and the loyalties change....

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Random and more Random

Quest for solitude, persuades my pineal to defer its duties by a convenient enough margin.

-Me, Random

The innards levitate when the horizon borrows the pink of rouge, the pink of heart, the pink of love and the pink of......never mind, dairy milf sorry milk is purple while kit kat is an unhelpful red....but the lipstick...aah....call it fulfillment, i call it the undoing of a frustrating jigsaw......

The gaping, blind hollow of an expression of incredulity, the precise pink, barricading the noir, the streaked and glistening black of my tee, the black of a miniaturized legacy of tesla,kissing your cheeks and the black of fearful misgivings, unfounded albeit.

The green of the mutant, sinewy turtles....the green of my envy, envy of DJ....the green of madison county, Iowa....

The blue of the dainty scrawl, the blue of my blues invariably starring in a scene deficient of you.

The article, marked 377......europe's tryst with destiny....my tryst with hypocrisy......the fucking despot....prada's devil collection.....the eastern woods....the covered bridges....the haplessness as life descends into a pall of uncertainty....Then..Then there's you...

the U of You....the U of our Utopia...

Do hare's have orgasms?? Or was it a spelling error.....

poor hares(or otherwise).....they never knew you...maybe the spelling would have been different...

But would i have wanted you any different...randomness can't be classified or typified so my ignorance wells up like stale bile, for the infinity, you seem to encompass in the unfathomable realms of your grey goo shrouds the answer like an adamantly opaque wisp of fog.

So i just lose myself.....drinking in your arbitrariness......becoming you....becoming a canvas....for you to drench in the insane streaks and dapples of your colours...

what colours??

The pinks of my love, the blacks of my unfounded, malicious premonitions, the green of my envy and the blue of my blues.........

Am i you.......you decide...

huh??

A day in the Life......Part II

The cosmos milled about the nondescript byculla street corner, where a run down clinic, set up by kamal damle, clamored for a survival sustaining eminence. The board was the same red paint on a rusted, wasting, white coated iron sheet. An experiment with fonts was probably the only betrayal of the capitulations to marketing, that the inheritance of a bigha of land in barren raigad afforded.

The MBBS emblazoned, could of course be contended for circumstantially, interpreted as one's

economic position dictated.go figure.

The arduous road chalked out by reality for prostitutes like padma, did not have a propensity for lavish and elaborate medical care. So the the throngs at random street corners in byculla, did have a smattering of kamathipura locals.

A complaint never permeated out the lips of the mentioned crowd at the dingy sustenance, they entrusted their health with but then obviously riches of life had never had a particular penchant for leaking into their sore pockets or sordid, sweaty blouses(bras were tedious contraptions, given their profession) for that matter.

Padma was, therefore a natural clientele for the dispensary. She hadn't been frequent at the place, i mean, not as much as some of the other clients most notably, those whores, whose HIV had assumed terminal dimensions.

But since the death of her son, she'd grown increasingly conscious regarding, every unusual characteristic, her health displayed, however frivolous, it might have been.

The leash afforded by damle's compromised education did not allow him to decipher the test result's for what they were.A look of abject ignorance was, by practice, masked by a veneer of sadness and shock. It was, in general, a trusted method to eke out, more than necessary dough from some of the most deprived pockets.

But in padma's case, it only acted as a catalyst to accelerate the misgivings, she already had been having about her health. And for this dangerously precocious conclusion of hers ,she, if not justified, wasn't at least completely complicit. The stat that nearly 40% of kamathipura prostitutes had HIV, did nothing to compell her to deliberate over her inference.

********************************************************************************************************************

A small column on the page that dealt with local news,one day, blared the headlines,

Fire incinerates three shacks.

A brief read would reveal the number of fatalities to be 2.

********************************************************************************************************************

An unusually animated humming, the same evening hung like a lazy and languorous cloud, over the small queue at damle's clinic. Ignoring the persistent colloquy for a while, the curiosity of damle, finally overpowered his cold professional facade.A few right questions to a few right people, and he could finally make out the truth though the translucent visage of colloquial exaggerations.

'The fire' was the pestilence that had afflicted the tongues. The proliferation, almost epidemic.

