Author: fictionhead

Irreclaimable Innocence

An unplanned beach getaway to rid myself of the politics of everyday life.

A barely affordable sushi experience to quell the ‘sense of adventure’ in me.

The exorbitantly priced ride I take home post a tiring day of shopping…err…‘retail therapy’ simply because I can’t wait around for a metered fare.

The ka-ching does come from my very own ‘deep’ pockets that I dug sacrificing my eyes and back to a computer screen.
Of course I am entitled to spend it the way I choose without having to justify myself. I think ‘hard-earned’ is the adjective they use.

Then, I came across a little girl, barely in her teens, an A-grader in the 7th standard. She loves Maths and dreams of becoming an Engineer. And her father, a casual labourer, ‘casual’ not an adjective of his choice but a hand-me-down from life.

For their family, electricity is a luxury like sushi; kerosine, an expensive alternative, like an overpriced auto ride is an avoidable indulgence.

I came across her life on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, having eaten my fill; lethargic to even switch on the tv, I read about her life from a page that the fan chose to open for me. It was Coincidence in her Sunday best.
I am not a social worker, I don’t like the implications. I work for myself, to cushion my life.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance-Confucius

Now that I know, I imagine what a 1000 rupees, pocket change really for one of my ‘fun’ weekends, could give this girl, who dreams from the darkness of the room she calls home-a month’s expense and more considering her family of five earns 5000. For her father who knows no magic to make those 5000 rupees stretch over books, uniforms, sick days and the big dreams of his little treasures.

“Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”-Nelson Mandela

To imagine that a thousand rupees that I could add ‘mere’ as an adjective to if I thus chose, could help a little girl achieve her dream. I was a little girl a while back and I had dreams that I didn’t necessarily follow but I never had to worry about how my parents would manage the logistics of. I now remember the freedom of dreaming without logistics. But that’s an irreclaimable innocence.

Life

Butterflies flit

Leaving shivering leaves in their wake

Water drips tense like sweat

And air holds its breath

Willing all noise to quiet down

 

I did notice earlier

And I am wondering now

Did they pre-empt my condition?

 

Contrary to popular belief

Pointlessness is a calm feeling

Only negative.

The loneliness, solid in its intensity

Weighs me down, its lead boots to my head

 

White noise funnels into me

Hollowing out instead of filling

The certainty, the singleness

Of that settling sadness

Like drying concrete.

 

My world zooms into my loneliness

It is fade out for everything else.

It is nothing more than a feeling

My feeling, because outside I see

I see the world go on around me

 

Go on like nothing changed

And my life, the entirety of my years

Compresses into a lead ball, the size of a pill

Heady with side effects.

 

It makes my tongue thick

And my voice echo

It twists my legs and hurts my throat.

I feel everything and then suddenly

Nothing.

 

I look around and I recognise afterlife

But sadly for you its

“Authorised Personnel Only” from here on.

 

Something Else

Yes, I am a dreamer. But not one that dreams while sleeping. Maybe I do, it’s only natural, but I rarely remember them. I love dreaming while asleep because they are mostly pointless. They have no beginning and definitely no logical end; however they seem to have a body which is truly captivating. Seems like a beautiful exercise for a universe on a tea break.

A pond, that’s what this post should be called but its going to be called something else.

Laughter of the raucous kind, the one that sneaks in when you are in truly comfortable company. Splashing of water, joyous, like squealing children let out of school. Adventure glints in our eye, when caught by the sun above. Emerald, that’s the colour water wore to work today. Emerald, powerful in her capabilities but elegant in her demeanour.

Grace, mesmerised, twirled with water around us to the quiet music in his head. She dances along, smiling at us, an unshakeable confidence-that smile.

We swam effortless. I swam weightless. I held my hands out of the water and looked up at the water peeling away simply to check if I’d grown any thinner. No. My hands were just as chubby. Glee is what I felt, I never knew I could feel something as pretentious as “glee”. Years of accumulated fat like memory seemed to have melted away…no… dissolved in the all-consuming emerald around me.

I felt light, I felt great. I haven’t felt light unless I skip breakfast and lunch, but that’s a different light altogether. This felt like possibility to the touch. A vast expanse of possibilities where I could ride this laughter and surf the waves of absolute happiness. Even when I thunk it I knew it to be a fallacy, this business of the absolute. But I was impressionable, afterall I was feeling glee and my light self was laughing with friends in an emerald pond.

