Interview; Part 1

-Have you heard about the kidnapping, attempted murder and rape case that was in the news couple of weeks ago?
-Umm, yes, but very vaguely. Why?
-Well, the Delhi Police is on the verge of cracking it. The prime suspect is already in custody, and its only a matter of finding the evidence.
-Oh, OK. That means they’ve already cracked it, no?
-The prime suspect is Aruni Mahapatra, someone-
-WHAT?
-I think you know him, don’t you?
-Wait. There must be many people by that name.
-The Aruni Mahapatra who takes extra classes for English language skills at the Government Senior Secondary Boys’ School in Vijaynagar, and who also teaches Social Studies at Vikas Coaching Centre in Mukherjee Nagar.
-That’s him, shit. God, who are you?
-I’m a freelance journalist. I heard about this from some of my journalist friends who covered the story for their newspapers. I’m not a crime reporter. I’m just curious. I met him at a party once, and I remember noticing something curious about him. He was odd. Not eccentric, not striking, just odd. He tried to pass himself off as ordinary, as someone who you pass on the street and don’t remember. He tried to make sure no one gave him the second glance. But he was tall, and thin, and he had these big ears, which made it kind of hard to not notice him. So the effort was showing. He was straining himself to be ordinary, and that set him apart.
I’m not milking his life for a story. I don’t even know if there’s a story. Although if I was working for a paper I’d already have written something down. I would like to talk to you about it if you don’t have a problem. I don’t feel the urgency to pass a verdict, to judge. I’m not investigating a crime here, because I’m not sure if there was a crime in the first place. Besides, I’m interested in little insignificant things, things which I’ll never know if I assume there was a crime committed in the first place.
-Why’re you calling me?
-Because his box of possessions which are lying in the warder’s office have some notebooks which have your name mentioned repeatedly in them.
-Why havent the cops come to me then?
-Because they probably havent gone through his notebooks. As far as they are concerned, their job is done. Its like they say, “an open and shut case”. The woman who’s accused him has a very strong case. First, obviously, it’s a woman accusing a man of rape and attempt to murder. If she was smart she could’ve saved herself some trouble by ignoring the attempt to murder charge. Because as far as the man is concerned, even a complaint of rape is enough to put him in jail with an unbailable warrant. Second, Aruni’s background doesn’t help him. He’s 32, unmarried, stays in a one-bedroom flat, pays 3500 as rent, earns 8000 by way of part-time teaching jobs in government schools and tuition centres, has no social life to speak of, no regular job, no friends, and even his parents didn’t know his whereabouts when the cops called them. His brother, though, was able to help them. I know because I accompanied my friend to Tihar Jail, and since we both have Press Cards, we got access to the warder’s office, and there, I sneaked a quick look in his notebook.
-Isn't that invasion of privacy?
-Yes, but if I can help you help him maybe then its alright to invade his privacy?
-Wait. Didn’t you say its impossible?
-It is, but it wont hurt to try. If you want to, that is. And, also, of course, If you think you can.
-Its impossible for me to imagine…He wouldn’t hurt a fly.
-well, people change with time. Anyway, I’m not with the police, so I hope you’re right. I know how the police investigation works, its not the world’d most professional organisation. Besides, he didn’t look like he’d do something like that. But my friend, who’s done some crime reporting in Delhi, says they hardly ever look like the murderers they’re made out to be. Or are.
-I’m sure he’s being made the scapegoat. He’s so dumb, he’ll just sit there and allow people to manipulate him, put words in his mouth, and he wouldn’t be able to do anything...
-So…do you want to meet me over lunch sometime and see if you can do something for him?
-I don’t know. How does it work? Will there be a trial? Will he be tried? Cant he be bailed out?
-No, not before the trial. And no one knows when it will be. If he’s not lucky he could be in jail for a very, very long time.
-How long?
-Seven years, if worst comes to worst.
-Oh God. For a complaint of rape? Does he have a lawyer?
-I don’t know. But I can find out and let you know.



Part 1: Trupti

A: Trupti?

S: Yes

A: Hi. Amit Sharma. We spoke on the phone. Morning.

S: Hi.

A: Thanks for agreeing to have Sunday brunch here. The All American Breakfast is just great. Have you tried the bacon here? Its worth getting up early for.

S: Yes, I like this place. How did you say you got my number?

A: I called your office earlier in the day. They gave me this number. I’m-

S: Oh yes, I’m sorry. I forgot.

A: I hope you had a sound sleep last night, and I also hope, without being too presumptuous, that you are at ease to speak about Aruni.

S: Yeah, I’ve slept well. Shoot.

A: I would like to begin with your relationship with him. Would you say that you were close to him? How did you get to know him?

S: No, I wouldn’t say that I was ‘close’ to him, though he did feel that he was close to me. We were in the same class for three years, in Ramjas College, where we did our BA in English. We were never involved, as in, in a relationship, but I could always feel a strange kind of tension in all my interaction with him. In the beginning it was just infatuation, and that was very obvious, because I was getting that from many boys. They were all falling in love with me, throwing themselves at me, and most of them were people I didn’t want to be with.

A: Was he one of them?

S: Yes, and no. Yes, because he did throw himself at me. No, because i wasn’t disgusted by this attention. It was nice, in a peculiar way. Peculiar because it always amused me. He was so clumsy, so shy, so nervous, and yet there was this desire, this very strong desire to talk to me, and this led to funny things. He would call me at night, and this was a time when people were just getting to know each other, so, you know, the comfort level wasn’t exactly in place, between us. He’d call me, and it would be somewhat late, you know, like 12.30, or 1, and he wouldn’t know what to say. He’d just sit there on the other side and expect me to steer the conversation in whichever direction I wanted. There was a time when I actually laughed the moment he hung up. The conversation lasted for five minutes, and all he could say was ask me what I was doing, why I wasn’t asleep or some random thing. After two minutes I took over, and I told him stuff about my school and my friend who had come over and was spending the night at my place. I don’t remember much about that night (it was more than ten years ago, and this is a five-minute phone conversation we’re talking about) but I remember telling him that the most beautiful thing about falling in love is that it can happen again and again and again. We were talking about love. No, wait. We weren’t talking about love, we were going on about how cool it is to be in love, and, in a very fake, mature way, each of us was trying to show the other person that we knew all about it, and we could now talk about it in a detached, objective manner, like old people, who have left their conquests and affairs so far behind that the gap of time between themselves and their affairs is too large for the recollected feelings to make them uncomfortable, to have any effect on them at all.

A: What kind of relationship do you have with him now?

S: It's not even a relationship. It's just compassion… and charity. I know he’s not the criminal he’s being made out to be. It doesn’t fit in with the Aruni I’ve known for the last 14 years. He used to write letters to me. So I’ve seen him grow old, in a way, through those 14 years. Of course, I only know the things he chose to tell me, but it’s a life nevertheless, isnt it, his life, and its as good as anyone else’s version of his life, because ultimately that’s what they all are, arent they, versions of truth?

A: Absolutely. Though I must say, I admire your compassion, because you went to see him in prison, right after I told you about him, and you’re the only visitor he’s had in the whole of last week. Fifteen minutes of compassion in a week of misery.

S: Oh, so you know. How much do you know?

A: Not much. Being a journalist means you have sources in all the major places. And having friends doesn’t hurt.

S: Well then you should probably also know this: he’s not miserable in there. And he’s definitely not lonely.

A: Because he’s always been something of a loner?

S: Ya, and anyone can say that. I mean, just look at him. Have you seen him? You must’ve. I entered the visiting room, and when I saw him there I paused for two seconds near the door to look at him, and he was sitting there, all alone, not even looking at the people around him, scribbling something from time to time in the notebook lying in front of him. He wears his loneliness like a shawl, draping it around his shoulders, covering his neck, holding it tight with his hands, as if he were protecting it against a gust of chilly wind, lest some of his precious solitude be blown away and land on someone else, who will just—I don’t know— brush the crumbs away from their shoulders and go about their business of daily life.
He’s probably thinking of himself as Dostoevsky, how he wrote these memoirs of his incarceration in Siberia, where he said he wanted to spend time in prisons to write about freedom.

A: But you said he has always been lonely. Isn’t it a bit harsh to say those things? In my experience, people who have been lonely for a long time begin to burrow into themselves, constructing an imaginative universe(s) within their heads, and they snuggle up in there. They find it difficult to trust any extended hand of warmth. Its almost a consequence of loneliness, that way in which one tends to guard one’s solitide with a frightening, because disproportionate, ferocity.

S: But don’t you see the contradiction? How can you call someone lonely if that’s how they want to be? I know “lonely” lonely people, OK? They’re not like him. They’re sad. They don’t want to be lonely just so they can write better. And they’d accept a relationship with real human beings. He’s not starved of human contact. He’s just contemptuous. He looks down upon human contact, at least the ‘kind’ of human contact he sees around himself, the kind of on-off things he sees in class-rooms, families, offices, hostels.
It’s a highly condescending attitude, and I don’t think it deserves the sympathy which one might reserve for “loneliness”. He’s schizophrenic. He’s clinically ill, because he’s created a whole imaginary life for himself; he thinks its fashionable if he’s lonely because Kafka and Beckett were lonely, and since he wants to be a writer, he thinks its good, that it’ll help, if he was lonely as well. Sort of an extra, something that can’t hurt, that even tastes better, once you’ve gotten over the bitter part and begun to get the hang of it. But, you know, his whole attitude to people is disgusting. Its like he fakes psychological illness and then uses his writing, his ability to make up stories, as a sort of psychological cure for that. He uses people.
Social intercourse is like masturbation for him. He spends most of his time alone, thinking, reading, trying to write, and then, after a point, when he cant take it anymore, and he thinks he needs a break, he goes out, and talks to some people, as if he needed this little bit to sustain himself, his larger, more overarching form of “detachment” from which he hopes to observe “life” and write about it with spell-binding precision and unflinching insight.

A: You almost speak as if you’ve been inside his head.

S: I’ve read his letters. He wrote obsessively to me. It wasn’t funny. I would be with my friends, shopping or having a nice time after a long day’s work, and the moment I’d sign into my Hotmail account there’d be a four-page email. I read all his letters. That’s something of an understatement. I devoured them. The first three or four were really boring. I didn’t hate them, but it was a real pain to reply to them. I wrote one reply for every two or three letters. I’d write five lines for 5 pages of typed text. And I didn’t answer any of the things he’d ask me about in the letter, you know? Just the usual How-are-you bullshit, and a request for him to tone down the theatricality.

A: Theatricality?

S: Oh, yeah. He was the showman. He’d put on this typically teenager kind of display of love for me. In the beginning, when we’d just graduated, his letters were extremely cheesy. He was so in love with being in love, he forgot most of the facts and exaggerated things out of context. I think it helped him imagine himself and me as some fictional existential love affair, you know, because this was the time when he was watching a lot of French New Wave cinema, a lot of Godard, Melville, Truffaut, the likes. He was taken in with all the beautiful women, cigarette smoke, conversations about Faulkner and Lenin in Parisian cafes, and things like that. There was this one letter, for instance, where he said that I was so beautiful, I reminded him of Anna Karina, because he wanted to film me, and although he was no Godard, he was sure that he could make his best effort for my sake.

A: And how did the letters change? You said the early letters were too theatrical.

S: Yes. But as time passed he got more real, as in, he began to tell me things that were really happening to him, stuff he was going through in his head, not idle fantasies. I know, there is a very thin line separating the two. But I say this because this time he wasn’t flying off on his digressions. Sure, there were times when I just totally lost his drift, like this one letter where he talked about Mozart and how listening to Mozart helped him understand something from Lacan’s lectures, some abstract philosophical concept he’d gone over in his head many times months ago and given up on, pushing it to the back of his mind and all but forgetting it. At moments like this he was really flying off on his hobby-horses, but it was a momentary lapse, and he checked himself as soon he ’d finished, in the very next paragraph in fact.

A: Do you want to tell me about a particular letter, something which elucidates this shift more carefully? This shift between the two phases of letter writing?

S: There were many letters. It would be very, very hard for me to pick one as representative of all the letters Aruni wrote to me, even if we’re only considering the latter phase. Because I’ll just end up feeling like I’ve been unfair to so many other things that he could (and did) say to me.

A: Trust me, the people who will know of these things will not judge him on the basis of the content of his letters. And even if they did, on some vague, emotional level, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change anything, because he is already in jail.

S: Right.

[Sigh]

OK. This was in December 2009. He was in the second year of his Masters and I was about to finish my Advertising course. One morning I woke up earlier than usual and, when I signed into my Hotmail account, I saw this really long letter from Aruni. I read it in five minutes flat, made myself a big cup of lemon tea, and sat down to read it again. My first reaction was to turn red. I felt the heat on my face. He had praised me in unreal terms. It was absurd. He began with Naipaul. For one whole page, in two paragraphs, he kept talking about Naipaul’s love-hate relationship with India. I got bored, so I glanced at the paragraphs below it. If my eyes hadnt caught “you’re so beautiful” I might’ve stopped reading the letter. But I saw it and continued reading.

I endured the Naipaul lecture like a wide-eyed undergraduate in awe of her lecturer. When my roommate woke up she was surprised to see me giggling. I was giggling, but it was not just the things he said about me. I couldn’t help but be amused at him, as I imagined what he would’ve done. I imagined him waking up in the morning, thinking of me and typing up a letter on his laptop. The time on the email said 6:30 AM. So obviously, at about 5:30 or 5:45, this young man cannot sleep on a cold December morning in Delhi and is blinking into the harsh white electronic light of his laptop, typing up all he knows about V S Naipaul to a girl he shared his BA classroom with for three years.

Reading the letter, I wanted to give him a star, a smilie, and a 10/10, with a “V.Good!”, like teachers give to children in class 3 or 4, children who submit their homework on time. To not read his letter would’ve been unnecessarily cruel, like not looking at a ten-year-old’s drawing, however messy or clumsy it may have been, when the kid walks up to you and shows it to you. Listen, I can keep talking. Don’t you have to leave? You said something about leaving. Let me know when to stop.

A: Go on.

S: So ya, I read the Naipaul bit just to be nice to him. I was wondering, why does he write all this to me? Doesn’t he know I don’t take novels— and my reading of them— too seriously? I mean, surely I can appreciate his interest in Naipaul, and his analysis, or whatever, but surely there must’ve been people, other people, apart from me, who could have responded more completely, more intelligently, to what was in the end, just a piece of literary criticism? And a not-too-extraordinary one at that.

But, let me be honest. I was selfish. I read it with the expectation of some sort of a pay-off in the end, you know, of something really intense or interesting he would say later in the letter, and I felt that I would be able to savor the letter completely only if I read the whole thing, including the boring bits instead of fast-forwarding to the good bits. I wasn’t prepared, of course, for what came later. It was more than a little overwhelming. I hadnt thought he was capable of reaching that level. It was very early on in our correspondence, and prior to this moment nothing I’d read by him suggested that he might be any different from thousands of other sexually-frustrated, twenty-something, self-torturing pseudo-intellectuals with a moderately good command over English and access to a blog.

He took this line from Naipaul’s essays (which, he said, used them repeatedly): “the obvious is overwhelming” and explained to me why it meant a lot to him. I obviously cannot reproduce his language (and so you cannot imagine the effect it had on me) but in its essence, what he told me was this: he couldn’t really grasp what Naipaul felt when he first came to India (and wrote these lines) and also, why he kept coming back , again and again, throughout his life, even though (it was obvious) that he had a lot of hatred for India, till he met me and, more specifically, till he yearned to see me once we’d graduated and there were no more classes to look forward to, where he could spend hours just looking at my face.

And then, of course, he ended a page with a bizarre modification of Naipaul’s line to say this:
Trupti, about you, the obvious is overwhelming.

The first time I read it, it was quite stunning. But that was only because back then I wasn’t used to his way with words. After a while, that is, after about six months had passed and he’d written some letters, I stopped getting excited, though I never stopped looking forward to his letters. There were phases, lasting for a week, or 10 days, when my fingers would shake as I signed in to check my mail, because I would be nervous with the weight of imagining all the things he might say in his next letter. I just craved for someone to tell me how pretty I was (am). It’s such a simple need. It’s not presumptuous, and it doesn’t have to do with factual correctness. I’m not embarrassed I felt the need. Its like food. Our psychological selves need nutrition, like our physical selves, and one shouldn’t be health-conscious all the time. I would go and ask my mother, “Mum, am I pretty?” And she would understand. I hoped he understood this too, since his letters displayed an uncommon degree of insight into human weaknesses. I knew it in my head, but I was too proud to actually tell this to him. Now, of course, I know for sure. But back then, ten years ago, I couldn’t say it to him. Maybe I should have. But he was quirky, you know? He knew strange things about strange things. All the hours he spent alone reflecting on random, insignificant things meant that he found obvious and staid many things which other people found fascinating. He had an uncommon awareness of the ego’s narcissism, the absurd, urgent need to flaunt an image of oneself. But he was also too locked within his idea of himself as the artist/writer.

A: Did you see in his attitude or in his letters to you any inclination towards violence, or a tendency to lose control of oneself? As if there was a tendency for violence which he had kept supressed, but which threatened to break out from under the veneer of civility?

S: Hmmm. Violence. Well, he was clearly a child, in the sense that he sometimes failed to negotiate his emotional needs with an awareness of the cold, pragmatic nature of the world. He was just disconnected. One day, during our undergrad time, he spent the whole day reading a novel. I don’t remember which one it was, but he sat through five lectures, and throughout them all he kept reading it. When classes were over for the day, someone told him, “The last lecture was quite good, man, why werent you listening to it?”, and he answered, “I have to save my soul”. He said it without irony, without any emotion, in fact, with a stone-faced expression. It was funny. Some people got scared. Most people in the class stopped talking to him after that day. I was amused. I thought it was cute in a strange way. Of course, I could never relate to it on a personal level but when I thought of this incident years later, when I had read many of his letters, I remember feeling a vague kind of sympathy. Like he was an overgrown kid. Of course, we’re all kids, in our own ways, and the “complete adult” doesn’t exist, everyone’s scarred somewhere in his/her childhood, but he was a child in the most unexpected ways. And he didn’t realise it. Not just that, he thought it was perfectly mature. He thought of himself as OLDER than all the other people around him. That’s the irony. Of all things! That’s why he could also repel people even when he had the best intentions in mind, even when he was trying his best to be nice to them, to bring out his most tender side for them.

But violence? I don’t think so. He’d be the last person to hit another person. He’d get beaten up by other people. And he did get beaten up. There was this incident, now that I mention it, where he got punched around by four or five men.

A: Can you tell me more about that incident?

S: Well, I don’t know everything. You should probably ask around other people who were closer to him at that time. I just heard some things. Random bitchy gossip. And he did send me a story which he said was almost completely true.
Anyway. A woman he had once been involved with, his last and most deep love affair, she asked him if he could teach her some things, because there was some exam she had failed and had to repeat in order to clear and get the diploma. OK, picture this: this guy obviously hasn’t gotten over her. Like I said, he was pretty deeply involved with her, and he probably never will get over her. But he doesn’t care that she’s moved on, that she is happily settled down with her boyfriend. So what does he do? In his infinite wisdom, he tells her, in an SMS, that he’d be happy to teach her whatever she wanted but only if she slept with him after every session.
I mean, can you imagine this guy? How childish can you get? Its not cute. Its gross. Its beyond funny. I would’ve laughed if there wasn’t something seriously wrong. It’s like he’s a child with a man’s sexual needs, needs that he doesnt quite know how to control. I know the person he made that proposal to. She said it was ugly. But of course, she didn’t want him to be roughed up. Her boyfriend saw the SMS and asked his friends to scare him a bit. But when they warned him, he supposedly talked back defaintly, and made some proclamations like “so what if I said it, you don’t own her body, she owns her body, I was only suggesting a slight re-adjustment in the way she managed it between different people”. Knowing him, I wasn’t surprised. But ya, they wouldn’t have any of it. So they roughed him up, literally.
I agree, I found it ugly, like my friend, his ex. But I did laugh silently for a minute when I heard of this.

A: Did he do something about this? After they beat him and left?

S: He tried to keep it secret. That didn’t prove to be too hard, given that he wasn’t really hurt, just a couple of cuts on his face, and pain all over his body. So he could avoid telling people. I’m assuming all this because he wrote a story and sent it to me, and I’m just putting two and two together. In the story he had a woman meet him after his encounter, and soften the pain of the punches with intelligent, sparkling conversation. He named her Trupti. He was always doing this, naming his fictional women after women in his life, women he was occupied with at the given specific period of his life. His obsession with me, of course, wasn’t like the others. It didn’t come and go, in phases. He remained obsessed with me for a period of nine years, and we didn’t meet more than three times all through the period. But he would write copious amounts of letters to me, telling me everything he did, thought about, dreamed about, hated, wanted to do but couldn’t, stuff he cried about, just about everything. He even told me about the women he was dating, at all the different stages of his life. All through his MA, M.Phil, Phd, his long jobless period, and finally the three years he spent teaching at a government boys’ school, he wrote to me about the women he met. I was the “distant” love, the unattainable paradigm, and the women he met everyday were the “near” loves, the different faces and bodies in whom he looked for the essence of me. That’s what he told me.

A: You know, everything you’ve been telling me, it’s drawn this picture of an reclusive, intelligent but shy, also highly individualistic and creative person. Which is interesting, because while it makes it hard to imagine him as someone who might resort to something as violent a crime as he’s accused of, it also gives a very crude and simplistic kind of explanation for it, because as an artist he must imagine himself to be outside the purview of everyone else’s morality, make it very easy for him to look down on laws and all other earthly trappings of the world we live in.

S: But isn’t that ridiculous? Just because you can write some poems and stories it doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you feel like. I think you’ll still be obliged to the world you live in, artist or otherwise. But considering him, I admit its impossible for me to imagine him like that. Firstly, I don’t think he was the “artist” artist. I mean, he just wasn’t good enough. I’ve seen most of his writings, and they’re above average, but nothing exceptional. I never told him this, but that's my objective opinion. It would shatter him if he knew.

I would be willing to forgive him such a crime if he was. But I don’t have to go that far. We dont even have to use the 'crazy-artist' excuse. He was just soft. He’s probably the softest man I have known, and I’ve known a lot of men, because I’ve done some PR as part of my job, managing the Agency I started with my husband. I deal with all kinds of unwanted male attention. But I’ve seen very few like him. And I’m not praising him. I wish I could, though, because I know for a fact that he’s not bad, he’d make a good “family man”, a boyfriend or husband or father, but he just doesn’t let himself. I’ve seen him teach a class of rowdy sixteen-year olds and not get upset by all the taunts and gibes thrown at him. I’ve seen him take a lot of pain to explain an obscure John Ruskin poem to a boy who came to him outside class. He sat with the boy for a full hour, and kept explaining to him, repeatedly, again and again, till he got it. I don’t know if he really got it or if he was just exhausted, having heard the same thing so many times, and decided to give up. But Aruni could call up uncommon degrees of patience from some secret reservoir inside. I just wonder why he never showed this kind of tenderness for people around him, people he worked with, people he shared a lot of working hours with. He couldn’t live with them. He looked down on them.

Even the women. He could be extremely nice to them, but his interaction with them was at the level of children. He treated them like children because he expected them to treat him like a child. He resisted growing up. He believed he could do that by creating an imaginary world through his writing. I just cant imagine how he convinced his girlfriends to have sex with him. Like I said, he believed that he’d grown up faster than others, instead of acknowledging the truth, which was that he had not grown up at all. Maybe there’s not much difference in the end.

A: You said you run an Agency with your husband. Could tell me more about it?

S: Well, its an event management agency. We organise fashion shows, rock concerts, business conferences, corporate forums, that kind of thing. Five years ago, when we decided to get married, after living together for a year, me and my boyfriend decided to do something. I knew some people from the fashion and advertising business, he knew people from the corporate side, a lot of his batchmates who were posted in Bangalore, mostly IT professionals, and we decided to start something of our own, which would be fun and challenging, and we could be proud of ourselves, working for ourselves, which is better than working under someone else. Also, I am the emcee at most of the shows.

He used to look down on me, on the whole corporate lifestyle, even the idea of hospitality as an industry. But he got over it soon. He’d say, “I hope I don’t turn into a factory-made zombie”, used phrases like “corporate bitches” for people who did their MBAs and landed jobs in Gurgaon or Bangalore. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, just what he didn’t want to be. It didn’t strike him as tragic.

He felt he could continue living like a student all his life. And he did, didn’t he? You said they picked him up from a two-room flat somewhere in Vijaynagar?

A: Roopnagar. Its almost the same place.

S: So ya. There you go. I mean you get it, right? Bad food, dirty sheets, books strewn all over the place, beer-cans rolling on the floor, cobwebs hanging from the walls, cupboards smelling of months-old male sweat, that kind of thing. He liked doing that.
He kept hoping that I wasn’t like “them”. He had this naïve, childish illusion, that maybe I was faking all of it just for the comfortable life, and that deep down inside I was passionate and tempestuous and ready to abandon all security and reason for the sake of one moment of pure, undiluted, illogical passion. I did nothing to foster this notion. In fact, I told him how wrong it was. I told him, I am a “corporate bitch”. But he wouldn’t believe it. And then I stopped telling him. I guess it gave him some emotional satisfaction to believe that he wasn’t alone, that I too, beneath the façade of the cushy job, the duplex flat, the two cars, the memberships to certain not-very-inclusive clubs, the weekends at golf links, the spa and the holidays in Kerala, was actually a comrade in his social ineptitude, the only difference being that I was a bit lucky and I was smart enough to be practical when it mattered. And for what? Just because he saw me reading Gora, the Tagore novel, one day in class. Its absurd. He believed what he wanted to believe.

I think he couldn’t accept the fact that he liked a girl just because she had a pretty face and a good figure. He needed depth, something that was sufficiently poetic enough to justify his obsession, and he created this myth just so he could live out this idea of himself.

A: In all his childishness, nervousness, disconnectedness, did you notice anything to suggest that he was repressing something very fundamental, and that it might burst out without warning? And didn’t you ever feel like helping him, as in doing something more concrete than reading his letters and replying to them?

S: Like what, go out on dates with him? Pretend to be nice, pass compliments and go to sleep with him? He would laugh at the idea of these things. Like I said, he looked down on conventional social intercourse. And about the repression bit, I can’t really say. Because I never really gave much thinking time to him. Even if I did, and came to that conclusion, so what? He was never a big enough presence in my life. Not big enough to merit any form of extended deliberation in any case.

A: So it was just an empty sympathy? Something you smiled sadly about while reading his letters and then forgot all about, till you got the next four-page email, and wanted to take a break from your corporate bitchy life-style?

S: Look, it was a very real sympathy. But what can one do about it if he himself didn’t see it like that? He couldn’t sympathise with himself. Either he was arrogant, and said that I don’t have time for this emotional bullshit, I have other, more important things to do with my time, or he’d throw this blanket-pessimism over everything, and say stuff like the world disgusts me but not as much as I disgust myself. He swung between extremes.

A: You said he was not a big enough presence. Clearly he was interested in you. More than you were in him. So, between the two of you, you were the one who didn’t want any intimacy. May I ask why exactly?

S: Are you kidding? What have I been saying all this time? It hasn’t helped you understand? I’m sure you’re not that naïve. You probably want me to say it more dramatically, more explicitly. Well, I don’t mind. He was scary. I could sympathise from a distance, but I couldn’t imagine living with him. It was impossible to know how he’d react to simple, day-to-day things. He had these hyper-liberal, impractical, hyper-radical views on love, sex, relationships, and sometimes just reading his blog made me recoil.

And besides, let me make this clear by stating it unambiguously, on record, he never asked me out. I know, this is not what you, and most other people, including his close friends think. Contrary to popular belief, I never rejected him. He never gave me a chance to reject him. In the beginning, he was just playing it safe, but later on, he began to realise that he wasn’t that into me. I’m not complaining, because I was perfectly happy in a relationship with my boyfriend, whom I eventually married. He was awed by what he called my “beauty”, but he shied away from any real contact. It was as if he knew that we were on completely different levels, and there was no way we could possibly connect. I could still have communicated, but he didn’t even try to communicate with me as an individual. He communicated with me as an idea. It was insulting. I felt particularly humiliated, on this one occasion, when he praised my beauty and told me, shamelessly enough, that he felt no love or hate or desire while praising me, and he didn’t feel any “closer” to me after praising me. It was as if he was talking to his class about a photograph or painting of great beauty. And yet, the terms of his praise, the words he used to praise me, the language of his letters, was exalting and touching (he hoped), precisely because he felt no desire on an emotional level. I remember thinking, as I read that letter, that he is so cold, so dead inside, so stone-hearted, that he cannot really bond with anyone in his life.

So he had resigned himself to this kind of connection: writing long letters to me about each stage of his intellectual development, and how he had me to thank for giving him the spark, the excuse, the “reason to kick the blanket and jump out of bed each morning” as he put in one of his letters.
It was parasitic and selfish, but the only consolation was that it was honest. He was brutally honest. He was disgusted with himself and he showered praise on me as a way of getting over that larger revulsion that everything else filled him with. He told me, “you make pain liveable. I feel pathetic about a lot of things (including this feeling) but one of the things I feel the least pathetic about is your face.”

What’s the time? Oh God. I have to leave. Gotta pick up my son in half an hour.

A: Alright. One last question. What’s your verdict on this rape and kidnapping charge slapped against him?

S: My verdict? Who am I? If you insist, on a simple, Hollywood-morality level, my verdict is this: I try to empathise. Clearly he’s being framed. Some woman he was involved with is framing him because it didn’t work out between them or she felt wronged and she’s getting back at him. I know that he’s not even capable of something like that. But people do strange things. If someone is so detached from other people, people one stays with, how can he expect his actions to be taken as he intends? He was a person who expected people to understand the crazy wirings inside his brain. He assumed that all the complex emotional connections and reactions inside his head were transparently visible to other people, so he wouldn’t have to make any effort to explain himself to them. He didn’t think it was a lack of imagination or arrogance on his part, because he imagined the inner lives of other people with a reciprocal richness. But this is an naivete of massive, gargantuan proportions. He made no effort to explain himself or communicate with anyone apart from the letters he wrote. He chose random people, and arbitrarily dumped all the trash, the whole of his sordid emotional life, truckloads of dirty linen, on them. I didn’t mind, of course, but others did.

He opened his heart out for me. He could do that because he knew that we could never really meet. We hardly spoke on the phone, I’d leave a few comments on his blog and he’d reply with a letter. He felt free, thinking that because he was never going to see me, he could say whatever he wanted. I was his confessional stand, where he could be himself, the intelligent, nervous, drunk-on-female-beauty, wide-eyed boy that he really was, and never really grew out of. I felt sometimes that he felt he needed me to be pretty in order for him to successfully live out his idea of a lonely, struggling, writer who’s fallen hopelessly in love with a beautiful woman and doesn’t know the first thing about how to deal with it.

fragments; 13th January '10

He takes a walk every morning at six-thirty because he likes the cold weather. He likes to wrap himself in warm clothes and take long walks. He thinks of Wordsworth and Werner Herzog while walking. He doesn’t notice that while his choice of these names isn’t exactly random, they both start with the same letter (William Wordsworth).

The cold wind makes his face look pale and sickly, as if he has just recovered from a bout of viral. His lips which are ordinarily pale, look anaemic and purple, like a beedi-smoker’s. I have to buy a lip-balm or some cold-cream, he tells himself. It is probably the thirtieth time he has heard this from himself. He goes out covered in a thick muffler, a lambswool skullcap, on top of which he puts the hood of his sweatshirt, on top of which he puts his jacket’s hood, the last because it has just started to drizzle.

He has shopped for books worth two thousand rupees. He hasn’t bought them from a bookshop in South Delhi, which he likes going to, and where he’d most probably get a 20% discount on a hot-off-the-press, new book, book whose spine, if one were to put one’s face close enough, would actually smell of the press, of ink. He has gone to Daryaganj and bought them, where he gets some rare, good books for jaw-droppingly low prices. He feels some pride in doing this, fortnightly ritual, going and buying books, but he can never tell this to his friends, because they all manage to get better deals than him. His ‘jaw-droppingly low’ is usually a bad bargain for them. But he is so excited by the prospect of possessing the books he gets that paying 50 or 100 more when he could have avoided it, seems to him a mere trifle.

Also, and more importantly, he sees it as an insult to the book in question to haggle beyond a point. He bought a 1970s Penguin Classics edition of Nostromo (Joseph Conrad) for 40 rupees. Although it was a battered copy, with both the front and back covers terribly dog-eared, the back cover folded almost to tearing-limits, and the pages had turned completely yellow, he couldn’t quote a lower price. He thought of asking the man sitting next to the pile of books, “30?”, but the words got stuck in his throat—they refused to be spoken. He didn’t say anything, quietly paid the 40, and walked on.

The thing about the Sunday books market that irks him is this: he finds it impossible to shop there like he normally shops, in other book shops. He is in a different mode there. As if, because he has made some ordinary effort to come here on a Sunday, he needs to make the most of this opportunity, and this brings an element of impatience into his behavior, his dealings, his way of talking to the vendors. He becomes desparate, frantic, and makes hasty decisions, decisions he regrets minutes later. If he sees a rare book he gets so excited that the vendor quotes a high price. Even when he knows this, he cannot haggle, or negotiate and bring the price down. Something of his excitement leaks through his eyes and communicates itself to the vendors, who feel confident that he will buy the book at any price, come what may.

