The Unfortunate Poet

He’s a poet in a war, they said, such sensibility
He has the sight, such power, the true nobility
You can sense in him a sense so fine,
In his songs a choral music so divine,
And sometimes he tells a story, or not,
Have you ever seen the like?

We repine, they said, It is sad, he is wasted
Sitting out that horrid little war; He’s never tasted
The beauty we hoard here, and expend, but still
Such beauty he holds in him; If he has his fill
Of days such as ours, his music shall bleed into the sky,
His poems shall fill our afternoons in swirls and eddies.

And he was brought to the city, he was captured
By his lovers, he was held like a jewel, caged like a bird,
Taught beauty, Shown works of art, and beautiful things,
By daughters of wise men, and sons of kings.
And he strung together meaningless words,
His melodies were bitter airs with the flavor of salt.

-"You know Her friend, P, Imaginary sidekick?"
-"Yeah?"
-"Well, P has this friend G, who is an actor or something. Anyway, this G was in a movie, and the director, who was only 27, just had a heart attack and died."
-"Really?"
-"Apparently he was making a bengali adaptation of La vita è bella."
- [Snigger]
-"Yeah, I know! And I said to her, when She told me, I said, 'you know, this might seem a bit excessive to you in view of the fact that Netaji only gets one minute and Gandhiji only gets two, but for this brilliant young director, I think we should have eight hours of silence tonight!"
- [Imaginary sidekick laughs till he cries] "My, Aquilus, that's the funniest thing I ever heard!"
-"Isn't it?"
-"Absolutely!"
-"But She didn't think it was funny at all!"
-"No! Unbelievable!"
-"And then, she actually said that there was no way I could think of a coherent way to put it on my blog! Can you believe that, Imaginary sidekick?"
-"The gall!"
-"I know! Well, I do find myself quite in charity with you today, Imaginary sidekick. But hark! What was that?"
- "Holy Scatological Wisecrack, Aquilus! Professor Pokaface is trying to enslave the citizens of Nosensahumaville again!"
-"Come, Imaginary sidekick! We must fly there at once! With the power of humor on our side, we WILL defeat Professor Pokaface."

Whoa! September just flew by!

I've got this account at librarythings.
Its scary how much fantasy fiction I've read. Scary.

I’ve never really thought much about being a Brahmin. I do not think about caste. I certainly do not think that caste makes me a more important or exalted person.

I have had my sacred thread ceremony. Quite frankly, I didn’t see what the fuss was all about, then. I was about 10 years old, and I sat in front of a fire that smoked enough to make my eyes smart, and all these priests said all these shlokas. I had my grandfather sitting beside me, and it went on and on, interminably until somebody threw a cloth around me, and my grandfather, my guru, came in under it and whispered the gayatri mantra in my ear.

I was hungry, sleepy, my eyes were red and smarting, and I was pretty unhappy about all the curtailments of my diet that were to ensue.

So after it all ended, I was a good little bramhachari for a year, because everyone told me to, and I knew that my mother would be upset if I didn’t do all the things she wrote down in a little copy for me: I did the daily sandhyavandanas in the morning, and in the evening, wearing a little saffron dhoti, and saying the gayatri mantra one hundred and eight times each time; I didn’t have meat, or eggs; I observed ekadashis; I did the rituals prior to every meal; I never went for invitations; basically, everything I was supposed to do. And after one year was up, I firmly told everyone that that was that, and I had had enough.

It has been more than a decade since I stopped doing all this bramhachari stuff. I’ve never missed it; in fact, I never saw any point to it back when I did it. The whole thing always seemed to me to be an exercise in futility.

My 10 year old cousin just had his sacred thread ceremony. Besides my own, it is the only one I have watched from the beginning to the end. I ran around, did errands, talked to millions of relatives, and herded them to the dining hall, but mostly, I watched. There was my cousin, in a dhoti, squirming around, sitting next to my uncle, looking morosely at the fire. I knew his eyes were smarting. He took bits of leaves, and twisted them around his fingers, mouthed “I’m bored!” to me a few thousand times, and asked for, and drank gallons of lemonade.

