Gathering

I stole this image from NYT because I coveted that moment (I forget the name of the photographer, so in that sense, this makes it theft )--I wanted to be a woman standing in a random street, just after a storm, gathering fallen leaves. I found enormous comfort in that thought.

Lately, I've been unsure about everything. Everything. And yet so comfortable in becoming this woman who's a hermit, living everyday inside my parents' home, cooking, cleaning, eating, sleeping, reading, writing nothing worth reading. That's me. It's like all the awful things that happened to me in life were leading me to this moment of quietness. Maybe death is like that, too?

I often think about the horrible things that happened to me. I am probably not past the abuse in my marriage, the gaslighting in certain relationships, the sexual exploitation by men who claimed it was stemming from love. I haven't gotten over those things and I think sometimes that writing about them might help. Perhaps if I write about how frightened I was that afternoon when he parked his scooter outside Gyanedra's residence and called me a bahunphile and how I was coerced into going to his friend's house to have sex. It was the beginning of something horrible. How is it that even for women who are educated and wise and who know good from bad, it often ends up becoming just the physical fear of a man. How come?

 

Trapped somewhere far

Meera, like her name, belonged in only one place--to herself in a far flung idea of herself trapped somewhere.

When periods came, she would bundle up her mother's old sari and clutch it between her legs. For underwear, she had learned to cut her father's or brother's old trousers and alter it into something that fit her. No one offered to buy her any knickers. She was the invisible one in the family. After polio stuck her when she was four, she could no longer participate in the games her siblings played. And her parents didn't think it was necessary to send her to school.

And no one spoke to her about what she should be doing during periods or what they were about. Her elder sister, Laxmi showed her how to bundle up cloth, then tie a string around her waist and knot the ends of the cloth on to it so it stayed in place. But cloth was always scarce. If her mother discarded an old sari, she and her sisters had to compete for their share. And sometimes, when children in the extended family out grew their iicha cloth diapers, a tatter of pretty print from a frayed cotton sari would land in her hands. That served as period cloth.  

Meera liked to fold the period cloth neatly after they dried in the sun. They went into a corner of her trunk to wait until another month. And until then, she forgot about them, ran household chores, cooked for her family, fetched water in the ghaa, but before that she would polish it with ash until it shone like a gold pitcher. That was her job. To fix everything in the house, to take care of everything, to look out for the others. It sometimes included picking up her siblings' books and piling them neatly on the table. 

Meera, for everyone but not herself. Trapped. Far away.

 

Bindu's curse

I haven't been able to stop thinking about the story Mamu told me about how Bindu Taama's curse might have killed a man.

When they were little girls, their home in Boudha had pigeons. Baajya had built a pigeon stand on the terrace and the birds lived in little house-like holes on that stand. The family fed the birds grains and talked to them. 

One time, a neighbour came over to ask if they could borrow two pigeons for a pooja. 

When they didn't bring back the pigeons for two days, someone from Mamu's family went over to enquire. And they were told they had sacrificed the pigeons during the ritual, because that was what it demanded. 

When they heard, the little girls-- Mamu and her sisters-- got very upset. They wept. And then Bindu Taama spat a curse. She said: Die! Sheema!

In the weeks that followed, they heard the man who had come to borrow the pigeons had hung himself.

Sometimes, I've done what my Taama did. Muttered a curse in anger and grief.

When my neighbours got together last week to cut down six trees in the hood, I went into a spiral of grief and I hoped the trees would become ghosts and haunt the men and women who had ordered the trees to be cut down. I hoped they would suffer from severe stomach pain and die mortifying deaths. 

The next time I ran into them, I was bowing my namastes to them-- muscle memory. And I wondered what had happened to the witch in me. 

Dear Germie,

I'm sitting here in bed, thinking of you. My little girl lies across the bed at my feet, growling at someone in her sleep.
I injured myself when I fell in the bathroom. It sounds kind of silly and was sort of fun when it happened. I hopped, slipped and went flat on my back. That's how it began. And now am nursing a painful body and thinking of a time in the past, when something similar had happened and i had sat in bed in a neck-brace for months, writing a novel i never completed.
it's rainy again and am lonely again.
the man who had popped into my room, just to kiss my mouth, despite my neck-brace, is someone else's now.
the man has become a memory. like we've become a memory to you and to me.
what is there to salvage of it all, is the loving we find every time we trip and land on our backs. there's a kind of high in the tripping. i guess, that's why i don't mind the fall so much.

