do you know?

What do you know?

Of early mornings spent
Paralyzed at dutiful desks
Unable to move, to think,
Overwhelmed by this unbound liquid
That collected and expanded
Without an end in mind, existing
For its own sake,
In the well of my chest, demanding
Screaming, to be felt, to be felt, to be felt.

To be given, to be poured
On someone, on something
Anything, (and yet nothing was worthy enough).

What do you know of that terrible yearning
That inarticulate hunger
For subsumption, of being consumed,
That would shatter my breast if I but
Gave it
Half a dozen inches.

What do you know?
Safe in that remote icy corner
That you carved one night in your heart,
What would you know?

...

I'm not even angry. I'm just curious.
Do you know?

Hayat

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

...

I want to rip
your softly pulsating loneliness from
your breast.

Consume it whole.

Creep in the holes
of your tightly-knit skin
and inject the universe of
my red-shifted affection
into the pools of
your quiet days.

...

Happy Birthday, Hayat. You deserve the world.

Aabi

Say lah! We.

...

My eyes had ants in them
from exhaustion, when you kissed me.
And we spent the hesitant night
painting a lonely stairwell
Blood red.

...

"Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. 
All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red."

...

Your face is now an entirely divorced dream
I keep in an envelope, and it's interesting:
in your absence, I have fallen in abject love
with the extreme aestheticism of
the corners of your mouth.

What a funny love. A love that began last night
when I happened upon a photograph of you - when
your face hit me, and settled
somewhere in the pit of my stomach -
and a love without an end.

A love that can but meet with hate and pain,
but a love that I cannot help.
I do not want to help.

...

Urdu?
Tabeez bana ke pehne tujhe.

...

I am done being strong.
If I can but ever be in love with an idea, so be it.

Bearable Lightness

I see him
diffuse into
you.
I see you
beautifully stretching to the limit of what it means to be
you.

Your affection floats like foam
and this simple frothiness becomes you;

...

Your innate heaviness goes well
with his 
helium love.

Python

"…my need for closeness outweighs my sense of self-preservation." 
- Virginia Woolf

...

There are so many ways to know you.

For a part of me wants to kiss your eyelids, and
rest and frolic in your quickened breath,
and yet another part wants to
catch a fractal of
thy mind, and keep it safe
against the slope of my eye-
lashes.

There are so many ways to know you, and
a part of me wants to laugh adoringly
at your tiny games.

And a part of me wants to swallow you whole:
I am a self-devouring python, and our
conversations will dissolve
your exoskeleton.

There are so many ways to know you, and
I want them all.

...

You don't understand.
I want to become you.

You are a pocket of complexity in the space-time mattress
and besides,
I need an inertial frame:
What does an algorithm feel like from the inside?

...

And besides,
This skull is boring.

b

I would have written about you
in pretty words

but
words
deconstruct:
they break you down into
a collection of atomic
types, and
they are braces of definition, whereas
you
are irreducible.

You are so violently yourself, and
that is why you are so loved.

Happy Birthday, you fantastic human being.
The world needs more of you.
Please just clone yourself already.

Suggestions

We live in a world
where friendships are determined
by graph theory.

Now if they could just optimize
this massively parallel distributed network
that is my brain,
that would be perfect.

(I could do 
with a less persistent
cache.)

Actually,
if they could put in
a hard reset button
that would be perfect.

And if they could make
the soft reset
contain less references

to the way
you used to awkwardly laugh at your own jokes, I could
wake up in the mornings

without crystals of you
dissolving like quicksand
on the tip of my tongue.

Tuple

My internal implementation of the specification for a compiler for the language of Love is not as weakly typed as I had hoped.

To be sure, it's not statically typed (for that would be too boring), but I do have types, which are allocated dynamically at some point during runtime.
The variable Relationship of expression type tuple (e1, e2) has a polymorphic product (T1 x T2) type (because annotating types would be just plain unnatural).

To be sure, the tuple type flows/morphs between these types. However, at any given time, it is typecast to a single type. There is no Heisenberg-y wishy-washyness happening (well, maybe if I observe it too much, the act of observation will affect the reading). At the very least, the probabilistic murkiness is much less pronounced than I had earlier thought.

To be sure, I learn.

GC

I wonder if a compiler ever
sits down with a glass of whiskey regret.

...

I am fed up.

I am fed up
of this ghost that haunts this shell.

So

I cast you
into an Object.

And with time,
references to you
will delete themselves
Quietly.

...

But

I know the pieces fit, because
I watched them fall away.

Curse this silence,
and curse the fact
That at least one of us
is not perfect.

...

It's funny, this loop:

I learn to handle loss
from a compiler.

1+1

I'm allowed to be self-indulgent sometimes, right?

...

Tonight
I found it.
Her eyes are the colour
of pure hazel.
Her eyes are the color of chestnut.

She's leaving tomorrow.
She is imprisoned in this skull.

She is beautiful from the inside, and milky love
Flows steadily through her green veins.
She is beautiful, and she is as selfish as me.

