Paper Rose

I was beside you today, wrapped my arms around your image in my mind, spoke to your silhouette, in an abstract, bright corner of my thoughts. Our skins were so close to each other.
 
I could smell your words, I could hear you smile, I could see the deepest desires dribble down those eyes like tears from the harshest pains and best elation.
 
I wanted to hide those eyes in my hands, protect them, preserve them. I wanted to kiss those lips, be one with them, like immiscible spirits losing themselves in a oneness.
 
But somewhere, this dream was brittle, like petals of a dead flower. I found the distance between us, it was a gaping chasm, a gorge pitted with the rotting cadavers of hopes not yet dead.
 
Why could not I touch you even when our skins were so close, why could not I see your words fill my eyes, like the morning light in a valley. Why do I see you floating away like a paper boat in drying stream.
 
Why cannot you stay a bit longer, till I have filled my breath with your image, my eyes with your hazy colours. I shall not persist beyond that, I shall then become one with you, in your heart in your soul.
 
I search for you in my prayers, in my recluse, like vestiges of my past, like dusty old dreams. But you are not there. Lost somewhere in my simpleton mind, but I know you are close, like the early morning glow, like the warmth on a winter's day. I know you are there, I know you shall come.

Darkened Glasses

Look, there, through the darkened glasses beclouding the eyes, you will see lights fading slowly. Slowly seeping out of your eyes like brine from an old memory, like breeze through the hollows of a dead tree. So slowly, so tenderly, it feels like the pain would never end. But there is this deep, entrenched, engaging, enticing pleasure in this slow, tender, gradual, egression, in this tip toing of the lights to freedom.
 
Look there, near the horizon, the immiscible lights dissolving into one another, just before they fade out of the night sky, leaving nothing but dark and dense thoughts floating about in the starlit empty minds.
 
The lights look strange through the darkened glasses, like synesthetic manic eyes, changing colours in the mind. But these colours die out soon, in those empty minds; they slowly turn grey, and then disappear.
 
They leave behind dry, glassy eyes flickering like a dim flame, searching the many colours of the cavorting lights near the horizon and in the starlit minds of thoughtless creatures, under thoughtless skies.
 
The nights are starlit, dark, and dense. They are thoughtless and manic. Yet they are calm, like the lights through the darkened glasses. But these darkened glasses trouble the simpleton eyes.
 
The darkened glasses make the eyes look hard for manic minds floating around. The darkened glasses are liars. They hide the thoughtless empty minds in the dark; they befog the dead hopes under the starry skies. Yet you look through the darkened glasses all night long.
 
Look now, the brightening horizon, it is daybreak, and it is the demise of the empty minds at the altar of a ruthless, hopeful morning. The cavorting lights are back effacing the thoughtless skies, and the manic nights.
 
The darkened glasses are shimmering again, glowing in the brightness of the thoughtful, hopeful minds of the day, under brilliant skies, and over the cadavers of the night. Yes! The night died again, calmly, softly.

Your Last Letter

Scouring through my thoughts last night, I stumbled upon a letter you wrote. It is a letter, a forgotten reflection of your mind, on a parchment, lying in a forgotten and forlorn corner of my life. I was excited to see it, but then, I was not entirely happy.

I remember you used to write, long time ago. May be you wrote this to me in one such frenzy. I browsed through the letter, glanced at the scribbles and the overwritten words. It reminded me of your effervescent mind.

Scouring through the maze of your words I tried hard to find some stains of your tears. There had to be a few, but then, was it too late? The whole parchment looked stained, with time, with lost hope. Should I have read it earlier? I was not ready, not ready to know how you despised me while you loved me, or how it halved you to go away.

Stains of tears, yes, remind me of the spotted pillows every morning. The mornings, whose nights bore scars of my refusal, scars of you gnawing at your self-respect. But what could I do? No, I wasn’t tired from a long day at work. No, I had not dissipated my love elsewhere. It was just that, you, with your endowed self, the heavy breaths, and that moment’s love, reminded me of a chronic hatred, of an eternal love lost in the eternity of angst.