a bit of the city -- by Tiku Gauchan

A river runs through this city The river crawls along, hidden away from most people. No one, it seems, wants to admit its presence. The river’s sewage-infused water stinks. It smells of rotting animal carcasses that bob on its currents. It smells of harsh metallic chemicals from industrial runoffs. Its bends, which trap objects, smell of sour fermenting trash.
All along this forgotten river live the forgotten people. They live in cramped hives of mud huts with rusting corrugated roofs. They breathe the dust from the road that runs alongside the river.  On this road, I often see children chasing old bicycle rims. They roll the hoop along, shepherding it with a small stick. Beside one of the river’s many bends, some kids play cricket. Instead of wickets, they use bricks. Instead of a bat, they use a small plywood plank. Their fathers watch them from the doorsteps, chain-smoking. Their mothers barely look up from the job at hand. I mostly see them wringing piles of laundry. Sometimes I see them queuing at the community water taps. Plastic jars astride their hip, waiting their turn, they make small talk.
I take this pockmarked, uneven road to work to beat the traffic. After heavy rains, its surface softens to sludge. In the summer, the tyre marks turn into narrow crisscrossing ravines. But no one thinks to move the rocks that remain. They jut out at unexpected places, looming like miniature hills. They just lie there, unaccounted for by the road department.
The road department focuses on the bigger, vehicle-clogged blacktopped roads. The motorists too don’t prefer this bumpy riverside road. Thus it barely sees traffic.  The river cuts like a long gash through this city. And yet the river remains invisible to most people. Perhaps this city wants to forget the river. Perhaps the city wants to forget the people living alongside it too.

Cul-de-sac

http://www.modes4u.com/

1. I still crunch up my nose in memory of the boy who used to say he wanted to drink coffee out of my navel. Silly fantasy, Pete, I'd say, when he talked about things such as buying the town out so he could make love to me everywhere and anywhere we liked.

2. Thamel hasn't changed much since. The streets are always busy with strangers, who sometimes jostle past each other, as they walk in and out of stores and eateries that are multiplying in numbers by the day.

3. I want to go to that particular coffee shop located at the cul-de-sac today, where A and I spent all our time talking quietly, as though such a thing were only possible between her and me. There are tiny pretty things, arranged in neat rows in that coffee shop that brighten your day. Just like that.

4. I'm walking fast because it seems like the rain will catch my back before I get to the coffee place. And I absentmindedly walk at the edge of the street where the road meets the footpath-- a bad habit picked up from an old boyfriend.

5. There's got to be some sesame cookies and brownies to go with coffee. They always have fresh bakes. Kathmandu is becoming better at its baking skills. My flip-flops slap tiny grains of dust against my calves as I speed up my steps.

6. The cul-de-sac. WE ARE CLOSED ON SUNDAYS. SORRY FOR YOUR INCONVENIENCE.

How are you, dear Chiang Mai?

There isn't much to say about me, except that I recently lost an old relative who loved me and my mother very much. She fed my mom beaten rice and fish everyday when she was expecting me. And after I was born, Yaama (as I fondly called her) carried me around until my growing legs started slipping off her waist. 
Then I lost one of the dogs I loved. He died fighting his way back home after being attacked by all the dogs he met on the way back. 
There isn't much to say about me. Just that everyday, I fall a little more in love with my poet, whose suffering breaks my heart over and over again. 
I'll never be whole. Just like you. Because, I too always seek love where it eludes me the most.

Take care of yourself.

Love,
.

persepolis

who would have known the craving for a plate of biryani for lunch and a swarma for dinner were only the needs of a pregnant woman? during those days, they were lost in translation of missing the sharp Asia spice that brought one home- if only in the form of food.

she had no memory of how she discovered Persepolis. but it must have been one of those walks back to the dorm after university with DU, that led to this eatery.

so, Persepolis was a restaurant of plain settings, with Iranian rugs thrown at the foot of tables and paintings from Tehran pulling you into the walls.

her classmates noticed her love for the paintings and decided on Persepolis as the location for her birthday celebration. they brought out a Goldilocks chocolate cake and created a day for this pregnant girl, who was unaware of the baby growing inside her and unaware of how she was soon to have no home and no more birthday celebrations.

but that evening, she had had the happiest birthday in her life, as she bit into her swarma and later drank down her green mango shake- sour, sweet, chilled- like the memories of a home left behind.

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.

After 13 years

On Wednesday morning, when Kapanadidi arrived, she didn’t walk into the house calling out for my mother, which she does like a ritual every day. She just stood on the veranda, leaning against the window. I think I’ll probably never forget the way Kalpanadidi looked that morning. She wore an aquamarine woolen kurta, and an earth coloured shawl, her hair held in a pigtail and her cheeks blushing from the walk.

“I went to see my sister, yesterday.”

My mother and I had been admiring the flowers when she arrived. We stopped and looked at her when she made the announcement.

“Your sister?” my mother inquired.

“My step-sister. I found her in Panchkhal.”

“I think you’ve mentioned her before. But didn’t you say she was lost?” my mother asked.

“I found her. Someone from the village told me they seen her in Panchkhal, so I went looking for her yesterday,” she was still leaning against the window.

Thirteen years had passed, when Kalpanadidi decided to finally jump on the first bus to Panchkhal to find her missing step-sister. The bus journey didn’t take as long as did the search.

