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.
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