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.