I watched. When the time came for the Bramhopdesa, and they threw the cloth over my cousin, and his guru, I had the biggest smile on my face. It was a beautiful moment. It always is. This is at the centre of being Brahmin, whatever that is. This symbolic moment, when a boy is reborn, and he becomes Dvija, twice-born, reaffirmed. After a moment, when they reappeared from under the cloth, I could tell my cousin was rather surprised at all the fuss. I was nearest, and he looked at me, puzzled. I was still smiling.

Perhaps that is how it is designed. You feel nothing at your own ceremony, and you suddenly get it, standing in a crowd watching someone else go through it, just as bored and skeptical as you had been, when it happened to you.

What hits you is the continuity of it. The way it has been, for hundreds of years, these words, in this order, said aloud, by you, and by generations of ancestors. That is where you come from, and this is the substance of which your culture is made, and this is what ties you to them and them to you, and you are blindingly aware of your moment in the slipstream of time. I have forgotten almost all the rituals and shlokas; it has been more than ten years. But I have this strange desire to start it all over again; as a gesture, if you will, of thanks to a thousand shades.

“Brahmin” is such a loaded word nowadays. But being a Brahmin is much more than a circlet of thread round your middle. It is more than a tarpan every year, or being able to perform pujas. It is more than an accident of birth.

Being a Brahmin has nothing to do with your name.

Being a Brahmin is a mystic awakening, a sense of things bigger than you are. It is a desire to live not only for yourself, but for things grander: for knowledge, and its perpetuation.

My mother used to make my sister and me recite a particular shloka when we went to bed, when we were children. I think she hoped to condition us into falling asleep as soon as it was said. That never worked, but I remember that it ended with saying, “May the whole world be in peace and harmony.” That, to me, is what sums up everything that goes with being a Brahmin.

It happens to all of us, sometimes, all of us poets. In fact, I believe they call it the poets’ curse. Some of us are poets who do not write poetry, or even write at all. Some of us cannot. But it happens to all of us; all us poets.

You have to watch yourself.

If you don’t: well. It gets you. It’s insidious, you know? It creeps into your mind.

Like when you sat on the floor. It is comfortable in the summer, you lie below the line of vision of the heat haze, and sometimes, sometimes, it can’t get at you. You sat on the floor, and it was comfortable. You felt like you could sit there for a long time. You saw yourself putting down roots. Slender roots, which tease the tiles apart, insinuating themselves between them, and then they thicken, and become wood, and the tiles bend and then splinter, but slowly, very slowly, and the crumbling dust lies in a sinuous pattern of thick cords of dust against a faint background of powdered nothings.

You see how easy it is to slip into it? Now do you believe me?

You have to watch yourself. Constantly.

Or you could end up on the back of a bus looking at a rainbow of oil on a wet street, and wondering what it would be like to throw frozen cubes of gasoline into a fire.

Or you would be walking down the street, talking with this old dog you used to see around, but don’t, anymore. He’d be teaching you philosophy, and you’d listen. “…Because if the food is rotten the first time you sniff it,” he’d be saying, “it’ll still be rotten after you sniff it a hundred times, only more so, so you’ve got to know when to walk away…”

And sometimes, sometimes, you could be looking at a man who had coughed in your general direction, without covering his mouth, only you wouldn’t be looking at him straight, you’d be somewhere high, somewhere quite far away, and you’d be looking at him through the sights of a sniper’s rifle, and then, you’d exhale, like they taught you, and pull your finger tight on the trigger, ever so softly, and his head would explode in a rainbow of blood.

Careful. Stop. Look at that sign. Sixteen times sixteen is two hundred and fifty six. The poets curse. You cant escape it. You just have to watch yourself. There, you see? Are you watching yourself? Are you watching yourself watching yourself? Are you watching yourself watching yourself watching yourself?

Writer’s block is a horrible disease.

It is a strange thing. You feel absolutely the same. You see the same things, you feel what you’ve always felt, you know all the words you used to know. But somehow, nothing seems to happen. It’s disorienting. It’s like you cooking something the same way, year after year, and then, one day, suddenly, you can’t. You put in all your usual ingredients, and you do all the things you’ve always done, which have, hitherto, invariably produced something quite… adequate. You’re known for your soufflés. And then, you lose it. The eggs just curl up, and they die, they simmer into wisps of unrecognizable material, and then disappear.

Your ideas lead nowhere.