“It was hours before I found the right village,” said Kalpanadidi later, as she sat in the veranda with a bowl of potatoes and peeler in her hand. She finished one with full concentration before turning to another.

Some two hours were spent going from door-to-door, asking people if they knew where Saraswati lived. Some gave her sketchy directions. Some told her there were many Saraswatis in the village. An old man told her to sit down on the pirka for two minutes and talk to him and he would help her find Saraswati. But it was not the time to sit down. So, sketchy directions were issued once more.

“Then I met his seven year old boy, who said his mother was called Saraswati, which filled me with hope” now she was slicing cauliflowers, making them apper like white bonsai all piled up in the bowl. “The mother had gone into the forest to gather fodder.”

I had put down Memories of my Melancholic Whores now, shutting Delgadina out of my mind for Kalpanadidi’s story.

“I felt strange waiting for her to show up,” she continued. “I wondered if Saraswati would recognize me- thirteen years is a long time.”

Saraswati was thirteen when she disappeared. She had been living in her village in Dolakha, with her father and step-mother. Kalpanadidi had been married for a few years and had moved to Kathmandu. The family later discovered that Saraswati’s biological mother had arranged a wedding for her and had sent the uncle to get her out of Dolakha secretly. The family made no further efforts to find her when they found out a wedding had been planned. And Saraswati never came home again.

“When I was little, I used to carry her on my back,” Kalpanadidi said, as she mopped the floor, never looking up once at me, as I followed her everywhere in the house that day.

“Sometimes, I climbed trees with Saraswati on my back, while people shouted me,” she smiled.

“I would carry her to wherever my step-mother was working, so that bahini could be fed.” When the step-mother eloped, Kalpanadidi became Saraswati’s foster parent.

Kalpanadidi had moved to Kathmandu and just become a mother when she received the message from her village saying her kid sister had disappeared. But that day, in Panchkhal, sitting on the pavement of a mud-plastered brick house with a corrugated tin roof, Kalpanadidi wondered if the Saraswati she was waiting for would really be her sister.

After a good 30 minutes, which felt much longer, she saw Saraswati walk toward her.

“She came toward me with an unchanged pace, as though she had been expecting me,” Kalpanadidi was now doing the dishes. “The girl hasn’t changed much- only more fat everywhere now. And how much she resembles me!”

Her face turned toward the faucet, I could only hear her voice now.

“Her face was soaked in tears by the time she came close to me.”

Saraswati put her doko down and fell into Kalpana’s arms, summoning an audience from the neighbourhood. Her hands were coarse and her heels cracked with dark lines that promised a permanency. Her hair was still jet black and longer than it had ever been.

“The first thing I told her was that her uncle had died,” Kalpanadidi continued. “I told her he was crushed by a boulder during a mudslide. And she said he must have died of the sin of giving me away to an old man at 13.”

“Saraswati had asked aama why they were setting up the marriage without telling Father and all she was told was it was Aama’s duty as a mother and Saraswati’s destiny.”

The two sat in the sun, talking about everyone in the village. Saraswati flaunted her sister to her neighbours, “Mero didi, from Kathmandu!”

Saraswati fixed a lunch of boiled Wai Wai and a fried egg for her sister. But the sister had no appetite.

“Her eldest is seven, then a four year old boy and a two year old girl,” explained Kalpanadidi. “They only started at me the whole time and the eldest once asked Saraswati why she was crying.

When Kalpana got on the bus to Kathmandu her temples throbbed. Saraswati rang her five times while she was still on the bus.

 “Sapana jastai, like a dream,was what she kept repeating to me,” Kalpanadidi turned toward me and wiped her hands across the apron. “My sister wouldn’t stop crying for a single minute. I wonder where she found all those tears.”

Every chore she ran around the house that day became an interlude to the story I was sewing in my head like a patchwork quilt. I had met a different Kalpanadidi that day. As she stood leaning by the window in the verandah, in the soft December morning sun, her cheeks starting to blush with the heat, talking about her sister, it occurred to me that the unmistakable moisture in her eyes that morning-which lasted all day- made her so different from every other morning I’d seen her.

Retch

how much hatred can i possibly hold in this heart? that's what i wondered, when i saw him walk toward me from the other direction today. there was nothing different about him from day "one" of what i learnt to love about him. the usual swanky walk, lost gaze, laptop slung on one shoulder. i cannot tell what his thoughts were as he moved, but there he was- his steps only bringing him closer to me and mine too nervous to retrace. i looked away for a minute. he did too. then we looked at each other again. it was as though we were reflecting it all in mirror action. then we both broke into what was something between half cry, half smile, half scoff and half laughter. just as he crossed, i asked- when did you come? asti, he said and i couldn't fathom why i had asked the question.
here's the man who dispels everything i appreciate about men in a few minutes of push, pull, drag, punch and kills the woman, who is capable of love.

he passed. i kept walking ahead and there i was on the street, retching, as though everything inside me would jump right out of me on the road.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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