To love you is to be rational.
To love you is suicidal.

Stay.
Leave.

Lover.
I wish I could hate you.

...

"It doesn't matter."

Tonight, I found it. Right next to the tiny brown freckle next right to her nose, there was a tiny speck of white loose skin, that dangled wrapped in its own humdrumness and in this humdrumming I found that she was human and alive and incredibly vast and labyrinth-like and a massive galactic private show goes on behind her eyes, just the same as it does for me. She is as human as I am! She is as alive as I am! She thinks! She is alive!

I want to push her off a cliff.
I want to jump off a cliff.

You are a collection.
Your face is focused around your lips.
Your eyes are alien.

How did it come to this?
Oh ooh ooh yeah-e yeah-e yeah-e yeah-e yeah.

I love him. 
This Trinity. The Father, the Daughter and the
Alien.

I want to explode.
I want to suspend thought.
"You think too much."
Stop.

You say you want a revolution

"Oh Shivan, if you had to be Kashmiri, couldn't you have been Muslim? You'd have been so much sexier."

Unfortunately, dull quotidian loss is blasé. Doesn't quite have the attraction of a nice little blood-soaked revolution.

Allahs, that I shall never know the language of my parents.

This lack of a home is not sexy though. No flags to wave or songs to sing or Shakespeare adaptations to be made for something to which your only recollection and right is a white-haired woman's account of what used to be a home, before calls to prayer were calmly punctured with the hysterical laughter of midnight torture.

Sadda Haq unko dedo yaar, humein kehwa peene do.

Arundhati Roy is sexy. Delhi University girls with wits like zanjeers studying International Development/Relations/Politics/Economics whose Facebook About pages scream that they are 'Libertarian' are sexy. My beautiful friend who charms in a single conversation and studies social impact in Kenya is sexy.

I am boring.

Temporary

I fall into her
Insatiable softness,
and find temporary oblivion
in her too-small arms-hands,
and her softly insistent grunts
and the brown freckles
in her eyes, and on her soft white cheeks.

Ghost in the Shell ("Doublethink")

You don't live up to yourself.
You couldn't. You are human.

...

I am lost in the infinity between us
And nothing is real to me
Until I've translated it for 
The ghost 
That haunts my shell. 
I talk endlessly to Her
And this artificial intelligence
Is my Idea, and not even you
Can steal her from me.

But
I wait for her to dissolve
Into me, until all I can make out
Is flotsam, like
An outtake of amused breath
That shall pop into the landscape of my consciousness
Like a stray strand of
Brown hair.

...

I indulge
In this Orwellian game
Of not remembering
(Because you are my
Big Friend)
And holding on
(Because my mind
Is untamed)
At the same time. 
And every day I get better.

Of Scar Tissue and Compilers

We are
Always
One revolution
Of mind and emotion
Behind each other.

We fall
In infinite circles
Around equilibrium.

Stuck in orbit, we
try
To solve
A free body problem.

And this separation
Is delicate.
Stretching us to comfortable stability;
But
Does a snapping string
Make a sound
If there's no one around to
To hear it?

...

For silence you art, and unto
Silence shalt thou return.

...

And time and sleep shall heal,
As always, too much;
The great lobotomizers.

...

The turtle crawls into herself; alas
That fate is an artist, not a logician; alas,
That I touched too much.

Shelf Life

Ideas
Are cold.
They do not
Breathe fire
The way
Undulating skin
does.

But

Ideas
And memories
Last.

Prophecies

http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/03/inkwell-16/

Eden

I wish you were a boy.
I wish you were a girl.

...

We played
Human jigsaw
last night, on
a mattress of your Original Guilt, and
my confused affection,

and in the morning it was decided
that we must repent forever
for the temptations of
The people we were
Last night.

...

And now, you
and your green God impose
Exile.
But
You have your guilt to sustain you;
What have I?

...

Hello coldness my old friend.

Clique cliche quiche

Today.

What is today? There are all these interfaces to the realness, these abstractors. These computers and emails and telephones and tools. I can see a strand of curled up hair fidgeting near my foot, agitated by the mindless fan droning softly somewhere behind my back. And I can see your picture in my Gmail inbox, as I type this. But you are not here.

You are thousands of miles away. I wonder what you're doing. I wonder what you're thinking. You have a 'today' too. You're living life, going through the necessary and trying to create tiny sparks of magic in the interstices between the momentum, just the same as I am. We inhabit the same continuum, and yet you are so far away so as to be unreachable.

The past is a story we tell ourselves.

What is today? A stretching on off the hours. Sometimes if I close my eyes it feels like all these German physicists are right and that time really is relative and that if I closed my eyes for long enough, time would cease to exist as a concept.
And yet it drips like liquid sand from the ends of the seconds-hand of my bedroom clock, unmindful of my exhausting and frenzied Gedankenexperiments. Soon I shall pack it up in an ugly suitcase. The summer is over and I have to move.

