Of Maths and Metro ('Delhi')

Home.

I am in Chandigarh, at Home, resting in a state of postprandial contentment (is there any other kind?). Thank god I was born into a Kashmiri family with a penchant for all things non vegetarian. ‘Rogan Josh’ is equal to ‘happiness’, in my communally biased opinion.

Coldplay plays in the background. Acoustic guitars are so much more alive, more real, than their electric siblings; sounds of wood and steel (or nylon, if the guitarist in you is a part-time bullfighter from a financially troubled EuroZone nation. Avi Ahuja, get out of my head!). I used to love Coldplay. This is before I realized that everyone else did, too. A little bit of Dominique Francon lives on in me (as she does in the rest of the teenage population who read about Objectivism in the throes of youthful idealism; basically, before they should have). Ayn ArrogantYetInfluential Rand, take a bow.

Wood and steel, though. Cigarettes and coffee. Beer and paneer. Old guitars. New guitars. Brown paper packages tied up with strings. These are a few of my inner-aesthete-self’s favourite things.

I love Sundays. I didn’t use to. No one below the age of eighteen likes Sundays. But recently, I’ve begun to appreciate the lazy nostalgia of an unwashed Sunday afternoon. Teatime of the soul. Hours suspended in time and emotion. Suspended. After a point, the sheer lack of things to do (or what I will allow myself to do; I force upon myself rest, Sabbath-style) exhausts me.

I draw apart the matte-grey curtains of my bedroom window, look out in hazy boredom: patterns of tile, upon which pigeons hop. Terracotta tiles? I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not very good with the names of such things. For example, I never know what the name of a particular shade of colour is. I only very recently found out that fuchsia is a kind of pink (it is, right?). Or, the names of birds. I barely know what a pigeon is. I can’t tell a mynah from a sparrow to save my life.
Come to think of it, that’s not entirely true. I do know what a sparrow looks like. It’s just that I’ve always thought that I don’t know. Has that ever happened to you? Like, you think you don’t know a thing, but then you do know it, but still the thought that you don’t persists. Funny.

The afternoon’s fading. Soon it shall melt into the chilly evening, and everyone shall wake up from their naps. Indian siestas. They depress me. I used to think sleeping a waste of time, as a kid. So while everyone in my family slept in the ‘noons, I used to play or read or think. It used to get lonely as hell. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel lonely at the time. The loneliness reaches out across Time and Space; haunts me now. The afternoon begotten prosaic melancholy is a relic from my childhood, something I’ve carried with me through all these years. A friend once told me that Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with me. I’m lying, actually. He didn’t really say that. But I wish someone would say something like that to me. But I don’t have too many friends who would say stuff like that. You know?

Anyway. I’m enjoying my weekend, this brief bubble of insulation from the (so-called) rigors of collegiate academic life. This break from Delhi.

I should start on my Math assignment soon. The trouble with me is, I can’t ever get started studying. Once I start, I can keep going till whichever-mealtime-is-sooner, but I have what my Father calls ‘ignition problems’. (Because it’s winters. And I hate getting out of bed. And because my Dad loves cars.)

But for the sake of the Nerd within me, I should study. I will, soon. I know I’ll keep feeling horrible if I don’t. Maybe I’ll start studying when I go back to Delhi; Home should be about relaxation and books and writing and music and family and old friends, shouldn’t it?

Home. I’m going to miss Home.  I miss it already. Which is funny, because I miss Delhi too. How can I miss both of them at the same time? Typical.

I remember hating Delhi, when I first moved to it.

…

Delhi.

Delhi. Mad, crazy, insane, rushing, controversial, self-contradicting, honking, dusty, dirty, swearing, tattooed, old, new, lonely, friendly, rude, sticky Delhi.

Delhi. Flashy and coy and oily and chilly and sun-setting and theatrical Delhi.

Delhi. Simultaneously Old and New. Dilli and Delhi. Co-existing in uneasy comfort. I miss it.