I know why you hated me so much, but I just could not accept it. I could not accept that you thought time killed it, that it died a natural death. No! I killed it, brutally, in cold blood, in despair. I saw you choke every day, waiting for me, in hope of a better night and a better morrow. But you knew somewhere that it would not happen; that I would break your hopes and somehow know it and laugh. I did not laugh tough, it cut through me too. I wanted to love you every night, every moment following every time you edged close to me seeking me for yourself.

I read your letter again. You had a few complains which made me smile. It reminded me how you used to complain about my forgetfulness. See! How I forgot to read this letter, how I forgot how close you were to me, how you knew me so well, so well that it frightened me? Today, when I read this letter, I am not frightened anymore, and I do not forget many things. But I regret not forgetting. These memories gushing into my eyes and dribbling down my face aren’t exactly what I wanted to remember.

You left me, with memories, with scars, with regret, and with this letter. I am reading this letter for the first time, but it just doesn’t feel so. This letter is a faceless you, talking to me, smiling back at me with tear laden eyes, a heavy voice and a belief that everything would be fine, every wrong would be undone, and every ineffable wish be lived. What could I have done? I did not know how to make you not believe in me? I did not know how to tell you that your hatred for me had left me cataleptic, rigid and lost.

I wish I could have you back, not forever, but for a brief moment, where I could tell you that I was not worthy of that hatred, that I could love you back, all those deserted nights when you thought I was cold and heartless. But how could I, when I could not revive what I had lost in me… Me!

Sleep

Sleep! How can I sleep when we are so estranged, so distant, so lost. How can I sleep when your thoughts linger in my dream, thoughts of you crying. How can I sleep when I feel anger yet a longing to have you in my arms. But I think this anger is an opium, one stronger than the longing, one stronger than lust, than love. It is so because it hurts me to be angry, to be unable to contain it yet to think it might burn you which is why I swallow it. You don't understand it, but it tires me to know that you do not understand it, that you will never understand it because you don't want to. How can you be so indifferent when I suffer so immensely. How can you preserve yourself when I destroy myself. How can you defend yourself and attack me when I ruin myself for the both of us.

जीते रहते

है पिंजड़े में बंद एक सपना, और कुछ आंसू |

और कुछ सिसकियाँ बिखरे इधर उधर |

पर वो सपना अधूरा नहीं है, कुछ पन्ने कम हैं, पर उम्मीद पूरी है |

थोड़ी उम्मीद, थोड़े सपने, बस यही कुछ गहने |

और थोडा दर, थोड़ी सी हिम्मत |

पर आँख में वही दर्द का अंजन, बोली में बहती रहती |

बनके आह, बनके जीवन, हाथों में हाथों से खेलती रहती |

मुस्कुराते रहते, खिलखिलाते रहते, गिरते रहते, रोते रहते |

पर जीते रहते, थक के हार के, जीते रहते ||

Eyes

         Peering within my own tumultuous mind, a simpleton maze, perhaps a child’s play, I find pastures of myriad colours.  The hues that look monotonous and monolithic are coloured in mysterious ways, of love, of hatred, of dismay, of solidarity, of such thoughts that reflect my benevolence and promiscuity in the same tone…

I look back to those tones and think, like others, like inordinate selves around me, those colours reflect something grotesque, but art is grotesque. Yes! I am art, a work of a divine construct but of infinitesimally less abilities. I spurt from the underbelly of a struggle to shine bright, to feel ecstasy, yet crash in the abyss of conventions and contemporaries. I am different; I am the hackneyed difference that you will never perceive. Yes! I am lecherous, I am respectable, I am egoistic and proud, I am forgiving and humble. Can you see the shades? No! You can’t. I can’t find the shades myself.