But what is change? These concepts are lies. There is no past. There is no change. There is only you and me, and the rest of us, and all this motion is unnecessary and if we all just closed our eyes maybe time would really stop.

I want to walk all the way to you, swim across the oceans, measure out in my preoccupied breaths and drops of sweaty seconds the distance between you and me. And then everything will be real, because one thing shall be real: you.

Perhaps time is real. The sun goes down and comes up and every morning is greyer and one of these days I shall wake up and I shall be Thirty and the grooves in my skin from the flowing erosion of passing days shall sit heavy and carry in it half-remembered affection. And then I shall realize.

Every day I seem to realize something new.

I should stop writing and live instead. My laundry is calling me in wet gurgles, and I must go and pack.

Time and distance. 

...

If I could just hug you right now and walk with you in your mind for a minute, every thing would seem worth it.

Time and distance and silence.

...

Too meta to be truly alive.

Closer

By the light of the moon we grow
Closer, and yet not closure enough.

Tiger

You beautiful idiot. 

Struck dumb
By the impossibility of the distance
Between our realities
We whisper mutely
That we miss.

Our coherence sucked into this
Black hole that erupted from the mouth
Of a flight attendant who screamed at you
To tell you,
That phones must be put away whilst taking off.

The  pupil of
Your right eye bleeds a tiny
Chocolate pool into your tiger-flecked iris,
And I saw myself
Growing larger in your eyes,
One last time.

Goodbye, love.
You've given me more than you can know.

Kepler

We spend our midsummer days
Falling around each other
Like two stars locked
In a Goldilocks gravitational dance.

...

Carefully precise in our attachment,
We dance. 

Plath

"A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife. "

I'm scared.

Every passing second bears witness to a crime of galactic proportions - I'm sleeping. I'm petrified that every living instant, every second, is slipping by me and I'm not living enough. I'm not feeling enough, I'm not alive enough. My senses are fogged; I'm trapped in the belly of my mind, and my mind is dying one wasted second at a time.

Just going through the motions. Every emotion comes to me from across an ocean of confused ideas and thoughts. Every thought is slightly muddled; I am impure. I want to be a shard of glass, but I am an inchoate cloud of smoke. So... dead. Where is happiness? Is happiness only evident through a rear-view mirror? Is life lived only in memories?

I want to be pure. I want to torture myself, burn myself, until I can feel, until I can think, until I can touch, until I am raw from the living, until every second pulses like the frenzied heart of a dying animal. Tired of all this extraneous fat and blubber. Make me pure. Pure intellect. Pure. 

!haiku

Our kisses are cheap
Like paper butterflies that
Float abundantly

...

and yet 
Shimmer like dreams.

Distraction

I am a blade of grass
Shivering in the wind of
Awareness that swirls forth
From quiet contemplation.

My days are confused, and
I pump in activity to keep
Them from deflating.

Motion shall save our souls,
Shall deliver us from the
Edge
Of a dispassionate,
And undiscriminating
Ledge.

...

Time gushes forward with gruesome
Haste, and
I avert my eyes politely. 

The Fifteenth of June

You are
Wine sipped in fine company, laced with conversations
Studded with 'Rushdie' and 'Schumpeter', and
You are
Bombay downed in a violent gol-gappa gulp
Dripping with gulaal-coloured nautch and Bollywood passion and an insatiable will
To be raucously alive.

You are beautiful, and you know it; your
Eyes are the colour of soft milk chocolate
The kind we used to love as children; that we used to lick
From the golden-silver foil of a nostalgic Indian Cadbury's, and 
You worry incessantly about 
Spectacles and rashes and hair density.

You are godless, and
I do not know of anyone more devout.

You are American hope and ambition and the
Desperate need to be known and loved, and
You are the half-urge
To live away your life in a quiet cottage
With books, and someone you love, and pass away
As silently as you came.

You are rational and logical, and
You keep a list of people who called you on your birthday.

You are the strongest girl I know, and
You cry once a day.

You are easy friendship, and instant connections, and Little Tiny Acts
Of love, and
You are Delhi 2012.

You are regret
Of all the shared moments and individual ones shared
That I lost out on, when I went off in my search for
Happiness, and 
If losing you was the price, then if I could go back in time,
I would choose you.

You are anti-nationalist, and pro-Pakistan
and pro-Pakistani boys, and  
you were standing on a plastic chair, framed gloriously in your tri-coloured salwar-kameez-chunni against 
A sky awash with two thousand and twelve tri-coloured balloons, and
Your hair was flying in a sable cloud, and you were looking off into the distance
With a hinting smile on your lips, and 
In that moment frozen permanently and hung on a canvas in the gallery of my mind, I love you like I love Art.

You are now twenty one, and promising,
And beautiful and intelligent and charming and gracious and bursting at the seams with
Potential, and

Most of all,
Noopur Sen,
You are loved.

Happy 21st birthday, Khargu. *trumpet*

…

You are my reflection cast onto a prettier mirror.
You are what I hope to be and I love you.