Words elude you, a structure lies somewhere just beyond the limits of your vision, offering tantalizing glimpses of something vaguely familiar, but you lose it every time you try to look at it. It is like one of those motes in your eye, do you ever get them? Something at the edges of your vision, floating across the sky, and when you swivel your eye towards it, it slips neatly out of sight, a bashfully malign nothing that puts your teeth on edge.

And there are so many things that ought to have inspired something and all these events that should have had a story inside them: the labor room; the boy who had an evisceration of his eye; the woman who came in with a subconjunctival hemorrhage because her husband hit her.

I expect inspiration now. I need it. It’s a fix like no other.

Writer’s block. I hate it.

I picture it like a fog: a thin sheet of smoke and dust and choking moistness, occupying all the nooks and pushing its tendrils into all crannies that exist between my brain and my skull.

I need to clear my mind. I need to write. I need this.

A crowd spills out of the movie hall, the second last show,

As a piercing scream rents the air.

The woman standing next to the boy in the tight jeans,

She screams. She is the first to not look away.

A young man had fallen off the bus that turns

Here and takes the road to the esplanade.

He lies in the road, next to parts of his brain,

In a pool of his blood,

“It’s suicide,” someone says.

“He was jilted by some girl, he took this way out.

Young people have too much license these days,

I blame cell phones.” He nodded to his audience, a pout

On his coarse, nicotine stained, lips. Someone says, an old man,

With a beard, “Suicide! The young nowadays have no respect.”

The commuter crowd swells as the tea stall regulars join it,

And the traffic policeman comes over, to serve and protect.

He pushes his way to the front of the crowd,

His walkie talkie buzzes, his buckles clink,

The woman who had screamed begins to cry. She is very loud.

The motherly-looking woman in a crumpled sari, pink, I think,

Pats her kindly, condescendingly. The bus driver still sits, cowed,

In his seat. The bus conductors have already run away.

The boy who cleans the glasses for one of the tea stalls, he is

The proverbial first to cast a stone. A hefty brick through the windshield,

Splinters of glass fall on the dead boy, the bus driver is dragged to the ground,

Beaten. More people come over, there are cars stopped everywhere,

A carnival atmosphere, freakish abandon, and hysteria, more people crying,

“Does his mother know?” thinks the woman in pink, “Poor thing.

I wonder how long it will be before I get home?”

“It’s the driver’s fault” another someone says,

One of the crowd pushing to get a shot at the hapless driver.

The police come a long time later, they quell the crowd, its thirst already quenched.

The crying woman is led away, and a lot more crying women appear.

They were there, they must have been, you just didn’t notice them before,

Before the TV crews arrived and started taking pictures.

The local MLA arrives, to posture amidst cameras,

Which, however, ignore him.

They are busy taking gory pictures

Of blood and blood, and the shallow, staring eyes of the corpse.

“The funds for the widening of the road are being allotted,” the MLA says,

To anyone who will listen.

There is a young man who shoulders past the traffic cops,

He takes out his handkerchief, he spreads it out in the air,

And he lets it fall on the dead boy’s face. He stops

A million tasteless gazes. He hides the boys face. Gives him a little something.

Dignity, maybe. Some privacy.

The policeman grabs his shirt, and jerks him away.

The crowd is scandalized.

“The young nowadays have no respect.” The old man repeats,

Blinking rheumy old eyes. “They have no respect for anything.”

I Don't believe God exists, because if He did, He'd have made me the lead singer of FallOut Boy

Not really.
But if there is one band I'd most like to have written songs for, it's them.
I love their song titles, especially.

The alluder has tagged me. And here we go.

1. Pick out a scar you have, and explain how you got it:
A: On my psyche, when I found out that santa claus didnt really exist, and that it was my mum slipping chocolates under my pillow on Christmas night. Ditto for the Tooth fairy. Except, noone cares about the tooth fairy. Santa is so much cooler.
Erm, to children, that is. I wasn't talking about myself. Obviously. Ahem.

2. What is on the walls in your room?
A: A green board with dusty pieces of paper pinned up on it, windows, the plainest calendar that I could find...