I stare down my throat and I see something torn, something vitiated and undulated. Not my soul, could be my resolve, could be what you call as loyalty. My heart, as they call it, goes many ways, trapped in an abstruse maelstrom, it remains in flux, falling prey to follies. It beats for you, but it beats when you are not there, it beats when I do not want you, it even beats when you walk away. So is it loyal? I don’t know, I cannot say. I don’t utter the words of love, I don’t sing them well, but my heart beats rhythmically, in strange ways it beats, mostly for you, but yes, it always beats for me. Your eyes do not arouse me, your voice does. Sometimes your eyes do too. But when you touch me, I see reality, my heart beat screams, and it arouses me, always. But my heart beats without you too. I am not loyal, but my heart beats for you a lot.

Last night, when you touched me softly, I could not feel your finger. I felt something press against my skin, like a gale blowing violently into my face. I could not understand that touch. Did I want someone else to touch me? But my heart did beat aloud once. It settled down when I spoke to you, in my thoughts, as always. Do you think it beat for you? All the selves floating around me, in my sky, that blue, blue sky, seem so faceless. Which one are you? I know I am not the same as you touched last night, may be slightly different, may be a bit stronger, a bit more loyal. Yes, that is I, another me residing in your mind, you touched that me last night, but my heart beat when you touched that me. Perhaps, I am that me in your mind, and this me too, who woke up here. But then, my heart beats otherwise too. I choose not the think, those floating eyes in my sky, like two terns flying south, make my heart beat. I call out one by your name, both look back. But both are not you! Did I call out the right name? I do not know what is that named I called out, but they both looked at me, with a smile. Yes! Two pairs of smiling eyes, different, yet they answer to the same name. May be, my heart beats for that name, a name I do not remember, yet I call out whenever I see those eyes flying south. But my heart beats for a voice too, not the voice that touched my last night, yet it replies to me when I call out your name. Who are you, whose name I always call out?

The sun has set in my sky. It is still bright outside, bright enough to find minute thoughts streaming down to the tip of my fingers while I write your name on a dusty, parched mind. I saw another pair of eyes, bright glassy eyes in my sky irradiated by a dusky moon. They did not answer to your name, but kept smiling at me, kept pushing at my systolic heart. They left awhile later, smiling as ever, a heart not beating that hard, but I felt it was not meant to beat, because it would beat only for you, yet those eyes felt warm.

I stared down my throat again; there were remnants of unknown eyes, and echoes of strange voices. My heart is loyal, it beats for vestiges I cannot remember, eyes I cannot see flying south in my blue sky. There is a new tern flying in my sky, it also smiles back when I call out your name. I do not know whose name is that. My heart is pounding today. I will always remember your name, under blue skies, under orange ones, sometimes under starry ones too. There is a new tern flying south, a happy tern. I do not know if the other terns are still happy. Are you happy?

Untitled

Perhaps it was the anguish in the blood of those who lost their minds to betrayal or ecstasy, or merely the ultimate wish to die, hidden in the garb of insanity, creating private hospices in their own minds. Whatever be the reason, Rajjo never seemed to qualify as the common insane kept away from the world in the murky depths of a women’s asylum.

I always wondered how mad men and women saw the world. Anyone could have figured it out for the inmates, but not for Rajjo. She never differentiated normal from insane, weird from commonplace. All she did was to stray away in the depths of oblivion, may be stars, or newer moons floating in the cosmos of her officially deranged mind. But, was she mad? I guess she had some story to her, like everyone else. For example, there was a woman in her 50s who was dumped here a few years ago. She tried to burn her family members alive. I wonder what could be the circumstances under which she was driven to do something like that. And then there was another, a beautiful and young woman, who tried to kill herself repeatedly. People say she was driven to madness by her in-laws. All of the inmates had a story to validate their present condition. But, what about Rajjo, do they know anything? All they know is that on a warm evening she was found sitting at the asylum’s gate wearing nothing but a flimsy kurta and a pajama.