Walks Along the Seine

She smoked cigarettes like minutes,

And we spent the summer

Being chased by days

That lengthened like shadows.

She smoked cigarettes,

And the ever-thickening smoke

Dissolved lovingly into the fabric

Of the Original Distance between us.

She smoked

Violently, and we burned in the frenzied heat and

In the lush green fertility of Novelty; until one day

She smoked herself away.

She left behind

a solitary cup of thickhotsweet chai,

Infused with ginger;

And soon the memories of her

Hazel eyes and bouncing humour and

the delicate warmth of her tooslender wrists and

Her armour and her monsters and

Her affected joy, all

Shall fade into a beige nothingness:

Like a lover

Or a dream.

Honey

Goodbye, Cristina.

... 

You gatecrashed into
Our monochromatic days, and
Added strokes of lemonyellow laughter
That shall belly-dance through the summer-lit streets
Of our magically realistic memories,
And recollections of your diamond tongue
Shall tint our evenings to come
With a crimson, sombrero-wearing passion.

My only regret
Are the unborn conversations
That lie still in the pregnant space between us.

Nicotine

Last night,
You spoke of cigarettes.

And I fell in love
With your ingenuous self-destruction;

The fifteen-year-old you that now exists
In tar-stained words

Spray-painted provocatively onto a sleep-deprived corner of
The walls of my brain - your words are graffiti;

...

Their beauty makes me restless.

Glass

She is
A broken shard of glass
Sharpened on the dusking sun.

She is
A cloud of foam
On the hypothalmus of my morning coffee.

She is
A leaf stolen from a tree
Of memories, that I am envious for.

She is
A sentence whispered by velvet lovers
In a veiled language I shall never understand.

She is
A dancer; alas, that
My honesty is awkward.

She is
A stone of abstraction, and I desire the
Idea of her. Abstractedly.

...

She is
Beautiful, and I hate her for it. I wish
She were discarnate. 

Immortal

We dip ourselves in the ink
Of our thoughts and words and
Emotions and deeds
And inscribe in tiny lettering
Tiny stories on our tiny corner
Of the tapestry of this infinite universe.

And minuscule though we are,
We are heroes and heroines of
Our tiny stories, and
Our accomplishments and achievements
And poetry and love affairs
Shall be sung in paeans
By every tendril of summer wind that
Blows through the dusty streets of our
Hometowns,
(The dust ground out of the slow
Grinding of the gears of Time)
And our tiny stories shall live on
In the hearts and minds of the tiny people
We love. And theirs'
Shall live on as well, in some one else's;

And thus we are immortal -
We cheat death through
These doubly linked-lists
Of love.

...

(I am Tolstoy, and

I want to be Chekhov. I am

The Self-Taught Man, and I want to be Antoine Roquentin.

I am Betsy, and I want to be Esther Greenwood.

I am milk.)

Casual

It’s not hard to forget.
All you need to do
Is to remove their agency.

Cast them into an Object.

Take their swirling, twirling complexity -
The way they crinkle their nose
When they catch an errant thought.
The way Her gazelle eyes capture
Stray sun flakes, and the way
You try to follow her down one of her
Rabbithole thought-chains and you resurface
Hours later, a little less sane,
But swaying softly to purple music.
Her unpredictability, her randomness,
Her labyrinth-like emotions and Her passion and her cool familiarity –

And put them into a delineated brace.
Tear down the edifices of them you’ve erected
In the recesses of your mind.

Take away their humanity.
Define them.

And poof! No more.

You cannot be too deeply in love
With an Object.

…

Surrender
To the liquid nitrogen anger that
Smolders in your veins;
Let it wash away these cobwebs of complexity
And stale poems that breed quietly
In your mind,
When you’re not looking.

Youth

Youth is

An overflowing heart and

A trembling-with-ache brain.

Maturity is calmly wistful.

Maturity is a burden

Squeezing down my rebellious throat,

Gagging me.

The cross that grants me stability

And structure;

Youth is a poem that reveals too much,

A song that feels too much,

Half-smiles that say too much.

Him

Your synapses are

Lined with memories

Of his eyes, his nose, his smell;

The ghosts of his fingertips on your waist

Crawl around like spiders when I touch you.

His name is engraved in ornate lettering

Onto some corner of your brain.

I can taste him on the tip of your tongue, and

I can hear him murmuring like a salty stream

Underneath the sound of your choked sobbing.

Perhaps one day you shall invite me in

To your skull again, and perhaps

I shall acquiesce;

But I shall find draped on the sofa

And the lampshade and the coatrack,

Shadows of him

and him and Him.

Rain

These morning raindrops round

The outer skin of my mood;

Send the occasional fractalling thrill

Of cold pleasure shivering down

To my core.

The rain is impersonal,

And yet so familiar. It tugs playfully

At yarns of memories

Of infinite June afternoons in my mother's verandah, and it smells 

Of the summer that is to come. It

Washes away terrestrial concerns

Of my pre-caffeine mind, and

Whispers softly in the echoes of

The drumming on my sill...

