vent

i
need
this
space
to
fling
myself
at
everytime
am
mad
at
the world
i
feel
like
throwing
myself
at
it
till
this
anger
seeps
out
and
i
can
think
again
like
a
sane
person

Getting a story right

has never been so difficult before. Never sat a month on a story and still not got it right. Food. Why does everything connect to it with such complexity?
Food.

shutdowns again

it's always a funny feeling driving through the town on a shut-down, with demonstrators and pedestrians behaving like they'd hurl something at you any moment. makes you feel guilty riding. PRESS. Jana deu. you keep hearing that.

what a turn off this week is about to become.

i feel unexcited about everything that's about to happen, including reporting them.

i just want to sleep and sleep and sleep and take an evening off so that i can walk all the way home from wherever i might find myself. i miss my walks. solitude. the sidewalk. it's all you really need to bring yourself home.

Time for strikes

Start of another series of closures.
I saw three buffaloes being trucked away to Jorpati. They were even tied up to the thing.

Some people think bands are a time for good food and afternoon naps and movies.
I think even with that, they might have reached a saturation point after a deacade of these shut-downs.

I'm not even making sense. Rant!

Khulamanch rocks everyday

these days- with slogans, songs, speeches and the like.
a group stood on the platform, singing the national anthem today. and while i thought how beautiful our flag looked, i also realized how uninspired i felt by our national anthem. i cannot identify with it. i wonder how many people born in my generation can. i don't even know what the song says (although i know it has words like agragami, bir, santati, ragat, phool, swatantra) and those standing next to me didn't seem to know either.
every morning, when i went to the Uni in Manila, the Pinoy national anthem would play and everyone would stop, sun or rain, to pledge their allegiance to the flag. i've heard Pinoys say theirs is a "bastardized culture". yet, they are able to take pride in their national anthem and touch their hearts in grace, when it plays.
the day we're able to feel that kind of pride, maybe we'll at least start to keep the place clean, if nothing else.
don't wipe your gloss on the seat cover! i had wanted to tell the chic girl who sat next to me on the bus. pride  comes from the smallest things we do. it's not just about singing your national anthem right.

Surkhet Bulbule taal, maya mai sani hunale chutyo maya jal...

Here's my find in Juphal. A bottle of water, sold for Rs.130, (discounted rate) with a folk song on it. 

Water never tasted so good! 

Rain and Mamu

The sound of thunder always removes me
to some place else
that was my home.
There was a room in the house that overlooked the Ring Road.
If the rain was falling thick
you could still see the cars moving on the road. Especially the bright red ones.
When the thunder growled
the qwati in mamu's wok started bubbling.
She would drop phing in it
-noodles that shone like crystal.
The sheets were always clean
white, clean, with pink flower patterns,
sometimes spattered with Chelpark ink.
Tonight, my sheets still feel the same
-clean, white, fresh- no stains.
I'm still Mamu's girl.
I still sit in bed, listen to thunder
the soft patter of the rainfall,
and wake up to Mamu's broth and
warm breasts.

Mid-morning song

Morning in progress-
the sky flits between gloom, sunshine and rain.

I think of summers that held some promise
of consistency.

fear

idonottrustmyselfwhenitcomestogivingabitofmyselfawaytopeoplewithoutfearingtheywillcrushmeforgivingandtramplemeundertheirfeetforhavingaheartthatbeatsforanimalsjustasmuchasitdoesforbabies

Kanchu

rolls over on the carpet,
thumping her tail on the floor,
while pawing Kitty,
Mamu keeps talking to her
from the distance of her own room
the sky grays
preparing for another shower
and i'm quietly slouched on my divan
sleep
almost knocking the laptop off me

The bleating

grows clearer inside my head

it makes me want to walk out into the night
to find the goat. 

Happy Birthday!

Pizza
Pepper
Olive oil
Sappho
Lime soda
Van Gogh
A Candle
And a table for one

P.S. Food. That's where happiness is.

burn

rays
burn
- there was just so much that lit up

Ides of May

My birthdays are always related to shorts. Why? They have always been. Mid-summer Kathmandu. They were slightly different in Darjeeling, where an umbrella and a cardigan always lurked inside the bag, along with books and a water bottle. When I think of my birthdays, I think of lemonade, chocolate cakes, Archies/Hallmark cards, teddy bears, gift wrappers and shorts. How long and lazy my afternoons are on May 15s, punctuated by phone calls and flurried visits from people who remember.
Bahini's birthday's are always about fingers that were giving up under freezing water, cold morning showers and the fingers turning red under the abir. And a little excitement for the things she received.
These two birthdays in the family- so square in their rituals.

