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.

Wind Up Bird Chronicle

"All I could see were shaggy, grass-covered mounds stretching on and on, the unbroken horizon, and clouds floating in the sky. There was no way I could have any precise idea where on the map we were. All I could do was guess according to the amount of time we had been driving.

Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make on feel that oneself, as in individual human being, is slowly becoming unravelled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. I wonder if I'm making myself clear. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. That is what I experienced in the midst of the Mongolian steppe."

-H. Murakami.

A third reading in progress. Never ending love affair this.

JDS went out, two days before I aged another year. It's almost fitting that I have R.E.M. playing loopy songs dragging me along with them. Stranded between two different feelings unable to be captured by either emotion, it's like losing ones way in the jungle acutely aware of being lost and yet not knowing if you want to find your way back.

I recently came back from a couple of games that become part of your permanent memory. Like the relay victory back in 11th, or the 100 ms. gold the same year at annual school sports. The two match winning goals are now a permanent imprint in memory.

After getting back though, the sense of euphoria disappeared suddenly; it got sucked into a hollow pit and left behind a huge vacumn that refused to budge despite my strongest efforts. I stared at the walls in my room for many days hoping they would magically turn into unicorns and make me go chasing. But walls don't become unicorns, which is why they are walls and unicorns are mythical. It was new, unexpected... why something I literally dreamt of doing turning into reality would feel so contrary to expectations.

Nevertheless with the music back on after a whole year of quiet, familiar ghosts visit again. And the fact that soon the place will empty out and there'll be no shadows to take shelter in, seeps in steadily through the inadequately waterproofed roof and floods everything in my room.

Sleep has washed me over like a refreshing dip in a cool pond on a blazing hot afternoon. And the evening darkness leaves me a little disoriented. Confused between early morning and dusk I step groggily out of my room and reality grows on me. Dazed and confused, grogginess and the slow submission to reality; is somehow the motif of my life. Like when you read the review of some pretty acclaimed book or movie and the reviewer talks of motifs. This is like that; except this is a pretty lousy assed book/movie.

Just finished reading The Stranger and the presence of a void filled with meaninglessness seems to be the only plausible explanation. Even though we didn’t fight any great war, which is part of my belief about how such a book came to be written, my penchant for romanticising leads me to believe the war has been inside us all at some time or another. To find cause and effect is essentially an attempt to find hope.

Hah, now that I sound sufficiently hollow I will shower and go back to day dreaming about how to paddle to the shore now that the Amazon is widening up and the current is getting stronger. The story till now has mostly been about how my amazing survival skills have seen me through near death after I lost my way in the greatest rainforest. This rickety raft I built out of balsa wood has been my saviour, helping me get out of this forest of phantasmic of visions as quickly as possible. The strong current is pulling me out into the sea and the Pororoca waves threaten to tear my raft to pieces.

Mumbai revisited

The campus is quiet and depopulated. Walking towards the promenade the only sound that floats with the humid breeze is of the waves lapping up the shore. Breaking and crashing onto the rocks occasionally with a roar. Coconut groves and a green lawns seem to take the edge off all sounds lending the place a certain softness, the cacophonous city is a faded dream.

Dark huge clouds gliding across the massive open sky silhouetted against the fading light of the sun seem like shadows of actors on a massive stage in a grand theatrical production. The crescendo of O Fortuna on my i-pod builds up the scene in front of my eyes and I see dark stormy seas, primal, untouched and untamed. With every beat of the drum the Orcs get closer and will infest the land soon. A certain primitive form of fear grips me entirely.

It's hard not to get caught up in the surreal scene and I'm completely sucked in. I'm far far away from the lame excel sheets of office and the mind games that drive me nuts.

Sitting on the rocks, the big city lights shimmer far in the distance, it seems truly to be the edge of the world. Staring at the lights I can almost hear the bustling noisy city and yet be far away to only hear the sea and the coconut groves converse softly with each other.
................

Am in Bombay for two months. Discovered the TFIR campus last Sunday and fell in love with the city all over again.

Farewell

I read this poem when I was 13 years (I think). Back then the world was a newer place. I think I had also prayed and fervently hoped Agha Shahid Ali's boat would capsize and he'd drown in the lake with porcelain waves and that would save me from reading such incomprehensible poems as school texts. Alas, my teenage prayers weren't answered and it eroded my occasional faith in God who was called on for life-death situations a 13 year old faced: like getting the window seat on the bus to school.

I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.

The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.
It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.
I am rowed- as it withers-toward the breeze which is soft as
if it had pity on me.

If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
have happened in the world?

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive.You can't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

Today, as I read the poem I realize Mr. Ali was way smarter. He wrote and trapped my life in those lines; and to find them today brings me face to face with the deep chasm that has grown and swallowed up the simplicities irredeemably. Of the changes twelve years can bring? Yes. It's suddenly too complicated for any God to help now. Well done Mr. Ali!

Thanks DT for bringing this poem back :). And the rest of the poem is here.

Hollow man

Swallowed by the world, a shadowless man wandered past me. He asked me for directions and a way to go. I saw his lips move but heard no voice. I saw his searching eyes but no light in them. I heard the hollow ring of a tin box when he walked and not the sound of footsteps. Deserted by his shadow with no where to go, he said he was the hollow man, the King of Pain. Staring into the well of echoes that was bored into his soul I saw the reflection of a face I know well. And then I saw darkness more primitive than the ancient night.