Whispers what? Who knows?

It's enough that it whispers.

Cold

The days take on the hue of infinity, and yet
We are all hurtling at 67,000 miles an hour towards
A rusted bed and a rusted bedpan.

The incorrigible sticky loneliness makes me cry, sometimes,
With mirth;
Life is hilarious in its cruelties, and I'm

Unsure if the cavernous stretching
Of the days makes me want to explode with
Infinite happiness, or infinite gloom.

...

She
Is in cold love with everything, and I
Am in love with her coldness.

Cobwebs in the Sky

Yesterday, we talked of spiders.

“The sky is so blue,” I said, and you chuckled at my inane obviousness. But it was; Rayleigh still refuses to tell me why the word ‘periwinkle’ fits perfectly like a rubber band over the concept of ‘sky’ – both onomatopoeically and in meaning.  I glanced over at you as you played with a single blade of grass – we’re still getting used to summer – as we both lay on a sloping part of the lawn. I kept feeling like I’m falling off.

And there were cobwebs in the sky over us, crisscrossing silently from one end to the other. We spent the evening unraveling them and unraveled with them until the sky darkened in silent protest against our analysis and we trudged off home silently, slightly drunk on the grass-stained memories of the sun and the pollen and a happy, unisexual exhaustion.

Summers and Home

Another piece I found lying under dusty binary digits. It’s unfinished.

…

Home. A shape-shifting palmy island in an infinite ocean.

9 months ago – give or take – I was born to this Island, and though my thoughts of home have come galloping on a cloud of dusty humidity and familiarity and realness and friendly family less and less over the months, my emotions haven’t left their spiraling orbit around that cinnamon-scented and turmeric-tinted idea of Home that exists, frozen, under the surface of a winter lake of my thought-stream; a whiskey thorn in the side of my hippocampus. Sometimes at night, still – though I have long since learned how to sleep alone – monsoons of my receding childhood wet my Wal-Mart pillow.

It hasn’t been easy (and other platitudes).

Ghosts of my mother and my brother and Her have crept into the crevices and crannies of my uncanny days, and have frightened me with their incorporeality, jumping out screaming when I’m most weak; caricatures of the denizens of haunted houses that I used to read about in Ruskin Bond books when I was too young to discriminate between literature and literature, and every novel was a blur, and the days didn’t hurtle past me with breathtaking recklessness.

Pardonnez?

The poutine-coloured dust of Routine is now sprinkled liberally over my days and my thoughts have lately taken to speaking to me in a nasal twang born out of French winters. The hollow eyes of the mannequins that guard Rue St. Catherine against the fashion-unconscious used to rake me earlier, pouring judgmental venom upon my close-cropped hair and my baggy jeans and dropping diacritical remarks about my different-accented English. Now, I almost-understand them, and they sometimes understand me; if I move my lips enough these days, they even nod.

Department of Homeland Insecurity (and other pastiches).

Last night I allowed myself to dream, and I saw myself eating a masala ground-beef burger in a French restaurant where the waiters only spoke Mandarin that dripped like maple syrup onto my bemused p(a)late and induced vague guilt.

Vague guilt. The dirt that is omni-scient/present and gets in everywhere, clogs the treadmill of your brain and fogs your eyes. The subtle melancholy of the summers in my monochromatic hometown which I find myself having difficulty remembering in detail (and yet the mood lingers on the tip of my tongue), even though it was barely a year ago that I left a mother’s humid embrace to come to this cold country.

And yet I’m happy now. Or at least, placid. As I sip Marché Lobo’s finest instant coffee and sit on my granite balcony and look out at the city, summer is breaking out over Montreal…

…

Summer has come to Montreal. In a matter of days, the grass and the leaves on the lasting trees have turned green in envy of the slipping tan-lines of the exercised bodies of these fiercely young women and men. You can smell the settling summer. You can smell it in the gusts of lilac air that bear frizzing Frisbees along with the solemn promise that summer has come to Montreal. You can hear it in the idle twittering of students who’ve come out of intellectual hibernation and now intoxicate themselves on knowledge-for-its-own saké in hardcover-bound wine glasses. Rimmed in overlarge fashionable intellect, they eat metaphors like doughnuts on sun-washed lawns and Lower Fields and Upper Fields and Just-Right fields, and remind me that summer has come to Montreal.

Oh, but look! There is now a hint of leaden moisture in the air: a symbol for renewal, the world over. Soon the heavens shall pour forth, wash away the fluffy white cobwebs of the sky, and of the minds. The thunderous vacuum cleaner shall roar away, and soon the night shall be ushered in like a shy vermillion-marked Indian bride, for the enjoyment of poets and lovers, who shall inscribe her into their work, symbol-ize her. And like all beautiful things, she shall give joy forever to others.

Epilogue, again

Found this a while back in my notes. It’s pretty old, and I was clearly much younger (or was I?) I found it entertaining.