3. What does your phone look like?
A: Like a phone. Its a slightly used W700i. Yeah.

4. What music do you listen to?
A: Alternative rock.

5. What is your current desktop picture?
A: I dont use a wallpaper.

6. What do you want more than anything right now?
A: Free time.

7. Do you believe in gay marriage?
A: course. As much as I believe in marriage.

8. What date and time were you born?
A: 10th October, 1985, I think it was 4 o'clock-ish in the morning.

9. Are your parents still together?
A: yeah.

10. What are you listening to?
A: Barenaked Ladies.

12. The last person to make you cry?
A: Greg Chappell.

13. What is your favourite perfume/cologne?
A: I dont particularly like perfume.

14. What kind of hair/eye colour do you like on the opposite sex?
A: I think I'd like red hair. And dark eyes. Not the kind that results from an injury.

15. Do you like pain killers?
A: Yes. They're very polite drugs.

16. Are you too shy to ask someone out?
A: I used to be.

17. Fave pizza topping?
A: extra cheese, on extra cheese. And some extra cheese. And I like those thingies, what d'you call them? Melanzane?

18. If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?
A: A very large steak.

19. Who was the last person you made mad?
A: My sister. I've got this new thing, where I look at her sadly, and sing "We Shall Overcome" in a mournful tone.

20. Is anyone in love with you?
A: Oh yes. The most wonderful woman in the world.

…And continuing with our discussion of the rather more obscure writers of the first half of the twenty-first century, we shall devote a few moments to Aquilus. His real name is now lost, if not exactly in the mists of antiquity, then at least in the fog of obscurity.

Aquilus was a product of the middle class in the post-colonial, liberal, global society from whence he came. He was an Indian, however, he wrote in English, and most of his literary influences can be traced to twentieth century European and American literature, as can many of his cultural references. He is generally, if apocryphally, held to be a medical doctor, who wrote part time. It is a fact, however, that many of his writings are set against the backdrop of poverty, disease, and a prevailing ambience of apathy.

Like many of his contemporaries, Aquilus was a man who had no sense of belonging to the society that shaped him. He wavered uncertainly between two sets of societal mores. He spent a large part of his life away from the country of his birth, but always felt estranged from the people of the country that he adopted. Many of his writings mirror that sense of rootlessness. Again, like the fairly typical specimen of the writers of his time that he is, he spent a lot of his time trying to write the definitive coming-of-age story that would establish his career as a writer. It is difficult to ascribe his works to a specific genre, seeing as how he wrote poetry, science fiction, and fantasy, in addition to his attempts to portray real life.

There are those who consider his writing to be an honest attempt at describing his particular niche of the underbelly of his period, though uncharitable critics have described his style as ‘derivative’ and ‘hackneyed’. As to whether he succeeded in writing the book that he himself described as his ‘elusive opus’ most authorities are undecided, although there are those who consider his…

Dear All,

My mother is getting rid of broadband. So, while I am still going to be able to check mail and all that sort of thing at college, I am going to be unable to type out long, involved posts.

I believe in making clean breaks. So here’s where I tell everyone who stops by my blog that although I shall try to keep visiting all the blogs I usually do go to, I shall discontinue blogging.

If I ever start blogging again, I shall be sure to let everybody know.

I shall miss you, blog.

I shall miss looking forward to comments.

I shall miss writing.

Blog friends are close friends, by definition. And I shall miss all of you. A whole lot.

Well. That is that. Au revoir.

Yours faithfully,

Aquilus.

"I wish reassurance could be bought and sold at market places.

You'd be rich. I'd be broke.

And you'd be self-employed. See?"

"Yeah."

I went to a reunion of old friends a few days ago.

It was one of those occasions where (almost) everyone got a little tipsy, and went slightly maudlin, and told old, old stories, or maybe it was all the smoke, and not the drink.

A lot of people have changed. De wears better fitting clothes now. Bi drinks a little, and Ra drinks a lot. Pu is in love with a girl, and he used to be in love with two other girls, but those didn’t work out, and this was a guy who shied away from girls like he thought he’d get a venereal disease just by thinking about sex. Quiet, shy Lambda, the guy who once accidentally touched this young teacher’s breast, and then actually apologized to her, he was that much of a doofus, he wears Ray-bans now. Even in the evenings.

And Sou has finally sprouted facial hair. Finally. After years and years of being ribbed about it. And Arnie has a girlfriend. And Andoo can dance.

