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.