…

No, I can’t talk to you. You can’t just drop in with your infrequent ‘hi’s. You and your ambition are made of sterner stuff, but I have long since realized that I am Antony’s Caesar. And I am dead. Life slips away from me for a millisecond every time you pop into my mind, and I can’t spend my days sighing. You are an herb of nostalgic regret, and I am trying to weed out the last remnants of your voice from my head, so that they don’t crop up all over my brain, and hurt me. Your ‘hi’ is fertilizer to these cut-up, miserable, bastard roots.

I can’t talk to you. But I know I shall bow down to the excited teenager in me, who shall gush and play in words and bathe in your tele-presence, and pine like a poem that doesn’t rhyme in your absence –  when you decide your work is greater than me.

I can’t talk to you. Please try to understand. I’m not as strong as you are. Change has made me feeble, and my own attempts at being a rock of strength have weakened me. I tremble like a reed, subordinate to the wind, when you come a-calling.

I can’t talk to you. You are becoming a passion. A goal without an end, in defiance of Aristotle’s confused manifesto. You are crossing over from the mental to the physical world of wants, and I cannot have the former – the latter I cannot even dream of without nettle-like desire pinching me. You are the personification of the yellow masochistic streak in me.

I can’t talk to you. Yes, I admit it. My rational construct – the ivory tower from which I make sense of the world within and without me – is crumbling. My friends these days are maudlin love songs and wet-papery poems written by unknown internet poets who shall die without a name, and the mud creatures of my mind, who haunt me in the depths of the night. The darkness used to kiss my window panes; it invades my bed these days. And my poetry. What am I supposed to do, when my finest works are created under the grace of your ghost?

I can’t talk to you. I like who I am when I talk to you. I’m sorry that I am the way I am, and the way I was. I’m sorry that I imposed my attempts at rationality on you – I should have known they would fall under the onslaught of a declined invitation to talk.

I can’t talk to you. I’m trying to justify this madness, place it in a brace of thought-out concepts. I wanted us to be unrestricted friends. But you were intuitively cleverer than me, weren’t you? Your gut knew Hume, knew that the mind is a fallacy.

I can’t talk to you. Don’t talk to me. Cut us both free, why don’t you? You have reason to hate me, so why don’t you, completely? Or would you rather torture me by throwing me occasional bones of casual affection?

I can’t talk to you. I have laundry to do and dishes to wash and food to cook and I have to socialize and clean myself and think a million things. My timetable does not have time for you. Please go away. I love you. Please. Please.

…

Hi.

Rabbit

You are a puppy’s footprint, caught in fresh cement.
You are the dew that settles on icy car windows, and keeps hope alive of a world outside.
You are the rasp in Norah Jones’s voice, as she croons ‘Sunrise, Sunrise…’

You are hope, and A.R. Rahman on his best day, and the sound of music
Wafting over a freed Kashmir.
You are the old record playing on a Sunday morning, you are
Sunshine that fades away Kodak memories.

You are in my heart, and in the
Varnish fast rubbing off my toe-nails. You are
The slender fingers that adjust too large glasses onto a crooked nose.

You are the dusty letters that dance
Inside of old books, you are words and you
Are voices, and most of all, you are me.

You are twenty one, and I love you.

- Noopur Sen

…

You are my reflection cast onto a prettier mirror.
You are me and I love you.

Virtual Machine

I speak like a compiler to her.
In precise words we exchange ideas; her
Frigid foreignness doesn’t allow
For redundancy in communicated thoughts
And speech.

Our relationship is
An algorithm to her, and
My poetry burns a tattoo on
The inner surface of my public methods,
Which she calls when it makes sense to,
No more, no less.

She wears her austere religion on
Her olive-green sleeves; I lost mine to a song
And a book.

She’s beautiful like a mathematical proof; I am swirling
Twirling, fighting
The hydras of half-thoughts that are born
Out of wedlock between the Past and the Future, who
Copulate with silent screams on my fecund pillow.
I am trying to fill empty spaces in my jigsaw, and she
Fits precisely.

…

Too precisely. Alas, that
Fate is an artist, not a logician.

You Crazy Breed

Skip

Tiptoe

Around

These criss-crossing ropes

That form a maze:

A delicately mutating labyrinth

A hydra that refuses to die.

Second-guessing

Second-thinking

Always second

To the pressing need

To be acceptable

To be normal

To belong.

...

Adultery is a lesser crime

Than slurping. 

Vegas

Miles and miles

Of the United States of

Nothingness; a solitary

Cigarette of happiness dangles

From the side of a racing

scarlet convertible,

impervious to the desert

Wind, which is itself

Retaliation against speed.

Speeding towards

A purveyor of

Hope.

Miles and miles

I have travelled in solitude

Just me and my ironic cigarette, and

The theater of my mind is running

Advertisements -

Billboards that approach billious

And brilliant and increasingly

Behemothic until they vanish -

The Great American Highway is

A Capitalist-Zen dream.

