going

there's a fine line
inside me
that begins to submerge
when you fall silent

am crumbling

i am crumbling.
it is all i understand of myself today. it is all i have understood since the evening i tasted the soil. my nape freed of the clasp, my hair let loose and i fall to the mercy of the ground beneath my feet.
fuck- i say, in memory of the worst only times i've spoken that word. my phone goes tumbling and my heart follows its motion, causing an erosion within me that refuses to let me gather myself for several minutes.
my insides tremble, even when i know there is nothing that is likely to have them heard on such a night. but i erode and i cannot anymore contain what inside me has crumbled.
i let my limbs loose, let the mudslide take me elsewhere.

My first ever love

I was five and a half. My kid sister had just joined our family so Maa had to stay at home watching her. Ba took me to the Gokarna Safari Park with M aunty's family. I was excited! We were going to get to ride an elephant. So, there we were on a winter morning, climbing up the steps of what looked like a snapped end of a slide and getting on to the square seat on the elephant back.

Lulu never stopped talking. He was a couple of months younger than me. Everyone thought he was cute and he stole all the limelight all the time. Jordan, three years my senior, was always quiet and well behaved. I instantly fell in love with him!

A snake crossed the elephant's path and I, who was the first to see it, screamed, "Look! Snak!"
I could have been a Gujrati, mistaking snacks for "Snakes". But the word was out! I had no time to correct myself to "Snake" and everyone was already laughing. Lulu laughed the loudest and kept taunting me for the rest of the day with "Snak". How I hated him! I hated him for being younger than me and for being cuter than me. And I hated how everyone talked to him and much less to Jordan or me.

The next time Lulu and Jordan were home from the boarding school, they did momos at M auntie's place. We played hide and seek around the house while the women made momos and men played at a game of cards. Lulu showed me their dog and Jordan shared his five star with me. And I just knew I was going to marry Jordan when I grew up.

Maa and P aunty and M aunty busied themselves in the kitchen stuffing flattened dough with spiced buff mince. Maa was an expert! They praised her for the beautiful shapes she made. They were such a big hit that evening. I was standing by the kitchen watching them do the curious shapes, when Lulu pulled me toward the sink in the dinning space and kissed me on my cheek.

"What's going on?" asked Vikram uncle.

I turned scarlet. I wanted to punch Lulu on his face and disappear. I hated Vikram uncle who went around telling everyone in the house what had happened. The uncles and aunties in the house decided Lulu and I should get married when we grew up. But I hated him even more. I felt defiled. How dare he! I was in love with Jordan! How was I ever going to marry him now?!!

I never saw either of them again. But as I passed into teenage, I often thought I should actually kiss Lulu and maybe really marry him since he'd kissed my cheeks already. But what about Jordan?

Once, P aunty's daughter told me Lulu had grown up into an unattractive young man and it delighted me. Serves him right, I thought! But it also disappointed me. He was my first kiss.

I forgot the brothers as I grew older. They were away at boarding school all the time. At that time, I had no clue what going to boarding schools in Darjeeling were like.

My experience only came much later in my late teens when I joined Loreto Hall. Girls lived under such strict rule, I think of them now and wonder how the gypsy in me endured such austerity. The only visitors allowed to us were our parents, siblings and relatives. Among male relatives, it was either your father's brother or your mother's.

I had a visitor on a Saturday morning. I went down to the parlour. Visitors meant grub!

A young man, fitting the traditional description of a "nerd" sat on a chair near the fire place. Next to him sat my friend's brother Chong, who had made the visit possible.

"I'm Jordan."

Jordan was on his way to Bangalore, where he would live in a monastery. He was training in the Ghoom monastery to become a monk. It was too late to persuade him not to go. Regardless, I tried. To no avail.

I ran into Jordan in the Darjeeling Chowk Bazar once. His glasses were broken so he'd tied it up with a string. I made him remove them and cleaned them for him. He put them back on.

I haven't seen Jordan since. But I heard he had become an English teaching monk in Bangalore. I heard about him from Ba now and then.

Last week, Jordan added me on Face Book. He's working in Kathmandu now and is getting married soon. I felt the same warmth I did as a five year old to hear his voice over the phone again, in a brief conversation. One long friendship!

I went around telling whoever would listen, the story of my first love that day.

the sea, the sea

the sea
strolled on the shore-
the colour of the water
reflected in your eyes,
as you stood
leaning against the window-
looking out

i became the woman
who sat by
your feet
counting
at the waves,
a hand
running over your ankle

Threshold

you stood
on my front porch,
a bunch of eucalyptus
cradled in your arms.

in my hands,
stalks of wilting gladiolus
blushed
at their sight.

Mannequins

Something about nude mannequins always make me uncomfortable. Whenever I see them standing in show windows without clothes, I wonder what they're doing there and am filled with a rush to cover them up.

Why do you have mannequins in your store if you don't need to clothe them and leave them exposed in their lifelessness during stretchy intervals of changing costumes? They come to do you service. They cannot protest their nudity.

When you leave them like that, I'm sure they all wish you didn't humiliate them to that extent. Because, aren't bodies more beautiful when they are nude with life? I'm sure it humiliates mannequins to be so dead and to have the world know it and laugh at them for being hypocrites. While, they are clothed, at least they can pretend they have life.

Of my lover

i want to tell you
about my lover with
bright eyes
who waits for me
with
a clinking of glasses
on a cloudy night
and drenches
my insatiable moans
in burning Mead

i want to tell you
of this lover
who fills
my days
of tight chests
with flowers
and dark chocolates
that melt away
the congestion
in my nerves

i want to explain to you
how his eyes
graze my skin
smell my hair
and search my mouth
for an answer

let me speak to you
about this man
who exists like dreams
and wafts around my house
as a voice unseen
and a touch unheard

he's what i dare not conjure you into

Longing

i long for you today, with a longing i've never felt before. i dreamed i ran past the steps of the airport and found you standing at the other end, your cheeks slightly dented with a dimple, your smile ready to break open. and i remembered your hands that had once comforted my back for two minutes, when i'd just got up after a long illness. this illness makes me desperate. it makes me want to jump out of my skin. it makes me wants to eat everything i cannot palate. it makes me want to get out of bed and explore the winter flowers in the garden outside my window. but more than anything else, i long for the silence in which you understood my last illness, in which you offered healing without knowing you were doing it for me.
i long for a walk homeward, with you telling me of your compassionate deity, who i believe cured me too.

Fever

when
fever
burns
my skin
each night,
i feel
parts of me,
and think of
all the babies
my body
will never bring
into this world

cannot

i cannot be brave about things such as these
when they come and grab me and want to be allowed to stay
i never learnt to be brave about you coming back when you want, throwing my life out of gear.
i can only hide, go into my cocoon and stay so that you never figure what places i can find when i want to disappear.

Tonight

Tonight, I'm fluid from the memory of the year that passed me without me knowing. How much I had wanted to hold out to touch it and how it flew out of me, without my knowing it had been here.
Tonight, I'm limp with confronting a year that stands before me with its arms wide open and I do not want to take them.
Tonight, I want to sleep to eternity, and forget.

Sabina

i love Sabina's smile.
there's something about the way she smiles that makes me feel like she's going to be alright.
but when she cried today, i felt a different kind of fright in me. when her baby hands tried to push me away, i felt helpless- the way i always feel when i look at her and know that she will never walk or run.
but maybe she will become a wheelchair champion...maybe a swimmer...

against the whitewashed walls

we came full circle when we sat against the stupa's whitewashed walls, in silence. much had been said and so much more left unsaid and undone. but in that silence, we came from uncertainty to uncertainty- a full circle of looking at the future with one eye, even when we knew we'd found our place to stay.

like confusing dreams

the walls
had marks
like wet cement

when the bus
roared in its engine
on the street outside
it made shadows
on the pillow

you tapped my ankle
i laughed

i said there were birds
flying out of my ears

you said
-like the sound of the singing bowl

inadequate

i have always been inadequate. but it's only once in a while that i respond to my own inadequacies. for instance today, when you were looking at me the same way you did in summer. i needed you to look away just so that i didn't have to remind myself how short i am of love.

i do not have your capacity for selflessness, your absolute lack of possessiveness and your giving streak. i'm selfish. i love with a need if ever i do. or i don't love at all. even in that love, there is always inadequacy.

people who can love seem like gods to me. (what are gods?) i mean, they can't be normal?!

what does it take to love without thinking about oneself? when will i learn to love and just love and shut away my jealousy, madness and the need to possess.

when will i even learn to love?

i've lived with dogs all my life and envied their selflessness. and to think they never rubbed their capacity of unconditional love on me!

i feel like i'm closing. closing like the rusty tobacco tin which won't open in "Beloved". there will be rustles when you try to pull me open but you will never be able to open it. coz when i shut, i do it just so that you can't find me.

what do i do of this little thing i feel for you which makes my chest tight like it did when you looked at me today?

