The Girl

She was 17 when she began disappearing. Every afternoon there was a little less of her, and soon people around her started remarking how pale she'd become. The color washed out; the apple green mingled with the banana ochre and collided with the orange orange as they swirled into nothingness, and crept away, leaving her alone.

No one cared too much about it, though. People don't have time for fruity colors, any more than they have time for looking up at the evening sky, or saying hi to their morning sugar. I wouldn't even say 'now they don't have time', because they've never had it. The time, I mean.

But there was no denying it. She was fading away. Curiously enough, it started with her eyebrows. Don't ask me, I don't know why.

She did regain corporeality at times. Sometimes, when she listened in between the notes of her guitar, or when she sat cross legged in the night, looking out of her rain splattered window, reading her poetry, she could almost feel herself whole. Ephemeral balloons of humid happiness used to call her back, sometimes. Not that she cared too much. She'd come to terms with the graduating greyness. In fact, I think she almost welcomed the slow fade. She'd always been lost within herself; in the hookah puffs of the music and the receding colours of her mind. She used to have the scent of smouldering hashish in her hair, and the tang of soft alcohol in her insouciant eyes.

At the age of 20, three and a half years after It happened, she disappeared completely. Funnily, no one noticed she was going until she was gone. They got over her, eventually. Time and sleep heal, perhaps too much.

Me? I often wonder what colour her eyes were before they finally faded away into patterned emptiness. I used to love them when they were brown. They reminded me of chocolate.

Mercy

The boy
Was pathetic.
His eyes were emaciated, dappled
Pools of hungry want.
His hands were outstretched,
Almost out of dirty habit.

His need was too great for me to fulfill.
He needed my burger.

Except that it wasn’t mine.
It was bought of my father’s sweat.
As were my guilty cigarettes.
He needs it more than I do.
As does every other beggar in this jaundiced city.
I’m hungry.
As is he.
The society?
The individual?

I gave him the burger.
I ate the burger.

His face betrayed no startled happiness, no
Glare of gratitude, that is so
Silently precious to practitioners of charity.
He walked away, insipidly; almost
As if his want had exhausted itself long ago.
My heart wasn’t filled with any warm, liquid
Love towards humanity, borne out of doing that
Which is morally green.
This quality of mercy was strain’d.

His half-hearted tugs at my undeserved shirt
Were ignored, until he
Went away, to spoil someone else’s
Appetite.

...

It is twice curs’d.

There Is No Coin

I could just lie here for hours. On this patch of grass. On this lonely oasis of seclusion in an ocean of people and buildings and civilization. I could watch the weather change. I could look at the birds – enraptured by their own freedom – and indulge in envious desire. What I would not give to be like the eagle, and have pleasure as my only occupation, and existence as my only pleasure.

Instead, I glance guiltily at my textbooks, and what they represent. I have chained my contentment to a set of mostly arbitrary and external parameters of academic success.

My brain and I want to soar free like the birds among clouds of violet intelligence. I want to live off the earth, and among the stars of my dreams. Be a child of Nature. Let the sun rain down upon my face, and watch the sunlight sprinkle through the leaves of the mango tree. Write until the day metamorphosises into the crippling night, and until the patterns of thought in my head exhaust themselves. Think, until I’ve defined myself, and wrested my identity (the balance between what I want to be, and what I am) from the shadows of the impressions of others in my head. Until I’ve found the Secret of Life, the Right way to live. Within. Without the without.

But.

But then I remember, that I love the external too. Music. Guitar. The sound of an old acoustic. The power and sting of an electric. People. Humour. That girl I met in college, whose crimson florality of thought and whitish golden-pink couplets of emotion-in-action, who fascinates me. That blossoming of new friendship with another. My mother. My brother. Douglas Adams. Books.
I find joy in the thoughts of others, too. Society, despite all its faults, often provides me my dose of prosaic happiness.

But then what is the Right way to live? What is Right? What is me?

Maybe there is no Right or Wrong. Absolute colours exist only in our heads. Judgement is our response to the cacophony of action and reaction that is Life. We were never Meant to do anything, never ordained by God or Nature or whatever higher power appeals to your intellect to be good or bad or whatever. All of it exists only in our head. We were designed to only exist, like the dog or the tree or the camel or the cow or the eagle. We are born and we die. All that we do in the intervening space of time is attempt to give ourselves happiness. And while that is a worthwhile cause in itself, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it is the higher purpose of Life. Because there is none.

Maybe there doesn’t have to exist an ‘I’, even. Maybe I don’t need to have a set, crystallized identity. I am not a toaster. I am not a box of things or attributes or traits. I change constantly. I am a lot of things at once. I exist in plurality. I exist.

…

The sun is setting. It’s getting colder. I should have brought a jacket. The mood is passing, as is the clarity of thought. I should return to textbooks, and study in pursuit of the fulfillment of some long-forgotten reason. Return to my vanilla life. To my quotidian confusion.

To the dichotomy of my thought-stream, and therefore, existence.

…

There are no two (or more) sides of the coin. There is no coin.


(Dedicated to Mansi K, for being the first one to appreciate what the hell I'm talking about, here. Onwards, to the Forest!)

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.