Supro was this really, really carefree guy. Laughed a lot, the kind of guy who never seemed to have any worries. Now he calls himself a misogynist, chain smokes, and is all too ready to talk about all the times this bitch, or that bitch bought movie tickets for him because they wanted to make out with him.

And Ri couldn’t make it. He’s still at Haldia, stoned out of his mind. He uses heroin to put himself to sleep, and cocaine to help wake himself up in the mornings.

A used to be fat. Very fat. He was really smart, and funny, too, but not many people looked past the fat, and the ridiculously thick moustache that he had. Now he’s clean-shaven, thinner than I am, and has hair just the right length, with streaks. He looks very cool. He’s happier, too. Or so he says.

Everybody loves the new, hep A, they were all exclaiming over him.

I wish someone would take this stranger away, and bring me back my fat, bumbling friend.

“What’s with this thing, this Safi thing? You know, this syrup thingy that is advertised as a blood purifier? What’s a blood purifier, besides a dialysis machine? A liver?”

Laugh. “I don’t know. Blood purifier, my ass! The stuff some people will buy, man, it amazes me.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it.”

“You know, speaking of dialysis, I saw this man once. He had an arterio-venous fistula.”

“Oh, an artificial one, for dialysis? Where?”

“Medicine, the cold wards.”

“Jeez, when was this? You should have told me, I’d have come taken a look at him too.”

“Nah, he had uremic encephalopathy. His kidneys had shut down, the fellow was jerking every time someone touched him. When I went to examine him, bugger caught my arm, gave me quite a start, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But the fellow died a few hours later. I thought I’d go take a look at him again, and I’d have taken you along. But when I asked, they said he’d died already.”

“Hmm.”

“But the arterio-venous fistula was quite characteristic, you know. Large, too. The pressure differential was huge, felt like there was an electric current there.”

“Damn. I wish I’d been there.”

“Yeah. It really was something.”

I was standing outside the eye wards, listening to some music. I think I was playing Fountains of Wayne.

I saw a man come toward me, and he said, “Sir, may I ask you something?” He had on a dirty green shawl, and he had a straggly beard, I think he’d be two or three years older than I am.

I removed my earphones, and he drew me to one of the benches in the corridor and took out a file. It was dirty green too. He took out a couple of prescriptions from it.

He talked very fast. He said he had a daughter who was 10 months old, and she had a tumor on her chin. They took her to the local doctor who couldn’t do anything with it.

He stopped for a few moments, and then he said that he wouldn’t lie, and he took her to Medical College. He stopped again, and said, “Should I tell this to the other doctor? Will he be angry that I didn’t come here straight away?”

I almost laughed. I reassured him, and he said that they went to the OPD, and they referred him to the Pediatric Surgery department. They referred him to the pathology department for an FNAC. He came back with the report, but then they referred him to our college, and he came to our OPD, and they referred him to Pediatric Surgery again.

Here he stopped, and handed me the prescriptions. There was one from the OPD at Medical College and the new one from ours. I saw the one from Medical College, and the reason they had referred her to our college was that their Operation Theater was under repair.

I was reading this when he said that he wanted some help.
Well, this happens fairly regularly at our college; so much so, in fact that I have evolved a strategy to deal with it: I took my wallet out and showed him the couple of tenners I had, and told him that I could only afford to give him ten rupees.

He started, and said that he didn’t want my money. He wanted me to take him to the pediatrics department, and introduce him to someone. He told me the names of the three people from his village in Nadia who had graduated from NRS, Samrat Banik, Bimal Das, and someone else, I can’t remember.

He said, urgently, that he didn’t want to be turned away again.

And then he showed me the FNAC report. It said that she had an embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a very malignant tumor.

I looked back at him, and I saw he had tears in his eyes. He pointed to a woman coming toward us, and he said that was his mother, with his daughter. I saw the child. She was crying, and she had a piece of cloth around her chin, but you could see the outline of a large lump, with three twisted segments.

I would have taken him, but I don’t know anyone in Pediatric Surgery. It is a post-graduate discipline, and we don’t have any classes with them. I told him that, I told him that going with me, and going by himself would come to the same thing.