Delhi. I miss the Metro, with its steely rush and people and overcrowdedness and the twin announcers’ voices announcing that we’ve reached Kashmere Gate and Rajive Chowk and XYZ Nagar and ABC Park. I miss the shady laziness of the tree lined walks on Campus. I miss the clumps of students discussing boyfriends and girlfriends and Shakespeare and Salman Khan and Eliot and Mankiw and Ranbir Kapoor while walking to and from the Vishwavidyalaya Metro station. I miss never being able to spell ‘Vishwavidyalaya’ in my head. I miss the fests and the inane/innumerable Treasure Hunts, and I miss the (equally inane?) dance/club music so worshipped by the hip students of Delhi University. I miss the new people I’ve met in college. I miss DramSoc. I miss lounging around after class (and often during it) to the gustatory background of Irfan’s diabetes-in-a-plastic-cup chai and liquid Maggi and anda patty. I miss missing classes. I miss attending classes. I miss college. I miss you.

…

Delhi and I, we’re just beginning to make friends with each other.

Bus Stop

Moonlight grazes,

The paper yellowing
With a girl's outpourings.

The soft golden spheres of streetlight
Bear witness to the
Boy and girl exulting, in
Their own emotions.
Enraptured by their own poetry.

On an introspective winter's night.

The darkness is our friend, and
The light: our mistress.
The dark rain falls
Outside; they are cocooned in
Their orb of vicarious love.

Sheltered against
The mottled external;
Close enough to observe and derive
Joy, but far enough to not
Feel the humiliating
Vulgarities of reality.

The boy writes of a frustrated
Passion; the girl loves another.
Both timidly scared of sharing
Too much of themselves
With the
Other.

The romance of the setting is
At odds with their
Relationship;
They're lovers, just not of each other.

...

The moon is a solitary sentinel.
The streetlight flickers in warm
Understanding.
The rain falls down.

Where The World Ends

I sit looking at the clock tower

Terracota tiles.

The leaves are rusting

The bell tolls,

reminding them of their closing hours.

Muted warmth

grows

strengthens till it's visible.

Gold precipitates to your sight.

Sunlight.

And when it swells

Its living warmth

imbues everything.

And when it weakens,

leaving the tiles, the tower, the trees

bereft

There the world ends.

Copyright © 2012 Ambika Sharma

Guest poet

In Absentia

Goodbye
Is pathetic consolation;
Inadequate to the point of being
Deceptive.

The memory of you
Dances on the doorstep
Of my thoughts.
And, fueled by amber liquid
Teases me, in times
Of contemplative melancholy.

Would it be, that I could be
Bereft of this subtle torture.
I deal with your absence by
Suspending thought.

There’s a worm inside of me
And it burrows, deeper and deeper,
Until I forget you
In sheer self defence.

But then you collapse
Into my thoughts again, unbidden,
Like musty honey chocolate
And I miss you again.

Want vs. Should

Flighty heart
Insatiable, thirsts for adventure;
Never content,
To just be, and soak in
What is good, and what is Real.

Instead, looks without.
Desires what I will not let it have,
I am aware of its masochism.

And because I know:
Ignorance grants exoticity;
Distance imparts charm.

I console, and remind it
That the forks in the road are too far
In the past.

But it won’t cease struggling.

The more I build walls, the more it complains
Like a canary in a cage
Thrashes more, the more it’s chained.

In trying to overreach,
Will fall.
Will ruin Reality in pursuit of Fantasy.
Will ruin me.

…

Let logic wash over you,
And wrap you in a coldly comforting embrace
Preaching compromise.

Bored

I can scarcely remember
Yesterday’s happiness.
It is but an idea.

Mere specks of fading light,
They count for nothing.
Flotsam on the immensity of life.

…

Still searching
For a pursuit.
Still searching
For a reason to exist.

Give me relief from
These cycles of day and empty night.
The years are rolling past.

Give me something
Greater than myself.

Give me something, or
Someone
To love.

Winters

Shared laughter
Hand-drawn on the river banks of
Eternity.

Chilly philosophical evenings
To the music of old kitsch
Will be remembered days after.

People now animated and
Full of life, shall
Be gone tomorrow.
Like
Autumnal leaves, plucked
Off the Tree of Life, by
The inexorable hand of Time.

To be reminisced about
With other people, who shall
Pass away too, as silently.

And you.

All shall be reduced to mere
Dewdrops of thought,
In your head.

Everything shall fade away, like old linen
And pressed flowers; will exist only
In your head.

People and music and thoughts
And feelings and emotions
Shall melt together in uneasy comfort.
And
Shall pulse across time and space
And shall torture your present
Make you desire yesterday.

Yesterday is already dead
The future is growing old.
And today is lost in poetry.

…

Cursed is the poet
And the thinker.
Happiness is in smothering the brain
And losing ourselves in the people around us.