The land above was a grove of fruit-bearing trees laden with cashew, jackfruit, mangoes, tamarind and rose apple. An enormous banyan tree stood leaning, investigating the traffic in the pond. He watched us languorously with the air of someone who had seen many such rendezvous. He didn’t mind it. He liked the gentle distraction. Countless years of standing and shaking his leaves like jazz hands had made him gregarious.

My orchard wasn’t a jungle. It was a cool haven, a dream place for the lovers of fruit and shade. In the middle of the day when the tropical sun slapped you hard for stepping out, my orchard was the serene colour of dusk with the serene feel of dawn.

Just as the temptation to explore the orchard came over us we realised the difficulty. It was impossible to get onto the land from the water. They were like a discordant couple, living in the same house, but both aware of the lines not to be crossed. The banyan tree had let down his hair of roots into the water through the earth. That was the secret of his perfect jazz hand-leaves. These root-hairs had now acquired a mind of their own. The root-hairs had formed what seemed like a dangerous maze of a sturdy root-trap which came alive to get you stuck in them. Earth, who could not bear to watch this torture had collapsed a long while back giving way to an even more cavernous and indistinguishable ruse.

Adventure that glinted in our eyes had made its way to our hearts and without much thought we set forth to gauge the real danger of the root-trap.  When it was noticed that the root-trap, if we could circumvent it, held shimmery things, we stepped over each other to volunteer for that epic voyage.

The plan was simple. Take a deep breath, dive as far down as was required to get around the root-trap, check on the other side and be right back. In theory, this was child’s play. In practice we were all children of the swimming pool, with its chlorinated water and a lifeguard on standby.

One of us went forth with much gusto and was soon a bubble in the greenish darkness. Panic, on her way in, made way for Logic to leave. I walked straight into the root-trap to “save” my friend. Thankfully this was a dream and no man, woman or animal was harmed in its making.

Life on the other side was literally breathtaking. We forgot to breathe. Roots-tiny, thin, long, juicy, sturdy, purposeful- roots were in full attendance. The light too was different. There was a brilliant light, much like a wet sun, diffused yet luminescent, shining below us. The roots weren’t lit, they were glowing, like series lights. We were glowing, our skin translucent and orange, our mouths pale and our smiles bubbly. Eyes, all eyes in the vicinity had caught the light. The source of it, however, was far away and like the sun could not be stared at directly.

Roots, clean and pastel, were having a good time. You could make out how genuinely happy they were from the way they touched each other’s arm before stretching into the vastness and coming right back to share some naughty titbit about going south. They belonged. That’s when the thought crossed my mind like a certainty. This was root heaven. We were in root heaven.

The more industrious among us were sure that the light was from a hidden treasure. A trunk of gold, perhaps, maybe more. Before I could log away that thought as silly, we were making a beeline towards that light.

But as we got closer to the light, I felt myself sweat in my underarms and in the crook of my neck. Is it possible to sweat under water? I thought not. The light shone brighter and I tried to forget the evil feeling that I was somehow being wrapped in the water around me. Then came the high pitched deafening voice like thunder had caught a cold.

Then I felt the touch. Of something living on my shoulder. I could feel myself turn white with fear. The distance to my home seemed to flash before my eyes like a digital clock: 00:37

I saw myself turn around to look at it, and that meant yes I saw what it was that touched my shoulder.

It was Amma, shouting her usual high-pitched rant about my sloppiness and general lack of discipline. The lecture was into B-side after having switched on the light, switched off the fan and tried to pull my blanket off.

I sat up groggy and thinking I should wear green to work today.

Perfection

The cynicism in my blood cannot deny that I’ve experienced perfection.

The ease with which I can complete his sentences, without a wasted breath, as if it were the same mouth uttering them words.

The balance that keeps my grandparents married has to be Perfection. If she were any less deaf or he blind to her devotion, they would long have battled out of the bedroom.

The blanket that wraps us when Amma matches my curves in sleep. A knowledge that no one else can possess of every cell that shapes me. Because they were her own before me.

The smoke that twirls seductively into my lungs from that distant first drag; lone and potent perfection, your express ticket out of this world.

When the mouse walks straight into the trap, welcoming its death, the time has come for Perfection.

The simplicity that is fish curry, dead fish swimming in their private spiced sea. Its earthiness remembers the sea and I weep for the sea the fish miss.