Shall we?

i cannot imagine how you put up with a man who drags you by your nape and tells you to go to your room and puts you out in the night. it's hard to believe we let ourselves get stretched so far for the sake of a social bond- just so there is still something to flaunt. the world confuses us no end about roles in a family. when he touches you, i wonder if you know it's alright to flinch or if you hold the lump in your throat back, and get on with the jagged rhythm. i wonder if you too feel sometimes like you're being pushed to the brink of insanity. if i've been desperately moved by the need to set my mind free, i'm sure you've felt it too.
let's change our mothers' lives a little?

Festive?

I slip into a cocoon.
The festivals pass from outside my shell. It's like I never looked out of it when I heard the sounds and flashes pass my mind.
Between L's cooking madness for the occasion, there are images of your legs- athletic, dark and agile, running about the house in your restlessness, chasing your hallucinations.
Festivals, hallucinations, your legs- they jumble up in my memory as the paneer turns saffron in L's tandoori power recipe. The dish just joined the list of foods I will not touch, alongside all the meat items I cannot stand the smell of when festivals are here.
I will remain shut in my shell. Let the festivals fly past.

Sari

I've spent the morning being not too mad.

The energy is spent on changing the template of my blog- a hundred times.

Draping a sari around you at 4 in the morning. Walking about in it, taking two hundred steps up and down the office, multi-tasking on the computer- chatting, working, googling images and reading breaking news.

If I can walk and work in a sari, maybe seizing the remote control of my life won't be too hard...

am tapping you dead

i wish there were buttons to make people disappear- to make sure people can never press buttons just to shout at you- to make sure they can't reach for your body and treat it like flesh - to make sure they they burn every time they think of you.
i wish i had a button to press you dead.

why don't you disappear?

my chest tightens at how you lash back in a thousand ways to get one hurt right.
i made it easy for you to kill me with my silence- walking into snares.

The Red Wheelchair

Sabina will have to abandon her red wheelchair. The one she climbed on the day she cried so much because her first one got stolen. I cursed hard that day, and so did her mother. I would have kicked the face of the thief. It made Sabina cry. She doesn't like the red one so much, even though she acknowledges someone was very kind to get it.

I thought today about how excited I was when the stranger offered to get her a new wheelchair. But I also curse myself now. Maybe there would be no bed sores if there was no wheelchair.

I think of Sabina on her wheelchair, alone all day and she becomes a close-up photo inside my head, her face becoming paler with every new meeting. And I make a promise. There will be a bigger and better wheelchair when there are no more bed sores. Maybe there's a way they won't come back?

Not too bad

My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.



I woke myself to Emily Dickinson today and dedicated everything she ever wrote to you. I don't hate my Sunday morning so much.

The World Clock

time
does its tricks again

so
i turn to the world clock
just to put you and i
together

even at the mercy of the digits

Sore

i am a little sore on days like this, when i've set my eyes against the neon lights, the honking of vehicles and the city monuments against a never-ending snag of our voices at how the setting should have been.

basantapur is still brilliant in its antiquity, as we look at it from the highest point ever, taking it in, in an ariel shot.

when you get up and rush down the temple steps to avoid our dispute over the settings, i'm still thinking of how your designs got tousled in the first place and how you kept pushing back the blame on me for all of that. i'm also thinking how easy it became for me to bounce everything off you, making my shortcomings at the colour schemes, all your business.

i race after you down the temple steps, and we run awry. i, relieved and loosened from the pangs of what humiliation there was. and you, fuming, hurting and letting go, because you know you've finally struck me sore for good.

Words

your days
slip into words

you weave them
wind them
spread them
arrange them
like books on a shelf
(in the order of reading)

you invoke them
smudge them
crush them
dissolve them
(until the water runs gray)
to equivocate the past

at least one,
i wish
you'd unconsciously pick
for me

insomnia

how nice to have the excuse of insomnia, when all you want to do is to stay up and read people's blogs and wonder why we all need this space for our thoughts. as though an infinitely wondering-wandering mind wasn't enough!
yes, so insomnia becomes an excuse to stay up, so that you can read people from across the continents, maybe bump into them online and talk to them about a thousand and one things that have been on your mind.
insomnia is my excuse to stand you against the stillness of the night and workout a hundred and one ways to capture your silhouette inside my head.

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

(by Kay Ryan)

not enough

not enough to hurt too many times. you bend, twist, turn, fragment and heal to become whole. it is never enough to say this is the last straw. because it never gets over. it's only like a miller's wheel that spirals. hurt is never enough to shape us. it only helps us grow.

Burn

there are blue fumes
from what burned
this afternoon
under the heat
of humiliation

they turn blue
against eyes
that hide themselves
behind drawn-up
windscreen
of a taxi-cab

there are signs
of defeat
in the rubble
of what was burnt down this afternoon.

crush

pull, drag, push, trample, destroy. it's so easy to crush the human spirit. we do it to eachother as vengeance.

words

why am i so wordy? i once asked Chris. because you're a wordsmith, he said.

every day, i am conjuring words from my memory to tell stories.

words. words. how much i need them every second i press the keys on my little computer, to strike just right so that you know what is in my mind does make sense and that i haven't quite lost balance after all the times i tried to think of just the right things to say and they were not making sense to you.

i'm still trying. i have moved to stories about other people though.

Hollow

there is an emptiness, even as the hours cram-up with twitter feeds, Facebook messages, emails, text messages and offline chat messages. none of them compare to how you look at me and can't bear to look away.

On Sunday mornings

I stumble out of bed
at 4 am
at the sound of my own singing
on the phone
and catch a brief
glimpse of you
in the bathroom mirror
reflecting
my disheveled self.

of moles and memory

every time i stretch my arms over the key board, a mole on the inner-elbow of my right arm glances at me and passes, as my arms turn down and i begin to type. nevertheless, the mole is there, bending down over my lap as i continue typing.

then there's this other mole on my nose- exactly where women have their nose-piercing in all the communities in Nepal, except for the Newars- which has always encouraged people to ask me if i am Rai. i always smile at the approach that i should nearly pass-off for a Rai. from the time i was in school, i thought of being mistaken as so much fun. still do. to belong like that is to unbelong.

another mole on my face, on my jawbone on the right, making my face almost fragile, but not quite. one can only tell it is there if the face has been in view for hours and at a proximity. but the one on my neck is almost always visible- showing off the lines on my neck, speaking of age that's begging to sit on me with a promise of making me quiet, if not more graceful.

the one where my waist ends- only i and mamu and one more person seem to know of.

the one on my right leg is the faintest. but always there.

ajee used to say, girls who have moles on their legs travel right across the world. often, when nights are about shutting my eyes and counting sheep to put myself to sleep, i wonder if the traveling she mentioned was in the physical sense or just my mind crossing seas to seek out people from the past, who i thought i forgot and never did.

Saturdays with Aki

Aki's fur is soft against my feet. That's her favourite place to be. Sometimes, she raises her head, her chin perched on my thighs and looks out at the world, like she was an old woman, brooding over a major problem.

Aki is such an attention-seeker! Like me. Narcissist too. The other day, she was licking herself in the mirror. Just like I like to read my own words over and over before turning them in to the editor.

On Saturdays, I get to catch her flinging her toys in the air, and catch. I get to cook her meals and watch her relish it. I also get to see Mamu and Aki talk to each other in a weird lingo. And how she pushes herself next to Mamu, just to remain close to her.

Best part of a Saturday is when I get to look up between work and rest my eyes on her baby face- a respite from the computer screen, or look up from my book to a moment completely stolen by her innocence.

To be able to love unconditionally like she does, without hoping that I'll love her back and yet love me without shame and guilt before the world for the way she feels. I want to learn to love like that. Selflessly. Without reason.

and so i write

in the last 30 minutes, i've emptied mamu's bottled achar, finished all the cheese in the ref, spooned out the peanut butter till the jar was only half-full and searched the kitchen shelves to see if i could also find something extremely spicy, sweet, crunchy.

i've also eyed Chhori's pedigree for an instant and then looked away in guilt.

before that, i lay tossing and turning in my bed, with a thousand things crossing my mind like it always does the moment i decide it's time to sleep and cross over the threshold, to where images of gore and slime await me.

and then in the midst of digging out the sticky peanut butter and sticking the spoon in my mouth, so that the butter slid down my throat in all thickness, i realized, the madness for food was because the thoughts were not falling into place. and they were not falling into place because i hadn't found a white space to put it down on and then fiddle the chaos into order.

and then i decided, no matter how badly i write, i shall write for the sake of putting myself to sleep, so that i no more lay tossing-turning, waiting for sleep to come and drown me.

i write- no matter how badly- to keep heartbreaks in place, to give concreteness to memories and to let my fingers tap dance, when the rest of my body wants to give in to the lure of a jar of peanut butter, a box of sweets, a bag of cheese-potato crisps and the touch of a hand that corrupts my soul.

