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.

My grandfather has three children, and six grandchildren.

For quite some time, I was my grandfather's pet grandchild. Don't get me wrong, he loves all his grandchildren equally, but I was his first grandchild, and… Ok, I can't quite explain or qualify this. But I was.

And then, my cousin, Su, was born. This was when I was about 12, and firmly accustomed to being the cock of the walk. And I realized that my grandfather was talking about him all the time. And, of course, not quite realizing at the time that superannuation is in the nature of
things, I didn't like it at all. I liked Su, but I didn't like the fact that he existed, if that makes any sense.

I dealt with it, but it took me a long while.

Now Su has a brother, Vi. And when I went over to my grandparents' yesterday, everybody was clustered around Vi in the drawing room, and Su, I saw was sitting alone in the bedroom. No one noticed he wasn't around.

I could have told him it was going to happen eventually.

The worst thing about it is that I see his parents completely ignoring him. And it doesn't help that Vi is one of the cutest children I have ever seen. Everyone is in raptures over him.
I am no expert on family dynamics, but I realize that I am very lucky that after my sister was born, I still got a lot of time, from my Mom, my Dad, my grandparents, everyone. I was never made to feel completely overlooked.

And even though a few years ago, I quite desperately wanted the focus to shift away from Su, I would never have wished this on him.

Prologue: The City of Gold

The city was cold and dark. It was a thousand miles below the surface, where there was desert, and rock, and pitiless sun; and nothing else. Or so tradition said.

Far below the city in a chamber gouged out of the living rock sat a woman. She was clad in a shroud, and on her finger was the ring of the dead, the ring that was put on a person’s finger after death, just before the burial.

Though she was insulated from the city by an unspeakable weight of rock, she could see all that happened in every part of it. She was the spirit of the city.

The chamber she was in had no obvious source of light, and yet was diffusely illumined. She was on a slab of rock, the only thing the bare chamber contained. Above that slab was the opening of a long shaft, her one corporeal link with her city and its people. Along one side of the chamber was a sluggishly flowing stream- the blood of the city, it was called. The water was bitter, and dark- and always blood-warm. It was said that the stream would flow for as long as the spirit of the city remained within her chamber. And this water was the lifeblood of the city, and in its dark stream was what made the city prosperous, and her people rich: innumerable granules of gold that the stream brought from somewhere along its course in the rock.

The woman looked young, and her hair was long, and as black as a raven. As black, indeed, as the rock that surrounded her. But her hands were calloused and hard from constant contact with the rock.

There had been a spirit, for as long as the city had existed, imprisoned in that little bubble in the rock- and the city had existed for thousands of years. No one knew who had built the first tunnels, or indeed the last, since none of the tools the people of the city had now could make even a dent in that black rock. No one even knew if the ancestors of the people of the city had themselves hewed it out of the rock, or had found it empty and settled in it.

The city existed as a single tunnel, in a series of five rectangular spirals, one below the other, each turn of the great spiral tunnel connected to the ones above and the one below by shafts, which had rudimentary steps carved into them at intervals. And set along the walls of the tunnel were doors, which led to the chambers in which the people lived.

The end of the tunnel, at the termination of the last and lowest spiral was the Hall of the Dominus, the lord of the city, the master of much of the wealth the city contained. No one was allowed in that last chamber, without express permission, on pain of death. Because that is where the shaft connecting the spirit to the city opened, at the foot of the throne on which the Dominus sat. The walls of the hall were veined with gold, and there were torches all around, and guards who, it was said, never slept.

And so she waited, in her chamber alone, and tired. She watched the people of the city: their crowded marketplaces, the areas where they harvested the gold, the stifling, dangerous tunnels that connected them to other cities, much higher up, closer to the dangerous surface.
And sometimes she sang:
“In the city of gold, will be born the one,
Who will lead the child of man into the sun.”

It was an old couplet, part of the tradition of the city. Men said that it was an old wives tale. But the spirit knew what it meant, and she waited for the Golden One as time grew gnarled in the city of gold.

The ballad of the perfect Romance.

He was looking for another cause, something else that could be saved.
He was sitting under the twisted tree that grew beside the lake.
The twisted tree was company, and he told it what he craved.
And the sky was full of tangerines that hung upside down.

He was sitting there when she found him, she sang her siren song.
She told him he could be brave, now that she was there to be strong.
He told her to paint him on a canvas, so he’d remember just what he was.
He asked her to preserve this reality in her jar of cobweb silk.