It was the year 1946, a cold winter somewhere in the Punjab district. India had still not been divided then, the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Sikhs were still living in some sort of assumed harmony, and Rawalpindi was still a small city. It was Rawalpindi where Rajjo lived. We know that because she told the authorities of the asylum herself. Yes! She could talk, make coherent statements, and answer questions as they required to be answered. Then, what was wrong with her? Why was she there?

The story behind Rajjo was small and stark. Her story was similar to that of a million others who got severed at the heart by the Radcliffe Line. But that wasn’t the whole story. Rajjo came from an impoverished Muslim family living in the outskirts of Rawalpindi. A family of only daughters was not a boon to a poor barber in the village. Rajjo was the youngest of all, but not the most loved one. In fact love was inexistent in that family. All they could serve every night over supper was some cold dismay heated to palatable tolerance. Rajjo was beautiful with a dusky, unblemished skin, glossy lips, but with dried up cheeks and a sweaty worried forehead. She cared for her overworked father and her sisters who were to be married off in respectable families. It, however, did not go as planned. She got married off to a rich man in return of some favours. This man was old with three sons and enough assets to feed an entire village, a part of which went to Rajjo’s father too. But Rajjo did not complain. She did not complain when she was reduced to an old mop that lapped up every refuse, or when she was stripped naked by every eye that turned to her in that house. It was not a family, but a barn yard where a lone sheep is left to a multitude of rams waiting to be ravished. She took it all, occasionally calling out to Allah for either ending her or ending her, but that end never came.

Once lying on a hard bed out in the yard, she felt something warn on her neck. When she turned her head she was shocked pale to see one of the sons staring at her. He gave a smirk and walked away. She was not used to that. It was fine when she caught the middle aged men staring at her bosom, and not shying away even when she noticed. But they never came so close before. She could feel it was because the old man was dying and she feared the aftermath of his death. She did not have to wait long to discover the horrors. Her husband died leaving her like a road kill to the vulture like sons. Turn by turn the three raped her, dousing her screams in the grave silence of the night. She stopped screaming later. Even the servant took his chances with her breasts or her hips. She kept quiet because she had a young daughter to bring up and out of the hell she was in, she could not afford insanity. Independence from the British raj was imminent, but that did nothing assuage her personal sufferings, the three sons of the deceased old man, Rajjo and her infant daughter had a last momentous moment in life. In the chaos of the partition when violence occurred outside, some of it occurred inside too. The three sons went at her for the last time, to please themselves, while she fed her daughter.  They were drunk in lust when one of them slapped the child off her breast onto the floor bursting its head. The others pinned her down and started chewing onto the frail remnants of her soul while she witnessed her child bleed. She was stunned to quietude, while the three men ingested her body. Suddenly she came back to her senses and banged a heavy charcoal iron-press onto one of the son’s head. Warm blood splashed everywhere.  She then ran into the kitchen and fetched a butcher’s knife and cut off the phallus of one and the throat of another. Together with her daughter, they all bled to death, and she bled to liberation.

It was the independence of Pakistan and India. She gained her independence too, but like many others, paid a price for it. She did not go mad with that incidence. She just wanted to leave the normalcy of the normal world she was living in. That was her madness.

Memoirs

With an inclination, with strange proclivities of the night;
With a strange desire, I think of you;
I think of your eyelids drenched with some blood;
Of a dream you killed last night;
I think of your lips with stains;
Of the words you never spoke;
I think of those moments when you were left behind;
In my thoughts, in my mind;
I think of those days when you never came;
To the brink of my smile, to the edge of my shame;
And then, that night, you were there;
Half naked, sitting by my besotted gaze;
Waiting, for some hope and a life;
Waiting for another breath and an old strife;
But I left, in haste, in waste;
With a trail of a scent, of disappointment;
I stepped off the last stair, with no words to spare;
With no hatred or amour, but a soft clamor;
Of a desire, to lie beside, the dreams those have dried;
The words those have died, the hope I have denied;
But you shan’t be there, in my memoir;
On an orange evening, staring outside;
Towards the horizon, sinking and bright;
Bearing the proclivities of this strange night…

Foregone

Tonight, lying by your side, dreams are not what I see.