Posting on this space is shelved for until I regain faith in my writing.

Falling words

words were caught up

in the almost pauses
in between the falling raindrops

i try to trap those silences
against the noise
the rain makes.

August

it is august again when it rains like this. swift and lyrical. dramatic in how it creates two different strains of music when it falls on the garden and on the backyard.

it is august again when i sit up another night, wading through words in my gmail, yahoo and a stack of old poems on an abandoned blog.

it is august again when i look for you in words, in wasted moments when you stood by the carpark, waiting.

it is august again when i walk back on our sidewalks, stand in the carpark while the drizzle falls races on my face through the fragmented sky, cut by the tall twin buildings.

it is august again, when i decide to leave pages in my diary blank a whole month because you've run out of things to say.

on sunday mornings,

the week comes full circle.

i'm at my desk again, as early as 5 am. my colleague's media player plays loud, songs i know by heart now, but can't place.

my coffee is too sweet today. only on sunday mornings, i drink sweet black coffee. (on other days, it's just bitter, in your memory) i let the sweet and the bitter mix at the bottom of the mug, as i form four quick concentric circles with the mug in the air. the mixture swirls at the bottom, the aroma rising to touch my nostrils with what i know will be a wake-up call to my sleepy sunday morning.

something about these mornings never change- the music, the slight gush of adrenalin over headlines, the coffee mug on the side of the computer screen, the morning newspapers, and the cell phone. something about sundays never change- my only guarantee of permanence.

end of a week

amid the sound of the crickets, the croaking of toads and the last drops of rainwater falling off the shingles, you also hear the singing of a shrill female voice. you know it is bollywood playback singing but can't place the voice. must be out of a hindi movie set in the most dramatic of sequences, you think.

the afternoon passes like it was waiting to be slapped aside quickly. you picked up Murakami and it was over.

when you got up, it felt like you'd lost your sense of time.

it is dark, the rain has stopped and Norwegian Wood lies against your stomach, your pink frames perched on it.

Kanchu sleeps on the floor.

saturday afternoons used to be different. they began slowly and stretched like the love-making that happened every afternoon in repeated cycles behind the unpainted door. when the cycles ended, the door suddenly opened into a dulling evening, striking your face with a sudden realization that another listless week had gone by.

you pick your things off the floor of your bedroom, spread things on the kitchen table to chop and prepare for another week. another week. you know it will bring back the painful back, the damp heart and the stretching of your soul. nevertheless, you start cooking.

just because

just because

i refuse
to
believe
that
we
do not
exist

you call me angry.

ennui

a morning is spent sitting at the deck on the veranda, my laptop propped on my thighs and Kanchu sitting by my feet, watching the pigeons.
she watches them in silence and then suddenly springs to her feet, pouncing as though they were within reach. the pigeons fly away and Kanchu sits down again by my feet.
i scan the onlines for stories. nothing interesting happening today. i'm tired of political haranguing.
mamu talks to kalpana didi about something she read in the newspaper. a woman thrashed by villagers accusing her of witchcraft. Tsch! Tsch! they keep talking.
i'm sitting there listlessly, looking up at the sky as it prepares to rain in a corner of Kathmandu.
something comes back to me in fragments of a dream i had last night. you were in it.

Buses and trains

It looks like it will rain hard today, said Prachinta to herself as she looked up at the gray sky.

There were photos in her mail-box that morning, of a face strewn with innocence.

He'd sent her photos of his little one sitting in a stroller, trying to imitate his father in thick glasses and one of just staring at the camera lens.

The little boy's face had a faint trace of the him she had known in school.

There were no words in that correspondence. Just images. And they made way for a brief mental journey to a walk on the banks of river Cam, where they had stopped to look at their favourite tree in silence, holding back the surge of emotions that had been filling their hearts, the moment they started on a walk on the stone-paved sidewalks of Cambridge that day.

The walk had been about the chill that touched them, more than what tugged at their hearts.

All unsaid and undone, they parted ways at the station. The warmth of the passengers in train embraced her, instead of the Cambridge air. For just a moment then, she had longed for his hands and then turned her face toward the Cambridge grasslands the train was fast traversing.

Now, Prachinta looked at the thick patches of cloud rise above the airport and said a little thank you for the rain.

She knew rain was creating havoc in Pakistan and wondered why what could breed love, was also attached to destruction, death and ruin.

Nothing is permanent, she thought.

by the by

this isn't one of my favourite mornings.
this isn't how i want my morning to begin. i don't need to be thinking about the tangled politics and wonder how i can fit my words correctly to make sense out of the chaos Nepali politicians are deft at creating. i don't want to wake up to newspapers filled with news about "political impasse" on their front pages while the more important deaths, sufferings get buried in the non-significant columns.
i don't want to wake up to these slow-moving, gloomy mornings of editing and re-writing political stories.
i'd rather read blog posts by people who live their lives with the honesty of being self-centered and not feigning philanthropy. i'd rather wake up to emails from people i haven't forgotten, who remind me that in my not forgetting, i'm still alive.

August and everything after

i don't know what to write any more. from august to august, my blog comes a full circle. from one monsoon to another, this new identity has survived, unlike the one on wordpress. i don't know if it's just that this was easier to handle and that wasn't. i don't know if it was because i became obsessed with the need to record and record and record in the bygone year, lest i should forget what i was like when the rain of 2009 was on and how it sowed the seeds of transformation in me. and yet, i don't know what to write anymore. i can't turn to the rain for inspiration anymore. i'm only losing my way through the night when i sit-up and listen to this pitter-patter.
and right now, i ask myself if writing has made sense at all. if August, and everything after will ever make sense for anyone but me. and if it's at all possible to live every year, waiting for it to be August so that the peak of monsoon, when it washes out rural homes, sweeps down roads and carries people away will still bring you back to me.

any day

it's been a while since i heard the rain. now, am not sure why i haven't heard it in all these months, when i've seen concrete and iron bars come down in landslips, and typed the names of a hundred people who got swept away by flash floods, buried under mudslides or carried away by swelling rivers. how could i not have heard the rain all these months?
but i hear it now, as though it starts a music for me alone, as i prepare to record more deaths, tears, conspiracies, victory and defeat.
just another day at work.

Conversations

you have become
the drafts in my inbox-
written and never sent.

you have become the pauses
during conversations
with my favourite girlfriends-
a secret song.

you have become
the sweetest,strongest
last gulp at the bottom
of my coffee mug-
almost done.

I found you hinged on the conversation that flowed out of the new me I've become, during a conversation with my favourite girl writers. I'm a new me. Happy, swift and flirtatious.

My shoulders remained slouched as they laughed at how embarrassed girls are about the first traces of breasts and how there's a desperate need to feel like one of the boys. I laughed at the tip I was offered for my femininity. But in my mind, you propped on our talks as though you had been there listening to the girl talks and becoming a part of the words our minds formed, becoming a girl yourself.

I looked on in amazement as P and S said "kapalnai ta ho". It's only hair. You can chop it off at a barber's. They do a great job.

They reminded me of Parijat's Sukumbari.I filled with envy at their comfort with their own bodies. It reminded me of the time I'd drawn my legs to my chest in an attempt to hide myself from you, bundling me up in a ball, shutting out what might have been the desire for your fingers and their poetry.

I fell in love with S's eyes that distanced itself into a pool once in a while, during the conversation. I fell in love all over again with P's big curls. I fell in love with M's little note stashed in a black pouch.

With you hinged to the conversations, I fell in love with my favourite girl writers all over again.



there will always be drafts in my inbox, written with someone in mind and never sent.

i forget

memory plays deafening tricks on me. i try hard to remember things, places, sidewalks, the colour of shirts, ink deepening into your skin and a sky that was so angry it was about to pour. i can't remember anything now, but the sky. because i do that just as much as the sky does, when i'm mad. just pour.
i'm losing my hold over memories. i'm forgetting passwords, clues and the location of unopened envelopes. i'm forgetting so much.
i wish i could at least remember where i left you behind.

medias res

she has stuck in me like the still walls of the corporate office she always sat against- radiant. she only becomes more beautiful in my memory. her smile always stretched to the corner of her lips, baring a slightly unruly tooth, that kept girlhood intact on a face that ran a small corporate world. and how perfect she seemed in that chair.

life seemed perfect.

a day of smiles at work, getting picked-up every evening to go home to a beautiful daughter with an energy that always made her smile. i describe that as perfect.

but the night Spain and Holland were busy kicking the ball, the air and one another, he broke to me what i still find hard to believe. i still can't believe she dimmed over a bottle of poison, putting off forever, what might have been a fun afternoon of reunion. it would have been sudden, but i would have been there, dropping in just to say that working together had been fun.

and now, she sticks in my heart every day, in the beautiful face of her five year old daughter, who i don't have the courage to meet.

