Whore

I like the music I am listening to. I like the drive in the mornings, alone, screwing up your eyes against the sun, I like the changes when September skirts around October. And the Kaansh is growing spectacularly beautiful this season.

I like what I am writing too. Not this, but the book, the 1st chapter. It's coming out beautiful. Moving and sensual. With all the verve and the energy of the city, with all the ugliness of its people, with the pathos of love and longing, and the kick of betrayal.

I like my car. She's old and beat. But she's a good car. She always starts, always runs, always gets me where I want to go.

I like my talents. I like the way I draw figures out of nothing, tales out of everything.

And to the things I do not like, I wish to be impervious.

If life's a whore, i'll buy her, but I wont be a pimp.

They who mutter under their breath

Elves!

You who mutter under your breath, you who breath, you who talk, you who tempt, taint and tug.

Show yourselves one time.

Come out from under the tables, from behind the curtains. Get off my shoulders, my knees. Come out! Come out. Out! of my shoes, my pockets, my underwear, my drawers and my cupboards.

Come out of the dark for god's sake.

Naked children, you feotal monsters, will you please for once

let me be

In peace.

For once, please fall into line, one word at a time, grammatically correct, aesthetically pleasing and a little - just a little - human.

Please.

So much for dream seasons

I used to have dream seasons once. They would come suddenly and stay for a few months. They would throw my life out of gear. Shake up my sense of time, induce queer visions, be marked by a complete lack of hunger and sleep, a chronic aversion to human contact.

Now it will happen to me no more. Perhaps because I am not a poet anymore. At least not in the mode I was.

I am, instead, turned into that creature I call the New Aesthete. I have no past. I do not care for the future. What I write is not contemplative now, it is seductive. Sensation over emotion, brevity over infinity.

The image of the thinker is gone, replaced by the face of the 'sneering gargoyle of Paris' - Ugly, mocking, sneering and supremely disinterested.

In a prosaic world, one only does prose. One cannot 'do' poetry. First there was beauty. Then there was the beauty and the beast. There is only the beast now.

I do not wish the dream season anymore. I will not permit it to touch my eye. It is too noble a season to touch me anymore.

But it was good while it lasted.

The Crocodile's Back

I moved into that mad salvador dali world around 1 at night with a tired back and a near-numb head.

It was a trip to a familiar corner of the mountains that frequently features in my night trips, only this time I was driving my ol beat-up baby 8503.

The colour of the air was an orangish something and the frame of the world was a little tilted. I drove up to a many-storied house, curiously empty. The verandah was familiar and I felt a funny feeling in my head.

And then I slept in a large room, on a large bed, under a large fan. It was strange. Everything there. Like when you watch TV with the mute button on.

I turned on my side and realised that there was someone sleeping INSIDE the thick mattress under me. The mattress was transparent, jelly-like and inside it was a corpse, stiff and nude.

I jumped off the bed feeling revulsion and vomitish. Ran out and jumped into my tired cranky car and drove off. And the mountains were all barren and lifeless. There were no humans, no animals, no trees. Just mountains, large and bare and dusty.

And at a pass, narrow like a woman's word, the car came stuck and wouldnt move. I shifted gears and pressed the pedal muttering please please please please - and I could still feel the skin of the corpse on my skin. The car didn't move but a black dog floated out of the air and stood staring at me.

And thats how I remember the night.

A picture from a distance:
The car in the mud, the dog staring, the memory of a naked corpse in the mattress and the mountains stretching on all sides, grim like a crocodile's back.

Diamond Merchant

I play the fool usually and keep quiet. I only speak when I write. Truly, that is.

So most bright souls think I am the village simpleton and can be had. That's a disadvantage to me because I have to suffer- a little. But it is also an advantage because though they do not know, I observe and note and weigh, and never reveal what I have seen and heard and known - the slyness of the in-between hour. And I am patient. When I laugh, I am quiet inside.

My secret room in the head has a large shelf with a board on it that reads ARISTOCRATS. It was a board I had put up when I left school. And each time I write a name on it, I make sure it is written in chalk, so that when the truth about people comes spilling and adds up, I can walk up to it and wipe it clean with a damp cloth. And wait.

Every name I write goes.

I remember having read once that - Treason is like diamonds; there is nothing to be made by the small trader.

I am a diamond merchant not a small trader. :)

If I am quiet, dear names, it is because I know more about you than I show.

Lear in the river

It is that time of the year again when the rains desert Delhi and you can sense the stirring of the autumnal month, and autumn stirs like an invisible apparition, a phantom presence by the roads - you drive alone and quiet, down the dusty highway to Delhi at sundown, and suddenly you realise that the wind has changed its touch on the trees, a mere caress, a nudge is scattering bagfulls of leaves, cracked like palms, in the dust, against the windshield.

You drive on and suddenly you realise that you are looking into the future as if you were looking into the past. That you are smiling as if at someone else.

The grasses are greying in patches in the river, on the banks. In october they will look like white fire. The beard of King Lear.

"Nothing will come of nothing: speak again."

Doppleganger

It's been a recurrent dream. And while the settings vary, the central theme remains the same. The boy with curly hair in jeans and T, holding a large pile of red books. It happens in London once, once in Delhi I think and once somewhere that could be anywhere. It is followed by earthquakes and mass destruction, but he is there and I can't figure out who he is.

I am told it could be my way of recreating my old friend John.

I am not so sure because John figured in two of those dreams with us.

I suspect it is my Doppleganger.

And something, somewhere has set him free. if only, he'd step out of the dream. It's the creatures who hover in dreams that are more dangerous than the creatures who inhabit the day.