I see hope, in a doused light of dismay, in an air of despair.

I see you, naked yet surreal, I see us, torn yet alive.

I see you waning, faking smiles, blurring in your own shadow.

I see you without me, fighting tears, fighting sorrow.

You don’t look back, you tell me not to follow.

But I am tethered, forlorn and weathered.

You want to tear me out, from your flesh and my doubt.

You say you want a new beginning, call my love blithering sickening.

But I see you bleed, without me to heed,
your calms and crying, in your eyes never drying.

Could I be there while you forget and regret.

Could I be there while you seethe and breathe,
in an air of a scent, of us reminiscent.

This day shall pass, like wind over some dead grass.

But I shall follow, like a thought so hollow.

Like a spirit of the past, like vestiges that last.

Event Horizon

 “I cannot perceive beyond the shadows I live in, I cannot seek beyond what I cannot see; I cannot live beyond what I cannot choose. When you walk past me I am merely a thought that shan’t linger beyond the next vision you encounter, may be a bird, a falling leaf, or just a musing, but I shall not live that long, for you to look back and wonder. But that does not mean I am not there, that I do not breathe, or that I do not exist.”

Lost in my reverie I could hear all this ringing in my head, throbbing like a bickering thought, incessant and belligerent. It troubled me, like the sight of a dead bird, or a diseased stray dog. But it wasn’t a dog, a bird, or a pile of uncouth, unsavory entrails in an abattoir. Staring into the oblivion with a deeply entrenched vision, wrinkled skin, emaciated and hopeless, she sat there in the middle of the road. Her eyes had dried up; not that I expected them to rain like that of a dryad on a famished earth.

Staring at her I could very well picture a fading black and white painting, her eyes glistening in light and I could see the minute shadows between undulations on her skin. The silence on her mien travelled down her back to her feet in a vibrant way, leaving out all the worldly noises in their pitiable places. Was this some meditation, or some trance that made her an unperturbed and an undisturbed monolithic idol?

 A part of her clothing covering her head would move a bit in the malaise breeze barely revealing her hellishly black yet bleak hairline. Her chapped lips, her parched cheeks and her inundated thoughts were like a painting in the Louvre. Just that here there was no one to draw interpretations from her eyes, the color and hue of her skin, and the unending impossibilities of her dilapidated life. This epic seemed like it would stay this way for eternity, but it did not. Amidst all the burst of colours she moved her knee a bit revealing something. All I could sense was a fettering stone in the continuum of sanity, of the self-proclaimed normalcy of one’s existence. Whatever she had on her lap just lay there in peace. Was it a child, an animal, a toy, or an apparition of a thought so strong and resilient that it took the shape of a vision I could not wipe off the parchment of my mind? She seemed to cherish the presence of that object a lot, she held on to it for a long time, longer than time; maybe she grew this old holding onto it for this long, a thought, a mere lifelessness in one’s lap. Did she just turn her head, did she just nod, in dismay, in despair, or was it an illusion of my overly hopeful hope trying to mend the retardation created by her in my mind’s sanctum?

Pondering on all this I kept observing her. She looked down; I could see her eyes fade into a cascade of disbelief coupled with realization. I saw her hand move, the veins sticking out of her skin, as if they had relinquished their duty as the bearers of her blood. Her frail fingers twirled a bit, perhaps to feel the thing on her lap. I could imagine the immense pain she had to undergo to make her move from her current poise. But, how could I imagine something I could never feel? She moved her hand to and fro, in a way of reassuring herself of something. But she abruptly retracted; for once I saw the tiniest spec of life in those eyes, teardrops waiting to dry off like a thousand such before. It was strange how people walked past her without looking at her, without looking at those eyes and those lips, and that thing on her lap.