A Kamala Markandaya novel (Bombay Tiger) which he picked up for 250 was selling for 180 some 200 metres down the same street. And the second one was in a better condition. He was cursing himself because he had no money left for a Penguin Classics edition of Women in Love which was in perfect shape (no frayed or dog-eared edges) and was going for 100 rupees. Walking from the bus-stop to the hostel, he sees himself in the tinted windows of a car: a tall frame, pale—almost bloodless—skin, scraggly beard, with a bag-ful of books slung on his shoulder, and four more books held against his chest, he trudges across the road on a cold and wet January afternoon. He tries to imagine a kind of woman who might find something moderately likeable, if not attractive, in the sight he presents to the outside world. He fails.

The failure of imagination irks him more than the practical implications of what it means. Most people, whatever they do and wherever they go (particularly when they go out), see themselves walking beside themselves, like a character from a novel or a film. John Berger, of course, famously, puts it like this: we don’t just see others and ourselves; we see ourselves being seen. And then they project an image of themselves. But he hasn’t even got to that stage; how can I, he thinks, when I still cannot outgrow JM Coetzee’s ghost? It is a ghost which he has imagined out of a line from Youth:

He is well aware that his failure as a writer and his failure as a lover are so closely parallel they might as well be the same thing.

There are other ghosts: Michael K, who was “a man who passed through the bowels of earth undigested”, and Robinson Crusoe, who, as a writer, prepared himself everyday for “a bout with the page”. When he reads in Youth that the young JM Coetzee watched Bande a part several times because he was in love with Anna Karina for a period of his life, it unsettles him. When he reads about his love for Monica Vitti and Anna Karina, he identifies it. It is a specific ‘kind’ of love, one that not everyone is capable of, only those who bring into their reading of novels and watching of movies a kind of schizophrenia, because they can imagine a world from an idea, and they give more reality to this imaginary world than their immediate surroundings. Because they can splash a universe around a face, like a child spilling a bottle of ink on a white sheet of paper, he thinks.

He reads about JM Coetzee watching Bande a part and he remembers the letters he wrote to a woman telling her that she was very beautiful. He compared her to Anna Karina. Because that’s exactly how he watches Godard. He doesn’t understand most of the things about Godard’s cinema apart from a vague and superficial understanding of the innovations he did and why he’s considered a “great” film-maker. But there is something about the way faces, emotions and ideas are depicted in his films. There is an intimacy with images and texts that he finds intensely alluring. There is an appreciation of the written word which blends with a reverence for the immediacy of the image to create a unique imaginative experience. He sees in Godard a writer who just happened to be better at handling a camera instead of a pen.

The voice-over narrations are sometimes so erudite they feel like something out of Proust or Faulkner. Godard, he thinks, like Woody Allen, is a writer’s film-maker, like Tarantino is a film-maker’s (or film-lover’s) film-maker. Watching films and thinking about them can sometimes backfire.

Watching Godard’s films is like “reading novels on speed”, a healthy form of substance abuse, like swallowing pills or injecting, intravenously, a highly concentrated and freeze-dried form of culture, tightly condensed packets of meaning, wrapped around layers of images and texts, so that one takes it and lies back, waiting for the effects to make themselves felt, watching the drug spread out in waves, as the blood gets diluted and one’s pupils dilate. The solitary hours he spends give him many chances to unpack the layers, whether tenderly, with caresses, over a whole day, or tempestuously, explosively, in a burst of frenzied writing. Most of Godard’s films wash over him like a tidal wave of ideas, but when he gets up he’s all dry; there isnt a drop to be felt on his face. It is only when he sits down to write every night that he can make some sense of the films, and even then his understanding is fragmentary.

Instead of answers he only has questions. Why am I unable to see depth in a woman’s face unless it is accompanied by lines of dialogue or commentary? Why not still photographs? Why do I feel the pain and anxiety of some lines of written text in, say, La Petit Soldat, only when they narrated as the camera focusses on Anna Karina’s face? Why do I not feel the same for, say, Katrina Kaif in any of the pictures or videos that I’ve seen of her? It’s a serious lack of imagination. Because photography has as much artistic merit as film-making. And what is this fascination with ‘depth’? Isnt it pretentious? Why cant I just appreciate someone’s face for what it is? All such pretense towards “depth” may only be an effort to sound intelligent and cultured, to compensate for what may essentially be a primordial animal desire in the first place.
What then is the right way to watch films, if being an avid watcher of films can have this sort of an effect? I began watching films with the strongest aversion to all forms of ‘cultural consumption’, but in my attempts to make sense of Godard I have become a consumer, because I use the ideas and images in Godard’s films to trigger off trains of thought in my head which help me write better. I take Godard out of my LCD screen and reclaim the images, hang my own ideas around them.

Watching films, it seems to him, can be like reading illustrated versions of books for adults.
That’s the worst way to watch a film. The function of the image is not to help the viewer imagine an idea that the words couldn’t adequately articulate. The image is the form of cinema, like words are for the novel, and any serious practitioner of the art of film-making must, first and foremost, share a fascination with the form at his disposal. Godard goes beyond most other ‘serious’ film-makers because he went one step ahead: he took both words and images seriously.
And so he goes on, ranting away, labouring over obvious things in painfully complicated ways, reclaiming ideas for himself by dressing them up in words of his own choosing, believing, that its the only way he can ever understand anything clearly. Not just knowing something at the back of your mind and feeling complacent, but telling it to yourself, as if you were sharing an interesting thought with your friend or date or parents, repeating the obvious things, so that in all those repetitions you find out something that wasn’t so obvious; that’s how you make the invisible visible, and the obvious overwhelming.

Sketches: 3rd December '09

A young man, kicked in the crotch by a young woman, writhes on the floor, clutching the seat of his jeans, screaming “FUCK! Oh, FUCK!” as his shoes soundlessly scrape the floor like nails on the back of a lover at the moment love is spelt with a breath instead of alphabets. The woman stands back, unmoved, moving only very discreetly, without emotion, taking one careful step back each time his legs—which are toeing the floor, trying spasmodically to claw their presence on the concrete floor in a useless attempt to divert the pain from his testicles to somewhere lower down his anatomy, come close to her Converse-clad feet, reaching out, as if wanting to hold her there, force her to watch, to witness the spectacle of suffering her actions have produced, not knowing, of course, that she has decided to watch it all anyway, hoping that maybe this, if nothing else, can bring out some genuine emotion, some heart-felt interaction between two people, herself and her boyfriend.

He dreams of sitting next to her, of looking at her as she makes notes, tries to be interested in the lecture, scribbles something in her notebook once every two minutes, between looking at the lecturer’s face and turning, partly bored and partly about-to-be-disappointed, to the book lying open on her table. He dreams of looking at her neck from the left, so he can see the little birthmark on the two-inches of skin where her ear-lobe ends and her jaw-line has not quite begun. He’ll wait till he sees the hint of her Adam’s apple, even if it takes all day, for the sigh that will shake the two strands of hair which end a couple of inches from her lips, for the vein on her neck to swell, to fill with blood as she speaks to her friends, answering them as they ask her about the class, about her Facebook status message, making the right noises, smiling with an effort which she has to remember to exert (sometimes forgets and people take offense, thinking she’s arrogant; she has even heard eyes speak: “Just because you’re pretty you think you own the world? Who do you think you are?”), but which does nothing to her smile as other people see it.



Two brown squares of Diary Milk chocolate stay huddled together in an overwhelming darkness. It is a scientific, physical blackness: the sheer lack of light is so overpowering, it creates an infinity of space, because their eyes play tricks with them, creating shapes and dimensions out of nothing.

They have no sense of depth, no idea of how closely they're packed, whether they have a giant double bed to sprawl, moodily, like lovers bored of each other, or if they have to squeeze into a tiny space, like young lovers, hungry for each other's skin, fitting into each other, or even if they are thrown together, thoughtlessly, like cattle being transported in the back of a pick-up. In the last case, the truck would appear particularly crowded, populated as it was by a pencil, 2 CRL cards, 2 Sahitya Akademi cards, a Vicks inhaler, a stapler, a toothbrush, a blue Reynolds 045 pen, a strip of Crocin, strip of Flex-on, Fevi-stick, a bunch of keys, a USB drive and a Nokia charger.

They keep staring at this palpable blackness in which they have been imprisoned (palpable because they feel as if they were staring into space even if they sleep- there is nothing like sleep because closing their eyes doesn't make it any darker); the only source of light was zipped shut two days ago. The boy who owns the bag also owns them; he has spared them because he is thinking of giving them to a girl he likes. He believes she will appreciate the effort, the gesture: the fact that he ate the rest of the eight squares on the chocolate-bar, but suddenly, as he thought of her, he saved the two at the end. He has wrapped them in the golden foil and then in the blue wrapper which is their standard uniform, like a blue shawl. The pouch where they're being carried is part of the bag he carries to class everyday. He unzips the pouch occasionally to check if they're alright, if they've started softening or melting.

Would it change his mind, if he could imagine a life for the two squares of chocolate in his bag, if he thought them capable of suffering, of being lonely? Loneliness, of course, is a feeling he is intimately aware of. It is something that he claims to feel a lot, even prides himself on feeling it sometimes.
Is the imagined loneliness of a chocolate cuboid authentic enough to have any real consequences upon the boy who is carrying it for a girl?
And if he realized, what then? What can he really do? The chocolate in his bag can only be thrown or eaten by someone. He cannot even pretend to feel sad. His upbringing trains him to feel bad if the chocolate melted or got infected by fungus, or some other form of 'wastage'. If he imagined a life and a death for two brown squares of milk chocolate he would have to imagine the sadness too.
What does this say about the limits of imagination? Turning vegetarian surely has a lot to do with imagination, with imagining life in things other than oneself, like the food on one's plate. One needs to imagine what it feels like to be a cow, or a goat or a turkey, and realize that just because they're animals we do not have a right to kill them wantonly.
What if someone imagines a life, complete with pain, suffering and alienation in a table, a chair and one's laptop? How can one survive? Should one, in such cases, become a pragmatic vegetarian, instead of an 'idealist' vegetarian?

Fragments; 1st December '09

Each passing glance in class is like a plunge. Strangely enough, it feels like jumping into a hard, dry and wooden sea. A sea of people, stiff with judgements on things and about other people they don’t know much about. We open our eyes, pinch them at the corners, keep them wide open, but only so we can blind ourselves more completely. More securely.

The desire to not see, to enforce a blindness, to make watching impossible, is very strong. To make the act of pre-judgemental looking impossible, till the point someone’s face is no longer what is visible, a face, but simply a galaxy of exploding pixels. After that we don’t look; we simply judge things based on what we already know of them, no matter how little or inaccurate.

The desire to not see is an unconscious perversion, to stop thinking, to fast-forward the act of deliberation, introspection, thought, the period of deferral, when one simply looks before pronouncing one’s verdict, and to dive in, head-first, so that all breath, and all space for thinking, listening, smelling, seeing, is crushed out, and we are surrounded by a comforting ignorance, as the water crashes into our faces flooding all sense. The burden of deliberation is lifted by the breathlessness of speech. That’s why people keep talking so loudly in class, straining their vocal cords, trying hard to make themselves heard over the din of voices, marking their necks with delicate, throbbing veins. They don’t want to allow themselves the time or physical capacity to contemplate, to feel discomfort, or loneliness, or simply a frustrating emptiness; a resounding hollowness in their heads, which might echo their screams of agony, and might make them wonder if they can hear themselves just because they are loud or because their world, the whole screaming-room is so hollow.

Facebook status messages, lunch, class-notes, fan-fiction notes, New Moon, Breaking Dawn, Eclipse, Twilight, marriages, Big Boss, Internal Assessment Marks, guys, girls, Breaking Dawn. What else? A lot. Lot more than I had the patience to listen in on and write about.

This why there is a disgust of theory. It’s just a perversion of what could’ve been called honesty, or the clarity of passion, but is now pornographic, mechanical, condom-obstructed fluid-exchange.

You said you hated plans. Your idea of living life was to have nothing to do with plans. I will always remember that. I don’t make plans either, do I do something else. I have dreams, and try to get at them through plans, which are always so bizarre and impractical that I shouldn’t even call them plans, like reading three novels in two days, or like telling a girl I have never spoken with: I wanted to tear your clothes off yesterday.

I dream of a kind of love affair. A love affair that looks out, instead of looking in, at each other, like most of the affairs I know do. Everything that’s got anything to do with love, or sex, or relationships, is narcissistic. It forces us to imagine a myth of equality, and then sublimate our erotic drives. Any semblance of class inequality always forecloses any possibility of this sublimation, only bringing out our revulsion. Its almost as if we need to believe that both of us belong to the same socio-economic level before we can imagine anything erotic with the person, and it could be anyone. Of course, people pay for sex, but that doesn’t count as a relationship in any strict sense. And in those cases where relationships between a customer and a seller of sex do develop, they do so when all signifiers of their difference, their separation in the economic scheme of things, is made invisible. That gets segregated to another realm, these ‘kinds’ of relationships, and it is strictly economic, without any figment of emotional attachment.

The other extreme is the typical “relationship” between men and women where all desire is supposed to have its root in some emotional longing and derive its moral justification from that non-sexual longing. This moral justification doesn’t work in economic relationships, and creates a form of disgust at these economic relationships, with arguments like “he’s such a beast, he can’t even see how destitute she is, all he cares about is his desire to have sex”. It is almost as if one is morally justified in imagining non-disgusting sex with people of the same class.

There can be no room for imagining class inequality in any morally-insulated sexual relationship. I don’t want the imagination to be that of an outsider, as part of lovers’ talk, like the affectionate conversations one can have lying in bed after sex, or while walking home after a late dinner in a fancy restaurant, with lines like “we’ve just spend someone’s annual salary on one dinner, just because we are out on a date”, or “love is such a bourgeoise masturbatory thing”. That’s still looking inward.

The relationship between lovers is an imaginary one; one imagines the myth of equality that keeps the passion alive, at least at the moment of coming together. Try telling this to someone on your first date with them: I have some friends who are Naxalites, should I give them your home address so they can raid it?

Watch the ink dry on the page, while you’re taking notes, and it will let you pause for a while. I always wait for a while after writing the first sentence, watching, from an angle, with my head titled, as the light stops bouncing off the wet ink and settles into a blue inscription, making, as the ink slowly dries off, “Watch the ink dry…” stand out clearly, an oasis of colour and opacity in a desert of white.

Fragments; 29th November 2009

I did not have time to write a letter to you from Orissa. In fact, I do not have time to write a letter to you even now, now that I am here and under no pressing deadlines. But this is something I can share with you. These are some fragments and images I scribbled on my notebook.

Riding on motorcycles for longer than two hours: one thinks of the pain in the back, at the spot just above your buttocks, where the two bones meet. Or don’t meet; just give one the impression of two separate objects overcoming the separateness of their objective realities and fusing to become a seamless stitch of unbroken pain and promise. Touch yourself. You’ll know what I’m talking about.

The thing about discussing bike-prices; one never wonders why one is discussing bike-prices in the first place. It makes one think: there is a reason why some people discuss bike-prices and others car-prices.

Also, riding on motorcycles: the feeling of an openness, a wideness, a complete freedom. The feeling that, for the little while that one is on the bike, anything is possible. My friend used to tell me, back when we were undergraduates, after filling the bike with 20 rupees worth of petrol, “Alright, now lets go to America!”. Of course, it’s a joke, but it carries the message very beautifully.

The exhilaration of the wind whipping at your face from all sides, your eyes watering from the impact of cold air, your shirt flapping at your back, your spectacles shaking from the wind, as if on the verge of flying off, your hands moving up to hold them in place (but not take them off, because without the glasses your eyes water even more, and you can’t spend the bike-ride blinking out the water from them), the faint chill in the air as it enters your sleeves and gives you goose-pimples in places you thought could only be excited behind closed doors: these things are hard to replace.

The sight of coconut trees, banana trees, huts with thatched roofs, temples, ponds, teenagers on 60cc scooters with FIITJEE or Padhee’s bags on their shoulders passing you by; very few things can replace that.

On the way back there was a stretch of road where we saw the sun, which by now was orange and about to set, reflected in a small pond (there are many ponds in Orissa, particularly on the coast) by the side of the road. We passed by many ponds, of course, but this one was different because this one was surrounded by coconut trees, so the shadow of all these trees was lit up. As we zipped past it on the bike, we saw a bright yellow light, both of the sun and its reflection in the pond, flashing intermittently at us through the gaps between the trees. A pretty thing to look at.

On our way to Cuttack, we saw a huge paddy field, and in the middle of it, a hut with a roof that had a huge Vodafone logo printed all over it. It had become a sort of free (do they pay for it? Maybe they do, maybe they even have competitive bids for it), extra-large billboard. In the background was a row of coconut trees, some huts, and a stunning cloud-covered sky. In the middle of acres and acres of green crop, this reddish-orange square, with a single inverted inverted-comma, the Vodafone logo.

Outside a PCO, a woman in an off-white salwar kameez and brown dupatta was waiting for her husband/brother/friend/boyfriend/male-companion to end his phone conversation so she could mount the bike behind him (he was already on the bike, one hand holding the handle while in the other he held the cellphone). We must be going at about 60 kilometers an hour. It wasn’t more than a brief flash, a single frozen moment, but her face made sure time would be measured differently, more leisurely. She jumped out of the conveyor-belt of routine, everyday life and watched it go past, from my half-bored eyes. Almost.

Remembered time is longer than passing time. I was made aware of the irony, for the first time, today. If you look at a woman for a whole day, and you can feel like you’ve seen everything about her. But if you see a woman for half a second, because you’ve seen her for half a second, you remember her face again and again, you try and imagine time in your head, from the memories of all the faces of the women in your head, and you milk that half a second through memory, imagination and language, till you remember (or you think you do) every little detail about her, like the shape of the mole under her nose, the sharpness of her cheekbones, indeed, till feel like you have seen her for a whole day.

On the way we stopped at a coconut seller to have coconut water and eat the soft pulp inside the shell. It was tasty and we were hungry, so we ate two and three coconuts; I had two, he had three. The man selling us coconuts spoke to us very sweetly. He broke open the shells with a huge machete, and as he brought it down with one hand, the hand holding the coconut whose shell he was cutting open, one feared for the future of his hand, his fingers in any case. One also admired his skill in identifying which coconut had more water (and softer pulp) and which didn’t.

At Puri beach, one thought of things unrelated to the beach, like the idea of tourism as being centred on the philosophical premise of “the knowability of a place, as a geographical or epistemic construct”. Every transaction becomes economic, whether one likes it or not. But one cannot keep theorising one’s way out of every instance one gets fleeced by locals, with thoughts like: if the locals don’t fleece the tourists how will the tourism industry run? No, one has to to try and appear local enough, so that one doesn’t get fleeced, so that one can get things for lower prices. Besides, one cannot keep thinking all the time one is visiting a place, one has to let go, stop being cerebral, let the sights and sounds of the place decide the little specifics of one’s experience, instead of always steering oneself with a heavy-handed, intelligent, decision-making head.

The sight of naked children playing in the water, of a boy of about seven, and a girl who looked younger than him, playing without inhibition. They looked very free, very happy to be getting wet; squealing as the water hit them, periodically, in waves. They hugged each other, half-carried, pushed and pulled each other as they fell over, trying to get (the other) wet and keep (themselves) dry, and then both together, failing which, they laughed out loudly. Their parents kept watching them from a distance of about ten steps, the father occasionally stepping in to wrap a protective hand around the girl in case the wave appeared to overwhelm the children, or the children appeared unable to cope with the water. Will the children be as fearful of the water as I am when they’re of my age? If the father is always on time, they might well be, who knows?

A group of four young women, playing in the water. Their relatives, an old couple, two children, two men, were walking towards them, taking their shoes off and carrying them in a bunch (the index and middle fingers hooked around the rubber strip of the chappals that separates the thumb from the rest of the toes), as the water softly crawled over and crawled off their toes, too weak, by the time it reached them to splash their feet, covering their toes in a soft puddle of sand and water, tempting them to curl their toes in an attempt to hold some back of the sand as it trickled out between them.

As I looked at the women, I noticed that not everyone was young. Two of them were slightly older than the other two, who appeared to be of college-going age. One of them, in a blue salwar kameez, was doing a sort of joy-dance, raising her arms and bringing them down like wings, in rhythm with her body, as she skipped in the water, though she really wanted to fly, and moved her body believing that she was flying, causing the water to splash loudly into her face and, more annoyingly, into the faces of the three other women next to her.

After a while one of them, slowly moved away from the group, and her son had followed her into the slightly deeper part of the ocean. She was wearing a saree, and her child was in her arms. As the water hit them and made them wet her child got excited and clamoured to be let down. She resisted his energetic appeals for a while but as he started hitting her with his arms, and kicking out at the air with his legs, slapping his thighs against her midriff, she allowed him to stand in the chest-deep (he must’ve been about five feet tall) water, holding his hand. And so they stood for five minutes. He kept falling down as the stronger waves hit them and each time she had to bend over to help him stand, because he refused to let her raise him and carry him in the hook of her hip.

As I watched them,as I watched her bend over and help her son stand up, while the salty, frothy water splashed all over her, and she wiped her face, brushing the water away from her eyes with both her hands and setting the four or five loose strands of hair above her ears, I was left in no doubt that the saree is the most erotic garment that has ever been designed for, or worn by, women.

The sights and sounds as one weaves in and out of the narrow lanes that lead up to the Puri beach, the smell of bhog coming from every courtyard one passes by, the cows and cycles, the pot-bellied old men in saffron lungis lazily rubbing their softly rounded, almost pregnant tummies, yawning, twirling the hair around their navels, standing in courtyards and looking at a wide-eyed young man riding pillion behind another young man whose eyes are covered by the tinted glass of his helmet’s visor.

Boys and girls returning home from school with bhog in their hands: the rickshaw which is meant for four people carried at least eight, with kids sitting on a plank of wood affixed between the seat of the rickshaw-walla and the passenger seat, and each of them carried a translucent blue polythene packet inside which I could faintly make out the dried brown banana-leaves which are stitched together with little sticks to make the plates in which bhog is distributed.

Navy blue and off-white. How many schools use this combination for their uniforms? The girls all had their hair done in two plaits, held securely in place by transparent red ribbons, to match with the maroon of the ties on their necks. By this late hour (it was almost four) the ties were out of their tunics and dirty, and one of them, a girl who sat in a corner and didn’t talk to the rest, or got herself involved in any of the boisterous games the others were playing, was chewing on it, sucking on the grimy, sweaty fabric at its end. I think she was rejecting one hypothesis --about the uselessness of conversation the others were having-- after another with each consecutive clenching of her jaw. The boys wore blue shorts which they weren’t old enough to notice as too short.

The rickshaw-walla’s muscles: they pushed out of the wrinkled skin on his wrist, flexing as he manoeuvred the rickety contraption through the crowd on those narrow lanes, as if saying: look at us, we do the hard work, and we don’t fuss about it. On his hands, the years of handling a rickshaw seemed to have etched a network of veins as intricate and as complicated as the lanes on which he cycled it everyday. His lean, muscular legs, stringy with veins, were as sinewy as the thin tyres on which the rickshaw moved. What does it do to his heart, to spend two hours, twice a day, carrying someone else’s children, seeing their clean uniforms, their bags, their books, their little toys, their magic-pencils and their sweet cigarette-shaped sticks, seeing them quarrel over which Pokemon Card has more value and spill sticky lollypop-syrup on each other, as his own children learn to do some work and earn money, because he is getting old, and will not be able to pull a cycle-rickshaw all his life?

I saw an advertisement and I thought of you. I cant recall what it was advertising. All I remember is that it was some sort of insurance, and it showed a boy's parents stuffing him with things as he is leaving on a train journey. This is what I will remember for some time: the girl in the red top, sitting on the window seat with a book in her hand and ear-phones where they’re supposed to be. That look was arresting; the lips beginning to curl into a smile, not quite there, not fully a smile, but with every inch of her face swollen with promise.

I saw her eyes and realised, it's not all about the smile. In fact, its not about the smile at all. More than that, it was about the expression on her face; the expression on your face as I remember it. I think it’ll be hard for me to recognise you even if we accidentally met, if I, say, ran into you in the metro. Because I don’t look for you. I look for a face, the expression I remember on that face, a face which, after so many years, I am not even sure exists, or if the person it belonged to is still alive, because we are killing and resurrecting ourselves each moment.

dream, (badly?) remembered

We were part of a group. We were staying in a large hostel, something like a mixed dormitory, because most hostels don’t allow men and women to share rooms. You, of course, stayed with your boyfriend. My room-partner was a Phd scholar, and I was not offered any further explanation. The boyfriend, and the Phd scholar; they are the unnamed people. They will remain so. Every evening, before dinner was served, we’d all sit and talk for about half an hour in the common room, less for the shared interest in some TV show and more because it was warm inside there, the source of warmth being the amiable presence of all the members of the group. This ‘group’ is like a tour group, you know, those little groups that the travel agencies make, of people who want to go to Kerala or Goa? Come to think of it, we really were on a holiday. Not all of us together, like a vacation, but each one of us on his/her own private vacation. Maybe that is why we never had any fights, in this ‘group’, because it was a new experience for us, the whole thing, this staying in a new place with new people, and we still hadnt known enough things about people to start hating them, or even getting mildly irritated.

I was always the last person to leave the common room. I would wait till everyone had left, because I liked to sit in a corner and watch people, their actions, the way they talked, the things they looked at and how they behaved with other people, their friends, girlfriends, boyfriends. One evening as I left the common room, I saw your wallet on the table next to the couch, where you had kept it because you were cuddled up on his lap, and where, I assumed, you had left it. I picked it up, and as I was going to give it to the attendant (to lock it in the almirah, to keep it safe till you could pick it up) I was seized by a desire to keep it for myself. I looked at your wallet in my hands. It was one of those really big, soft ones that look like notebooks with leather binding, the ones I see only in the hands of annoyingly stiff and snooty uncles and aunties who stay in Panchsheel or Maharani Bagh, buy watches from “Boutiques” and who only go to restaurants where the entire staff, from the manager to the waiters, addresses them as “Sir” or “Ma’am”. Do you really have a wallet like that? I will not exactly be disappointed if you do, but it would be comforting to know that you don’t. Wallets like that arouse only one thought: this won’t fit into the back-pocket of my jeans.

Strangely enough, I didn’t think of giving it to you myself. And it didn’t seem like anything out of place, strange or ironic, the fact that I was looking at your wallet and thinking how to give it to the attendant, so you could take it, when I could have simply walked up to you and handed it over myself. I glossed over it as if it was something as natural as brushing my teeth or scribbling on the margins of my notebook, drawing sketches of people around me in class, while taking notes in class.

It seemed to me a way of possessing something about you, as if I was winning arguments in some imagined intellectual debate about ‘knowing T_____’. I felt as if I was scoring points over all those other people who see you everyday, or every other day, or every month, or even twice a year, but who claim to ‘know’ you because you have shared a long stretch of time, so you can claim to having ‘grown old together’, or because you speak with them over the phone. I felt that by looking at your wallet, by holding it, gingerly turning it over in my hands to hold it in all possible ways, by lovingly going over all the little things, pausing at the details, I was getting to know parts of you that most other people didn’t even know existed. I couldn’t foresee the danger in this. I didn’t know that the pleasure of reading you from something you probably didn’t care much about would blind me to a point where I would merely be imagining you from my head, reducing you to something cerebral, like a practical-criticism lecture.

(I know now, though I didn’t then, what it’s like to be part of a seven-and-a-half-minute, pre-ejaculatory fantasy formed inside a cubicle of the men’s toilet, while one’s pants lie in a bunch near one’s ankles, and one tries, with as much exertion as is needed to hold one’s eyes tightly shut, to fly at super-sonic speeds across a geography of images, a vast, continent-sized painting as it were, continuously accelerating, not caring about the fuel needed for the flight, pushing the limits of physics, but only looking down, taking in the sights: mountains, valleys, oceans, grasslands, rain-forests, cities, entire eco-systems of sense-impressions, trying to see more of this mindscape with each pulse (as the blood steadily rises, threatening to end the flight), to squeeze one last nautical mile of faces, voices, smells, half-finished dialogues, in the dying seconds before the flight crashes (as one knows it will, but one still keeps trying to fly higher) as the barometers, altimeters, guages begin to spin wildly out of coherence, when the body comes gushing forth, with the final tsunamic pulse of blood and the warm, desperate drops that it forces out of the fuselage. Only then does one realize, that the real-life counterpart of this surge is but a sad trickle. Hence the phrase ‘flights of fancy’.)

Your wallet: It was the size of a small telephone address book, the ones you still find in the houses of people who got married more than ten years ago. I opened it, and on one side of it was a phone held in a velcro-strap. It was the same model as mine, and I know for a fact that you don’t have the same model as mine. You’ve always liked your phones sleek and smart (“because sleek is smart”), like your idea of fashion, like your idea of yourself, and this phone was squarish in shape, thick and stocky. It was given to me by my father, and if cell-phones were real people they’d call my phone a wrestler who’s grown old, about a decade past his prime.

I could have gone on looking at your phone, admiring or admonishing its various other aspects, but the other half of your wallet fascinated me. So I left the phone and looked into the right half of the wallet, where I was sure you kept your cash. I was right; I found a 500-rupee note, and after about five seconds of what I might (in a good mood) remember as dialogue, I pocketed it, placing it discreetly near my right hip, making a mental note to think about it after I’d gone through the rest of your wallet. Soon after that I heard Ram Das’s (the care-taker) voice. Suddenly the calm with which I was exploring your wallet disappeared, and was replaced by an intensely paralysing awareness of the presence of another person near me. In all my thoughts as I went over your things, this simple possibility had remained unforeseen, and the suddenness made itself felt as a sharp vacuum in the back of my mouth. As the breath returned to my lungs I heard his steps behind me and pocketed, without thinking, the wallet in my pyjamas.

“You haven’t gone to eat?” He enquired.

“Yeah, I was just about to leave. I was checking the scores of some match.” I answered, hoping he hadn’t seen the quick manoeuvre I made with my hands, hoping, in fact, that he only saw the gesture, the hands being shoved furtively into the shallow pockets of my faux Umbro pyjamas, without reading in their movement the criminal intention to hide, to conceal, intentions which I could make no attempt to hide.

I waited for him to leave, to have his dinner, but he stayed in the room, in my vicinity, proceeding, in a while, to tinker with the TV controls. I wanted to keep the money back in the wallet, and the wallet back where you had left it, but suddenly it appeared increasingly difficult, and after five minutes, it was confirmed as impossible. I stood there and pretended to be amused by looking, for the fiftieth or fifty-first time, at the pictures in the week-old Outlook lying there.

I didn’t think; I didn’t ask myself, is that what Antoine Doinel felt in The 400 Blows? Are all thieves ultimately victims of their own existential crises, and is that the true meaning of ‘criminal’? Are prisons merely a convenient social tool to educate people who would otherwise be incapable of making sense of their chaotic private lives, by replicating in the physical conditions of their accomodation the mindspace of oppression which they would have unconsciously created for themselves anyway?

So I went to the mess and ate my food uneasily, feeling, all the while, not the money in my right pocket but your big black leather wallet in my left. I was careful while looking at you, taking care to meet your eye whenever possible, to stare back, and not look away the instant our eyes met, as if saying: I’m sorry, you caught me looking at you, and now I cant look you in the eye because I’m feeling guilty. No, I don’t say that. Instead, I stare this back: you didn’t catch me doing anything. You just bumped into me as I was going about my things, my routine existence, and that in itself doesn’t excite me.

I looked at your hands, at the way you eat, not with the curiosity of watching something new and exciting, but as playing a game, seeing how precisely I could predict the way your actions, you rest your hand on the soft underside of your wrist, with the spoon balanced precariously between your thumb, middle and index fingers. After sometime I looked at his hands, as they wrapped themselves alternatively around your waist, causing the fabric of your light-pink sweatshirt to bunch up and gather in some places and stretch itself tight in others, causing a contour of your torso to reveal itself through a strange pattern of creases which appeared and disappeared randomly, creating an asymmetry that was symmetrical because of the clarity of two bodies testing each other, each finding in the other a place to grow old.

I finished my meal quickly and left the hostel. I put my hands into my pockets, covered your wallet with my left hand, so that people didn’t notice that I am carrying two wallets. I went out for a walk, thinking what to do. I put the money back in your wallet, and decided to put it back in the common room, so that people can find it there and give it back to you. I wondered if I’d have stolen the money had it not been yours. I took a long time to return to the hostel, and I saw a crowd of people in the reception area. Some of the talk confirmed what I suspected. You had alerted the authorities, and everyone was being asked, very politely, if they’d seen a black leather wallet. The manager asked me if I’d seen it in the common room, since (he thought) I was usually the last to leave the common room. Interesting. People had been talking about me. Had they’d already concluded that I was the culprit?

“No, I didn’t see anything. I left with everyone else, actually.”

“Oh…okay okay…I see. If you find something just let us know. You know that Miss has lost her wallet, so we’re asking everyone to be on the lookout.”

“Who?”

“You know, the tall lady with her husband, I don’t know what her name is, she seems to be very upset though.”

“Oh ya, ok, I know who you’re talking about. Will let you know.” I began nodding seriously, and he was convinced that was thinking gravely about it. But I did think gravely, and that’s the irony, probably. Of course, I also wondered why this had become such an issue in the first place. Ok, so you forgot your wallet in the common room, and now it was nowhere to be found. Did you expect that someone would come and return it to you? Not only is this amount of naivete absurd, but it also means one must be naïve enough to expect it in the first place. In any case, the normal course of action in ordinary circumstances would have been to get over the initial shock, the loss and the carelessness assuming that someone, probably the staff or the caretakers, had obviously picked it up, and that was the end of it, because even if one searched all over the place for it, it wouldn’t be found, since people generally are very particular about things once they have stolen something.

Being very particular about things. Maybe this was the mistake I commited: to steal your wallet by mistake.