Blue lashes

"two blue butterflies
stand guard
over your eyes,"
you said

and i looked-up
just in time, to dismiss
what might have been
longing

i wish

Kanchu is a warm fluff against my feet, where she lays fast alseep, probably trying to find comfort for two days of bleeding. I can see it has been confusing her. She can't understand why I keep saying "NO" when she tries to get on the bed. She can't understand what I've been trying to do, inventing diapers for her and dressing her up in loose lacy underwear, making her look rather dramtic. She can't understand.

I wasn't so baffled when I first encountered my blood. The thought "hemmorage" did strike me first, but then I understood. It's easier to deal with such things in life if you have your mother around. Mothers are the answer to everything.

But there isn't much help with a mother like me, who can't understand what it is to be a one year old Golden Retriever, who's just started menstruating. I don't know how to take care of Kanchu right now. And I wish you were here to help.

It still rains

on a rain-spilled morning like this,
you came back
to say monsoon was almost over.


coffees and teas
were done

the sidewalks
had been exhausted
with conversations

and i had forgotten
to flip the calendar.


on a rain-spilled morning like this,
i dreamt you'd come back
and could not stay.

sleep

and it felt last night
like i was weaving you
out of the thick blankness
that forced
my eyes shut

and in that i hoped
that somewhere
the heaviness
drooping my eyelids
would put you to sleep

Another Country

at work today, rabi dai played me "another country". i'd left my desk to go and work in the sport section because i can't work if people around me are talking too much. of course, newsrooms are supposed to be noisy. but i can't handle too much talk and too much tv while i'm working. i like a lot of my quiet moments, although there have been years when i couldn't write a word without leaving the music on.

so, anyway, he came and left his phone on my table. i was enjoying the song. i played it twice. when it was playing a third time and i was completely drenched in the need to fall in love (you know how some songs make you feel that way), rabi dai came and took it away because he wanted some one else to hear some other song. rabi dai always has his phone full of songs.

it had been a while since he played me anything. he did today but he took it away halfway, making me feel like something had just been snatched away. i told him later that he had ruined my "moment". and it does feel like he'll always owe me that moment. but nothing can mend it anymore. it will always be a lost moment. it will always be a song, half understood. and playing it now, won't restore my loss.

so many other things in life are like that. left dangling at an ellipsis.

you're one of them.

Sleep

how wide do you shut your eyes
when the nights
coil out
to bring back memories
of transpacific touches
where we were both absent?

Jukebox

nhooja has something playing on his jukebox. i don't know what it is. but it's a single guitar and it's good. i've been living on borrowed music for far too long now. it's always things i catch on other people's computers, ipods, phones.

sometimes, rabi dai plays his 80s numbers for me at work.

he'll leave his phone on the desk for me to listen to and then ramble along with the lyrics and surprise me with his taste for poetry. he doesn't even realize it's poetry, but what he loves with a prosaic mind are always the most beautiful lines.

he will do that like a kid- get super excited about the song and tell you what it is about- the situation if it's a track from a film or just explain the circumstances the song was written under or who it was written about/for. i've often just smiled, heard the songs, liked them when i liked them. or just heard them because rabi dai is a great editor and i love good editors.

but as the guitar plays on right now, i'm thinking i should have played stuff for rabi dai too. how little we think of giving back!

it's almost time for him to leave and there's going to be no one at work anymore, who'll play a song for me on his phone and leave it on my desk for me while i rush with the stories.

Poetry

slipped away

as though it were something
i'd held captive for you

you released me
and
it was gone.

FOOD

Dhauli Nepali: Rice, lentils, spinach.
Reporter: How will you get it?
Dhauli Nepali: Exchange it for clothes.

That's Dhauli Nepali talking to my colleague Bijaya Adhikari.

Dhauli, a resident of Doti in far-western Nepal, hadn't had a proper meal in days when this video was taken by another colleague Deep Rayamaji. On this particular day, Dhauli had just been sitting around, not knowing what she could possibly cook to feed her family. There was no food.

The story arrived at my desk for repackaging on the evening of June 14th, 2010. So, my job is to subtitle the sound bite, write a script, do the voice-over and set it as package for the English bulletin. And Sanim Singh rushes to my rescue, if the program 'Purple' for some reason stops responding to me.

Doing the story was like deja vu.

Eight years ago, fresh footage had arrived from war-ravaged Rukum, about the victims of the Maoist insurgency. My job was to pick out as many stories as possible from the raw footage.

I had picked then eight-year-old Devendra Pandey to begin my story. His father had been shot by the police, alleging him of being a Maoist informant. I started the story with the child talking about his father and then choking up. I choked along with him and ended up taking longer to do the story and consequently wrote a piece on The Kathmandu Post, about the "Children of a lesser God".

The tears, the tight chest and a throbbing temple, all came back as soon as Dhauli Nepali started talking. Thankful for the silence and solitude of the "Subtitling room", I let my tears fall, and replayed the story for myself till I felt soaked in it.

Dhauli's is among the families that haven't had a proper meal for days. And she has children. The local produce (rice) only suffices the district for about three months. (Much of the land here is barren.) Rest of the months are a struggle to find food. The UN World Food Program has been distributing four kgs of rice and half a kg of lentil to the families in this region in exchange for a day's labour, to build road, school and irrigation canals. But that does not provide a long-term solution. The government has been criticized far too often for its "ration distribution" program, which has not done anything significant in all these years to help these people.

My tears shed in an airconditioned office in Kathmandu is of no significance to the people in Doti. They continue to suffer.

There's something about the way Dhauli, numbed by hunger, looks at the camera and then looks back at the reporter that continues to haunt me and makes me want to do something to take away her hunger. Yet, what?

I have never felt so helpless.

again

and the dream was back last night
amid the clanking next door
in between nasal greetings
and the roaring of engines
once more
i tossed and turned
my faceburied in sheets
eyes wide shut
and bled you to death

Last summer

Suvarnabhumi airport has started taking on a new shade. The gray feels like a dungeon. The reflecter glass windows make me feel like a prisoner. Of course, we hate, hate transits. The only redeeming factors, are when you meet people - interesting ones, who make interesting conversations, and then disappear. Then there are strangers to observe, their language that goes above your head. But those are not what transits mean to me anymore.

So, I walked into the grey ladies room again, when I arrived, gathering whatever it is that you need to do things you don't want to, but know that you have to. The heat went right up to my temples, making me want to run out of the cubicles. It tugged on my face, my throat and on my limbs. But I needed myself to stand there and face it. I had to confront the heat. I had to take my time to spend some more time sitting on the toilet seat and and know that nothing would go wrong this time.

Bangkok is not yet over. But it will be, tomorrow morning. Till then, i'll go book myself a 6 hour room in Louis Tavern, saunter in the duty free, swing my legs over the seats in the lounge and try to read a book borrowed from a fellow-passenger, called SOLD, which tells the story of a little girl sold to sex slavery.

And I will think of possibilities. I will also think of you, who I left behind forever, last summer.

a line

last summer

there was a line from Manila

"how are you?"


there was no voice over the telephone

but a conversation had begun

lost

it's time again

to lift a hand

so you know where i am in the crowd

Rain stories

The raindrops sound rather large and swift. They fall on the corrugated tin roof of the guard house in my neighbour's compound. They beat down on the leaves, on the bamboo shoots that grow outside my room. They take me so many places.

Each sound is new and old at the same time. Each smell it kicks-up from what it falls on, is old and new. Rain is relief- connecting my now to then.

I always fall short of words when it rains, as though nothing I say would describe it aptly. The only things I can do about it are, listen, touch and gaze.

When it rains, it's always you Im thinking of.

in my head

there's a man in my head.

he has a face
lined with features
that define me.

his eyes are shy.
his voice reflects his eyes.
his hands move like regret,
letting go of everything they touch.

there's a man in my head,
whose smile
still makes up
for days that aren't.

leaving behind May

from May to May
i leave you behind-
somewhere
in clogged pipelines
and incineration vaults
of a hospital
- on foreign beds.

from May to May
you no more fester
like an incurable wound.

Scars-
they do more to rip your conscience.

Trees

Trees never fail to fascinate me.