What else is the column of hollering monsoon that takes me in from the noise in my head if not Perfection?

It was ingenuity that brought me Perfection that I never sought. In a foreign land where English paraded out of mouths and where English was the only language between us, we took to our mother tongues. Tongues, yes plural, different; languages that we did not share. We spoke thus, in two tongues when knowledge, a lost boy, was vying to be found. While our tongues mouthed coherent syllables, our ears replied to senseless mouthfuls thrown at us from the other. Our understanding wasn’t tongue deep. In the ungainly comments we spouted at passersby, we didn’t speak or hear each other. We were being each other. She and I were, in that moment, two friends, perfectly in tune, when no words made  sense and we recognised Perfection.

Maybe We Have Time By Pablo Neruda Translated By Alastair Reid

Maybe we still have time

to be and to be just.
Yesterday, truth died
a most untimely death,
and although everyone knows it,
they all go on pretending.
No one has sent it flowers.
It’s dead now and no one weeps.

Maybe between grief and forgetting,
a little before the burial,
we will have the chance
of our death and our life
to go from street to street,
from sea to sea, from port to port,
from mountain to mountain,
and, above all, from man to man,
to find out if we killed it
or if other people did,
if it was our enemies
or our love that committed the crime,
because now truth is dead
and now we can be just.

Before, we had to battle
with weapons of doubtful caliber
and, wounding ourselves, we forgot
what we were fighting about.
We never knew whose it was,
the blood that shrouded us,
we made endless accusations,
endlessly we were accused.
They suffered, we suffered,
and when they at last won
and we also won,
truth was already dead
of violence or old age.
Now there is nothing to do.
We all lost the battle.

And so I think that maybe
at last we could be just
or at last we could simply be.
We have this final moment,
and then forever
for not being, for not coming back.

The Butter Story

“Do you know what homemade butter tastes like?”, I ask, not with a hint of condescension but with a glint of affirmative hope that you will.

Not the melon yellow store-bought cubes devoid of character that we call butter.

They are brilliant at heroism; of redemption on the day you are running late; swish and go, that simple.

But I am talking about homemade butter. Homemade butter from cowmade milk.

First you need to be a cunning matchmaker and acquaint working class hero, buttermilk, with classist maiden, milk. Just an intro will make her day. When they fall in love she will curdle into that cotton cushion clouds are made of. At this point marry them off using a mixer and out of her beautiful consistency will be born little islands of butter.

So coming back to the butter at hand, it’s slightly sweet and slightly sour, pale and light, looks textured but is fluid in your mouth.

This is what my 3.45pm tastes like
Buttered up

I had a slice of sugar-kissed buttered bread today. Its been ages. Those hurried tea-times before freedom are long gone. Freedom spelled with friends, cricket, cycle and sun.

But I remembered the minute details. Like how the butter, in all her silkiness, had slipped over the pot-holed bread and sugar in all his bravado had kissed her scraped knee to make her feel better. A bite could taste like a smile if you bit the crystals of sugar, like peace if you got the butter and like an argument  if you hit plain bread thanks to my inferior buttering skills.

This is the taste of my 3.45 pm.

I Smell A Dream

Jasmine, that’s what our house smells like.

It’s not an urban jungle, my garden. Giving the jasmine company is the long-ish bed of some plant I like to simply call spinach (for no reason) with delicately coloured pretty flowers.

We made dinner with loving hands, hungry voices and happy noses; we sat adjacent to each other and ate from our porcelain plates. Now, washing up has stopped being a chore, and so has cooking. We walked off our dinner along Champak-lined streets, its fragrance seducing my fiesty curls. The beauty of repetition dawns when we walk arm in arm, the way we know how we fit. Our bedroom smells of Sampige too, thanks to the thoughtful Chembakam outside our window.

On lazy Sunday afternoons, I make small talk with all our bookshelf people, though of course I like mine better than his. They watch me, like an audience, from a world of their own. Neatly overflowing, my books always find their way back home to the bookshelf. His books are elite and you cannot open one at random; you need a certain standing in society to mingle with them.

Our TV watches, him, me, and everything we do, through her omniscient eye. She wants us to know that she is ready to play a movie, any movie we fancy watching. She wants us to watch her channels perform but she knows that’s out of the question. Hence the offer we can’t refuse. Him, me and her end up sharing our suspension of disbelief. On a sofa, the right one, on whose purchase we spent quarter of a year, we sit comfortable, curves melting, bones cushioned, ready to fall asleep at the stench of the movie turning lousy.