There was something about your wallet that made me a criminal in ways that other than the most obvious. As if on cue, when I went to the Common Room to try and leave it there, I found some people in a huddle around the entrance, talking about you, how you were careless to forget about your wallet, and who might have taken it away. It was impossible to return your wallet and impossible to carry it around without feeling like I was dragging a ton of dead-weight. That’s when I thought of Antoine Doinel. He is the boy-protagonist from Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows. He and his friend steal a type-writer, which he uses to type an essay on his grandmother, copying the style of Balzac. But after a while his conscience gets too heavy for him to carry around, and he goes to return it. This time, as he is carrying the heavy typewriter into the shop, the guard catches him (the same guard had been sleeping when he stole it in the first place), and, taking him to be a thief and the type-writer the thing he stole, has him sent to the juvenile detention centre. To be caught and called a thief, when you're returning the object you stole, because you felt guilty about stealing, and, swallowing your pride, accepted the petty, hypocritical moral universe which calls you a thief, decided to return it: I have always believed that to be an extremely painful thing.

I joined the group near the common room entrance, hands firmly in pockets.

“Someone’s lost their wallet, right?”

“Ya. T_____.”

“Oh, really? That’s sad. Its been a couple of hours, no? Whoever took it must have done something serious by now. Chances of finding it now are pretty slim, no?”

“Yeah, but we’re trying, you know, just in case.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I could feel his eyes scanning me. I felt them linger for a moment on my pocket, as if he knew I had it but just couldnt prove it.

Fragments; 9th November '09

How much time, energy, money and effort is spent on procuring (just procuring, not consuming) books, magazines, films, paintings, photographs, posters, calenders? Too much; much more, in any case, than is necessary. The effort is limited to the point till where we can show a degree of intimacy with a given cultural artefact in our conversations, discussions and relationships with people more generally. Once this is done, once our social intercourses have been conveniently lubricated, we seem to have no use for those pieces of culture other than as decorative pieces of furniture for our shelves/walls/projection-screens or as extra pounds of all the new kinds of garbage (electronic, emotional, spiritual, erotic) that we generate. I am convinced that many of our waking hours are spent doing things we would not feel nostalgic for when we can no longer do them.

A wave of people at Chandni Chowk station, pushing at the doors of the metro-coach before it could even open. The people on the platform have no idea how much space is left in the coach, even if there is any space left at all. All they know is that they have to push the people standing next to the door, if they are to get on the train, if they are to not wait any longer, on their already-aching legs. It is what they do everytime, everyday they travel. But what if there is just no space, and the blind force of this crowd, this brute, animal urge that doesn’t think or calculate but knows only an absolute need to push, like a female mammal giving birth, just keeps pushing?
Of course, the analogy is absurd. It is not one female. It is not even many individual persons. It is one faceless crowd, a frightening wave that rages like a beast. The fear of suffocating becomes a genuine physical sensation, as one wonders if people can be asphyxiated by excessive pressure on their chests, backs, arms and bodies in general (because surely, the air inside the metro-coaches is properly ventilated).

A sense of life as a series of stampedes and a sense of our achievement consisting merely in staying on our feet, because falling, stumbling or losing balance for even a second, would mean leaving the continuing existence of our lives on earth to the vagaries of chance; blind chance, which doesn’t allow one the luxury of calculating the risks.

Beauty as a series of failed chances to apologise. To acknowledge the fact that disgust and apology are the strongest, most authentic feelings one can feel for another person, and then to appreciate the complexity of the situation that doesn’t allow one to turn the acknowledgement, that moment of clarity, into an opportunity to apologise.

The middle-class boy’s dream of being a taxi driver, or a librarian in small-town America: is there anything respectable in that? I dream of being unable to read as much as I can read, of having the desire to read but not the resources. Isn’t that a weakness? Shouldn’t one be able to read even if one has the resources? Isn’t that proper? And isnt this worse than simply not having the resources?

The inalienable right of the luxurious to grumble? However many privileges someone may get, there will always be the desire for more. Even if there is no desire to actually, physically consume more than what one is presently consuming, one starts to pick faults with one’s current way of living. That’s why the Seneca line on the back of my notebook, that wealth lies not in possessing more but in wanting less, makes sense. These things only show us the worst thing about dreams: they can be an excuse for narcissism and idle fantasy.

I dream of a boy who works in a photocopy shop owned by his father, who helps out with the copying and binding whenever his father isn’t in the shop. I dream of all the books he copies, sees the titles of, the contents, the chapter-titles, and all the little insignificant details littered amidst the small print on the dust jacket. He sees the copyright info on the cover photograph, the author photograph, the Type, the Printing Press where the book was printed and bound at all these little things, before he has to hand the books back to the customers, without having the time to follow a train of thought to its logical conclusion, the thought wrenched out before it had matured enough to be able to support itself without the umbilical cord of the book’s image in his memory.

I know, there is no richer imagination than that of a person whose life doesn’t allow him time to imagine. I know this as I know that there can be no greater knowledge than that of a person who doesn’t have all the material resources, but burns with a desire to know, to know more than he already knows. I dream of all the fragments, the book-titles and author-names, that flit through the head of the boy as he lies awake in bed at night. I dream of an inability to read. But I am only jealous, not motivated.

I cannot begin a conversation with you without saying this: I’m sorry. But the other things stay just under the surface, simmering; things like “I love you”, like “You’re so beautiful”, threatening to boil over at all times.

A Dream

I get a call from a number that my cell-phone doesn’t recognize. I harden my voice, answer with an extremely stern and rude-sounding Hello, because I feel sure, after one look at the number, that it is someone calling with a new offer of easy-banking or a post-paid connection or the computerised voice crooning a bad song, exhorting me in dramatic tones, (with no sense of the ironic whasoever), to buy a dialer-tone.

It’s a woman, but she doesn’t announce her identity as a call-centre executive.
-Aruni?
-Yes…
-Hi. Its been a long time, but I think you remember…

So the conversation begins, and I am more than pleasantly surprised, for one hour, as I speak with Alicia. Although I can’t seem to remember anyone with that name, she is very sure that she hasn't called the wrong person, so I don’t question her. Her voice is a warm quilt; it calms my doubts, as well as my fears, that she has called the wrong person, and if I point this out to her she might end the conversation.

So I assume that I and Alicia have a shared past, which Alicia remembers more vividly than I, of which she is in the process reminding me, and which, as I listen to more of her voice, I begin to remember. I begin to retrieve a life, piecing together, scene by scene, the broken shards of memory, watching curiously as the jagged pieces, sticking eagerly (with very little glue, as if they were broken with some innate adhesive still intact) and firmly, give some unknown shape (is it a dolphin? A unicorn?) to the reconstructed piece of glass. Will it be decorative? Like a cut-glass rabbit my mother keeps in the drawing-room cupboard? Or will it be functional, sparse, like a Borosil glass, to warm water and mix salt in, before one gargles, to ease the pain of a sore throat?

Is that how memory works? Do we all need a familiar sense impression, like a voice or a taste, to really take us into the past, to dump us smack in the middle of it and make us alive to the starkness, the strangeness of it, without uselessly talking about it in the language of the present? Or is it just that we need to be comforted somehow by a sweet-sounding female presence so that we automatically lapse into nostalgia and the sepia-toned images begin to float around reassuringly?

After half an hour there is a silence, an awkward moment I make no attempt to ease. She asks me if she should hang up. Finding no reason that would suggest the contrary, I say, yeah, why not? She asks me, in a fake, put-on baby-voice: you don’t have time for me? I’m calling you after so long and you wont even talk to me, huh? That was when I woke up and realised that she wasn’t Alicia but someone much more real, someone whom I had tried so hard to forget that even in my dreams I couldn’t allow myself the maturity to accept that I had loved her name more than her, and that was because her name seemed more cultured and artistic than she herself ever could be.

Our shells are first layered with the bricks of conversations, but the cement is always liquid: transparent, like brine, from tears, or translucent, like Fevicol mixed half-heartedly in water. The piecing together of the glass shell only reminds us how much the broken pieces retain their innate adhesive, the brine or the sticky Fevicol-solution, and how we must keep making and un-making them throughout our lives, like Crusoes, fencing ourselves in and fencing ourselves out on islands that everyone has seen on the map but no one has gone to, or wishes to go to.

As strange as they are familiar, our memories are the only islands we can hitchhike across; the past is the only holiday-spot left.

you disgust me

Why?

[Silence]

You think you’re the only one person asking this question, don’t you. You’re wrong. But you’ve got company. What the fuck is happening on this blog? Ok, so someone wrote anonymous comments on a year-old piece, and you, linking it to someone else, have written a long essay-style reply to the comment, which has led to some unforeseen consequences.

Why? I mean seriously, you didn’t even need this.

And now, since you’ve realised, via another anonymous comment, that the person you believed to be the author of the comment is not so, and that the first comment was probably someone’s idea of a practical joke, you’re going to write something else, clarifying things? Apologise for the apology? How is that a clarification?

WHY?

I’m sure you haven’t paused to consider the relevance, the social meaningfulness, not to mention the absolutely pornographic degrees of narcissism, of these events, the entire cycle of uselessness of which the sole author can only be you.

Why?

You were obviously thinking that one can take something very mundane and frivolous and gossipy and make something deeper of it, use it as a launch-pad for some genuine philosophical questions. Little did you know that people can turn your philosophy journal into a fucking tabloid. But hey, tabloids are actually picked up from news-stands. This democracy of the readership will slowly turn the entire humanities department into a cultural shopping-mall. But don’t blame the readers. What were you doing posting something like that on a public platform? Didn’t you know what people like to read?
How many comments did you get on the essay on travel and tourism? How many on the essay on pornography, how many on the piece about emotions and language? Do you think people have even read those pieces? But write about sex, and everyone's got an opinion to share.

WHY?

Because I’ve made a discovery. I just found out something about you people. Yes, you people. People who consume someone else’s frustration, someone else’s rage, perversions, filth and garbage as a blog-post. All the putrefying garbage of a moth-eaten, emotionally-rotten existence, the filth, the excrement, everything which can be packaged into a clever sounding blog-post. You lap it up, hungrily, lick it clean, and puke up your own half-digested versions of it as “anonymous comments”. Yes you, each one of you, consumers (except, you don’t even have to buy it, because I give it to you free of cost, which says something rather unflattering about me), who come here week after week, blog-post after blog-post, looking for something “interesting” to read on my blog, you disgust me. But that’s nothing new. This is: you have begun to disgust me almost as much as I disgust myself.



(Oh, and by the way, for the record, all the vomit-flavoured sludge that’s splattered across the unmopped floor of this blog is at least mine. Cant say about the comments though. And I don’t want your goddamn comments, or whether something's interesting or not so, on my private life. Its just that in order to be a writer one has to develop a certain level of accessibility in one’s writing style, and that involves an inevitable dumbing-down of content as well. It’s a negotiation I still havent worked out.)

apologia

This is what you said in your comment on this blog, here:
you are 1 sex starved psycho....u need to visit the nearest brothel and give vent to your yucky fetish...crazy ass...S

And this is probably the world’s strangest apology:

It is not an apology which is expected from me, by you. That you may never get, because I cannot be guilty in the sense that you accuse me of, having rejected the moral registers that you measure the world in, recording transactions of feeling, adding and subtracting, calculating love, deducting economics. Don’t get me wrong. I am not blaming or criticising you. I am offering an apology, not demanding one.
I must apologise for the condition that has made me apologise to you in the first place, because the first apology has implications that travel in time, reaching backward in the past as well forward into the future.
I am guilty of something other than offending you (because offense is taken, not given). I am guilty of not thinking that you would be offended. I thought you would be above those petty games of blaming people for things that are not under their control. Its quite reductive, isnt it, blaming someone to momentarily feel better about oneself, one’s own failures. I had assumed (quite optimistically, it appears now, with hindsight), that you would be more generous with your sympathy when it came to matters relating to the passions.

(Passion, from the Latin patior, meaning ‘to suffer or endure’, hence the ‘Passion of the Christ’, meant to evoke the zeal of Jesus taking the blows and suffering for humans, and the need for humans to empathise with that. But there is also the other passion, the passion that comes from passive, the antonym for ‘active’, meaning agency. Passion therefore signifies a loss of agency, a state of being wherein the subject loses his/her volition, the ability to control what one does, and is no longer the author of one’s actions, acting under the control of a larger force, as if intoxicated. I’m sure you notice here undertones of a kind of weakness, of losing mastery over one’s self, being enraptured by the emotions, seduced away from the logic of reason.
But this trance-like state is not just pleasurable; it can be quite painful, and that is why a certain South American poet has said, that even when Leda was raped by the swan, that wasn’t the only rape, that was merely an inevitability; the first, and in some ways more irreversible rape, had already happened: the rape of the swan itself, by Eros, the beast, the God, or the beastly God, of desire. That was the real rape, and this is why we must see passion as both suffering and a loss of agency, and not merely a form of rapture. Not my favorite poem, but worth a mention nonetheless.)
Sorry for the long aside.

I did not think of all this when I read that comment. I only thought that I had assumed too much.
And in thinking that I made an even bigger error. So my apology must now be two-fold. First, I must admit to myself that my idea of you was seriously flawed, and I need to do a harsh reality-check, to reconcile the idealised image of you in my head with the quite ordinary reality of you. Second, once I do that, I need to ask for an even greater amount of forgiveness, because once I give up the images of you, images of excellence, I will have nothing but a numerically accurate figure, a shade, with outlines strictly bound by all manner of numbers and figures: dates, addresses, phone-numbers, e-mails, measurements, codes, signatures. This state is worse than having an idealised image of you, even if I never got to know how factually untrue the image was.

You were the stuff of myth, of poetry, of dreams, paintings and dreams of paintings. Now you will simply be history, photographs and Facebook. Because when something is not exceptional, and is simply part of a larger group, with only as much individuality as is needed to confirm its authenticity as a real member of the group (because all groups after all are made of individuals, albeit unexceptional ones), something terrible happens. Instead of being characterised by what is the best about the group, it tends to be characterised by what is worst about the group.

I might have said a lot of things, some flattering to you, others not so flattering, some even infuriating. But I never said that you’re just another human being, as good or as bad as the rest, who did not ask to be born, and will die without choosing it. (That’s not even a criticism. It’s the truth. See how one becomes the other.) If there will be any beauty left, it’ll be the beauty of the human race as a whole, and that is anonymous, faceless. It is not crystallised in your face, as if you were reflective of the sorrows and triumphs of a community, of an group of people other than yourself, something almost approaching the oceanic vastness of the human race. It is seen in every human life, no matter how ugly or how pretty, in all the sad things humans bring upon themselves, sadness that, after a point doesn’t even deserve pity.

I told you, you’re so beautiful that you push beauty from the aesthetic to the ethical. I meant it. You are so beautiful you are irony in female form. In you the aesthetic is so overwhelming it surpasses itself, becomes the reason for it's own annihilation, and becomes the ethical. I meant that with you, ‘beauty’ is transformed from something we can sit and appreciate in art class or movie screenings or lectures, to something that questions the very core of our identities, that demands of us answers to this uncomfortable question: what are we to do, in order to be good. And the irony is that for this to happen one needed the very earthly beauty of your face.

How do we survive in the world, how do we go out from the solitude of our selves, and make sense of ourselves in the real world, which is nothing but a conglomerate of the inner spaces of many other people, people like us.

Blind to any ethics-challenging beauty, we are clearly lost, trying to give a meaningful existence to the private life in this massive objective universe, a public space where we are one bubble jostling with similar private-bubbles, each pushing and shoving, grazing shoulders against others.

You educate us in ethics; you teach us not to be selfish, to realize that the first definition of passion is too romantic, that it is unfair to even evoke a definition of passion from a poem, which means that there is only one definition of passion. You teach us how to redefine passion, to create a passion that is ethical, a passion that doesn’t allow the swan to justify the rape of Leda, which is a passion that doesn't need the excuse of art to sustain itself. And so this is also the most shameless apologies, apart from being the strangest.

This is the reason why my apology is two-fold, why I had to write those two long and boring paragraphs in the beginning of the letter. This is almost a confession, and it demands an amount of sympathy which I shouldn’t even be hoping you’ll share, because this is a betrayal of a claim I made for you, for your face.

I still haven’t learnt that lesson, that profound lesson in ethics that I complimented you─your beauty─ for teaching us. I know I will learn it, someday, and that I probably should, because it might do me some good, but I seem unable to bring myself to believe that it is entirely a good thing. Till then, though I may try harder to not give offense, I will still not know whether I should feel sorry.

People

Something happened today. I saw people.

She told the boy she was speaking with that she had wanted to grab his ass the first time she’d seen him.
“…I wanted to, you know, stand in front of you, look at you, move closer, as if I’m going to kiss you and then move my hands around you, one from each side of you, and instead of hugging you or rubbing your back or putting my hands on your shoulder blades I would have squeezed your butt-cheeks, lightly, the left one with my left hand and the right one with m right.”
“Oh… ok… I mean…”
“Oh, it’s OK, I’m sorry. I’m just making you uncomfortable.”


He told a girl he was speaking with for the first time what he’d thought of.
“Back then when I was new to the department, I thought you wanted all the boys in the class to look at you. I thought very many mean things about you. I’d see your jeans slip a bit, go down maybe an inch, and the waist-band of your panties show up, and I thought you were doing it on purpose, because I thought you wanted all the boys to look at that bit of elastic, and think of your panties, and fantasize about you as a fuck-machine. I’m sorry. But it’s not enough, because I am only apologetic now. I should really be sorry again, because I didn’t even think that it was something I should be sorry about, back then, when the thought first came to me.”

She asked him if he wanted to get a cup of coffee from the Law Faculty canteen. On their way back to class, they sat down on the red bricks of the corridor and talked about life. She told him how times she felt ashamed just for being herself, because of all the things she’d been thinking about.
“When I see those six-seven or eight boys of our class get together in a circle, and stand like that outside class, cracking really bad jokes, and laughing loudly, whenever there’s a break or the class is cancelled or the teacher is late, I always imagine their cocks extended, and touching each other in the centre, as if there was a massive chunk of frozen semen at the centre, like the centre of the Ashok Chakra, around which all these cocks were the spokes. I imagine them masturbating each other, connecting to a common pool of sexual energy and virility. As if all the fantasies they’ve had, sitting in class, getting bored, and looking at all the girls around them and imagining them in all kinds of sexual positions, all those fantasies are finally getting their pay-off, and once the teacher comes they go back, refreshed, like tabula rasas, open for new fantasies with the women (whom they wont have the stomach to talk to), and accumulating them till the next break. The ones in the tightest jeans seem most eager. I imagine their cocks, pressed tight in a pouch, bent out of their natural shapes, stuffed into their underwear, straining to be free, making a sticky smear against the soft fabric, at the point where it touches the tip of their members.”
“You seem to know a lot about the male member inside underwear.”
“That’s alright, a boyfriend of mine told me. But the thing is, I’m not even apologetic about it, you know? I just keep on thinking all these shit-crazy thoughts one after the other, and they just keep coming, like a train, a thread of connected images, and even when I have a slight feeling that I probably shouldn’t be having these thoughts, I keep having more and more of them, as if I’ve developed a secret, morbid appetite for having perverse thoughts and then laughing at myself for having those thoughts in the first place.”

The two girls waiting in class after the last lecture was over and everyone had left were not waiting for anyone. One of them spoke of the boy she had a crush on.
“I don’t even like him anymore, you know? Its disgusting. I disgust myself, when I see him now. Not because I hate him, but because I just can’t imagine myself falling for him, someone who’s so different from me in every respect. Its good nothing happened between us, beyond the one polite conversation, because from what I hear now, he’s probably gay. No, I’m serious, I heard from a guy who stays in the same hostel, that he’s been spending entire days with this other weird guy. You know, the tall, thin, dark guy, the one who always has a shabby beard and wears glasses? I heard that’s how he scored well in the exams too. He doesn’t study anything, you know. So he got everything he needed from L____ and scored more than him. Yes! I know, he doesn’t look the part. Looks so straightforward and everything. But you know, these days, you never know… Can’t trust anyone.”

The two boys walking to the photocopy shop were not happy. They hated their class and were talking about in imaginative ways, trying to surprise the other person by coming up with comic and witty expressions of their hatred.
“You know, I see all these half-men,-“
“Half-men?”
“Ya…Half-men, you know, umm… impotent-men…”
“Oh, impotent. Yes.”
“Ya. So I see all these impotent men of our class, and these two or three really beautiful women, and I see one woman surrounded by seven men, and chatting and joking and laughing, and I say, fuck-all. I mean, how can you not feel anger? Its heroic if you don’t feel anger. It’s pornographic. Life is pornographic. I can keep repeating this to myself and nothing will happen, you know? Things will still be the same. Still pornographic.”

The boy who wrote poems blurted this out when the woman of his poetry came up to him and asked him he didn’t talk to anyone, why he always sat alone, in a corner.
“I wanted to squeeze your breasts the first time I saw you. I thought, you’re so soft, I just wanted to put my face between your breasts, and go to sleep, like on a pillow. Everything about you is broad, or at least large, and soft, you’re like this really sexy mom-figure, you know, and I feel this strange combination of attraction and affection.
Affection is like a soft bed, you know, a really soft bed, something you can sleep on when you come home after a long hard day’s work. But it can also be irritating at times, because the comfort it gives you is so unbroken, so interrupted, so unmarked by any hint of a an awareness of discomfort, as to be monotonous, and this fucks your mind up.
But attraction is different. It’s also a bed, something to sleep on, but it’s not monotonous somehow. It is not so much about the sleeping as it is about what one does while one is lying on the bed, and is not quite asleep. It’s not as soft a bed as affection, but it’s up to the people to make it soft, to create a level of comfort out of the bare bed and each other’s presence.

That’s what is important. The other person’s presence is important; it cannot be taken for granted, it also gives one the feeling that this bed’s softness has been earned. This comfort will not last forever, it’ll end when the two people get bored, but it’ll be all the more precious because it was genuine and short-lived… So, I don’t know which one is actually better, or even if the difference between the two is sufficient enough to allow a comparison, because there are times when one is not motivated enough to make the effort, and sometimes other people can be hell. So it may be better to sleep on a soft, well-made bed, feel the occasional boredom, and not burden oneself with the psychological effort of making one’s bed worth sleeping in.
So I never spoke with you and, of course, I never told you what I thought either.”

One of the two girls walking outside the main gate of the Faculty was tall and the other was short. The tall one said to her friend,
“Did you see the jeans he was wearing today? I can swear he has never looked more fuckable. I can count on my fingers the number of girls I caught staring at him, at his jeans, and the different parts of his body that they had covered.”

poem, 15th September 2009, victoria's secret

I think this is voyeurism
The only competitions I can have are with the mirror:
Which of us can look at you for longer-
Without getting bored.

When you came to me last night
I filtered out the rain from your voice
The smell of leaves from your hair
The wet earth from your eyes-
and the reasons why I shouldn't stop.

So I didn't
I searched all over you
And across you,
My hands on your thighs, butt, chest, lips, arm-pits, crotch, mid-riff, waist
I even squeezed your bare shoulders
And the back of your knees
Just because you didn’t say a word.

Don’t forgive me if possible
I was merely looking
For a hatred of the world.
For something to pair off
My disgust at the obscenity of life.
Before you left I had begun to think
That I was only groping myself.

conversation: emotions, language, writing, conversations

U: Emotions are not in the same subset as needs. We feel things like emotions when we have all our needs satisfied, taken care of. So, in a way, while calling it a ‘higher’ need, as against ‘lower’ needs like food, carnal urgencies, as something that requires more maturity and sensibility than animals are capable of, we’re saying that emotions are something of a luxury. Sure, you need to be capable of feeling emotions, sympathy, love, hospitality, shame, desire, loss, the whole thing, but then, isn’t it also true that things like this can be felt once we are free from the daily grind of life, the pressures of making a living, of making sure that the bills are paid and the stomachs have some food in them waiting to be digested with all that gastric acid flowing around, so that the mind is free to think of existentialism and post-colonialism and love and friendship?

But that’s not entirely true, is it? Because emotions aren’t merely the theoretical ones. And besides, by calling it a higher need, aren’t we assuming too much, that we deserve something simply by being what we are born as, and not because we’ve actually done something to earn it? Aren’t we assuming too much in assuming that we’re really higher than animals? So not only does it feel like wealth unfairly arbitrated, but we have even started to rationalise it in terms of an aristocratic privilege, so that it appears natural.

I: What you’re saying about emotions hold true only if they’re articulated, and hence we can think like that only if the emotions in question are those that demand articulation. There are emotions that are so close to their physical realities, the actual conditions that they’re born out of, that this spontaneity brushes aside the need for language to wrap the words around, to drape the thought in fashionable clothes. The naked body can be beautiful solely on the basis of its starkness, because it simply is naked and not because of its measurements, but only if its a Picasso nude. So, you see, what you’re saying about emotions isnt really an argument about emotions. Its an argument against the rhetorical possibility of language. It’s a critique of language because of its ability to create emotions that are really no emotions, simply effects. Effects of linguistic combination and permutation. The work of language should be, in your scheme of things, a self-effacing one.

Imagine every word in a sentence or a book to be a tragedy, a woman giving birth and dying immediately after the child is born, before even the umbilical cord can be removed. Because your ideas of language demand, perhaps a little unfairly, that the function of language be limited to creating a world of actual physicality, and no more. So the word on the page must exist only till it has created in your head an image of a place or a sound or a smell, and then it ought to self-destruct, try and burn itself if it could, right? If the words do anything more than that, draw attention to themselves, to the artificiality of the created world, then they’re over-reaching themselves, violating an unspoken arrangement between writer and reader. This is a metaphysic which your way of reading is a mistress to.

U: Yeah, right. Okay. How seamlessly you have detached emotions from language, and translated my idea from something I had thought of to something you can write a blog post about. Do you notice this? Im sure you do. It wouldn’t improve my image of you if I found out that you didn’t.

All emotions need not be so distant from real things, all those ‘lower’ needs that I spoke about, right. But then, why do we even need to go beyond the lower needs? There are emotions that are very close to actual being, and those emotions would be felt even without language. We could be happy to live like animals, no? Whoever is the strongest will survive, he can eat everyone weaker than him, everyone unable to defend himself from the king of the forest. And all the males can fight over one female, and the one lion can jump on her when the others are sufficiently wounded or scratched or bleeding or dead. You know about lions, don’t you? They move about in prides. A pride of lions has one male, several females and cubs. The female guards the cubs and fights off preying animals. If a male lion falls out of a pride he may die soon, killed by other males. The only way to survive for a male lion is by finding a female, producing cubs, and forming a pride. Can you have ‘murder’, or ‘rape’, as definitions of crimes in the jungle, in a place where the origins of state are nowhere to be seen, not even on the edge of imagination? Do they exist even as ideas? Can the subject be allowed this bit of maturity?

Because if they do, there will be at least individual who will devote his conscious imagination, a sizeable portion of his thinking time, his mind-space, to sympathy. Its not about the law. Crime doesn’t have to be addressed immediately by law or the state. The first defence against, if not the first reaction to, crime, will always be in the mind. It may not even be called ‘sympathy’, you know, as the 7-letter, English-language word, but the feeling will be there. And that’s the point, you see?

We’re at the origins of language. A similar word, if not ‘sympathy’, will be born, a way of expressing that thought will be created, and it will be in some externalised, formal manner, like a particular movement of the body, which may become a dance ritual, or a particular way of modulating the vocal cords, to create a song or a jingle or chant, or a particular way of twirling the tongue around in the mouth, which may become a new utterance, a particular way of leaving marks on a surface, like dye on clothes, or ink on paper, or petals on water, which may evolve into a culture of literacy. All of these expressions are inscriptions, and they are the source of literature, culture, archives of collective memory. This memory is made of fragments, and these are fragments are particular and objective. They are also public, so that a form of expressing a personal feeling is created and placed in the public sphere and others can draw on it as an emotive resource whenever they feel the urge.

Something that evokes the same feeling. And yes, it’s a very emotional feeling. Because the physical conditions have forced the individual to create a mode of articulation. There has been a discovery on the emotional level, and this new found land needs to be given a name and a place on the re-drawn map. That’s how language is born. All theory is born out of praxis. And the process is both natural and forced; it is painful an visceral, it tears at the muscles, spills blood, and is accompanied by screams of agony. You cant say that some emotions need articulation and that because of that we can call them fake, or ‘effects of language’. All emotions need language. Language isn’t just a frill added on the edges to make an idea more marketable. Its also what carries an idea from one person to another, and, to some extent, a fundamental core of what we call pure thoughts is always ‘corrupted’ by language. Effects of language become affects of language, and the difference is less noticeable than the spellings.

Before the law comes into place, before the state and its custodians can write constitutions calling an act of urgency a crime and prosecute the doer of the ‘crime’, someone will feel sympathy. He may not write a poem or scratch a painting on the cave-walls with a stone, but the idea will be there.

And that idea will find a way to express itself. It may not be powerful enough to make a change in the circumstances it was born in, as a reaction to, but it will certainly make inevitable the addition of a new column in the emotional registers of more than one person. That addition to the collective emotional register of a society is itself useless today. We have become so cold and distant that the only real feeling we’re capable of is apathy. And that’s why emotions feel like a luxury, something that makes you feel disgusted with yourself, as if you’re indulging yourself at the cost of someone else’s pain, someone’s suffering that’s not even fashionable enough to be the object of charity.

What's the point if that pain is the subject of a new poem? Writing a new language of sympathy out of someone’s pain becomes not only useless, but obscene, in a world that has drugged itself to a post-emotional state, because the only sympathy we are capable of feeling is a synthetic, linguistic one.

I: We’re still not over the language-versus-idea debate. We’re both saying the same thing, but we’re arguing because we think the other person is not aware of some of the finer things, whereas it is we ourselves who are not aware of how much the other person knows. The whole transcript of this debate could be read as the thoughts of one person who knows a little about a lot of things but not a lot about a few things. So, we are left arguing about small things like the rhetorical possibilities of language and shit like that.

Take the idea that emotions can be detached from actual life, the reality of the physial world. We both know that what you said in the beginning isn't entirely true. Agreed, its easy to think of existentialism on a full stomach, but you’re stretching this analogy a bit too far aren’t you? I mean, its not like people who are caught in the grind of making a living for themselves are alien to feelings of love and friendship. It is ideas, like existentialism, or post-colonialism, which require one to stop doing whatever one’s doing and just sit and think. Apart from these overtly contemplative ideas, there are things that don’t require us to take time off from our work. They are basic things like love, hate, gratitude, sacrifice, and these things are felt even more immediately by people who spend their days working, trying to make ends meet, as compared to people who sit and think. When they feel it, it’s the real thing, completely authentic. Compared to a person who spends his time thinking, he’ll doubt everything he feels, because he can never be sure if what he’s feeling is really there or has he simply imagined it for himself.

We’re both frustrated with our life, which is an example of the latter instead of the former, and we are trying to arrive at ways of knowing authentic feelings without having to cross check. So is that what all debate is about, simply a way of getting to know something that’s just around the corner of one’s mind? Things that one is more or less aware of, on a general level, but the specificity of which lies just beyond the boundary, behind the edge of the visible imagination? So we take our limited knowledge of things and exaggerate them, to critique an imagined adversary, with the hope that someone will critique that position, and find faults with the way we were thinking, and by doing so educate us about ourselves, so that we may learn something in turn. It’s a way of self-questioning. Of course, its disgusting, going through all this just to know about oneself, but let's not get into that now.

Let's say you hold a nuanced position on, say, economic reforms. You do know, that there are some problems with complete liberalisation of the economy, so you don’t support the free-market argument whole-heartedly, but more or less it’s what you support, leaning towards the right-of-centre instead of the left, because you believe that that’s what is needed for the country's growth at the moment. In this case, its best if, in a debate, you exaggerate things a bit, and forget about the nuances for a little while, to just take the essence of your thought and build an argument around it. Because, if there is any blind-spot in your ideology, it will show up in the argument you construct, and it will be critiqued by your opponent in the debate, and if that critique of your position makes sense to you, you will have seen exactly what is wrong with your views on free-markets.

It's good to be unfaithful to yourself once in a while, for your own sake. Your intellectual growth will be real only if you give your ideas a real test once in a while, a triathlon or a marathon, instead of the usual one-hour at the gym. Reading is going to the gym. Having a debate, or even a lively conversation, is the marathon. See if you’ve got real muscles in your head.

I said that this entire conversation may be read as the thoughts of one person. Maybe that’s what writing is about, trying to form two sides with opposing thoughts, setting them against each other and just following the argument, back and forth, ping-pong, tirelessly, patiently recording all the boring and obvious things that are exchanged, until a fascinating thought presents itself, something absolutely strange and unknown, out of the morass of the known world. Writing is like having a boring conversation with oneself, being patient and faithfully recording all the mundane trite that may emerge from the limited resources of one’s mind, editing the transcripts, reading it over and over again, making sure the sentences are word-perfect. Once in a while the writer is bound to stumble over a gem.

U: Word-perfect?

I: Yes. You know, like in football they say that someone’s passing is so good, its inch-perfect? They mean that the pass goes within an inch of where it should go, that’s how accurate… So writing should be word-perfect.

rant #3

We need to begin with hope. Without hope there is nothing, even if the only hope we can manage is dirty and stinks.
I feel that one of the indices that someone today may be measured against is a spirituality marker. It is one of the markers of how well one has settled down in society. Its unique for the times we are living in.