The first ones in my memory are the ones that grew in our neighbour's garden, in our ancestral home in Naradevi. It was the only house with a garden. They had trees and flowers. No weed. The garden had exactly three big trees. Two, that bore a fruit called Yomari in Newari. I'm not sure what it's Nepali or English equivalent is.
So, the tree bore fruits that were green, and if you pressed them between your palms, they cracked, offering you an inside that tasted something like Kiwi fruit, but sweeter.

I only got to taste the fruit once. Once.

But when I sat in our room in Naradevi house and looked out the window- where I always sat doing my home-work- the trees always gave me stories. Most of the time, it was the story about the Yomari tree that a girl climbed to run away from demons and later kept feeding them fruits, until they were all gone and they finally carried her off. So in my five year old head, the story underwent improvisations. The girl had to be rescued!

I don't know if the garden still exists, or the trees.

My other memory of trees are the ones that stood in front of our house in Mahankal. Two. They were at the edge of a patch of land that was lower than the level of the one where our house stood, so I could see nests on them at eye-level. There were always birds and berries on them. And thorns.

One day, Sita, who used to cook us meals and keep the house clean, climbed one of the trees and started chopping off it's branches. It made me angry. When the branches thinned, Ring Road was suddenly not so far and I hated the thought of being close to a Road. Sita made me angry that day. She was young, beautiful and full of some angry energy and I was just a child. When she came back into the house, her hands and legs were bleeding. That's when I realized the tree had thorns.

The branches grew themselves back. And although Sita went back to her village to get married, I always thought of her when I saw those trees.

My other favorite tree was the one near Kancha Jyapu's house in Boudha, where I so often went for walks with my cousins. This one we climbed. It had low hung branches, offering to be clung to. I don't know what tree that one was, either. But we did rope down a swing on it once, near Dashain. At other times, just climbed up and down it and pretended it was home.

Then, a flowering tree in my Ta Maa's garden comes to my mind. It was a good one to get into if you were playing hide and seek.

There were trees during my Darjeeling years, that became shelter. Their trunks were home when I felt home-sick. The orchids that fed on them, an object of attention. Those are trees of the Oval Garden, which have stood there, watching convent girls, nuns and other women of all ages and generations.

Smriti's home in Ganesh Basti had two very pretty peach trees. They blossomed every spring. And when the wind broke the petals, they scattered on the roof of the extended TV room, on which we would climb if we wanted to talk for hours without being discovered.

Then one afternoon, I walked into Smriti's yard to find that the twin trees had been scalped to the ground. Smriti's snow-flowers were gone.

Trees.

My favourite tree these days is the one near the town of Banepa. Every year, when we visit my in-laws, I look at the tree for as long as I can see it. It's a crazy tree, with its branches curving right down to touch the ground. You could run in and out of its archways. Paddy or some sort of green always grows at its base.

And every time I pass that tree, I say in a near whisper- "My favourite tree", as though I'm afraid people will hear me. Sometimes, it feels as though I go to Banepa every Dashain and Tihar, not to visit people and receive tika, but just so that I can drive past that tree again and whisper- My favourite tree!

Surreal

(Image by DJ Clark)


and there i am on the street again, making DJ, walk around in the Kathmandu heat, while he takes pictures tirelessly, something that seems to come to him naturally.

the tough side of "teacher" DJ has toned down and i've started seeing him in a friendlier light and it's what is most rewarding about working with him.

he's showing me how to take still pictures,lending me his camera for my story on the little girl, who's always sitting in her wheel-chair on the sidewalk.

when the shoot is done, i go off to get some food for my little girl, Sabina, and it's a long time before i'm back.

when i come back, i see DJ, sitting by the roadside, showing little Sabina her photos, which we took together- DJ's outstanding and mine, struggling for focus.

it's a surreal moment. also a moment of regret. makes me wish i had my camera with me, to take a shot of DJ and Sabina sitting on the road, talking to each other in two different languages. both smiling.

DJ transforms into a very strong image at that moment. something other than a journalist. and it makes me realize how i love observing people, just as much as Sabina does.

i don't know who DJ becomes at that moment. but it's the side of him that has taught me in three days to believe a little more in human energy and the possibility of doing the little that you can to make things better.

maybe i won't quit journalism, afterall. it's the only voice i've got.

Bangkok

do you remember Bangkok?

and how she came back to you
asking for a little love?
how you toiled, touched and twisted with need
and how she retched in your arms
unable to tell you
she only needed you a little more than ever?

do you remember
the sting you felt
while walking away
toward departure?

you still know the distance in her eyes.

i remember Bangkok.

i remember Bangkok as the ground that bled me to death

i remember Bangkok as faces of smiling strangers

yes, i remember Bangkok

that's where you and i left a part of us behind

Refuge

you're still

my place
to go to

only,
no one lives there
anymore

Five days of Maoist Jana-Andolan

My sister is a great cook. I come home to her innovate recipies like prawn biryani, pasta with home-made buff-sauce, mutton-stew, chopsuey with huge chunks of chicken and carrot slices dipped in butter, or spaghetti dripping with yak cheese. These, since the Maoist strike began. Since there’s nowhere to go during the Maoist called clousure, she spends her days practicing her culinary skills. Pehaps a preparation for married life, as she’s soon to be wed. Or perhaps, a way to keep her mind busy since she doesn’t even know how many times she’s going to have to reschedule her wedding to find a day there’s no hadtaal.

Of couse, I relish what she prepares. There’s nothing more delectable that a dish cooked by someone you love.

Am I supposed to be feeling lousy about eating these while the Maoist protestors are living on dalmoth and chiura and water supplied by tankers and sleeping on the cold cement floor?

I did feel sad for the Maoists walking in the rain today, some in their kasrat uniforms, some with red bandannas, some with flags- all of keeeping the pride of their party and the “noble” cause they are offering themselves to. They weren’t mounted on trippers like their leaders. But they walked just as far as the office van took me around the city, while the rain fell without any signs of ceasing. And the Maoist protestors kept walking, still cheering for reasons some of them don’t even understand. Some of them don't even know why they are there. But why would the leaders care?

I got off the office van for a while to feel the rain just like they did. But I had the option of getting back in it after my cameraperson colleague was done. The protestors didn't. Most of them looked worn-out. Thin.

Ironically, the one thing the closure has done for me is helped me gain weight. One, my sister doesn’t stop cooking. And plans her menu without guilt, when a mootha of pharsi ko moonta is selling for over fifty rupees.

Over half the population in Kathmandu is already running out of essential supplies. If you have stored stuff in your larder, you’re lucky (like my sister). Otherwise, either you have money but you can’t buy. Or, you can’t buy because you have no money. Some of us who do have some money, can't buy as they don’t have access to cash because the banks are closed.

The other reason that has helped my flabs is because I don’t walk anymore. I spend the day, waiting- sometimes for five hours- at home, for the office car to pick me. You have to be on stand-by because you don’t know how long or short it might take for the car to arrive. It could be anything between five minutes to five hours. You can’t walk, because the office needs you and you’re not supposed to get injured or too tired to work.

But I walked half-way today. The first walk in days.

So, the streets are filled with people, walking, chatting, listening to the FM, playing badminton, cricket, walking around with canes. The only vehicles that ply are ambulances, press vans and human rights defenders’ cars. So I walk and stare at people. And stare and walk. There are such sights to see on days like these. The same things or even more interesting things won’t even register in your mind on other days. But the silence of a bandh magnifies everything and everyone.

For instance, the elderly lady who was walking in my direction this afternoon, seemed highly attractive to me. Possibly in her 70s, her face shone against the blood-sari and the huge red tika on her forehead. It was the kind of tika that shone like a light. Her bangles shone too. And her bun sat almost atop her head like a Rishi’s. She looked stunning and I had to talk to her. It was her energy. She said she had walked from Budanilkantha to Om Hospital in Chabel and back to visit a sick relative.

So I walked and watched people and talked and walked again, until I came to the little girl in a wheel-chair who is always there at the Chakrapath tempo-stand, watching the world pass her by.

Poetry

if it can't be
on you

then

it will be
on nothing else

Insomnia

You

slip

...under my eyelids

the wait

you seep into my eyelids
-like another sleepless night


The train came to a halt in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between King's Cross and Cambridge. The system had broken down, they said. I pulled out Pico Iyer's "Abandon", trying to kill those endless hours of being held-up among strangers, in a strange place. The train was mostly quiet, aside from muffled telephone conversations- people informing their loved ones, bosses, and associates, about the delay.

Across the aisle, someone had started talking to his fellow-passenger. He spoke with a sharp English accent. Hers was coarse German. I heard the word Munich. He said he'd traveled some parts of Germany. She was a student of English Literature at Cambridge.

"Abandon" had started to become little else, besides Rumi's poetry. I went back to the poems repeatedly, instead of following the progess of the plot. That, I interrupted several times, with pulling my sleeve back to look at my wrist watch or just fishing out my mobile phone from my pocket to read and write back text messages asking me which station.