He asked, “But will they ask me to go somewhere else?”
I said, “No, you’ve come to the right place. Just tell the doctor exactly what you’ve told me, and you’ll be fine.”
“They won’t be angry that we went to Medical College first?”
I smiled, and put my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Of course not. All medical colleges are equivalent. It is all the same.”

And then he asked the question that I was praying he would not ask. “But will she get better?”
I replied, carefully, “They will cut it off. The tumor will be gone.”
He looked up at me. We both knew that wasn’t what he was asking.

I told him I had class, and left him waiting for the doctor.

There wasn’t anything else I could have done.
There wasn’t.

When the sun set, the sky looked like the ribbed edge of a beach, sand which the waves had lapped at as the tide ebbed.

Would you choose a cause over power?
I don’t know.
Over life?
Probably not. No.
Why?
I would rather be darkness than a point of light.
Darkness prevails, and the night lasts longer than the lightning bolt.
Yes. But, speaking in your own brand of cryptic utterances, the comet burns in the sky for only a few days, but its memory endures for much longer.
He laughed. Yes, he said, but you see the comet against the darkness. It suits the night to let the comet be seen.
So why aren’t you the Sun? It is bright, and it is forever.
You’re forgetting entropy. The sun must die, too. Only the night is forever.

Can you see the sun in the water? In that patch?
Yes. What do you think that shape in the middle of the disc of the sun looks like?
You mean the cloud?
Yes.
I don’t know. A wolf?
Yes. A wolf.

He looked at the water, choked with the water hyacinth.
Is that a flower?
No, he said. It is only paper. Only paper.

“No. You have no self.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is like… um, you know, like they say people wear masks, right? You know, modify their behavior according to the people around them?”

“Yes?”

“Well, you don’t just wear masks, you transform, you know, transfigure yourself into these completely different people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ok. Look at this. You know, around thatha-patti? You have a Tamil accent. A Tamil accent, for God’s sake! And when you talk to some of your friends from college, you have those slightly elongated vowels, you know, that just hint at a Bengali accent. And when you talk to your old school friends, you have a very distinctive Hindi accent. And when you talk to me, and to some of your friends, you speak flawless English. What is that?”

“What is what?”

“This. Your… your chameleon reflex. Why do you have this obsessive need to blend in?”

“I don’t have an obsessive need to blend in. Most of my friends at college laugh at my Bengali, which they shouldn’t, because it’s almost perfect, but it is like the standing joke. So you don’t call that conformity, do you? If I was so good with accents, I could have faked that, right?”

“ No. You don’t care about surface stuff like that. You wont fake a Bengali accent, but you will adapt your English accent to put them at ease. Your stance, your expression, your entire um… ethos, you know, it… just completely changes. Fundamentally. I bet you are brisk at your college, and you stand around like the rest of our relatives at family things, you’re this joke-cracking, funny-thing-saying person around your friends, and I’ll bet you walk around, drawling slightly, and being consciously oblivious of things, like the JU people, when you go there.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No. You know, your blog?”

“What about it?”

“You know your writing is fantastic, right? It is wonderful. But have you ever written anything personal in it?”

“Sure I have.”

“No. No vague allusions. Something definite, something about what you are feeling, or something?”

“Well-”

“No. You haven’t. Because your blog is not an outlet, it’s a mouthpiece.”

“Oh, come on. I’m just not that much of an exhibitionist.”

“Ok. Have you ever written anything personal? Something so visceral that you couldn’t bear to let anybody see it? Ever?”

“Well…”

“See. That’s what I mean. It’s like you’re always watching, and you project to people what they want to see. And you are good enough to do it. You’re like that ‘Pretender’ guy. You are put in a situation, and it’s like a new, complete, fully-fleshed, made to order personality leaps to the fore. Its no illusion, either, you manage incredibly detailed personalities, you know, with… with depth, you know? And I have no idea how you do it.”

“Oh bullshit. People are different around different people. I’m sure you don’t act the same way around your teacher and your best friend.”

“Yeah, but I am the same person. My thoughts, my opinions, for God’s sake, my accent doesn’t change!”

“So you think I let myself be swayed by any argument? I beg to differ.”

“No. You argue really well. That’s what I am saying. You can argue any side of a debate. It’s just what I’m saying. Whatever the argument is, you can conjure up a personality that believes implicitly in it. You see?”

“Oh, blah. I refuse to listen to this scurrilous nonsense. Go study or something.”