(The ability of someone putting on a subtly condescending tone, something of a seer-like philosopher’s or intellectual’s high tone, is married to one’s ability to use phrases like “our times” without sufficiently qualifying them. Why do some people feel the need to be self-appointed moral entrepreneurs, undemocratically arbitrating who deserves charity and who doesn’t? What about the politics of charity? The ethics of humanitarian aid? Do you know that giving free medicine in Africa is a way many companies have of testing new medicines? They can do that because the lives of people in war-torn, poverty-eaten African countries are considered dispensable. The only way to criticise such practises is to assume a moral tone for oneself, a tone that will inevitably be condescending. It is impossible to speak of “our times” without betraying one’s biases, one’s prejudices, one’s weak spots and blind-spots. It is a distillation of something very particular, in order to make a generalised comment. It’s a practice philosophers tend to engage in, and we who are not philosophers have tended not to appreciate it, and we were right not to, because it is condescending to assume that what you experience in the passage of time has elements that connect you to what an entire community or economically-related multitude goes through, and, subsequently, that that experience equips you with enough psychological, moral, ethical benevolence to make a larger comment about a category called “people”, people whom you do not know by name or face but who exist for you only as an idea or an image. How else can one use the word “time” without adjectives, as in, you know, ‘my time at University’, or ‘your time at work’ or ‘her time at home’, but just “our time”, an unqualified, objective, cold and universal category that is supposed to answer by itself, by its very being, all the questions about why we are not separately told about the time of the taxi-driver or the milk-man or the boy who works at the tea-shop or the woman who sweeps the floor in middle-class households. But I feel that there is no other way, because all the alternatives seem to end in semantic anarchy.)

The marker is this: how much, how whole-heartedly and with how much unadulterated concentration can one enjoy watching porn, without thinking of the people who are acting in those movies, without imagining the pain and the hopelessness that might’ve driven the men and, to a greater extent, the women, to such degrees of desperation? And how much of the desperation is shared, between the watcher and the watched? The desperation of the people watching porn almost matches the desperation of the people who have to project themselves, images of their bodies in those simulated sexual positions. This is the most perverse thing about pornography, not the idealised bull-crap about exploitation of women, which is a naïve idea, because exploitation doesn’t need the excuse of a porno flick to present itself to the woman. The economics of the modern market, and the rotten, freeze-dried-and-microwave-heated morality of the modern society together allow for such a situation. This is the most perverse truth about our times, and its the reason why I continue to see pornography as the reflection of everything that is wrong with us, and also how far human beings are willing to push themselves, in these desperate times, to try and get over the conditions they were born in, to salvage something of hope, some value that remains after its price-tag has been pinched off and the bar-code reader has beeped.

Does one’s success in doing this, watching porn without getting too pre-occupied with the lives of the people working in it, mean that one has achieved a balance? Between theory and praxis, between being and knowing, between subjective feeling and objective knowledge?
One’s attitude to porn reflects a lot about what they think about life. It’s almost spiritual. Its like Somerset Maugham says, in every shave there lies a philosophy. Every time a pornographic film is seen somewhere a way of living is explored, most of the time it is rejected, but at least it is tried out.

Its possible to feel extremely disgusted about pornography, and I respect that, since it is an exploitation of women and men, not to mention a grotesque mockery of everything that feminism and gender-sensitivisation groups have ever done. So, it should be banned. But what about all those sex-starved, frustrated people, people for whom society, morality, whatever else there is, exerts a choke-hold that they’re not even fully aware of most of the time? All that unused estrogen, testosterone, semen will get spilled over, one way or another. In the market place, if one packages a quick-fix solution for all that unused hormone and markets it attractively, there will be a flood of buyers. The thing about pornography isnt just the sexual equality and gender roles. Its also the economics. Of course, I’m only stating the obvious here, I'm aware of the nature of some of the work that Germaine Greer has done on pornography and snuff, but surely, doesn’t this say something about a society that’s finding creative ways of dealing with its economic problems?

Ok, let me give you an instance. Here’s how it goes. On one side I’ve got my theory straight, my professional, political line, that says this: PORN IS BAD. Right. So, I go around campaigning, writing articles for the op-ed pages, speaking at public lectures, the whole shebang. But what about the times when I feel so lonely that suicide and rape feel like the same thing? Those are real times, real enough to give you migraines, and I’m sure that I wont be alone even if I had those times more frequently. So I open Google Images, go to advanced search, switch off Filtering, enter, say, Heather graham nude or something. May be four and a half minutes of that works for me. Or maybe it doesn’t, and I log on to Facebook, look at picture albums of someone I knew sometime ago. Not that they don’t know me anymore or that we’ve fallen out. Its like any other ordinarily estranged relationship; we say Hi once in a while, and spy on each others’ lives on a more regular basis. Maybe I find something there and that works for me. Either way, I did whatever it took to get by. Can you tell me that I was wrong for accessing those pictures online? The ones on Google or the ones on Facebook? Because both are legit. Or is it about the way I saw the pictures, particularly the latter ones, the ones that didn’t contain anything explicitly pornographic about them?

You see where I’m getting at, don’t you? I’m not defending pornography, but I’m trying to tell you that it serves a very practical purpose in our lives today, and because of that practical purpose it is increasingly hard for anyone to criticise pornography in a form other than the merely theoretical way, and that’s not the smartest of things, is it?

It serves different people in different ways, ranging from the psychological to the economic, and none of the ways are more practical or more dignifying than the others. People who are driven to desperation, to fantasies of rape and suicide and sometimes both, are present on both sides of the screen. Or the page.

I was reading an interview of a woman who made a profession as a porn-star, and she said it was very tough for her to begin. But once she started, and had hardened herself after the beginning which felt like harassment, she couldn’t believe how easy it was. In fact, she said, she felt that if all women realised how easy it all was, those few women, the ones who work as prostitutes or in the porn business would lose their jobs. She started working part-time to pay her school fees and to make a little pocket money to have fun, to pay for her parties, her dope and her booze but as she saw opportunity to make more money she started working full-time. For her the industry served a perfectly practical end.

She was, of course, one of the few lucky ones who is able to work in the industry and maintain some semblance of dignity. The majority of women working in the porn industry live much more miserable lives. Most of them are transported like cattle from Asian African or even Latin American countries to America or Europe, sold off by families trying to survive. They smile seductively through layers of lip-stick, eye-shadow and rouge while slithering and slobbering over similar skinny foreigner women or groping themselves through synthetic clothing while the directors give them directions from behind the cameras, telling them how they’re supposed to move and when they’re supposed to remove the different articles of clothing. If you notice closely you can even notice their expressions change when they forget a move and then correct themselves after one look at some place above the camera. Beginners have it hard, particularly if, being in dire need of the money, they sign up for hard-core. There are stories of first-time girls being penetrated by five or six men consecutively, one after another. There are no ethics here. Gang rape at least comes with the pay-off of screaming about it at the end, the psychological buffer of directing anger at something outside oneself; here one can only scream at oneself. The pain is psychological, and desperation is the only real thing.

P.S- Have faith. I am capable of writing better things than these rants. I just need to get some things in life sorted out.

flu notes

I want to ask you something I have been thinking of asking you ever since I saw you. Do you ever dream of conversations? Do you yearn for memories? The whole of yesterday I was sitting and thinking of having an experience that'll be worth remembering. It’s a curious thing, this dreaming and yearning for things that are in themselves forms of dreaming and yearning, ways of prolonging one’s comfortable ignorance, postponing that final, inevitable impact with reality, when your eye-lids become heavy, your tongue dries up, and the extremely distasteful smell at the base of your throat almost forces you to gag, like someone using a public toilet for the first time. Today when I saw you I felt this yearning. A yearning for the real thing is, in a funny way, a yearning for the end of yearning.

I fear it is nothing but a reflection of how completely jobless I have become that I am talking like this. Dreaming of conversations? How much time do you have? I know. But what about someone who really hasn’t had a conversation with someone he yearns to talk to? Is that a justification?

I just want to talk to you. I have been looking at you for so long without having a decent conversation that its not even funny. We are the lead characters from a Wong-Kar Wai film. Chungking Express. Have you seen that one? I am the waitress and you’re the cop. But will you ever get to know the things I do, and why I do them? And after that, will you ever confront me? I wish you do, because I will never push you away, or avoid the impact of recognition.

The extent to which hope permeates our thoughts is something to think about. It would have been ridiculous, had it not been obscene. Its one of the most disgusting ways we have of cheapening everything of any value.

The things people wear on their clothes. Leaves, branches, stars, trees, stripes (vertical), checks, polka-dots, flowers, blocks, stripes (horizontal), embroidery, patchwork, cross-stitching. To observe without hope. Not hopeless, as in despair, but without the mute longing, the unspoken nostalgic imagining of the possibility of something which the act of looking may lead to.

To observe poverty, to observe sex, without hope, is difficult. It's what I try to do. I fear that my attitude to women is becoming like my attitude to art. I don't know if it is a reduction of the women because I see them as art or an alleviation of art because I see that as women. I can appreciate the women I speak with, praise them, like works of art, criticise them, even feel sad for them, but I still don’t relate to them. The conversations are still within my head. I still feel lonely, without real company. Maybe I need to redefine what company means, tone down my expectations, get real. The fault is my own; I have been reading The Picture of Dorian Gray.

If everyone did everything in their capacity to make the world a better place, would it become a better place? No, and that's the point of modern ethics. Its not what you intend to do. You need to take in difference, and the fact that other people have as much claim to everything you say or do or own as much as yourself.

P.S- I tried to draw Brinda Bose the other day in class, and what I made ended up looking Olive Oyl. My sketch of RGM was pretty accurate, though I wish I'd made it with a pencil or at least a black pen. Didn't you see that one? I thought you did.

Rant: #2

You make pain liveable.
Its not a sign of hopelessness. It is one of the most sincere things that I can tell you. But the effort I’m making is evident, and you should ask me, which is more,the sincerity in the effort, or the sincerity in the feeling of things that I tell you I feel about you?
I have started hating things that tug at my feet, like children, begging for sympathy, pawning the spectacle of suffering. Its obscene. Sympathy is the new pornography. Our lives are censor-board-certified snuff films. The snuff that the censor board passes with a U certificate. U should mean Ultra-porn or something, instead of Universal viewing. This is an achievement, the way we've accomplished this ardous feat of making porn that no-one even recognises as such. And not just making porn, but actually living it, day in and day out. Like philosophers say, philosophy is not theory, it’s a way of life. This is our askesis. Welcome to the desert of the real cinema verite, where part-time ascetics are full-time pornstars.

We are all socially acceptable drug-addicts, who live secret, double lives. We function as the drones of a faceless, raging, consumptive beast in our public life, and we become sanitised, picture-postcard-perfect versions of dope-addicts in our private lives. All our public, professional lives have the sole purpose of keeping the status quo in order, to keep the conveyor belts of the urban monster that is India Inc. rolling, so that we can get home, kick off our shoes, throw our back-packs into the corner, and start shooting whatever drug it is we need to keep us going into our veins, whatever it takes to see us through this evening, till the morning alarms wake us up, remind us that its time to get up and re-boot the system.

The people who shoot smack or heroin are only the ones that we choose to get moral about, because we hijacked the moral brigade before they could. They are only the ones whose addictions do not come with the guarantee of prolonging their existence on earth. I'm not exactly sure if that’s entirely a bad thing. Our addictions maybe much worse, because they don’t kill us. I have books. Someone has movies. Someone has football videos. Someone else has clothes. Shoes, text-messaging, cellphones, marks in the exam, aspirin, Facebook, cigarettes, coffee, maggi, Op-ed articles in newspapers, notebook computers, sex, life, sympathy, love, everything is incorporated into the messy circuits of human desire and revulsion, love and rejection, need and greed, only once it has been sufficiently leached of its essence and photoshop-ed into a fetish, till it isn't identifiable by language, feelings, imperfections or anything individual any more.

You give me the chance to stop and stare. I notice the small unimportant things in everything that I do, imagining that you will speak with me at night, and you will want to listen to the stories I might share with you. It's all imaginary, yes, but an imaginary life is better than no life.

You, the idea of you, reminds me that it is not entirely a waste to spend some time looking at the features on the face of the boy from Bareilly who is carrying a bundle of "t-shirts and jeans" that is bigger than him. He will carry it from ISBT to the Gurgaon bus-adda. He has been carrying them from his home-town in UP. These are the jeans with Diesel and Levi's stitched on them, t-shirts with every logo from Adidas to Lacoste to Nike, the kinds of clothes we are so thrilled to buy from shops calling themselves "Exports Surplus". Its thrilling, perhaps, because if you think of it, the so-called original Adidas and Levi's are seriously over-priced anyway.

And they are made by kids who probably suffer more. I remember a day last year I saw this flimsy top with spaghetti straps in Pepe Jeans and it had a little bit of embroidery on it, a beautifully done flower in the centre, and a tag that proclaimed, in a rather unsubtle manner, that it was "Hand-made". Price: 1,699. For one second, I completely believed that the PETA campaign, with its exhortations to rather go nude than wear clothing thats been made unethically, was practical.

I sat with this boy for an hour and forty-five minutes, and the smell of sweat that we shared like an eloquent, flowing conversation throughout the journey has made sure that I will not look at a can of deodorant without feeling a slight prick on my conscience. That’s what is better than sympathy. A human face, a name.

What about names? Its so hard to keep track of names, and to even remember all of them. And, because my ears are not very sharp, my problems are even sharper. I asked him his name, and he responded in a low, guttural monosyllable. I leaned closer and asked him to repeat himself, and he repeated himself, literally. I couldn't understand anything, but looking at him, taking in the overpowering smell of his sweat, and the effort that my probing seemed to exacting out of him, the completeness of this unnecessary, physical and psychological absurdity was made clear to me. I didn't have the heart to ask him again. I spoke with him about the rain, about the clothes he was carrying. He probably guessed from my tone and from the way I spoke my words that I was just curious, and that this one-dimensional curiosity was totally sucked dry of any real consequence. Words without meaning.

We shared one good laugh. We were very scared that the van might stop, due to the copious amounts of water entering the vehicle from all sides. The timing and amount of rain was extremely sudden and immense. But the breeze that hit our faces when the showers had reduced to a slight drizzle (so we could open the windows) was clearly heavenly. The roads were all jammed. Traffic was crawling. One could walk faster than the speed with which the cars ere moving. Everyone in the car was going over this ambivalence in our heads when suddenly, this boy said, it should only rain at night, and two other people, inculding the driver, laughed with us.

After a bit of this unexciting, anonymous intimacy, I asked him if he had ever done school. He said yes, for four years, before he began helping his mama, to whom his parents owed money. And that's how he ended up in that rickety van where the seats have been shoved into place without the screws on them and the doors don’t lock from the inside and the glass in the windows is always one careless move away from shattering, travelling from Karol bagh to Gurgaon, where someone would pick him up at the bus adda and take him to the shop in DLF shopping arcade where upper middle-class families would come shopping in the evening, the parents wanting to show their children how good parents can be and the children taking inspiration from them, inspiration to play their own roles to a increasing, possibly a higher, degree of perfection. The typical happy family having a nice time, with the children getting excited at the prospect of all the cheap and branded clothing piled in front of them, small hillocks of entangled logos and plastic tags screaming out Tommy Hilfiger and Benetton and Puma, like beached whales, heaps of obscene labour and sweat. Labour and sweat of boys like the one I spoke with, the one whose name I could not even hear, so complete is my class blindness. So complete that my language refuses to relent before the theoretical appeals against, its better sense, of all the politically correct ideas in my head.

When I stand in line at McDonald's or Nirula’s or at the Canteen in Arts Faculty I see the cashier smiling at everyone, telling one person after another about all the different things they can possibly eat, and I envy him or her the ease with which their inter-personal relationships are operated. I think of you, of the way you were (and still are, I’m sure) so good with people, partly, of course, because you’re so beautiful that most people come to you on their own, and they make an effort to make themselves understood. They want you to understand what they’re saying. I cannot motivate people in that sense. Its hard, when I myself am not motivated enough. Neither do I have the looks or the money to motivate people.

I marvel at people who speak so smoothly, smile and speak clearly and snappily without stuttering, without once getting tongue-tied. I yearn for that practiced ease. I have to rehearse my lines, lip-syncing to myself in public, going over my lines even before the most banal social encounters. I could do away with the practice if I got enough conversations that were at least half-way outside my head.

I hope only my longing isn’t communicated to others in line behind me. The banal reincarnates itself as something frightening and strange because I refuse to allow it a space inside me, to let it melt seamlessly into everything I do. I need the strangeness of the banal to remain as that, even if it threatens to mature malignantly.

I fall in love with voices, and mostly it is the wonder and the mystery I attach to the way they speak, when I ask myself over and over again how it is that they can speak so well. There was this woman called Priyanka who called me from HDFC (she introduced herself to me, strangely enough). Her voice was like warm milk, with no sugar and a lot of honey. I thought of her for one whole day before telling myself, rather dismissively, that probably all HR and PR personnel are trained to speak like that, and after that I lost respect for her too, thinking that if speaking is a training one undergoes to make money, then I’m no worse, even if I stammer, because I don’t have to earn my living from speaking.

You asked me once what's beauty. Well, the beauty lies in imagining Priyanka in as different ways as possible, even when one knows that one is never going to see her, even as one sees other soft-speaking or smooth-talking people and aches with the knowledge that one can never speak like that. Its something between a forced blindness and blind faith, if you know what I mean, if you've been following me till here.

I don’t stammer while speaking with rickshaw-wallahs. I feel comfortable, probably because I’m financially in a commanding position. I have to try and be as loud and as clear as I can, because they speak to me from some distance and over that little distance I have to hear him over the noises of the road. Sympathy ought to be motivation enough for someone to prick up their ears.

But enough about sympathy. Sympathy is the new pornography. Charity is how a whole society masturbates, not as a pressure-release valve but out of uninspired habit, as mass cultural schizophrenia. It's been a while since I last felt the inklings of desire, not to mention the beginnings of an erection. I haven't quite figured out if that's an entirely good thing or a sad thing.

Conversation stopper

-So, how are you?
-Good.
-I’m good too.
-Yeah? Great.
-So, you know, I thought I should talk to you. Because, you know, I don’t get to see you very often.
-Ok. I’m sorry. I don’t intend to be rude.
-Its quite alright… I was going to say that too. Glad someone said it. Now we can forget about it. Its out of the way.
-Out of the way of what?
-I don’t know, conversation, I guess.
-Oh. Yes, that’s right. I didn’t know you had been wanting to talk to me for so long.
-I have been. For almost six months now.
-Then why didn’t you?
-Initially I was too arrogant. Then I was too desperate. So I thought I might say something inappropriate. Let the desperation cloud my better judgement. I was shy. Scared.
-Do you always judge things before doing them?
-No, but I thought that this time I should, because I had been obsessing about you, dreaming of you two nights a week, stuff like that.
-Stuff like what?
-Let’s not get into that.
-Is that you? Shy? Scared? Is that why you’re shy? Because I might want to get into things like that?
-Yes. Actually no. because if I was that shy I’d never have walked up to you today. But then I spoke to you after six months. So I guess I am shy.
-I should have known.
-How?
-I sat with you once. For two classes. You didn’t say one word, just sat there for two whole hours, reading the paper or something. I never thought about it again. Its just, now that you mention it, it seems to make sense.
-Oh no. No, I mean, that wasn’t it. I remember that day too well. It happened during the arrogant phase.
-What makes you think shyness and arrogance are complete opposites?
-Nothing. Particularly.
-Ignorance.
-Huh?
-You’ve never analysed it properly. Hence, ignorance. Innocent, ignorant little boy.
-Little boy loves you.
-Huh?
-Little boy loves you.
-Why’s that?
-Why why?
-What do you mean why why?
-I mean, why ‘why’, and why not ‘how’?
-Shut up.
-We were talking about love.
-Were we? What is love?
-Its… I guess the closest I can come to defining love is that it’s the effort I can make, to say “I love you” to you, without hurting you, or offending you in a horrible way.
-So its a semantic game.
-No, not just that.
-Why not?
-Because it can lead to real consequences. People can die. People can be saved from dying.
-Have you ever killed or saved someone? Almost dying yourself doesn’t count.
-No.
-Im sorry. Its just—really, I never meant to—lets just go back a few lines. Where were you?
-To tell someone that you love them without hurting them. Even if the hurt is implicit, or if it isn't felt immediately but later, its still done. That’s the challenge. The effort is love. Its never complete. But the state of becoming, rather any static being, that’s what love is.
-But you can hear yourself, can’t you? I hope you know what you sound like.
-What do I sound like?
-Like a middle-aged professor who’s just stumbled upon the reality of his sex-life, and is doing everything possible to make up for lost time.
-No. That’s my line. You probably read it off my blog.
-Your line says 'professor'. I'll make it 'English professor'.
-That's still plagiarism.
-But you do sound like one! Why else this insistence upon the words “I love you”? Why does love have to be articulated in such a textual manner? Why always something that can be measured in, and reduced to, syllables, or words, or decibels or musical notes. Why cant it just be? An act, a physical perception, something that cannot be further broken down for analysis? Why so cognitive? Why not a kiss? Why not the act of sex?
-Are you saying that’s not cognitive?
-No, I'm not, but its there, you know? People don’t have to go around worrying their head off if its hurting the other person or not, if the other person is going to be suffering later. Its intimate, its quick, its physical, and its genuine. Its like- snap your fingers. Its real, and it makes everyone happy.
-Yes, I’m sure it does.
-If the people are right for each other.
-Like us?
-Us? I hardly know you.
-Knowing only spreads alienation.
-So its better to have all the fun before the knowing process begins?
-I didn’t say that. Someone did, but I didn’t say it. No. Wasn't me.
-You think the world runs like some short story you’re imagining in your head. And even if you want to get real, you think things are going to be like some theoretical text you’ve read sometime ago. What’s that? Foucault on power? Dominating-dominated relationships? A system of agents?
-You’re over-stating things.
-Really?
-Yes.
-Alright, tell me something. How many times have you imagined this entire conversation in your head?
-Never. Not once.
-Well, not like the way we’re having it, but some version of it? To prepare your replies to me, so you won't be nervous? So you won't get tongue-tied and embarrass yourself at some point?
-Well, you know, a couple of times, but very sketchily, not the details, not the exact words. Broad strokes.
-And what did you get? Nothing, right? ‘Coz the truth is, you do get tongue-tied. Even when you know exactly what you’re going to say, even when the words are on your tongue. They just dont come out. You're left with an open mouth, moving lips and no sound. Its not even the romantic “lost for words”. Its pretty fucked up, I know. And it could be seriously embarrassing. But you know something, its not embarrassing at all. Its alright.
-Really?
-Yeah. Its hardly anything. Its nothing.
-You’re beautiful.
-Huh?
-You’re so beautiful.
-Just because I said I can understand why you suffer from unexpected attacks of aphasia?
-No, really. You dont even have to earn it. You've got the whole bank stashed up inside your wardrobe, or something like it. Stay unemployed your whole life. I'll just drop by from time to time with the interest. Or returns or whatever is the right technical term.
-How beautiful.
-Thanks.
-No! No, I mean, how beautiful?
-Oh, that way. You push ‘beauty’ from the realm of the aesthetic into the realm of the ethical.
-Uhh…
-Its ok, you can just smile. I’ll tell myself you liked the compliment.
-When exactly did you come up with that?
-Week before. I was eating and it just came to me.
-You actually thought that I'd ask you to tell me how beautiful you think I am?
-No, I-
-You imagined a conversation, and you were waiting for me to ask you how beautiful I am?
-Hey, didnt you like it?
-I think he’s come.
-Who?
-GC.

Rant: #1

Thoughts on death, on writing.

What can a young, twenty-something man, fancying himself as a writer, learn from Sylvia Plath’s life? That writing is tough? I know that. That balancing one’s personal life along with one’s career is tough? I know that too, or at least I know that I will know it sooner or later. That men are promiscuous? That the male member in a marriage is more likely to stray, to ignore the kids and run after one or many of the many young, attractive women who’re ready to offer themselves to him, even if he’s rapidly ageing, more rapidly than they are? I have seen that happen. I don’t need proof for that. That the chores of a middleclass family life can be crippling, even suicidal, if you’re a budding creative artist, trying to assert some of the fierce individuality that’s searing you up inside? That wasn’t new either. That if you’re forced to repress your life and exist in a sort of straitjacket for an extended period of your life then that repression ferments inside you and if you make a genuine effort at a later, relatively saner stage in life, you can create art of surprising depth, sensitivity and pain? That was something. I think that was presented to me in a much more eloquent and dramatic way than the way I’d known it in my imagination.

But what really struck me, was a very curious thing about suicide. If someone could plan a life like that, like Sylvia’s, it would be so much better than what most of us do, existing, without meaning, living without purpose. I mean, if somehow, we could enjoy living the life she lived, it would be great for the world, no? Imagine all young people living to the ripe age of thirty, writing their best writing, and leaving the world, not stagnating. I mean, it’s a recipe for a genuine, collective, global effort towards creating the closest thing we can have to a utopia. But there two big problems. Not everyone will enjoy the life Sylvia Plath lived, and sadly, not everyone can write as well as she did. (And, of course, the other minor problem of leaving babies uncared for, but I’m confident that we can find out some solution for that too).

I’m assuming, of course, that Sylvia killed herself because she was sick of her life, and not because it was part of some plan, because if she did it on purpose, then it must mean that she did like some parts, like say, writing, discussing poetry, literature, teaching, raising her two children, of that life to continue doing it, to continue living that is. But that’s the paradox, you see. Is the lesson that all philanthropy is actually rooted in entirely selfish aims? Assuming the minimum from what we know of her writings and that of her friends and Ted Hughes, we can safely categorize Sylvia as the typical depressed artist, and I mean the clinical definition of depressed. Now, if we, as two curious, moderately intelligent people try to work out the logic of reasoning that must have gone on in her head as she made the decision to commit suicide, we can rest assured that we’ll get the following conclusions:

Its better to kill yourself than to prolong the uselessness, the burden on other people, on the earth, both purely physical and the purely emotional.
Since you are is aware that your best production in terms of cultural or industrial artefacts has already happened, and the future holds at best the possibility of matching that level or, more likely, falling short of that standard, why take a chance when even the best odds on your side can only bring a sense of mild ‘relief’ (oh, at least I’m not degrading), and not any real excitement (which can only happen if you do something so new, so radically different, that even you yourself will have difficulty recognising it as art, as something that even merits that haloed label), when one can just as easily shut shop and leave, and let people thank you for the memories?

So, is the lesson what we have always been pre-programmed to ignore? That one of the best ways of ensuring both one’s immortality as well as minimising the risks of being described as someone who’s “dried up” or who’s “mellowed down” or “playing to the galleries now” is to produce one’s best, the absolute best, kill oneself, and then leave it to a bizarre combination of fate, faithless husbands, zealous fanatics and followers to make an idol of your work? Your achievement? Well, at least you didn’t prostitute yourself for the sake of fame or recognition. You just forgot about yourself and expected the world to do the same, except that they didn’t quite forget you, choosing to remember you over the countless others, who wrote verses not much worse than yours, but who didn’t quite get famous, possibly because they just weren’t motivated enough to kill themselves?

Sylvia, you yourself said that sometimes the elements don’t allow you to commit suicide, however much individual effort one may put in. You, more than the average twenty-two year old female who studies Literature are aware of the pain that can cause. That’s the worst, isnt it? To know that you cant even commit suicide. As if that would’ve been the last straw, the light at the end of the tunnel and somehow you’re denied that bit of relief. As if suicide was your right.

Its happened to you. You tried to kill yourself many times before getting it right. What about the many others who give up? Some gave up because the first attempt was too scary. For one other person, there just wasn’t enough motivation, gumption, heroism even, to bring oneself to swallow the pills, knot the rope, climb the railings on the terrace walls, or whatever it was they had imagined themselves doing but never actually done. Its possible to exist without any particular motivation to exist meaningfully. Trust me, you’d be surprised to know how little of it can suffice. Look around you. People do it everyday, and how.

Other People: 2; Dev Mishra

“You see, Sujata, the whole of my life, from the moment I was born till this very moment, including all the 'high' points when I’ve had the greatest sex with my girlfriends or, subsequently, my wife, the birth of my daughter, the time when I published my novels, everything, just everything, it's all been an extended sequence of one-second-long, one-act Beckett plays where nothing happens, ever.”

“Really? I thought you were one of the open kinds, looking forward to life, embracing life. You know, the kind who seems to be very... mirthless, and serious, but is aware of the other side too? This side of you is surprising... this depressing, cynical side of you.”

He took a deep breath, opened his mouth, but stopped just as he was beginning to reply, pausing to let the waiter to leave their table after placing between them a tray with two tall glasses and one cup, copious amounts of caffeine considering how little time they were going to spend at the coffee shop. He, Devendra Mishra, had been just invited for a cup of coffee by Sujata, a girl in the Undergraduate English Honours program he taught in the first semester of the year. While having coffee with a student in a cafeteria surrounded by more students wasn’t new or exciting, being actually propositioned, as a way of speaking, over a couple of casually written text messages, was, even by his standards, both new and exciting. Perhaps the excitement would take more time than the hour and a half she had before her next class started to subside, and he might only then realise that it wasn’t exactly prudent to order three coffees, two cold and one hot. His immediate logic had been that he didn’t want to waste time going up to the counter in the middle of their conversation to get something, and besides, even if there was a lull in the conversation (or even if the entire conversation was a polite, extended lull), instead of both of them feeling awkward they could occupy themselves with the perfectly meaningful (and purposeful) activity of sipping their obscenely over-priced beverage. He could even offer her the cup of cappuccino, after they’d both finished caffeinating themselves in a much more diffused, ice-cream flavored fashion.

As the waiter left them to look conemplatively at their coffees he began again.

“Well, I’m not half as cynical as some of the people I’ve known, but sometimes when I read Beckett, you know, the fiction, or see a play of his performed, I cant help but draw parallels with my life, thinking about how useless all of it is, in spite of all my efforts to make it meaningful... And, and that’s when I realize how much I appreciate Beckett’s work, for that function of reminding all artists, all writers, of the dark side, almost as a reminder, that serves as a precaution, a shining, red neon-lit warning sign, to never slip into complacency, never to stop striving to prevent the world from becoming the kind of Beckettian dystopia… Although it already is a dystopia in many ways, but the function of an artist should be affirmative, not nihilistic, and even there I see that Beckett can be a source of inspiration, for the eloquence with which he articulates his vision. I want to rival that vision, to rail against it…"

“Wow.” She was smiling, as she sipped her cold coffee, and spoke again as she picked up the spoon to pick at the ice-cream floating on top of her glass.

“So—you really like Beckett, right? I mean—oops, sorry—we have Waiting for Godot in our course this year, you know.” He followed her movements as she spilled some ice-cream on her jeans, wiped it off with her finger, and then proceeded to lick the finger clean with her lips. He was moved, though not visibly so.

“Well, I don’t exactly hero-worship Beckett, but I hero-worship Coetzee, and he hero-worships Beckett, so sometimes, you know, I feel like I have an obligation to appreciate my master’s master." They both laughed at this.

"But seriously, about Waiting for Godot…”

"What about it?”

“Have you read it? Who’s doing Beckett with you?”

“Uh, no… I havent read the whole of it--”

“That’s OK, don’t have to apologise. And a play is meant to be seen, performed, not read in a classroom. If at all you want to read it, read it in your study, in private. It should be a completely private experience, your own actors, your own stage. Reading it in public spoils a play, just destroys it totally.”

“Um-hmm. Yeah, I felt that too, you know. But its difficult catch a performance.”

“I have a DVD of the play, a British production, I think its for the Royal Theatre of Britain or something. I’ll get it for you. Just remind me sometime before 8 tomorrow morning. I’ll throw it into my bag.”

He knew he was wrong about the ‘Royal Theatre or something’, but something had automatically snapped into place, reminding him that she probably wouldn’t know, calculating the risk in a ‘calculated risk’.

The day passed into evening, and the evening into night, and as he sat on the balcony of his two bedroom apartment over-looking the Metro Construction yard, nursing a half-filled glass of scotch in his hands, turning it ever so slowly from time to time, so that the six or seven cubes of ice rolled with a soft clinking sound, he caught himself thinking about Sujata. He wondered why she had coffee with him, a man almost thirty years older than her, when she clearly was spoilt for choice in her class, people closer to her in age. He declared to himself that she was extremely, stunningly beautiful, and, since this reminded him of his own days as a graduation student, and the girl he had always found stunningly beautiful, he wondered if she knew a thing or two about his past.

As a student, while he did nothing to distinguish himself, as a teacher, he quickly earned a reputation for himself as the professor who wasn’t shy of punching people. It had all started quite unexpectedly. He wasnt planning on it, and anyway, who plans for this kind of thing in advance?

He had recently ended a "romantic, heterosexual" relationship with a student, who, it was gathered from hearsay, had left him for a younger man, someone in the department, a trainee assistant teacher or some-such, someone who’d joined recently. His 'role', insofar as the word has etymological links with 'agency', in ending the relationship, was a fiction, a polite way to avoid saying that she walked out on him. It didn’t quite qualify as a scandal -- the Department had seen much more sensation than the break-up of typically Lolita-esque relationship-- but because, at the time there wasnt anything else to fill the conversations with, his colleagues had jumped on this bit of gossip like scavengers starved for ages who'd been lured, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, by the promise of fresh meat.

As he was going home one late evening, having locked his room and stacked all his papers under his left arm (he was planning to shift all his things and work from home for a few days; the department was becoming impossible for him to concentrate, mostly due to the nostalgia which was his own fault, and the stares and the hushed whispers, which weren't), he heard some people talking rather loudly.

The staff lounge happened to be between his room and the staircase that would lead him out of the building. He saw three people having tea and laughing. One of them seemed to be cracking jokes in every alternate line he spoke, and the others just laughed. He planned on avoiding them. While he had never really shared a camaraderie with any of his colleagues, this was a particularly trying time for him to make the renewed effort or even the semblance of effort at social intercourse. The jovial old man, Prakash Mehta, saw him walking towards the group.