Tri continued texting me. I pictured him standing in the cold of the Cambridge station, waiting for the train to pull in. I froze with guilt. I didn't deserve to have him waiting like that. The prodigal son must have been like me. I was returning home after almost a week of London, which I'd lived with fervent abandon, all the while, almost forgetting all about Tri.

Tri, like a tree. Always around, kind, cool, reliable- almost like a father. And what did I have for him? A roving mind, questions, more questions and so much need- he could never fathom.

When I thought of him that night, I had thought I would run into his arms the moment I jumped off onto the platform and would ask his forgiveness for who I was. Tell him he lived somewhere so deep, even for the shallow that was me. I hoped he'd perhaps understand that during the walk near our favourite tree, the look I had placed on his slightly upturned nose and the longing with which I took in his generous eyes and his dimples, had been more than just a casual pause. Maybe he would understand that I had looked at him right then like that, just so that I could forever remember him that way, standing there with serenity on his face, telling me how much he loved that particular tree. He had said it was like his diety.

The system was back on track. The train started moving again. The German girl and the Englishman kept talking, laughing. When the train arrived in Cambridge, the girl decided to join the man. They exchanged a long kiss before she slid her right arm into his left, and walked on.

Tri was standing at the platform, looking like a schoolboy- smallish, agile. He smiled like something major had just happened and I smiled back and apologized for the delay.
"No worries. It happens sometimes. Not your fault."

When he drove me home my mind filled with the monuments in the Bristish History Museum and the BOUM sound installation at Tate modern, by an artist, whose name I could no longer remember. I had stood in the vast, vast expanse of the hall, letting the echo swallow me completely. The BOUM almost sucked me in. I felt its vibration-like waves against a big bell, even as I sat in Tri's car.

He played something for me to listen to. "My generation stuff", he said.

I heard someone familiar sing a lyric with words like eyes, love, forever, heart and life. And I kept thinking how I could never, never bring myself to explain to Tri how much it meant to always have him at the station to take me home, no matter how far and long I'd been.

THIS

This is what I most want
unpursued, alone
to reach beyond the light
that I am furthest from.

And for you to shine there-
no other happiness-
and learn, from starlight,
what its fire might suggest.

A star burns as a star,
light becomes light,
because our murmuring
strengthens us, and warms the night.

And I want to say to you
my little one, whispering,
I can only lift you towards the light
by means of this babbling.

Osip Mandelstam

Denouement

The telegram says you have gone away
And left our bankrupt circus on its town;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The maestro gives the singing birds their pay
And they buy tickets for the tropic zone;
The telegram says you have gone away.

The clever wolly dogs have had their day
They shoot the dice for one remaining bone;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The lion and the tigers turn to clay
And Jumbo sadly trumpets into stone;
The telegram says you have gone away.

The morbid cobra's wits have run astray;
He rents his poisons out by telegram;
There is nothing more for me to say.

The colored tenst all topple in the bay;
The magic sawdust writes: address unknown.
The telegram says you have gone away;
There is nothing more for me to say.

(Sylvia Plath)

BREAKFAST

A stainless steel tumbler
slightly out of shape,
slightly ridiculous, on a varnished table.
Seven-thirty in the morning,
chalk steam rising from sleep,
stretching out of its metallic bed,
yawning-standing tall,
to pull in cool gale
before stepping in the wind,
the speck of world behind it
trembling and transluscent.
Niveous cloud-
twisting, turning, sommersaulting, swaying vapour,
most delicate feather-
dispersing at my breath.
Constant change-
now a whirlpool,
now a flat white flora,
now an old woman with blowing hair,
now a white Oscar award.
Modern art-
careless brush taking a careless path,
moving, dissolving, disappearing,
dispersing at my breath,
as I bring the container to my lips.
Smooth white milk slides down my throat.
Maa, I feel your warm love flow in my veins.

(Smriti Jaiswal, 2002)

AS IF!!!!!!!

yes. yes, i know it's bad to go to bed late, sit-up at the note-book for hours, staring at its tiny screen without blinking at all, or batting my eye-lids a number of times the way a coquette does, when i'm at a particularly favourite page on the web , which is however, merciless with its dark background and tiny font size; i know it's a terrible thing to do to the body, to stay awake late into the night, navigating pages as my eyes start turning sore and to keep hoping i'll run into something about you in the web- at least your name, if nothing else- and hope that there'll be a way for us to connect again...especially when i know fully well that lack of sleep makes me susceptible to emotional outbursts causes my mind to go out of focus, kills my capacity for judgement and decision-making and depresses the life out of me and i can never get-up on time in the morning to meet the rest of the family at the breakfast table(makes me guilty as hell at times)and they are tired of asking me to sit with them at least during meals...but i will still sit-up and wait as the night deepens and in a crazy flip, the darkest hour of midnight becomes morning; as though you're supposed to believe that the continuation to another round of roatation for the arms of the clock means an end to the night and the start of the morning.
AS IF!
and as if that changes anything, anything at all, about your absence!!!!

by the by

1.
the intensity of that iris
likely to stare me down

was resurrection supposed to cost so much?


2.
a face
in the photograph

i'm just another name added to the list.

April rain

It has just started to rain. I can always stay cooped up in my room and try to count the so many different sounds it makes as it keeps falling on different things. Like an orchestra.

My particular favourites are when it speeds up and the leaves- the larger ones- sound like bold umbrellas, throwing the rain off to the ground. Then there's the pitter-patter on the pavement and the one that falls off the edge of the roof. These come in different versions too. Each one makes it's own noise, depending on the speed and density of the drop. Drops falling into an already stagnating pool is another wonder!

I can't tell why rain holds so much fascination for me. But it does feels like my second self- falling, battling, raging, quietening down and recreating all over again. Like the Phoenix.

Jon in Cambridge

This is my favourite picture of Jon cycling to the University, taken by his friend.

Jon, with the disposition of a geek and the soul of an angel. (So I think of him). I like to think of that moment in stasis, even while I know he's off somewhere to meet friends, professors and work on his papers, which he so loves and on which he sometimes ends up writing a haiku. I like to think of that moment as still, even though I know it's been long since it was over and Jon is probably sitting somewhere in Cambridge right now, drinking coffee and longing for a Halohalo.

I like to think of Jon as always riding along that beautiful cloud of cherry blossoms (is that what they are?), his mind filled with all the intriguing things he's read -including the philosophers I can never understand- and his heart light with the beauty of Cambridge spring. This will always be my favourite picture of Jon, for it so arrests in a single frame what I so long for- books, bookstores, the townsquare where students gather in the evenings, the EAT eatery, punting and a walk along River Cam, by which I once sat down, my arms hurting with the weight of books and pretended I was also a student there.

SCRABBLE

They were words you were coining out of little bits of wood. Spread on the diner. STORY. TOIL. TOYOTA. SURNAME. SEPARATE. ACCIDENT. CLIMB. They were just words. You picked them out of your treasure for letters and created meanings- nouns, verbs, adjectives. It made you like the gods. Creating from bits of wood. An entire board of meanings and stories sprawling on the table. I watch you create, shuffle and recreate, in silence.

You took the scrabble game away from me. Where will I find the words to fill my silences and make sense of it?

Starved

A man died in Darchula last night. Of starvation. He had two children, parents and a pregnant wife to feed. No money to take her down to the hospital in the plains and no food for his family. The rest of the village is beginning to starve too. So no one responded to his begging.

A man starved to death last night. He must have tossed and turned and gasped for breath and finally abandoned it, while I lay in bed wondering why it was so wrong to try to define love and fail in living-up to it. I lay in bed wondering how I could possibly love you and still want another. Why should these thoughts kill me when life is actually about anatomy and nothing about heart's desire?

What have I become?

April fields

It spattered on the windshield
as your eyes focused on the road
and I mistook the raindrops
for something else you brew in me.

Dust rose in whirling mountains and Baneshwor looked uglier than ever. In the past seven years, I've watched this part of the city everyday, swiftly freezing into cement and rods and bricks. It's everywhere, taking away what used to be wild long grass, cat-tails and pussy willows.

Elevators are good business in Kathmandu, a voice said. Look at the concrete going up so high everywhere! The other voice said, maybe Otis has its hold here already.

I walked out the teastall. It had begun to drizzle after the churning up of dust, leaves and snapping off of branches. The raindrops came down like falling stars, shooting down at my face as I turned my head toward the sky to welcome the first April shower.

I asked Rabi dai if we would have more rain. He showed me the satellite pictures and said the clouds should move to Kathmandu from the west and head east towards Sikkim. But this drizzle is not enough. We need heavy rainfall. We haven't had water for days. We've been buying water every week.