Then the sun was in their eyes, and then it drifted away to the right,
They held each other as the day died, and as time was reborn as night.
The stars came out as hard little points, and hunkered down against the light.
And fires burnt on the horizon, where the others waited.

She was crying one day when he came to her, and he would not ask her why.
She cried into his shoulder, she sobbed for hours, and then she let her tears dry.
He knew he should have asked her why she had been crying.
She smiled at him, and she said, Thank you, for knowing not to ask.

He was writing symphonies in the street, and they saw, and ran to get her.
He is mad, they said, he is lying in the road, go to him, make him better.
She smiled, he won’t listen, she said, he is free, he doesn’t understand fetters.
She wouldn’t go, he has the soul of a poet, she told them all.

She never tried to reform him, she would never try to own his mind.
And he never tried to shield her, from truth, from life, or from the blind.
They were together until they were parted, and that was when they died.
And turtle doves bled feathers over their pyres.

The smoke rose high.

I want time to stop.

I want order. And quiet.

And long, cool draughts of rest, to fill my soul.

And long, quiet conversations where I do not need to be charming.

And days where I do not have to be intelligent.

And evenings with my feet up, reading.

I do not want to pace this bridge anymore.

I want everything to stop. Now.

I want to live here.

And I want this moment to be everywhen.

I see a thousand shades rise up out of the dark. They tell me that no single thing abides, and that all things must flow. Who was it that said that? Lucretius? I forget.

Everything flows away.

Away into the dark that houses the past, where the smell of sacred incense blends with the stench of dead intentions, with the sustaining odor of past triumphs, with the tang of happy promises and every so often, with an elusive whiff of forlorn regret.

Before I became a not very pompous young man, I used to be an extremely pompous boy. I wrote horribly. Verbosely. Pompously.

I wrote this poem in the space of fifteen minutes as part of a creative writing competition for a fest that I went to.

This is one of the very few love poems I have written, and it is one amongst those of my own poems I least like. However it did win me the first prize, and I like the way I arranged the poem in three line stanzas.

I am putting this up to show one person who agonizes about her own writing, one of the follies that litter the landscape of my own creative efforts.

Before you read it, remember to not judge me too harshly. I was young. And foolish. And had a crush on a girl I thought I’d never see again.

Ah. Youth.

The topic they gave us was, “Love Among the Ruins.”
Yes, I know. Browning turns in his grave.
And yes, I have noticed my creative use of adverbs. It is called poetic license.

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

The velvet night was dark.
Yet it all stood out so stark,
Against the confusion that was your hair.

We stood in front of the walls,
That stood surrounding the dark halls.
Our love, we vowed, would never end.

The wind from the sea was salt, and sweet,
I saw you turn to me, watched our eyes meet.
But I never finished what I meant to say.

When I met you that night,
Your face was framed with ethereal light.
I was falling into the dark pools of your eyes.

The walls echoed softly, with whispers and sighs,
Of long dead lovers, their half-truths, and lies,
The ruined halls calm, and indifferent to our love.

We turned from each other, tears in our eyes,
I was a fool, and so we said our goodbyes.
But our love was enduring, as timeless as the ruins.

I meet you today, after eons, it seems,
And these ruins are the same, moonlight gleams
Off them tonight, as they have done for years.

Tap tap.
Hullo?
Tap tap.
Is this thing on?
Hullo?
Um.

Oh, right ho, then.
Um.

Ladeez and gemmen.
I thank the sensational one for my very first tag. 10 simple pleasures.
Ok. And here I go:
1. Shaving: Yes, I know. Weird. But it’s oddly therapeutic.
2. Writing: I love it. Enough said.
3. Reading poetry aloud: I do it, even if I’m alone. But its better if there is someone else in the room.
4. Having a snuffly wet nose nudge the back of your knee when you aren’t expecting it.
5. Listening to a song for the first time, and knowing that it is going to be one of your favorites forever.
6. Having warm feet. Like in the morning. Or at night, just before you fall asleep.
7. Sunlight in the winter. And peering at bright things through narrowed eyes, and watching the patterns you can squeeze the light into.
8. Watching someone read a really great book you told them about. And then talking about it with them.
9. Sitting, stuffed, around a table, with very old friends.
10. Aimless conversations that last till 3 AM in the morning.

In turn, I tag: shunshine, xiamaze, aarshi, mercuryshadow, agarwaen, and magnus.
Im sorry, It really is too much effort to link all of them, but they're all on my blogroll, anyway.