A fire had broken out at padma's place, charring her and her husband to a black sooty mess.

The fire engulfed the two neighbouring houses before the fire brigade, blared its authority over the inferno and managed to control the fire before any other casualties could occur.

Suicide was suspected, but the fire, it seemed vapourised every clue to padmas's heavenly abode itself, or so it seemed, as a lethargic police, was diffident to sieve through the mess, that remained.

Instead of facing the long drawn death that was in store for her, or so she thought, the immolation, from the left over kerosene from the stove(pondering over her act, she hadn't eaten anything, the previous day, nor did her husband, or so it seemed), was a dignified and swift way to end her troubles.

That night, when kamal damle went to bed, putting curtains on yet another day, he did not have a reason to ponder over an innocuous blood transfusion he'd carried out on inspector gaitonde, some years back.

Having the Blood sterilised from the retrovirus wasn't his worry.

He had also not foreseen what inspector gaitonde's perverted inclinations would reap.

The connection to padma, hence, was pretty serpentine.

Snoring indulgently, the paucity of knowledge of the above resulted in him being in-complicit......the conscience for now, had been cloaked by the mind's short sightedness.....

It had been just another day, in the life of kamal damle, and the last one for padma and her husband......

We, live on......

Love, that never was....

When a lonely strech, yawns about,

and the guardian angels call in sick,

I'll be there to dispell the sorry clout,

emtombing your worries, brick by brick....

call it dabbling with taboos,

or sick insinuations like some pugnacious shenanigan ....

as i sieve through your psyche, hunting for clues....

for any illicit leanings of the sort, from the time, we had 'begun'.....

why does it always rain on me.....

the clouds rumble to your voice's reverberation...

the rain drops tap a rythmn to my unrecquited plea.....

and camouflage my tears, borne of our separation......

misgivings galore,

decapitating my attempts towards legitimacy...

bringing to fore,

the deeply engrained cultural orthodoxy....

consigned, to steer my desires from behind the veils...

mutely spectating,

as some other being, acquires the centrestage of your life....

can't wince, even as my resilience fails,

wearing a constant gag, stricken alone, by this strife....

Who says, i can't get stoned alone,

in face of hopes, incinerating in a smoky plume....

in a clammy shell, my feelings, i enscone....

perhaps you never learned to love angels, whispered the vaccuum......

Guest Entry- Indian vs foreign authors.

My cousin from the states hapenned to read my indian vs foreign authors commentary and pitched in with his take of the whole thing....

Do you think Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss is an 'author's story'? Do you think 'In Custody' (Anita Desai; there was a wonderful movie made by Ismail Merchant based on the novel) is an 'author's story'? I am not so sure. I always thought that there was enough plot in the Desai novels orVikram Seth or Naipaul.I do agree that in a large number of cases, 'Indian' authors (I am thinking of the two Desai ladies, Jhumpa Lahiri, Naipaul, Vikram Seth here; this is a completely unscientific survey you see) write very'specific' stories in the sense that if you read Jhumpa Lahiri you would think that all Indians have a 'first rice eating' ceremony for their kids. In fact, there is a funny incident in her novel The Namesake (or at least it was funny to me) - our Bengali couple take their young son to the neighbourhood nursery or something and they are surprised when the (white American) teacher tells them "Oh Don't you know the Patels? Their child is the same age as yours."Its the same thing with Vikram Seth novel A Suitable Boy. If you read that book, you would think we all sit around and indulge in high-browUrdu poetry to pass time. But of course thats not true. He is talking about a group of people of a very specific class, very specific community and ethnicity, and religion (not to mention the sub-religion or sect). Also his novel is set in a different time (it is post-independence and people haven't heard of globalization).There are those 'Indian' authors who use what some would call cliched language - Bharati Mukherjee is a classic example. These are novelswith titles that will always contain the words like spices, mango,tamarind, dharma, shiva, vishnu, karma, etc.Manil Suri is another such author.
There is also this question of who is an 'Indian' author? Is Jhumpa Lahiri really Indian? really? I mean, she was born and raised in theWest. And V S Naipaul is Indian? really? He was born and raised inTrinidad and then he has spent most of his time in Britain. He has seen India as a visitor not as a citizen or resident. And is Pankaj Mishra still an Indian? (after his writing a heavy criticism of theIndian armed forces in Kashmir; and just to sprinkle 'salt to thewounds' (jale par namak chidak dena, as we say) of the 'hindu patriots' he has also given up hinduism and embraced Budhhism!)And is Mark Tully Indian? He was born and raised in Britain but he issettled in India. And what about Ruskin Bond (I have a very soft corner for him; we used to have some of his stories in our CBSE syllabus)? I think he is more 'Indian' than many other so-called'Indian' authors. I don't think that there is any such thing as an'Indian.'
So, I guess... well, I am not trying to write a definitive thesis onthe subject. But according to me there is some bad writing and thereis some good writing. Thats all. There are plently of awful 'foreign'writers too. And believe me many of them get their facts completely wrong.