Of course, we need more rain! Who could know that more than I do? Not just because Kathmandu people will have more water if it rains. But because when it rains, I'll finally be in my element again.

At least

catch me unawares sometimes.
the invisible web
is so easy to disappear into
if it's you I'm looking for.

Friendship

I ask the cab driver to go faster because my heart is aching. The afternoon feels like nothing but a recap of years missed until the time we're taking photos, exchanging hugs and huddling away into taxicabs.

It's like we all suddenly metamorphosed into women. Crossing into a new decade. There are unwelcome flabs, blemishes and unnecessarily long, dry manes- reiterating the years that have gone by. There are also aches we had not hoped to encounter during the Loreto Hall days. But I guess that's what we meant when we said "the big bad world" back then. Wasn't the convent preparing us to take on such a world?

There were movies like "Ann of Green Gables", "Sound of Music" and "Huckleberry Finn", along with those on abortion. How come there wasn't anything on how to deal with miscarriages, heartbreaks and on what to do when the man you risk everything for jilts you? I guess at convents, they never think such things happen. It's all about ethics and virtues, that we're already learning to breach even while in school.

P raises a question about our generation being too scared to walk out and too scared to stay in. Why are we in transition? What would happen if each of us learnt to move on without the men we once claimed, like our younger sisters do. Is it the claim part that makes us this way? Or are we just chicken?

It feels so dishonest, sometimes.

As the cab goes faster, I wonder what kind of a man would not want to be with P who is always the person who keeps the girls together- at least virtually -on Orkut, on FB and who knows exactly how to say "I love you" without saying it. I wonder how any man would not want to be with S who i still like a school-girl, demure, neat and willing to fail her finals just because South Africa lost a cricket match. Why so much suffering stemming from men? I guess it's not even about men. I guess it's only our ego, sexuality and ultimately love. But what is love?

Talking to P and S over fruit-juice, I think of love as "the desperate" need each one of us feels to fly to Dublin, just to see Mother D one more time. I equate love with the smell of books in the English literature section of the library and Ma'am K's fireplace near BIBLIO series. I think of love as the bad feelings we all get when we hear how the Irish and Austrian nuns who wanted to die in Darjeeling were asked to leave and how grills have gone up around the Carmel wing and St.Anne's.

Still, there is no definition of love.

I am hurting from the goodbye hugs. Nothing changes the way you feel toward some people you've shared frangments of your life with. Perhaps insignificant, but shared. Perhaps that ache and the happiness of meeting again after so many years and still being able to lay your heart bare on the table alongside Home Fries, is love.

A transpacific call

A transpacific call, the night, your voice,
Your lips that nestled round the words you said.
A sudden stab of longing, but there's no choice
Except to hold your image close instead.
This wounded distance seems to swirl and turn
Our thoughts and faces, like disembodied signs.
And every second, a second which we burn
Away down into these strangled telephone lines.
But softly through this link of satellites
you say the words, to make distances dissolve.
For just one moment, we touch, through the nights
of time and space in which our names revolve.
I hold you nearer, this faith we understand.
The mouthpiece, earpiece cradled in my hand.

(by Suman Subba)

He said

he wanted to drink coffee out of my navel
-that boy with the most gorgeous eyes.

He said
he would buy the entire town out
just so that
he could make love to me
all over the place
-that boy with the most persistent smile.

He said
he wanted to cook noodles for me
read me poetry
and make me happy
-that boy who doesn't believe in sin.

He said
he wanted to love in the shower
take me in a forest
and come in the rain
-that boy who wanted to consummate love in a temple.

He made me laugh.

But he wasn't you.

What Security?

The policemen stood in a file. The sign said- Suraksha Jaanch Hudai Cha (Security Check Going-on). My brother clutched at the brakes. The policeman nearest to us, asked my brother what he had in his bag. Art books, he said, instead of flaunting his press pass. His books on sketching and sculpting were brought out.

After entertaining a long look, I prompted myself to ask if he wanted to check my bag.

Lipstick ta hola ni, he said. Must be only lipstick. Janus. Go.

As my brother rode us away, I said lipstick chaina. My bag rarely accomodates cosmetics. But I smiled at the thought that the policeman had thought of me as a woman. I found his sexist remark flattering.

During my teenage years, I always had a problem convincing my male friends I was a girl. With my boy-short hair and the willingness to sit on the pavements any time, they always thought of me as one of them. Many times, I had wished they thought of me like they did about the others- like a girl. But the policeman thought I looked like a woman!

Sexist!

I actually think of the "suraksha jaanch" policemen as a breed, who stand on the streets, nights, getting tortured and torturing unnecessarily, while letting go of the wrong people.

They never check a car that says PRESS. How do they know the cars do not need security checking? Whenever (which is always) they let our office vehicle pass without security check, I feel like requesting them to check every car that reads PRESS including our own. I also feel like asking them "whose security"?

The Catcher in the Rye

Manila
melted under my feet
that evening
as I walked back to the dorm.

Germie, as always, lay on her chest on her bed strewn with books on the lives of saints. She only turned around briefly to tell me how painful the deaths had been and went back to reading, her legs propped in mid-air.

The electronics didn't keep the heat out of the room. (I wondered out-loud to Germie, how people could possibly make love in such heat. She laughed and called me crazy.)And the walls were no guard aginst the shouts that bounced at the dorm gate from the tricycle stand.

It was on one of those evenings drowned in paper-writing and youtube videos that I discoved a line for you in my head. "How are you?" I typed and dashed it off with a click at SEND. Not that I missed you. How could I have missed you when I didn't even have a memory of you then? You were just a a voice that said "Thank you" over the phone. But if I had thought hard enough, I might have recalled the Pikachu tattoo. Who knows! But that was before we became grown-ups.

Anyhow, I had no memory of you at that time.

Months later, we would sit across the table on our first meeting; you trying hard to guess if what fluttered on my eyelids was blue dust and I would gaze at your voice and decide to read "The Catcher in the Rye" again.

stay?

today

i
watch you
walk out
the door
again

our hearts that churn dreams
also fan infernos

how can we ever ask one another to stay?

When Aki leaves

I can never quite explain what it is that Aki always tries so hard to tell me when she looks at my face. It's like she looks deep into my eyes- almost touching my soul. When I sent her off to Chitwan, I felt she was asking me why she was being sent away. She almost jumped off the car as they drove away. She did the same today, wanting to jump off the car, still clenching my tee with her fangs. She actually tore it and dashed my glasses to the floor, smashing it. Again the same look in her eyes. Can't believe she's grown into this girl who can knock me down, from the little one who used to sleep on my chest. But the same baby eyes! They will always make me the mother I can never become.

SHAMROCK

There was this girl who had very pale skin, fine-thin light brown hair and albino nails. Her eyes were soft brown and her lips the softest pink. I wish I could say hazel eyes and chestnut hair. But I won't because they weren't. She was this plain, pale girl, who spoke with a lilt, as though she was afraid, even when her voice laughed. She was called Shamrock.

Everytime I think of her, I have an intense urge to describe all her features with added intensity and make her fiercely beautiful. I guess that's because I do think of her as "fiercely beautiful".

I don't remember a time when she looked strained. Only shy and ever-smiling. How apt for her name!

Rosy and I spent an afternoon in the Oval garden, plucking four-leaved clovers, pressing them between pages of Indian and European history and the History of English literature books. It was as though we'd pluck them just so that we could say the word "Shamrock". It did something to our teeth and lips when we spoke the word- leaving a light hoarse strength at the bottom of our throats. And we wanted to repeat the word, as we counted every new discovery.

The four dimensional green leaf of hope. So, so like Shamrock's shy smile.

An unsent post

I want
to do with you
what Spring does
with cherry trees.
-Pablo Neruda




Dear You,

Yesterday, I started to write you a long hand written mail. Aki started nibbling at my shoelace and I couldn't finish it.

I went back to it later and thought of rewriting it. But I kept staring at the half-finished mail and didn't get about to writing it any further. It struck me that it was pointless writing it when I don't even have an address to send it to you at. Besides, who cares about hand-written letters anymore? They are a thing of the past now. But I do wish I could write you volumes and neatly pack them in envelopes, label them in clear neat writing, paste stamps and send them off, hoping to hear back from you.

These are, but dreams.

There's no address to write to you at. And you probably forgot a long time ago that there was once this old-fashioned girl who believed in old-fashioned things, such as hand-written epistles and staying in love forever.

I've walked past where you and I said good-bye, a number of times now.

I noticed every day, that the cherry trees were in bloom all the way to the Japanese Embassy lane. And I thought of taking pictures of them for you. But I only walked under the trees and looked up at the spotless blue sky from the spaces between the cherry blossoms and dreamed of you. Never got around to taking pictures.