“Dev! Come, come… We were just talking about you. You’ll surely live a long life, at least hundred years if not more!”

“Well, I surely never planned on troubling my fellow earthlings for that long, but if you insist, who knows? I’m afraid I really cant stay. I have to leave. Something urgent.”

“Come on, there can be nothing so urgent, that you cant stay for even two minutes?”

“Oh, it’s a football match I have to watch on TV.”

“I thought those matches were at night?”

“Yes but I have to get some work done before that.”

“We were just leaving. Just stay till we finish, no one is going to scold you for coming home late, not now. Now that you’re really free… aren't you?”

Then he had laughed. He’d laughed that infectious laugh of his, which he would begin before he had finished his sentence, just so his eager audience got the cue before hand, just so he wasn’t the only laughing. And the truth was, he was never the only one laughing at his jokes. He had a way of speaking that made bad jokes funny, as if, in the last minute, its semantic vestiges had sprouted some new element of mirth just because he was telling them. Indeed, there had been times when Dev had found him truly funny.

But that day he wasnt smiling, not even at his own jokes. It was after that comment that Dev had, quite impulsively, punched Prakash in the face. He hadn't aimed the blow, just thrown his arm with whatever weight he could manage to put behind it in the half-second it took for the decision to make itself and force his hand to enact it, giving the on-lookers the impression of a middle-aged man with a seriously ill mental condition. But not aiming a punch doesn’t free the eyes from the sight of what the hands have done, and Dev was appalled by the slow trickle of blood from the left under-side of his colleague’s lips.

He remembers those moments as moments of paralysis, since all other ways of labelling often end up only reproducing the incoherence he’d felt overwhelming him as he stood there, silently feeling the capillaries under the skin of his face get filled with blood. If it wasn’t paralysis it had to be the inescapable immorality of the act, the almost criminal weight of the gaze he found himself struggling under, unable to enunciate words distinctly, either as apology or as explanation, but merely scrambling, to support Prakash as he almost fell from his cane chair as he sensed that his victim was more shaken than himself, though he wasn’t too far behind, not by any stretch of post-impulsive imagination.

It wasn’t so much about anything in that very line (he’d heard worse) as it was the cumulated rage of the last five years he’d spend at the department. And it had shocked Devendra too, because he could never, even in his wildest dreams, have imagined such a childish manifestation of suppressed anger, almost as if he had a precariously controlled tendency towards violence.

It wasn’t the man, Prakash Mehta, that he hated, but more of his smug, self-satisfied attitude. It was his self-righteously right-wing leanings, his tirades against Western Culture, and the witticisms he never failed to come up with, the smooth transitions he managed to work out between his political thought and his literary persuits. The other day, they’d had an argument about the concept of love. Prakash had begun by stating, almost as an off-hand remark, that the idea of loving as an agent was entirely a by-product of Western Culture, and then saying that the use of expressions like “do you love your husband” in English translations of Sanskrit texts of Bhasa and Kalidasa amounted to what he called “the colonisation of love”.

“Are you saying, then, that if young people in India today say ‘I love you’ to their boyfriends or girlfriends, they’re all mimicking Western Culture? That they’re inauthentic, that they’ve relinquished all claims to calling themselves Indian?” Dev had countered.

“Well, they’re surely aspiring to a cultural role that no culture originating from India ever codes individuals into. And insofar as they aspire to a role that they can only be allowed to have in a non-Indian, Western culture, I think one must look at it as a curious sociological phenomenon, deserving more than the usual critical scrutiny.”

“What about the role of human subjects? Isnt that how cultures evolve? Adapt? What about the dynamism of cultural codes? Culture is not a tyranny exercised over us by a group of dead men wearing saffron robes and doing more drugs than would be legal today.”

“Neither, my dear friend, is Culture defined by what young people, with the arrogance to believe that the world began when they were born, do.”

“For God’s sake, can you hear yourself? You sound like a RSS pracharak. Is that what an intellectual must take it upon himself to do? To become a second-rate ideologue?”

“And you sound like you have a sentimental attachment to your undergraduate learning, the need to sound politically correct. Well, I will call a spade a spade, untill someone can persuade me to argue otherwise, and I will be persuaded by argument, not by a romantic insistance on political correctness. Come to me when you can argue more fluently. Don’t react emotionally, we know you feel very strongly about some things, but we are arguing here as scholars, not schoolgirls.”
He laughed.

It was impossible to even speak with him. Everything Dev said was readily refuted, reduced to an excuse for one wisecrack or the other and Prakash, who was at least ten years his senior, did it so effortlessly, he hardly seemed to be exerting any effort, apart from that of periodically raising a cup of tea to his mouth. This infuriated Dev, as did the fact that he couldn’t speak as cleverly as he could write, which meant he would have to bear that smug grin on Prakash’s face, and the way he’d laugh after making each smart comment.

Dev’s desperation to wipe that grin off his face had boiled over only once, and it had almost been a suicidal career move. He himself left the Department and applied to for a lectureship in a college. He got one in Hansraj, the college he’d done his BA from.

Devendra, for a man who was going to be fifty-two in five years, liked to think that he had fixed the problem of sex quite satisfactorily. He saw himself like many of his favourite characters, and today was a day (another in an ever-increasing list) when he saw himself as David Lurie, the English professor from JM Coetzeee’s novel Disgrace. Other favourites were Augie March (Saul Bellow), Tom Joad (Steinbeck), Stephen Dedalus (very rare, but nonetheless, he was there) and, most recently, Jeff Atman (from Geoff Dwyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi), who, incredibly, had replaced Aschenbach, from the Thomas Mann story Death In Venice.

He had finished reading the book only yesterday, but he had been thinking of it, and Jeff Atman, for almost a month now, ever since the evening in Landmark when he read the first five pages and found himself smiling, even laughing at times, with a spontaneity that he hadn't known since he was twenty one, and had graduated with a Major in English Literature, a spontaneity that he had only very recently connected with, albeit fleetingly, when he punched a senior colleague and all but committed professional suicide. It didn't surprise him, as he realised, with a wry smile, that for the sweet taste of life to be savoured, for the memory to be registered on the tongue as indelibly as the brain, it must be tinged with the black pepper of mortality.

Other people: 1

He has a one-room shanty in Wazirpur, the construction area behind the metro station. The government had planned to clear it, but them many of the labourers working in the metro had houses in the slum. He stays near the metro, yet he cycles everyday to his workplace, which is Vijaynagar, a smallish residential colony near the North Campus of Delhi University. His name is Prakash, though if you ask him you hear "Parkash". He has a push cart on which he sells chholley kulchey every morning, and eggs in the evening. His working hours are from 9 in the morning to 11 at night, which leaves him with very little time to spend at home. He just has enough time to have dinner, sleep and get up in the morning early enough to pick up his cycle and move before the roads get jammed with cars. It takes him one hour to cycle from home to the place where he sells food. Reaches home at twelve in the night, knocks back a 375 ml bottle of Whisky, and falls asleep like a log. Some nights he has to satisfy himself with English liquor, something like Royal Challenge, or maybe something cheaper. But these are nothing like 'desi' daru, which is much more potent, heady and satisfying, he told me once, when I asked him about an empty plastic bottle lying in the dustbin one morning. I remember very clearly his remark:
Angrezi daru me nasha bhi to kam hota hai...
it was full of nostalgia, a sort of wistful, longing for a bliss, an innocence that was lost with the corruption of culture, and which he tries to connect with every night with his bottles of country liquor.

He has developed a conspicuous paunch as a result of these regular nightly flights from sobriety, a protruding mass of soft, circular flesh that stretches the fronts and sides of his shirt and pushes his trousers down considerably, making it necessary for him to hitch it up form time to time, after rubbing his soiled hands on his butt and the back of his thighs. He claims a 4 ft by 6 ft spot of street space as his own, and pays a monthly rent of 1000 rupees for the claim to be strong enough, for him to station his push-cart there. This not-so-princely sum is shared by the Police, the MCD and the RWA of Vijay Nagar Double Storey, and the split-up divides the money in its entirety, leaving none for charity.
His children, a boy of 8 and a girl of 9, attend a Government school near his home. On most days they're still in bed when he leaves for work. They consistently get to see very little of him, though they do call him once in a while on his cell phone, a battered little Motorola C101 that doesnt even charge at times, something he'd got for 1500 (heavily over-priced, he realized soon after he started using it).
When he thinks of them he is secretly, even unconsciously, happy that so many people in North India consider it sacrilegious to have non-vegetarian food, including eggs, on Tuesday, and that is his off day. On Tuesdays he closes shop at three or three-thiry, depending on when all the mutter is sold out (and if all of it isnt, he throws the remainder or gives it to some hungry people on the street, though its hard to find many like that, and he doesnt have the energy to go looking), and goes home, not staying the evening to make omlettes, boiled eggs and the like. There are some regulars, and they have accepted this one-day gap in their egg-consuming routine. There is, for instance, Gaurav, who comes in a Santro, parks it next to his push-cart, rolls down his tinted windows and extends his hand. Into his stretched hands Prakash places a paper plate with the whites of ten eggs. Just the whites, the yolks have been scooped out with a knife, in an elaborate and curious procedure that started just ten minutes ago. As the window rolls up and the rhythmic pounding of heavy bass from the car is partially muffled, Parkash pauses for a while to note the differece between their lives. He may even reflect on it, if there are no other customers, waiting for their orders of boiled eggs or omlettes. This Gaurav chap, whose face he hasnt seen for sometime now, needs the proteins, and he eats the egg whites on his way from the gym.
How peculiar, one might note, that someone has to drive oneself in a car to special place, and eat a special diet, only to keep fit, when it is so easily done with a just few good habits.

31st July '09; In a station of the metro

God, you’re beautiful. You have to get off at Vishwavidyalaya. You just can't stay on the train till Jehangirpuri. That’s because you—you cant possibly have anything to do in that dirty, stinking place. You belong here, with the unending line of rickshaws, with the over-spiced and over-priced bhel-puri.

Why can’t I?

Because you should see yourself first, and then you should deign to conform to a stereotype. Be a little sympathetic. Stereotypes are how people make sense of the world. Instead of seeing it as a reduction of any complexity we can see stereotypes as opportunities for intellectual charity. For people who cannot tolerate complexity. Their systems will get seriously overloaded. They’re like University professors who’ve discovered the existence of their sex lives after spending 50 years of their lives behind the veil of intellectual blindness and are now desperately trying to make up for lost time. Let them jack off to whatever meets the eye. To know little is safe. The risks are not worth taking if the taker is not worth risking.

The rest of Delhi and Gurgaon does’nt move with a pre-conceived idea that the English Department of Delhi University has decided to start the morning classes at 8:55 instead of the usual 9:30. It’s a blip in the windshield; a bug that doesn’t affect the movement of the vehicle, though it does manage to get noticed in case it gets squashed on the windshield.

To travel in the metro at any time between 9 and 11:30 is to be made aware of other people. Its a lesson in ethics, complete with the smell and the sweat, to make sure you don't miss out anything. It makes such brilliant wicked and ironic sense that the London Tube has quotations like Sartre’s “Hell is other people” written on the wall. One is reminded of that and other curiously misanthropic coinages. Misanthropy is so pervasive, it now possesses the capacity to disguise itself in several forms, so that one can be forgiven for not noticing the slightest hint of it in innocuous expressions. Like me praising a woman’s beauty.

I don’t look at women anymore. Not the way I used to, in any case. I look at the way people stand, the way they carry themselves, how they see themselves being seen. I try to make sense of the mirrors we all create inside our heads, closing ourselves from any real influence. I look at the men, to see where they’re looking, what they’re looking at. I saw three men looking in my direction and I turned around to see you fiddling with your iPOD (that’s what technology does to us, doesn’t it? Even if we have nothing to do, instead of accepting that we have nothing to do we just adjust the volume or change the EQ settings or shuffle or repeat modes, hoping to make our listening to music more enjoyable, even when we know it hardly changes anything. We do all of it and when it doesn’t change anything we make excuses for a hopelessly over-priced piece of plastic, silicon and LCD. Excuses like, Oh the changes are very subtle, I wont be able to perceive it in all this noise).

You ran your thumb along the circular scroll pad, turning up the volume, turning it down again, then you hit the menu button on top and browsed through the albums and tracks. The train stopped, we stepped out together, I tried to keep step with you till the escalator, but then the sea of other people swallowed you. I turned my head once while on the stairs, saw you standing five or seven steps below me. You looked up and met my eyes for about half a second.

P (brown top); 21st July '09

P
To look is to love. I am surrounded by beautiful women. Its not just mental masturbation. You have to be really sick to assume that just because I can look at a woman and carry on an extended love affair with her in my head, there must be something wrong with me. I imagine a love affair that’s not limited to the sex and the conversations (after the sex) and lunches and coffee and cigarettes and maggi, but an affair that’s got its own dissatifactions, existential crises and fights, with days of unspoken, unspeakable trauma. Days when neither can do or say anything that might help thaw the ice. You think that because I can do that, I am creepy.

It would perhaps comfort you if I just stared each woman’s breasts or behind and just thought of having sex with her. You’d be able to reassure yourself each time you saw me looking at a woman for more than ten seconds, “Oh, he’s just wondering what she’ll look like under her clothes, without her bra, without her panties. He’ll probably go home and masturbate. What a perv. Whats the difference? All men are.”

The point is not that I am not like the others because I am not obsessed with naked figures of women. Its that noone really is. Its not normal. I am speaking in very general terms. I know there are many instances of men doing exactly that, but those are rare.
The only thing that probably sets me apart is the fact that I imagine a woman I see in ways more than one. That I accept a woman as a complete other person, someone about whom I know very little, and that if I am genuinely interested in her I have to exert an effort of imaginative will, do everything in my capacity to make sure that she remains another person at the end of the day, not a figment of my imagination. So I imagine only because I know how little I know, and how unethical and dangerous it could be if I forget for an instant that the only reason I imagine is because I do not know her. I should be painfully aware at all moments that my efforts are, at best, attempts to compensate, to merely fill in the gaps of a long and complicated story that wasn’t started by me and will not be mine to finish.

Other men probably don’t have the patience to wonder what other women do in their free time, things that I am obssessed about. Things like, does she spend time dressing up? Does she have fights with her parents over how much time she spends studying? Does she have trouble waking up early in the morning? Does she hate herself for switching off the alarm on her phone whenever it rings at five, to give herself another hour of sleep? Does she love dogs? Does she want to cuddle the little pups she sees on the road? Does she have milk in the morning? Buttermilk? Tea? Coffee? Does she like a hot breakfast or does she like fruits? How many times does she bathe everyday? Is she particular about her toiletries, or will she be OK if she has to use her mother’s things one day? How does she peel a banana before having it? Does she peel it in four or five strips, pulling a bit down and gradually going down its length as she takes small bites out of it? Or does she take off the entire yellow thing in one smooth movement and then chop off slices of the banana before taking a fork and eating it from a bowl? Does she pause for a second before opening the banana, to smile and have dirty thoughts about things she’s done in the past or things she’s read about in novels or seen in films?
Dwarfed by impatience, other men probably don’t imagine any of these minute aspects, concerning themselves with other things like the football match score or the next meal or just random gossip. But that doesn’t mean they don’t imagine what a woman looks like under her clothes. Its just that, more often than not, that’s the last thing they think about, before moving on to something else. Or they might not move on to something else, deciding to stick to the woman’s figure, depending on their assessment of the same.

I, on the other hand, do that, but I don’t stop at that. To see what she looks like under her clothes isn't enough. It’ll still be part of the crowd; she’d still be a part of the crowd, faceless. If I cant find something that makes her jump off the page and come to life, I think about some other characteristic feature, something that allows her reality to jump out of the tiny window that I see her in and assume a larger-than-life sense of being. That feature, that warm, reassuring pulse of individual existence I found in the way you make love to me.

But I don’t want to talk about love. We do that enough a anyway. I want to talk about death. I am obsessed with death. I want someone to talk to me about death the way I dream of talking to you. I wish I had a girlfriend who’d ask me,'Do you want me to feel sorry for you?' and not listen to anything I said till I’d answered that question. After that, only if I said yes would she really feel sorry for me. Because I cant help thinking about death. Sometimes I spend hours together just conjuring up situations where someone close to me died, and I try and predict (with varying accuracy of course, I like to tell myself) how things would be after that event had happened. Would I go to class everyday? Would I smile and laugh at the same jokes? Would I lose patience more quickly? Would I still hate the same people for the same reasons? Would I cry? Would I have to comfort other people crying? Would they want my comforting? Would I shout at people for being normal with me, trying to help me get over it, forget the huge loss that I’d suffered, by behaving as if nothing had changed? I can imagine myself screaming at the top of my lungs: “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you think you can help me by pretending as if nothing happened? Do you think I’m really going to find those jokes funny? And even if I laughed, being sympathetic to your efforts to cheer me up, telling myself, "See, these people are making an effort to cheer you up, just smile and let them feel good and purposeful about their benevolent actions", whats the point? I’m the one who should receiving sympathy, not you. I’ve lost someone. Someone just died. But I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t know if I want anything.”

To write about death is to attempt something extremely difficult. Sometimes I think I want to write a surrealist poem about death, with poetry about blood and black roses and beautiful women with dishevelled hair. But then again I remind myself of the other side of death, the death that brings with it undeniable pain, trauma, the loss of a bread-winner, anxiety about bills piling up, broken bones and viscera, even insignificant but unavoidable things, like booking the cremation ground, arranging food for the wake, getting the death certificate setting aside money for the Pundit, covering up the body, awkwardly asking for someone’s help (“Hey, could you, uh, just hold him like that, so I slip on the underwear?” “Could you just unhook the bra while I hold her up?”) plugging the nostrils and ears with cotton-wool, and its not so poetic. I think I’m mature enough not to treat someone’s else’s suffering as food for art. The only suffering I can use as food for art is my own, and, sadly or otherwise, I just havent suffered enough.

I’ve been playing it safe for too long now. I need to just let go sometimes. Everytime I see you, for the first two seconds I see the two of us having sex in the middle of the class-room. Between noticing your face and saying ‘Hi’ that thought is stuffed into my bag, pressed next to the laptop in the back, flattened and squeezed into shape. I feel like I should lift your top, unhook your jeans, pull them down along with your panties, and then (assuming you have done the corresponding things to me) we should make love, to the background noise of Harish Trivedi lecturing and cracking those little jokes that he does. I’ll let out a particularly loud laugh if he cracks a good one about people having sex in public. The other students should try very hard to concentrate on Harish’s voice, and we should amuse ourselves by looking at their faces, eyebrows knit and jaw-lines clenched with the effort of taking copious notes, not missing any important point, of not looking at the writhing and rolling on the floor, right between the rows of benches in the middle of the classroom.
A

13th july '09

I started dreaming of you after about three months. It was nice. I was reading the paper and suddenly, this tune stuck to my mouth. I kept humming it, without knowing what song it is, or even where I might have heard it from. I racked my brains trying to remember. After about half a day had passed, I told myself, I’m going to ask P about it when I see her. But how will I get across the tune to her? And I know just this one line, five or six notes. I’ll try. I’ll make sure no one is listening to our conversation before I subject her to my (really) bad singing.
After about half an hour I knew that the song which had been echoing through the whole of my body but kept getting stuck on my tongue was Sisters of Mercy, the Leonard Cohen cover you’d given me, the line which goes “They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem”. Well, you know, I hate to sound like I’m breaking a suspense, but you kept asking me to listen to it repeatedly for four days, everyday before class started, till I finally heard it. I never admitted it to you but I really liked the song. It’s a very strong unconscious feeling I have. Whenever a female who is close to me, and it could be anyone, recommends something to me, and asks me for my opinion about something, something they wrote, or sang, or they’re wearing, anything, I find it impossible to admit that I like it. Even if I absolutely agree with them (and they are usually wanting me to say yes) I find some lame excuse and just deny it, find some insignificant flaw that I know doesn’t make a lot of difference to what I think of them, even when sometimes I know I’m only doing it to differ from them.

I saw The Seventh Seal again last night and I thought of you when I heard this line: If everything is imperfect in this world, then love is perfect in its imperfection. This is spoke by Jons, the squire, if you remember, and this line comes after he’s been telling a blacksmith how worthless love actually is, and that ‘love’ is nothing but lying, cheating and hatred.

I saw a movie called The Double life of Veronique and I want you to watch it. Its one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. Its up there with The Dreamers, and Irene Jacob, the woman who plays both Veronique and Weronika, is, I think, up there with Eva Green. Besides, Eva Green is someone I havent been liking a lot lately. I didnt like her in Casino Royale- though that maybe more because of the man playing her lover than Green herself, now that I think of it. Its just that each time I think of her hair catching fire in that scene from The Dreamers she makes me forget all earthly forms of female beauty. But enough of Eva Green. Im telling you about Irene Jacob.
Well, she must be as pretty, if not prettier. But the cinematography makes her look stunning. I cant stop raving about her. I want to watch it with you. She is one of the many women I am in love with at this moment in time.

I missed you last night when I saw the movie. I shed drops of sweat that have Bergman and Kieslowski and Godard embedded into them every night. I switch off the fan and the AC, take off my shirt and just sit in my shorts, with beads of sweat running down my back, my hands, and boot the computer. I get a bottle of ice-cold water, place it near my feet (because the computer table is made of wood, and the circles of water left by the condensing water drops leave white stains on the wood. Then I watch a movie, pausing it regularly as I take long draughts from the bottle. I do it because I need to be wrenched out of my comfort zone. My life at home is very comfortable. There are ACs in all the bedrooms, and one in the living room. And yet, I sit without the fan when I watch my movies. I try to sweat as much as I can, because I want to live out a part of my biological existence through that piece of culture that I’m putting myself through, as if the blood that courses through my veins for those two hours or so has a tiny marker labelled Bergman or Kieslowski or John Ford, like a radio-active tracer, and a certain fragment of my life will be permanently marked by the movie that I am watching… Oh, its not just Bergman and Kieslowski. Its Ben Affleck and Zack Snyder and Micheal Bay and Hollywood “trash” too. just in case you’re starting to have ideas.

I’m sick of existence. The over-ratedness of life, of my existence, is killing me. I used to smile at people when they told me that I should never stop writing. I thought I wouldn’t ever have to exert a conscious effort to keep writing, because it came naturally. I remember those moments with pain. I haven't written for two months, and things aren't looking good. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. But I have to believe that this is something that has meaning, some significance in the larger scheme of things. I am making every effort to stop myself from getting bored. Its so easy to get bored. I’ll speak with you sooner than you think.

01-07-09

I woke up, and the fine red embroidery of the veins swelling, silently, and branching out across the white of my eyes in the mirror reminded me of the dream I’d been wrenched out of; a dream of watching porn. And it almost turned into a nightmare, because someone walked into the room, (and porn-watching being the kind of surreptitious thing that one does, not telling anyone, is severely circumscribed in the extent to which it allows one the privilege of privacy). It scared the hell out of me, because I could sense that someone was coming and decided that I had to see all the clips quickly, before they entered the room. I didn’t want to miss any of those clips because I was going to masturbate in a while.

I always take a mental list of images, situations and voices before I shut the door, check twice for the latch (don’t want people accidentally barging in just because the door opened) and lower my shorts. Sometimes when I’m studying, I suddenly remember something incredibly arousing, I make a quick note of it either on the back of my notebook or on one of those pink sticky-notes slips, saying something like 'Playmates in uniform, L’s butt, Penthouse last section, Marisa Tomei’s “No, Henry? No?” from The Wrestler', or just about anything; the range of my images challenges efforts at cataloguing. When I’m done studying for my planned time, which is about three or four hours, I take a look at the piece of paper, close my eyes and think for a while. When I have made sure that I have enough virtual cinema reel in my head for the next 6 minutes or so, I tear out the scrap from my notebook, crumple it, tear it into shreds and stuff them into the back pocket of my boxers, to be sprinkled at leisure into the dustbin in the kitchen when noone’s looking.
I’m strangely happy I had that dream, because its very close to the truth. In many ways that’s exactly what I do, you see. The thing is, when I realise that I don’t have a lot of time, (like say, not more than half a minute or so at the most), I suddenly want to see all the clips (or, if they’re pictures, the enlarged ones) clips which I’d found boring just a little while ago. That house-wife in the red robe, that teenager in the white shirt, suddenly I find myself imagining stories behind the tiny thumbnails that appear on the screen, as hyperlinks, that lead to the complete videos if I click on them. Those stories are very vivid, I wish I could preserve those moments and magnify them later. I want to spread out those moments and relive them, let the mood of them seep into me like a warm water from a sponge, because I want to regain some of the richness and originality of the tiny stories I conjured from the tiny thumbnail images.

Those stories are lost as the door creaks open. Those moments are wrenched out of their incessant shuttling and stifled in their immaturity, as time is freeze-dried, compressed and packed off in the little tin-cases of painful seconds, hyphenated between the embarrassment of being “caught” watching porn and the pre-emptive action of shutting down the laptop screen.

52 Poems

Friction

S
I haven't been writing to you for some time now. I feel the desire to communicate through letters only when you've just left me, not (strangely) when you are near me. The desire to produce some sort of utterance, something that can be measured, articulated in terms of words, phrases, sentences, or decibels or electronic code, or just numbers, that is a desire that comes when the usual ways of communicating seem absurd, or at least have reached the limits of meaning, beginning to border now on the senseless and the inane.
That's why I have sneaked out of bed at 3:30 in the morning, just to squeeze off this letter to you before I begin to feel sleepy again, before the bad dreams begin to fade. I am writing on your laptop. I hope that by the time you open this you will have left me, and one week should be enough time to assuage whatever anger or discontent that may overwhelm you when you come realise that I saw (stole) your password when you opened your laptop on my bed.
I couldnt share this with you for reasons which will soon become obvious. I was really moved today, in the two hours that I spent reading in Landmark before I saw you and we left for my flat. I picked up a novel called Friction because the cover reminded me of Atomised, by Houellebecq. You know, the model in nothing but white panties, and the word Atomised covering the two points on her chest we're not allowed to see. This novel, Friction, is about five young people in Manchester, England, who are all trying to become happy through sex and money and social relations and other things. Its really about sex in a big way.
So there's this guy Justin, the hero of the novel, and he's obsessed with sex. So much so, he ends up flunking his papers because he's too busy watching the latest porn videos. Other characters include Jessica, Zakir and others whose names I dont remember. Jessica is a Post-Grad Literature student at University of Manchester, and she works at a strip bar to pay her fees. She works because its not tiring, its good pay, and all she has to do is take off her bra for "poor lonely souls". But the interesting part is, she is obsessed with Dostoevsky. She is curious about the male psyche, about the gap between a man's self as sexual being and the same man's self as an intellectual being. While giving lap dances to her customers, she would wonder how the guy's mind works, and she'd be disappointed because everyone was the same, they all got excited by her breasts. She has an image of Dostoevsky in her head, where Dostoevsky didnt find breasts exciting, preferring, instead, other parts of the female anatomy such as hairy arm-pits or the back of the knees. One day she meets Justin in the bar, and the two have a conversation about how many lap-dances a guy needs before he can say no to a woman's breasts. He says he's had three already. When she asks him if he wants another, he looks at her breasts and says no, but a little later he asks her to take off her bra. After a while he asks her to put it back on.
She begins to get her hopes high, thinking that this guy is a bit different from the rest, but as their conversation progresses her hopes begin to plummet steadily. Just before Justin passes out (he's had one drink too many) he manages to excite her. He tells her he wants to use his money and buy himself all the sex he can, and then use his example to help society gain an insight or an understanding into how sex works. He wants to be a sacrificial lamb, to help society learn a thing or two about itself. Her initial reaction to this is "Get over it, go home, sleep. You've had too many Martinis" but when he doesnt relent after five minutes, her reply changes to "Alright Justin, I want to understand your sexual desire". As the bouncers are carrying him out, she scribbles her number on a scrap of paper, tears it out, crumples it and squeezes it into his shirt pocket. He manages to smile and say "Jessica, I love your tits."
She replies, "Call me, handsome".

I was so moved by this I sat and mused over what I'd read for a while, and I couldnt figure out who I could relate to more intimately, the guy or the girl. Both, I guess.

P (wet hair); end of exams

She is not exactly at the top of her class but she is pretty good. Good enough to ask questions, to attract stares outside class when she catches the professor for a two-minute chat. She doesn't wear red very often but that is simply because she doesn’t have a lot of red things, not because of any particular aversion to the chromatic aspects of that colour. I used to think of you every time I saw her.
Now I think of you both. You are, like she is, fragments of me. I tell myself that I am going to remember you while walking up the stairs to the department. But then again, the very idea of female beauty is so naïve and unqualified. I am aware of the biological behind the visual (and the imaginary), and it doesn’t stop me from appreciating the beauty of both the biological and the visual.

But I still cannot explain what happened a few days ago, right after the exams got over. I was sitting outside class, listening to people declare how badly they’d done their papers, and suddenly I saw her walking toward me. I looked away, to pretend that I hadn’t noticed her, so I could be surprised when she actually stopped near me. When she stopped next to me I smiled, and couldn’t do anything else. I told her that I’d written a decent paper, and she asked me what were my plans for the two-month break, now that the exams were over.
I don’t know why, but I can’t quite explain what happened next. I haven’t cried for eight years now. I never cry. I have felt physical and emotional pain, but the carapace of masculinity never allowed me the tears, the liquefaction of dejection.
As the first tear rolled down she pretended not to notice. She began to get slightly embarrassed as the drop grew to a steady flow. She looked away from me, either because she was uncomfortable or because she thought I would feel better this way, if she didnt look at me. At that point, I hadn’t started to hate myself for crying before her. I was really, just crying. I had dreamt of that moment for so long. I couldn’t believe it would really amount to nothing.

-Uhh...are you ok? Is everything fine?
-Ya, Im fine..
She smiled. I couldn’t look her in the eye, caught as I was, between hating myself and trying to explain myself to myself. Crying unmans you somewhat. It really does.
-Nothing… Just this really stupid thing. You know, I’ve had dreams of this day, this moment, of how good it would feel to be done with the exams. Its… its like the past six weeks someone was choking me, forcibly holding my head under water, and now I have finally surfaced… but I cant see myself gasping for breath… I imagined doing things after the exams got over, and I cant think of anything now.
-Maybe your lungs have got used to breathing under-water. Maybe its not so bad anymore.
-Like the way your stomach shrinks if you don’t eat a lot of food for days together?
-Ya, something like that.
-Okay.
-Okay.
I wiped the tears from my face. More like smeared it across my cheeks. She began to walk towards the main gate. I followed, making it look like a mutual decision.

-I have to have lunch with a professor. Actually, its we. Four of us are having lunch with her.
-Okay. I would have asked to have lunch with me otherwise.
I fixed my gaze on the embroidery on the sleeve of her kurta. I hoped she’d notice it and not think I was looking at her arm. It had tiny flowers, eace with a mirror at the centre and four thin petals surrounding it. The flowers were dark green, and were stitched on a black strip that ran along the edge of the sleeve. The bed sheet in my room has flowers like that, though the flowers are much bigger and without the mirrors.
She saw me looking at her sleeve. I didn’t move my eyes, though after a while she moved hers.

-You actually cried… Aww.
-Don’t have to remind me, embarrass me…
-No, its cute…I think I’m going to tell my friends.

We walked into her friends at the gate, they reacted with a similar aww… and I told them it was nothing. I spoke with them for two minutes and left. I walked back to the building because I had to use the urinal. As I stepped outside the loo I saw her waiting for me. She was standing near the water cooler at the corner. Between smiling at her and walking toward her I took my water bottle out of my bag, thinking of filling it up. Before I could ask her why she hadn’t left for lunch she raised herself on tiptoes, leaned into me, supported herself with her hands on my shoulders and pressed her lips to mine. I closed my eyes at the moment of contact, and I knew she was waiting for me to make some sort of movement, to give a sign because our lips stayed like that for quite a while. I moved. I puckered my lips, held her in mine briefly, and released her. She did the same. I wanted her to use her tongue but she didn’t. She pulled away in less than a minute. Her eyes were half-asleep, unwilling to get up, and the dream of a smile slowly painted itself on their watery canvas. I preferred to look rather than to speak.

-Wow.
-Thanks.
-I should be thanking you. I half expected you to push me away.
-Really? I was a bit shocked, honestly, if you ask me, but I’d never have pushed you away. Even if I didn't like you kissing me... I mean, its not everyday that I have people kissing me as I fill my bottle at the cooler, you know…
She laughed.
-Ya, I thought so. I have to leave.
-Oh yes. Of course, I mean. See you in a couple of months, I guess?
-Yes, I don’t think I’ll see you before that. Don’t think I can.
-Have a nice lunch.
-Sure. You too.
-Whatever they give in the canteen…where are you going, Nirula’s?
-Yes, I think.
I nodded and waved. She walked down the stairs. I followed her head till it all but disappeared under the staircase and I shouted.
-Thanks a lot. I don’t think anyone saw us.
She looked up, smiled, winked. Time slowed down, enough to let me notice her sleeve again.