Miles and miles,

And then:

A neon oasis.

She Sleeps

She walks with a

Permanent half-smile

On her face,

She tastes like an avocado

On my tongue.
Her smile 
Crinkles up my world.

She forgives me my cruelties

After midnight

So that's when I call her.

Sleep smoothes away the bumps

I cause in her synapses.

Every years she's getting older

And every year she remains the same.

She spends her allowance on expensive

Stickers that she sticks on cards to me:

Tweety the Bird proclaims her affection

For me, and put

My self-conscious attempts at amatory poetry

To shame. 

Pirate King

Bertrand Russel says that his advice for any reasonably talented young man afflicted with the disease of sinusoidal ennui is to go out into the world, become a king and/or a pirate, explore and live such that survival is never at any point assured. We shall find happiness in struggle - through action, we shall enjoy the present. In motion there is contentment, and in comfortable solidity, decay and boredom and ultimately unhappiness. Like Will Smith says in my favorite movie of his, happiness is a pursuit. Where his character goes wrong is, however (although he may be forgiven for this given his circumstances), is his supposition that this pursuit is an unfortunate fact. Happiness is not a state; at least, not one achievable by ordinary folk who do not have much of a chance at achieving moksha and nirvana and the like. Happiness is necessarily active - it exists in the space between seconds spent moving.

I worry, sometimes, that what I really want from life is what Russell suggests: to become a pirate. Well, not that particular profession necessarily, but rather an absence of profession. Freedom. Freedom from the concept of a career, from the bred need to 'do well', to be successful, to earn lotsa money. From the need, from the disgusting, wretched nauseating need to have a resumé - an A4 size sheet of paper describing the sum total of me, my infinitely complex self with its myriad roots and branches and nodes and shy tendrils, to someone else who decides whether I'm 'good enough' to 'be successful' (quotation-mark everything) based on aforementioned sheet of paper. However, I would hope that I am not naïve: I understand that this organically-grown (and growing) system works best, and is probably the most optimal. It is all just rather unfortunate. I am also not anti-money: money is important, insomuch as it buys things that give us happiness: flight tickets to visit friends and family, books, art: all these things are (often) expensive. This of course begs one way of living a happy life: do a conventional job, amass capital, then do things that give you happiness. This is probably the model followed by a number of people; indeed, it seems like almost every one of my friends plans to do this. Yet here we sacrifice a number of the best years of our relative youth. Is there a point to being able to travel to the Amazon rainforest, when all of ones friends can't because they have families and they must be responsible adults? Or being able to afford the expenses of mountain-climbing, yet not having the knees for it? Can we, in another words, do better in our search for a model to life?

The best-case scenario, and the rarest, is when the performance and exercise of one's skills (the things that come to one naturally; we shall assume that this set is a subset of things we enjoy doing) results in wealth-creation. So the blessed are the computer science nerds, or the techies, or the people-who-love-finance-and-its-siblings: they love their jobs, and at the same time they earn money. To these people I say: I envy you.

Another case is that of the starving-yet-happy poet - intellectual satisfaction compenses for the lack of monetary satisfaction. The love for your craft outweighs the disadvantages to not having money. To these people I say: I respect you, but do not want to be you.

Why do I say that? Because I am increasingly suspicious that I don't have passions. At least none which are financially rewarding. I like computer science and math and engineering for the intellectual challenge of it. I would call what I'm studying 'interesting' and 'satisfying' and sometimes even downright fascinating, but is it my passion? I believe a definition of terms is in order. I define being passionate about something as an activity that you would do in your leisure time. It gives you so much happiness that you would exercise it on a holiday, even if there were no monetary benefit to being good at it. You would do it because the very act of it fills up your soul. You think about it all the time. It is a part of you. In that sense of the word, I doubt I'm passionate about anything.

Except maybe literature. Maybe. In any case, I shall never find out. 

My Little Cousin

My little cousin

Has an uncertain smile

A smile of innocent vulnerability

And it makes me love him.

It's probably a survival technique

Honed by years of evolution

And my love is a calculated response

But the smile slits through my armor of rationality

And I love him.

Montréal

Montreal. The city is an impostor. It would become my home. It beckons me sweetly yet insidiously to dissolve in the echoing jazz borne on the cerulean wings of its wind and in the singing drawl of a melanin-bankrupt denizen.

Montreal. Beautiful stranger. You shall soon give up the secrets of your tresses and the enveloping wrinkles of your brownish-white streets to me, once I get used to your ways and your speech and your idiosyncrasies.

Montréal. These initial salty pillowcases are the ransom I've paid for you.