As I lay there, an aside in my brain processes the things in our storeroom. I have two kinds of pickle, with another one waiting to be made. I have three homemade attempts at winemaking in different stages of completion. I could bake a cake this evening with a touch of improvisation. I take stock of supplies, the ones I need to use and the ones I need to buy. I don’t wonder what his brain is up to. The joy we sought has been found, like a dual-sim phone, we live together but still keep our heads separate.

We pay no maid because we love playing house. The chores aren’t divided between us, no one is responsible for anything but it’s an understanding that these need to get done, no matter who does it. Another understanding is that the other will step in without a word when required. We step out during the week, for beer, movie, play, fair or for an occasional mandatory sighting. We don’t have children yet, but we talk to them, about them. Our Future stands at earshot, listening.

The love has stabilised, it’s within the limits of expression now and our hearts aren’t bursting out of our chests. We are not a perfect match, we are not the dream partners, we don’t understand each other or share common interests. The respect, however, has grown, so has the camaraderie. Love is too commonplace to be mentioned. There is a sense of fitting well, a feeling that I previously thought only a pair of jeans could provide. We have our fights, of loudness so deaf followed by silence so loud. But we are both eager to make up and we are glad to have fought because the fight seems to have filed away yet another sharp edge. We fit better making our hugs a national convention of skin.

There is work, family, friends, bad drivers, opinions, things each of us doesn’t like to do, things we are forced to do, duties we forget, meetings we don’t make it to, points we cannot convince each other on and things we don’t appreciate to exasperate us as a couple. But, we seem to be gliding, our only surety that of being attached to the glider; me-mine-him, he-his-me. That everything can be dealt with as long as we stand by each other. That we are each other’s strength and weakness.

Distance has always been a part-time friend; the best part being the dream I could invent. Whatever life with him serves up now, it wouldn’t upset me for I have lived my tame Jasmine-scented dream. I am ready for my chaotic reality. This is how I smell a dream.

Here And There

I’ve met once a time traveller, during one of my many sabbaticals from life it was. He was like a peaceful child, unperturbed by the loud world around him. The blind world that shouted at him as if their disability were deafness. And he listened to it all, all the curses they send his way, all the orders at odds, all the cruel jokes and other manifestations of stress. I’ve often wondered the source of his peace and it is clear to me now, clear yet heady like vodka. It is their high levels of stress that fuels his travails in time.

He was in his sixties last Wednesday. A fun time to be in life, I imagine-settled, retired, relaxed-I wonder what he sees, I can only hear his replies. Future or past, wherever he might go, it’s an uncomfortable feeling-like eavesdropping-listening to someone time-travel. But he doesn’t leave me a choice, I have to stay with him at all times and he leaves without notice.

He met an acquaintance the other day. He wanted to learn her whereabouts in real time. Our efforts fell to their beautiful death like autumn leaves because I couldn’t travel with him but the intriguing dimensions I reconstructed of his reality were beautiful. I am into reconstruction, big time. Mainly because he doesn’t take me with him.

Seated next to me on an old bed that sagged like a soaked slice of bread, he could see not the nondescript lane outside our window but a life lived in another eon, equally commonplace, even more so. Instead of the room lived in by our lives, he saw a clinic with sloping rooms fit for terrace farming. He met with children who stood atop the tube light and he was quick to caution the man who stood inside the table fan. When the cupboard was opened, his eager voice wanted a nameless someone to get ready on time for the chauffeured car that would soon be sent to get them.

One day he was a magician who had lost his pouch of gold dust in his handkerchief and on other rare days he was a positively resigned old man in purgatory. On a usual day, he would stop feeling generous and want to account for all ten of his wife’s gold bangles. Quite a wife, to own ten gold bangles! He led an expedition far and wide to search, count, pat down and account for every one of those ten bangles and didn’t want to stop till every inch of his vast empire of an entire bed was turned inside out.

Such information did alarm me before I knew he was a time traveller. Now I roam mindless, my ears always alongside him on his trips, mesmerised by what his mind’s eye conjures, from the shackles of his bed and I imagine I am with him, holding his hand, seeing what he sees. He used to be my grandfather, before he was a time traveller, now he always will be…