The following day as I moved my things I was hating myself. I hated myself for settling down in one place such that it was so difficult to shift. Carrying the books from the room to the cab, and then from the cab to my flat in Gurgaon reminded me of my own complacency. I sickened myself with the way I had settled down in my room in North Campus, with everything from books to toiletries to clothes and a computer. How much better if I just had a big canvas bag that I could carry on my back to college everyday, and if I could just dump all my stuff into it and move out of or in to any place I wanted to. A couple of shirts, a couple of t-shirts, a couple of trousers, sets of underwear, some books, a bedsheet and a toothbrush. That’s all one needs, really. But I’ve got a taxi full of stuff. Around two hundred and fifty seven books. And a computer. I was shaking my head in despair as the taxi moved out. The taxi-driver took a long hard look at my books and asked me if I had bought them all, and if I had started a laboratory (I think he meant 'library') in my room. He leafed through one book and said he couldn’t understand a word of what was written. It was DM Thomas’s The White Hotel.
Everytime I came down with my hands full of books he’d raise his eye-brows and ask me if that was it, and I would shake my head and go back up. I couldn’t help thinking of a line from Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass: they settle down as if they’re never going to leave.

two fragments; p(rattle)

I can watch you dance for hours.
Patel Chest at night is not a romantic place to be in.

You had a white scarf around your head. it covered your hair and also a part of your neck. I did not see you. I was crossing the road, hurrying, with one eye on the traffic light, when two arms reach at my neck from below, from below, as if from a very short person, like a dwarf or a pygmy. The arms wrapped themselves around my neck and I felt a pair of lips brush the stubble on my lower jaw, on the right side. All this happened too quickly. I saw a white scarf moving away from me, with the crowd of passers-by. When the motorcycles and cars in front started inching forward, I knew the light was almost green. I decided to follow the white scarf. I followed it till it became you. Your face looked so different. Were it not for your eyes, I might have never recognised you. But I did. And i did see how your face had withered. Faded. You'd put on at least ten kilos of weight, and I arrived at this figure without looking at your figure, just your face. I smiled.

-Sujata.
-Yes.
-What are you doing here? How come you're not in Bombay?
-I had a test. I had to give a test.
-oh...ok
-I have to rush.
-Wait! Wait. Wait a second. I want you to see someone.

I called my brother and my mother.
-Mama, this is Sujata. She was my classmate in college.
-Hi. Today I had a NIFT exam. Now I have to rush, because my husband is waiting for me at the Metro and from there we hve to hurry home, if we're to be in time for the evening prayers. Nice to meet you.

I wanted to tease the knot on your larynx, to finger it casually. I had stretched out my index finger, the tip of it already anticipating the white fabric against skin, like blind lovers; lovers blinded by and blinded by each other.



He thinks of force; of forced sex; of death; of death in the bathroom; of the irritation suffered, and the annoyance of the first person who discovers the corpse; the dilemma; to cover the corpse with the dirty underwear which is seen hanging on the hooks (aluminium hooks, plastic heads) behind the door, along with the towel, or to let it be; does shame survive death?

The dilemma is better than the embarrassment of suffering a seizure in the middle of an examination; when you're planning to write non-stop for the next ninety minutes, and suddenly your right hand doesnt move. Not only does it not move, but every attempt you make to move it only results in excruciating amounts of pain.

What is it? The nerves or the veins?
Something's pulled itself and it wont be set right, wont fall back; its stuck. The pain is hardly a diversion from the fear of not completing the paper. You wish for a miracle. Before you can call it an absurd thought she gets up and starts walking toward you. She kneels by you and takes your spasmodic hand in both of hers.
People are looking down, writing. They dont want to leave out their RTCs. But some are looking at you; you are past caring. Neither do you want to leave out your RTCs, but she has kissed your hand. The pain doesnt free you from her gaze. A part of you wants to jerk it out of her grasp, but you have begun to enjoy the throbbing pain, the blocked blood, to wait for the funny feeling when the ripples of awareness reach you; you seem to have settled in with the pain, to enjoy predicting how much pain will come with the next wave.
By now you can point to the exact vein which has been stretched, through which the blood has stopped flowing. You wince from the pain, as you feel a fresh tug under your skin. She sees you grimace and runs a hand through your hair to calm you, and it is orgasmic; it feels so good that you blurt out, from underneath the pain:
-kiss me on the mouth
-why. Its your hand thats hurting, that needs healing.
-ya, but its ok if you kiss me on the mouth.
my phone beeps. it is 4:05 AM, and I will leave out the last RTC.

(P)rattle; 15th April '09; I should be doing Hamlet; (hence) guilt; you

I don't remember my dreams, you know that. I've been trying to remember something, just to have something to tell you, to not disappoint you. All I can recall from the last two nights is a question:
what is your name?
So, there I was, climbing up the stairs, two at a time, and I see you, in the white top and those dark blue jeans (the ones with lines running down their length, remember?), straddling this guy in a corner, kissing him vigorously. It was the corner behind the water-cooler, and I was hurrying because I was late for class. But I turned back to give you a look. I didn't stop walking, but I looked back just to make sure if it really was you or just the clothes that I remembered. It was you.
I had my arms around your neck, and I wouldn't let you kiss me because you wouldnt say anything. I kept asking:
what is your name?
I saw you in the Law Faculty canteen. I just saw the back of your head. I saw the shirt you had put on, and the jeans. You were as tall as my memory. And the contours on your body matched the pottery skills that my hands will not forget. Because we never confused that pottery with poetry.
I wanted to see your face. But you were walking away. I had to follow you. When I got near you I realised that I was the only dreamer. I don't usually feel like a stalker. Only when you're around. Its a thought that threatens to upset my whole day. I am so conscious of myself i cannot bring myself to even speak to you. I scare people away. People think I'm rude, that I don't want to talk to anyone.
Its so strange. Its ridiculous. Straining the muscles in my neck, craning my neck in all possible directions, just to make sure you're unable to lock my lips in yours, because i know, once that happens there's no return. We'll make a Rubicon from the glaciers of our mouths. Why?
I just wanted to know your name. Not who you are(I wasnt asking "who are you?" in my head). That would've been nice. Sort of romantic in the more jaded sort of ways. You know, getting to know each other by reading the body, instead of the usual ways of greeting, the Hi's and the how-are-you's. The hands and the lips and the thighs and the nails... But that just did not appeal to me.
I wanted to know your name. The words in your name. The alphabets and the syllables. The sounds from your mouth as you pronounced it. I wanted to touch the vein on your neck, to feel the blood filling up; the warmth of identity, as you spoke your name to me.
Who are you? If that sounds fake, let it. Dont remind me of it. I know that you study in my class. I know that you look stunning in shorts. I love you. I dont want to qualify that. Why should I? The effort of saying it should be its own reward. The only thing I can say to win your heart is this: I'm actually saying it. In spite of the truth, in spite of myself, in spite of love. I love you. And if I ever made you feel like I dont want you to speak about yourself, its only because I dont want you to educate me in self-deception.

P(bad hair); marks; pain

14 out of 20; 12.5 out of 20; 11 out of 20; life should be more interesting than a porn video, no? At least one shouldn't have to exert a super human effort just trying to make it better.
You want to know my first thoughts when I got to know my marks? I was happy. In about three seconds' time I was longing to sleep with you again. The exact thought that presented itself to me was this: I want to have sex till one of us doesn't feel anything. Till the time you cant feel the blood on your butt or I cant feel the blood on my foreskin. The wave after wave of blood is the sick, deadening drone of monotony, of uninspired existence.

You know, when the vigorous, blind friction of skin against skin turns skin itself into a numb, plastic-wrapper of tissue? Its amazing, because I want us to think about feeling, about pain, about pleasure and about nerve endings after we have sex- if you have time, of course. If your classmate doesn't call you to the library with notes. Will he ever understand that some people can have real lives, shaped by flesh and blood, even if they spend some seven hours everyday reading inside a library?
I'm trying to give you that life. Because I know how good you are, and you'll only self-destruct if you keep up the schedule that you've kept for yourself. One has to stay alive, apart from the ideas one engages with, or the books one reads. The real life needs to keep you alive, however sad that maybe. I know how bad, how deadening the real life can be. The real life is dirty, its full of fat uncles scratching their penis and spitting paan from their windows, its teeming with people who don't feel an iota of passion for what they do, and it can be very loathsome to pick one's way through the real, especially if one is picking it among mines which are just so petty. That life is so petty, it would be nice if we could avoid it altogether.
'Reality is a place I like to visit, once in a while'.
I've written that on the first page of one of my notebooks. But we cant escape it altogether. We cant forget that it exists, honey. We need to grapple with it, if only because we have to transcend it. And then our transcendence, our love, our art, will have more meaning. Because we will have braved not only the irritating landlords and the nagging babies, but also the fan that doesn't work, the anti-virus that fails to protect your computer, and loses your texts.

The real life can only enrich the textual life, and its not enough to just know that. Because knowing can be such a reductive, textual thing. You know that. You have known it for a long time now. Because you probably read about it in a book, or heard someone lecture. But you didn't really know it till I tickled the inside of your ears with my tongue and whispered that Saul Bellow came in his pants when he kissed his first girl. And I didn't know it either, before that afternoon. But now I know it in a way that I can never forget, in a way that has shaped my identity in an irreversible way.
If I wasn't so selfish already, I would be able to make myself happy with the knowledge that I'm saving your life. That's charitable enough, no? You letting me believe that?

Do you know that everything we know as pain is nothing essentially 'painful', that the body doesn't know anything as painful or pleasurable? What counts as pain or pleasure is only the sensation, the raw, biological impulse. Listen to me speak next time you come to see me and you'll see how it is. Its as if we're making a big deal out of what was essentially just a signal, just a tiny, micro-ampere of an electric charge, relayed on to the brain from the skin.

When you sedate yourself, like take a paracetamol or a pain-killer or smoke charras, you kill off that impulse-sending function of the nervous system. The lack of an feeling feels pleasurable because of the continual assault on the senses that we're used to experiencing everyday, each second of the day. When people go to rehab, they cry out in pain because after months of abusing their bodies, they've forgotten what pain is. They've lived in a dream, forgetting to sustain the real body that sustains the dream, and the care that this body needs. When I prick your hand with a needle and you wince, you forget to note how great a thing it is, that you can actually feel the pain. It's actually the body's first, invisible line of defence, the intimation of pain, this 'buzz' that all is not well. Only if you know that can you do something to make it right. You wince and take your hand away.
Imagine living without the skin for months and then suddenly being reminded of it. Is pain then just a reminder?
Is that how real pain is? Not something real in itself but only a deferred, secondary intimation of a deeper, more primordial reality? I refuse to believe that.

That's why I pinch your thigh everytime you're taking off your jeans. That's why I lie to you each time I see you smile.
-You look funny with those big teeth.
-really?
And I love it when you smile, because you can see from my face that I don't mean it. It is vaguely comforting that each of us hears a different lie when the same thing is spoken. We see different things in the same seven words and feel so close to each other.
At least I do.
I cannot explain why I feel pain when you're not here. And I cannot explain why I feel no pleasure even when you're here, smiling at all my stupid mistakes like my mother, when you could very well roll your eyes and say 'what the fuck?'. I shiver when you touch me because some parts of my body have a much higher concentration of nerve-endings than the rest. We can 'detonate' each others' orgasms because we know where to touch to get the maximum nerves firing electric charges to each other.
I refuse to believe in the opposite too.

Arithmetic

From P to V. From V to A. From A to K.
Distance= 38 alphabets
Displacement= 5 alphabets

Emotional distance= beyond enumeration
Emotional displacement= nil.
What do you think I'm calculating here? Love?

I want to share with you how love reduces us to a frustrating logic, a mad shuttling between the borders of everything that seems sane and worth betraying. Worth destroying.

K; 28th February '09; RGM class; Saturday

Ways of holding a pen. Are you writing, or sketching, or just doodling, trying to kill time in a boring lecture? In the last one you are like me. I have been looking at your hands, at the way your fingers curl around the Reynold's ball pen, white stem capped by a black dunce-hat.
People say desire finds its way into language from the outside, that we don't start with desire in our conscious imagination. I think your face is intriguing. I imagine your lips shying away from the prick of the long moustache on mine. I do not think that I should impose a censorship on what I write here. All censorships shall henceforth be fake, if they weren't already. Your fingers are sweet. The flesh around the joints makes them look like a child's fingers. Not like mine, which are long, bony, spindly, like an eighty-year-old woman's. The shaft of the pen looks hard; iron against the soft cushions of your flesh.
I know you will have lunch, like you will make love, like you will be angry, like you will scream, inside your head, at the person standing in front of you or cuddling you: "I hate you". What difference does it make, if I don't get to squeeze the neck of the bottle, while listening to hear you speak, looking at the hair on your neck, which is beginning to grow out, fanning out like two feminine hands with four fingers on each side, under each ear.
It doesn't matter if I cant feel nervous while looking at you speak, cowering under the strange weight of your gaze. If I did I might close my fingers tighter around the neck of the bottle, and I might remember the sight of your fingers today.
I have questions for you. If you have questions then I'm afraid I can only answer them with more questions. I have no answers that wouldn't want you to add something, to really twist and turn what I've said. I want you to wrench my words away from me, only so I can tire myself out trying to get them back. And I must fail; unerringly must I fail. The only meanings that I can create of 'love' are from 'failure'.
How do you pronounce your name? How do you want me to pronounce it? How do you utter 'us'? How do we utter 'us'? How much time do you spend in front of your mirror everyday? DO you take time to dress well? Do you care?
Are your mirrors made of glass? Can you share my mirrors? Mine have to be created before you can see anything; and you'll have to create them for yourself, on your own, before you can share mine. Will you?
I see you have filled a page with some notes; paper crackles as you drag your fingers over it to turn a leaf. You close your hands, rest your head on it; chin on knuckles.

11th January 09; red-bricks; Valentine's; She

Red brick, from the corridors.
Stillness must seep into their veins
Everyone who sits on them is waiting, bored
making the bricks sad with their weight.
the hours must leave furrows on them
like heavy metal grinding over soft rocks, marking them down.
empty rivulets of sand,
blinded to their own violation.

she cannot stop her boyfriend
she doesn't want to 'suck him off' but she doesn't want to upset him
and its Valentine's, not worth a fight.
where does the line of desire stop,
does it go far?
Dreams have time for questions
But she doesn't ask him.

She is Time
She dreams of red-bricks from the Department
They could be her lovers; they should be.
Damned to sharing it,
they cannot force intimacy on anyone.
had they resisted
they might allow their aggressor the audacity
and the category of a rapist.

Metro rides can be metaphysical too

(the incidents referred to happened about three months before the 10th of February)

What happened today? I saw your face for five minutes and I remembered my dreams. Not just the dreams i had last night; other dreams too. I thought of all the dreams I'd had of you, in the last 18 months that have passed since the first night that I dreamt of you. I made connections between the last time I met you and the last time I'd dreamt of you, and I concluded that whenever I dream of you it means that I'm going to meet you in the near future.
So, this is what? I am given a glimpse of your face, with straight copper-brown hair, sharp eyes, forehead peeping through parted curtains of hair, and my heart beats are suddenly 'audible', up from the usual 'palpable'?
I forget to think that you've reduced, lost a lot of weight in the time elapsed since our last meeting. I don't pause to think that it might've taken a real effort from you to bring about that change, and I only admire the beauty that I see in front of me. I think that is selfish. Do you think it is selfish?
To praise your behind without praising the 'you' that has attained this behind?
The image has an acidic fervour in my mind. I remember very clearly, the moment when I first recalled that image to mind. It was five minutes after you left. I shuddered. I wanted to ask you if you received the poem I sent to you sometime ago.
I wanted to tell you that if ever my novel is published I want my pseudonym to be Sujeet Mishra. Sujeet from Sujata and Mishra because that's my mother's maiden surname. I want to call you Lydia and write poems in your memory, to celebrate my longing for you.
I want to cover the pimple on your chin with my lips and suck the infection, the sick blood, out of them. I want to say, I lied to you...

About a lot more than just my dreams. I did think of you, but not in all the ways that I wrote about you. I need to dream once, to begin the journey; then I'm better, I suck on that one image, and that leads me to other things, ideas, thoughts, I travel, forgetting that image, losing myself in the metaphor, in attempts to make sense of insane amounts of beauty, to describe in the appropriate word or phrase the sublime wonder of the image. I suck on one image like the yellow pus from a ripening pimple; have you ever tasted it?

It's got hardly any taste, you know. I have tasted the little that flowed from my lips to my tongue once. Its brown. Pus is white. From the bacteria that infect the skin. But the pus that flows from a burst pimple is brown because it has blood mixed in it too. Well, if there was a lot of it, like say half a cup or one teaspoonful of it I'm sure we could all have it sampled and tasted...

But anyway, since no one is going to go from person to person, pinching their cheeks, bursting 'ripe' pimples and collecting pus in a jar, we're never going to know what it tastes like. Well, I can tell you one thing. I'm sure its salty (from the blood, I'm guessing). You must've tasted blood, I'm sure.

19th Dec 08; dream (p)

I saw you in the garden of five senses. You were kissing a boy. I didn’t see his face clearly. When I came to you, you looked at me and smiled. I asked you if you liked kissing. You said not particularly. I put my mouth to your mouth very slowly. It stayed there for a while before our lips moved.
You had my book in your hands. I didn’t ask if you were reading it, if you had got it from me, if it was the same copy that I’d last seen on my unmade bed. It was not Art and Lies. It had somehow become Storytellers and Lies, and I was frantic. I tried to burn my eyes into the cover, the red and white color of the cover page. It was still Storytellers and Lies. I thought I had misread it, so I looked at storytellers for a long time. It did not change.
The woman on the cover was you. I knew it was you from the way you scratch your head. You stick your right hand in your hair, into the top-right corner of your head, as if looking for something hidden inside the mass of hair, and then you take it out. I knew from your neck. But your neck is no different from many other necks. And you’re not sad, or lonely, or longing, with the memory of a past desire. You’re amazing. Already you’re not the woman on the cover page of the novel. And yet you are.
What are you doing?
I screamed. I tried to explain but I failed. I always fail. I want to feel that I too love. That even if I’m lonely I’m not sans love. But you believe that love is spontaneous, that it should involve a real other person, not an imagined person. It shouldn’t be a figment of imagination. I wanted you to understand; to exert, to act with an imaginative will. This too is love, I told you. If it isn’t I will lose myself to the nameless, faceless crowd that says something and does something else.
You asked if it was real, if I had gone through all the things that I wrote about. If I had indeed got beaten up in Arts Faculty, if I’d had sex with a cousin. I told you it was and it wasn’t. I wanted to ask you if you’ve ever had sex in a hurry, if you’ve ever known what it is to have sex without the luxury of time, without the otiose pleasure of exploring another person’s body. I was thinking about it, and I wanted to tell you that it changes our very idea of sex, and how much we’re the poorer for this lack, because the luxury of both time and space allowed us an experience that is extremely fragile in its articulacy.
You looked puzzled; maybe you were. You gave a confused, unsure smile, and said, what do you mean?

19th December 08; letters

Why do you feel embarrassed about yourself? I know it scares you, even if you wont admit it, not even to yourself, in the solitude of your heart. I see you tremble, when you're speaking about some song you like, and I see your mouth move but no words come out, even if its over in a small fraction of a second.
There are many annoying things I can come up with, but today I want to waste our time with this: its alright. Dont think too much. People do that all the time anyway. And it doesnt make them any happier. if it does anything, it brings them home to a larger uselessness, a bigger maze of which their lives are merely a part. And thinking only alienates you, drives you to the deepest centre, in a spiral of concentric jigsaw puzzles, with all the pieces mixed up, because to think is to imagine a larger, more hungry circle around you, and it goes on, till you're trapped inside a Russian doll maze.
I contemplate rape, murder, and many other things on a regular basis. It doesnt embarrass me. I am not half as lonely as you are, as you are going to be. Because seeing all the people around you only drives you further into your shells. The more friends you have, the more orkut profiles, facebook profiles, the more you want to blog, to prolong another micronarrative of love, loss, suffering, hope, joy, pain and existential crises, a micronarrative that noone is going to read. It should fuck your mind like an eighty-year old nun raped by soldiers. Why?
Why does your story not have more humanity than War and Peace? Have you considered it for a little more than two seconds before discarding it to the debris of canonization debates? Have you wondered what motivates old people to write bad poetry, read it loudly and have it admired by young men and women who will go out and bitch about them? Why can you not say to the woman you're thinking of while you write this, that she is really one of the most beautiful women in the whole world? Can you not explain to her that every woman is beautiful, but you saw her in a way that moved you to say this to her, to utter her, to make her a burning image in your narrative of loss? Well, the measure of love is always loss.
Or so Jeanette Winterson says.

class notes; 2

P.
I am not very clear about the reason why I feel compelled to call this piece of unsolicited melodrama ‘class notes’, though I am clear that I do feel compelled. However, if I am forced to be as lucid as humanly possible, I would say the reasons are obscure. Obscure because this has no similarity to the entry titled ‘class notes’, apart from the purely formal ones.

I don’t hope that you will ever read this. Not even that you will ever get to know of this, the fact of I having written something like this. It is a vaguely comforting thought. But the fact- the purely empirical reality (remember empiricists? Social-contract theory? anyway)- of the matter is that your presence is more than a nagging doubt. It has festered on me, grown, metamorphosed, as surely as I have drawn breath, and now it is quite chronic. I know that there is nothing to be done, that I should just shut up, stop whining and get on with life, but it has proven so impossibly difficult that I haven’t had the courage to even begin the arduous and complicated sequence of compromises that might lead up to forgetting you.
It doesn’t help at all to know that even here I am selfish, only bothered with my own problems, not you, the other. My dilemma, my existential crisis (that’s bullshit, I know, before you roll your eyes, but that’s part of my point here), and my tragedy (if I’m to call it that), even if it concerns the utterance of “I love you”. The height of pretense! Tragedy? In the saying of three words?
Trying to be accurate about that detail doesn’t lessen the problem. I hope that by at least anticipating you I bring you into my words, my lament. Each word I write embodies a realist nostalgia for the impossible.
I’ve dreamt of you in so many different ways, sometimes I’m scared I’ll be tongue-tied when I’m talking to you, if you do or say something exactly as I’ve imagined you. If I told you that you are important for me because when I think of you and try to think what exactly it is that I feel for you, it disturbs me, how would you rate me? That your presence is necessary to foreground my tragedy, a tragedy that is born in the way we use language. I am not ashamed to know that thinking about you in this way might amount to a reduction of both you and me.
I need illusions, lies, to believe in. I am using you, if only to re-affirm my faith in life, in love. I am highlighting the violence, the pain and the cruelty, inherent in the very idea of “love” as we see it, because for a long time now, all I have been seeing is that. And I am tired. I feel like giving up.
By trying to tell you this I am groping for a few strands of redemption. If I can explain clearly to you how much I think of you as the “good” and the “hopeful” and the “positive” in my life, I think I can get away with being selfish and masturbatory. I am adamant in my belief that you know about narcissism, love and the narcissism of love, and that you will “understand”. Not even you yourself can shake me from that belief, I think.

Even if I can safely claim to “love” you or to be in a state of “love” with you, I will be happy, without any actual consummation of this passion. Precisely because of that lack. What began in theory must end in theory; it must not use praxis and discard it, merely to produce an act of knowledge, an inscription, ink-stains, words on text. It must remain an utterance. Can you utter me, without calling me, or saying my name? Can you scream an inchoate scream, as if in a dream? I’m asking you to scream without speaking, for me. Not because I don’t realize how big a deal it is; the audacity of the sign is born out of its very being. It doesn’t take guts; it came naturally; I just am.
It’s not that what I’m saying to you is the most important thing in the world. It’s that nothing else is. I can utter you. No, that’s not it. I can utter us.
Well, at least you can try this with your lover(s); in the future, in the present, whenever you want to. And you can also make fun of the crazy bugger who thought about a lot of big things but was too shy to even talk to you properly.
A

chronices; 2

He thinks about the way she shook her head, to clear the two or three strands of hair that had strayed into her left eye. He looks for that movement all around him, in the library, the canteen, in cars, bars, movie halls, at home. It is a leit motif, a rhythm; he filters the world through it. The dull, heavy drone of existence that he hears, all the time he spends alone, intimates it's emptiness to him. He can impose patterns on the shapeless, tuneless drone. The first three or four times the beat he is hearing is completely out of tune with the song he is going over in his head. Then things get better. Finally he makes it match the rhythm of With or without You. He slowly nods, while walking the coffee shop to the library, while lazily scribbling notes from books he cannot issue from the library. He doesn't miss his iPOD. He misses her. He cannot see her in all the women who shake the hair away from their eyes. He has named her Ruby Tuesday, because that's the song he filters out of the noises that he is taking in, whether it is the staff in the English Dept lab, (or the professors), professors lecturing, class-mates laughing.
Good bye Ruby Tuesday...

It isn’t love at first sight. It was, if he allows himself the emotional excess of it, love.
Ugh. Ugggghhh.
It is as if someone just cut out the main artery, the aorta, put it in his hand, and closed his fingers around it. The blood gushing out, in spasmodic jerks, spilling over his clothes and his notebook, annoys him. The artery is a slippery tube, oozing an excess of life. That’s how he defines it, an excess of emotion. “I love you”.
Not controlled, hence not powerful. Not disciplined, hence not neat.
He avoids talking to her when there is no one else with them. He tries to, but his words are beyond his control.
Why, he thinks, why do I have to tell her that I’m lonely? She knows. Well, it should be her problem even if she doesn’t. She sees me everyday, she can figure it out herself
It doesn’t help. He excuses himself from the company of four girls. In the toilet he stands in front of the mirror. He is in a dramatic mood. Moving his hands, as if he were lecturing, he tells himself: control is paramount. You have to control yourself. Talk about other things, dude. Books, movies, whatever. Why yourself?

letters; 3

21st Nov. ’08 Friday.
P,
(actually S, but you can wait till I finish to psychoanalyze me)
I love you.
I’m trying to come closer to you, closer to the words I speak and write. I am struggling to shake off the fetters that quotation marks coil around me. I’m trying, finally, desperately, to belong, to the words that seem to carry me to you. I’m doing this because I don’t want to add “for want of a better word” after “I belong to you”.
It frustrates me, because beyond a limit, I cannot zoom-in anymore. Cant dig deeper, cant go any more micro on life. The magnification of any one single detail to its minute degree frustrates me, because it is infected by the censorship I am compelled to impose, by the enforced blindness to other things. When I come within touching distance of “I love you”, it is all I see. It is all I see, and yet it is all I do not see, because it is no longer “I love you” as I knew it. It is not I, a 20-year old man articulating an excess of emotion, for a woman. It reduces itself, in the act of opening up its lacunae, to 3 words of English, inscriptions, stains on paper. I don’t want it to be an empty signifier, an “irresponsible utterance”. It could mean so much more than what I intend it to mean. It’s a terrifying thought. It’s a comforting thought. The excess of emotion can be scary, retrospectively, if not immediately now. Besides, even if it is an excess(and therefore supposed to be embarrassing), I want to claim it for myself.
I’m torn, between your skin and the words that dissolved on it; between the tips of the fingers you ran across my face and the images, the sounds that spring to my mind when I wake up in a cold sweat, feeling around myself, among the books, the dust, the papers, and plastic wrappers on my bed. I look for you. I look for the sounds of your sleeping, the warmth of your presence, your body exhaling a reassurance. I am not reassured.
Love
A
(or whatever else you can come up with)
P.S: I missed you.

letters; 2

S
He is alone. I feel strange, for the almost absurd sympathy that rises in my heart like a tidal wave, for him. He is a brother, a lover, a mother, and a father. He told me he has 40 books on his bed. There are 147 books on the rack in his room. Apart from that, there are seven books in his bag, and three books in his hand right now. He doesn't have more than 3 hours each day to read books. Apart from books, clothes and a computer he has little else, by way of possessions. There are about 50 girls in his class. Out of that figure, there are more than 40 whom he has never talked to, and the future doesn't appear very promising. He dreams of women, and of books. Sometimes the categories are not so clear. Should we do something? Should we write to him? Tell him something, maybe?
I miss you so much.
XOXOX.
Hugs, and the wettest kiss of your life. (doesn't mean it will have to be the longest)
Love,
A

letters; 1

S
Do your hands ever tremble when you type in your username and password before you open your gmail inbox? When I see you sitting in class, I wonder, do you get anxious about ex-lovers sending you cryptic, existential e-mails? Sad, almost lyrical letters full of arrogance, nostalgia and absurdity? I would never stop writing you letters like that, if I was one of your ex-es. I would love to imagine your face, as you type in your username and password, the anxiety making your wrist tremble ever so slightly. My fingers dont tremble anymore.
See, suddenly I want to be your ex-lover. Not lover. Suffixed by the all-important ex. I'm used to luxury. Feel free to say yes, even if it means you have to make me an object of charity. I see you, and I wonder if you spend time dressing up everyday. Do you?
I remember the days when you come to class with your hair tied. Its a vaguely comforting thought, that very few women feel the way I do, about you today. Your clothes must not remain crumpled near the foot of the bed, when you give yourself up to love, or whatever else you call it between yourselves. You clothes deserve to be held with more respect, they carry something very valuable. They hold your body. They make you desirable. Where would we go, without clothes, without the erotic allure of nylon bra-straps, panties, negligees, buttons?
I think its fashionable to sign with just the first letter of my name. I think it started with Kafka. I was reading letters one day in the library. I read Virginia Woolf's letters, letters between Yeats and Maud Gonne, and I read letters between Kafka and Felice. Everyone signed their names, except for Kafka. He's got this sexy K. Franz K. Sometimes, I wonder why he doesnt sign F. Of course, I'm not unaware of the many 'K's.
When I talk to you in my room I speak the most beautiful, the most articulate lines. Very few people can boast of writing lines like that. And yet, when you're with me, Im tongue-tied. In the afternoons, after I've dumped my bag and books on the bed, my shoes on the floor, and my shirt and jeans on the chair, I sit down in front of my computer, put on a playlist I've saved as "mood" and start to write something. After writing for half an hour, I start to dream. I believe I can see the future sometimes.
I hold my head in my right hand, take off my glasses, run my left hand through my hair and sigh, "Oh S_____..." Those moments are really magnified. Time slows down, and movements feel small and ineffective. If I say "I love you" I tremble. I try not to say it. It drives all other thoughts from my mind, stopping all work for some time. Even here, I cannot recreate the beauty, the clarity, and the almost pearl-white innocence that my lines have, when I'm speaking to you, when you're not there with me.
Love
A

chronicles; 1

He hates the way Yash dresses. Skinny jeans, jacket, wannabe Adidas slippers. He has always been conscious of the way he dresses, even if it has merely been a conscious effort to not dress like people he hates. He was wearing what he wore almost everyday, a striped shirt, with the sleeves rolled till under the elbows, and blue jeans.





The blow catches the corner of his upper lip, to the right, and splits it. He feels a warm trickle of blood, reaching his skin through the thin layer of stubble. He hears his jaw-bone rattle against the knuckles of the boy’s fist and waits for the pain to come, in waves; after the initial shock of contact has sunk in, he tells himself, the blood will resume its normal course, carrying home the pain, the awareness.
He had managed to block the first two punches with his hands, but when the blows started to come from all directions he couldn’t keep up. He is grinding his teeth, clenching his jaw harder, trying to divert the pain elsewhere.
The second boy punches him in the stomach. The third jabs a knee at his back. He staggers, but stays on his feet. They are laughing, calling him names. Hyenas, he tells himself. Cant come alone.
Another jarring blow. He opens and closes his mouth, stretching his jaw, testing it. Nothing broken.
-Come on, fighter!
-Ladies come closer, Im the Casanova!
Jeers. Laughter.
He spits blood, holding on to the railing to support himself. The inside of his cheek has grazed against his teeth. He feels for the gash with his tongue, finds it, and caresses it. He makes a mental note to take his tongue in before he gets punched again.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about the scene. Four young men having a violent argument in the corridor of the English Department. An argument that turned violent.
The next punch is on his nose. He goes on a sneezing spree. Each sneeze shakes him. He has no control. In an overpowering seizure, he spews water from his nose, mouth, eyes. He splatters phlegm on his hands. He fumbles for his handkerchief, to stop the phlegm from dirtying his shirt, but as he is taking it out of the back-pocket of his jeans one of the boys shakes his hand and it falls to the ground. As he tries to bend and recover it, the boys kick it away. He sneezes into his cupped hands and wipes them on the back of his jeans. But it isn’t enough, and he is forced to smear a lot of it on his shirt. He looks at the handkerchief, beyond his reach, and at the yellow stain on his shirt, thinking of the time he would have to spend washing it the next morning, squatting in the bathroom, before bathing, hurrying, trying not to get late for class.
Is this the Absurd? It must be.
Reality grips his head once again, holds it with both hands and shakes it thoroughly. Someone slaps his head from the back. He lashes out with his hand, but only grasps air.

As the boy comes forward, he raises his hands, prepares to block. But the boy doesn’t come. They do not move. He stands, bent over, breathing heavily. He senses that something is expected of him. It is an opportunity.
To fight back, throw a punch or two.
He clenches his fist, calculates time, height and prepares to throw all his weight behind his right arm. He lunges towards Yash. Something tells him he shouldn’t have. It is too late.
Someone trips him. He sees the floor rise, inching closer to his face, and closes his eyes.
The tiles are clean, and the white light shining on the tiles has a sanitizing effect on his senses. The leather boots one of the boys is wearing has a two-inch thick sole. It could easily crush his little finger, fracture it beyond repair, should he choose to.