My reverie had turned into a trance, a limbo where sanity, logic, and all ideation collapsed into one singularity; a metaphysical singularity, synesthetic and bright. Suddenly there was a question that flashed in my mind. What was so amazing about her? Was she beautiful, was she holy, did she achieve something great, feed millions out of an empty bowl, walk on fire, or spoke to God? No! The only thing she did was to dissociate me from my perception of reality, from my version of starkness and brought me to a world of cogitations that I had never seen before. Some bystander might pity her, throw some money at her. Some writer might pen down the apparent miseries into a journal on human sufferings, or some social worker might want to “rehabilitate” her into a popular world. I wouldn’t do anything of that sort. I would just sit at a distance and witness reality unfurling all its colours as it did then.

 In such moments of illusion imagination is like fungus, it shall grow wherever it can. I would imagine her dancing and singing. I would imagine her in a beautiful red dress. However, my imagination would fall in the colourless pits of her darkened eyes that would swallow every thought beyond her current state. I turned blind to the dancing, deaf to the singing, and the redness of the dress turned to a shade of grey like  a wilting leaf in scorching sun. Her presence was profound like an Event Horizon where nothing could escape, eventually collapse to nothingness. What remained was a mangled perception, a tangled up motley coloured realization of everything, carnality, happiness, serenity, anger, lust, humour, melancholy, and eventually a stupor.

I looked at my watch, five minutes had passed. Strange, all it takes is a look and the passage of banality stops, the entropic world halts, giving way to a stoic and controlled dystopia where everything happens slowly, in our knowledge and with our consent, even if it may destroy us.

I was possessed by a realization, an understanding of the situation I was in. What importance did she bear, that I was so captivated by her existence, an existence that resembled that of a billion others? Her presence was as important as her absence. It never mattered to me whether she was there or not, but till she was, I was tethered to her.

“I do not intend to be you, to see the world as you may, to feel the world as you would, but I would be you, to feel what it feels like, not to be you, not to feel what I felt not being you. I shall be you, just to celebrate not being you. But I fear, what if being you is better, is more fulfilling, or, what if being you is no different. What if I can never give up being you?”

Her presence, her sheer existence made me sick, made me feel that the lack of starkness, the lack of truth is an easier life. She did not have a life, she had clockwork. What was happening to me, why was her absoluteness in truth giving way to doubt? I had started to sympathize with her, with her condition, her solitude, and her burden. I wanted her to feel better; I wanted her to be better. The standards of morality would mark me as immoral, but it was true, what generally stood out as her misery, was her beauty, the reality that she carried with her embellished her all the more. She was devoid of any wants and desires then, she did not know riches or comfort, and that is how I wanted her to be because she made me feel nice. I was feeding onto her being. I do not care! She shall die like that, she shall perish in want. How does it matter to me? It shall be a glorious death, quintessentially true, how death should be, without people to mourn, without people to glorify. I wanted her to be there for a little while longer. She made me pity myself. Yes! Self-pity is the opium of life. Why was I there, staring at her for this long? Because she made me realize how foolish I was in desiring all that I desired. I could have been her, living for those few minutes and then dying; only to be thrown away like the carcass of a road kill. I knew she had no qualms in dying; it would not have made a difference to her. I guess it was the thing on her lap that forced her to live. Why did she bear it? May be she never wanted to, may be fate had its way with her on a weak and feeble night. I do not care for her miseries, they are not mine. However, the more miserable she is, the more I pity myself, and hence, the more I opiate. After all, I am immoral by the standards of what gives meaning to my life. Does it take immorality to see real beauty? Perhaps it does, perhaps it takes a sick man to know what it is not to be sick. How can I feel what she is, unless I am what she is not, and become what she is?

I walked away, my Catharsis was done, and maybe she died, or grew older to die one day. I do not care, the Catharsis shall not last that long for me to care. What shall last is a memory, of a day when I saw what it is not to be me, to be something worse, and realizing how worthless being me was, but how necessary worthlessness was.
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