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.

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…

In Paradise, By Her Side

As her lips form my name, calling out to me through the thick darkness of my sleep, I sense her doting tenor.

I would, even if I were dead.

As she comes close and wedges herself perfectly into the nick of my curled up self, I babble random nothings that she alone can decipher. I snuggle closer, wrapping my warmth around her in search of hers. Smiling that compassionate smile, she breaths in my scent, gently kissing me back to silence. There I stay in that supremely pleasurable lull between wakefulness and sleep, listening to her call me ridiculous endearments. She opens out my left palm and kisses it awake narrating for the millionth time how my soft palm was what she loved the most about me when she saw me first.

Even as I realise that I am smiling a peaceful, sleepy smile at being admired I can feel myself shift to accommodate her. As she settles down, gently gliding her right arm under my neck, her body evolving effortlessly to match my posture, I burrow into her bosom searching feverishly for the safety of a long-lost innocence. As we lay there in the clinging wraps of the early morning, all I know is her illimitable love.

As I savour in the knowledge of being truly loved, I wish to be framed for eternity in this moment, a moment of true happiness, a daily moment of being woken up by Amma.

The Life And Death Of A Dream

There has always been a peaceful turquoise dream. A permanent dream of having a person of one’s own.
A person for whom one is most special. Of being someone’s that special person.

Elaborate details of being someone’s reason for living had been sketched and re-sketched a thousand times over. Right through all this idle imagining there was an understanding that this was a dream, just a dream; an impossible indigo dream.

Implausible: stacked like audience in a theatre; having wilfully suspended disbelief; enjoying the performance. Though the longing for such a person was palpable, never once was it imagined that this royal blue dream would come into acquaintance with reality.

The dream turned a questioning shade of blue this May. Summer was blamed for the strange colour change. It took a while to reckon that the darling dream was being eaten.

Eaten whole by a nerd.

On stage the blue dream was losing colour like a 2x rewind of liquid blue in water. The spotlight switched automatically to the weirdo who stood up from his seat. Simple and regular like any other, this psycho stood.

The dream, now faintly blue, was lost for clues as to why this was happening to it. The blue dream was supposed to be eternal. Audience sleepwalked towards the exit as if the titles had scrolled. They seemed to know better. They seemed to have known all along.

On that fateful day, the dream had met Neirdpsy, the slayer of blue dreams. This blue dream grew pale, for having met the prototype of reality. He had no use for this happy blue dream because it wasn’t his to live.

As the dream lay on stage being progressively de-blued, ‘All dreams die’, waltzed the music notes. Though the spirited dreamer who gave it life would dearly be missed, this was like the limitless blue sky for the dream; Neirdpsy was here with a possibility of a real life for the dreamer.

Devoid of all hints of its blueness, the dream knew it had to die, the time had come for this blue dream to give way to a differently coloured reality.