Dimple

When Susan bent down to pick the magazine, deep dimples formed on her small of her back. Prachi wondered if Dev had dipped himself into them.
Susan sat down with the magazine and started talking about what rice means to the region. "All Asians wake up to rice." She started a discussion on what it meant to not have rice everyday, if you were Asian. The dimple on her left cheek did somersaults as she talked without interruption.
Prachi's bladder felt bloated. She decided she would just sit in bed anyway and wait for Susan and Alex to leave. She didn't want Susan to see her legs needed waxing already and that under the hospital robe, she was just a lifeless person. She didn't want Susan to know she would never be Susan- the woman with dimples, spirit and kindness.

Mess of a room

What a mess this room is. Teddy bears in all kinds of sizes. Each, a remnant of a lost relationship. Jewelry, picked from far-flung markets. Summer clothes, acrid from being out of sight so long. Picture frames, dotting the study table. Books. Newspapers. Mary Jane gathering dust. Cords, running into each other becoming a mesh. Resembles my thoughts.

i still love rain

just the way it is,
without it having to do with you
who promised to help me
skip a puddle
(it was in Fr.Boa's Hypnotherapy classes
i realized i had an innate fear for puddles)

the sound of the rain hasn't changed.
the pitter-patter on the courtyard,
the drumming on the corrugated tin-roof,
the consistency

of a childhood afternoon
watching cars cut past Ring Road

the ache of
a teenager
with stained teeth, thick glasses and no waistline
who went unnoticed

the smell of clean skin
that dipped into crevices on a lazy afternoon

rain-
only that never changes. 

the bell jar

"Plath is not good for anyone."
But whenever I've read her, I found her swirling inside my head, making me understand exactly why I feel a certain few things, like I feel them. Some days are a bit like you were trapped inside the world, claustrophobic, wanting out, seeking a definition for yourself.
Returning home in the office drop today, I felt I had lived one life already. Put it behind me, even. And yet, this need to define what was, is and will be. That's what I was trying to do last night, spreading my hands in front of S's eyes, asking him to predict my future. Is it terrible? No. He said. But you won't live past 48. Oh, make it 28, I should have said. That could fix all these years. I would fix me right at 28, at the hilt of struggle. Martyr to some sort of emotion, I could still name.
For these days, I'm short of vocabulary.

CAN NOT

i cannot deal with love.
it's this greed for too much love that i cannot handle. i can never love just right.
love always spills, crushes, bruises, burns holey nights into me.
i cannotcannotcannotcannotcannotcannotcannotcannotcannotcannotcannot deal with love.
i'll be alright without love.

MAMU

mamu is fragile
on days of incense sticks
pitambar
tae, jaki, abir
and
swaan

her eyes run
like they never learnt to rest

her shoulders begin to stoop
like a forgotten jacket in the closet

ondaysofdeaths
mamu makes my heart curl up against her

Week

1. it became impossible to hear the boy wailing "i'm a good boy," limping in the hospital hallway, his urine suspended in a pouch, his mother held. i don't know if he thought repeating the words would lessen the pain. he walked his five year old self back and forth, depressing the life out of me, as i sat with several others who were waiting on their relatives. the boy's suffering became so unbearable at one point of time, just before they took him back into the room that i thought i would jump off a great height.

2. they shattered ajee's red bangles with a little tool they found in the drawer. when the howl began, i went immediately on my knees and caught the bangles before they fell on the floor. i collected them all in my palms and took them downstairs to where bajyaa lay oblivious to all the crying and praying. they all started at me in disapproval. only widows break and hold those bangles. you're not supposed to look. you've brought bad luck on yourself.

3. afternoons are precious little whiles i dash the tea, kiss kanchu and mamu and rush to the tempo stand- all the while, wanting to linger a little longer around these two, who form the largest chunk of my every day.

WRITING=PAIN

and now i find writing is increasing becoming a pain. a royal one, at that.
for a whole week now, i've been hinged on my food security story. all the madness that drove me as far as Dolpa to get a story on what i think is such a big problem, doesn't flow in writing the way it should. it gets crammed in my head in the form of too many names of all the people i interviewed. too many details.
i can't tell a feature from a story. and yet it is all so simple. the problem is "only food". (i wish i could imitate that tone.)
when so much appears on the dinner table on days like Mother's Day, i forget how many starving stomachs of humans and animals i walked past last week.
this writing thingy is painful because it doesn't make sense of so many things i've experienced, even as the only thing that does makes sense.

COFFEE

is what i need to wake up to work on Sunday mornings. nothing ever changes about these mornings. i live from cofee to coffee to coffee. and it feels like something between the beginning of a week and a weekend.