There's a certain bluesy tune to the rainfall outside my balcony today. It's been an incessant flow, making me feel like I'm living next to a mountain river. Like the Beas that flowed below the hotel I was staying at in Manali. I remember the view from the room: looking out into the upper valley, a forest of dark green pine trees and grey cloud capped mountains.
..................................................

It's been speeding and slowing at will, the rain. Like a whimsical child playing with her imaginary friends, talking to herself. And I wish it poured and poured and poured more. Like it would flood and everything would get washed away. Washed clean of the tiniest speck of dust and purged of every memory of the past. And the next day would bring only the freshest, most thoroughly well scrubbed world of new possibilities.

Listening to Sain Zahoor sing Aik Alif on loop for the past hour I think. Reminds me of last year and the feelings associated with these songs. Almost like being washed up on shore by tidal wave, in a mixture of helplessness and awe that's just right.

An extract from Rumi's Masnavi.

Mathnawi VI: 2955-2962

The spirit is like an ant, and the body like a grain of wheat
which the ant carries to and fro continually.
The ant knows that the grains of which it has taken charge
will change and become assimilated.
One ant picks up a grain of barley on the road;
another ant picks up a grain of wheat and runs away.
The barley doesn't hurry to the wheat,
but the ant comes to the ant, yes it does.
The going of the barley to the wheat is merely consequential:
it's the ant that returns to its own kind.
Don't say, "Why did the wheat go to the barley?"
Fix your eye on the holder, not on that which is held.
As when a black ant moves along on a black felt cloth:
the ant is hidden from view; only the grain is visible on its way.
But Reason says: "Look well to your eye:
when does a grain ever move along without a carrier?"

"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"
Camille and Kabir Helminski
Threshold Books, 1996

"In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping things across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, cutting them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress under a sea of sand."

- H. Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Sometimes I get the feeling maybe I'm reading too much into this guy. Maybe he's good but not as good as I think he is. Maybe he's warped my brain in someway, stolen it without me knowing and kept it in some gelatinous blue liquid in an underground lab he has in his basement. Experimenting with it, transferring whatever he wants me to think into it. And thus impairing completely my ability to judge anything fairly, enslaving me to every word he puts on paper. If the book I pick up starts like this, I don't mind being held hostage thus. I don't know if I should stop with him already.

I'm left behind as a residue, of a time that's long forgotten. No one here knows me anymore, all who knew me are long gone. A relic hoping to find a place in the sun that will rise in a few hours. I can do with the shade, reflected light is enough for my depleting appetite. In an attempt to catch attention I know I'll make a fool of myself. Like the court jester sentenced to the gallows for his below average attempts at humour, I know that'll be my destiny. Unlike any other, my road is unmapped and mine only.

A fruitless attempt...

I have been reading Bukowski for the past hour and half. Drinking the wine left over from last winter and smoking the last couple of cigarettes of the night. And I don't know where this will lead me. I started out with a note to you, which I didn't have the courage to finish. I didn't have the courage to tell you why I chose the ways I did. And yet I know I'll regret this the next morning like the many things regretted on a drunken nights excuse. I'm hoping to find songs and sounds that fit seamlesslely into the night. Of confused emotions in conflict with the rational world I will wake up in. Finding passions that I had thought were shipwrecked in the middle of the great ocean, in complete isolation, in absolute lonliness, feelings from a body that's been dead for years; Is magical. Like the card trickster guessing the cards the audience were thinking of. And the surprise that spread across the hall of admirers. It's more than just that actually, everyone knows it's a trick at the end of the day. Unlike a child whose genuine amazement has beset me too. I sit partly inebriated, stunned and wonder by myself; how this dead body of mine was awakened by your coming.

Banalata Sen

At the end of all the days, dusk comes like the sound of dew;
The kite wipes off the scent of sunlight from its wings.
The earth’s colours all quenched, the manuscript prepares
To tell its stories, lit by firefly gleams.
All the birds come home, all the rivers - all life’s trade ends.
Only the dark abides; and, to sit face to face, Banalata Sen.

(Chaudhuri 1998)


Possibly the only lines that could emote the feelings today. Though sadly, the best is lost in translation.

The week has just slipped through the sink hole in the washroom basin. Washed down along with the soap water, the alcohol tinted blurry nights, office-day-morning headaches and excessively humid Bombay days.

Suddenly, even though it's a Friday evening and everyone in office is running home dressing up and going out; I'll sit in, waiting for night to fall and drive my way back to a quiet night home.

Maybe you grow tired of an expectation filled Friday evening in office, the evening that'll end in an alcohol induced stupor, that'll make you numb to everything that just drained into the sinkhole. That's a good thing because it saves you money. Money is an easy excuse too, a nice cover. But the repetitive cycle that is a week, the office centric carousel that starts each Monday and ends on a Friday can take enough from you to give back very little. And that's when your mind wanders, is the weekend that excuse you really need for attending the weekly circus.

Colin Hay after ages!

After killing the day in my room, trapping it inside this little coop I call home, getting it's throat and strangling it until it ran out of breath, I got up and went outside. It was dark and I paused to consider the transpiring of the day. The morning was already a faded memory. I couldn't remember anything in sequence; everything was isolated and broken and I couldn't find the sequence of events. It had been just another day in a whole blob of indistinguishable, sticky summer days. A cobwebby something in my mind put a, well, cobweb over my thoughts and I needed to clean up and clear my head. Entering the shower, I washed and scrubbed myself thoroughly. The last thing I wanted was obvious traces of murder on my self. About half an hour later I felt clean enough to step out. Walking to my room I contemplated if I should feel guilty about what I had done. But then my mind quickly rationalised that it was best to not to wallow and extend the misery by feeling bad about what I had done.

I stepped inside my room and turned up the music. I tried to focus my mind on something beautiful, something that is the exact opposite of an oppressive single room, an expansive blue sky maybe? I needed happy memories. Immediately images of the sea flooded my mind. I could see the bluest of blue skies, bright sunshine, smell the salty air and hear waves crashing on the beach. I could hear Colin Hay sing about a beautiful world and swimming in the sea. To go out beyond the white breakers, the place to feel completely free. Sitting down to watch the sun sink in the ocean, and the sky holding back whatever bit of day it can.

I was feeling sufficiently better now. And it was time for dinner. Putting on my white tshirt I called A and started towards the mess. Walking past the little wooded area behind my building I sensed a bit of purpose in my walk. And finding that purpose lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. Like the oppressive heat of the day lifting with nightfall, it was easier to breathe again.