The blossoms must have started to wither while I looked at the sky beyond. For yesterday, I realized that the flowers were all gone and the leaves had turned a dense green and clouds had started to appear in the sky.

It rained hard last night. Thunder, lightning and wind. I turned toward the window where the curtain fluttered and thought once again of the letter I didn't finish. I started crafting it in my mind, and I guess it tired me to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning, the clouds had disappeared, declaring summer. And I just knew it was going to be several summers before I could even hope for my heart to understand that you do not exist.

Yoursasever,
Me

blue

dead ends...decay...should not have been the words as spring crossed into summer. but how else should it have been? we never discussed that.

the city has started soaring above us again, lifting in a heat we are calling "global warming". i think of it as claustrophobia. and i think of claustrophobia as a feeling of people breathing down my neck- all of them pushing me into believing you will not return.

i've often thought of how you spring from my entrails, consume my fears and lie low inside me again like you never changed anything. but what's that to the city? the city, like I said, has begun to rise. i see it in the honking, the swirling of dust in the afternoon wind and the stench lifting from massive gutters that were once rivers.

the city has no memory of rivers. only the sewage now and the stone spouts that trickle drops into plastic containers.

the butcher's wife stands across the street and looks up at the sky, shielding her eyes with her hand stained in blood. With the other hand, she clutches her apron- soaked in blood. flies swarm her best chicken breast. she waves a hand at them and looks up a the sky again.

the sky is blue, blue, as though they draped an ocean over the city. not a single hint of cloud. the butcher's wife must love the blue.

but she turns away to look at the city and i follow her gaze.

i don't love the blue anymore. it reminds me of these endless spaces where i cannot find you. and the city is a constant reminder that you don't live here anymore.

milestone

i stray-
from me
to me.

You used to be a milestone.

If it ends

and should the world end tonight, my darling
amid birds chirping premonition,
and the roaring of airplanes in the sky,
i will still have loved you
like I did
when the earth was still about
morning dew on petals,
the coy moon over green meadows,
and the soft drizzle of April shower.

web

there were days
when it felt like
all i had to do was
to reach out through a mesh of waves to touch you

there were days, when the waves
sent you tingling through
my nerves
restoring into me, life

but these are days
of the invisible web
for all the layers i navigate
you still do not appear

a little love

a little love you asked for
making me want to give endlessly

a little love i asked for
you wanted to but could not return

i became
what you wished to become to me

and you became
what I never hope to become to you

after dark

and it felt like the stars had been missing for ages and the moon had been gone for decades. it was impossible to figure if i had just forgotten to gaze at the sky or i was only sinking so deep in my ruminations that there had not been time enough to look up. but that's how it felt. with the blankess of the skies, nights were nothing to look forward to. that darkness of waiting for a single star to show up had started taking its toll on my psyche. while i reported the rising death tolls from earthquakes, floods and snow storms, i saw my own flesh emerging further scathed from the experience of being cast headlong into a darkness from where it had become impossible to reach out to you. and the little hope that had been there for daylight flickered and went out for good.

Shadows

Kathmandu kept growing into concrete
from where we sat and looked down.

These were "pretty" buildings.
But none of them was home for us.

I heard him talk about his family
in a tone that removed him elsewhere.

The Shivapuri hill started catching fire
and I had no voice to point it out to him.

I was instead thinking of the crickets
and the Nagarjuna hill that shimmered in your voice.

When we stood up and started walking downhill,
the streetlamps lighted our back.

Our shadows- oblong,
were awkward as they walked.

His tone made me want to hold his hand
as he tripped on words.

My eyes, on the shadows trailing down the hillside
almost knew the feel of your hand.

March 3rd

from march 3rd then to march 3rd now, i am no more me.

a room of one's own

What wouldn't a housewife do for a room of her own?
Imagine the entire...the entire room to yourself! It means you have the windows to shut and open as and when you want. The door ajar if you like. Or wide, wide open or latched.
You could leave your piles of book waiting by your bedside table and get up at any odd hour of the night to pick one and read it. All you have to do is extend your arms a bit and touch the lamp on if you have poetry rambling in your head in the middle of the night. There is no need to worry about waking someone up when those lights come on.
Without the husband in the same room as you, you never have to worry about picking his clothes up, his cigarette stubs or the paint brushes he leaves on the table, on the dresser and the floor.
Without the husband in the room, the sheets are never disheveled, your bottles of cologne always in order and your night cream always intact.
Without the husband in the room the water-jar always has the lid on it. So does the tube of tooth-paste. And the bathroom is smoke-free!
Why encourage a woman to give up her space?
Abolish marriages!

P.S. Wife and husband should have the liberty to have separate rooms to work and sleep if they prefer. Of course it works! Like Heaven!

Ms.Carriage

One afternoon, Kriti Mukherjee walked across the Common room and asked me, "Who wrote LOVE'S LABOUR LOST?"
"Shakespeare."
"No", she said. "Miss Carriage", followed by laughter.
Of course, I laughed too.
But I don't laugh at that word anymore. The word is synonymous to anything but laughter.

This morning, my colleague came back to work, ending over two weeks of emergency leave. We had been told she had slipped in the bathtub. When I asked her why she had been away, she said she had miscarried.

My reactions suddenly changed from general concern to consternation. I sat down on the visitor's chair in her cubicle and looked at her for a while, before I could say "sorry". She said, "it's alright", so as to comfort me. It should have been me saying that. But it wan't alright and we both knew. Miscarrying is not only about losing blood. It's about losing a part of you. It's about losing hope while losing someone, who might have been there to hold your tired hands in your days of despair. It's also about losing someone you would have showered with love.

In the next ten minutes, my colleague would talk of her depression, her attachment with the baby in the twenty days from her discovery to the loss and how she can't believe she lost it. I would tell her, mothers usually miscarry if the baby is already unhealthy. I would tell her she could make a baby again.

She's awfully depressed at the moment and I can't but think of the way I had felt after my loss.

Right now, I feel a void in my womb. A miscarriage is irreplaceable.

"All the selves I was"

all the selves i was...
seem to have come together
on that one occasion
when you walked past me
in a crowded street.
what did it take you
to conjure those saturated selves
into a whole?
i'm not even sure,
if you remember
playing the conjurer.

conjurer of dreams,
aches,
longings
and a whole
that is us.

Neurosis?

Can it be true that women only write out of their neurosis. Why is the woman who writes, a woman with and "itch"? And why does she draw her inspiration for writing from the more mundane things? Mundane things, such as a heartbreak. Such as longings and everything else that should be present in a life but isn't.

Can it be true, that I write because I find no joy in living? Because life has nothing to offer but a bunch of people who pretend not to understand me? Or do I write because people have started to believe more than ever that I'm insane and I need to keep writing to prove to myself, more then to the people, that I'm still sane? I'm not sure.

It scares the life out of me to think I write out of madness. Maybe I write to get the madness out of me. But why should writing scare me? Maybe something about concretizing your fear- giving it shape in words, letters, pharases and sentences. Maybe I confirm my fears when I write. But what does that matter? Erica Jong says, writing is a way of conquering your fears.

Wasn't it last night that I was reading about this woman who wrote at the speed of her adrenalin just because she wanted to prove her lover wrong? Well... all he did was said she couldn't write. And she wrote in such speedy fear, she finished a novel in a month. And when the book was published, she went to Venice to celebrate it and kissed so many men under the bridges in the night, who dispersed into the sunlight like vampires. And she returned home to act like nothing ever happened. The story of that woman made me wonder what her conscience might tell her.

But this morning, I heard Maa talk about this woman who wept because she didn't want to go back to her huband and children. She had run away with a boy 8 years her junior and she claimed she was in love. She didn't want to go home but they dragged her home. Maa said the woman had gone mad to leave her children like that. And I wondered what kind of madness that must be. So I pushed aside the story of that woman from the kitchen sink and started cooking for Aki. Only Aki brings me sanity. Only her soul-searching eyes mean sanity.

Out of Focus

This morning...
slightly out of focus...
sub-consciously...
dwells on you.

There are a set of books on the shelf that are familiar to me only by the way they feel in my fingers. I've forgotten their titles, the authors. But I need to rummage through them now and then, for reassurance. They're a kind of assurance that the world is still sane and that I'm still me.

I squint from where I lay in my bed, trying to figure what books stand stretched on the shelf in the hall...I'm trying to recall their titles. The one that comes to my mind in the thickness of its pages, the different fonts, the foreword, the dogears, it's slightly weak spine and the lines formed on the front with age, is Rainer Maria Rilke's collection.

It transports me to that afternoon's warmth, the buzz in the cafe, the way I couldn't wait to start reading Rilke, even as I also knew the book was your parting gift to me.