Indian vs. foreign authors

I am, if i might say so with full dignity and modesty, a veteran, when it comes to reading novels, purely nicking this assertion from the sheer number of books, i've read.And therefore, with time, i've grown fascinated with the differences in the writing styles of indian and foreign authors.

One chief thing that betrays the stable of an indian writer, is the fact that the language is deeply reminscent of the post-colonial literature. The metaphors and the composition of sentences, is hardly colloquial in the current scene and therefore, requires the reader t be a serious enough connossieur of novels to trul appreciate the depth and sheer intricacy of the language 'contraptions' employed.The plot takes a secondary perch and loses its eminence, in a slight measure to the beauty of the prose, the language, i mean.

The foreign writers, on the contarary attribute a lot of importance to the plot and pay a lot of reverence to the importance of hard, reasearched facts towards the development and the gradual unravelling of the story.

Indian writer, i venture, write author's stories.........

The Maximum City......chapter one- beyond the opaque veil...

Mumbai.....

Perhaps my favourite city on this third planet from the sun.

Measure out: one part Hollywood; six parts traffic; a bunch of rich power-moguls; stir in half a dozen colonial relics (use big ones); pour in six heaped cups of poverty; add a smattering of swish bars and restaurants (don’t skimp on quality here for best results); equal parts of mayhem and order; as many ancient bazaars as you have lying around; a handful of Hinduism; a dash of Islam; fold in your mixture with equal parts; throw it all in a blender on high (adding generous helpings of pollution to taste) and presto:Mumbai

The description, above, kind of sums up the upsurge of emotions that the very feel of this city induces in my soul......

When i was, but a proverbial 'bud', this place used to terrify me to no end. The bustle and the confusion seemed like a harbour to malice and darkness.The uncertainty, dwelling the realms beyond the facade of this superficial cacophony, used to stir my heart into turmoil, dissolving the crystals of fear into a vortex of dread.....a fright of the unknown.....

The stereotyped image of the city prevented me from making the most of the time i spent in the city during my childhood and most of my adolescence......The make-believe shenanigans of the city etched a permanent fear for the venom, the city would reserve for my innocence and my deficiency of age....

It wasn't as if i hated the city, in my formative years....The trips used to be as interesting as it gets, hanging around a few adults and doing nothing but watching TV and acting, as if following their bidding. And it was perhaps for these trips and the need for my parents to restrain a precociously exuberant me, that drove them to murder my ebullience, and compose a requiem, as an interring, for the same, that would echo in my ears, warning against the hijras that would kidnap me, mafias that would force me into begging, assassins that were jobless enough to issue shoot at sight orders in their fraternity for me.........and more such depressing stuff.

But the allure for the unknown has been the hallmark of the irrepressible urge of a human for conquest and so it did reflect in my life. Imagining to no end, the existence of an abominable creature-the city itself, forced me to mull over the secrets buried in the womb of this metropolis.

The need to know, gradually overcame fear and i opened up to this city....to love it with all of my heart....

The process, this barricading of inhibitions, might have been excruciatingly slow,but it did come about and i am sincerely thankful to the propellants, that drove me to this new-found enlightenment, one, that promises to forge an association of a lifetime with this throbbing mass of life that is Mumbai......my Mumbai......aamchi mumbai..