***

“So that’s what she said to me.”

Silence.

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“As in, I’m still waiting on the oh-no-of-course-nots, and the words, that like soothing balm ease a fractious spirit.”

Laugh.

“Well??!”

“You know, she’s not completely off the mark.”

“Oh, come on!”

“No, just think about it. You do do it, you know. Switch personas.”

“Yes, but so does everyone else.”

“Not to the extent you do. She is right, you can argue any side of an issue. Convincingly, you know. I can’t, I believe something, I can probably come up with some views from the opposing camp, but with you, it’s...”

“Yes, that just means if I put my mind to it, I debate well.”

“I don’t know. Ok, tell me this. Of the different personas, you say you put on like everyone else, which is the real you?”

Pause. "What do you mean, the real me?"

“There. See?”

“No, I don’t ‘see’!”

“Sometimes I think the real you is the poet, and sometimes, I think it’s the goof. But I can’t tell, either. Because you can’t tell. Its like you are under the spotlight, always, in your own grand opera.”

“Ok. That’s it. This conversation is over. I’d rather go talk to the dog.”

He saw a lot of graffiti on the streets when he was out the other day.
Much of it was political, some of it was not.
R----- loves P----, one said. He was standing next to it for a long time, and he wondered if it was R----- or P----- who had scribbled it on the wall with chalk.
A bus roared across, and it spat out a gout of black smoke, which flirted gracefully with the air into which it dissolved.

***
I saw a woman crying in the street, yesterday. Not out loud; quietly, you couldn’t tell if you weren’t looking very carefully. She wiped away her tears as soon as they appeared at the angles of her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, which teased her eye-shadow (or was it mascara?) out into a dark stain.
She was walking quickly, with short, hurried steps. There was a worried looking man behind her. When she was waiting to cross the road, he came and stood behind her, and when she started walking again, he almost didn’t follow. He hesitated, I saw it in his face, the desire to walk away. I know that expression. And then he walked off after her.

***
He was walking with her past New Market, when he nodded at the Globe theater, and he said, we shall go in there one day, and I shall kiss you in the friendly darkness, and ten years later, when it is some large, anonymous retail outlet chain, or a sparkling clean McFood, or McCoffee outlet, we will be able to look at it and say that we knew this place when it was big, and crumbling, and dusty, and had a soul.

***
The streets leave their own graffiti on us.
Dark smudges of grime, heavy smoke that lingers in our nostrils.
The loss of our ability to make eye contact.
And the way girls walk in a crowded place, guarding their breasts with their arms.

***

As he wakes up, the first thing that he thinks is that it is too warm. It's much too warm for winter. He feels feverish, [Flash: malaria, Pel-Ebstein in small print at the bottom of the column to the right in his textbook, someone-saying-low-grade-fever-in-the-evening-is- tuberculosis] almost like it is too warm inside his body. He needs to think about it for some time before he sees that it is actually the blanket that is too warm. Or maybe it's the heavy lunch [Flash: Specific Dynamic Action of food, protein has the highest value] that he had before he fell asleep, or maybe he constitutionally produces too much heat.

Maybe they could write that for his epitaph, [Flash: visual of tombstone, bluish-grey, and the opening credits of "Six Feet Under"] they could write that he was warm, and he was nice to sit next to in winter.

It is dark already, and he can't see the window slats any more, it must be five, no, six, maybe? [Flash: Bart Simpson on a skateboard.]

He smiles, and thinks, man, you are completely colonized; American culture is so very [Flash: Mcdonald's Happy Meal, the cover of his copy of "The Great Gatsby"] intrusive.
There's absolutely no connection, but he is suddenly glad that he's half and half so he has an excuse for not being an angavastram-wearing freak who is conditioned to think that rice and curds are some kind of panacea [Flash: someone's voice floating, smiling, over the phone, saying, "'Panacea!' You're such a nerd!"] on the one hand, or some freak vociferously defending the relevance of Rabindrasangeet today [Flash: Someone in a Kacchha-deowa-dhuti saying, "Bengali Culture is the greatest in the world; Exhibit-A: Rabindrasangeet."] on the other.

He will brush his teeth when he gets out of bed. Then he will go play
with the dog.
He turns over, and falls asleep.