"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.

No vote is also vote

In the past one week, I've had colleagues walk-up to me and request that I vote for them in the Trade Union election. It went on for a whole week and as the week was drawing to a close, the campaigners grew more fervent, more desperate and they were eager to pull eachother down.
We started seeing new faces in the newsroom. I later found out that these were our reporters from the districts that we know by name, if not their face. They had arrived just so they could vote. One of the candidates had sponsored their trip. So when the issue about my not showing up on the ballot-casting day cropped up, I was told, "Look the boys from the districts came!"
Tea sessions were filled with talks about how one was playing a "game" to make sure the other lost or their side won. And this was done with utmost pride. It got me wondering why we must even feel the need to divide ourselves for a cause when we aren't united for any cause in the first place.
Of course, I got condemned by the entire office for not voting, for being the only "fool" to not vote. But you vote when you believe you will be represented. That's how it goes.
I told them, "No vote is also a vote". But my intelligent colleagues had only jeering to offer.

To breathe me into you

Like all the women
Who have kissed your earlobes,
I too want to lead you
By your hand
From Samarkand to Tashkand,
From Paro to Phuentsholing
And across the Borneo Islands,
Where we're in our own statis
Of freedom
To sit for ages and watch the world moving,
And move us too without touching.

I too wish to walk you through
the ancient streets,
the simmering mountains and thickening forests

But a wailing begins
At the pit of my stomach
When I stretch to touch you
Taking shape inside me
And there's the fear of losing
As I lost the one who refused to come

I am unknown to the taste of your earlobes.
Perhaps you're just the one
My soul conjures -
Breathes itself into.

Maya Angelou

Passing Time
Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.


Insomniac

There are some nights when
sleep plays coy,
aloof and disdainful.
And all the wiles
that I employ to win
its service to my side
are useless as wounded pride,
and much more painful.


When You Come

When you come to me, unbidden,
Beckoning me
To long-ago rooms,
Where memories lie.

Offering me, as to a child, an attic,
Gatherings of days too few.
Baubles of stolen kisses.
Trinkets of borrowed loves.
Trunks of secret words,

I CRY.

Remembering Rosy

...I do this once in a while. And I did it again after a long time. Soma RB and Rosy Chamling are names I often google to see if there are any traces of them on the net, which will connect me to them. Sometimes I feel like a stalker. But I know it's only my love for these long lost friends that makes me look them up.

Looking them up, is like trying to find pieces of me that got strewn over the hills of Darjeeling when I left that place for good. Looking them up is like trying to find the side of me that believed in goodness, in love, in living by principles and in working hard and being a girl that parents took pride in. But perhaps I forgot these aspects of being human, when I lost touch with these friends- almost like I needed them for my sanity.

I fell out with one over emotions that were exteremely complicated. We fell out because we were girls in a convent, who were always living in fear of being branded lesbians. So, to assert your sexuality, you sometimes stake your most tender sides- even though it never matters what the world thinks of you. With the other, I just drifted, even when we both probably knew how much we meant to one another, and that there were things only we understood about each other.

Poets to love a lifetime, men of words to desire, books read under the Oval's trees, pacts made against the shade of the sun-dail, stories told on the bench near the grotto... these are still a part of me and these memories still bond me to these girls- women now. One a Ph.D. Don't know about the other. But when I found a link this morning, saying Rosy Chamling is a Ph.D., I thanked her for fulfilling a dream that I promised her but didn't live-up to. But she made it a point to.

I look at Rosy's smile- still the same baby smile clad in a blue sari and I'm reminded of the day we made rounds of the Chowk Bazaar, looking to buy saris for the farewell. We rummaged through piles of silk and finally settled for a wine red for Rosy and a white one for me. The excitement of getting your first blouse and petticoat. Your first sari! And rounding it up with Wallis biscuits and pastries from Glenary's- the last shopping we did together.

What happened to heresies?

Ages
after
I had put behind
Showalter, Woolf, Plath and Rich,
I encounter you.
And
everything about you
is a reminder
of what they were
and that I could never be.
Who was the woman
I had found
during my years of
the pheremone?
The woman,
later nurtured
destroyed
and abandoned for you
to come by
and gather
into a mosiac
from bits and particles.