Montréal. Meet me half-way. Teach me happiness in the insular bubble of individuality. Teach me to be content unto myself, and shower upon me the seasonal comfortable blossom of friendship. Give me you, and let me keep myself. Teach me to accept the accent marks in your name, and your nasal speech. Teach me to accept you, and accept me in turn. Supplant (but gently) the centre of my universe. Make me love you, but let me keep what I had loved safe in the granary of my unconscious mind, hidden under a dusty sack of songs, or maybe filed away beneath an innocuous emotion that darts in unnoticed some rain-and-whiskey soaked late-evenings. Make me come back to life. Adsorb my green-leaved fears and doubts onto your powdery-white skin, and when next spring you shed your skin, let me look back and be happy that I came to your doorstep one late August afternoon, with an inertial heart and a half-formed tear welling in a lonely corner of my eye.

Love

Love

Wakes us up

To life.

It rings a bell

Near our fuzzy ears

Ears that are plugged in

Against the static of life

Unplugs us, and dribbles

In a few choice drops of golden honey

So that we see and hear and touch

Life, as it really is.

Unfiltered.

Hear the beauty of musky speech

In words dropping like soft boulders

From a slope of a liquid tongue

See reflected sunlight on a a windowpane

And love Tyndall's dust mites

Hear the footsteps approaching

Like twin birds flapping,

Slapping against the heel of a beloved feet,

Clapping unconsciously for Today

Trapping.

Smell old cigarette smoke in wood-lined sofa rooms

And love every ash flake that flickers down

Like tired miners.

Love unblocks the mind, widens the

Narrowing filter

And lets it all in.

All in.

Till you swell up with an autumn glow

And burst into unbeckoned humour.

That singes everyday living

Paints a few brushstrokes

Hums a few bars.

Instant Coffee

There's a copy of you

That lives inside my head.

Ersatz-You murmurs like a breeze

Or a ghost

Softly right under the throb of my

Consciousness

During the day, but

At night, Ersatz-You comes out

Of your hiding,

Ferociously stalks like a tigress

The savannah of my mind, hunt

The fauna that creep like slugs and slip

In to the cinema of my pre-slumber

Imagination. My pirated copy of you

Protects me from myself, and

I snuggle into your feline eyes-neck-arms

Every night.

But now,

You're fading. Every night

You're a little paler in my arms,

Your eyebrows are dissolving and

Your cat-smiles come from a great distance.

The flow of Time is eroding a hole in my brain, and

You're slipping through,

Draining from me, and I'm trying to gather

Straws and strawmen into my arms, but

Every night my bed is colder, and soon

The shivering will start.

Fisherman

I'm a fisher-man

I'm a student

I'm employed

I'm a husband

I'm a father

I'm rich

I'm old

I'm a grandfather

I'm a fisherman.

Feminist

The thin, barely-there line of hair that made its way from one depression of the corner of your lip to the other, framing your closed smile; clung to your ivory-chocolate skin like fine moss to a marble wall.

The smattering of down on your exposed arms that you bare audaciously to a magazine world. This poster of rebellion against a parlour-beauty that you wore like an organic medal made me fall in love with your mind.

Dust

Exhausted listlessness

Stalks me through

The bush of the everyday.

Passionless 'how are you's

Old backpains

Listlessness of the day that stretches on for forever

Tired dust that swirls and dances in a ballet Under the spotlight of a beam of stray sunlight

Visible, then invisible. Visible. Invisible.

Incorrigible apathy of the hard bed

That seeps into the patterns in our skin, clenches tight

And holds on,

Till every morning we wake up exhausted.

Cut fingernails

Bits of paper that float in anarchy

Existing without a cause.

Stray droplets of sweat bead and coagulate

And fall, wordlessly.

Small apartments

The walls perpetually shrink

Contract

Squeeze

The life out of me.

Tired smiles

Of tired parents

Old undershirts

And sweaty meals

Served with a smile and the fervent hope

That happiness is well-cooked mutton.

Moisture hangs heavy

Over the dusking evening as

People hang onto their phones in loud

Desperation

And the ones who don't wait silently

Decayingly, for the ones who do.

Four tiny islands

Live under this yellow roof.

Insulated against each other's fire by

Old newspapers and TV and books

Cellphones and summerheat and money

And the internet and tired smiles

And old jokes and tired

Tired tired tired

Tired pursuit of money and/or happiness

Dusty filthy choking

Back empty words and empty jars

Of affection filled to the brim with

The dust of the Indian everyday

Days slip into weeks slip into months

And soon it is time for me to go back

And I have gained nothing, hung onto nothing

Nothing has penetrated my flesh and made home

Among the stars of my heart

Everything is blunted

By the dust of the Indian everyday.

Tired tired tired tired.

The exhaustion makes me want to burst out in tears

The anticipation was impotent

My love for these islands

Is anchoring me into quicksand

And I'm sinking, sinking

Into the exhausted everyday.

There is lead collecting in the pit

Of my stomach.

The abstracted notions of emotions

Connected to time and objects

Are draining like small rivulets into

This lake of churning metal.

The air is so heavy with moisture

That I'm trapped in it, wading through it

And I breathe the scent of old saliva

Every night as I lie on my bed

On my vagrant pillow

And toss frothily

Into the 'morrow.