He reminds himself to be angry at them, for he fears the pain on his face might force a tear-drop to leak out of his eyes. He is secretly considering himself lucky because they are three and he is one. It would’ve been slightly embarrassing to get beaten up by just one person.
Cowards, the lot of them.
He can almost hear the scorn in his voice as he recounts this incident to someone. His strength has not been tested today. The first physical fight of his adult life has been a fight in which he got punched and kicked by three hooligans and he couldn’t do anything. Of course he couldn’t do anything. How could he? He was out-numbered.
Should I get up? Maybe they’ll leave if I don’t get up.
Yash nudges him with his foot.
-Get up, asshole.
-Yash, wait wait…check this out man.
He feigns a woman’s voice.
-Get up shona…Get up na baeby…
The three laugh loudly. A crazy, maniacal laugh that again brings hyenas to his mind. The noise comes to him like an empty polythene bag blowing incessantly in the wind. Another nudge on his side. This one hurts, and he cannot help but flinch. He makes an attempt to get up, pretends he lacks the strength to pull himself up, gives up, falls back on the floor.
That should do.
A drop of spit leaks from his slack lower lip. It hangs on the edge for three seconds before dropping to the ground. As it rolls off his mouth, the drop tickles his lip. He resists the attempt to close his lip and pull back the drool of spittle, which is accumulating in a widening pool. An image from Ripley’s Believe it or Not comes to his mind. He remembers reading it there that the human body generates (approximately) a couple of million litres of saliva each year. It is vaguely reassuring.
The two boys in leather-jackets drag him into a corner, and leave him there, slumped against the wall behind the water cooler near the English Department.

-Don’t get smart again, alright Mr. Casanova?
-Yeeeaaaahhhhh baby. Or we’ll leave you with a real cut. And next time we probably wont come empty handed.

It is seven in the evening, and dark already. He waits for them to leave the building, and then makes the first effort, moves his first muscle. His hand trembles as he brings it up, to examine the wound on his face. Suddenly his entire body is aching. Particularly painful are his thighs, his back, and his face.
Why, why didn’t you ever get into fights in your neighbourhood?

When he tries to get up, on the first attempt he really fails. His thighs quiver so much he fears they might give way. Using the cooler as support he pulls himself up and staggers to the toilet, where he examines himself in the mirror. He slides his hand under his shirt to examine his stomach. It doesn’t hurt a lot. There are scratches on his ribs (he can see them), which he attributes to the thick sole of the boys’ shoe. His nose is red and sore, and cleaning it proves painful. Then he tries to stretch and flex all the muscles carefully. His back hurts if he tries to rotate his head, his shoulder blades hurt if he raises his hands, and his face has an ugly black scar. The small cut has dried and hardened, the skin around it swollen and black. He likes the rough, brown mark left by the dried blood, just under the cut. He loves the texture of it, the way it feels when he rubs his index finger over it, like imitation silk. He scratches it with his nail, and it falls off, in small flakes of a reddish-brown hue.
Well, now I know how it feels. Now I won’t be scared of getting into a fight. Or will I?

He splashes cold water on his face, flinching and gasping each time the water hits the wound. Wiping the slight stain of blood that stayed below the cut on his lip, he feels pride. There goes my blood, the blood of a young man, that was bled on this chilly November evening. He shakes his face after closing off the water and looks at himself. He scowls. Then he growls. Bares his teeth.
Right. You’re such a girl.

He is amazed that he actually nodded vigorously when he said right.

After sitting on the stairs for five minutes he gets up to walk back home. Maybe not walk back all the way, maybe he will take a rickshaw. He sees people coming out of a class. One of the girls catches his eyes. Before he can be sure who she is, the colour of her scarf has taken him back in time, two years and counting. But the girl of his memory is more than two thousand kilometers away. This is Sujata, a girl in the M. Phil class, two years his senior. He has fallen in love with her every time he has seen her, but has not been brave enough to speak with her for more than two minutes, telling himself to forget about it, forcing himself to believe that nothing is going to come of it. But then again, she isn’t the only girl about whom he feels this way.


The beating has infused fresh courage in him. He positions himself on the railing in such a way that she will pass him by as she walks out. She is alone, and she doesn’t see him sitting. It is dark, and there are no lights in the corridors. Clearly, evening classes weren’t a part of the plan when the building was originally designed. She keeps walking straight. As she crosses him he lets go. He is not prepared for her reaction, and since the look that she passes him is one of alarm, he looks down at his watch.
-Hi.
-God, you scared me. Hey… How are you?
Only as she finishes speaking the last word does her mouth begin to curl into a smile, widening slowly.
You have scared her.
She acts more scared than she actually is. She keeps her right hand against her chest, the flat area below her neck. Her delicate fingers spread out like a four-petalled flower against the equally fair skin on her chest. The neck of her sweatshirt is wide, and he cannot see collar-bones. He smiles.
-Fine. You had class?
-Yes. And a presentation.
Something does not feel right. Her smile is too overpowering. What is it? Must be her eyes. They’re big, like a child’s, curious and excited. But the smile is slowly fading, almost gone by now.
-What’s wrong with your face?
-Oh, nothing. I just um… fell from the stairs, you know, like one whole flight of stairs, I went rolling down. Cut my face. Nothing too bad. I was just going to eat something, and I thought I’d wait for you. You’re not going to run off, are you?


They start to walk together, and he is relieved because this way he doesn’t have to look at her. She is about nine inches shorter than him. He tries to shut out from his head an image of her moaning and digging her nails into his back. He has to clench his fist, nails digging into his palm.
-No no, I’ll stay for a while. I’m hungry too. Starving, in fact.
-In that case, we can talk.
-Ya… But then, couldn’t we anyway? Anyway, where do you want to go? I say Law Faculty.
-Good for me.
As they walk down the first flight of stairs, he sees her classmates gathered around, some chatting, others smoking. He feels embarrassed for being himself. Self-conscious to the point of trembling, he decides to embrace the source of his nervousness.
-Sujata?
She turns to face him. He jumps into the open doors of her gaze, and he doesn’t want her to smile, even to say hi to any of her friends, for the time that she is with him. He feels an overpowering desire to violently kiss her, to squeeze her shoulders, press himself to her, possibly make love right there, in front of her friends.
Alright, I’m fine.
-I didn’t fall. Someone punched me.
-What???
-What what? Don’t be so shocked. Three boys came and kind of punched and kicked me.
-Right, and why did they beat you up?
-It’s a long story.
-…well?
-One of them is my ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend. And I said something to her. That’s really mature behavior, no? But its ok. I should’ve known better. He was always an asshole.
She smiles and waves to a man in the crowd.
He is in love with her name. He wants to stop doing everything else and just speak her name, Sujata, Su-jata, Su-jaaa-taa, Suu-jata, over and over again, like an infant sucking on his thumb.
-You don’t look like the kind of guy who’d do such things, but anyway. You can tell me more over food.
-Sure. It’s a nice name for a short story, no? We could discuss ways of avoiding suicide over coffee. In quotes. Ways of avoiding suicide over coffe.


They are sitting in the Law Faculty canteen. He has got two cups of tea and one plate of Maggi. He goes out, desperately in need of some ice to put against the cut. Not finding any outside, he asks the Nescafe guy to give him a couple of ice cubes. He wraps them in a poly bag and comes to sit with Sujata, loving the ice pack on his face. He thinks something horrible is going to happen soon, since things are looking too good for him.
-So, tell me, how did you get this cut?
Oh ya…Something horrible has already happened.
-There were three guys, and I didn’t stand a chance.
-of course, but where did this happen? In the department?
-Yes, I normally stay here till the office closes. I sit in the lab and use the internet, just writing things on my blog and reading random stuff. Today the office was open till 6:40, so I stuck around. I came out, and these guys were waiting for me.
-But this is not right, no? I mean, shouldn’t we do something? Tell someone about it?
He pushes the Maggie towards her. She picks up the plastic fork and pokes it around, letting wafts of steam escape from inside the yellow mass of food.


-No, please. I’m not telling anyone about it. You can make something up if you want.
-oh look at you. Stop being the man. Besides, girls in your class might even like it. You look like the innocent baby who’d get beaten up.
She speaks this tenderly. The smile with which she meets his gaze is warm, almost maternal. He is not comfortable. He picks up his cup of tea and blows at it.
-So what did you tell her to earn this cut?
-Nothing. She’d called me some days ago. She wants help with some English paper in her course. I told her I’d be happy to help her if she agreed to sleep with me. I thought she would appreciate the honesty, that I cut the crap, got to the bone of it, but I realized that what I call crap means so much more to her. Its everything in fact.


She laughs, throwing her head back and opening her mouth, a loud and full-throated laugh. He waits for the laugh to end, listens to her voice change its tone as the laugh dies away and she is about to begin normal conversation. He tries to catch the precise moment of change, and when he hears it he wants to tell her that she sounds very funny. He doesn’t.


-Its not possible, you know. Noone is that open, that free of pretense. Maybe you can afford it but people have to live through it all. This is India, dude. You’ve got the great bourgeoise morality hurdle to jump over.
-I see through it all, and when the loneliness gets too much I begin to long for those sickening illusions, like a short-term, masturbatory thing. Its extremely selfish.
-I know.

-you do?

-I-
Her phone rings. She gets up, walks a little distance away and starts talking. He catches fragments of her voice from a distance. He wants to know what she’s saying.


…yes…I’m done with my classes… have talked to her… no no…canteen… Varun had called… should drop me… 10:25… four Brecht classes… I have a copy of Sexual Dissidence… No way!!...


Varun? Boyfriend? Must be.
She comes back, smiling.
-Do you ever feel absurd about the need to smile all the time? Isnt it just a part of the whole pompous farce that civilization demands of us?
-Don’t begin to question everything. You wont get anywhere.
-If I don’t smile, and if I don’t talk the usual polite things, and I just walk up to you and tell you that all I want is some fluid exchange, but that the politics of the situation demand a veneer of pretense, however irritiating that maybe, how will you react?
-I’ll tell you to get real, honey.

part 7

On my way back home, I noticed there was a traffic jam, and a rickshaw-wallah was struggling to pull his rickshaw in the middle of all the snarls and smoke and heat. The rickshaw’s back half was replaced with a flat board, and on it were sealed cartons, piled in a big heap. He was pulling it with all his strength, but it wasn’t fast enough, and the cars behind him honked and cursed. One Innova hit the flat board on the back of the rickshaw, and one of the cartons fell off. He ran to collect it. The three men in the Innova laughed.
Why does he do it? Surely he must’ve thought of leaving it all, leaving this rickshaw in the middle of the road, and going off to smoke, to let the world curse him and shout at him? What motivates him? He must have a wife and kids to feed. Back home in maybe Bihar or Jharkhand or Orissa. I wonder how many of the things that I’m using right now were transported in this way.

At home, I kept the call number of the Library book and this picture in my diary, next to the poem I wrote for her, the bad poem. And I wrote, on the next page:

S,
15th February, ’08. A day in the library.
I wonder if quotation marks are like those moments when you’re woken from your dreams, the moments between nostalgia and oblivion. Because, it is an attempt to look closely, to stare hard, to keep the prism at less than an inch away from the eye, so that the stains and finger-prints on the surface show up, as might the dream landscape between the soles of our shoes and the ground underfoot. It is the gap between the word “mnemonic” and memory itself, and the pleasure and intimacy of that gap is garrulous. Garrulous, if only because one of the things it glosses over is the pain, and the inscrutability of unpayable debts. To write, to exist, is to be unfaithful. Because the impossibility of drawing up a complete list of “Works Cited” is hardly the worst thing one has to deal with, if one is to write. What about the debts to rickshaw-wallahs? To maid-servants? To friends? Lovers? How can you pay them off when you don’t even understand why they make the sacrifice in the first place?
So should we understand that it’s not important to just ask the right questions? Is it more important to know if we’re looking close enough? And that nothing can help us know for sure if we’re too close to the lens or too close to ourselves, when we’re in love, when we read, when we reminisce? I am not missing you, merely letting you know the fact of your absence from my memory, and an absurd nostalgia for the times when I was weak enough to miss you.
Love,
N. (or whatever else you can come up with)
XOXOX

Works Cited in this story:

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Vintage, 2002. pp 18
Iglesias, Enrique. “Love to See You Cry”. Escape. Interscope, 2002.
Five for Fighting ft. John Ondrasik. “Something About You”. America Town. Sony Music, 2000.
www.aruneyefoucault.blogspot.com/poetry
Bono, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. “With or Without You”. Joshua Tree. Universal Music International. 1987
“Hansel And Gretel”. Children’s Stories. New Delhi: Jaico Books, 1996
Bono. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. “Stuck in a moment you cant get out of”, All That You Cant Leave Behind. Universal Music International 2000.
Bed And Board. Original French title Domicile Conjugal. Dir. Francois Truffaut. Perf. Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claude Jade. 1970. DVD: Criterion, 2003.
Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster. 1973
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. pp 214-5


Works Cited in the novel:
1. Pamuk, Orhan. “To Look out the Window”. Other Colours: Essays and a Story.New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. pp-391
2. Dostoevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Jessie Coulson. third ed. New York: Norton, 1989. pp-102
3. Coetzee, JM. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999. pp-26
4. Coetzee, JM. The Master of Petersburg. London: Vintage, 1994. Pp-9
5. Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for lost lovers. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. pp-132
6. Coetzee, JM. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999. pp-4
7. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. pp 184.
8. Ghosh, Amitav. The Hungry Tide. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2004. pp-342
9. Coetzee, JM. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999. pp-49
10. Coetzee, JM. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999. pp-45
11. Kundera, Milan. Life is Elsewhere. London: Faber pp-88
12. (ibid). pp 90
13. Coetzee, JM. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 1999. pp-5
14. Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for lost lovers. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. pp-198
15. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of A Death Foretold. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. pp-60
16. Mahapatra, Aruni. “Rainbows on your Navel”. unpublished work
17. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Kalyani Publishers: New Delhi, [1998]. pp 258-9
18. Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for lost lovers. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. pp-198
19. Gordimer, Nadine. My Son’s Story. New Delhi: Doaba Publications, 2002. pp 49

20. Aslam, Nadeem. Maps for lost lovers. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. pp 198
21. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. pp 184.
22. Cohen, Leonard. “Famous Blue Raincoat”. The Best of Leonard Cohen.
23. Coetzee, JM. Youth. London: Vintage, 2002. pp 3
24. Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying . London: Secker and Warburg,1940. pp 1
25. Coetzee, JM. Youth. London: Vintage, 2002. pp 3-4.
26. Coetzee, JM. The Master of Petersburg. London: Vintage, 1994. pp 250
27. “thinks”. The Collins Cobuild Advanced Learners English Dictionary. 4th ed. 2003. pp 1505
28. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Trans. Jessie Coulson. London: Penguin, 1972. pp 1
29. Coetzee, JM. The Life and Times of Michael K. London: Vintage, 1983. pp 124
30. Althusser, Louis. The Future Lasts Forever.Abacus Books. pp 234
31. Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. London: John Calder, 1977. pp 1
32. Bradbury, Malcolm. “Fyodor Dostoyevsky”, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers. New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, 1989. pp 30
33. Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book. Trans. Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. pp 461.

part 6

Even after realizing the impossibility of sustaining an entire book like this I kept at it for a few more pages, before giving up the idea completely. It became impossible to stop, and everything I read seemed to have something, a line or phrase that I could fit in. I was screening out the whole world for usable lines, through this lens. Every morning after I woke up I opened my computer and sat down, editing my piece and adding more lines, citing more sources. With time, I came home to the impossibility of having one grand text to which I could trace everything back, to have the last say on my condition. That text wouldn’t exist, because every morning I would get up wanting to change it, and I was never satisfied. I couldn’t have the book that came closest to being me, simply because the ‘I’ changed every second. Just to be more authentic, I had to write my own lines, lines that I myself wouldn’t believe in, some years later. I sold my soul to write my book, to produce an image of myself that was not mine, to preserve a part of myself in static paper. I ensured longevity through permanence, rather than performativity. I fell back on my own lines, with the illusion of originality, the blindness to unconscious, inevitable plagiarism.

Normalcy reared its ugly head. I was still trying to impose coherence on an alien vastness. A mistress to metaphysics. What I called chaos was order, and naming it chaos wouldn’t change it. In merely surviving I had celebrated my survival, written things, lied, cheated, been unfaithful.
Coetzee wrote about Michael K, Dostoyevsky wrote about Raskolnikov. They didn’t become those people. Or am I being too reductive?
I had believed in the promise of words, having had my promises with people broken. I had believed I could belong. It didn’t feel good.

When I think of Natasha, and the fact that I long to hear her voice, I want to thank her, for letting me know that nostalgia is one of the myriad forms that narcissism comes in. I feel no shame as I realize that one of the most vivid images I have of her, she half-smiling with two or three strands of hair matted across her cheek, wet with the sweat of love-making, is an image that I recall with alacrity because it seemed to flow naturally from the sequence of images that stayed with me after reading Love in the Time of Cholera.

I was sitting in the library one morning, telling myself to stop being pretentious because for the past three days my life resembled that of Murphy (of Murphy), when I saw Natasha. My head began to swim at the precise moment when she entered the reading hall.
What is she doing in the library? Must have just come with her father, he reads some fiction. But she doesn’t know I come here. She must have heard from someone.
She kept a thick volume on my desk, looked at me, half-smiled, and said: open it.
It was wrapped in a pink cover. Opening it, I saw a leather spine that read Antonio Gramsci: The Prison Notebooks.
I had thought of this for so long, I did not know which line to say, to thank to her, since I had made up so many. Before I could pick one, I heard her again: open the book.
The first page said: With love, from your mother.
I moved my head to look up to her, thinking of saying that if one read my manuscripts, he might easily call them prison notebooks too, when a blinding white light caught me in the eye. It was 4:43 in the morning, the tube-light in my room was on, and in moving my head up I had knocked The Kristeva Reader off the bed. The dull thud had woken me. Often when I turn in my sleep at night, I feel the spines of books bump against my face, thighs and legs. I would have tried to lose her memory in pages of books, books that I seem to possess and impose my will on, books that occupy half my bed, had I not realized, very early on, that even in these affairs I couldn’t always dictate terms.

The next day I went to the library and typed in “Gramsci” in the OPAC system. I found the prison notebooks, took the call number, and went inside. I asked the man who arranged books:
-Where is the book R3xM17v,1 ?
I showed him the paper where I’d scribbled it. He showed me the book. It was a paperback in white and red color, and in good shape. No torn covers, no frayed edges, no dog-eared corners. Somehow, I didn’t like it.
-This is the book you wanted, right?
-Yes, yes, thanks a lot.
He left.
It was not a reference book. I could issue it. But I stood there, thinking whether to take it or not. The man walked past me again. Seeing the book still in my hand, he said:
If you’re not taking it, keep it back in its place. People mix up the books and they get lost.
-Yes, I’ll do that.
I didn’t say, yes, people do mix up books.
I kept it and left the library. I walked to the Bungalow Road, to Sharma Bookshop. Squeezing past the crowd of under-grad students I made it to the counter. The woman there knows me by face. I’ve always liked her for her voice, but sometimes, when she wears a saree, I think she looks stunning. She has a voice of warm milk and honey. That day she was wearing an organdy hair-band on her head, and a black bindi on her forehead. The green kurta she was wearing had three flowers embroidered on one side, near the hips. Each had five petals and a circular hole in the middle. The biggest flower had a stem and two leaves.
The black bed-spread in my room has flowers like that.
She gave a small smile. I nodded.
She’s married. Where’s the sindoor on her head?
-Gramsci, the Prison Notebooks?
-Yes. One second. Yes.
There it is.
As she gave it to me I let my index finger brush her thumb. I loved the book. It was a hard-back, and the pages were rough, with little microscopic pores, and the smell of print was fresh. The sticker at the back said: £14.99.
-how much is it for?
She took the book from me, looked at the sticker and consulted an attendant.
-Its 15 pounds, so… it’ll come to around a thousand rupees. After discount.
-it’s too expensive.
-Then take this. This discusses all of his texts. And it’s affordable.
She kept a Routledge Critical Thinkers Antonio Gramsci in front of me. It was my turn to smile. I wished she wore less make-up on her face, and less jewellery on her neck and ears.
Really? So you can ask her out for coffee, right?
-Uh…No… I just wanted the notebooks. But it’s alright. Can I have a look at it again?
-Sure.
I took out my phone and, pretending to read a text, took a picture of the first page. I got her waist and hands in the picture too.
Flower-woman and Gramsci. Nice.

part 5

Each word, each second, was like falling in love all over again. To pick one word from the million others was to lay myself open to rejection. It seemed to demand of me a reckless abandon, to be seventeen, vulnerable and eager. Because of the demand each word made of me, that I forget the infinite meanings it could have for different people, and pick it up, string it in a line of beads threading a rosary, thinking only of the three or four meanings I had known it to have, it felt like a silent proposition; like the nervous “Hi” coming from a girl who wanted to talk to me but wasn’t sure how to approach me in the reading room; a whisper.

Words…
Like the buttons on our clothes, the last two at the end that we’re too careless to undo while undressing before love, they stare at us, silently learning a secret tongue of their own, threatening us with a unpredictable infidelity, almost unthinkable an autonomy. Its an autonomy that is radical because its literal, something you cannot prepare yourself against, by thinking it before-hand, cannot contain simply by out-knowing it. Who knows who will read your words, and how, once they’re left inert on a text, on a static piece of paper? Yes, we both made promises to each other, but are there any worth keeping? Do people always secretly remember the things they said and wrote in love, believing, that if we can’t own people, we can at least own words?
We can only live, and love, and betray; we can only know that some images, some metaphors feel good, like a two-line poem by Ezra Pound, like the touch of her thigh, and the tightening of a tendon on the inside of her thigh, but isn’t that too reckless?

To make the distinction between the rustle of a dress sliding off her stomach and the rustle of page against page is a task of the readers, the voyeurs and the gossip-mongers, not lovers, and not the writer. We are Hamlets all, and we should want to murder any one who tries to know the heart of our mystery. The tactile pleasure of a book can be orgasmic indeed.

I wrote passages randomly, and planned to fit them in later. I thought of beginning my novel with a passage that had the last lines of novels and ending it with a passage of first lines.
The opening passage read thus:

Down in the street, everything−the dark stones along the avenue, the car lights, the little empty space in the middle where the traffic policemen stood, the wet cobblestones, the letters on the advertising boards that hung from the trees−everything was lonely and sad1. “I don’t think I’m delirious” he thought, “it seems real enough...”2
In his arms she sobs miserably3.
[S]he is crying freely, [her] nose is streaming4.
She lets go but not before a tear drop the size of a pear seed has fallen audibly on the paper. It was the first sound you heard upon coming into this world; women- screaming, cooing, reassuring, out of control, in charge, shouting in pain, in pleasure, laughing, sobbing. [He] sometimes feels that to come to this old neighbourhood… is like entering one large labour room….It is like being born5. Through his mind, […] flit phrases, tunes, fragments from the unwritten work6.
“I adore you because you have made me a whore”7
“She meant that words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water’s surface. The river itself flows beneath, unseen and unheard.”8
“There are more important things in life than being prudent.”9
“You haven’t asked if I love her. Aren’t you supposed to ask that as well?”10
The presence of a girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words) but her absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love.11 The world was constantly wounding him, he blushed when he faced women, he was ashamed…12 The irony doesn’t escape him13.

Taking the moon with him like a balloon on a string he is walking… towards Scandal Point, a mile and a half away…. He feels he is moving further and further away from death, with each step he takes towards her, holding a broken heart in his hands, pushing aside the blue brocade-and-velvet of the foliage as he short-cuts through the trees and grasses, the wetness on his fingers and palms making him think that a bunch of over-ripe cherries must have burst in his hand when he gripped a low branch for balance in the darkness, but then he remembers that its only May, and that the fruit wont appear till August, and he realizes that the wetness of his palms and fingers must be the sap that the two flowers are releasing, and he continues, the passage through the vegetation now narrowing like the neck of a bottle, now widening to bring him at last to the stir-less vicinity of the Safeena.14
He [is] carrying… almost two thousand letters she had written him15. One letter throbs in his head like a migraine, the letter that pulls him to her, where she had written:

you know what Hemingway said?16 “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places but those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry-”17

The night awakens at the sound of her earrings.
In the darkness he gently wraps his left arm around her neck and lowers his mouth onto hers, his other hand letting go of the orchids so that they fall at her feet, and his free hand sinks up to the wrist in the curls of her head, her skin giving off the scent of birch bark and almonds.18
The caresses were an easy performance, rehearsed in the habit of marriage, dutiful to please his wife, but the uncontrollable animal thrill of his orgasm was horrible…he wanted to get up out of that bed and house and go to Hannah, shut out everything,[…]himself, blotted against the being of Hannah.19
Bright gnats of static electricity dance in her hair and he tries to prevent the pulsing world of fireflies from invading his mind.
She is life.
A clock-tower strikes one somewhere faraway and the fragrance she is wearing is an olfactory smear in the hot dry air.20 [He] had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood.21And when she came back she was nobody’s wife22.



And the last passage read thus:

Sometimes he imagines a beautiful girl in a white dress wandering into the reading room and lingering distractedly after closing time.
It never happens.23
Bored in advance by tomorrow’s tobaccoless hours, he walked towards the door- a small, frail figure with delicate bones and fretful movements.24 He is proving something: that each man is an island; that you don’t need parents.25[He becomes]… Like a soldier shot on the battlefield, bleeding, seeing the blood, wondering: Am I dead already?26 [He] thinks27. We must all leave home, after all, we must all leave our mothers. Or am I such a child, such a child from such a line of children…28
I am a sick man…I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver, but I don’t understand the least thing about my illness.29 I hope those who think they know more or have more to say will not be afraid to do so. They can only help me live.30
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. [He] sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton.31 “How I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world… a novel needs a hero, and all the traits of the anti-hero are expressly gathered here…. Why, [why] to tell long stories?32” Because nothing is more surprising than life. Except for writing, of course. Except for writing, the only consolation.33

part 4

I checked out books. I fantasized about books. Picking up Madame Bovary, I told myself, “I’ll stay up all night today and finish this book.” That was my idea of a one-night stand. I believed I would begin reading a novel, and, in a breathless frenzy, finish it that very night, everything being a blur of hurried, furtive moments, the way I imagined people must behave when they made love on the first date. Like my idea of the other one-night stand, this also remained a fantasy. I learnt much later that it was wrong to dream like I had, and that books could indeed be like women to a lonely young man, it was just that everything had its own entanglements. To think that I’d be able to consume either books or women like commodities, and not get entangled in any hassles, was being either very naïve or very misogynist.
My novel wasn’t making a lot of headway. That was when I began to pick up lines from books I was reading. My notebook was full of phrases and short passages from Conrad, Beckett, Coetzee, Pamuk and Marquez. I saw myself like a traffic controller at an intersection, with a traffic of texts just passing me by, except that I had very little control over which text went which way. Not a traffic controller, more like a taxi driver, Travis Bickle, staring at the cars that passed me by, no different from the white lines on the road, like me, everything being a text, like myself.
I’m God’s lonely man.
Life progressed, from one heart-beat to the next, with a love affair of texts. I lost track of time, minutes, hours, seconds, if I didn’t connect it to a larger map, if I failed to squeeze off a tiny, nostalgia filled, love-letter-infested affair into each second of life.
Quotations within quotations within quotations were the links along the chain, the knots along the rope connecting me to a reality outside me.
Quotation marks.
The two small curly specks of ink, which, if put one against the other look like two lovers, fitting into each other, feeding off each other, [‘’],69, became for me the gates, and the maps. They led me, both into my mother’s lap and out from an enormous, uncharted outside. Echo was looking for Narcissus, in the pages of the books in Sahitya Akademi Library, and each set of quotation marks was an image, an estranged lover pining for the beloved, hating the words between them but unable to articulate, neither love for each other nor the hate for this obstructing medium, without those very words. This inability had the potency to mature into a love affair with the medium, rather than the object, the words themselves, rather than the woman whom I loved.

Maybe it was only pragmatic, I thought. Maybe the longing was to fill some absurd gap, because two quotation marks without words between them, without an author’s name under them, seemed ugly, the textualised shape of an abjection, which I sometimes saw as an instance of abstraction, as if the abject in us found a pure form to manifest itself, in this ultimate purity of form which cannot be sustained on its own.

In college, as in school, I was used to teachers telling me that my answers were the most heart-breaking ones to read. The person who taught us Mrs Dalloway was quite sweet.
-Is everything fine, Sujit?
-Yes, yes, everything’s fine.
-About your answer, well, I was sorely tempted to give you all the marks, but I just couldn’t.
-But how could I write that answer the way you asked us to, when I think Virginia Woolf got it wrong? Its not just public time and psychological time. Its biological time versus textual time.
-And can you explain why?
-Because your body needs to draw breath, as you read something. It is almost as if the words on the page were the oxygen that infused your blood as it reached the cells, in order for that secret, that hidden organism to be born inside of you, to allow you to midwife its birth, and to nurture it, like an orphan. An orphan that’s so dear to its parents, particularly the blind mother. That’s what Mrs Dalloway hates. The Big Ben doesn’t allow her to nurture those organs inside her. I mean...It stifles you, if you’re not allowed to live, as and when you discover a text that you want to grow up with. I mean, we would forget Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ if it wasn’t quoted in so many places. Or Keats’s “my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense”. Also, it wont help to read up all the different references to Keats in one night, in one go. It wont help to read so much unless between each reading, our body changes, somehow. Each reference to Keats is a nostalgia towards a particular image or memory of Keats, and between each appropriation by us of that nostalgia our body must change. I mean, it can only be real for us if each reference has been infused with blood and flesh, with the blood coursing through our veins, our flesh feeling pain or pleasure. It’s a little bit like watching porn. Unless I see the women in those videos as real, as more than ions or pixels on a screen, I wont enjoy it. For that the woman of the video has to grow within me, with me, as much a part of me as my lungs, my liver, and of course my heart.
-OK. You know, it all sounds very nice but it wont fetch you a lot of marks.
-But don’t you think that textual time should progress along with biological time, for us to even exist? Isnt that how we feel time? The ever-changing material world, the body, against the inertia of unchanging texts? Because if everything changed there would be no relative change, and no nostalgia… We must long to read Hamlet and Keats five years from now, and see how our Hamlet has changed from the Hamlet we had in our BA days…
-Yes, yes, yes. Now I have to go..
-But you do agree that texts can locate us, in time atleast? Because time doesn’t change the words on the page, and it changes the worlds we create from those words...
-Yes, yes… That’s beautiful, really.

If I was lonely and angry I told myself that Coetzee was lonely too, in Youth. He told himself that Kafka and Wallace Stevens and Eliot did bad jobs, but they still wrote great things. I told myself, that if I told myself what he told himself, it would give me some respite, and I forgot my way back home, coaxing myself to keep writing, to fall in love, to be blinded by insight.
I felt my way around like a blind man, making language out of author-biographies, epigrams and letters. I recorded my experiences. I archived life. And I traced everything back to some or the other recorded, textual proof. The episteme of my lovers and the ontology of my love-letters, began, in effect, to negate and affirm each other. I felt my notebooks were more authentic proofs of my life than my birth certificate. And yet for all this profusion of texts, I used to rehearse a line that, or so I told myself, I would spit out if a senior or someone older came to me saying ‘I understand you’re frustrated and all, it happens’:
Do you think you know the first thing about why Im alone, just because you’ve read The Outsider?
It never happened.

part 3

I never told Natasha I’d seen them kissing, because I didn’t think she had a lot of trouble with her conscience, which is a good thing, because then there are less possibilities of misunderstanding, of double-standards. And less chances, also, of any real feeling. I scaled a peak of isolation the following week. I began to see hypocrisy as the critical difference between real and fake emotions, believing that unless the other person sees you as a bloody hypocrite for a long time after the two of you have separated, you can’t be so sure of your love, of its being true, for the time when you were together. Sort of like Camus meets Danielle Steele.



Long after we’d separated, I told people all kinds of reasons why we’d separated, ranging from the most juvenile like ‘She probably got sick of all the pimples on my face’ to the more sensibly thought-out ones like ‘We didn’t connect on an emotional level’.

-I never used you. I loved you.
-Why did you leave me, then?
-Again. How many times do I tell you that same thing?
-You’ve only said it twice. Still. Why?
-I don’t know. I wanted to fuck him. Does that help?

The mole on her face seemed to me at that moment, to be the ugliest thing in the world, if only because I couldn’t touch it, and a few weeks ago when I could, I had loved it immensely. For the first time since we’d gotten together, I felt a strange urgency. I wanted to ask her, if for all the intimacy, for all the promises made lying naked in bed together, or while she sat wearing my shirt and I drew, there were things she kept from me, just because it felt odd, and for no other reason but that. Not happiness, not shame, not pride, just an irritating mosquito-bite of a doubt; like the half-burnt cigarette dangling at the edge of her lips. I have often wondered how it stayed put there, just as I have wondered, if there was a particular medical condition, whether good or bad (but unique all the same), that afflicted a boy, if he was subjected to passive smoking every alternate evening, between 5:30 and 5:45, within thirty minutes of sexual intercourse. I gave up that nagging doubt too.
It’s just a moment, this time will pass.

I decided then, that ‘rainbows on your navel’ had to be the title of my first novel. Art had to be the refuge of the homeless tramp looking for temporary shelter, for a place to belong. I thought, if I couldn’t wear the gloves of life on my hand to go about the business of existing, living the world around me, then I might sit and think. So I turned the glove inside out and I learned to bear the exposure to the ugly underside, the stitching on the inside. I wanted to stand on the very tip of the stitches, on the seams at the edges, make a comment on the etymology of the word “text”-I know Barthes said that but I’d written a poem about paper and clothes before I read Barthes- and scream out to the world outside, the world I hated.
My quest for belonging led me to believe that language could open me up to the world from the inside, that if I had nothing new to add but my own confusion, I could play around with the infinite loquacity of contemplation. With all the texts around me, I wanted to affirm the materiality of my existence through a textuality which, ultimately, seemed to pre-exist the materiality of that very existence. That text, I believed, would be Rainbows on Your Navel.
I began to write. I was writing a novel when I was all of twenty years. Zadie Smith was an immediate inspiration. The novel was to be about class struggle, sexual frustration, nostalgia, failed love affairs, and an intellectual, even literary, narcissism. I tried to make up for my lack of experience by reading as many books as possible. I became a recluse, spending my days in the college library, and nights in my room. I stopped meeting people, and the only people I saw regularly were my parents. Home became free bed and board. Bed and Board (Truffaut), too, was an inspiration. The staccato sound of my fingers tapping out words on the keyboard was smoothened, and it felt like the strokes of a brush, like my autobiography, this painting, was being painted, and the pins that held it in place, or the tripod that supported it, were all the novels, songs, movies that I poured into the thirsty orifices of my mind.

There were days of frustration, of stasis. I saw my share of ghosts on the ceilings and I imagined beautiful women coming to ask me about some book while I sat reading in the library. To belong to the realm of words, to have love affairs with ideas, with characters from novels, was in effect, to not belong anywhere. It felt like necrophilia, not least because Nietzsche and Foucault were both dead men by then. But far from being necrophiliac, my relationships with people were, I found, enriched. Texts helped me go from the intra-personal to inter-personal.

What the fuck am I doing? Why, why this desperation to belong? To lose myself in the multitude of identities, the faceless crowd? It’s better to stay different, even if it means being lonely. But to be alone in everything? One cannot exist, if one’s sole aim is merely to exist. Survival must not feel like a chore. Normalcy needs to be affirmed, articulated, celebrated. The fact that ‘normalcy’ maybe a violation needs to be written, not lived.


The little amorous experiences I’d had, I mixed with my fantasies, and wrote about them from a variety of perspectives, assuming for myself the personae of boy, girl, mother, father, stranger, and so on. I put it up on my blog. I read novels and erotic love stories avidly, smelling and sweating and feeling pulsating silences, as if I was in them, and I read my blog with a voyeur’s eye, as if it was something from A Lover’s Discourse.
I began spending entire days in libraries and bookshops. Even after months, I still spent an average of four hours each day, just looking at books. The woman who used to come to arrange books recognized me by face, and she began to ask me to put books on the top most shelves, shelves she couldn’t reach on her own.

part 2

I found out that she was sleeping with a colleague of hers, a guy who stayed in the same apartment complex as ours. One evening I thought I would surprise her, and went to visit her without telling her. As I was walking towards her house, I saw him enter her door, and before closing the door she kissed him on the mouth. My skin suddenly felt very hot. An incoherent screaming began in my head, and I could make no effort to know more of it. I walked like a robot towards her house for half a minute, before I could visualize fully the consequences of what I had just witnessed.

University of Warwick. Her t-shirt screamed out, in a hideous, lime-green and grey combination. She had studied there for two years, after her BA in Economics from Hindu College. From there she’d gone to UC, Berkeley for a year. Must’ve kissed a lot of guys there, I thought as I stood there with my head spinning, and uncles and aunties in tracksuits walked past me, and some teenagers played basketball and shouted ‘Dude’ and ‘Dawg’ and things like that. [I walked back home and sat alone, watching Friends. Rachel and Ross kissed for a long time. Many months later I would laugh at the same things, but at that point, I still believed in what I saw.] I felt sad and angry, and I wished I didn’t have to answer my mother, my father and my sister. I didn’t want to switch from my vulnerable, wounded self to a normal, smiling one, just because I was at home. My sister would probably have understood if I had told her what I was going through, but I didn’t, because I wanted to feel stronger than that. I went to the balcony and watched people. There was one aunty I would stare at everyday, because she wore a tight-fitting shirt for walking, and when I did not see her for one hour I decided she hadn’t come out to walk that evening. I saw my mother walking with two other middle-aged women, and I proudly concluded that she was the prettiest mother of her age, in that DLF locality at least.
Natasha’s mother smiled when she saw me. I smiled back, nodded and said, Hello Aunty. I tried to figure out if I felt alone simply because of the circumstances I found myself in or because I was just unwilling to make the effort. Looking at the people around me I realized it really would take a considerable ‘effort’ if I wanted to fit in, to belong. How much effort, was the question. Was there a particular amount of it, a degree, measuring the magnitude which was enough to justify my “existential” angst, without dragging it into the abyss of “you’re always in denial”, or “you’ve never made the effort”?

My class position was clearly that of a ‘subaltern’ there, since I couldn’t afford many of the habits that came naturally to the children there, things like having a car for oneself, or even the clothes and shoes that were all the rage- and clothes and shoes were very important for me then. But if that was a problem, I made no effort to get around it. Being with Natasha for that little time allowed me to live in the illusion of belonging, not just in the emotional sense of having someone who might understand your levels of madness, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the material sense of having a firm foothold in a world where ‘club-hopping’ was very cool and lounging with your boyfriend in a resto-bar was a source of sheer, unambiguous pleasure, unmarked by any trace of irony.

As my father came home, and he pulled up the car in our designated parking slot, I noticed the smallness in size and the singularity in number of the car we possessed, against the corresponding largeness and the plurality of the other people who stayed around us, and I read this as another evidence of a larger, more over-arching alienation. He saw me standing, and smiled. As he came in he grabbed a lump of skin from my left cheek, pulled it, and then left it.
-What are you doing, darling?
-nothing, just looking.
-What happened in school?
-Practicals. I couldn’t get the spectrum on paper today also. I’m pathetic at practicals.
-Keep trying, trying is the key.


After many months, when we had moved from that flat to another, in a locality where the people were of a class position roughly similar to ours, on one sunny winter morning I was playing in the sun with a prism and a paper. I thought of the woman I was dating, and as I unpleasantly acknowledged that we’d spend more time fighting than doing any other collective activity, apart from having sex (during which we never talked), I had a sudden encounter with the seamy side of fate. After toying for sometime and failing to get a result, I gave up and went to bathe. Inside, I stood and thought of the woman squatting in the fields next to the slums outside my apartment gate. I wondered how she felt about dressing up, about privacy, about freeing her body to the outside world, if these things were more than ideas to her. I tried to put this image next to my girlfriend’s voice telling me excitedly that she loved to bathe for an hour and a half every Sunday, and that she loved to wear Cartier perfume whenever she had to meet me in summer, outside college.
I wonder if her mother haggles with the maid-servant when she asks for some money as an advance payment before pay-day? Exactly what fraction does the money saved through these small arguments form, of the money that Meenaxi spends while she goes shopping for belts in Janpath, or sipping ‘Irish’ cappuccinos at Café Coffee Day with me?
I had been soaping myself unconsciously while I thought these things. As I stood against the window, and the sunlight fell directly on my stomach, I noticed that a bubble of soap had settled directly on my navel, and the light fell at such an angle that I was able to see a tiny rainbow, much smaller than a soap bubble, on my navel.
The people I saw squatting outside the boundary wall of my apartment, were becoming a part of my natural thinking process, and simultaneously, they also ceased to cause me as much trouble as before.
The fact that it didn’t hurt when I thought how blind Meenaxi would be to both the real and metaphorical rainbows was a pointer; it seemed to suggest a warped sense of homecoming. The alienation was now comforting. It seemed to beat away silently, to pulse, like the blood in my veins, instead of imposing itself on me physically as I stepped outside my house.
I had found a place to belong, in the strange cacophony of distance and intimacy, in the impossibility of any belonging. The prisms were turning into mirrors, slowly but surely.

(part 1)

-Do you like rainbows? Like, the idea of rainbows, and some part of your body?
-I don’t know. I’ve never thought of it. It should be pretty, I guess… OK. Now tell me. love is both material and fantasy. Does that scare you?
-Yes, sometimes, because it blurs the categories of infidelity. But I like novels better. Novels never leave you.
-Because they can’t, stupid.


If there is one image, or a phrase, or a particular sound that you can hang some memories on, things get better as time goes by. There are many things that are not pleasant at the moment you experience them, but if you can look back at them through the moist prisms of words or sound- images, sometimes the beauty of the lens can redeem the squalor of the sights being revisited. Goddamn hindsight. Always 20-20.

About four years ago, when I was in school, I went out with my first girlfriend. Memories of her are tied to memories of hair-clips. She wore a clip in her hair, and it resembled a minuscule rainbow. It was a school fest, and I was introduced to her by a friend’s friend. In the chill of Christmas Eve, she wore a red sweat-shirt and blue jeans. The DJ was playing Love to See You Cryb for the tenth or fifteenth time that day, and the light from the school’s Ferris wheel glinted off the top edge of her belt buckle, giving one the impression that maybe she wore the sun at her hips. She was almost 5 feet nine, and when she wore a short skirt she looked like the woman in the Swatch advert, the one which played Baby There’s Something About Youc. It was the stuff of fantasies, if not better.

She was five years older than me, and I took less time than the six months that we were together to disappoint practically every hope of hers. Listening to me speak had made her feel that I was different, that maybe I was babyish enough to be slightly more mature than all the people she had met, and in no time I had made it amply clear to her that I was too completely infantile in my utter inability to grow up. One of the less embarrassing things I can remember about this relationship was that it made me write my first poem. I wrote it when she went away to Washington, for two weeks.
I was sitting at my desk, trying to solve Physics problems, when I tore the last page from my register and wrote fifteen lines, an imitation of Kylie Minogue and U2 lyrics. I showed the poem to some friends, in my school bus, and they were quite impressed. One of the lines went like “you left me here, writhing in pain, longing to kiss your lipsd”. Till about last year I did not accept, even to myself, that it was really me who had written those lines. The days passed by in a daze, waiting for evening, so I could get away from home, and meet Natasha, when my mother believed that I was going to my tuition centre to study physics, chemistry and maths. I frantically looked for ways to pass the hours till evening. In the afternoons I would sometimes masturbate looking at the last page of Delhi Times, and although my mother didn’t like it, she soon realized it would be futile to try and dissuade me.

On days I was not seeing her, I carried a novel to my evening classes. The Sands of time, Nothing Lasts Forever, Midnight’s Children, The Hungry Tide, were all finished in such secret situations. Another of my favourite reading areas was the toilet next to my room. I remember having a lot of trouble smuggling Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since it was a hardback. I left it in the car, on the dashboard, so no one would see me sneaking it out of home as I left for class. I remember sitting in a maths class, as the poor old man tried hard to teach me “Arithmetico-Geometric” Progressions and I tried hard not to sleep, thinking only of the copy of Harry Potter in my car, resting against the windshield, getting the full blast of the 3:30 sun. That was when I learnt that “excruciatingly painful” could be more than a phrase.
Existentialism was With or Without Youe, and looking for better hiding places to stack novels was a source of clarity and meaning in many lonely hours, otherwise desultory phantasms of confusion.

When I did meet her, she was full of stories from her office. We spent some evenings just driving in her car. She wore braces to push her teeth back, so when she yawned the two teeth at the front of her mouth stuck out at the top, and for one second it reminded me of a cross between the hippos on National Geographic and the witch in Hansel and Gretelf. She would tell me that I was too innocent, “too cute”, that I was in fact so cute that I could have fun even when someone thought he or she was using me. I have still not blamed myself for not noticing a tinge of irony in those conversations, conversations where I spoke very little, not least because all that talk of ‘using’ people seemed too abstract for me to grasp.

In school one day, I was doing a physics practical where you’re supposed to calculate the refractive index, or µ, of glass, using first a prism and then a lens. In this experiment, one draws a line at an angle (say, 30°), sticks two pins on that line and sees the same line from the other side of the prism. The next step is to draw the ‘emergent’ ray, from the two pins stuck on the other side of the prism, that is, two more pins are stuck on this side of the prism, so that the four appear in a single straight line. But, of course, they are not in one line.
Then the prism is removed and the two lines are connected through a third line drawn inside the box of the prism. The deviation of the emergent line from the first line is measured, and the ratio of the sine of the angle of incidence to the angle of refraction gives up the refractive index. I gave up trying to get it right after a couple of tries, and, since the teacher was not really looking at me- he never expected me to get it right anyway-I began to try different things with the prism. I tried to get the whole spectrum on a white paper, since we’d been taught that the prism splits natural light into its constituents, all of whom have different wavelengths and frequencies. I tried a lot, putting the paper against the sun, opposite to it, facing it, and even changed the position of the prism many times, but couldn’t see seven colors on paper.
In my naïve imaginary universe, I was slowly drawing an analogy between the literal and metaphorical prisms. I thought of how love, as I saw it, split two people into their elements, so that they saw each other as they really were, and was therefore a sort of an inter-personal prism. That evening I told Natasha about it, but we laughed it off between two glasses of Bloody Mary and it was simply another image to remember while struggling to write a poem, to tell my male friends, and to feel that rush of masculine pride which seemed to decide almost everything I did those days.
There was a small, light-brown coloured mole on the right side of her face, right next to her lips, and she tried to smile more from the right, so the mole might be concealed amid the slight folds of skin.

16th oct 5:30

now my love
You, tying your wet hair
the only promise worth keeping.
The rustle of your dress
sliding across the stomach remains,
an image.
a sound

the two buttons at the end
the two I was too carelesss to undothe two stare at me,
screaming,
learning some strange tongue of their own
they refuse to be dreamed into me
refuse to be sexed into being.
like the stars refusing to come out, shying away from the moon's misogyny

Tempting, like Molly Bloom's kiss,
like the desire to own
Like the view from her lap, in the lawns of your apartment.

I believe in your memory, in roses. I bought roses for my mother. The buttons spoke roses. Liars
You drive well, even when you’re breaking promises to your mother, at the rate of five per litre of petrol burnt, and ten, per amorous adventure. You flash the most selfish, the most proud smile when I walk out of your car.
Your buttons tell me I’m sick. They stick out of my dreams like broken splinters of bone from a fracture. Your buttons make me greedy, nervous, infantile, aware. They trap me in the political
They remind me of Pussy Cat Dolls.

Life unbuttons itself in you
That I don't refuse you, when you say that you love me, is a fear.
Molly Bloom's nose starts to leak
a clear, innocent thread of memory
reminds me, how unlike you two are,
have always been.
And my love is a nomad's fading footprint
searching for the keys
to the prison-house that is nostalgia
to the urgency that is buttoned up
inside your dress.
inside a father's unsent letters
to be dreamed,
sexed,
written out of memory,
used as a melt-in-mouth murder-weapon,
and smeared,
into a tear-drop
into being
four wrinkles at the corner of each eye.
Your demands of a palpable reality fall short when I turn back to meet your eyes and I see only a silent, stony repeatability.
The future is nothing but the present stretched out, photoshop-ed and wikipedia-ed into a million fantastic pieces.
Why, tell me, should I be alone in demanding a more real you?
I don't tell you what I'm reading because Greer makes me feel like a selfish jerk each time I make love to you. Derrida makes me feel proud enough to ignore what people near me say.
Its the worst thing you could do. Take all your trust, and dump it all on me. Before I fall out of love.
Now, my love.

Library Thoughts: 2 (25th september, 2:40)

I have learnt to differentiate between nerve impulses from my thigh. I wait for, and try not to miss, the tightening of a ligament on the inside of your thighs, pressing my buttocks, pulling me in. Until I have felt that I am insecure. I need to know that I’m wanted too.

I read your muscles like a blind man feeling his way around Braille alphabets. The sudden clenching of the tendons on your buttock, and then their subsequent and gradual unclenching, I feel with the tips of my thumbs. That’s why I long to hold your hips from behind, even when you don’t want my hands there, cos it would mean that we have to achieve a complicated posture, almost acrobatic a feat. But don’t you know everything already?
Its not for you that Im writing this, then.

It is for someone else.

The two minutes, from the moment you have put on your clothes (and I, my boxers) to the moment when I shut the door of my apartment, having let you out, are epic moments. Time, space, everything seems magnified, and the clarity of those moments is one of the most numbing things I have ever known. Those moments could be the space of a novel, a play, a song. 9 songs.
Our movements, gesticulations, seem very slow, ineffective and futile, almost as if we were uselessly trying to impose coherence on the vastness of a grand, memory-busting, existential time. Our choices seem saturated with a mock-epic grandeur. Each small decision, whether to smile, to say ‘I love you’ or ‘Don’t go now, baby' or ‘did you like it today?’ seem to be like small bombs, packed, like knotted thread, the knots being those hard kernels of truth that resist signification, and yet carrying meaning, the inarticulate screams, groans, moans, sounds, and as if the thread was dyed with strands of meaning. I would like very much to see Scenes from a Marriage, since I think that it has a dramatization of some such similar emotion.

I still hear your whispers at night, and when I do, I wake up, as if from a dream. I pull up a chair on the balcony and sit there, watching the moths flying near the streetlights, for about half an hour before crawling back into bed. It’s a good thing then, these visions I have of you, because when I go back to sleep it’s a dreamless sleep.
The most frequent fantasies I have of you are those where you’re wearing that yellow-colored Lovable bra and those huge black panties. Apart from that, you usually have two layers of clothing above your waist, and one layer below it. The next time you wear your black skirt I’m going to slip my hand under it within ten minutes of you kissing me. Its been more than five months I did that. I will not let you undo the zip and hooks on your skirt, or the three buttons on your shirt before we go to the bed and start kissing and cuddling, more kissing and less cuddling.
I know, we decided on it because it made it easier to slip out of our clothes once we were in the throes of desire and impatient to devour each other, but this time I categorically want us to be stuck on buttons, hooks, zippers, Velcro, elastic-bands as we fumble and struggle to get our hands on flesh, skin that lies beyond the barricades of cloth. I want to see how it feels, after all this time, to get irritated simply because we cant get our fingers to explore someone else’s body.
I feel we have been taking each other’s bodies for granted. I hate to think of the way you flashed me a hint of cleavage the other day in the restaurant, while having lunch with Saurabh and Smriti. I hate it because it fills me with a maddening desire to undress you, and then to hold your breasts in my hand, to kiss and fondle and suck on them, and to tickle you, by playing with my tongue on the tip of your erect nipple. But I think that’s what we need right now, to bring back to our relationship the excitement and the vulnerability that we had six months ago.

Please don’t flash me the waist-band of your panties from under your jeans, ever. Not even for fun. I hate to wait till we get home, to hold your hips from behind while having sex, from behind. Have you wondered if we’ll ever get to a stage where we can call it ‘anal sex’, proper, before we’re done with the actual thing?

I’m trying very hard to be apologetic. I’m sorry if I was rude on the phone when you called me on Saturday. It was never my intention to offend or even mildly upset you. I found myself in an absurd, and an irredeemably absurd situation. Here I was, sitting in the library, which was empty save for one old man (who knows me by face now, after so many days) and a fat girl (who sleeps a lot), debating whether I should go to the men’s loo or not, and trying not to be pretentious while reminding myself that for the past 3 months my life has been exactly like Beckett’s Murphy (from Murphy), when you called. You began to tell me of a party you didn’t want to attend but would have to go because the host was a creepy man who talked to Reebok Woman and kind of helped you get the assignment. I never saw any of the pictures you modelled for, apart from those I painted, when you lounged or read in my room. I wondered if you could add my paintings to your portfolio which you send to these agencies.

I wondered also, if that man would peep into your neckline, and try to guess the colour of the bra you were wearing, or he would be too busy sipping his wine. Last was a lingering doubt, when you got home that night, you would call me, and, to make me happy, tell me the colour of that bra, just because some nights I want to know exactly how you’re looking, underneath your clothes. I was going through all of this when I should have thought of something nice to tell you, something that would have comforted you. I hope I sound credible enough.

It was my sister’s birthday on the 13th. My mother made a cake and decorated it with icing. There were roses and leaves. And on the corner, it said ‘Happy Birthday Trupti’. The green leaves with fine lines branching out in their centre looked like the thin, blue-green veins on the areole of your left breast. The skin around the areole is so fine, it shows a very beautiful filigreed pattern of veins; an image of breathtaking desire, had it not been one of as much vulnerability, and much more overtly so.

Library thoughts: 1

If you hang a silk saree from the ceiling, and switch off the fan, and the AC, and then take a long stick and raise it from the bottom, you can see ripples go up, along the fabric.
I used to love watching your breasts shake, you know, when we had sex. That’s why I asked you to lean into me and then take off your bra. I loved the way your breasts tumbled onto my face. Even when I put my face against your stomach sometimes, I loved the squeeze of the top edge of my ear as it brushed against the tip of your breast. I have wanted to tear off your kurta and peel the bra off your left breast, to ravenously devour that flesh, to suck on those hardened seeds, seeds that seem to be waiting only for my tongue, to harden, and to bloody exist solely for my lips, seeds that taste so much better than any fruit. I have been possessed by so overpowering a desire sometimes that I feel almost helpless, and numb to all other sense impressions around me, not bothering about the people around us, nor about undoing the straps on your shoulders and unhooking it from your back. I know of no larger restraint ever imposed on anyone ever.

I thought of you as I was having water from my new bottle in the library today. I was there for almost six hours. I read another essay by Catherine Belsey. I think I’m falling in love with her. And you know what’s ironic? In one of her essays I read last week, she says that people fall in love with the authors of books they read, with voices they hear on the telephone, and so fantasy is as important as reality for falling in love. I’ve got this new sipper kind of bottle, and in order to drink from that, I have to pull out the small sipper tube, and put it in my mouth and squeeze the bottle. Either that, or I can just suck on the tube, and the water keeps flowing into my mouth. Its strangely seductive, you know, when I suck from it. I can totally understand why sucking is such a hugely obsessive thing. Sometimes, when I forget to release the air from my lips and ease the tube off my lips, the air sucks my lips in, so the tip of my lips pucker out, and stick to the hole on top of the bottle, before I pull it away, and the slight sucking noise it makes causes people reading around me to look up from their books. As I pulled it away from my lips, an image of you tugging at my lower lip flashed in my mind. I tried to imagine my lips at the moment, stretched at the tips, pouting, pretending to kiss.
I love the fall of the skin on your breasts. Its quite luscious. I can almost allow you not letting me kiss your thighs, sometimes. That's how much I love the fall. I can just watch it fold and stretch and shake, and ripple, in clumsy, broken little waves, and I can write about it, be it poems, stories, essays, letters, dissertations, just looking at it. It, or you?
Its been one week that I stopped having dreams with your face in them. I cant be so sure if I have stopped masturbating with your image across my closed eyes, more across the retina than merely the mind. The last time I was fighting with myself was over to masturbate or not to masturbate? I have been thinking of talking to you about Of Grammatology. I have more than a mild feeling that Derrida talks about masturbation in it. Onanism, its called, in some places. I read Life of Pi three years ago. I first came across the word “onanist” in that book. That’s how I remember that book. The electronic Cambridge dictionary on my computer doesn’t have this word.
I don’t know if I'm really so frustrated or disgusted that I end up masturbating more than once a day sometimes. Maybe I am, but just because masturbating seems to help get rid of it to some extent, I’m compelled to think that maybe I created this whole big deal about being frustrated and alienated and other things simply because I wanted to masturbate.
For a long time before our first separation I was shy about letting you know that I used to masturbate. Even when we’d started having sex regularly, I would jerk off occasionally, just for fun. I knew that if I told you, you would never have a problem. In fact, you thought I was this hugely repressed sex freak or something, so you should really “understand” and all, and so you kind of assumed, that I was having it off with my hand as often as possible. Still, I told you that I’d stopped after I got together with you. Why? Because I thought it was too boyish to masturbate regularly. Because it was not normal, not natural? Because sex was natural, and masturbation’s supposed to be a compensation for what is lost or unavailable? Maybe.
This secret, if it can be called that, remained one of the most fiercely guarded ones I’ve kept all my twenty one years. I never stopped masturbating. Now sometimes when I'm alone I actually feel that I liked those no-nonsense, lonely minutes in the toilet more than the hours in bed with you, but I know its only a psychological defense mechanism.
Why do you ask me how I feel? Its not very kind. You see those kids begging on the road? The girl with make up on her face, who does the twisting-turning trick, and the boy who dances like a monkey, kids like those? If you go and give them a feast, will you ask them how they feel, as they’re eating things they’ve never even dreamed of.
Let me tell you how I feel. I cannot begin to string words together in a sentence, because I’m too caught up anticipating the ambiguities and second-guessing the double-meanings in each syllable, each tiny utterance of sound that my tongue rubs out. The children who don’t get enough to eat are too occupied by the fibrous texture of the meat and the softness of cake and the stickiness of pizza, to be able to step out, and make some meta-comment about the quality of food, it feels very distant, too vague an idea.
So if you ask me how I feel, trying to answer you will feel like I’m trying to put down in words something that’s essentially too abstract. I’m trying not to be intoxicated on images of your thighs, with the jeans being pulled off from them. I’m trying not to lose sleep over a female voice laughing, with me, over spilled semen across the sheet, or some such thing.
I still hate to tell you how weak I am in your presence. I try to squeeze time in pages of written text, and wait for you to come. I wish that if I keep writing about you like this, on page after empty page, and flip through all of it in one second, once before its time for you to come, it'll really make time roll back, compress, and spring it back to life, into a really “sexy” montage of lethargic kisses and half-line poetry.
I wait all week for that one evening, and when it is about to end, I cant wait for you to leave, to leave me alone so I can do my reading, and writing. I do not feel ashamed while knowing that thinking about you in this way might amount to a reduction of both you and me. If it is a reduction, I'm happy to be reduced to a fantasy.
Now, if ever, you really do keep your promises that you're never going to talk to me again, I swear never to forget you. Not just that, I swear to keep remembering you even as I try to forget you. Because the promises you make to your lovers are the ones that are easier to keep, sweetheart. Merely the easier ones.

Orientation Programme for us (saturday, 20th september 08)

In the afternoon the clothes stick to my arms. By the time its morning my shirt will have white stains. You know what’s funny, if you think about it? The body fluids that leave colored stains are not colored themselves. If you have semen spilled on your pants, or sheets, it just dries up, and leaves a hard residue. It mixes with the color of the fabric. And semen is white, isn’t it? And sweat is colorless, and it leaves a white stain after it dries.
People can be so still. Still, lying, smiling, faking people. When you make statements like “I try to write, and find some meaning to my life in that”, exactly how much are you faking? If you feel that “language is a great deadener” you’ve touched the pinnacle of hypocrisy. Scaled the highest peak, and now you’re too full of it to be scared of falling off. But you will fall, and it’ll frustrate you, assure you that when all the polite and sweet sounding people leave this hall they’ll humph and sneer and laugh cynically. They’ll abuse someone, somewhere, either economically, socially, sexually, or just the good old condescending verbal abuse. How else do you expect them to go on? One cant finish the exam if you stare at your watch, and try to discern some pattern in the way the second hand crawls between 11 and 12, and that the second hand doesn’t touch the five small lines drawn on the dial between 11 and 12, that the light and the angle make it look like your watch is one second slow. The time should be 8:59:59, not 9:00:00. And that since this watch is not being used to judge whether Michael Phelps won the gold or silver, its ok. You’ve got to write your answers, not look at the watch. If you don’t, you might end up leaving 35 marks, and you’ll have to face accusing looks from people in your family, because your aggregate score in BA is 10 short of a first division.

Saw your face in a dream
its hidden now,
Or lost.

You are colours on thread
A garden bursting forth
Into flesh
Into orgasmic tissue

Twenty one years
Of feverish love,
You could be
In stolen words,
encrusted with tiny white crystals
From dried beads of sweat.

A violin bathed in tears
Could only pretend
to sing for you.

More than a trick of memory
More than the meaning of a word
Chosen
Or culled
from a million others
Like you.

The night spilled you over,
Ink on my sheets.
And I,
I try to choose my words as if you were always here
Staring at my inability,
My defeat,
whenever I try to write from memory
of our reason
of the blindness
the real and pretended blindness
to each other.

At night

At night, lovers talk in tender voices, thanking BSNL for free calling minutes, making sure their images of each other are intact, reassuring each other with discreet tokens of fidelity.
The old man sleeping on the street kept a transistor on his chest, and he hugged it, while hooking up the antenna with the other hand, and keeping one eye on his rickshaw which was tied to the rest.
AIR fm plays classical music on Monday nights; surely a reason for him to change the station.
At night, a boy walks from the cyber café, having posted a story on a blog that is read by two people.
Does he lose sleep thinking of how many people may have starved, or slept without a roof, or worn torn clothes, that very night?
Does he lie in bed, on the sheet which gets soaked with perspiration if there’s a power cut, and figure out a way to get rid of all the countless debts he incurs with every breath he takes?
The price someone else pays for every breath, does he make a mental note of it?
A mother calls her daughter, from Siliguri to Delhi University, to make sure everything’s alright.
Everything’s alright, she says.
someone listening to it might want to say: You didn’t come across any potential rapists in the DTC bus, did you.
Did you- how could you?- think that I know the first thing about your solitude, just because I’ve read The Outsider?

10th september 08, 8:30 PM

The man bathing on the road side saw me
I was staring at him.
too ashamed to undress completely in public,
too poor to have two pairs of underwear,
he pushed a few bubbles of soap into the cleft between his butt-cheeks
tucked it under the towel, rubbed it around
moved to his groin, then to his arm-pits.
The smoke must’ve reached his nose
and the heat, from all the idling cars.
I looked away in case he might not like being spied on.
Anonymity can be both enhanced and dissolved in a crowd, depending on whether one looks the other in the eye.

Stupid fucking bitch. You know what that means? saali kuttiya. How does that sound? You like the lilt and the twang of the word kuttiya? huh? The visceral "tt-" sound as your tongue hits the back of your teeth? How much do you earn? 35 thousand? more? Well you can sit and grind your air-conditioned arse on that swivel-chair, and take home your 35 thousand, but just because you've got the right to scowl and ignore me doesnt mean you can get away with anything. I'm going to walk up to you one evening and scream in your ears, and tell you how awesomely fucked you are.

I learned today that nothing matters untill you write about it. And that there can be no retribution, no poetic justice if someone shits in the common loo in the morning and doesnt flush. That its not particularly rewarding if you want to take revenge by shitting in the same toilet and not flushing. Because you just cannot do it. Because it stinks and it feels sick.

When a sticker is pulled off hastily, it leaves a sticky patch. Over time, that patch attracts dust, and it becomes brown, and its not a pretty sight. Sometimes there's a thin layer of paper left over, from the back of the sticker. If you're thinking of killing someone, really, seriously contemplating murder, scraping your nails over one such sticky mess can offer some meaning. If you buy that, you have to give up your notions of respectability, and etiquette.

I never understood any of those, so I can enter such deals easily. I dreamed you up in a post-card, and you know what? We're fighting in it. You sat with me in a cafeteria and we had cold coffee. My professor came up to me, and demanded my phone. She said her kid was in the hospital and she needed to make a call immediately. So I gave my phone to her. You called on my phone, as she was talking to her kid. She ignored the call-waiting alerts. You called two more times, and I still didn't understand why. Then, as she returned my phone you shouted at me. You said I have no commitment, no sacrifice. That I'm just like all the other guys (did you mean all those you dated before me?). I know that, but I dont like to hear that from you, and I think that's why you said it to me. So that happened, and I could tell you to go to hell. I said, whatever. I am wondering how to thank Rimli B. I want to let her know of my gratitude for letting me know some otherwise embarrassing things about myself.

The man who stays in the house opposite to mine changes his shorts in the balcony, and he thinks that no one sees him do it. But I did. He came out of the bathroom with his wife one morning. She did not look very beautiful. Not as beautiful as she does, on other occasions. Not as insanely beautiful as you do in that post-card of mine.

26th August, 3:20 pm

I while away hours looking at the women in some of my lectures. In a class of about 70 or 80, there are about ten guys. So yeah, I'm sure you think I must have dreams of my life, just sitting and staring. If I look at a girl, and I try to imagine her, in different situations, and one of those happens to be fornicating, that's supposed to mean I'm really frustrated, sexually, right? But if I wasn't, and that is to say, that I didn't feel even slightly deprived of any libidinal excess, (and any form of libidinal compensation will, inevitably, for me at least, spill into the ominous category of "excess"), what would I do? I would listen to the lecturer? I do that anyway. I take notes too. Whenever I think its relevant, that is. And I make sense of the lecture. What I fail to understand, is that where would I be, without these day-dreams of mine. I feel so weak, and disconcerted, without dreams. Its the lack that I use, to milk it for words, the absent centre, the hole I keep digging away at. I'm not sexually frustrated, any more than I have pancreatic cancer, or Lindsay Lohan wants to read The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. (Frustration, as a state of being, seems not to exist any more. I have reached a point where my radicalism seems to bleed into a compromise of bourgeois conservatism. I have no need to feel as if a part of me is stifled, or suffocated, or just repressed. Its strange, because on one hand, everything seems OK, and at the same time nothing is really irritating. But something must irritate you, if you need to press forward.) Although I once dreamed I was reading The Postcard with Lindsay Lohan, but that's different. I have neither. I don't have the book, and I don't think I'm ever going to meet her. And the sad part, the really sad part is, that I'm pretty sure I wont like her even if I ever do meet her, and I'm not sure I will want to read through the whole of Derrida either. But as long as the distance is maintained, I'm happy to dream. Intimacy kills the ludic space that distance wraps around me like a soft, fur-lined parka. I want to keep writing my own texts, my own Lindsay Lohan and my own Derrida, and prolong this innocent, childish, narcissistic fantasy, instead of engaging in any real, tangible experience. That translates into an extremely conservative position, politically. I'm not proud of it. I plan to write my way out of it. How the fingers lose their way among the keys...How the keyboard suddenly stiffens, resisting, I hope, this latest round of transference.
I wondered how she divides her time, her money, and her body, between different institutions, between MA, between family, friends, boyfriend, and lastly, with more than a fair amount of narcissism kicking in, unknown people who she sees in class. I begin with her waking up in the morning, and try to see how far I can imagine her, without reducing her to a cultural stereotype, and/or a consortium of massmedia-generated images.